skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is this a US specific thing? Why would you need to keep your SSN and bank account number private?

For SSN, if you have good credit, you a SSN and a name is basically all that's needed to open a new account connected to your general credit record. If the account was opened in your name without your consent, it's a lot of work to get it disassociated from you.

For bank account numbers, most payments are processed through the 'automated clearing house', which is fancy check clearing. In the old days, maybe your bank would look at the check presented and return it without payment if they could tell it wasn't legitimate / your signature wasn't right. With an electronic withdrawl, there's not really any information provided to them to check anything.
“The gospel of doubt” – SXSW opening keynote by Casey Gerald
The earliest tweets on the account send messages to Amanda Goguen
Regarding Java and Hardware
Question for the room:

Question for the room:

I've been working in mostly Operations roles primarily with Java over the past several years and most recently have started to become interested in development.

In the past, I've heard a few people mention that we truly don't have the hardware for Java though I never really understood that statement. I can also not
cite any official source for this or similar statements. Question is, with the advent of Cloud Infrastructure, does this apply anymore? Do we now have the hardware necessary for the JVM?

Can any veteran Java Technologists explain the statement above? I also saw a recent talk about Spark mentioning the low-level Hardware optimizations (Tungsten) which is attempting to address some of the low-level instruction sets etc. I would love to hear others thoughts. Regards
Does Prof. Edelman have a financial stake in Julia? He is such an enthusiastic booster of the language, that either it must be truly amazing, or there is an undisclosed motive.
Are you going to police the entire industry from your keyboard? Everything laid out in the article is already being handled by the judicial system. Sideline gawking is not adding anything.

I agree the VC system and the start-up ecosystem in general should be more decentralized and sustainable but that is beside the point. Sensationalized articles like this that only work because of people's morbid curiosity are hardly the way to galvanize such change.
I've never had anything but plug and play it just works with HP network/wireless printers. The Linux stuff works far more reliably than the Windows drivers.

For $100, you get a wireless/ethernet dual sided printer that can also has a sheet fed scanner.

The main downside of the HPs is the cartridge cost, along with the DRM and the annoying "this cartridge is expired" messages you need to click through.
The fear is that prices won't correct because passive investors are the market. Also, there may not be anyone to take the other side of a trade because passive investors don't trade very often.
I'm glad people are starting to realize that the moral hazard with index funds is far larger than the moral hazard at the core of the last recession. Everyone goes into index funds expecting somebody else to do the homework, so the few quants actually doing homework increasingly figure out how to make money at the expense of the market instead of in a way that boosts the market as a whole.
We're all getting trolled by the printer companies. Look at this thread.
https://vimeo.com/158477241

It's a 50K display that wraps two levels of a football stadium (the MCG in Melbourne, Australia). Everything can be rendered in real-time. Control is handled handled by an on-site operator, or can be handed over to an autonomous system that links into game stats feeds, umpire systems and a host of other triggers.

Content is generated at 60Hz and pushed to the physical displays at ~3600Hz to provide smooth visual during broadcast and during slow motion playback. Being ~1KM long and outside individual sections of the display can also have smoothed, real-time image adjustments adding to account for variation in environmental conditions (shadowing etc) and provide continuous visual quality across the full image.
Show HN: Code-Snippets-Bloggable – Keep it private or blog it by one click
I have the Pixel 2015 with 16GB, and run Archlinux on it. It's awesome. There were some of the normal Linux hiccups early on (sound/trackpad had some issues) but they seem to have been completely ironed out now. It's a fantastic machine. I wish they'd make a 15" version!
How much do people still use printers? It's gotta have declined lately—I honestly can't remember the last time I printed physically.
Just to clarify, when I said "the sort of information about it you're presumably interested in", I wasn't at all doubting your genuine interest and curiosity, but rather, whether I was correct in my assumptions as to the sort of information about the relevant number that said interest and curiosity would be directed towards.

Mostly, it's just a hedging phrase that I felt the need to write which carries no great meaning. (And, in some sense, this whole post is similar...)
I think other than a minority, the majority in the US that consume digital goods are willing to not respect copyright when acquiring them, so they don't care about copyright much more so and then don't wish to be prosecuted for it. In fact you will have a very hard time finding majority support for prosecution of copyright violation. In terms of money laundering most Americans don't care for their finances to be constantly monitored, and will not support such policies.

Surveillance and privacy are a different issue, because it's not really possible to properly frame it in terms of most American's activities. You can frame it as a way to get drug dealers, junkies, the terrorists. So obviously when you put it that way you can get support.
I'll grant that some revising is needed, but...

From the start copyright and anti money laundering laws have very different intents and act upon very different subjects. Avoiding money laundering is a laudable goal, while avoid the dissemination of information is not clearly so.

Yes, anonymous payment systems are something interesting, and it may be that societies should let them flourish (I'm very ambivalent on this). But they are not on the same league as free communication systems.
That is an interesting point. In my opinion AIs _could_ have "emotions" put in them too. Emotions are nothing more than a mechanism baked in the neural network to work toward goals. AlphaGo for example, could be seen as having a single very basic emotion: Work toward winning the match. We may not clearly understand how to put emotions in the AIs that we will build. But we have some working example: The emotions in our brains. Or in some animals like dogs, or dolphins. These are mechanism to guide individuals toward goals: to survive, to mate, accumulate resources, etc. And are pretty effective. If we successfully reach to understand how these mechanisms work, then we will be able to bake emotions in the AIs that we will build. That we will use to push these AIs toward specific goals. If we succeed, then we could actually have "friendly" AIs. If we don't do this, then we will have "cold" AIs. Without emotions, that we will have to try to keep under control in other ways.
With vouchers and food stamps, you're effectively prescribing how the basic income is supposed to be spent. But that totally misses the point of a basic income. You get money, you spend it as you see fit. Where some people will pay their rent and buy food, others may want to spend it on booze and gambling. They'd still have free reign over the money just like people with an income have nowadays. Nobody shall be able to force you to spend your money in a way that prescribes a very specific kind of lifestyle.
GCC Bug 66110: uint8_t memory access not optimized
While I can appreciate the optimism, I think it's important that we get this right (which might or might not be my idea).

Think about all the payday loan places. They're everywhere. Think about all the credit card debt (among other excess debts). Note that a lot of people with credit card debt make much more than any basic income would be. Think about how much the poor (who do not have luxury of wasting money) spend on cars, cigarettes, and TVs. With all these things in your head, do you still think that people will manage the money well if you just hand them money? Will they handle money that they didn't work for better than they handle the money they did work for?

Sure, some of it will go to good purposes. Why not make most of it go towards good purposes?

And to be clear, I'm not just trying to blame the poor - good money management is psychologically hard.
Still a thing, even in Windows 10. See the "Segoe MDL2 Assets" font.
I confess I do run vim-airline and tmuxline so I am not entirely innocent when it comes to adding custom fonts to machines for my terminal. It makes them look a little bit nicer, doesn't cost much effort or screen space and doesn't degrade too badly.

For my eyes, vim-devicons looks like a crazy amount of icons for any console app. Can't say I am a fan but as always it is great to see diversity and tool makers making tools for every need.
I doubt the avg Joe has that much influence when compared to institutional investors.
Why do we keep assuming that people don’t care about privacy? Perhaps they care just not the way we do because we’re more informed. The average user doesn’t have the technical background to realize how companies are monitoring him online, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that if he knew he wouldn’t give a damn. From another point of view perhaps the main reason a great part of society is skeptical towards technology could be exactly because they fear it could steal away their privacy.
I think the bigger problem is that Whatsapp doesn't even allow users to verify each other's fingerprints. Whatsapp could disable the end-to-end encryption and you would have no clue that they did that.
Once everyone and their grandmother started investing in index funds, I knew it was time to pull out. I do Greenblatt's magic formula [0] strategy now, it's doing pretty well even in this down market.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_formula_investing
ASK HN: Help with my “existential” crisis as a project of developer
I'm an 18 yo project of developer, 1st year computer science student.

I'm very curious, so I'm always wondering how X thing (related to CS) works and trying to figure it out by googling it and reading books.

I'm trying to learn to develop on my own. I created a bootable program in C and assembly, I did a course on Android development and know I can create apps with material design, fragments, SQLite. I coded with Node.js. I know the basics of HTML and CSS.

My problem is that I can't focus on a single technology in order to master it and have fun building apps. This is NOT an attention deficit disorder, because it doesn't happen to me in the university.

For example: I'm developing an Android app, and then I start to think: is Java a nice programming language? Should I focus on Android? What if Google replaced Java? 2 hours later I'm reading an introduction to Scala, and then I read a post on Reddit that suggests that Google should buy Red Hat.

I can spend a whole afternoon reading about new experimental programming paradigms. Then I think that I should learn functional programming, and I start an introduction to Haskell, and then I read about how to implement a C compiler.

In contrast, I have a 17yo friend who have dropped out from high school. He is an Apple fanboy. 4 months ago he decided to learn Swift. Now he is doing an internship in a pretty nice company as an iOS developer. He is really good at Swift and iOS development. Why? Because he has chosen only one technology, which has a high demand an a huge community.

Now I have a kind of "existential" crisis as a project of developer. I feel completely lost. When I code (as a hobby, not in the university), I'm always thinking: is it the "right" technology? Why learn Java if it's not "cool"? Why learn C++ if is that boring? I'm considering to switch to Mac and iPhone, because like this at least I could have a clear goal.

Could you give me some advice? It would be very appreciated.
It would be nifty if there were a proxy mechanism whereby index fund shareholders could vote their underlying shares. It's technologically feasible, I have no idea if there are any legal hurdles, or if it's simply something no funds have bothered to implement yet.
I will try.
>In fact you will have a very hard time finding majority support for persecution of copyright violation.

I think it's a little more nuanced than that. Most people might not support criminal prosecution for individuals downloading movies, but I think a majority would definitely support prosecuting someone that made thousands of dollars from copyright infringement.
_ak:

"Nobody shall be able to force you to spend your money in a way that prescribes a very specific kind of lifestyle."

But they're not spending their money, they're spending other people's money.

ak, If your version of basic income is about taking money from one group and letting another group blow it on alcohol and cigarettes, then it's obviously a bad idea.
Show HN: USA visa refusal by country
The "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" is not a law about beef labelling procedures, but about whom the monitoring of the labeling of beef is assigned to. It's not that simple. :-)

Edit: Bonus exercise: What about "Grundstücks­verkehrs­genehmigungs­zuständigkeits­übertragungs­verordnung"? I'm ducking away ;-)
Here you go: "Microsoft Windows BSOD Caused Deepwater Horizon Disaster" [1]

[1] http://techrights.org/2010/07/23/blue-screen-of-death-and-bp...
Curiously, as of a few minutes ago, this thread has been no longer visible on main HN page -- despite its high ranking, and obvious relevance to the HN community.
AlphaGo has no form of state space discovery. That really prevents all the magic that strong AI fans want. Even though the actual rules of Go are a minor part of the program, the human who put them in was doing something that AlphaGo fundamentally can't do. AlphaGo can't learn what Go is, it can only take an existing understanding of the rules and learn to play very well.

You can expect a lot of advancement in actual games very soon, including ones with randomness, and after a few years probably hidden information games too. Being able to specify real-world problems as formally as a board game is now a more effective skill than it was before (it was good already).
That just creates the conditions that lead to Warren Buffett's rise: a conservative market that often wildly mispriced securities. And you can trade against it the same way Mr. Buffett did: identify underpriced securities and buy & hold them until the market realizes their value, or if the market never realizes it, just end up owning a large fraction of American business and reinvest the profits from it.

Usually, once it's become apparent that some people are getting fabulously wealthy by breaking away from the herd, jealousy and Dunning-Krueger take over and you get a large number of people that are suddenly true believers in active investing.
This is on a Mac. I wanted to see if the firmware bugs would be fixed by using their firmware update tool. The printer itself times out when attempting an on-device firmware upgrade. The downloaded update utility just attempts to grab a new firmware image from an IP which is non-responsive.

It can't scan over AirPrint if it has gone to sleep, it only can accept print jobs via IPP if you want it to WOL. So I have two printers configured, one via AirPrint for scanning and another via IPP for printing. There are so many low hanging firmware bugs that it makes me think the same folks wrote healthcare.gov

This is par for the course in brother firmware, https://gist.github.com/seanjensengrey/4223dc23d1f7cc95a157
> At some point I realized that when I read someone else's Java code I often find myself digging through countless layers of abstraction, factories, builders, suppliers, visitors, delegates and each each time I have this thought in my mind: "so where the hell is this place where the stuff actually happens?"

This has nothing to do with generics and everything to do with Java's heavy-handed approach to OOP.
> For context, Ontario has no natural resources.

Timber, minerals, hydro-electric power, Uranium? Are you being sarcastic?
My Father’s Killer’s Funeral
There is a myriad of new clips that have been added. I found that it really added to the story--but did lengthen the film quite a bit.

I think it was really smart to have edited those out because they ultimately did not change the meanings in the movie while making it quite a bit longer. However, having watched the trilogy a few times already, I found these new clips to add a lot of depth to the characters and the progression of the movie. You have to understand that the 7 and half hours do not include the 3rd film. The 2 films and new clips account for the entire length.

Also, this recut is in chronological order--and does not use flashbacks. I found this to work really well for me because I had already seen the film many times. However, I do agree with the decision to use flashbacks for first-time viewers as the parallelism Coppola draws is amazing. The chronological recut did add a new perspective on the film that I enjoyed.
Basic Income is meant to cost less than current tax and benefits as the bureaucracy to means test every request for benefits is a lot less or even totally redundant. Ie less forms, less interviews, less investigations, less complaints, less fraud, and in the end less bureaucrats, ie cheaper. Obviously that does not happen over night, and no country/state/province has gone full Basic Income yet (Universal nor Negative) so still just theory.
Actually I didn't know about [1], since news articles were only covering "by someone" up till recently. It was just "a county employee".

But let's unpack then the argument being had: "oh the FBI could've just asked the cloud provider for data". What precisely, is the functional difference here, if we exclude the actual effort required to implement what is being asked for?

Encryption and the use thereof, is not the argument being had. It's whether it's right to grant access to the data at all, which Apple is claiming it isn't. Which is also patently absurd, especially in this case as it pertains to (1) a criminal matter, (2) a deceased person (who does not have a right to privacy) and (3) a phone owned by someone else (the county) who has okayed accessing it.

Apple is taking an absolutist position, and so are most of their supporters. If this were an apartment, no one would be asking questions. If it were a lockbox, the bank would've cut it open. But because this is a digital device, for some reason, everyone suddenly insists its "totally different" and that the FBI clearly "doesn't understand technology". Except for the pesky detail that the very specific help asked for pretty much only hinges on if it's undue burden to Apple or if compensation should be involved, because it's absolutely possible to do, but additionally this part of the court order (http://www.ndaa.org/pdf/SB-Shooter-Order-Compelling-Apple-As..., page 4, item 4):

If Apple determines that it can achieve the three functions stated above in paragraph 2, as well as the functionality set forth in paragraph 3, using an alternate technological means from that recommended by the government, and the government concurs, Apple may comply with this Order in that way.

Apple is free to do pretty much anything which would comply with the goal of accessing the device, provided it does actually access it. Until such a point as they propose something reasonable and the government rejects it, once again, the only defense they are actually using is "digital devices are magically different". Because no part of this order somehow rides its away automatically into "ban encryption". But boy have they (Apple) done a good job ensuring that's getting put back on the legislative agenda.
Who use Samsung Pay. Cmon mate
Feb 2016 surpassed pre-industrial baseline by nearly 1.7°C
This is very similar to wmii [1], which exposed windows and operations on them via the 9P filesystem/network protocol.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wmii
People at risk of starvation or homelessness are indeed in exceptional life circumstances and need urgent assistance. This is a matter for social welfare programs. Most developed countries already have such systems in place.

UBI is not a welfare system. It is universal by definition. Most recipients of UBI are not in the dire circumstances you described.

So let's talk about the real beneficiaries. I see no reason why a software engineer or a doctor needs an early retirement scheme that allows them to quit their job on the graduation day.
A man committed a mass murder, is dead, and the legal owners of the phone have okayed a search of it. If this were an apartment, a lockbox, or apparently even just his iCloud account, we would only need 2 of those to be fulfilled.

Since people keep complaining that they "totally should just get it from iCloud" it seems pretty obvious no one is actually not okay with the concept of a search.
The second won't happen because there will always be a demand for market making traders, and at this point the cost of automated trading technology is low enough that it's worth making a market even in small/emerging exchanges.

The first can't happen because you can't answer what is the correct price of a stock. :) That's a bit glib, but the only reason passive investors are said to not correct is because there are plenty of active investors to move the prices of stocks.
You're saying that, but only today I learned that pharma companies have been using neural networks and machine learning to classify and select chemical compounds to be tried in the development of new medication for the last 30 years.

Saying that automation is like giving up is clearly the wrong view. As we've learned from history, and get to observe even on a daily basis, is that automation gets more and more abundant, and more and more people will lose their jobs. Given that this trend will continue, we, as humanity, have two options: either we will not do anything about this, and will at some point wake up to impoverished masses with no work, or we can actively strive for a maximum of automation with the declared goal of commonwealth for all mankind. The third option of antimodernism to keep up the amount of available non-automated work is so ridiculous that it requires no discussion.

What people nowadays may not grasp and may deny is that the end goal of full automation will mean the end to our economy as we know it. We're talking post-capitalism, post-scarcity. That sounds scary to people, because the mindset of capitalism is still ingrained too much. People can't imagine a world where they may own less, individually, and don't realize that it may not matter if everything is available in abundance due to full automation.
My last HP multifunction was complete garbage. The sheet feeder was unreliable. The scanner insisted on adding a black vertical line about 2 inches from the left margin of every scanned page. Scans resulted in massive file sizes even though quality was sub-par.

Print quality was fair, but cartridges went dry super fast. Frequently replaced cartridges for drying vs usage. Software was also sub-par. Network printing wasn't exactly reliable, as the printer would go unreachable.

Switched to a Canon MX512 and it was a much better experience on all points above. I'm sure there are better units to be had, but for light duty printing and scanning, it gets the job done.
Yes: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

ICCCM is but one piece of the multitude of half-baked and extremely-fragmented protocols that make up the modern X11 environment, by the way.
According to this review http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-2016-9550-InfinityE... it has a serious heat problem.