skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OLC doesn’t necessarily have a great reputation. They give legal advice to the executive branch, and attorneys are notorious for giving the answers they think their clients want. OLC is supposed to give the “best reading of the law,” while regular attorneys are expected to push the envelope a little.

Even so, when I read a new story that says the justice department’s failure to act is newsworthy, I shouldn’t have to read the justice department’s website to find out why it didn’t act. A decent news organization would make some effort to ask that question before publishing their story.

Mentioning OLC’s interpretation doesn’t mean I agree with it, either. The Congressional Research Service paper doesn’t call out the issue, but see if you notice a theme in the last few bullet points in the “Potential Questions for Congress” list (last pages): https://fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R45345.pdf .
This is a good analogy for multiple reasons: Both Ikea and H&M hit a variety of price points and tend to have quality commensurate with them.

I’ve bought a $30 dresser at Ikea and $7 T-shirts at H&M, and both were about as durable as you might imagine. I’ve also bought a $200 dresser at Ikea and a $100 coat at H&M, and they’ve held up as well as comparable products twice their price.
This is an ill-informed vulgarisation article.

1. Black-Scholes was originally designed to describe the price of assets like equity (which tend to move proportionally to their price). So applying to rates was already using it for something it was not meant to. And everybody knew it. A lot of people had developed normal models instead of lognormal models.

2. Black Scholes has been broken for years. Pricing with a volatility smile has been around since the 90s. It's a way bigger hack than what's needed to make black scholes work for rates.

3. If the problem is that R can go below 0, you can just model R+2%, and voila, you get a process that's never negative

4. The negative rates problem dates back to crisis, so of course people have already found ways to make it work.

Was it painful? Well it required tweaking the models for sure. But this is neither high-flying math nor out of "business-as-usual" activity.
WeWork’s plan was to raise at least $4Bn from IPO which would unlock $6Bn in bank loans, before the end of the year. Now they have a $10Bn hole in their budget which coincidentally is almost exactly the same size as SoftBank’s investment in them. They are in a lot of trouble if SoftBank doesn’t double down, and do it soon. Q4 starts tomorrow! And $10Bn may be more than the entire company is worth!
> you'd tend to call some counterparties and hear what they thought of how to value things

They might well tell you how they think you should value things ...
I swear, I half wonder if some of these questions are just outright trolling. It's hard to imagine a company actually being this stupid. Yeah, let's take one of our brightest and hardest working people, communicate to them that their hard work and effort are useless, and then bitch when they quit putting in overtime. Brilliant.

If this story is real, I think the OP (of the SO question) needs to accept that the fuck-up is on the part of his/her company, and quit looking for ways to "discipline" their engineer.
I think it's more the connotation that 'partial' has. In my head that means that there is still significant portions of features missing. Also given the context, partial implies that it is not useful for its intended purpose. I'd say it's not really synonymous for all intents and purposes.
I know these data points. And they look great. Yet, I look at the co2 ppm chart and somehow it just keeps going up. With no sign of slowing down.
Anyhow, I'd expect people in scientific computing to be familiar with LLNL, LANL, ANL, ORNL, ..., specifically as hosts of major supercomputing facilities.
Thanks for posting it.
From an external viewpoint stuff like building your own internal chat application seems like a "too many engineers with too little to do" kid of decision.

https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
Do you know whether this requires the person in store to enter an exact match/have you enter it on a pinpad, and that it is absolutely not removable in any way by any CSR, customer service, or other humans other than you knowing it and logging in with it?
Here is the “how I built this” for ‘we work’

Listen to this, to compare to the current state of WeWork

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i...
I vaguely agree with you and to add to your point:

I think the dynamics of selection are a bit different for Spotify vs Netflix, i.e. my personal assumption is that customers are more elastic to selection for music than tv.

You can consume a unit of music much faster than tv, and you repeat consumption of music more often than tv so things like playlists suffer more from absent music and albums than TV may do.

I think it is vaguely easier to train TV watchers that there will be some rotating backcatalogue than you can music listeners...
Compared to Uber they're still small. But I recall an article not so long ago talking about the tracking WeWork had installed in their offices that gave them startling insights like "people tend to drink more coffee in the mornings". They've been just as guilty as any of hiring a bunch of developers just so they can call themselves a "tech company".
This is actually a hard problem to genuinely solve. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm not really happy with the current way we typically talk about such things, which often amounts to denying that such issues exist.

You can't solve problems while pretending they don't exist and making it Verboten to speak of them.
Is it acceptable that ieee.org posts an article with a faked photo?
catch 22 by joeseph heller
> legally a person

It's not enough to say 'legally a person,' you must say 'person' without any qualification whatsoever.

> Or is this a person without the full breadth of human rights?

Rights are for peoples or persons, not humans.
The machine cannot replace craftsmanship. Soldering transistors and writing small, fast code are two completely unrelated activities.
Gay rights are admirable to you. Rights for minorities like Latinos or blacks are admirable to you. But you don’t speak for places like America, which is diverse enough to politically contemplate whether gay people should be married or have kids, or whether Muslims and immigrants cause no-go zones.

Those politicians which advocate for antagonism against Latinos and other minorities are reading the room too.
I mean... I am just a random internet person but I've spent a great deal of money to make my commute not use a single drop of gasoline. My house also is a net positive in energy production. It'll take a while to offset the production of the items I had to buy but I have a horizon of a couple of decades - and they'll be recyclable afterwords.

More to the point though is it isn't A) US has to fix itself or B) the developing world needs to be mindful of how it develops - it's both. It's perfectly possible to be "Holy shit guys, the US needs to change how it consumes!" and be like "Holy shit, the developing world needs to change how humans have developed historically!" Hopefully, we'll get back on track in 2020 nationally on A...
Video can reveal you through walls
Researchers use WiFi to identify a person through-wall, by referencing a past video from another area.

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDZ39h-kCS8

Project page: https://www.ece.ucsb.edu/~ymostofi/IdentificationThroughWalls
Very decent, definitely watchable!
And Crystal! https://crystal-lang.org/2019/09/23/crystal-0.31.0-released....
I wonder at what point the fraud charges come out. As opposed to Theranos, in this case some insiders did very well.
That isn't accurate. In a modern military the role of interfacing with an external public is divided into three distinct roles:

* public relations

* civil affairs

* psychological operations

Public relations' job is to interface with media and community leaders where the military is an established asset. This means in area where the military is not conducting active (non-training) military operations.

Civil affairs' interface with media and civilian leaders in areas where the military is conducting active (non-training) operations. This may include areas where the military is operating in a peace keeping or humanitarian capacity. This communications responsibility may be more diplomatic or business oriented in nature and focuses on welfare and humane needs of a supported civilian population.

Psychological operations operates against a military enemy.

It is the job of all three roles to provide some amount of influence and general information. The public relations and civil affairs are far more restrictive in the information they provide, almost as if in a journalistic capacity. Psychological operations will provide any information as helpful to win military engagements and is primarily restricted by military tactical conditions.

It is best not to intermix or confuse those 3 separate communications roles, because the overlap between them is extremely limited.
Then do other people now trust you less because you were wrong, or do they trust you more because you correct yourself?
It's not a tech investment though.
Please don't use code blocks for quotations. It ruins display/readability on mobile.
The future of privacy starts in California
I think Uber will pop within the next 5~10 years. I'm surprised they still have investors at this point. So much was banking on the self-driving model, which I honestly think is 10~15 years away from being viable (and for half the cost of the research, cities could just start laying down rails with all their roads .. would be way easier .. and a solved problem).

We're due for another venture backed capital burst. DropBox, Lyft, Uber .. the article posted on here a earlier about Counterfeit Capitalism comes to mind. There are too many companies trying to 'get there first' at all costs and squeeze out everyone else.

I honestly wonder if we're going to see another 2000 era dotcom burst for many of these smaller companies. I'm curious how taxi companies will retake their local markets once the big ride sharing companies are gone.
The US had ~580,000 bombing missions in Vietnam each of which dropped several bombs on average. Doing that with cruse missiles would quickly hit 10+ trillion dollars.

On top of that a cruse missile takes around an hour to reach a target making them of limited value vs a mobile target. They have real value vs thinks like air defenses or high value buildings, but building hundreds of thousands of them is never going to happen.
It is from the novel Catch-22.
And his latest book as well... Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. The book explores mind uploading to the Cloud from the perspective of Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, a character introduced in Stephenson's 2011 Reamde
Then why is it here?
You can imprison people when you make it against the law.
what about the other 3 examples I told you?

There are obvious things, there are complex things. But not caring is not a solution.
JEP 362: Deprecate the Solaris and Sparc Ports
I'd certainly endorse the Adolescence of P1, and Fire upon the Deep. There is course Colossus the Forbin Project which is also pretty canonical.
Furthermore, and this to me is the most damning indictment: where's the moat?

SoftBank and Masayoshi Son's hypothesis is:

1. Find a market which can be captured by a business with access to massive capital

2. Provide massive capital

3. Extract profits once a monopoly has been established

WeWork is a terrible example of this, because in no way does scale give them unique advantages. And furthermore, "scale" in this context means "scale in the office property market" -- that's a pretty big pool to expect to overflow.
What You Need to Know About Google’s Quantum Supremacy
Let's keep in mind that this is an end user application for pixel artwork. You and I might care that it's Rust. End Users will not. It could be written in Malbolge or BF for all an end user cares about.

Namespace collision is gonna be a pain for end users and newcomers, possibly depressing discovery, which is our point.
The hidden structure of human tooth enamel
May I point something out?

Bitcoin, for 2019, is another Denmark in CO2 production (34,730,000,000 kg this year alone) due to the amount of electricity it burns. This data compiled by digiconomist. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Mind you, there are universities and critics that claim digiconomist understates the amount of power consumed by Bitcoin. I also think their average .49 kg of CO2 produced per kWh is a bit too low. Even when weighing for renewables on the average grid. Also, this doesn't take into account cooling costs. But at these numbers, it takes about 1.9 billion trees to neutralize the excess CO2 produced by Bitcoin, alone. There are other coins red lining computers as well.

Certain lifestyles as a target are silly when there's some others that are much easier low hanging fruit to deal with.
> or cheat

This is called "Being disruptive." Basically, just ignore the law, but make sure you get enough workers and customers that love you so that they turn against politics when you break the law.
GDPR-compliant organisations don't use blockchain
Man, that Naggum quote hits home. I was a much bigger asshole early in life before I went to work at Microsoft. Usually one of, if not the, smartest kids in the room. Go to work, usually the same thing. I had to be insufferable at times. Then off to Microsoft I go to get thoroughly humbled. Much like I didn't know what "rich" really meant until surrounded by millionaires, I didn't know what "really smart" was, either. I still consider myself to be "pretty smart", but I now know that I am a long way from anything resembling brilliant, and always will be. So how about I tone down that attitude, eh?

Lesson #2 was that those super-smart folks I worked with had absolutely no problem saying, "I have no idea what you're talking about, could you explain it?" Probably how they got so super-smart.

So though I learned a lot about the craft in my time at Microsoft, I'd dare say I learned a little bit about how to be a more decent human, too.
> I have got to think that Soft Bank knew/knows the valuation was off.

For private rounds valuation is part of the equation, but liquidation preferences and ratchets are likely more important. As the famous finance saying goes "You set the price - I set the terms, you set the terms - I set the price".

SoftBank has negotiated downside protection. Everything from there is just gravy on top.

The press never seems to discriminate between preferred and simple shares, so why not reach for the moon, e.g. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-uber-ipo-20181016-...
Humans are often irrational

wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction
Next: you talked about WePay, so we burned all your Libra.
One of the key problems with HW was that rates could go negative, and quite negative -- this was considered in 01/02 if not before.
Meaningful, maybe? The green energy industry was tiny when the original science around global warming was done. I don't see how they would have the power to do that.

Plus you would have to actually show some evidence.
I'd put money in a startup that solved this.
Segment Functions - Build custom data integrations in a few lines of JavaScript
Yes. If the lenses are too large (circumference) too much pressure will be placed on the lenses and they’ll do just as you describe. Certain materials (polycarbonate) will actually crack in the same situation.
I know it's impolite to say that here, but if you actually read the rest of my reply, you'd see that in my opinion the best answer for a Q&A site would be "The restaurant burned a year ago, but it was at 450, Blahblah street". Maybe I didn't make it clear enough before, but I am saying it now.

Consider that the asker might just using the restaurant as a reference to some other place. Or someone "hearing" the answer in the future wanted to know the address to visit the ruins. The information might still be useful. Consider that you might not always know better.

If this were a chatroom or forum, fine, answer informally. But we're talking in the context of a Q&A webiste.
I feel like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer should be on there instead of The Matrix since it's actually a book.
What gobsmacked me about this is the complete lack of introspection or contrition.

> If the product is software and thus can produce software gross margins (75% or greater), then it should be valued as a software company.

> If the product is something else and cannot produce software gross margins then it needs to be valued like other similar businesses with similar margins, but maybe at some premium to recognize the leverage it can get through software.

> But we have not been doing it that way in the late-stage private markets for the last five years.

> I think we may start now that the public markets are showing us how.

This presents the situation as if the connection between gross margin and valuation is some new discovery - "Cool, we've learned something about how to price companies! - and not a basic fact of business that everyone has been screaming about for a decade, but that many VCs have simply been ignoring.
Unfortunately, the only Rothko I've seen in person was a small one. But I have seen a lot of other modern art in person, large and small. I was not impressed.
One thing that immediately stood out to me was the section titled “UEFI support” [1]. And there are demo projects and examples too. Neat!

[1]: https://ziglang.org/download/0.5.0/release-notes.html#toc-UE...
I think the reconciliation here might be that "imagining a future world and spreading it" isn't necessarily noble or different from blatant lying.

An example: the UK government has been playing chicken with the EU over a Brexit deal. As Johnson tells it, the goal is to prepare for and commit to a successful no-deal Brexit in order to gain leverage for a better deal. (There's some debate about whether a deal is actually being pursued, but let's assume it is.) The UK government, then, is imagining a world where it can pass and succeed at no-deal Brexit, and is consequently able to negotiate a good deal. If the real state of affairs is "it'll be a disaster and so our MPs won't let us"... well, spreading that imaginary world would require lying in a very mundane, "knowingly making false statements" manner. A move like releasing the Operation Yellowhammer documents would interfere with that consensus-building.

Of course, that's far from the only reason governments lie. Continuing the example, the Brexit process has been absolutely full of lying that was not even slightly in the public interest. But the point is that governments lie for selfish reasons by invoking the arguments and mechanisms they justify with public-interest lying. It's fundamentally the same problem as government secrecy: the intent of the system is compromised by scrutiny, so it becomes an obvious channel for abuses of power.

It's possible, I suppose, that a government could solve this by simply not ever lying. A crisis like Brexit was self-inflicted by committing to the outcome before doing the planning, and you can just not do that. But it becomes a much stickier issue with questions like "should we lie about our military readiness, or admit what we're unable to resist to our hostile neighbors?" (And saying "only lie about military stuff" still leaves you with politicians lying about war to get elected, pass kickbacks, and so on.) At the very least, it seems like you'd need military security and relative economic stability before you could try to demand total honesty.

(None of this is an endorsement of governments lying, though. To me it's mostly a justification for extremely constrained state power to minimize the threat of those lies.)
Engineer on the Segment Functions product here. Happy to discuss any questions about how it works and how we built it.
Lasik is destructive, if you're a candidate another option to consider would be IOL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraocular_lens
There are plenty of PHD's who lead thoroughly uninteresting lives, there are plenty that have exciting and meaningful lives.

Your degree isn't what makes your life interesting or not, nor is your job title, nor is your job, nor is how much you get paid.

The premise of the question is wrong, IMHO.

If you're "not sure" about the PHD, take some time off and work for a couple years in something challenging and then decide if the PHD is right for you. You'll still be sharp enough to resume the studies and you'll have more experience from which you can base your decision.
If you turn in the Iowa State University VP of Finance in for NSF grant fraud, then YES. Do not recommend.
Disable WebP Format in Chrome
Translators have emerged as key contributors to the global economy
I feel like I’ve seen this basic plot line before, once or twice.

Ending 1: the deadline approaches and nothing has been done, so the deadline is extended, or additional clauses are written to grandfather in the non compliant offenders (who are of course too big to fail).

Ending 2: they find a port that is near the port they want to visit, in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care, and then ship the last mile to the actual destination via other means. More costly and more pollution but technically in compliance with every law.

Ending 3: they learn to game the tests, so they meet the letter of the regulation but not the spirit of it. Much cheaper than actually reducing emissions.
The irony is that essentially all of SoftBank's playbook is ripped from Buffett.

Except Buffett did it with non-tech, capital-heavy companies. Where it arguably works a lot more reliably.
Any idea how much the actual salary for these positions was vs the stock component which may well be worth nothing?
This kind of conservatism is actually pretty important. This is t engineering where you need to get that bridge built so people can use it; you’re trying to get to some “objective” “truth”. If your estimate is way off what someone else’s there’s a pretty good chance you’re wrong. After all the stepwise refinement did converge.

The alternative leads to things like the cold fusion debacle. There are still people working on it, but the ones I know know that they are regarded as cranks (At least for their CF work) and are super careful to try and discount any results seemingly contradictory to existing physics. Which is correct: another CF claim better have an unimpeachable, reproducible path.
I would add the „Stealing the Network“ series. Hackers writing about hacking. More high tech than high literature though...

“Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” another take on the singularity.
Sorry! But Crystal was last week's news!

This week is Zig's turn on HN :)
> I do find if I walk into the random restaurant on a street I expect to be unimpressed, even in SF.

My sincere condolences.
Wouldn't this be the pirates' paradise?
> Personally I view Elon's action as a profound statement on why you shouldn't smoke cannabis.

I'll bite, what is your take on why you shouldn't?