skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can just close a demanding application

Sorry, I misspoke. Having a watchdog timer reset the GPU is indeed a useful feature.

I meant to say "you can just avoid such a site in the future." See greggman's point #1 on DoS: http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft-...
Who needs ideas and good tech when you have boatloads of capital?
I think they're asking why one might use this instead of weak linking, which is something the article does not explain.
Funny you should ask. The project I'm on at work is written in D, and actually had Andrei working on it at one point.

The two languages are very different. D feels very much like an attempt to resolve the warts of C++ and extend its strengths, and it does a good job of that. If you like C++, you'll probably like D, although in many ways I feel that it has an immature implementation. (That's a rant for a different time, and it's not like Myrddin is more mature.)

Myrddin is going in a different direction, I think. It's far simpler than D. The best example of this is probably generics, where in D, they're seen as an opportunity to do complex metaprogramming on types, and idiomatic D uses generics. In Myrddin, they mean that your function is not allowed to care at all about types.

If you like both C and the ML family of languages, I think there's a good chance you'll like Myrddin.
Apple readying new 4-inch “iPhone 5SE” for the spring
This is a great idea!
Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly
aerovistae is talking about the abstractions provided by the language. Yes, all Turing-complete languages can all compute all computable functions. But not all languages structure those computations in the same way, or make the same things easy or hard.

For example, Python has the concept of a decorator: https://docs.python.org/2/glossary.html#term-decorator. You can achieve the same thing in a variety of ways in JavaScript, but Python makes the concept of "a function that wraps another function" a central abstractions by providing syntax directly for it.
Thanks for clarifying amateur vs pro - it's easy to overlook the fact that dan levels are completely different when comparing amateur and pro. Is it that 7 dan amateur is roughly comparable to 1 dan pro?
We're planning on exactly that ... a dashboard for employee spending is a BIG part of how we see the future
Nothing that I could not re-license again later. I lost the patents in progress as I didn’t have the resources to continue with them, but this was actually a blessing in disguise. Rather than protecting the IP by patents I was forced to concentrate on trade secrets which if you have the choice is a much better way to go.

If anyone is interested in learning more I wrote a rather long blog post about the whole experience [1].

1. http://www.tillett.info/2015/06/24/why-i-kept-my-startup-in-...
You haven't rebutted his argument by adding this extra detail. Much of the personal communications infrastructure of the Internet is housed in the US; foreign targets of US intelligence use these services. It makes sense that NSA wants access to that data, and that their mission is harmed by US Internet services that provide an easy-to-use refuge from surveillance for the country's adversaries.

(I'm not making a normative argument).

I don't know what you mean by "weak defaults in RSA". You mean RSA-1024? People use RSA-1024 because, especially during the time period where TLS began being rolled out to non-commerce websites, RSA-2048 was prohibitively expensive.
Very interesting post. I've also been looking for interesting content online since Usenet days, although my interests are a bit more .sci than .soc.

If you ever do a similar analysis using say, science Nobel Prize Winners or some other similar list, I'd love to see it.
I believe what's made NPR unlistenable is that you've decided a particular vocal affectation is objectively bad and annoying, so you notice it more and let the concept bother you. Personally, I can't help but smirk any time a talking head on cable news uses their `important newsperson voice`, but not everyone feels that way.
The point is that the storm will take their income streams (customers) away from them, making them no longer profitable.
Analysis of Nebia's Brilliant Pre-Order Campaign
This why I love Google. They are leaps and bounds by orders of magnitude above other companies like twitter, facebook, snapchat, linkedin etc. in terms of revenue, value and real innovation.
My summary of the disgusting suggestion: "don't worry that millions of humans might die because the human species will live on and be amazing."

Me, I prefer a human species which is amazing and has empathy.
> Manufacturer key escrow services seem almost sensible in this light.

I understand your position, but I could not disagree more strongly with your conclusion. Many of the techniques law enforcement is complaining about losing didn't exist before cell phones (and smart phones in particular). The challenges they face in a world with FDE-by-default are not new, their biggest frustration is in losing capabilities that they feel have been valuable.

The problem with something like key escrow is that while there might be value in occasionally providing access to law enforcement, there is absolute certainty of damage in cases where the keys are lost, stolen, or compromised -- all of which happen with alarming regularity already. You can't un-ring the bell of a data loss due to compromised encryption - so the only real question is how many abuses we should be expected to endure in order to realize marginal benefits in some circumstances.

It is understandably inconvenient & frustrating for law enforcement to lose access to the contents of smartphones, but that alone is not sufficient justification for universally compromising one of the layers responsible for protecting our data.
Great read.

I've become allergic to words like "privilege" as they usually are seen in the company of ill-thought-out and grandiose/insulting/wrong proclamations about How Things Should Be Done,

..but this is none of that - it's an honest look and deep analysis of someone's experience.

And knowing how important upbringing is, and the sheer (almost superhuman) tenacity the author had to go through to even partially overcome the (poisonous? non-optimum?) mindset that was completely a result of things out of their control...

what the heck is everyone else supposed to do? How does society do right by people like this? Overall, we're pretty horrible at dealing with things that are as subtle as mindset.
Google Chrome Incognito Mode Leaks Google Search Queries [video]
The problem here is that I'll have to fill up a wallet with Bitcoin now, and then pay them later. That takes away the sting of, "Wow, being lazy cost me money". Still, right now, this is the one of the best ideas I've found. Paypal has a Payments API, and I can pay charities through it, but it's not a very good API, and it really seems like it'll be painful.

You'd think it would be easier to give money away!
Hang on though. The people calling the shots, or at least providing feedback, should be the end users, not the developers. Usually the developers do not use the software they're building. In rare cases, the developers "eat their own dog food" but this is often not the case.
> Maybe I'm confused about the documentation here, but it seemed like this was rendering to a back buffer, not directly to the front buffer

In most implementations, WebGL is triple buffered on Windows (since Firefox and Chrome go through ANGLE), or are double buffered. No one ever renders directly to the front buffer.

I highly recommend reading chapters 1 and 2 of WebGL Insights edited by P. Cozzi. (shameless plug, I wrote chapter 5).
I still don't understand why everyone is so excited about slack, it really doesn't offer that much more than IRC.
I was planning to just pay one. But, I need an easy way to do it. Sure I could just send myself an email with the details and do it manually, but, then again, I could have done this whole thing manually!
Little things that changed my life
Kim Stanley Robinson explains why sci-fi writers avoid geoengineering
You should learn how to monetize your skills and avoid being judged or scored by any employer. Your bonus could be much higher.
> I think people buying new cars every 3 or 4 years is already the status quo, regardless of cost. That's the average lease/finance period (though financing duration is increasing).

Not where I come from. Most of the folks I know are sitting on 8+ year old cars.

Leasing is useless in the US at this point because you are on the hook for the full price of the car if you get in an accident and total it.
Probably by just limiting their contracts to sourcing only super-expensive US-military-contractor-manufactured milspec electronics.
Stop waiting. Your reasons may be noble, some modesty about how nice you want the code to be when you finally release it to the world. But..we all know thats a flawed mentality. Open source it, now!
Fitbit data undermined a woman’s rape claim (2015)
Team size Preference?
Hey folks! Just curious what your thoughts are on team sizes.

Do you prefer a tight, skeleton crew, or a larger crowd of devs where you can blend in, maybe? Something in the middle?

I personally prefer the skeleton crew, as stressful as it can be sometimes. Feels like we're making more of a difference, and I enjoy how everyone is working with everybody else. How about you guys?
Ricky mentions the guilt at not cashing out on his Stanford degree immediately and providing for his family.

Day-to-day, how do founders in similar positions coming from cultures with tight-knit families address this? Especially as parents age?
The Landing Page Demystified
The question is how much of a network effect Uber really has.

People stay with Facebook because that is where all their friends and family are, but do they have the same lock-in with their rideshare provider? It is an open question how much of a network effect exists in this market. My gut feeling is not much, but others obviously disagree with me. Uber could win the battle and lose the war.
>WOW! I never even thought about that business angle to dealing with shoddy tech. Thanks for the warnings.

Well most companies don't supply hardware and software. Also NI's hardware is great, best in the business. Their software is complete poop.
Cn I contact you and give you all my personal pain points, I have actually been thinking about this for months -- but only internally. I'd like to vent and give you some context as to why.

Ill gladly sign an NDA - you actually dont need to tell me too much - but I'd like to just brain dump on you in the hopes that my issues will be addressed by someone.

I want to opt out of the traditional banking system 100%.
I support a universal basic income as a replacement to the status quo, but don't pretend that a minimum wage is a way of "valuing someone and the quality of their existence". It's simply not. It's degrading them by refusing them the autonomy to make their own decisions.

No matter what your feelings on the matter, sweeping a floor only has a value up to some hourly rate that depends on a particular business' circumstances. Beyond this point, sweeping will be substituted with technology or simply forgone.

Also, there isn't much empirical evidence to support your claim about a race to the bottom (note: almost all jobs already pay over federal minimum and yet there is no "race to the bottom"). It's also funny you would cite tech workers--some of the highest paid people in the world--as your example of a "race to the bottom". Yes collusion can happen between companies--no one thinks markets are perfect--but markets punish this type of behavior over longer time frames. If Google and Apple are colluding and pushing down wages, some other entrepreneur has an opportunity to pay their workers more and steal their talent. This is slightly complicated by the fact that competition is often constrained in other ways (occupational licensing, regulations, intellectual property, etc.), but these are artificial barriers (i.e., government) to market competition.
I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m a programmer
So, how does work with DMCA issues? (Or am I missing something?)
I'm not sure this means much.

Several popular encryption schemes have been developed by or heavily influenced by the NSA (including algorithms mandated by FIPS and other government organizations), and there has been a lot of speculation that they added backdoors to AES and other algorithms.

So in reality they've had the ability to add backdoors all along, and it's in their best interest to keep it a secret whether they've added one, so it makes complete sense that their chief would say this.
You can subpoena google for the calendar and email, Apple for iMessage routing, and the phone company for phone calls and texts. You can even get emergency warrants for that kind of thing. Then you subpoena all those contacts.

This idea that the immediate access to all of an individual's information is necessary for law enforcement to do their work is a farce, especially considering the propagation of private and public security cameras. The same logic is used to justify torture, expand SWAT and procure urban assault vehicles. These things are almost always unnecessary, impractical, or unreliable.

Yes, people can be extremely careful to avoid police. That's not the average case, and we shouldn't optimize our law enforcement for it.
So? In the US, owning two cars is not at all uncommon.

Making the one you use for your daily commute an EV and the other one a gasoline engine is still a huge improvement in air quality.
So a semicolon plays three roles in the code (arg; statement; block;;), and it seems that ;; has higher precedence when ;;; is seen.
Designing a More Expressive Profile Picture
All of these people look at least 30
No fucking around with SOCKS and stuff, you get a real IP tunnel to all the ports (that are allowed by your firewall).
Ok, I dug into this a bit. You got stuck in a trap in our current setup. We've improved the docs slightly to make this less common, we're going to fix up the error messages to be more clear, and we have a longer-term plan to make this much more push-button.

Lastly, I'm going to go chase people down about getting you a comp for this.

Apologies for the trouble.
-Andrew
I've absolutely experienced this, most notably in the Boulder, CO area. I met a number of interesting retired drivers, including people who had had some pretty impressive careers and just wanted to get out of the house regularly.

Of course, it's also awesome PR for Uber/Lyft/etc to promote this segment of their driver population. :)
I think this would be more work than it's worth. Legal overhead + the likelihood of the stock being worth anything for a low possibility of future revenue seems like a losing proposition.

They'd be better off focusing resources on their core competency and giving the cloud services away for free (up to a point). See the Microsoft BizSpark program for an example of this.
Are four separate threads for the same story, submitted all at once, really necessary?

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rhengles
How to Setup Free, Automated, SSL Cert Renewal with Letsencrypt
My agency just dumped Westlaw for cost reasons and now we are exclusively Lexis. Lexis is inferior in many ways. The subject indexes are not nearly as comprehensive or usable (makes sense, since West has a huge head start with this with its Key Number System.) The case summaries are too wordy.

Westlaw and Lexis both get big bucks to invest in their databases but then they are not at parity. So I doubt that some free (beer or speech) competitor is going to come along without those same resources and mount a serious challenge in the Lexis or Westlaw strongholds.

However, there is a reason Westlaw and Lexis are both going to Google-like interfaces with their next generation products (Westlaw Next and Lexis Advance). Attorneys are just going into Google now. Certainly if I'm looking for a news article I'm going to Google first, where years ago one might have done LexisNexis first. Even having to type my Lexis password is too big an impediment when I can get stuff on Google.

Also, when I don't need the firepower of Lexis I often go elsewhere. A lot of my work is just the CFR or US Code and the government has those for free, though the search capability is not as good.

So overall I doubt anti-competitive behavior explains much what dominance Westlaw and Lexis still do have (and I do think it's shrinking.) They have invested lots of money and these are professional tools that need lots of investment. The free (beer or speech) competitors aren't going to compete on the elements that need lots of investment, but they will nibble away at the things that Westlaw and Lexis were overkill for.
200th Robots Podcast Episode, with Rod Brooks
Did a scientist tell you this? That is not how science works. You cannot attribute events around you to some notion of obviousness. That reasoning would not pass any physicist's approval.

Climate science is predicated upon a proper understanding of physics. Any scientist who tells you that worldwide evidence is obvious should be treated with the same level of respect as Dr. Oz.

The typical response would be that the physics is proven. Well, AFAIK, yes, at least to the degree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that it has SOME effect on climate. The magnitude of contribution to toal effect by various sources and sinks seems far from certain.

To draw a parallel, which a physicist (scientist) would do when instructing - this is like saying salt makes blood pressure go up, so it's bad for you... And ignoring all the ways the body can come to equilibrium. Stop eating salt, today, or you'll burst.

So if a physicist calls it bullshit, that's pretty much your trump card. Which is why people put so much stock in Dysons opinion, because he was an expert in properly using the tools that most climate scientists are not experts in.

Were you to go study physics at a masters level for a bit, and then read scientific studies yourself with a critical eye, you'd learn how much of what we call science is grade A bullshit.

Until then, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to debate with you. It's kind of like me arguing American football with John Madden.
A personal discovery on how to win
Careful. Wars have been fought over this. The letter 'æ' in danish is a proper letter of the alphabet (in the 27th position) whereas the same symbol in French represents 'a' and 'e' joined together. Much fun.
Hi jsprogrammer, no one is making an argument about computability.

This is about how programmers can express themselves and reason about code. Not many people would choose to write their CMS in assembly.
We tried this at Daltic and I know Standard Treasury (YC) tried this as well.

Buying a small bank with a healthy federal charter is definitely the way to go over trying to start a new charter (FDIC hasn't given out a new charter in years and even if they do, de novo status is very cumbersome). The real challenge is getting around the Bank Holding Company Act with respect to raising capital. Basically, if any entity has a significant stake in a US bank (5-10% can trigger this) they are subject to BHCA which includes scrutiny from federal regulators (Plural!) over your books and a legal duty to bail the bank out. Our idea around this, consulting with a top financial attorney and consulting firm, was to get a consortium of wealthy individuals who would not exceed the limits individually and wouldn't be "acting in concert" with each other (which also triggers BHCA).

But even after this, any major shift in the bank's operations, including a re-architecture of technology is subject to regulatory oversight, similar to de novo status. Also, not to mention background checks from not only the FBI but also the CIA. Replacing management (which you probably want to do) is also a major change in bank operations. You also need a CEO who the regulators approve, and has previous CEO-level experience at another charter. We also had someone like this lined up.

We got pretty far in this process, but decided to put our efforts elsewhere. Seems ST did as well. Curious if you've found the same things, happy to chat further about what we learned (email in profile).

Edit: Of course, all the fun begins once you successfully acquire a charter. The real business in acquiring a bank is not to make money on loans. It turns out, despite the monopolistic access to cheap capital from depositors, non-bank lenders do a much better job at making high margin risk-adjusted loans (see https://foundationcapital.com/fcideasfintech). I believe the real opportunity for a tech-first bank is to be a whole sale and commercial bank, and tackle the $300B+ treasury services industry.
Ask HN: Which American startup would you copycat?
Suppose you are in a developing country, like Brazil or Russia.
No more Butlers in AI: Design process to re-imagine AI persona
First SpaceX Competition Hyperloop Design, the future is here!
VENONA: Decrypting Soviet Esionage in America
Yup! This is what happened. I wonder why those two don't get linked somehow though. For example, when you repost, copy/move everything from the old post and do redirect the old links to the new.
Addressing your first point, Heroku charges $20/mo for HTTPS support and plenty of people pay for it: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/ssl
That's fine for the first siege (assuming an extra couple months was all you needed), but now you have to supply up with 4x(number of horsemen) for the next one to be in the same position. Tens of thousands of horses for even a smallish Mongol army. And at least some of them must be trained for war, specifically in the Mongol fashion, not just any ol' training. In short, it's not gonna happen on any reasonable time scale.

Plus you lose whatever advantage the extra horses gave you until you get more—I mean, I'm sure they didn't keep them around just for fun. Greater travel speed by resting them off, extra cargo/loot capacity, whatever their reasons were.
I guess what I mean is that coherent outcomes in any of the other worlds cannot be observed from our world, leaving us with nothing but the same observations predicted by QM in general. This could probably be said with a lot more rigor.

Framing the MWI as conceptually simpler than the other popular interpretations is a very interesting approach. I've read a few of Eliezer's essays along those lines, and I think he has a compelling point.
"Its investment in Ravel, a for-profit corporation, via its XFund venture capital arm, and its subsequent contract with Ravel to earn "proceeds" (HLS’s term) from that relationship, involves profit."

Unrelated Business Income? As far as I know, non-profits can invest in for-profit entities with no problem. Even 100% ownership of a for-profit corporation by a 501(c)(3) is ok.

Not to say I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I think that argument is the wrong approach.
RiveScript – A Simple Scripting Language for Chatbots
Could someone give a brief bio of Dalton Caldwell? I know he created Svbtle, but don't know much else about him.
How I Publish Content for the First Page of Google
Just thinking out loud here, but... suppose that many/most nodes on the WWW implement Webmention and publish their knowledge of who links to them. In other words, the link graph can be navigated in both directions. Does that not simplify the implementation of pagerank-like algorithms somehow? Could deployment of such a linking standard make it cheaper to index the web?

Not a fully formed thought.
I like the penguin it's cute, but I can't help but think of Microsoft clippy
Compiling to Java code > compiling to bytecode. With Xtend, you get much better Java interop due to using exactly the same type system and you can use all the goodness of the original Javac.
I wonder about the strength of network effect for ride sharing. Both drivers and riders can easily use multiple networks. The tech isn't monumental. Sure there's value in the brand / installed base but is the defensible part really enough to justify the amount invested?