skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Transporting people with current human lifetimes might not be practical. But brain scans on a computer? Or people in some form of cryogenic state or with life extension tech?

I'd say that's a fair bit easier. Still not trivial, but manageable with a lightsail.
Not if the Alcubierre drive works, which there's no reason to believe it doesn't. Cracking FTL doesn't mean just stepping on the gas really hard.
I find the HN “hide” option to work well for uninteresting stories.
I mean, it's not like there are plenty of other countries where they can put a headquarters? Countries with lower rent prices, more lenient taxes, less horrible governments, etc.

I know it's not that simple to move a company elsewhere but if you're in an oppressive state and your business is suffering because you have to bow the overlords, maybe it's time to run.
Yep, almost all of the economically free countries are liberal democracies with strong independent courts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom

There's a strong correlation between economic and social liberty, as well as with the average wealth, quality of life, and happiness of the general population.

The fact Taiwan and HK are right next to China with ethnically and culturally similar people and were both way ahead of China economically and socially is no surprise. I often wonder how much more advanced the entire world would be if China didn't waste 50yrs trying their failed experiment and had skyrocketed to success like Japan, South Korea, HK, and Taiwan did long ago.
> Do you see companies that aren't partially owned by Chinese interests doing things like this?

I think this is kind of cheating (Tencent, Alibaba, etc. have zillions of small-ish investments). I was mostly thinking about Apple, Google, heck, even the NBA.
They have very serious demographical issues though.
The freaking US government did not mentioned the human rights so I am not sure why you try to insinuate that human rights are even a slight reason why this conflict is happening.

I can only assume that many US citizens dislike the idea to become citizens to the no 2 country in the world so anything goes , including false things.
Your point is well taken, insofar as manufactured goods, but does not explain the decline in agricultural and construction inputs. In agriculture we're (currently) a net exporter and construction is non-traded.
I think I got a Stellar "air drop" through Keybase. I don't even want their fake money, but now I have to do extra paperwork to deal with it.

I am surprised that McDonalds can offer you 50 cents off a burger without having to file a 1099.
Weren't (the) BMPs large in size?
So you're willing to allow for far future engineering to solve the time problem, but not the problem of bioengineering the human body?
You have a similar sentiment to what is permitted to be displayed on Weibo. As we have agreed, there is strong censorship on Weibo. Do you believe that pro Hong Kong protester posts would be permitted by that censorship? Clearly there is a strong anti Hong Kong protester reaction on Weibo. But with the heavy censorship we have no idea what percentage of the Chinese population might have a different view.
Can you link me to the Trump human right demands?
American labour organization pretty much no longer exists which is quite convenient for this sort of thing - it's quite likely this went across a few folks' desks who bowed their heads because they thought they'd be singled out for objecting.

I praise the employees that are walking out today - but a number of them were involved in this happening and didn't feel empowered to speak out and oppose this before the poo hit the windmill. That tends to be par for the course in modern america (keep your head down because anyone who objects is fired) and while it has some short term benefits for upper management they end up wholly owning their problems and nobody is going to call out a big mistake like this one before it goes public.

Lastly having worked in the gaming industry the turnover is quite high, I don't know if Blizzard is better about retaining senior folks, but it might be that everyone who would have the confidence to stop this before it exploded was long ago canned because their salary grew out of the range where Blizzard wanted to keep them on.
See my other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207421 If you care about queer rights at all, they're like night and day. There's also clear differences on abortion rights and freedom of (and from) religion.

I don't disagree with anything you said, either. It sucks, and I said so. People are reacting like I said the Democrats were nearly perfect, and I'm not sure how anyone got that from what I actually said.
Black people seem to be able to dress up as white characters without using white face just fine.
That was commonplace in the west for musicians and actors with a mass young fan base -- they often were forced by management to be single, or appear single, hide their relationships etc, not to disappoint the fans of the opposite sex. And of course actors/singers/etc who were gay/lesbian/bi/etc were forced to hide it for marketing reasons.
If you ever a get a chance to hear Putin speak then you'll find he's extremely intelligent. It's much harder to disagree with him when you hear what he has to say in his own words instead of through the filter of US media.
How do Taiwanese companies do business in China?

"Hello, I am the CEO of a company located in a fully autonomous province that does not pay taxes to the PRC?"
No, that's handled separately. You're not in possession of the coins if you can't access them, and you aren't taxed on them until you gain possession.
Statements mean and accomplish nothing. I thought after decades of being fucked over and lied to by corporations, maybe the public would become a bit more suspicious of people like this, but I guess not.
If you bend the universe, you're bending time, as well.
I'm not upset, I see this as "seeking an attention from an audience". And speaking will not change anything only taking actions which are not "I declined subscription to a game and made the world know about it". People in the Hong Kong are clearly taking actions against injustice and not the ones who sitting at home and tweeting about it. It's just how I see it and it's my opinion. Such events could happen with any public company which make a living from international deals and their business could lose money. Blizzard didn't even make it clear on what they think about those injustices and people already taking sides. This is just a consequences of taking an action to protect their business.
> For performance, IMO in this order you should consider (1) PyPy, (2) multiprocessing, (3) cython and/or c-extensions

They are all very limited in what they can do (neither can replace others) and bring tons of complications.
Modern languages can give you all of that without big issues.
>Gaining access to the infinitesimal microscales where superstrings supposedly wriggle would require an accelerator 1,000 light years around.

Has anyone ever proven that there aren't any better accelerator technologies left to be discovered? What about natural accelerators like the charges that build up and produce cosmic rays?
None of the things you listed are possible or realistic in the next 50 years.
it's true that each of us usually lives in a story and we all live in a collective delusion.

But. We all know the feeling in our own lives of suddenly waking up getting real.
Due to the one-child policy, china is headed for extreme economic issues -- even without interference. Those issues are already starting to become apparent and will skyrocket over the next decade or two. Extra economic pressure on top could definitely have a significant effect on the country.
This is the post that keeps on giving.
And still no (American) statement from Blizzard. Whoever runs their PR team is getting fired, if they haven't been already.
Exactly. And we have that magnesium and other macro-nutrients are declining in fruits and vegetables (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/). Unregulated capitalism will grow "food" in the form of apple shaped buckets of water and sell as many as they can as the soil is exhausted.

We're doomed.
My experience is the same. Rollbacks never fail. Upgrades often break my desktop environment. Maybe I should just stop using GNOME, since KDE seems to be the better supported "fat" desktop environment. Not sure if cobbling together some kind of i3wm-type environment would simplify things or result in just another kind of fragile complication.

Can't really figure out why GNOME stopped working for me after 18.03. Wish there was some kind of guide/tool for validating that my configuration.nix was still sane with newer versions.
tmux buffer back scrolling is onerous and highlighting in split view with a mouse is the same.
Many of the pigs are dead thanx to ASF, so they won't be needing huge amounts this year. Also, they have rented vast amounts of land in Ukraine, Africa.

Trump wants a trade agreement with the EU for soy and beef in exchange for not imposing tariffs on cars. It probably won't happen, as the EU is too slow to act and most likely won't accept hormone treated beef.
UWP is ambiguously defined and the acronym's usage is on the way out. An evolution of UAP and Windows Store apps, it boiled down to a whitelist of APIs allowed on multiple devices (the U in Universal) and encompassed Win32, WinRT and COM APIs. UWP itself isn't an entity with APIs, is not a technology, and the original concept is dead thanks to new platform leadership at Microsoft. (Still in play on Hololens, Surface Hub, and other sandboxed devices for now...)

That said, "UWP" is confusingly also used to refer to Windows apps that tap into WinRT APIs, participate in the modern app lifecycle, are modeled and have identity, or generally tap into newer technologies such as AppContainer. You'll see this, for example, perpetuated in Visual Studio in its project templating. It's a BIG OL' MESS right now; I'm working with/pushing Microsoft to get this communicated clearly and mopped up but old habits die hard.
Occurrences of the word "Impossible" in the article: 0.
I wouldn't blame Wall Street alone.

There's money on the table to be sure, but multiple incentives are aligned to make getting games in front of China make sense. Even for developers who aren't profit-motivated primarily, being seen is its own motivation.

It's hard to ignore the country with over a billion people.
I know it's the original but this title is turrible.

'Staged' - usually means faked

'Protest Banned Pro-Hong King Gamer' reads like they are protesting the gamer
Huh. So this is why cars parked on one side of a street (with no tree cover) will be covered in condensation, while those parked on the other side (which has tree cover) will not?
Thank you for the advice!
Activist investors often have less than 10% stakes in the companies they’re trying to institute changes in. 5% is not a meaningless amount to hold.
The Congress party has a leader in Rahul Gandhi who is incompetent, and the self-inflicted damage over the years, makes them a non-choice.
Xi Jinping ‘No Dictator’, American Businessman Michael Bloomberg Says
Europeans seem obsessed with obscure status games, which probably drives the obscurantism in European (Continental [sic]) philosophy.
Agreed -- what kind of psychopath overrides default scroll behavior?

As mentioned above, there is a better article that covers this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/science/solar-energy-powe...
Is there an English translation of this somewhere? I googled around and couldn't seem to find it.
Well, as I said, potentially an Apple II emulator might actually do the job depending on what the software is doing.

This might be a fun thing to compute the numbers on.
So we’re just blindly believing whatever CEOs say now? There are so many incentives for them to say whatever the public wants to hear that it doesn’t make sense to take any of it at face value.
FTA:

> The Guix development branch we just merged introduces a reduced binary seed bootstrap for x86_64 and i686
On behalf of all us, thanks for your work. Does the distance between the two surfaces at different temperatures matter? I'm sure this has occurred to you and your team, but the ambient temperature inside of a bedroom, beneath the roof, could provide a greater temperature differential.
I'm interested in hearing from anybody who has sucessfully built a useful research robot for < $1K. Even just a SCARA arm.

my experience has been everything < $1K uses crappy servos.
You seem to have ignored the parts about agricultural and construction inputs.

Additionally, the manufacturing output of the US economy has continued to grow in the 'post-peak' period.
It's worth pointing out that today's China is communist in name only. They literally arrested the president of Peking University's Marxist society on ideological grounds: https://news.yahoo.com/china-arrests-marxist-student-leader-...

China in 2019 is a simple fascist dictatorship.

Edit: Fixed a broken link
Reproducible builds don't mean compiling with different compilers, or even different versions of the same compiler, to result in the same binary.
Really it's because of a mixture of the two. The traditional DES-based crypt is basically a really early KDF - it was intentionally designed to be slow in order to thwart brute-forcing attacks. (Of course, since it was based on the speed of late-70s computers and had a limited password length, it's pretty feasable to brute force with modern hardware.)

MD5 wouldn't be invented for another decade or two...
You can't wake up as that's all also a story. It's turtles all the way down. All you can do is tell a different story, to change the script so to say. So far we have gone through a few scripts... Polytheism (many gods) -> Monotheism (one god) -> Economism (money is god and the way to reach god (get more money) is through science perhaps). We need to figure out the next story. I think Economism is terminal.

There is no science and epistemology without their drivers. They are in fact the political economy. You can not divorce how they are used from politics.
I guess I don't understand if you've got a good why it's so hard to arrive at some reasonable approximation of what. You can so quickly prototype and test a bunch of whats. You can draw things on paper, you can spend a week luxuriating in all the whats if you have a good why.

And if you don't have a good why, no amount of design or development will save you.
I cancelled my blizzard account as soon as I heard this news.

I doubt I'll renew - since the root cause is unlikely to be fixed with any PR expedient move at this point. They have shown the world where their true nature lies - and it ain't good. Cancel yours if you have them...
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... or is currently being held in check by management, who has absolutely no idea how to spin this yet.

Can't march with no marching orders.
> We need to let the USA PATRIOT act expire.

Why would they ever let this happen? It's an excuse to own you.

But let's say they did "let it expire", to put on some political pony show for the concerned voter, would they then stop spying on you, because of the new rules?

It's a stretch, but let's imagine that the agencies now decide to "follow the rules". They really miss that Patriot Act though! All they'd really need to get their favorite Act back is another major terrorist attack.
It might be time for democratic countries to consider not trading with China. China is totalitarian and marxist and is therefore incompatible with democratic values. But still democratic governments and corporations aim to trade with China because it's a massive market and there's plenty of money to be made.

The Australian Prime Minister is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, China is our major trade partner. On the other hand, America is our ally and also a major trade partner. So Morrison has to dance with each.

Blizzard, I read, have significant investment from China, and China are a massive market for them. So they self-censor in order to stay in China's good graces.

I don't see how corporations and countries can do business in China, without compromising their values and possibly stepping on the values of citizens/customers in democratic countries.
> It's their equipment you're using.

I don't find this a very good argument. Sourcing inspiration from a sibling comment, it's also the employer's bathroom stall. I might be convinced it's okay to snoop when it comes to their network usage, but this is not the argument to do so.
I am working on a course to teach kids ages 5-12 programming using Scratch. I am behind schedule in releasing it, but I would highly recommend you try Scratch.

The visual blocks, sounds, and some plugins like musical notes make it a really fun approach creatively speaking.
> Why doesn't anyone put Saudi Arabia on a blacklist for human rights violations

Canada has basically cut diplomatic ties with KSA (more like they cut ties with us after we criticized their human rights record). Good riddance and I was proud to see it.
Apple starts selling Microsoft’s Xbox controller after adding support in its OSS
If anyone knows how to fill out a list of companies to boycott in relation to HK, please see this link:

https://github.com/hongkonggong/beyond-lennon-walls/issues/2...
The post didn't make this very clear. $10 was the starting price - at the time it was for 5 users. Similar to Confluence or Jira with a very cheap (in this case loss-making) starting tier. Once a customer got to ~10 users it became profitable.

What we didn't know if whether there'd be enough customers for us to care about the loss on those $10 tiers. E.g., if only 100 customers signed up a month, the costs would have been around $10K/month - enough to write off as a marketing expense. Once it got to $100K it became something we needed to fix.
FTL travel is straight up science fiction, ok? Look, I would absolutely love to be proven wrong on this, but literally everything we know about physics is telling us that FTL is impossible. Ditto inertia-less propulsion to a slightly lesser extent.
A lot of not so elderly and not so distinguished scientists would also agree with his statement though. All it takes is familiarity with the physical constraints imposed by the speed of light and the distances to the planets in question.
Is there a theoretical limit to the device's performance? Something relatable to power like milliwatts/m^2? How does this theoretical limit relate to the devices you've actually built?

Is it possible for a device to be both a solar panel and a radiative thermoelectric generator? How close to a theoretical limit for radiative thermoelectric generation could a device that was also a solar panel become?

Would capturing heat via mass e.g. warming up a block of cement during the day help improve the efficiency of a radiative thermoelectric generator that sits atop the heat source?

Is there a better term for this other than radiative thermoelectric generation?

Thanks!
That's why Tesla's approach is pretty brilliant IMO. It's easy to collect samples where there was hard braking and there was a real, actual human visible in the path of the car while the car is under human control. No dummies are needed, and AI was not in control of the car, so there's no ethics issue either. Your Tesla will upload such samples automatically if Tesla deep learning system wants them.
It would be easy to find thousands of people to volunteer to set forth on an ark that wouldn't arrive at another planet for generations. It'd be an enormous technical challenge, and cost a fortune, so it's unlikely to be funded any time soon, but there's no technical limitation if the will is there. Some day the will may very well be there.

I'm not endorsing the idea, nor do I think it's likely in my lifetime. It won't be necessary for the survival of the human race any time in the next billion years. That doesn't mean people won't want to do it eventually, if for no other reason than to explore. There was never any reason to climb Everest either, yet individuals devote their entire lives and fortunes to doing so.

Just because we don't have to do it doesn't mean it's not something people will want to do.

We'll probably become a hive-mind synthetic species long before anyone considers it, but if you call that human, eventually it'll get there.
I think it's the most reasonable reading of the guidance, but I would agree that it would be vastly superior if this (or some other treatment) was made quite explicit. Guidance should do a better job of guiding.
What’s wrong with complexity theory? I remember seeing a talk about it a long time ago and the concepts were super interesting, but I didn’t (I don’t) have the mathematical maturity to understand it in depth.
The Birth of Standard Error (2013)
Yeah strong / independent courts and laws are absolutely required... for a lot of things really.
"They" maybe should.

This is not a change of position for me. I'm 40; I remember the tail end of the Cold War, and for me, this is merely China unmasking what I always knew was there, not some amazing revelation. This is Communism. It has not changed in 50 years, right up to and including holding a pretty mask over its face for its Western audiences ready and eager to believe in it. The only difference is the world shrank, and it's harder for the mask to work when you're standing closer to it.
Goodbye Diablos, Overwatch and WoW.
If nobody gave a fuck about Palestine, people wouldn't be so bent out of shape over Representative Omar's comments on the topic.