skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Non-anonymous payment systems can be blacklisted to deny people rights (most importantly, the ability to publish, travel, and hire legal representation) without due process.

Witness this occurring recently with Wikileaks being banned by Visa, MC, and PayPal without any criminal complaint filed against them, much less a trial.

The government cannot have the ability to censor payments or perform traffic analysis on one's payments and receipts if we are to maintain a free and civil society. The US Supreme Court has ruled several times that free speech is not free speech without anonymous speech.

Dependency chart:

(anonymous payments) <- (anonymous publishing) <- (freedom to publish unpopular opinions without reprisal) <- (freedom to publish with the intent of changing public opinion and changing society) <- (free and civil society)

Another:

(anonymous payments) <- (untracked travel) <- (freedom of association with unpopular groups) <- (ability to form new political parties) <- (free and civil society)
Big thanks for everything Garry, good luck in whatever comes next and enjoy the well earned rest!
A lot of listening today occurs through streaming services, and huge uncompressed songs will eat into data plans quickly.
I think the aircraft has only a tiny effect on profitability. In general, aircraft total cost of ownership and operations is proportional to size. There are some outliers, but the purchase price and/or leasing costs are negotiated up or down based off of perception of costs, so if there are any issues with aircraft costs they are short lived and go away after a while because those cost differences are eventually negotiated away. Similarly, any aircraft with lower than normal operational costs will have its price bid up until it breaks even with the cost levels of inferior aircraft (scarcity of production capacity for aircraft ensures that higher bidders get first dibs).

The real issue is flight capacity utilization. Airline cost structures follow what accountants would call a step-fixed cost. In other words, the marginal cost per person is negligible until you fill the aircraft and then the marginal cost per person is the cost of a whole new flight. This also means that once you fill a plane past its break-even load factor, every additional seat sold is pure profit.

The airline industry as a whole is operating on load factors between 82% and 84%, and it is net neutral in terms of profitability. That would lead me to believe that at current fuel prices (really the only source of variability in operational cost), that 83% load factors represent the zero-profit scenario. Now if Airline A can achieve 85% load factors, they will have a positive EBIT. If Airline B can acheive 87% load factors, they will roughly double the EBIT of Airline A.

Some airlines make money. They do it using the same exact planes and technology as other airlines that do not make money. The difference is that they have higher load factors. They are better at selling seats.
I don't see a correlation [1] Basically any airline which can handle the aquisition cost of new airplanes buys brand-new airplanes.

1: http://www.statista.com/statistics/269285/most-profitable-ai...
Do you mean Portland? It's a short flight from SF, in the same timezone, and has a huge software culture.

But even Portlanders are now complaining about the tech industry taking over and driving up rent.
Caffeine is very addictive. Should we regulate it too?
The ones I've seen aren't visibly hooked to the incoming plumbing (it's just porcelain all the way to the top).
I dislike vaping.

People thinks it's ok to blow those things in your face or near people.

It's basically spitting to me.

I also think Vape is bad for you and is up there with smoking. Just cause it less bad than smoking doesn't mean it's not harmless, it's just an excuse to not quit a harmful habit.

It's a free country but still I wish they can't vape in certain area or have a designated area so they can vape.
Whereas elsewhere in this thread you suggest the addiction dangers of caffeine from coffee is comparable to the addictiveness of nicotine?
You grew up wanting to be Luke Skywalker, but realize you're a Stormtrooper
To give some context, a new automotive assembly plant could cost around a billion[1]; or an old plant could be modernized with a billion[2] -- It is well within the realm of a normal capital expenditure of an auto company.

Industrial Automation is more expensive than you may imagine. A robot arm may be 100k to 200k or even more (hard to cite as prices are never listed on the internet); you also have to have a controller (PLC) and all of the associated sensors and connections.

We already have heavy duty robots capable of high precision positioning; the area for expansion / improvement is in making these cheaper, and in "Internet of Things" style automation.

Modern factories are heavily automated in the body welding processes and paint application.

The only area of the plant unconquered by robotics is General Assembly, where all the fiddly bits are put on - wire harness, carpet pad, carpet, etc. Robots are famously bad at handling bendy things. [3]

1. http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-auto-makers-are-building-new...
2. http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local/tarrant-county/2015/07/...
3. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/19/407736307/robot...

Disclaimer - I used to work at Arlington Assembly, and still work for GM. Any opinions are my own only.
Thanks. I was an ignorant fool on these issues for a long time. Now that I have slightly more clue, I figure one of the best things I can do with my privilege is just to visibly object, to get white dudes to listen to, well, anybody else. So much of what I got wrong happened not because I heard both sides and picked the wrong one, but because I didn't even know there was a choice.

And for what it's worth, I'm as impressed as hell by people in their 20s today. As an old, I think I'm supposed to grumble about kids these days. But I see so many young-ish voices that are so much smarter about these topics than my cohort was. I have enormous hope for the future.
Exactly the opposite --- I work with Qt in Python, and I've used both PyQt and PySide. I assure you it's not simple. Not that that's bad. It's a flexible and powerful tool. But using it doesn't feel like Python. It feels like C++ with Python syntax. No surprise, since Qt is written in C++.

You've got a point in that web-based UIs aren't any simpler. Jupyter is a project of impressive sophistication and hard work by all involved. Really what I'm complaining about is that the move toward web-based UI has starved native GUI toolkits of interest.
We do that (amongst a few friends), we pick a time such as 3:22 to meet up. I wish I could recall why we started doing this, but it always feels purposeful.
Maybe it's a short string optimization in this case, because the docs say that dropFirst is O(n)
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

Or they have optimized it after writing the docs. In any event, there's a lot more going on than what is necessary to parse a float. But I guess that's OK if the goal is to have a clean and consistent high level API.
Google now uses Deep Neural Nets to generate YouTube thumbnails
Well, thanks for the citation. I'm now much more confused about why this is what I was told in class by an expert in the field. Maybe he meant specifically the difficulty of finding a steel up to the challenge, it was a decade ago so some fidelity may have been lost!
When people start selling caffeine patches and joining support groups to quit drinking coffee, maybe we can visit that topic.
You need to think about it logically and put it into perspective.

Would you rather breath next to a tail pipe of a running car? Or next to someone puffing on a vaporizer?
ThreaditJS: an example application for SPA libraries and frameworks
Find travel destinations according to your budget
Show HN: DateCheckup.com – Schedule fake rescue calls and texts via SMS
Crazy that it's around Stripe's valuation and crazier it hasn't gotten in to Stripe's business yet.

Typically $300m in margin on $1b in revs would get you $6-8b but there's just too much negativity on Square right now with the part-time CEO, stream of negative media and chaotic product set.
Many highly valued companies armed with private capital
have stayed away from the IPO market.

I think this might become a norm in the short term

* as the late stage funding rounds appear inflated,
* an FED rate hike seems imminent and
* arguably, public market may not have the same risk/return
appetite as those investing in late stage rounds.
The author also overlooks some fairly major usability factors in urinals, such as the fact that the ones that go all the way to the floor inevitably get clogged up with the bits of trash that easily falls into them, and the fact that using a child-height urinal increases splashing considerably for taller men. I also didn't see any discussion about the splash-mitigating properties of various shapes of urinals, which I think is one of the most important factors.

You can't necessarily just decide you're a Designer of Everyday Things(TM) by critiquing them solely from the standpoint of an end-user who considers himself observant.
I'm not sure that anyone can speak to what happens to crypto in a post quantum world.

Mixing does not happen on a server - that would be an atrocious violation of privacy. Monero (and other cryptonote coins ) use ring signatures - https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0004.pdf

There is also work being done to employ gmaxwell's Confidential Transactions: https://github.com/ShenNoether/MiniNero/blob/master/RingCT0....
This was an idea originally from 4chan[1], it will be interesting to see if it passes approval.

1: http://i.imgur.com/t8w4fvCh.jpg
Do you drive? You realize you are pumping extremely harmful smoke into the air in large quantities?

I'd rather take a puff of someones second hand vaporizer smoke then to breath in the shit that comes out of your tail pipe.
> At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.”

That's always been the point with Twitter for me. There are very few things that I want to discuss in front of potentially every person in the world. I wonder why it took so long for people to realize it.

Writing this here is not the same as writing on Twitter, different size.
It took me a while to figure out why I kept coming across references to the Cheeseshop. Turns out that's why PyPI has that little quote at the bottom.

https://wiki.python.org/moin/CheeseShop
That's a good point, i will work on this. Thanks a lot.
> Ford plants produced the faultiest American war planes, by far, dooming quite a number of American pilots. There’s every reason to think this was intentional.

That is quite an assertion to make about someone, even long dead. Could you provide some evidence?
I'm consistently disappointed at the (IMHO) mischaracterization of Twitter's woes by prominent writers. While I realize that they are experiencing some real stress, and yeah, it should get fixed, I think they're blind to Twitter's real problem.

Simply put: twitter is, for those without an audience, a strictly one-way medium. There is no social network or medium that is less interactive to the relatively anonymous, save perhaps a standalone blog. You're shouting into the vacuum, which is disheartening and eventually people just stop and eat their tweets.

The opposite of love is total indifference.

I would argue that twitter is actively encouraging this one-way-ness, which is going to be their downfall, because Twitter as a feed aggregator is high-noise and feature-poor. All of my "suggested friends" on Facebook (who got this right) are people who might reasonably care about anything I have to say. All of my suggested follows on Twitter are people who could not give one single fuck. (It's ok, I forgive you just this once Elon Musk. I'm not tearing your poster off my wall or anything. Although you're missing out on a goldmine here.)

It is a shame, because yet another news aggregator is highly unnecessary at this point in time, but number of two-sided social networks of Twitter's scope you could count on the fingers of one hand.
Your argument is that exchanging anonymous digital money is like cash, except without the risks to personal safety that exchanging cash requires...and that is a bad thing?
I would say, No. Square's trajectory has definitely diminished. $300m in margin on $1b in revs should easily support a higher valuation. And most of the preferential terms apply to acquisitions, not IPOs. The "ratchet" is at the $12 midpoint so likely will not come into play. The late stage investors are not going to make money until Square goes above the $15.46 they invested at.
The future of the interent is in Linus Torvald's hands
New bot uses Taylor Swift-inspired lyrics to describe what it sees
And that's why I leave location services disabled by default and never sign into any Google account from my phone: it has been obvious from day one that this sort of abuse would become commonplace.
They didn't want my money and now I don't care anymore. Don't know about the current situation there but for a long time they only accepted credit cards. We in Germany don't use credit cards the same way US Americans do.
>Avoiding the risk of transgression has become more important to us than carrying a difficult position for God. And it is this that is killing us. "The more dangerous a thing, the more is its conquest ordained by life": it is from that conviction that the modern world has emerged; and from that our religion, too, must be reborn.

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
No, because that's just enforcing a private contract.
Yes! There are times when my motor memory recalls the password just fine. But, if I specifically think about the password and can't consciously recall it, at that point the motor memory seems to reset and fails too.
Reminds of the Urinal Flash Game - http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/urinal - one of the first flash games to go viral in early 2000's if I remember right.
Is that an extension or are you on mobile?

Edit:
Thanks!
>Lesson learned - Be very circumspect when turning your back on 40 years of computer science.

So true. We moved away from Mongo for very similar reasons, but we moved to Cassandra instead of Postgres only with great trepidation (we were worried about scalability issues).

Only time will tell if this was a good move or if we should have just done as you did. Good luck out there!
The Cost of Convenience: Communities and the On-Demand Economy
Yeah, spot on. At least now in 2015 using 16 bytes for id's and hashes no longer seems like a lot of memory or storage.

It pains me to see people inventing weird id schemes for every app and api.
Just came here to see if anyone else noticed it and it's funny that it's the only comment ATM :D

I think someone should come up with a browser extension to disable custom scroll jacking.
it's possibly unfair, but when twitter started exerting strong control over the platform and user experience i went from enthusiastic supporter to "enh, whatever". i will be happy for them if they succeed, and i am glad that they are supporting a lot of valuable use cases, but i no longer have any emotional investment in them as a "space". their ongoing failure to address harassment properly is just the final nail in the coffin; these days, i see it as exactly equivalent to facebook - i use it because that's where the people are, but if it goes the way of myspace i'll switch to whatever replaces it without a backward glance.
An interesting aspect to this that seems to be overlooked is that the conventional intelligence was probably intentionally fudged in order to garner funds and support and raise anxiety and fear as a means for motivation.

You can't overestimate the production of tanks by that much when you are observing the production facilities. You would either have to have been tricked, i.e., knowing that it is being observed the same tanks were "shipped" multiple times or you, for some reason thought there were more factories which you didn't have eyes on. I'm not sure how to judge whether it would have been in the Nazi interest to provide an impression of high productivity or hide the true nature of the numbers.

Another interesting aspect to this is that it provides the background for why the US military operates with what would otherwise be seen as abject retardation. There is a strategic value in being aimless, illogical, and confused in your operations for various reasons. One reason is that if you have "random" serial numbers your enemy can't do these kind of calculations.
Clickbait use of "Fired" - It's a pet peeve of mine when headlines used the term to create more drama. The correct term for terminating an employee due to business reasons as opposed to "cause" is laid-off.
I think he just did you a favor. Were you previously under the impression that the handles pulled by pissing, genital-cupping, anonymous men were clean?
The Boom, Bust, and Rebirth of New York's Tech Scene
The Most Militarized Universities in America
What do they have you doing, and what you would like to be doing?

If the difference is insurmountable (or if your career goal is different from the job reality) then you are on the losing end of the deal.

As soon as you can identify what is wrong with where you are, and where it is you need to (or should ideally) be, it is time to find something closer to that thing, and move on to it.

This is in that venn overlap between what you are good at, what you like to do, and what other people will pay you to do. Life is full of tons of other things, but this is just the core of this situation.

When life squeezes on the Venn until any of those three things (or other important things) are no longer overlapping, it is time to change something, like switching to a new job that overlaps better with your particular venn idiosyncrasies.

Hope that gives you something to mull on instead of dwelling on the suckiness of this one job, which, I can attest has been the case for me on multiple occasions in my life. It isn't fun when you feel like little more than another seat warming robot and not a valued contributor.

I have had the luxury of quitting my job without having another lined up, but I still have had to take another critical look at my work/life arrangement and try to ensure that whatever is next is really what is best for me and my unique venn diagram, which as I have gotten a bit older has become complicated by mortgages/wives/families/etc.

Ha! Now I am going to go try and actually draw mine out!

Cheers
ESP32 Announced (ESP8266 Sucessor)
As I mentioned, I’m pulling this from a book. http://www.amazon.com/The-American-Axis-Charles-Lindbergh/dp...

One reviewer on Amazon says:

> This is one of the most carefully researched, extensively footnoted, beautifully written, books on this subject ever published. The sources include entries from Lindbergh's journal, Lindbergh's speeches, FBI files, letters from German archives, Ford company records, and many other primary sources. Every assertion of fact is backed up with unimpeachable documentation.

IIRC — by this point it was Ford's son running the plant(s) in question, but Henry Ford himself is not just a known anti-Semite, but quite literally ran and anti-Jewish propaganda paper in Dearborn, MI. It hardly takes a leap to look at the abysmal performance of planes built by Ford and suspect that management there was particularly … lackadaisical in their pursuit of quality.
Ask HN: What is the purpose of link shorteners?
This may be a dumb question with a simple answer, but I've spent a while trying to figure it out and still don't see it.

These are the 2 reasons I always see.

1. They track clicks - But is their clickthrough tracking any better than Google Analytics + URL parameters?

2. They make links more shareable / manageable - Twitter counts all links as 23 characters. And all it involves is copy-paste.

They clearly have value for the businesses doing the shortening, so I understand why they exist. But for the person sharing the link, is there some value I'm missing?
It's a superscalar CPU running Tomasulo’s dynamic scheduling algorithm to extract instruction level parallelism. Once you are beyond two-issue in-order processors, the CISC vs. RISC distinction becomes a minor point.

Note that most ARM processors are two-issue in-order, so RISC is still relevant at the low end. Compare power consumption of ARM vs. equivalent Atom processor. Intel has a process advantage with Atom, but ARM is still lower power.
That is a convincing argument for a lot of people. A lot of people also don't consider that they forfeit their right to dissent if the government ever does anything that they disagree with in the future.
false dilemma (n): a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.
> [...] when you're logged in, stories on /newest and on /item pages have 'past' and 'web' links. Click on 'past' to search HN for previous stories with that title. This helps with finding duplicates. Click on 'web' go to a Google search for the story title.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645
Like Gumroad, a company like this should not be staffing up to 20+ before finding some traction or at least some product/market fit.
Vaper here. It's incredibly rude for someone to inflict their vape on you. I would support designated vaping areas similar or identical to designated smoking areas.

Your statement about exuses to not quit imply that you believe that quitting is easy, or even possible, for all smokers. This is certainly not the case. Studies have shown that it's easier to kick a heroine habit than it is to quit smoking.
Interesting. As a developer, I've never had trouble assessing the trustworthiness of packages on github, and I see no reason to implement some kind of trust system for language specific repos (npm, for example). The reason is simply that there are many ways to assess a library, such as community activity, use in production, quality of tests, and general reputation.

Perhaps this is more of a problem for scientists who just want to download and use a package, but don't have the know how to assess the quality of a package the way developers do?
>Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

-McLuhan
This one is much better, thanks.
The more interesting point, stands, however: Snowden's actions are not a Christian vs non-Christian issue. Their effects on the NSA and the international cybersecurity community have been enormous, and whether their totality served the public good is an incredibly interesting debate without a clear answer.
But the within-audible-range-"beat" at the recorded "listening position" (where the microphones are located) would be recorded anyway, no?[1] So how does hi-res audio help in this case?

[1] AFAIK most music is not recorded like that, instruments are recorded separately and then overlaid; but then adding realistic-sounding "beats" based on whatever positioning the sound engineer envisions should be possible in software?
Not colonies, markets. The connotations of your word choice seem solely intended to make emotional connections that the reality does not support.
First, lots of people do have very real problems quitting caffeine. Second: the support groups and meds for quitting smoking are there because smoking actual cigarettes is harmful. Take the burning cigarette away and you're not very far from the situation we're in with caffeine.
You can just disable JavaScript for the domain?