skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I certainly think that NoSQL databases are only going to grow more popular in the future for more complex and specialized use cases. I don't see traditional RDBMS systems going away any time soon, but I don't know if they'll maintain dominance in perpetuity.

> The relational model will still dominant for most applications...Likewise, SQL (or some dialect of it) will remain the de facto language for interacting with a DBMS

The author does believe RDBMS systems will continue to dominate for the next 50 years. I have no particular reason to cast serious doubt about that, but it will certainly be interesting to see what the role and prominence of NoSQL databases is in that future.
> There's no incentive for them to improve health care for the patients

The healthcare systems they are collaborating with (e.g. Mayo) are strongly motivated to improve health of their patients, particularly in capitated models like accountable care organizations. Mayo is actually pretty famous for adopting the ACO model. Note the author on this article (1) from Mayo Clinic Proceedings is by David Shulkin, who went on to become the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

You may also be interested to know Ascension is another ACO (2).

So why would an ACO be motivated to work with Google? Because they know reducing diagnostic variance is almost certainly identical to improving quality of diagnosis, which will reduce poor outcomes and reduce malpractice, cost of overtreatment, cost of undertreatment, and so on.

(1) https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(12)...

(2) https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/acos-to-know-2019.html
So you may be right, but I'll point out that if your sample of American housing is "California" you're getting a biased sample. The housing stock in California (and particularly the Bay Area) is uniquely terrible in the U.S, for a variety of reasons:

1.) Much of the housing in Silicon Valley was built in the 1950s and 60s by a wave of migrants coming to work in the nascent defense & semiconductor industries there, sometimes with their own hands. They'd go to the hardware store, buy some lumber and build a house, something you definitely can't do today. Oftentimes they were in a rush to do so because they'd just taken a job in the area and were otherwise living in a tent. Of the ones that are professionally built, they were often quickly mass-produced to keep up with the flood of new migrants.

2.) There are a variety of disincentives to upgrading your house from the original build: you have to bring it up to the (now vastly upgraded) building codes, you need to deal with the year-long permitting process, you often need to get written permission from your neighbors if you're doing something big like adding a second story or rebuilding the house, you may lose your Prop 13 grandfathering if the value changes significantly. That's why you end up with ridiculous situations where the land under your house is worth $1.5M and the structure is worth $100K.

3.) California has forgiving weather. You can get away with stupid stuff like having doors & windows that don't completely seal, no heating (let alone air conditioning), no basements, etc.

4.) California has unforgiving natural disasters. Between earthquakes, wildfires, termites, mudslides, and floods, it's often not worth sinking a lot into your primary residence if it's just gonna get destroyed with the next earthquake anyway.

I lived in Massachusetts before California and there were houses in my town still standing from the 1700s. They were a bit drafty since they still had the original windows from then, but the build quality was a lot better than what you see in California.
You're right on the money here. It's a distraction from the underlying issue. Instilling critical thinking in the population might not be desirable from a politicians perspective but it's reached the point of being a national security issue.

Plenty of handy tools for the aspiring fake tweeter too:

https://www.tweetgen.com/create/tweet.html
this is from 2018!
I often wonder if Eng's should even be on slack, have email or even a phone number.

Basically - some kind of 'light online chat' with their immediate peers if they need it: everything else in person from management.

Kaban on the physical wall.

That's it.
There's more to worry about screenshots of modifying a bit dom and spreading 'deepakery' like that, but then again no one cares anyway. Worrying snout deepfakes is truly a pseudo problem.
By the way, I understand that editing while writing disrupts some people's "flow". But that doesn't mean that we have to write an entire larger work in a flow. We can switch to flow mode the granularity of paragraphs or sections/chapters.
> ...but humans will never actually write SQL. They will instead ask questions about data in a natural language.

Wasn't that the promise of SQL in the first place? I don't believe it, why would people (only) want to access structured data with something as ambiguous as natural language?
This same thing happened to me. Nurse commented on my ear wax and upon removing I felt so much better (and had no more ringing).
Simple and fun! Nice work :)

Even in its simplicity there are a few similarities (lessons?) with the real-world that I think are worth mentioning:

- Generalists (like the founder) are often useful because they're able to consume different types of work from the backlog as needed (when flow isn't perfect and work piles up in some areas)

- Ideally work doesn't pile up in any area, and it proceeds left to right without any waiting

- But if you don't want work to wait, you'll have people waiting (the aim should never be 100% utilisation)

- Work going backwards (bugs!) is more expensive (time consuming) than doing it right the first time

- Managing all this isn't easy: it's much better when the team can be proactive and do the right things at the right time without supervision/overhead (having everyone on the same page, shared vision, practice, etc)

Thanks for some good fun… and a reminder of all these things.
Terry Davis is proof that if you're equal to Albert Einstein in intellect, people would rather mock you over & on the Internet than give you medical assistance. And then complain "Wah! Why hasn't God sent us another Einstein?"
Even if they did there have been many, many HN stories of data being deanonymised absurdly easily, and health data tends to unique very quickly indeed.

How many females in a (county|country|postcode} born on 5 March 1942 are there with a kidney problem? Particularly in the UK where a postcode, even the locality selector (the first half, e.g. M50, NW11) is more precise than many US zipcodes that can cover many square miles. A full UK postcode narrows it down to within the street - a dozen or two houses usually. What if there is associated medical data like medications or chronic conditions - diabetes, arthritis etc?

To make it suitable for study a) keep it within the NHS or relevant health authority - perhaps allowing an airgapped DeepMind server to come in process locally and afterwards get wiped or shredded, or b) remove all personal data including gender, dates, associated medical info of any type - i.e. render it almost useless for study.

Oh and c) imprison all the management who agreed to share this data without patient consent and in breach of DPA, and require Google to remove all trace under audit.
Ah. I hadn't actually looked at TFA.
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - "A Personal History of Computers" (TCSDLS 2019-2020)
Different forms of Japanese pronouns “I” and “me” in life and entertainment
Thing is, with the amount of leverage they are running, it's more luck than skill.

Luck means making big returns, skill means doing it with low volatility and high Sharpe.
kinda related, an interesting story about pronghorn evolving speed in order to outrun North American cheetahs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHP1Ac7GX_Q
Is the speed of sound barrier higher too?
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
London’s Royal Free Hospital Handed over Personal Health Data to Google
There are no roads where you are going. But I can offer you some pointers:

Consciousness requires sensation and action. Without action animals don’t learn to perceive anything at all.

If I were trying to make a conscious artificial being the first thing I would do would be to sign them up for a fast paced online FPS and teach them to play.

Next give them emotions (0 dimensional precepts).

Any time your codebase starts to feel big, delete most of it. Your end goal will be maybe 1000 lines total.

Use matrices.
Why can’t planes just pressurize the outside air for breathing? No need to bring your own o2?
I agree with this comment. I don't know the actual cut off, but having done a lot of home shopping and some home owning, I'd suggest you look for houses built before the 1980s, and if you can afford it, in the less dense suburbs and rural areas. Say a place with an acre or more. Bet you'll find it was built with some care. Look at the standard 1/2 acre or less suburban development from the 1980s forward, though, and it's cookie cutter, cheap supplies, tight deadlines. Of course that's a generalization, but I feel like there's a broad spectrum of build quality to be found in the United States.
Which shops? That's true of the big chains (Safeway, Trader Joe's, Costco can be hit or miss), but you can get ugly-but-great-tasting fruit in plenty of the local produce markets.
> Mostly because they're imagining what the worst-case scenario in the future is.

I'm one of those developers, and I don't appreciate being strawman'd and dismissed.
Google put $1bn in to the early stage of Musk's satellite ISP plan as I recall. Did they get 50% for that investment? I'm not sure.
I don't want to be stonewalling progress. But evidence is that any savings win here will be wasted by the same parties that are bringing the savings.

Google lost a ton of good will by making Gmail a laughably bad experience on load.
I think the Galapagos effect exists anywhere there's enough isolation, whether it be through language, geography, class, or politics. Different cultures have different values, preferences, and priorities.

These differences shape all of our opinions, whether it's you visiting the US, or me visiting the EU. Don't assume that your values are as equally important to someone in the US as they are to you, though. Many of our cultural preferences are just that -- preferences -- which all come with an associated set of pros and cons.

One person's "crappy hollow-core door" is another persons "ADA accessible, 2018 IRC-compliant, lead-free, contemporary-style door".
> please don't tell me that googlenet would never sell/barter/exchange this data or analyzed results based on it

Why would they be any less trustworthy than the hospitals or insurance companies who normally has this data?
12,000 satellites is the current FCC approved launch figures, I believe. 20Gbps per satellite but I don't know if that's full duplex or how much is divided between terminal/gateway, so lets divide that in half. For simplicity let's say they only sell consumer-grade 100Mbps connections, which are oversubscribed 100x as is typical. Divide the possible number of customers by 3 to account for uneven geographic distribution and other factors.

12000 * 20Gbps / 2 * 100 / 100Mbps / 3 = 40,000,000 customers

A service like that could sell for a lot in rural North America, but maybe not to 40m customers. Let's assume most of those customers are from lower income countries or from places with more competitive ISP environments. Maybe $20/mo average revenue per customer. That's $800m a month. That already sounds compelling to me, before considering the potential for more or higher bandwidth satellites, or for higher margin commercial or government contracts.
>I'm not sure who you're arguing with

I'm arguing against your comment: "You surely can’t be oblivious to how this has been a process of boiling the frog slowly — almost certainly they will eventually be permanent-blocked like on iOS".

And I'm saying that this is a good thing in some ways (whereas "boiling the frog slowly" doesn't just point to the graduality of the process, but also implies it's bad).

I don't disagree on the graduality or that we will "eventually see it evaporate" (it being various current more open abilities).
Why is this sub-optimal? People may not like Cockroaches but they definitely have a reputation for durability, which isn't a bad mental link for a database company. It also provides an identity & personality which is so often missing from modern companies. Maybe they've found they get more from those who really like it than those who really hate it (or maybe they just like it themselves).
Combustion engines are quite inefficient and so are fuel synthesis processes. batteries have a high energy round-trip efficiency. The energy density does not matter as much in cars, which after mobile compute have been the primary drivers for technology. The density may make more sense for planes.

Additionally 1st gen biofuels have poisoned the well to some extent due to competing with food crops.
They had larger brains than us.
I think the speed is going to have a tight inverse correlation with the population density of your location.
That's looking at the energy density of the fuel itself, not counting the weight of the engine, several gallons of oil, air filters, fuel pumps, etc etc. The weight of equipment required to extract that energy from gasoline is a lot higher than the weight of an electric motor.
That would make this an illegal weapon system according to the Geneva Convention. Weapons that are intended to injure rather than kill are prohibited.
DNA is only one among millions of possible genetic molecules
The speed of sound decreases as altitude goes up, unfortunately.
I once had a job interview where they gave me a problem and expected some answer of "use a spark cluster, da da" and I said -- well given the problem specs and upper bounds you've given, I'd throw a $200 stick of RAM at it and be done.

They wanted some answer involving using spark engineers you'd effectively pay for at $200/hr for many weeks. I didn't get the job.

OK, but seriously speaking, if the upper bound is beyond 786gb RAM or whatever the current max is, I might want to use dask distributed. https://distributed.dask.org/en/latest/

edit: wrote mb instead of gb
"Free" means the app isn't charged for, not revenue generating directly... so jumping through hoops to satisfy Apples whims is not productive. Context matters, and I'm pretty sure you understood the context.
That was a poor choice of words on my part. Rather I meant, they themselves stated it was not feasible for them to keep up using EdgeHTML and they could not. The same may be true if they were to completely fork Chromium and maintain their own version (ala Blink from WebKit) while keeping up with the changes made by Chromium that in turn propagate to the entire open web due to its dominance. It’s the reason they moved to Chromium and contribute back upstream rather than “fork” it.
It's not a about trust. Apple apps ran on mac for 40 years or some without any epidemic issue as it could have been the case with Windows.

It's about money. They want to close down the platform like iOS, as they said a few years ago, in order to bring the business model of the mobile platform to MacOS by forcing them to intall everything through the app Store.

Now there is notarization, but it will not last. They're just boiling the proverbial frog slowly, step by step. In 2 or 3 years, it will also disappear.

It's not only the game but a shitload of little utilities which will get lost with notarization

Once the users get used to not having as much third party software as before from outside the app Store, except big name like mozilla or google, they will stop notarization altogether and impose a 30% fee for every software sold on the platform.

With the system partition permanently set as read-only device, as they currently test on catalina, even if you can still currently mount it in read-write, MacOS bill be lock down like iOS. The only way to install a software outside of Mac App Store will be to jailbreak it thank to a "security flaw".

As i said, it's just about money.

Only technically naive users will stay on the platform and developer whishing to take advantage of them with softwares paid through subscription model.
>> So I don't think that the human capacity for learning supports the idea that a tabula rasa AI system should be able to learn any particular thing with just a handful of examples.

I don't know if Brooks is talking about learning everything from scratch here.
I for one don't think that humans come into the world as tabulae rasae. I
think instead that we come endowed with a rich knowledge of the world already,
as well as strong inductive biases that allow us to learn new concepts from a
combination of existing knowledge and new observations, with our
characteristically high sample efficiency that remains unmatched by neural
nets.

For instance, one theory about our ability to learn human language as infants
is that we are born with a language endowment, Chomsky's "universal grammar",
that predisposes us to pick out and learn human language, without having to
figure it out from scratch.

I wonder then if what Brooks is saying is missing from neural nets is the
ability to use background knowledge and strong inductive biases as effectively
and efficiently as we do, so that they don't need hundreds of thousands of
examples before they can learn a new concept.
Who said that proper anonymisation doesn't remove exact birthdates and fine granular location? Proper anonymisation techniques are much harder to attack.
Competition is good and directly leads to the progress we’ve seen in the western world.
Big planes do this. In a little plane, that's expensive and heavy and you still need to have a backup system in case it fails.
> Why not? Are you sure that won't happen as demand increases? Is it too expensive? How much does it cost?

I don't have the real numbers. But I can run some estimates in my head to see what is or isn't reasonable.

I'm thinking on the scale of my neighborhood. I have ~5000 housing units in my neighborhood (Mixed-housing development: single-family, townhomes, condos, and rental properties such as apartments). We have a bit over 12,000 humans living in my neighborhood.

The neighborhood design is currently scaled at maybe 20MW of power or less. I don't know for sure, but 6MW (average daily load), x3 because summer has higher loads (air conditioning)... just for a rough estimate for the power-infrastructure of my neighborhood.

Again, I don't have precise numbers. But 20MW capacity is probably the capacity of my neighborhood covering 12,000 people.

-----------

20MW will cover 133 Tesla Superchargers (150kW per). That is to say, to provide 3% of the homes in my neighborhood with a supercharger, the power-capacity needs to be doubled for the entire neighborhood.

A more reasonable estimate is for 22kW chargers (much slower, but 3-phase power and more easily supported for sure). In this case, roughly 900 chargers can be installed if my neighborhood doubles its electric capacity (18% of homes can have an electric vehicle).

And many homes are 2x or 3x car households. So really we're aiming at 200% or 300% cars-to-homes ratio if you want to go "all electric vehicles" across the whole neighborhood. To get there, my neighborhood needs to deploy something on the order of 200MW of power-capacity.

--------

So now, ask yourself. What is approximately the cost of providing 10x more electricity to every single neighborhood in the country? Its not going to be cheap, that's for sure.
Because for a small aircraft, the weight and energy requirements of a compressor is greater than the weight of a small tank full of oxygen.
I was going to say that "Opium" wouldn't fly as a perfume name in 2019, but apparently Yves Saint Laurent still sells it:

https://www.yslbeautyus.com/fragrance/womens-fragrances/opiu...
Given how fast missiles are and how slow ships move I can't imagine it being hard.

Between a good gyro, some satelitte positioning I can see it getting a good hit rate even if blind.

And even if you miss just triggering an explosion in roughly the right area will do a fair bit of damage to ship antennae etc

The whole thing strikes me as a bad stopgap till lasers are powerful enough to take down missiles
Because that's what I care about.

And I don't think your fact is correct? E.g. this post[0] is not about mainland China.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19695854

edit: grammar and add second paragraph and link.
Dask anyone? Allowed me to handle a 60 Gb dataset on a machine with 16 Gb RAM. High level of compatibility with Pandas dataframes.
he's right about the last point, probably.
My employer has Chrome configured to prevent installation of extensions.
That's interesting, can you expand on that? Thanks.
Hiding the paragraph seems extreme to me. I'd like to refer back to what I wrote to get a sense of what I still need to write. Would it be better to instead make the previous paragraphs uneditable?
> Someone is going to create a phenomenon like Avatar for VR and content will never be the same.

Avatar was a milestone for 3d movies. Would you say movies have never been the same since then?
Nothing about graph databases ? I thought it was on the rise
I don't understand the need for the arbitrary "without running something like wine" distinction. Wine has gotten head and shoulders better in the past year or so. Between the gallium nine direct 3d state tracker which gives better performance in Linux than in windows for directx 9 games, (!!) dxvk giving directx 11 support, <edit> vkd3d adding directx 12 support,</edit> and Valve's seamless integration of wine in the Linux steam client, wine is just peachy.

If your objection to wine is philosophical as opposed to practical, why is dual booting into Windows an alternative?
This. This so fucking hard. The whole point of writing clean code is so I can spin back up on it in 15 minutes instead of the 30 mentioned in the article (or often very much longer).

Literally everything I do at my job is in service of this fact, and no one else where I work understands that. :/
Not knowing why that one satellite failed is also a big cost though.

There could be some systematic failure that affects them all, and just this was the first to fail. If the rest fail over the next 2 weeks, that will be a big goof.
The "spin up a big data cluster" bit at the beginning seems like either a straw man or just oddly out of touch. Who, when determining how to process something on the order of a 100gb file, even considered something like that?

Also, SQLite is a first class citizen in this space. Most if not all languages can easily load data to it, virtually any language used for analysis can easily read from it, and it's file-based so there's no reason to spin up a server. Finding 100GB on disk is much easier than 100GB in ram.
On the other hand a plane loses weight as it burns fuel, this isn't true for batteries.
> temporality will become important as well because it matters how information changes over time. Current systems are not able to account for this because of the large overhead of storing extracted information

This quote happens to be in the context of video frames but I think temporal indexing in general is widely under-utilised, both for providing consistent queries (i.e. the database-as-a-value) and for integration of late-arriving data (i.e. bitemporality). It seems particularly relevant when considering how best to synchronise information across the "omnipresent Internet of Things" (not to mention inter-planetary devices, which also get a mention in the post!).