skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well yeah, streaming services also suck for creators. That doesn't excuse the practices of Roblox.

However, the comparison isn't entirely fair for several reasons. First off, those platforms don't restrict releasing the content on other platforms. If I'm unhappy with Spotify, I can move my music to Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or even my own website. This isn't ideal, and doesn't excuse bad practices, but it is possible. Roblox games only work in Roblox, and if I want to move my games elsewhere, I have to rebuild it entirely from scratch.

Secondly, all of these services have various tools that enable discoverability, without requiring any payment. These tools are obviously not ideal, but I can become successful on Youtube without giving Google a single cent, and without advertising outside of the site. It's unlikely, but it's possible. Roblox requires you to spend money for any chance at discoverability, and even then there are no guarantees. Roblox doesn't even let you cash out unless you have an active subscription.

Finally, all of these other services pay me in actual money, not their own fun bucks. The conversion rate is also ridiculously bad for creators. According to the video linked in the article, you can only cash out when you have $1000 worth of Robux, which then only returns $350 back to you. Combine this terrible conversion rate with the fact that Roblox takes an additional cut of basically every transaction, and the actual percentage of money going to creators is potentially as low as 17%, which is way worse then any other service I know of.

So yeah, I would say this is more exploitative then someone trying to make it big on other platforms. And we should call out these bad practices specifically when we see them, instead of brushing it off under "all platforms are bad too."
With cars specifically, shops get paid to replace the blower whether or not it fixes the problem, while troubleshooting doesn't really pay. As a result there's a significant incentive towards scattershot parts replacement as a diagnostic tool.

I'm not saying it's done out of malice, but incentives drive behavior. You'd probably only develop solid diagnostic chops in the shop if the shop placed "bids" on fixing an undiagnosed problem, betting they can figure it out & fix cheaply.
I’m not looking forward to the day the US government stops believing in the magical security properties of fax machines with respect to HIPAA.
"Things change as time goes on" is not an excuse to ignore valid standards.

You're talking about an idealised, theoretical world. I'm talking about the real one, the same one where big mail providers routinely ignore valid standards themselves in their efforts to fight real world problems like spam and identity theft.

Again, if someone is going to help themselves to private information then the burden should be 100% on them not to screw anything up for anyone, whether or not that anyone was following any particular set of rules.
Tried to run it on few old ThinkPads and it froze frequently. Seems others have better experiences but to me it didn't appeared capable to be used for daily work.
I think the takeaway is that government represents too many people and you cant satisfy everyone, so leaders listen to citizen action groups and lobbyists who are able to aggregate all these different viewpoints into more broadly popular legislation and show with their supporters that these ideas would be popular among a given electorate.
AI Blood Test Can Spot Lung Cancers with 90 Percent Accuracy
'Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.'
Lax lending is not the core issue of a market crisis like 2008, it is the amount of leverage and debt.

You must look at how many people have cash in their banc accounts to cover mortgages if the stock market dives 50% and rates go up 2~4%. Can that generate a cascade of foreclosures?
It's such a low bar to pass. The guy in the article is 67, makes 1MM+ in interest a year, and won't even consider telling his friends or family? Or donating a penny of it? Is there not room for a middle ground here?

What about: "Hey, I made a million bucks in the lottery/stocks/crypto. I heard you're having a tough time, take this -- you don't owe me anything. Wishing you well, -Dave."
For a more scientific, technical discussion, see this paper, linked in the article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0307-1

Available here:

http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/13800/1/SG_geog_potential...

(Thanks abdullahkhalids for finding the latter link; I'm just posting it here for more visibility.)
It's way past the point it's ridiculous. It's starting to get dangerous, and if we don't take action now, this is going to be a systemic problem, not unlike ethnic/racial biases in justice systems throughout the world.
Medicines with expired patents that had generics become available.
Well, if conserving money is your goal then any course you took to conserve money is self-evidently a correct one.

The more interesting questions are if and why money conservation to this extent would be desirable. Neither is self-evident to me – but, admittedly, also not terribly interesting.
Same with me. My kid makes Roblox games for her and her friends. It didn't take her long to realize that the odds of her making any money at all were very slim. In the meantime she gets to learn programming skills in a way that she finds fun.

I do feel a bit bad for the older kids that put real effort into it, but I don't see how it's much worse than trying to start a youtube or twitch channel and failing. At least with coding they're getting some valuable experience.

All that said, the way they sell "Robux" is absolutely predatory. We've had to have several talks about what is reasonable to spend money on. They even let you pay with Amazon. Payments via Amazon are on by default for Amazon accounts and don't require re-authentication, so a kid who clicks on a link in Roblox on a computer that has already authenticated with Amazon can drain their parent's account.
‘They call us bewitched’: the DRC performers turning trash into art
> I mean Apple track record with swollen batteries...

That's just what LiPo batteries do at end-of-life. Not specific to Apple by any means.
A lot of modern handsets are multi-mode and can switch between CDMA and GSM once unlocked. But yeah ultimately comes down to needing to select a GSM carrier.
Cell phone services
> I realize they explained how they source the videos, which is in direct contradiction to previous claims.

No it isn't.

You don't seem to understand the billions miles of driving compared to how much of that was actually uploaded.

Please show me where they claim to have uploaded billions of miles. But I know you can't.
Ya financing in Mexico is a big challenge. We do offer a financing option, but not for the entire amount unfortunately. We are actively looking to partner with banks and funds to be able to offer longer financing options. Stay tuned!
No, this is just the Chinese billionaires trying to hide their money before Xi Jinping takes it all.

https://techcentral.co.za/xi-targets-chinas-richest/110293/
As others said, Buddhists and Stoics were earlier. Some Christian writings were definitely influenced by those lines of thought though, yes.

Speaking for myself, another reason I enjoy Buddhism and Stoicism is that they feel more like pure, distilled wisdom. Especially Zen Buddhism. Christian writings are filled with excessive moralizing and mythology, which enables all sorts of problems.
They cite the numbers in "real terms", which would mean inflation adjusted:

> The average price of American homes, in real terms, is now the highest it's ever been

Of course, you really need to be looking at mortgage rates to understand housing affordability: http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html

July 2021 average 30-year mortgage rate: 2.87% (with 0.7 points)

2008 12-month average 30-year mortgage rate: 6.03% (with 0.6 points)

To put that in perspective, a $500,000 mortgage (excluding down payment) would require a $2,073 monthly payment today, but a $3,007 monthly payment at 2008's 6% mortgage rates.

In other words: Houses are still way cheaper, in actual out-of-pocket terms for average people, than they were in 2008. Today's interest rates are way too low.

EDIT: Updated with 2008 numbers, thanks to comment below
Well the letter of the law wouldn't apply since it is US law, but in spirit I guess all Western countries are expected to treat US's "enemies" as their enemies too. But the CIA won't be having tabs on you unless you're a billion $ company recruiting Iranians.
The federal minimum wage to hire someone is worth less now than in the 00s.
i think what they were really afraid of was a grass roots boycott. It's very easy for a consumer to cut up a mastercard and just use their visa. It's virtually impossible for a business to say "we accept all cc's except mastercard".
Almost everything. Important exceptions are housing, health care and education, which have large impacts on COL. But most else is cheaper.
> "They are also bigger, lay larger eggs and have smaller brains than their wild cousins - differences that are also seen in chickens. ...Pets tend to have floppier ears and curlier tails than their wild ancestors. They also have smaller jaws and teeth, white patches on their fur and breed more frequently. This phenomenon is known as 'domestication syndrome'."

I am not being glib, but I wonder if this is what happened to humans. allow me to explain. As short as 5,000 years ago, our brains were 10% bigger, our jaws were bigger, and our size was smaller. The former 2 have been associated with diet, but the shrinking brain is still debated. Maybe its simple though. Maybe humans domesticated humans.
why is HN so invested in attempting to debunk all of the solid, dependable, reliable inflation gauges?

if you look at where much of the % increases are, they are happening in undesirable (even ghetto) places in the rustbelt - this isn't due to demand from knowledge workers
> I also do not believe in loaning money to friends and relatives, no matter what.

This guy sounds like a special kind of asshole. Who wins $55 million dollars and thinks about “loaning” money to their parents? Lol. I get why you wouldn’t want to tell anyone you won the lotto, but you can tell a little white lie and claim to be doing well career wise so you have an excuse to give your parents some money.

This guy wants to justify being a greedy jerk IMO.
No, they kept it quiet. My close friend group is pretty distinct and tight so there wasn't really anyone on "the cusp".
That's precisely what it is. The game animations are fairly simple, but you can build a world and write fairly sophisticated game elements/rules/etc with Lua, and the kids actually seem to like the cartoonish models.

Once you write a game or create a world, you can click and publish it for anyone to join.
Twitch isn’t amazing at it in total but it does recommend smaller streamers to people.
What is the point of writing a letter like this to a money advice column? His only question is, "Was I wrong in not telling anyone about my winnings?" Surely by 67 you should understand that wrong is the eye of the beholder. Only you can answer whether you did right or wrong, although I will say that sending a letter to an advice column is a signal that you are not completely satisfied with your decision. Honestly this comes off like a brag -- simply because he is not conveying any information other than his wealth and dislike for his family.

There are a bunch of different ways to approach having a lot of money. I have been lucky enough to be extremely well compensated these last few years. To the point where we are getting on toward having so much money that it doesn't seem possible to use it all, although we are nowhere in the range of this lottery winner. My family knows I'm doing well, but perhaps not exactly how well, which is a fine state of affairs as long as everyone understands that there are boundaries. I think you can use money like that to make life better for your loved ones without going all the way toward making them dependents, and personally it has felt right to do that for me. But everyone has their own views on what is best.
I'm not sure why it's only happening in Peru, we should be doing this work world wide. I have similar water capturing techniques at my house where I redirect road runoff into a gentle stream and allow it to infiltrate my landscape, watering Maple, Apple, Plums trees, hydrating the landscape to reduce effects of multi-month droughts:

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAQS4CN_4OY
We already have systems for notarization, perhaps we could try to leverage that, updating it for more modern purposes. I could see them issuing things like smart cards. Then again we have some pretty hardcore religious zealots who refuse to do anything even remotely resembling a national ID system, so it will continue to be fragmented and subject to each state's implementation.
“Shouldn’t make that much difference?” It utterly kills various perfectly reasonable use-cases. Here are a few that I’ve personally experienced and seen others experience:

1. Laptop that can sleep for a week or ten days, and you’re going on holiday for a fortnight and leaving your laptop behind, and don’t want to leave it plugged in unattended (fire hazard) but don’t want to lose your session.

2. You’re off-grid for days on end (e.g. cycling tour with mostly tent camping, which I’ve done several times), and want to be able to use your laptop occasionally without its battery having been drained by being asleep instead of off, and want to keep using the same session.

3. You’re using a device with no battery (desktop computer or laptop with dud battery so that it dies as soon as you unplug it), but you need to move it from point A to point B without losing your session.

These are all straightforward examples where hibernate is essential.
compute? GPUs used to basically top out at $400, now the cheap ones go for more than that.
KYC: New frontiers using Computer Vision and Deep Learning technology
This just seems like it stretches the concept of "violence" to the point of uselessness. If I went to a store and refused to leave at closing time, they'd eventually call the police to drag me out - does that mean closing times are violence?
That's a good example! The technology hasn't really improved that much (it has, but not like TVs), but the cost to deploy solar panels has gone down significantly likely due to manufacturing improvements.
> Overfitting is, by definition, learning a model that doesn't generalize to the distribution of inputs you care about.

No, that's just mis-modelling. Overfitting is specifically doing so in a way that learns the training data too well, at the cost of generalizing. If you try and have a single layer perception network classify a nonlinear function, it will fail to generalize. But it certainly isn't "overfitting".

Overfitting is not the only form of mistake when training a model. You've presented a different one, which is just like trying to train on misrepresentative data. But that isn't "overfitting", it's just having bad data. Your model isn't "failing to generalize", it has nothing to generalize over.

The classic demonstration of this is that overfitting usually results in a accuracy curve that "frowns" on validation data. Your accuracy peaks, but then decreases as you learn the structure of the test data instead of the general structure. In your example that won't happen.

Training a model in the wrong problem isn't overfitting. In fact, your example is more like underfitting than overfitting. The model in your example would fail to see the full complexity of the structure, instead of as in overfitting, make it more complicated than reality.
Road runoff is usually pretty polluted in cities and some places have laws against capturing rainwater to protect downstream resources.
It's also worth calling out specific instances like FightTheNewDrug and Operation Underground Railroad who have deep ties to Conservative Christian (Mormon) ideology, and are often called out by sex positive groups.
That's not really a good summary I think, since the important part is that everyone told the author that this wasn't what they thought it was, while it was precisely that. I also think that it was a nice read, I like the style and the way the story was told.
Messaging is to email as texting is to physical mail: you send physical mail or email when what you want to send isn't quickly dashed off or replied to, but you also take a large risk that the recipient will never see it (spam filtered), or never bother to read it (left in the inbox with tens of thousands of other emails, hundreds of which are from that very morning), or never reply. Also, you never know if someone turned off read receipts, so you can't even assume they didn't see it and start the escalation message with "Hey, I know you haven't gotten to this yet, but..."

So, for a number of years now texting, Slack, or Messenger was the way to be clearer about the intention of only taking a moment of someone's time, which makes it more likely that they'll pay attention. I've been dismayed, as recently as this week, to see on shared screens a red Slack badge that has numbers in the hundreds.

What we really need is much, much better prioritization systems.
Index minimum wages on inflation? The minimum wage in France by example is indexed on inflation (in fact half the increase of an average worker increase) https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaire_minimum_interprofess... (sorry french, no EN translation)
It probably depends where you are in life, how much money, your relationship to family, how comfortable they are, etc. Certainly seemed like the right call in this case.

On the other hand, if your family is comfortable, this happens to you when you're 35 and want to retire and travel the world at least for a while, it's probably hard to deny that you had some sort of real financial windfall.
A barrel of crude peaked above $140 in July 2008 and has been lower ever since.
Donating is not necessarily an ethical "must", as it is entirely possible to continue being true to one's ethical principles while sitting on a huge stash of money, but from a philosophical perspective I'd say that "easy come, easy go" is as good as any a principle for releasing some of that cash towards those entities that align with one's aformentioned ethical principles. The money was neither earned nor owed for services rendered, yet there it sits, unused and inaccessible.
Super Mario 64 on the Web
Sigh, so true!
I could probably write that more precisely, though I stand by the gist of what I said. If we don't disagree about anything else, we can probably leave it at that: you have a valid point.
I bought a new iPhone with cash, signed up for a Verizon MVNO using an assumed name and used an impersonal email address (and assumed name) for my Apple ID (which I seldom use).

Nobody in this chain has my real name or any significant PII. I don't care if any of them get "hacked".

Further, if my phone is lost I just recreate the chain and point my (twilio) number to the new SIM card. I can temporarily forward SMS to email for a day or three. Yes, of course twilio has an assumed name.

None of this was difficult nor illegal nor expensive.

The enabling factor is that Visa/MC do not actually verify cardholder name (even though everyone thinks they do).

So my bank sort of knows who all the providers are, but they'd need to collude with (MVNO or twilio or Apple) to have any real PII which could then be stolen ...

My threat model is PII theft via hacks (like this one) and wayward employees at each provider. My threat model is not state actors or LEAs.
> If most people are making the obvious move to better compensated jobs with better working conditions, what’s driving some people to stay in the underpaid, overworked jobs?

I think there's a real perception of "better the devil you know" for some people that factors into it, even when there's evidence of friends and coworkers doing better. To some degree it's hard to tell if the market is just good or if you just have a sample size of people that got "lucky", and no matter what there's some risk and luck involved in switching jobs. It's even harder if you have little in the way of savings. Having a family relying on you and your income and living mostly month is not a situation amenable to trying to trying new jobs on the market. Stability is prioritized, and even if you secure a new job before quitting the old one, there's always the risk that they'll tell you it's not working our after a couple weeks and then you're in a bad spot.
Word gets around and eventually you're going to get harassed, conned, and maybe even robbed.
App Is Paying Users Thousands of Dollars a Month to Try New Feature
That's not how you compare prices.
cannabis
What I mean to say is that you should take what he's saying as "talking aloud" and not as any concrete prognosis, even if he makes it sound that way. Then it's fun.
The ongoing eviction moratorium comes up quite a bit in real estate circles as one of the many reasons for current prices.

Of course, the very low rates, high construction costs, demand to leave cities, and various other factors also come into play. However, yesterday I was very surprised to learn that the eviction moratorium that is preventing landlords from selling their properties is actually an order from the Centers for Disease Control. When and why did that organization get that sort of power?
The Modern Data Experience
And attracts stalkers and desperate? It may not be his friends or families, but strangers.
I keep hearing about a housing shortage. How we are not building fast enough. I personally know several people that own more than one home and AirBnB it when not in use. Also hedge funds are now targeting real estate. I can't help but wonder if this is partially an AirBnB and hedge fund created situation. Of course these are the same people that have access to all this free money. The average Joe still has to pay interest.
Multi-node distributed training for PyTorch Lightning made easy
SSD drives, anything producing white light with LED, Lufthansa shares :D
Perhaps, but perhaps not. In the history of the Earth, CO2 levels have been significantly higher for a much longer time. (See here: https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/ and note that the time-line is on a log scale.)

Worst-case projections show that at our present CO2 growth rate, things will get bad rather quickly, but keep in mind that the Earth's climate cycles have many (not well understood) self-regulation systems. Increased atmospheric CO2 may lead to explosive vegetation growth which may lead to increased carbon sequestration.
I wrote about this exact topic a few years back: "Algorithmic Bias is Not Just Data Bias" (https://aaronlspringer.com/not-just-data-bias/).

I think the author is generally correct but there is a lot of focus on algorithmic design and not on how we collectively decide what is fair and ethical for these algorithms to do. Right now it is totally up to the algorithm developer to articulate their version of "fair" and implement it however they see fit. I'm not convinced that is a responsibility that belongs to private corporations.
Hunting Greek Unicorns #35
Awesome. I've been trying to buy a home since 2015 or so and noting that housing prices continue to rise, without fail, regardless of economic or political climate. Economy is doing well? Price increase! Economy is doing terribly because of global pandemic? Price increase!

I have been patiently waiting for the next "bubble" to pop, even as my realtor insists that oh no, we're not really in a bubble, this is just the new norm.

Surely this cannot continue forever, right?
No. The first paragraph of the article states that these are inflation-adjusted prices.

> The average price of American homes, in real terms, is now the highest it's ever been