skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is one area where legal theory is not up to date with how society interacts with technology.

For example, I strongly believe that Internet should be considered something akin to a utility, because it's such an integral part of our lives. If an ISP were allowed to filter the internet however it pleased, it could have a substantial impact on our personal freedom.

Same goes for smartphones. Given that there's only two realistic choices, the Apple/Google duopoly means there are real restrictions on what kinds of apps/services you're allowed to access. Yes Google allows you to sideload apps, but if you use the same arguments about "they built the platform, they can charge/restrict whatever they want" that people use for Apple, what happens if Google takes that away and you're left with no real choice?

I would have a hard time defining a legal principle of which industries are so critical that they deserve regulation, but I would say there's definitely an argument for applying it to smartphones, and less for something like game consoles. Ultimately it comes down to political discussions to decide what is worthy of regulation; over time, we've decided that things like transportation, finance, communications, food, medicine, and so forth require regulation, while other areas are very loosely regulated if at all.
USA perspective

In my country for 100K USD/month you could get like 10-15 very highly skilled and experienced people
> In this case, Lucas Arts is equivalent to the mob and is forcing someone to pay money for their book?

Absolutely. If you pay attention to the beginning of every Disney/Lucas Arts movie, they all start with the threat of violence (proof: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/L3OPoOUMQ2M/hqdefault.jpg). And those aren't baseball bats the FBI carries around in their holsters.

> But what if they just stopped paying you while you were still working there?

I would stop working there. Many years ago I was a contractor and that happened with a client every now and again.

> Do you have a problem with an author writing a book and then selling the book?

Nope, no problems with an author writing a book, getting paid to write a book, or giving a book they've written to someone in return for cash. I have a problem with an author expecting "royalties" via an "Imaginary Property Law" scheme enforced by violence.
Yeah. Every time I hear someone blamed for bad parenting, I think about how Abraham Lincoln's father used to beat him for reading. Let's all try to raise little Lincolns, then?
Have you thought of being a startup ceo?
I cannot reply to your lower-level comment at the max nest level, but I disagree with you about https.

The contents of the https transaction is not available to the CA.

The data is not available for snooping for intermediaries.

And tampering, while it seems like a silly check, is actually done almost casually by ISPs for a variety of reasons. They will insert executable code into a HTTP reply.

In other words, preventing HTTPS might support the subjugation of your users by others.

Sounds silly but once RMS said "proprietary software subjugates people" and it sounded like weird over-the-top political rhetoric when I heard it. But over time I notice that indeed subjugation is a huge part of our use of computers
Interesting. Overall, I agree with everyone else - Affirm looks like a healthy company.

Major takeaways:

1.5% write-off rate for their jan 2020 vintage is very healthy - comparable to the long-term trend for unsecured superprime consumer debt. Given the (I suspect) lower average creditworthiness of Affirm customers, this is a great number. I'd be curious to see their long-term trend for same-age vintages, however. In consumer credit it's well known that all the stimulus support in 2020 has significantly depressed defaults. It would be interesting to see if this is a fluke, or if this is actually what their charge-off rate actually looks like in a normal environment/part of a bigger trend.

I'm a little skeptical of their claim to use ML & build a data moat for significantly better underwriting decisions. Consumer credit laws in the US so severely restrict what you can use for credit scoring purposes that better underwriting through data is basically a lost cause, absent some specific customer segment that has special credit situations.

Finally, as others have noted, 30% of revenue just from Peloton is an enormous number.
And her mom is a hair stylist, cook, and seamstress.
I guess I don't have to feel bad about republishing Disney's IP now. After all, I purchased it from a retailer intermediary and have no contractual relationship with the original publisher.
Stanford rushes to comply with Trump executive order limiting diversity training
Autotune works by resampling and doing time stretching (not sure if in the time or frequency domain, depends on the technology; there are many variant ways of doing this) in order to decouple pitch and duration to make adjustments, so it doesn't break harmonic relationships.

Audio time stretching (or equivalently, changing the pitch without changing time) is not a clearly defined process with a mathematical description (unlike plain resampling or modulation) but rather a semi-heuristic process that takes into account psychoacoustics. But yes, in practice, for small adjustments of a monophonic sample like a voice, modern algorithms sound really good.
My argument is for interoperability and better 3rd party access to APIs within the OS.

My argument is not that Android doesn't function as well, I quite liked it infact but all my other apple devices basically lost half their functionality without an iPhone and Apple won't give access to 3rd party developers or itself make those apps for Android.

Apple won't even let 3rd party apps integrate with the system like their own do - which is why I wanted to shift away from an iPhone in the first place. Not because I hate or like Android, but because I can replace whatever parts of Google I don't like
Harrari’s Big Mistake
Oculus is an extremely niche product, barely out of the experimental stage.

Can you point to cases where people have been locked out of their Android phones?

If so, I’m surprised lawyers aren’t involved.

It’s not clear though, what this has to do with app stores.

If we think companies shouldn’t be able to lock us out of their products for speech violations, that seems like an important consumer protection that should apply to all companies.
Gatekeeper-by-default is sensible IMO. I've seen how some people interact with these devices, and how easily malware gets on a computer.

As long as the walled garden can be easily circumvented, advanced users can do what they wish. "Able to learn about Gatekeeper and decide if they should turn it off" is probably an okay heuristic for "can tell a fake Flash installer site apart from a real one" or even "knows that Flash is pretty much abandoned, do everything you can to avoid it".

That said, it absolutely changes the incentive structures, and Apple is also doing it for profit. Will they cross the line in the future, with this goal? I expect they will conclude losing the advanced users would be a net loss.
Hello! We're a few quantitative investing professionals and software engineers on a mission to lower the still-massive barriers to algo-trading.

No need to code, no need to spend hours researching financial theory or sift through research papers, just choose from our catalogue of professionally-built algo-traders, test them, tweak them, see what other users have to say about them, and run them with as little as $1!

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Ironically enough, that too is now owned by Disney.
From a quick glimpse, the business model of Affirm seems to be about letting people get loans for things they would previously have to save for. In other words:

Before: Alice wants to buy a chair that costs $100 from Bob. Alice saves $10 a month and buys a chair. Bob got $100. Alice can buy a new chair every 10 months. She may also conclude after 10 months, that she doesn't want the chair that badly, and would instead save the $100 for retirement, or pay it into the house mortgage, reducing the amortization by a week.

Now: Alice wants to buy a chair from Bob. She gets a loan, paying $10 over 12 months. Bob gets $100, Affirm gets $20. Alice can now buy a chair every 12 months. Affirm's founder buys a supercar.

Slightly later: Alice's job gets cut due to COVID. She can now only pay $5/month. She gets a $100 stimulus check, but instead of paying off the chair, she buys Affirm stock and remortgages the chair to 24 months. Now Affirm gets $40 in interest and $100 in fed money routed through Alice.

Net effect: Alice's purchasing power has reduced 2.4 times, Affirm's founder buys 50 new yachts and starts a company that lets people get loans to buy food.
> Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app.

And the marginal cost of copies of software is nearly zero, and yet developers still want to get paid, no?

> Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created.

The important bit is they created it. And the barrier exists because things are better inside than outside. They made the iPhone, got people to add their card info and normalized paying actual money for 0s and 1s. The BATNA for developers is not "Apple opens their platform", it's "try getting customers to hand you CC info to buy your app on the WWW".
Additional vote for Firefox. Lately it's been less buggy for me than Chrome even.
We're work in quantitative investing and software engineering :)
They can pay a human to update their web stack instead? Seems more efficient.
Of course there is an alternative. Android.
It is if the contract says he’s owed royalties on those works, as it is presented. I can’t imagine he’d have done the work pro Bono for Lucasfilm out of the kindness of his heart, do you?

The reasonable interpretation is that someone at Disney is attempting to shore up their revenue this year and is using Mr. Foster’s due proceeds as a way to attempt to make their balance sheet look better.
So much wrong here.

The party of Lincoln, in the last 4 years has:

- Given record funding to historically Black colleges

- Seen record low unemployment for Blacks and Hispanics

- Pushed through judicial reform

Etc. There is good to be seen, if it is critically examined.
>I can't tell you what the Librem 5 is really like, because they haven't shipped mine yet, but the PP is very, very nice.

I guess my question is: can you use the PinePhone (or Librem 5) as a phone? Can you reliably make and receive calls? Can you reliably send/receive SMS and MMS? Does it have error recovery if for some reason you don't get a message? Does the battery last for a reasonable day (>= 16 hours)? What networks are compatible, and do they work with MVNOs and not just the big boys?

I've used SailfishOS in the past and enjoyed it—and would've continued using it, but my phone died and I bought a KaiOS burner and never updated. I've toyed with the idea of picking up a PinePhone because it's more within my budget; but I want my phone to, you know, be a phone—not (just) a miniature computer that fits in my pocket. I have a fairly high pain tolerance (Sailfish wasn't exactly polished the way I wanted), but if I can't make or receive calls or SMS/MMS, that's a serious problem whether I can run Blender on it or not.
(()=>document.body.innerText.split('\n')[0])()
Why are ‘normal text messages’ somehow a big deal?
> I'm really curious about the reason why MMS is a thing in North America

Everyone on almost every phone has MMS, no matter what else they might have. It's the common language.
The business of Amazon has changed greatly since Bezos last packed a book.

I'm not here to tell him how to run his business, but let's not pretend he would be happy to work in his warehouse.
Don't you have to boot into developer mode on Xbox to run sideloaded apps? AFAIK you also can't access any store titles when in dev mode either. And UWP apps don't get access to the full power of the console, they run under the system OS.
Expand on drivers of serum cholesterol please...
Most ML models can be shrunk at the cost of some accuracy, but some models are extremely large.
Some years ago a relative of mine was hired to be a Regional VP for a very large restaurant chain. As part of that training he had to spend literally weeks of time learning the basics in each role in a restaurant, from waiting tables to cook, to (end-user) cleaning & maintenance of equipment, assistant manager, general manager, regional manager, to their position.

I've always thought that was a fantastic form of training, and spoke strongly to the fact that the chain has been around since WW II.
Not all roles/companies are covered by SoX so a blanket dismissal of the idea is not helpful to the discussion.
Call me old, but I can't understand how people can sit in the most uncomfortable chairs for hours, tilting my head and neck down towards my laptop.

A workday at Starbucks would cause me head and shoulder pain for days.
It’s their prerogative to force the issue. Switch to Android if they won’t listen to petitions.
Legit question: Why are these still called "GPU"s? Shouldn't they rightly be called "AIPU"s, or "IPU"s?
Let's say I'm a private individual who thinks the world would love a book on robot kittens. The author I want to write the book says she will do it for $1M. But I don't have $1M to pay her. So we both agree that I will pay her some lesser amount, say $100,000, and then give her $1 for every book I sell. She's hoping I will sell more than 900,000 books, and I'm also hoping that. What exactly is unethical about that? How is that any less ethical than an author selling their own book directly, or selling their book wholesale to some other party (who then sells the book)?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can't do the work for a week because they aren't the right skill to do the work?

I don't have a ton of experience with SoX compliance specifically.
>> but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.

Yeah I think you're right. VOIP and landline and probably one and the same these days, and as long as whatever voice application you use doesn't use excessive compression or any added complexity, or route you halfway around the world, you've prob got landline quality.
Budget 'windfall' in California as economy weathers virus
Just going to set up a double Irish with a Caiman sandwich to avoid paying any taxes.
> “The Fall of the House of User,”

Sorry for bringing it up, but is that a typo in the description?
That PIA blog post is not exactly high quality.

> Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist.

There's some truth here, but it's presented in a shoddy way. Yes, KrF (Christian People's Party) has at various times made noises about pornography DNS filters. I don't recall all the specifics, but various proposals have included opt-out DNS filter and/or filters in schools and such. While I don't support these proposals, I think the language used really exaggerates the reality (and few or none of these measures have ever gained much headway, either at the national or local level)

> If you read the Norwegian Christian paper, though, it is expressing itself very positively toward this censorship (which is somewhat weird for a newspaper, any newspaper – those generally oppose censorship vehemently and defend any and all freedom of the press).

They really dug deep on this one. The paper in question (Dagen) has a circulation of slightly over 10,000. That's not even among the top 20 in the country [1]. I'd be skeptical of assigning much weight to their coverage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway
I mean that mac hardware is terrible for video games in general, and that at some $1.5-$3k avg price tag, "Macs" (in the hardware sense) are almost always outclassed by PCs (in the hardware sense) that are less than half their cost.

The OP commented games were "always available through bootcamp or emulation", which is true of a Windows-only game running on your Mac hardware via Bootbamp/Parallels... my point is, Macs provide a sub-par, no good, very little fun experience for anything but the simplest of games.

And before I sound like a typical PC bro, this line of thinking is coming from someone who has exclusively owned about a dozen Macs starting with the iBook Clamshell, and only recently built my first gaming PC during COVID. I'd never try to play a game on a Mac again lol
> The amplification gives rise to a "partner wave", which carries negative energy and passes through the event horizon, where it remains trapped, reducing the total energy of the black hole

Is that the same kind of negative energy that comes up in talk of stabilizing wormholes and building Alcubierre drives?
looking at the PinePhone today, I've seen a few reviews and the subreddit

the impression I'm getting is that it's pretty buggy right now, although I'm okay with some hiccups. I wonder what's the best way to go around it, best practices etc, how to go about troubleshooting as well...

despite these problems, I'm tempted

EDIT: I do think though that having a totally open platform without a reference OS image is too ambitious. Even with flagship hardware, companies prepare images with hundreds of little workarounds and stability-related choices. This makes mobile hardware look a lot more polished and solid than it really is... those components are being shipped with a tonne of bugs generally as the cycles are so short and unforgiving, anything that can be patched up at the OEM level, pretty much is
DuckDB vs. SQLite Quick Comparison
Seems like it should be TRIVIAL; (if backed up by legal authority of governments - and that's the REAL trick) - to cause all claims to be properly categorized.

Either something is OPINION, or it's FACT. And anything that is Factual, could have the privilege to be labeled as such. Things that are proven not-true or misinformation, or unsupported - they could be permanently labelled "bullshit" and why the hell can't we do this?

Because people will skirt the system. Unless we have a government that supports rule of law.
As a AmEng speaker, I think of "having a moment" as being a fairly recent idiom, maybe from the past decade or so. My personal classification of it is that it's used by the same generation that uses "bae", "cray", "totes", "YOLO", and terms of similar vintage.

I have no idea if that's true or I'm just out of touch, but that's my impression of the phrase. Basically I feel like I tend to see it in titles of thinkpieces about newly popular things from people who are around 30.
This isn’t a problem, it’s just reality. An app dev needs to support the platforms. You are still free to use something else.
Ironically there is evidence that diversity training is counterproductive and creates resentment, so Trump is probably having the opposite effect of what he intends here.
In a similar vein, private equity firms seem to be able to execute leveraged buyouts of companies (such as Toys R Us) saddling the company with huge debt payable to the private equity firm, which sucks money out of the company until it files for bankruptcy.

It sounds like a scam but apparently it is legal somehow.
Could you explain the use case? I don't understand how a video form field would work. Is it a specific field for uploading videos?
some find that as a perk.
I believe you have confused training and inference.

Training usually uses large amounts of data to get your system to recognize a pattern. It generally uses huge memory and compute and generates a model.

Inference will use that generated model to recognize the pattern in new data. It uses significantly fewer resources and can run either very fast or on a smaller system.

I believe the speed of inference may be affected by the resources available during training, where more speed/memory for training can produce better models.
Not inconceivable, but a third party is unlikely to be able to garner the involvement of the SFWA or as much public sympathy. The discount is probably below what he can recoup himself.

Heck, it’s not inconceivable that the other entertainment unions take an interest in this case. They presumably have a pretty deep interest in Disney not messing with artist royalties
In this post-Snowden revelations world isn't it wise to assume the NSA is spying on absolutely everything and everyone they possibly can with the goal of strategic, military and financial gain of the USA?

I mean.... that's their job, and we know they have the tools to do it.
I assume it won’t be long before there is a Samsung Galaxy mini.
Not being overly dependent on an outside provider? AFAIK, most traditional corporates using clouds often use multiple cloud services of the same type from different providers.
I've spent a significant proportion of my career working on financial codebases that did serious number crunching in Java and were performance-bounded, and Java was still absolutely the correct choice for those codebases. So the idea that performance is irrelevant for those domains in cases where Java is a reasonable choice is completely wrong.

Having the programmer be personally responsible for memory safety doesn't work, we know that now. What spacecraft control software is written in isn't really C any more than typescript is javascript: yes, the final runtime artifact is in C, but the "source code" includes a lot of additional verification material without which it wouldn't be valid. As for operating system kernels, even Linux isn't written in C any more because C is too unsafe; rather it's written in an ad-hoc language that provides stronger safety guarantees (which it compiles by passing special parameters like -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks to GCC).
That report doesn’t address the censorship complaints at all.
I am in the same boat with a 2017 Macbook Pro that I bought in late 2018 :( It is the most expensive thing I've ever bought in my life. Apple is asking for 65% of the original price just to replace the display.
Really this is central to how the USA started, as there were several among the founding fathers who printed newsletters.
AM reception basically uses envelope tracking, so you don't really care about the carrier frequency. It's really just "how much power am I receiving". The tuning ends up defining the window of spectrum you average power over.

In the frequency domain, you could think of AM demodulation as computing the width (and phase!) between the carrier images on both sidebands. It doesn't matter if the signal is a bit off to the side, because the width will be the same. You have a mirror image which gives an absolute reference.

In the IQ domain, you look at the magnitude of the vectors, not their angle, so you don't care about the frequency.

In SSB you only have one sideband, and often no carrier at all, so there is no reference. You need to nail the frequency to get a proper signal out. And even then AIUI your phases will be random, though that doesn't matter for audio.
"On my models currently in test, it’s like using a 1080 or 1080 TI."
https://twitter.com/spurpura/status/1329168059647488000

That's amazing.
The DOJ has approved MasterCard’s acquisition of Finicity
@wenbin what do you think about adding the ability to comment at specific portions of at podcast (in the player obviously) similar to soundcloud (assuming there's no patent issues).
The OP is talking about posting comments, not viewing them.