skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having a well articulated purpose, and being "centralized" are two sides of the same coin. We can agree on a purpose for government money because it has been deliberately molded to specific purposes: A medium of exchange, short term store of value, and instrument of economic policy. We can measure its performance against those purposes, and in fact, that measurement process is part of the technology of our money system.

Not knowing the purpose of cryptocurrency is its purpose. There's nothing wrong with having a general purpose technology, like computer programming, that is adaptable to specific purposes on demand.
Any application where you need an immutable ledger, and

1. You can't trust any single known party, or group of parties, to attest the integrity of the ledger (otherwise, you could just use plain old digital signatures)

2. You need infinite pseudonymous accounts in this ledger.

3. You need it so badly that you're willing to forgo a significant share of whatever value having this ledger creates, regularly, forever (mining fees).

There have been attempts to rebrand blockchain as anything containing a chain of digital signatures, no mining needed. In which case it's old technology - but in that case I also agree that it has a use.

Artists are by their nature known parties, as are factors in a supply chain. They may have a use for digital signatures, but they have no use for a scheme including mining.
One of the recurring arguments from anti-vaxers is that big pharma is setuping us for a vaccine version of netflix: Shot As A Service.

After being told one dose of the vaccine will prevent us from catching covid, then that actually it needs a second dose the same year, well actually you could catch it, wait actually you will probably catch it but it's less deadly, oh I forgot you'll need 3 doses. Ah, now 4 in 2 years... Also, the FDA wants 55 years to process FOIA request over the vaccine data.

Those people need to get their communication act together, because they are loosing credibility at the speed of an R0 of 3. The public is already squirmish, not to mention tense because of the economic and social impact of the pandemic.

It's like they have a secret wish for people to explode in their face.
In our legal system, actions are legal unless there is a law making them illegal.

If you are referring to anti-trust laws preventing this, then MS would need to be buying a huge number of companies to monopolize the gaming market, not just Activision, in order to be in violation of this law.
Hello from Scandinavia. No Revolutions in sight, government takes 70% (taking both tax and vat into account)
So was all the bad press Activision got recently in spite of, or driven by, acquisition plans? What better way to put pressure on a company to give up its independence than public shame and infamy?

Prolly knocked a few bucks off the price at least.
>>> In any case it's hard to see why this is news

It's fascinating! The "psycho-history" style preservation, and indeed flourishing, in Contemporary America of endangered cultures of the Ancient East.

We see a bit of it with ex-pat Turkish communities thriving in NY & PA. And I suspect with the recent influx of Afghan refugees we'll see a renaissance in ancient sources of Pashtun tradition, once freed from the shackles of mythos, and able to engage in free inquiry into their exegesis.

ML of "dead" language corpora is key. It was instrumental in decoding Syriac texts. And I suspect data mining of insights into ancient wisdom and digital archeology advances will only uncover more truth, more controversy. "Is this the real Islam" indeed!

Zoroastrian Global Glossary

https://fezana.org/glossary/
That's also done.

"Funded by the Arts Council" is a phrase commonly seen on posters for all sorts of artistic endeavours. "Funding Opportunities" is front and centre on their website too:

https://www.artscouncil.ie/home/
Boom and bust cycles are inherent to capitalist markets, you can't have capitalism without it. Blaming it all on the Fed isn't accurate. Markets boomed and busted long before the Fed existed.

> hardly a bastion of price stability

Relative to BTC, USD is much, much more stable. This is what I don't get about these kinds of arguments. What are you comparing the Fed to in this case?
Nadella transformed a company that was at risk of turning into the next IBM into the 2nd most valuable company in the world. Where have you been the past 9 years of his tenure?
Forecasting, Principles and Practice by Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos is a great resource as a starting point: https://otexts.com/fpp3/
I would find it interesting to see some old server hardware phased out and maybe purchase it for my home- office/lab. But I don't really know what to look out for, except for the gen4 hardware from 2017.
Well, if all one wants is an "audience" one can simply report the results of their research on twitter. Much bigger audience. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that you want someone who knows their shit, to review your paper, and who will have both the knowledge and the motivation to engage with your work critically and help you see what is behind all those big blind spots we all have for our own work. I'm sure this happens with papers put on arxiv, occasionally, but my expectation is that just because the paper is on arxiv most people will not be that interested in making a serious effort to review it, and that it is much more likely that such a serious effort will be made by a reviewer in a peer-reviewd venue, particularly one of the top journals (conference reviews are a mess).

So, yeah, I disagree. The level of scrutiny one gets from putting their work on arxiv doesn't compare with peer review by experts in one's field.
Also, HoloLens. I think they are going for the Ready Player 1 version of the metaverse.

Edit: scratch that reference. I realized HoloLens is AR, not VR. And just saw that they are marketing HoloLens 2 to business use cases.
Being asked to sign in after spending time to customise anything, should be illegal.
I think exhaustion and dis-orientation. I remember being told to eat more, and stay out in the sun.
So we agree then ;)
We print the most important photos and put them in photo albums. Properly printed photos on good photo paper and stored in a photo album should last a long time, hopefully measured in centuries.
My name is Grom Hellscream, He/Him.
Yeah this seems like a copy
It's actually explained in the FAQ section of this post: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo2/23658118/diablo-ii-r...
Golden parachute incoming... Probably hanging around for a few months until the buyout completes, then off he goes.
> With peer-review you know that someone will read your work that has the background to understand it and to catch errors.

This is a remarkably naive (and charmingly optimistic) view of peer-review.

For the vast majority of the history of academic research peer review did not play a major part. It wasn't until the 1970s that the modern day peer review system emerged and it did so as a reaction to a funding crisis in academia to produce the illusion of legitimacy.

It of course has done no such thing. It has done nothing to limit the reproducibility crisis which has shown it's ugly head in nearly all scientific fields of study. One could even argue that peer review coupled with a publish or perish culture is the cause of such a failure of science.

This also means just about any great scientific discovery you can think of prior to 1970 did not go through the peer review process as we know it today. If science seems less exciting today, peer review is certainly one of the reasons for this. I'll leave you with Geoffrey Hinton's words on the subject:

> Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.

Laking peering review is a feature, and not just because it speeds up time to results.
Some of my fantasy thoughts about a photo storage service:
Can I ask Siri, Google, Alexa (or any smart assistant) when was the last 3 times I saw ____?

Can it show me emails, photos, tweets, etc of the related meetings/events?

Can I take a photo or upload a photo of someone and provide as many details as possible? In relation to me personally and them alone as a person?

Can it be a celebrity or a person from the past (no longer living) and it could try to see a connection, related things, etc?

Would this also be helpful for parties, weddings, funerals, and more?

Could I ask it to try to find a relation between two people?

What if you connected it to something like Lexis Nexis?
Be able to display connections in different chart types? bubble, connected graph, or graph commons: https://neo4j.com/blog/creative-network-science-graph-common...

Can a timeline or photos help to tell a story? Act as a guide or reference? Add more clarity to situations/events? Could we offer this as an addon to weddings and other events? Can we create a linear timeline of photos, dates, times and locations?
Could we also show related influences? Like songs, albums, family history or tree.
Topics to disable: lyrics, alcohol, ??
How to access/merge other apple photo accounts? AI photo collage, web based, download as video or PPT
Farming Co. Says John Deere Is Monopolizing Repair Market
This is all considerably more abstraction than I have wanted or needed when writing Java. When handling transactions, I’ve passed around the same connection before committing.
> It can create pockets of Muslim majority in countries where they are minority

I assume you're talking about the Parisian "banlieues", Berlin-Neukölln and similar areas? These ghettos are the result of a mixture of gentrification and (decades of) ethnic discrimination... basically, what happens is:

First, many immigrants take up low-paid jobs in society because of language barriers or un-recognized qualification documents [1] or because of ethnic discrimination in hiring [2]. That means they are restricted to social/cheap housing by their low income.

These housing situations (sometimes quickly) deteriorate in a phenomenon called "white flight", which leads to a vicious cycle of discrimination by city quarter [3] and everyone who is able to fleeing, leading to a collapse in rents and a subsequent rise in migrant and "down on their luck" (i.e. criminals and other people unable to find regular housing) people. In the end, the government and its services as well as economy (e.g. supermarkets, small shops, ...) also retreats from such areas, leading to further decline. The people left behind then go and self-organize - some in positive forms such as ethnic grocery exports/imports stores, some in negative forms such as crime gangs.

The ethnic discrimination, especially against the young second- or third-generation migrants, also leads to a rise in gang-related crime: when schools fail to educate them, the employment market discriminates against them and cultural icons glorify a life of crime or crime is the only way to make a living without depending on social security, way too many choose the way of joining a gang.

The crime then invites politicians, usually from the Conservative to far-right, to call for "law and order" tactics from police, which leads to an increase of discrimination by police, a further split between the immigrant and indigenous population and sometimes outright ethnic riots (the London 2011 riots began with the killing of a Black suspect by police, the Paris 2005 riots began with the death of two immigrant youth who fled from police in fear of lengthy "interrogations", and the BLM-associated riots were triggered by George Floyd being murdered by police).

And historically, governments haven't exactly had a track record combatting the early signs of gentrification or ghettoization... which makes all the crying and complaining about "segregation", "parallel cultures" etc. when something happens (such as the mentioned riots, or the gang murder spree in Sweden) a bit cynical. The policies of the Conservative and far-right politicians created the very same problems they are now complaining about.

[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/oecd-eu-studie-besonders-vie...

[2]: https://www.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/schule/auslaendische-v...

[3]: https://www.bpb.de/politik/innenpolitik/stadt-und-gesellscha...
Why has interoperability failed in the past? Why don’t we have it today?
I guess the price had already been settled but they probably wanted to distance themselves from the accusations against the company.
I used numpy a lot for my PhD research, and think you're right, in the sense that things could have been much more numpy array centric (just like how in R the dataframe is a tiny structure around arrays).

There are a lot of problems you encounter when using arrays for data analysis, like some of their funky behavior with strings [0], but it seems like extending arrays, or building new types of numpy arrays would have been better than new data structures like the pandas Series.

(pandas folks thought a lot about these problems so I could be very wrong).

[0]: https://mchow.com/posts/pandas-has-a-hard-job/
>Bearing in mind how much profit a lot of home builders make, increasing the regulations is likely to add at least £20K to a basic house, significantly more if you include mechanical ventilation, triple-glazed windows and heat pumps (perhaps +£50K), which is some cases will be 50%+ of the original cost!

The sales price of houses in the UK (and elsewhere) is driven by the market and there is a low amount of released, buildable land and a lot of demand in the Southeast. The land value (a large component of the value) is not actually set in an independent market but is based on the expected sales price minus construction costs and development costs. Therefore increasing the built cost of properties will decrease the value of land likely to receive planning permission without affecting purchase price by much.

The marginal cost of thicker walls is also very low (especially compared to retrofit costs) so the impact on construction cost is nothing like £50k.
If they want to be all-in on game pass, then they should actually go all in.

As somebody who just got game pass, I feel kinda cheated for what I get; All the games offered there are the “f2p” versions, even MS first party titles like Halo only offer the “default” versions to play “for free” when paying a monthly subscription.

It’s like those free versions Epic hands out; They are playable, but they usually lack any and all of the “extra DLC content” that too often are needed to make a game actually fully fleshed out.
The old Blizzard always seemed much closer to Apple than Microsoft in culture. An incredible attention to detail and the onboarding experience, clean, fun and friendly design and a slightly rebellious attitude expressed through their willingness to enter new markets.

The "new" Microsoft though, really is different than the old and might actually do quite well in stewarding this supposedly sinking ship into fairer waters.

But as a die hard Apple user with an active WoW subscription I can't help but feel slightly dismayed that the Apple x Blizzard deal never will (or probably could have) happen(ed).
> For example, Activision had a successful franchise Call of Duty that did releases every 2 years or so. Kotick’s insight was that they could release one every year and basically print money.

To be fair though, they put two studios on it, which is very unlike other annual games, and a much better approach for WLB and avoiding (some) crunch.
Saving smooths the earnings to some extent, but the fundamental issue remains. Mortgages and schools are financial committments for decades.
What if I claimed that "neat digital art images" do not have any value to be monetised, due to usable by anyone at any time from the internet?
And 100% of that drop (and more?) has been recovered for shareholders by this acquisition.

One could argue that Microsoft would have paid more, and I’m sure some enterprising lawyers will get paid by tricking some shareholders into suing over that, but that’s like arguing with the waves about when high tide is.
Phatic Expression
>call it free if the choice is not computable in advance

Is it not essentially equivalent to "actual" free will? I am perfectly happy with just this.
It might have made it cheaper, but I still think it's a bad deal for MS.

Activision doesn't create very much new IP these days, and that's where the talent is that brings new games and gamers to your platform.
Pretty sure then as a tax paying citizen that I'm responsible for drone assassinations etc., so by comparison the entire Blizzard drama would be pretty low on the priority list by that logic.
It's not that its illegal. It's that its "discouraged" via arbitrary regulation usually under the guise of money laundering or high charge backs. For instance, cam girls are legal in the US, but they have a difficulty getting a payment provider Same is true for states with recreational marijuana.

Cryptocurrency also solves the problem of charge-backs. Venmo and PayPal gives a sense of finality, but it actually takes days to transfer the funds. That's why there are so many paypal scams on craigslist
Or perhaps you can stop asking others to adjust to your behaviors and not sit idly by waiting for someone else to type something to you?

Isn't that how async communication is supposed to work?
In my experience there is very little actual blacklisting/badmouthing in this way. Such behavior reflects poorly only on the badmouther.

In consulting there are always functional and non-functional criteria for a relationship- on both sides. Sometimes/often invented after the fact, after parties have gotten to know one another. Engagements will be described to others against that criteria. The listener can glean and infer what they are able to.

And sometimes for the careful listener, there will be some barely detectable tepidity in an endorsement.
Indeed, and what I observed is even one step beyond this, to conclude that it is something like an Internet-propagated cult-like "movement".

My understanding is that cult leaders teach their followers to be prepared for those trying to convince them of anything outside of the leader's teachings. The leader has carefully planned out all "teachings" such that when someone comes along to convince a member to leave the cult's teachings, the member already has a long series of prepared counter-arguments to every rejection of the teaching. No matter how carefully reasoned the rejections may be, the counter-arguments will defeat them, and, critically, the member will view anyone trying to convince them to leave the cult as a mortal enemy trying to harm them.

Apply this to flat-earth and it is why I believe it to be cult-like.

I really wish that someone who studies cults from a psychology perspective would take a very serious look at the flat-earth communities. My personal experience with someone I knew for over a decade was seeing this person felt that everything I thought I knew was actually a clever deception and that I and everyone else is out of touch with reality, and they are the few that have been able to see through the deception. It can make even casual discussion exceptionally difficult.

When I have gone through YouTube videos "debunking" flat-earthers, what I usually see is the person or group making the video are not respectful of all claims being made, even on a scientific basis. For example, in one video a local group of flat-earthers was contacted for performing an experiment to test their theories. An agreement was made as to how to perform the experiment, and one of the items was the experiment must occur before a specific time in the morning. No surprise, the people who put the experiment together didn't show up to the experiment until several hours after the agreed upon time, invalidating the experiment. Of course, they proceeded to perform the experiment at the invalidated time and post a video disproving flat-earth theory, but the result of this is to embolden the flat-earther, because of course the reason for showing up late is to trick everyone into continuing to believe the deception. Nearly always, the people trying to disprove such theories will use this to show how crazy the flat-earthers are, and not see or publicly admit they have made the problem worse with their actions.

Similar results are achieved with science-based videos put out by science or engineering-based YouTube channels, where the person making the video is, frankly, disrespectful to the flat-earthers. This never helps, but it does get the person making the video more than usual views for probably less than usual effort.

Also, a lot of discussion and content will be in regards to the cult leaders. Part of the attraction to the leaders is they are the lone sane ones fighting against the hordes of crazies. Instead, people should ignore the leaders and focus on the members. You can never get a con-man to admit what they are.
I've done a couple of fixed price jobs but they were very small (a couple of weeks work) and with a client I trusted.

In general I won't and I've found the more the client demands it the more I should be worried.
Understanding what git is doing under the hood did more for my ability to use it effectively than it did for most tools.

That said, this document in particular does not seem to be a very good way to get that understanding, it's a very "IBM documentation" way of presenting git. I wish I remembered what I read, because it's was a much easier read.
Thats what I thought. A CEO reporting to a CEO isnt going to end well.
There's nothing to read into. He is categorically going to being staying on.
Declassified documents reveal ID-card crisis from decade ago
This is among my primary frustrations, but I cannot find a polite way to address it, especially with overseas employees. I don’t want to come off as rude.
You may not be realizing that PayPal's primary business is fraud detection and dispute resolution, not merely moving money. PayPal is layer above money transfers, providing insurance and reversibility of transactions that cryptocurrencies themselves don't have, and most don't want to have.
> What percent of vaccine holdouts do you reckon have already been infected?

I'm not going to sit here and guess

You have the information to work this one out yourself if you like and none of these comments make any sense mate
Fine as in common practice and the way aviation has been operating safely for the past few decades.
Xi Jinping warns Fed against hiking interest rates
Show HN: A book, an Artificial Intelligence foundation For Laypeople