skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's cool, but what's in it for me?

That's probably the last question they want writers asking because it's a very hard one for them to answer.

So why are you publishing on Medium? You could pay for hosting and keep total control of what you publish and how it's presented. Instead, you give control to Medium and what do you get in return? You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth?
How Constraints Can Be Advantageous in Business
They only tracked Android devices then as iOS does not return the MAC address to WIFI.
I haven't seen the site from the link at the time it was accessible, but analyzing the link it seems the site contained the text of the book "Commentaries on Living" by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_Living

Moreover, it probably linked to the chapter "Loneliness" from the first book, which can be found online in various forms, including on this nice site (Chapter 42 `Loneliness'):

http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-tex...

Also see my other comment here for the context.
Actually, EM was very much talking about the merging of individuals with machines. I can't take the following quote in any other way.

"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.

I find it terrifying that people are out there who are so myopically focused on merging machines and people. The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire. I'm not saying they won't be helped by data analysis. I am saying that quicker analysis of terabytes more data isn't going to do it.
I cant help but notice you and someone else are here both promoting this "Moloch" stuff and that particular website slatestarcodex

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13636150&goto=threads%...

why?

Frankly i don't feel it's productive or rational to attach the name of a biblical villain to new technology.
So, minus the thing you don't recommend people use, there is no advantage to this over TweetNacl?
What Transport for London Learned from Tracking Your Phone on the Tube
I have been using it for a few years, and I miss it when I am working on github projects :/
To me this

<He said the disruption to people whose job it is to drive will take place over the next 20 years, after which 12 to 15 percent of the global workforce will be unemployed.
"The most near term impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars … That is going to happen much faster than people realize and it's going to be a great convenience,"

Was more important.
You should empathize with the reader.
You need a lot of capital to get involved in the above, no?
Bot domains will become available shortly
Yes indeed, it's a place for constructive conversation.

There's no problem with humour in your comment but that shouldn't be the point of your comment (at least IMO).

Before anything else read the guidelines, they're short, easy to understand (IMO) and practical.

It's never a game for points.

Before voting on an article (link) make sure you've read enough of the article to actually place value (or lack there of) in it, again it's not a game for points.

If someone is rude, overly negative towards someone else without being constructive it's totally within anyone's rights to politely refer them to the guidelines.

Practise empath and respect for others regardless of their personal opinions (as long as they are framed as opinions!).

Learn from anything you were wrong / mistaken about and better yet - share what you learnt and how you discovered you were mistaken with others, that can really help communities prosper.

Tldr; Read the guidelines, if you're going to be critical - be constructive (which is a great thing!), learn and share with others not for points, but for the greater good and practise empathy.
Language exists in this medium - language that computers cannot mimic or understand the way humans do. There is also intonation, pauses, etc.
hide seen links on firefox with: https://github.com/GMouron/HNMarkAllRead
(useful to also have some stylish CSS that colors actually visited links different than "seen" links)

So useful I can't stand browsing on my phone any more because I'd have to see the same * again on my desktop.
PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks
ProtonMail is "good enough" for me.
Ask HN: What is an algorithm design job like?
So I've had some rough times since dealing with some recent company events and was looking out toward a new type of job that deals with pure algorithm design (image processing in this case). I'm a bit worried that I won't be prepared mentally for the right mindset of this kind of job since right now I'm just used to mindlessly making reports and addressing tickets and the like.

What does a job like this entail? Of course I've been reviewing all my algorithm books and basic maths (concrete mathematics, linear algebra, diff Eq, etc.) so I'm not worried of that stuff, but I'm curious: can anyone that does this sort of work elaborate on what your typical day-to-day is like?

Thanks!
Self serving comments more than anything. I mean of course he is going to say things like this, he owns companies that are investing in ML/AI.
> "In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans would be useless, so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk."

Useless for what? Working their jobs and feeding families? Sure, if we assume that current capitalistic structure is going to persist, many humans will either need to be eliminated or otherwise sustained through some of form of welfare. But why must we assume that?
Why SDLC May Be Destroying Your Productivity and What You Can Do
If nobody visits it, they'll shut it down.
Implementing content aware image resizing
The debilitating impact of query and render latency on analytical applications
>“If you want to lose your religion, make friends with the priest.”

Sounds quite puritanical a view.

Even if we consider Christianity, a priest can and will be (or have been) as flawed as any man, including even a hypocrite, greedy, murderer or worse, and even all kinds of original Christian doctrine (except the BS about the Pope being some kind of super-saint) agrees with that. Heck, the very first person believed to go to heaven in the Christian faith was the murdered/thief/etc next to Christ on the cross.
See Diaspora by Greg Egan :)
Ask HN: How would you improve Reddit? Is it possible to make a better competitor?
Interesting to see JK on HN. I went to the first boarding school he founded, Rishi Valley, in southern India. Certainly the most transformative part of my life, although we weren't exposed to much of his philosophy. He also founded the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California.
I was looking at my blood work: cholesterol and fasting blood sugar. I had the worst numbers of my life.
I'm a little concerned that the emerging consensus in question may be led by you, as you are a famous information security expert and people take your concerns and views very seriously. When you mention your view about this here or on Twitter, lots of people quarrel with you about it (some of them engaging with it seriously). A number of people have been persuaded by your arguments but a number of people keep strongly disagreeing.

But it's possible that more people agree with you and fewer disagree in contexts where people have more information security expertise or where more of them work on it professionally.
They are probably aware of the pending shift in attitudes with diet sodas, ie more people becoming aware of [1] that they realize that regulation of sodas will lead to regulations of diet sodas a few short years later.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/08/the-awful-truth...
There should be a search mode for IT professionals. That way, things like curly braces, numbers, and non-words are still treated as meaningful.
Ah, so like prohibition ? Cause that worked so well for alcohol and drugs ?
> The emerging consensus among experts

"conseunsus"? a few blog posts about some bad user experience with GnuPG / the PGP ecosystem is, at best, just an (re)emerging topic on HN, not the end of email encryption. OpenPGP implementations may not be the easiest encryption software out there (its usability issues have been discussed for two decades now) but that's simply because PGP was not designed to be used by the laity, which, doesn't necessarily mean that you need to be an expert to use it: my friends and I learnt how to encrypt, decrypt and sign emails when we were still in high-school. And while you probably need to read a manual (something that may sound draconian by the current standards of the software industry) to learn how to use gpg, there is no other cryptography tool as powerful, versatile and secure as this.

Why bother? because e-mail is federated, Signal, WhatsApp, and Wire are not. Because you don't need to put all your trust on a device like a mobile phone, or a company like Facebook. Because you don't even need e-mail nor Internet to send encrypted mails to some journalist, for instance. But please don't get me wrong: I really appreciate the effort of messaging apps like Signal for casual conversations, but if my own life was at stake I wouldn't even touch my phone (except for taking out its battery).
> and are all staring at glowing screens of varying sizes

I don't know.. whenever I peek most of the times it happens to be facebook/whatsapp/instagram/email. To me it seems to be more of an addiction of some kind, perhaps I'm wired differently because I like deep focus and totally abhor random notifications and alerts and don't peek as much into my devices
1. It's not as addictive as sugar
2. Significant number of people don't like diet sodas
My fasting blood sugar rose as well as my cholesterol levels.
Partisan flamebait takes threads on partisan tangents. Please don't do that here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632981 and marked it off-topic.
We're going to change the color. We've been hearing feedback that it's a little hard on the eyes.
The Real Problem with Asking Visa Applicants to Hand Over Social Media Passwords
>The N-Body on this site

As noted elsewhere in here, the C implementation is using SSE, whereas the Rust implementation isn't. It's just as much of an unfair comparison as the one you're describing. :P
Is that to be explained by legality rather than morality, though?
Ask HN: Storing and Searching Volumes of Text
Many companies have a firehose of text they need to store and search. Even if it's just log files. From PostgreSQL/MySQL + Fulltext search to distributed filesystems + multinode grep instances, to TiDB + sphinx, to cassandra + elasticsearch, and many more in-between and mixed. There are a lot of options for both storage and search of text. Yet it's something we are all finding more need for as we store social network reactions, technical documents, forum posts, emails, company documents, error logs, and many other text-based data points.

Can you share your company's database design and why this design works for you (or why it was chosen)?
For a real peak at the future, study Roman history.
Seems like a dumb reason to flag something, especially for a new account that's only posted two rather interesting articles here.
Thank you! I never realized I could do this for some reason. I always restored from snapshots.
> the way your brain tricks you into thinking you make "free decisions"

It's my own experience that I have Free Will[1] without my brain tricking me. The idea of free will is not without controversy, though, and we could argue at length of whether it's truly free in the classical sense, or a mix of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
I'd put higher odds on a multi billionaire being able to successfully colonize mars than be able to solve poverty or make an appreciable impact on corruption.
I don't know what you mean when you say "evolution". Certainly, the evolution of mammals shows cooperation as a common, viable strategy - just look at all the species operating in packs/flocks/herds. The little I know of simple organism evolution also seems to suggest cooperation(symbiosis) is an important part in evolving into a complex organism.

But the best part about evolution is that we don't need to replicate blind mutation and strict fitness functions, we can use the proven-to-work strategies as our springboard. And the best part about AI is that we have no ethical issues simulating millions of evolutionary iterations of "bloodshed" until we arrive at an AI that is acceptable to our ethics.
How to build cross-platform mobile apps with JSON
I think people were more likely (or should have been, IMO) upset about the ugliness of the 996-[1] "fried egg" headlights, not that they were the same as the headlights on the first-gen Boxster.

[1] - 996 was the internal model designation for that generation of 911, which was being designed at the same time as the original 986 series Boxster.
Wow, really cool. Do you have more documentation about the ISA bus implementation? :-)
Fighting Fake News with SEO
Good for you. However some of us live in the countries that are quite close to it, and it hasn't been that long when we had Russian soldiers stationed here.

So either "contained in its den" means eating up half of Europe (which just isn't good enough) or there's plenty to be wary about.
WhatsApp doesn't just support¹ Signal's end-to-end encryption, it enables it by default for everyone with no option to turn it off. It successfully prevented my government² from decrypting user messages even with court orders.

It's a major improvement over whatever bolted-on security email has.

¹ https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

² https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-...
Aside from the various recognition+analytical+creative tasks that are only tractable on the human brain ... biology doesn't have much going for it.

It uses carbon, yes, but only in the structurally-weaker forms; e.g. no nanotubes (ergo flimsy skin+muscle, brittle bones, flimsy cell structure in general) and no diamond (ergo weak fingernails and teeth). And it makes no use whatsoever of carbon's heavier quadruple-bonding cousin, silicon.

Oh, and without a nonbiological computer, a human brain has no coprocessor to turn-to for tasks which are intractable for the human brain. (e.g. nontrivial arithmetic computation)

Energy efficiency? That hasn't been a concern at all ever since the Western world got good enough at food production^W^W calorie production to turn obesity into an epidemic (from a status symbol).
Any merging with machines (which I'm very much against) would have to be "wireless." That is, injecting or implanting chips or bots is a bad idea.

The AI age is overblown. The only fallout would be the automation of repetitive jobs.
Disqus Ads Are No Longer Free to Disable
Amtrak is the contracted operator for a number of commuter rail services, such as MARC. Not sure if that counts as "by or for Amtrak".

The real issue is that often operationally, a passenger train has to stop for a freight train. If you have a 1000' siding that you have to have a 6 car passenger train pass a 30 car freight train at, the passenger train is going to have to stop for the freight train. That doesn't even take into consideration other factors like how freight dispatchers don't like to stop hazmat/"hot" trains for safety reasons.
Can you design structures that last forever?
Not completely, but somewhat, yes. Gandhi is a terrible example of how to be a husband, but he nevertheless managed to teach nonviolent protest and help liberate a country. MLK also did some philandering, but it doesn't detract from what he did for civil rights. It's easy to be dismissive of a cardboard priest, but if you had an actual human in mind, it would become less black and white.

If you need your spiritual, religious, philosophical leader to be pure as the driven snow, you're going to get some pretty inhuman advice from your leader. Most of us have faults and things we struggle with. If someone doesn't, how do they relate, how do they help?
Ask HN: Which websites do you submit your blog posts?
I submit my blog posts to HackerNews, Reddit & Flipboard. Which of them do you submit to? Also do you use any tools for auto submission?
Generally sink holes like what is affecting the spillway are caused by rain and flooding. So I'd say it is likely that the inspections all came up clear for the past X years, then the rain started, the sinkhole formed and the reservoir started filling at the same time.
> Python does not use "issues" feature for good.

Interesting, I didn't even know you could disable 'Issues' for a Github repo. Why do I come across so many projects where the dev lets random issues pile up which they clearly have no intention of responding to, then?
>>Whatever problems the EU indeed might have, its role in keeping the peace in a continent that has seen war almost uninterruptedly over the course of its history cannot be emphasized enough.

I think you are confusing the EU with NATO.
Or my favorite: life forms that have spent millions of years decomposing and transforming into oil are drilled out of the ground, refined, hauled somewhere, turned into plastic, hauled somewhere else to be formed into a spoon shape, hauled halfway across the globe to reach your table/store/restaurant... just to be thrown out without being used.
Specs for first Intel 3D XPoint SSD: so-so transfer speed, awesome random I/O
Even worse: users of TweetNaCl can easily switch over to the real deal (performance-wise) — NaCl or libsodium — without changing anything, while with this library they'll have to grab pieces of optimized code from various sources, and then dig into insides Ed25519 implementation to replace SHA-512 with BLAKE2b. Unless the author implements an optimized version of Monocypher, of course.
Molecule from malaria parasite attracts hungry mosquitoes
Is this any different from the educative account [0] that posts nothing but educative.io links? If that account is fine I don't see why this one would not be OK as well. The rules here are not the same as on Reddit. There are no rules specifically about self-promotion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=educative
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630087 and marked it off-topic.
Lots of people don't like diet soda and would stop drinking soda rather than switching to diet. The realistic outcome of heavy tax on sugary soda is a reduction in the amount of soda consumed. (Which I'd probably call a win, though obviously not a win-win.)
The non existence of other orgs fighting for second ammendment rights, even if it were true, is a pretty weak argument for supporting this particular one, especially given that you agree there are good reasons not too do so.
There are more types than classes
Yes, the programming is the fun part so if you don't want to design a new computer from ground up, a kit or a complete computer is to recommend :-)
I also don't work with VS Release Candidates for production code, as such I think it is faire to use only stable Rust.
I would suggest Aquapel instead (lasts way longer, water starts flying off at lower speeds). I love it. (http://www.aquapel.com/)
>Elon Musk is a little arrogant due to his success in business and likes to make 'fun' predictions based on his very limited understanding of whatever field he happens to be talking about. He sounds like an eager undergrad student that tries to demonstrate his genius to his professors and the class.

This actually reminds me more of Thiel than Musk.
> they have legitimate complaints... we'll raise minimum wage to 15 an hour and give you free community college' and rejecting that offer

So should we throw our sabots at the microcontrollers and robotic arms? Or what?

>...free community college

I suppose those people have college degrees?

Oh, no?

So basically they want a well-paying middle class job but feel they're entitled to that wage without getting any education.

Feelings of resentment and entitlement aren't mutually exclusive with "going dumb". In fact, they usually co-exist.
For the first part - it'll be decided soon I guess.

For the second part, I still believe you're getting too distracted. The US is a huge country with a lot of diversity. If you apply at YC and magically get in, you'd have to come to the san francisco bay area. Here, it's pro Obama. The large majority of California is Democrat. It is an extremely diverse place. This is where tech startups do business so I'd see it as a distraction if you don't get impacted by #1 and still believe the US is not a great place to start a company coming from another country.
> What's the benefit of decentralization? Not being snarky, I just don't really see it. What does a decentralized PGP email have that I don't have with my Signal Messenger?

It's a lot harder to block. You can have anyone run a mail server on any port (SSLed if necessary), which means you can use it for secure communications inside any "great firewall" (like that of China or Kazakhstan), or even in a country/region that's been cut off from the Internet (which we've seen happen for various amounts of time in Syria, Crimea, Turkey...). WhatsApp/Signal have a very limited version of this by getting makers of popular HTTPS services to work with them, but those services are subject to their own commercial pressures (all the big names have been known to collaborate with e.g. the Chinese authorities in the past) and attackers always have the option of just blocking those services outright.

It rules out a whole class of attacks involving compromising the central servers and tricking the client into redoing an initial exchange. If the Signal client is implemented correctly this shouldn't be an issue, but it's an extra attack surface that simply doesn't exist for OpenPGP.

Also compared to Signal et al it's more practical (though still difficult) to use pseudonymously, because a pseudonymous email address is eaiser than a pseudonymous phone number. Signal advocates talk about having deniability because your messages aren't provably signed by you, but I don't think that advantage exists in any reasonable threat model - if we're worried about a state adversary hunting down everyone who corresponded with dissident x, they'll find it easier to track down a phone number than an email address, and once they've tracked down one of x's correspondents (i.e. someone who has a phone with a number that exchanged messages with x) they're not going to be bothered by the fact that they don't have signed mathematical proof that this is the same person who corresponded with x.

> Signal was designed from the ground up with UX in mind, and made several important trade offs for it

Such as? At the protocol level I mean.
Clustering of genomes reveal post-colonial North America
9 logging best practices based on hands-on experience
I have read the article, several times, thank you very much. Don't take the easy way out by dismissing the opposition as ignorant.

>So yeah, there is a reason they didn't do that. The hardware they're using specifically makes it difficult to do the verification you want to do. Which is directly related to foiling the kind of attacks they want to foil.

Then they've chosen the wrong hardware. This doesn't make it more secure, it just explains why their product is insecure.

>I think we have the same goal, but you have a conviction that open source stops "obvious back doors." It in no way would help that at all in this case. The hardware is configured before it is shipped, then locked in a way designed to prevent rewriting or inspection. You have no rational basis for the belief that the source code on a website and the binary a malicious and deceptive actor would deploy to the hardware are the same thing.

I already addressed this - reproducable builds. I don't have to take anyone's word for it.