kogus

This is very interesting. Is OCR good enough to reliably read these kinds of bills in bulk? Or have they been manually entered?

I once again am reminded of this bet:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-2030-self-driving-car-bet/

This code is surprisingly readable. For a Gameboy Advance, I expected piles of assembler. Many years ago, early in my career, I implemented a Minesweeper clone in Delphi. It's still there, a testament to how terrible code can be, and how much fun it is anyway:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/delphisweeper/files/delphis...

I guess you are right; I kind of fly off the handle when I see this kind of topic come up. But the underlying premise of the research in question is that Facebook should be an unbiased, moderated forum for open public discourse. I just don't see how anyone could reasonably expect that to happen.

All government action is, by definition, an act of violence-backed force. I think that should be minimized.

I don't share your cynical view that people only behave with kindness because they are forced to at gunpoint. I also try to remember that every war ever conducted in human history was the explicit act of organized government action, ostensibly as an expression of the will of the people.

Anyway this isn't the right thread or forum for this kind of discussion. I hope you are right; my viewpoint is definitely not about to take over the world :)

I disagree with this sentiment:

  At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society
  according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold
  the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance
  with American values

There is a list of things the government should to. "Shape society" is not one of them.

At the end of the day, companies can and will decide what's profitable for them to do. If a hosting service doesn't want to host your site, you should probably speak in some other way. The internet is not the only vehicle for public communication. You and I should be completely free to say whatever we want. Nobody owes me (or you) a platform for speech. Those two statements are not incompatible. As I write this, I'm aware of the irony that I'm doing so on a public online forum. But I acknowledge at the end of the day if Hacker News wants to delete this comment, they have a right to do so.

The surprise to me is that anyone would ever expect companies like X or Facebook to pay more than lip service to the idea of being an open public platform. These are private companies who want to

  1) Attract a lot of eyeballs
  2) Sell ad space in front of those eyeballs

That's all. To bastardize a Lincoln quote[1]:

  My paramount object in this struggle is to make a profit
  and is not either to save or to destroy free speech.
  If I could make a profit without promoting any free speech I would do it,
  and if I could save it by promoting all free speech I would do it;
  and if I could save it by promoting some free speech and forbidding other
  free speech, I would also do that.

My point being, if you want to say something controversial, host it yourself. It's childish to expect businesses to host your content when it attracts the ire of regulators who can threaten their business, or when the content directly threatens their business by causing people to leave.

[1]http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley...

I don't know if I have ever read a more generic, boilerplate quasi-condolence paragraph than this one:

  This isn’t a decision the leadership team came to quickly; it was the result 
  of extensive considerations and road mapping for our future. We are proud of 
  the work the teams have been doing, pushing into new areas with weekly content 
  on Crown Channel, and finding more ways to help publishers reach new audiences 
  with Game Growth. But after further evaluation of our businesses, it became 
  clear that we need focus our resources and efforts to deliver great games to 
  players now and in the future.”

I'm not sure if overall literacy rates were as high in the past (in the sense of "what percentage of people can read"), but among those who could read, the level of reading and writing skill was dramatically higher. Consider that the works of Charles Dickens were released serially, and crowds of people thronged stores to pick up the latest addition to his stories when they arrived. Those are not books that a typical modern reader would find accessible.

This sounds like a colossal waste of time, and a lot of fun. The “repeat” key is a cool idea though.

Your comment made me curious to look up their leadership page. As of this post, Katalin Karikó is featured very prominently on the president's page, above even the president herself. That's a pretty big mea culpa.

https://president.upenn.edu/

I agree 100% with what you are saying, but I don't think you need a human connection to have good content. The encyclopedia Brittanica didn't establish a human connection, but it was a valuable resource. An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver. So we get clickbait headlines and veneer-grade content because that's enough to get the ad dollars, without the investment that original content would require.

To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life. The large-scale effect is decidedly negative, though.

I half expected this article to essentially say "we wouldn't know life if it hit us in the face", but happily the conclusion was that yes, we could see strong evidence for the presence of life on earth from Galileo.

Life in other places might be radically different from our own, and we might be looking for the wrong things - but it is good to know that our search is at least able to find what we are looking for.

The V.C. Sumner site has been a multi-decade slow motion financial and management catastrophe on many fronts[1][2][3]. It does not surprise me that the rot that apparently existed (and maybe still exists) at the top has filtered down into operational and maintenance issues.

One lesson for me is that excellence is a symptom of a healthy organization, not the other way around.

[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-carolina-utility-agrees-t...

[3] https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new...

Making public colleges free isn't... free. The perception is often that public universities are already getting most of their money from the state or federal government, so why not just close the gap. But the typical funding level is between 40-50%. The remaining 50-60% is currently covered by tuition and philanthropic giving. So closing the gap to make universities free to the public would involve (in most cases) more than doubling the current level of state/federal funding.

That doesn't mean it should not be done - but the magnitude of the investment should be made clear.

The related WSJ article is here: https://www.wsj.com/business/a-futuristic-plan-to-make-steel...)

or, at the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230927135925/https://www.wsj.c...

The first card image is interesting to me because of how many animal-related injuries it features, hinting at the much more rural life that most people had at that time. Three horses, a cow and a dog - I think a modern equivalent would include at most the dog.

OK, so is it like this:

BEFORE: We remove 99%, the other 1% metastasizes, you live for six months

AFTER: We remove 99%, this medicine stops the other 1% in its tracks, you live out the course of your life

?

This part confuses me:

  Twelve days after he was given the immunotherapy
  drugs, Professor Scolyer had surgery to have
  the bulk of his tumour removed.

If they were able to remove the tumor, was it incurable?

Afterwards, they were able to analyze the tissue in the (now removed) tumor to establish that the immunotherapy drug had performed far above anyone's expectations.

That is fantastic news, but it is not my impression from the article that the drug enabled the removal. So by "incurable" did they mean "only treatable by surgery", or am I missing something?

This is changing the subject. My point was that 1) corruption exists and 2) it is not (in my opinion) a dominant factor in the justice system.

Regarding drug use: I do not think I have a right to tell other people what to put in their mouth / nose / whatever. It should be legal to use recreational drugs, just as it is legal to do many other very stupid things.

Police corruption and abuse are real. Failures of the justice system are real. We must also acknowledge that the system often works correctly, even in high profile cases. As I write this, there is a real chance the former president will serve jail time after a fair trial. The police who murdered George Floyd are in jail, and serious reforms were enacted as a result of their misconduct. It is healthy to sniff for corruption. It isn't healthy to smell it before it is there.

Now I get the character of Vice Principal Nero in the Series of Unfortunate Events a little bit better.

You are right - but because each hire is less risky, a US company can afford to take the risk of hiring for an "experimental" role that may not work out. I think this additional risk is what they were referring to.

Presumably the creator created with purpose. If I make a chair, it fulfills its purpose when it serves as a place to sit. It does not serve its purpose if someone uses it to awkwardly dig a hole.

Likewise if God made me to, say, love and forgive others, I can either serve my purpose or not. But the purpose is given to me by the intent of the creator.

As it says:

It's actually no more of a purpose than a tautology. It just happens that a species that survives and reproduces will continue to live.

Without a creator, there is no real “purpose” at all. Everything came from nothing, will end as nothing, and is ultimately irrelevant. Everything.

As a Christian, I sometimes look over into that chasm and wonder how atheists bear it.

Answering questions from the White Clown ala Fahrenheit 451 will finally be possible...

The article says "The U.S. government on July 3 said it had fulfilled its requirements under the agreement." But the article detailing that "fulfillment" is behind a paywall. Does anyone know what changes the US made?

It would be encouraging if pressure from the EU actually resulted in improved privacy protections in the US.

“5” might be the key for a thousand different records in your database. A uuid is a key for exactly one. Integer keys permit wrong joins to have the appearance of working.

I believe the Windows equivalent is to click on the Calendar in the Taskbar, and select the "Focus" triangle

Reference:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-focus...

Amusingly, the first thing it does is put a big countdown clock on your screen, counting down the time till your "focus" ends. Otherwise it works pretty well.

It is very patronizing to think that these Kenyans have those kinds of opportunities, and have foolishly traded them in for a job writing essays. This is the best opportunity available to them at this time, and it is being taken away from them. If you think there were better opportunities they missed, then you are implicitly saying that they don't know what is best for themselves.

Having said all of that, let's not overstate the difficulty of writing college level essays, especially essays that are good enough for someone who isn't able to write such essays themselves.