skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, this mostly tracks with what 538 has said on record about how their model works and the design philosophy behind parts of it. To me, what Nate means when he says "directionally the right approach in terms of our model's takeaways" is that these sorts of wild and unintuitive outcomes are part of the point of the way the model is constructed.

Specifically, that when you get off into the weird situations like Trump winning Washington state, it's likely something incredibly weird has happened - something that likely has no historical precedent, so it may actually be a more sane thing to do to assume that now almost everything is backwards and Biden would win a bunch of states he shouldn't either.

To me, this points to a general willingness in the 538 model to just go "who knows" and build in some room for insane things to happen on the fringes. The Friday podcast episode about the 538 model specifically mentions that they have large/fat tails on their distribution that make it nearly impossible for someone to get over 95% chances of winning on a national level, and these sorts of wild results seem like the outcome of that. If you bake in an assumption that there's always a 5% chance of something crazy happening, that chance has to come from something in the data somewhere that reflects the ability of that to happen numerically, and thus will have numerical outcomes that seem impossible.
> I’d think that if Trump were to win New Jersey or, even more so, California, that this would most likely happen only as part of a national landslide of the sort envisioned by Scott Adams or whatever.

That's a valid intuition to have but you can also clearly make the argument that if Trump wins California you're in such a weird scenario that using the traditional wisdom about correlation is dangerous. The point that 538 have tried repeatedly to make is that firstly: if you're conservative in your level of confidence you'll give a higher likelihood to outliers, and secondly: It's not particularly useful to focus on whether X has a 3% or 4% chance.

If Trump wins California, we aren't going to be talking about whether the chance was 3% or 0.3% we're going to be talking about that Nuclear explosion that wiped out 25million Californians.

For the same logic the reason that Trump winning Alaska given winning New Jersey is lower than given losing New Jersy is because your sample size is rubbish. The chance of Trump winning Alaska given losing New Jersey is an accurate number, the number of Trump winning Alaska given winning New Jersey is like saying "How likely is it Trump wins Alaska given the UK gains US statehood" it's like.... well... if that happens then we're so far outside of what the model thinks can happen then you should be that we're just gonna say it's 50:50 - because who the hell knows.

It's not like saying "Oh well if X swing state goes blue, Y will probably follow", the scenarios in this article are so bizarre that the model should rightly be very cautious and probably default to either refusing to give an answer or just default to 50:50 or the same probably ignoring that data. The implicit bias in this analysis seems to be that if NJ went Red that would be because Trump won by a big margin, but that's not a likely enough scenario to actually get numbers for, and is so unlikely that things like "The supreme court threw out all the ballots for inner city areas" start to become valid possibilities.
But the media is not Nate Silver. He said Trump had about as much chance of winning as the Cubs had that year of wining the World Series, and obviously both happened.

Silver did a nice writeup of the whole experience: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/
Ask HN: Any real world protests over the RIAA YouTube-dl takedown?
Pretty much as the title states. Would people be interested in organized protests(COVID allowing)?
If real world protests are not an option what else can be done?
>Go makes arbitrarily large codebases feasible

For me, this is the consequence of a reasonable static type system. Without generics and the current error handling story, it almost feels like Go makes large codebases necessary in the projects I've used it, compared to other statically typed languages such as Kotlin, Java, Rust, and C#.

Go 2 on the other hand looks like it will solve this problem, and I eagerly await its release.
I like Java on the backend. I use Jetty/Cometd without Spring or frameworks.

I'm skeptical of how efficient transpiled code will be for WebGL/Canvas apps like games. For other types of content, there's no need.
> anyone paying attention to the Rust Belt ±1980-2016 would have dramatically upped Trump's chances in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

There was a very decent chance that Clinton could have won in 2016 (if any factor had gone slightly better for her), and if that had happened, nobody would be saying this now. This is literal hindsight bias.
Ok, so does the standard body plan on incorporating those extensions into the main standard at some point?
I'm not trying to get points, or keep points. I'm just trying to point out that the models are not going to work this year and its crazy to assume they will.
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Propane weed torch is another good non-chemical solution that might be appealing to some depending on nest location.
I'm glad it enables other folks to build such great tools with it, but I don't think I'd pick it for my own projects or prefer to code in it at work. For the clever stuff they picked up from ConcurrentML (channels), they treat the user (developer) like an idiot due to having to spell out everything in great deal compared to languages that have a better type system.

It's good to get a lot of programmers onboard at Google who may have never written a line of C or C++ in their life. Coming from Java or Python, I can see the proposition of a language like Go. As in those languages, Go doesn't have myriad points of "unwritten code", e.g. having to worry about lifetimes of objects, the "rule of 5/6" for autogenerated methods (and knowing when the compiler generates some and not others) in C++. It's all there in the code with great verbosity.

I think people complain about Go because it's not the hammer for their nail. It's not for folks working with a team of moderate to elite-level C++ or Haskell folks who enjoy writing "beautiful code". It's for a company with an army of developers of varying degrees of skill who all have to maintain the same codebase without exploring the dark arts of the C++ abstract machine, and to do it in a much faster language than Java.

Like Java, it's driven primarily by business decisions for application software that needs to support all sorts of developers for server-side applications. It's very good at that. It's just that playing to that lowest common denominator creates an unpleasant experience for folks who want a more expressive language.
Wait, they destroyed Mitch McConnell's office? That's great news!
Yes, which is why it’s foolish to talk about the outcome of that single race. You are right that there will never be another 2016 election between Clinton and Trump. However, that is only one of hundreds of forecasts made by 538 across multiple election cycles, so we can see how often their probabilistic outcomes align with actual outcomes. The fact that their track record is fairly good across all of these is evidence suggesting that Trump’s win may be more likely to be the realization of a less likely outcome predicted by their model, rather than a fundamental problem of their model itself.
At the end of the 2016 election, Donald Trump had a predicted 1/4 chance of winning the presidency. Does this seem like a massive debacle that Trump won under these conditions? Not to me.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
I disagree with webinars being a necessary product for a Zoom competitor. It feels like a necessary feature for a different, only partially overlapping market. As I remember it, Zoom has Webinars as an optional paid extra on top of its professional accounts.

Forcing mute (and ideally video off) on participants is a pretty easy feature to code for someone like Google and their google meet does seem to support 50+ users. It doesn't have green screen, but it does have background blur, which I would expect to be the same.
I know people that have moved, but forgot to register. Its a fact of life that voter registration will take the back seat when managing more complicated things in life - like a move
Thing is, I'm not advocating for performance over functionality or premature optimisation. We're talking about text editors here, as an industry we've done this before, we can write a fast cross-platform text editor, it feels like we've either forgotten this or don't care.
The lack of algebraic data types makes it hard to use, as opposed to other languages. Even Python now has ADTs with type hinting and Microsoft's Pylance language server in VSCode.
It doesn't matter whether I, personally, am aware of this. It matters whether the organizations with whom the acquired entity did business are aware of it. It's the responsibility of the acquiring entity to keep those parties informed. And since some of these parties publish public information, it seems logical that we would be able to determine such acquisitions by looking at their public records.
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Thanks for sharing your perspective as an Iranian, I find it quite interesting.

I'm curious if:

1) you still live in Iran and/or have immediate family who do?

2) is your opinion common amongst Iranians (and/or Persians)?

3) do/would you still feel the same way if the sanctions brought extreme economic hardship on the people of Iran?

(Considering your remark about North Korea, I'm assuming the answer to the latter is "yes".)
That's not how it works. If not for all the investment Apple did on their platform, it wouldn't be worth $8-12B from Google in the first place.
Thanks for the pointer. A direct link (not going thru pinterest) is:

https://vividmaps.com/global-rat-distribution-map/

Vividmaps.com is a great site.
Been ideating on this for a long time, it's great to see you put together a platform that captures this deep inefficiency in the market. I would say to go after youtubers as brands like Gymshark did, the music space will always make it difficult for you to extract value for your company if you're touching major label content. Congrats on launch!
Right, but if you were to test for "successful interpersonal relations" you would inevitably produce something culture bound.

There was that time my wife and I got from the airport to the mountains in the Dominican Republic with instructions to use various forms of transport I'd never heard of, ran away from motorcycle taxis, shook hands with a police officer (along with everyone on the bus), walked into what we thought was a bus stop but was really a sports betting establishment, and caught the last bus to Ocoa which was a good thing because the only Spanish I knew I learned from reading half of Don Quixote and shopping at Home Depot -- it would have been awkward to find a hotel and regroup the next day.

A person working across a cultural barrier to do a more complex task over a longer time has similar 'knife edges' to performance which will make everything fraught.

See also

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

"Based on publicly available government statistics, Asian Americans have the lowest chance of rising to management when compared with African Americans, Hispanics and women in spite of having the highest educational attainment."
I’m interested in learning more about Ruby’s garbage collection issues. Could you recommend any resources on this? Or any tools in the Ruby language that would allow me to test this myself?
Navigational Instruments
I suppose you meant that election forecasters don't claim election forecasting is a science, not 'no one.' I don't mean to quibble, this meaning was not at all clear in your original comment, nor did I expect that meaning from the context of the comment you responded to.
What many don't seem to understand about Crimea, is that Crimea is an occupied territory of Ukraine [0] (as understood by UN, as well as most countries except the Russian Federation and several of its affiliated states).

As an occupied territory, it doesn't have any legitimate institutions (such as a recognised government, banks, courts, etc.) — only a foreign occupation regime. Same way as Germany's Reichskommissariats and Reichprotektorats during WW2 were never legitimate entities despite being de facto governed by Germany.

This means than no contract (private or public) with a Crimean entity can be internationally recognised and will be easily contested by any court/arbitrage outside of the RF.

In addition to this, there's a moral concern of giving legitimacy to a foreign occupation. There's just no way to justify this unless one supports the mentioned occupation, with following systemic abuse of human rights, change of ethnic composition and militarisation.

[0]: https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/71/205
Obviously? The disconnect is that you seem to think that we can draw conclusions from nonexistent benchmarks.
Sorry, bit misleading there - I meant the iOS LastPass app is better, not the "press here when entering a password" integration.
I find the bit about affixing a tracking devices to hornets with dental floss part of the amazing bit. Some seriously tiny radios these days.
It is worth noting that they explicitly aren't accounting for any election tampering/throwing out ballots in the model, so that final hypothetical isn't something they're factoring in. Your "an explosion kills everyone in LA" is closer to the sort of things that the model is "considering" in so much as a pile of statistical code has any understanding of what could happen in the real world to cause the outcome it's putting forward.
The fact that DDG is grossly inferior to Google is a pretty strong incentive.
The question is, "Do the creators of bibliotik have proper licenses to aggregate those books into a dataset?" The dataset is certainly a derived work.

Edit: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/humble_books_20180509/

Cue the "they're depriving me of my income" complaints from authors.
I have basically no background in the subject, but I'd be interested in your perspectives if you feel like answering any of these questions:

- What are the United States' goals with respect to Iran?

- What goals of Iran's are being hindered, objected to, or otherwise meddled with by the United States?

- In the end, dictators know that the Western block is finicky, unstable, and short-termish; This makes it so that high-pressure strategies do not work. Just to be sure I understand this, you're saying that because Western countries (Europe / the US) cannot maintain a consistent foreign policy, their targets (other countries) see the best strategy for dealing with moments of high pressure from the West as being "wait for the pressure to go away"?

- I do not know of a solution, frankly; Most of my peers see immigration as the only viable solution. Solution to what problem? Immigration of who, from where, to where?

Western democracies generally are very bad game-theoretic agents; They play repeated games as if they are oneshots.

I suspect term limits have a lot to do with this.
More and more, when looking for (open source) software solutions to adopt for my startup, Go as a development language is a deciding factor.

Go-based software is smaller, faster, easier to deploy, easier to update, easier to contribute to.

I find that the installation footprint of a Go-based service is usually in the 10s of megabytes or less, where the installation footprint of pretty much anything else starts in the hundreds of megabytes.

In the classic world of one or two servers for a small company, sure, the disk space is meaningless, but with containerized workloads, small images are great for quick deploy, and quick iteration.
> Also, if you get a Mount Tambora like episode, how do you think solar will fare in those conditions

Well, badly. How do you think nuclear would fare? History does not make one optimistic.
I found one surprise after another in

https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Federico_Faggin

That Intel had to be physically dragged into microprocessors was a revelation. If they had not had this side-project 8080 that they considered absolutely uninteresting, when the memory business collapsed, there would be no Intel, and Andy Grove would not have become a big cheese.

Also, that self-aligned gates, depletion loads, the 8008 and 8080 were all Faggin's projects.

It is an enduring mystery why the 8080 was designed into so many systems. It was such a bad component: it couldn't do anything without a bunch of other support chips from Intel. And the ISA was so bad: half the instructions in a program were just to correct for the other instructions that didn't do the right thing.

People insisted it was great that it had these support chips, that you didn't even need for other CPUs. I thought it was because Intel had sharper sales people, but apparently not. So it remains a mystery.
Aren't you doing the exact same thing that you're accusing me of?

My view is simple: the media completely, totally got 2016 wrong, mostly for sociological reasons. The people making the predictions simply had a huge blind spot. Brexit is another similar situation. The fact that Hillary almost won or Brexit almost didn't happen isn't really the point, because both things were never expected to be even remotely that close. Had the predictions been "Pennsylvania will be close", it would be relevant, but those weren't the predictions.
polls and votes don’t matter when one side controls faithless electors and the supreme court. none of these models are accounting for that black swan.
With W I assume you mean Wayland? You comment is confusing because the W Window System [1] is in fact the predecessor of X11 and that's what I thought you were referring to.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System
This is undoubtedly useful to know when playing around with different scenarios.

However, for my use of 538, I’m perfectly happy to ignore such scenarios (such as Trump taking New Jersey). I can call the election in his favour by myself in these scenarios without needing the model.
You started off by calling the 2016 prediction a debacle, but now you're saying you would have put the odds about 12 percentage points differently. That doesn't seem like a big enough disagreement to warrant the kind of vehement criticism you're throwing around.
> > "The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying."

> Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.

It is, because it is also a misstatement. The actual rule is "unit price will trend toward the marginal cost of an additional copy", but that elides a couple of caveats; first, this only holds true under conditions of a "perfectly competitive market"[0]; second, over a sufficiently long term ALL costs eventually become marginal costs[1].

[0] Suffice it to say that most businesses try to leverage or introduce imperfections in the market (aka "sustainable competitive advantage").

[1] Instead of thinking about the "sunk cost" of building a factory, consider the (eventual) marginal cost of building the next one.
Did you read the same page I did??

They specifically and directly claim that a cell phone kept in a bra causes breast cancer.
What does it mean to deserve something? Do short and tall people equally deserve to be in the NBA? Do slow and fast people equally deserve to run in the summer Olympics?

No amount of exercise will give me the garden hoses for veins that someone I know has, but I can still work to reach my own potential. Should I still be given a job that requires holding a jackhammer over my head for 8 hours a day because it's not fair?

Why is it socially acceptable to be taller or stronger or faster, but not to be smarter or more studious?
i’m not disagree with you, just pointing out that by that definition all companies above a certain size are bad
While on a zoom call this morning, I ran a continuous TCPDUMp to see what servers were being contacted; the majority of the traffic was sent to 193.122.212.125

Edit:
This IP is hosted by Oracle https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125
Reverse DNS for the IP is handled by oracle cloud.

Although zoom ostensibly has its headquarters in san jose, the code is developed 100% in mainland China. We should consider the face that the chinese military likely has access to MITM all zoom conversations on demand. I find the situation disquieting, but I am of two minds because I also feel almost the same level of distrust to facebook and whatsapp conversations.
I've definitely been around too many business people who want blockchains for no real particular reasons then to get onboard the "innovation".

Most of them just want a ledger. Blockchain is just used now as the "solution" to anyone that wants a ledger.

The issue is, in the financial world, it seems distributed ledger refers specifically to blockchains. So now there is no way to talk about a distributed ledger the way you'd describe a distributed system, that is, a database used as a ledger that is replicated accross site, but which is still owned by a single entity and administrator. And now people say they want a private blockchain, which is basically them saying they just want a normal ledger but they want the database to meet modern database standards of having multi-site replication.
Involvement of government is the distinguishing factor. Platforms can curate their content as an exercise of free speech; governments forcing their hand on particular issues is censorship.
I wonder if that is true for people who were also likely to vote? I know registering to vote was one of the first things I do whenever I move, and I've also voted in every election since I've been allowed to.
Kind if banal, but it just seems like internet forums and twitter now.
Have you used it lately?

It’s on par or better for 99% of what I use it for (tech, real estate, and advocacy).
A freedom that a large majority ignores, because they only see it as free beer.
Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? 12 billion might just be the cost of keeping them out of the search market.

It's not 2000 anymore. Building a web scale search engine no longer requires novel distributed systems work, and the most viable search algorithms have strong open source implementations. It's still a very hard problem to get right, but you can create an "interesting" poc in a few weeks. Recent work on unspervised content based recommenders can help reduce click stream data requirements.
5 years back it was China, when China was doing strongly in tech since 2010ish. Now that China has been barred, they're looking at the next billion person market. Or at least that's what I think it is.
I'm actually somewhat upset about this in my city. The fire department is driving these gigantic fire engines with ladders and everything to every medical emergency, when just a small van would be totally fine.
I think that is a pretty normal OSS situation though; there's a fairly small overlap between who care enough to play in the arms race for Tiktok videos and people who want to spend their time updating youtube-dl. Other sites were regularly updated, so it's just down to what individual maintainers have time and inclination for. Tiktok are pretty active in that arms race, I can only suppose most maintainers feel it's not worth a constant battle for Tiktok content.