skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That kind of goes to my question though. It seems that people are suggesting that by offering a process to flag & bury content and by employing moderators, HN becomes a publisher and therefore should be liable for our posts.
This effort betrays a supreme misunderstanding about what makes Bitcoin important.

"Blockchain technology" is not what makes Bitcoin revolutionary.

Bitcoin is censorship-resistant electronic cash. It's teleportable currency - without a deplatforming option.

That's the innovation.

What Sweden is engaging in is a cargo cult. Build the blockchain runway, hoping the planes will land. They won't because they have no reason to.

Censorship-resistant money is a direction no government will pursue voluntarily. The reason is simple: censorship of transactions will be demanded by a ruling class indent on "doing something" about drugs, terrorism, and rogue states. Some governments may be forced to follow the censorship-resistant direction by market forces, but that's probably far off from today.
Show HN: A way to pay less every time you pay on the internet
> On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake

Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"
The good news is that remote jobs are growing by the day. Remote.co is doing a good job at snagging high quality jobs https://remote.co/remote-jobs/developer/
Who even knows? If APIs are copyrighted and implementing them is a crime, Tim Berners-Lee might end up a billionaire.
I think a couple big concepts are being conflated. There are a couple really important questions:

1. Should Google, Facebook, etc. be responsible for user generated content hosted on their websites (i.e., should they not be treated as “public square”)?

2. Should the government have any hand in telling any company or any person what they can or cannot say, as long as they are not making threats or publishing illegal materials?

I am of the personal opinion that most (all?) of the major tech companies have engaged in censorship and even politically driven enforcement of their content policies, and therefore should have lost their “public square” status a long time ago, making them responsible for illegal content posted by their users.

Pertaining the second question, there simply is no question; the government does not and should never have any authority here, because the Constitution protects free speech, regardless of what kind of Ministry of Truth they would like to implement.
A lot of the discussion here seems to be about the methodology and value of the "synthetic data" concept, and squaring that approach with the analogy to github.

It feels like we can tease those two things apart:

1. Is a github-style website/service of forkable data sets useful?

2. Are anonymized, synthetic versions of those data sets, created via ML, useful?

Feels like the answer to both is "yes"?

(Also makes me wonder if there's a "rebase" equivalent for data in this sort of world...)
Consider that much of the universe is expanding away from us at greater than the speed of light. That is effectively another world already (without any possible information transfer) and all it requires is that you accept relativity + the expanding universe.

Many worlds isn't the universe forking. It is more straightforward to think of the other worlds as probability spaces. The probability space simply divides as we call each division a "world".
And he also did not request any specific answer. Someone at the DNC is trying _really_ hard to get ahead of damaging information about the DNC leak. If Assange reveals the source, and it's in the DNC itself, that would utterly destroy whatever remains of the "Russian collusion" narrative they worked hard to push for the last 3 years. So you can see why all the stops are being pulled here, and why they are trying to discredit Assange ahead of that.
The only rats to leave a sinking ship are those who can swim.
Saying "full stop" doesn't make or strengthen an argument.
Ha, I know that. But my point is, you don't see petsmart.com 302'ing to pets.com. You see the opposite. Which furthers the point that <genericword>.com's aren't that valuable. Since Pets.com didn't last all that long, it might not be fair to characterize it's short-term existence and high-market value as a sustaining, legitimate billion-dollar business.
Scanning credit cards on iOS with computer vision
One of the most jarring things about the impeachment saga was Trump supporters defending him by saying "all presidents do it". Fundamentally the issue is norms are easy to break if a bunch of people don't know what they are and don't care enough to find out.
The concept is that you're carrying over the same general topology of the real data but in a way that is effectively non-sense. This allows you to build ML models that are representative of the parameters of the true data which you can then use for inference systems in production.

It's a technique we've used in the DoD a long time and it works ok when everything is perfect. There are a lot of boundary problems like being able to troubleshoot bad data if you are doing your initial analysis with the transformed data, having DS's actually grok the problem-set since it's abstracted etc...

Edit: It's worth noting that this is a technical solution to a policy/legal roadblock. As organizations mature into better data governance, they are pushing more fundamental changes to governance that gets at these problems where solutions like this will no longer be necessary. For example, hiring data scientists into the groups that have access to the raw data (in our case hiring data scientists and giving them security clearances).
Interesting. I'd learned early on that the heart is on the left side, but it looks like it's more centrally located than that. eg 2/3 on the left, with 1/3 on the right.
Thanks, Brexit!
Tech, Aviation and Agriculture are some of the areas where Americans are the world leaders by far and yet the American government is totally set to hurt these very industries (we'' break the evil google) and so on.

This is beyond idiotic.
Launch HN: PostHog (YC W20) – open-source product analytics
James, Tim and Aaron here - we are building a self-hosted, open source Mixpanel/Amplitude style product. The repo is at https://github.com/posthog/posthog and our home page is https://posthog.com/.

After four years of working together, we originally quit our jobs to set up a company focused on tech debt. We didn’t manage to solve that problem, but we learned how important product analytics were in finding users, getting them to try it out, and in understanding which features we needed to focus on to impact users.

However, when we installed product analytics, it bothered us how we needed to send our users’ data to 3rd parties. Exporting data from these tools costs $manyK a month, and it felt wrong from a privacy perspective. We designed PostHog to solve these problems.

We made PostHog to automatically capture every front-end click, removing the need to add track(‘event’) - it has a toolbar to label important events after they’re captured. That means you’re spending less time fixing your tracking. You can also push events too.

You can have API/SQL access to the underlying data, and it has analytics - funnels and event trends with segmentation based on event properties (like UTM tags). That means we’ve got the best parts of the 3rd party analytics providers but are more privacy and developer friendly.

We’re thinking of adding features around paths/retention/pushing events to other tools (ie slack/your CRM). We’d love to hear your feature requests.

We are platform and language agnostic, with a very simple setup. If you want Python/Ruby/Node, we give you a library. For anything else, there’s an API. The repo has instructions for Heroku (1 click!), Docker or deploy from source.

We’ve launched this repo under MIT license so any developer can use the tool. The goal is to not charge individual developers. We make money by charging a license fee for things like multiple users, user permissions, integrations with other databases, providing a hosted version and support.

Give it a spin: https://github.com/posthog/posthog. Let us know what you think!
The blockchain technology that will be used in this pilot is apparently R3 Corda : https://www.corda.net/
The released one wasn't. Its OS was written in C++ and its apps were written in Newtonscript, which was an interpreted language that loosely resembled Javascript (but well before Javascript was created).

The first Newton OS was written in Lisp (specifically in a dialect called Ralph, which was basically Scheme plus CLOS) over a C++ microkernel.

By the way, that Lisp was written by Apple Cambridge, a group in Apple that was created when Larry arranged for Apple to purchase the assets of Coral Software and hire some of its best hackers to design a new programming language.

Apple later spun out that group to create Digitool, which took with it the code and the rights to Macintosh Common Lisp. Digitool did not prosper, and one of its employees, Gary Byers, negotiated the rights to turn the MCL compiler into an open-source implementation that later became Clozure Common Lisp. So Larry is also responsible for the creation of Clozure Associates and Clozure Common Lisp.

There were some issues with the first Newton OS that led to two developments:

1. John Sculley ordered Larry Tesler to redo the OS in C++. That's the version that shipped.

2. Larry asked me and a few other Lisp hackers to see what we could do on Newton with Ralph. That resulted in the bauhaus OS, which didn't ship.

The authors of the first Newton OS were smart programmers, but they weren't Lisp hackers. Larry speculated that that had something to do with some of the early issues, and maybe it did. I think our version offered some improvements.

Another set of issues had to do with the UI design of the initial OS. Larry was critical of it on the grounds that it was basically trying to be a desktop UI in a handheld device. He thought we should try for a UI experience more suited to a new kind of device, and, in the end, both the shipping OS and the bauhaus OS did what he asked, and were better for it.

(In a final evaluation meeting for bauhaus, our managers told us that we had met and exceeded all goals of our experimental project, but Apple was of course going to ship the OS that the CEO told us to ship, and it was of course not going to ship two OSes for the device. None of this was a surprise to the bauhaus team. We were grateful to have had the support to work on the project for as long as we did, and disappointed that it was over.)
Developing muscle memory for Emacs is no harder than developing it for Vim, and since both involve rebinding annoying keys on the keyboard (mostly about whether Caps Lock becomes Esc or Ctrl) I prefer the editor with the more mature extension language.
Or Postgres APIs? Nginx plugins? Etc
There’s very few constitutional limits on the power to pardon. I suspect abusive use of the power would fall under the scope of impeachment, but we’d be unlikely to ever see that play out.

Pardons are also interesting because they have to be affirmatively accepted, and they have to be for an actual crime that was committed — so there is endless debate about whether accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt.
Anime-Zing Ganilla for Ghibli Style Image Transfer
A Hidden Gem in MySQL: MyRocks
The snowden leaks touch on it
> There is not a federated messenger that provides the same security as Signal.

Actually, there are federated messengers that provide better security and privacy than Signal. Yes, XMPP ones. They might not have the same convenience yet, yes, because they are not tied to phone numbers, but don't even get me started by trying to say that tie to phone numbers is a plus.
I agree.. we really really don't know much of what's going to happen here. We definitely need to stay on our toes and not get complacent here.
> It carries over from not being able to sue the telephone or telegraph company

On the other hand, phone calls are not persistent and one to one, not one to anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
Anecdote - Talked to a highly paid contractor from Nasa the other day. He said he's been working in-office 30+ years and just this month was allowed to work full-time remote.

Renaissance of remote work approaching imo.
Does it matter? Every time without fail when I argue on HN that government involvement in tech is usually negative I get downvoted to oblivion.

But then when the same government interferes and is on the "wrong" side of popular geek opinion there is an uproar.
Why should they have lesser baggage attached to them?
I couldn't get into Mistborn either--solid, just didn't grab me. His Reckoner series is my favorite (Steelheart, Firefight, Calamity), though it's YA and more superhero than fantasy. Also Elantris, his first published novel, and its follow-up The Emperor's Soul.
Maybe we should just get rid of liability for authors and publishers, then, also?

It's fair to ask how big of a problem libel is. It's hardly enforced now, anyway. False accusations fly, with no consequences. Reporters at major outlets repeat accusations with no evidence ("sources say that ... did ...").
I imagine a future where the workers are on the Irish side of the border but the servers are on the UK side of the border.

One still enjoys the tax advantages of the value being added on the Irish side, but also the relatively lax data requirements on the British side.

I am not pro or con anything, just pointing out the arb.
The problem that's being solved here is "I'm somewhere in a building, a building I know the exact layout of. Where am I in the building?".

The robot in this case can ask "roughly how far away is the wall in front of me, to the sides of me and behind me". Given that information it can rule out some places it might be, and figure out some more likely places. Then it moves a bit somewhere and says "OK, now how far away are the walls?".

You could imagine doing this in your house, blindfolded. You reach out and touch a wall in front of you - ok you know you are not in the middle of a room unless it's a small room. There's no wall to the sides of you reachable so you're not in a corner. You keep moving and measuring and you can work out where you probably are. If the walls either side of you and straight in front of you are far away, then you step forwards and the walls either side are suddenly touchable, you know you've just crossed from a room into a corridor. There's only one place in my house personally that can happen so I'd be able to say exactly where I was if that happened.

This is localisation. There's a harder problem called SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) where you don't know what the world looks like or where you are and are trying to build up a model of the world and where you are in it.
Proposal Temporal: Fixing dates and times in JavaScript
All these cars, they're owned by the same person
LOTS of countries don't have a health system as advanced as China, this is where the risk is. You can't dismiss the risk based on the fact that China is overworked because it is likely that other countries could end up in that situation with sufficient amount of cases.
If one observes Trump presidency, Trump amplified previous admin policy rather than changed direction. If I have to bet a $1000 dollars on this - the previous administration has similar policy but much tamer version of it.

Trump doing this for Larry Ellison doing a fund raiser for him, is simplistic mid-manager level thinking!
> There was a player from Utah whose name eludes me now that had a, I think, ~$2B exit but that might be the only one.

Are you thinking of Instructure? They're based in Salt Lake City, and Marketwatch gives their current market cap as $1.86B
Ironically, Samsung invested in Tizen development for a minute so they would have their own backup in case Android was no longer viable.

And it's also amusing that the Dart-skeptics now see there is at least one legal reason to justify Google's continued development of Flutter.
Indeed, Excel is usually not the right tool. It is very powerful, but organization of the code/logic, correctness of the calculations, and readability/maintainability are all left on the developer. Mistakes are hard to spot. The levels of discipline and meticulousness needed to use the tool well are high.

I have at times remarked that typical Microsoft Office installations should exclude Excel! :-)

And I am saying all this about Excel even after being a power user myself and the primary author of the OP. :-)

Mathcad, Mathematica, etc. could be good alternatives if not Python or R.
Deaths are a lagging indicator. 2119 deaths as of yesterday / 0.004 = 530,000 cases that are ~2+ weeks old. In other words 530,000 infections around February 5th. That seems extremely unlikely based on the data we have.

For a reasonably accurate estimate you need to look at percentage of total infections detected, and the lag between detection and death. Using say 50% detection rate and 7 days between detection and death you get 2119 / (63,851 / 0.5) = 1.7% fatality rate. That’s about as optimistic as I think is reasonable.

PS: A 50% detection rate may be high or low, but that’s the real unknown.
Err sorry folks. I really did not mean to offend anyone, but I can see how my comment could be misinterpreted. I won't add any further clarification since it might harm more than it helps. I don't think all priests are fake tbc.
It is good to see that the generally accepted media is finally picking this up.

2 weeks ago talking about potential upcoming supply line issues and speculating about the virus / disease (most of what turned out to be true) got me and others banned, censored, quarantined (because of "spreading misinformation") and even threatened over PMs on several of the other social networks.
I think they're mad about the "Apps" section on the Summary tab. But I don't really get the complaints or see it as an advertisement; it's at the very bottom and users may genuinely be wondering how they get more data into the Health app, and a curated list of apps that do that is useful.
The government caused the phone monopoly and the slap on the risk had nothing to do with Microsoft's missteps when it came to the internet and later mobile. Microsoft still has the same dominance on the desktop that they had during the 90's.
Goals. I like our role models. I would have never independently perceived most of these opportunities and possibilities. Thank you Google and other multinationals, and the media for dissecting their expensive legal strategies.
Overcoming Knowledge Hoarding in the Workplace
The MyRocks is a major trade secret in my company. We can very quickly store TBs of highly compressed text in Hundreds of GB. More than 10x compression
You can still pretrain on synthetic data and finetune on a smaller dataset of real data.
Let's say you have a platform where you can define excel-like tables (parameters), each change to this table creates a new version. Assume that after creating this parameter new version is created with generated rest endpoint to it.
e.g.

/param/currencies/version/1

could give you

{
data: [
EUR, USD, SEK, GBP
]
}

Use cases:
- You have in your app map with store locations. Adding or deleting these locations would require some kind of UI or access to DB, you could create param and fetch this data from there

- There are discounts feature in your app, you could define a parameter with discounts for each product, and non-technical people could easily change its values without developers assistance

- You can create whitelists, blacklists, addresses, descriptions almost anything that changes and non-technical should have the possibility to configure/change.

Of course, creating parameters and managing them would be done through simple UI.

The only thing the developer has to do is to integrate the feature with rest API

Let me know what you think. I am really interested in knowing your point of view and if this is something that you could find useful.
That's how issues work, there are different stances that people feel positively and negatively about. People here are generally pro-net neutrality, which involves at least some FCC intervention and enforcement. It's not a blanket libertarian vs. statist situation.
Wouldn't all health care systems be overworked with this high of an infection rate?
Yes, however because it spreads so easily (even in the period without symptoms!) it is likely to spread outside of China. Singapore has done well to contain it, but not all countries have great health and control systems and it will eventually be just spreading everywhere, it's almost impossible for it to be entirely contained based on the pure fact of how large China is and how hard it is to detect.
It seems so tragic to me that there are so many people that bust their ass their whole life to save up for retirement at 65, only to die 5 years later.

It makes me almost not even want to bother saving up for retirement...
There is already "GitHub for data": http://academictorrents.com/
Under what scenario would this disease be left unchecked? Seems like a false hypothetical.
The Section 230 saga just shows how dangerous it is for the government to interfere in industry.

The CDA was passed when people were scared of the internet and looked to government to protect them from its evils. Section 230 was added to save "the little guy" from becoming collateral damage of this legislation.

Fast forward 30 years and these "little guys" have grown into the scary forces that everyone wants the government to protect them from!

Imagine if ordinary people had been allowed to sue Google and Facebook over this time. There's good reason to think that no one would have been able to monetize the internet in such a way as Google, Facebook, etc. if not for Section 230.

I don't think anyone in Congress is interested in repealing Section 230 but I'm glad people in Washington are at least talking about it.
The cynic in me says this is intentional. The more control over facts there are from any source the more limits there are in general to the spread of information and general discourse. From the governments perspective this is probably desired.
Let's stick to facts, CDC, WHO, etc, not some anonymous doctor.
> 1. Is a github-style website/service of forkable data sets useful?

Depends on the specifics, but it can be.

I've been working on and off on getting a GitHub style data thing going (https://dbhub.io).

It's still a work-in-progress, and I really need to get the data visualisation piece working, which is a pretty key feature and lousy to not have. ;)
Practical aerogel production makes a huge difference in insulation effectiveness.

Lifting body designs provide plenty of interior room for tankage.

Spherical/cylindrical tankage is needed only to contain high pressure, but we don't need to contain pressure.

The greater energy density of hydrogen means much less fuel burnt at altitude, vs. diesel. Water vapor is a grrenhouse gas, but condensed into clouds they reflect sunlight before it gets converted to IR. Not so easy to know the net effect, but the lifetime of water vapor is much less than CO2. Visible contrails suggest that condensation is preferred.
Blocking Tor and IP ranges might be sufficient. CloudFlare might offer this as a service, but I'm not sure. I'd imagine using a third party would legally put you in the clear, but again IANAL
It would be great if it at least becomes a draft. Did IETF simply ignore the proposal since 2018?
If this gets to where most of the people in the world are, ie: India/Bangladesh/Pakistan/Africa, do you think their health care system will be better than China currently or worse?
It's a tough balance. My partner teaches grade 2. They focus on play and exploratory based learning. Parents are furious that their kids aren't instead memorizing times-tables.