skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think he's opposed to it, he just recognises that in practice federation and open protocols impose large hidden costs that are typically undiscussed and unrecognised.

Federation between WhatsApp and Allo would face some obvious problems: features that don't work the same way or don't work at all, for instance. Moxie's point is that federation is just less important than it once was because there's no real lockin due to the pervasive use of phone numbers as identities. There's no real reason to use Allo to send message to a WhatsApp user or vice versa given you can just install both apps for free anyway.
I had to look that up, but I think I deserved it.
That's some highly biased writing you just quoted. Rather than respond here, perhaps I shall at some point write a more detailed essay. But for the time being, re-read that with an eye toward how many times he sets up a strawman and then knocks it down saying "there's no evidence". Seriously? Did you do a lit search before you reposted someone else's writing?

For example: no evidence of primordial soup? Go diving much? Craig Venter brings back genes unseen by man just driving his boat through the Indian Ocean and this guy waves his hands saying there's no evidence of primordial soup?
What is this? All I get is:

404. That’s an error.

The requested URL / was not found on this server.
That’s all we know.
Is the DAO unable to fund big projects?
Hmmm... back in around 1997 I rewrote the Synaptics TouchPad driver for Windows NT, and most of that code is still in the drivers today...

So I bet I win the number of copies still being used by nearly 20 year old code among the comments here... probably something between a quarter to half a billion of those laptops still in use...
I guess I made a gross assumption? Thanks for the link -- i had just accepted the premise of the question.
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/538/
Ukrainian hacker admits stealing business press releases for $30M gain
This is built into the Netflix client on most platforms: https://m.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2fkylx/hidden_netfli...
i'm an average programmer but reading "High Performance Computing" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565923126.do made a huge difference for me even when writing more efficient CRUD apps. A big issue is understanding the cost of the operations in the stack you are using and the overheads caused by your stack.
Google has a lot of potential options that NVidia doesn't have. They can size their cache heirarchy to the task at hand. They can partition their memory space. They can drop scatter/gather. They can gang ALUs into dataflows that they know are the majority of machine learning workloads. They can partition their register file at the ISA level or maybe even drop it entirely. They can drop the parts of the IEEE754 floating point spec they don't need and they can size their numbers to the precision they need.
I think we need to go even further - we need to reduce the cloud back to being dumb piece of infrastructure, compute for hire, paid by the hour. The only thing it should do is abstract away computation - not centralize data and processing under control of some companies (big or small, startups are actually the most annoying entities in the cloud ecosystem, IMO).

So for instance, I want my calendar or e-mail to be stored somewhere, I don't care where - hence in the cloud. But I want the data to be under my control. I can pay for a reasonable guarantee that the data will not suddenly disappear. I can pay for someone else's piece of code to be run against my data, but otherwise I want that someone else to stay away. Companies can earn money by providing useful pieces of code, and even managing stuff for people who absolutely don't care about how this stuff works - but we do need to reverse the idea. It should be arbitrary code run on demand against our data, not our data feeding someone's machine.
It might be the first one to pass some sort of critical mass of consumer adoption, and within a few years have 10x the market share of Amazon Echo. Depends how much Google subsidizes the hardware and how much they advertise/push it in their other platforms.
Borderline. Police boxes have their downsides. The OP missed one important distinction between Japanese and North American police architecture: Guns. A japanese police officer may feel comfortable sitting at a fixed point, brightly lit, surrounded by darkness. A north american or even a UK officer will not... and probably should not. That's why those police buildings don't have big windows.

(Note the "best" example is actually Canadian, with a very different gun culture than the US. And the worst is in a rural part of the US where guns are the norm.)

Also, privacy. Japanese police do not interview people in the same manner or with the same regularity as north american police. North American police buildings need to be able to take people inside them without worry of someone snapping pictures from a car outside. They need a closed environment to interview suspects, witnesses, and any number of other people outside of public eye. That extends to police vehicles, which are regularly used to move people to places for interviews away from prying eyes. This is not as common in Japan.

Thirdly, density. North American policing involves a relatively few officers spread over a much greater area. Even our dense urban cores are more spread out than anything in Tokyo. Tying an officer to a fixed point severely limit's their area of operation. And an empty police box gives the impression of an absent force. North American deterrence relies on the concept that police 'might' be watching. Any clear indication that they are or aren't at a given time, whether or not the police box is empty, works against that deterrent.
It is not a self control problem.

Addiction is a disease.
> I don't do PreCheck because buying your rights is not something we should be able or have to do.

The standard answer is that airplane travel, just as being able to drive on public roads is not a right. Founding fathers apparently failed in their inability to predict we'd be able to amazingly fly through the air one day. So it is not in the Constitution. Therefore please step right into the Rapeyscan machine if you want to make it to your job interview, or to see your family across country.

It seems to claim a right to travel unimpeded you'd have to walk, on public land, or ride a horse or bicycle. Basically what you might have done 200 years ago.
Explain Amazon circa 2000.
"Acquires."
Looks like a UK PhD. Can't speak to that. But....

I did a part-time MS in the US at a relatively low-pressure school (I switched to part-time from full-time after looking at my loan level). I can confidently say that I don't wish anyone to have the experience of working all day, then coming home and working into the night on research, day after day, rabbit trail after rabbit trail. My work quality suffered dramatically between full and part time grad school.

I would love to have a PhD sometime, but I simply don't have the ability to do what I would consider adequate research when I work part-time.

edit: Oh yes. There's a collaborative environment when working in the halls of the academy. That is, IMO, an intangible and extremely valuable experience. It is not like undergrad in the US.
Among the more fascinating results out of evolutionary biology and the Red Queen Hypothesis is that species survival probability is almost wholly independent of species age. That is: survival does not convey a survival benefit.

I don't know what the corresponding trend is for business ventures, but I suspect they may exhibit similar traits.

I am aware that various measures of corporate dominance are declining -- residency within the Dow Jones 30 Industrials, for example.
Yea, there is of course a learning curve in AI.. a sort of uncanny valley of sorts, but bots have the potential to be used in any application where you would like to use humans. Their complexity and or realism is of course the deciding factor for where and how they can be used, but that will only get better with time.

Much of what we don't use people for these days is out of necessity. Microsoft can't afford to have a chat window on every Windows machine directly connected to a 1:1 support agent, but with bots, you can. Same goes for.. everything, heh.

Bots won't always be welcome on every page and piece of software, just like people won't always be welcome in every web page and piece of software - but there is definitely potential.
Sega announce new Motorsport Manager game coming soon to PC
OK, I see where you're coming from. Thanks for clarifying.

The reason I pushed back is that I think KC has drawn disproportionate interest and/or tends to invite speculative nonsense. But, re-reading, I see your point as well.
>If one side enabled this "use E2E encryption for everything" feature

That's not what I'm suggesting. I want E2E to be separate from the "delete chats when I'm finished" feature.

Wanting an E2E chat that stays on my device when I'm done should be fine.

I'm fine with having E2E require a separate mode, but that shouldn't be bundled with the incognito feature of not remembering history.
Let's not go to what I think they should do.

But for so much resources and combined talent, I would expect more than new sets of emojis. They way they were dishing it out was as if they brought peace on earth. Honestly, I would have felt embarrassed to mention it even in passing. (And what was with all those jeans and dress code in general?)

Also, if you are copying Apple and Amazon, which are known for their attention to detail, how about improving things a bit? At the end of the voice demo, the app purchases the tickets (without showing prices, locations, times, etc. (and how do I set up those in the first place?)). Now, the kicker: the phone displays a QR code and asks the owner to show it at the ticket counter at the movies. Himmm.... Really? How about skipping that too and just buzzing/vibrating/texting the user with that info when actually at the movie theater? After all, they spent a whole lot of time talking about context awareness, location awareness, NLP processing, etc. Didn't Siri do this much years ago?

Anyway, too many other things like that. I don't have time to list them all. I am just saying that a lot of people expected something more, and more cohesive.
If I'm remembering correctly, an ex-Seattle police chief wrote in his book that vehicle-based policing is at least partly (if not more so) driven by "consumer" demand, i.e., people want a response to their calls now.

NYPD did something almost like this with:

http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/nypd-skyw...

But it received a negative response from several directions.
Blame the victim? Really?
"Impossible" is a tough standard to meet. But given how different idiomatic Java code and idiomatic Rust code are, it does seem kind of unlikely. I'd expect nothing at all would carry over from one codebase to the other even if you were making as straight a port as possible. Or alternatively one program would look like total garbage, like someone mechanically translating Lisp to C.

And indeed, with a quick browse through the Wire [0] and OWS [1] repositories I just can't find any kind of commonalities at all. Not in the structure, not in the comments, not in naming, not in the data structures, etc. Am I missing something, is there anything at all in the code itself that suggests the two codebases are related in any way at all? Or is the "GPL's OWS code" you refer to something else entirely?

[0] https://github.com/wireapp/proteus/tree/develop/src/intern

[1] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/libsignal-protocol-java/tr...
I've seen a couple sites say that Amtrak has priority only when on time, and others that say it doesn't matter whether or not they are on time. None of the former that I've seen have provided a cite for the on time claim, though.

49 USC 24308 (c) says:

"Preference Over Freight Transportation. - Except in an emergency, intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation provided by or for Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing unless the Board orders otherwise under this subsection. A rail carrier affected by this subsection may apply to the Board for relief. If the Board, after an opportunity for a hearing under section 553 of title 5, decides that preference for intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation materially will lessen the quality of freight transportation provided to shippers, the Board shall establish the rights of the carrier and Amtrak on reasonable terms."
Doesn't work at all well for me here in Melbourne on 4g. Netflix: 7Mbit, speedtest.net: 39Mbit
Yea, i hear the API is quite good - i should have been more clear, it sounds like for me the main blocker is the trigger word.

But yea, what i would want is to literally take all input from the Echo, have amazon/echo transcribe it to text, and then send it to my code. Echo would then read the english response back.
That's true, but sometimes that disagreement also stems from one or both parties rationalizing ;). Like a lot of people who hate being lied to, but have absolutely no resistance from lying to others, and would defend their behaviour if you said to them that lying to people is generally unethical.

But my point is, ethics is not a very strong thing, and alone it doesn't stand much chance against free money lying on the table.

(What I think people miss is that moral behaviour has to be actively maintained in people, otherwise it slowly erodes. This concept goes against the zeitgeist of contemporary western societies though, because it implies there is a standard to hold oneself to.)
You can't wait at a register... people will try swapping the card 2 times (maybe 3).
I am the original author of the software you refer to. Before its complete rewrite (released two months ago), Cryptocat was based on a codebase that I wrote starting in my early undergrad and that was notorious for containing many high-severity vulnerabilities. The most important was "Decryptocat", documented by Steve Thomas [0] but we also had:

* AES-CTR counter-reuse (2012)

* Biased Fortuna CSPRNG implementation [1] (2013)

To be sure, Cryptocat's substandard reputation was well-deserved; but all the same, I think that every vulnerability that did pop up was addressed responsibly and with full disclosure.

Since then, there has been a major rewrite that I am conversely quite happy with.

[0] https://tobtu.com/decryptocat.php

[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/07/09/anatomy-of-a-pse...
The very code you linked to settles this:

// Based on libsignal-protocol-java by Open Whisper Systems
Ask HN: Interesting data analysis project using elasticsearch and Kibana?
I want to make something with elastic search and Kibana. I want to answer a real world question like, "Why India has a huge GDP?", but i dont want to work on data collection, rather on the query and analysis part. Can anyone suggest something.
Part time PhD is interesting but probably very challenging.

He seems to have completed it in 5-6 years, which is average for full-time PhD students, so my question is what got left out? His google scholar lists a conference abstract, and his thesis. No citations. His github projects have a total of 1 pull request. Now this isn't a personal attack on the author, just trying to tally what kind of productivity a "part-time" PhD produces.

If I someone looking to hire a recent PhD. I'd look at what kind of work they authored (software/publications), and what kind of impact it's had. A PhD isn't just a line on resume, it's your statement of how useful you can be to the software/scientific community. If someone claiming a PhD title showed me 6 years of work with no meaningful impact. I'd be skeptical to say the least.
I'm taking it this is so people can run NodeJS or MSSQL on AWS now? Heh, sorry for the jab - what could this be used for considering that AWS' top tier provisioned storage IOP/s are still so low (and expensive)?

Something volatile running una RAM disk maybe?
Android Instant Apps will blur the lines between apps and mobile sites
See for yourself: http://www.uhc.com/

OK, it's UnitedHealthcare® if you want silly capitalization.
How Important Is a Repository Manager?
For what it's worth, Steve Thomas's vulnerability was not the most important in that code. I think Steve Thomas (fair warning: a friend) might dispute the "full disclosure" comment you made, as well.
I think recently the lines go longer and the efficiency went down on purpose, to show proof that they need more funding.

"Media: Look the line is 2 hours long at the airports"

"TSA: That's right, we are so very overworked, we need more funding".

"Uncle Sam: here is more money for TSA"

"TSA: Thanks"
I agree. The current trend of outsourcing everything to "the cloud" is partially fashion, partially laziness, and mostly dictated by business models - why do something the right way (from engineering point of view), when you can lock your users up in your own garden and extract rent (either directly, or by spamming them with ads and selling their data)?

Our devices have incredible amount of computing power now - a great untapped potential that we could use for something else than for supporting unnecessary indirection layers.
It's not like there's a lot of freedom on how to express headset orientation. Every headset so far provides a quaternion you can poll. The word from developers like Northway Games with Fantastic Contraption is that even hand-motion controllers like the Vive and Oculus Touch are providing nearly identical interfaces.

No, you won't have literal one-to-one code, at least outside of WebVR. But I highly doubt porting is going to be that hard.

If anything, because you have to do the graphics on your own, there is an even greater chance of successfully building cross-platform systems. At the end of the day, it's all just GLSL.
The first number you give is wildly inaccurate.

I knew that when I posted it. When I posted it, I thought I had clearly indicated it, but looking at it again, that must have been forgotten before it could be enacted. My intention was to play with the two wildly inaccurate figures together.
I've considered that. At the very least, it would be cool to have an OS-less piece of hardware with known performance characteristics that I could program as a custom coprocessor. I feel like I've got so many projects on my hands that I don't have time to learn hardware design on top of the software stuff I'm already working on, though.
Except even NASA projects written to those standards had and have bugs still.

Apply Mission Critical/Life or Death practices to software can reduce the amount of bugs, but it doesn't take much searching to find medical software and other space software that has shipped with bugs, some with dire consequences.

I don't think the consumer software industry is prepared to take on those costs to still end up with bugs anyway.
The article didn't make it clear. Will the two systems be able to interoperate?
That's grossly oversimplified and wrong.

> Your order goes out to all of them, and the HFT firm sees it on the nearest market then races (and beats!) your offer to all of the other markets.

No, they have no idea or way to know if your order was big enough to even go to other markets; if they rush out ahead of you and you don't show up, they lose money. What they do is not risk free.

> That's why they care about nanoseconds so much, they're racing the speed of light.

Incorrect. They about latency because all traders have always cared about being first to get their orders in and this would matter whether HFT existed or not. They're not racing the speed of light, they're racing other traders and that would happen no matter the speed of the trading. It's not the speed that matters, it's being first that matters. Even if you outlawed HFT, being first would still matter except it'd be human traders seeing who could push buttons faster.
Funny how the title made me instantly think: SAP HANA. After not seeing it for the first 5 paragraphs or so, Ctrl+F, ah yes.

Not too surprising given how close SAP and Amazon AWS have been ever since SAP started offering cloud solutions. Going back a couple years when SAP HANA was still in its infancy; trying it on servers with 20~100+ TB of memory, this seems like an obvious progression.

Of course there's always the barrier of AWS pricing.
I wonder how many other signal protocol integrations are in progress...
Why does everyone(really!) compare aws to colocation ? I've never head an aws-believer ever mention dedicated servers.

Why don't you compare aws to building your own cpu?
TSA Pre is not what it used to be. It used to offer two advantages: Less-invasive screening, and mostly frequent fliers in the line. Over the past year or so, the second advantage has evaporated in many large airports I've traveled through. The airlines seem to be handing out Pre chits like candy now, and the Pre line is full of little kids, baby strollers, and people who have never been on an airplane before. It still saves time, just not as much as in the early days.
I'm highly interested in how the author managed his time, distractions, studying, family, and keeping his motivation to continue to do this for this long amount of time.

Are there any self-management techniques to be learned from this experience? Is it something you could teach someone else to develop as a trait?
> the SEC

Hahaha, that's a good one! As though investment banks are afraid of regulators[0].

[0] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/536/t...
Note that the version of AlphaGo that beat Fan Hui and was presented in Nature is significantly different from the Version that played Lee Sedol. Unless you believe that they didn't work on it for half a year.
> This concept goes against the zeitgeist of contemporary western societies though, because it implies there is a standard to hold oneself to.

The zeitgeist of modern western societies very strongly holds that there is a standard to hold oneself to (it rejects some elements that used to be commonly held to be part of the consensus standard, and adds some that were not, and people who still hold to the rejected elements often portray the new reality as "no standard", when its really just that the dominant standard is now different from their preferences.)
New emojis !!! :-)

I am looking forward to when they release the version where they are generated on the spot with their new GPU improvements.
Of course, I was only referring to vulnerabilities I could verify are real.

Steve was paid two separate bug bounties and invited to a Cryptocat hackathon in NYC. I also consider him a friend and never heard a complaint from him regarding the project's disclosure policies.
> Google is finally publicaly saying that "we did it first ;)"

Makes sense. In that respect yeah, they probably wanted to keep it under wraps to avoid Facebook/others from getting a timeline estimate out of it and jump ahead.
I did this too - a part-time PhD with a full-time s/w engg job. So its good to know there are more crazy folks like me. Essentially I took up my PhD in a topic that was statistical as opposed to what I was working on distributed systems/applications.

It greatly helped broaden my horizons professionally. The writing experience you get doing journal & conference papers is excellent. Your analytical & critical thinking skills will get an immense boost and you will know how to critique, publish & communicate well. And when it is all done you will understand why some call a "worthless academic adventure" is one of the best things you should have undertaken years ago.

To anyone on the sidelines - do it. Don't think, do it - there will be times when you think you can't and just have to quit. But have someone around who can support and kick u back in. I have an awesome wife who pitched for me every step of the way... Also have someone to provide you with the motivation to finish. I had an impatient 3 yr old :)
Join an Open Design Critique with Facebook