skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks."

And ironically a superhero radio serial helped seriously weaken the KKK in the 40s:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/23157/how-superman-defea...

I heard elsewhere that, after the program aired, the children of KKK members were angry when they found their children playing "Superman vs. the Klan" and understanding the Klan to be the enemy.

I'm not defending the superhero genre targeted at adult audiences, and I think the movies tend to be boring and unimaginative.
>Or, you know, sometimes we just like a little escape-ism.

What kind of escape-ism we chose, and how much escape-ism we chose, also has societal consequences.

>Not everything needs to be a deep exploration of our intellectual and emotional destitution, not for everyone.

His point is much larger than deep vs shallow entertainment.
I have created a MVP for a service that identifies your anonymous website users by company and thus generates inbound leads. If you are in B2B let me know if this might be of interest to you? Email in profile
However, you're leaving out what I think is perhaps the central thesis of these rules: sex is inherently sinful, and it should be done with as little enjoyment as possible, and by striving to accomplish reproduction in as joyless a way as possible you are following the example of divinity.

Perhaps you consider that one of the "extras" by this bishop, but I see it as central, for all of the other rules are basically along the lines of "even though this feels really good, it is the way of the devil".

So yes, while many of the rules do promote reproduction in nuclear families, I think more importantly by turning one of the most basic human desires, sex, into an inherently shameful act, where your only method of salvation is through the Church, that it is a fairly brilliant attempt at furthering the levers of control of the Church.
I tried to get into Watchman and I couldn't...found it too embarrassing. I do get what he wanted to do through the story but the dresses and die dialogues are as cringe worthy as the rest of the genre.
I don't think they care a fig, tbh. If they did, then they'd have a small department that watched for bad publicity like this, and proactively fixed it ASAP. It would cost them virtually nothing, and solve the reputational problem overnight.
“Come out and we will tell you what you’re guilty of”.

The US was once a great defender of liberty and democrac, but when you talk to its average citizen nowaday you start to get truely weimarian vibes.
It might be similar to (albiet the oposite of) how putting on a pair of decent active noise cancelling headphones "sound different" (even if you were in an otherwise quiet room) and/or many people report a "head pressure" feeling.

Their brain is used to filtering out the background noise, so removing it causes strange sensations.
From my experience on Scuttlebutt and other decentralized/alternative social medias, thousands will try something out just to kick the tires; it's staying, contributing and utilizing the tool for things it wasn't intended for that really matters.
Right, the man sure knows how to turn a phrase! One of the best ever.
>Perhaps it's someone who values public good over personal profit, and someone who doesn't compromise their principles in the face of trolling and smearing. Children should be looking up to THAT, not being able to punch through walls.

So... almost every single super hero then? Have you even watched any of these movies?

CA Civil War is all about authoritarianism and how much freedom we should trade for safety. Dr Strange grapples with a death he caused in self defense and uses his mind to save the day. Captain America represents the pinnacle of self sacrifice, and Iron Man's entire journey is about him eschewing his old ways and becoming selfless. Beyond this, they've done a good job of making less one dimensional villians lately.

And yes, there are fights and super powers. Lots of them. People like action and mysticism, and they always will. That doesn't make them dumb, get over it.
Suggesting ways to pollute less and improve their lives and environment != blame
The Star Trek reboot also did this.

But Star Wars already did it in the 70's come to think of it.
Very nice summary, right to the points
If you rely on YouTube for income, the time to diversify was a couple of years ago. It seems like they have a whole team of people whose sole job is to mess with the creators. Squeezing out the "little guy" so they can be the sole provider of content. They don't need you anymore.
Let’s Talk About Aging
> The difference between stealing and theft was unknown to me.

Feel free to read it as "I would disagree (although it is closer to the definition of stealing than 'stealing data' is as you lose the ability to withdraw the money)." -- I was not implying that there are differences between stealing and theft.

> Manning has been proven guilty, she never denied of illegally obtaining those documents.

> third: in this case Manning confessed. There's no much debate we can do about it.

I was talking about the general case, not specifically about Manning

> is just how the system works

I did not know that the courts can magically bend the laws of nature at will.

> And after that people would say "he's a sex offender" not "the court said he's a sex offender".

Well, the people would be wrong.
Scientists are being threatened for doing their jobs
Senators Ask Big Tech to Explain How They Curb Child Sexual Abuse Material
Heliostats are expensive and failure prone. Due to their physical design, with lots of leveraged moments acting on a complex hinge, a simple wind gust can break them.

Honestly I think the future of CSP is going to be a lot lower tech. Something along the lines of this:

http://www.storenergy.rs/

This is a drastic reduction in the amount of moving parts. Nothing is space age: they've got mirrors and frames that can be built by pretty much any local manufacturer, they're using air as a heat transfer medium, they're using simple ceramic refractory as a heat storage medium. Everything is dirt cheap but still extremely effective. They're claiming $0.031/kWh LCoE, which might be exaggerated, but if they could get anywhere within 2x of that, they're gonna be running in the same league as the top tier technology available. More importantly, this is something that can be made readily available in places like Mali or Bangladesh, unlike some of the other ideas out there that require first world infrastructure, well developed supply chains, and top tier researchers willing to work on site.
The announcement got like 120k upvotes on r/gaming.

I think it'll be fine. Half-Life hasn't had a proper entry in a long time -- though it's worth pointing out that Portal takes place in the same universe and has some mechanical similarities, at least -- but it still has legendary status among gamers.
I don't think it's a Dutch vs USA thing. More a white-collar vs blue-collar dichotomy. Some people don't seem to understand or appreciate how good they have it, and their complaints ring hollow to me. It's a matter of perspective.

>"Why should someone hurt after any work?"

Because some work is just HARD. It involves dangerous things (chemicals, biologicals, heavy things, powerful equipment, sharp edges, heights, etc.). The world is built by people willing to take on these tough tasks and not all of it can be accomplished by a digital assistant, or through pushing a button.

The bit about the actor bursting into tears from the idea of being paid to read a second day shows a serious lack of self-awareness and perspective.

Ask a stone mason how his shoulders and knees feel after a few days of stacking block. Or the oilfield worker, after a few hours of stacking straws on a derrick. Same goes for the guy in the steel mill working hour 10 of a 12-hour shift, the office janitor tidying up at night, the line cook at the restaurant on the corner, or the long haul truck driver clocking mile 600 with 200 more to go. Some work is just hard.

For the actors, watching a season or two of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" would be a suitable counterbalance.
KPI Overload
>...more realistically, I think we could use more stories about regular people who made a difference just by be being good people.

Plenty of those exist, but they scratch a different itch. People can enjoy both.
You can say that about Instagram but not really WhatsApp. When FB acquired WhatsApp it was already the most popular messaging app in many countries. In Israel for example literally every person in the country had WhatsApp on their phone by the time of the acquisition. FB acquiring WhatsApp wasn't that impressive. The impressive part was the amount of money there were willing to pay for it. As far as I know it's still not making any money so it's not even clear yet if it was worth it.
I'm still considering signing up. I would do it in a heartbeat if, with my subscription, I could "gift" a subscription to a couple people of my choosing
Isn't any entertainment (movies, music, reading, gaming etc.) by itself escapism? i.e. few mins to few hours of escape from the pathetic(most) life.

Alan Moore talks about Super Hero worship, but if you take a country like India; people have been worshipping 'movie heroes' literally, they command huge power, in certain states movie actors get regularly elected as 'Chief Minister' i.e. highest position of state power. I tend to think, it's because here people need more escapism due to obvious reasons.
sounds like a film version of Christopher Lasch
That decision was more than a little contentious; some developers hated the store-supplied user product reviews and forums, and Epic wooed them over by rejecting those features for allowing too much toxicity.

As an old fart, developer and gamer, I don't feel much sympathy for those who are wooed by intentional ignorance.

Personally, I will not buy products without reading user reviews; and I find that most professional reviews aren't worth the bandwidth to download.
I haven't seen it - does it follow a Hero's Journey template?
I am not gonna buy a VR setup....

What work is has been done for taking VR only games and using not VR controls/interfaces? Even if it's not optimal.
I keep hoping that society will become more actively forgiving of things people actually regret in the future. Blackmail isn't possible if no one cares about your edgy phase that you got over.
Some Nintendo games are definitely explorations of their own novel input methods; and also, earlier on, explorations of the possibilities of the console’s fancy custom hardware features. (Whether you got one or the other often depended on whether the software/product department, or the hardware/R&D department, was responsible for the game’s design—the product folks [Nintendo EAD] tended to push for the inclusions of novel input methods on new hardware designs, so they built games around those; while the R&D folks were more intimately familiar with the more “gimmicky” hardware features they had included into new console designs, and so only they really understood what could be done with them, until they demonstrated it to the world and to the other departments with a tech-demo game.)

But I would say that, most of the time, Nintendo (and similar allied shops like HAL and Intelligent Systems) just invent novel game mechanics out of thin air, then ask how the player should interact with those mechanics; they make the interaction with the mechanic as a prototype, and playtest it on its own; and then, if that turns out to be fun, they wrap a game around that.

This is why, for example, the Paper Mario series looks the way it does. Nintendo + Intelligent Systems both agree that you can’t just take the same mechanics and make a new game, even if the mechanics you came up with the first time were really good. They already explored the possibility-space of those mechanics as well as they could manage in the first game!
This is in line with some observations I’ve made. If you notice, decades ago, superheroes were imbued with some sort of power and then study it and train diligently, eventually mastering it. The majority now, however, are suddenly thrown into a confusing and frightening world, eventually asserting themselves.

I wonder whether that trend reflects our trends in psychological states or simply on our seemingly more complex, information overloaded world.
He's not saying there is a connection.

He's saying that there are so many white heroes and the whole culture of the "super men" in comics, that they might as well have been the "Birth of a Nation".

Nothing kooky about it.
TikTok's grown so fast I have to wonder if it's a fad. It's built around a pretty specific interaction. When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep them there? Will they be able to pivot to something more engaging, or will that just look too much like Facebook or Instagram?
India closer to world’s first male contraceptive injection
I hope this is sarcasm?

The things the USA did supposedly in the name of stopping "red danger" were utterly dispicable, and still have an impact today.
Google created algorithms to hide its political bias
114,000 Students in NYC Are Homeless
This week it occurred to me that what is going on in Hongkong is the same as the story of Half-Life 2.

This was what I always liked about HL2. It is a game but also a kind of protest against oppression.
If you sync to garmin connect its easy enough to manually download many different formats of activity recording for fitness activities. I don't have a vivosmart but I haven't had issues collecting data from my Fenix watch.

There is a service I do like from https://tapiriik.com/ that will sync all your fitness data across a bunch of common fitness apps (it helps when all your friends want to link up for activities but nobody agrees on a single tracking platform). One of the sync options is just to directly download all the raw datafiles to dropbox which is pretty convenient.

If none of those sound good you could roll your own from the source code to tapiriik which is available here: https://github.com/cpfair/tapiriik . It does use some hacks to get around garmin not making all their APIs easy for personal development.
Poll: Is backprop of SGD happening in neocortex?
I similarly relocated away from family. Turns out that if they know you don't use Facebook they will go out of their way to update you directly. Just believe that you are worth it, and my friend, you are.
It kinda is if you think about the economics of the box office. Scorsese makes this point in depth with his NYT Op-Ed. Basically studios have become preoccupied with making purely franchise tentpoles and not funding lower budget creative movies.

Now the common response to that studios are just giving the people what they want. But A. people will tend to like what you put in front of them and B. that doesn't mean studios should starve creative, new ideas. It's a sign of the times that someone like Martin Scorsese has trouble getting money, that a film with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci has to be made with Netflix.

Also, studios seem to forget that these franchises started as risks themselves. Iron Man was a huge risk. Star Wars was massively precarious. If executives hadn't taken the original risk, these franchises wouldn't be the cash cows they are.

Escapism isn't necessarily bad but it's a little noticeable how much escapism is being sold to us at the detriment to real, innovative, intelligent art.
is there a serverside version of this. I've been looking for somethign similar in python all day. Actually seems a little buggy seeing this test -> https://superanimo.com/bodypix/
How about a hoodie and we all watch Mr. Robot?
More PG&E power outages likely to begin Wednesday
Clumio raises $135M for cloud data backup
Why People Demanded Privacy to Confide in the World’s First Chatbot
Sure, and it should be illegal (especially if she knows that she has a sexually transmitted disease), but it is far from rape.

If you consent to have sex with a woman as long as she promises to not cheat on you and she breaks that promise, is that rape? I would claim that it is not.
C++ has std::variant, but that's pretty new.
While I don't disagree, the crowd is fickle and has at best a short attention span. He would have been better served to face the charges while it was all going on and he had the crowds attention. He is in a far worse position now, given that attentions and the world have moved on. The US can pretty much railroad him and no one will bat an eye. Whereas before they risked making a martyr.
I don't think it's a mistake that we don't hear Gordon Freeman talk, and barely ever see his face. I think the burden is on the player to feel connected to HL2. It's more an exploration of a dystopian landscape, which wasn't as played out 15 years ago as it is now. You get NPCs with excellent-for-the-time voice acting and huge landscapes to explore. You get to insert yourself into the character of Gordon, it's kind of "2004's VR" in that way.
I'm pretty much the perfect audience for Stadia.

I have three HDTVs on my house, none of which are 4K and I don't plan on upgrading unless one of them bites the dust. I imagine that I'll do most of my playing on my phone or at the office during lunchtime (in the browser), but it's nice to quickly "deploy" Stadia to each TV I have by attaching a $69 Chromecast Ultra.

I don't want "stuff" in my house in the form of game discs and consoles. I'm not a collector. I don't engage in a second-hand market. And I can't imagine myself in 10 years being nostalgic about games that i played in my 30s. I don't really care that I'm just "licensing" digital copies of games and that it might go away at some point.

Over the years I've occasionally seen a game that I might be interested in—I just want to be able to drop $50 on it and play half-way through until I lose interest.

Stadia gives me all of that. Maybe some day I'll get "serious" about gaming again and want a full-fledged console. In the mean time though, I'm happy to pay $80 for a controller and $10/month (until it's free) for Stadia.

If you consider yourself a "gamer", then there are definitely better options for you than Stadia. But for me, this is perfect.
The fact that escapism and fun is of certain style and theme tells a lot about the mind of people who consume it and people who provide it.

Also the underlying assumption that something you watch for fun and entertainment must be mindless and stick to repetitive format seems to be weak.
Salesforce wants to bring voice to the workplace
You mean it was just a pretext to exfiltrate him to the US, and that Sweden does not in fact have a long national track record of pursuing rapists across international boundaries without prejudice, using the full arsenal of state power?
I agree - but there exist only few numbers between 2 and 4 (!= 3) that the general public knows of.
Avengers: End Game is a prime example. Filmmakers have gotten too liberal with using deus ex machinas to push a story along. And even with these lazy devices, these films are still riddled with plot holes and absurdity.
Nah, he just applies his ordinary Slavic pessimism and cynicism to it.
I really hope Scrosese and articles like that re-appearing and gaining upvotes are indicators that the genre has finally peaked.
oh yes. Rajiv Gandhi, Premadasa, & 104 more people were assassinated by a peace-loving organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_Tigers_of_Tamil_Eel...
Is there are second example? This is the first thing I thought of ... and then couldn't come up with more.
You need enough space to stand up, stick your arms out, and move around. Considering the average human wingspan is 5' 9" for men, add another foot and change on each side for a safety factor so you don't smack things if you lean a bit, and you end up needing a playing space that's an 8' diameter cylinder, and that's just for seated/standing experiences, not room-scale. This 8' cylinder also needs to be next to a computer, or you need to run a lot of cables. I live in a 3 story row house and the only space I have with enough room is my kitchen, anywhere else in the house and I'd end up hitting something.
Was he asked about James Bond movies?
That's also a case where the tech came a while after the story. Our early snow tests on Frozen looked pretty terrible until the MPM simulator [1] came online later.

[1] https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/matte...
There's no reason to think evolution gave us a single variable for "goodness".
We have a strong tendency to love our in group; our family, friends, tribe and so on.
But I see no reason why love of the out group should be the same.

Parents do lots of bad things to get their children ahead.
Consider the soldier who "loves his country" but "hates the enemy."
Prosocial behavior benefits your society, not other societies.
But there's also no reason to think it benefits individuals.

We know the halo effect is real and we have no reason to think empathy to attractive people is the same as empathy to ugly people.

More worryingly consider the case mother cat.
Mother cats love their kittens.
They also eat them sometimes when they are sick or there's not enough food.
The same drive to have genetic offspring can produce care and intense hate.
There's no reason to think apes don't have similar kinds of natural urges.
I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're trying to say. Is Jeff a personal friend of yours?
Rendering. :)

I worked on a GPU-based real-time path tracer prototype at Pixar, which became the RTP renderer used for their in-house lookdev tools [1].

[1] http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/siggraph/2017/video/sig1738...
Mere thousands are nowhere enough, but even Facebook also should have a very small number of high revenue customers. As long as this new network can draw a good enough amount of those users, they will be fine and will also impact Facebook's bottom line.
Comparisons dont matter. It's easier to fight a one front war against your own countries evil then to also have to deal with another empire waiting to swoop in and make things worse.
And convincing people to use a service named “scuttle butt”.
Platform lock-in to encourage adoptance was a strategy they used in HL2's release, as I noted above.
I listen to a lot of non-fiction in TTS but I haven't found it all that satisfactory for novels. Although part of the reason is if I'm listening to a novel via TTS it's because there isn't an audiobook available and I've had to do some hacky OCR to get the text in the first place.
I would argue that HL2 was just “Gary’s Mod the Single-Player Campaign”—probably with Valve first thinking more along the lines of something that would look like Gary’s Mod itself if they had delivered it in that state; and then losing confidence, thinking that a pure sandbox title couldn’t possibly be something people would pay for (those really weren’t a thing back then, until GMod itself showed the demand!) So they backed off and built a single-player campaign instead.

But I think their goal with HL2 wasn’t really to deliver a compelling narrative, any more than the point of a modern Mario title is to give a compelling narrative. It’s a sandbox with a goal condition. (Sort of like Scribblenauts, now that I think of it.)
Stadia has a chance of killing cheating for PC gamers (if that can still be called PC gaming of course)