skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally unrelated, but why is he in Math department instead of Physics?
WW2 was bigger. The lack of mobilization is the hallmark of this crisis. The vaccines are the only bright point in sight.
There's certainly irony there, but then they're actually getting on with stuff rather than debating tooling. Discord and sheets are also both free - anything else is going to require an investment of money and time.
Ethics must be objective/universal

That's a bold statement without accepted axioms & subsequent proofs to build off of & establish the universality of ethics. There has never been universal agreement on any set of ethics. Genocide is itself an excellent example of that: It's not hard to find examples where those participating in the genocide believed their actions to be perfectly acceptable.

If you watch children for any length of time, you'll see that "universal ethics" are not readily apparent to them either. Children have to be taught not to hit people, that they can't take another child's toy (stealing) just because they want it, that lying isn't acceptable, etc. Plenty of people never learn those lessons, and have no problem violating them when the consequences can be avoided (and even many times when they can't)

Your other examples of what is right & wrong are also not universally agreed upon. It's not hard to find examples of any of those actions where people justify their actions as acceptable.

This is without even getting into the gray areas: Is it wrong to kill in self defense? Is it right to honestly tell your neighbor the story that his wife is cheating on him if he'd previously said "I'd kill my wife if she ever cheated on me"? Is it right for puppy mills to give life to animals it will kill in a few months if someone doesn't buy them? Is it right to accept a gift from someone who stole the money to purchase it? Is it wrong to lie if the lie would save an innocent life?

If ethics are universal, then the underlying principals have yet to be discovered.
What happens if the robots can dance faster than human eye can see and can see your eyes in detail? Invisible robots - exploiting saccades to move around unnoticed.

See also: Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
Too messy. Bad press. State actors would also break some sort of treaty without plausible deniability.
For the accusations that the NYT makes, are the women and black employees doing exactly the same job as the others, or are they in different/easier/less technical roles?

I don't have access to the article, and I'd need to know that before I can make any judgment call.
That's pretty weird, thanks for reporting this! I work at Google in the Maps org, I reported your bug internally and will update this once I have a resolution.

In the future, if you encounter a similar situation, consider reporting it (https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6194894). Any user feedback is greatly appreciated!
Perhaps so, but none of this is relevant to jgraettinger1's subthread.
But so much of the video is unnecessary flourishes, lots of excessive effort put in to make it a cool video, rather than focusing on the robot itself. It seems more baroque than brutalist. I'm sure it's a matter of personal aesthetic judgment. But I would consider robot videos like this one to be "spartan":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZMtKQ-R9II&feature=emb_logo

Go 15-30 seconds in. The video is obviously just showing an industrial robot at work. They didn't build something fancy just to make a viral video. It's just focusing on the components of the robot that do something useful.
>Do you love me now that I can dance?

No.
San Francisco is a great example of more and strong government. There are committees and steering committees to keep the committees accountable, and oversight committees to keep the steering committees accountable.

However even with all this government oversight, lots of regulation, and very large budget, they haven't been able to make a dent in the major problems like homelessness. Are they doing something wrong?
sure go for it.

If you have a country rewarding intellectual effort, that’s a good country to be a part of.

I’m betting that there will be more smart people trying more smart things that will end up positive than not.

I mean we are on a hackers and startups forum - it’s the fundamental premise of a majority of people visiting this site.

Honestly this seems like an issues of not having testable hypotheses. I’d love to see how it gets to a testable state.
>That may have proved a problem for ammonites, which routinely fed on their own offspring.

How can we possibly know that about species extinct for over 60 million years??

Edit: nice down vote without a comment, stay classy
Part of the issue is in training your taste. Yes, the super high calorie foods are always going to taste good. But that does not mean that the less caloric foods will not also taste just as good. My SO has a super restrictive diet (due to some pretty bad health reasons). My SO's taste has changed dramatically since being on the diet for some time. In that my SO can taste a single 'no-no' ingredient in just about any food item. I'm talking a single pepper-flake in ~4 hour roast. Things you may not think of as 'sweet', like broccoli or cabbage, are reported as near candy. It's taken a while, but the effects are real.

I think that issue is a big deal with the obese: taste. Their tastes have become so desensitized that only the umami bombs of Doritos will elicit a response. Similarly with fats and sugars, only the largest signals are now received.

Perhaps a way to deal with this is to just have the obese eat more, but of the 'good' stuff. To retrain their taste. Have a salad, a good one, and then eat dinner. Have an apple with breakfast, and then all the eggs and butter. Etc.
I personally refer to these concepts respectively as inherent and incidental complexity, what should be classed as inherent complexity is anything that directly supports the description of the problem. Everything else is incidental complexity (and we mostly write incidental complexity).

The big thing that I don't hear often is about where complexity lives. Complexity is like a pile of receipts you need to hunt down to do your tax - you can have it distributed all over your house, you can sweep up into a pile, or you could file it. The first is by far the most complex, and I've worked on codebases that looked like that. Even the most trivial of changes takes a long time.
Overleaf’s Remote Hackathon
Only one way to find out! What are the possible legal risks to an innocent researcher testing this worthy hypothesis? Asking for a friend of course ;)
There might still be some value in it. I think people will use tools like AdS/CFT correspondence for a while. And it is worth remembering that in terms of actual dollars, fundamental physics research is not that big of a spend. Like, part of the reason why these articles are important, is that the pie is so small to start with. So I don't worry too much about the string theory grant money, if anything I would not mind the absolute dollar amount going up if the relative fraction decreased with it.

The one thing that kind of irks me is this Kaku book “The God Equation.” I have only seen one equation that is so universally applicable that it could deserve that title, and even then I would be hesitant about that because it might give people the wrong impression. (It is the transport equation—it keeps appearing and appearing, a bunch of other equations are special cases of it, it is involved in one of the million-dollar Clay Mathematics prizes so there is clearly something hard/intractable about it, and it has a term which refers to creation and destruction. It says, a box flows downstream, the time rate of change of stuff in the box is equal to the flow J of stuff through the walls of the box plus the rate Φ of stuff being created/destroyed in the fluid. Or, ∂ρ/∂t + (v · ∇) ρ = - ∇ · J + Φ.)
I'd expect any submissions to this are just appended to a database without any actual validation beyond the trivial Luhn checksum and then there's a batch process once a day (maybe the same one that actually generates whatever marketing "insights" they claim to provide) that reads from there and ignores any card numbers from the opt-out DB.
Web Scraping Legality
I am a college student creating a non commercial app (for my resume). This app uses unofficial APIs to scrape data from several competing services, and then displays comparison between these services on a mobile application. Should I be concerned about violating the terms of use of these companies, and possibly being sued? Should I create an LLC?
If you dive deep into the hiking/running community you'll find people that say 54km is just an easy day hike.

A few years ago I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and was able to comfortably do that much mileage in about 10 or 11 hours by the time I finished.
Nope, that is not the distinguishing factor. Historically, money was used as an incentive for slave labor done especially well. That does not prevent it from being slavery.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/slave-labour/
And maybe all their metrics say that in the grand scheme of things, shooting some customers in the foot is the better strategy compared to not shooting them in the foot. Sometimes via deliberate price hikes, sometimes via shoddy support channels and discontinued products.

The big questions are whether their metrics factor in customers who avoid google's products to begin with, knowing they might end up getting shot in the foot, or whether they have a moral obligation to not shoot their customers even if they can make more money that way.
There is something I don't understand.

A radiator is not necessary for a car to work, specially in a freezing place.

A radiator is needed to refrigerate the engine. In a very cold place the engine is refrigerated just by natural convention. Probably you will have to stop and open the car hood from time to time.

Without globes touching metal could be dangerous, but it is strange. Traveling to very cold places,what you notice is that globes are not accessories, they are vital elements.
Totally unproven, fraught with peril. The rolling out of proof of stake was delayed years as new challenges were discovered. It’s good that somebody is giving it a try, but it’s no slam dunk. Bitcoin would be irresponsible to jump on proof of stake right now.
well, then it is probably good that GP is saying that you are presenting unreliable evidence
hehe, nice. I can see I have a new way of wasting time :)
I got a dog a year ago and one of the things I'm most impressed with is how well he understands context and adapts to new situations.

Granted, the first time I took him to a rocky riverside all four paws fell into cracks between the boulders like some early Boston Dynamics prototype (he's from Texas and I guess never encountered terrain like that before) but he's a pro now. And he's mastered "soft human interaction" right out of the box (is just amazing with toddlers).

Seeing all this firsthand makes me appreciate how fine-tuned the product of evolution is and how much work must go into achieving basic behaviors we take for granted.
Afaik, there's no AI yet, so we don't know if it's power hungry or not.
I have heard that Japan is more tolerant of sexual depictions, while less tolerant of extreme violence (*guro"), and the United States is the opposite. A lot of overseas releases of anime/games are censored for mild nudity that passed Japan's rating association. And some popular districts advertise erotic games on massive billboards under large crowds of pedestrians. On the other hand, a mission in a Call of Duty title was changed in the Japanese release so that it immediately ends with an admonishment if you try to shoot civilians.
Probably because many fossils have been found showing partially digested juvenile ammonites inside adults, I expect. That’s how they found out placoderms (which went extinct 360 million ya) gave birth to live offspring.
I see. Well, here's hoping they solve it.
Then why aren’t they paid a fair wage? Keep moving the goal post, but these people are being exploited.
> It's a meme among bitcoin advocates to troll suckers like you. We see plenty of value in bitcoin. Enough to save the world from fiat.

No need to go all ad hominem. I've been pretty avid about BTC for some years now.
December PyTorch Lightning Talks
Catch up with 5 great lightning talks on sharded training, the latest trends in SSL, how a #Kaggle grandmaster is using Lightning, and more!
Public debate on gun policy in the US is amazingly bad. On one side all regulations and restrictions are bad, on the other side proposed regulations and restrictions are extremely poorly targeted.

The former is probably obvious so here's some points for the latter:

Public debate centers around "assault weapons" high powered rifles and mass shootings.

- 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides (usually with handguns)

- The vast majority of gun homicides are with handguns

- The broadest definition of "mass shooting" I could find was 4 or more victims (excluding the shooter). That puts mass shooting deaths on par with accidental gun deaths; about 1% of total gun deaths and single-digit percentage of gun homicides.

Now, I'm not saying ending mass shootings is a bad thing, but it's as if everyone worried about traffic fatalities in the US was informed by watching "The Fast and the Furious" and wanted to ban forced-induction sports cars and was super worried about deaths from underground road races.
Agreed. I've had exact same idea for quite some time now, but never got to writing it - I'm glad someone did, and seemingly in a very good manner.
Apparently John Carmack thought highly of Ken's programming, too:

"Carmack: Well there's a big difference between who I consider the most talented and who I would necessarily hire, because you have to hire people that fit right. If I had to pick who I think is just the most talented, it would probably be Ken Silverman, the guy that did the BUILD engine. He does engines and tools. He's great as an editor. He writes all the code for everything, and he's just extremely talented. I think it was 3D Realms' worst decisions not to coddle him, or whatever it took, to keep him on board. I think if he was still working directly for 3D Realms, they would have a Quake-type game shipped by now, just because he's extraordinarily good."

http://advsys.net/ken/carmken.htm

—and he's now working on the voxel display project that was on HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549717
The way I see it, they're just doing R&D. The things they show off serve as advertisements to attract new investment, and remind the current investors that they're making progress.

And it's fine, really. They push robotics forward, they solve really tough problems. It's infinitely more interesting and useful long-term than most of the high-valuation startups on the market these days. I'd take another BD for a different field over another DoorDash or WeWork any day.
> My countries government should understand the implications of the policies it impliments, including the impact on people in other countries, but my governments first concern shouldn't be those other peoples, it should be it's own citizens!

The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have. The responsible thing to do is to do both. Just like my responsibility is to both take care of my family and my community and the world, all at once. If I sacrifice one, I'm irresponsible and failing. I would be (and sometimes am) ashamed that my government fails at those responsibilities.

The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone. Thankfully, I have great solutions internationally. Globalization and the democratic world order have been the most successful international policies by orders of magnitude. Name any point in history, any approach to international trade or international relations, that has yielded the success of the post-WWII era? Not only in economics, but in peace and freedom.

We need to do better. What better option do you offer, that will improve the lives of the next generation
it's pretty trivial to implement a deterministic fork/join[0] in actors, mostly by using the strategy "ignore messages". Elixir does this with the Task.async/1 function.

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Task.html#module-async-and-await

[0] determinism can go out the window once there's an error. Can you safely say you know what happens in ruby if you are running async and one of your concurrently running async functions throws?

The nice thing in elixir there is zero ambiguity as to what happens if you have (N) async functions running and one of them crashes -- it brings down all of the other threads and triggers their respective resource cleanups in exactly the way that they do as actors, since Task is a fairly trivial wrapping of erlang's actors. (Or you have choices!!, you can async_nolink if you want your async function to plow forward even if its parent dies due to the crash of one of its siblings)
They would have a legitimate reason to doubt that all cards individually opted out and so they'd probably send people a letter or post a notice somewhere (updated ToS, idk) that there is now a new form that makes it more annoying for you to opt out (have to enter other details, send a letter, whatever) and that opt-outs after date X (when the mass additions started happening) have not been processed.

Or you do it like the EU and make excessive data processing opt-in. (Where by "excessive" I mean something that doesn't fall within recital 47 of GDPR: "legitimate [e.g. marketing] interests of [the company] may provide a legal basis for processing, provided that [users' rights] are not overriding, taking into consideration the reasonable expectations of [users]". It's a grey area where this line is exactly, but Visa can't simply do whatever they want. They have to tell you what data they process, but nobody reads that, and for unexpected (arguably excessive) things they'd have to ask you to opt in.) But I guess that's a little beyond the scope of this comment thread.
What? Have you tried to use new reddit with a screen reader?
In the US? Jail, probably. The CFAA is given very broad reach, especially when you mess with corporations.

IANAL, though.
> And that's why all those countries are firmly beholden to the US, for protection.

Yeah, but from the US perspective, it's the weakest zone of that protection. So they'll be firmly beholden until suddenly they're not.
A downstream issue with importing the product of forced labor into the US is that US manufacturing markets, business (small & medium in particular), labor, & markets affected by finance are distorted. The argument that an influx of cheap foreign goods & cheap labor costs are good for the economy does not properly consider the long term & strategic costs of hollowing out large markets where the USA once lead the world as well as the poverty/blight incurred by former middle-class communities.

I grew up in Hawaii, which used to have a large sugar cane industry. I found it strange that the sugar cane was shipped to the mainland, to be processed, then packaged, shipped back, & sold to the consumer in Hawaii. The value added was effectively removed the local market, which created a monopoly for H,C,&S to buy land, have authority over water rights, allowing them to break treaties & promises to the citizens of the islands. There were also celebrated things that occurred due to the sugar industry, such as importing many people of different ethnicities to work in the plantations.

Today, Hawaii has highly prized land, which is expensive, & many families living there for generations who do not make much money. With few employable industries (government & tourism being the largest employers), the economy is vulnerable to Black Swan events, such as the Covid lockdowns.
> In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility

> You keep harping on the US, but it is one of - if not the most - upwardly mobile societies in history.

The data doesn't support your conclusions. The US has lower social mobility than many of its (more redistributive) peers in the developed world. [1]

1 - https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
> We have chosen to release on just one platform initially, and there are a couple of reasons why. The Raspberry Pi’s hardware is largely fixed – you can’t swap the CPU or GPU. Variations in hardware could cause us to get distracted by issues that really shouldn’t be a priority right now.

This (provided the Raspberry Pi's poularity, affordability and power - surely it would be of no use without these) actually is an extremely cool feature. You can engineer OSes and entire solutions without caring about compatibility issues now. Like in the good old days when people would invent entire HW+OS platforms like NeXT and Amiga, but now you have the HW part done for you.
This comment expounds on what I said pretty well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25576634
You have an uphill battle to convince anyone being paid (any amount) for voluntary labor is akin to slave labor.
That's a great story and worthy of a post on it's own.

I've forwarded it to a few people. It's also made me slightly sad about being stuck in the UK lockdown for at least the next few months. I love South East Asia.
No worries - I'd expect a dozen visa.ru.evil mirrors to pop up asking for the same information if the legit one goes sideways.
None, because basicly every credit card transaction passes through Mastercard, Visa, and American Express, and they log and datamine it.
Hopefully without sounding rude - what's the experiment exactly?
I wonder what is their policy in EU. Do they automatically process your data without any opt-out?
I think you are absolutely on the right track, but in my view the problem is less tightly coupled to the funding and more institutional.

As a professor it is simply extremely unnatural to just drop your main area of research.

First, your academic network will almost entirely stem from the subfield you have been working on. This affects the expectations of your PhD students, the recruitment of postdocs (who are often swapped between colleagues in the subfield), and the conferences you visit -- where you will see all the familiar faces of colleagues you have known for years.

Second, your mind has been shaped significantly by years of working in your own little subfield. It is easy to come up with ten projects in your area, rank them by difficulty as well as the interest they would generate amongst your colleagues, and help your students to execute them. It is significantly harder to do anything like that outside your subfield; for one, you will not have the mentoring that a typical PhD student has.
But this is not about bias...it’s about representation of your actions.
I think your post is well thought out but you are hand waving a bit too much over string theory’s inability to reduce to known results. Reduction is an important cornerstone in physics and it’s a way to validate if a theory is on the right track even when things are not measurable.

I do not think it is correct to say that special relativity for example gives 10^500 possible classical theories. We know special relativity needs to produce same outcome as Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell’s equations in the limit as velocity tends to 0. In my simple example, we have 2 well established theories which bound the possible outcomes. This is all possible even without knowing the speed of light.