skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, not every death is natural selection. In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses.

Natural selection is random processes that weed out certain traits (biological, physical, social) before those have been passed on to the next generation. This typically means before the entity has had time to reproduce. If you have deaths after reproduction then the traits can still be passed down genetically. Though the longer post birth maturation period can still have an effect.

The deaths reported in the original article were all removing stupid people from the world; thanks to their actions the average level of the stupidity of humans has decreased slightly.

Their deaths should act as a warning to try and reduce further stupidity in the world; though some humans are especially bad at learning from other's mistakes.
Intel spends about $10 billion per year on R&D, and a single fab costs about $10 billion (they build one every few years).

If they want to catch Intel, they will want to at least spend as much as them, and also benefit from IP-leakage. So I guess it depends on how far you think they are behind the state of the art?
Economics! What is the best way for a developed country to sustain creative destruction, and employment.

How to get rid of lobbyists
protected academic life? MIT is known for going after its students and shooting them in the back without second thought (Star Simpson)
> Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too?

"centuries" is far too short-term; "forever" is the goal, and "centuries" just buys enough time to get there. And of course that lifespan should be available to everyone. If the solution itself doesn't already imply a post-scarcity world, then it'll help that once you have a cure for aging, it's more economical to supply that to everyone than to treat the myriad complications that arise from aging. It's hard to get people to fund such a cure, but it seems far simpler to get funding for "we have a proven cure, let's get it to everyone".

> How would people remember everything?

In the short term, curing aging seems likely to help greatly with many degenerative mental disorders. In the long term, I expect people will find increasingly successful ways to augment their own capabilities. I doubt I'll have the same brain structure a hundred thousand years from now that I do today, if only because I expect we'll eventually run out of effective ways to debug biology in-place.

> How would you spend all that time? What would everyone do?

What wouldn't everyone do? I don't have a finite "bucket list"; my list contains everything positive I can possibly imagine, with a sort order applied, and it will always grow faster than it shrinks. Quite apart from the rest of the universe, other people provide an unbounded source of novelty.

Do you think people thousands of years ago would have asked such questions about a 120-year lifespan, and think it sounded too long?

If you lived for ten thousand years by default, would you think it too long and decide to die at 120? How about if you lived indefinitely?
Future generations? Current generations curse them right now :-).
+1 for basic income
+1 for the safety of AI

I came here to write "basic income" and was pleasantly surprised to find it already on the agenda.

Other suggestions:

- Desalination / easy clean water

- Related : Cleaning the oceans. This may sound noncommercial, but if the profit-motive needs to be addressed : a worldwide clean-the-oceans tax will become palatable if the situation with the world's oceans worsens.
Was anyone able to run ASP.NET projects from VS code on Ubuntu?
Install Visual studio code on Ubuntu linux
I agree with you, but then we delve into the fun of needing to implement a syscall for this or a something in sysfs that limits the damage that can be done. I suppose it's better than the current efivars filesystem, but neither is a wonderful solution when we have to limit access to the hardware that could potentially do useful things (without patching the kernel, of course).
Show HN: PySceneDetect – Video Scene Cut/Break Detection and Analysis
Stories about the Burrough B5000 from the people that were there (1979)
Interesting; and I agree with their point.

For me a well crafted tool is more important than a highly performant one in terms of GPU/CPU throughput.

Build quality and driver support mean a lot to me, which is why I'm still using a 5-6 year old Thinkpad X201
China will actually probably let Intel alone, instead go against other east asian tech firms from Taiwan or Korea, which is way easier to influence.

Whether it is a good thing or not, hard to say. If it succeeds, China will dominate the market, at least the chips will be become cheaper. But as asian tradition goes, those investments may never find its way back in face of next tech revolution, just like how Japan dominate the analogue electronics but fail to keep up with digital ones.
I got the efi vars in /sys/firmware/efi/vars on a Debian witht sysvinit boot (but cgmanager and systemd-login), and its mounted rw as default.
> You're telling me there isn't so much as a factory reset on these boards?

Quite a few boards have a backup EEPROM to initialize from if the primary EEPROM fails to boot, but who knows if those that do will bother to reinitialize the UEFI variables stored in NVRAM. Honestly, since they are just supposed to be stored in NVRAM what happens if your board battery runs out of juice, will it still brick?
A way to teach people how to do research (without doing a multi year "apprenticeship" at a few limited locations). Research skills as one of the "R" taught as a fundamental skill.

Like you can learn programming without really apprenticing yourself to a specific master programmer, people should be able to learn do research without doing a PhD. If this problem is cracked, all kinds of non-traditional people will be able to contribute to progress.
Cool, stay scared and not go anywhere. GP poster is gittin it dern - money, power and bitches will come to him.
For the curious, here's a link to the Github repo:

https://github.com/Breakthrough/PySceneDetect/

Questions/comments/feedback are very welcome, and feel free to submit any issues or bug reports to the issue tracker on Github.
Ah okay, I didn't know there was now a specific String type (and that the one I was calling 'str' is called 'raw'). Does the Python library use it?
Would modest funding for legal defence make a real difference for poor-to-middle-class people?

One of our nastier social problems is that the legal system assumes people have realistic means of defending themselves when prosecutors charge them with crimes. But for people without savings -- which is a lot of people -- that's not really true, so they end up taking all kinds of crappy plea-bargains rather than actually contesting the government's accusations in court.

There's legal aid, of course, but it tends to be funded at very low levels, and done by either wildly overworked staffers or contractors paid at such low levels they rarely deliver a spirited defence.

If the down-and-out were given enough money for a real defence, would the law deliver results that are more just? By what metric? And how much money would it take to make a real difference?
What are the positive effects that you expect? Saying "reducing global inequality", do you mean something like communism, where everybody shall be equal? Please, don't take my question negatively. I have myself lived in a communist country and I think it had both good and bad parts. Essentially it boils down to whether everybody becomes equally miserable or equally happy.
Another problem that I could see with globally open borders, is that people may not actually want it. They tend to side with similar ones (race, language, religion,sexual orientation, income, mentality etc). This has been shown scientifically in 1971 in Thomas Schelling's segregation model. We are actually witnessing this on a very large scale all over the western world. Have a look at Germany for example. There are about 2-3 generations (~3 millions) of Turks that have not dissolved in the German culture and are actually quite compact from a social networking perspective. People have been like this for centuries and I don't think it is realistic or even fair to expect they will change (e.g. Kurds, Gipsies ...). Even in the US, which has a good reputation of being able to dissolve immigrants into the US culture, we see Chinese and black neighbourhoods.
That said, I do think that it makes sense to do research on how such segregated groups may live together (in close proximity) peacefully and sustainably. I guess that to some extent these problems are a subject of the military science, although it is probably trying to solve the opposite problems as well (i.e. divide and conquer).
iPod + offline mode works for me :-)
How People in Bhutan Practice Happiness: What I Found
Yes, he deserved slack. MIT dropped the ball, for sure.

However, my point is that it's very dangerous to count on slack. Consider the theft of that cannon from Fleming House. Sure, it was a prank. And Caltech didn't press charges. All in good fun. But interstate theft is a federal crime.
Technically, denial of service is a security issue - I have modern servers that boot via UEFI (since GPT is required to support large disks), hopefully with less buggy implementations but if someone manages to get root on a server they could totally kill the hardware.

Having to reinstall an OS because some script kiddie decided to `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` your server bites, but actually bricking the system requiring a board replacement is scary. (Of course, they could technically be a jerk and flash your UEFI EEPROM, but most servers have a backup they will restore from in case the primary has been corrupted).

EDIT: Though, now that I think about it, this is still only going to stop users from hosing their systems. A malicious user could still run an arbitrary binary or kernel module that hoses the UEFI variables as well. Or by modifying the UEFI boot config to load some other custom UEFI binary to hose it... firmware vendors really just need to get their crap in gear, software (even running in UEFI boot services mode shouldn't be able to hose it).
But the tone of the blog post implies this graph thingie is _the_ solution:

"How graph databases stop fraud e-commerce frauds in real-time" - note the use of 'stop' and 'real-time'.

"Fortunately, graph database technology is able to detect the patterns that arise around these e-commerce fraud scenarios and put an end to them in real time"

Again, look at the terms used: 'put an end' and 'real time'.

I am not trying to nit-pick, but what has been discussed is far from being able to put an end to fraudsters. Maybe this could weed out some of the newbie frausters, but that is it.

Disclaimer: I work in the payments industry.
The same reason smaller teams can accomplish things that large teams can't. The solutions don't scale. Corruption, fraud, abuse, bureacracy and enforcing regulation gets in the way of actually addressing or better yet SOLVING the problem. This is why large companies cannot innovate but instead buy small companies that do and that government does not actually solve problems.
The United States Should Admit It No Longer Has a Middle East Policy
1) Quantum Technologies.

a) Quantum communication has some awesome communication privacy protocols, can make a huge impact on global privacy.

b) Quantum computing and simulation. similar to the startup rigetti that I know was funded, but from a research level. Quantum computation and simulation hardware can be a huge breakthrough for our understanding of physics, being able to perform computations never even close to possible with a classical computer in a decent amount of time.

2) Refreshing education research. How could we, for example, make high quality learning content (think coursera) something that's used by schools around the US, and would not be compromised by bad teachers?

3) Reinventing the current political system. Somehow we live in a time where political figures can honestly say anything and have little accountability --- both of their previous stances on the subject, and future actions taken. we need to do better here. America can't keep choosing political figures cause they are popular. That information needs to be made easily accessible and a rising cultural norm, like wikipedia.
>"There is no need for the government to massively interfere unless there is a real physical danger to citizens."

Generally, I'd agree with you. Individuals should be allowed to associate with whoever they wish.

Unfortunately, when it comes to unions, they're most often awarded special privileges by government. At the very least, they make large-scale organized strikes more likely to happen. And those strikes are protected, giving the unions power to wield over business, and to "convince" people to join.
Do you think of cancer as inevitable? Or do you think of it as something humans could cure someday?

Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? Or do you think humans can cure them someday?

I don't think of death as inevitable. I think of it as something humans can cure someday. Thinking of it as inevitable means giving up on all possible solutions.
Raspberry Pi Self Driving Car
Cordless Telephones: Bye Bye Privacy (1991)
The Neural Network That Remembers
The link itself (and the title) is the submission, not the site that the link goes to.
I have NOT internalized the disciplinarian culture.

I think you have:

I'm fortunate to have had jobs since I graduated college.

Edit: I mean that it shouldn't be down to luck whether you have a job or not and how productive you can be in the limited time when you can be productive, in your life. It's rotten that not everyone can. We're doing human civilisation wrong, if it's down to luck whether you live a satisfying life doing fullfilling work, or spend your life in slavery.
Somewhat agreed.

I wish technologists would focus less on Aaron and his death.

I wish the Department of Justice would focus more on Aaron and his death.

I also wish the CFAA would die in a fire along with its authors, but that's not likely to happen. :(
> Despite the fact that they're primarily a systemd distro, Arch Linux strongly recommends that you mount efivarfs in ro mode and remount rw when doing kernel upgrades.

Why not leave it unmounted entirely, and only mount it when installing new boot entries?
Not affected by unsafe HTTP configuration but affected by Sparkle bug which allows to exploit it in a case when XML file on the server was replaced since it's not signed using DSA key. You can still exploit it without HTTP and MITM "features".
Fund open source hardware design tools, such as synthesis tools, or simulators, place and route, etc
I could do it in an RPM post-install script too if it will get people to stop whining about running arbitrary scripts.

All software you install on your system through binaries is potentially suspect to an extend. Sure, I trust the Fedora build system to do the right thing, so I can with some certainty assume anything in the Fedora Collection or EPEL is "safe" - but when I need to install 3rd party software to get my video card working I can throw all that out the window.

Be sane when testing any binary you install, at least with RPM's or DEB's I can verify the GPG key of the vendor - assuming they bother to use one at all... piping scripts directly from curl to bash is bad because of the potential of the stream ending early and leaving in an inconsistent state, that's the only thing that is notable worse versus installing a package (and can be worked around by downloading it first, THEN executing it).
Essential Design Trends, January 2016
and https://overpopulationisamyth.com
You should fund Fusion research. Yes, it's much more expensive, but we really need it. Energy per capita and GDP per capita are very closely related!
Not sure about the posted paper, but another recent work that comes to mind is from David Brumley's group at CMU:

http://security.ece.cmu.edu/aeg/

"Automatic Exploit Generation" which does basically this. (I haven't read enough of either paper to understand how similar the analyses are, but both seem to be based on symbolic execution.)
I rather agree with MIT about that. Wearing an LED vest at Boston airport was rather reckless, no?
Trumpbait Is Fracturing the Conservative Internet
Usually I'd agree, but this article did a good job focusing on stuff that I found valuable, because Aaron wasn't just an activist to me, but also a person with whom I identified, strongly at times.

The little bits of new information, but mostly just the reminder of him and his life, which prompt me to read his writings again, and they often help me get out of some funk I might be in and pursue things I find worth pursuing. His suicide is not the main point of the article for me.

As such, this article is, for me, probably the most useful link on HN today, if not the week.
Everyone is talked about in death more than in life. Same happened with Steve Jobs. But I guess it's okay to remember the dead along with their lessons than to just mourn for them.
Codifying the legal code(s).

I suspect this is already being done to some extent, but I think it would be really useful to

1. Input a list of facts and receive a list of laws pertaining to those facts.

2. Automatically detect language that is too vague to resolve or that conflicts with other parts of the legal code.

3. Suggest optimizations or refactoring opportunities that could guide legislators in simplifying the code.
Sliding Gems
Did Lennart have anything to do with the actual efivars implementation in the kernel? If so, then yeah, shame on him by all means. I agree it's a broken abstraction, but it's what the kernel developers decided on (and they sure like making system configuration available with filesystems, see sysfs and procfs).

Ultimately access is needed to even configure the bootloader, and right now that means it needs to be mounted RW. Let's go yell at the kernel developers instead of taking it out on systemd for using a virtual filesystem instead of a syscall.
Though I have no use for the information in this article, I found it well written and interesting. I like it when folks do little research projects and present their findings.
A Warpdrive. (Just because I am currently playing with GR as a side project.)

Actually serious, I believe the transmission of information between the frontiers of science and the public are broken. On one hand the university system is geared towards producing specialists, on the other hand the media is geared towards spectacular as orthogonal of important, due to a mixture of science journalists being the product of the university system and market forces. So one would need a reliable process to produce the one book to read about X.

In first approximation one could try to produce a four volume series "Frontiers in Physics", were the volumes are "Particle physics," "Atoms & Nuclei," "Solid state physics" and "Astronomy and Geophysics" and then distill it into a single volume. (As a illustration of Universities producing specialists, I could not name the four titles for chemistry, let alone linguistics.)
Then just require the efivars to have different semantics, just have a look like unbind works for drivers. If you really want to be super cautious, add a safeguard to enable this.

echo 1 >/sys/...efi.../enable_remove
echo varname >/sys/...efi.../remove_var
> Do you think of cancer as inevitable?

No.

> Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable?

No.

Change, and thus, death, is inevitable. Also, if you want to prolong you then you are the result of countless deaths.
Unless the person became infertile, why would death by old age not be considered part of natural selection? The people who die of old are are unable to have more children, because they are dead. They are also unable to further contribute to the fitness of their descendants.

A person's reproduction isn't just whether they did or not, but how much they did.

when people use language like "thanks to" when talking about evolution, I think it attaches too much of a value thing, such that people sort of smuggle in the idea that a thing that happens is good, by hiding it in the description saying that it happens.

Natural selection is, in its respectable form, about what is, not about what ought.

That's not to say one can't say related things about what ought, but I think one should be sure to clearly express when one is doing one versus when one is doing the other.
Top NSA hacker on how his elite team can get you
France's anti-terrorism laws leave Muslims in a state of fear
Collective Intentionality / Consensus Building

I know it's not easy and not sexy; but as a species we're in the process of transitioning from a centralized hierarchical model (inherently arising due to costs of communication) to a collective decision making model.

Apart from society collapsing wholesale I don't see any way we won't have global consensus building / decision making in a hundred years; and helping speed that along is the most powerful thing you can do for humanity's benefit right now.
I agree with GP. Can't really answer the hiring question (because I am not interested in being anyone's boss), but why not? Do you think that the way to advance your career is always do what you're being told? GP's suggestion, at least, makes life a lot more interesting.. And people willing to take risks and make their own projects typically will have better CVs.

I would rather see somebody genuinely advance in the organization by genuinely improving something (and taking some risk), while taking time from a stupid project, rather than by taking credit for work of someone else (but that never happens, right?). And in fact it's the latter people who get angry, so for that really doesn't matter on whose time you do it.

As for your suggestion, why is it OK for employer to steal employee's free time and not OK for employee to steal employer's time? We are talking about improvement to the employer's business, after all.
How can HN readers help YC research? The list here is very long, and YC might not be able to deal with the whole set. If some of us can help, do mention this as well.
I escaped the boredom by becoming very proficient in a popular open source project that I found interesting and that multiple companies are looking to hire for. While the business requirements for the features I have to add may come from my employer sometimes, for the most part I'm really just working on upstream and making it better. I've also job hopped a fair bit to try to find a job where there was motivation on both sides before getting to this point, so your tale is somewhat familiar.

Perhaps you could aim for something similar. There's employers out there (eg. RedHat) that will happily pay you to hack on open source if you can show that it's in both of your best interests. That way you get to choose what you're working on going in. Even just specialising a bit more might make things more interesting as you'll be hired to work on <thing you actually quite like> instead of some random stack put together by someone who may not have a clue.

Good luck in your search :)
You have to trust someone. You don't have to trust whoever is currently MitMing your Internet connection because the authors didn't bother to add HTTPS support.
Really just a "how the sausage is made" look into military intelligence, interesting because we're curious moreso than because the government is acting unethically.

What's so wrong with that? "Business as usual" press pieces usually seem to come from organizations' PR departments, so (speaking in general, not necessarily about this article) it's useful to the public to have independent information about what they are doing.
HN simplified that with up-votes only.

Next: implicit up-vote by following link.