skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
as an avid small bookstore customer, in a university town where every genre of book and bookstore existed, I came to know well one successful bookseller, worked for him on special assignments, then worked at his estate. He was literate, mercurial and absolutely a scoundrel about money. The most important, basic, recurring issue of the day was money in every form. Every opportunity to get something for one price and sell it at a higher price, was the priority and the topic and what was important.

What the customer expects, how the customer buys and how the customer thinks the bookseller is in character or otherwise, is open to manipulation at every turn.

This particular was fellow probably genius material, but make no mistake, you are a tool as a customer, and that is utterly different than the stuff of reviews and taste and literary movements and craftsmanship and collectability. Now that the word appeared, yes, collections and valuing of collections came to the fore over the years. Special rare books that are collectible became a better trade for an aging trader. This was all before Amazon.com appeared. Your mileage may vary. I doubt this sort of person, absolutely real in the West for centuries, is able to be in business now. Bookshops are closed one after another in that town now. There used to be fifty in a two mile radius from campus.
There are no nice words to describe how beyond insane this belief is.

Governments are charging for providing an environment in which you can have a business in the first place.

Good luck running a business in a place without police, laws, basic infrastructure like roads etc.

And if you don't want to pay taxes in some place, you're free to not do business there.

Doesn't fit the definition of theft very well now, does it?
The human raters are used to assess the performance of the algorithms (i.e. do human opinions align with algorithmic ones), not to rank content directly.

A recurring theme with Google is that they always want to solve problems algorithmically.
Cats are very useful for removing rats. Cat ban is considered harmful.
Most people ride bikes because they do not have to wait for a bus, and they go places that the busses do not go. I do not think much of the calculus there is about cost.

For this reason you see people put their bikes on the bus rack and use both.
> Does the author actually have a reason why analog would possibly be better, other than giving consumers choice?

Duh no. And this article does a disservice to itself, as it looks like there could be a real issue of fidelity in the digital chain[0]. Bluetooth is known to cause issues (lag, bandwidth variations, …), and the processing chain might be problematic:

> the digital processor samples incoming sound at a rate far lower than that of an old CD player

I don't know if there's any truth to it, but it should certainly be investigated and if true fixed. It might also be that the perceptual models used in these hearing aids are not correct for, well, hearing aids.

[0] though some of the complaining could be a question of habit, the wearer's old hearing aids had a coloration to which they'd gotten more and more used, the different profile of the new ones is jarring even if it might be more correct
Vertx is not part of the standard library either, saying that Fast HTTP is a spezialized lib is very missleading since it's widely used.
This sort of thing blows my mind. My great grandfather was born in the 1910s.
> Last I heard, he'd been heavily sedated during an interview,

Do you have a link to a source? I know a lot about use of restraint and rapid tranquillisation on people with mental illness and this sounds like an unlikely situation.

EDIT: after having read your source and I can say it's fucking bullshit.

EDIT2: In the spirit of teaching people stuff. All episodes of restraint of mental health patients in England is supposed to be recorded. This should include all types of restraint where a staff member puts a hand on the patient. This range stretches from prone restraint and rapid tranquillisation all the way to "guiding hand" ("hey Bob, I can see your annoyed. Come and have a cup of tea and tell me what's going on" with a hand on the shoulder is probably an incident of recordable restraint).

We want to end all episodes of restraint.

We especially want to end all episodes of prone restraint because it's traumatic, degrading, and dangerous.

We want to avoid all other forms of restraint because preventative working to avoid the situation happening is better for that patient, for other patients, and for staff.

If you want to see what we're doing to try to end restraint the "Reducing Restrictive Practice" programme might be interesting (although it's heavily aimed at staff and patients in MH settings in England) https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/improving-care/nccmh/reducing-rest...

Restraint is used in in-patient mental health settings, and in in-patient learning disability and intellectual disability settings.

Mental health settings can include prisons and also "forensic" (secure) hospitals. (Secure is a bit of jargon with specific meaning in the context of MH care).

So, if you want to claim a prisoner is being restrained and drugged it would be easy to make this credible. Use words like "supine restraint" and "rapid tranquillisation". Get the names of the meds right. Say that you've put in FoI requests but were denied access to someone's medical information. But also put in an FoI request to see total numbers of restraint and rapid tranq being used in that setting.

There's probably a name for this thing where a conspiracy theory is such obvious bollocks that the only people who believe it are other conspiracy theorists. I guess it's a bit like some email scams are deliberately full of typos in order to select a particular audience.
If you pay your tax and not your competitor it is self explanatory.
Sorry, you are right, meant to say cumulative density function. (Or survival function, as in the case of exp(-x).)
The UK is beholden to and partner to US influence.
Converting a capital intensive and inflexible office lease commitment to monthly payments and the ability to scale is very useful to many companies that manage their real estate prudently.

WW could be successful without all the rah-rah about changing the world. Like Uber, I’m sure they could afford to shed a few thousand employees (who were hired for growth) and continue to run a more sustainable business.
Just as AWS made it easy to spin up a server, WeWork is making it easy to spin up a desk. This matters for companies with teams scattered around the world. If there's a WeWork in a certain city, it's super easy for us to get our team onboarded there - the brand is consistent, we know our people are going to be comfortable and happy.

Say what you will about their ridiculous financials, the product itself is good.
It seems clear to me the author is dissatisfied with the quality of the digital hearing aids compared to analog ones. And while this is probably subjective, the author having hearing loss probably means his reasons for writing the article are pretty straight forward.
Complex exponentiation is not defined arbitrarily to make Euler identity true. The Euler identity is a consequence.

I love the Euler identity in its typical form, but I think it is more surprising when you replace e and pi by their (approximate) numerical values and i by sqrt(-1)
DNA doesn’t survive that long. In this case they recovered the sequence of amino acids in proteins from the now-extinct rhino. Of course, the proteins were originally transcribed from the now-lost DNA, so you can use this information to infer this species position in the tree of life.
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.

-- John Maynard Keynes [0]

My personal conspiracy theory is that the age of abundance has already come but we just don't know what to do with it other than keep working our BS jobs.

[0] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
I've never knowingly been tested by any body heat sensor at an airport or other border crossing, and I've travelled plenty in Asia, USA, Europe, and in/out of my home country of Australia.

It’s hard to imagine how much use it would be; an active fever is only one indicator of whether someone is carrying an infectious illness, so such a test will lead to many false positives and negatives.

I'm fine with a sober discussion about the economic and moral pros/cons of immigration, and about fair and humane means of controlling immigration.

But this line of argument seems like a red herring.
How is it possible that you have the intellect required to work in tech and somehow believed any of these companies could give a single fuck about you?... They couldn't care less. Do your job, cog.
> Good luck running a business in a place without police, laws, basic infrastructure like roads etc.

Basically the Internet.
Tracking and concentration is not cost effective, so it’s just a tilt advantage.

Solar panels in a remote location need to be converted from DC to AC for transmission, then transmitted long distances with associated losses, then converted to DC again to charge the car, stored in batteries in the car with associated losses. A solar roof could actually be a net gain assuming the energy is used while the car is in motion, and it’s used near the equator so no tilt required.
> It's cool to see how Google is changing online journalism

It really isn't. That sort of 'cool' is what got us AMP, Chrome and search results mixed with advertising as well as Google products that are promoted at an unfair advantage compared to established products by competitors.

Monopolies have their occasional upsides but they also have structural downsides which is why they should be avoided.
This explanation is so brilliant that I created a short URL pointing to it: https://cutit.org/AJCFS
> Draconian, fascist use of technology on people, that's a matter of actual importance.

That's what he's arguing for. A global police state that knows what everyone is doing, everywhere, and can intervene at a moment's notice to stop certain kinds of technological work.
All fair points, but I wouldn't exactly call damage to brand reputation the single worst punishment a corporation can get though. Can easily think of an infinite number of worst punishments.

I guess there is a parallel with actual people. Personal reputation matters, but surely we need to be a bit more harsh when punishing certain behaviour.
for smaller storage servers, up to 2TB, Time4VPS beats Hetzner on price.

I've been using one for afew years now and it's been great. I run borg backups, rsync some stuff, and serve a calibre server out of a 1TB storage server.
Fantastic read, thank you. Hopefully you're not put off metric for life -- so much as put off low-quality tools. I'm a bit envious that you have a thicknesser at less than a year 'into woodwork'. Presumably one of the benefits of living in North America. (In AU decent workshop tools are hideously expensive, with limited ranges available domestically.)
I said it takes the humanity out if it. I am not, nor have I ever been against, having a border patrol. You’re putting words in my internet mouth.

It’s how you approach the idea of border patrol. I don’t know the ratios but border enforcement probably splits their time between smugglers of things and smugglers of people (or just Individuals crossing).

This fully AI based border-patrol system could work well if you see the border patrol problem as a "bringing shit in that we never want, under any circumstance" scenario, so for drugs this could work well. (although it'll just be yet another cat and mouse game, with the AI taking even longer to learn)

But the other side of the coin is the people side. It's more complicated. With people, it isn't just "we never want, under any circumstances" – there are many questions to be asked. We want to apprehend the actual smugglers for trafficking people, even if we want to deport the actual migrants, we want to properly file them, make sure they aren't malnourished, and send them back safely. Is an AI going to do all that? No. That's the problem with this solution.

I'm sorry that this doesn't fit into a binary view of "he must hate this totally AI border control, so he must be for open borders!"
What Makes a Good Story? Designing Composite Rewards for Visual Storytelling
Wow, what a garbage journalism
Interactive: The city caught between a British past and a Chinese future
Also to add, the vast majority of the users use cell phones, and the ability to pair your hearing aids to your phone is a big deal
"Quality" is a really hard thing to define algorithmically. Even if you had great journalists on staff, I don't know if their heuristic expertise could translate to an algorithm.

Most signals of trust/quality come via backlink profiles, which may be a poor proxy but are still the best that Google has been able to come up with.
There are other benefits to cycling that aren't just helping the envoirnment that you won't get a from a bus e.g. excercise. Also a bus works according to a schdule and route -- your bike doesn't.
The internet is infrastructure. So is a postal system that gets your wares to your customer.

Or the banking systems and laws that make it possible for you to receive money via the internet in the first place.

If some customer in country X doesn't pay you for your services, you fully expect the government of that country to have systems in place that allow you to go after what you're owed.

But even darknet drug markets rely on a lot of infrastructure provided by countries/governments at the end of the day.
That's a problem in low quality streaming music, sure, but is the author even sure it applies to digital hearing aids?
California's 'Workers Rights' Bill Does No Favors to Drivers or Consumers
This is from 2016.

A lot of states have been giving carbon credits to nuclear plants for a long time. There are several where it makes good sense to implement subsidies of that nature. So this is not a terribly new idea, nor is it as controversial as the article attempts to make it out to be..
There's also the extra weight involved. If you used that extra weight for more batteries instead of solar panels, you might have even more range.
> Ideally, citing your sources should be done without being asked.

Do you have a source for why that would be ideal ?
you only get 7 free snapshots, and if the others are totally different then your live data, you'll pay for them.
When was the last time your dad tried a newer hearing aid? Some now have multi-directional microphones that are meant to solve for the use case you described. They've been getting some good reviews, and with the recently de-regulation expect the pace of change/competition to get more fierce.
>Let's stop downplaying what happened there and in the US: a similar, unethical & careful PSYOP teasing legitimate popular concerns to tip the vote toward a result that breaks the stability of the West.

Actually let's stop altering what happened in the UK and in the US (and in France).

The masses, after 40+ years (beginning with Reagan and Thatcher) of getting the short end of the stick,

increased globalization and loss of domestic worker jobs (which the Left once, especially in Britain, was much protective of),

and the left (using the term loosely for people like Clinton, Blair, and co) and right elites agreeing on business as usual on everything that matters (including corporatism, trillion dollar bank bailouts, and war) and peddling token social/religious issues to divert their ever impoverished working class voters, while having pundits and specialists telling people who've seen their jobs and cities destroyed how they had it "better than ever",

decided to go off the rails and vote for a populist "bring jobs back, stop globalization, reduce imperialism wars" candidate in the US, and a "fuck EU imposed laws and German economic leadership, let's have a sovereign Britain again" brexit, or take it to the streets in France.

The 10% of well of "good hearts", who were never affected all those years, and probably have it better than ever indeed, consider them deplorables, unwashed masses, etc, wonder why the masses don't just "eat cake" and get on with the program, to let their favorite politicians continue business as usual, and of course are certain that they know better and everybody else

Unable to understand their defeat, those bleeding hearts, blame it on some inconsequential villainy on the part of Russia, on some BS "collusion", on the masses voting "against their own interests", and whatever other straw they can grasp...

They are the same people who consider a president who helped destroy 5 countries and turn them into hell-holes of civil war and fundamentalism a Nobel peace prize award winning good person, and another who tried to withdraw from 2 wars, de-escalated and met with the S.K, and acknowledged that the real competition to the US in the 21st century is China in trade, as a bad person (because he has no manners and tweets random BS, which, as we all know, is what's really important in a politician).

In the end everybody votes based on their wallets, and the 10% (and an additional percentage who feeds of them) never had reason to disturb the status quo.
Do they not see their own risk of seeing a similar scenario?

Or, perhaps they have settled. Compromise?
Speech enhancement (denoising/dereverb) and seperation is absolutely a hot research topic, as it's needed for fields like voice assistants as well. Unsurprisingly, the state of the art is variety of deep neural networks, here's a good overview of recent developments [1]. Of course, many of these are far from real time, but earlier techniques are used in some digital hearing aids iirc. Apple have also released [2] some details of the system the Homepod uses, along with audio samples.

A quite interesting further development of these is this paper [3] which uses brain activity to determine which particular speaker the listener is trying to hear, and then optimises that.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07524
[2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/2018/12/03/optimizing-siri...
[3] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaav6134
Center of Gravity Concerns Lead to Lufthansa Pulling Last Economy Row on A320neo
It doesn't appear miraculous because knowing all derivatives for a function is quite a lot of information about a function. A polynomial of degree six can be described with six derivatives but it can also be described with six factors. There is no information advantage.
Because marketing, need something new to sell. My mother in law has worn hearing aids for years and was recently convinced to upgrade to the latest greatest as she has to have her phone on speaker and has trouble hearing/understanding when she can't see the person, eg, not in the same room but shouting. S0 €5000 ($5500) later and still has phone on speaker and still can't hear at a distance.
I think for many people emulators are a sweet spot between technical challenge and potential usefuleness. You can actually improve the state of the art, and it's fun and challenging, and people will actually be thankful!
Not OP but I guess it’s because a monopoly can afford to keep on paying fines and continue the same practice. A smaller competitor pays by the rules, can’t afford to pay fines, hence anti-competitive.
Hi Matthias! As everyone else, I love your work, and really admire your designs. Thanks for sharing!

> Funny how my old stuff shows up on hacker news from time to time

I really like this feature from Hacker News. People sharing periodically the same projects that have inspired or awe them. These kind of projects are not "news", and that makes them better, they've standed the test of time and keep amazing people year after year.
I get that perspective. Let me ask this: Do you feel the same way about the people in your life who smoke? or eat fast food? or don't exercise daily? or text while driving? I know you can say those are an accumulation of small dangers but it isn't like Honnold never climbed once and decided to free solo the hardest cliff in the world. Do you feel the same about race car drivers? NFL players? We all have our identity and a lot of time it is associated with the things we are good with.
> The barriers to entry for building HTTPS software are a lot lower than building out cellular infrastructure.

Why assume extra cell security would be a hardware build-out? Surely all towers in existence can get remote firmware upgrades, the same way all of todays routers can?

> For HTTPS you have a lot of altruistic people and companies, like letsencrypt and Mozilla willing to give some resources to make HTTPS everywhere possible.

That seems true in retrospect, but there was lots resistance to, and futility thinking about HTTPS before it happened, I remember it, I was there. It only seems like there are altruistic people helping now that it basically is everywhere and now that it’s easy & cheap to do, and everyone knows it’s a good idea.

> So unless the government mandates it

Agreed that’s unlikely to happen, but it doesn’t seem like a real barrier to me. Maybe GDPR or Europe will take the lead on this one too. But very little of the security & privacy we have in the US has ever come from a government mandate, yet we do have some. HTTPS wasn’t a government mandate. They didn’t oppose it either, possibly because they have keys and/or cooperative ISPs, but they sure didn’t do anything to push it forward.

> I just don’t see how given where we are today.

Public awareness about the issue for one. Rather than saying it’s futile and will probably never happen, talking to your friends and family about it will help. Though we have a super long way to go, improvements in privacy do tend to happen once the public truly understands how they’re being spied on. Privacy pushes by Apple and Google could make it happen. Even Apple alone might be able to make it happen, and they’re currently on the side of privacy. It might also unfortunately take more widely reported cases of StingRay before people perk up to this issue.
>Cars are convenient to the user because their externalities (noise, pollution, inefficient use of space) only affect those people on the streets who don't use cars.

If cars magically made no noise or pollution would demand drop?

I can see some substance behind the assertion that their use of space is what makes cars convenience but saying that people like them because they make noise and pollute is just needlessly extremist.
How to Tell a Bird's Age by Its Song
Taxation is a social agreement that we as a society of people decide to pool part of all individuals' money towards
projects that will benefit everyone in short or long term.