skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm always utterly blown away by the humility that John shows in his questions and his answers. The development world would be a better place with a much larger proportion of developers like him.

I've worked with some real ego-centric assholes that think of themselves as rock-star developers yet probably haven't done a tenth of what this guy has done.
I was not aware of your blog post when I wrote mine.

I wrote this blog post to introduce the work we did this week on PGP-verified installs and updates, which itself was motivated by Twitter threads last Friday (which you can find in my Twitter history).

If it's any consolation, when I first posted my link yesterday, it didn't get upvoted either. Apparently someone reposted it and had more success. HN is random that way.
Thinking about it, at least with key escrow the private keys can be stored in HSMs.
Australian Software-Tools Maker Atlassian Planning U.S. IPO
I think the key here is that as long as your building something and are enjoying doing it in the process, who cares if its useful. Tinker long enough and you might fall onto something revolutionary.
Why should the loss be spread around? There are a number of rights and privileges you can purchase from the government, which are an investment risk. You go into them with a hope of profit and accept a risk.

For example, if I pay for rights to drill for oil somewhere and oil becomes obsolete, should I be reimbursed by my competitors?

The upside potential of one of these medallions was unlimited. After buying it once, you could use it to make an unbounded amount of money. Part of that is accepting the risk that it might make no money. Otherwise you're asking the rest of society to subsidize a private interest.
Liberated Pixel Cup
Where Can You Buy Twitter Followers Without Following?
Did you actually look into it? The threads you run can't make any change to existing objects, and various other changes. It does break compatibility, and needs patched version of Numpy, ODBC (and I would guess, most other packages).

Definitely not "solved without breaking backwards compat".
At Mozilla we're actually currently working to run some of our tests continuously under RR (http://rr-project.org/), our record-replay debugger. When a flaky test fails the replay can carefully studied to understand why test only fails say 1 out of 10,000 runs.
New ion engine could go to Mars and back on a single tank of fuel
As mentioned in the article, Boeing did this work two years before Ufimtsev even published his paper. It was also a full ten years before Lockheed even started designing the F-117.
Serious question: has subterranean housing ever been considered for SF? If you can't build out or up, may as well build under.

Feasibility aside, the only problem I see is it'd create a literal underclass—as opposed to the proverbial one that exists now as a result of absurd rent prices.
Mentioning HSTS was meant to emphasize that we're serious about "HTTPS everywhere", not specifically meant to be relevant to curl, where the protocol is specified in plain view on the command line anyway. Sorry for the confusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
Any language that uses the latin alphabet has different rules for how pronunciation is derived from or encoded with the letters.

e.g. with your example, the letter pair ‘si’ is pronounced differently in Mandarin that it is in English. So it's not surprising that you couldn't write it down properly in pinyin as you don't know how to transcribe Mandarin into pinyin. But Google does.

Another example - without knowing how French spelling works there is no way that as an English speaker you could work out how to correctly spell ‘peut’ (can) just from hearing it.
Success Is Not Final
i feel the cynical post amigo. i feel it.
The AI behind Facebook
I quit my job at Raytheon right after I was assigned to the JLENS program . Every day there were meetings with f-bombs being exchanged between managers and employees. The environment and culture became extremely toxic. Safe to say I didn't want to have anything to do with the defense industry after that.
Indeed, a good argument, and a logical inference from facts, should be one and the same thing.
And I thought open source software was bad... ;)
Lol. And what precisely is a fact, but an argument about the state of the world being a specific way?
The problem I see with the title concept--caring for strangers at the expense of family, or more generally caring for people you don't know, at the expense of people you do know--is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them. But no one person can know everyone in the world. Human beings don't scale. The only effective way to get a lot of people helped is to have a lot of people willing to help, each of whom gets to know a few people well enough to understand what will help them, and then helps those few people.

But for some odd reason, we don't think of "charity" this way. We think that helping people you know, so that your help is as effective as possible, is somehow less "moral" than "helping" people you don't know at all, so that you don't know what will help them.
man i need to get some of the radar signal absorbing paint.. ya know for science n stuff
How to avoid biggest mistake you can make as a new software engineer
He sounds like a guy Id love to have a beer with. We might just be able to understand each other :)
I highly doubt the neural nets required would fit in the memory of whatever device you're using, high end PC or not. And, there's absolutely no way they would put these highly valuable neural nets on anything that would allow them to be copied.
These switches are a great idea..

Many security conscious companies routinely collect cellphones and other devices during meetings etc. NSA aside things get compromised by regular malware all the time.

I've had a small thought in the past to setup a 'luxury' service to retrofit something similar on smartphones. You would still be screwed during an actual call, since the mic would have to be on.. but a kill switch would still provide a fair amount of damage control in the event of a compromise.

If you go the extra mile and implement a 'read-only' connection to software you could remove most of the hassle for users.

Imagine moving the switch to the on position also answering an incoming call if the phone is ringing. Then when you hang up the software can send a signal to move the physical switch to the off position (but make it physically impossible to move it to the on-position from software).

Complete with a tiny LED to alert the user the switch is on.
You're right. I would delete it, but it's past the edit deadline.
I've seen some mild demand for it on occasions where there's a debilitating bug in Chrome. Fixes almost never (never?) get backported, so if you want it, you have to upgrade off stable to the more bleeding edge, and then follow that release as it stabilizes, or wait. Sometimes this up/downgrading is just plain onerous. The two bugs that come to mind are a. a font bug whereby the wrong (fallback) font was selected; this happened quite often on Wikipedia and b. gestures would flat out stop working randomly. AFAIK, these are both long fixed, but the experience on stable during that time was pretty bad. Thankfully in the many years I've used Chrome, such bugs are exceedingly rare.

As a developer, I wouldn't recommend an old browser solely for security reasons, but also so I can stop support ancient browsers sooner…
Which is why I feel that skipping the microcode updates is entirely useless.
>No, representatives are theoretically there to guard against majority tyranny

This is a classic case of the just world fallacy.

Historically, representative democracy with one man one vote exists because that was the result of the last compromise between the underclasses and elites trying to keep them from getting out of hand.

It isn't any more theoretically reasonable than the compromise before that (no women voting), or the one before that (no blacks) or the one before that (nobody votes who doesn't own property) or the one before that (nobody votes).
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

—Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks.
This is fairly standard for recruiting sales people. Sales is unique in that there is a clear metric to judge performance. A W-2 is incontrovertible proof that they have been able to hit their numbers. It's a great way to cut through the bullshit.
Salesforce now says that it does not support CISA
While I'll appreciate the technological advancement that this will signify, I absolutely think that I sound like an idiot if I talk like I write.
You can already get a hacked up public chat via Slack. There's a package (which is all set to run on Heroku) that automates the process of sending an invite to the Slack organization so that anyone on the public web can do it.

I noticed this when the Bootstrap 4.0a announcement had a link inviting you to join their Slack:

> For those jamming on v4 with us, we also have a dedicated v4 Slack channel. Jump in to talk shop and work with your fellow Bootstrappers. If you haven’t yet, join our official Slack room![0].

[0] https://bootstrap-slack.herokuapp.com/
I am afraid PRTs would have hard time competing with roads, and even more so with railways, in terms of passenger carrying capacity.

Wikipedia says [1] high capacity road can carry 2,400 passengers per hour; light rail 20,000 - 25,000 passengers per hour per lane in each direction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail#Comparison_with_hig...
i just came to say, emacs is number 1
I don't think it's possible to issue subkeys that can create further subkeys, or revoke each other. You have to use the master key for that, which means going back to your safety deposit box or the center of the Earth or wherever it is you keep it. We don't want to make people do that, so we can't represent your set of devices as subkeys of a single PGP key.
Much of that can be had with a IRC bot. That doesn't include media handling, but you could do search via 1-on-1 /msg (query) with a bot. Then it'd truly be "in client" search.

Most would probably prefer a web ui, with search -- but recording chat could still be done via a bot.

I wouldn't say you could get most of the whole slack experience with just IRC, and you'd probably have to do some work (if only configuring channels/bots/find a web ui etc).
I think the author makes some good points, but I think the term "learned helplessness" together with the arguments made, imply that if reasoned arguments can't be trusted then nothing can. But I think that a better characterization is that people use other ways of thinking, such as intuition, emotion, etc. in addition to reason.

Any expert in a field other than pure math, will tell you that in order to evaluate an argument or evidence, you need experience and intuition, not just argumentation. Arguments are not a formal process that can definitively arrive at conclusions. The same applies to mathematical models. Economists often complain in private about the need to dress up their ideas as mathematical models, even when the model adds nothing to the discussion. This is especially annoying in empirical work, when no one is actually interested in the model, just the empirical results.
Repeater boat in international waters?
But one more protocol on the stack with mac/windows/iphone/android clients is, IMHO, an entirely different ball of wax than a libre project with only a single platform under its belt. In my situation, the existence of mobile clients is clinch for actually pitching it to any org I participate in.
I have yet to see a working definition for "change the world." And if there is one, who creates this definition? VC? Journalists?

Once I see a workable definition, my next question is why "change the world" is a metric, a goal, or whatever it is. Given your answer, what does that imply? Maybe the phrase should be more truthful... something like "make a meaningful contribution".

Maybe this is just an American buzz phrase and I am not getting it? To be honest, I am getting a little tired of it.

There's that Woodstock generation song from the 60's with the chorus: "I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do..."

I guess software VC and tech journalists have now solved that issue?

Funny, but "changing the world" (in the idelistic sense of the song) today seems a much more daunting task than it did back then, even with the addition of cable TV and now another communication medium being offered by the telcos and cable companies. The world is better entertained and possibly better informed. The "change" it led to is some ridiculously strong monopolies that like to maintain status quo.
I've been thinking lately that "do the best that your intuition can" is the optimal way to solve these sorts of mini tasks. That way, when your intuition is right about 10,000 things in your life, you have a bit of leeway with the other 10,000 it's wrong about.

I'd imagine that this really only works as long as your intuition is in constant check, though.
Well, there's Canada..... Where the Harper government is in the process of eliminating all historical archives and scientific libraries...

Australia? Hmm, wasn't there something about data retention? And maybe Western Australia trying to change the laws so protestors would have to prove that they weren't about to do something illegal when they were arrested?

New Zealand? Baaah.
> Where is Python genuinely way ahead of everyone else? Only on numerical computing.

No, that's not where it is. It's in being a user friendly language for people who need to get numerical work done, and there's a huge difference. IPython/Jupyter did not happen in any other language, not even remotely (the closest thing I've seen is some Lua graphic repl that didn't go far).

> Nobody wants Python to morph into Java.

Python is not morphing into Java, far from it. 3.x represents a cleanup of the language (str vs. unicode, new vs. old style classes, a lot of other stuff). I do not agree with all of it (I too disagree with demoting print from statement to function), and there is other stuff I would have done - but most of it was desperately needed.

> What I want is vectorization plus DAG-like workflows. These are the most important pieces of computer science that actually dovetail with real world use cases, today

For a tiny, tiny part of the users. And they already have e.g. Theano, and a few other tools, that give some solutions.

> What I'd really like is for Python to give us a good framework for the Big Data world which is in almost everybody's use case now,

Excuse me, but I have to disagree anyone other than a tiny (perhaps 1 percent) of Python users care about big data. Most definitely not "everybody's use case". And the minority which actually cares about big data should not get anywhere close to Python - the runtime is prohibitive.

> This is not a nice-to-have capability anymore. It is what the next wildly popular mainstream programming language will have, built into the language.

Interesting. What language has this today? I know not of a single one, mainstream or niche. I don't believe that you are right on this.

> Let's not gift the opportunity of huge data to Java (Spark) and Cuda, or a new language that will see the future better than us. It should be Python!

Check out Nim + Nimborg. You'll get the best of Python and Nim, and Nimborg would let you do the transition smoothly.

Your idea of Python is not Guido's idea of Python, and as far as I know does not have popular support anywhere. If I were feeling so strongly about my favorite language being so misguided, I would look for a new language. The momentum of existing development direction is essentially unstoppable, whether it is right or wrong.
I'm more interested in knowing what was used to toggle in and out of the mode that made everything but the comment disappear!
Clever! A judge will surely look favorably on your ingenuity in making the technical facts of your actions not a violation of a pedantic reading of the law, and disregard the intent of your actions.

Similarly, did you know you can legally murder anyone by poisoning their food? You didn't make them eat the poison, they voluntarily ate the food. It gets ruled a suicide.

For more on this and other little-known facts about the law, please subscribe to my YouTube Guide to Being a Sovereign Citizen, only $199/month.
Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? From what I've been able to figure out, H.323 looks like it's one of the better candidates of protocols that exist today and is "reasonably" simple... while SIP... well, SIP smells a lot like it came from big TelCos. And not in a good way.

See eg: https://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/
I'm not sure what you're asking here... that text looks fine but it's also much larger than mine. Are you on a 4k/retina/high DPI monitor?

I'm viewing on a 1900x1200 24"
If you're accused of working on stupid, trivial things, and Facebook and Twitter are your best counterexamples, it's a little pathetic. It's very easy to conflate making a lot of money with doing something that matters. At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks that delivers CandyCrush and advertisements and an endless stream of selfies from our most annoying, narcissistic acquaintances.

Almost every founder, engineer, Stanford grad, and VC has been chanting "We're changing the world!" for the last eight years. Stop it. It's trite and annoying and it pisses people off. It doesn't piss people off because your current batch of products are half-baked and stupid. It pisses people off because your very best products of the last decade are, at the end of the day, stupid and trivial and really haven't changed the world in a very positive way. It pisses people off because it doesn't hold water outside the myopic Silicon Valley bubble, where everyone tells each other "We're changing the world" often enough that they actually buy into it.
That seems partly a reference to this classic article <https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/hadoop_hatred.html> "Your data isn't that big".

But in this case, it does seem incredibly advantageous to be able to scale up to any number of parallel searches, and to be able to search arbitrary new genomes.
The last time I checked, it says Minot as minnow whereas the North Dakota town rhymes its name with "why not?" So you'd say it as my knot.

Now Google recognizes I'm talking about Minot but it says Minnow back to me.
Eh. thats if they are militant. what if they want to allow us to use their alien technology as long as we disband our gov, and join their alien alliance.

man ill tell you what, ill see you up there, then we can talk back about it.
I've been trying to use the voice-search feature, but my phone is a moto G 2 and maybe the phone is too slow or my internet connection is too weak, but I find the long delay after "OK Google" makes it just too clumsy to use naturally.
No worries! Feel free to ask any questions of us at hn@ycombinator.com. Hacker News can be a slightly arcane place sometimes.
It's a terrible policy. Have you looked into the gender imbalance in China? Google "China gender imbalance"

This policy will hurt China for decades.
Great to see the principles codified. We practice them at PagerDuty with our Failure Fridays - https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/failure-friday-at-pagerduty. Seeing the production system handle a data center failure gracefully during practice gives us real confidence that we can handle an unplanned region outage (and we have, in fact).
I know it's old hat on HN, but I just wanted to point out how close to science fiction this article is. This technique to edit genomes is only a decade old. This startup is able to run sub-second searches without requiring any of their own infrastructure.

It costs them less than a $100 a month.

It was written by an intern.
I have been thinking about sortition for a while now.
It does seem rather unwise to collect data if they can't protect it.

Didn't the US government organisation responsible for security checking millions of employees and presumably storing all kinds of sensitive information about them in the process just have a huge leak?

I have a sense of Schadenfreude about that particular incident from the point of view of a government collecting too much data and itself becoming the victim, but when you look at it on the level of the individuals involved and presumably also their family and friends in some cases, it's pretty hard to see any real upside to that kind of result.
It reminds me of the post about using metadata to find Paul Revere: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada...

Last-second blackmail isn't really the best way to defeat a political movement. Compromising the central figures in organizing the movement -- not necessarily "taking them out", but potentially just reducing their involvement or creating some alienation -- when the movement is still young is the way to really stop it.
> given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible

Not gullible, he just needs to read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow".

The intuitive mind is unable to distinguish between consistency and truth. That is, a consistent story will always seem "proven" to the intuitive mind.

"Seeming practically proven" means little. You need to use the more logical part of your mind to crosscheck it.
But there is no reason to be altruistic. It's a total fantasy, just like any religion is.

To believe otherwise is to live an unexamined life, and the unexamined life is not worth living.

Some people feel like being altruistic, but feelings are the products of ideas. Ideas can be examined and thrown out when irrational (as in this case).