skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Criminal law is literally a set of statutes.

Simply untrue in common law countries (e.g. the US). Criminal law is absolutely driven by judicial opinions and statutory interpretation.

> In most states, the formal rules of evidence don't apply.

This isn't about evidence. It's about interpreting many doctrines that vary wildly between states. A single statute (re: defenses, attempt, conspiracy, the requisite mens rea to hold someone liable) can yield totally different interpretations.
The Baboon That Controlled a Railway for 9 Years
This is most certainly what will happen if there is not a massive push back from consumers soon.

And I don't see it coming. Older people don't even seem to care that Imo is secretly recording them as longs as they can videochat with their grandchildren. Younger people are just happy for their new shiny toys.
There is an interesting podcast about this on the Ezra Klein show: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/e/64086...

Roughly the point is that while "the working elite" is much harder to be repelled by; it is still a problem that many tasks in society that could before be done by a medium educated middle class, is now done by a few highly educated people plus a swath of people with no education.

This causes the second group to have less part and prestige in their work, while the first group gets alienated from their own work, by being forced into the few fields that allow one to reach the 1%.
When they move to Texas.
== Simply put, why aren't there more tax brackets for cap gains and other investment income?==

Because the people who make large capital gains are the ones funding political campaigns and helping to write the laws.
The full reference is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo

The Trail of Tears https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears was other tribes such as the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations.

It still amazes me that my most down-voted posts are about Native American facts.
The transition from InterNIC to Network Solutions was botched, but ICANN was a very complex and still expensive fix for that mistake.
Cards Against Humanity's Black Friday A.I. Challenge
A Homeless Man Helped Cloudflare Counterattack a Bogus Patent Lawsuit
Based on this, yes. They would be a hypocrite if they made a moral argument. But they made a selfish one of "I'm going to copy and nobody should be able to copy us" which is not hypocritical.
A Tesla Model S reaches 1M km
Fair point, but my wife and I bough at $1600 sqft home on a nice large lot in a decent neighb when we were in grad school (College Station, TX). We paid $120K and had P+I of $400. Sure, taxes added a couple hundred bucks, but it was still a fraction of California. We interviewed at Livermore labs during that time and the same home was about $1M.

We stayed here (she still at university as a professor), and I left to co-found a startup. Still pretty cheap real estate, affluent & educated population (of all political leanings), and endless supply of smart folks to hire. And BBQ. I'll take it.

Though I love California too, just returned from a week in Big Sur and then the wine country. It's just must cheaper to visit :)
Taking 30% of a yearly income of $14,000 has a much greater negative effect on standard of living than taking 30% of a yearly income of $14,000,000.
Show HN: How we decreased website loading time by 24% with 3 improvements
I think it best to think about the ads in the same way you would in any other medium. Unless you have a special offer or something, it's just branding. The original hypothesis upon which Google was founded, that people would be interested in buying things if they were searching the internet for something relatable, seems to have failed- at least in the near-term sense. Just because I am looking for campsites in the Rockies doesn't mean I am in the market for a sleeping bag. But to put the ad in front of me then to make me aware of your brand might be useful. That's the game played by advertisers since they began with media advertising.

Given this, all of the data collection/tracking/etc. seems like a round-off error in effectiveness, and doesn't seem to be worth the loss of individual privacy.
The property taxes are sky high, yes, but they most definitely do not exempt the rich. There is no state income tax. I wouldn’t call the state’s general tax structure progressive or regressive.
The problem is perception. If a company seems to only move their headquarters in name only (IOW most of the staff still stays in SF), then that seems sketchy. If they make a clean separation and shutdown their SF presence, that doesn't appear as dodgy.

And these companies are not just moving to Texas. I live in Oakland, CA and many of these companies are relocating here. I don't care if they leave SF, but if they're cheating on their taxes, that's just not right.
And where are bigger news outlets to be found when it comes to reporting on this? Who besides those of us inside the tech bubble have even heard of the issue, much less would even care?

It reminds me of the struggle to communicate to the general population the issue of Net Neutrality. That issue seemed to enjoy MUCH more coverage and yet (anecdotally), all my non-techie family and friends still didn't know what it was.

Recently I sent a "story idea" submission to NPR to ask them to cover this issue in a way that can help illuminate the dark corners of this story to the broader population. Unfortunately so many of the other major news outlets are so sensationalized that I wouldn't trust them to report on it accurately.

What other organizations have a broad reach that we should be contacting to encourage covering this? I don't know anyone outside tech checking in with eff.org on a regular basis, and many certainly don't have save.org on their radar. Any suggestions?
To be fair, the iPhone 11 is well over two orders of magnitude more powerful than the iPhone 1.

Not bad for another $99.
Yes. https://opencorpdata.com/sg/201004959C
So for example, what kind of understanding do you think is lacking in the visual recognition example? To me it seems that this field is quite well understood.

The net looks at the data and searches for patterns. On first layers simple patterns like contours (which is a simple mathematical function), on higher levels different kinds of dots or smaller objects (objects meaning, a spatial configuration of contours and whitespace from the previous layer), on higher levels relationship of those obects to each other, etc. etc. Pooling and convolution handle recognizing of these patterns in different parts of the image. Final layers do statistical weighing of which patterns were found in which strengths, and generate the most likely result (of in this case, a classification task).

I'm not saying it's magic, I'm not saying it is AGI, I'm not even saying it's far from pure statistics, but what part of this process is "hard to understand what the net is doing"? It is all pretty clear at this point? There are online courses the describe every step of this...

> These "visualizations" or high level descriptions of machine learning algorithms aren't a form of true understanding... It's just a summary of a class of problems

Seems like an arbitrary distinction that you have come up with. I argue that if we can make those nets, if we can control them, if we can predict them - then yes it is true understanding.

Now yes the universe is indeed a fractal and you can undersatnd any small particle in a an uncalculable number of ways and claim that your understanding is more true, more profound etc, but what is the point? I think a great cause is to create AGI, to which I still haven't seen any arguments hinting at impossibility of.

> The logic of "visual recognition" is not understood by humans. We can only reproduce such logic as a blackbox. A neural net.

I really don't understand what you are saying here unfortunately, sounds like a philosophical black hole of overintellectualizing a simple phenomenon. I would say that we understand enough to have practical ability, which is all that matters.

> It's a very meta concept and possibly as a result it's also very hard for you as a consciousness yourself to write the exact definition of consciousness or pinpoint exactly what it is.

Well sure, I agree with you there. It is already the case for many phenomenon that we can nonetheless control. What is the exact definition of a car? Of a video game? Of a tree? Of a career? Of a family? I don't think humans need exact definitions of things, they can just as well function relatively optimally without them. Not all knowledge is in logical definitions.
Judges shouldn’t be elected at all, they should be appointed in a non partisan process, from a pool of experienced and respected lawyers.
You’re allowed to delete whichever digits you like. But you aren’t allowed to reorder the digits which are there. I.e. if you had to delete one digit you could go from 189 to 89 but not to 98.
1. somehow the hate against the 0.01% always turns into policies that tax the upper 20%, or 10%, or 5%. why is that? Is there a way to formulate the arguments / policies so that it doesn't do this?

2. the wealth of the 0.01% are numbers stored in computers. They are claims on future production, yes, but the whole system only works because 99.99% of these claims never gets cashed out, because there are physical limits to what a handful of billionaires can consume, no matter how opulent their lifestyles. If you try to distribute this virtual wealth, people will try to turn it into physical consumables, only to find there really isn't enough for everybody, and the whole system will go to shit.

3. at some point, a guy I know made the observation that revolutions don't really redistribute much, mostly they just take the wealth from the wealthy and burn it. Well maybe how it works is the most important and expensive physical good - land - gets redistributed, most other physical goods are destroyed, and the virtual wealth is zeroed in a very expensive accounting exercise.
Minimum modifier is -90%, so you only can penalize mobile.
Frank Zappa said it best when discussing the decline of the music industry:

The young guys are more conservative, and more dangerous to the artform, than the old guys with the cigars ever were!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0
I heard they have water and electricity out there.
In Texas, you are forced to drive because there isn't public transit. In California, you are forced to drive because you have to live far away from transit centers in order to find affordable housing.

Regardless if you look at commuter data, it's pretty obvious that the Bay Area & LA commuters are significantly higher than Texas metros. We have higher median, average, and extremes in commute times:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/08/22/bay-area-traffic-dela...
https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/traffic-trains-or-...
People here trend conservative. This cuts both ways, it means that they don't want to make a scene when they see something that offends their norms, but it also means that you have to try a little harder to open minds.

The other ruling ethos here seems to be 'good fences, make good neighbors'.
In germany it is even worse. The tax rate is highly progressive, topping off at 50,5%. But the additional social security and penson payments are capped, so above a certain wage you actually pay less in total for social security, pension and taxes. There is a big hump which you need to overcome to become really wealthy.

Of course once you are so wealthy that the majority of your income is passive income from e.g. stock market gains, the capital gains tax is at 25%.

The situation is so bad that in relation to what your employer pays for you (Arbeitgeberbrutto), you get much less than 50%.
I was part of the counterculture in the '60s and '70s. We called ourselves hippies and freaks.

And we called people who were not hippies or freaks "straight". This did not refer to sexual preference, but meant someone you should not share your dope with.

"Dope" meant grass or ganja, which we might refer to as pot or cannabis today, or as young people call it, "weed".

Some straights used "hippie" or "freak" as derogatory terms, but we took them as a badge of pride.

Let your freak flag fly!
Which then, if so, doesn't really add up... how is $50M "broadly equivalent" to $120M??
Ask HN: How do you challenge yourself every day?
I like this trend that I am seeing, even if Project X isn't for me, the fact that both Vue.js and Svelte have kicked off a newer perspective of strong compile time (or bundle time, if you prefer) optimizations, due in large part to their realized benefits (and why I think they're both rising in developer mindshare popularity, even though I think Vue's install base is many factors time bigger then svelte's, svelte is the baseline now for performance metrics to be measured against from what I can tell)

This has inspired me to work on in my spare time a Web Components compiler for optimized at compile time custom elements (and other features) kind of like Stencil JS, but I want to use Babel as to not alienate those who don't use typescript. I'm also considering what the compilation target should be (currently I'm toying with Lit HTML, but I've looked at Incremental DOM too, or forking my own thing based on it, because Google's lack of communication around it makes me nervous.)

This is what I feel like the bundler promise is ultimately the most logical extension of, highly optimized compiled components that frameworks/libraries can hook into (the compiler, I mean) to highly optimize their builds without the developer having to worry and fret about whether their build is setup properly to be the most performant

This is my opinion of course, and its entirely possible this started long before Vue or svelte even existed, but I'm excited to see more of this now.

I feel like its what Handlebars was suppose to be, but I don't know if it ever lived up to that hype, especially performance wise (in the browser. I know its popular server side, where the performance concerns are a bit different).

EDIT: Just a heads up, it appears they're using a bit of eval (view `new Function([...args])`[0] under the hood. I'm personally not a fan of this . Too many security related edge cases not to be considered risky. I'm open to the fact I could be wrong though.

[0] https://github.com/calebporzio/project-x/blob/master/src/uti...
My primary issue for paying premium for "the more ethical product" is that transparency is lacking, so I can't know whether I'd be only paying more to make myself feel better
Does that include taxing employee equity based on how it is valued based on each round of funding?

Would you also be okay with taxing someone based on how much they had in savings and mutual funds?
This is such a vicious cycle. The worse we teach math, the worse our math labor force, including teachers. The worse our labor force, the more of a pay cut it takes to teach math for the rarer and rarer people who really get it. To cut this cycle, I'm tempted to say we just need to throw money at it for a while. Pay people who really get math to teach it. Pay them enough to draw them away from whatever industry would pay them to do. Pay for them to be trained to teach well.

Or maybe require more stringent testing to become an elementary school teacher in the first place. If this means too few eligible candidates, pay more. It seems like a no brainer use of tax dollars.

I'm appalled that it's so acceptable to let people who don't understand a thing teach it. Maybe it just comes down to "pay teachers more."
All domains go through the registry; for .com that's Verisign. So you can't get a .com domain cheaper than ~$8. Nobody is hoarding domains for cents, although domain tasting was a hot thing for a while.
It should be relatively straightforward to implement this even without any server-side storage - serialize and urlencode the input to the URL hash and then read the hash on load. Modern browsers support very long URL hashes (~1MB in Firefox based on my test, even longer in Chrome)
I'd say don't use it until there are more than two contributors. The last thing you want to do is rely on something like this without support. Tightly binding dynamic logic in your HTML like this would be something I'd see as a "critical path dependency" for an application.

I've seen a TON of projects with huge teams of contributors go belly-up just because they fell out of style, after a ton of people had implemented it because "cool!" This is almost a trope in the JS/ECMA world.

If you're looking to make something informal then all of what I just said goes out the window, but usually even my hobby stuff has a potential support cycle/lifespan.
> However, a lot of people rely on capital gains for their retirement, so a tax on that money would negatively affect anyone who puts money in the stock market for retirement...

That's pretty much already solved with 401ks and IRAs which are retirement investment accounts with tax advantages.
I would love this if it was open source
You might be interested in mavo (https://mavo.io/): it also lets you produce interactive pages by adding some keywords to HTML, but the primitives offer higher level functionality (e.g. a few attributes get you a full WYSIWYG editor)
How does that relate to the question in this sub thread?

Do you actually propose that they did violent things because they got the prize?
It isn't that we don't believe animals are intelligent. It is that that doesn't define our behavior in the way you apparently to expect it to.

Humans (on the whole) aren't even particularly good to other humans, yet some people seem to have the expectation that humans be particularly good to animals.
Because the policy doesn't just cover a diversified investment portfolio where a loss on one transaction offsets other gains. Small business owners put a significant chunk of savings and all their time into their business. What gains are they going to write down if their business goes under?
The negative feedback is all the people who moved from other states to SF over the years, voted for politicians that virtue signaled loudly enough to attract said transplants’ votes, and then moved to another (likely conservative) state after saving enough money to live comfortably with their new families. That’s ultimately one of the biggest issues in the Bay Area that no one ever talks about.
Is there a way to formulate the arguments / policies so that it doesn't do this?

No. The upper .01 percent have tax lawyers and accountants and many other staff members (not to mention lobbyists) working full-time to reduce their taxes. In theory, anyone could do the same. In practice, the tax code is so enormously complex that only people who can afford to hire multiple college grads full time can pull it off.
You may be right that this is a stretch to apply to any one phenomenon, but from my studies on conciousness the findings of this paper are consistent with most of what I’ve seen. Basically the brain sort of tells us stories constantly and consciousness is more of an after effect. There was an explosion in the field of neuroscience with the high avalability of FMRI devices. The big experiment that seems to be repeatable is telling someone to make a desicion while watching their brain, and the watcher could predict the decision ahead before the decider had signaled their decision. Some experiments seemed to go further and show the brain made the decision before the person was aware of their decision.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I wasn't referring to intro classes either. I had to take several calculus classes that were for STEM undergrad students and I still didn't encounter laplace transforms until a signal processing class. Students in other majors like business or education had their own separate set of less in depth calculus classes, if they had to take any at all.

I find it odd that laplace transforms would be part of the general calculus curriculum, but even more odd that non-STEM students are required to take those classes.
tl;dr: 1. rel="preload" to pre-fetch JSON data ahead of API calls, 2. server-side caching, 3. removing 70kb of font-awesome related stuff.

Stupid click-baity headlines.
Once upon a time, "Go West, young man" was advice for "growing with the country": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man

Now with California's anti-housing, anti-commerce policies & government deeply captured by incumbent interests, better advice may be:

"Go East, growing company."
Technically it's impossible to use TLA+ without using refinement, as the entire TLA logic is based on it. Checking Machine ⇒ □P is checking that Machine refines □P. But, of course, the real power -- and what you and I both meant -- comes from writing machine formulas on both sides of the implication sign.

I don't think many of those who use TLA+ use refinement between two machine formulas, but I think that's partly because they still consider TLA+ as a frontend language for TLC, which is unfortunate, because if all you want (or, rather, think you want) is a model-checker, there are probably better ones. In fact, the little use of refinement is just a symptom of this bigger issue. I don't think refinement is always useful, but I do think that everyone who uses TLA+ should use its power for analysis rather than just mundane model-checking. I admit, TLC is so enticing, that once you use it, TLA+ can feel secondary to it. Of course, I'd be happy if people used model-checkers more, whether TLC, Spin, NuSMV, Simulink or others, but I'd be even happier if people used TLA+ for its primary purpose, perhaps after being enticed by TLC: thinking about system design. I guess the problem is exactly what Lamport pointed out: programmers (including myself) don't like to think, especially when we can use automation. To be honest, I don't think I would have come to TLA+ if it weren't for TLC. So, in a sense, TLC both pulls people to TLA+ and obscures its main purpose.

In the TLA+ workshop I imagine one day giving to my colleagues, I start with refinement. I would also start without TLC at all; just showing how TLA+ helps you think -- its main purpose and advantage. When writing specifications, I now always start with refinement, first writing how the system would behave at a very high-level, and only then refining a specific algorithm.

(If anyone reads this without having read the article, and doesn't know what TLC is, it's a model-checker for TLA+ that's included in the TLA+ Toolbox)
Turns out a lot of businesses don't need A-team tech though.
Sincere plea to everyone who does frontend: please knock it off with the on-select rich media shit. I am a compulsive selecter (and I know there are others like me). I like to select text as I read and it's jarring to have annotations pop up on the side as I do it.
How are they "cheating"? It appears like the city is the one cheating, refusing to enforce criminal law, which taxes are paying for. The city is cheating so much that they make some of the highest per capita tax revenue disappear without providing commensurate services

Maybe you can mention the statute relevant to HQs? I'm not aware of any
intercooler reminds of Stimulus JS looking over its docs. Not exact parallels, but its a great idea, especially if you just need that jQuery style interactivity

https://stimulusjs.org/