skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NIH study reveals differences in brain activity in children with anhedonia
If you can clone a great scientist and get another great scientist, then yeah cloning would get us more great scientists.

Perhaps, generations from now, our descendants will look back and consider us massively immoral for permitting our children to be born with unoptimized DNA.
> Heh, too late for that

It's never too late!

> but I wonder why I haven't stumbled on any philosophical literature about it before ?

Well, you'd usually only be exposed to it via a Philosophy of Mind class or in journals for professional philosophers.
The GP is talking about a bartender refusing to allow drinks to be taken outside. I think it’s fair to say that if there was no threat of the bartender getting in trouble, the GP could have walked outside with the drink, no problem.

This argument can be extended to cover murder, theft, drug use and any other crimes you might think of by examining people’s value systems. I think we can all agree that murder is against most people’s values but you can’t say it’s universal. Some people are okay with murder in different circumstances but they may not necessarily be psychopaths who crave murder to the detriment of all else. It’s these people that I think may be deterred by the threat of punishment for murder.

Furthermore, to complicate matters a little bit, there is the principle of marginal deterrence. If the punishment for murder is much more severe than for burglary, for example, you can expect a burglar to think twice before deciding to murder the home owner during a break-in. If, on the other hand, you punish stealing with the same severe penalty as murder (say, death penalty for either crime) then you risk incentivizing the burglar to murder anyone who might be a witness to the burglary.

Ultimately, I think the soundness of the principle of punishment as a deterrent derives not from the assumption that everyone has the same values (we don’t) but from the differences in everyone’s values. This helps society produce an outcome that would not otherwise be achievable if we required 100% consensus on every individual value.
I imagine they will spot whatever you are using to transport your million drones...
You are basically describing some if the potential concepts. And in addition to all the technical points you raised in scenario like that you would need a lot of drones, not all of which would come back. Which again drives costs up.

Would kind of make sense, IMHO, to have a superior, super stealthy dog fighter that can serve as a drone "mothership". Supplemented by droves of cheaper, non-stealthy specialized planes for ground attack, recon, bombing and whatever nasty fun things a future air force might dream of. Otherwise I think the next world war starts with zhe equivalent of a X-Wing and ends with the use wooden bi-planes.
Please elaborate in what was innovative here, their technical infrastructure seems to be nothing to write home about and well appointed office leasing has been around for quite some time.

The social focus is indeed different but I wouldn't call that alone a massive paradigm shift.
BWAAHAHAHAH! This is the pinnacle of HN. Someone calls forth from the depths of the great comedy cloud some of the most obscure, perfectly attached comedy for this thread. Resulting in coffee-nose-snort keyboard destruction, and all you can say is, "you encoded this wrong!" BWAAHAHAHHA nerd humor... does it get any better?
what do these clear rules and laws say about the following?

- US blows up various hospitals because "may contain insurgents"

- US blew up US citizen + his child without due process because "terrorism"

- US sanctions countries it doesn't like, causing civilians to starve/suffer/lack medicine

seems evident to me that one party doesn't really follow "the rules". how come they have a permanent seat at the UN security council? what punishment is prescribed for rule breakers? because it clearly isn't any loss of influence/prestige/sanctions/etc.
Isn't an increase in the reported amount of trafficking to be expected in legalization? Legalization means that they have to worry less about being criminalized while reporting being a victim of crime.
I have heard it anecdotally time and time again, "Overqualified".

Specialization only pays more when there's demand for the exact specialization. Nobody wants to pay a PhD and risk them moving onto the "perfect" position when the same job can be done by somebody more generalized.
> but it seems that the last couple of really huge unicorn companies have all been based on BS(We Work), Fraud(Theranos), and untenable business models (Uber).

What I don't understand, and this is an honest question for this crowd: aren't these viable businesses, in and of themselves? Maybe this is a stupid question. This is probably what allowed them to run so far on what they actually were, but here's the question anyway.

For instance, WeWork seems to be an AWS-for-office-space. Is that not a useful business? If I own a contract for space that can be slotted into anywhere in the world I might want to sit, is that not a useful thing to pay for? One might argue that, if I had the resources to truly care about a world-wide smorgasbord of office spaces to choose from at any given time, I'd have enough resources to lease my own building(s). But it still seems like something the market needs. Did it have to be a one-hundred-billionaire-minting business to rent space into that kind of market?

Theranos seems like a useful thing, and there seems to be an opening in the market for it. Are the cost mechanics of the available technology and the opportunity not aligned? Is there no way to run an economically-viable company providing a blood tester unit with a more-limited set of tests? Did it have to be a unicorn, end-all-be-all, existing-testing-company-destroyer to make any money?

You see where I'm going now. Does Uber need to suck all the money into their pockets to fund their self-driving car efforts (or wherever all this money is going) in order for any of it to work? Surely there's a model of ride sharing through an app that doesn't have to suck, pay their drivers well, and is a sustainable business, right? Does it really have to be the "Uber-of-cars," so to speak, in order to exist at all?

Is the only game left in the Valley, now, unicorns? All others need not apply?
According to the article, they've added rules that the ships can't discharge within their national waters. So the ships will discharge right outside that line. Nothing is prevented, only delayed.
If you are into audiobooks, the one on Audible, narrated. y Ray Porter, is really good.
Neither is the taxi lobby out there for the social change.

It's better to have two parties competing for user's money than just one party fixing the price and service quality.
>So are weird polyamorous people who are into "cuddle puddles" committing sexual assault or something similar by advertising that fact?

Nobody is accusing RMS of committing sexual assault.
Hear, hear. It starts with the birthing of a new AI, the proceeds to its education, its migration into a physical form, its migration into space, the migration into encoded form based on the geometry of a biological organism -- and all of this ancillary to the central plot.
All right so I got a strange question.

how do I get to be like this employee? With that kind of drive vision and focus? It's something I've been trying to cultivate in myself for a while but I'm always looking to be better.

It seem like I never know what to do next
Same as Facebook, Google etc. (Tho not it has to be said HN) It got network share to get people on board. Then once they got too big to lose they dialed down the competency requirements for those operating it.
This article specifically says the near work hypothesis does not fit the data.
Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End would be my recommendation though I'm not sure how it falls into the comp-fi genre.
Fark yeah, wish the author would finish the series.* He left readers hanging so caveat emptor. Even so I can recommend the audio books as well. Great for doing laundry, mowing the lawn, etc.

May as well copy the last update from Dennis E. Taylor here since I'm not alone in wishing we had more Bobiverse novels.

http://dennisetaylor.org/2019/01/06/outland-is-in-the-can/

>And this means that I’m now back to writing the next Bobiverse book(s), working title “The Search for Bender.” I say book(s) because it looks like it’s going to be a duology. And spoiler alert — the end of book one will be a cliff-hanger, and a doozy. Bob and the Bill Wonder will be tied to the front of a Zamboni, while the Penguin and his henchmen–er, no, wait, I’m having a flashback. Sorry.

>So stay tuned–same Bob-time, same Bob-channel–for more updates as they happen.
I don’t think I have ever seen such an aggressive shaking gdpr popup
Wind doesn't move nearly as much cargo as compared to self-propelled craft. It's true that throughout the 18th and 19th century industrialized nations used wind power to move cargo, but I doubt people are going to be willing to revert to 18th and 19th century standards of living. Global commerce is built on cheap long distance transport, and any climate solution that involves eliminating or drastically reducing global commerce is a long winded way of saying "no solution".
are you somehow unable to read monospace text or something? That looks fine to me
Overtraining is bad by definition, like overcooking. But "don't overtrain" is about as useful a maxim as "don't overcook".

Naive bayes has higher bias than logistic regression. Is that a good or a bad thing? Depends.

(I don't actually see any analogy with overtraining.)
> Comic Neue

For the uninitiated:

http://www.comicneue.com/

As far as Comic Sans-like fonts go it's quite nice
It's sorta like AdTech, where machines carefully optimize the ads shown to other machines and blocked by humans, with each layer charging humans for the privilege.
At its core, Black Scholes is a set of "obvious" differential equations.

You assume a normal curve. You define "volatility" (the market's uncertainty to the price of something) as Geometric Brownian motion with some standard-deviation / variance, and then perform differential equations on that to determine the "proper price" of an option.

After all: Options grow more valuable in times of uncertainty, and grow less valuable when everyone can accurately predict future prices.

The part that "brakes" because of negative rates is the "risk free rate", predicting the future value of money. To me, it seems like there are a variety of obvious extensions you can do to fix this problem. You could redefine Black-Scholes to operate on "Real" terms, and then convert everything back into "normal" terms later.

----------

Black Scholes doesn't "fundamentally" require postivie interest rates for the risk-free rate. It was just an assumption that they had in the original model. But as a differential equation, its pretty easy to tweak your assumptions around and fix these issues.

But any such tweak means you're no longer working with classic Textbook Black Scholes. Sure, it served as the basis of the theory, but you gotta account for more real-world variables than the original textbook model.
Not technically deleted perhaps, but flagging a unique and/or relevant question as a duplicate or not relevant, is guaranteed to make that question effectively invisible.
> Is there any other serious argument against encrypting DNS?

In DNS over HTTPS, requests are still going to a single, potentially untrustworthy entity. Encryption by itself only offers privacy against eavesdroppers, and can give a false sense of security to the unaware. Although not a fault of the technology, people in the EU have been encouraged / defaulted to use DoH provided by US companies on the grounds of privacy, where data privacy law in their own countries may be relatively strong.

I think we should be working towards DNS with a stronger privacy model than DNS over HTTPS. There is no need for centralised resolvers which get to see who are making which requests. Name resolution is a service which could be provided by a distributed network, with authority provided by cryptographically signed records.
This is a spectacular example of where “DevOps” as a team goes wrong. DevOps is not a team, it’s a relationship between developers and operations (and hopefully others) to align to deliver business value. Just as there are no “Agile developers”, no person should be referred to as a DevOps (it’s awkward even linguistically).
It was also actively broadcasting its location at the time.
Actually in the case of breaking DRM potentially in violation of the DMCA, they have relaxed things a bit[1].
I do remember that they would delete any discussion of cracking DRM.

But my bigger point is that they essentially act as toadies when they are not obligated to. I think it is actually worse when they try to act as enforcement agents of behalf of terms of service for corporations that they have no relationship with.

And there is no moral context considered. What if a Saudi woman being held hostage wanted technical information to escape and seek refuge in another country, but doing so violated some company's TOS? I am certain that SO would side against the woman, because of their narrow and sycophantic attitude.

For example, I was enrolled in the Meego developer program in 2011, and was given a free Exo Tab tablet from Intel. When the project was canceled, I was supposed to destroy the tablet after one year. Intel technically retained ownership of the tablets on paper, so that developers would not have to pay taxes on them.

So, I posted, asking to find out how I could get the specialized drivers and interface software for Windows 7 on the device. But the mods decided that they should act as agents on behalf of Intel and the US Internal Revenue Service, even though nobody else cared.

I asked a simple technical question about where I could hypothetically get software for hardware I was in possession of.

A representative from Intel assured me that Intel had no plans to enforce this agreement, and it was merely on paper so that we did not have to pay taxes. Additionally, I seriously doubt that the IRS would want to track me down and fine me for not paying taxes on the $700 tablet I received. And the development program was canceled anyway, so why not put it to other use? And how do they know I was not going to honor my agreement and destroy it anyway??

But no, the toadies on SO decided that just in case I wouldn't honor my trivial agreement with Intel and just in case I wouldn't pay taxes, they would prevent further discussion of it. How could they possibly know my intentions? Nobody asked them to interpret the intentions of Intel and do what they think is their bidding for them! They are a bunch of toadies who way overstep their bounds.

[1]: https://meta.superuser.com/questions/2212/is-discussion-of-t...
Excellent question. Embedded within the article is a video of the airplanes arriving in Berlin, and there is no sign of external stores. They might have stopped elsewhere in Europe and removed them there, but a caption on the video describes it as "a record-setting long-duration flight for the F-35 from Arizona" and "an 11-hour flight."
Seems fair. Non-athlete college students are allowed to earn money and profit from endorsements. There shouldn't be special rules just for athletes.
Be careful using the ab wheel! I pulled my lower back so bad that I couldn't walk for a couple days. And I had been powerlifting for a couple of years at that point. Really have to use proper form
Kansas runner killed by lightning near ultramarathon finish line
The problem with WeWork is that it's business is fundamentally rubbish.

It has long leases for buildings, and short leases for customer, so it's basically failure scenario number 1 for an economic downturn.

And yes, if you act as a startup, and hire engineers assuming you are startup, you better be a unicorn.
Nope. They just require the same critical thinking and situational awareness that is required to spot phishing, obviously malicious links, dark patterns, etc.
It's a cheat device in that it skirts the intent of a law: that sulfur not get into the environment at all but extracted and disposed of properly.
Accelerando by Charles Stross is a good one.
Yeah, they have no posts in months? Or am I missing something
If rotation lock is off, placing the display in landscape mode might improve your experience.
That's just not true. Before you would run into all kinds of bottlenecks after 2-4 cores. I believe it was addressed in R13A[1].

[1] http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_R13A.readme
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Zen
>> Minimize energy spent on coding style.

For me this is sort of important because languages not having standard coding style end up 10000 coding styles. Rust fmt is an excellent example for avoiding that. Does anybody use Zig + fmt?

I know they have something. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1523
Groupon is a perfect example of a company that became irrelevant before reaching profitability. Most tech valuations are based on the assumption that the company's product will stay hot forever, giving enough time to cut expenses and turn black. While in reality, the crowd of early adopters that gave you the hockey stick growth, quickly moves on to something else once they get bored and then it turns out your market is orders of magnitude smaller than your investors expected.
That was just the first step. Firefox first had to disallow XUL/legacy extensions before they could remove APIs that others used to depend on.
I think you may be missing a key point of the system described in the article- it is passive, and does not transmit any signal. Instead it relies on RF already in the environment - radio, tv stations and the like. This makes the system far harder to detect and target. I recall hearing about a similar Chinese(?) system a little while ago which used the scatter from mobile phone signals.
Not exactly the same thing, but about six years ago, I was working for a startup that did consulting work, and we had a project where I was doing the frontend JavaScript in AngularJS, one person was doing the backend in Node.js, and another person was doing the HTML/CSS. This was a pretty logical split, and there wasn't too much toe-stepping.

One day, my manager decided (and this isn't a joke) that he was going to make the project finish "three times faster" by adding three times as many people to it.

This turned out to be a royally idiotic decision; this was a monolithic application (before microservices became a buzzword), as a result it became incredibly easy to break everyone else's stuff. Since there was now three people doing every given thing, and we were now in a time-crunch, and since the management wasn't terribly good, it became incredibly easy to accidentally break the whole app without even trying; there was no longer a clear division on where my part of the code began and ended.

It turned out to be a shitshow; eventually management realized their mistake, and annoyingly since I was the only one who knew all three parts of the app, I was the one who had to complete the mess.
> And governments in general seem more obsessed with information manipulation than ever before. Consequently, I find it only logical to assume that all social media is currently being heavily utilized by government level actors to push their various propaganda and agendas.

There is so much Twitter bot activity around politics. It is deeply troubling to consider that the intelligence agencies could be actively involved in manipulating political discourse with the goal of influencing US elections.

EDIT: Surprising that a reply to this comment mentioning the JIDF was flagged to dead within 5 minutes of being posted. I don't think I've ever seen an HN comment go dead that fast. Poster seems to have a history of being flagged (maybe only took one report?), but in this context is a bit unnerving.
If you're looking to the media to provide a unified narrative on anything, you're on a fools errand.

Fundamentally, the ability to understand the world involved critical thinking. The types of things we see from global warming deniers tends to be a kind of faux critical thought. Find some nugget of information that supports your cause, cling to it, and definitely do not attempt to gain some sort of comprehensive understanding of the subject.

This is understandable in one sense - the world is extremely complicated, and one cannot form a deep understanding of all the things they need to interact with.

The problem is people compensate for this by bullshitting themselves into believing they have some sort of understanding of said complex topic without putting in any of the work required to actually understand it.

I don't know what the real name for it, but talking about 'the media' has become sort of like a code smell to me. "The media" doesn't exist as a unified thing, and that's almost certainly a good thing. Instead of being a useful phrase, it becomes a wild card for assigning responsibility for whatever the source thinks is wrong with the world.
Right, but Lyft has the same product. Given enough time, we might see other ride-share companies succeed with the same (yet inferior) tech servicing specific cities.

Austin has a non-profit rideshare business that matches riders and drivers.

http://www.rideaustin.com
Decentralised by providing computing power, not hosting content. Would that still constitute as illegal if the bits aren't on your computer, and hence are unviewable by you, but you have somehow donated computing resources to run the network?

Just thinking out loud
It's efficient in the sense that if you compare kgs of goods per km, but it's not efficient when you consider the great distances ships travel versus producing goods domestically, just to put those same goods on rail and trucks anyway.
Lagom Data Knowledge Platform
> Anecdotally, most of the climate deniers I know (and am related to) also believe that Jesus is coming back soon, so fuck the environment, right?

No, that's a very caricatured interpretation of Christian theology about stewardship of the environment. But Christians are a convenient scapegoat, right?
> For instance, WeWork seems to be an AWS-for-office-space. Is that not a useful business? If I own a contract for space that can be slotted into anywhere in the world I might want to sit, is that not a useful thing to pay for? One might argue that, if I had the resources to truly care about a world-wide smorgasbord of office spaces to choose from at any given time, I'd have enough resources to lease my own building(s). But it still seems like something the market needs. Did it have to be a one-hundred-billionaire-minting business to rent space into that kind of market?

I think about it from the other direction. WeWork leases office space and parcels it out to temporary tenants. But, what's to stop the management companies that already own the office space to do the same thing? Why pay a middle man? WeWork would take the risk and prove the model effective in a particular area, then their own suppliers could undercut them.

Theranos was trying to sell technology that doesn't exist.