jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> But leaders pay a political price for instituting draconian enforcement measures, while their country pays an economic price, which makes them less likely. It's one thing to send armed agents to storm the homes of executives of a large private bank to shake down the bank. It's another to do it against end-users at a scale where it becomes effective.

I don't think the political price is as high as you think, and armed agents don't have to storm the homes of end-users at scale. All they have to do is storm enough homes discourage people by making it clear the risk is real, and everyone internalizes the rules.

If cryptocurrency is contraband, it's the worse kind of contraband because it advertises that you use it to the authorities through easily monitored channels (since you have to connect to identifiable internet services to use it).
Thanks, the screenshots were quite out of date actually so I updated them.
Because search engine quality control is a cat and mouse game with spammers and grey hat companies trying to game rankings.

Literally a multi billion dollar industry. If google gives advance notice of all of this to australian news orgs, they have an asset worth billions and which would break the web worldwide if leaked.

This is just part of it. Even legit sites do some gaming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
I remember liking this interview when I heard it years ago (about an hour long).
https://archive.org/details/nerdtv003

It was from a Cringely series called NerdTV and the tagline for this episode:
Bill Joy -- the father of Berkeley UNIX -- explains why he was fired from the International House of Pancakes.
Then the word should be retired. The suffix -cide means to kill. Any other meaning makes the word itself a lie.
I can't figure out if I like the article or not.

On one hand it's good to see that the subject get's into mainstream media.

On the other hand. The subject is dealt with quite simplistically. And the focus on Kurzweil is giving the story a very one sided and kind of geeky don't take too serious kind of angle.

I realize that even a newspaper like the NYT can't get too nerdy. But there are far more important stories to talk about when it comes to transhumanism even if the singularity doesn't happen. (I am personally skeptic)

I would though make one book advice that isn't following any specific school of thought. Hans Movarec: "Robot - Mere machine to transcend mind"
I knew I would get a spelling correction at some point. I had planned on working "grammar and spelling fixers" into the article but was unable to pull it off.

Look, there are tons of programmers out there that are extremely intelligent. This article was not pointed at all "smart" programmers. It is pointed at the ones who have let their ego's get out of control. It's pointed at the ones who lose focus of the big picture.

Just because you are talented in one area, does not give you a free pass in all other aspects of life. That was the point of the article. The target of this post was a collection of several different personality types, and to be honest.. myself many years ago.

I knew when I wrote this that it would be offensive to some. As I said.. I have been guilty and still am guilty of some of these things myself. I challenge you to take a hard look at yourself. I did and it has opened up many doors for me.

- Mark Snyder
It's perhaps not in the checklists since the current low returns for the last ten years bad results for the industry is a new thing (at least in recent memory).
I would love to see something like this using App Engine and Google Storage.
Context?

What is PAX, and is said "ban" real or hypothetical? (I can figure out "booth babe" on my own.)
There are certainly Marines who've been tremendously successful after their military career--but that's not what the training and culture optimizes for. Look at Marine heroes--Chesty Puller[1] was such a "candid speaker" that the thought of a political career is laughable. Smedley Butler[2] retired, then wrote a booklet called "War is a Racket." These are the men that are the subjects of Marine running cadences, not George Schultz and James Baker.

Full disclosure: I did a tour in the Marines, found I couldn't get a civilian job, joined the Army for one more tour, and am now employed by a Fortune 500 company.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesty_Puller

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
What device do you have? One busy day seems to be standard with iPhones as I understand it and based on my experience with an iPhone 3G, though iPhones are generally supposed to be worse than say Nokias or Blackberries.

Apple's figures suggest that if you browse the web on 3G or Wifi, make calls or watch video constantly then you'd get 5-6 hours on my 3G, but even that's a high estimate as it assumes that when you're talking on the phone or watching videos then you have the 3G and WiFi powered off.

That's enough for me as it's routine for me to charge my phone every night (though I've turned notifications right down and I do have a car charger because using the GPS for directions seems to really eat at the battery) but I can imagine many kinds of travelling businessman who would find that an annoyance.
Bullshit. Leads come off, equipment malfunctions, patients fidget, and they definitely don't have redundant stuff on each patient.
That makes sense. For example, standard SQL is not considered a programming language, as it's not turing complete, neither is HTML for the same reason. Interestingly, some proprietary SQL dialects such as PL/SQL (Oracle) and T-SQL (Microsoft) are considered programming languages due to their turing-completeness.
that jargon has legs: "cloud-pocalypse"
bitmap, one extra int and some bitfucking at the end to get the zero bit.
Finally! Good to know that somebody else was annoyed by this bug too.
From what I recall, later immigrants and second-generation Cuban-Americans tend to be significantly less supportive of the hard-line stance towards Cuba. The original generation of immigrants dying off over time is likely what will lead to normalization with Cuba.
I did get a good laugh out of the Gordon Brown video. At around the 0:40 mark he punches some guy out in the corridor then throws a woman out of a chair and onto the floor, both accompanied by sound effects.

I'm not too worried by the idea that one day all news will look like this, though. These sort of animations are always going to be labour-intensive.
I sent them an email saying I wanted to cancel and they confirmed it a few days later. There was no nonsense involved.

I've since resubscribed.
May the 4th be with them forever
Basically people should be posting anonymously on the internet (via distinct handles with no connection with one's real name), as is done in Hacker News (although a small percent do post enough details in their posts to connect with their real name). Lots of us started out posting with our real names in the last century (on Usenet for example) and after a while realized how poor an idea this was.
Can you comment (either generally or wrt your product) on specificity/generality/constraints when searching for audio? The image-based examples are intuitive, but what features can one search for in audio? i.e. Can it detect a specific singer's voice, or an instrument or effect? Only more general features like genre, tempo, etc? I assume it's some combination, but it's not clear to me what this type of neural search is "good at".
The ID prefixing is cool from an identification point of view, but we've been using UUIDs for tokens and if we implemented this we wouldn't be able to use the UUID optimized datatype field in Postgres.
I think if one were to dig into the statistics of road fatalities, they would probably find 400 HP race-suspended muscle cars are not a major mass murdering menace.
looks neat! Do you have the code open sourced?
Is the implication that Microsoft is willing to release this now that the Oracle case is resolved?
I'm pretty sure in the handset division, Motorola is making good revenues with the Droid family. They are still some of the most popular handsets, certainly on Verizon.

What impact the failed Xoom has taken on their bottom line, I don't know however.
ilya@mixrank.com
Guarantee the fine print in the AT&T contract authorized them to share information with a third party.
Every time you use `fmt.Errorf` and `if err != nil { return nil, err }`, you're returning a stringly typed error up the stack.

The entire stdlib does this. An error stack is never present from stdlib functions' errors, and third party libraries I see it just as infrequently.

If only novice go devs do that, than the entire go core team are novices, as well as the authors of popular go projects like kubernetes and docker.
You use a proxy botnet and route your scraping requests through that. Use something like hola proxy or crawlera for example.
This is a nostalgic article, as underlined in the closing section about XON/XOFF and mainframe-compatible escape sequences.

The world is moving on, and while historic systems are beautiful (I still have a 2.11 BSD emulator running - or rather runnable - somewhere), at some point you need to weight the breakage for legacy users against the cost of maintenance of the compatibility.

Indeed, POSIX is still mandating that filenames are arbitrary byte sequences. But it is just becoming impractical, and in the end it's up to whoever has the motivation to have it working to keep it working, and if there's not enough people with this motivation it's just going to inevitably rot.

It's likely that 10 years from now, anything non-Unicode will be completely broken on modern (desktop, at least) systems and perhaps Linux even gets an opt-in mount option for enforcing filenames to be utf-8-compatible (which may change to opt-out another 10 years on, just as POSIX is going to evolve too in this regard).

Yes, it's a pity and I likely still have some ISO-8859-2 files from 1999 on my filesystem. But I think it's unreasonable for anyone to waste time with that support. And I wouldn't advise anyone wasting extra 20 hours of your developer life on building things around ncurses instead of a more direct approach - build a cool feature in that time instead!
To be honest, I can't tell if you're being serious.
It's so ugly, I want one.
The fact that these cognitive biases exist does not preclude the possibility that people's actions also influence what occurs in their lives.

The question is really how much of your circumstances are due to randomness, versus your behaviors.

And regardless of how much of it is due to chance, I'm not surprised that these cognitive biases exist, because basically only the parts of our lives that we control are relevant to our cognitive processes.

That is to say, if you want to avoid getting raped, the parts that are not under our control are irrelevant to our minds, for the very fact we can't control them. It makes sense to be hypersensitive to any factors that might be under our control.
Technically you're right, but they're both operated by the same company, so we get screwed over with their pricing.
It's 4 clicks to disable in firefox, many people learn it lurking forums and other porn sites, I don't believe you can assume this.
It simulates file creation, which can then be retrieved from your browser's cookies using a normal-looking URL. I like it. Incredibly clever indeed.
Pretty shameless (though I don't think against the guidelines afaict), but my mother has written a series of novels that have a similar focus in terms of time period and section of society, for anyone who might be interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fortunes-Wheel-Meonbridge-Chronicle...
Does anyone have a link to either the actual legislation or a simplified version of it? This article doesn't actually tell us what the legislation will be, just that google and facebook are scared..
Nearly all the top physicists in the US with relevant knowledge took part in the Manhattan Project. Even Einstein, the pacifist, lent his name to the effort to persuade the US government to build an atom bomb before the Nazis.[1]

I judge people much more by what they did after the war. Contrast Edward Teller's campaigning for the development of the H-bomb with the actions of Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe.

1. Einstein-Szilárd letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...
I'd agree with designer and possibly video, but I count those as technical skills depending on the type of startup.

Writing and research, I think, have to be bundled with other skillsets at the very early stages. If you have 2-3 people, you can't have a pure writer or researcher.
The courts seem to disagree with you on this point as it pertains to national security letters.

I haven't read any of the legal decisions; they're long, and I'm not a lawyer, but I see a big hole in the argument you're making. In every non-pathological case I can think of, a person receiving confidential information that they'll be prohibited from disclosing agrees to the confidentiality first. You can't send me an unsolicited letter containing information you want kept confidential and sue or jail me if I disclose that information, but the FBI can (pending the outcome of their appeal of the ruling that says they can't).
It's only an efficient market because of arbitrage. If the price of copper futures in Europe suddenly soars, the price of copper futures in America doesn't magically, spontaneously rise to meet it; somebody has to do the work. You don't need to be better at modelling, you just need to be faster, or have a way of getting information earlier.
This doesn't work well with multiple drives. If you cut an object from a usb stick, should it get transferred entirely to your desktop (maybe taking many hours for big files), for you to then paste it somewhere else on the usb stick? (When a direct move would be near instant).

If instead you want a .scrap directory on every volume, you have a new inconsistency - if something is cut, and the device removed before the paste happens, the paste will fail.
This narriative has also taken over the VC world.
The internet was and remains the most democratic knowledge dissemination engine in several thousand years of recorded history. It is substantially more democratic than it was in the 90s and 2000s because there are more people accessing it now.

It isn't shifting towards an oligopoly unless you count things like Wikipedia as a monopoly. Which it isn't, Wikipedia is probably about as close to an ideal democracy as any human project ever attempted.
> If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd be logical to abandon a bunch of seemingly profitable products.

In case anyone is wondering, the math has been done. I have been told that Google even has an internal page devoted to informing engineers how much something has to be worth before it is worth their time, and it's a big number.
> but you need help

OK, I don't like your page and did openly disparage it but have said nothing unkind or impolite to you as a person.

You, however, refuse to acknowledge that you are insulting large classes of "programmers" by assuming they cannot understand a simple paper.

I would suggest that you yourself do not really understand it correctly and urge you to re-read it carefully and then read its references.

I would further encourage you to stop assuming that everything you do is great and anyone who thinks otherwise should be yelled and to told they obviously missed the point. It could be you who is missing the point as well.
Thanks for putting a good word for us. I work mainly for US clients from Serbia, and while I do occasional overtime, or 60-70h/w before a deadline, those should be and are exceptions. Even you as an employer don’t want chronically overworked employees.
Cloud = Virtualization. Creating redundancy within the same virtual ecosystem is idiotic, as the article points out. Any hardware or virtualization software failure would throw your redundancy out the window. You need to have your virtual eggs in very different baskets, in different geographical locations, with different providers.
That's almost exactly one of the parables between Achilles and the Tortoise that Hofstadter gives in Godel, Escher, Bach, where the Tortoise keeps breaking Achilles' record player by playing records of the machine's resonant frequency. Hofstadter gives it as an example of the 2nd Incompleteness Theorem, that in any mathematical system there are always statements that can neither be proven true nor false using the system's axioms (although I'm not fully convinced this resonant frequency example is actually an example of Godel's theorem).

In any case, that's funny, I bet Hofstadter based the example on this story of the Black Team.
There's copying and then there's copying. At one point Google had a reputation for being innovative. Insofar as "innovative" continues to be a word that means something then--given that there is indeed very little truly new under the sun, technology or otherwise--the question is two-fold: Is this reputation changing and is this reputation becoming less deserved?

Some amount of copy-catting is certainly necessary and healthy to push horizons and to help competition keep things fresh. But that doesn't mean all copying is benign and healthful. Copying can certainly be tacky.

Most people seem to agree that some large companies copy not because they have something genuinely worthy of merit to bring to the table, but simply because they are very large, and can leverage some of the advantages of that largeness to horn in on the market. You can be certain that in these cases, said large companies will make the case that their differentiations are worthy, but that doesn't automatically make it so.

Schmidt's quotation is roughly true, obviously. But it's also something that you'd say to a group of people you wanted to motivate to continue to perform well even though some of the crew is growing restless. Many high performers would rather attempt visionary and trailblazing products rather than work on another boring me-too project.
I'd focus less on the idea... (not b/c someone is going to steal it, but b/c it doesn't really matter) give some idea of the space but if you really want to connect with a potential co-founder you have to be able to explain your experience, skill set, etc.
More than that, from studying various VM techniques it seems to me, that most optimizations that make Javascript fast for computation actually harm performance of calling into foreign code (like DOM) even more so because in most browsers where is often quite significant interface mismatch between JS VM and DOM code (like plain JS objects lying on separately managed heap from DOM objects).
> The IRS knows what you owe and could just tell you if they wanted to.

This is true often, but not always. Examples just off the top of my head:

* Had large medical bills compared to your AGI? How does the IRS know that?

* Paid for college tuition? How does the IRS know that?

* Deducting state sales taxes? How does the IRS know what those were for you?

* Paid for daycare? How does the IRS know how much?

I'm sure I could find more examples if I went and looked at the actual tax forms right now. And while these are all things that don't affect everyone every year, they do affect a large fraction of people at some point in their lives. They certainly affect everyone who pays for college or has kids.

Note that this is not getting into anything too esoteric here, and completely ignoring anything involving self-employment or consulting, or running a small business or whatever. I _think_ those are rarer than having kids anyway.

Now could we have a more streamlined filing process that did the easy bits when possible and asked more directed questions to find out whether people might be in edge cases that might need more handholding or professional help? Absolutely. Could we get rid of the edge cases I listed above with a simpler tax code? Perhaps.
Well I suppose that's the upside of cryptocurrency.. allows fools to piss their money away on pie in the sky "investments"
This is out of date information, they introduced auto renew for OVH and Kimsufi sometime toward the end of last year. Both my machines use it.
@fly4dat has posted some astounding charts that highlight just how overvalued Tesla has become. They’re closing in on the value of every other automaker in the world, combined. Elon Musk’s net worth is higher than the combined revenue of all his companies, plus all wages those companies have ever paid out.

https://twitter.com/fly4dat/status/1347490490564931594?s=20
https://twitter.com/fly4dat/status/1347331694915956736?s=20
https://twitter.com/fly4dat/status/1347193345714630656?s=20
From a Chesterton's Fence perspective think about the ability of the people to hold a amendatory convention.

If you don't know, a amendatory convention can be achieved by having two thirds of the state legislatures vote for one. If that happens then you must get a two thirds majority of states to agree on the proposal presented and it becomes a constitutional amendment. Entirely side stepping the federal government.

This power hasn't been used in a very long time, and from my readings of Washington and Jefferson they intended us to use it. Perhaps this is a corollary to Chesterton's Fence, call it Chesterton's Button rephrased less elegantly than he or you put it: "If your forefathers were willing to die to give you the ability to do something, you should question if that ability has not used in a very long time."
Yeah COVID has really tweaked the normal incentives.

A lot of these big buildings are very new, and are sitting way below projected occupancy.

They just need cash flow to pay their debts.

In contrast, most brownstone owners have only maintenance and taxes to pay. So they have fewer units to move, can afford to sit on vacancies, and have a relatively unique commodity on the market.

It’s been fascinating to see this all play out!
> In reality, unless it's your hobby, you don't need to be able.

I agree with you completely here. I also feel like I fit the description of a plumber presented here. The most challenging algorithmic problems that I've had to confront in my career, which came when I was working in DSP for an RF company, were things that were tackled by the team -- a group of very talented and very experienced engineers -- and we worked on these problems collaboratively and over a period of time that is not measurable in minutes or hours.

But, having said that, isn't it also undeniable these things, these leetcode-style algorithms, are used to gatekeep entry to many of the "better" jobs in our field, despite the fact that we know that these things are not strictly necessary on the job? At the very least, this has been my experience and I read the same anecdotes on HN frequently.
Military crypto systems have rarely been based around one-time pads. One time pads are difficult to use and extremely slow in practice because you have to work by hand to decrypt a message. A cipher machine is hard to make mistakes with and can disseminate information quickly in both directions. That's why you don't load up ships with hundreds of pages of OTPs, you put an Enigma (or modern equivalent ;)) on board.

One time pads are useful for espionage, and you can see examples of how they are used here[1]. They took advantage of how most espionage worked (and who knows, may still work!): different channels for sending and receiving. The numbers station read you a short message, and if you needed to send a message back you signaled your handler to meet in person at a prearranged place.

The same thing that makes OTPs suck on ships make them excellent for sending short messages to spies. You can't hide an Enigma in a walnut, after all!

[1]: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/otp/index.htm