skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Social welfare spending in the US increased an average of 4.8% per year between 1972 and 2011. Government spending in total increased from around 25% of GDP in the 1950s, to around 40% of GDP today, with a shift from infrastructure and military spending, to social welfare spending.

So I disagree this has to do with what you're implying - society not taxing enough to fund social programs. To give a concrete example that demonstrates that: Harlem in the 1950s, when there was much less social support available through government programs, was a relatively safe neighbourhood. The situation eroded in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of the Counter-Culture, along with numerous social programs as part of LBJ's Great Society campaign.
AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II (2019)
It is a fallacy. The only real reason I ever found were people in positions of influence and power wanted another hour in the evening for a round of golf. Though we can make DST permanent, keep the hour and eliminate the horrible time changes.
These big projects aren't about actually solving problems. They're a combination of public works projects and returning money to your political investors. So you choose the project then construct the justification. Because the true confidence interval is really large, you can go either way.

If you're good about it, you can drag the project out with delays but with milestones you can talk about politically.

Then by the time the project has been discovered to have been unnecessary you're out of power and it's no longer a problem.

And your investors have a good return to invest in the next guy to give them the next project.
Don't worry, we and our children and grandchildren will be long dead before the first general AI and/or brain-computer interface (at the level of thought, not motor control) ever happen.

I feel people are vastly under-estimating just how complex general intelligence is. Even simplistic intelligence like what you find in a worm is far beyond us, not to mention insects. Thinking that we could decode human thought out of electrical signals in the brain at this stage of our understanding is like the ancient Greeks thinking they could build a rocket to the moon.
Apple already tried to punish Epic. They removed all of Epic's apps from the App Store yesterday. And they tried to terminate all of Epic's developer accounts, including accounts for Unreal Engine, which was only stopped by a court's temporary restraining order.
Empire Market Down for over 100 Hours Sparkling Fear of Exit Scam or DDoS Attack
Exercise May Boost Your Vaccine Response
Check out 'covert maladaptive narcissism' (googling yields many articles on this), which is not at all like what people usually think of when they think 'narcissism'
Consider that the reason you buy this $1000 device, is that Apple decides a lot what happens on this device.
China's new AI export curbs threaten TikTok's US sale
Unless Slack does the right thing and pays this researcher properly. It is never too late until it is.
I also experiment a lot with structural editing. My latest project is an editor for a lisp-like language for building small audio synth programs: http://kevinmahoney.co.uk/ocellator/

Hazel looks fantastic - I don't think I've come across it before. I think an obstacle structural editors have to becoming more widely adopted is that they start out very general and don't immediately solve a problem that people have. You can usually build little toy programs but not much more. What I've tried to do is to focus on creating an editor for a small DSL that helps with a specific problem.
At least you are calling Apple's behavior what it is: rent-seeking.
Have we? Gig economy and offshoring practices are mostly disguised slavery.
You can use Xcode and the SDKs without even having an account! A free account is required to sign code temporarily to run on test devices. Apple shouldn't even get to know what is being signed.

Apple might be cracking down on people who sign apps for others as a service, publish signed stuff online, etc. but they literally have no way of preventing development of anything.
> If the difficulty lies in actually embedding the implants, then a biological solution such as this fungus should be used

That article says that the fungus doesn't go anywhere near the brain.

"Hughes’s team found that fungal cells infiltrate the ant’s entire body, including its head, but they leave its brain untouched."
Is there any good game design curriculum you'd recommend? The webpage above is not suitable for self-paced learners...
It adds to the confusion for meetings as some places don’t change time, others at different times of the year. I am happy to take Russia’s lead on this one.
How to Search-and-Replace Across Multiple Files in Vim
> Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data.

That is only true if the data is likely to be the right data. For motor control, electrical signals seem to be pretty much it. But we have no clear proof that the same is true for higher thought processes - it could well be that chemical signals and processing inside each neuron itself are major components of that, so the data would be massively limited.

It would also be interesting to see how well such an approach would do when tried on a microprocessor - could we tell that a microprocessor is displaying "hello world" by sampling electrical signals from its transistors and trying to apply some kind of machine learning on that data?
This looks really cool. Will they have a mode to emulate an amber screen? I ask because I got to know turrican and other games like Port of Call, Rick Dangerous and Wings on my friend's Amiga 500 for which he only had an amber screen...
Def highschool, maybe middle school. Make fundamental statistics appear in middle school so high school transitions into data science putting concepts and methods to work.
I had investigated what explained the huge gap between the few fastest frameworks vs the rest.
The answer is a deceptive one, they didn't achieve revolutionary optimizations.
The thing is: on many of those benchmarcks, the bottleneck obviously is the DB.
The ability to do DB queries asynchronously and with batching is the differentiating factor.
Only postrgresql can support such a feature but you need support on the postrgresql client too.
The official C postrgresql client used everywhere does not support said feature except with a patch from 2016.
Yes the secret of drogon (and probably of Lithium) is that they use a fork of libpq from 2016 because upstream can't agree on merging the patch and nobody is working on upstreaming it.
Actix web benefited from the feature because their client tokio-postgres is a reimplementation and does not use libpq.

The industry grade server ecosystem that is the JVM use the jdbc which sadly has a blocking socket thus not allowing asynchronicty.
But when loom arrive every jdbc existing code will magically, automatically become truly asynchronous such spring should come on the top 4 place.

There is also a wrapper of the jdbc through kotlin coroutines and there are reactive jdbc implementations such as R2DBC. It is unclear as of today if such solution enable postrgresql async queries and batch processing. It seems that nobody has tried those on TechEmpowerUp which is sad.
Finally one could use libpq over JNI.
Edit: I have read that the next release of pgjdbc (43) will switch from std socket to the NIO non blocking socket.

What should be heuristically the fastest HTTP framework (H2O, in C) has refused to use the old libpq fork because the api is not stable and thus not production grade.
The benchmark show that the frameworks has a big impact on performance. While all the frameworks are using the same database server, performances varies from 1x to 100x.

While the benchmark focus on more req/s, we can also see it the other way around: for the same req/s, you can use smaller hardware, i.e. save money and energy.
Easy, don't buy Apple.
At least in western Europe, before WW2 many countries were not on CET/CEST, so that's fairly recent.
But the specific issue in this case is whether Apple is an abusive monopolist.

Apple is proving that they are.
Once a Radical Idea, Uprooting Neighborhoods Is Becoming New Flood Policy
Define an asshole: “ the basic tendency to maximize one's own utility at the expense of others, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications for one's malevolent behaviors“
At millions of reqs per second the thin contract of the internals of http request/response will never be the layer that will have any fruit left to pick to make gains.
No, it is glorious watching the sun rise each morning. I miss it.
Amazon's Halo: always-on microphones and undressed selfies
You can read Epic's court filing but the tl;dr is that Epic alleges that the terms of the contract restrict Epic and other parties from competing with Apple, that Apple uses their market power in one area to get an unfair advantage in other areas (such as payment processing), and they cite the Sherman act as the primary legal basis of their claim that those terms are illegal.

This case is likely to last for years so it is very much too soon to be predicting who will win.
I'd say the difference is that the tax is not uniformly charged by a middleman. If a mall made its profit by charging 43% on every purchase, I would think of it (informally) as a tax.
This Is What Your Unsolicited Advice Sounds Like
If you don't want to subscribe, you can access any "nightly version" by going directly to

http://nightly.changelog.com/YYYY/MM/DD/

For example: http://nightly.changelog.com/2020/08/28/

There's a broswable archive of the weekly version: https://changelog.com/weekly/archive
Where I live, winter time year round means the sun has risen at 4.30 in the summer (and not being able to have dinner without artificial illumination). Summer time year round means total darkness until 8.30 in the winter. Either way it sucks. There are places where DST is indeed the best of both worlds.
?

If by 'rogue actor' you mean someone that actually has a mind of their own, their own ideas and whereupon the company can benefit tremendously from them?

The 'psychopath' in the company will generally not 'seem' like a Rogue Actor, more likely, they will be 'seen' as doing really well, acting in the companies best interest, but really they're purely acting for their own benefit.
I haven't said anything about black markets but:

>You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces? Jesus, not everything is about money

Not me, not you, but many people make it all about money. I don't think it's ridiculous to think that people can have absolutely zero ethics.
New Connection Discovered Between Primordial Organisms and Complex Life
Thanks for the link.

A web search for "lithium web framework" gave https://li3.me as the first result, which is a PHP framework.

Why did you pick such a name if already taken by a similar product?
"Update 08/10/2020: this was written almost a year ago and I have since quite freelancing to work on my side project full time. As a result it is no longer a “side project,” but all the info here is still relevant!"
-----
I think it's worth mentioning that this has since turned into a full-time project (as the article mentions).
You're reading bolder claims into the quick contextualization in the preamble than I am.

If I saw an earlier edit of yours correctly, you were using "must" when the article uses the weaker "should". And the article itself later admits "nothing about this technique is unique to quaternions" and compares vs matricies, without framing it as a contradiction of suprise in light of the aforementioned "conventional wisdom".

I read the sentence in question as merely claiming:

1. Conventional wisdom says that you should represent your rotations as quaternions

I would lightly agree with this - granted, for more reasons than just solving gimbal lock (hence why I brought some of them up) - but they're the right default, admittedly sometimes with exceptions.

2. quaternions avoid this [the gimbal lock] problem

And I would lightly agree with this too - with the article pointing out the important caveat that you can't just construct 3 quaternions from your euler angles and assume that will fix your euler angle caused gimbal lock problems. You gotta use 'em right.

-----

We agree that none of the following are true, nor "conventional wisdom":

- quaternions must be used

- quaternions are the exclusive solution to gimbal lock

- the only distinguishing feature of quaternions is their ability to solve gimbal lock

But I don't think the article was claiming any of those things. Perhaps an exhaustive sidebar into the various differences and pros/cons of various rotation methods could have been useful? My two reasons weren't exhaustive either!

... on the other hand, it also might be reasonable to practice restraint - keeping the article focused on a single topic, generalization into N dimensions of solutions to gimbal lock specifically?

Non-exhaustive sidebar?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'll have to look into per-city stats around the world, but around me, the city with good PT managed the pandemic quite well by cutting PT capacity in half (and demanding masks on), removing parking restrictions, and doing various other things to incentivize people to start using their cars again.
I'm more interested in the fact that something called asp.net core is one of the five fastest, while asp.net not 'core' is the single slowest. What's the deal there? I dimly know that asp.net is a Microsoft thing, and remember it being used by a bunch of enterprise sites a decade or so ago...
has there ever been a code created just specifically for this benchmark, in assembly language with everything hard-coded, just to see what the upper bound is ?
In case people are wondering, hes talking about Warcraft 3 Reforged, which is a remake of Warcraft 3. A real disaster of a release, I couldnt imagine anyone could have f* up such a beloved game worse than Blizzard could.
There's a disclaimer at the end of the article, right below the "test":

> Note: The Dark Core Scale was adapted from the larger test battery. I selected the items on an ad-hoc basis for entertainment purposes, but I do not recommend using the scale to make any sort of diagnosis.

The author is a well respected psychology researcher, teaching at Penn, etc.
Agile Sprint Planning
What kind of madman would walk around with their entire life savings in a hot wallet on their smartphone? That would be nearly as irresponsible as carrying your entire net worth around in a backpack.
Free speech shouldn't be anonymous speech. You can say what you think, but you should be ready to face the consequences of it as the view society has on you will change.
Also I think not all kinds of speech should be free. Racism and hate speech should be something to be clearly defined and prohibited (in my country, Brazil, Racism is a crime with clear consequences).
Except culturally, in some places 8 am is basically 6 am in North America.
I’m currently cross posting medium and hashnode but you’ve got a point there. Maybe time to say goodbye to medium. I’m not using their distribution/paywall anyway so all medium is to me is a really nice editor.
I remember 15y-20y ago when it was becoming a trend to fuel your own car, some gas stations had two prices. One for "self service" and one "served". I believe that majority of people were trying to avoid tipping the attendant (imagine tipping £€1 for a £€10 fill, that's 10% tip).
The typical store model also has the store owner selecting products, paying in advance to the suppliers, and assuming partial liability - especially over fakes. Comparing it to a mall makes more sense IMHO, given that it's the developer that initiates the transaction here, pays to the mall owner, and assumes all liability.

P.S. Quite a lot of products in I buy in $LOCALSTORE link to the manufacturer's web site, and more than a few manufacturers allow direct sales. No store here would imagine it could force the manufacturer to use only its preferred credit method in their web site.
As a Spotify subscriber, I don’t really care, because it’s their job to handle their overheads, in the same way that John Lewis on Oxford Street pays different rent to John Lewis in Kingston (probably) but the prices stay the same. Cost of doing business is a thing. Capex and Opex are well-understood by businesses, or should be.

If the Spotify web store is more profitable than the Spotify iOS store, because Apple wants ITS CUSTOMERS to get the same deal and Spotify wants those customers, then this is good and fair for customers at the point of purchase.
Curious what the hate for Slack is. I use a 1-person Slack workspace for personal note-taking and memory extension, and I find it is also a super useful tool to manage ideas, photos, shared files in romantic relationships.

For either use case the ability to write bots for it, and the fact that it syncs across devices with multiple simultaneous logins is awesome.
What Time of Day Is Air Pollution (PM 2.5) Lowest?
The paper The dark core of personality (2018) discusses the inclusion of Self-Interest. (pp16-18) Apparently the traits were selected by generating candidates which were associated with "links to ethically, morally, and socially questionable" behaviour from a literature review of given journals over the twenty-first century, and seeing which candidates correlated well with the "dark triad" of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. (traits and measures appear to be technical terms)

Narcissism and Self-Interest were the traits which correlated least with their proposed D, and p.70 points out important nuances with Self-Interest:

> "Self-Interest is defined as a rather mild form of individual utility maximization in terms of pursuing gains in “socially valued domains, including material goods, social status, recognition, academic or occupational achievement, and happiness” (Gerbasi & Prentice, 2013, p. 496). According to this definition, aiming for material goods and a higher status are the only aspects that immediately imply potential disutility for others (which is a defining feature of D). It is quite possible, for example, to strive for occupational achievement or happiness without inflicting negative consequences for others. Indeed, Gerbasi and Prentice (2013) even reported positive correlations between their Self-Interest construct and Other-Interest (“the motivation to act in another’s interest”, p. 495), between .20 and .35. Thus, quite contrary to D, high Self-Interest as defined by Gerbasi and Prentice (2013) and measured herein can be associated with benefits—rather than disutility—for others. This line of reasoning is further supported by our results of Study 3 testing the incremental validity of the specific dark traits (after controlling for D) for the diverse outcomes: whereas the residualized Self-Interest factor (which is independent from D) incrementally predicted values of Power over D, it showed positive (rather than negative) relations to Internalized Moral Identity, Perspective Taking, and Nurturance. Taken together, this suggests that those aspects comprised in Self-Interest that are associated with ethically, morally, or socially questionable behavior are indeed mainly due to D, but that Self-Interest additionally comprises aspects positively related to others’ interests–aspects, in turn, that cannot be reconciled with the very definition of D."

tl;dr: self-interest is not strongly correlated with D, but neither is it uncorrelated, due to the difficulty of gaining social status without someone else losing social status.
Thanks for that pointer! Fascinating to see the multiplication method invented by the Babylonians being used on a microprocessor.
Right on. We live in Arizona where daylight savings time is not implemented. Much nicer and there is not time transition twice a year.

Off topic, but monitoring your sleep can serve as a training resource for improving sleep. My wife and I allow our AppleWatches to share sleep data with our iPhones (data never leaves the watch/phone, never goes to the cloud). My sleep is so much better now because I have learned habits that improve my sleep metrics. Recommended.
I really hope they amend the bounty paid to actually compensate you for the find.

As a slack user, seeing them pay < $2K for RCE report does not make me feel safe. Next person finding something similar might be looking into this and saying "$3K? no thank you, I take the risk of getting caught but being paid fairly."

To be clear I am not advocating for this, but it makes me concerned as a user "some people" will be more likely to do it.
The experience is not different than before. You can buy ads or not. They don’t sell the “AI ad manager pro” in the app which manages everything for you. The software remains the same after the purchase.
Anyone thinks Airtable's use of “Login with Google” is spammy?
Hello HN,

I recently wanted to try out a simple Airtable table for a list of solo founders and brainstorming sessions. What I saw is that Airtable defaults to asking for contacts every time -

1. When Registering (you cancel and then select "try without contacts")

2. Then every time Logging in - this is terrible since I have signed up with Google and already expressed my choice?

3. On mobile app (Android) there is not even a choice so I can not use Airtable on phone!

Does anyone feel this is too far to try and build a contact list? I will surely never give me contact list to Aritable, so it will simply lose a founder who was planning to use it for other founders. But why make sure product/marketing choices? Am I the only one who feels this is too spammy?

- Sumit
>The industry grade server ecosystem that is the JVM use the jdbc which sadly has a blocking socket thus not allowing asynchronicty.

Assuming connection pooling, can't you just use another Thread to do your queries?
Indeed, sql query batching is the key (and I personally think that the techempower website should make it explicit), async communication with the db and the http client is also the key.

FYI lithium is not using a libpq fork from 2016, it has been rebased on master 1 month ago. but yes Lithium (the sql-pipeline branch) is using it. (I mailed the drogon maintainer to update it aswell).

About H2O, the non batched version of lithium is as fast (slighly faster on some tests, slighly slower on others), while being much simpler to use (implementation of TFB of H20 is 4400 lines vs 250 lines for lithium...)
>we won't consider that our school schedules are stupid,

Or the fact that most schools itself are stupid.
The more charitable interpretation of their comment is that it was earnest, not that they thought some elementary sarcasm would make for a great, funny HN comment.
As a general point I wouldn't quote Greenspan on just about anything after the GFC

> One of the arguments against inflation targeting, whether implicit or explicit, is that it invites asset bubbles--financial markets know that so long as the CPI[1] doesn't budge, they can go wild. But that's a somewhat different debate.

Basel III introduced a 'discretionary counter-cyclical buffer' on capital requirements to enable central banks to better manage asset bubbles, while still focusing on price stability with the cash rate.

> I think the basic argument against explicit targeting is that it hinders the Feds flexibility. With implicit targeting there's a degree of uncertainty and so markets arguably respond better to abrupt or unexpected changes; whereas with explicit targeting the Fed has to be more careful and gentle because markets will more heavily leverage against that fixed number.

Central banks strive to keep inflation at the target band on average, over the long term. It doesn't stop them from taking quick and decisive action in a crisis. A cursory study of the bank's actions (under Bernanke) at the outset of the GFC will affirm this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III#Capital_requirements