skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In Miami, a protestor who allegedly threw something at police officers was later identified and arrested using Clearview AI’s facial recognition system

Very good police work using AI to arrest this transgressor

> In 2018, in response to more protests and riots, Baltimore police used facial recognition through the city's CCTV camera network to identify and later arrest protestors. Similarly, the New York Police Department arrested more than 3,000 people using facial recognition technology

Excellent use of technology to arrest rioters

> According to the ACLU, the pervasive and precise surveillance system built in Baltimore

Does the ACLU even have any credibility left? Left....oops :-)

> Researchers would like to think that their work in AI or robotics can be separated from politics of the moment. They are wrong.

Please explain why they are wrong....oh you didn't, just skipped that part.

> However, the surveillance systems built by police in New York, Baltimore, and Minneapolis are not isolated examples of excessive policing

How is using technology like A.I. to apprehend criminals, rioters etc, excessive policing? If you look at how we use technology today in our daily lives and places of work, that could also be said to be excessive. Does the OP want the police to go back to pre-computer days of mountains of paper work and inefficiency?

> ... expanding surveillance apparatus that is granting law enforcement unprecedented powers to watch, search, and seize the sensitive data of American citizens without a warrant or even suspicion of a crime.

Well, you actually have to vote in congressional elections to make a change in the system in your state, but citizens of the US of A don't like voting. Anywhere between 21% to 61% depending upon the state. Guess you better vote next time and get your senator to not endorse these types of data collections.

> State, local, and national police have access to more than 20 databases that cover a person's criminal history and his or her interactions with the state (e.g., drivers licenses) to build a “pattern of life” of the targeted individual, who may or may not have committed a crime.

So the OP thinks that there should be no data correlation between different datasets for any person?

The OP's article is an exhausting mess of emotive statements with no facts to back them up. This article could have been something, but it is really just a rant.

Waiting for the lefties to vote me down because i don't have a problem with the police doing police work and catching criminals.
> banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea

Super interesting. Reminded me that in Cuba there's a type of banana they call "guineo". I wonder if it's at all related to its origin.
A 5% false positive rate can be pretty high depending on the situation, like whether or not a drug is effective.
Except YAML is straight-up wrong at times, unless you know all the edge cases. I just learned unquoted NO is coerced to False. A classic case of leaky abstraction/"bad magic".

Unless you have actual type annotations/tags (eg xml, jsonld, graphql), everything IS a string. There's no assumptions otherwise.
Ah thanks. We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Dementia 50% lower in bilingual populations".

Submitters: please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A few related projects:

- https://github.com/DLR-RM/BlenderProc

- https://github.com/cheind/pytorch-blender

- https://github.com/DIYer22/bpycv

- https://github.com/yuki-koyama/blender-cli-rendering

and youtube videos covering blender for synthetic data:

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq7npTWbkgVAt4cnrsEzo...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaXy-m2I5hs
Ask HN: Can we digitise coffee tally sheets?
Hi everyone!

Mi name is Florian and I stumbled upon a problem at work and tried to find a solution for that:

At work we are using a shared coffeemachine with a coffee tally sheet to track who is drinking coffee. One of my colleagues is buying the coffee and we are paying him each month. He is counting the coffee's per person, sending them an email and often telling them paying strange amounts of money (5.75€ or so).

We thought we can do that better, so I build a simple device that tracks the consumption through our Company ID card. Every user gets notified when the consumption is reaching a predefined threshold (like 5€) to pay the person that's buying the coffee (capsules in our case). It is cloud connected for easy access and can be extended by additional terminals too.

Our department was quite happy with it and other departments requested this solution after they saw our small gadget too. :)

In the future I plan to bring some fun and useful features to the coffee pal like:
- Use your fingerprint instead your company ID Card
- Coffee subscription: Get your favourite coffee automatically per mail, based on your consumption
- Newsletter about your coffeeconsumption
- Extend for tea, snacks and more
- Connectivity through 3G for hassle-free setup.
- and a lot more ;)

Now my question: Do you think such a solution could be nice for your workplace too? I know that a lot of companies are providing coffee for free, but at least in Europe a lot of my friends told me about the same problem at work.

I created a small webpage for you to get a feeling about it:
https://coffeepal.autonoma.cloud

If you are interested in this solution I would be very happy if you show your interest at the bottom of the page.

Thanks in advance for your feedback and have a nice day! :)
> Fact of the matter is there's nothing too scary about living in China as long as you are not involved in politics.

Just curious, who decides what's politics and what isn't in China?
Why choose this over the other options? Just some thoughts:

1. I like that comments are part of the standard. I wrote my own C++ JSON parser that allows for comments too.

2. Is it strict about indentation? One thing you can never get programmers to do on significantly sized teams is consistent indentation. Is that tab+space? Or spacex5? Is it going to break if a tab sneaks into Git? (Setting up Git push rules just annoys and confuses people.)

3. "without the syntatic clutter of JSON" - I happen to like it. I can compact it quite far if I need to. I also like the fact I can spit it out over a debug server and JS will just magically start reading it.

4. Something really cool would have been the introduction of typed data. One way we achieve this via JSON is to create a template file which would declare something like (in a file named 'template.json' or something):

{
"data" : { "type": "float", "default": 0.0, "min": -1.0, "max": 1.0 }
}

Obviously this requires checking in the code, but it does build up some kind of format checking and sanity. It can also warn you that it's using a default rather than a config defined value.

It would be nice if there was then the ability to define type syntax... But I fear this might be going too far.

5. Another thing I do with JSON is inheritance. So you define a 'parent' property at the top of a file, the values are loaded from the parent and then the child loads theirs over the top. Why have this? We usually need some per-application configuration but mostly it stays the same. It saves having to write it multiple times. You can even break it down into sections to keep each configuration file smaller.

(NOTE: For inheritance, a top tip is to implement "maximum depth", encase you get into a loop.)
This is insanity. How do they even have the authority to do this?
It's Raj Chettys research. It's good stuff, worth the read.

Also, somehow this site is not terrible with ads.
I'm not sure which side to take on this issue. I think both can be right, but I lean towards agreement with the root comment.

Root parent comment is right to question if the N=266 is truly random given the description we do have at hand.

You are right to say N=266 could be truly random and we don't have enough information to definitively decide either way.

We can't read the study so it's just what we have - saying you have a truly random sample with a group just from Barcelona is extremely hard to accept. I mean even you've got to admit that.
Optogenetics, Controlling the Brain with Light
> a century-old law passed in order to criminalize dissent to US participation in WWI

Christopher Hitchens references that in the opening of his defense of free speech: https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY?t=2
My oatmeal technique is to boil water (in an electric kettle), pour that over the oats in a bowl, and let it sit for a few minutes. This works with both regular rolled oats and quick oats (thinly rolled), but it takes longer with regular oats.
I'm making hot water anyways for a beverage, so it's already available.
After a few minutes, I just add milk, cinnamon, and sugar.
Hmm, seems so, though a different Guinea! Very interesting:

> Guineos (pronounced [ɡiˈneos]) usually refers to an unripe banana. The term guineo is sometimes used in reference to its ripened counterpart: the yellow (ripened) banana. Etymology of the word Guineo comes from Guinea, a country in the west of Africa, as it is one of the places from which bananas originate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineo
Analysis – Nvidia and the Disruption of Intel
This isn’t “opinionated”, it’s biased and poorly researched..
https://cuelang.org

- clean syntax

- logical & unified

- roots in LINGO

- forked from Golang

https://cuelang.org/play
No, they dream of having customers who buy more stuff.

As employers, having parents take care of children cuts into work and is a distraction.
And a quote by Buckminster Fuller

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/133403-we-should-do-away-wi...
>Libertarianism is the party supporting rule by the biggest corporation

There are a variety of libertarians, and you misunderstand all of them if you think the above is true.
I think I'm in favor of the pipeline, the alternative is shipping oil via rail which is riskier and burns more oil. Sadly it doesn't stay in the ground without a pipeline.

However, Canada should get smart here and do what Norway does with their oil profits. Invest it in a sovereign wealth fund that's diversified away from oil. Because the oil age is ending and it will hit the most expensive producers, like the oil sands the hardest.

That seven billion spent on converting to renewable energy might have made more sense.
Just hope your password manager's password doesn't get phished.

> or your phone.

Using your phone for 2FA doesn't provide any phishing protection that I know of.

What realistic attacks is a non-U2F Yubikey protecting against that TOTP (Google Authenticator) won't protect against?
Yeah this is just poor reporting by the NYPost. It looks like this mandate is part of a 30-year long range planning proposal. It doesn't appear there's any regional or municipal legislation or business impacts tied to this in the short-run.

No doubt we have our share of idiotic proposals in the Bay Area, but this is definitely a misleading headline.

Here's an article that offers more context and concerns from SF politicians on the plan:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Bay-Area-planni...
This is very normal for first time usage. It's described as euphoria. I believe it goes away with sustained use for most people. It did for me, and I was sort of sad that it did - it was the happiest months of my life. Even now after not having used adderall for years I still don't get that initial euphoria feeling when I randomly take one again.
Wow, I use pb's a ton and didn't know this. I'd upvote this twice if I could!

It looks oddly like HCL. I wonder...
"After nearly two decades, Kamchatka recorded a net natural population growth instead of decline in 2007. However, in first half of 2008, the trend was reversed and population decline was observed again, partly due to an increased mortality rate among the rural population."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamchatka_Krai

A person might start to wonder whether massive planetary poisoning is part of some plan ... a useful 'side-effect'.
I'm confused. I doubt that the "Metropolitan Transportation Commission" has the power to enforce something like this.
Assuming you take 27 people from all over the world at random, and all 27 of them have two legs, you can be fairly certain that most humans have two legs. You might also conclude that about 50% are male and about 60% are from Asia, but as traits get less frequent your error bars get bigger and bigger.

Of course actually picking 27 random people is extremely hard, so actual studies compensate by picking more people.
> What are some other professional duos?

Car Talk.
Rules in Victoria preventing building within x no of metres of trees or tree lines have just meant people are cutting down more trees. Which just adds to the problem of hotter, dryer conditions. The only thing that stops fires is holding moisture in the soil and in the trees.

Fire breaks are really effective for small fires in moderate weather conditions. The kind of fires we saw in Oz or Cali jump straight over them. Look at these maps from late last year from the guardian[0]. The fires were jumping 20kms or more at a stretch. If look down to the snowy mountains map, you can see where a strong change in wind sent ember attacks to every ridge line over successive days. Unless your fire break clears every ridge you can't stop these kind of fires.

Also, since all the misinformation last year in Australia in the msm about lack of back burning and arson being the major causes of fires. I can't speak to the experience in calu, but we have now found that back burning had actually increased 10 fold before the fires from the previous 10 year period, but suitable conditions for back burning had also decreased by more than a third. Lightning strikes were responsible for most bushfires, with only about 1-3% being deliberately lit. Hell, in the midst of the firestorms, the sudden updraft of smoke and ash into the atmosphere was creating it's own mini weather events including more lightning.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/nov/21/how-au...
Came here to say the same, Cuelang is by far the best config system and paradigm I have tried. All else seems so last century, though Cuelang has its foundation in NLP systems from last century :]
Unfortunately this didn't work for me because it meant I would just sleep 20 hours a day of weekends and essentially didn't have a weekend
This study was not about an immigrant population: "we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual..."
I bet you can build an antenna on / near Earth large enough to pick up the Voyager's signal at 4 light years. I don't think that a star emits much radio waves at the same frequently range you choose for your radio transmission, and especially has the same modulation side bands.

That said, MW-class radio transmittets are not heavy, their cooling systems are. You also don't need to transmit continuously, you can send bursts as long as your thermal budget allows. For energy, you have unlimited sunlight.
There are easy connect PTO couplers. Of course you have to buy (and attach) adapters for all your gear, but it might be worth it to you.
Thank you very much. You're right!
I hope this post will help some folks with chronic illness.
I’ve seen #2 happen once or twice but never did figure out exactly what the person who generated the duplicate commits had done. I suspect that they made some mistakes while rebasing a feature branch.
Enzymes don't eat they accelerate. Enzymes lower the amount of energy that must be put in for a specific reaction to begin.
Why is California becoming so radicalized? It seems like almost every week we hear about some insanity that keeps driving business and people away from the state.
"Therefore, unlike in previous studies, the researchers established a bilingualism gradient: from people who speak only one language but are passively exposed to another, to individuals who have excellent proficiency in both and use them indiscriminately on a day-to-day basis. To create this gradient, several variables were taken into account, including the age of acquisition of the second language, the use made of each language, and switching between languages in the same context."
https://reelgood.com/

You tell what you subscribe to, and it'll search all the catalogs at once.
Regal, Cineworld to close all theaters in US and UK next week
Ask HN: Would you take the equivalent of a Thiel Fellowship for CS?
Idea is to fund 10 students $100K for 3 years to study computer science. You would live in Palo Alto near Stanford. You would have mentors from tech companies and professors in the area. The majority of the learning would be independent and project based.
The difference is that none of the above examples actually process real image input - the Cartucho app utilizes stereo cam images.
I can't imagine that the MTC has the legal authority to do something like that.
Waste of time video . . .
Also per the Chronicle article linked above:
"The Plan Bay Area Blueprint for 2050 was shaped by online public feedback this year during the coronavirus pandemic. The plan is expected to be adopted by next summer, but any legal mandates on remote work would require future legislation."
Intresting, any success story yet? How many readers are there?
I never understood this logic. Outsourcing energy, building materials, and food production doesn't absolve a metro of it's climate impact.
This study tries to explain why "some studies have failed to show this bilingual advantage, suggesting that it might depend on the type and degree of bilingualism", by laying out evidence for the "type and degree of bilingualism.

Here are the facts that the article established:

- Lifelong degree of bilingualism predicts delay in age of onset for all clinical measure of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI).

- This is NOT true for Alzheimer's Disease patients.

- This prediction was independent of occupation, education, and job attainment.

The second bullet point isn't properly emphasized in the article, but it's directly from the abstract.

The researcher has a hypothesis that multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve [1], and, and Cognitive Reserve has already been established to have an effect on the timeline of Alzheimer's disease related pathology. [2]

That being said, it's also true that "AD is the most common etiology of MCI and mild dementia" [3], and the researcher has a hypothesis that the multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve.

Based on the existing hypothesis of how CR and AD interact, the lack of correlation in AD patients could make sense, and should not be seen as counter-evidence to the bilingualism increases CR hypothesis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reserve

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3507991/#S2titl...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4185370/#S5titl...
I imagine it would be a lot easier to assemble on something you can stand on and mine from, right?

Only an amateur here, but I see James Webb many years and billions overdue and wonder if it wouldn’t be easier, cheaper, faster on ground.
Alternatively, find successful startups and find who coded their MVP or whatever they started with, and see which type of dev has more success.

I'm guessing the results won't be as lopsided and "profound."

Correctness, quality, speed are not always defining metrics (and sometimes they definitely are!).
Wishful thinking buddy.

It already happened so many times for so many media formats that it /will/ happen with Spotify. Unfortunately for both of us, downvoting some random post online won't change this outcome.

Cheers!
It's not about knowing more languages (I would be surprised to learn that they only knew two, after all it's Europe). This paper instead studies differences between people who actually use multiple languages, against people who don't.

There's still corellation here, like professions where the lingua franca isn't the local language (programming, medicine, music (to some degree), sciences, etc). The paper claims the effect appears equally strong in all occupations though.
Care to share any of the stories? I think you'll find a receptive audience :)
To be clear: the scenario outlined above is one where I'm filing a bug report against a software project that I do not use and do not ever intend to use.

I think your premise is specious. Who files detailed bug reports on a piece of software that they have never and will never use?

What is the scenario where someone would bother doing this?

What is the scenario where they even have the knowledge to file this detailed bug report since they lack any context on the software in question?
By exporting a lot of industry, we pollute more, just other people's water.
Software has a lot more abstractions these days. Almost no one codes close to the ISA. I don’t think it’s as much of an issue as it was.
What about a small industrial society?
May I ask what apps are both of you using?
Yes. I lived on a farm for a couple years recently and you had to extensively research any tech you bought even if logic said there’s no reason that particular tech should need internet. The TV we took with us no longer worked (Samsung) so we had to buy a Sony (and have never looked back), among other things.

Also, software. Half the software on our computers stopped working despite not being internet related.

It was incredibly frustrating and really soured me on the direction tech is headed.
Location: California

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: SQL, Python, R, Microsoft Excel, SAP, SPSS Statistics

Résumé/CV: https://bit.ly/3jsSGKZ

Email: shahnikita35[at]gmail.com

Recent college graduate interested in entry level roles ranging from Data Analyst, Junior Data Engineer, Database Administrator, Business Analyst, System Analyst, Big Data Engineer (ETL pipelines)
Mainstream science largely resembles a secular theology. 'Observations' are the deity, scientists are the 'authoritative interpreters' of the sacred insights for the faithful. The inquisitions are less physically violent; only careers die.

Paul Feyerabend was a very likeable guy.
Freelancing Platforms
> There are some projects I've submitted issues for without such excessively fluffy language, and the maintainer has responded very negatively.

You are only responsible for what you say and do, not how someone else chooses to react. If you provide a bug report in good faith, and don't act entitled or snotty, you've done your part, and have behaved within the terms of the implied social contract. If the maintainer chooses to react in an unwarranted manner, that's on them, and I think that sort of bad behavior should be exposed for others to see.

Personally, as a maintainer, I find that unnecessary fluffy language makes it harder to get to the meat of the problem, and it annoys me. If you're risking a bad reaction either way, why not choose the way that's objectively the most helpful?
Not possible. Tetrachromates have to have two X chromosomes, which means that almost all tetrachromates are women. In rare cases, a man can have two X chromosomes, but I'm definitely one of them.
I would hazard to say that any magic is bad in engineering. (Sorry Perl fans!)
I feel like india needs to sort out abject poverty, lack of sanitation and rampant discrimination before moving on to government mandated spy apps. This is yet another example of that country’s government giving the impression of a democracy working for the greater good when tens of millions of people suffer. Pretty disgusting.
You want XML from 15 years ago? Yes, me too. Schemas and includes.
XInclude works pretty well.