skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem I see with (software) patents, is that they don't account for two individuals having the same idea on their own. Specially in todays quickly evolving society, something can become viable from one moment to another and there's room for several people to have an idea before the first one can actually implement it.

At this point, patent law doesn't protect any invention from being stolen, as it's supposed to, but instead denies people the right to sell their own original idea because someone else registered it first.

The main reasons why this seems to become more and more of a problem are a) globalization means patents have a much longer reach b) the increasing pace of technological advances makes it harder to be aware of every possible invention in a field and c) the increase in supporting technology makes even complex-sounding inventions trivial to implement.

With all those things in mind, my opinion is that the trade-off has tipped over the point of balance; it used to be that patent laws predominantly protected the rights of inventors from intellectual theft; these days, more than anything, it's abused to legally lock inventors out of selling their creations.

I'd say patent law, as a concept, needs a complete rework. It's just not fit for the 21st century anymore.

Think using voice control to turn on your toaster; it sounds like quite a task, but it becomes trivial by leveraging technologies like Googles voice assistance, IFTTT and some cheap IoT hardware.
Yes indeed, and I have no problem with their choice to serve only those who fit with their mission.

If they had only been honest and up front about it, and as soon as I said I was "separated" they said "sorry, we're not the dating service for you", it would have been fine! I would have respected that and moved on.

But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.
Are computer games the future of literature?
This is weird because the postal union was the one wonky, deep in the weeds policy where even the globalist agreed with the populist that something needed to be done. Way I see it there were 3 options.

1. Use international institutions like the WTO and UN to affect a change or enact a legal, narrow set of tarifs on bad actors without putting the wider, generally beneficial system at risk.

2. Start subsidizing our own postal service. China does it because it's an economic multiplier that benefits a wide segment of society. Why not copy it.

3. Burn the postal union treaty to the ground.

Trump picked 3 and has now pivoted to 1. I personally would have picked 2 but I don't think any of these options are crazy. 3 sucked but wasn't outrageous IMO.
It's the kind of figure that suggests someone has tapped the supply and has a cannabis farm next door.
One time on Match I got a wink from someone who passed me a web URL that was for an event, a performance of performance art IIRC. My entertainment tastes range all over the place, but at the same time I can only be in one place at any given time so I have to reject ideas.

When I shared my rejection of that particular idea with my fellow Match participant, there were no further messages. So I have no idea if maybe this was some sort of cult-front come-on or there was actually an attempt to fill some small venue with paying attendees for a legitimate entertainment, based on keywords in my profile that indicated a likelihood of interest perhaps? The latter of course is the most charitable guess. It was clearly not my sparkling personality they were interested in.

It was "in the middle" of my time on Match so I don't think there was any link with getting me to renew. Also the process passed the Turing test, so the term bot seems misapplied. But scammer in a gentle sense does apply in the sense that apparently romance was not the goal, but was a lure.
I hope this is sarcasm
It still isnt clear to me that at this level that locking your door is a win.

If they break in you still have to pay to repair the damage and the things they've taken.

I'm fairly certain, if someone broke into my house, the biggest bill would be repairs, not replacements.
His magnetic attack[1] on a common commercial lock that's no longer in use was entertaining too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCay5ek_cW0
Right - but what I was pointing out is making that particular scenario more expensive doesn’t shift the overall incentives that much of the COGS are significantly different.
Good luck trying to punish someone in Macedonia, Nigeria or whatever other place that has Internet but no legal support agreement with a Western state.
About a year ago I started being hypervigilant on my food intake: Three meals a day, no snacks, take a picture of everything. No other restrictions. In the past year I've lost 75 pounds...
1. That would upset many customers if they found out.
2. It's redundant because he had a reservation.
I think it's printed on some TSM manual somewhere and I never forgot it: "Backups are irrelevant. Only the ability to restore matters." I had that in mind when I said what I did.

The casual observer won't understand the difference between "ability to restore" and "doing backups", but it matters when the building burns down.
It seems to me that the relevant distinction between a boiled (chicken) egg and a Cadbury creme egg lies in its nutritional content -- grams of sugar, starch, fat, and protein -- rather than in the mechanism by which they are produced.

If chickens laid Cadbury creme eggs, they would still be just as unhealthy.
Honestly, it seems like you’re trying to make it sound like a device one would use exclusively for scamming.
I mean, there is hella replacement for craft: industrial precision. Like you can write fucking fast code now without having to ASM that shit. And no one is building a revolutionary microprocessor with his hands. That shit is going in the machine.
Exactly. Word of mouth marketing is authentic, advertisments are impersonal and deceptive.
Whether or not it's incredibly stupid, you're in good company: it occurred to Leibniz, too. Search for 'prime' at https://pron.github.io/posts/computation-logic-algebra-pt1 (though for him the unique IDs were for concepts rather than individuals).
Why not just headphones but glasses?
Something about your comment triggered a primal fear in me of tiny, immortal 9mm bullets of non-existence fired randomly in space at all directions until I remembered an earth-mass black hole, while about a centime wide, it's still has a full gravity field the size of Earth's. If one's coming our way, we probably can't do much, but we'll see it coming.
Making the Oslo Algorithm More Efficient (1986) [pdf]
My favourite part of this paper is the 1:1 scale image of the posited black hole in the appendix...
I'm truly conviced that exploring landscapes is the way to get higher abstraction skills in the design domain. Yet, discussing this point with someone in the field, they told me we're still lacking a major breakthrough, since right now we only have several (more or less interesting/successful and still) arbitrary approaches to the problem, each of them more fit for one type of problems.

It is expected that someone in academia develops the whole mathematical apparatus needed for the rest of us to keep wrong steps to a minimum. I believe until that point we will not get closer to a general solution, although of course the more knowledge we hoard about particular cases, the better!

I'll contact you regarding those positions :D

Cheers!

PS: out of curiosity, with what version of MNIST do you work? Binary (B&W, 0 or 1) or grayscale? And what image resolution?
CDs / money market are essentially risk free. I don't understand why people expect a rate of return above inflation without taking any risk. This is a fundamental component of capitalism, and most people have no understanding of it.
This only shows that you have a high tolerance for awkwardness. We also need to interview your colleagues to see if they consider you a weirdo.

Only with these two pieces of info we can decide whether it's feasible to use voice assistants in a lab setting.
Note that the property we're talking about isn't really irreversibility of individual transactions. We can come up with whatever policy about what can show up in a ledger, including "undo" transactions.

But what we want is that once transactions are recorded to a ledger, that it's not possible to remove that record.

This durability is a highly valuable property for financial transactions and other things where non-repudiation is desired. However, it's a possibly scary property, too (what if something copyrighted or illegal ends up in the forever-durable and public ledger?)
True, I just meant buying whole birds is usually a good way to get a better handle in provenance. Should have been more specific.
Reminds me of Tilly from Paper Menagerie!!
Interesting, thanks for sharing! So what are the features a big company like Facebook can offer over e.g. JanusVR? Asset generation? Network effects? Does JanusVR have anything like a killer app?
Legal Regulator Announces Eight A2JTech ‘Legal Access Challenge’ Finalists
This feels pedantic, but to answer your question: because it is revenue and calling it profit is incorrect.

It may be a very good revenue source which a high margin and very low expenses associated with it resulting in a large profit, but money in is revenue and money in net of expenses is profit. Parent was discussing the former.
Sorry, but this looks like a completely uneducated opinion.

There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work.

Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is a different story.
Stoic Freedom as a Productivity Hack by Caleb Ontiveros
On my domain I made _ and . Also work the same as +, for annoying sites that somehow think + is an invalid character for email addresses.
^[:q!^M
India’s Education System Gets Renewed by ELearning
I worked for about 3/4th of a year for a dating website. The market is ...unique, to put it nicely. Employees are constantly poached. When my boss told me this I couldn't believe it but it actually happened. During lunchtime, it became an often occurrence for someone to come and talk to me to try and reveal secrets.

Also they had a lot of people on payroll to pretend they're available girls on the website, in order to increase engagement and lure subscribers. One of them was a huge biker dude and it was hilarious. The truth is that on all these dating website, as someone else pointed out, the ratio is about 30 guys to 1 gal so building a dating platform is hard.
Yes, because in countries where health care prices are 3-100x lower it is total anarchy. People lie on the streets for hours, browsing price comparison websites while bleeding out.
Relevant HN submission about this kind of behavior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071746
>The researchers did not find direct evidence of contaminated turmeric beyond Bangladesh, and they point out that food safety checks by the importing countries have incentivized large-scale Bangladesh spice processors to limit the amount of lead added to turmeric destined for export. However, the researchers caution, “the current system of periodic food safety checks may catch only a fraction of the adulterated turmeric being traded worldwide.” In fact, since 2011, more than 15 brands of turmeric – distributed to countries including the U.S. – have been recalled due to excessive levels of lead.
Disappointing tbh..
Ask HN: How do you review code?
In the US, sugar consumption is down but obesity is still trending upward. If anything, it's the added oils and fats that have gone up.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/sites/cato-unbound.org/files/im...
Should inertia mitigate some of this? It would all happen quite quickly and be over just as quickly right? I imagine enough to release tensions in earthquakes already bound to happen, and some serious Tsunamis, but maybe not so large that they'd wipe out all life? Would it eat a lot of our mass? Would that slow it down?
Would evaporation give out any signal? Anti-particles could be a signal, no?
Same here, maybe even write a simulation or two to help pin down some of the side effects.

I did do a super simple simulation trying to explore if you could escape from beyond the event horizon where time dilation becomes so extreme that even very rare events become common. One of those extremely rare events could be when a galaxy collides with a second galaxy and the black holes at the center end up merging.

Turns out you could escape from falling into a particular black hole if you had a second black hole to counteract the gravity. Unfortunately even while you are at zero acceleration, you end up inside an even larger event horizon formed by the two black holes. Your choices would be to fall into the first black hole, fall into the second, or wait for them to collide. Even the waiting isn't a particularly good option. While being outside the event horizon of a very large black hole minimizes the spagetification problem, there's no such protection inside the event horizon.

In any case if interested in reading sci-fi based on black holes check out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_holes_in_fiction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Levin
There is a tradeoff between how many batteries and power-to-gas plants you need and how large your excess production and how well connected you grid it.
This varies a lot from place to place. My school mostly focused on print letters, and didn’t provide much useful guidance to students. I agree the typical American “cursive” letters are quite terrible, and that in many places pedagogy is not very effective.

Personally I think students should learn some type of simplified italic-type script, using a pen with ink that flows well enough that they don’t need to use much pressure.
Jim Keller: Moore's law is not dead
That book also featured crypto-currencies which is of course another thing Facebook is dabbling with. And it had a plot that featured vastly diminished US government marginalized by commercial burbclaves and other corporate entities, which seems to be exactly why governments are anxious to block Libra and worried about companies like FB having valuations exceeding the GDP of most countries.

I recently re-read Snow Crash. I love that book. A lot of that stuff looks a lot less like science fiction these days.
I have a smart meter in my apartment.

A few weeks ago I was on holiday. Usage was 2.5kWh per day, about 100W, which is the fridge and a low power PC (NUC).

Otherwise, it's 3-6kWh per day, and depends whether I did laundry and cooked or not.

District heating and water.
> you mostly can’t buy stuff with it

Sometimes I cannot buy legitimate stuff without them. Just today, I bought some books for which US credit/debit cards refused to work. And I see that every week.

> you can’t pay taxes with them

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-sta...
This is purely idiotic opinion and should not have a place on a forum like HN of all places.

A lot of things like Linux or Open Office started purely out of hardwork of handful passionate people. Most of those people did not make much money in the process either but the y were purely driven by the joy of building something interesting. THAT is the nerd culture.

Bitcoin idea was floated by and contributed to by many folks who were not interested in making money but rather in solving interesting problems. Cryptocurrency is not a very hard tech but anyone remotely into tech will be able to appreciate all the theoretical and practical work that has gone into it.

Now, people engaging in bitcoin trading thinking it will make them filthy rich might be stupid but then that does not make the technology or its creators a scam.
> Finland even built a new one recently.

They are still in the process of building it, and it is set to become the second most expensive building built in modern times. [0]

[0] https://metropolitan.fi/entry/olkiluoto-ol3-second-most-expe...
> Quicker you pass say your driving test, the less money the instructor makes

Only if people never recommend driving instructors to friends and family. If they do, a driving instructor who consistently has people passing their test quickly is much more likely to make more money long term
That was a good read.

> Even when you are paying for the product, you may still be the product..

Damn ... can you think of any other segment where this works as well?

From my experience, most fraudulent businesses seem to be with one time customers.
> Not all doctors are motivated by the same things and yet most of them would consider their primary motivation helping people.

That's fair. I probably over-emphasized the money part of it.

> The incentive for doing difficult procedures is often because they are challenging.

We can assume that since doctors aren't doing this for free or at least cheap already, that they require at least some amount of compensation. To return to my original point, if you force doctors to perform procedures on people that can't afford them, and the amount they receive is less than they want, then there be a greater shortage of such doctors.

> Compensation for doctors in the US isn’t fully correlated with difficulty either... with no offense to my dermatology colleagues making more than most general surgery sub specialists.

Not directly anyway, it's probably more supply/demand. Low supply of neurosurgeon means high cost. Whether that's from artificially suppressing the supply of these doctors or because it's very challenging is up for debate.

I'd guess dermatologists make so much because people are more willing to spend money on that sort of work.
Fascinating! But, if that's the case, the densities of light after the big bang would have created endless numbers of these?
You don't have to make an account to access the article.

If you have reached your max number of articles, try clearing all cookies or using a private window or a different browser.

Firefox has 'containers' which have isolated cookies, you can open news sites like these in a separate container. If you want to take it 1 step further, you can install Firefox's 'Multi-Account Containers' add-on and tell it to open certain websites in a container by default. When you run into the limit, just clear the cookies of that container.
> I don't have any ideology

Yes, you do. Regardless of if you want to or not, you have an ideology.
Page 5 of the pdf (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11090v1.pdf) for anyone wondering.
The Book of GANesis
To be fair, we don't know what is behind those 9mm. Einstein's equations predict a singularity but afaik there is consensus that those don't hold there.
At least once a year, something I buy from a US retailer for shipping to Ontario, Canada ends up in Ontario, CA if it transits from a Pacific time zone. It’s rather frustrating to have that extra delay, and I’m sure the shipping depots that service Ontario, CA or these other confusingly named areas don’t appreciate the extra workload...
I am assessing it in two ways. One is comparing it to other services: do they have modern equipment? Is bureaucracy a burden? Do people working in those services generally act like decent human beings? Are doctors/technicians competent? Is it easy to imagine a service at higher quality and how much would it cost? Using those criteria I think medical services in my country are low quality, especially the public option.

Another way is comparing to other countries. I have family living in US (both immigrants from different countries, now US citizens, having children there) and very close friends living in Switzerland. Both lived in Poland for many years and often visit so we are all in good position to make comparisons. Both US and Poland suck in comparison to Switzerland in all imaginable respects. They comparison between US and Poland comes out about equal at least according to us.
This looks rather like an ebook written with pandoc[1]; if you don't mind, what prompted you to write your own rather than using an existing format?

[1]: https://pandoc.org/epub.html
It means different business strategy. Tech companies can have massive revenues without having many employees. They write software, this is the initial big fixed cost, then making a copy of the software or servicing another customer in a SaaS is extremely cheap. This has not started with software - a factory has the same characteristics in comparison with manufacture: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aggregators-bffd36063a72 - but with sofware it goes on another level. The Stratchery article is great in analysing all the angles of this.
How the World Would Look in 2050 If We Solved Climate Change
If I recall correctly the main problem for evaluating the amount of trees on earth is in the tress density of forest which may vary by quite a lot more than we initially believed. And of course that numbers can easily vary by a factor on 100 if you vary the criterion you use for counting a plant as a tree.
It is not part of any standard. + is a valid email address character and is not special in any way.
Not to mention that anything with 9mm would accelerate at the speed of light to the singularity. So while moving through the earth it wouldn't meet any resistance at all.
You'd keep in yourself a small amount of Bitcoin.
You'd keep at home a bigger amount.
You'd keep in a safe place the rest.
Exactly as with cash.
SurveyKit: Android library to create beautiful surveys
Asasa Asas
Ok thanks for your contribution.

Now where is my facebook dot com shell?
> "I think increased interconnects are the way to go..."

What do you mean by this?
Your calculation is a bit pessimistic because electricity is a much higher quality energy than what you get from burning fossil fuels. For example, electric cars, from wind turbine to movement, are maybe 70-80% efficient. ICE cars from gas station to movement are maybe 30% efficient (now add in the cost of extraction and refining). Similarly, heating your home by burning oil you get a little less than 1J of heat per Joule-equivalent oil burned. But with a heatpump you get 2-4J of heat for every Joule of electricity.
If your email provider does not offer a catchall alias option, this is also achievable with an email forwarder (e.g. mailgun), provided you are ok with giving another service provider access to the content of your received mails.
And here I was expecting that an environment that suppresses price information and and eliminates competitive pressure would just get cheaper and better over time.

Silly me.
Switzerland doesn't have nationalized healthcare and Singapore has a hybrid model. In a ranking of top 5 healthcare systems, on average you will find some that are nationalized and some that are not.

One thing that is unequivocally a mistake in healthcare in the US is making it a "free market" and then having employers pick the insurance for their employees.
Hi
test
Razorpay has been working hard to solve this problem. I used it last year but wasn't happy with their service since they were collecting mobile numbers (for some reason) and failed to send OTPs on time (issue i faced). They have apparently rebuilt it and promising some great features. How are you stacking against them as of now?
Do you allow to create plans in multiple currencies?
I was once at the receiving end of business talk clearly addressed to someone else on my gmail account.

At first I believed it was some scam but it soon got clear that my account was accidentally siphoning mail from someone using this supposedly clever scheme...
05:30 AM - wake up & press button to make coffee

05:35 AM - open laptop and browse TODO list + important communication to be done

06:00 AM - finished coffee

06:05 AM - shower and change of clothes

06:30 AM - work for ~2 hours on side projects

08:30 AM - family wakes up and we start daily activities
Java Ain't So Slow