skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey I'm all for making agriculture humane and to end needless suffering. I'm just saying there's got to be a point on the ethical scale where farmed animals are better off than they would have been in nature. I live around massive cattle operations, and they are absolutely in every way possible better off than a bison wondering the Serengeti. If only because they can drink water whenever they want and never fear a giant croc will drag them into the water to be drowned.

And yes, pig and chicken operations like that should be stopped.
The contradiction is your belief that the US way of doing things is bad, while enjoying stability and advancement given to you by the US.

If the US pulled out of the European Theatre and stopped "world policing" like many in the EU (and the US) would like, then it would not be long before most of the EU was speaking Mandarin or Russian, and the EU can not stand alone with out the US backing both Militarily and Economically

the "western-European nations." you wish me to compare the US to would fall in about 3 seconds with out US backing, and their Large State Welfare systems would collapse
Actually, it's more!

1,2,3,4,5,6 and 10,11,12,13,14,15 and even 2,4,6,8,10,12 would have had the same amount of attention and scruitny.

So "what are the odds that a sequence of numbers would come out that would look 'funny' to many people" is now not one out of n, it's several hundred out of n.
Fascinating. I'll do some research; appreciate the input.
To clarify slightly, LINZ is Land Information New Zealand, a government agency. They provide an enormous amount of map data on NZ under a creative commons license: vector data, address info, aerial photography (including multiple versions over time), satellite data, etc.
I'm sure you believe what you're saying. But, as pointed out in many posts here, very few people can setup Kubernetes, let alone know it enough for troubleshooting. As an example, in a project of mine we had to call-in an k8s expert after almost a week of downtime (turned out IP address space was exhausted on that Azure instance). And a constant in almost all recent projects of mine is sure people fiddling with k8s integration setups, and achieving very little.

In that kind of situation, it is unwise and irresponsible to treat your infrastructure as a black box. You still need to be able to re-build/migrate your images for security, stability, and feature upgrades, so you're basically just piling additional complexity on top.

The premise of Kubernetes and containers/clouds is an economical (and legitimate) rather than technical one: that you don't have to invest into hardware upfront, and pay as you go with PaaS instead. That tactic only works, though, as long as you have a strong negotiation position as customer. In practice, if you won't get locked-in to cloud providers by tying your k8s infra to IAM or other auth infrastructure, or mixing Kubernetes with non-Kubernetes SaaS such as DBs (which suck on k8s), then you still won't be able to practically move your workload setup elsewhere due to sheer complexity and risk/downtime.

The economical benefit is further offset by a wrong assumption that you need no or fewer admin staff for Docker ("DevOps" in an HR sense).
Not well. Those that can leave. Those who can't, grin and bear.
The glaring part to me is "without running it", since you can run it and still may never learn if it will ever finish.
I used repl.it when first learning Scheme years ago and remember it being okay. But after using emacs or Cursive, I couldn't imagine writing in a Lisp without being able to slurp/barf at the very least.
I'm similar to you but there are people who are very different. Psychopaths exist on the end of this spectrum but there are many people in between as it is a spectrum and can be measured physically and determined genetically. People not like us are much more common than you think.

I'd peg the number at 30-40% of people who are largely indifferent to murder and abide by the rules simply because of consequences society or habit. This is of course is just a anecdotal and hypothetical number.

The problem is when people judge humanity they instinctively reach for a mirror and believe that other people are a reflection. This is partly true but it causes people to miss many parts of the personality spectrum that are massively different.

Case in point:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...

The above is an example of a psychopath who probably would have lived his life as a normal person were it not for his occupation and a serendipitous brain scan.

You will note that he has confirmed psychopathy through genetic evaluation and physical evaluation of the structure of his brain.

Also just want to say that I lied. I'm not like you. I'm a bit lower on the spectrum. I won't murder someone but if a stranger dies in front of me, I won't care. I'll definitely try to help him, but I won't be having problems sleeping at night.
Few more generations with the new Moore's law, means a decade?
Unfortunately, that is wrong as well. Ships generally can support their own weight if only supported at the ends. Because waves exist a ship can find itself with the stern on one crest and the bow on the next with little or nothing supporting the middle. The under keel explosion works better because:

(1) The weight of the ship acts against the explosion increasing the initial stress

(2) The gas bubble created can vent straight up on a side explosion. Under the keel means it has to go through/around the ship increasing the stress.

(3) Since the explosion lifts the ship you're going to get significant additional damage when it crashes back down into the water.

(4) Like (2) as the gas bubble disperses water rushes back into the vacuum. All of this water coming back in will collide in the middle resulting in a geyser going straight up into the ship.
Launching Familio – From MVP to Public Launch
I built my own with a raspberry pi, touch screen, and tiny webserver (on Hetzner). It doesn't use voice. It works perfectly in the kitchen, and perfectly on my phone while shopping.

https://github.com/fredley/digital-black
I really hope you're not making an infrastructure cost argument here. Would be kind of laughable.
We did concierge onboarding and set up shared slack channels with many of our early teams. This made it really easy and expected to ask for more feedback and to have users give it proactively.

Community channels are key as you grow. Frankly this is an area where we've underinvested as we've been heads down building/shipping product and is going to be a huge area of focus for us in 2021. The job of the founder is to really to give people who love your product a venue to share their ideas, questions with other users. Customer advisory boards work well too.
What about people in the risk group(s) for vaccine side-effects? E.g., people with autoimmune issues. Does their safety matter less than yours? (Assuming you're advocating for vaccinating others; if you're just advocating for vaccinating yourself and yourself only, then carry on.)
So you learned this the hard way but you don't have any opinion on whether it's ethical?
Some theories I've heard from my learned South African colleagues is that this was possibly a computerised system's glitch.
Another risk factor that I doubt anyone is considering -- if the vaccine is rolled out and ends up not being effective (if vaccinated populations still die from covid at more or less same rate once the vaccinated population becomes sufficiently large) -- then this could lead to a real, long term, and very unfortunate surge in anti-vaxxers ability to persuade people not to take good vaccines that are proven to be effective ...

At the end of the day, a Smallpox pandemic in 10-20 years might end up killing more people than a premature covid vaccine saves ... No idea how you could quantify this risk though -- but seems unfortunate that medical science has no way to realistically factor in this kind of third order effect into their risk modeling ...
I have an autoimmune disease and I sit a lot. So I guess I will say no to the vaccine?
Realisticly, how many of the people working on Google Voice, Siri and Alexa do you think try to use their own service as much as possible day to day? Because just like you, I think it's evident they simply don't. They build for others, not for themselves, and they miss the point 50% of the time.

What we need are people building interfaces for themselves, not people building interface they think are good for others.
Was Oomba even supposed to be a real company?

The name sounds like it was trying to confuse people into thinking it was Ooma. (The phone services company?
Understanding Coronavirus in America
Fascinating. Do you have examples where someone thinks they're factory resetting an Android phone, but it turns out the device is still capable of a) running a corporate profile, and b) performing man-in-the-middle or any other attacks that "rooting" would allow? Or is this just a hypothetical?
Drifting Efficiently Through the Stratosphere Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
The “interesting number paradox.”[0] Basically, if one were to classify numbers into two categories: “interesting” and “uninteresting”, you’d end up with a contradiction as the smallest “uninteresting” number is itself “interesting” for being the smallest in the set.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
Out of curiosity, can you name the providers?
this is a feature, not a bug.
"Hey google, play five little monkeys ten thousand times on max volume and disable input"
> they don't seem to care

Maybe their lives are just not tethered to their phones. I use my phone for phone calls, texting, and maps/navigation. That's about it. It would be a bit inconvenient to lose my contact list without warning, but I export those periodically in case I lose my phone.
we are starting to and beginning to stack transistors on top of each other. It is a heat dissipation issue but it seems like we will be done.
Here in South Africa we have plenty of reasons to investigate the lottopreneurs looting the corrupt lottery: https://groundup.org.za/article/hawks-set-special-team-inves...

But I can assure you this is not fraud, because our fraudsters aren't dumb enough to pick sequential numbers and draw even more attention to themselves.
Preventing self-reference until instantiation resolves this paradox. Am I missing something?
Thanks Scott. I remember back to our convos in the Grain office from a year back that helped to inspire the structure of this post. Was cool to see you invest in it at Tipe and reap the rewards!
Ask HN: Are there any privacy drawbacks to storing encrypted files in the cloud?
So obviously storing sensitive data on someone else's computer is a bad idea, no matter how much they promise never to look at it.

However, as long as you encrypt the data BEFORE uploading it to a cloud storage provider (eg with rclone), and with a method that strips the metadata, would you still be practicing good opsec?
A link to the paper published to go with the blog post, "Autonomous navigation of stratospheric balloons using reinforcement learning":

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2939-8
This was a tool designed to notify employees of security alerts, not a chat app. These are not the same. It feels like people are being purposefully dense at this point.
The problem is IP can be stolen easily and leveraged very quickly.

Hard to steal a plant.
I agree with your points about what is and isn't "better", but that is not what I am arguing.

Are you saying there are no lessons the West can learn from China's infrastructure projects without resorting to authoritarianism, IP theft, or environmental harm? That there is no way to pick apart and separate some positive learnings from the negatives?

Are you saying THIS is the best we can do as a Western democracy?

https://torontolife.com/city/transportation/tortured-history...

To me, this kind of paralysis on infrastructure projects is not "better" by any definition you use. It's not an intentional tradeoff between infrastructure and environmental protection, or between public development and property rights. It's just indecision, waste, and stagnation.

Every time a comparison to China's infrastructure comes up, the knee jerk reaction is to point out that it's an authoritarian regime so of course they can force through any infrastructure project they want. Which is fair enough, but it drowns out any discussion asking "Hey, CAN we do any better in the West than we are doing right now? Is what we have good enough?"
A Japanese shop is 1,020 years old
If my company were hiring an SEO consultant I'd recommend you most strongly.
RNG doesn't do that. The probability is infinitesimal. It didn't happen by accident. Its fixed.

I can say that with something like 99.99999% confidence. Which doesn't mean "See it could happen!". It means "No its never gonna happen"
INAL but it is your right to illegally cross the border of a Geneva convention signatory country and seek an asylum. So no, not the same.
Right now all that ops stuff is a pain in the ass, and most everyone does it differently, and when you do do it, you get something that resembles a walled-garden social intra-net platform, but decentralized.

I strongly believe it can be cool to run systems again. And that we can be good at it. We are only just emerging operational paradigms that span multiple concerns, where-as historically the panolopy of concerns each needed their own daemon, their own configuration, their own tending, and there was no common operational paradigm. That, finally, is changing.

Still more fantasy than real but I do think we are starting to pave some of the cowpaths, & build a realistic, practical, well-trod path for running your own private cloud.

What remains is to make that fun. Pretend the ops box is ticked, what now? NextCloud is like the most advanced all-in-one suite you can do for yourself, and it's pretty cool, but it's still kind of this big monolithic jumble of PHP features. It's it's own point of of presence on the web, containing a lot of things. But I don't think it's enough.

ActivityPub & federation presents some good interesting grounds we can begin to inter-network on. But it's still just a start. Ultimately I think a lot of computing itself needs to be re-imagined to be networked-by-default, with good underlying general paradigms to build specific systems atop. We have a lot of exploration to go before we start to understand what that looks like. But, with good & sensible paths to home clouds (even just a raspberry pi), I think starting to make our personal computing also networked computing, & then internetworked computing, is what will topple the remote, far-off walled gardens that we commute to to compute on today.
CMS Launches Hospital-at-Home Strategy to Manage Latest Covid-19 Surge
The introduction frames the following translation as focusing on

> various “failures of democracy” that, if left unchecked, could lead to the weakening of the Chinese political system. Not only does his analysis argue the importance of having more senior officials rather than the rank-and-file party cadres select competent officials, but also serves as an implicit suggestion of the superiority of the Chinese system in contrast to western democratic systems.

I believe that is a misinterpretation caused by misunderstanding "failures of democracy" as referring to "failures of Western democracy". However, as an academic affiliated with the Central Party School, Wang Dongjing can safely be assumed to be using official terminology, in which China is defined as a democratic country. So all references to "democracy" in the article should be understood to refer to the system of leadership selection implemented in China. In particular, the "failures of democracy" he talks about are specifically "failures of leadership selection in China".

That is also very noticeable when he talks about the difference between "majority of the minority and the majority of the majority". In his example of minority selection, all 20 superior officials are corrupt, blocking the young official's promotion for not doing them a favor. Then later he says that "in our society, the good guys are in the majority and the bad guys are in the minority" and "if under the guidance of democratic centralism, we elect those who have the support of the majority of the people and entrust them with important tasks, then the bureaucratic culture will change greatly. In this way, there will be no market for those who are political ‘social climbers’, who only seek to curry favors with others but don’t seek to accomplish anything."

I.e. he is arguing explicitly against having senior officials decide on promotions and wants rank-and-file cadres to get a vote instead.

Just because he is affiliated with the Central Party School, it should not be assumed that he wants to paint a rosy picture of the government. On the contrary, it is kind of their raison d'être to be aware of the government's shortcomings, so that they can educate future cadres to improve the system. (Though I don't think posting such criticism publicly was part of the job description.)
How could this possibly pertain to the conversation you are responding to? Or do you just ask randos this question to make friends?
Kolmogorov complexity is one metric: what is the size of the smallest program that can produce the sequence?

(Note that Kolmogorov complexity is not generally computable, because you could solve the halting problem if you can compute it for all sequences).
I find it funny how people assert that she used it for her political "beliefs" (when the message was simply informing people of their rights) but seem to take at face value Google's assertion that they acted on this because she (ab)used the infrastructure, as opposed to what she used it for.
So I am not going to update my opinion, this was legal but morally dubious on Google's part. On her part it sucks but she easily could have avoided the situation.
I wish there was a cal sync different from mail and the rest. Having to login to a secure device to check meetings for the next morning in an annoying ritual.
I'm not the boss of you. If you want to spend 60 USD on a program that is mostly built into Finder and Nautilus, fill your boots.
I'm looking at the first 100,000 digits of pi. Lo and behold, 00000 shows up once. So does 11111. What are the odds of each of those happening? It's 1:100,000!

Absolutely astonishing.

As an aside, the inevitability of weird flukes in large sample sizes really sinks in if you've ever wasted part of a year multi-tabling online poker. You'll see some hands play out in totally WTF fashion, as 1:100 and 1:1,000 probabilities come good.

The lesson, of course, is that when you play thousands of hands, encountering such oddities with your money at stake is no longer nearly impossible. It's moved into the zone of nearly certain.
My understanding is that the results are still useful and can be include in the statistical analysis. This is what I heard form the BBC's Newscast podcast

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08ztv8h (starts around 7:30)

Professor Jennifer Rogers (clinical trial statistician):

> "There was some planned dosing differences anyway but this one happened by accident. Now that doesn't mean these results are completely invalid - doesn't mean that at all. You can make changes to your protocol and you can make changes to what you're gonna analyse all the way up until you actually see your data.... If you haven't seen what the data looks like, you are allowed to make changes to your protocols and it is quite common, it does happen that people make changes as to what they're going to analyse.

> "So this change was carried out with discussion with the regulators so it was all fine..."

Now I tried to find the same information reported online and I found this from the same Professor:

https://spectator.com.au/2020/11/what-we-know-so-far-about-t...

> It is perfectly acceptable to make changes to the protocol prior to database lock, so the protocol could have been updated to include this additional analysis (the point of closing a database is to ensure a trial can remain blind, meaning researchers can’t carry out ad-hoc analysis or potentially selectively report results before proper analysis takes place). However, according to version 14 of the protocol, dated 9 November 2020, the primary analysis was set to be the efficacy of two doses of vaccine (across both half and full dose), with secondary analyses being the efficacy of at least one full dose and efficacy of two full doses of vaccine. Efficacy of half dose with a full dose booster was not considered as a secondary analysis in the protocol and so could be an ad-hoc analysis post database lock.

So I'm not actually sure whether AstraZeneca announced the change to their analysis before or after they started looking at their results. If they announced they were going to include the half-doses before database lock then they can use them as valid results.
looks up meaning of "precepts"

Not trying to be snarky, but I'm obviously not smart enough to understand what the Urbit project is about.
Ah yes, familiar with him. Thanks.
My concern is Why is the winner of the US lottery always in some out-of-the-place town in the middle of nowhere? The chances per-capita of the dart landing in a small town are microscopic, yet it happens all the time. Because its fixed. Somebody's relative.
It reads like a how-to guide for writing a IOCCC entry.
What percentage of Americans even know that alcohol is a drug? As a Wisconsin native, I've seen first hand the toxic culture surrounding drinking in America, including having a relative die of alcoholism. Still, we don't seem to look at it like other drugs, even though it ruins lives just as effectively as something like heroin.
Got to be honest. If the security team is all like "Install this extension. It'll help you with security" and then it's gonna pop up all sorts of crap, I'm going to uninstall your shitty extension and after that I'm going to treat any software from this so-called 'security' team as some Bonzibuddy crap.
Facebook's Digital Currency Renamed Diem
So because the chances of something happening are so infinitesimally small, it’ll never happen? Airplanes are orders of magnitude safer than cars, yet planes still crash. The “law of large numbers” and all.
Yarvin was quite explicit about creatively embedding neo-reaction in the design. The most obvious is the hierarchical finite namespace -- you receive your identity from an authority, and the authorities (read as "land") are already assigned by the founders (read as landlords). The early writings were very explicit with language like "planets", "moons", etc. https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/
Not all anti-union stuff is illegal. Hiring a law firm to consult on employee management and unionization would not be illegal. If anything, they should be learning the correct and legal actions that they can take based on the consultant's recommendations.

Not to mention, the comment the plugin displayed wasn't saying anything against illegal actions, but rather stating that concerted activities are protected. I don't see how that has any bearing on the use of a law firm's website.
This could be a game changer policy. May opportunities opened up for startups.
It's great if you have young kids. Your hands are always full and you're always in need of a distraction.

That said, I end up frustrated with Alexa more often than satisfied.
Urbit feels more like an ARG than a serious project. You need to buy into what feels like an entirely new language and religion.

It has some real TempleOS vibes.