skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The two theories on motive posed in the article are interesting, but I think there's another one worth considering: the Deseret alphabet looks a lot like Paleo-Hebrew[1] and Armenian[2], both of which would have probably been (vaguely) familiar to the Mormon church's early leadership.

Constructing your own alphabet to resembles the alphabets of the religion(s) you establish your legitimacy via is a savvy political move.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet
Do you really think it brought in that much money? I'm sure they had plenty of data when they made this decision.
You don't need to build wires that spans half your country! Just a big building, some transformers or whatever equipment is used to consume the energy from the stranded producer and a lot of miners, as much as you can power!
I grew up in Montana and saw the Milky Way every non-cloudy night
There are fast-drying inks that are suitable for lefties. Noodler’s Q-E’ternity comes to mind.
Forefront: A Better ChatGPT Experience
I agree, but you can't mine USD, it's actually printed out of thin air.
It’s definitely an interesting discussion.

> who doesn't want to know who will an upcoming election?

In particular, politicians want to know. This to me is the interesting upshot. Polls are non binding, so the public could use them to signal to candidates how to tweak their platform.

I’m always curious if there’s any real good data saying turnout patterns change. The thing is, voting because you think your one vote might change the result, is already completely irrational. I always think of voting of being like when you go to a concert and buy the band’s CD even though you already have Spotify: it’s more about find a way to personally participate in an important life moment than practicality.
The last paragraph is both funny and so so in phase with a lot of security by obscurity found everywhere:

"The V700 consults both “/proc/cpuinfo” to learn the CPU serial number of the device it is on, and a binary file associated with the device file system structure as part of its method for determining its AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) key. It then ignores all of these device-specific items, and reverts back to a static key “87654321” stored in the binary."
All fact-based reporting on politics and current events is journalism. I'm sure some of your HN comments have been journalism.

538 is a bunch of opinionated statistics and bad editorial. Squarely in the center of journalism.
> Are there precedents for this in the tech world, where somebody can legally bring IP with them to a new role but the old employer/competitor keeps an exact copy?

This is actually the standard arrangement, depending on how you define "tech world". In California for example a Proprietary Information And Inventions Agreement will include a provision along the lines of:

> If, in the course of my employment with the Company, I incorporate a Prior Invention into a Company product, process or machine, the Company is hereby granted and shall have a nonexclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license (with rights to sublicense through multiple tiers of sublicensees) to make, have made, modify, use and sell such Prior Invention. Notwithstanding the foregoing, I agree that I will not incorporate, or permit to be incorporated, Prior Inventions in any Company Inventions without the Company’s prior written consent.

Meaning anything you created before remains yours, even if, out of the kindness of your heart, you allow your employer to benefit from it.

What's unusual in Silver's case is maintaining that arrangement for a) the founder of a company, and b) through an acquisition.
Poetry and pipenv seem to be quite popular among ML researchers, especially those who care about reproducibility.
Katakanization: Converting English into Japanese
This is a list of accounts, not persons. One person could be operating several of these accounts.
> > You haven't contradicted anything.
Yes, I have. I have even explained the contradiction.

Let's dissect this:

> No, its lots of events with the same methodology (within an election cycle, within any class of election events.)

So if that were accurate, it would require that he have an algorithm which is exactly the same from election to election, and requires no human tweaking for each one. Is that the case? Does his methodology never change, which would require that the inputs are always done the same way, too?

I think you see the problem here. The "inputs" are the polls which get done mostly by third-party polling firms, using methods that are always evolving.
Secondly, I don't believe 538 has an algorithm that's free of human intervention and never changes. What that means is, each election is a unique event.
POWER is supported on linux to the point where it runs, but it doesn't come close to fully leveraging the hardware. AIX does. Stuff like hardware accelerators, transactional memory, hardware counters, reliability monitoring and self healing, etc. Lots of stuff left on the table because it doesn't perfectly overlap the x86, and it would be a massive undertaking to correct that in the kernel. You'd think that wouldn't be the way it is with IBM and RH... but I suspect there are some market segmentation ideas informing those decisions.
Really great site would make solid Tik toks and YouTube shorts one technique a minute long. No joke can see this being useful for prompt engineering like for people making AI memes. It’s about knowing what to ask for.
> no, you can only "calibrate" his prediction abilities in general:

Yeah, but that's what we care about - the past has already happened so we only care about future events.
What does it mean to be "right"?

A pollster claiming Trump:Hillary at 99:1, 50:50, or 33:66 could all claim to have been "right".
Who cares if it's privately produced or not? The other 20% of the land is a free market free for all. You can always go there if you prefer.
I have the cheapest plan, 5GB, and an unlimited data Android tablet for a total of $30+$15=$45 for both...

I pay my cell bill a year in advance - then I never have to worry about a bill ever.
I first saw on HN itself an article on how it’s possible to extract lithium from seawater. Wondering how scalable it is. Seemed to me like a game changer, possibly.

https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...

Someone can set up some extractors up in the great eastern garbage patch, and filter plastics ,microplastics, chemicals, etc, whilst extracting lithium.
> Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP?

It was probably a risk hedge from them.. he would have wanted a lot more for the full enchilada and they didn't know how it would perform in the future. And now his work is not hard to reproduce so it wasn't a bad call. Every political data team I have heard reporting on essentially concedes that whatever they do ends up more-or-less matching 538.. so it is hard to extract surplus value but also easy to hit that mark roughly.

I follow the NHL and there are a lot of models, they disagree in certain details but they largely agree and the "winner" at the end of any given season isn't winning by much.. even private data isn't a big boost.
I’m assuming this is lovely in the SomethingAwful bowdlerized sense
How much value does the model actually have, in and of itself? It’s just a bunch of correlations, right? The value of the model is in the reporting that he does using it (articles, podcasts).

The competition would get value from having him host a show about it on their platform. Disney… I wonder if they even care about the model, or if they just took a license to it/current copy thing because, I dunno, maybe he offered it for really cheap.

I mean can you imagine, 538 but without the main character? It would be incredibly lame.
Is there any case law on whether clicking a checkbox constitutes a legally binding agreement?

A dark pattern that tends to provoke an unintentional behavior does not seem to be likely to hold up as "agreement"
I have chronic tendonitis in my elbows and hands. They say it's non-rheumatologic but don't know what it is. How frustrating medicine can be.

There is no specialty in medicine for treating undiagnosed diseases. You just bounce around between doctors until you give up.
Generally speaking, you don’t hear this because 538 is not a poll, it’s a political analysis brand and competitor (ABC news). Most news orgs or journalists quote the polls themselves.
I think this could reinvigorate the humanities. People will think about philosophy a lot in the world you imagine.
Disney is a media company that was dabbling in data science because of its name recognition. It almost certainly didn't have the strategic vision to care much about something as nerdy as the intellectual property being used to generate that name recognition.
What js library is being used for the visuals?
And eventually, AIs firing people.
You're so 2016. Nate Silver is now a punching bag in left-liberal media circles.
The reply made it clear that the problem is with the email landscape, not the protocol:

> you're entirely dependent on how the other servers run by the recipients view you.

A protocol can be bulletproof. But spammers will spam, blockers will block, trusted platforms will control.
By hand, but I get a lot of great references from the film community.
If you apply the same statistically model to many discrete events, you can evaluate its accuracy. Intuitively, High confidence + Correct answer > Low confidence correct answer > low confidence wrong answer > high confidence wrong answer.

Burning my roulette wheel after winning doesn't invalidate the fact that there was a 1/38 chance of doing so.
all the group chats im in use signal
'Businesses' would also include business vehicles visiting the town, such as FedEx trucks, moving trucks, etc.
There's sense in what you say and that's one reason why different scores are sometimes used for mortgages vs CCs etc. But one could also imagine ways in which zero risk creditors might be less desirable to mortgage lenders. They might be more likely to prepay the loan or refinance quickly and stop making those interest payments prematurely. I payed mine off massively early due to some good fortune - wonder if the mortgage company was annoyed they went through the laborious process of approving the loan and only got a few years out of it.
"Just block fingerprinting" is also not trivial to do while providing a good user experience.
When I ask it point blank, it dodges:

> Are you using a Large Language Model?

> I can’t tell you about the exact details of my underlying technology, but I can assure you that my developers have considered the latest research on language models.

But InflectionAI’s about page [0] says “We are excited to introduce our Conversational API, designed to provide developers and businesses with access to our state-of-the-art large language models.” And uses branding clearly intended to connect that API to the pi demo, and gives no indication of some radical different chatbot technology used in their Pi demo.

So, I think its almost certainly an LLM.

[0] https://inflection.ai/about
A cavern beneath a West Antarctic glacier is teeming with life
Unfortunately this 'explanation' turned meme has had unintended consequences. I've seen this used by the uninformed online as a counter argument to dismiss legitimately dangerous sources of radiation on more than one occasion, likening radiation exposure to just being around a large amount of bananas. Sometimes only partially understanding something can be worse than not understanding it at all, especially when someone confidently misunderstands it.
> I question this view. Why?

I think because what's the point of following the projections if at the end of the day they're indistinguishable from a coin toss? This applies to all polling. It's vaguely interesting but when (in Trump's case) a candidate can be consistently far behind for months and then still win because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that's how probability works, then what's the point of having followed the polls?
For real, I used to just take off an ignition cable (vehicle rarely driven). Good luck driving that one lol
If everyone chooses not to confront car thieves, then car thieves have successful careers stealing everyone's cars. If everyone chooses to confront car thieves (preferably with friends, preferably armed), then car thieves quickly choose another career.

Getting the police to do their job would be ideal, but that won't happen so we only have these two options.
"538" can be hidden inside of "BB8", given the shape of the chars.
I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain.

Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.
Never tell me the odds!
This is excellent! Beautifully simple interface. Took me a minute to realize I could start typing without seeing a blinking cursor.
The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature
In the grand scheme of Disney stuff, it probably didn’t make much money relatively speaking, but it seems weird to get rid of it right before the season where it’ll make any money.
Have a good look at Nim
Checking an ID in person is a bit different than uploading a picture of it. US IDs are designed for in person verification with security features like holograms, laser perforations and microprinting. Also don't think it's a high bar if they're allowed to use one ID to unlock multiple tiles
How much less? 10% 50% 80%?
In fact, horse race journalism has been observed to have such negative and self-fulling effects that some countries ban polling and/or electoral journalism for hours, days, or weeks before an election. Even in the US, it is illegal to do any "electioneering" within 100ft of a polling place.

On top of that, while 538 initially provided good and solid insights, it has recently been successfully gamed by right-wing players by standing up bogus polling organizations and getting their bogus results into the aggregator's (like 538) results. The goal of course was to make their candidates seem more popular, and the "reliability" scores did not work, as the aggregators results were significantly off in that direction.

Safe to ignore NS and any of his output (and more reliable).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence
Damn it feels so much like Apple now
https://heypi.com/talk
Used to be that they would drive it somewhere quiet, pull parts off, and leave the carcas on the side of the road. At least, that's what happened to my cars a few times in the early 2000's.
> Do we really want all these legitimate tech operations to depart the US?

Cryptocurrency has had a over a decade. It's still mostly pump-and-dump with a few barely useful niches. Doubtful it will be missed in the US.
Hey HN, author of the site here!

Happy to answer any questions.

(below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit)

The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release.

But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always "top headlines" — even on days when nothing important happened.

I am forced to make a choice: waste time going through unimportant updates or ignore the news and miss important events.

So I built a web app that I think solves this.

It uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10 based on event magnitude, scale, potential, and source credibility.

The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

I also run a newsletter where I post summaries of all the news with a score over 6.5. On average that's 1-3 articles per day, but sometimes it is 5, and sometimes — none at all. In that case, I just send an email saying that nothing important happened that day.

You can read previous issues here: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/

Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.
Was it really any better than NYTimes or CNN? I think it’s pretty unremarkable these days and I don’t think Disney is losing revenue or prestige.
That's how John Malkovich famously became a puppeteer
> i'm a bit sad that experimentation isn't being done, here.

Oh, it is! Just nothing of substance has made it into mass market shipping that I’ve seen.
And who knows how much of this Disney really cares about going forward outside of the Nate Silver Brand--and had they had wanted that they'd have kept Nate Silver.
>Can you run the 2016 election 1,000 times and count the times Hillary wins? Of course you can't.

If you think that evaluating their model based on binary outcomes is the best way to do it, then, well, this argument makes sense.

If you want to evaluate the model based on all of the details available, then, well, it stops making nearly as much sense. What explanations were given for potential Trump victories? What information was available at the time? What information was available after? Do we have data around if those explanations did align with Trump's victory?

I've not done a deep dive on this - 538 is entertainment for me. But from what I remembered in 2016, what I read today in digging up some example articles for another comment, and looking at the actual outcomes... yes, those explanations were closely aligned with reality.

Humans have to come up with probabilities and make decisions based off of them all the time, even when we will never get a chance to get 1000 occurrences. These might not be provable in the same way as something we can run 1000 times is, but the idea that they are meaningless and without value is bizarre.
Rust is different though, because its purpose was to make Firefox more secure. So the ultimate goal was to improve the browser. Maybe there is some way this acquisition leads to a better browser, but I don't see it.
So I ask you again, are China's censorship laws enforceable in France just because they say they are?

If you don't think that analogy is accurate, can you explain why?
I mean, android is fine. But as I’ve gotten older I have less patience with the mucking about I must always do with android devices.
Interesting. I'm marked as safe here.
EnerGel Alloy RT Gel Pen, Medium Point, 0.7 mm

(copy/pasted from my amazon order)

I've been using this pen for a long time and I just love it so much.
MS buying Apple stock involved a pretty complicated deal that also involved settling a number of court disputes between the two companies, Apple agreeing to ship Internet Explorer for Mac (rather than Netscape) and MS agreeing to ship Office for at least 5 more years.

At the time and subsequently it was absolutely seen as a lifeline.

For example:

> Providing the biggest sign of hope yet for ailing Apple Computer, Microsoft today announced it was forging a new era of cooperation with its longtime rival that includes an investment of $150 million. [snip] News of the alliance sent Apple's stock up $7 a share, or 35 percent

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19970806&slug...
I mean, 538 was under the NYTimes.com domain before that, it's not like Nate had to sell, and when he agreed to move to ESPN/Disney, he surely had more of the bargaining power.
Stability is an illusion. Everything is fluctuating in value every day. Some would argue that given bitcoin's fixed supply, it could be an asset against which everything else value can be measured accurately. An economical measuring stick, if you will.

> International accepted

Yes, except China!

> 50% attack

Buddy are you still in 2013?

> Crisis

Yes, there are some accounts of people fleeing the Ukraine war with their savings in a USB stick, Bitcoin sure is great in a time of crisis where criminals would be on the look out for shiny metal!

> start really using bitcoin..

What are you talking about? I'm using Bitcoin right now! I use it every day especially when I am soundly asleep knowing that my Bitcoin is safe and my purchasing power will grow in the long term.

> El Salvador

El Hodlador knows what long term means.
The model is only one feature of the site, you realize right? Have you read anything else they put out besides the election forecast?
You mean they acquired a bunch of infrastructure stuff, but no consumer products (unless you count failed blekko). That's not a fair match for anything that FAANG companies are building.
The last tweet from Fivey Fox's account, just after the second round of layoffs was announced, is ominous https://twitter.com/FiveyFox/status/1651634606272126995
Or after its 2016 performance they didn’t expect it to make that much so a year of salary was more than earnings.
Eh, both Google and Microsoft have been using dirty tactics against each other for awhile.

Remember the entire reason Microsoft scrapped their own browser engine was because Google kept breaking YouTube video acceleration in Edge/IE.
Nate got his start in this world doing baseball forecasting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PECOTA), well before he delved into politics. Jay Boice definitely doing much of the heavy lifting these days, and deserves more personal recognition than he currently gets. But I wouldn't discount the amount of work Nate personally put in on the sports front.
> where "the latest polls" will mean (among other things) 538.

No, it won’t; 538 doesn’t produce polls.
In the US, the vast, vast majority of iPhone users use iMessage for chatting. When you are in a group chat on iMessage, and you are the only Android user:

1. Video sharing is essentially unusable. Forget "potato quality", basically the videos are essentially unviewable. And this goes not just to videos that are sent to you, it's also videos you send to the group. Sharing videos in a group chat is not an uncommon activity when you're on vacation, for example.

2. In iMessage, using emoji responses is a big part of the social interaction in group chats, e.g. someone posts a photo and other people post responses. You basically can't post emoji reactions in iMessage group chats if you're on Android.

3. Messages you send randomly get dropped. "Hey, hn_throwaway_99, can you send us that group picture you took?". Me: "Sure thing". An hour later: "Why didn't you send the photo like we asked?". Me: "I did, but apparently half the group never got it."

Then, basically, everyone gets annoyed if you're the "Android man out", because everything works perfectly if everyone is on an iPhone. And, in the US, if you belong to certain social groups in particular socioeconomic classes, you will be the odd one out if you don't have an iPhone.
And that will happen no matter what. Polls and prognostications will always exist and probably have always existed back to the first tribal chieftain election. It’s just that instead of getting totally inaccurate predictions that only serve a narrative, for a little while a few of us knew how to get a more unbiased prediction. Now even fewer people will know anything aside from their favorite outlet’s media bubble.
There is a very real reason to vote for the candidate during the primary who is most likely to win the general election.
>I do believe in privacy rights, but... free porn just doesn't feel like a must-exist thing in the sense we are all talking about.

...Well gee golly gosh, did you ask anyone else in the room? Or did you unilaterally decide what's best for everyone else?

And clearly you don't support privacy rights if you're willing to turn around and hand everyone else's off. Talk about saying one thing and doing something completely different. The turn of phrase this brings to mind is "Stop pissing on my shoes, and trying to convince me it's raining."