skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really wish they would let you turn off the whole "show other users' typing activity" thing, so that people don't hold back their replies if they see someone else replying.

I'd turn it off for our whole org if I could because I'd rather the conversation happen quickly than...well I'm not sure what their goal is. It's like they're taking a page from Apple's anti-user/anti-choice playbook for iOS Messages by not giving you a painfully obvious option at all, at any level.
> his philosophy in the eyes of academia and the public has garnered more scrutiny simply because of his ties

I think this probably is indeed the case. Although I would argue the value of an idea should be entirely detached from who had it, and be a function only of its usefulness, beauty and other significant attributes.

Of course if a Nazi has an idea we might then argue it becomes less beautiful because of that.
Is it really hard to beat them when they only cover one's eyes?
It protects the code not the invention. Rewrite from C to java and you get around copyright.

With respect to patents, inventions are about how you do something. Whether it is written in java or C is irrelevant. Similarly, for gadget patents, the material it is manufactured out of doesn't matter.
Can’t you make a payment plan on the 155$? Good luck and I wish you will overcome any hardship!
I'm bookmarking this to re-read every year or so!
>Separated bike lanes can be equally dangerous and more inconvenient for cyclists.

I'm no expert, but I googled "protected bike lane safety statistics" and every result is touting the safety benefits. The results with reliable looking numbers are reporting injury reductions of 30-90%.
That is true, but you did say precision, not accuracy.

I assumed you accurately chose your wording, when you used the word "precise".
The title doesn't really tell you what they're actually doing. Toyota is basically running a program to put 34% efficient solar panels on a Prius to charge the battery during the day.

Using typical panels on roof, hood, and trunk only nets you 4-6 miles / day of solar energy if you do the math. They're increasing surface area of panels here and using what are probably multi-junction (i.e. really expensive) cells for a fair boost in potential range / day. The claim of 18 miles per day of sun seems like a stretch and in actual production and real-world conditions you'd be more likely to get three quarters of that, but I could be wrong. Still impressive, though.
An analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives
Here’s a cool interactive map of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis: https://geoshen.com/posts/the-pearl-river-delta-megalopolis
"Because FRBs last only a thousandth of a second or so, any object producing them couldn’t be much bigger than 200 miles across"

I read this sort of thing now and then over the years, and I'm not sure I understand it, or if it is misleading.

What is an "object"? Could an "object" be part of a stellar object, or is it necessarily the whole thing? It seems like surely some event can happen on the Sun in less time than it takes for light to pass across it, just like radio waves on earth can be modulated in less time than it takes for them to pass across the planet.

Maybe it's obvious what an "object" is, but I feel like the statement that it has to be under 200 miles wide is promoting the assumption that it has to be a neutron star, or perhaps a black hole. But does it?
There's a tention between "paid per prisoner day" and "fewer prisoners come back to stay".

You could get a bonus for not getting "return" prisoners - but it'd have to be better than gaining life sentences (though in general, harder to compete in three strike legislations where you'd be incentivesed to allow prisoners to commit crimes in order to trigger three strikes).

Perhaps there's a way to pay for recovery - but if your business depends on there being prisoners, it's hard to see how you could motivate anything but an increase in prisoner population.

Certainly an end to prisoners would mean bankruptcy?

[ed: you might have a goal of lowering crime, and by extention prisoner population. A private prison, paid to house prisoners, would be commercially committed to the opposite; increasing the prison population.]
LCA: Loss Change Allocation for Neural Network Training
Also, innovation is encouraged by forcing inventors to discover different ways to solve the same problem if licensing a patent is not an option.
No, just there's a big part of it that's particularly baffling
The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that there appear to be two settings, one for trackpad, and one for a mouse scrollwheel. You can find them in different locations. They change the same value, though. You can't have natural trackpad scrolling and "pull the wheel towards you to scroll down" scrolling at the same time without a 3rd-party application.
> The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning.

It actually does, because federal prohibition has not been lifted (even though there is non-assured enforcement forebearance).

The fact that anyone in a significant ownership, leadership, or management position in any business in the industry is technically guilty of a federal felony with a 20-year minimum sentence (and, just by being sufficiently successful, that can bumped up to a life-without-parole minimum) [0] has a fairly substantial impact on the willingness of otherwise legitimate businesses and businesspeople to participate in the industry and thus on what kind of business people do participate, even when the feds aren't actually prosecuting at the moment.

[0] the “drug kingpin” (formally, Continuing Criminal Enterprise) statute and it's later-added “super kingpin” provision.
AI thinks this flood photo is a toilet
Wow, I had no idea about any of these. Good to know!
Did you mean patent trolls?

At least some multinationals would benefit from software patents going away, since they are often used defensively.
To refresh the point that I am making: OP said "Ruthless capitalism and fundamental human needs do not mix well." The implication being, housing should not be subject to ruthless capitalism. And I use the ready and cheap availability of food and oil as a counterargument.

Your point seems to be that food and oil are beneficiaries of subsidies in the US, therefore are not "ruthless capitalism".

The US government pays $20B/yr in farm subsidies. HUD has a budget of $40B, and the mortgage interest deduction is a $110B/yr subsidy to homeowners.

If food in the US is subsidized such that it is not "ruthless capitalism", then on this basis it would seem to me that housing has been subsidized well beyond the point of "ruthless capitalism" as well. Yet OP (and you) seem to think that food is subsidized to a far greater degree than housing. I challenge you to make a concrete case that this is true, either in the US or globally in general.
I'm so sorry to hear that. I wish the best for you and your sister.
Nonsense, and you don't believe that either. Otherwise you'd be arguing for hard borders between US states to preserve their unique character. Border politics are drive by racism, pure and simple. You may not be racist, but you should look into the history around the politics of this and the extreme right wingers that back the various anti-immigration front groups.
I would concur in your take on the argument. I think it's important, to promote rational and productive discourse, to push back on those that would have us believe that ideas are in essence, "guilty by association", based on the reputation or history of those who formulate said ideas.

Instead, the ideas, theories, philosophies, etc. should be confronted directly on their own merit or lack thereof. I don't think someone, in good faith, could claim that the ideas of liberty and freedom proposed by many of architects of the constitution of the United States are lessened simply because some of these people were slave owners. That's not to say that we can't look back now and agree that their practice of slavery was morally wrong, but to pillory their positive contributions to the world simply because of this seems quite nefarious.
A long time ago I was vehemently against all software patents. But as I thought about it more, I ran into the same problem you did: where is the boundary between a clear "machine" patent versus a software patent, especially if you look at modern microprocessors that rely heavily on microcode.

My resolution to the conundrum is this: software should be patentable, but we should recognize that the bar for a software patent is much higher. It is much, much easier to iterate on several ideas and concepts in software than it is in hardware: I can try five approaches in a day in software, but building five prototype machines may take several months.

As an example of something that might make the bar, I'd submit PageRank. It's easy to say that it's merely taking the eigenvalue of the Internet, so therefore it's not patentable. But the novelty and creativity is not in figuring out how to take the eigenvalue, but recognizing that the result of this operation is tremendously useful in the problem of searching the internet. The combination of the algorithm and the use it is put to is the basis of the patent--for prior art here, note that drug patents do not patent the molecule itself, or the process of manufacturing the molecule, but using the molecule to treat the condition.
I think the claim that Dasein has to do with Nazism would need to be demonstrated. I think for any idea it is reasonable to assume it doesn't have anything to do with Nazism until demonstrated otherwise. Dasein's throwness, so far as I can see, doesn't have anything to do with Nazism.

Of course there is always the possibility for any idea that it leads to death camps. But it is rather hard to exhaustively explore the consequences of anything.

It could well be, however, that having an affilation with Nazism increases the likelihood that your ideas lead to death camps. Although even that ought to be deomnstrated rather than assumed.
Marcuse was corresponding with him about it in 1947.

https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/40spubs/47MarcuseHeideg...
> The first meeting of EU leaders after Brexit was devoted, entirely, to discussing the apparently urgent EU army.

The Brexit vote was on 2016-6-23. The next EU Council meeting was on 2016-6-28. According to the minutes [1] and conclusios the Council discussed the Syrian refugee crisis, economics, external relations and the Brexit vote. No EU army was discussed, the only defence-related thing was EU-NATO cooperation.

* [1] http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-27-2016-INIT...
* [2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/21645/28-euco-conclusi...

> Guess how much time they spent discussing that the EU was just rejected completely by the biggest vote in British history: none whatsoever.

Immediately after this Council meeting the EU27 (all member states sans the UK) met in an informal meeting whose whole topics were of course Brexit and the state of the European Union.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/20462/sn00060-en16.pdf
The problem there is the police using bad processes. That's not insolvable. Courts already have processes to protect against some of that cherry picking and prosecutor's fallacy type stuff. Avoiding technology doesn't seem like a sensible solution when safety processes already work in many areas.

If you can legally be fired for having police show up at work, then you're at risk of being fired for any reason and that itself is a problem. Solve that problem with employment protection laws like many countries already have.
> Why not just present the court with renderings that would have been used in all devices in question?

How?

You'd need a very expensive lab that keeps all phones and apps and records updates at times to work out what looks like when.

Assuming you also can forensically see when the owner updates their phone and know the apps they are using and if they jail broke it and what country it's from.

Common sense is take a best guess, if both sides can't agree get them to prove/argue their side if they think it matters using experts and let the jury decide. Basically the system we currently have.

Transcripts of witness are pretty inaccurate, on top of what they actually said being inaccurate. Been here before.
Sorry, I think you're misunderstanding my argument. I agree that wood reinforced glue is stronger than wood, but it's not really speaking to improving a wooden gear as above.

Gears are subject to predictable stresses, and so being able to orient a material to best handle those stresses will make a stronger gear. Plywood, like anything else, is a compromise that, as you say, has a more isotropic character. Obviously, there is a wide range of strength in wood, and so plywood. I think it's reasonable to say that one could construct a stronger gear using teeth from readily available solid wood, then readily available plywood. Good luck finding hickory plywood :).

To your first sentence though, if you take the same size and quality solid board and piece of plywood at your local hardware store (making a reasonable attempt at an apples-to-apples comparison), the board will be almost certainly be stiffer and stronger with the grain, than the plywood will: https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fplgtr190/chapter_...
Is this like when the British settlers deliberately used smallpox-infected blankets to give diseases to the native Americans? Trying to associate immigration with disease is some vile rhetoric.
Denunciatory rhetoric breaks the site guidelines regardless of what you're denouncing. If you hurl the buzzword weapons of the moment, it will take the thread further into political flamewar regardless of whether your position is right or wrong. Yelling a right position doesn't help; it will only trigger others into yelling a wrong position, or their idea of the right position, back. We know from long experience what sort of comments take internet forums further into flamewar. What good does it do if this place burns down?

We took the word "civil" out of the HN guidelines because people kept lecturing us about it, as if we were ignorant of the objections against that word or somehow on the wrong side of them, when the truth is we know as much about it as the people doing the lecturing, couldn't care less about that word, and aren't motivated by the concept.

If you're bringing up "the Jewish Question" as a way of insinuating something about HN moderation, that's pretty offensive.
It's a start. Thank you Ruth Wilson, thank you Angela Davis

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...

https://books.google.com/books/about/Golden_Gulag.html?id=zT...
No, not in this case. It's my perpetually maxxed out credit card.

I also have a dead fridge I'd love to replace and numerous other things that I've put off because I simply couldn't afford them.

I've been poor long enough that I have actual poor people problems. It's a completely different problem space from what most folks on HN are dealing with, or what I dealt with for most of my life. I wasn't always poor. Combination of serious health crisis plus divorce were The Perfect Storm.
He didn’t make an economic argument, he made a social and political one about changes to culture. I support open borders for the same reason I support free trade but the idea that it would be anything but massively disruptive to most existing political settlements is a joke. The US fifty years after open borders would have a lot in common with before but the Roman Empire had a lot in common with the Republic too.

No way a welfare state, democracy and open borders go together. Open borders isn’t going to be costless for existing residents.
What to Do About the Student-Loan Fiasco: Is “Debt Forgiveness” the Answer?
I thought you had said people ought to be as low-photo as you are in general, but on rereading it I see you did not say that.

Apologies for my misinterpretation.
The text of the law.
I bet you could get a more useful vehicle by making something more efficient than a Prius - sacrificing some niceties of course. This is a marketing stunt for the Prius brand, but it makes me wonder what you could get if you relaxed that constraint.
Sell support
>It's so very Peter Thiel-ish.

soon, all of the United State's defense companies will be named after stuff from Lord of the Rings
Square card reader converts credit card information into noise
Now how many USB-C to USB-C cables are there? (USB4 Update, Sept 12, 2019)
What software inventors? All I see are people standing on the shoulders of giants claiming the next six feet as their own.
Any thoughts about the other 118 days you work for free and donate your salary to the French state?
Ok, nothing there about face data. Only thing enabled is youtube history and everything works fine.
I like it. What would also be cool is another Go compiler and linker, developed by a different team not at Google. It would be good for the ecosystem and performance if there was more than one compiler and runtime.

I think there would be a market for a proprietary compiler and maybe an IDE to go with it — if the performance was better than the open source one. I think this is achievable because as good as Go's performance is now, there's still a lot of headroom. Google isn't exploiting modern CPUs very well, and the linker is not doing extensive LTO.

The biggest constraint is the blazing fast compile times. A compiler and toolchain that was able to take some time for optimization might deliver markedly better runtime performance.
Hey Google, is serving a lower-resolution image to Firefox part of leveraging a monopoly against Firefox?

Is your legal team fine with that? Is there any legitimate reason anyone could possibly identify for why you would purposefully worsen the experience for a fully compliant browser like Firefox, by lowering the resolution?

What does your legal team have to say about this?
The thing is, you don't need to build a machine to patent the design. You just need to design it. So you can still try five approaches a day for a hardware invention as you do for software.

I generally agree that picking the right line is hard and that nobody will ever be happy.
The case for changing the voting age to 0
Great article, misleading title. It's not "from scratch" if it's using OpenCV, TensorFlow, and a web service to do all of the work.

Imagine, "Bake Cookies From Scratch," and step one is remove the Pillsbury cookie dough from the freezer...
Given the recent influx of iOS exploits that have centered around WebKit they should probably adjust that priority
> And what value what that be?

A lot of embedded development still have very tight requirements. We're still talking about things discussed in tens or if generous, hundreds of kilobytes.

As a more mainstream example you might have heard of, the Arduino, I think the baseline Arduino has around 32KB available.

Also, in the embedded space, the compilers used are notorious for not having a complete standard library implementation. Lots of things are missing. Thus, developers who care about porting their code to different chips, are cautious about limiting what standard library functions they depend on.

Again, as a more mainstream example you might have heard of, look at Lua, which is implemented in 100% ANSI C. Because they care about Lua truly being portable to everywhere, they try to constrain their dependence on the standard library, and they supply some #ifdefs in luaconf.h to implement or workaround some standard library functions they know to be often missing.

And as a more mainstream example of an incomplete C standard library, look at Android. Bionic is the name of their C standard library. It is missing a lot of things. (And you have to use one of those #ifdefs in luaconf.h to compile Lua successfully on Android to workaround Bionic.)
SaaS vs. e-commerce: why I launched a physical product business
Antitrust and “Big Tech”
> 20% of Israelis are Arabs

Does that include the Palestinians, do the Israeli government counts them as people?
We don't consider 99% of them patentable. They're a technique, a style, an algorithm. No more an invention than a simple method for doing arithmetic.

Software can rarely come under a patent in the EU, but there is a very high bar to reach first. It's not my field so I'll avoid trying to explain where that bar is.
Yes, they are?

Considering most inmates do not have access to the internet, do you expect the state to publish these stats in good faith? Inmates to trust them? Or do they just subscribe to print editions of The New York Times?

I guess I'm not sure if you're speaking in hypothetical or talking about inmates today. As the article is on California I'm assuming we're both discussing USA.
I'd rather call them the Nazgul.
Your claims require evidence.
Should let him know his site breaks the back button

The visualization there is pretty cool though!
> Stating that you'd expect a country to 'remain the same' is tantamount to stating you want the current horrible problems that presently plague our society to persist - with no action against them. That doesn't make any sense.

This was the entire premise of the current president's platform; going back to before things "changed" and everything was "better"
The data I see says bike commuting nationwide grew 43% from 2000 to 2017, despite a dip leading into 2017. It's not just about powered alternatives, but spaces to do it. If you build a road for a powered vehicle and make the barest accommodations for everything else, of course powered vehicles will dominate. People take public transit more when you build more. They bike more when you build protected lanes. It's not about saying people should do these things, but rather saying that cities should better build for them.
It would be technically correct if what he meant was that the problem would be solved in constant time.

I bet it wasn't.
Yes, this is exactly it. It’s hard not to feel weird when every day I’m surrounded by hardworking individuals who aren’t making nearly as much as I do. It just doesn’t feel right. Is the difference in produced value actually that great? I mean I sure as heck wouldn’t be able to do what I do without without the collective support of all of these people.
The alternative is being defenceless when a patent troll comes around. Hate the game not the players.

I'd be 100% for ending software patents. We already ban patents on mathematics.
Plastic packaging: How are UK supermarkets doing?
Put your secret places inside private property with privacy protection. Prostitutes in hotels, and gambling in the back of a shop, for instance.
Been using CitiBike for 3 years. None of these have been an issue for me, except for the 30 minute time limit, but I was going from WTC to 96th st which took me 40 minutes
> software inventors

Are those the companies that force patented technology, to the exclusion of free alternatives, into widely used standards, so that they can charge everyone that wants to read a FAT32 filesystem?

The ones that patent an idea, not method, like one-click buying, or minigames in loading screens?

The ones that have some overly broad, unreadable patent, that would be invalidated in court due to countless prior art, but use it to extort businesses for amounts too small to make litigation worthwhile?

Or is this some mythical inventor, that creates something actually useful, and licenses it to others at fair prices? Something that improves the state of the art, but bizarrely does not rely on any prior patents in that area (otherwise existing companies could simply block the use of the new method)? And this someone isn't already employed at some company where the invention was made during the normal course of R&D (because otherwise, you already have your answer as to what software inventors do - write software/do R&D for existing companies that need it).

How many such people are there? Enough to justify the enormous headache of software patents?