skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume, or at least hope, that this is an attempt at mockery. Only, CIA meddling in South American politics is a historical fact, and massively so. Where do you think the term banana republic comes from?
Over the last 40 years of working in the bay area I've noted that a lot of people don't understand how shitty big tech companies are to work for.
> Unsure why phone manufacturers insist on trying to make their phones thinner and more fragile when everyone wraps them in a case of some description.

Because consumers don't actually buy what they say they want.

I'm always seeing people demand more durable screens and longer battery life, and Motorola made the Droid Turbo 2 with a massive 3750 mAh battery and a truly shatter-proof screen. People dropped it from a drone onto concrete from over 500 feet and it survived [0]. It takes more than one smack with a hammer to break the screen. [1]

And yet, nobody bought it, because when it comes to make a purchase, people still want phones that look sleek and modern, which means thin and a back made out of glass, because plastic is ugly, and metal interferes with wireless charging.

Motorola's been producing phones for years that have the features people actually ask for. They made Android phones with physical keyboards up to 2012 [2]. I remember seeing polls about phones with QWERTY keyboards back then and so many people saying they want one, but when it came to actually buy, they'd rather get an iPhone with a screen that shatters if you sneeze.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTJOL5ikuZA

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaiEIlPxnok

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_4
If you follow American football, your comment reads quite a bit like "Tom Brady has terrible throwing mechanics." Ultimately, it might be right, in some purely academic sense, but in a more relevant sense, good throwing mechanics are those that win you games, and good software implementations are those that meet the business requirements.
Maybe because there's a lot of gambling in esports. There was that controversy with CS:GO skin gambling a few months back.
One of the challenges is how do you distinguish the kinds of outrage? It seems to me like the majority of outrage is based on falsehood (Ascension is selling data to Google to use for ads). Then there are some people where the very idea of medical data being managed by cloud providers is unacceptable. The presence of the first shadows the latter and makes the whole thing come across as misinformed.
This is pretty funny
Fraud has completely different profile on cryptocurrency. They would have zero chargeback percentage. Just think about it.
The Joy of Radio – Sixty Symbols
The headline (as is usual for phys.org) is clickbait. The paper's title is "Experimental test of local observer-independence", and a more informative version might be "Experimental implementation of the Wigner's Friend thought experiment".

The notion that that Wigner's Friend thought experiment "suggests" that reality doesn't really exist is tendentious. It just points out the same problems with the Copenhagen Interpretation as the Schroedinger's Cat experiment does, and they're answered in much the same way by other interpretations.

The experiment doesn't tell us anything we don't already know: that quantum mechanics works as the theory says it does, and that our classical-scale-inspired understanding of what "reality" means doesn't apply well at a scale where you can prevent decoherence. Wigner insisted that consciousness was an essential part of decoherence, and there's simply no support for that in this experiment.
Great point that I hadn't thought of, but is so true! It communicates ok in text, but verbally not well at all.

Maybe they can rebrand to "123456"
There are plenty of porn friendly payment providers. They just cost a lot of money relative to "normal" merchants because of a few simple reasons:

1) Chargebacks -- people chargeback the shit out of these kinds of transactions. Significant other sees the bill, gets pissed / confused about the charge / whatever
and gets it charged back.
2) Fraud -- people use stolen CC's to pay for this kind of thing.
3) Porn operators are, as a whole, rather shady themselves and present their own set of risks to a payment provider. A lot of those chargebacks in #1 are actually valid chargebacks.

You could say "use bitcoin", which would solve the chargeback problem but do nothing for fraud and shady porn sites. If anything it would exacerbate the shady behavior because consumers would have no recourse against fraud.

In short, collecting payment for porn sites a tough, costly business.
Shouldn’t there be a futures market for bitcoin like there is for commodities? Where a middleman could lock in the price and do the transactions for both sides? The middleman is taking the risk and charging a fee.
Arguably, the combination of centralized and decentralized parts ace much closer description to what the internet is today than the idea that it's solely centralized. Same is true of society; while the 20th and 21st century are replete with efforts to completely centralize society under one organization (there is the Party, only the Party, and nothing outside of the Party), such structures have consistently failed and collapsed. (Which does not stop people from continuing to propose them seriously, unfortunately.) Society is a mixture of centralized and decentralized elements.

The problem is that in biology, you don't have intelligent entities exploiting the centralization, which is I think where the metaphor breaks down.

Interestingly, the metaphor isn't completely broken; I have seen serious discussion of thing like cancer, and even more interestingly, what can convince a cell to not be cancer, in terms of self-interest and exploitation and such. One of the mysteries of how multi-cellular life ever got started was how one cell convinces another to not seek its own survival at all costs. Being rather complicated multicellular entities ourselves, we take this for granted, but it's a legit research topic.

Still, the cancer abusing the system is not doing it with human-level intelligence, whereas arguably Facebook is a super-human level intelligence, so the metaphor is not great.
Yeah Morales was just about to give the profits from their lithium supplies to social programs etc. and suddenly he's sleeping outside.
Crypto? Credit card bill would show whatever exchange people use to buy crypto.
I'm in this situation right now - was just debating buying an iPhone yesterday after never owning anything from Apple. How do you like it so far?
See, it just broke when UTF-8 was interpreted as ASCII. It's entirely possible to treat bytes as bytes and leave encoding out of it for the vast majority of programs. If you're dealing with text editing and so on, then you know you need to be UTF-8 aware, and the broken programs would still be broken in either language.

The visibility of the errors is a minor point, but I think it more appropriate that it be solved by e.g. the windowing toolkit API.
Since `pip-tools>=3.7.0` it supports links to git repo URLs without editable mode and --generate-hashes works as well (since 3.8.0 version).
Space-grade CPUs: How you send more computing power into space
This is neat science. The only problem is that some people read pop media articles about it and leap to unjustified conclusions that result in the kind of silly 'quantum spirituality' crap that Deepak Chopra is known for sometimes spouting.
I think this is a US thing. I've tried to do chargebacks before in Europe because a website wouldn't stop billing me, and was told the only thing I could do is cut up the card and get issued a new one.
In theory USB4 is supposed to just be the Thunderbolt spec rebranded, which should set a floor on the available feature set for ports on computers.
Absolutely -- it's that promise of financial freedom and products that "basically sell themselves" except you're stuck with the inventory because 10 people are working on the same friends to get them to buy Younique mascara.
Yes. My mom and I had phrases for duress. Since she has long since passed away, I can share ours. "I love you". Sad, right?
Not if the Point of Sale system won't let them.
Spotify's Magic Leap app lets you virtually pin music on the wall
What I find so interesting about Vice Ventures is how she has drawn a hard line on the weapons industry.
Closing the loophole in the law that lets them treat workers as "contractors" rather than employees is going to torpedo their whole business model.
Bolivia has 9 million tons of unexploited lithium reserves in their salt flats. "The region has 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/11/bolivian-coup-c...
> They would have zero chargeback percentage. Just think about it.

LOL. Great for the shady porn site operators but not at all good for the consumer who has no recourse. A lot of those chargebacks are perfectly valid because the site operator is some shady fly-by-night site doing shady stuff.
StackOverflow was down
It's more like taking away someone's pension if they steal from the company, but even that's not a good analogy.

At least under US law, frequent flier miles are property of the airline and the program operates basically free of oversight. They can take them from you at their sole discretion for any reason or no reason, and they can't be sued for it, at least in state court. Only the DOT has meaningful jurisdiction over airlines, for instance look up the last few battles over 14 CFR 399.88(a).
I refuse to learn about infosec, for the same reason that I refuse to become an amateur surgeon: I don't want to know enough to be dangerous. This is a field that will take 100% of your time if you want to be good at it, and being "meh" is more dangerous than realizing you don't know anything and paying an expert.

(Crypto and security in general were a hobby of mine until I realized how difficult the field really is. "Programming Satan's computer" was one paper that contributed to that.)
I agree. I read this 2 or 3 times, and while I've read about the concept before and I'd like to think I have at least somewhat of an understanding of the "idea" at least, this was a total loss for me. If something can't be explained without resorting to actual Greek characters and irrational numbers, it might be worth trying again.

I don't know if I was just grumpy from the struggles of trying to parse this, but having the author interrupt every other paragraph with a tangent about how I shouldn't feel bad for not understanding this immediately didn't particularly help matters.
« Legally headquartered in Luxembourg »
chrome://flags

Search for "for you"

Disable.

Saved you a click
Between that and the natural gas, Bolivia will be a key natural resource in the eventual solar-dominated energy economy.
According to the lead SRE at StackOverflow, "SQL is very, very angry. We're aware and working it."[0]

This outage seems pretty bad. Everything, even their static pages (like ToS/Privacy Policy) seem to be unavailable. Best of luck to the SO team to get everything back up quickly.

Edit: it's back up. Outage seemed to last 12 minutes.

[0] https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/1195071424614092801
My first thought on seeing the post was "What do reaction control system have to do with android?"
In my opinion, all phones should be set to not ring unless the number is in the address book in a specific category. Mine won't make a noise. If it's important, they will leave a message.
Changes to Chrome Extensions in Manifest V3 [video]
... is that bad?
> this is one case where I think it’s warranted

How will you deal with fraudulent / sketchy site operators scamming people into sending them money via irreversible payment channels?
And while they're at it, they should laminate their phone because it's not robust to water, dirt or even manipulation either.

I know, I know, IP ratings. Okay... good luck.
They don't give a shit about your vault. They want your money every year instead of once-off.
"For each lookup, we first find the desired city with a linear scan of all the city geofences, and then find the containing geofences within that city with another linear scan."

Why wouldn't this be dogshit slow if they used all of the city geofences at once? I would think that first they would scan the country geofences, then the province geofences, then the city geofences, etc...
Ask HN: Will Fintechs Die?
Or be absorbed by big techs ?

As we can see, large tech companies are turning into finance.
Amazon has launched a full range of services.
Google is on the same path.
Uber began to manage the cash flows on its network itself.

It seems that big techs, which control consumers (and have become the operating systems of our lives) will end up managing everything themselves rather than relying on third party companies like fintechs.

Retail banks are dying, payment charges are falling sharply with the explosion of digital payments.

Big techs could very well share a same payment protocol and manage everything internally.

Don't you agree ?
Yep, nearly 70% of voters voted against allowing short-term rentals. AirBnb spent over $4 million on that local election alone[1].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/06/airbnb-suffers-setback-in-je...
I'd just like to add E11EVEN is not a strip club. It is in fact a burlesque club. There is some nudity but not in the same way as a strip club. For any Miami-based HNers, you can find me at the nearby bar, you'll know the one.
My thoughts exactly. I've been thinking about going back to a flip phone and using on of these pocket computers or a tablet for my computing. Sometimes I have my phone for the sole reason of needing to be available for family or work. Sometimes I have my phone because I want to read or kill time. I like to think if I split these devices up, I could free up some pocket space and disconnect a little more. I've already closed down all my social media except for my pseudonymous twitter account. Even that has been up for the chopping block with all this impeach pit chatter.
The alternative would be to write a side effect inside your `render()` function, which is illegal -- it breaks the new Concurrent mode rendering, which can call render() speculatively.

I mean, I see why it's intuitively unappealing to you, but there are perfectly good reasons for the design.
Will this will make people less likely to use Python in future for some projects? I'm no developer or manager but I figure there'd be a thought in the back of my head thinking "what if we need to rewrite this all again for the next major release"
Ask HN: What are some good cities to live in while hacking on a project?
I'm a 29yo single guy, and would prefer not to spend a princely sum of money on rent. I value walkability/public transit, the ability to meet interesting people, and good transit to/from. I'm from the US, but would consider any city worldwide. Which cities would you recommend and why? Thanks in advance! :-)
Can vouch that as an amateur Python user from a country using "non-ASCII" language, py2 is a pain in ass when I was learning the language.

It didn't help that Py2's IDLE had (have? I didn't recall they actually resolved this, simply closed the issue) a major bug [1] that even if you explicitly use u-literals (a = u'日本語'), it will still be encoded in your locale (shift_JIS [2] in Japanese case), instead of unicode/utf-8. You can imagine how confused people would get when they were testing unicode support of py2 in IDLE and saw this.

[1] https://bugs.python.org/issue15809

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS
When you scale your db, now you're scaling your queue, too. One thing to scale, one thing to monitor.
Faster than writing an AI that could pass the turing test ;)

But yeah a voice actor seems like an even easier (if less press-worthy) way to run this grift
EJ Olmos, in his role as Adama in Battlestar Galactica, refers to the Cylons as "skin jobs".
This is my new side project. I am very excited to share it with HN community.
Nobody is talking about it, but Google Discover is working wonders for publishers. Think 10 times the traffic Google News ever sent.
Proof that voting works (IMHO). Local residents won against a distant corporate entity.
Great software and I've started using it for some hobby stuff on my Macbook. Some of the default setup locations such as /usr/local/bin/custom/app.ini could be better, heck app.ini in that location could be anything! The FAQ at https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/faq/ does give a clear indication of where things go, so I put all my stuff in ~/.gitea and, a simple alias takes care of starting Gitea: alias giteaweb='gitea web -c ~/.gitea/custom/conf/gitea.ini'
This would be way better in a format where I didn't have to click over and over. One page with the text going down, even.

Yours was a decent example. I've seen one for weather conditions on a golf course and people's inclination to play used to predict how busy you'd be based on the weather that was really good.
I also made the switch somewhat recently, as I've had iPhones as company devices for awhile now. I'm no Apple fan-boy, but at least having a relatively solid feeling device that does what you expect 90% of the time and doesn't change core functionality without at least some warning is a great feeling.
It's not bad-engineering at all; how many engineers have to operate at that level in your stack, ever. Close to zero, as normally they just use an abstraction on top of it - Rails for instance is ActiveJob. No one has to care what's behind it, except folks running production - and for them it's a trade off; it's simpler - one less moving part, but also more load on one single part. Is that worth it, or not? Depends.

I can't stress this enough; claiming anything is "vastly superior", especially with no examples, isn't useful - things aren't this black and white in reality. Most tech-choices like this are somewhere between trade-offs, preferences, ignorance or wrongly held opinions about something being vastly superior > something else.
20 years after the invention of the light bulb, one of the most important inventions of all time, only 3% in the U.S. were using it. We sometimes forget it, but a decade isn't a long time.
I found « The Dream » podcast to be pretty good on the topic.

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream
Their behind-the-scenes video shows them working on it for over 4 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74KHL9UWqr8&feature=youtu.be
My post might not meet community guidelines. Removing.
Try her on taffeta.
> the Messages app might be a Google product, but the underlying transport has to be implemented by carriers

That design flaw can be attributed to Google.
I agree that these techniques are often used in popular media in deceptive ways, but a couple of those plotting techniques have valid use cases.

Specifically, if you're really concerned about a delta, removing the origin is good for visualization; it lets you just see the difference between two trends (in particle physics, you can show an energy excess this way). Likewise, for exponential phenomena, log plots are the correct choice, since uncertainty will be magnified for larger values. In both cases, of course, you need to include error bars, but that is always true. But I don't think you can "instantly distrust" someone who is using these techniques when they are valid.
In a related note....

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/five-...

Five months after returning rental car, man still has remote control
Man can still track vehicle, lock and unlock it, and start and stop its engine.
Macbook drives typically can go to 1TB or more. You'd need much more storage than that to properly do a versioned backup solution that was online and that doesn't include any of the other uses of that storage.
J and K generally use symbols instead of words, but what you said still applies. I have seen very similar solutions that allow to represent J with APL symbols, and it surely looks much better.

But these solutions are far from optimal. The convenience of being able to write J with any hardware or software I get my hands on is huge. I can use it to write equations in emails, in my phone or tablet, in a windows computer with notepad as the only text editor. I cannot do that with APL. It's not too far, there are workarounds, but it is much less convenient.

If you work with lots of formulas, you will understand the pain of practically needing paper or a blackboard to work with equations, then translate that to your favorite programming language to solve some problem, or to latex for publication. APL gave a wonderful solution to this, but it did not catch on.
I suspect that someone, or a group of people, will step up to unofficially maintain Python 2 for the foreseeable future. It's clear that there are a lot of people using it that either can't easily migrate or are unwilling to do so for the various reasons already discussed in this thread.
I’ve seen a lot of people taking issue with the self argument. Am I crazy to actually love it as a feature? I pulled out a lot of my hairs when I first started OOP (Java) trying to gork `this`, and I remember myself thinking “why didn’t everybody just do this” when I saw how Python declare methods. And I still think that’s a good idea now. So much easier to keep my sanity than using JavaScript’s bind.
I would be surprised if the best way to free people from sex trafficking is to confiscate money from sex workers. I would also be surprised if the best way was force all sex workers to ask to be paid by a mechanism that either can’t be blocked or can’t be traced.

To adopt a cliche: if you outlaw sex work, only criminals will verb sex workers.
Fresh water is a scarce resource, but only because it is required to feed the enormous number of plants needed to feed an enormous amount of livestock.
Fraud.

One of the factors in determining your interchange fees as a merchant is your risk profile. It is why a grocery store has a different fee structure than a gas station or a restaurant.

Almost the entire industry is driven by risk profiles.
Judge refers copyright troll Richard Liebowitz for possible Discipline
So much love for this; 'Every piece of complexity you incur should be proven as required', plus 'Fewer pieces in the technology stack is better, because each piece is operationally expensive'. Also, this totally ignores (as these, imho are enough in themselves) the actual practical differences between using a single thing and two - synchronizing state; most of the cases here guarantee atomicnes individually, but not as a pair - you (the engineer) have to deal with that - which is non-trivial.
There's certainly a lot to be done, and we'll likely need new approaches. But is it really productive to be tackling a general problem when we don't even know how to solve specific sub-problems? Especially if solving said sub-problems would bring a lot of value in its own right.
There's a pretty hilarious screenshot going around showing that the bot accounts tweeting support for the coup are not very sophisticated either (they're literally copy and pasted).
Does she not brush at night before bed?

That's the best time to brush. Otherwise, all the bacteria and the like in your mouth have all night to fester.
What does "mm" in $800mm mean?
And the side-effect of an endless trail of shit to deal with. I write primarily ML code so until 3.5 or 3.6 python 3 offered me almost nothing better. It did, however, make managing environments even more of a mess. I quite frankly resented having to deal with code in both, swapping back and forth between python2, python3, pip2, pip3, etc.
I guess a handwavy worked version of the one-time-pad analogy would be 1) a shared random pad that you can't read without destroying it, 2) some data to send that you can't read either and 3) a destructive XOR operation that destroys both inputs

Alice runs the XOR operation (destroying the data and her copy of the pad), send the result to Bob, who runs it against his copy of the pad, producing the original data.