skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With almost 50 (17 in the last two years) acquisitions most of the growth is from that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Funny. I've handled a lot of dialer traffic for customers, as an intermediary (a billion calls every day or two).

"Legal" robo dialer is fairly easy to block. We blocked it on our systems using the same ideas as in the link. Look for repeated calls, low call duration, etc. However, this did not impact our calling stats at all.

That's right, even filtering out all the "known" dialer, we still had tons of shitty dialer traffic coming. The scammier the dialer, the more inclined they are to just make up a new caller ID for each call. Then there's no real pattern and it's easy to slip through. This is illegal and the FCC can fine $10K a day or something. But they don't.

That's the REAL problem. There's never any follow up. Sure, end-users complain now and then. What does that do? It makes one telco pass up a request "please review or block this number". That's it. It is utterly ineffective.

If the FCC was actually serious, they'd start enforcing rules and hold companies accountable. If I, as a VoIP provider, am liable for my customers to a certain extent, then I'm gonna be a bit more selective. I'll make sure my $29 customers aren't faking caller ID or sending lots of calls. On the wholesale side, I will make sure my contracts contain harsh penalties and keep customers liable. It'll take a few months for stuff to trickle down and be enforceable, but eventually the FCC can simply start handing out fines and this whole game will be over.

There's nothing really stopping this from happening other than the FCC not wanting to do it. Sometimes people say "oh well the problem is someone in Elbonia can sign up for $15 and get going" - yeah well eventually their calls hit the US network, and US law applies. If the provider is letting the Elbonians do their scam, the provider is liable. End of story. Suddenly, providers will require a deposit and scammers will piss off.

It doesn't even have to be a large fine. Just making the cost of making up a new identity be non-trivial (a few hundred dollars is probably enough) will put a pin in it.
Yes. Americans are fortunate to have arbiters of morality such as yourself to draw these conclusions for them.
GitHub down?
> Why do media companies need to use so many similar analytics services, e.g. the 30 odd trackers on many news sites?

Let's see what we can find on CNN right now:

Clicktale, analytics for their design team with things like click heat maps and scroll maps.

Optimizely, A/B testing to compare the results of layout changes by serving variations of each page to portions of their traffic.

Turner corporation's internal analytics tools, for who knows what.

A tag for PostRelease, which distributes media for content-based advertisers, like advertorials and videos.

Usabilla, a tool for surveying user satisfaction.

Dynamicyield, which personalizes page content to specific visitors.

Krux Digital, which is about tracking people across multiple devices for a better measure of how many real people are on the site, and then segmenting that data for the advertising sales team.

Moat, which measures viewability of ads, i.e. what portion are actually seen by people rather than just being loaded below the fold.

Scorecard Research, which is audience measurement and surveys.

Chartbeat, which is real-time analytics specifically for the editorial team. It shows them what stories are hot and trending at that specific moment, which directs what headlines get pushed up, what journalists get assigned to cover, what stories get pushed off the front page, etc.

Outbrain, which adds the "more stories you might be interested in" type stuff to the end of each article, which are actually ads.

The rest are tags for serving banner ads through Google, their own ad server, and various exchanges.
I greatly appreciate this post. I would love to hear about other people who are using RethinkDB. It is an interesting and unique tool, and fits certain use cases very well.
Those who use it as a status symbol, may view it as a business expense.
But companies cannot forbid employees from sharing how much salary we make. I don't understand how options are any different. I should go find an employment lawyer.
Your analogy is a little off: $2k at the department store is not $2k in the Antwerp diamond markets. The USGS prices are for wholesale markets, not retail mercury.

The recycling shop in the slum has to deal with the same issues with the copper they handle. My price from his sign was out of date, perhaps due to our world-leading inflation: he pays AR$45 per kilo, which is US$2.87. The difference between that US$2.87/kg and the US$5.31/kg that CME copper contracts trade at is exactly the cost of converting random chunks of copper of unknown quality bought from laymen into copper acceptable to scientific and industrial consumers, plus his profit.

If you're not a neoliberal, you could reasonably argue that it's unfair that the junk man pays you only half of the bulk commodity price for your copper. This does not defeat the point that the price he pays is sufficient to motivate people to aggressively recycle copper. In fact, even the AR$8/kg he pays for aluminum is high enough that cartoneros remove heatsinks from discarded computers.

Maybe whoever handles mercury recycling in the US is willing to pay somewhere between 25% and 50% of the bulk commodity price for jugs of metallic mercury of unknown purity. In fact, maybe they'd be willing to pay even more: maybe removing the impurities from a kilogram of impure mercury only costs one to five times as much as removing the impurities from a kilogram of impure copper, not ten times as much. The USGS report I linked notes that more than 50 companies in the US currently collect mercury for recycling from "Mercury-containing automobile convenience switches, barometers, compact and traditional fluorescent lamps, computers, dental amalgam, medical devices, thermostats, and some mercury-containing toys," and even more companies collect metallic mercury.

…that said, my attempts to find offers in the US on the internet to buy mercury for recycling for anything approaching US$54/kg are not finding anything. At all. So maybe the EPA guy is, in practice, correct.
This was basically official process for Scientology. That's why they deliberately aimed for celebrities—get them and (presumably) the rest will follow.
I have to disagree about the demographics. The job market will not improve. It will continue to deteriorate.

China may have a growing middle class, but there are over 1 billion people in India and 1.1 billion people in Africa which have yet to be brought into the middle class, and companies will take advantage of this army of reserve labour.

By the time these countries have been exploited, then robotics will have taken over and most everyone will be unemployed.

Once fully automated, are the owners of the robots going to be even richer than today, and the rest of the world population left to live in misery, or will there be a revolution (peaceful or violent) which forces redistribution?
It turns out that "Can't run faster than Molasses in January" isn't all that slow...
What's interesting is they've had a lot of leaks...a leak like this comes from someone high up so that's a problem they need to fix. Moments leaks, Jack as CEO leaked...big old bucket there.

If it's actually engineering I'm sure they'll all have jobs in a week but it's still hard to find talent so why wouldn't they just move people around?
It's like compilers. There is optimization by recognizing cases that might occur in programs. And then there is optimization by recognizing ... entire functions featured in specific benchmark programs, or those entire programs themselves.
Well, no economic system exists in its own right; they're all just human interpretations of a large number of human decisions and actions. So it's not an economic system that involves a moral choice; it's moral choices that, on scale, get interpreted as economic systems.

That being said, I absolutely agree with your final statement.
GitHub System Status - 9 Oct 2015 16:15
Yes, we moved to galera cluster. Even with its random node shutdowns, from my second-hand impressions it's still better than dealing with the pgpool, slony, et al.
The earth is not a globe and the space program is a lie.

4km laser experiment
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0qR-cQxOqPo
I have a blowtorch and a bought a Searzall for it. While it's a really cool device, I've found I prefer blowtorching my steaks normally as it provides a higher temperature.

I feel the Searzall works better for things like melting cheese, lightly toasting bread, or otherwise browning things without too much heat.
Growing up is a pretty metabolically stressful activity. It's not uncommon to be able to eat huge amounts and not get fat while you are growing.

There are certainly fully matured people who can eat more than other fully matured people who are the same size and weight, but the amount they can eat more is like a cookie a day maybe.
I use this when I'm travelling because I've had so many issues with Illustrator requiring me to login, not even allowing me to do free trial option. I work in remote locations now and then and this becomes an issue.

It is fast and easy to use, would recommend if you're a Adobe Illustrator user looking to switch.
Inverse offers in Mesos: The cluster maintenance use case – Mesosphere
Lazy, composable, and modular JavaScript
J Kenji's articles on Serous Eats are phenomenal. It's what got me started sous vide cooking, as well thinking about cooking in a whole new way.

I highly recommend anyone who hasn't read any of his stuff to do so, regardless of whether you like to cook or not.
> needing multiple keys in order to decrypt - not sure if that's mathematically possible

As a matter of interest Shamirs Secret Sharing algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing) is quite nice in that respect. The "secret" would be the decryption key. Using Shamirs Secret Sharing algorithm you could split the key into two so you would need both parts in order to work out the decryption key. The government could have a part. The company could have another. Only when both were combined could anyone work out the decryption key.

This would mean neither the company nor the government could decrypt messages until they work together - and therefore reduce the risk of hackers and rogue employees. It wouldn't break the encryption with dangerous backdoors but would allow the authorities to quickly gain access when needed for a specific investigation.

I doubt anyone would ever implement anything like that since it would be (slightly more) complex and you would have to trust that the decryption parts are valid. But I thought I would just mention it in case anyone else might find that algorithm as interesting as I do.
I saw Passwordbox getting acquired by Intel, now this. I don't think I'm going to switch to 1Password or another. I think they are just going to be acquired one day by unknown big entity... better be safe and keep your passwords to yourself
Isn't that what current WHOIS privacy is? The way I understand it is that if you currently have WHOIS privacy enabled, technically the domain doesn't belong to you but to the registrar who is providing the WHOIS privacy.
The correct link is https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/10709

April 1 was a good day in the lab!
I'm seeing Dashlane at $40 per year. That's pretty steep.
The industry is brutally competitive. There are basically no barriers to entry with a blog, and also no barriers to someone taking your content or story ideas and passing them off as their own. That makes it very hard to build an audience, let alone charge money.
Scott and Scurvy (2010)
It seems like much of the difficulty this paper is dealing with is the fact it is possible for expressions to diverge. Is their any case where this happening would not be an error? If not, then wouldn't it make more sense to leave the behaviour undefined, and have the compiler throw warnings when it detects this possibility?
On top of this, I would add that general trends in information workflow / technological advancement, which ML models like this running the world would certainly fall under, are as close to unstoppable forces as we've ever seen due to the complexity and power of the smaller trends that cause them.

Basically, if this is going to become a thing, then there is no stopping it.
"left to their own whim"

It's illusion to believe that there is anything except "people's own whim". It's always the question of someone's whim, the question is only if you will allow me to decide based on my own whim or you will force or persuade me to follow your whim. I'm not saying that we always have full conscious control over our actions -- quite the contrary, indeed -- but in nearly all cases people act according to their own interests (perceived or real) or values.
This argument is specious. Bridges only continue to be relevant a thousand years on because humans have barely evolved in that time frame, not because bridge builders put any effort into ensuring their bridges would still be relevant to future mankind.

Computer programs on the other hand are driven by fashion, and evolve rapidly. Digital documents created by programs will cease to be readable when the programs that could read those documents fall out of fashion, but this is not due to any short-sightedness by the developers of these programs, but rather by users that choose to prefer new (more fashionable) programs even when these are incapable of reading the documents they previously wrote.
There is a difference between what is possible to do with rump kernels and what NetBSD is currently doing with them. The basic point is to be able to use the same code in different contexts, so in theory you could use rump kernels in implementing a microkernel. However, AFAIK NetBSD currently uses it for (optionally) running filesystems in userland (so you can mount potentially corrupted file systems without crashing the kernel) and for testing. Your (b) is a separate thing that has always been possible in NetBSD (there is also loadable kernel module support). More things could be made to work as userland drivers easily but could still require glue to make it actually work. I don't understand the details but there are multiple ways to make the glue and it can be easier if you are trying to get NetBSD drivers to run in NetBSD userland.

You can also use rump kernels to make an application that runs directly on Xen, KVM, or hardware or that e.g. uses NetBSD file system code on Linux (or Cygwin) userland. Much of this still need some work to do what you want, but less than writing the drivers from scratch, much less maintining them. rumpkernel.org is starting to have packages for some applications. This doesn't require otherwise using NetBSD.
> with a couple days of drafting a new regulation, and then a few months to implement it.

How would they enforce the regulations though without NSA style SS7 taps throughout US telcom network infrastructure?
This is where we are at anyway, no laws needed. A few select YouTube content partners allege infringement, there is no recourse, there is no law that gives you leverage for complaints made in bad faith, and just like that you are now excluded from the monopoly in online video.
Hmm, that's not the one I read. The one I read was more recent than May. I must have mislinked. My mistake.
I just encouraged my SO to move what she'd held in savings to start off her retirement. Now her savings account is just a small emergency buffer with automated minimum monthly transfers to prevent maintenance fees.

The only reason I still have a savings account is because I expect interest rates to go up again at some point in my lifetime, and, as petty as it is, I didn't want my credit score to take that temporary dip for closing the account.
I didn't quite get your comment. Did you have a problem that I'm trying to avoid using labor at all costs to achieve my goals? I don't think its wrong to give everyone what they need to survive without them needing to work if I don't need labor to do it. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
The interests of one and the interests of the other do not need to conflict. It's in shareholders interest to not have such conflict.
Beyond replication and sharding, another key point of differentiation with RethinkDB is data sync/push.
I'm gonna stretch things a lot but it reminds me of the standalone webserver versus language embedded webservers.

Before you had to rely on say apache for urlrewrite and routing. Now the data and logic has been lifted into languages.
Can a 'yc interview invitation' be used in the embassy the same way a regular 'visa invitation from a relative living in US' to get a B1 visa?
FPGA-based switches from Arista are a gimmick of that particular vendor. 10G ethernet and beyond is absolutely commodity in the FPGA world, every dev kit has one.
Dang is incorruptible (which is why YC put him in charge of HN). He couldn't care less if someone was funded by YC, A16Z, or POTUS. If enough people flag something as spam (or he felt something is spam), the post would removed faster than we could blink.
As usual, I'm tracking this outage over at StatusGator: https://statusgator.io. If you want alerts on this sort of thing, it can post to your Slack and the like.

The most interesting thing to me about GitHub outages is how many services it affects. I always get notifications for at least 20 or 30 services which all proactively and automatically post warnings about their GitHub integrations potentially being down. A lot of services integrate with GitHub!
It's a little complicated, but it can be very helpful. The basis isn't zero either, it's what you paid to exercise the option. The tax due at time of exercise is $0 because the fair market value is the same as what you paid (assuming you exercise either at the time of the grant, or at least before the next evaluation of the FMV). The benefit is if/when you sell, if you've held everything for the right period, you can pay long term capital gains tax on the gain, instead of ordinary income like you would if you held onto the option as an option.
IANAL, but the judge may order you to keep the warrant canary or find you in contempt. Law is based on intent and if your intent in removing that clause is in broadcasting you are under gag order, when the gag order restricts you from doing exactly that, you may find that will be taken as a breach.

This should not be taken as legal advice, YMMV, yadda yadda.
And you lose one of the best things in life... love for food! Sometimes I think some americans have never known how good food tastes like.
This could be incredibly useful for video editing - creating one of those "word collage" clips sometimes used in documentaries.

If you could filter the results by another keyword (within just the video title for example), you could easily use it to search within the words of a specific person and create mashup videos a la "Brian Williams rap"[1].

Of course it'd require a little bit of manual trimming of clips, but it'd get you 99% of the way there - provided the content is on YouTube and captioned. Maybe there are other cheap/free solutions out there for this kind of thing, but last I checked, there were a few transcript-searchable video services targeted at media production companies, and the subscription pricing was incredibly high if I remember correctly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CYJ73pVpVc
I tried this earlier in the year and it seemed cool - been meaning to go back and have another look into it. It was pretty easy to get the basics up and running.
The assault on the pie chart
I'm curious as to why this is downvoting while the top-voted response has this exact same thing in it. Is HN just allergic to anything that isn't cheerleading the software industry?
Westinghouse Announces Lead Cooled Fast Reactor Initiative
What's funny is that you can guess the answer to these kinds of questions - if it was what you'd naively think it would be, then there wouldn't be an article, so you can easily guess the "counterintuitive" answer.
An interesting data point but:

From the article:
> In the power industry, Hawaii is commonly considered a "test case" for new renewable energy technologies because its power prices — the highest in the nation — have made cutting-edge resources cost-effective on the islands before they reach that point on the mainland.

So not directly applicable, right now, in most other locations.
We have doc stuff here: https://docs.cloud.gov/
The Future of Transparency in the Music Biz – and the World
In general, I think that there is an important conversation to be had about how this newly proposed cacheing tier would effect the overall cat and mouse game between tracking networks and ad blockers on mobile phones. Since the web community is being asked to choose to adopt a new technology, I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reason about what would be technically possible to achieve in terms of tracking tech with this architecture. Here one rough estimate:

If ads are all served locally (from a single domain) then it becomes technically feasible to utilize a short-lived rotating mutation URI generation scheme. Under such a tracking system each ad unit URI would be instantiated "just in time" to redirect a certain amount of load after which it would expire away. This JIT transient URI generator could be aware of the domain's application routing table so that it can dynamically spin out each new tracking/ad unit URI in a camouflaged form. In other words each URI could appear to be only a mutated variation of organic cached content.

In computer security parlance this would establish a "covert channel" on top of HTTP via a timing attack vector (extremely short-lived URLs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack

I would imagine that ads propagated through such a system would be pretty much impossible for an ad-blocker to identify within a low-enough latency window. In other words by the time the ad unit's URI is discovered by a blocking server and it's clients are notified the URI has already vanished as if it never existed.

What's I find slightly humorous about this approach to tracking is that the scheme would closely resemble several of the "blackhat SEO" techniques which are frowned upon by Matt Cutts' "Quality Guidelines" for example "link schemes", "automatically generated content", "cloaking", and "sneaky redirects". Surely it's unfathomable to think that Google would one day resort to such forms of trickery in order to confuse other search engines :)

https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6001971

By the way this is only something I came up with earlier today and definitely not something that I've even heard discussed although I'm not in the advertising business myself. In other words it's entirely possible that I could have missed something here.
No question that a torch is an amazing tool for the ultimate high temp sear. We are going as high as we can in an electric device, shooting for 500F in the first version. However, the most interesting thing is that we've found there are some magical temperatures below that (500F), but above sous vide (212F) the higher end of the spectrum. For example, 365F lets you maillard unattended, giving amazing eggplant or grilled cheese. You can toast pine nuts or sweat garlic.
You've explained partly why the phenomenon exists, you haven't explained why it's not a problem.
Colin, given that you don't want to live in the Bay Area, how do you envision yourself being a part of the YC community? These propositions seem fundamentally at odds with one another. Given that restriction, however, here are some ideas:

Could you arrange to go down to YC periodically and hold "office hours" to begin relationships with founders that are doing interesting things in your areas of expertise?

Could these relationships lead to you becoming a technical advisor for some of them?

Could you angel invest in some of them?

Could you attend YC investor day?