skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobody is saying the ML algorithm (or any algorithm) is expected to be perfect.

> Amazon wouldn't deploy these systems if they didn't move the needle.

This is an appeal to authority that Amazon executives are immune to making mistakes. They could have bad metrics. They could have bad incentives encouraging managers to make poor decisions (basically this describes everything wrong with Google today). They could be incompetent. They could be focused on short-term gains at the expense of long-term gains because it maximizes their personal net wealth and they can just jump ship in a few years.

Again, nobody is saying ML algorithms are worthless. I just don't believe (and have lots of reasons based on personal experience I won't go into) that they are 10% as useful as the industry wants you to believe.
And that's exactly it! Why do people adopt seemingly less mature technologies? If they never did, we'd never have new stuff, and startups would never win! But they do, and the question is, how does it happen?

The canonical story is described by Clay Christensen in the Innovator's Dilemma, where the new toy X is inferior to the mature Y along most dimensions. However, something changed in the world, and people are starting to value a dimension where the new toy X is 10x better than the mature Y along a single dimension. And that allows the new toy X to gain a foothold. I'm super curious as to how Godot managed it, even if it has been a long time in the making.

Of course, not all toys end up replacing the incumbent. But by dismissing everything as a toy, you're shutting off a line of inquiry to see how this process happens. If you're on HN, it's a good chance you're a programmer and by definition a creator. And if you're at all ever wanting to bring something new into the world, it'd behoove you to understand how new creations are accepted.
immigration requires opportunity, and opportunity is becoming increasingly scarce in europe. it's more likely, lots of capital will be reallocated towards the growing parts of africa
5. No Aladdin's lamp. There's no FLT, no wormholes, no solution to the huge distances. And/or interstellar space is so full of toxins or plasmas no lifeform can survive it. And/or all EM data transmissions are reduced/scrambled/swallowed/encrypted by the void. All the experiments are naturally locked in separate containers.

6. Klaatu barada nichto. We are indefinitely locked in solitary, incommunicado, for creating and using nuclear weapons. On ourselves. Immediately.
The GPS thing is unlikely, what would be the rationale of that? This would be a very unpopular policy.
ML is certainly valuable for speech recognition, translation, and fraud detection, but those are somewhat niche applications. It's a long way from "every tech company, large and small".

As for ad placement, social media, and search ranking: is that actually effective? The one constant with ads and social media and web search, IME, is that it just never gets any better. From the Lycos/AltaVista days to Google there was a huge jump in search result quality, and then it plateaued.

The ads I see online are still laughably bad. They're more professionally produced than 10 or 20 years ago, but they're still never for any category of product that I'd ever buy. Targeted and tracked advertising seems like a big scam.
> How is that ok?

Probably because a browser like FF has the goal to load and display arbitrary dynamic content in realtime like a reddit infinite scroll with various 4k videos and ad bullshit, whereas the game has the goal to render a known, tested number of pre-downloaded assets in realtime.

Also on shitty pages the goal is different-- load a bunch of arbitrary adware programs and content that the user doesn't want, and only after that display the thing they want to read.

Also, you can click a link somewhere in your scrolling that opens a new, shitty page where you repeat the same crazy number of net connections, parsing ad bullshit, and incidentally rendering the text that the user wants to read.

If you want to compare fairly, imaging a game character entering a cave and immediately switching to a different character like Spiderman and inheriting all the physics and stuff from that newly loaded game. At that point the bulk of your gameplay is going to be loading new assets and you're back to the same responsiveness problems of the shitty web.

Edit: clarification
An unconventional international airport in Saint Helena [video]
I support nuclear power, however I doubt we will ever see many more reactors built in most countries. The growth of photovoltaic solar power combined with coming cheaper grid scale battery storage is going to wreck the economics for nuclear (including fusion if it ever works).
Previously submitted and flagged 4 weeks ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21719685 . My reply to that killed posting is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21720045 . It starts "An opinion piece by David Brooks. One he's made so many times it's in his Wikipedia entry"
...and that we'll have fewer trolls...
Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus is public domain! I read that (and many other Lofting books) when I was 12ish. :)
Yeah, when China breaks down again, it will be for very unique reasons, singular for their time and place, and dependent on a few very good or bad political decisions.

When has social change ever not been unique?
Yikes. Does Unity do forced paid upgrades, so you'd have to deal with the incompatibilities?

Do they have a culture of incompatibilities so they can simplify their development and keep the best features and discard the worst?
> I’m saying that their effective tax, as a percentage of their wealth is, much lower than everyone else.

Income tax is collected as a percentage of people's income, I'm not sure why you're referencing wealth here. And judging tax as a percentage of wealth is not a very sound approach:

* You have someone that makes $50,000 and has lived frugally and saved up $500,000 over the span of decades.

* You have someone that makes $250,000 a year and spends nearly all of their money as they earn it, and so only has $50,000 saved.

The former will pay $4,342 in federal income taxes (filing as single) and thus pay under 1% of their wealth in income taxes. The latter will pay $58,424 in federal income tax and thus pay over 100% of their wealth in income taxes. Am I to understand that this situation is unfair because the former is paying a smaller percentage of their wealth as compared to the latter, and that the former should be paying more than the latter?

Judging taxes as a function of people's wealth is not a sound approach because people's wealth has much more to do with their financial decisions than their income. Why should frugal people who save more be taxed more heavily than someone who makes as much (or even more) but spends their money?

This portion of your comment seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of income vs. assets:

> ...they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property.

Property (in other words, the assets people own minus their debt) is wealth. Talking about how the source of wealth is derived from property is nonsensical - wealth and property are two words for the same thing: net assets.

Income is the delta of people's wealth. If you have an annual income of $X then your wealth is increasing by at most $X each year. Gains from increased value of assets (capital gains) are another source of wealth. These are taxed, too, but at the time that the assets are sold rather than immediately. Inheritance is another source of wealth and that is taxed as well.

Income is taxed because income, not property, is the source of people's wealth. It's valid to think of "income" as short for "incoming property".
What do people do to deal with it? Are there services / libs that help you do the conversion?

Or is it that you can't fully trust them, and you'll need to do that by hand anyway, because you might be one of the exceptional cases?
Does it matter? They're a manufacturing powerhouse and have a government in place that can (and has shown willingness to) take long term bets that are in the interest of their country.
Everything we make and buy will someday return to dust.

It is an economic decision to make choices about the level of complexity you are willing to tolerate from device to device. The lights go out, I can burn some candles, but I would still rather have my lights working despite their relative complexity over the candles, but I want them to always work with a manual toggle. The toggle shouldn’t have 30 pages of legalese and a promise to not violate my privacy too much for too much personal gain, with the words “too” and “much” defined rather loosely in all the legal jargon.
https://www.emptywheel.net/, though just the posts written by Marcy Wheeler, a.k.a. emptywheel, herself.

> Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.

> Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
>The reason modern western leaders support house of Saud isn't that they're the good guys. They're just the best of what all realistic possibilities in the region, unfortunately.

I doubt it. Saud family were interested in fighting the Ottomans, as were the British in WW1, and their interests aligned then. And during WW2, once it was found to provide access to oil, it only made sense for the west to make sure a stable regime was established. The US/Brits support the Sauds in whatever they want to do, and the Sauds provide oil and purchase weapons. Keeps the region nice and unstable for future weapons orders and to prevent a situation like Norway where the oil wealth is distributed to everyone and no longer able to be controlled by a handful of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud#Origins_and_earl...

For further proof, the more modern socially liberal Iran was destabilized in favor of a fundamentalist leader by the US for their refusal to play ball:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini#Khomeini's_c...

It's just business, it's easier to deal with a small country's king than a democracy.

This is a good book about the circumstances that result in the modern situation:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64594.A_History_of_the_M...
Even if that is the case, jobs now change at much more rapid pace than in the past. It used to be that if you trained and worked as a blacksmith (or whatever), you could die a blacksmith. It was their kids that would have to do something else. Which isn't too much of a shock to the system.

This is no longer the case. Now someone within a single lifetime can go through multiple job creation and destruction cycles. So it'd be helpful to have a floor to help deal with the transitions and provide a buffer.
I don't program Rust regularly or track its status in that much detail, so thanks for the correction.

Do you have some links about the known soundness issues? I was under the impression that although it hadn't yet been proven it was still a medium-term goal, and any soundness bugs were considered fairly major.

(And yeah, "mathematical proof" is strong regardless since e.g. LLVM is also in there somewhere. But it captures the idea more closely than any comparison of "compile vs. runtime" or "static vs. dynamic" does.)
I think the climate is going to change much faster than any models predict, like 3-4x faster, because we went past the tipping point about 30 years ago.

Phytoplankton populations will crash out in the next 10 years and the marine food chain will collapse.

Extreme wether patterns are going to completely disrupt food production, which will cause mass starvation and a global immigration/refugee crisis.

In the U.S., the terrified of everything elderly, and right wing will go for less freedom and more authoritative government control. They will also secede more control to corporations as a way of avoiding “big government”, effectively handing over power special interests and the ultra wealthy.

Healthcare will however become nationalized because the system as it stands is out of control and therE is no way to reign it in, so costs will keep spiraling up until the system breaks.

Marijuana will get legalized in most states, and the percentage of THC will start to get capped.

Designer CRIsPR “therapies” will become popular.

The U.S. college system have a major event, costs are spiraling out of control, and the colleges have no way to stop the cost growth, students are becoming more accustomed to online classes, in the next 10 years there will be a mass realignment of the U.S. college system, just like banking, healthcare. A lot of closures, mergers and partnerships. A commoditization of higher education, which will be good for some majors, like STEM, and really bad for majors that are more “subjective”. I also think we’ll see incorporation of what is seen as traditional “trade school” skills. Learning is learning, and is the schools can make it profitable, “why not?”.
Immigration doesn't require opportunity if you're fleeing from drug cartels or islamist death squads.
Not to mention that the ISO says Monday is day 1 of the week:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
The rationale is taxation. As more cars go electric they have to replace the gasoline tax.
This is awesome and I really hope it works. I still wonder how well it actually performs though (assuming it actually works).
For those interested in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the book The Great Bridge[1] tells a very interesting story of both the difficult engineering problems and the political intrigue of those times.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/067145711X
Would you have any advice on choosing a quality pillow?
I'm selling the most expensive sandwich for 11B if anyone is interested.
What convinced you to pull the trigger and use the Godot on the new project? Was it the VR development smoothness?
What happened: nobody needed it.

Too slow (latency is inevitable), too limiting, too hard to do or show anything non-trivial.

You could do interesting things if you put it a lot of time. But few have the time to spend on unclear benefits.
People used it in the past. If your child has a real risk of contracting polio you would do anything to get them that vaccine.

The anti vaccination movement has only survived because most of these diseases are so rare. If we see a return of diseases like polio the anti vaccination movement would disappear fast.
Class of 2020: New in the Public Domain Today
Thanks for the nudge. I donated.
There are all sorts of people. To some art is “boring”. To some being a refuse truck operator is interesting or being a remote crane operator is exciting. I’ve met people who straight up love “cold calling”. I cannot cold call for the life of me. Some people are excited by engaging with strangers and trying to get them excited about a product or service.
I find most Fermi-paradox arguments drift towards being too biology-centric even if they acknowledge the possibility or probability of a transition to machine-based life.

For example this paper assumes that you need classic "habitable worlds" to colonize a solar system, but it's unclear why machines would need more than relatively small rocks or comets.

The paper also assumes that each colony needs to operate as a continuous entity and can therefore collapse or experience massive cultural shift. But if it's all machines, then you can put some powered-off seed ships in long orbits for cheap self-recolonization (seems strictly easier than crossing interstellar space in the first place).

I'd like to see more studies on the feasibility of those ultra-long-lifetime interstellar ships (assuming plausible tech like general AI). Maybe there are thermodynamic or other reasons why that can't be done.

(Personally I'm in the camp of "abiogenesis is actually really hard so we're the first civilization in our light-cone; the doomsday argument holds, and will be a theistic eschaton".)
Calver?
The main usage will be porn.
As a standalone method of authentication, insecure is more ways than I can list.

I didn't think this was controversial or obscure. Authentication on my work laptop is fingerprint + 2FA, then password and 2FA for VPN. Access to most other resources at that point is certificate driven.

I wish my bank would use certificates, for instance. I absolutely get the human (ultimately cost) factors involved, but my bank is one of the few entities with which I would go through the hassle of in-person key setup/renewal.
AI Shows Promise for Breast Cancer Screening
I really wish simulated worlds would pick up. They’re just such a cool idea. And now we have VR!
The cnet quote I still can't find a source for so I have no idea if Google even said they would use it for "product experience"; Regardless, that page I linked also states:

> In addition, we keep the video and images that power these features separate from advertising and don’t use them for ad personalization.
And that's a valid approach, I learned React (and unfortunately Redux) from your courses and they're very high quality. I really do appreciate the handful of your courses I've bought and owe you a lot more than the $10 I paid for the Udemy video.

However, it is exceedingly difficult to find any React tutorial that doesn't have Redux, making it seem to beginners that Redux is required for React. And Redux is entirely overwhelming, especially for a newbie like when I was learning React. It took me three or four courses until I was comfortable and knowledgable enough to strip Redux from my projects, and after that my speed and productivity skyrocketed.

When I was first learning React from your video, I'll admit I turned it off several times, frustrated with the mindset that I was never going to learn React and React was stupid because what do you mean I need to hydrate a store and map state to props and maintain a file listing all of the functions I have? Turns out it's just Redux that I hate. React is fine. And without experiencing the pain that Redux solves, Redux (to me, as a beginner) just seems like completely unnecessary boilerplate that keeps me out of the React ecosystem.

Anyway that's just one person's feedback. I'm sure Redux solves some very real pains, but to me as a beginner, Redux is more of a pain than the problem it's designed to solve (because I've never experienced the problem it's designed to solve) and it is very difficult to find a high-quality course or demo project that doesn't include it.
...contrary to the other replies, I think thunks are fine (and have yet to understand why sagas are needed at all). But I have minor issues with createAction and createSlice:

createAction I don't think we'd ever use, and I'd recommend against it - multiple explicit function arguments instead of a payload blob is much easier to understand when reading the code, and the action function should use those arguments to create the blob. Your example here makes sense simply because the blob appears to be a single string value, rather than say, id+value, or even something more complex.

createSlice, to me, appears to be adding a lot of complexity for no apparent benefit. I even had to read through it a second time before I realized extraReducers was the escape hatch to avoid the action=reducer antipattern, but the structure definitely still seems to be promoting it, where actions are defined as part of a set of reducers, then reused elsewhere if need be.
I often wondered if that's the curse of building a horizontal product where you're trying to satisfy multiple types of users with different jobs to do (typical in enterprise products)

Or if it's just an inherent complexity in the actual job.

Or if it's an issue with management and product managers that can't decide which users to service, so they do the easy, but wrong thing and try to service them all.
This seems to be the particular podcast:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/12/09/76-n...
2010s were a terrible decade for housing construction
What country is this intended to be in? I can see it, possibly, happening in more forward minded societies... but certainly not the United States.

If anything because there’s no way in hell they can cost effectively retrofit the vast amount of old vehicles we all tend to drive here.
Language is defined by the majority.
I found a couple of old scanned mathematics books on the archive, which I could not find elsewhere. Many times a web.archive.org link cut short a journey to an old blog post, that might have been lost in the ether.

Thanks archive, I'm glad I can support you a bit.
Aside from his many obvious and damaging fabrications that he has since admitted. The crank reputation is the consensus of just about everyone, left or right, in the international trade world. He doesn't even understand the basics of macro, insisting somehow that reducing imports would increase GDP?

Noah Smith: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-28/trump-...

Cato: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/navarros-trade-...

AEI: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/donald-trump-and-peter-navarr...

Krugman: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/opinion/how-to-lose-a-tra...

Kevin Williamson: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/04/peter-navarro-trump-c...

> I don't see a single argument in your post.

I'm not really trying to argue about China policy.. just provide some context to the people being impacted by the trade war any my skepticism of this administration's ability to fix anything. We're two years into the trade war, which we all know are "good and easy to win", so hopefully we get some progress soon.
But what real enhancements does Windows 10 provide, which couldn't have simply been done as patches to Windows 7, keeping the same main structure and layout and overall design, but just continually improving it, the way Henry Ford did with the Model T for 20+ years?

For that matter, one could for example take the Windows NT 4.0 source code, add in drivers for the necessary hardware, fix boot code, linking, etc to be compatible with late model computers, spruce up the UI with better font rendering, antialiasing, 24-bit color wallpaper, OpenGL rendering even--and in the end, you'd have something just as functional as Win 7/10 but at 1/4 of the bloat.

This sort of thing would be technically very easy to do. It's much easier than the status quo of continually reinventing the wheel. So why, oh why, is there this overpowering desire to continually throw out good code and replace it with heavier, more bloated junk, which doesn't really offer any real increase in functionality?
Exactly! But it was slightly more esoteric and personal to dig it out of a second hand bookstore and decide to read it.
I, for one, make my physical workspace disappear from my view as much as possible. When I'm at my desk, 99% of what I see is my screen, 1% goes for the occasional look at the tea cup.

No room, or need, for decorations and fluff.
Probably a matter of personal preference, but if you're not a fan of low-quality, intellectually dishonest shitposting in your feed, I'd avoid @Popehat on Twitter. I enjoy his columns and blog posts, but Twitter does weird things to some people's brains.

OTOH, my tolerance for that stuff is extremely low, so the SNR may suit someone else.