skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You are still focusing on the material output and treating immaterial work as secondary.

This is the core of the argument. I am not misunderstanding anything.

There are 3 kinds of stuff (for lack of a better term) in the universe: matter, energy and information.

Your argument is that because we have infinitely more information, limits to matter and energy are pointless.

My argument is that, while it is possible to apply information to enhance the matter and energy processes that support our lifes and our lifestyles, there are hard limits on how far we can push this. This is a matter of mathematical certainty. The curve is a negative exponential. Once you have made a physical process twice as efficient, you've already consumed half of the (upper bound of) potential gains. Surely the multiplier can keep growing an growing to infinity, but the hard savings will be marginal the more efficiency you apply to the process.

A second point, which I have not raised so far, is that information itself is subject to the limits of marginal returns. The amount of data that we have keeps growing and growing, but if we lack the processing power to organize it (and I am talking about weat-were here, our computers are not smart enough yet), paradoxically, our capacity to extract any useful application of that data diminishes. There is a name for irrelevant data, noise, and if you mix it with your useful data, you will have to waste processing power to sort it out back.

Merely adding population does not fix this problem. You have to increase the percentage of population that receives high quality education in order to begin surmounting this problem. That means diverting young people from other useful tasks and pursuits and shelther them for year or decades while they learn in a nurturing yet challenging environment.
it seems nearly impossible to believe that you honestly feel that the OP and the reply are talking about the same topic. One is discussing experiences with the platform discussed in the article, and one is the "I don't even have a tv" comment in another guise. In case it isn't clear to you, "I don't even have a tv" doesn't contribute anything to the conversation.
My health insurance provider has an app I can use to schedule a Skype call with a GP whenever I need to. Haven't needed to use it yet but makes sense. They even give out free macro lenses for mobile phones
>if it's possible to substantially alter the genome of an already living creature.

Yes, but it's tricky right now. The delivery mechanisms are still rough. But for certain applications, in certain tissues, for certain kinds of diseases it is being done today (see Sangamo getting cleared for a gene therapy for hemophilia last week)[1].

Currently we have two ways to direct a genetic payload - one is localized (cellular) control of the actual delivery mechanism, the other is (biologically-relevant) temporal control of when the payload gets 'fired' or used.

Practically, we can strip some kinds of mammalian viruses of their own payload (and their ability to replicate), and utilize their own DNA insertion machinery (which is very nicely evolved to match our physiology) to insert a desired payload into the genome of a live organism. Some tissues are better at receiving specific payloads than others. (If you find a tissue and corresponding virus that delivers a tissue-specific viral infection, we can likely deliver a tissue-specific viral gene therapy to that tissue.)

Once the genetic payload is loaded into the genome we have other ways to control when the payload is actually turned on. We can make the payload sensitive to tissue-kind, or biological timing events, or sensitive to other kinds of biologically relevant environmental cues.

Both of these methods alone, however, are generally leaky. If the changes you are making are critical either for effect, or for preventing off-target effects, then these two methods alone are likely insufficient for a general population therapy to not be a dangerous gamble. The consequences of injecting the wrong code (or the right code to the wrong place) can be fairly catastrophic (induced, and immediate cancer). And that is precisely why a good 'text editor' is valuable.

One intervening point is that most viruses inject their payload into your genome randomly. And if they happen to overwrite some required genetic code of yours they cause cancer. Some viruses actually intentionally overwrite the code for your viral defense mechanisms (see HPV overwriting the P53 gene). In general, random injection of genetic payload into a live organism's genome (source code) is a bad idea.

The ability to have a good 'text editor' means we can now ensure that if the payload gets to the desired cells, then we can insert that payload into the genome in a desired location that is unlikely to cause problems. And since we can further regulate when the payload is fired, we now have 3 levels of control ( 1: localized cellular delivery, 2: localized genetic insertion, 3: biologically controlled activation). And those three levels together can significantly reduce the chance of mis-editing a live organism's genome.

Once these three regulatory mechanisms are made safe enough to not just be used in situations where risk/reward ratio is skewed by the lethality a disease, there is no reason they cannot also be used for an arbitrary biological effect.

[1] http://investor.sangamo.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=9448...
Recently I heard that BMW (I think) has a project to use old car batteries for energy storage... but the problem is they basically don't have any used LiIon batteries. This recycling approach will only get interesting in 5-10 years.
This is a prank right?
I came here for this exact thing. They said they were going to go open source in 2014 IIRC, and failed to deliver. I have stopped using SpiderOak - how am I supposed to trust them with my most private files when I can't verify that they're not doing anything shady on my machine?

The opening line of this post is amusing. They ought to give thought to fixing their core product first.
They switched the default on me recently such that moving to Gmail now redirects me automatically to Inbox
New Bootstrap 4 alpha
Spideroak can and does dedupe client side before uploading. It can't dedupe across multiple clients, but it does dedupe within the client. It also tracks syncs so that data synced between multiple client machines only has to be stored once (with appropriate redundancy).
Thank you. The writer had way too much fun writing that --at the expense of the actual article. There is about one page of actual information woven into 12 pages of anecdotes of wandering around a conference being exasperated.
The key is that the request rate be independent of the latency of individual requests.

In the case of wrk (the original wrk, not Gil Tene's version), you could use this version to check for maximum RPS / bandwidth. This is because it's sending requests as fast as it can, but one after the other.

In the case of wrk2, Gil Tene's version, you have to specify the rate at which to send requests. This is how it avoids coordinated omission.
> Reminder: you can take money from non-accredited investors

My understanding is that it's only legal if investors approach you, or if you solicit individual investors on a one-by-one basis. It's illegal to simply announce that you're publicly accepting investment. I wholeheartedly agree that the marketing of these types of offerings need to be tightly regulated, but as it stands today, it's effectively impossible to participate (as an investor) without having a personal connection to the business.
In general, I agree. But getting to mastery level takes time even for really good developers. Certain jobs require master-level application of that language's constructs for efficiency, security, or other reasons.
Simple Secrets of Superb Shipping
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10696460 and marked it off-topic.
Saturn V rocket is not yet required for content blockers.
My reading of the article was not that it uses the protocol, but that it actually unpacks it into an actual Postgres database. This obviously looks bad for MongoDB if their analytics literally uses a competing database.

https://github.com/asya999/yam_fdw
Ask HN: Are there abstractions for Neural Networks?
Are there abstractions for Neural Networks? The Brainfuck language is Turing Complete but does not offer abstractions powerful enough for it to be put in actual use. Is a similar case true for Neural Networks since I can only find things that train the network in different ways. Are abstractions for Neural Networks even possible?
Wouldn't you agree that the code inspection should be easy enough to be performed without fancy tools? It's good to empower yourself with tools to make oneself more efficient but I can't see any compelling reason for us to rely on them so much that we could not do without!
Strangely Microsoft's one is missing: Application Insights.

Pretty much works like Google Analytics but utilises both client JavaScript and embedded runtime code to generate a richer picture of what is going on.

Too bad the interface on the Azure Portal is terrible. They spent too much time making it look fancy, and not enough time getting the 101s of usability right (which is a criticism I'd lay at the feed of the new Azure portal in general).
The comments are always like that for CFS articles. The only difference with this one is that there appear to be a couple of people trying to introduce some scientific sanity, whereas normally it's just the "CFS is physical, any other suggestion is heresy" crowd. Best avoided.
3 big options for hosting your Rails apps
Storing the a cryptographic hash of the credit card number would allow for searching for receipts by credit card number without storing the actual credit card number.
3d-Printed Revolver Can Fire 8 Rounds
Doing what giphycat does would make it better, with a large enough dictionary of adjectives/colors/animals.

Then you get URL's with easy-to-remember names like "TyrannicLavendarOrangutan"

And "right" as in your solution doesn't solve the problem. It just limits it to "people with botnets".
Though his Bachelor's was still in Engineering - Physics.
Disaster Preparedness Tokyo
How to protect from timing attacks - It's All About Time: http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/its-all-about-time.html
How platform coops can beat death stars like Uber to create a sharing economy
So much Swift!

All iOS developers I know are hopeful about Swift, but say that they wouldn't use it for a serious, large-scale project yet. (I'm a Unity developer that only occasionally touches native iOS or Android code). What was your experience with it?
There is more synergy there though. RSNs show more games with the team you like. It only makes sense to charge more and the fans are more than willing to typically pay it.
80% of the power-wall business is expected to be industrial installations, not home installations. Big installations like that are a much better home for "tired" batteries - a homeowner cares about their 7kWh, a business with a 500 kWh install might not mind if 1/3 of it was used batteries with 1/2 max capacity.

And yes, Tesla's been talking about that for more than a decade.
Web application security checklist
There are some obvious things to "fix" in humans if we knew how. The laryngeal nerve, the mechanics of birth, the growth rate of cartilage. Certainly it's possible to be hubristic here, but there's also just as clearly some things that need fixing.
How insects breathe underwater
You make it sound like people don't implement static analyzers from scratch for every static language out there. Static analysis is not obsoleted by using a "static" language. You can't even say that static analysis is easier in a static language (the problems you deal with are just different).

Every language with a non-trivial number of users tends to have a couple (or maybe couple dozen) different static analyzers of varying quality. This is one of the PHP static analyzers.
Victory - An ecosystem of modular data visualization components for React
This comment is ridiculous, and so is the fact that it's at the top. This is supposed to be about Google Analytics, come on.
Meet the Pixel C, our take on the tablet
Compare the US vs UK before the Dunblane massacre. The UK was a far less violent place even when civilians had guns.

In other words there were marginal, if any, benefits to disarming.

In fact, there was an increase in certain kinds of violent crimes. It may well have been a net negative.

No thank you.
Well you can see the list of users here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_analy...
An article that are sceptic to VC's and startups could be interesting to discuss here on HN.
How to Set Alerts
My bad! Sorry about that, my brain wasn't working well yesterday... :)
This is called "demand response" in utility circles, and to varying degrees, has been operational for decades. Lately it is becoming much more reliable and accessible thanks to smart grid networks.
The US Navy’s largest destroyer ever heads out to sea
I can determine what ads I do and do not want to block. How many other ads does Focus by Firefox not block?

Edit: Y'all downvote weird shit sometimes. Marco quit the ad blocking game because he didn't want to be the arbiter of what did and did not get blocked. It's perfectly reasonable to question what a given blocker will and will not block. And perfectly valid to wish to have that control.
My understanding is that Facebook also had a MASSIVE amount of PHP code written. They then ported the performance bits to C++ and then realized they still had a huge amount invested in PHP, such that it wasn't worth it to switch off it entirely.

I also have a small suspicion that they wanted to stick to their roots a bit. But thats just me.
From my experience, and what I understand, google has made it so that if you use Inbox, gmail.com will now direct there. Those who don't use inbox are unchanged, and inbox users can turn it off. As an Inbox user I can still access gmail from the app menu, but the url forwards.

Shortly after this happened (last week I think), I saw a few articles saying "Google forces all gmail users to inbox" and "Google Kills Gmail", but I haven't seen any evidence of this, and I really doubt they're going to retire gmail. There's too many people using it, and no reason not to leave both services running if they're using the same backend.
Somehow it seems way more valuable the way you say it.
Maybe it is and that's why they faked it! /s
I think this is the first time I've seen PHP accused of getting "so much love"...
GunTV, a 24 hour gun buying channel coming soon
In the 1980s and 90s, knowing about computers was also a way for kids to "rebel against old people". It was us who could teach our teachers how to use and program a computer, not the other way around.

That's gone now. Today, config.sys is something "old people" talk about, why would a kid learn /that/?
Modern designer and UI experts demand better--really worse--UI than the moon lander had[0]. This can make almost any project harder than landing on the moon.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj2IETkScWA
What a ton of nitpicks, missing the big picture.

Embarrassing for HN community this comment is top voted.
Agreed - for some cases just pasting the GA snippet onto a site is sufficient. For others you should add events and such. For others you must roll your own.
Ah, the distinction being that it wasn't stolen in a single bulk breach or via a device placed between the card and the scanner. Fair enough.
Exploring Google Fiber for Chicago and Los Angeles
Video was cut off after 2 minutes for me, with a message saying "You are previewing this course."
It's astonishing to me that regular ole texting still has not reached business considering messaging/texting is otherwise the most popular form of online communication.

Show HN: we are aiming to make SMS texting more prevalent in business with Textline.com.
Period of Soaring Emissions May Be Ending, New Data Suggest
Its an IE/Edge thing. Error messages < 512 bytes will get eaten by the browser and replaced with a standard error message.
What about desktop Firefox?
Is this surprising to anyone? There are millions (tens of?) videos on youtube. Expecting all of the videos to conform to any individual's taste or even talking about "youtube videos" as if that's a canonical thing seems ludicrous to me.
They didn't just leave the site, they came and complained here. To turn an adolescent meme around: the OP's broken sense of entitlement isn't the business model's problem.
Who needs bandwidth most for mission critical large file transfer applications?
Wow, easier than DF? I was interested in trying it until I read this. I suppose it has an advantage over DF in that it is actually winnable.
DIY vinyl records from the Soviet “Stilyagi” scene of the 1940s, 50s and 60s
I've been commuting into downtown Minneapolis by bus for a few months now and I have to say I'm really surprised by how sparsely populated the HOV lanes are. Especially now that crowdsourced traffic congestion apps like WAZE are available, I would have thought that more people would be using them to avoid traffic. But even with lanes to stopped traffic to my right, the HOV lanes remain almost empty.
I'm guessing PHP still dominates shared hosting but would anyone ever use it on AWS, DO, Heroku, own servers, etc?
If twitter and google stopped alternatives would emerge without ad-supported business models and life would go on, there's no divine mandate they or what they do be valued at billions or even necessary forever.
password_verify() compares hashes in constant-time, so, yeah...
For a blog article under a data subdomain, there's surprisingly few numbers and quantitative analysis, which is disappointing. And one matrix of survey data as the only visualization.

I get that startups do not want to reveal their competitive advantage, but there has to be some give-and-take. Taking an analysis on blind faith alone is frustrating.
> Likewise, the unauthenticated, un-paid-for Web has permitted frictionless composition and repurpose of content without the need to 'do deals'.

Yes, but...

> Beyond just the consumer issue, a non-Ad supported web would have severely limited its evolution, by forcing content to require authentication.

Having no ads would have eliminated one of the several means of funding content that doesn't require authentication -- but ads aren't the only mechanism that doesn't require authentication -- and, yes, any limitation in available models would have limited the ways in which the web could evolve, by changing the opportunity space.
An unsophisticated investor can deduce that the risk profile of Coke is much different than that of a company with a penny stock trading at $0.05. Likewise, the majority of "unsophisticated" investors can probably deduce the difference in risk between investing in <bluechip> and <startup>. But we can't know for certain without conducting some kind of survey of the demographics and level of sophistication of the retail investor population.

As someone else pointed out - the SEC should be protecting investors/general public from unethical and illegal acts by the businesses, not from themselves and their own lack of knowledge. If you don't know what you're doing, you probably shouldn't be investing in the first place. Put your money in an ETF/savings account and only gamble what you're willing to lose in the equity crowdfunding market.
That's interesting, I've had almost the opposite experience. The team I work on is slowing migrating over (new classes and classes that need refactoring are done in Swift), and most of my friends who are iOS developers have told me they're doing the same.

FWIW, I work at a medium sized company (~300 employees) who is owned by a larger company (15k employees).
> On most webpages, if you click a link, the browser automatically handles loading a new page. On Medium, we speed this up a bit with JavaScript.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHH

You really don't need to reimplement the <a> tag in javascript. You really don't. You really don't. Ever. Stop. Argh. Fuck. Fucking web developers.
That doesn't sound good. On the other hand, I use SpiderOak with not a lot of cloud storage use, with clients on OS X, Linux, and until this morning Windows 10. The only problem I ever had was more or less my fault - trying to register a new laptop with a previously named setup.

BTW, why store photos and videos on encrypted storage? For that I use Office 365's OneDrive: everyone in my family gets a terabyte for $99/year and I really like the web versions of Office 365 because when I am on Linux and someone sends me an EXCEL or WORD file, no problem, and I don't use up local disk space (with SSD drives, something to consider).
Microsoft Windows DNS Server Remote Code Execution
You don't need to be sceptical about my account :) It has been registered with Hackernews for >1 year. Many YC alumni can confirm me being real and being not Dominik (founder of refind). I know him personally, I have been a happy user of refind and when I learned there was a chance to push it on hackernews I did.
The author seems to have fallen into the 2nd camp. His criticism seems to be based on nudges that haven't resolved an underlying problem. Which should not be a surprise. Nudge (the book) did not argue that structuring default choices with an awareness of behaviour and psychology would immediately resolve the core issue. Only that it would be better starting point than not thinking intelligently about defaults and the decision making process.
well, the post is from SpiderOak, so its understandable.

but its an ad hominem argument, thats for sure.
"Two large YC companies (both with machine learning teams) have told us that they consider interest in ML a negative signal."

I wonder why this is?
Since ML/AI are currently "hot" those programmers may be trend followers? Or maybe interest in ML is correlated with being a junior programmer (those that are more senior specialized when ML/AI were not so cool and consequently are in different domains)?
According to [0], private sector investment in clean energy in the US alone was over $100 billion in the US. In 2012.

[0] http://www.acore.org/files/pdfs/ACORE_Outlook_for_RE_2014.pd...
I would add wisdom to that list. Wisdom to know which modifications will allow you to be the lazy in the future and produce the best results before the user realizes they needed them. I think wisdom is a very important one.
I like the ontology of programmers. Are there any other efforts to do this? Anything data driven or externally validated?

Given what a big role personas and demo/psycho-graphics play in marketing, I'm surprised that I haven't heard more about then in the context of hiring and managing.