skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The discussion is a nice overview how py3k crowd just steamrolls over any discussion that there are indeed inherent difficulties with forcing lossy conversion of imperfect outside input.

See example in the fine manual:
https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/urllib.request.html#exam...

You are only told "we know python.org uses utf-8 so just decode it as utf-8." No further discussion, no pointers are provided how to correctly fetch an URL with text content into a string. Even small convenience function that at least tries to look on Content-Type: header would help here!

I am well aware that "in py2k it just worked" was mostly an illusion. But honestly, is the situation above an improvement?
>You completely misunderstand the security model if you think one honest stakeholder can prevent these attacks.

Unfounded assertion. The security model is that the chain with most stake is valid. Whether it's stochastic or direct is only an implementation detail.

>There is no concept of an honest stake holder in the eyes of the network

Honest doesn't mean trusted. It just means he never uses that old stake to attack.

>Why do you think this is difficult?

Because owning enough to attack a large currency would be most likely impossible. A small one with few owners would cost at least orders of magnitude more than attacking pow for equivalent size.

>you think only social consensus and not a blockchain is necessary.

That's apples to oranges. Consensus here concerns order of data, not its organization as blockchain.

Regarding algorithm, in fact given how centralized bitcoin in practice is, you could replace all mining by a small set of signers - Gregory Maxwell. He timestamps blocks and everyone trusts him, as long as no contradictory or wrong blocks appear. If they appear, users are to go to r/bitcoin, r/btc and bitcointalk to find out what to do. Which is what happened and is going to happen in case of problems and major upgrades anyway.

There's no negative difference in security; miners' investment costs could be emulated by a collateral deposited in a Swiss bank by the bitcoin users. Which would be way safer than collateral in the form of hardware under direct control of Chinese government. Greg would get interest on that sum as long as he signs and not contradicts.

Actual bitcoin's energy costs are so small as to be worthless for security. 10 blocks cost at most $50k. Just multiply block reward by 10 and rationally assume miners don't mine at loss. 10 blocks is more than enough to deposit, exchange for something else and withdraw that. PoW's supposed energy-based security is so broken it's hilarious. Even shitty actually implemented PoS (ie. Nxt) are like aes to pow's rot13. Bitcoin is really proof-of-collateral, the collateral being asics.

There's a potential positive difference to timestamper-proof however - it's in principle possible to delete keys used for older blocks, so if they were really deleted, the chain upon that point would be eternally safe (assuming signing mechanism itself isn't broken).
With child prodigies often in sports, music, arts it easy to see and recognize the talent.

But 'smart' as a word out of context on its own is vague, subjective and can say many things.

How do we distinguish between 'smart' and those who may simply have a high opinion of themselves or are being pushed by parents with extra training, and the pressure itself on children of unrealistic expectations.

If you leave it vague you risk creating a whole victimhood mentality of individuals who think they are entitled but the world, schools, teachers etc has somehow conspired to deny them.

I think its important to be explicit in these discussion about terms like 'smart', their context and what is being referred to.
> I would argue that rings in the sense that the author describes confer money and status.

I strongly disagree!

First, while those are his early examples, he later discusses how even the rejection of money and public status is another form of wanting-to-belong:

>> People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life.

>> An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

Secondly, he explicitly states that money and status are _not_ the desire that tempts people over the line:

>> And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.

TLDR: It's a cautionary speech about people idolizing a group and the corruptive desire to belong to that group, totally regardless of how the group is defined.
Growth Hacking vs. digital marketing
Not outdoors!
You're not, of course. And there are similarly many people running production critical code written in Perl 5 on RedHat 9 or something like that. "If it's not broken, don't touch it" is a wise rule to follow for that kind of stuff.

But to keep it running, you don't really need Python 2.8 with new features, right? You need extended support for Python 2.7 - basically, making sure that it keeps working with updated versions of other software (like OSes), and that bugs are fixed.
You also have to add in that once these experimental results were released that a hundred or so theoretical physicists immediately started working on massaging the data into supporting their pet theories. After every anomalous result there's immediately hundreds of published papers by someone trying to simply be the first to publish in case their idea happens to pan out. It is a kind of shotgun approach to winding up being the next Dirac discovering the positron from math or whatever.

Since there's 99 other PhDs who probably looked at this data and found their pet theories didn't match the data and haven't been able to publish you have to account for that filtering effect that this was the 1-in-100 paper that managed to match the data. Adding that "Look Elsewhere Effect" to the 2.9 sigma would push the global significance (in the literal sense of global -- meaning all the research teams across the whole world) of this result down into meaninglessness.

Of course its likely that any discovery would start out looking like something on the edge of significance exactly like this. The safe bet is that this disappears, but all we can do is wait for more data to come in and see if the significance improves or disappears.

And I do really hope that someone finds something like this via the LIGO data. I'm convinced there's something very interesting out there to find, and sooner or later it should pop up experimentally and shake up our model of the universe.
Do you know these keywords?
The biggest problem with this for me is the app ecosystem needed. If proper Android app emulation was present then I would love to try an alternative OS, but currently I rely too much on apps that are only available on Android/iOS for which a web app would provide a very poor experience.
I just go really high level. Larger companies usually have a process, sometimes it is categorized under "conflicts of interest". My current side projects are non-commercial, so I just put together a 3 sentence description of the project & a link to the GitHub page. Generally if the lawyers have any questions then I answer those, but I don't go overboard providing info. In the end it's better for everyone to have clarity.
Have you actually /been/ to reddit in the last year? The idea that anything of value is created by this raging mob of hateful teenagers with too much free time is laughable.

FFS, they've just spent a month riling each other up about a Clinton/Podesta pedophile ring operating out of an italian restaurant. That may be "challenging" for some of them (because letters etc.), but it's not the stuff the next breakthrough in physics will be based on.
Seems pretty legit to me: it's of interest, both actually and conceptually, it could inspire discussion, and it's just flat-out cool.

Besides, HN is full of ads: hiring boards, show HNs of products HN users have worked on, various nonsense from HN startups, ads from other companies popping up on the front page ("hey, our new product launched this week"), and so on. And that's not even mentioning all the advertising for projects that users do inside threads: How often have you heard kaz essentially advertising TXR, his project? (although to his credit, he only does it when it's relevant to the discussion, or if TXR would help with a problem another user mentioned: many are less restrained).
I've always been fascinated by this ... any time I walk around barefoot, I seem to find every rock, sharp stick, and piece of broken glass in the area. How long does it take for your feet to develop the required callouses?
Omni Labs – Making the Most of Compose
Hum .. don't think so. Not quite yet at least. Underneath this, there is Finagle on top of which most services at Twitter is built on. It offers a java API, but remains a Scala library. And there's still a lot of existing code inside to twitter to ditch Scala right away. Java 8 is awesome, but Java is still not an FP language.
They have to pay.
A custom build of a completely silent PC [video]
The ones that end in complete failure are the most valuable.
Saying "this is how the world is" is obviously also not valid...

It depends on what you mean by "how the world is". If you're taking about some mutable aspect, then it's invalid. But if, as in this case, you're talking about the fundamental dynamics, then you'd best get used to it. If you fight reality, you're going to lose.
We would like a machine that draws pictures like humans do
> Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS?

Why do businesses invest in new tech? Why pay for excel when I can use a pen and calculator? The answer is because it makes them more efficient. We have excel sheets to do the same thing, matlab code to do the same thing, and yet here we are paying for these member design tools because they are the most efficient for us. If you save an engineer even a couple of minutes for each element they are designing, you essentially pay for the software.

>Any reason why the people you know don't use ETABS or Tekla?

We do use ETABS extensively for analysis. We don't use it for design. It is foolhardy to trust the automated RC design in these software. That seemed to be the standard of practice around here, but perhaps it is different in other areas of the world.
You can keep your py2.x code running, absolutely; but you cannot expect other people working for free to help you pay your bills.

Honestly, the level of self-entitlement through all 2vs3 threads is staggering.
"* Ignore AI cities until you're well established."

Couldn't disagree more. Wait till your second resupply and then take a city. You get double creation everyone else gets in exchange for about 55-60 units. Although, I completely agree with how awesome this game is!
If you weren't busy taking things so personally, you could note that I already hinted in my comment on why I made it - I missed the feature of unpacking within function arguments myself at first too, until I realized that unpacking within the body isn't really less readable. (And please - do not waste time replying.)

I admit I don't use lambdas that much, since generator expressions (which is like Python 2.3) they aren't really needed too frequently. And in most cases you're better off using function anyway, because in Python statements are not expressions, as I already also stated. For example, I use print() for debugging frequently and this is tough to insert into lambda. (And even in Haskell I prefer to name subexpressions to lambda syntax.)

> That said, like I said, I never actually downvoted that comment (because I obviously couldn't). So you don't need to worry about the internet points.

I am not worried about internet points (I actually got about 80 of them on this discussion alone, which is frankly ridiculously too much, and in practice, I find that comments I personally find to be the most insightful only rarely get most points), I am just really annoyed when somebody downvotes my comments without any explanation, because I am a very curious person and in most cases it's just a honest misunderstanding, which could be cleared up with, I don't know, actual communication?

And at least two or three other people actually downvoted my original comment, so I would like to use this opportunity to invite them to come forward with an explanation what they found so wrong about it.
This is like the fourth instance of computational graphs that I've seen recently. Can someone recommend some resources on the underlying theoretical ideas? It's not just graph theory, it's something like computational graph theory or maybe data flow but neither seems to be at the level of formalism I'd like.
To give a comparison between the two, here are the two preview files for each:

Cryptomancer RPG
http://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/186678-sample...

Hero Kids RPG
http://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/106605-sample...
>Doesn't this take money away from your firm?

No, because we are in fact competing on cost and client-recognized quality, and to a lesser extent time. Plus our fees are driven more by the market than by our actual costs, so if we billed fewer hours, we would simply bill at a higher rate to reach the same expected fee while still maintaining our position in the marketplace. Or if we could reduce our fee, we might be able to win more market share.

The pejorative term in the industry for padding billing with useless busy work is "fee justification," which really shouldn't ever be necessary. Especially in my practice area, because there's always more work that can be done to flesh out our deliverables, which in turn makes them more effective for convincing the IRS (or state equivalent) or an appeals judge. When I say I've cut thousands of dollars of charge hours, we didn't simply stop charging those hours, we allocated them to more useful, value added activities.

Right now, staff spend far too much time inefficiently manipulating data in Excel, manually organizing exhibits, and a variety of other mundane, low cognitive effort tasks (I can't really specify what kinds because that would essentially doxx me). They feel productive, they look productive, and they meet their charge hour goals. And it allows them to procrastinate on the more mentally taxing work, like evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues, which in turn detracts from the quality of our service. Our clients aren't paying us to be extra-expensive outsourced spreadsheet monkeys. They're paying us to eliminate uncertainty about complicated legal and tax issues. So freeing up engagement budget and the staff's mental bandwidth to focus on the high value added cognitive services is tremendously useful in improving quality.

And in terms of time, we compete on that in some cases where there's an audit, exam, or appeal deadline and the client came to us late in the game. But that's an edge case and relatively rare. Certainly having a reputation for being quick, efficient, and timely wouldn't hurt our market position, though.
Cute. But strangely, my Android refuses to render most of these.

"No Tofu," they said...
Python 3.6 – Asynchronous Comprehensions
Agree with this completely ^

Didn't see it in the tutorial either. Here I was thinking there was no advantage to WASD and just spam clicking everywhere :P
That's the thing - people expect core developers (some of them working on the project for free) to keep backporting crap out of the kindness of their heart. It's like asking Microsoft to backport security fixes and .Net features into VB6.
How my startup failed (1999)
I've moved all my banking (credit card, checking, savings) to Discover and I've had great experiences any time I had to call them - except they refuse to lower my APR despite great credit. Oh well, I don't carry a balance so it's just the principle of the thing. And for no annual fee, the cash back is quite nice, and it has extended warranty and purchase price protection too!

I'm not a shill, I promise. I just really like my Discover relationship.
My most distinct memory of early education is my grade seven teacher yelling at me, saying that he never wanted to see me read a book in his classroom ever again. I used to read books in class after I finished whatever trivial in-class work we had... apparently, this was more annoying to him than the kids who didn't do their work and loudly talked about their drug consumption.
I see the unvote link on mobile as well, unless you're using an app (that should have updated to have the unvote link)
Right, it's clear enough "from the inside" as an experienced user. But from the outside, people (e.g. journalists) just talk about "Reddit" as one place. Reddit Corp issues administrative policies for the site as if in complete ignorance of this public perception.

There is a reason WordPress has the .com/.org split, and it's not just that large customers demand to self-host. That could have resulted in something more like GitHub Enterprise, but instead you see a well-supported FOSS offering. Why? Because this split allows WordPress.com to maintain a very strict TOS that disallows many types of content, while still allowing other people who don't want to adhere to those policies to "run on WordPress" easily by using the WordPress.org software either directly or through third-party hosts.

If Reddit was smart, the "Reddit engine" would be a well-supported, easy to install FOSS offering like WordPress.org, and there would be a healthy ecosystem of third-party hosts running that software. Voat would just be "Yet Another Reddit-as-Service Provider", instead of a competitor and political statement.

As it is, the Reddit engine is an effectively-unsupported blob of code that needs tons of other heavy dependencies to get it running. The only site I know running a copy of the Reddit engine is LessWrong—and they've heavily forked it for their own purposes.
Indeed strange, the android ROM i tested it with worked. But thats a while ago, so i'll check. Thanks!
A lot of games require .NET, so integrating mono allows a .NET runtime. Personally I've used this to run Skyrim.
I have a Steelcase LEAP, at least ten years old, that was acquired when a local company went out of business. The v1s had a design flaw where eventually a weld would break and the piece of metal that adjusted the front edge of the seat would fall out of the bottom of the chair.

I lived with this for a few years and eventually contacted the local reseller to see if replacement parts were available. Got blown off because I wasn't a corporate customer.

About a year later, I decided to contact Steelcase corporate directly. I described the problem, as well as how I'd been basically ignored by the local dealer. Told them how I'd gotten the chair, and that I was willing to pay for parts. Not only did they apologize profusely, they sent me an entire (v2) seat assembly - in black leather - at no charge, described the changes between the versions, and said it would fit on my chair just fine. It did.

There's a reason I now have four of these LEAP chairs at home.
Major hacks in India by Legion
Am I the only one who finds lots and lots of good stuff on forums etc?

My wife is annoyed because I spend time here but just because of the time I spend not because of anything that shows up on my screen; most of the bad stuff people write about just doesn't seem to cross my path.

:-/
Static recompilation is not possible, even for simpler CPUs like the 6502 (NES, Apple I, etc). There are parts of the program that you will never know until you actually run it. Forget about a complex x86-64 program.

Apart from that, the complexity of all the system calls made by the program is also a huge challenge as those not always have an equivalent in the new system and are really hard to match at such a low level. It is, however, not impossible. Emulators such as Dolphin do that, also combined with dynamic recompilation.
Really? Guess I must have joined after the Hacker News crowd joined, my names have all been surprisingly normal (for the internet...)

"Bruno", "Mvlo", "m", "Galactus", "jflorey", "Tobias", "Chef", "Bruno", "Popey", "Mvlo", "m", "Galactus", "jflorey", "Tobias", "Chef"
Given the topic of the thread, it's clear that your comment was upvoted because it's inspirational to do new things at the (oh so advanced!) age of 43. But I want to address it along a different axis.

> Viet are shy and have poor personal communication skills.

When I imagine how such a statement might land with your fellow HN users who are Vietnamese, let alone, say, a Vietnamese elder, such a claim is painful to read.

> I'm the oldest guy in the company and the only American here. This has quickly lead to a lot of personal mentoring on many levels, not just software, but life in general

I have a similar reaction here too. Other dynamics leap painfully to mind—a vast power differential and violent history—that don't have to do with "life in general".

We don't want a gotcha discourse in which well-intentioned people get scourged for saying things; I don't mean my comment that way. At the same time, civility means more than personal politeness. It includes respect for others different from oneself. That is a profound thing with many levels, each of which challenges us to awareness. Every one of us has these challenges, of course. They're just easier to see in somebody else's case.
Tape measure and formulas is better than both weight and BMI. And while the errors can be large for some, you won't mistakenly think you are fit at 35% nor fat at 10% using them. There's actually not very much good knowledge out there on exactly what levels are optimal for health. It's mainly based on epidemiological research. However, as long as you aren't below 10-12 % BF (ca. 84 cm waist) there is probably no danger going down. If you are going towards 25% BF and above(ca 98 cm waist) you probably should see over your habits.

If you want to keep it simple, just set some random measurement in-between those numbers as a limit and start dieting when above.

I don't think the big issue for regular people is that they have tried measuring themselves but by random chance got an inaccurately low estimate, rather that they haven't really tried measuring or does not succeed in losing fat. The latter is sad as losing fat is mostly a solved issue, but the misinformation is so high that it's hard to get on the right track. If someone could solve the information problem they'd be a public health hero!

For people into body-building or serious fitness, the issue of estimating fat is a bigger one. Some people go for DEXA scans, but they are quite expensive and takes time. Something doable in your home, but more accurate than tape measure or callipers, especially for tracking variations, would be the ideal.