skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I alone here in actually liking the ribbon?

I almost never use any MS Office product (Latex for serious writing, R for statistics, ...) but when I have to because of a client or whatever, I find the Ribbon to be convenient for a non-power user.
Author here, thank you for lifiting this up from the mists of time.

Is there a readable summary anywhere of the last few years of progress towards Constellation (or whatever it's called now)? I find the situation confusing and have trouble figuring out what's still slated to happen, what got changed, and what missions are still on the drawing board.
Humans, the Latest MOOC Feature
Any blockchain client for any chain (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, ...) could very easily implement a storage layer for the underlying blockchain data using a protocol like IPFS.

https://ipfs.io/

In this model, individuals would not need to store the entire chain as they could lazily fetch parts of the chain as they are needed. This would allow individuals to store very little of the historical blockchain data if their use case doesn't require them to access that historical data.

There are nuances to this solution. IPFS can be thought of as one giant torrent, and with torrents, someone must have the part you need for you to be able to fetch it. There is a theoretical failure mode in this model where everyone happens to delete the same part of the blockchain thinking that they won't need it and if they do they'll get it from someone else. In this case, this portion of the chain history would be lost. This failure mode should be simple to mitigate, especially since many people participating in the network need access to significant portions of the historical data, and everyone won't use the IPFS based storage layer so, when a chunk is not available over IPFS, the client can just fetch it over normal means.
We are building clinical trial software that makes a difference in people's lives. Clinical trials are slow, unpredictable and expensive and we aim to improve this for everyone's benefit. We are actively working on a greenfield app and have more interesting development in the pipeline. We care about building great products, providing a great user experience and listening to our users to improve on our products. We actively use, contribute to and author open source libraries.

We are hiring for the following positions:

* Mid to Senior Frontend Engineer: HTML, CSS, ReactJS, ClojureScript - https://jobs.lever.co/reifyhealth/089e5e4c-13e9-49c8-93a9-11...

* Mid to Senior Fullstack Engineer: ClojureScript, Clojure, PostgreSQL - https://jobs.lever.co/reifyhealth/dd9f818f-d94c-4a0c-b97c-06...

If this sounds exciting, we'd love to hear from you! If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us: hiring (@) reifyhealth.com.
The key is to recognize how it's not just that TOP and TOC both measure X with different models. It's that TOP measures X while TOC measures Y.

It's as if we claimed Spell Checking were as complex as Natural Language Processing because they were both called "linguistics". Yes, they both abstract over language. But the primitives of Spell Checking are glyphs while the primitives of NLP are morphemes. Glyphs don't exhibit the same patterns as morphemes. Which is why Spell Checking uses a Trie while NLP uses a Matrix. Debating whether glyphs or morphemes are "more fundamental" is a distraction.

Likewise, bits don't follow the same patterns as ADT's. Calling both the study of bits and the study of ADT's "Complexity Analysis" is misleading, which I believe is what Pressler was getting at. But we've put bits and ADT's in the same bucket for the entire history of computing, because the Church Turing thesis (i.e. anything a TM can do, lambdas can do too) lead us to believe Turing and Church were studying the same primitives.
Who exactly would use this product?

You'd have to be someone who doesn't mind ads, but doesn't like bad ones, while also being someone who is willing to pay for content so you do not see ads.

More to the point, in what possible universe is there a moral justification for stripping a publisher of the advertising they've selected, only to replace it with your own, and then dictating to the publisher what percentage of that revenue they deserve?

If you care about users, just strip out ads. Don't replace them.

If you care about publisher's getting paid, just establish a mechanism that makes it easy for people to stick a META tag in their header which shows a Bitcoin address for payment remittance.

Publisher's can then implement a mechanism to verify whether individual users have paid.

If your project needs to make a profit, either charge for the browser or the service which intelligently strips out ads, the way Tivo charges for their "Guide" feature.

This is a convoluted business model which helps literally no one other than Brave.
So you don't deny that enforcing a ban requires violence, thus a ban is an extreme and violent stance to take and only makes sense if there is evidence that harm can be prevented, which was my initial statement.
Juries - chosen at random and vetted from a representative sampling of the population - choose whether a defendant is guilty or not. It's part of the civic duty of a US citizen / resident.

Could we make choosing people to choose whether a law should be passed or not a similar responsibility? "Oh I have to take a week off to go to Washington DC, there's some law I have to hear testimony on and decide the outcome."

First I've heard of such an idea!
True, but not necessarily that important. In world of Bitcoin this is important due to anonymity and criminal activity.

In a regulated industry there are other ways to prevent cheating. Making cheating obvious and undeniable is probably enough to prevent it from happening (due to legal risk).
I was delighted to find "Let's Encrypt SSL" in my cPanel.

Tip: Select example.com and www.example.com and press 'Issue Multiple' to get 1 certificate that covers both!
That is a terrible comment to make and comes across as overly hostile to someone who is only trying to help.

Cool project though.
First stars formed even later than previously thought
So open them in LibreOffice?
Securing whistleblowers
I think most of the forums on SA are filled with great people. AI is the best car forum on the 'net and BFC is pretty awesome too.
The big problem with Beep(), or so did thirteen-year-old me think, was that unless you were on Windows NT it ignored the arguments, always producing a sound with the same frequency and duration. It meant that, despite it seeming like a straightforward replacement, you couldn't really use Beep() to port MS-DOS code that relied on Borland Pascal's CRT unit [1] to produce sound effects with the PC speaker.

[1] http://putka.upm.si/langref/turboPascal/0698.html
Smoking rates may be declining due to public smoking bans limiting the number of places one is even allowed to smoke. At some point, quitting makes more sense than planning ones day around designated smoking areas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12407659
That can be said for a lot of things. I'd say the gov is right in this case to listen to the Scientists advising them. If there was a secret agenda behind this I'd say they'd be encouraging people to use anti-bacterial soap because of all the concerns already raised by people in this thread.
AI Grading Application Gradescope Shortens Grading Times
Silent downvotes right on schedule!

I think civil and honest discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym.

I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and even pg wrote about the need and how HN will need to evolve (I can't find that post of his right now). What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If the API exposed votes, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment rankings.
I applied before and didn't get a reply.
As a follow-up a somewhat readable copy of the wing-warping patent filed by "O & W Wright" is here: https://www.google.com/patents/US821393
Millions of stolen Last.fm passwords have been decrypted. These are the top 50
From Apps to AI: How Digital Assistants Will Destroy Apps as You Know Them
The content used the word "resume" only once, to argue that people now start companies that don't have a viable business plan, because those are "resumes designed to reduce the information asymmetry of a hire."

It did not describe what a "traditional resume" is. I think it means "people who get hired by a company directly out of school and stay with the company for life."

If so, this tradition has been mostly dead for decades, so it's almost a strawman.

It also says:

> About a decade ago, before the latest tech boom, many of the best and brightest college grads started their careers on Wall Street.

Wasn't that also true in the previous tech boom, the dot-com boom?
LLVM 3.9 Release Notes
The experiment I described is done in undergrad bio labs, I honestly can't find a paper a paper on it. Anyone with an interest: there's a paper that could easily be published!
Eh, even then, there's still tons of shitheads on there. The $10 barrier is not that strong, and the community is kinda balls anyway.
> The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant.

This is where I have to disagree. I feel the civility comes from swift and brutal downvotes of low effort contributions.

If there's a pattern that I see amongst grey/flagged/dead comments is that they are most often off-topic and/or low effort.

Not to say that groupthink doesn't exist or come into play, just that it's not the prevailing cause for burying comments.

Well to me at least. After all, I'm just a single user that reads arbitrary threads, I have no data to reinforce my opinion.
With a choice of paying someone to remove ads or removing those ads with any one of a number of free methods, I'll choose option #2.
what's the latest research in this area?
> This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good.

The indirection of electing a representative that may or may not represent all of your views proves quite frustrating, compared to individually deciding on various issues. Representatives are a package deal: you can only pick from the available choices. If none of those representatives represents your views, you have no recourse.

An individual voter will almost never find a representative that exactly represents their views, so they have to determine which ones they weight more heavily and focus on those. Successfully elected candidates thus focus on issues that the most people care the most strongly about, nearly to the exclusion of all else, which then produces polarizing candidates.

Representative democracy has two advantages: people don't have to deal with day-to-day issues, and representatives can have discussions and negotiations and work out novel solutions in ways that large numbers of individuals cannot.

As an alternative model, suppose that instead of an all-or-nothing election of one representative, all legislative issues (above a certain adminstrative level, such as things Congress would normally vote on) were directly voted on, but people could choose to delegate their vote to a proxy so they didn't have to deal with it themselves. Any proxy, and not necessarily all the same one, or for the same issue. So a sufficiently motivated individual could vote on every issue, but they could also choose to pool their vote with many others, and the vote of those representatives carried exactly as much weight as the number of proxies they represented. Representatives holding enough proxy votes would then carry enough weight to have discussions and negotiations.

I've seen many different proposals for that kind of process. While it would require some new infrastructure to handle, it still seems vastly preferable to the current approach. All the people who want to argue over a tiny handful of polarizing issues can go fight over those, but that doesn't disenfranchise all the people who care about everything else.

> What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc.

At one time, the expectation in the US was that the states could determine their electoral college votes arbitrarily, not necessarily by popular vote.
> Please try not to roll your own encryption. It's frightening how easy it is to get this sort of thing completely wrong.

He's not rolling his own encryption. That advice dates from the mid-'90s when people were inventing their own block ciphers.

The state of the art in disk encryption technology is absymal, e.g, no MACs at all, just some voodoo block ciphers that maybe offer tamper-resistance. If you want to do this sort of thing properly, you must roll your own cryptosystem.

There's the significant danger that the "don't roll your own crypto" mantra has separated the crypto-implementing community into two groups: one that's too self-confident to listen to any advice, and one that's too afraid to do anything but use existing crypto code that's probably been written by group 1. That's basically the story of SSL today, for instance. Let's not let that be the case any more.
Swallowing is not the problem, it's getting the plastic egg stuck in the back of the mouth or throat, blocking the airway.
Windows 10 Enterprise now available on subscription
What We Learned Analyzing Hundreds of Data Science Interviews
>But people spend millions on this product every year? Surely they get some benefit.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise.

>You can argue that the benefits of drug use are actually a mirage since it's linked to so many other problems, health and social.

You could, but you'd be ignoring the health benefits of certain patterns of consumption.

What you can't do is argue that antibacterial soap has the same social and cultural significance as Chartreuse or Cognac, nor can you claim that there exists a mode of consumption for antibacterial soap that has net positive effects (outside of a hospital).

Yes, it's a trade-off. We're on the same page. The point is rather that one of the two categories (drugs) has a positive counterweight to its negative effects while the other does not.
Not necessarily. There's a growing trend of finding "mastermind" groups to have group skype chats with once or twice a week. They're great because you're not limited by geography. They're terrible because even the most antisocial introvert needs some human contact. :)
There was an Israeli startup that tried to do this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modu ) and apparently Google acquired some of that IP. I wonder if this effort is related.
Yes, agreed. From an entertainment point of view, if the NFL didn't exist people would watch some other sport and find that just as interesting (maybe for different reasons). The skill level isn't essential to the entertainment value.
Legendary post game conference by Kaepernick
It's really strange how far most group moderation systems have regressed from Slashdot's features. The algorithms are more powerful now but users have a lot less control. It's like they used to say about ALGOL-60: it was a significant improvement on its successors.
"Does the MS Office UI conform with the Windows UI guidelines ?"

Definitely not. The ribbon style and circle menu are a different design universe entirely. I agree that moving things around was annoying.

"As for 'unreliable' - i can't share this perspective; LibreOffice works for me; didn't have any problems with OpenOffice either - before i switched to LibreOffice. I switched because LibreOffice is supposed to have better support."

The unreliability for me was a mixture of not such great support and occasional crashing. Libreoffice was much better.

I originally moved from Microsoft office because I got tired of pirating the latest version. It was a hassle because of the time to download (I had a slow connection) and the risk of viruses each stage. The move to Linux was the final nail in the coffin for me.

As time has gone on I have come to appreciate open software, which again makes Windows (or Apple) not an option for me.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747
Encrypted RAM as AMD is implementing it (SME) protects nicely from "cold-boot attacks" but is otherwise largely a feel-good feature. It also probably doesn't help a whole lot against rowhammer-style attacks because it's merely encrypted, not authenticated. The result is that a bit flip will effectively randomize 64 bytes or whatever the block size is but will not be otherwise detected by the hardware. I bet that clever attackers will find a nice way to take over by randomizing 64 bytes.

Intel's encrypted RAM is authenticated quite nicely, but it's not (yet?) designed for general purpose use -- it's for SGX only right now. Using it for everything would (if I understand correctly) add considerable space overhead and possibly considerable latency.
Ray Dalio's Principles, now available on the web
by D&D do you mean dungeons and dragons?
> There are some heavy moderated subreddits for insightful discussions, like reddit.com/r/truereddit

True Reddit is decidedly not heavily moderated:

> This subreddit is run by the community. (The moderators just remove spam.)
Freedom is wonderful provided, according to this writer, it's not freedom to live whereever and with whom you want to live in your local environment. If your kids are outsmarted and outperformed by highly competitive incomers, a decision to move somewhere else is 'racist'.
GP was referring to Libre too.
Another potential option is to throw Compiz in the mix after you have Mate up and running. Though that may make things more buggy than less, at least you can justify it with eye candy. :)
It might be an OK life if he didn't have to worship "Mr. Great Leader," but I would probably kill myself before being forced into a ridiculous life such as that.
But Roundup actually works and works really well. There is no proof that food allergies are related. Anti-bacterial soap isn't proven to work better than regular soap and we have legitimate concerns about anti-bacterial resistance.
Uhh... Pretty much the entire war on drugs? I am surprised you even had to ask. There is much more though, as you can find in this comment, for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12414467
Samsung popularized the phablet form factor and so did Apple with the smartphone and tablets but neither can be credited with pioneering these products. At least for me, both are technically fast followers and not first movers but at the end of the day, what counts the most for commercial products are sales and profits and not bragging rights.
Antibiotic resistance has the potential to throw society back to times where people died regularly from a variety of bacterial infections, I think it's one of the most important issues today.
Ars Technica: "OpenOffice, after years of neglect, could shut down"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/openof...
Not that I don't think 6k birds isn't an unfortunate number, but even if we built 1,000 more of these power plants they'd only kill about 0.20% of the amount of birds killed by cats in the US every year [0].

[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/cats-wi...
not just fired, but shot dead :-)
The guidelines ask you not to do this, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> So by default, everything should be banned, and it should only be legal if you can show it's safe?

...Yes?

If I want to manufacture/import and sell a car, I have to show it passes safety regulations.

If I want to open a restaurant, I have to obtain permits and show that food are stored and processed in an approved fashion.

If I want to build and sell a house, I have to prove that it won't collapse on itself, spontaneously catch fire, or electrocute its residents.

Every one of these points is, yes, enforced at gunpoint, because so many people have died in the past in gruesome, preventable accidents that we have collectively decided "Well, fuck it, we will make everyone prove what they are selling is safe, and we'll enforce it at gunpoint!"

That said, (hopefully) nobody arrests a pair of seven-year-olds for selling lemonade on the corner. You see, these gunpoints can be actually quite reasonable; they have centuries of experience.
Damn, we (sqlitebrowser.org) recently went through the process of obtaining a MS code signing certificate... from StartCom. (so we can sign our release binaries)

sigh
Without SIMD (or autovectorization) this will be very slow. This is really the canonical use case for SIMD acceleration, which Go doesn't support.

This is very clear code though and great for learning.
I love the ribbon. It brought the most used functionality to the front where you don't have to navigate a text menu to find.
I still use LibreOffice for my day-to-day word processing and (limited) spreadsheet needs. I'd greatly prefer for it to continue functioning well.
BBC Radio 4 is enough for me. No need to hear what my friends think about politics.
Cantor Dust
The negative effects of smoking and drinking are fairly local. In this case, the question would be:

Is it worth taking chances with multidrug resistance bacteria for this miniscule psychological benefit?
Buy a grill with a cast-iron grate. Then, you season it with oil, just as you would a cast-iron pan/dutch oven.
> you could always know the date and time you pushed a new version of the page and track visits/conversions from then until you replaced it with the next test.

While this is true, it's worth acknowledging that this comes with some risk. If the current version is doing reasonably well, you could potentially miss out on a lot of conversions by replacing it with an untested version.
It's also partially because the "upper crust" of intelligent, wealthy individuals is far less locally invested than in the past. They're more mobile and tend to connect with others and communities less because of geography and more because of shared experiences (e.g. university alums), shared industries/professions, and similar economic statuses. These are the people who, in the past, would have had strong investment in local politics and the intelligence to problem solve issues at that level.
On the flip-side, their high standards make it difficult to contribute to the conversation.
"* Earn a profit (not a sin and a good way to make the project sustainable)"

It is a sin if you're doing it by replacing a publisher's advertising with your own.
This is a problem Ethereum is currently working on. With the upcoming switch to PoS, methods of sharding the blockchain are being experimented with.
> establish a mechanism that makes it easy for people to stick a META tag in their header which shows a Bitcoin address for payment remittance

Hmm, that's an interesting idea. Has any such tag been standardized or proposed?
> The FDA started asking about triclosan in 1978.

What is happening now that will get "fixed" in 38 years. This is great news, but what is being done to reduce this latency?

How about having over arching goals of separating people and chemicals, that all chemicals need approval before being introduced into the environment!
A2: Analog Malicious Hardware [video]