skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but my main point was that the advancement of civilization shouldn't depend on the whims of random billionaires. We shouldn't prevent random billionaires from developing the tech either, but multi-decade trend of politics and society believing that "capitalism" provides a complete economic system has big holes in it for certain advancements: space travel, for antibiotics, for civilization-ending externalities like climate change. The pileup of what capitalism isn't addressing is getting very serious. And if you're being quantitative, skipping all/most long-term, low-visibility-payoff risks still leaves your economy behind one that is able to make those investments -- at least some of the time, in favor of the next social-chat app, or k-cup juice tech.

And incidentally - IMHO, I strongly suspect there is nothing in avionics algorithmically or computationally that modern rocketry needs that didn't not already exist 30-40+ years ago (then again, I don't closely follow that anymore...) One of the key structural advancements for SpaceX rockets - was created 20+ years ago - friction stir welding... I may be too cynical, but really the only real advancement there is parties able & willing to take on long term risks.
One of the major costs in IP development is verification, when someone buys an ARM core they're not buying it purely because of the ecosystem or the performance/power etc. It's also because they know the core is verified. They also know they can receive support when things go wrong.

You may be able to get a RISC-V core for free, but will you get a fully verified RISC-V core including support for free?

Should RISC-V become a success then I imagine you'll see ARM dropping prices and perhaps core licensing will be a major cost in producing an SoC (as I understand it it's rather cheap right now, relative to full development cost) however you're still going to see people buying cores off established IP companies to get that verification and support.

Now linux gets plenty of free bug-hunting and fixing, most people in need of a linux kernel will be off to kernel.org rather than paying a company to supply a custom one. I'm not sure you'd see the same thing for a processor core. Verification requirements are a whole lot higher than they are for linux.
> I read somewhere that VCs don't mind burning cash at GitHub, because the fire helps power the greater Software ecosystem.

That makes no sense at all. No LP would be in favor of paying an "investment tax" which is not broadly paid yet is broadly used. LPs put money into venture firms for higher than average returns. What you describe would make the investor's job harder.

In the Valley (and on HN) the VCs are the BSDs of the money scene. But they need their customers (LPs) and if you go to any LP meetings you'll see that most of the money comes comes from the actual BSDs of PE, hedge funds and pension funds. And since VC is such a tiny part of the financial world, you'll see that the folks that represent the big LPs at those LP meetings are just kids on their first job after an MBA, or even between college and MBA: all they really care about is reporting good returns to their bosses.
As one might expect[1], I have some thoughts.

There are a few "layers" of rolling your own crypto. Often, people think they're not rolling their own crypto because they're using AES instead of some hand-rolled bizarro cipher. This is not that: the primitives the post references are solid (e.g. BLAKE2b, ChaCha20, X25519).

There are definitely challenges with explaining crypto to programmers in a way that is non-scary and at the same time factually accurate; I walk that tightrope constantly with Crypto 101. There are significant factual inaccuracies in this post that matter and aren't just a temporary educational tool so you can get a concept across quickly. Someone on Reddit[2] already pointed out most of the ones that were glaring at me after a cursory review. To the author's credit, he's put that link up by the start of the post.

There are at least two kinds of crypto education for programmers. One is practical advice or libs to help people build better applications with crypto. This means building better tools. Don't "pick Ed25519" -- pick a library like libsodium that did signatures right for you. Saying "compose ChaCha20 and append a MAC" isn't the best level of advice we can strive for. Instead, "use Fernet" and possibly "use libsodium's secretbox" is (although I think having to specify a nonce may not be the greatest default -- I'm working on fixing that). The other kind of crypto education for programmers is to help people break things. That can help you become an expert, but I don't think we should expect any meaningful percentage of programmers will spend a bunch of time finishing all 8 sets of Cryptopals. [3] It is, however, a reasonable assumption that a (super)majority of programmers will at some point touch some crypto: the question is what they find when they do that. Will they have secure password storage and not even notice because that was the right default in the software they were using, or will they have to cobble together their own? I for one am hoping it's the former.

Fundamentally, there are two reasons why you don't want to roll your own crypto. One is because there's a good chance you'll mess it up. The other is because that's effort, and you are not going to do better than the programmers that already have done the hard work for you. This is sometimes true for primitives (don't generate your own FFDH prime/implement your own FFDH -- you will probably have small subgroups!), but especially true for high-level recipes at varying levels of complexity from authenticated encryption (you won't be better than OCB or secretbox) all the way to cryptographic ratchets.

Those reasons put together form my main criticism for this article. Sure, it has fundamental inaccuracies, they're not trivial, and that's not OK. But even if it was technically perfect, it doesn't help the next piece of software be safer.

[1]: I am a cryptographer. I did https://www.crypto101.io. I am Latacora's crypto nerd.

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5iv1ti/rolling...

[3]: http://cryptopals.com
That was my experience using Kopete (which was the best client I found for 1:1 chats, but the groupchat experience really sucked). In theory there was a bookmark/history feature where you could just right click and go through two levels of menu to get back to the groupchat you were just in, but it never seemed to work.
Interesting. For comparison, Geekbench 4 single/multi-core results (from https://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks):

MacBook Pro (17-inch Late 2011, i7-2860QM): 3180 / 9593

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016, i7-6700HQ): 3968 (+24%) / 12189 (+27%)

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016, i7-6820HQ): 4093 (+29%) / 12883 (+26%)
It really applies at all levels save perhaps very small town municipal elections. Whether the probability of influencing the election is 1 in 10M or 1 in 1M (or 1 in 100k) is all pretty much zero when multiplied by the change in benefits you could expect to receive.
No it is a telecommunications network.

As per the law, ads and content-snooping don't belong on it.
well, i learned to program alone ;) Started with C#, then switched to HTML/CSS(/JS? i don't remember it anymore) and then in 10. grade learned Java. But i never finished a programming book! For me it just doesn't work that way. I started with some idea and tried to do it. First a simple guessing game (you had to guess the number and it would return whether you're above or below), a few websites, then a program to manage my homework which scheduled it to be as lazy as possible, taking into account free slots between classes. I still first have the idea and then try to implement it, learning by doing is what works for me (also applies to math. The lectures are important and so, but it falls and stands with the assignments you complete. Just don't try to do it alone).

When i was in school, programming was a hobby and not super important. I just did it irregular in the evening. But doing something with friends is more fun and programming is something that should not be done isolated, entire project fail because of that. Communication is key. I just did other things to learn how to work in a team.
Honestly I read this as the Atlantic's sad struggle for survival.

I once considered a print subscription since their writing quality was high and they weren't as high brow add the New Yorker, but a lot of their output over the past few years had been embarrassingly desperate.
I agree.

What I see we have now is lots of bricks - often overly problem-specific (and it's important to stress this; a lot of things that get called "AI" in the news is really lots of compute thrown at super specific heuristics). To call it AI, we still need to connect them together into a system that can use those components to learn and solve problems it didn't see before, without bricking itself in the process.
Cuba goes online with Internet connection to 2,000 homes
Something that really bothers me about the sentiment expressed in this article is that computer manufacturers are looking to fit people's specific use cases. I see it all the time, especially on tech sites, where people want to complain that Apple (or whatever tech company is being questioned) has abandoned them because of X, Y, or Z since they no longer offer some kind of functionality that was useful to a person. People seem to have this idea that Apple needs to continue to offer certain features because they did offer them in the past and people created workflows around those features. In reality, Apple is going to keep the features that people buy their products for.

Just look at the number of people in these comments complaining that Apple axed the 17" MBP. While I agree that there may be a use case and a segment of the population that could make use of a 17" laptop, they obviously didn't sell enough of them to make it worthwhile. The response to this is usually "well, they just lost me as a customer completely now" as if that's supposed to sway Apple into saying "You're right! We should keep building and sourcing components for a computer that less and less people are using". I'm sure Apple loses some money and some customers from the lack of a 17" laptop, but that obviously doesn't outweigh the number of people that are willing to switch to another one of their computers.

Vote with your wallets. Look at what the computers can do and buy them if they work for you. If not, go somewhere else and buy a competing product. If enough people do that, companies like Apple will notice. If not enough people do it, then you're in a small demographic that it doesn't make sense to cater for. Yes, they may lose a long time "loyalist", but it doesn't really make sense for people to be loyal to a specific product. You can be loyal to a company that continues to make products that you find value in, but to base your livelihood and your loyalty on a product seems misguided.
Placement new isn't obscure or strange, it's in all those red books.

You may not use it, but you can appreciate it's very useful if you want that fine grained control that you're using c++ for in the first place.

Most of the other examples are just pure weirdness that you should never use. The kind you find in online employment exams.
I entirely sympathize. Over time, I've gradually come to the same conclusion as Bruce Schneier in Data and Goliath: regulation and legislation are the only way to make sure that surveillance works in the interests of the people, not against them. It should be possible for a society to decide what its surveillance is and is not used for.

The problem that we currently have in the US and the UK is that there is a total breakdown of trust between the state and the citizenry. The government does not trust the people it obstensibly serves, and lies to them. Many people generally are apathetic and disorganized (proud individualists). It's the latter part that means that decisions are likely to go against the interests of the population, and this problem extends well beyond surveillance.

I should have originally mentioned, it's possible for CCTV -- without good legislation -- to have almost no utility for individuals. This is what the linked article demonstrates; corporate surveillance protects corporate interests.

All this said, I remain optimistic about the prospect for change. 2016 beat the political apathy out of me.
Christmas Terror: It Is Possible That We Have a Dangerous Criminal Around
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It might be interesting to consider how and whether time is relevant to computation. For example-- does time have an arrow on a computer?

It does, for at least two reasons:
1) Computation physically produces heat and increases entropy.
2) Many operations lose information -- for example XOR's can't be run backwards to reproduce the original inputs.

People have tried to tackle both issues with reversible computing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

Someone even wrote a programming language that was (logically) time-reversible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(time-reversible_computi...
The issue is that of management. The management profession has taken over hospitals and it runs those according to management practices. Overworked doctors are a result of (bad) management, and nothing else.
Better coverage from Krebs at [1]. But not much more hard info.

Maybe this will make the video ad industry unprofitable. One can only hope.

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/12/report-3-5m-in-ad-fraud-...
Many similar vehicles are available in Europe. They just don't like them as much as Americans do.
Journalism's sad struggle for relevance.
Lifting Up Projects That Matter: Decentralized Ad Networks VC and Case for DAOs
'The housing bust appears bigger than the boom' even after 7 years of recovery
Google's focus is distributed systems and ML, both of which they're blowing MSR out of the water on.
I'm not talking about the group or the team. I'm talking about the contribution that each person considers their primary value-add to the company. Every worker will say of their own class of workers "this company would fall apart immediately without us", exposing at least an implied, though it's often explicit, belief that the class of contributions they are personally making are the most valuable.

The issue is not "My engineering group is most important". The issue, rather, is "My engineering group, and consequently the company, would cease to exist if I stopped performing my core competency".

In the case of managers, this core competency is schmoozing. Thus, when the engineering management must choose between engineers who advocate a better/safer/more effective engineering path and their bosses who advocate not that, they will choose to schmooze and give their bosses good news that generates tingly feelings rather than bad news that generates angry feelings.

This is where the manager puts his craft into play. The goal is to manipulate the engineering team into a set of compromises that will allow the manager to generate good feelings for the bosses. Because the manager is not an engineer himself, he doesn't understand the ramifications of these compromises and/or whether it's actually the correct and wise way to proceed. Yet, he will still feel that he has saved the company (and possibly his team's paycheck) for exercising his core competency: manipulating subordinates into taking uncomfortable shortcuts while keeping the bosses satisfied. Middle management is a massive distorter.
I don't understand everyone's response to literally everything Nintendo does ever.

The stock drops like 15% in a weekend, because Super Mario Run came out and made a ton of money...? It's got numbers comparable to Pokemon Go, which tripled Nintendo's stock price and Nintendo only owns 1/3 of Pokemon, but Run brings it down? And it's not even on Android, which makes up what, 80% of all mobile devices? (I know, not in the US, but still...)

It's like someone writes an article about how gamers don't like a specific design decision, and all of a sudden Nintendo is about to go out of business?

Nobody talks about Nintendo's successes, like Pokemon Sun/Moon kicking ass, Amiibo still selling like hotcakes, the Switch coming out with tons of first and third party support, game sellers and game makers endorsing the Switch as something awesome. Who was the king of the last console wars? Pretty sure it was the Wii.

Can you even name a famous video game character, other than Sonic, who isn't a Nintendo brand? Can your kids?

Enough of this bullshit. Nintendo isn't going anywhere.
Non-profit foundation.

I'm definitely a friendly PITA. Most of my coworkers get it, though some definitely think that I'm just creating more work for myself. It's really only the IT director who is so defensive, and unfortunately he has the power to back it up. HR goes out of their way to find answers to questions, and my immediate coworkers are really driven.
100 Marketing Growth Hacks Learned from 5 Years as a Startup
Go isn't even a product of Google research. We're in a thread talking about AI research. I'm comparing Google's ML work to Microsofts.
I recognise your handle from the favesound react/redux app!
Partially true, and Joe Armstrong (creator of erlang) makes similar arguments. But that doesn't work well for everything.

Erlang is more clear about their assumptions and goals. They don't claim to have an amazing new GC, they just say they have a simple generational GC, and that's all they need because they assuming many small heaps.
I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.
This is more trivia than the kind of knowledge that implies understanding. Also needs an update:

> 14. How many Supreme Court justices are there?

:(
This may only be sort of relevant, but I write a math/programming blog on which I implemented a (very inefficient) elliptic curve crypto library from first principles. This includes all the math background, and implementations of a few working protocols. It might be a good starting point if you're looking for resources like this (exposition-wise, not in terms of a practical crypto solution).

https://jeremykun.com/2014/02/08/introducing-elliptic-curves...
Unfortunately, it will never get adopted...
I can see the "built in Firebug" user interface building in front of my eyes. The top bar appears and a good 100-300 msec later the second bar with the tabs draw. Toggle F12 mutliple times, it's slow every time (you'd think it's not necessary to redraw everything and that this window could be cached somewhere?). I'm on 50.1.0 Windows 7 x64

With "Electrolysis" isn't that supposed to run even faster than the Firebug add on ?
Probably not. The reason they payments appear to work to increase accuracy is because the possibility of a payment motivates critical thinking abilities--what Daniel Kahneman, author of _Thinking Fast and Slow_ would refer to as "system 2".

As described in the book, system 1 is effortless and automatic; it produces the first thought to come to mind when attempting to answer a question. It is good at pattern matching and associative memory. However, when faced with a difficult question, often times the best it is capable of is to answer a different, easier question instead.

System 2, on the other hand, is the source of effortful, logical thought. It requires deliberate effort to engage and because of this is often described as "lazy". In everyday experience, we rely on system 1 most of the time, and most of the time that works well and is sufficient. An example is reading: an experienced reader rarely needs to sound out the individual letters of each word, instead perceiving entire words and phrases at once; that's system 1 at work.

Now, if you ask someone to answer an objective question that has a partisan aspect to it, system 1 will immediately provide an answer (without you even asking it to, and regardless of whether system 1 is actually capable of providing an accurate answer). In this case, it's likely that system 1 is actually answering a question which is superficially similar to but not the same as the one that was asked (e.g., "is this my tribe" instead of "did deficits increase or decrease during the Clinton administration").

At this point, unless a person chooses to engage system 2, they are likely to accept the only answer at hand, the one suggested by system 1. The possibility of receiving a payment for an objectively accurate answer provides motivation for engaging system 2.
Well not to dispute some of your points but let me introduce another concept here. That is the act of 'forced savings'. And example of this is when you build equity in something that doesn't appear to be a good idea in the long run financially when compared to another alternative.

Ok here is an example. Let's say that your home that you are paying a mortgage on offers a 5% increase in value per year (totally made that up) vs. putting the money in a money market that pays 6% per year (definitely totally made that up). On the surface the money market is a much better return let's stipulate and observe. After all you have liquidity and I will even further assume that the 6% is guaranteed. But wait a second. If the money is tied up in a house you can't spend it. In the money market you can. So the house is forced savings and in the end you might very well end up with more, all else equal.

I say this as someone who just took cash that I had and bought a sort of expensive car by the way. Realizing that if I had the money in more real estate (which I also own) I most likely wouldn't have bought the car (since I don't like to finance or lease even though in theory it can make more sense financially).
> Speaking of the builtin tools, I found an old announcement about the Page Inspector 3D View which I recently wondered what happened to since it disappeared not long after it was introduced. Apparently it's available as an addon instead now so you can still have it

Unfortunately, tilt (or 3D View) does not work with e10s (multiprocess) enabled. There's a bugreport/issue somewhere at bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=937166

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1114959
I recently switched because I need something with some GPU horsepower. I was pleasantly surprised with Windows 10 dark theme + http://cmder.net
But as a data point, you could do it 10 years ago. On a cheap desktop PC. And without Internet connection or cloud computing.

Source: around 2006 I made a Star Trek-like music control system with Microsoft Speech API and an electret microphone hand-soldered to a long cable and an audio jack. With ~30 minutes of training on my voice it worked as reliably in noisy environment as Google works for me now.
> followed (presumably!) by happiness

Baby blues and postnatal depression are common, even among people who've been through fertility treatment. Indeed, those people may find it harder to seek help because of the assumptions that they must be happy after all that struggle.

(Also, about 1 in 10 men have postnatal depression.)
Just wanted to update this thread to lets folks know that AWS reached out and helped us find a solution for our MOOC students. I've updated the post with this information.
Really ? Can you tell me the name of the mega corp you work for. All of them have some shady activities that never reach the media.
A laundry-folding robot was programmed to push the limits of machine learning
Search (elastic/solr), Cassandra, presto, and most other java backend storage and data processing engines need 20+Gb (at least) to be mildly useful. It's not uncommong to go with 64gb+ heaps there too.

Microservices/API won't help with lowering these.