skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just went through this with a refrigerator and I was amazed that I had to spend hours reading reviews of innumerable brands (most of which are really the same, as mentioned in the article) before coming up with even a handful that seemed reasonable. This should have been a simple task but virtually all of them have several got-completely-screwed-a-few-months-after-purchase comments.

My own repair guy told me that often the insides of different brands are IDENTICAL, changing only the brand name, door chrome and other superficial things to justify some kind of premium. This means you’ll break down just as often spending thousands more. The companies themselves are becoming lousier, it is not that they are taking your extra money to make a good product.
Bias is a stats term.

I think if we look through history - there has clearly been a change in treatment of women over time. Why is it that now the treatment is reliably indicative of some underlying quality that has remained static through time? Couldn't it just as easily be that the treatment of women currently isn't indicative of some underlying truth? What would indicate to us that now over other times the differing treatment was in line with underlying qualities and not cultural assumptions?
Only unintentionally. I meant that they were king of print, and have been completely usurped by a new mechanism for controlling content consumption by users.

I don't buy for a moment that Facebook users are choosing a lot of the content they see.
>a subsidiary of PayPal

And for that reason, I direct my clients to go elsewhere.
Arduino was designed as an easy way for non-technical artists to use electronics in their projects. I won't argue that anyone half-serious should go bare metal.

The RPI is a useful production device in some niche applications, thanks to the Compute Module. There are a lot of circumstances where you need a powerful SoC, but you don't have the time or the budget to deal with a dense BGA; the RPI Compute Module replaces a lot of difficult design work with a standard SODIMM slot. Obviously it's no use in a mass-market consumer product, but it makes a ton of sense for a small-volume industrial device.
The flaw is to think that security can ever be 100% tight.

Not ever physical security is organized like that.

At best you can design for a certain level of determination of the attacker, and thats it. Any attacker that is more determined will eventually get past.

Question is what are you protection against.

Your garden variety identity scammer?

NSA?

Sometimes it feels like _sec has developed NSA myopia.
Well the Ars article says they're still promising 1000x lower latency so that seems pretty misleading. And that 3x endurance is vs. MLC flash; it still handily loses to SLC.

The SemiAccurate article looks very fair to me.
Different regulations regarding money transmitting businesses in different countries.

Different countries require different paperwork from money transmitters, and you have tomcomplain with it. If you could just follow your country's red tape, all the money transmitters would just operate from an unregulated tax heaven...
> MD4 was broken, MD5 was broken

There are no practical pre-image attacks for either of them yet. (2^102 for MD4, 2^123 for MD5)
I just came back to my esp32 after a 6 week hiatus and the framework has evolved impressively in that amount of time. It's an awesome product for a steal of a price. Definitely at the usable stage.
Leadership compensation does not work in the same way as rank and file compensation.
good to hear stories from people that have done it.

FYI, there are now many articles/blog posts/etc. by people who have done these Vipissana retreats -- this Google search will find you some:

https://www.google.com/search?q=vipissana+10+day+retreats

(Here's one with the details of the daily schedule (among other things), if that's of interest:

https://oneshrinksperspective.com/2013/06/27/i-am-slowly-goi... )
All I got form that was "we cloned Uber, then didn't do due process when selecting a payment gateway".
As technologists defining our black sheep is as core to defining our community as to any other. It make us feel better about ourselves (as long as we are not associated with the dark side). Instead of focusing on building better tech, we can instead point fingers at <put political target here> for getting in our way.
I have at least one serious potential investor ready for anyone attempting this (vertical farming automation).

Also, I am interested to cooperate on creating reliable contracted urban demand without the need for retail packaging - http://infinite-food.com/ - currently relocating to Shenzhen.

If automated urban vertical farming happens it will probably happen in China because dense/cheap/economies of scale/rising food prices/rapid urbanization/transition toward smaller households/cultural preference for fresh and less processed foods/less regulatory issues.
> corrode

Corrosion is unlikely to cause any problem with the heat exchanger unless it is really severe, as there are no moving parts in it.

> nothing stops a circa-1994 Windows NT machine from continuing to work

My older machines of that era have all failed due (most likely) to failed capacitors. The disk drives fail most likely due to lubrication issues. The semiconductors fail because all semiconductors fail due to the migration of the doping that occurs when they get warm.

None of my 80's machines will power up anymore. I'm not too surprised, they were only built to last a couple years, and it only takes one failure in those enormously complex machines to do the whole thing in.

I try to keep my XP machines running because those were the last to support DOS programs and I still support Digital Mars C++ generating DOS programs.
I'm as far removed or more so but don't police have some form of this whenever they discharge their weapon? I realize that can't logistically happen very easily in a combat situation. I would at least hope there would be the option to talk to someone about it. Someone that doesn't pass judgment and just simply listens. I feel like in this scenario anything is better than nothing at all.
Few people have seriously contemplated ordering the manufacturing of a small run of something they themselves designed. More people have seen the term BOM when reading estimates of how much it costs big brands to manufacture a smartphone or a game console in industry publications or even in the more technically-oriented consumer reviews.
> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?

Lets assume that NYT is indeed complaining. How does this make it ok for Facebook to control? This is a classic ad hominem fallacy.
GOLD: Bullish, Risk Points Higher
A competitive advertising space
Sorry, a Robot Is Not About to Replace Your Lawyer
You are right, but no beginner truly understands do notation. It's just magic to them. Do notation is an abstraction on top of monads which is an incredibly hard to understand abstraction on top of functional programming.

Functional programming in essence does not allow procedures, but with special incredibly complex abstractions you can simulate procedures. If you program using said abstractions I would argue that it makes functional programming even Harder to understand.
'how do you purchase a new product that will last 50 years if it's only been on the market for 3' is a really interesting problem. If someone can solve this even partially it will matter.

The most interesting question that came up during the 'cash for clunkers' program is 'how much energy does it cost to create a car' -- i.e. the relative fuel efficiency model needs to take into account that the new car needs to be manufactured whereas the manufacture of the 'clunker' is a sunk cost.

Planned obsolescence is another interesting question. If a manufacturer advertises reliability and also designs parts that don't last, can I sue them to reclaim the cost of disposing & replacing?
Tool for Tracking Viral Outbreaks Receives Open Science Prize
Not necessarily. E.g. for PayPal you need to provide company president's home address in a given country.

I had a company and a bnak account registered in UK, and PayPal didn't want to do business with me, because I lived in Poland. I couldnt register for Polish paypal either, because the company was in UK.
There is planned obsolescence, sure, but most of the examples in the article are about keeping the price low.
And they go cheap because it is what the market demands. We want $300 appliances, and this is what we get.
Of course, managing prices that low requires cutting every corner.
We can still get high quality stuff if we buy commercial machines... for 10 times the price, like in the old days. However, for most people, it isn't worth it.
This Christmas just gone, we stayed with some friends in their holiday cabin that their father had hand built back in the 1960's. It had a refrigerator (cannot remember the brand) that had been there since 1961, and it still worked perfectly.

The only thing was that you could not open it too many times, otherwise the ice build up would mean you had to turn it off and defrost it.

Makes me wonder if 'convenience' leads to a reduction in longevity at all? Nowadays fridges are self defrosting, self cleaning, have built in IoT and a myriad of other features in order to try and make life easier for consumers.

Has this abdication of care and responsibility actually cost us in the long run? Perhaps if people went back to having to spend time to care for their goods, and took on a little extra time to ensure simple preventative measures, simplicity of manufacturing could come back in and things will last longer?
Do you believe, then, that Uber breaks these laws as a form of protest, rather than because they want to maximie profit and eating the fines won't hurt their bottom line? What evidence do you have to support that belief, if so?
BS. It is AI that this AI can only play Go.
> Postgres uses "utf-8" for 32-bit Unicode

What's the reason for the quotes around utf-8? To my knowledge it's bog standard utf-8, with the exception that NULL is disallowed in many types.
Aye, and he wrote before the great stabilization of the Western hemisphere by the Monroe doctrine, and before the American and Canadian Manifest Destiny fervor, before the Irish potato famine, etc. Adventurous times when people of indigent circumstances went somewhere else or faced dire potential outcomes. Smith's argument supports my point that there are margins in all kinds of directions one may potentially save on, in noting that one can forego wine and beer without reproach. The people I lived among also had norms considered reproachful to cross, yet necessity occasionally required.

Sometimes you bite the bullet for awhile, as an investment for the future. You do what it takes.
The drum was a point all the repair guys brought up for basically all washing machines because all the modern ones are welded or something. Essentially they said they are terrible for repairs compared to the old style (which I presume weren't welded?) but the benefit to the newer setup was less leaks (or words to that effect).
Well, the quickest way to create a job is to create one for yourself. This can be done many ways but here are two of the simplest. Pick one thing and become an expert at that. It could be as simple as "I only do email signatures....but my email signatures have a 97% click through/conversion rate." It does not need to be profound or exciting but you can then market yourself as THEE guy that does X. And when I want X done I will know that you are my guy and I will most likely tell everyone that has a need for X that you are the guy to call regardless of what you're charging. Specialties usually breed efficiency which will allow you to compete at a higher rate of perceived valuation. It may seem a little scary to pick a specialty but I can tell you that I won't call a plumber for brain surgery and I wont call brain surgeon to fix my motorcycle. There is more work than you think for whatever you choose.

The second way is to find a specialist and create yourself a position as saleman of his specialty. You will then have created two jobs, one for you and one for him. See? Easy! Plus you can start that part time while you are busy perfecting your craft as whatever you want to be in life.
Revise Until You Drop
part of the issue, and I'm surprised the author didnt mention it, is that in the last 10 years most devices have switched from mechanical to electronic.

when i bought my speed queen washer and dryer, the person selling it said they only had mechanical, which some consider an advantage. I tend to agree.
Ramdisks are back. This time persistent.
This article was posted and discussed here around the time it came out.

Here's a link to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615198
Around 40%[1] of the population rents, which means 40% doesn't make the purchasing decision for many appliances. We can sanity-check your argument with this: That reasoning should predict no change in the quality of commercial appliances used in apartment complexes and laundromats, since these customers are used to making spreadsheets with a capital expenditures budget that they pay into for 30 years.

[1] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/02/the-rise-of-renting-i...
AlphaGo played plenty of games online after the Lee Seedol match. It went 60-0 against some of the worlds best players. Granted they were fast games but that's a challenge for AlphaGo as well as its adversaries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909315
Would you? Do you subscribe to consumer reports?
I'm willing to bet manufacturers actually went and did market research, and found out the opposite.
As if there was a market demand, they would have build and market such products.
A really long warranty only helps if the company remains solvent.

I would be happier with something the manufacturer was confident was serviceable. Control boards that approach the cost of a high end smartphone are unreasonable, but also common.
Mindset: smart headphones that improve your concentration
How Music Evolved: Billboard's Hot 100, 1958 – 2016
> It’s closer to a block device now, the block size being 16 bytes for dual-channel DDR, 32 bytes for quad channel.

Don't forget the 8-deep prefetch buffer. The real block size is more like 128 bytes for dual channel.
Kashkari was the lone dissenter in the most recent FOMC meeting, which determines the US Federal Funds Rate.

A decent intro (<25 pages) to US monetary policy (I read it during intro macro), if you're interested: http://www.frbsf.org/education/files/MonetaryPolicy.pdf
I've never seen Miele but Siemens is here, though not in the home appliance market.
>It uses intuition to play,

Not by the normal definition of intuition. It reasons about millions of moves.
I really hope the bit about "free machine-powered psychologists" is satire, but given YC's unironic techno utopianism fear that it is not.

Reading "Computer Power and Human Reason" by Joseph Weizenbaum (published over 40 years ago!) should remind people that attempting to build a "machine-powered psychologist", even if it's something that can be done, is not something that should be done.
Take a look at the chart titled "Market-Based Inflation Expectations". What's the rationale for selecting the 19% and 24% percentiles. I assume these are percentiles of all values of the underlying metric recorded throughout the week. If that's the case, why does the subtitle says 'Weekly AVERAGES'?
In my experience I have encountered 3 different types of outages:

1. Multiple availability zones in a single region are experiencing reduced performance/outage.

2. A single availability zone is experience reduced performance/outage.

3. A single service (bound to your account) is having reduced performance.

The dashboard displays item 1, and very rarely item 2. It never displays item 3, and that's the one most people actually care about.

Many AWS services appear to be siloed into user accounts, such as S3 or DynamoDB. Sometimes the systems comprising your storage might be severely degraded (due to poor access patterns or simply random statistic degradation). In such cases users have absolutely no way of being notified about degraded performance unless they have built metrics to monitor their services.

For example; I once wrote a program which was making access calls to S3 which was essentially destroying my performance and reliability. I had not instrumented my code to report fairly lowlevel information (number of TCP-RST, authentication negotiation time, packet loss). In fact, most of the low-level metrics are hidden so deep in their SDK's, that instrumenting logging is itself a major engineering effort.

I think 99% of customers would be happy if there was a simple REST endpoint to query how my services are running. Fidelity could even be something like 15 minute accuracy.

GET: /MyStatus
{
"S3": [
{
"BucketName": "...",
"Status": "DEGRADED",
"FailingOperations": [
"ListMultipartUpload",
"CreateMultipartUpload",
]
],
"EC2": []
...
}
Will the $5000 fridge last 20 years? How do I know the manufactor isn't lying?
This sounds like the Paypal stories all over again. Oh wait, Paypal acquired Braintree.
Along the same lines, probably the easiest way to get quality in almost every type of product is to buy the commercial version. The people using these products are very familiar with them, so nobody sells garbage.

Businesses are also generally more conservative in future projections and less price sensitive than consumers.

I personally started doing this a few years ago. I even have a throwaway LLC that sounds nebulously like a contractor so I can sign up for "industry only" marketplaces. Since I can usually get wholesale prices doing this, I pay only maybe 30% more than for crap consumer level throwaway stuff.

The major downside is the time it takes, but the upside is that none of my stuff ever breaks.
Κίνητρο παραμονής Πλατανιάς – Ηρακλής
The site itself would have to be attempting to detect and flag networks of users, and take some kind of action.
reinforcement learning, the most promising approach for robotics today, doesn't require a lot of data to train. Or rather the data required to train it can be synthesized from the problem domain itself. Access to compute and hardware, possibly, but that is it.
Why's mechanical better? Mechanics stick, break, become worn out. A circuit generally doesn't, does it? I know capacitors burst but they're easy enough to change. Do components like ICs ever just stop working? I would have thought solid-state would be better for endurance.
GPG signatures actually sign the hash digest of the text they're given. Fun fact, which I think (hope) changed in recent versions of GPG: the hash, by default, is (was?) SHA-1.

One can check what is used with e.g.

$ git cat-file -p $some_tag | gpg --list-packets | grep "digest algo"

The output is of the form

digest algo n, begin of digest xx yy

Where n can be:

1: MD5
2: SHA1
8: SHA256
10: SHA512

(See RFC 4880, 9.4 for all values)
Ah, cool. I am familiar with AWS and spot instances, but after that comment was assuming it required multiple instances for training or something.
You left out a crucial part which is "Europe" and there it's undoubtably true in areas where I know how buildings are financied and what the costs are (central Europe).
Of course it is painful to implement a seconds provider for backup, but payments are their lifeline. And PayPal has a track record for stuff like that. Never rely your whole business on PayPal!
To me this book looks like a whole bunch of equations, with some fancy graphics sprinkled on top. And, far too many equations! Linear algebra is much more elegant (simple) than this. To pick one example, they define the inner product using the cosine of the "smallest angle between the two vectors." Sure if you want to calculate a number (an inner product in two dimensions), and you happened to know the angle in question, this might be helpful. But otherwise it completely obscures everything else about the inner product. How does an interactive graphic help you understand wtf is a cosine doing in this equation? What is a cosine anyway? Where is the graphic for that?

This just seems too backward and over-done to me. But go ahead and test it on some newbies, maybe I'm totally wrong here.
if using Braintree would lead to problems like the ones mentioned by OP, what are the alternatives, in US and elsewhere, square cash?
What problem does this solve? Are collisions common?
This is the chance to get rid of the object prefixes (i.e. "blob" plus file length) that prevent the generated hashes from being compatible with hashes generated by other software.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Just Told Staff He’s Hiring a COO to Help Him
What is a bluedoc?
CloudWatch?
Well that should obsolete ORMs! There's no impedance mismatch when there's no RAM/Disk. We'd need more Disk (DB) components running for Persistent-RAM (indexing, transactions.)
Sounds like you need to stop complaining and pick a new payment provider. Get a local loan, start giving away free rides, continue to pay your drivers and start a countdown clock to doomsday. That's how long you have to implement a new solution and recover from this.

Or you can whine about it on Facebook and a few weeks from now you'll be forgotten.
The oldest appliance I have in regular use is my Carver amplifier bought in 1980 or so. I use it all day every day. That's nearly 40 years now :-)

In "bang for the buck", it's the best purchase I ever made.
How new? 14 yo Miele washer never had an issue.

>no filter cleaning for first 5 years!

That's pretty disgusting for something you use to eat.
Are we ready to dismiss an entire brand because of one anecdote? All appliances fail at some point. We can't make a judgement based on a single data point.

Reading about this stuff also makes me sad that the rest of the world have such weak consumer protections. In Norway, sellers are obligated to provide 5 years of warranty by law, and the consumer has certain rights such as the right to get a replacement if the product cannot be fully repaired after a certain number of attempts at resolving a problem.
Good to know. Have they actually said anything about Optane that would be an outright lie if Optane devices were using already-existing hardware technology?
Not only does it use a form of intuition, but it's an intuition that it's developed itself, rather than just copying others. Professional Go players are learning from the creative strategies of AlphaGo and if that doesn't imply some level of weak intelligence then I'm not sure why anyone talks about a weak/strong AI divide to begin with.

Like Scott Aaronson said, "You can look at any of these examples -- Deep Blue, the Robbins conjecture, Google -- and say, that's not really AI. That's just massive search, helped along by clever programming. Now, this kind of talk drives AI researchers up a wall. They say: if you told someone in the sixties that in 30 years we'd be able to beat the world grandmaster at chess, and asked if that would count as AI, they'd say, of course it's AI! But now that we know how to do it, now it's no longer AI. Now it's just search."
I think that's just his way of saying that things we like to do or don't like to do in this incarnation are informed by events from previous incarnations.

That makes sense if you believe in reincarnation.
Also, DNS round robin won’t work with IPv6. At all. Round robin DNS depends on a client connecting to the first address record it receives in the DNS reply, and the DNS server altering its responses to set different addresses as the first one each time it sends a DNS response. But with IPv6, a client host is required to connect to the address closest to its own (as determined by the longest range of common bits), regardless of the adress’ position in the DNS reply.
Turn it on and ask it your question?

But seriously, narrower forms of AI are useful for things like self-driving cars.