skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the more interesting theory-driven rabbit holes I've dug into was the bullwhip effect in inventory management, which was a failure mode model popularized by Jay Forrester, who was Donella Meadows' mentor and colleague. One of the interventions that can be taken to minimize susceptibility to the bullwhip effect was to decrease information flow latency. In other words, faster information about demand fluctuations improves the ability to respond to them. This type of intervention is ranked #5 by Donella in this article.

The problem with that intervention is what happens after you've improved your information flows. Faster information flows about demand leads the profit-seeking enterprise towards tighter inventory tolerances. They eliminate "extra" safety stock that is no longer needed due to their faster information flows. And it works out phenomenally well...for a while. But strong demand fluctuations can still appear, and without equivalent response mechanism improvements, the risks become more fattailed: failures become less common but much worse in severity. And in context of this article, I'm claiming that a leverage point ranked at #1 (the profit incentive) overpowered a leverage point ranked at #5, ameliorating its benefits.

The new topic du jour on HN seems to be self driving cars, and one of the many claims is their ability to improve traffic, and one of the other claims is their ability to improve safety. And interestingly, a systems model of these claims would likely show situations that are suspiciously similar to a bullwhip effect. In other words, it is a stateful model with latent information flows (roadway conditions), physical responses to the information flows (brakes), and buffers (space between vehicles) which protect from failure due to information latency and reaction capability.

Self driving cars can improve upon baseline reaction times to changing road conditions. They have more and better sensors and well known algorithms for detecting dangerous situations. This fact isn't speculative at this point, we already have some proof of it [0]. The question becomes, what do we do with that improved information flow? Do we tighten buffer tolerances? If so, you improve roadway capacity the majority of the time and possibly still reduce the risk of accidents...but what happens to accident severity? Maybe traffic throughput isn't the be-all objective that we want it to be, and we should be content to let that information flow improvement result in increased safety and traffic resilience instead.

[0] http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tesla-autopilot-begins...
The team that discovered ibuprofen routinely tested candidates on themselves.[1] It wasn't uncommon. My dad did it at Merck in the '70s. In one case, he and his lab partner took a candidate appetite suppressant (serotonergic) and then went out for Chinese. They ate like kings and concluded it didn't work.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34798438﻿
Reading all of the comments I am deeply concerned. Everyone who is opposed to this is doing 'their side' a disservice.

Comments are about how stupid, or ill informed the Home Secretary and advisors are, or that they are being blackmailed by the intelligence services. Seriously? These kinds of comments are not going to get the broader public to support your ideals.

I think you misunderstand why she (and law enforcement) believe that they should have access to the messages. If the terrorist called someone they can get a warrant for the metadata and see who he called and whether it is relevant to the investigation. If the terrorist sent an SMS they can get a warrant for it. However, if the terrorist sends a WhatsApp message what can they get? Why should a WhatsApp message be treated different from an SMS?

That is what we as the tech community need to explain, why backdoors, weak encryption, and escrow are not a solution.

I value my privacy. I want my messages to be secure. But if the tech community keep acting like most of the comments on this, we will lose.
People gloss over details all the time. As a case in point: it wasn't the author of the linked article written in 2017 that walked past the phone booth with his 3 year old, it was author Peter Ackerman who used it as inspiration for his childrens book. The book was published in 2010, but it's not clear when he wrote it or when he received the inspiration to do so.
I agree it's terrible; even from TFA's opening paragraph:

> if electric utilities were to pay $15,000 per battery, the battery alone in a 10-year-old Tesla would retain more value than an entire vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine (ICE).

a) why would a utility pay that much ($2.2/cell) for a bunch of heavily-used 18650s when you can buy lightly-used 18650s on eBay today cheaper?

b) if you look up used 2007 Mercedes S550 for sale in the US, you'll see plenty that sell for $15k+.
> In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of outsiders.

US median income is $52K, software developer is maybe 100K, so around double. But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living, and the various governments take more than a quarter of the difference in taxes and more than a quarter of the difference in disqualifications from income-based benefits programs. While you work 80 hours a week.

Someone making $100K in San Francisco is not doing better than someone making $50K in Houston. (You have a serious problem, however, if you make $50K in San Francisco.)

And the people clearing a million aren't typically silicon valley developers, they're Wall St quants and investment bankers. And those same people are generally paying the lower capital gains rate rather than the higher earned income rate, and losing a smaller percentage in benefits phase outs because by then everything is already phased out.

The numbers in the article are also including people who aren't working -- it has the 25th percentile income as zero and the median as something like $25K, which it probably is if you include retirees and homemakers and students, but how is that "income inequality"? For it to mean anything you have to be comparing people who are actually working full time. Anyone working obviously makes infinity times more than anyone with zero income.

As to the central thesis of "winner take most", markets like Facebook with network effects are the exception and have existed before (e.g. AT&T). In most other markets you can really blame regulatory compliance costs and regulatory capture. More paperwork to do and lawyers to hire and fees to pay to do business today than in 1970. The higher the cost of operating a business, the more advantage to consolidation.
Ada was designed for cross-language development. It was ahead of the curve on that. I'd be surprised if it was hard to integrate C today. The others I recall off top of head that went big in industry were OpenVMS (standard calling conventions, etc) and .NET CLR. I can't find my original article on "mixed, language development" in Ada but the marketing piece below gives you an idea of what developers were doing in 2005. Mixed language development, debugging, and traces. It's probably better now.

https://www.rti.com/hubfs/docs/2005Q1_2.pdf
I played SC, SC2, and WC3 fairly competitively (top 100 or so in each of those games). I tried WC2 multiplayer once and I swear grunts were in my base within ~60 seconds of the game starting. I'm sure I would have figured it out if I continued but it felt faster than a 4 pool.
Agreed. Also, I think there is a more fundamental problem, which is that people don't know how to construct logical arguments. Discussing different types of fallacies is more targeted at getting people to identify flawed arguments, which isn't really helping the underlying problem. The key realization is that every argument is a fallacy unless in explicitly contains a logically valid argument. It doesn't really matter who in an argument is the first to point out one of the categories of argument if both sides of the argument are devoid of logical reasoning.
I have substance. You're completely delusional if you think that being good-looking will ever be anything other than a benefit. An extremely significant one at that.
Yep and not only are the units rendered in 3D but the unit's projectiles really move in 3D and get blocked by terrain etc, and line-of-sight gets blocked by hills and so on as well. The terrain is just an image but it's calculated via a 3D mesh that underlies it.

Also, TA supports all screen resolutions your monitor does, so far from needing a Remaster, TA still looks surprisingly good today at high resolution. The interface (which is designed to work with 640x480) quickly gets tiny though.
Maybe when compared with iPhone or Nexus cameras.
6 Tips to Know How to Choose a Name for Your Business
$4k sounds like a market failure, and probably Chrysler Fiat mismanaging the project. They treat the 500e with utter contempt.

If there's 18 kWh of the 24 kWh left, that's just $222/kWh. That would be a fantastic battery system for an off the grid home.
Does anyone know how Bloomberg magazine is funded? It seems to produce very high-quality articles that are provided for free (unlike WSJ which has a very aggressive paywall).
I recommend founders end customer discovery interviews by asking for a purchase (or a preorder/letter of intent, depending on the situation). This is the most immediate way to testing whether a customer's really willing to pay.
No I don't believe that. Never implied anything of the sort.

You made a fair point about the number of employees, but I was careful to also mention other senior executive pay. I mentioned a host of other factors such as political corruption and rent-seeking behaviours being likely far more important factors. Jumping to the conclusion implied in your question is unfair, and might point to a bias you're walking around with, I think.

Do you believe, as this article claims, that :the majority: of inequality in the US is due to how much Google and other top companies choose to pay their employees?

Regardless, do you believe that this article employed convincing analysis and evidence to back up such a belief?
If a museum with anything of value is using Wifi cameras, then they are incompetent and the camera is likely not the worst of their flaws. Wifi disassociation attacks affect every Wifi camera.
Problem is everone gets a new url. Haven't foun a good way to check if one link to medium is the same as another.

This breaks a number of things like duplicate checking for news aggregators and tag suggestions for bookmarking services.

Edit: checking now it seems at keast the part before hash stayed unchanged after copy-pasting into another browser and loading. Have they changed or have I misunderstood the whole time?
> Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers.

Like Visual Studio Code uses 12% CPU in idle due to cursor blinking? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

In comparison the Windows Shell (up to Win7) is a lot more efficient and coded in C/C++.
I wonder about that. Right now, I can pick up pretty much whatever tech is thrown at me. But any job demands that I have experience in this field or that field which is pretty frustrating tbh. "You don't have experience in this entire react stack? Bye!" oki... I'll look for backend dev? Oh right. Must be fullstack and must know all the JS frameworks.

Maybe devops/sysadmin/whatchamacallit? "Must know this particular NoSQL DB, and be able to administer Kubernetes clusters"

Fine I can kind of do that, but I have my doubts because I've never used said DB. And it goes on.

It's a deeper argument than what I just made, but my extreme other side point was just to highlight that the job market looks scary when you browse sites and realise you've only worked with pure js and jquery and no one wants that anymore. And then you see that they want people who've worked on real world apps using all this new tech.

There is eithe a real need or at least the illusion of a real need and I wouldn't discount that entirely. Somewhere in the middle, the answer probably lies.
Free Machine Learning EBooks – March 2017
This is useful, bookmarked!
The best ones you can straight-up buy are SPARK and Astree that I'm aware of. I've already linked to SPARK. Astree is limited in application but pretty amazing in what it does:

https://www.di.ens.fr/~cousot/publications.www/CousotEtAl-ES...

My idea was to subset as many components as possible to static-ish components it could handle then focus more on integration testing. Then one could reap the benefits in a larger project. Similar idea for SPARK, which is probably cheaper.
> How about tackling the actual problem - terrorists seem to have resorted to using cars and trucks to kill people. Lets put up some metal/concrete bollards alone the edge of pavements that have no 'escape route', such as the one on Westminster Bridge.

Nice post. I agree almost entirely with you, but you can't put a bollard everywhere, and even if you could, bad people would find a way around or between the bollards, or simply another way to hurt people. It would be like playing a futile game of whack-a-mole.

At the end of the day, there are people who are so mean-spirited that they want to hurt innocent people for no reason, and they will find a way to do that no matter what we do. Honestly I think a lot of it is mental health more than anything we can really protect against.

It's not possible to wrap everyone in cotton wool, and in order to have some freedom we risk a small percentage of harm. There is no way around that. Without that freedom, there's also the IMO much larger risk of harm from the authorities themselves.

There's no way around it, living in the world involves some risk. It's unrealistic to not accept that risk and fantasize that all outcomes are preventable.

Like another comment mentioned, there are literally tens of thousands of stabbings in the UK every year. Why are we even talking about removing fundamental freedoms (the right to privacy) in order to probably not prevent a few unfortunate deaths per year? The payoff is so small and the cost is much too great.
Or their other url-breaking platform - blogger - who found out it was a good idea to redirect to a different top level domain based on visitor location :-/
The ability to work with others is more important now than ever(2015)
Magic Boxing is one of the more important ones.

Its not so much a "glitch" but an idiosyncracy. There's a special magic box "size" that you eventually learn in Starcraft. When all the units are "inside" of the Magic Box, they will move as a group, synchronously.

However, if even just one unit is "outide" of the Magic Box, they will all move individually.

The technique of "Mutalisk Stacking" involves burrowing a Zergling, and then making a group of 11 Mutalisks + 1 Zergling as a group. The burrowed Zergling is always outside of the box, and therefore the Mutalisks will "stack" on top of each other (moving as if they were individuals). You control them perfectly synchronized.

Because the Mutalisks are all flying units, they'll "stack" together.

Here's an example video of JaeDong's expert Mutalisk Stacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ipBj1sO3M . Notice how the Marines instantly die before the Medics can heal them... but the intense focus-fire and micro ability of JaeDong allows the Mutalisks to instantly KO Marines.

-----------

In contrast, the Protoss player would use the Magic Box to perform Dragoon Dancing instead. In this case, the Protoss player wants to keep the Dragoons all together inside of the Magic Box (while the Zerg Example above was the opposite). You want your Dragoons to stay in formation during a Dragoon dance, which requires them to be "inside" the magic box.

Because the Dragoons are grounded units, they'll bump into each other as the AI pathfinding gets confused.

In contrast, look at how Reach uses these Dragoons. They are perfectly synchronized, because of the "opposite" effect of the Magic Box.

https://youtu.be/zXZdGqWttic?t=6m21s
I am of the opinion that the EV market is going to be held back until we have standard battery packs of known price, quality, and warranty. There's no good reason that this can't be taken on by some standards body. ANSI? Milspec? Please, somebody!
The third flaw is endemic to Wifi, and it's so easy to execute with off-the-shelf tools that the more esoteric attacks hardly make the camera security any worse.

Anyone that cares about security uses hard-wired cameras.
I (sort of) disagree. In my experience, I have found that if an argument is both strong rhetorically, and logically valid, it is very difficult to refute. Strong rhetoric without the backing logical validity can always be deflected by more strong rhetoric.
That over $1700 price is a negative externality of home-as-investment culture and racist downzoning. There is no natural law that says the 2 bed/2 bath apartment has to be so expensive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/realestate/sure-build-it-...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/upshot/popping-the-housin...
I'm just getting to the point in my career where I've seen this happen a couple times. I believe it's cyclical. OO came and complicated everything and that died down. WYSIWYGs came and complicated everything, those have died down. Huge frameworks came and complicated everything, and largely died down. SPAs and Microservices came and will soon die down. I think every few years of new blood introduces a critical mass of complexity.
Apple is adding new Augmented Reality features for the next iPhone
that to me says (broadly) data entry forms and reporting

Yep that's pretty much it: forms over data, in various domains.
Searching for extraterrestrial qubits
Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala?
Hello, I've started to work with scala and I think it's a beautiful language. that said, I'd like to be better at it. What are some good books to get thst teach about the nitty gritty details of the language and it's use in production?
Great article :D
The grep example should search for one character. Grep can skip bytes so that longer search strings are faster to search for. On my machine, I get from 22%-35% more time taken if I changed "grep blah" to "grep b".
I can second the Unifi cameras if you don't mind setting up a server to monitor them. I'm using their outdoor cameras to watch my front/back doors at home, and I have about a dozen of the dome cameras at work. The NVR software has been working flawlessly in both places.

I was less impressed with the image quality of the Micro camera, it's adequate, but the Nest cam is better.
When someone doing a research using popular closed source game half of game related press publish some news about that research full of buzzwords. And company that own copyright on it could even dedicate few engineers to help because why not - it's cheap PR.

Same exact research for open source game would likely only bring attention of actual developers and ML crowd. Oh, on top of that many would expect to see your data and source code.
I think that there's still a need for significant exploration of the design space. What type of standard are you suggesting? Size? Connection? And how is that holding back anything at the moment?
No you didn't recreated anything. That company is worth 500M. Your fun experiment is not.

On the other hand, this is excellent PR for Opower.
This blog post is remarkably light on details. For the actual research paper behind the software in the Pixel camera app: http://www.hdrplusdata.org/hdrplus.pdf
Yeah, I was pondering on that for other shows already, too.

However, I can imagine that made negotiations for them much easier (no-one who still uses a TV would watch their show on $DATE at $TIME when there's a VoD around). On the other hand, it is also nice to be able to schedule one's own progress in a show without having to go "what happened last week again?" each time. I'd argue it's even worth waiting for the Netflix "launch".
> Globalization is not the enemy.

The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses.

But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international enforcement of regulations created via regulatory capture. You enforce the same rules everywhere, those rules are created by megacorps to give them an advantage and the predictable result obtains.
Depends on your threat model, I'm more interested in catching a thief stealing packages from my porch (as happened to a neighbor). These thieves don't typically wear a mask as it's hard to be inconspicuous while walking around the neighborhood with a mask.

The key is to make sure your cameras cover the street so you can capture their car, and even better if your neighborhood has a critical mass of cameras so even if they park of range of your camera, your next door neighbor may have caught them.
> What evil things could a hacker do to your dishwasher?

Turning it into a botnet node, cf. Mirai.

If the only harm that came from Internet-all-the-things was that to the owners of the devices I'd welcome it; the person who buys this junk is one who deserves everything they get. It's the damage being done to the rest of us that is worth caring about.
I write blogspam. It's definitely a problem but I don't know what Google is going to do about it.

Basically google can't trust backlinks anymore because people game them and competitors try to destroy each other's sites by buying scummy links to their stuff.

So they mainly attempt to measure quality in a vacuum. This is using their machine learning stuff to look at the quality, confidence, and reading level of the writing style.

They do the same quality checks for the site. Checking for EV certs, clean markup, real email volume through Gmail, reputable DNS provider, physical address in G maps. A lot of their hundreds of quality metrics don't measure the site itself, but use Google's pervasive data trove from their other services. Most scammers don't bother doing any of this right.

The problem becomes people like me. I setup sites with all measures of quality for legitimate businesses. Have articles written by good writers with knowledge in the subject. Sounds great right?

The problem is that these articles are still done for money and quite biased sometimes. Google is slowly running into a need for a strong AI because all measures of quality can be emulated if enough money is on the line. It doesn't matter if something seems truthful in every way except the fact that it isn't.

This is the same reason "fake news" is invading google and Facebook. Smart spammers have upped their game to the point that it's impossible to know what's real anymore.

Need a wikipedia article changed? Good reviews on Yelp? A nice piece on a popular tech website? All of this can be openly bought with zero consequences.
If you're a civil engineer in Kenya you can't simply create an infrastructure startup and build the country. Such a business requires many skills not related to engineering, for starters. You need to know which wheels to grease in government and how. You need to have appreciable investment to fund your equipment. You need to have reliable supervisors who won't steal and will keep the work on schedule. You can't simply start up, get funded and move fast while breaking things.

According to the Kenyan resident in the thread , it was corruption that was stymiying progress. That's something that Chinese contractors have bypassed.