mFixman

But Warner Bros owns HBO Max! How does this change the balance sheet at all?

My guess is that very small and very large values in the weights are already trained away due to the regularisation of the cost function, so insignificant changes in a network don't tend to have significant changes in the output.

You gain more by being able to run gradient descent faster than by having higher-precision floats.

That's the unexplainable part of DRM.

Every kind of non-interactive DRM media is trivial to break. What's the point of not allowing me to read a book I bought in any device when I will always be able to pirate it? Is there a point other than making software worse to show content creators that something be being done to combat piracy?

The Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Hemispheres are just four of the infinite hemispheres of a sphere.

By "canonical definition of hemisphere" I'm talking about the surface of any half-sphere that covers half of the Earth; the "joke" in my proof is that you can choose any one.

For any two continents there's always a hemisphere that contains both of them (assuming you don't worry about the semicircle in the border of the hemisphere). If you put three equidistant continents with the maximum possible distance between them (so that they form an equilateral triangle whose centre is the centre of the sphere) then you can't do anything about it.

Think it like shining a light from some point in space that lights 80% of the land in Earth.

Your example is not the same for two reasons: 1. You are assuming there always are 7 continents and each of them contains 1% of all space on the Earth's surface. I assume there are 14 continents with 2% of the Earth's surface each, which is still incorrect but it's closer to reality. 2. I'm not defining hemisphere however I want: I'm using the canonical definition of hemisphere, but choosing any hemisphere for me dice. For example, two continents that appear on numbers 1 and 48 can never be in the same hemisphere.

My question is the probability of being able to choose 11 of the 14 continents so that there exists a hemisphere that contains all of them, like the land hemisphere contains 80% of the Earth's land.

> The math is the same as flipping a coin 7 times [...]

I'm not saying that a particular hemisphere has a high change of having most of the land; I'm saying that there will be a hemisphere that has this chance.

29% of Earth is land and 80% of this land is in the land hemisphere, so this problem would be the equivalent of rolling a D48 14 times and placing the dice on a table so that any 11 of the rolled numbers are visible if I look at it from the top.

Is antipodal land a physical property of Earth's continents, or is it mathematical fact of distribution on spheres?

If we distribute chunks of land randomly on a sphere we would expect roughly the same amount of land on any randomly-chosen hemisphere. But what can we say about the average amount of land in the hemisphere with the most land?

My intuition says that in an Earth-like sphere, with 29% land and 71% water, there's a high chance of there existing a hemisphere with almost all of the land.

I have no idea how to prove this empirically, but it seems like a really nice maths problem.

Maybe aliens are trying to contact us in a way they understand.

SETI has been sending unconventional radio signals to random spots of the cosmos and waiting for a quick response. An extraterrestrial SETI might have launched ʻOumuamua a billion years ago hoping that it would be detected by alien life.

I propose we find a cool Earth rock, launch it to the solar system Vega, and wait a couple billion years for an alien response.

The hide button is useful for me.

I read the HN front page several times a day, and hide posts that are obvious ragebait, low quality submissions, or things that negatively affect my mood due to personal reasons.

By hiding posts I can make sure that the next page load is a bit better than the default one.

Of course. Human contact is an integral part of the Starbucks experience; otherwise they wouldn't do things like writing your name on the drink or having a million different coffee customisation options.

Your scenario could work with McDonald's, where people go for the cheap convenient food. But the fact that Starbucks exists along with good butchers, grocers, and fancy independent coffee shops is proof that the human factor will always be a crucial part of food shopping.

We've had automatic coffee machines since the 1950s, and yet Starbucks employs over 300k people.

Everything being possibly automated doesn't mean everything will be automated. There is always value in human work, even if we are objectively worse at working than robots and AI.

> today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL.

There's one big piece missing: we don't have an animation/gaming interface that's as easy and intuitive as Flash.

Flash didn't become ubiquitous because it was powerful, but because it was easy for any 13 year old to pick up and do something nice in a couple of days without reading any documentation or doing any course. Good luck getting anything to work in WebGL without any web programming experience.

I just wish it didn't have the giant useless light/dark mode button covering a chunk of the screen.

Most people of any generation are not technically savvy. Most people here in HN were technically savvy before formally joining the tech industry.

Our industry benefited a lot from new employees who had prior experience fighting against buggy Linux distributions or writing random hacks for fun [1]. One of the many consequences of the abatement of general purpose computing is making it harder for teenagers to accidentally discover this wonderful world.

[1] https://xkcd.com/519/

Widespread energy generation nuclear fission is politically impossible in most Western countries.

Why are people optimistic that fusion won't have the same kind of problems, such as new plants being too expensive to build and old obsolete plants being too useful to decommission?

Back in the day my phone carrier in Argentina would send me ultra-high-priority alerts with ads several times a day.

A lot of people in this thread are understandably okay with good carriers doing this for good reasons, but it's very easy to abuse if there aren't strong enough communication laws. From the amount of spam I got when I lived there, I'm surprised this is not happening in America.

The only ads I've bought things from were ones that were hyper-targeted to my demographics, like seller of sweets from my home country in my current city.

This reminds me of being taught that "ch" and "ll" were a single letter each in Spanish back when I was in school before they were re-digraphed in the late '90s.

Adapting alphabets to languages has a long history: just look at how the Greeks butchered the Phoenician writing system with weird concepts like "vowels" and "F". This is something that makes languages unique, and it should be chosen over having digraphs or diacritics.

The "it just looks wrong" makes me appreciate the effort of medieval scholars that added random silent consonants to English words to make their spelling closer to their Latin and Greek originals, like the 'b' in "doubt". It makes learning English a bit harder, but it also makes the language a big nicer.

Sometimes they got it wrong: "island" comes from Old English and never had an 's', but it sounds close enough to the Latin "isla" that they just tacked the letter in there.

Do they? Both alphabets are almost identical, but Cyrillic has many "standardised" sounds that don't appear in the Latin alphabet (Ж "zh", Ц "tz", Ч "ch", Ш "sh") while I don't think there isn't anything the other way around.

The biggest difference is that Latin scripts tend to create new sounds by adding diacritics or digraphs while Cyrillic scripts tend to create new letters — IMO the second way is better for non-Slavic languages.

I don't know. This entire job listing smells of a PR role created to communicate how the New York government is getting the job done rather than actually getting the job done.

Watching pictures of my friends vacations on FB is better for my mental health than reading the angry political opinions of some mentally ill anonymous on Reddit.

It's £12.50 per day.

I'm sure they can manage.

I strongly support this policy, but I worry that it will be struck down in the courts.

The government of London attempted to subsidise public transport in the 1980s, but that was considered illegal after the council of the London Borough of Bromley argued that a public transit tax would be unfair since the Tube doesn't reach that far. I could see a similar challenge happening today.

Brexit became a possibility the second UKIP became a threat to the electoral chances of the Conservative party. It's very likely that Labour would have won in 2015 if Cameron didn't promise that referendum.

Scottish Labour already has a committed anti-independence position, so they likely will let the SNP win over doing a similar promise. The only other possibility is a coalition government with Labour, but I don't see any government making the same mistake after 2016.

You just need a program that registers the `'; DROP TABLE 'users` font and voilá.

To me, the use case of Alexa is doing those exact same things _without_ having to use my phone.

Sometimes I want to listen to a podcast without risking accidentally spending the next hour on Reddit.

This is 100% the government testing the waters to see how such news would be received by the public.

Does anybody know of a book that's a good introduction to pre-computer mathematics?

I love factoring primes manually, and reading these kind of answers make me feel some "I was born in the wrong generation" vibes.

I have been getting those emails too, and I noticed that they get automatically send to spam ~5 minutes after I receive them.

I seem to be getting a spam email of this kind almost every day for the last ~6 months. Maybe the spammer found a way to prevent fingerprinting by Google and each batch of emails only gets automatically marked as spam after so many people manually mark it?