skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard all the arguments before and they're all bullshit. Every country that metricized in the 1980s had to deal with this. Every country that did is better for it.

I assure you that the UK spends that much or more on signs that were damaged by weather, were rendered incorrect by road changes, or needed updates due to new signage standards.

When the US automotive industry looked at metric as a big push was being launched they realized that metic was cheaper and switched. Fewer bolt sizes, fewer tools required, simpler designs, easier math for machining. There was literally no reason to stick to the old system.

Stubborn is not harsh. Stubborn is the truth.

There's nothing sadder than watching some American mechanics struggle to add together things like 7/8, 3/16, 1/2 and 17/32 based on different bits of material they need to assemble together, except maybe watching the team on Mythbusters flail as they insist on using ridiculous units like inch-pounds and feet per second to try and do basic physics. How many feet per second is 66 miles per hour? What kind of inch-pound torque on a six pound weight at the end of a yard long arm through an eighty degree arc generates that kind of speed?

The big perk of Metric is all the units are normalized and mostly interchangeable. The big nuisance of other systems is the units are all completely arbitrary and require conversion factors.

Get with the program already. Metric might feel annoying, but that's only because change is difficult. It's natural for anyone living in a country that's flipped.
Making a concrete fibonacci clock
This has an interesting interaction with another of Go's quirks.

As I read this (and it seems like the author has an axe to grind so maybe they aren't explaining the motivation correctly) the idea is that when you want to rename A to B, you can make an A -> B alias to ease the transition.

However, people calling your code and using A won't know that they need to update their code unless there's some kind of warning. But Go doesn't have compiler warnings.

So I think the author is right, this would be better implemented as a compiler error plus an automatic refactoring tool. That approach would leverage one of Go's strengths -- it's a pretty regular language and already has good refactoring tools.
Anyone interested in this subject will probably want to see Grady Tower's essay, "The Outsiders". http://www.worlddreambank.org/O/OUTSIDRS.HTM.

My IQ is just on the cusp of the level where these effects become a risk in Grady's view, and I think I did suffer from them rather badly--by the time I got to college I had extreme social anxiety that made me almost non-functional, which lasted through most of my 20's. (And still affects me a little bit now even at age 60!) I think it was rooted in the fact that my relatively high IQ made me interested in things other than what my peers are interested in (science, etc.), and to generally take an unusually cerebral approach to life, so I was different. So I was a bit bullied and isolated, which me feel more different, which made me more self-conscious and therefore less social functional, which made me more bullied and isolated, which made me feel more different, in a spiral that eventually led to deep despair for years and years.

But most high-IQ people don't have those problems. There usually have to be other factors at play than IQ, which are exacerbated by IQ. In my case I think it was because I was also unusually sensitive pretty much from birth (as described by my nursery school teacher in a report I still have!), so I really felt any rejection unusually strongly, and other factors including parents who shared none of my interests, and no siblings until I was already pretty far down the spiral.

Elsewhere in these comments, Johns Hopkins' CTY program is mentioned, where smart kids spend a few years each summer studying and hanging out. Kids who attend it generally love it because they finally get to be with like-minded kids. I feel that if I had had that opportunity it might have broken the spiral. So when I had my own kids I looked for an opportunity like that, and when I came across CTY I made sure my kids had that opportunity. One of them feels like it was the turning point of his life.
Least Squares
Way off topic from the original article but "we can all get service jobs" implies a reality where the cost of any manufactured good and food is approaching 0. In that reality, you would only ever need to spend the money from your service job in other services.
I think the hate is justified, to an extent. Freud's influence is not due to his theories, but his invention of the "talking cure." His original theory of deep-seated psychosis was more in line with the modern view: that it usually springs from traumatic sexual violence experienced in infancy or childhood. But this put him between a rock and a hard place: either go forward with his research and lose his academic career, or join the rest of society in blaming the victims. Freud chose the latter, and put such a convincing intellectual spin on it that he even earned a reputation as a scientific genius.
Whether you like the alias proposal or not, the bubble problem is real. Go's maintainers live in a bubble and have blindspots around what Go is missing. They refuse to consider any of the usual language mechanisms for code reuse: subclassing, generics, templates, or macros. They repeatedly shoot down any discussion of these topics.
Why do morons come in this field yet don't know how to multiply multiple digit numbers?
A small subset of society (school-children) needing to adjust is much less of a hassle than everyone adjusting though. I'd be curious to see how many subsets of society would prefer changing their clocks, vs keeping them the same.
I respectfully disagree as to your note about twitter being "un-walled". The easiest test would be: if twitter would shut down right now, and its infrastructure would go dark as a consequence, could you/our/any community on twitter continue? I believe the answer is "no", because its centralized (and proprietary). I do agree with you that cultivating communities are important...though we do need some universally accepted, open, and available protocol to allow for cultivating of communities...sort of like what legacy protocols have done - e.g. email, irc, etc.).
The _prettyPrint [1] and _getPasswordTemplate [2] functions they use to get from the HMAC to the actual password seem to have a lot of issues:

- _prettyPrint calls into _getPasswordChar which will then take the character code modulo the length of the array of possible characters [3], which is usually going to be biased if the character code is not uniformly distributed between 0 (inclusive) and a multiple of the length (exclusive).

- It's even worse because the input to _prettyPrint is the HMAC encoded as a hexadecimal string. The impact of this depends on the size of the possible character array, but in several cases, some of the options can never be chosen and others will be chosen twice as often as others that can be chosen.

- Using the hex encoding also drastically reduces the number of possibilities for a given length even if that input was then used in a less flawed fashion.

- _getPasswordTemplate appears to treat a password with lowercase/uppercase letters as a series of alternating vowels and consonants (by appending 'vc' or 'VC' to the password template).

- It also generally seems to define "password containing X and Y char types" as "password containing X char type, then Y char type, then X, then Y, and so on".

[1]: https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L8...

[2]: https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L6...

[3]: https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L1...
Zoox, a self-driving car company, raised a round of funding at a $1.5B valuation
I know this isn't going to happen, but I think the only way to make Perl 6 the new poster child would be to rename it.

It has a lot to do with human psychology. People don't like that argument, but many things happening in IT have a lot more to do with psychology, sociology and marketing rather than any technical ("factual") reasons.

The most technical reason probably is the cost to switch, but that reason doesn't explain many things and people do switch to new things all the time.
Simple Angular.JS plugin for creating beautiful linecharts
At least you're missing out on bottles (pre-built formulae) when your prefix is not /usr/local.

EDIT: The rationale for using /usr/local has been explained in the FAQ: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#why...
Google updates Gmail mobile app
I don't think insurance will cover you if the theft was because of negligence..
Where do you have it installed instead?
And what of the people that do "understand all the subtle aspects of privacy", and disagree with your conclusions?
You're only making my point further by assuming "diversity" must imply a 50/50 gender distribution in the players.

Diversity implies differences in class, age, origin, occupation, and so on, and this is definitely the case in the consumer demographics. The fact that some games appeal more to men and others more to women is unsurprising, and irrelevant.

In fact, that you're seeing numbers such as 60/40 despite the game makers themselves being far more male-dominated suggests those men are doing a pretty decent job in appealing to people not like them.
Ask HN: Could the blockchain improve voting systems?
I see all sorts of applications of the blockchain outside of just digital currency.

Are there some ways it could be used in public voting to improve upon the current systems?
Indeed. But as I wrote I think there are some good reasons why client-side rendering brings benefits in most of the cases - assuming you have already decided to use ajax.
Is there something like this on top of DigitalOcean/AWS instead? I'd rather rely on those providers for the hardware and uptime.
I wish we could get reasonably priced and spec'd Thinkpads in India. Had to move on to an MBP last year after almost 8 years with a T60 and T410.
I think it's because the language appears to be very complex. So much syntax, context, and novel terminology.

It appears that Perl 6 lets you be very clever and can save you some keystrokes. But I don't want to be clever, and am willing to type a few extra keystrokes if it makes things easier for me to understand the next time I look at my code.
Slow is good for a password hashing function. :P
A Snapshot of Foundational Attitudes Toward Quantum Mechanics (2013)
Classic thought experiment explains weird decisions we make about spending money
China Passes Controversial Cybersecurity Law
Crude Profit System Review THE TRUTH
Yeah, I'm disappointed that they dropped that line in there with zero explanation.

My understanding is that this should be impossible, as it could likely only be accomplished by calling private APIs. Calling a private API gets an app submission rejected automatically (it's caught by a computer, not a human).
Seems a bit expensive compared with the cheapest VPS/OpenVZ setups around.
Board games have really exploded with how they experiment with different concepts and mechanics over the past fifteen years, and they've been rewarded with greater and greater success.

Board game publishers actually encourage innovation from game designers (...to a certain extent. They also like safer bets when available too), much more so than video game publishers, and Kickstarter exists to fund the ideas that game publishers don't go for.

Kickstarter exists for video games too, but board games are succeeding on Kickstarter at a much higher rate than video games lately, in no small part because video games are funding development, for a game that may take a lot longer to develop and be impossible to complete with those funds. Even the darling Shovel Knight burned through all of its Kickstarter money 5 months before release and they all went broke just to get the game out the door. But board games are usually funding production of a completed design that's already priced out so they know how much it's going to cost them.

There are over a thousand new board games that came out this year at Essen alone, only one of several major board game trade shows. That's tons of opportunities for new mechanics and experiences. They're even getting deeper in their storytelling capabilities, as evidenced by the games Pandemic Legacy, Time Stories, and Above and Below.

Board games are still defining new genres even (most recently the Legacy genre which is only 5 years old, and Deckbuilders which is only 8 years old), I can't think of any new genres in video games since Grand Theft Auto 3 came out and popularized sandbox games 15 years ago. That is, unless you count 'Free 2 Play, Pay 2 Win', which is a perversion of game design dictated by market forces, not a true genre.

So I think part of the problem this designer is having is she's been too myopically limiting herself to only video games as an interactive form to draw inspiration from. Games exist in many forms. Board games in particular have a huge wealth of mechanics and ideas that video games have mostly left unexplored, and role playing/social games of late are no slouch either latel (just saw one that focuses on language and how it is formed and dies in an isolated community on Kickstarter, called Dialect).

Shovel Knight source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5974557/shovel-knight-sales-...
The difference I see is that I'm not personally at risk from someone chomping down on fast food. But I may well be at risk from someone driving unsafely.
I know that is what you intended to talk about, but I'm pointing out that it's not what your sources are talking about. They are about who buys games, about who identifies as gamer (i.e. is more susceptible to marketing)
Degrees are expensive, and if you don't get to bludgeon people with them, what's the point?
> Is anyone aware why is the situation like this?

Maybe because logos don't have any place in an alphabet?

> it doesn't really make sense not to have them.

I would claim it doesn't really make sense to have facepalm, avocado, etc.

As far as I'm aware, the original set of emoji were included due to existing messages on Japanese networks using proprietary encodings. There are precisely zero existing messages containing wifi or bluetooth logos as characters; adding such things to unicode creates a problem to solve, rather than solving anything.

At this point it seems like unicode is being treated as a meme database, with code points as URIs and the system font as a retrieval mechanism. This bulldozes through a number of carefully chosen separations of concern (characters/code points vs glyphs, glyphs vs fonts, fonts vs images, images vs URLs, etc.), with the only reasoning I can fathom being to fit the current implementation of the iOS on-screen keyboard.
It doesn't really come as a surprise either, see this article from beginning of September: https://electrek.co/2016/09/02/tesla-supercharger-credit-sys...
My experience was very similar. I used to write a ton of Perl for system administration, mod_perl web apps, etc. but swore off cold-turkey in the early-to-mid 2000s when I realized that every time I opened a .pl file the first thing I did was run it through perltidy and then spend a bit of time figuring out the author's personal conventions.

My rule is pretty similar now: Perl or Bash is fine for one-liners or a script which fits in an 80x25 window and doesn't use non-scalar data structures but anything longer or which has much expectation of maintenance is written in something like Python where the culture and tooling favor readability.
Keep in mind that operating Twitter, even if you eliminated all the stuff that's there to support advertisers, requires (bare minimum) roughly 2K servers just to handle the runtime request path. Monitoring those minimally requires another ~500 servers to ingest and aggregate all the log data and metrics. This wouldn't support any analytics platform, wouldn't allow for spam identification (because you wouldn't be able to build any spam models), so if you care about that stuff you need to add another 5K servers or so for the Hadoop ecosystem.

Essentially you can't run an advertising-less Twitter under roughly 10K servers (order of magnitude accurate -- people will want to quibble over these numbers but they won't be able to push it below 5K). I may well be forgetting something important that pushes it higher!

End result: there's no way to monetize Twitter at the scale it operates at without decentralizing it. Many of you will go "yeah, of course -- it shouldn't be a centrally controlled system in the first place." That's a fine sentiment, but many problems you can solve in a straightforward (not easy, but doable) way in a centralized system immediately become much, much harder, and now you are asking ISPs and individual users to operate these resources for free.

Take spam as one example. The main "solution" to spam we use these days is to all use a system that see enough email to power machine models that identify and filter spam out before we have to deal with it. IOW, we use centralized systems. This gets paid for with advertising!

You can fractally reinvent the system or you can just have Twitter.
>Or the simpler explanation of there being an election tomorrow?

There are 2 candidates this election.
Do you have real life examples of a country subsidizing an export to a country damaging is industry, and then jacking up the prices and get that so called monopoly profits?

I dont think you will find a subsidy that ended up being a net monetary gain for the tax payers, let alone a good investment option.
SHA512 is astronomically more secure how exactly? Under which scenarios?

Just so you know: SHA1 is problematic because of potential collision attacks. So you should definitely not use SHA1 for signing anything because it might be possible to construct a different document with the same signature. That's it.

What does it have to do with password derivation? Nothing at all. Collision attacks are irrelevant, what matters is computational complexity. So if you use PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 the only thing that would make your solution less secure is some shortcut allowing to compute a SHA1 hash radically faster without throwing faster hardware at it. And so far nobody found one.

Since you seem to like name calling, what do you call somebody making authoritative statements on matters they don't understand?

For reference, I am the author of Easy Passwords extension which uses a concept similar to LessPass. And it also uses SHA1 - for technical reasons.
I've seen Nvidia drivers do that too. I think it's mostly done to let the user override graphics settings that are otherwise hardcoded into the application's API calls.
Don't think so. Though their stack are open source.
> Email ... carries more abuse & noise than actual signal.

Really? That is not my experience at all. There was a span of years where spam got bad, early-2000's IIRC, but my email is now mostly signal and has been since since at least 2010. I think this is partially due to better spam filters, e.g., gmail was better than average when it went public in 2007ish, but also due to the rising popularity of DKIM and SPF.

I see the abuse and noise out there on twitter and in comments sections, etc. I don't see it with email. I know people with big public personalities do get hate email and whatnot, but I thought for the average person, email was kind of a solved problem.
As I understood it, the whole idea of intercooler is to fetch HTML snippets via ajax and embed them into the page client-side. Your fallback would require server-side logic to decide whether to return the snippet or render the whole page client-side. That's just as complex as fallback for a traditional SPA.
Perhaps not. You get a rich guy with 100k to blow on a car locked in your place of business for 30 minutes. Most companies would kill for that problem.
A lot of countries ban smoking inside non-residential buildings e.g pubs out of concern for non smokers.
My personal recommendation, if you like the first, is to at least read the next two (Dune Messiah and Children of Dune). If you're still liking the series, finish the next three (the tone does change with God Emperor and again with the last two).

It should be noted, the first three books form a trilogy. The fourth book is a bridge to what was intended to be a second trilogy. Herbert finished the first two in it (books five and six). His son (with Kevin J. Anderson) wrote several prequel trilogies (I did not enjoy, YMMV, read at least one of them if you've made it this far to determine if you'll continue, quick reads), and eventually concluded the original series with two additional novels (I haven't read them, I was turned off by the style of the first prequel trilogy and haven't returned to it).
Good points...tech is no longer enough...we have to have a brand as well as an attraction point; that is, some "place" where people think "the party" is happening (alternatively not a party but for example, where stuff or news happens). I think I've come to the point where - right now - we don;t need everyone to adopt decentralized platforms like gnu social...But, i do feel if there is at least a non-trivial percentage of users who can choose to not be limited to interaction by way of silos, then i think that's a pretty good start. And who knows, maybe in the future, when there is enough to attract the casual users (as well as the tech is easier to setup and use), more folks will slip over to something decentralized, though still be able to interact with the/their communities.
I was meaning if your machine was compromised.
Let me see if I got this straight:

1. Hyper.sh is a PaaS running their own open-source stack https://hypercontainer.io/ ?

2. That means that it's possible to host "your own hyper.sh" on AWS or DO?
Not sure what " traditional consensus algorithms" you're referring to.

Using a trusted 3rd party entity to keep everyone honest?
Google play does not review each app unless it's done after the fact. You pay a fee and upload your binary and then it's available. My understanding is that they have a permissive model that relies on users flagging the bad stuff and then they pull it from the store after the fact.
The bigger sizes? Yes, but the small ones work pretty sweet. And the per-second billing!
Medical related apps for one.
This has a chance to do to Docker (quick painless docker containers hosting) what Digital Ocean did to VM hosting (quick, painless VMs in the cloud).

This will definitely be my go-to hosting for personal side projects.

I wonder if the major cloud providers will have something similar (both Azure and AWS seem to spin up VMs on which they run the containers - but you do get charged for the VMs as well)
Using Artificial Intelligence to Identify State Secrets
But then can you run Docker on top of OpenVZ? Oh yes, technically you can starting from version x, but I've been told (by a VPS provider) there are a lot of issues in practice.

Of course, I'd love to hear if the opposite is true.
> but everyone was happy with it.

For what it's worth, that worst-of-all-worlds solution was what made me give up on Rust back on 0.9, and I haven't really missed it since.
The State of Machine Intelligence, 2016 Edition
I suppose I should have narrowed what I mean by whiskey to scotch-from-scotland, as price very much lines up with quality for scotch. The same is true for mezcal-from-oaxaca.

The current trend of "craft" distillers relabeling factory made bourbons and ryes is a different animal.
> Why not provide people with a quick and easy "login by email", since this fallback is almost always available anyway?

There was Mozilla's Persona (which was shut down a few days ago). Now there is this:

https://portier.github.io/