skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No one really knows why it's true.
This is what is so bizzare. We do know why it's true; the mystery is just pumped up in the press.

I have only skimmed the paper, but apparently Belevitch [0] showed (in 1959!) that Zipf's law and Mandelbrot's Law [1] are essentially just first-order and second-order approximations, respectively, for a large class of probability distributions, so no wonder it is so ubiquitous.

[0] Belevitch, V. (1959). On the statistical laws of linguistic distributions. Annales de la Societe Scientifique de Bruxelles, 73(3), 301–326.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%E2%80%93Mandelbrot_law
Hmm, that would be ironic, FB ending up being worth more by suddenly getting some ethics. :)
I wince at submitting my own tweets to HN, since I feel like tweets should have a very high bar to be featured on HN.

But this is sort of an Ask HN, or "ask the world" type question, and I spent some time formulating an exact description of the idea in that tweet chain.

Anyone know of prior research into this? This is a "meta" neural network. It's a network that learns the best techniques to help some other network learn some dataset.

Not only would this yield an optimizer specific to a certain training session, but the outcome would be specific to that specific dataset!

The advantage is, you'd be able to make that optimizer available to everyone else who's training on that same dataset, and say "as long as you keep the dataset the same, here's an optimizer that goes from 3.0 loss to 0.1 loss in the shortest number of training steps."
As you've noted, I've shared my first impressions about the service, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Please make sure to follow discussion guidelines, and try to refrain from personal attacks.
Was humanity simply not ready for the Internet?
And yet, those are all things where unregulated Uber is far better than regulated taxis ever were. Why is that?
I'm wondering why this looks exactly like https://org-web.org/ Is there some implementation of an org mode front-end that both use?
See my comment below to sibling. I think the real problem here is lack of exact timeline memory. The RAZR didn’t come out until 2004, not early 2000s. That said, very much agree with what you said about folks insisting on things that they are simply misremembering (or never knew in the first place and instead apply own biases).
Wouldn't it be better to have them in the regular financial systems subject to the "know your customer" laws, so the money and customer can be more easily tracked?

If it's about all sorts of illegal activities, shouldn't law enforcement use these things as a resource, rather than driving it underground?
It's also said in such a way that the Mother/Daughter and Father/Daughter combination scenarios aren't even considered important.

There is ample evidence that single-parent children don't suddenly turn into werewolves or whatever terrible thing it is that is supposed to happen to them accordingly.

The idea that a girl can't become a woman without Mom around, and boys can't become men without Dad around doesn't play out so well in the real world. Either gender has been shown to be equally good and responsible at parenting. And their kids, irrespective of gender, tend to turn out alright.

Most of the behavioural identity comes from friends, and not so much from imitating mommy or daddy, anyway.

People are so quick to join an us-or-them clique that they just can't get the concept of "equality" right.

Divisions never break down when you build stronger and stronger barriers between the two "sides."
The article explains that this program was terminated in 2017:

> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.

This program actually seems pretty sketchy. Government officials were having banks to identify customers in certain industries and subsequently "informally suggesting" that banks terminate these customers' accounts. Congress also criticized this program:

> Forceful prosecution of those who defraud American consumers is both responsible and admirable. However, Department of Justice initiatives to combat mass-market consumer fraud must be legitimate exercises of the Department's legal authorities, and must be executed in a manner that does not unfairly harm legitimate merchants and individuals.

> Operation Choke Point fails both these requirements. The Department's radical reinterpretation of what constitutes an actionable violation under § 951 of FIRREA fundamentally distorts Congress' intent in enacting the law, and inappropriately demands that bankers act as the moral arbiters and policemen of the commercial world. In light of the Department's obligation to act within the bounds of the law, and its avowed commitment not to "discourage or inhibit" the lawful conduct of honest merchants, it is necessary to disavow and dismantle Operation Choke Point.

Should the government be able to strip people of their ability to use banking services, even when they have committed no crimes? Sure, we may not like gun stores or fireworks or porn but the kicking people off of banking services without justification is quite authoritarian.
Speaking of "tax free", there must be some federal tax due at some point. I don't believe in magic.
> It's my understanding that package maintainers for Debian, RHEL, etc are typically experts in the packages that they maintain.

That’s certainly true in some cases, but is definitely not the case in the majority. I think you are letting your personal biases color your judgement to much.
I'm a 20 something in tech circles in the West Coast of the US and I use SMS
at least some of the time to communicate with:

* Brother

* Mother

* Father

* Uncle 1

* Uncle 2

* Roommate 1

* Roommate 2

* Friend of roommate

* Cousin

* Business partner

All of that is in just the last week. SMS is the first messaging system softened mentioned when meeting new people. Because it's a lowest common demoninator.

Why am I not cool enough to hang out with Whatsapp-using people? Joking....
In the article they explain this is already done and elaborate on it in several directions.
The problem with minimums is that they not necessarily make sense. Eg. if no one would use the prayer room, why provide it? But if one employee wants to go to the nearby mosque at specific times maybe let them agree on that, even if that's not guaranteed.

The lack of diversity of workplaces and work structures is a very big problem. (It results in dumb congestion problems, like rush hours, high tuition and student debt because of the super popular signals, peer pressure for uniformization and conforming, etc.)

Unions would just provide another very big hammer instead of incentivizing meaningful dialogue and custom agreements.

I'm not saying they would be worse than the status quo though.
what bunch, exactly?
Greta Thunberg Hitches Ride Across The Atlantic on Sailing Vessel La Vagabonde
I think you're reinforcing my point that existing transportations options suck, but I don't see how Uber is economical enough to compete with buses, bicycles and walking, especially if you're doing that at any regular frequency like commuting.

If you could walk somewhere then you don't need a car, but if you need a car then you weren't a pedestrian or cyclist anyway. There are also many people who didn't have any good option at all before (like kids, disabled, elderly, etc) and it's a good thing that they can get around now.
Again, the vast majority of "firearms" but not the vast majority of "arms". People aren't buying F-35s at their local gun store.
I was surprised to discover recently that you can still buy a new (not reconditioned) iPhone SE direct from Apple but the link to them is on the refurbished part of the site.
I have already addressed all of these points earlier.

Eg, you write "which itself is highly unlikely" while I wrote "Excepting any money that DHH made before the marriage, which, given that it was a long time ago, is likely a small part of that wealth."

You are of course free to have different opinions than I do, but I find it tedious as it appears you are not reading what I have written.

I keep bringing this up because you are making what appear to be very weak statements, then using those to suggest a stronger conclusion than it warranted.

Consider your earlier phrase "It seems entirely possible that DHH has 20x her net worth." This has a double layer of uncertainty - 'it seems' means it's your opinion and 'entirely possible' means that you are accepting anything except which is clearly impossible.

These are weak statements. In this case, what does "net worth" mean, how does GS determine their individual net worths, and how does it affect the credit process? As DHH wrote, "We have no separate bank or credit card accounts or any separate assets".

Can you tell why you believe DHH might have 20x her net worth? Other than as hypothetical constructed to defend the actions of a multinational company?
Volvo Deal
And, believe it or not, it is. Patriot Act helpfully provides mechanism for various LEOs to send requests to all FI in US to search for accounts they indicate. Add to that BSA and various KYC requirements that ends up sending data about suspicious customers to FinCEN and you have an easy way to identify undesirables.

And the list grows longer every day.
> "there is crossover but you might as well lump together stealth bombers and SUVs."

Saab comes to mind.
How Computers Play Chess Today
There are two points.

1) The statement that google deleted someones accounts because they used emoji's in a comment or comments is 100% a lie. Let's be crystal clear about this.

2) If you aren't paying you are not the customer - you are the product. Is this not obvious to folks?

If you pee in google's pool they are going to kick you out. You don't make them much money (they make money on volume) and if you annoy lots of their other users and violate their written policies they have an economic incentive to eject you from their ecosystem. Every MINUTE they spend dealing with you is profit lost - so they are probably NOT going spend a lot of time dealing with you.

If you want control - buy your own domain and point it to where you want to. Or pay someone for email. Or do both, I think those are all great ideas.

But the lies about an emoji in a comment being the reason someone's account is banned are very annoying.
The Next Global Security Threat: Explosive Devices on Small Drones (2013)
I hate that any online company can set arbitrary Terms of Service which they know for a FACT I have not read (I didn't click) and then decide to pull the rug out from me at any time because of that.

These companies are seriously important in our lives. If you take away my payment source or my email or whatever you are potentially setting me on a path to ruin.

I don't know what the answer is but I do think these companies should be required to have an appeal process of some kind that's regulated. They have so much power.
OK, so maybe I was unclear.

The point is that the delicious food smell from burning myself severely was unexpected, distracting ... and worse, rather invasive, and hard to put out of mind.

So that's like being confronted by advertising that triggers some unconscious drive. It puts some new thought in your head, which leads you to do something that you otherwise wouldn't. So that'a invasive just like the smell of ones braising flesh, which bringsd up thoughts of eating.

That is, the riff that art to advertising is like gastronomy to cannibalism. Or at least, autocannibalism.

There's also similarity between advertising and sexual assault. The possibility that a victim -- like a victim of advertising -- will come to enjoy the experience. And end up being betrayed by their body. Which arguably is one of thge worst parts of the experience. Seeing ads is rather like brain rape.
I am aware, Apple took it out a while sometime after Mac OS X Lion (presumably because it was GPL? This is the last I saw of it: https://github.com/apple-open-source-mirror/grep/commit/0b40...) fastexec is not called because Apple compiles with WITHOUT_FASTMATCH: https://github.com/apple-open-source-mirror/text_cmds/blob/9....
I understand all things are relative, but isn't the most expensive part of space travel escaping gravity to get from ground to LEO? Parking a mineral rich rock in orbit would still require lifting dump trucks up to the orbiting rock just to have them return with their loads.

Might as well plan a controlled re-entry of the rock to the surface. Drop it into the desert somewhere, then go mine it on the surface.
Same with the ICE tower and 2GHz overclock.

Even with stress tests I can't get the Pi to break 50 C.

I don't use mine as a desktop yet, though. I just run 8 Docker containers for stuff like DNS, Time Machine backup, etc.

The goofy-looking Pi: https://www.ericlagergren.com/share/d9htGfiETJHN3ua
Especially when you consider a non-trivial amount of the react-dom codebase is actually Synthetic Event handling (smoothing out differences in browser implementations). If you're using "the platform" and understand native events, that's a huge saving for you and your users.
Yes, Google AutoML and citing publications since. I think all of the major clouds offer this as an API now
People are building entire mission critical business on google (GCP etc) that they can't afford to be cut off from. You can pay $250/month for one hour support. If it truly is mission satirical you can pay $60k/month and get 24/7 support.

Agreed though - if you are not paying and are the product in their system - then you are definitely at risk.
> If they decide they want to buy from random website Z one day, making a lightning network connection between themselves and that website will be useless because establishing a lightning network connection needs to go on the regular slow block chain, so it'll take as long as a regular payment.

The "network" part of lightning network allows you to make a payment to anyone else on the network (trustlessly) through multiple hops. For example, if you opened a channel with a friend, and your friend had a channel open with Starbucks, you would be able to pay Starbucks through your friend without having to trust your friend.

And this works today. I have one channel open on the lightning network, and regularly make payments to random nodes on the network. I pay << $0.01 in fees for these transactions, and they settle in ~a second.
Bubby, I ain't getting paid nearly enough to hang out here. It's just a bad habit.
I think the difference is that the Indians were subjected to colonization, whereas the American rebels were themselves the colonists.

It would be more similar to a rebellion of the British governors/Raj in India against the Crown, which very plausibly would have led to even worse and more prolonged abuse of the native people in India.
this looks terrible
Wait. Trent Reznor? A country music veteran?

The same guy who created the one-man “industrial rock” band “Nine Inch Nails”?

Seriously?
How is it a pile of vaporware? It works today - I've used it multiple times in the past week.
I worked at a small company in Utah, and we shared a building with a MLM company. I have 2 fun stories.

One day, when I was arriving at work there was a red carpet laid out and people opened the doors for me. I felt pretty good for a few seconds. Turns out I had arrived just before a "high level member" of their MLM, and so they were really putting on a show, but not for me.

The company eventually went about of business and was just giving away a lot of the fancy pins and badges that "high level members" of their MLM had worked so hard to earn, I took a pin just for the fun of it. I instantly became a "Black Diamond" level member (or something like that), whatever it was it must have been pretty good because the pin had fake diamonds on it. Kind of shows how silly the whole thing is.
It's not just the features but them combined with a very cleanly designed messaging app ala WhatsApp. They aren't amazing or new on their own but they've become standard and essential in the 3rd party messaging apps.

There's a lot RCS is going to do to make SMS difficult to distinguish from WhatsApp for most people, especially these days as they've matured and everyone has finished copying the other guy.
You’ve just invented Universal Paperclips.
Rated Torque: 120 Lb Ft

Rated Power: 71 HP

This is a lightweight electric pallet stacker motor. You dont want this in anything other than maybe a VW bug. Not to mention the most important and expensive part is missing, as always.
The IRS deals with people trying to exploit loopholes like that all the time. The law isn't a programming language.
Sure people are terrible at decisions but that doesn't mean they're all stupid. I find it hard to believe that all these drivers can't figure out their costs, and everyone I've talked to has been fine with it.

The only time I hear complaints that driving isn't worth it is specific trips with traffic or a long dead leg back home, but that's not their entire driving history.
There are animals whose signalling mechanisms are very nearly fully scent/chemical based, ants particularly.

Lower order than mammals, admittedly.
>that just means their confirmations are 1/10th as reliable as Bitcoin's confirmations.

This argument is tired. There is no rule that dictates that the same amount of work or stake is equal to the same amount of security across different coins. I trust ETH transactions just as much as I trust BTC, and there are others that I trust equally also.

And now that BTC costs more in fees, their solution is to move to less secure off-chain layers. I'll take on chain ETH, monero, BCH, and a few others any day over a low security off-chain solution like what BTC offers. I may hold BTC, but I'm not buying it, and I'm not using it.
Where did KR say he was going to hire NJS or give him any money? NJS is not even on the contributor list for requests I don't think - so of all the people to hire is he even at the top of queue?

And is it impossible that KR is doing an order of magnitude more work on the requests projects, with a much longer track records and raised the money directly to himself (and so has to pay taxes potentially on it) such that using it to support his work on requests is unreasonable?
Sea-Thru: A Method for Removing Water from Underwater Images
It scaled so brilliantly when we could simply evolve plumage.
Looks like a fun idea and crisp images.

But-why.gif
Even if the block time can be lower, ethereum supports a comically low amount of transactions per second.

https://ethstats.net/

9943589 (gas limit) / 21000 (minimum price of a ethereum transaction) / 14.57 (average block time) = 32.5 transactions per second.
I first read the title as Waterfail Process. I need new glasses and less confirmation bias.
The Feminist
Given that lots of people use the SMS app that comes with their phone (which often isn't Android Messenger) I suspect it is more the case that if Google doesn't allow 3rd party apps to integrate then Google's RCS is doomed.
lmao. asyncio is sugar? you aren't a serious python programmer...
You felt so passionately that you needed to say the same thing three times? This isn’t documentation, think of it more like a slide deck or tutorial. If it’s not your cup of tea, read the source material on Github or look elsewhere for the knowledge. While I somewhat agree with you on it’s a bit overkill, harping on that point repetitively is pointless.
I'm starting to become more and more suspicious when tech companies offer free features out of the blue, so forgive me for asking this question:

Could this end up being a plausible "serving the customer" reason for DJI drones to start collecting and reporting Wi-Fi signal, location, and temporal data back to the parent company on a regular basis? (That's with or without the matching phone app being installed and running.)
3 months ago, 750 points, 190 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20584937
People bet on chess as well, I have old colleagues who do it actively. That’d fall under this VC’s purview as well.

I have hold no stigma against gambling, I used to gamble professionally. I just think it’s important to acknowledge what is and isn’t gambling and to acknowledge society and legislation generally have a stigma against it.
South San Francisco approves 800 homes, largest housing development in 20 years
>>>I don't know why people aspire to get their own house/apartment, its really boring.

Maybe you are dating a screamer, and she's self-conscious about all of your flatmates hearing her moan all night? Or you are dating people who are themselves tired of sharing their living space with a bunch of flatmates, and are eager to experience some quiet, romantic, privacy?

Maybe you wanna listen to death metal at 2am while you do Crossfit in your living room. Easier to do with a free-standing home.

Maybe you carefully meal prep, and are tired of your stoner roommates' random GUESTS eating your food.

Maybe you have met a few married couples who are swingers. They're probably more comfortable coming over a private residence for an S&M party rather than a shared living space, with people they haven't vetted.

Or maybe you want to start a family and have children (GASP, who does that, right?).

It's always interesting to me, seeing so many HN posters that correlate "living like sardines in a can" with "not being boring".
This allergy to reality is surely the biggest trap not just for startups but people in general. It's surprising but I feel like the norm is for people to care far more about feeling that everything's okay, rather than everything actually being okay.

That said, one problem I see with the anecdotes provided is that the problem solver is doing two things: discovering a problem and solving it. Conflating these two things is a great way to encourage pushback: every change comes with an associated risk, so the general rule is to say no (using whatever flimsy reason) if it's not well understood and agreed that the problem being addressed is a real problem worth solving.
thanks for explaining those other details.
Amazon will challenge Pentagon’s award of $10B Jedi contract to Microsoft
It seems like we already have something similar with high real estate prices and money-losing unicorns? But we don't seem to see unneeded new factories or mining happening. Apparently there needs to be some plausible idea around why the investment will make money, and tech has better stories about how that might happen.
That's not a python thing- that most likely has to do with your package manager.

In my archlinux installation, python resolves to 3, and I have to use python2 if I want 2
Taylor Swift: Don’t know what else to do
Reminds me of this scene from Frank Herbert's Dune:

“Because of an observation made by my father at the time. He said the drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable– except when you see it happen in the drawing room.” Paul hesitated just long enough for the banker to see the point coming, then: “And, I should add, except when you see it at the dinner table.”