skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why it cannot be both? I agree that me bringing in the argument that the number of "worst case" cases is low compared to the number of people that contract the virus was outside the topic of the discussion. I just obliquely wanted to address the issue that polio is often brought up as an absolutely devastating and dangerous disease, and yet generally speaking it is not so.

Here is a curious link to an article from 1961 with memories still fresh from the polio outbreaks of the middle of the 20th century and shortly after the polio vaccines were introduced.

Note the reserved tone which is so at odds with the current day thinking about the success of the polio vaccine. The whole article is worth a read, I will just provide a quote here that is pertinent to our discussion.

"Evaluating the true effectiveness of the Salk vaccine and the new oral vaccines has been difficult for several reasons. Polio is a relatovely rare disease in the United States. Because so few persons get it in its paralyzing form, success of an immunizing agent is hard to determine.
The definition of polio also has changed in the last six or seven years. Several diseases which were often diagnosed as polio are now classified as aseptic meningitis or illnesses caused by one of the Coxsackie or Echo viruses. The number of polio cases in 1961 cannot accurately be compared with those in, say 1952, because the criteria for diagnoses have changed."

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1961/03/05/page/62/articl...
The difference is a "close call" on a bike has a far higher chance of being lethal than a "close call" in a car.
I do wonder how many outside of crypto circles know about SHA-2 circa 2004.
Thanks. Right.

The wheat bread I eat I believe has some whole wheat flour in it.
Yeah but you're not saying ignited a reaction, you're saying ignited people. I guess it would make sense metaphorically for some profoundly moving thing but then it just seems overwrought. Zuck, Igniter!
They say they are 'legal' and perform 'stress tests', and 'distributed performance analysis' or 'real world testing'.

Granted I'd never use something as shady sounding as ddos.xyz, but they are plenty of legit companies that do the exact same things.

You'd need a bunch of manual review, and even then it'd become a "we think they're shady" instead of a "they're objectively sharing known illegal content" like it is with illegal pornography or copyright content.

Cloudflare understandably doesn't want to get into the business of being a company that manually reviews the internet (in how many languages?), and boots people who don't meet its tests.
Ask HN: How do you offload routine data works at your workplace?
Do you use services like TaskRabbit,Rev,etc.. for outsourcing your daily data works?What major obstacles have you faced using these plaforms (if any)?
I am likewise perplexed why "cryptographic hash functions are unnecessary in the absence of an attacker" is such a difficult concept for you to grasp.

Well, if we're going to be dicks to each other about it I'll try to explain what I think appears to be difficult for you to grasp. :) If you were throwing together something like git in a hurry you'd want a hash that

Lets you not have to think about collisions at all even if:

The collisions are by mere chance

The collisions arise by non-malicious accident

The collisions arise from malicious inputs [obviously, that implies an attacker but it also falls under 'I just don't want to think about collisions']

And right there, you grab the first non-completely-broken, not-too-giant, not-too-slow crypto hash around and get on with whatever else you had in mind. And this, to me, seems like the right call, especially since if collisions did eventually pop up, it'll probably be one generative collision and your entire system won't suddenly implode just because it exists. You'll have some time to fix stuff.

Again, to go back to the original point: Linus's argument is that cryptographic functions have unique properties that make them specifically useful in non-security contexts. He's wrong. They don't. The non-cryptographic constructions he namedropped then glossed over work fine in these contexts.

No argument there. Maybe I misunderstood 'Linus said something wrong' as 'Linus did something horribly wrong' and we're arguing over nothing?
> They break labor and transport laws flagarantly.

This was addressed in the second half of my post. Most people didn't really have a problem with this part for a long time.
Electronic Engineer to Be Deported Before Graduation
This seems like to me (with little text) you need to build that fire back up.

If you are good at your job and they pay you well enough, just keep it. Keep doing well at your job. In your leisure time, start working on passion projects. Something that you have been thinking about for a long ago and/or understand well. If this passion project turns into something amazing that you can run-away with, profit from, and bring you more power to change, do it.

There are a million things to be motivate by. There are people with serious problems in the world, like dying from thirst.

Just find out what you what to achieve and find out if you are capable of doing it.

Watch the real news. Find out about how terrible things are. Ask yourself if there is any small thing that you can do.
It's clear how Uber botched this. That traffic signal is not at an intersection. It's a heavily used mid-block crosswalk.[1] It's a very well marked crosswalk, with six redundant full size traffic signals all visible in the direction the Uber vehicle was traveling. This indicates Uber's system only looks for mapped traffic signals.

SF has a database of their traffic signals, and this signal is listed. It's object #902.[2] Apparently Uber gets their data from somewhere else.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/dzxEaaqWaAC2
[2] https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/Map-of-Traffic-Signals...
I'm currently using redis in a pair of applications, one of which also uses pub/sub. I have many other applications which would benefit from the caching layer that redis provides, and since they currently have none there really isn't an obstacle to testing another solution.
>> because you'll realize you're a very small cog that can be easily replaced

This very thing struck me when I was watching a video recently about Ph.D.s at Google [1]. You would think, well, a Ph.D. working at Google - what could possibly be a more fun job? Apparently, to conduct even smallish experiments, they need to make sure that the code runs on infrastructure which is basically created to handle huge scale. I couldn't locate the exact place in the video again, but couldn't help but feel that this takes away so much of the fun of working on research problems in the first place.

Obviously, if you disagree with my view, then you would thrive in that environment! Given how many times the research problems I tackle (as side projects, for fun) end up going absolutely nowhere, I would absolutely not want to invest any effort in things like readable and scalable code and such.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ-IwnnjBy0
I'm in favor of net neutrality.. but lets be serious.. there are users who are far more "using" of their bandwidth than others. And any given company should have every right to sell/filter as necessary those users. But as to what content they filter, imho that's a different story.

But the two get muddled quite a bit.. and what happened between Verizon and Netflix is an outright shame, but I can kind of see both sides regardless of where I stand personally. The trouble is where to draw the line, and what lines to draw from a legal standpoint.

Drawing only from what I got from the article, they're only requiring these companies to be more transparent to their customers, and I'm all for that. I think the 100k customer break was probably reasonable, but even the 250k break won't affect the really big players in the space.

My bigger fear is where individual states are legislating against local communities/cities offering broadband.
I've been driving for Lyft to cover cash flow gaps in between freelance gigs. Nothing like sitting on my ass in traffic having inane conversations with strangers many hours a day to increase my motivation.
And Nevada, with stolen Google engineer!
Ask HN: I quit my job. Need advice
Dear HN'ers,

I have quit my job last week. I work in a typical MNC and the corporate culture just took the soul out of me and i decided i got to take a decision to take back control of my life. There was simply no plan B for me. I decided its now or never.

What 8 years of IT experience has shown me is that you are constantly thrown at the hottest problem / issue and asked to resolve them. Rarely did i feel the sense of accomplishment and i didn't feel that under such pressure to deliver there was any scope for mastery of a subject. Everyone has just 24 hours in a day, and all the time was taken up by the job + commute + daily grind. Not complaining as such, but i had to face the truth.

Shallow work was prevalent everywhere, and no scope for solid work. It left a void in me, and i crave fulfillment.

What i wish to do is instead search for work instead of a job (i deliberately differentiate here). Currently i can manage to stay afloat for 3 months with the savings i have. So any guidance on how i could make this time fruitful would be highly appreciated and i would be thankful. I would also appreciate any guidance on how to design my career and work life so i wouldn't find myself facing this again.

i have worked on linux (have basic sysadmin skills) + shell + perl + python ( actively learning currently ).

PS : I have self-taught all i know about development.
> Motivate yourself by either pulling up those around you

This has the added side affect of indicating your ability as a leader, which may in turn lead to satisfying your desired leadership and decision making criterion.
It's the old happiness/gratitude inversion. The trap is thinking you will be grateful once you're happy. The truth is being grateful creates happiness. And your example of pulling others up is a fine expression of gratitude.
This Tiny College Town Is the Epicenter of a Food Revolution in Coal Country
How do you define simplistic terms? If you were hungry and someone gave you enough money to eat, that would be a solution regardless of how corrupt your government.

I don't know where you live but I'm in the U.S. where it's obvious the number of jobs is going to decline relative to the number of people who need them. Resources won't necessarily decline along with the jobs so I see this as not just applicable to the developing world and not just to solve poverty but to act as a stabilizing force.

On what do you base your claim this is a dumb attempt to guilt people? You're suggestion that's the motivation of those who are backing and implementing this test?

I don't really understand the idea that no action should be taken unless these conditions are met and these conditions are always outside the reach of those who want to act so they shouldn't act because conditions aren't perfect?

I don't think anyone's claiming that testing UI's objective is to see if it will lead to a utopia, otherwise it's a no-go. No, we can't fix poverty if you define fix as a perfect solution that works always and everywhere but if perfect conditions had to be met before anyone acted nobody would do anything productive or useful.

I guess I find your line of argument strange because it does not appear to be founded on anything at all that's coherent, though I'm hoping you can alleviate that problem by explaining it coherently.
thx @mirimir
I think most of your questions can be answered by realizing that Bloomberg was founded in 1981, and they basically got a monopoly in financial data provision because there were no other options in 1981. That is why they have a custom monitor & keyboard: in the days before the IBM PC, everyone had a custom monitor & keyboard, because these things were not standardized. Bloomberg was a technologist & businessman before he was a politician; his business success gave him the money to run for office, his office doesn't force people to pay for Bloomberg.

The reason they're still a monopoly is because knowing how to navigate a Bloomberg is a critical skill for most finance professionals, and now that they have that skillset, they can be very productive moving around in it. A different (better?) UI would require they re-learn everything, which is not going to happen. And when financial professionals are making half a million a year, paying $24k/year for a terminal so that they can be productive isn't a bad investment.

(Source: have a couple friends at Bloomberg. One is in their UI department, and keeps having his proposals for better UIs shot down for business reasons. Also married a financial professional who had to use a Bloomberg in her days as a bond trader.)
i worked at a startup called addepar for several years, making software for asset managers.

addepar's a cool place, and i learned a ton there and made some good friends.

--

that said, my overwhelming impression of asset managers is that most capture more value than they add. fee-bearing mutual funds, family offices, financial advisors, hedge funds: few are worth their fees.

hedge funds, with their standard two-and-twenty fee structure, are especially bad. you could hardly design worse-aligned incentives, short of outright betting against your own clients.

two-and-twenty means 2% of assets under management every year plus 20% of any profit and 0% of any loss. why people agree to those terms is beyond me.

for example, running a strategy similar to a martingale, a negative-EV fallacy when done in a casino, can be incredibly positive-EV when you're a hedge fund manager. it produces streaks of above-market returns, where you keep doubling your AUM and rake in the fees, for however long that lasts.

when the crash happens, the managers walk away unscathed.

if you're interested in an entertaining story that starkly illustrates this dynamic, check out Long Term Capital Management.
> there are users who are far more "using" of their bandwidth than others.

Neutrality doesn't prohibit charging for utilization.
I don't understand this thread. He's not some saint. He's a member of the 1%. He's in the same circles as all of those investment bankers who benefited from the 2008 financial crisis while everyone else lost their homes.
Primarily, maintain your ability to learn new things, whether it be languages, tools, concepts, strategies, platforms. That's the abstract answer.

The concrete answer is the cloud. Learn what serverless microservices are, how to build them, deploy them, and integrate them into a large system. Cloud devops is already growing leaps and bounds and just like we needed to know our OS in the past, we're going to need to know devops in whatever cloud we're using (AWS, Azure, Google, ???).

Learn Lambda's and functional microservices. Learn Paas and Saas, learn how to use a tool like DynamoDB even if it doesn't fit your prejudices for a data store.

Learn unit testing. You should be able to unit test and integration test using mocks in any platform you need to work in.

Agile project management. Sprint planning, planning poker, kanban boards, choosing tasks vs. being given tasks, retrospectives...these are all important to learn.

Keep some semblance of knowledge of metal. What I mean is, write some low-level code to understand how memory works, how things work internally within a platform. It's not important to be an expert, but understanding some of the nuts and bolts of software engineering will make you a better programmer.

Listen to everyone without prejudice. I can't say this enough. Everyone has ideas and even though new ideas may not make any sense to you, keep an open mind.

Be inclusive. Always try to make people around you better at their jobs.

Manage your emotions. You can be passionate and sometimes even obstinate about solutions, but manage how you interact with people. The greatest success comes from moderate temperament.
This one is interesting to see the "statistical" other side of the industry vs machine-learning people. For example I don't think gradient descent is used once in that book.
It's more than news. It also provides real-time financial data, access to trading, and a way to securely communicate with other traders.

You can find some background here on what it does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal
Extra cores might help with that, Intel Quicksync might be even better or some GPU based video encoding.
And adsense. Well, I guess the adsense goes without saying.

But what else has Gooogle ever done for us?
On the other hand, publishing publicly will force you to fix every little detail.

For example, the most popular article on my blog is about the TCP "time wait" state on Linux. I knew for years how it worked and wanted for people to stop blindly use some sysctls. Therefore, I thought, what's best than a blog post to spread some awareness on this? But, for every sentence, I had to be sure that this was true. So, I checked, I tested. It took me a lot of time. I would never have done that if this was just for my drawer. My drawer never sets random sysctls and my drawer doesn't know better than me, nor it would shame me for telling incorrect stuff.

It's like publishing as an open source project: you have to be more rigorous in what you publish. There is some balance to find.
> Since the encryption key follows the # symbol, it is never sent to the server.

This doesn't seem like a safe idea to me. While it's true that browsers don't send the # part of a URL when fetching a page, you can use JavaScript to get the value (in fact that's what this webapp is doing).

So what is the mitigation if someone manages to XSS the website and start snarfing the encryption keys for everyone's messages?

Really cool idea BTW.
No, they shouldnt.
and lack of the rule of Law. and lack of a culture where the rule of law is respected. that's gotta be the difference between the US and Brazil. I hear their version of the FBI is basically terrified to go into favelas. In America, we are all terrified of the FBI and swat teams that very few of us try to pull shit. America has a culture and history of grabbing your briefcase and going to work at your profession. We are brainwashed by Eisenhower era film footage. As well as X-Files that sedates us into thinking--and probably rightfully so--that US intelligence, police, military etc will handle us if we get out of line. Over there it's very quite literally a jungle. There's no where to hide over here.

So I don't disagree with your points. It's just part of a larger picture. My points probably don't even complete that picture.

But for now, for me, it boils down to: inequality + a culture of being civilized.
Frank Abagnale World-Famous Con-Man, Explains Why Technology Won’t Stop Breaches
This post is pretty full of bad logic and could benefit from comparative benchmarks in place of supposition.

- One retailers sale price on one chip is a poor way to judge the relative value of 2 entire lines of products.

- the Intel i7 7700k is normally north of 350 which is what a lot of retailers are selling it for. There is no reason to suppose that one retailers temporary sale right now ought to be compared to the projected sale price of amd chips.

-This price is without cooler/paste amd 1700 includes both for 329 so most would end up paying almost 400 for Intel $70 more if you include the next item.

- Historically Intel motherboards have been more expensive and have been worthless as far as upgrading even to the very next generation of cpu. Amd motherboards are often upgradable.

- It would be more reasonable to compare it to the 1700 which has uses 2/3 the power to run twice the cores with substantially better multi core performance as much as 40% better in fact.

http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-1700-gaming-performance-benc...

While single core performance isn't quite as good if you followed pc gaming you would in fact know that either chip is going to be more than enough to keep up with any mid and most high end gpu setups you could throw at it.

In summary going Intel on your next mid to low high end gaming rig will probably cost you slightly more, use a lot more power, give you substantially worse performance and no better gaming performance.
Interesting comment below the article regarding a government-run programme in Brazil trying something similar:
"However, there is a trend of the part of these persons become dependent of this benefit and do not strive to change this situation..."

That was my immediate reaction after reading this. What about after the twelve years, when the donors ride off into the sunset? There are some encouraging stories there of participants using the money wisely, but not all will do so. You could argue that nobody is forcing them to participate, but it does seem at least a little ethically questionable. Particularly given the targeted demographic of a rural Kenyan community with (presumably - I could be wrong) low education levels.
Techies love a hype train, but Ryzen is genuinely important. Intel have had a near-total monopoly on high-performance CPUs for many years. This has led to a dismal stagnation in the CPU market. If you bought an i7-2600k six years ago, you have little reason to upgrade - an i7-7700k is only about 30% faster in most workloads.

If Ryzen is anywhere near as good as the benchmarks suggest, then Intel have got a lot of work to do. They'll need massive performance increases, huge price cuts or both to remain relevant. That's good news for everyone except Intel.
Why don’t software development methodologies work?
I use reST daily agree that reST itself a bit too complicated; it would be much better to have a conceptually simpler syntax, closer to that of Markdown. Also, some of their syntax choices look too artificial for a plain text format.

Yet for me reST is a clear winner, because it's extensible; it's relatively easy to a) write your own directives, substitution directives, and text roles and b) hook into the parser. For example, in my workflow I only use their parser with a few of my own extensions and only to get the parsed text as XML; once I got this, I continue with XSLT to transform it into what I need. (I use Python and lxml with my own extensions to XSLT as well, so I can, for example, manipulate files and update a whole directory tree right from XSLT.)

I think most of these tools would benefit if their parser was a separate component that could save the resulting tree into XML. (It would be ideal to have a configurable parser where you can tinker with the grammar.)
I wanted to come back to this thread to say I imported my bookmarks into https://pinboard.in/ and my bookmarks feel useable again, though I deleted a bunch once I could see how much crap I had in there.

I also fired up Feedly account as that's helpful too and I'd sort of forgotten about my account.

I'm thinking of testing out some more things as it seems like maybe there should be one more piece of the puzzle. Maybe that'll be pocket though I don't even remember what the interface is like or why I don't use it. Maybe no good reason at all.
Many of the things you might want to attach don't fit into the flush form factor. A credit card reader. An ultrasonic scanner for imaging. Various medical sensors.

A phone where you could clamp sizable accessories onto one end might be more useful.