skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funding for pure science is a function of american politics. The problem isn't in budgets or even politicians. The people with the money/power have lost respect for science. Some feel that scientists have an agenda, others that they are simply untrustworthy, and a large percentage see science as a challenge to belief systems. Those views are the real root.

The desire to cut science funding does not come from rational deliberation. So the path to greater investment in science is not through rational debate. The only real path, and it is a long one, is to bring people on board through proper science education.
When you say that the company is "coming after you," do you mean to say that the CEO is calling you saying that he/she expects you to grant some ownership interest in your new venture? Or do you mean that you have received a communication from an attorney representing the company, and that in the communication the attorney makes an argument as to why the company has an ownership interest?

When you say you had no "employment agreement" in place, does this mean that there was nothing in writing? Or do you mean that there was no agreement whatsoever regarding relative contributions, time and financial commitments, division of equity, etc.?

If you would like to discuss this matter, feel free to contact me at (805)259-5778. I am an attorney with a computer engineering degree, and I specialize in IP, corporate, and HR related matters and would be willing to discuss the matter with you.

Kenneth Stein, Esq.
Frankly "world's biggest bookstore" shortly after launch sounds more like a potential world changing company today than much of what's coming out of Silicon Valley. And Bezos was bold enough to build it before many people had considered buying things online.

Sure, everything looks trivial to some people (bah! not another government-backed space launch vehicle manufacturer). But there's a big difference between companies that seem trivial to outsiders because those outsiders are sceptical about the founder's claims there's a mass market for the service, and companies that seem trivial because they're throwing VC money at incrementally improving existing platforms to capture a slice of a maturing market. Founders taking the Jobs/Bezos-type bet that things like consumer genetics and 3D printing are on the cusp of being ready for the masses evidently have world-changing aspirations even if many outsiders think the products will remain a toy (and even if hindsight proves them right). On the other hand it's already very well established there's a real and huge market for products which improve click through rates on ads, but you'll struggle to convince anyone that doesn't work in marketing that it's actually a world-changing mission, no matter how gushing the press release is and how close they are to success. I think the criticism directed at SV for focusing efforts on "trivial" problems tend to be directed mostly at companies with the latter type of ambition than the former.
Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 is the single worst thing to happen to the American university system.
> The question is, if this was a well known problem and they knew the way to test their existence (and given there were millions of cars on the street with these systems), why start the big scandal precisely now?

From what I understand the scandal was started after Europe funded research at an American university (since they were developing systems to measure emissions during normal driving that didn't rely on the car's computer output). The results were published a few years ago, which got reported to the US and European authorities, and it is big news right now simply because the fine/punishment phase is in motion (nobody cares about dry research results).

Up until recently (last three-ish years) the technology to measure emissions from the tailpipe during driving weren't readily available. They trusted the computer.
Property taxes also punish retired people. When your wages disappear after retirement, it's a lot more difficult to pay the taxes on your home.
> Well at the current rate of poaching, elephants would be extinct in the next 10-20 years. And considering the corruption levels in many of these countries, yes, it's consumer markets that have to get involved.

Or you could let African countries farm them and have loads of them, just like you have loads of pigs and sheep and cattle and all the other commercially farmed animals which somehow are ethically different.

Instead you create a "War on Drugs" situation, which not only is hugely ineffective at solving the problem, it empowers the criminal organisations within the country that grows the product. Replace Mexican cartels with African poachers. Now not only are we unable to make money from the animals, we're losing money having to pay for rangers, and at the end of it lose the animals themselves to the inexorable attrition from the poachers (as in the White Rhino).

Then everyone in the West has a fat tut-tut about what a shame it is for the animal to go extinct, while refusing to accept farming as a less ethically palatable but more effective means of preventing extinction, and we just move onto the next animal.

> It's not a 'commercial' product when the ivory comes from illegal sources.

It is a commercial product because there's a market for it and people are buying it. It may be illegal, but it's still being bought and sold. Not only that but in the past we (South Africa) have been able to release limited amounts of stockpiled ivory to be available for sale, but these kinds of agreements work to make that impossible.

> On the large scale of things, it would hardly make a difference for the living standards.

Africa needs every bit it can get to help development and be able to become an economic power with its own valuable and unique exports. Even if it just helps a few thousand people and their families be independent and contributing to Africa's growth, that matters, and dismissing it comes from a position of real privilege.
Why the United States have the best hackers. T or F
Well, that of course depends on the system of property value assessment.
The choice of the numbers used for S-boxes can be very mysterious unless the designers explain it. So reverse engineering the S-box design might reveal something interesting (something good or something evil).

For years people thought that the S-boxes in the Data Encryption Standard (DES) hid a back door since the NSA had helped design it. It surprisingly turned out years later that the NSA had actually strengthened the S-boxes against an attack called differential cryptanalysis that was not known to the public crypto community at the time[1]. But neither were they entirely benevolent: The NSA also weakened DES by shortening the key length so they could brute force it, and in the heyday of DES, the NSA was probably the only organization in the world that had the computing power to do so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.2...
https://www.google.com/search?q=boston+globe+tangled+history...
Voyager needed computational chops to do things like error correction and starfinding and etc, I suspect that NASA stuffed as much cpu in there as they could get away with, considering the whole 'radiation' thing.
>I hear this all the time, and it's absurd. The high P/Es of innumerable companies (like Amazon) are compelling evidence that investors are well aware of the long game companies play and they approve of it.

The sorts of people who invest in Amazon are, anyway.

Still, it's true. Growth companies think long term. But the moment a company (or other organisation) gets into trouble it starts thinking short term. When you've got to lay off 20% of your workforce, you pick the ones whose absence won't be felt for many years.

But really, the reason that companies don't invest in pure science is not that the value is too far in the future but that the value is too diffuse to capture.
North America is out of ipv4 addresses for really real this time
I cache with Redis
In other words, it breaks as soon as you look at it funny, and the users get blamed.
I love this sort of build video. I wish I could watch for hours the setting up of the various machines and the construction of the different parts.
Kamcord is looking for a Partnerships Associate who loves mobile gaming
I cache with redis:

https://github.com/seamusabshere/lock_and_cache

(and lock too, with Redis Redlock)
Interesting article.

On a somewhat related note, a few years back my GP advised me to eat the odd piece of food that had been dropped on the floor, and to stop cleaning as much; the reason being that a blood test had revealed I was low in zinc. His reasoning was that since dust has reasonable quantities of zinc, I should be able to be adequately provided with it via my environment. Apparently his idea worked, because in the next test my zinc was over the ideal (This could be a fluke, of course).
Hey FCC, don't lock down our routers
I don't think a lot of them are doing it by reading the hacker news internet forum either.
Note that they have decomposed the GOST S-box into several non-linear 4-bit functions. While this is certainly great for hardware optimization, the cipher is still not fully understood: the authors have not determined why these particular functions were chosen. Non-linear functions are given in the paper as magic constants.
I see a distinct problem with the terrain model. It seems to build the physical shape then apply a waterline to define the islands. That makes the above-water island a simple extension of the below-ground terrain. Earth, and I think is safe to assume any planet with water, is more complex.

Before getting to vegetation and biomes, why not some modeling of increased weathering above sealevel? Unless every island is tropical and volcanic, those mountains should be flatten out significantly in comparison to the terrain below sealevel. The deep valleys should fill with gravel.
> Or you could let African countries farm them and have loads of them, just like you have loads of pigs and sheep and cattle and all the other commercially farmed animals which somehow are ethically different.

Do you know much about elephant husbandry? If you do, can you please talk about some of the possible issues with your proposal and how you would solve them?

Also, do you really believe that it's the legality of ivory sales that's stopping the people who would become elephant farmers from being farmers?

> Instead you create a "War on Drugs" situation, which not only is hugely ineffective at solving the problem, it empowers the criminal organisations within the country that grows the product.

No, no it's not. If someone wants to buy heroin, the only thing that will scratch that itch is heroin. That is not the same with ivory as the potential customers can buy something else. The situation is similar to the U.S. ban on sales of Kinder Surprise eggs. What do you think is the size of the black market for Kinder Surprise eggs?

> Not only that but in the past we (South Africa) have been able to release limited amounts of stockpiled ivory to be available for sale,

You realize that these are just increasing the demand right? The current poaching crisis is generally attributed to the 2008 CITES reclassification of ivory which let some African countries sell their stockpiles to China and Japan. This increased the demand and poaching has skyrocketed as a result.

> Africa needs every bit it can get to help development and be able to become an economic power with its own valuable and unique exports.

Again, do you really think that there are that many people who would pick up elephant farming if it became possible to sell ivory?

> Even if it just helps a few thousand people and their families be independent and contributing to Africa's growth, that matters, and dismissing it comes from a position of real privilege.

Can you also talk about how this proposal would prevent poaching of elephants in the wild?
It's not a zero-sum game
I've heard this argument many times; investment involves risk, potentially 100% of invested capital or more, unlike a paycheck.
We use this at our makerspace. The only complaint I've ever heard is that it can do a better job at scaffolding.
So high P/E is evidence of a "long game," and traders operate based on their best estimate of companies' fundamentals? What are you buying, because I'd like to short it.
I've seen what happens to companies that think short term. They think they're fooling the investors, and some of them manage it for a while (Enron). But when the investors do get wise, the stock tanks, every time.

If you are better than other investors at knowing which companies are secretly eating their seed corn, you can make a fortune shorting their stocks.

CEO compensation is often tied to short term stock values. But those short term stock values ARE a reflection of the long term prospects of those values, not last quarter's profit. I've seen a lot of share prices tank when a blowout profit was announced, because along with it investors got hints that there were big problems looming.
I'm not sure. If it were a history of barbed wire it could be interesting, but instead it just seems to be an excuse for the author to parrot his own political opinions about the current situation at the Hungarian border via guilt-by-association to a bunch of other uses of barbed wire.

Barely mentioned: cattle, the original and still the main purpose of barbed wire.

I highly recommend the wikipedia article instead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire to anyone actually interested in barbed wire. It's odd to think that until the late 19th century nobody had invented a reasonable way to actually keep cows in one place.
Is this the most effective development program in history?
It probably has a lot to do with centrally planned economies (eg the Fed) and kleptocratic govts misallocating vast swathes of the labor and investment pools into nonproductive sectors of society, like banking, accounting, law, govt agencies, and other forms of regulatory capture. The number of people engaged in productive work has shrunk dramatically and they are supporting an ever expanding parasite class. Atlas's burden is increasing.
I've had AMZN since its IPO. AMZN has regularly crushed the short investors for 20 years now.
This is simply not true. The stock market is notoriously short sighted. Many investors are playing a game of musical chairs/the bigger fool because they know the economy works in a cyclical fashion with alternating booms and busts. So during boom times (now) investors will continue to push money into the market, pumping up PE ratios, with each investor thinking he/she is smart enough to exit before the next bust. If anything, the markets are even more short-sighted today due to the increase in popularity of arbitrage-seeking algorithmic and high-frequency trading, which is the anthesis of value investing.

I'd argue we are seeing the same mechanisms at work in the private tech investing space, and that once companies start to go under, those who have not exited from their investments are likely to get burned big time.
exactly. it punishes risk takers.
If the Voyager comparison doesn't work for you, then try the Cray-1 (or even the Cray X-MP, if your phone is a recent high-end model). "Doing its job", for most modern devices, is squandering (comparatively) enormous amounts of computational power and communications bandwidth to pretty up some pretty mundane tasks, most of which amount to reading tiny amounts of text, while showing you ads.
I disagree. There are countless places where text is probably the least best means. The real issue with text, with ALL text, is that it requires the viewer to be a reader, to have a similar linguistic background to the writer.

The for example a sign system for beaches. Which is a better means of communicating to a wide variety of people, a sign saying "Warning Sharks" or this? http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/shark-w...

If you are writing code or dev notes then text is no doubt the way to go. But if you are trying to communicate with strangers (ie prospective customers) then symbols have their place.
All I know is that my organisation recently replaced some horrible SAP-based things with some faster, neater, clearer Atlassian-based things.

And the Atlassian things don't require launching a virtual Windows machine on my mac every time I want to use them.

Maybe there's better solutions than Atlassian out there, but Atlassian is still a helluva lot better than what a lot of companies are actually using.
Related:

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/282154/eat-dirt
He didn't shuck a Micronta clock and hot glue it into a pencil case.
But PE ratios today, unlike in the late 90's, are not that high. Stocks, especially large cap technology and large-cap consumer like Nike and Disney, may still be a good value
No, the problem is whether to moderate forums- it's not happening and when people try to come up with codes of conduct so they can moderate better, there's a huge outcry.

It would be fine if we had better moderation in more places, even without any laws. But even that's not happening.
Well, it's up to you if you want horribly mangled text rendering ;-) I won't make a judgement call one way or another on the font weight on the site. I'm just telling you that your font rendering is misconfigured. This is why you can't read that text.

Even for higher font weights, the rendering in your example is atrocious. Compare the sibling post's thicker fonts to yours. Notice how yours are fuzzy on the outside? His are crisp. Now, pick a website with a font you like. Shrink the page down so the characters are really small. Look at the characters closely. Do you see how it looks smeared and how there are pixels of different colours (not just black and gray)? This is the result of the misconfiguration. Good hinting will allow you to shrink the font to a very small size and still have good anti-aliasing. Without playing with it, I don't know if it's just that you have the DPI set wrong, or if you have auto-hinting turned on (which you should never do now that the hinting algorithms are no longer patented), or possibly something else.

If you ever decide to look into it, probably the best keywords to search for is "anti-alias" and "hinting". It seems silly to me to put up with such awful rendering just because you are too stubborn to consider the possibility that you are wrong.
Property and sales taxes are both the most regressive forms of taxation in practice.

The reality is, as much as everyone bitches about income taxes, a progressive tax system [regardless of the exact source, you could do a "progressive sales tax" for instance] is critical to prosperity.

Property taxes are in many ways effectively a tax on owning rental property which translates into higher rents [up to the market's willingness to pay, which is quite high given people are spending 50% of their income in some places in rent].
> In 2014, the government spent $760 million to hire private advertising firms, according to USASpending.gov...That figure does not include the salaries of the innumerable federal employees who promote their agencies’ work in print, on air and online. It does not include the anti-drug media campaigns, or the cost of printing and publishing reports and government journals, such as the Federal Highway Administration’s Public Roads magazine.

For comparison, each of the presidential candidate spent a much more widely discussed ~$2 billion together on the 2012 campaign.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/#out
I've been building a web app to manage this, among other things. As of right now, I have 184 things in the pile. Books, Steam Games, (most from Humble Bundles) movies. I figure if I go through one every two days, it'll take me a year to go through the current list. Every time I load the page, it gives me a random item on the list.

Books aren't that big of a time investment when you realize that very few of them are really worth reading all of. I don't feel any qualms about putting one down halfway through. Once I feel like reading more would be masochistic, I click 'finished' and then find something else to do with my time.
Specifically, I think rifung is referring to the very high cost of fundamental research that startups don't have to incur, especially given the slow return on such investments.
Or they went with as little as they needed. When it comes to radiation, the older/bigger circuit paths on silicon are more robust. I'd bet they used the least-powerful cpu they felt would do the job.
Which companies do you believe are eating their seed corn, and are you shorting their stock?
This technique is unreliable in practice, and the author's discussion is confused.

First, their explanation doesn't make sense. They're supposing that there's some determinacy in the order in which a matcher can be expected to examine the different possible matches. But that's provably not the case: if it were, then deterministic and non-determinsitic finite automata would be inequivalent.

But the technique in question does seem to require some determinacy as to which of several alternatives will match against a string. Where does that determinacy come from? The semantics of the alternation operator (the '|') as usually formulated don't specify any preference among alternations. For that reason, POSIX additionally requires that a matcher return the longest possible match (and if there are several such, the leftmost is what must be returned). Where you do find an explicit guarantee concerning which of several different possible ways of matching will be preferred, it's almost certainly because the engine is aiming at POSIX compliance.

Such compliance has a significant cost, though, as it requires the matcher to consider all possible matches (in order to find the largest). For that reason, most regex engines forego strict POSIX compliance and only guarantee that some match will be returned if one exists, not that that match will be the leftmost longest. Some engines offer the option of requesting strict POSIX behavior, but the default will always be to eagerly return the first match encountered (and recall the point above that there provably can't be a guarantee about the order in which matches are encountered, in general).

You should never do this in production code unless you're sure that your matcher is POSIX-compliant.
Surely rising pitch to indicate a question isn't universal?
During the Scottish independence referendum last year, both the UK Government and the Scottish Government produced materials trying to persuade voters, BuzzFeed articles and pamphlets; and a white paper, respectively.

I probably don't need to tell you which sides the respective governments were taking.
short sellers who don't understand the subtlety between 'cash from operations' vs. 'net income '
I assumed that was intentional- "come hell or high water", liquid clock, it makes a lot of sense in a punny sort of way.
Sorry to hear that. Yeah, they're not as strong for C++ yet as it's more complex and has less R&D in that sector. My idea for C++ would be to try to find or even encourage development of those that catch the interface and concurrency errors at the least. So, that's Design-by-Contract [1] [2] along with something like ConSeq [3] if it's available or usable for your build. D-by-C, done right, gets a lot of mileage w/ ConSeq showing promise.

Do keep the exploit mitigation tech, though. The NaCl paper was one of best reads I had that year. Most interesting one right now is Code Pointer Integrity [4]. Curious, is there a configuration that swaps out the sandbox for something with the same interface but no real sandbox? Point is if we can swap out the existing sandbox (esp CFI) for a different technology (eg CPI, Softbound + CETS).

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/an-exception-or-a-bug/184401686

[2] http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/8293/Design-by-Contract-...

[3] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WZAQPu...

[4] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14...