skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Short answer, a qubit is a unit vector in a 2D complex Hilbert space. Now, that doesn't actually say much about why we care or how they're useful. In practical terms, you can think of qubits as complex unit vectors along two axes, with one axis corresponding to |0⟩ (the zero qubit) and one axis corresponding to |1⟩, or the one qubit. So for example, you could have a qubit called |+⟩, which is just shorthand for (|0⟩ + |1⟩)/sqrt(2).

Measuring a qubit in a basis collapses it to one of the basis vectors (e.g Schrödinger's cat must be alive or dead once we open the box) with probability equal to its inner product with that basis vector. This is why we need a Hilbert space and not just any old vector space.

Finally, to answer your question about gates, a quantum gate is basically a unitary matrix, i.e. a matrix that preserves the norm of its inputs. You can feed qubits into these matrices by themselves or, more often, many at once, by using something called the tensor product of the qubits - this is where the math gets slightly more involved.

The long and short of it is that we can induce correlation patterns between qubits using these gates (aka quantum entanglement) and orchestrate circuits of interference patterns where the wrong answers cancel each other out and the right answer gets reinforced so that we measure it at the end - unfortunately, this is where my knowledge breaks down as a beginner. My apologies if I accidentally handwaved anything important but hopefully you get the gist.
Looking forward to learn about healing retrovirus infections.
48?
Okay. But there's a double standard when it comes to food. Why do fat people get a pass? Why is it legal to eat cheeseburgers and drink soda? The health risks from obesity are statistically just as bad as smoking. It's the leading cause of preventable death in the US. 1/3 of America is obese. It's a larger problem than smoking, statistically.

I don't smoke or vape. But it's a glaring double standard. McDonalds can market to kids, lure them with toys, and people who are 300+ lbs are allowed to eat whatever they want, as much as they want.

Why is it legal for parents to feed a 12 year old Cheetos and Pepsi? It's just as damaging health wise. In my city's public school there are teenagers who have gout. Yet nobody cares.
I spent years traveling without a phone. You don't need a phone or even a laptop while traveling unless you're going to work on the road. I didn't even bring a camera for the first two years. It's okay to get lost and not talk to people back home for weeks at a time, except for a postcard or two.
Nicotine stimulates Growth Hormone release and GH is linked to some cancers.

For sure many tumors respond much more intensely to GH than normal tissue. Much in the same way estrogen makes some breast cancers grow faster. So it has a carcinogenic effect, and once the cancer starts, nicotine turbocharges it. (Depending on the cancer, of course).
OK... That made me giggle. It was a giggle I needed so thank you :-)
Well, once cash is returned to the investor, using cash returned on the initial capital base to calculate a compound annual return is the best way. This would allow you to compare the fund’s return to a public market index over the time period. Before this happens, there is no best or one way.
If you are coding C++ and it is not super, super FUN, you are Doing It Wrong.

Writing C code is also writing C++ code, but badly.
I have only used python (check out cyvcf2 by brentp!), R, and bash previously - so nothing else really compiled (its faster than these in general). But my guess is that you will have an easier time writing nim than the alternatives, and after that it is easy to optimize once you have basic functionality.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Last Tango
Howrah Bridge Ganga River View in Kolkata
A microcontroller with a decent CPU (a Zilog Z80 in this case) could, given enough time, run some serious AES-256 encryption. The storage is minimal but it could be good enough.

Of course, you could always use a paper one-time pad, and if you can get the pad distributed without interception, there's no way they can ever break that.
It's only curious because we're selectively viewing the stories of the subset of people who protested or reported bad behavior and subsequently received poor ratings. The people who speak out and don't subsequently receive poor performance ratings or get moved to a different team are not displayed here. Thus it produces an illusion of causality.
If the motive was to actually stop the behaviour then you'd be correct, however if the motive is simply to collect as many fines as possible then what they're implementing is the best solution.
Tried this and their froggy game a few months ago. I thought it was cool, but I felt it didn't translate well into the real-world. I still have significant issues figuring out how to do layouts in CSS and I still hate trying to do so.
Climate Feedbacks Explained, with Pie
The bit about colonialism was tongue-in-cheek, but it's not a completely nonsensical comment.

My country has such a poor median standard of living that things like computer fraud (or crime, generally) become attractive even to reasonably honest people as they become desperate in finding ways to provide a dignified living for themselves and their families.

Due to largely the same root causes, its government has insufficient infrastructure, bandwidth, and expertise to deal with cases of computer fraud, especially with big tech corporations usually refusing to cooperate/communicate with our officials.

One of the contributors to this situation is a military operation perpetrated by a well-known and powerful transatlantic military alliance as recently as 20 years ago; it resulted in $5 billion of direct economic damage (a big deal when that's your entire GDP) and countless billions of indirect economic loss which rippled throughout the years in the aftermath (not to mention the hundreds of civillian lives lost).

I'm trying not to drag politics and emotions into this too much, and my country surely has many issues unrelated to anyone outside, but I'm expressing my grievances as a common person who, like anyone else, did not choose their birthplace, and does in no way identify with the policies and actions of their government, but suffers greatly in many ways due to them + the constant bullying and pressure by the "colonial forces", which is what I was primarily referring to.
Apple Pay Suica Guide – Ata Distance
> Not really sure what the prosecutors could glean from this in terms of hard evidence of a crime.

That's why it's called an investigation, you follow leads not knowing whether they will pay off.
Britain, France, Germany Blame Iran for Saudi Attack
Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience
These are both works in progress! But here is the first one for working with sequencing data:

https://github.com/danielecook/seq-collection

And the second:

https://github.com/danielecook/tut

The second one has a really useful utility called "stack" that you can use to concatenate datasets where one might lack some columns or the columns come in a different order. It glues it all together and has an option to include the filename. It's useful for data analysis.

Both of these lack 'polish' at this point but a few of the subcommands work quite well.
Australia. Yes, there was a line. It was lodged as a fraud reversal charge due to them having another customer account hacked. Payment was made for a sale and cleared from that account. Since it was interbank, they decided to help themselves to the cleared payment, despite my asset already having been sold.
EU watchdog sounds alarm bell on housing market in 11 countries
>>I really don't understand how having a cop on the street corner is any better than the "Orwellian" camera. In both cases, you're being watched

Hmm; that feels a dishonest argument - I would expect HN audience to understand the differences between the two without being prompted. One of them will record the observation, store it potentially indefinitely, and enable unfathomable correlations for unfathomable purposes.

If it's really not clear, I would venture most people being OK with cop but not OK with a camera, feel that an honest cop may notice a particular law being broken right now, but a network of cameras may notice all kinds of things that are not illegal, as such, but may still be used against you.

(not to say that I disagree with your premise of US Cops being more dangerous than cameras; just that it shouldn't take much effort to have a basic understanding about other perspectives)
The whole "abolish ICE" movement seems to revolve around conflating the two - an awful lot of the things people point to when justifying their calls to abolish ICE were actually done by CBP.
At first glance, I thought this theory didn’t hold up to logical sense because ideally the cigarette companies would just switch to selling vapes and dominate that market as well (like Altria buying juul). But then I realized actually this makes perfect sense because no one is going to ban cigarettes. They are too entrenched and the interests too strong. It’s simply not going to happen. But banning vaping is a much more real possibility due to it being “new” and unregulated.

Much easier to kill your competitors than to dominate the market through aquisition.

Very insightful, thanks for your comment.
Nobody coerced her. She is autistic in a way that makes her unable to ignore the truth. Without the same filters of ignorance and denial that most of us have she is suffering more than most people.

I think we are all suffering somewhat trying to deal with this truth and work out how to find our place in the solution.
It occupies more or less the same space as Go: it produces fast standalone binaries with garbage collection. However, unlike Go, it isn't shy to give more features to the programmer to play with.

The cons are its lack of enterprise backing, its smaller community and its syntax, if you don't like either Pascal or Python.
I was going to make a similar comment, so I'll tag on here. Jesus was supposedly crucified for a few hours, which would be terrible, but he also knew what was waiting him, and that he would be remembered and revered.

In contrast, my sister suffered through multiple rounds of chemo, then a divorce by a husband who was jealous that she was "getting all the attention". The cancer spread to her brain and spine and lungs, and towards the end even morphine couldn't stop the pain. She had to say goodbye to her sons without knowledge of what was to lie in store for her or them. When she died, she stayed dead, none of this "Tada! I died without the consequences of death" nonsense.
Why We'll Never Run Out of Oil
IBM hints at aiding Facebook’s cryptocurrency efforts
> Start pushing for more validation from the payment providers so you can be sure that a payment is legit and once you have jumped though the hoops that a payment is legit the bank takes the hit for the fraud.

Agreed. There are basically zero digital payment systems in the US that aren't a complete joke, and all of our institutions think the correct answer to that problem is to add more captchas.

Imagine an alternate reality where we discovered that HTTP traffic was trivially monster-in-the-middled, and instead of moving to HTTPS, we all said, "well, we'll just do device fingerprinting to validate the request came from the right person." This is the current digital payment system.

Instead of moving to 2FA for each purchase or overhauling ACH, or changing payments to be a push system instead of a pull system, our solution to credit card fraud is that:

A) payments will take a long time to resolve,

B) customers will be required to be vetted using invasive, privacy-incompatible tools that don't work particularly well, and

C) whenever something goes wrong, the merchant will take the financial hit instead of the payment processor that let the fraud happen in the first place.

So many of our payment/privacy/fraud problems boil down to the fact that we are putting band-aides on a fundamentally broken system.
I started experimenting with nicotine gum as a non-smoker. From what I've read, the method you get your nicotine has a major effect on level of addiction. Inhalation combines a habitual act with the near instanaeous activation time to create a highly addictive behavioural habit.

I chew one 4mg piece of gum over the course of a day for mental stimulation and that's had some really nice side effects for me, such as being able to stay up later and continue on mentally engaging work.
I would just add that the #talos-workstation channel on freenode is a very good support resource. While we may not have been able to FIX the issue mentioned in this thread a lot of issues do get discussed and fixed daily. As a new and very happy Blackbird user I got a lot of great support there.
I’m actually not sure I still have my 48. I have one of the new limited edition 15s and an ancient 41.
Slightly OT: Meanwhile in Hamburg, Germany, at the construction site of the eastern Hafencity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafencity
https://osm.org/go/0HoGuvP~t--?m=

they inject something into the compacted sand of the former quays/piers which makes you think you are getting high. At least it smells like electrical insulating paint i had to work with a long time ago. Open the drum and hold your breath, or get dizzy.

Was a few weeks ago, in the middle of the night while i was on S/Nightseeing tour. Two large tractors with large liquid trailers which had centipede-like appendages on each side, maybe 10 to 12 "legs" and fully automated. Stop, ram the legs into the ground and loudly squirt a minute or so, move on, repeat. The whole area stank! Never seen or heard of something like this before. Apparently it's called Geo Injection to stabilize the ground, or impregnate against water. Nothing about this in the local media at all.

I'm suspicious. Why in the middle of the night at 2 to 3 AM?

A few days ago i've been on tour again, also during the night, maybe 7km/4.35miles downstream while the Elbe was at low tide. Same intense smell, though no construction site in sight.
Looks really nice and it's definitely something I might consider using if needed. However I was going through the privacy policy and it's not clear how data is protected. I've only found this line:

> We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect the information we collect and store.

I have not found any relevant info on what actual measures are implemented.
This is a big issue under the GDPR because without further info it's not possible to understand if sufficient measures are implemented. In short, the GDPR requires that all appropriate measures are adopted. Without knowing what measures this service implements, potential users cannot access if this app is sufficiently secure for their use cases. As a result, in case of breaches, they might be liable for wrongly selecting this as a service to manage their data (e.g. customers contact info).
IMHO, given the above there's no excuse for not encrypting data (in a way that makes it accessible to law enforcement authorities where needed), so if that's not part of the security measures implemented by a service, for me it's a deal breaker.
- Cross-entropy is used for roughly estimating the fidelity (see arXiv:1608.00263), which is independent of the problem they're solving. You're confusing it with the overall distribution of the readout states, which is the hard problem.

- CZ is a perfect entangler. No, iSWAP and CZ do not form a universal set. They typically combine virtual Z rotations (which has a continuous angle parameter) with an additional one-qubit gate, such as a X or Y gate (or their square root, which they mention in the paper) which gives a universal set. Although they don't make use of continuous Z rotations in that particular experiment, the device is capable of doing that, and is a (noisy) universal quantum computer.
Here are the totals, based on the figures in the post:

10.8% gross for A16Z

14.5% for S&P 500.

Calculation: https://imgur.com/a/jeFN8fL
Every pop sci article about a new journal article in some publication is always the same; personal question: doesn't it get frustrating needing to give an addenda of all the misleading commentary?

Pop science publications literally do more harm than good by miscommunicating the actually novel aspect of a particular discovery, irrespective of superficial intent (popularizing science topics). Oh wait, why do they even exist to begin with? Assumption: to soak up all the advertising dollars go around.

How unproductive can an industry really be? The cost alone in wasted human-hours time analyzing and post-processing to discern what is real and what is hype and nonsense must be huge.
How dare the Germans shut down multiple perfectly fine nuclear plants, so they have to burn brown coal instead?
> I'm still searching for a convincing argument as to why my neighbour's life getting better should make me unhappy.

It's psychology, not logic; there need not be a convincing argument why it should be so.

It's easy to see that people care more about relative wealth than absolute wealth. We have more wealth now than ancient people could have imagined, our basic needs are easily satisfied, but we still work and compete for the power and status that comes from relative wealth.
TL;DR: A quantum computer is a device that uses the measurement of quantum properties to do computation. There are many ways to implement one depending on the type of entangled particles being used, from crystals to make entangled photons and superconducting mounds to entangle electrons. This is the same for binary computers, which can made from electrical devices (transistors), values with air pressure or balls falling down wooden ramps.

Longer version

An observation about quantum behavior is that there are only certain properties that you can measure for the really, really small. These include things like mass (total energy), charge (intrinsic amount of electromagnetic strength), and spin (willingness to change direction in the presence of an electromagnetic field). It turns out that when you measure these properties, the measurements behave in non-intuitive ways.

The act of measuring the spin of a particle (which could be in any direction) is really the act of asking, "is this particle aligned with my detector?" The result will always be either aligned up or aligned down. It will be randomly about 50/50 up and down, also. This is not that surprising because the spin must align one direction or the other. The crazy part comes with the fact that you can entangle two particles.

Entangle particles can be sent off through different detectors and one thing will always be true: while any particular outcome is random, the detectors will always generated opposite results. The temptation is to say, "well, they were generated from the same source, so they have just opposite starting positions." Long story short, this has been proven not possible. Instead, there is some fundamental behavior is quantum mechanics that says that there are certain types of activities with entangles particles that have a correlation that is true as long as the entangle particles are not disrupted. In this case, particles sent to separate detectors will always have opposite results.

A quantum computer uses these correlation truths about measurements to do computations. A qubit is the concept of a quantum bit: an entity that represents one unit of entanglement. Just like a bit, quantum computers have many different ways to implement entanglement. You can entangle photons, electrons, and whole atoms. Each of these systems require specific implementations to achieve, like like electronic or mechanical computers.

Remember that one detail about "if they are not disrupted?" Yeah, turns out that it takes a hell of a lot to create an environment that doesn't destroy the coherence of the entanglement. You have to design something that allows you to setup the particles into starting state, be able to hold those particles in an entangled state with no disruptions and have a detector to determine the final state. Quantum mechanically, these are generally opposite goals.
> Because the U.S. economy is primarily internally driven; trade is only about 15% of GDP. So more important than the balance of trade is how that trade impacts the domestic economy.

That's almost scarier, really. It's a big shell game with money just moving in circles.
I think it's both what I said and what you added; they are not mutually exclusive by any stretch of the imagination. I would also say that chat apps are designed to be addictive, too. An important fact to consider.

>and not have to stop what you're doing.

Which is, in their case, being on their phone all day, ironically enough. Asynchronicity is what I meant by not requiring spontaneity (not being synchronous, in other words).
As an Australian that has driven in multiple countries, I would choose driving among Australians over many if not most other countries.
US drivers are much more aggressive, particularly in cities like LA.
UK drivers seem roughly equivalent.
Drivers in Germany and the Netherlands seem to drive safer.
Driving in South Korea, China, and India is terrifying.
> Exploiting the fact that you have "more users" should probably also be looked at as anti-competitive since it certainly doesn't benefit consumers by locking people into exclusive platforms.

It's not quite as clear cut as you say. The downsides of being locked into a single platform exist, but the upsides of a new feature benefiting from an existing network also exist. Many consumers have benefited by getting access to ephemeral messages with their existing friends, when they wouldn't have installed a separate app and nagged their friends to switch just to get that feature.
That’s too bad. Being Portuguese for some reason I thought some countries would be better than others. The British tendency to be indirect and weird about being straightforward (people like that are called “rude” if they work in a majority southern English company) doesn’t help.
I went from 12 down to 3mg, same with most of the people I know.

You realize quickly that the Nicotine content isn't super important as long as you taper it down.

Which is not an option with Juuls and the other disposable garbage products. Refillable Vladdin style devices are the way to go.
Notably absent in your list is to incentivize the "right" behavior, especially when society will have to pay for it down the line via social safety nets. Hopefully less of an issue with vaping.
Greta Thunberg speech: How dare you? [video]
> Eating eggs in a restaurant is not a belief.

That's a very shallow interpretation of what I said. You say that you avoid eating eggs at home, which must originate from a belief. And yet you eat them at a restaurant, so why is there the contradiction?

> you're trying to bait me into a corner

You've done that to yourself; or, I am pointing out where you're not being consistent.
Somewhat unrelated: I really enjoyed this recent NYT article about how schoolkids in Japan master arithmetic by learning how to use an abacus: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/asia/japan-abacus.h...
I'm sorry but GP is completely correct and you are just reacting defensively.

He didn't claim that your evidence was faulty, but that there is nothing to connect these two stories. You're making a link that does not exist.

In fact, when you say

> It is possible that this is not what happened

you are making it seem quite likely that this is indeed what happened. With no supporting evidence.

It's exactly what anti-vaxers do.