skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a line in there that I find a bit jarring and difficult to parse. I understand that this was written in 1975 (Not long before I was born, but nonetheless an era that I can't really say I understand), but when the author mentions this:

> The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat with. She said they all had long noses.

...it sets off strange alarm bells, but I don't quite have the cultural context to figure out how I should interpret it. Of course, everyone knows that long noses are a Jewish stereotype, and that in the 70s when this article was written, anti-semitism was far enough out of fashion that it would have been impolite to express it in more than an oblique way. Can someone explain to me what MacLean was trying to say here? I know Michelson himself was of Jewish descent, which makes the comment all the more confusing.
It's an issue in Canada[1] and the EU[2].

[1]https://www.bcpharmacists.org/news/update-august-18-2018-dru...

[2]https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/referrals/angio...
Did he try to absolve Minsky of guilt? I thought the thesis of his defense of Minsky was:

"Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."

"The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as
Y, which is much worse than X."

He's not wrong that "sexual assault" is used ambiguously to describe a wide range of behaviors, some worse than others. If a guy does something that's 7/10 bad, and everyone's saying it's 9/10 bad, what's the right way to point out that it was only 7/10 bad?
It also looks like they just alert the HTML of the error response when it receives anything other than a success. Seems like an example of not UX fault-testing your app.
Does it also explain why they keep 4.8 million Palestinians under occupation?
Uhm, Apple also holds emails, calendars, contacts and notes on their servers via iCloud.
Los Angeles OKs a deal for record-cheap solar power and battery storage
Not sure I have the budget for that :-) . I've often thought it could make a decent business offering though.
Unfortunately not. But I remember there was some really weird stuff in there. Anything from minerals to insect skins. It is customised to whatever the diagnosis is.
Personally, I feel the exact opposite.

I don't see VR providing a whole lot outside the area of entertainment. How often do you want to be completely removed from the physical world on a regular basis. Even when you do want immersion a good story or a game with good mechanics is far more important in entertainment than the medium it's delivered though. This is the reason people still read books, why retro video games are still played, and why 3D continually fails. A high tech medium, doesn't improve bad entertainment, but great entertainment can be delivered though a low tech medium. I'm not saying VR has no value, but I don't see it being some giant revolution.

On the flip side, AR doesn't provide immersion, but rather enhances the world around you. AR allows pretty much any information you get from your phone or computer currently to be instantly hands free and always available. If I told you I had a pill that allowed you to remember 20% more than you currently do, I can't think of many industries that wouldn't be improved by giving that to every employee. Once headsets become light enough and cheap enough, that's what AR provides. Instant access to relevant information without diverting focus.

VR seems to me like an extension of 3D technology, AR seems like an extension of the smartphone.
Generate a random string in vanilla JavaScript
> Is there a set of policies he could adopt that would mean every protester agreed all their demands had been met?

Well everybody's got more or less specific demands. But for sure, if everybody in France could have housing and food on the table, there wouldn't be mass protests/riots as we have had for over a decade now.

I'm not even saying "decent" housing or "organic" food although it is important to me. People would be happy with basic services they don't have at the moment.

Everybody sees on the TV or in the streets rich people spending hundreds or thousands of euros in fancy restaurants and clubs while ~10% of the population lives in extreme poverty and struggles to feed the children.

There's 3 million ABANDONED housing units (not counting secondary housing) for 150K homeless people, yet the government and landowners pretend there is a housing crisis.

These are just two examples that would satisfy everyone within and without the gilets jaunes movement. That's not enough to build a fair society, but that would arguably make life more bearable.
Hide-My-Windows Laser Tripwire
Having written massive amounts of both Scala and TS, I'd say the #1 issue Scala has the the impossibility to understand a simple variable reference.

If I see `A`, the search space to understand where that comes from is quite large for most Scala.
I have a clone of the final repository state and had created a Java implementation in about 2013. I was interested in integrating it with Github and Eclipse at the time. Now I'm wondering about resurrecting that project and converting it to Go but I don't want to create something that doesn't get used.
My understanding is that Apple only stores your data in an encrypted form, and does not themselves possess the key used to encrypt that data. I remember it used to be if you forgot your password there was no way to retrieve your iCloud backups because there was no way to decrypt them. My knowledge of this is quite dated though, so I could be wrong.
I hate to be blunt. But this is as much pseudoscience as the anti vaxers. Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. There is also a big difference between losing weight based on water weight and losing real body mass.

I sweat like a pig anytime I work out. I use to teach two hour fitness classes and even now after the end of a workout, I’ve “lost 5 pounds” but that’s pure water weight. I’m burning around 1000-1200 calories during that time. If I rehydrate and drink lots of water afterwards, I’ll “gain” 3 pounds.

If you are “losing weight” by being hungry or by limiting when you eat, you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.

The same was cited in the article. The chess players are forgetting to eat.
I've not bought into the Apple ecosystem so I'm not totally sure how it works, but when you back up your files to Apple's servers, isn't it encrypted on your device before transmission in such a manner that Apple is unable to decrypt it on their servers? That's been my impression.

(There is the matter of Apple's software being closed source and maybe they could push a compromising update that pushes your data to their servers without encrypting it, but that's probably a matter for another discussion.)
My great aunt was one of these. She was from Arkansas and married a much older Civil War veteran. She lived until 1979.
On a related note there's a pretty entertaining NPR video breaking down whether or not you can power your house with a bike - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbUxt2x4InE (spoiler alert - you can't :))

I worked it out and even if I pedal 8 hours / day and somehow convince the wife to join we're only producing 2kWh / day. Our house's power usage is ~11 kWh/day in the winter (worse in summer due to AC)...it's hopeless.
The company I work for is trialing AR solutions for remote support purposes. We've tried the glasses and customers hate it because it literally makes them motion sick.

Our current thing is phone/tablet based where you can basically stream real time video to our support staff and each party can draw on the screen, and whatever they draw stays where it is in physical space.

Customers love it, it works great.

Nobody wants dorky glasses that make you sick.
I a major problem for most people (even in tech circles) is the lack of ownership over their email address. E-mail address portability is a real problem.

Edit: Is there a reason for the down votes? Lack of portability/ownership allows Google to change policies with less repercussions. It is because my account is new?
Amy idea of their signing bonus outside of new grads? I'm wondering what they offer people with real experience if they give that much to people without any. Relevant for me because I'm interviewing with a large financial firm that "pays similarly to FB". I doubt their claim, especially in light of these numbers.
I decomposed this

Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 15) + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 15);

You are getting a random number, putting it into base 36 (so you get 0-9 and a-z) then removing the "0." at the front of the number. To get enough length, we're just doing this two times.

Fun!
I’d argue the opposite is true. Yes immersion is fun/cool... briefly. I liken VR to a rollercoaster — it’s very fun but very intense, and therefore I don’t want it everyday. Maybe once a year or so is enough. Also don’t forget that a significant portion of the population will experience motion sickness, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent that (there are many techniques that have successfully minimized it, but there still remains a portion of the population that cannot handle it, period.)

AR promises to be much more of a light touch in mixing digital content with the physical. You’re still grounded in reality so the motion sickness goes away (but if not well calibrated/tracked and is overused can still be annoying).

That said, the total number of applications where this is desirable is way less than predicted by those who want a big new product category. You’re still wearing a screen on your face, in a world that’s largely starting to rebel against screen culture. Everyday use has a lot of problems in terms of attention management, leading to dystopia if not done correctly. There are targeted everyday applications that can be useful, although many are hard to justify over the cheaper 2D screen you already have in your pocket and certainly won’t get rid of simply because of both keyboard and the cognitively grounded value of direct manipulation.
During the first internet bubble companies offered cars, not leased or company car, but the signing bonus was a new car. (I assume it was also PR go get their name out).

I negotiated 5 more (paid) vacation days once and would do again.

My very first contract had a clause of automatic promotion after 1 year unless there are objections.

> What is the hardest to accommodate?

Mostly companies try to be perceived fair. So paying somebody home internet but not offering it also to others in a policy (e.g. everybody is entitled after 1 year employment) comes off as unfair. Giving out more salary is usually easier.
Infections with this is isolate need not be causal, it can also be secondary to some other problem, for example viral or environmental.

On the other hand there may be a newly-significant way of transmission.
Uranium is more likely to distribute that toxicity in a convenient dust cloud, though. Tungsten and lead for the most part stay in one piece on impact.
It is true that lots of job in market do not treat people as human. Lots of them are just repeatable labor work and require very minimal level of creativity or innovation. In this sense, i agreed that eliminating these jobs would be a huge step for the whole society. However, I don't think the government and these giant capitalist tech company is ready or have a plan about how to distribute resource and money they earned.
Also, i am not sure how you define the work here. Instead of eliminate work, i would think working for what you truly believe can give you satisfaction since you are being rewarded for what you do and make.
Please link me any product pages for hardware enabling a quantum stuff for their network core. I might have missed some revolution, but expect this to be.... "wishful thinking". At best.
A "database" is a tool for storing data, which is a concept that completely orthogonal to the question of how a piece of data is encrypted or who is in possession of the decryption keys.
Did you ever test exercise? Just yesterday, before my workout (squats and bench press, no cardio), I weighed 202. Just after my workout, I weighed 200.

I've seen myself lose up to 5lbs before and after a workout.
Notes can be set as secure, which encrypts them with a password Apple doesn't have access to.
> Yes, that's how databases work.

A database is, at its core, just a bunch of bytes structured in some way. There's nothing stopping you from storing an encrypted value in someone else's DB, and as long as you keep your secret private your plaintext is as safe as your encryption scheme.
Absolutely. Since the keys are checked in LDAP at login, it happens instantaneously.
Since welding is a hazardous occupation, safety is a big concern. As such, they drug test workers on a regular basis. If you fail, you get fired.

Even if drugs were legalized, this would still happen.
I'm not sure if I follow your example.

Are you implying after one occurrence a person thinking "in a deterministic way" is going to take the outcome and think it will reoccur again?

I don't think that is deterministic thinking because a determinists accounts all the variables that made the outcome. Such as how the software was used and understands that will be different for the outcome of some other user.
> This does require some degree of effort in terms of implementation and accounting

I feel like you're really downplaying what would be involved. It is a great suggestion, but the effort to manage and implement doesn't sound trivial. Personally, the few systems that exclusively use this model drive me nuts. Instead of just paying for what I want I have to add to this account, then pay for what I want.

For the business owner, they now have to account for and secure new account balances. At a large scale (Starbucks has $1.6 billion [1]), you can likely cover any additional regulatory and accounting costs and also make money. On a small scale it can be a liability that costs more than it brings in.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/jp_koning/status/1160387043790413...
The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration are quoted on speculating that it may be parvovirus, as it seems to fit the symptoms. I have seen no further reporting or repudiation on that possibility, though.

Or ... maybe it's lupus?
I'm going to try to reiterate more clearly what your parent comment was saying:

Your experimental methodology is flawed because it fails to control for water loss. This isn't negligible: in the summer when it's hot and I sweat a lot, I can easily drink a 1 liter Nalgene bottle in the morning, about 2 pounds of water. It's likely that what you've measured is simply the slow loss of water through perspiration and exhalation throughout the night.

I guess technically this is weight loss because you do weigh less when dehydrated, but it's not loss of fat weight, which is what I think most people mean when they say weight loss.

Weight fluctuations throughout the day due to water/food intake and waste excretion/water loss dwarf any actual fat loss, so I don't think weighing yourself throughout the day is a viable method of determining when fat weight is lost during the day.
it always cracks me up when I visit the website of a "very serious newspaper" and see a critically important op-ed headline about "saving democracy" or "defending life on planet earth" but cannot read the article because they paywalled it. maybe their message isn't really that important?
Exactly. I “lose weight” every time that I take my blood pressure pill (a diuretic) and “gain weight” when I don’t.

My weight fluctuates 5 pounds in a given day based on how much I eat, drink, workout etc.
This blog post could be shortened to:

> Gmail's confidential emails are just standard emails with some extra features like unprintable, unforwardable, uncopyable, and so on. However, this will not stop anyone from taking a screenshot from the unprintable email, just to print off the screenshot.

In fact, this is literally the second paragraph in their help article on the topic[0].

The rest of the blog post is FUD and an advertisement for their E2E email product (which also doesn't protect against someone taking a screenshot or taking pictures with their phone).

Yes, Gmail does have access to the email before and after it's encrypted, and "Google has access to its users emails" is obvious; you'll have to choose who to trust, and gmail users trust Gmail to not personally go snooping through their emails. Google says very few employees have production access to data[1].

0: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7674059

1: https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...
> Middle aged men setting posers of a 16 year old girl on fire on the street.

I haven't heard about that (and can't find it). How many people were burning posters? If it was just a few, that's another example of the amplification I mentioned. A few crazy people are elevated as representative of the opposition.

The Washington Post ran a story like that. "Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is sailing to America amid a storm of online attacks"[1]. Their evidence for that "storm"? Three tweets.

1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/15/swedish-clim...
I don't really understand why this wiki article is a HN post... but since kosher slaughter was mentioned let me give you some more details. BTW, I'm Jewish myself.

1. Based on Jewish holidays and traditions, I doubt "Tza'ar Ba'alei Chayim" was ever a factor. For example, in Yom Kippur one of the traditions called Kapparot is about swinging a live chicken over others' head. Example: https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2013/09/f111007...

2. The main reason today for kosher slaughter and kosher food in general is money. It's how the orthodox community in Israel makes money. It's a big industry that employs many orthodox people. Kosher restaurants in Israel need to pay money to get a kosher certificate. There are multiple organizations that can certify a place as kosher (some have more strict requirements than others). Those places usually visit those restaurants to inspect their kosherness similarly to food inspection everywhere else. (but their focus is only the kosher part, not the food quality). A restaurant can be 100% kosher but most religious people won't visit it unless it's certified kosher by somebody that meets their requirements.

For secular people in Israel the worse part about kosher restaurants is that they must be closed during Shabbat (Friday afternoon till Saturday evening). Basically, the religious parties in Israel want everything to be closed during that time (no public transit, no entertainment, restaurants, etc.)
> It's reasonable if, like you said, the UI is very complex and if I'm going to spend hours using it. In practice, they mess up conventions on a single scrolling page I'm spending 2 minutes on and it's usually a clue to avoid that site in the future.

Scrolljacking and replacing the scrollbar are two very different things. And the problem is that there isn't a streamlined, consistent way to replace the scrollbar, so it's always a hacky mess.
The most widespread, successful use case AR which I can see currently is AR Filter i.e. snapchat filters and those who copied it.

The reason IMO, is most of the users who use snapchat filters wouldn't even know what Augmented Reality is. It is that intuitive use case which can make high-tech get widespread consumer adoption.

Looking at the rate at which limited attention, instant gratification apps are conquering market, the demand for AR filters aren't going to decline anytime soon and those who offer AR as a service would have enough buyers in the form of the copy cat apps wanting AR filters.

In fact, snapchat itself supposedly acquired the AR filter tech from a Ukranian company called Looskery in 2015.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. Obviously standards have changed a great deal in 150 years.
Here's an example for you: recent headline from NYT: Which Health Policies Actually Work? We Rarely Find Out
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/upshot/which-health-polic...

Yeah that's right - nobody knows which healthcare programs work. Neither literal idiots, nor uneducated hillbillies, nor ECON101 graduates, nor PHD-bearing professors, nor politicians, nor NYT journalists, nobody has any good information. On a topic as important as which healthcare policies actually work. So what's the point on insisting on ECON101? There's just no information about it, and nobody cares about getting one.
I imagine you could just carry around a little keyboard or simply type into any flat surface just as you do now with a phone screen.
I know she thinks that, but it's not what her post is about. She quotes Stallman, assumes the reader will agree that what he said was problematic, then spends the rest of the article discussing how we shouldn't tolerate problematic people.
I like the idea of the bug database synchronized with the code base, becoming part of the documentation, but here are my concerns.

Often people who are not developers put "issues" into the bug tracker and they might not find working with the command-line easy.

If an instance of the system is in use by many, debugging a problem experienced by a particular user might involve personally identifying information which should not be checked in with the source.

Also issue trackers sometimes deal with multiple branches of development. In a sane place you might have 4.8 and 4.9 in production and a 5.0-dev, fix a bug in 4.9, then port the fixes to the other branches. To do this you are thinking about the tree as a whole and that's easier done from outside rather than inside the tree.
If you have to read something, then your focus most certainly will be diverted, even if it’s relevant to what you were looking at or thinking about.

There in lies the problem — if information pops up that’s relevant to our conversation, you’re still getting pulled out of the moment in an asymmetric way. That has negative consequences to human interaction.

Plus don’t forget — popping up the right information at the right time is an extraordinarily hard problem to solve.
Feces are actually a perfectly workable way of pathogen transmission in dogs...
Not even worth responding to. That kind of low-effort comment doesn't belong here.

(My original response didn't belong either, so I edited it.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20920670
> don't see a world burning

If the NASA and IPCC graphs of global temperature, and rate of change don't convince you, nothing will.

Most predictions on climate heating are turning out to be far worse in actuality. Sea level rise is neatly tracking the IPCC's worst case prediction. Yet they're still putting out the middle ground , conservative case.
> I haven't heard anyone in the intelligence community suggest that Huawei has already implemented any back doors in their devices.

I'm not sure I follow you, wouldn't this then not rather imply that it only seems like a straw man if you've been led to believe that they're planning backdoors in their 5G network equipment?
They have a demo now???
if its open source then fork it, so everyone can contribute without harrasment or tracking.
Beyond explicitly using secure notes (which are encrypted), I don't recall Apple promising "confidentiality" of those things. I mean, I don't expect Apple to give that data to others, but I also don't assume Apple has no way of accessing that given a court order.
Sure, I understand what you're saying (and racism and jingoism are pretty hard to separate in practice). Clearly most private citizens anywhere in the world (outside of China...) don't have much to worry about using Huawei hardware, and if these laptops run Deepin they could easily have any other distro installed instead, if people are worried about the software.