skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Not enough competition. There are basically only four major appliance manufacturers in the world

I was browsing for a new refrigerator - my apartment has fitted appliances so there isn't really much choice, most stores here maybe 10 fitted vs 50+ free-standing. Anyway, one shop had a model by Electrolux, Zanussi and AEG next to each other, which are all brands of AB Electrolux - each model was exactly the same (looks and specs), except for the badge and the price :s
I second that. The basic models already have sufficient features, unless you urgently need a special fature (which 99% of people don't). I do not know about prices in other regions of the world, but in Germany you should get a descent Miele washing machine for about €800 (roughly US$ 900).
That it may be, but in git, SHA-1 is also used for authenticity. "Signing a commit" only authenticates one commit, and is considered to authenticate the state of the repository only insofar as it authenticates the SHA-1 references contained in the topmost commit.
what if that doesn't work?
I second this. In NZ most washers are top-loading, and I've never seen one that locks during operation. Instead, if you lift the lid while it is spinning, it engages some kind of emergency-brake and that spinner grinds to a halt in a fraction of a second.
and yet Google is saying some of that software was stolen and there was that other recent post that showed their cars still needed a pretty large amount of driver intervention .. so that's probably not working out for them at the moment either.
I'm interested.

Also, I'm curious how far you think is too far. And/or how often you run by a property you own.
Specifically, people are being persuaded to outsource risk at a steep premium rather than much more cheaply self-insuring themselves by laying aside less money regularly, or by accepting much higher deductibles. In order to increase sales, unnecessary products proliferate.
Miners have absolutely zero say on what goes into the blockchain. That's what nodes do.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_%28computer_science%...

> A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires processes to agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Examples of applications of consensus include whether to commit a transaction to a database (or, for example, committing blocks to a blockchain), agreeing on the identity of a leader, state machine replication, and atomic broadcasts. The real world applications include clock synchronization, PageRank, opinion formation, smart power grids, state estimation, control of UAVs, load balancing and others.

Nodes are the agents.

> Satoshi from the Bitcoin White-paper : The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

Nodes are agents in a multi-agent system with an agreed set of consensus rules that ensure that the system functions. Transactions are propagated through the multi-agent network based upon the agreed consensus rules by nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. Miners retrieve valid transactions from any of these nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. They then order the transactions, and perform a hashing function on them until the hashing function returns a value that is suitable to the nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. They then pass the new block that they've created to the nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. The nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system, then validate the block to ensure that each of the transactions within the block agree with the consensus rules. They then pass the new block, if it is valid, to other nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. Then each of these other nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system, each do the same validation on every block.

You demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of how bitcoin works.
Sneak peek on some of the best cross platform mobile app development tools
Lonnie Johnson invented the Super Soaker in his garage, while working for the USAF. He licensed the technology to Larami Toys (now Hasbro) and later used the same principle to develop the Nerf gun. After an arbitration hearing in 2013, he was awarded nearly $73m in unpaid royalties. He is currently working on a variety of technologies related to sustainable energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Johnson_(inventor)

To give an extremely niche and rather longwinded example:

Fine engraving is done with a specialised reciprocating tool that works a bit like a tiny pneumatic jackhammer. There are two real choices if you want one of these tools. GRS were first to market and are the dominant player; they make a relatively complicated system of tools that use a bulky desktop control unit. The alternative is the Steve Lindsay Airgraver, a beautifully simple design that connects directly to a compressed air source.

GRS would easily have the muscle to push Lindsay out of the market if it weren't for his patents. They have an international network of dealers and training providers; he has little more than a great product and some very satisfied customers. Lindsay's sole commercial advantage is superior technology.

The original patents for both the GRS and Lindsay tools have lapsed, but both tools have been continuously improved over the intervening years with many subsequent patents. If either side stops innovating, they're likely to be decimated by cheaper knock-offs as soon as their last useful patent expires.
Source? Are they lying?
Of course in the case of heroin addiction it's easy to poke fun at the notion of time-discounted utility functions, but you can't really shrug off the idea, since it's vital to explaining why people do all sorts of immediately neutral or unpleasant things like brushing their teeth, saving money, or exercising.
I'm talking about hardware capabilities. Actual support depends on the drivers. And why would Qualcomm, Imagination, Nvidia and etc. not want to provide them, if they can? Google has nothing to do with it (at least not in the sense of developing them).

Turnaround in the mobile hardware space is even faster than on the desktop (let alone stagnating consoles), so Vulkan availability is much less of an issue there.
http://archive.is/fB1oV if you still want to read it.
It is hard to do, and it is harder for these folks to understand that paying for quality is cheaper than going for the lowest price. A $500 washing machine that lasts 50 years "costs" $10/year (after 50 years you'll have to replace it with another one). A $300 Washing Machine that lasts 10 years costs $30/year. Or conversely a $300 machine that lasts 10 years will be re-bought 5 times over a 50 year period ($1,500), but a $500 machine that lasts 50 years will be bought once ($500) over a 50 year period.

So buying the "quality" machine actually stretches your paycheck further because you won't be re-buying a machine in 10 years.

Of course it is really hard to help people understand that math, but once they do they can find a whole lot of cost savings in their lives.
Dogs of Amazon
Newborn girls named Hillary
I thought I was the only one who did this. I just about factory standard everything for my Chevrolet truck and nothing mechanical has broken down in the cab in 12 years. It is a mid-sized truck, too, which are more prone to breaking down. The only thing I replaced was the clock radio.
Source: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/cultural-evolution-knew...
How is that stereotyping? He didn't come out saying "all Americans are dumb, iliterate, and about 100 lbs overweight". _That_ would have been stereotyping. By contrast, his post was a fairly mild and inoffensive "in my experience, the Europeans I know are more cultured". Are you reading more into it than is there?
The NES Final Fantasy 1 had gobs of bugs. Some of them are very game-changing:

Major ones to know for playing the game well:

* the index in the weapons table is used rather than the value in the table, making later weapons much more powerful and making Axes (lower %hit, higher critical%) useless.

* No secondary effects of weapons work at all

* Intelligence has no effect on spell effectiveness (yet another reason why red-mages are more powerful than they ought to be)

* All enemies are immune to poison.

Interestingly enough, people have created patches for most of the known bugs!

https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/522595-final-fantasy/4557505...
Mission impossible: Hardening the x86 based core infrastructures
Word-for-word copy of

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/vista-computer-...

which was posted earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13908249

Not just a word-for-word copy... even the capitalizations are identical.
So you wouldn't have a health insurance if it wasn't required by law? You would just die of cancer? Let your partner or kids die because you don't have the money? I don't understand how not being insured can be legal in some fields.

Also, in my country you are obliged to have an insurance that covers costs in case you cause an accident in traffic. Suppose you would hit me, it's your fault but you don't have money? I don't buy anything from you going to jail, you should have insurance.

Maybe you would argue that the state should in such cases pay, then I could agree with you. The fact that insurance companies of obligatory insurance have stock holders is a perverted concept with big (political) conflicts of interest.
How to speed read – 9 Ways to Find Out
Are those the ones that use 1/4 the water and don't destroy clothes?
For groundbreaking technology, 20 years is shorter than you think.

It could take 5 years at university to get it working at all, 5 years as a startup to get the first product to market, 5 years to scale up the marked from zero. Then you only have 5 years left where you actually have a chance to make money.

Shortening the patent life to even 10 years would make it unattractive to patent groundbreaking technology.

If you immediately make it to market, the story is different. In the software-sector everything is moving much much faster than in the physical world. The negative effects of patents become much more obvious then.

One way to go about that is to limit the license fees the patent holder can get. This would change the game in major ways (mostly for the better I think).
Progressive web app using: react – redux – redux-saga
Startup School Registration is open
NEC makes some commercial displays designed like this [1] - they have a Raspberry Pi compute module slot where you can install the latest version of the compute module.

Not sure about the longevity of that standard though...

(also another thing to note about commercial displays is that as they are usually on constantly, they frequently suffer heavy burn-in after a few years,so not sure if replaceable parts is such a big sell)

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/compute-module-nec-display-...
I've just registered for startup school but I'm guessing they will get thousands of applicants so fingers crossed!
> insurance is specifically about transferring risk from people who can't handle it to those who can.

It is probably true for eg. real estate insurances, but there are also quite a lot of extremely overpriced insurances for all kind of products (eg. cellphone) that people certainly can afford to lose, but they are fooled by loss aversion and hyperbolic discounting.
Kind of... We solved this issue like 35 years ago and then broke it again in the last decade. First CPU timing attacks allowed peeking at secret key generation in shared environments. Then we got rowhammer which ignores your mapping. Now we got memory access timing attacks which allow probing kernel memory mapping and bypassing ASLR.

While you can't easily write into other processes anymore, the barrier is more of a suggestion again.
I suppose needing a license to be able to repeat any non-trivial part of anything that anyone has done over the last lifetime + 70 years could stifle artistic expression in some way. Who knows.
Serious question: What is the alternative to an insurance?

The worst case would be that everybody saves huge amounts of money on their own, not touching it, for the case of a catastrophic event. If the catastrophe doesn't happen, or not as bad as feared, you wasted money. If the catastrophe is larger than expected, or happens when you are too young to have saved enough money, you are out of money despite the savings.

Either way, this is the exact opposite of solidarity. Also, in that setting, not saving any money would be some kind of gamling, too.

Solidarity means that if somebody had really bad luck, their peer will help them, because it could have happened to any of them. But that doesn't work well for large groups. On the other hand, we do want large groups to cover catastrophic events, because only then it is affordable. So we need some entity to coordinate their efforts: An insurance, a state, or something in between like a non-profit organization.

Or, am I overlooking something here?
Linux kernel mitigation checklist( update: Feb 28 2017)
The difference between cold emailing / calling and spam is that cold calls should be individually targeted and well thought out messages, while spam is an identical mass communication to as many people as possible.
And on startup, if anyone could have physical access to your hardware.
Yes Miele - they are family owned and not part of one of the 4 groups referenced by the article

1995 - GBP50 for 2nd hand Miele tumbler dryer - looked 20 years old then (chocolate brown 70s stylecontrol panel) - repaired twice - quite noisy - but still going strong age around 40 years

2001 - GBP1000 for top-of-the range Miele washing machine (wanted 1600RPM spin speed) - rubber seal replaced twice - still going - would probably buy bottom/mid range now to get adequate spin speed

2009 - GBP900 for Miele fridge and freezer - no problems yet
Vitapad++, a remake of Notepad++ for PSVita
I don't think that's quite what people usually mean when they talk about diminishing marginal utility. Granted, "marginal" was missing from the parent comment, but I gather that was the phenomenon being discussed.

Diminishing marginal utility implies that you gain more utility by acquiring your first penny than you do acquiring your hundredth. Now, at such small levels of money, you could certainly argue that almost nothing is for sale at 1 penny, but once you get above the level where the disutility of carrying around a coin is dwarfed by the utility of the money itself, diminishing marginal utility applies pretty well.
"So you get no reward at all for your idea,"

Idea's are a plenty. It's the correct productization that adds value. So - the correct fairness proposal is that the product development efforts to create a viable first example of a product category don't go to waste.

It's very easy to botch up the execution of a new idea into product. That's why it's not very good idea to trust historical specific examples to proof something does not work - maybe they just botched it. Now, when the first working example hits the market place competing players recognize that the method -in fact - can be implemented and have a bread crumb pathway lead ahead of them for viable product.

Now, the product development effort of competitors to reach market may not be any easier despite the breadcrumbs, but the initial product development had way higher risk because of no breadcrumbs to follow - and thus it's fair they should get higher return of investment for a while.

This is not to say the current implementation of patents is not messed up. It's quite telling that quite a lot of industrialization happened globally because people managed to ignore existing patents and implemented effectively industrial espionage to copy machinery. At least the world economy went ahead in leaps and bounds.
Wow, real dissent right here. Central banker votes a bit different on interest rates. It has zero consequences for him. Do you know what would be real dissent? Scrapping fiat money and going back to money that cannot be created out of thin air, proper money.
Sounds like you want to start an insurance company or a VC firm.
That Feynman link was very good indeed. Your point is well-taken. There is not enough time and energy to be interested in everything. At the limit, one can say that being interested in everything is being interested in nothing.

At the same time, I must say that playing around with random Sporcle trivia quizzes keeps paying off in unexpected ways, both in my work and social life. As I think about it while composing this response, it seems like the payoff is in making connections with people, although I play without having an end in mind or make a particular effort to remember anything. It is not the individual trivia point; it is more the stochastic effect.
Migrating Elmah.io from Windows Services to Azure Functions
I never found monads particularly difficult.

I still don't understand what the problem is with them.

It's just a box with some "stuff" in, a function that makes a new box with a thing inside, and a function that takes a box and a value and gives you a new box with some different stuff inside.

The hardest part for me was accepting that I can't look inside the box and don't actually need to.

I do get that there are a lot of people who'll look at monads and want to know why the heck they should bother when any "decent" or "reasonable" language just lets all their functions crap all over the filesystem whenever they like.
I see ML and AI raising on the market quite fast. How does this work? How many ML engineers are out there? If, broadly speaking, we have shortage of software engineers, what is the demand for ML engineers? It is not something you learn overnight as a dev or mathematician, so where are there coming from?
I'm thinking why it does have a moral component in either case. I think it might have to do with the nature of a financial transaction: it does not the change the world on its own, it is not a solution to any problem.

Suppose there is a low frequency event such as a comet heading for earth; the right thing to do is build a shield or way to reflect it. Suppose there is a flood once in 500 years; the right thing to do is to build dikes.

Money is a virtual thing, we sometimes forget.

Technology and innovation can oftentimes be the alternative for insurance.
The cost is the risk. Many people will pay more into insurance than they get out of it (that's obviously a mathematical inevitability), so those people viewed in isolation would be better off self-insuring. Of course, no one knows ahead of time if they're the ones who will be healthy.
Your CTM analogy is not the best choice: I'd hazard to say probably around 90-95% of CTM is utter nonsense (and 99.9% of the internal justifications are), but, without CTM they'd have never discovered artemisinin, which is being deployed as a first-line treatment for malaria in areas where there is resistance to chloroquine.
> The proportion of foreign-born people is higher in the San Francisco area than anywhere else in the United States with the possible exception of New York City.

Unless you combine San Jose and San Francisco into a single metro area (which I wouldn't, and the Census doesn't), then Miami, San Jose, and Los Angeles all have San Francisco beat, by quite a large margin [1]. If you're talking combined statistical areas, I don't know and don't have a source, but would suspect that both the Los Angeles and Miami CSAs beat out San Jose-San Francisco's on this metric.

Or maybe there has been a particular and drastic demographic shift in the Bay Area over the last 4-5 years that I'm not aware of.

[1]: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/09/americas-leading-imm...
From London, if you're flexible with the destination, it's easy enough to choose the $50 return deal.

This month, there are flights to France for £5 each way.

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/cheap-flights/?from=STN&out-fr...
If you scale it up you could 3d print houses from Cellulose.
Since 3d printing is inexpensive and the material abundant you can 3d print an outer isolation layer of a honey comb structure, bio inspired from bees. If the outer isolation layer becomes degraded from years of contact with wind and rain you can simply print a new one.
I'd concur. It's mostly around tooling for me (and Stack has helped here) but whenever I pick up Haskell for an out-of-work project now I end up putting it down again. I find Rust increasingly pleasing, although the lack of constraints on side effects is frustrating compared to Haskell's purity.
> You can already see these methods being applied at scale in industries where "beat the other guy by a month" isn't important, but "don't crash the thing and kill 100 people" is.

This sounds to me like implying there are no recalls of goods by manufacturers in "matured" industries. But we have tons of recalls for cars, toys, food and gadgets. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, most bugs and vulnerabilities are never fixed. Even banking (remember the banking crisis?), insurance, infrastructure projects (airport BER) or utilities like power generation show that they don't work like you suggest matured industries work by at scale.

So what are the industries you're talking about that work at scale by "don't cash the thing"?
> It's not like there is a breakthrough in mathematics (statistics) right? The theory probably has been around for ages but is only now becoming practical.

That's absolutely correct. But to pooh pooh it on those grounds is like pooh-poohing the fourier transform around the 70s (which theory had been around for 200 years) and only had then "become practical" with the advent of transistor-based computer. Now the FT and relatives are used in everything from audio processing and compression, image filters, statistical analysis, pretty much every form of scientific spectroscopy, MRIs, etc. If you had generally made investments in "FT-related technologies" you'd be doing well.
GPIO on Raspberry – How to connect button – Łukasz Hryciuk
But you do hear about them. SCO, Las Vegas Review Journal, Warner Bros., Prenda Law, etc.
Ask HN: Anything useful to do with a Blackberry Playbook in 2017?
I just can't get over it that it should be totally worthless (technically) already.
I always get disappointed with articles about AI like this, the headline is sensationalised while the actual content is nothing like it.

Sure, it might technically be a true headline, but what actually happened isn't the first thing you'd think of when reading the headline.

Still cool, but not as cool as the headline makes it out to be.
Liability insurance for automobiles is required by law and is very different from a legal requirement to purchase health insurance (you could probably make some argument for liability insurance for contagious diseases, but that's not really part of the health care policy debate).
Mail.app but only because integrated GPG support (with OpenGPG tools).
Qualcomm's new processor brings 4G to feature phones
Buy the one with the best warranty. A warranty is essentially a bet by the manufacturer that it won't break.