skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"An ad blocker that only blocks bad advertising" is a great idea, but it relies on easily faked characteristics. I'd love to see an industry group which focuses on authenticating non-harmful ads in a provable way, and thus, ad blockers could load only the least-worst stuff in a trustable way. But you've still got a ways to go before you can convince me that there are "good" ads, rather than just non-bad ones.

I'd also love to see laws passed which make websites legally liable for malware served on them by ad networks, which would incentivize sites to use only good companies.
Bobby never said he owned it. He didn't have hidden agendas going into the competition.

Billy says he owns it. Billy did have a hidden agenda.

Bobby at least owns a lot more than 0.04% of the company.

Had Billy hired the coders to do the work and say I own the company, I have no problem with that. But here, Billy tricks people to work on a project without fully disclosing his intention for virtually free, and than he claims he owns the company.

It's pretty clear who's wrong and who's right.
Is Big Tech Too Powerful? Ask Google
The desktop market is still mostly Windows & MacOS, but if we instead look at client devices in general, Microsoft is losing quite badly: Android (running a Linux kernel) and iOS (BSD-derived, like MacOS) have almost all of the market share, with Windows struggling to make much of a dent.
It's pretty amazing how cheap that is.

For $720 million, they built a half-ton spacecraft, launched it into space, sent it on a path out of the solar system, tracked and guided it all the way, and had it gather about a million times more data than existed before about a particular small icy body billions of miles away.

To put it into perspective, that's about what it would cost to buy two A380 airliners. Two. You can buy two airliners that are not much different from the ones that existed 40 years ago, but that happen to be somewhat larger and carry some more people, and then have to spend even more money to operate them, or for the same money NASA can do an entire mission to Pluto from start to finish.

Or for a different perspective, for the cost of the B-2 program (an airplane which basically never had a mission, whose key feature probably doesn't work anymore, and which in any case is far too expensive and precious to risk in any environment where there's the slightest chance it could be shot down), assuming costs would be the same as Pluto, NASA could send seven missions each to every planet in the Solar System including Pluto.

For yet another perspective, it's about 1/9th the cost of the Washington Metro's Silver Line product. So, one mission each to every planet in the Solar system including Pluto, or 60 miles of railroad track and 11 light-rail stations.

It's not a sign that people aren't being taxed enough, it's a sign that NASA is a bastion of amazing efficiency and capability in a sea of unbelievable waste.
> There is no contract or promise between me and the website that I am visiting that I will be captive to their ads or behavior tracking, implied or otherwise

If you ask any website without a paywall, they will almost ALL tell you their content is free. Some even advertise and market that enthusiastically. A visit still helps them - it is still counted in server-side stats (which is used to sell ads), and I am exposed to their brand, which is a large part of what marketing is all about. There are also other forms of advertising which are not blocked - things like sponsored posts, guest posts, mailing list opt-in forms, referral links, etc.

You also conveniently ignored my question on whether or not forcing me to watch an ad or forcing me to accept behavior tracking is moral on their part. This is not a one-sided equation.
That is a strategy people try but it's usually weak. The Chinese have stolen TB from clients and servers across industries. One still has to protect the server from attacks from the client, other servers, or networks. Whole problem remains.

The main benefit of that architecture is to protect against non-technical insiders and others who have less opportunity for physical attack. The compute nodes are stored in a hopefully-secure location with files similarly centralized. Additionally, if the mechanisms are technology agnostic, there's potential for further hardening, monitoring, obfuscation, recovery, etc.

Doesn't eliminate a Chinese-style threat, though, if it's connected to a network in any way and doesn't use high assurance components.
Microservices allow you to scale individual components of your system and reduce technical debt by isolating them.

Say you have services X, Y, and Z. Service Z handles a lot of traffic and is becoming a bottleneck to the whole system. You spin up 2-3 more instances, throw a load balancer in front of them, and increase throughput, all without ever touching the rest of the system. Pretty seamless!

In addition, monolithic systems tend to be a pain in the ass for release cycles.

Microservices allow you to very easily bring components up and down and do zero down time deploys by using a load balancer.

Using our previous example, consider doing a release 2.0 for service Y. You spin up an additional instance of service Y with version 2.0 and the old instance is running version 1.0.

You take the old instance out of the load balancer and stick the new one in. With the flip of a switch, your end user ends up using version 2.0 of service Y, without ever having to bring the system down.

Now obviously microservices aren't the right design decision for every application. But as your system grows and uses different components, it's usually best to separate them out as individual services so that you can scale horizontally using load balancers.
I handle it by speaking about it at the events that I facilitate and speaking directly to the folks who are behaving outside of the parameters of what the weekend is about.

This type of situation is pretty rare for me, though as on average theres probably one group out of 20 at the events I go to who have this type of setup/issue.
Uh huh.

(1) I already made that point, and linked to data on the UK including Scotland and Northern Ireland. But, it broadly matches up. If you have better data please share it.

(2) The full-UK list I linked to is "people who died directly or indirectly because of the actions of law enforcement officers, regardless of the manner of death". Again, if you have better data feel free to share it.

I have to wonder what point you're trying to make.

The relevant point I made to the parent comment was that the "police kill 8 times more than terrorists" statistic quoted doesn't apply in the context of the UK. Even if manage to quibble the "55 people" stat up to 100 it's still an order of magnitude short of "8x".

Are you saying that UK police do kill 8x more than terrorists?
Difference scientific fields will value different things. A computer scientist might prefer a fundamentally more "valid" metric, but someone who studies something more organic would rather have a less valid but more empirically grounded one.

You can't forget that there's really a ton of reported data behind BMI. So much that e.g. in children we know, per age, the percentiles which should be used as cut offs for considering obesity and triggering further analysis/intervention. But this is the individual level! As you certainly know, obesity is largely a public health issue, which makes BMI - which has lots of epidemiological data behind it - even more appropriate. There's really no better way, IMHO (and not only [1]), to track obesity as a public health problem.

[1] Hall, D. M. B., & Cole, T. J. (2006). What use is the BMI? Archives of Disease in Childhood, 91(4), 283–286. http://doi.org/10.1136/adc.2005.077339
It's also very likely that if things went just a little differently, Microsoft's main OS today would probably be Xenix-based.

Microsoft created Xenix because they knew DOS would have a limited future, and in particular they knew there was a lot of value in running enterprise software on microcomputers. They also knew costs would go down and performance would go up over time and that running minicomputer-grade stuff on micros would become more and more feasible as time goes on.

They made Xenix for a number of microcomputer platforms, typically partnering with the hardware manufacturers (as is the case with Tandy). For the PC, they chose to partner with SCO instead for some reason.

Xenix was Microsoft's next-generation operating system, intended to be a platform for the few high-end customers who wanted to run enterprise software on PC, with plans to push it across the mid-range and even the low end as PCs get faster and fast hardware gets cheaper.

And then, it all changed when AT&T got broken up. Suddenly, AT&T was allowed to commercialize their software, including Unix. And AT&T was very, very much interested in doing this. The whole thing culminated in System V Release 4, but that took a few years for AT&T to put it together. In the meantime, Microsoft thought they'd never be able to compete in the Unix market against the creators of Unix, so they panicked, sold Xenix to SCO, and began looking for a partner for their _new_ next-generation operating system.

So Microsoft hooked up with IBM and created OS/2 as their successor to Xenix. Eventually, however, Microsoft fell out with IBM...

After falling out with IBM, Microsoft decided to do it entirely by themselves, so they poached a bunch of ex-VMS guys from DEC and created Windows NT. After a few years serving as an enterprise OS, Microsoft began trickling NT down to the consumer market, eventually replacing DOS-based Windows entirely with the launch of Windows XP in 2001.

Just imagine the alternate world where Microsoft didn't get spooked by AT&T commercializing Unix and instead focused on Xenix, trickled it down to the consumer market, and ultimately replaced DOS-based Windows with a Windows-style GUI built on top of Xenix.
Here is our best image of Pluto just 3 months ago:

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-...

The image above is from the same camera as the images released today. Taking great pictures is not about the camera but about getting in the right spot at the right time
I have a SaaS app that has only US customers at the moment but I would love to be able to offer this type of support and begin acquiring European customers. Do you have any recommendations of services that handle this ELV/SEPA/iDEAL type of integration?
Zapier's entire team is remote.
>But once you know how to do it (it's swiping from right to left in a chat screen, by the way) it's a genius use of touch movement, right?

Why not always show the time, like WhatsApp does?
How can they not be willing to pay a transaction fee from even PayPal for donations? Seems their options right now is to take donations via a service like Paypal with a transaction fee, or just take no donation.
But if a computer is able to do the same thing as a human does (answer a simple question with pattern recognition and sentence parsing), then the internal mechanism of how a computer does it seems like mere trivia/jargon rather than anything fundamentally important to intelligence. A computer may have reading comprehension without having it in exactly the same way that a human does.

But it's true that we do have a underlying world model by which we understand passages. And that world model is pretty essential if we are to answer more complicated questions. So since it's pretty clear computers can handle the "informational retrieval" side of reading, we should now be focused on generating a "world model" based on text.
I did a startup weekend thing a few years back. I thought the networking bit of it was fun, but actually working on the project was not that great, and there are some echoes of this: these guys decided to use PHP as a lowest common denominator. Hacking on PHP all weekend long is not my idea of fun.
Isn't Baremetrics only 2 or 3 people though?
Sucks that people were doing that but its good to hear that you had a good experience.
Impressive. Her first was in 2006, which means means she's gotten around 18 patents a year, which seems crazy. At first glance I figured it was yet another sign of the failures in our patent system, but she has filed over 380 applications! She's filing for a patent roughly every 9 days; I haven't heard of anyone more prolific and successful in modern times.
Solved "problem" with a petabyte of training data and 18,000 GPUs to train the model. :-\
>Why shouldn't they at least be capable of making that much? I'm not saying all, but some, sure, why not?

I'm not saying anyone should or shouldn't be making any amount. I am saying that it doesn't make economic sense to pay an engineer millions when you can pay another $150k to do the same job with some productivity loss. If I ran a company and I thought an engineer added a large amount of value relative to other engineers in the labor market you bet I would pay him/her an astounding sum of money, but only up to the point it made economic sense.

>Friend of mine leads a team that has a 30 million dollar contract with a government client. It's a team of 5 or 6 I believe. He's paid I think about 110K a year. Personally, I wouldn't be okay with that.

So how much do you think they should be paid? $300k? $500k? Why would an employer pay them that much when they could hire another engineer for $110k and experience some productivity loss?
An account database that makes new money out of thin air is a huge catastrophe!

I honestly don't understand how this is even a live issue for debate. The "inconsistency" we're talking about is terrifying.
Tempe, AZ makes rule favoring Google Fiber, gets sued by cable company
If it is just a partnership, Billy can't compete with partnership in another company. That is a breach of his fiduciary duties to the partnership.
So why isn't there some sort of post-approval monitoring system for drugs? With aircraft and cars we have enough data captured that problems can be identified and traced.
I don't know if there is some official definition, but my experience talking to others working with databases daily tells me they have the same concepts as I do, and a 5 second google search on "data corruption" followed by "data consistency" yield wikipedia articles in the top 3 results for both queries, showing concepts that, also, match those that I have.
Interesting lecture by DARPA. It also refers to their secure UAV project, which is as anexample to embedded system:

http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/projects/TS/SMACCM/

They also released a formally proven real-time OS.
> restoration of brain connectivity back to a state that more closely matches that of non-depressed patients.

Do you have a source for this?
The head of Fincen ((Financial Crimes Enforcement Network)The US agency that goes after money laundering) has said that it is still easier to launder US dollars. [1]

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qx7ik/head_of_fin...
> Recent Ukrainian troubles were mostly caused by, oh I dunno, a foreign army invading?

It's not as simple as "they just now got attacked and now their signs have all been changed".

Crimea and its people have had linguistic/social/cultural/economic ties to Russia/USSR for a lot longer than merely the recent conflict....
That comparison is flawed, the author has already been compensated because you (or a library) bought the book, but virtually no one pays for content online.

It's quite simple. If there is no way to get paid for producing quality content, no one is going to produce quality content. I don't like the ad-riddled web any more than you, but it allows billions of people access to content they would not otherwise have access to. If the online ad business goes away, what fills that gap?

Please don't suggest micropayments, people don't want to pay anything to read a website.
> f: N → {−1,+1} taking values in {−1,+1}

Is there a need to mention the {−1,+1} twice?
"Dollars spent do not disappear" is true but meaningless. What counts is the wealth people create, and the opportunity cost of what you do.

For an extreme example, imagine that every day I hire somebody to move my wood pile to the other side of the house. After two days I'm back where I started, but I've wasted a person's labor for two days. The dollars I paid them didn't disappear, but we've lost whatever useful activity they might have done during that time.

Not all work brings value to society. Just because someone is given money to do something doesn't make that something useful. On the other hand, just because something isn't of value to society doesn't mean it should be prohibited or taxed out of existence. And determining whether something is useful to society is really tough, so we shouldn't assume we can figure it out. But saying they "create thousands of jobs" and "dollars spent do not disappear" isn't a good argument for these things.
This will be available in the Android app too[0]. It'll debut on beta[1] first.

[0] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/212922/
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia....
I think people irrationally get offended by swearing

As you said, there is nothing particularly offensive about what the person said (it certainly doesn't seem to be homophobia. It doesn't discount it at all, but by itself is essentially nothing). If it was made into some tense, awkward situation, well that's on everyone involved.

Having said that, everyone should avoid those sorts of statements, however benign, because under the lens of reconsideration, where people are looking for a narrative, it's easy to make them look much worse than intended.
Yeah he needs to get over the whole bully narrative. He sounds like he's still 16.
This is a really well put explanation of why the natural language processing side is hard, but it assumes that we can even get letters and words into the system.

I'm a linguist who works on speech perception, and I'm increasingly convinced that true speech-to-text, that can stand in for a human transcriptionist, is an AI-complete problem. We can get close, but you'll always need context and understanding of the world to accurately get things like "I'm going to take a walk in the park, then I'm going to take a wok from the Chinese Restaurant".

Siri and whatnot are amazing, and there's room for improvement, especially on the NLP end, but these issues combined with how damned hard speech is mean that Jarvis will be a keyboard away for years to come.
> SW clearly states that no contractual agreements can be made during the weekend the work is preformed.

Absolutely false: http://startupweekend.org/about/firsttimer/
"Startup Weekend doesn’t support or take part in the signing of any legal documents"

Startup Weekend would be a lot better if it required all participants to sign waivers releasing all IP generated over the weekend. That way everyone knows exactly what they are getting into.
You feel awkward because it's uncouth to talk about this kind of thing in public.

Unless it's spoken about publicly, this kind of thing will just keep happening. Which is why it was made uncouth in the first place. If everyone has to learn the hard way, there are more warm bodies pumping through the system.

I want more people to understand what they could be getting into when they enter into events like this. So what it if requires a bit of akwardness to get there?
She very likely receives payment in "dollars worth of bitcoin" and not a fixed bitcoin amount.
This is why I can't wait for Apple to introduce Force Touch. Do I press this lightly to do something completely different - does this app have that? Do I press it harder to do something else? Did I press it hard enough / lightly enough?
Bobby is entitled to his own work, and an aura of 'peevishness' is more than appropriate when faced with someone who is trying to dishonestly bully him out of it.
You can use the same data store with different services.

If you have a web application that handles most of the traffic on your site, and you have some management task/process that hogs resources in the same application, you're affecting your end users by running those processes on the same service.

The idea of microservices is to separate components so one does not affect the other, and you can scale individual components easily.
Loved this post. So prescient.

I was exposed to Amdahl's law first through this blog post about how the concept can be leveraged for competitive advantage. Always love seeing how the technicals affect the biz side of things.

https://www.extrahop.com/blog/2013/20gbps-realtime-transacti...
And what did you think of Bobby's emails? All just fine to you?
Blogger outreach – what is it and how to influence the influencers?
The 50 best romcoms of all time
Wait: paid messaging, articles stealthily written by PR flacks, "native" ads, in-feed hortatory messages masquerading as intelligent editorial content ---- this stuff is better than traditional ads? Because they impact you less?

Sure, perhaps they impact your LTE connection less. (But, hey, no one needed faster than 56kbps in 1995. Mobile bandwidth will grow.)

In point of fact, I'll bet ads "disguised as legitimate content" impact you more.

Most of us are technologists of one stripe or another here. But putting on our humanities hats, isn't it actually quite a bit better/more moral/more tolerable/sustainable to have a little shiny 300px by 250px cube with a picture of the latest BMW than to have the credibility of our favorite car blog or car writer compromised?
The Fundamental “Why” of Music Discovery
Has Kubernetes grown past its limit of ~100 underlying servers? What's the largest production Kubernetes cluster running today?
> Taking great pictures is not about the camera but about getting in the right spot at the right time

Exactly. It's an amusingly low res camera too, just 1 megapixel. But it's a workhorse!
The one-time card numbers generated by the old AMEX Blue system were great for shopping on sites you didn't trust. Too bad that they dumped that and the card reader system around 2002-2003? I really liked it and felt much more confident using it. Seems like it would have cut down on fraud a lot more than many systems in use.

That said, I really don't know why anyone would want to try and write their own payment integration gateways nowadays. There are so many good alternatives out there. Why not use them? You should focus on what you love, not payment processing. If you're just selling simple goods, you can easily setup a store on Shopify, Weebly, WIX, etc. Let them handle the fraud stuff. Sure, you might be on the hook for a few bad charges here and there, but at least you didn't waste hours writing payment code.
You change the mac address of the router, since it's connected to the modem, and you're not running a direct wire from your pc to the modem, in that case, you'd have to change the mac address of your pc.

ISPs assign IP addresses based on the MAC ADDRESS of the device connected to the modem.

You're spoofing the MAC ADDRESS, not changing the actual address of the hardware device.
This is why China won't upvalue their currency like Japan did in the 80's (at the insistence, once again, of the US essentially forcing Japan to sign the Plaza Accords to stop Japan from becoming a rentier nation). They've learned from Japan's crisis.
> That comparison is flawed, the author has already been compensated because you (or a library) bought the book

And if I got the book as PDF/EPUB and without paying anything (but legally)? Would it be moral for someone to force me to read because their business model says so?
I would bet that the studies focused on cognitive function and typing ability because they're objectively measurable, and much more repeatable than, say, measuring the significance or difficulty of the tasks.
You're probably right, but remember that we are only hearing the story from Bobby's side.
https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/644828700366647296
The author is upset at a blatant attempt to take advantage of him. Isn't that appropriate?