skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot

You could say this about any kind of modern software. Our laptops, OSs, etc are all way "better" but aren't instant in loading stuff yet.

> I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on.

Would be an interesting experiment for sure. Unless it's a progressively rendered, offline-first web app that looks the exact same as before, cynicism and working experience tells me most users would hate it (unless it's a site for programmers!).

Plenty of consumers prefer and like the big fancy JS sites even if they take >1 sec to load in their LTE connections. That said, you can make a nice looking site with cool effects and a JS framework and have it work and load fast (we're doing this now at work!). It just takes discipline, knowledge, and team coordination that most programmers don't have because our industry doesn't expect them to (not enough consumers complaining it's slow).
"There's a million things I haven't done, but just you wait...."
That idea is quite old, at least 20 years old. I'm pretty sure Matt isn't missing out on any "real approach"; he's a pretty famous researcher in applied crypto.
Unless you're on Ubuntu, where they ship a non-functional version of venv and require you to "sudo apt install" python-venv to get the working version, defeating the entire point of a simple module in the stdlib that lets you manage your Python environment as a user.

The big improvement on 16.04 is at least the error message explains what's going on.
What test could possibly test for subjective states? You can ask the computer how it feels, and it can just lie, or predict what a human would say if asked the same question. There's no way to know what the computer actually feels, and it doesn't really matter for this purpose.
Several things:

1. I know that organic whole milk is more expensive. I mentioned it in my response. It's still 3x less expensive per calorie than Soylent.

2. I understand that going to the grocery store is a non-starter for you, but that is not the case for the vast majority of North Americans, who already source a huge portion of their calories from grocery stores (and have refrigeration). Perhaps being able to get the main component of your diet from a grocery store is a benefit for many people, not a drawback.

3. You keep suggesting that perhaps I am unaware that other people have different priorities than me. But I'm not. I was not addressing all users of Soylent. Instead, I responded to somebody who said that Soylent was too expensive for them by mentioning an alternative which has more or less the same benefits as Soylent, but which is much less expensive.

4. Perhaps there are people interested in Soylent who are trying to optimize differently than you. Maybe somebody has zero extra time and is spending a small fortune on delivered lunches at work, so they're interested in something which is just as convenient but much less expensive. Maybe they don't care that they have to buy supplies at the grocery store (or, crazy enough, maybe they would prefer that to having to remember to replenish online). Maybe they're not fully thought out on the subject yet, but they've heard about this Soylent thing. Maybe the information I shared would be useful to somebody like that.
None, because the lawn owners are sitting out and yelling at the kids to get off.
https://twitter.com/thinkpiecebot
The Science of Faster Memorization with Spaced Repetition
Thanks for this. In my experience at USDS over the last year, it's absolutely true.
The thinking behind giving an iPad mini is purely just because we have one lying unused in a drawer. Here's an excerpt from what he actually had to say (rough draft translation by my wife from Dari so the wording is a little off, I.e "mechanical physics" should be mechanical engineering):

https://twitter.com/resobscura/status/761285673672409090
So are you suggesting that the sites that are collateral damage pay for my youtube red service?

Because that seems reasonable.
Knot theory is still quite popular with physicists of certain sorts, such as condensed matter physicists that study "topological phases" - a popular account that I like can be found here: https://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/SteveSimon/PWsept...
> but the point remains valid.

No it doesn't, exactly the point, you can't pay them so you have no transactional or business relation, in fact one SHOULD block the ads that are forced upon you.
Linkedin for example prohibit adblocking in their TOS, they can do this because you can pay them to get rid of the ads.
To be fair, I've lived mostly in cities, but I doubt the case is going to be different in rural India. I have grandparents in Dehradun, grew up in Bombay, have cousins in Delhi and relatives in Jharkhand, and no where have I seen lawns in the American manner; only concrete verandas with potted plants.
I have a fairly large lawn in Northern California as well. We enjoy it thoroughly. The kids and I play on it daily and camp on it as well. My water bill was about $170 last month but that was the peak. Most of the year it's under $100 and in the winter months it's about $20 per month (I did not irrigate for 4 months last winter). Not all of California is an overpopulated desert using imported water.

On the other hand, having a lawn at other times in my life did seem to just need to be mowed all the time and still looked bad.
Show HN: Every Twitter and/or Facebook user has a public message board here
Delta Warns of Chaos After Power Outage, Worldwide System Failure
Now that's a great scenario! There's actually convoluted stuff like that in the non-fiction. They're also still trying to misdirect people on stuff decades old to justify current positions.
Did you go to PDS (Poughkeepsie Day School)?
After unfortunate experiences in Real Estate, I began a new life as the Renting Scum in decent, fiber-optic-Internet-having neighborhoods. As you may imagine, this Floridian enclave of happiness has an HOA which utterly lacks enthusiasm for Renting Scum. Indeed, my webcams show them photographing my front lawn several times weekly. If one of their dogs happens to pee on my lawn and create a dead spot more than a couple inches across? My landlord hears about it from them. My expensive lawn service comes a couple days late after a heavy rain and the grass gets a bit long? Landlord. It barely rains at all during a summer month and things get a bit sparse and brown? Landlord (unless I illegally water on multiple days, which I do, just like the police who live around me do).

TL;DR many of us maintain the Reaganian-perfect front lawn out of the first scene of a David Lynch movie under duress, even if it's the dumbest, most wasteful thing we ever heard of. Hey man, fiber's fiber.
MIT faculty responds to criticism of Suzanne Corkin, investigator of amnesiac HM
So I'm a software engineer in SF who would love to work on projects like you mentioned. Where do I look and what do I look for?
I wonder what the Google Transparency Project "poured" over the data?
You can see the manned space program. If you're under 43, there's a decent change you'll never see a human leave Earth because you were born too late. Countless humans died before either of these. You'll always be born too early for some things, and too late for others.

What's exciting to me is what lays in store tomorrow, next year, next decade. Next century is someone else's territory, but mine is so vast I have no reason to be jealous of them.
I read the article but could not find any pointers to evidence.

It just said that with the technology available at that time it was possible for him to use optics. There is a big gap between that statement and the claim that he did actually use it.

He had the means to by a gun, hence he is the murderer.

May be there indeed is mounting evidence, but I could not catch it in the article. Unless by evidence the author means the scale of his detailed portraits, but that has been known for a while.
Secret Guide to New York’s Startup Ecosystem
It pays their bills right. They would have to move the advertising into real world. Essentially "Minority Report" version of advertising. Unless users stop owning their machines there will always be ways to block the ads.
Port-ectomy: a new word in my dictionary, must remember to use it someday!
The problem with gov is that everything is slow has hell / old tech on top of corporate contracts with the like of Oracle / SAP. I don't expect to improve things there because of all thoses problems + layers of bureaucracy.
I'm not associated with USDS, but email me (see profile) and I'll get you an intro.
How Photojournalism Killed Kevin Carter (2015)
Is it Airbnb's responsibility to verify the identity of the person standing in front of you? Im willing to bet that none of those hotels asked for that id in advance when you made your booking, and it was the person at the physical desk asked for it when you checked in, correct?

Also, how many of those hotels asked you what you did for work?

While she omitted the fact that she did sex work, she might not actually be lying about the real estate work. It's probable that's she has at least done that a couple of times, maybe infrequently, but often enough that she can say thats what she does for work to people who she doesnt know if she can trust with the truth.
If you own a home in the USA you participate in one of the most regressive tax breaks in the world in the form of the mortgage interest & guarantee subsidies. Even if you don't directly receive those, which would put you in a large minority, you benefit from the halo effect.

As for oil subsidies, between the commuting costs, care (lawn mower/herbicide/what have you) and heat costs energy to maintain most lawns is higher than people imagine.

I actually think you should own a yard if it provides you happiness & you pay for it. But its a trivial excercise to argue against them.
As World Awaits Apple Car, Tech Giant's First Vehicle Patent Is ForA Tank?
Just wanted to say I love requests. Thanks for it.
USDS is hiring! https://www.usds.gov/join

If you want to work remote from SF, check out 18F: https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/
Stochastic terrorism
Good on Kenneth for being quick on the draw. I love 'requests'.

If you're a developer of a popular open-source project, this should serve as a warning to make sure you have multi-factor authentication on, yes, but it's even better to learn from this and come up with incident response plans with your core maintainer base. Ask among yourselves:

1. Do we have the ability to detect an overt breach like this one?

2. Do we have the ability to detect a covert breach (e.g. are our builds reproducible, auditable? Are our binaries signed? Do we know who our committers are?)

3. Do we have a consistent way to message users of the project of the compromise?

4. Do we have a way to deprecate/mark as tainted compromised versions of our module/package/application?

GitHub offers some technology to help in this regard. Sign your release tags, at a minimum [1]; sign your commits with developer keys if you're paranoid. [2]

As FOSS becomes more used in the enterprise, I suspect these attacks will become less of a rarity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11494997

[2] https://help.github.com/articles/signing-commits-using-gpg/
Why assume computer costs is substantial to overall costs of maintaining and flying airplanes?
They were once an IBM outsourcing customer, so Bob has a theory: http://www.cringely.com/2016/08/08/outsourced-probably-hurt-... (spoiler: downtime was likely contributed to by outsourcing and cost cutting. Shocker, I know!)
The Mere Exposure Effect does work though, probably more effectively than you realize.
I think that it's a problem of "outsource" vs "in-house." Government is like a microservice architecture where each service being built by a different corporation with a non-technical PM leading integrations. Then, it gets maintained by basically nobody and is expected to work in perpetuity.

From what I have observed, having an in-house technical team at the government - even small - aids all of these projects.

In fact, that's basically what this team is - SREs - professionals at running and maintaining code. A small integrations / uptime team that understands the implications of design decisions aids everything.
DNA doesn't strike me as a good example. I don't think it was a paradigm shift. Crick and Watson didn't discover it; they just showed how this particular molecule fit well into people's expectations for what was going on.

As to this:

> you also admit you yourself have changed paradigms in your lifetime

I don't know that I have, really. Sure, some things have changed. But I'm still writing OO code that isn't that different than what I was writing in the late 1980s. I still build systems on Unix-ish OSes on collections of discrete servers. The major difference is that the servers are virtual, but that's hardly a difference.

As an industry, the phrase "virtual server" is a sign we're still struggling to make a paradigm shift. It's like "radio with pictures" or "horseless carriage". But look at how much hate the possible alternatives, like containerization or serverless computing get. And that pattern of hate is a common thing in technology. A large proportion of people just won't use anything new unless circumstances force them. [1]

> Does that not count as you putting yourself forward as a counterexample, and agreeing with respect to tech more generally?

No, because nobody is claiming that people never change. The notion is that they change more slowly than a completely rational actor would, especially when social status is on the line. The actual speed depends on a variety of factors. Planck exaggerated for rhetorical effect.

> so don't see why a fancier hypothesis involving me (and more broadly everyone) secretly refusing to give up on lesser ideas is needed.

I don't think that's the right question to look at.

The pattern of people holding on to old ideas because they're comfortable or socially beneficial is pervasive. For example, consider this graph:

http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...

The change there is very close to the death rate. Or look at the way religions change.

I think question with science is, "Is it essentially different than almost anything else people do?" And I think the answer there is no. Science is somewhat better due to having real data. But it's still a social enterprise among people embedded in status-driven primate dominance hierarchies. This leads to results like the issues surrounding the measurement of the mass of the electron:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.2...

That's easily explained if you treat science as another human social activity, but hard to explain otherwise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
Malware infection module can be stored nearby on different device infecting your target device every time you power it on, until you patch your device.
Similar arguments are made when the close ties between the government and say Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants are discussed. There is a revolving door there too.

Even the most forgiving interpretation of the facts implies that Google and Goldman Sachs and other corporations have massive influence in government. There is no need to posit a conspiracy theory. It's just that the same people flow back and forth between the government and those corporations, and there are friendships as well as shared perspectives and ideals, all creating a close relationship that is highly beneficial to those corporations.
There are fewer desired unknot states to your cable than there are tangled and knotted states to them. There also is some confirmation bias as you are less likely to noticed the desired state versus having to battle through the knots for 5 minutes.
I applaud the fast response, especially contacting a security engineer to be removed from the GitHub organization. One particular bit stuck out to me.

>>In this instance, though, the attack vector was DNS. My account at the not-so-incredibly-common DNSimple.com did not use a highly secure password. I didn’t think it was necessary, as in my mind, the only reason that the security of an account like that would be at risk would be if I was the explicit target of an attack. Once again, I thought to myself “That’s something that only happens to other people”.

Kenneth used a randomly generated password and two-factor authentication on his GitHub account, which is great! But on DNSimple he made the decision to forego better security because it seemed unlikely to be a target.

It is not enough to use some strong passwords for the things you think are sensitive. Every weak password is a weak link in your total identity chain.

The best way to use a password manager is to never give yourself authority to make passwords unless they are randomly generated. Even if the site or account in question appears innocuous or insignificant, even if it does not allow you to make a password of your manager's default strength, commit yourself to going through this process 100% of the time.

Yes, it's a usability pain to constantly use a browser extension to log in. But that pain is nothing compared to the stress of a compromise or targeted attack.

Until password management or authentication are substantially overhauled on the web, the most optimal solution for protecting yourself is constant, militant vigilance with passwords. I don't know any of my passwords at all, and what's more, I even have randomly generated answers to security questions.

Also, where possible, use two-factor authentication. You can use SMS, Authy, Google Authenticator, a Yubikey, whatever. Just turn the damn thing on and use it if it's available to you.
I've always been (probably overly) paranoid about redundant switches. Seemed like a good way to introduce bizarre failure modes to prevent a fairly rare but easy to diagnose switch death.
Firecrackers Under My Ass
i actually find him unlistenable. he says "uh" every two words and has a very choppy way of speaking. he caries a certain amount of arrogance in his speaking as well. it is authorative but too much so.
Jesus Christ! Someone is getting enjoyment out of something you see no purpose to? You need to get him to stop!! And right now!

What's next? Putting up bird feeders? Ugh!!
We'll find a way. Worst case it's possible to rewrite it using cffi.
Here's an autoconf-compatible and much, much shorter configure system that isn't expanded from macros and remembers that bash has functions. Look, you can actually maintain it!

http://git.libav.org/?p=libav.git;a=blob;f=configure;h=9f836...

http://git.libav.org/?p=libav.git;a=blob;f=Makefile;h=4e026b...

The new thing seems to be generating configure from CMake which requires you to get a Ph.D to figure out how to override $CC.
Where I grew up in the US you'd literally get fined if your lawn wasn't neatly trimmed grass. It's absurd.

Here's where you can report my parents if they slip up on their lawn game for a few weeks:

http://www.minneapolismn.gov/inspections/report/inspections_...
If you run some bitcoin-related company, winning the bid could be an easy way to get mentions in the media.
It could actually make sense to bid a bit more than the value of the coins, I would expect the coverage to be worth at least several thousand dollars.
Show HN: Input masking library
Is Tesla’s JB Straubel the world’s foremost expert in batteries?
Realistically, a HUGE number of "successful" people do this (out of necessity or otherwise). Similarly, if you're in a leadership position you need to adopt a similar mentality after a time.
Hey folks,

Over the past several months I've been working on this input masking library, Text Mask.

It takes a different a approach to solving the problem of input masking. Most input masking libraries read key-codes from browser events, and based on that decide what to do. Text Mask doesn't read any key-codes. It detects what the user entered by comparing the new value with the previous value, and works off of that. This approach eliminates cross-browser compatibility issues.

It's been a fun project to work on. But I would love to get more users and feedback!
The Manual transfer switches I have seen are mechanically interlocked or designed so that the sources can not be paralleled. In fact automatic transfer switches that are "open transition" have a mechanical interlock as well.

Any situation in which it is up to a human to make sure they break-before-make is a grenade waiting to go off. The only thing I've seen close to that is old power plants where the generators are manually synchronized but usually there is still a sync check so the sources can't be connected more than X degrees out of phase, where X is 3 for large hydro units, 10 for standard diesels, and can be as wide as 20 or 30 for diesels at hospitals where they need to get the thing online ASAP
Things in the natural world that nourish an animal generally appeal to that animal. It's why you find rotten flesh and faeces repulsive, but flies flock to it (and they don't flock to their own shit).
> For example, hiding the algorithm from whitehats may prevent/discourage them from hunting/reporting bugs.

Yea, this is a serious concern, I guess it depends on use cases. For sure "security by obscurity considered harmful" could be true, thats the thing people overgeneralize and fight over it when this should be weighted depending on the circumstances.
Not winter_blue but I imagine it sneaks up on people. I think when you enter an office (and sign the offer sheet) you're in a honey moon stage and tend to see only the benefits you are now receiving with a certain position. Then over time you see the worst parts of people creep out and as managers etc. get a better understanding of your thresholds they will push you accordingly.
I live just outside of Boston, have an acre of lawn I don't even have to water, and drive 20 minutes to work. Resumes welcome any time :-)
> You're just being silly now. CUDA isn't a standard, it's proprietary to NVIDIA

I would love to agree with you but the reality is that CUDA is the de-facto industry standard e.g. [1].

> and this isn't a general purpose processor anyway.

The "GP" part in GPGPU would like to disagree... [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_deep_learning_so...

[2] http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html
And someone will write their own rendering engine that removes the ads. The data still has to come over the wire.
Binti makes software that is transforming child welfare services administration. We work together in SF and are growing rapidly. Info in profile.
Mining hashrate is related ot the value of bitcoin because mining is how you secure the existing bitcoins.

The more valuable bitcoins are, the more incentive there is to secure the system such that they retain their value and security.
There you go! Nice thought experiment. Looks straight-forward. Also, individual pieces far as parsing could be auto-generated.

Far as what I was doing, I was just showing they'd done logical, correct-by-construction, generated code for everything in the stack up to OS plus someone had a Prolog make. That meant about the whole thing could be done declaratively and/or c-by-c with result extracted with basically no handwritten or arbitrary code. That's the theory based on worked examples. A clean, integration obviously doesn't exist. The Prolog make looked relatively easy, though. Mercury language make it even easier/safer.