skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure I agree entirely with your characterization, but the salient bit that we seem to agree on is that Democrats profess a belief in the existential threat of climate change and still aren't organized to combat it. That seems like a bigger problem than Republican obstructionism (what is there to obstruct if Dems don't even have a coherent, remotely realistic plan)?

While progressives are aligned on the Green New Deal, that's little more than a slogan (no draft legislation or anything). To the extent that it's fleshed out (e.g., AOC's Green New Deal resolution), it seems to mean "decarbonize energy sector by 2030 + fix racial injustice + implement European social democracy + universal healthcare + affordable housing + stronger union protections + etc". Basically the "Green New Deal" isn't a plan to fix the climate, it's a progressive trojan horse. This doesn't seem like real concern about climate change to me.

To be clear, the point isn't "progressives are the worst", it's that no faction or party is doing a great job here, but we're too preoccupied with figuring out who is the worst to actually move forward.

EDIT: Added the last two paragraphs, apologies for any confusion caused.
So, basically, you have no reason for making that assertion.
I think something a lot of customers will hesitate because of is the state of privacy and security in the software industry, and employers spying on employees in general. People will be very hesitant to trust such a system
At least that building has been re-imagined and revived as an office, entertainment, housing, dining hub.

https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/

Not to its full, old glory, but at least it is not abandoned anymore.
> I'm not really concerned with what you're afraid most people will think.

What matters is not what I think, but whether you care about making misleading comments.

> > If you are going to imply false positives are common, then you need to back it up.

> I just did with two links I posted above. Twice.

No, you posted some links that are not about Apple’s system, and you can’t explain how they apply presumably because you don’t understand what Apple is doing.

> Sounds like a claim that wasn't replicated or independently verified. Of course Apple is going to say their system is nearly perfect, that's what all companies do. The onus is on Apple to prove that their marketing claims reflect reality.

So this tells us you don’t know what algorithm Apple is using…

…And are accusing Apple of lying, when it is clear that you haven’t read about how they avoid false positives.

I think the onus is on you to prove your accusation.

> This is like saying the normal principles of computing don't apply to new Apple products because they might have invented a new brand computing paradigm that isn't anything like any classical or quantum computer

That just silly. It’s doesn’t take breaking the laws of quantum or classical computing to build a system with a low false positive rate.

One obvious way would be to leverage multiple images rather than just one. Increasing the sample size of a population sample generally reduces the false positive rate.

Have you considered that someone could build a system this way?
You're asking people to prove a negative and then you're upset when they can't?

It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.
To be fair saying "One of... is..." is a tautology and doesn't make sense to disagree with.
I think Snopes has pretty clear political biases that detract from their ability to fact check. An example is their article on "Sweden is the rape Capitol of Europe"[1] which they rate false. Their article talks about Trump and immigration and Farrage and doesn't really get to what they are supposed to be debunking, which is the rape Capitol thing.

Sweden does have the highest rate of rape per capita in Europe. This is possibly due to how Sweden and other European countries collate rape statistics but also possibly due to Sweden having more rapists or some combination of the two things.

I think an article that tried to investigate how to compare rape rates between European countries and where we should fairly consider to Sweden to be in that ranking would be both challenging to write and interesting to read. Instead, Snopes just says Trump is a dumb racist and therefore the claim is false.
of course it is planned, even dropping this news on friday evening no less
The New Yorker had an article in the discussion and interviewed two scientists, Stanford microbiologist David Relman and UNC virologist Ralph Baric, who signed the letter to WHO which was published in Science magazine.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-...

The two scientists seemed to think that although a lab leak origin is possible the natural origin story is more likely.
There's an old Rob Pike talk where he asks the audience:

"So how many of you are familiar with the work of Michael Jackson"
Most of the crowd raises their hand to which he replies
"Really? Quite a few! Well as you know, Michael Jackson developed Jackson Structural Programming".

He was seemingly unaware of the popstar of the same name.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE&t=44s
Hey @dang, can you search for an exact hash of users that sign in from Apple campuses and corporate VPNs and show it next to their username?
Merge Sort algorithm implementation without recursion, using cached binary trees
> How do we know that, though?

At some level, if you're uploading files to their servers, you have to trust them. And to a lesser extent if you're using their proprietary software (although you can monitor network traffic and so on.)

> Which, again, really hits the need for disclosure

Isn't that what they did?
I meant economic migrants and not true refugees, as defined by international laws. Like this

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/09/africa/fake-refugees-kenya-in...

https://abcnews.go.com/International/fake-syrian-passports-w...

https://news.yahoo.com/migrants-using-fake-syrian-passports-...
“The company says its announcement had been widely "misunderstood".”

You’re 𝚑̶𝚘̶𝚕̶𝚍̶𝚒̶𝚗̶𝚐̶ understanding it wrong!
Could they add to the network to say find people? Sounds good for goverments, Russia would love this. Also what goverment do they report to? How can anyone trust this? Trust that its not scanning for other things ? That the network has not been modified for goverments ?

Just scan the images on iCloud ... I mean the CCP can scan the iCloud files why cant Apple?
Who claimed that?

Even the most prominent proponent of the lab leak theory, Donald Trump, said several times early on that he wasn't sure if it was intentional or an accident. In fact, he was pretty clear he thought it was accidental, and only mentioned it being intentional as a possibility, but that was an afterthought.

Source, since everyone likes to put words in his mouth:

https://apnews.com/article/understanding-the-outbreak-intell... (dated April 30, 2020).

So who exactly said that it was engineered for certain?

EDIT: the downvotes indicate that the belief that some believe the virus to be engineered is dogmatic in nature, rather than based on facts. If this were such a common belief, surely someone can identify its main proponent.
Not according to the article.

All that it claims is that it may impact their social skills. They hypothesize that masks may cause social development delays, and they measure that masks make it harder to judge emotions, but they do not actually tie that hypothesis to their research, and they have no justification that the hypothesized changes to social skills would actually be problematic--which is not at all given, since what counts as "good social skills" is heavily dependent on culture.
Census data delay puts states, redistricting commissions on hold
I worked in the mobile network part of Motorola. We had smartphones in the lab for testing in 2001. We were all told that they would be on sale by 2003. But that never happened.

All of my interactions with the cellphone division were somewhat negative. You got the impression that they thought of themselves as the best of the best and nothing you could offer was worth their attention. The damned RAZR success probably doomed them for good. I was using the smartphones every single day and was making suggestions for UI improvements and software features. They ignored all of it. Oh well. Everything I suggested became obvious updates once the general public had used the iPhone for a year or two.
Describing the implementation details does nothing to change the reality that the device is acting as an informant against its owner. The number of hoops literally changes nothing. Adding an AI model versus using SHA sums changes nothing. Adding some convoluted cryptography system to implement some additional policy changes nothing. In trivial cases like anti-piracy measures or anti-cheat in games, we tolerate that the device will sometimes act against our best interest, but at least in this case, the stakes are low and the intentions are transparent.

We have every fact we need to know to know this shouldn’t be done, and I’m glad that privacy orgs like EFF have already spoken much to this effect.
I suppose it depends on how you define "downfall", but Motorola stock this year is at an all-time high, even higher than its peak during late 90s during the run up to the dot-com boom and when Motorola cellphones were king.

There's been some very hard years in between and it's a smaller company now, but it's actually doing very well by many standards.
Note how they use your device to do the dirty work for them, instead of doing what everyone else is doing and scanning stuff on their servers.
There are fast thinking fast talkers, and those people can be interesting and entertaining.

In Japan, there is a celebrity known as Kuroyanagi Tetsuko.

Practically the queen of "hayakuchi", this elderly lady talks a mile a minute, but people listen.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%BB%92%E6%9F%B3%E5%BE%B9%E5...
> Do they mean they haven't been doing it for iCloud Photos, but were arbitrarily doing it for other parts of iCloud?

I read elsewhere they they scanned Mail but not Photos.
Or peak oil or y2k or sars or terrorism or ebola or HIV or bad halloween candy or trump or china trade war ...

I'm in agreement with what you wrote. The amount of apocalypses we lived through is astounding when you think about it.

But fear sells and the media/corporations/politicians/etc have to make their money. With hurrican season coming up, it's super-hurricane apocalyse time no doubt.
Many folks are attracted to new tools and techniques rather than outcomes. And since our tools and techniques are constantly in flux, few reach a level of stability and maturity where a GUI tool would work well.
Exactly, it should simply state “Homo Sapiens specimen manufactures inanimate objects”
The issue with things like this is, it's often a tradeoff of making the public happy vs making the government. If the initiative is partisan it might make sense to make the public happy. If the it's bi-partisan you make the government happy, and if you're lucky the government/political complex will eventually alter public opinion until your not really fighting the public anymore.

The PR show is kind of besides the point.
The subjects of this article would probably disagree with you:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-barber-shops-salon...
Thanks and some great points here. As you say competition and differentiation are potentially really tricky in this sector. Really interesting to hear about your experience at ginger.io .

We're certainly not wedded to the chatbot idea, but it's just the best UX/UI we've implemented so far. The key we feel is to avoid becoming a boring, skippable content board, and maybe a chatbot isn't the final iteration of that concept, but it's the approach that has worked the best for us so far.

I agree that the key in this space will be to learn quickly and iterate to find a solution compelling to the user and payer. It's early stage for us, until the point we got into YC we had taken no funding, so I think there's a lot of scope for how we can expand and adapt our offering to the marketplace and we've already learned a tremendous amount.

We have ultimate long term aim of building apps which are certified Software as a Medical Device and get device-like reimbursement through healthcare systems. We certainly feel that's a place which is less competitive and more differentiated, there are a few companies in this space such as Pear Therapeutics, but unlike them, we feel it's important to start at the b2b and b2c end of the spectrum to build a product that people love before going through the lengthy and costly process of adapting that product becoming a fully certified medical device.
Thank you.
I’m always on the hunt for good archeology TV. The Netflix show ‘ Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb’ was great and good for kids too. Much of Time Team was as well.

I also enjoyed one on Must Farm - I believe it was this one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sX3bqmxD298

Far too many searches for shows end up with crackpot ‘Aliens did it’ type scenarios, which irritates.

Have you any other recommendations?
The thing about this app is that they don't advertise donations anywhere, and people aren't donating for the app, they are donating for the content — and that's available everywhere. You know, the same criteria that Apple uses to distinguish Kindle and Dropbox from non-content-reader apps.

The service Google provides is the Play Store, and it'd be extremely reasonable for everyone to pay for it. We aren't entitled to that for free. On the other hand, a cut of all transactions? How about a flat baseline fee for platform development plus usage-based fees for everything else, from bandwidth to support?

But then they wouldn't be able to double dip on users and app developers... Plus, they so kindly give you so much exposure on a platform built themselves! You wouldn't expect to rent a place in Times Square and not pay for it with a percentage of your income, right?
I could see that on Windows Home Edition, but I don't know how they would make that work for Enterprise Edition. I don't see companies like SAS or Oracle and many others being willing to pay a Microsoft tax to distribute client software or desktop apps for their products. Or IBM for applications like SPSS. SaaS may end up eating a lot of that sort of thing, and web clients would help mitigate the requirements, but I think there would just be too many that weren't.

If there was one thing that would push desktop linux into everyone's desktop in enterprise environments, it would be a move like this. And once that happens, similar to the initial home computing revolution, workers would bring it into their homes too.

As another comment mentioned, they'd almost certainly lose the desktop market among PC gamers when Valve & others refused to go along, and Valve's linux distro would be a very popular alternative.
We're at 13, on a slightly longer timescale.
Grid-level batteries will likely be made of something else -- check out form energy who does iron-based batteries.

> Can we transfer power between countries

Certainly possible, but requires infrastructure build out. Most countires can also provide a lot of their own solar/wind
The issue is that the scanning happens on your device just before upload. So now your own device is scanning for illegal activity _on_ your phone not the servers.

The second issue is that it will alert authorities.

In regards to CSAM content those issues may not sound terrible. But the second it is expanded to texts, things you say, websites you visit or apps you use it's a lot scarier. And what if instead of CSAM content it is extended to alert authorities for _any_ activity deemed undesirable by your government
Potential twist: it’s operated by the FBI/Secret Service/IRS/NSA. Would be a great way to compile a list of “addresses of interest.”
They say no but they already give up privacy to many authotarian goverments like China .... they already scanning iCloud data.
Wincompose can handle emojis, Compose compose g o b l i n will give you a tengu ("Japanese goblin") emoji for instance. But it's on you to try to guess what you think their names are and I usually fail.

I prefer the Win . for emojis.
Because it was a very small problem compared to this one. On the order of a broken leg versus having to cure cancer.
I am not confused. Apple Inc's about-face on backdoors for "good guys" and engineering tools that create the potential for "unmasking" says to me that they are the ones confused.
I became aware of a chrome extension that does this. Is there anything that the extension does that this can’t do?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speechify-for-chro...
> Yes, it could theoretically be abused if Apple went to the dark side, but we'll have to see what this 'auditability' that he was talking about is all about.

Or we can just short circuit the entire issue by deciding firmly we don't want this and punish Apple's behaviour accordingly. Which is what appears to be happening.

> it feels as though we should give Apple the benefit of the doubt

It really doesn't feel like this to me at all. Users have clearly stated: we don't want this. It's time for Apple to simply pull it all back and apologize.
Which same thing do you mean? I read your very interesting longer comment below, and you mentioned a lot of differences, and it's not clear which of them you mean arbitrary UI element sizes with scrollable overflow requires you to do. Do you mean that it requires you to use very slow layout algorithms? Maybe the problem there is that CSS wasn't designed to be efficiently implementable; I feel like CSS doesn't usually give me better layouts than LaTeX, which runs orders of magnitude faster than any CSS engine.

Is there a specific reason that scrollable overflow (rather than visible or hidden, which TeX can do) inherently makes the problem much harder than what TeX does? Naively I'd think making the overflow scrollable wouldn't affect the computational complexity at all, but clearly I know a lot less about the space than you do. Are there other things in CSS that are very useful for UI layout but very difficult to implement with submillisecond timing guarantees?

As I understand it, for example, iOS UI autolayout uses Cassowary, which uses the simplex algorithm and I think may at a better point in the expressiveness/performance tradeoff space than CSS. (Hilariously in this context, the original Cassowary paper https://constraints.cs.washington.edu/solvers/cassowary-toch... has an overfull hbox.) But Cassowary is from 02002, and there have been a lot of advancements in constraint solving and optimization algorithms in the last 19 years, both in theory and in practice:

• Z3 wasn't released until 02012;

• SAT/SMT solvers in general have gotten astoundingly better (the SAT Competition started in 02002);

• there have been enormous advances in conic optimization (overview in https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.08841), including open-source libraries like CVXOPT that are widely used (in the context of conic optimization, anyway);

• for more general optimization, automatic differentiation has gone mainstream; and

• there have been huge advances in gradient-descent variants including AdaGrad (02011), RMSprop (02014?), and Adam (02014).

In general, gradient-descent solvers and the interior-point methods often used for conic optimization are anytime algorithms, so you can trade off responsiveness against stability/correctness. If your layout algorithm hasn't converged by the frame deadline, you can just draw the best layout it's come up with so far; it's guaranteed to have all the right stuff in it, just maybe overlapping or in the wrong place, probably only by a few pixels, and displaying something is often better than displaying nothing. The conic optimization algorithms can also guarantee that the layout they deliver is "feasible" in the sense of respecting all the hard constraints in the constraint set; it might just be suboptimal. (Gradient-descent algorithms don't really have hard constraints; they have to simulate them by adding heavy penalties to the loss function.)

I don't know of anybody actually applying this stuff to UI layout; do you?
Show HN: Roombelt – meeting room schedule right at the door
I have it's my intuition and assumption it is up to scientists to confirm it or reject it.
I am happy to share the indie project I am working on for about 4 years. Right now it has about 30 customers (companies of various sizes). If you are running an office with meeting rooms I am sure you will like it.

Technically it's kind of boring project - a ReactJS and express app running on some IaaS provider. But this makes the solution simple, reliable and affordable. And it's a nice alternative for more sophisticated products like Teem or Robin.
Was really sickened by some of the political stuff I saw on Snopes, like this one, which reads almost like it's from the Onion: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-no-empathy/
Off course,everyone who's ever been in a large corporation will know these things aren't just soft launched.
There have been prior reviews with the authorities, lawyers, the drafters of the terms and conditions and every possible strategic deployment was a-b-c etc tested.
This is nothing but corporate double speech and damage reduction.

I wonder, though, why the back tracking on the messaging happened. Reputation damage or fear it might affect the bottom line.

With this act, they kind of make anyone guilty unless proven otherwise by scraping their data.
Apple was the last man standing regarding telemetry handling, bit better than others. Now, I am not so sure
> But in carpentry you also have to practice physical skills

In programming you have to practice mental skills. That is, abstract problem solving, logic, bigger-picture-how-things-fit-together. There's a reason many beginners struggle with concepts like pointers or recursion/recursive data types. These things become second nature with practice, just like the physical skills do, but to a beginner who has not practiced such things, they're equally difficult.
The minimum mass for a black hole is the Planck mass, approximately 21 micrograms. Such a black hole is a Planck length in radius, has a Hawking temperature of the Planck temperature, and will decay in Planck time, releasing Planck energy of 1.9 GJ (about the same as a tank of gasoline).
The Chinese didn't do anything that we wouldn't have done. In fact, they took better steps than we did, as far as the pandemic is concerned.

Of course the dude had concerns, anyone with half a brain would explore all of the possible origins and theories. But the lab leak theory is just that - one theory that could explain the situation at hand.

The problem is that too many people have put far too much stock in the lab leak theory to the point that it's being treated as the most likely source of origin, but that's just not what the evidence says.
Thanks. That’s a helpful bit of info I wasn’t aware of.
Yes. This is it. When I wrote the above I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I felt like this but this is the reason. It’s the slippery slope of mine / yours.
It’s my understanding that the your iPhone would be checking ALL your photos on your device. Where did you get to understand otherwise?
While apple owns the servers they shouldn't be legally lake. No more than a self storage facility is liable for the items individuals sure in their units.
What do you make of the statement published on snopes.com itself?

https://www.snopes.com/2021/08/13/snopes-writers-condemn-pla...
You have almost no control over what information you're giving them though. It's more like having to pay the mob for "protection" and then turning to me and saying, "What? That's the price for safety in this neighborhood. I'm choosing to pay."
Thankfully in the UK we have the national health service.