skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But isn't everything bigger to a small denominator?

E.g. the poor recieve me government services relative to discretionary income?
This is HN, not a cocktail party.

We've seen post after post about using the "demographic targeting" capabilities of facebook and google to target individuals, about the more general problem of de-anonymizing data, and about how damn hard this type of "abuse" is to prevent even if companies were interested in spending serious resources to prevent it.

We further understand that while this type of loophole exploitation is beyond the interest of the vast majority of people, there is an entire swamp of gray-market software developers willing to package the loopholes into nice user-friendly tools in exchange for a handful of bitcoin.

The cards against humanity stunt may well be a scam, but it's not nearly so damaging as the scam of pretending that ISP sales of user data will preserve privacy.
wings, retractable landing gear and aerodynamic control surfaces are WAY heavier and more complicated than 4 legs and a sensor/software based vertical balancing system that controls already-needed engine gimbals.
This works well in languages where whitespace matters
IIRC the client gets a significant discount for accepting an experimental launch.
Space shuttle's main engine was the "boosters". A huge liquid (very cold hydrogen and oxygen) tank which supplied the fuel to the actual shuttle during launch, and two smaller solid fuel boosters. The tank and boosters were all destroyed on launch.

SpaceX rockets use a much simpler engines, that burn oxygen and kerosene. The main cost is in the first stage of the engine - think two rockets on top of each other, the first stage is the bottom rocket that first first. When the first rocket is done, it falls away. This first stage accounts for the majority of the cost of the launch. Think of it was being equivalent to the main tank and 2 boosters of the shuttle.

What SpaceX manages, which no-one has done before, is to retrieve that big + expensive first stage for reuse.
I think people would freak out because many would forget to keep money aside to pay for taxes at the end of the year. If it were phased in or there was a large public education campaign to remind people to put money aside I bet there would be less anger.
First, what works in Europe is not necessarily portable. We could just as easily pick things that are better about the U.S. and badger Europeans about why they're not doing it that way when "it is plainly working fine".

Second, everyone attempts to cast every policy decision they dislike as evidence of corruption, chicanery, etc., but I don't think that's typically the case. The fact that a corporation and an elected representative agree regarding some policies does not immediately invalidate the position, nor should it immediately implicate the representative in accusations of malfeasance.

People have spent significant time in this thread discussing the pros and cons of such a policy, yet you insist that the only possible reason it would fail with the people's representatives is that "a small minority are profiting from a broken system". I guess since an advocate carried around a binder full of positive reviews, we assume that must be the universal sentiment of the people?

Is it not plausible that, as seen throughout this thread, many people simply don't agree that this would be a positive change?
There was a lengthy discussion about this in the subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/61walr/why_are_f9_b...

I didn't find many of the comments enlightening, but the general argument seems to be this: expert consensus (by both SpaceX and the insurance company) is that the risk of failure is simply not that much higher than a normal launch. So it doesn't make sense to waste a probably-safe trip to LEO; you might as well get paid. Even in the extreme limit where there was a 50-50 chance of failure, it's clear that there would be some payload that would be worth attaching (e.g., a standard satellite design with a low marginal construction cost, or even a high school satellite project).
As one of those brains that drained out of Toronto, I would say that "limited number of spaces" is malarky. You can create the space. What I did find was that Toronto's investment community (at least a couple of decades ago) was much more conservative, so it was much harder to create the space in Toronto than it was south of the border.
It's not a problem for MySQL, it's optimised for that use case and has pooling. I read recent Postgres can handle many connections as well.
They have done a number of static test stand firings of individual first stage engines, simulating up to six or eight launches of the same first stage... Undoubtedly the data gathered from the ground tests plays a big part in their confidence that this will work.
Mainly OCR. We were looking for cases where a specific set of law required forms were missing.

It took 14 days to train the algorithm to recognize these forms, and maybe 1,5 months to learn how to use the algorithm and the Azure cloud.

I can't give you the exact technical details because I'm not the CS guy, but I can tel you that we used Googles OCR and a common tree algorithm suggested by "the internet" for machine learning.

The machine vastly outperformed humans in most cases, especially with 50+ page compilations, but got beat when documents had been scanned extremely poorly.
They also like to call the landing a "hover slam" in that it burns at the very last second and slams down pretty hard.
There are pretty sophisticated machines out there for non destructive machine inspections. Many based on X-ray or MRI technology depending on the materials.

Similar to the machines used to inspect shipping containers. I would not be surprised if SpaceX had at least considered if not obtained equipment for the ability to X-ray the entire assembled rocket for any internal defects.

Anyone curious can take a look at the equipment from Yxlon (http://www.yxlon.com) for examples of COTS X-ray based inspection that's available. And Yxlon and most others in this industry do custom work, making a robotic full sized rocket inspection setup, quite a realistic concept when the costs of failure are considered.
Looking through here, haven't seen anyone using Pandoc, so I'll through that in the mix. Offers the ability to write simple LaTeX intertwined with Markdown. I've been using it for everything from letters to homework assignments, seems to get the job done for most scenarios. Probably wouldn't use it for an extensive paper though. But it's nice to be able to start typing in Markdown, call `pandoc -o output.pdf source.md` and just have something nice to send out without a ton of setup.
And the fuel to slow down.
The boosters were actually parachuted back down to earth and reused. Though the general consensus is that it didn't save any money, and may have been more expensive than if they had just been disposable.
Sshuttle – Transparent proxy server that works as a poor man's VPN
The engines have minor differences, namely that the space shuttle used fully closed cycle engines while the falcon 9 does not. All this means though is that the efficiency is slightly lower because some of the propellant is burned and the combustion product dumped overboard to power the turbo pumps that push the rest of the propellant into the main combustion chamber. While this reduces efficiency, this makes the engine somewhat easier to design and I believe the next gen spacex engines will have this feature.

The vertical landing design is actually really smart because it allows a relatively un-aerodynamic object to get back to the ground without adding heavy wings and fairings. Rockets don't actually like having fins when they go up since the dynamic pressures get to be extremely high. Rather, they opt for gimbaled engines to steer (this also helps when there's no atmosphere to steer with). The only downside to this approach is that some of the fuel has to be retained for the return trip, though this is a relatively small fraction. The other huge issue you have to deal with when gliding back is having some sort of landing gear in addition to the control surfaces. You can put wheels on it but that's a lot of weight and if you land it horizontally, without the pressure of the propellant keeping the body rigid, it will most likely crumple.
> Yes, obviously mknod is capability checked in the kernel, as there is a capability with that very name.

Yes, and it's checked against the root user namespace, not your current one. Which means that it's not as simple as "do I have this capability". It's "do I have this capability in this user namespace". Which is what I said originally, so I'm not sure what you're debating here.

> My point was that in your talk and comments you make some suggestions which I feel are misleading or inaccurate. In some cases this is probably because you are discussing your own implementation.

Can you give some examples? If I'm wrong about something, I'd love to see an example of it so I can correct it in the future. In particular, I'd like to know what parts of my discussion are related to runC's implementation of containers.

> capabilities are not 'part of' namespaces, any more than block devices are 'part of' the filesystem

Capabilities are effectively 4 bitmasks that are scoped to user namespaces. Yes, they aren't technically part of "struct user_namespace_t" but the way they are used make them quite intricately related. Much more intricately related than block device inodes in a filesystem.

> given that most security checks occur in other kernel subsystems, and a holistic conception is implied by the word 'unpriveleged'.

But those security checks generally will use either ns_capable (so they're all hooked up to the user namespace scoping logic), basic UID/GID checks (which are also hooked up to user namespace mapping logic) or some other security framework that is effectively an additional ACL (and isn't the purview of namespaces anyway).

The main complaint I would understand from the use of "unprivileged namespace" is that the kernel doesn't actually mark namespaces as being privileged or unprivileged, it just so happens that unprivileged namespaces act slightly differently because of how they are set up. But AFAICS that's not the argument you're making.
> Would you want a car built by hand, or a car built by robots? The latter is going to be better built and have fewer defects

My first two cars, bought in 1997 and 1999 were pretty prone to breaking and costing a lot of money and time to fix. But the car I bought in 2005 was different. I checked around, and it would seem all brands have suddenly become very fiable. I suppose the factory switched from manual to automated production.
Using a VPN to another country slows down browsing a lot – in my experience, enough to make the web unusable from a bad hotel WiFi connection. It's annoying enough that I usually just accept the loss of privacy.
> “We got a discount,” Halliwell said. “I can’t go into the specific pricing, but we did get a discount for being an early adopter of the technology.”

> In response to a question whether the discount was closer to potential figures publicly disclosed by SpaceX’s Shotwell and SES chief executive Karim Sabbagh — who discussed possible reusability discounts of 30 percent and 50 percent, respectively — Halliwell said: “It certainly came out closer to Gwynne than to Karim.”

> The figures, while stated as unofficial and somewhat arbitrary, illustrated the behind-the-scenes negotiation on the real price of a reused Falcon 9.

> Halliwell did not confirm whether the ultimate price for the SES 10 launch fell between the 30 percent and 50 percent discount figures.

> “We did receive a good discount on the baseline price,” he said. “It’s not as crazy or spectacular as you might think, and that makes sense. SpaceX has to supply an awful lot of equipment, and they have to do an awful lot of refurbishment.

> “It is an interesting price, and it’s something which we believe will be meaningful going forward, and will be meaningful for the industry in the longer term,” he said.

> SES says there was “no material change” to the insurance coverage or the company’s premium payment after cinching the agreement to launch SES 10 on a “flight-proven” rocket.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/13/ses-stands-by-spacex-a...
move fast and irradiate things
>why they decided to go with a vertical-landing-design, instead of putting some wings on it and having it glide home

Basically, the physical and aerodynamic stresses of decelerating vertically are fairly similar to those of accelerating vertically. Whereas designing something which can work as a rocket and a plane would be a lot more difficult, and probably more expensive to produce.

It's more difficult to control vertically, but if you can get it right you save a lot of complexity in the physical engineering.
Have you considered getting a copper IUD? I switched to it 8 years ago (I'm 29) and I'll never look back. The side effects of the pill weren't so bad for me but they were enough to get the feeling it's not a good thing to mess with the hormones in my body, and I'm not good at remembering to take a pill every single day.
Having my normal cycle back and not having to worry about my contraception for whole years is so worth the discomfort when inserting/changing it.
I prefer http://curvedns.on2it.net

This was the original.

Other than having to modify their ksh script, it is painless to set up.

In my opinion, authoritative nameservers, and therefore DNSCurve forwarders like CurveDNS, are more important than recursive resolvers/caches such as OpenDNS and DNSCrypt.

A recursive resolver should be authoritative for nothing. They are middlemen. Companies that offered this "service", such as OpenDNS, had to pander to advertisers, or were run by advertising companies themselves, e.g., Google.

The "rules" of DNS are easily broken. This applies to caches. One does not need to look very far to find resolvers that someone has designated as "authoritative". dnsq: "weird ra". This often means an open resolver IME.

A while back some companies including the ones named above if I am not mistaken were pushing for extensions in DNS to put at least part of user IP addresses into DNS packets so cache operators could track them. The reason? Advertising. (Although maybe they would cite other reasons.) Not sure what ever happened with that. BIND had started to implement it. Thankfully djbdns will never support this garbage.

This kind of nonsense is why I cannot get excited about the latest extensions to internet protocols anymore.

Too often they are for the benefit of web companies and advertisers, not users.

The "encrypted DNS revolution", if it ever comes, is not going to be initiated by companies running recursive resolvers. (Unless they also run authoritative nameservers.)

Note: When the user runs their own cache on localhost there is no need to determine nearest POP.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes!

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/waltwhitma132584...
The Making of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The profit-maximizing price drops as the profit margin goes up. As service providers make more money by selling customer data, they'll be able to increase profits by lowering prices and bringing in more customer data. Of course, this assumes a significant amount of customers who have the option to switch providers or choose not to have internet access.
Ahh, good to know.
You ship a robot factory and it builds robots in the Belt for you.
Capitalism is absolutely violent, and just as concerned with with-holding value as providing it (the primary means of price negotiation is the threat of walking away). Look at how much food a grocery store throws away, or how many houses are unoccupied, all in the interests of accounting and bargaining leverage.

However: I take umbrage with "natural right" (the only right nature guarantees is entropy and death), and "fair share" (as decided by whom?). I think a wealthy, free, and just society would include infrastructure investment and The Commons in addition to free enterprise and private property; but good luck getting every single person to agree on the same definition of "fair".
Parent comment didn't lay forth a good argument, but I think there is something to be said for the societal cost of people owning investment capital. However, there is also something to be said for the benefit of incentives. It's important to balance these factors, for example by making capital gains tax progressive and raising the rate for high earners.
Plain cheaper, sure. But the government isn't a for-profit corporation. One of the central policy themes of the last few decades is increasing inclusivity, that the mainstreaming of marginalized people isn't solely for their direct benefit but also to increase their visibility in the eyes of the majority and as such build awareness and empathy.

Segregationist policy is un-American.
I am the only one that finds the recent HN feature change that makes it impossible to upvote older stories annoying?

(I prefer to have all my upvoted stories in one list)
Jurafsky & Martin is the canonical textbook but it's pre-deep learning. Check out the wavenet paper[0], and Alan Black's Festvox[1].

[0] https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
[1] http://www.festvox.org/
While you're correct, you're not pedantic enough. Using X-rays to validate the most critical engine parts has been done for literally years and is a relatively boring and old part of "rocket science". Don't expect SpaceX to spend some serious cash on this and techniques such as this (MRI and sonic / ultrasound tech comes to mind).

Source: a good friend of mine is a structural engineer for Aerospace Corporation (a rocket scientist if you will) and I'm an avid r/SpaceX reader.
Robot prints and immediately burns Donald Trump tweets
Of course you can buy a non-identifying information perfectly legal. And then guess what's the definition of non-identifying information? Think again. If ISP thinks it sells you that, nothing stops you to look at that yourself closely - and may be, just may be you'll uncover something which ISP missed. After all, scrubbing data to be perfectly non-identifying could be, you know, expensive. And doesn't exactly fit ISPs business model. So sharing even Congress-related history could be an interesting thing.
Good luck with that.

The daughter of a wealthy estate might receive the very best in private education, music lessons, etc. She might take her allowance and start a successful business. She might just have a successful business because of all her parents' social connections.

Then dad dies. How do you propose to nullify all the advantages she still enjoys because of her father's wealth?

Can you take away the child's business that was started with a few million dollars from dad? No? But you can take away the million dollars still sitting in the bank?

How about the farm? the house? the boat? Can those not be inherited?

If you reject all inheritance, you reject much of the incentives of capitalism.

EDIT: better English
Turns out that people want to pay less tax. You say this like it's unexpected.

Most people are not going to have personal concerns over a pre-filled return as long as they are confident that they can modify it without repercussions. They may oppose it ideologically, on the basis that the government should experience as much friction as possible in its efforts to fleece the populace. Such an ideological position is a valid reason to oppose this change.
The Australian GST is national and included in the display price of all good sold.

(There are some goods - eg Fresh Fruit and Vegetables - that are exempt from it -- but if GST is applicable - then it is included in the displayed price)
I had a buddy who designed this web app a few years ago for a client of his. He was young and relatively new, and he charged the guy $500 to do it. The guy made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Years later, all of the APIs for the app are pretty much deprecated and things are breaking. The whole app needs a redesign.

The guy approached my friend letting him know that he needed to update it. My friend said it would be a lot of work and he didn't really feel like working on it. The guy said it was urgent and this was his livelihood. My friend came back at the guy with a price because the whole system basically needed to be re-developed and he was going to probably make it better than it was before -- having almost a decade now of experience. His quote: $25k.

The guy refused. As I said before: A guy who was making hundreds of thousands of dollars off this app refused to pay my friend to update it. Of course, he could take his business elsewhere, but my friend knew the app well because he designed it.

Another story to go with this in a way: I purposely did not update a clients' website for almost 5-6 months. Guess what happened? Exactly what I thought would happen: things started breaking. My client contacted me letting me know that things were broken, thus solidifying my justification for why I charge for monthly updates. Clients think that they can pay once and thats it. Sure, go ahead. But the web is changing so fast and especially things that rely on API that you just need to be handy.

Here is the thing by not doing that: If you go in months later, you have to figure out what you did, remember what is going on, try to fix it, etc. If you are in there monthly just to maintain it and update it, you have a constant reminder of the work you have done and the general maintenance helps you keep in contact with the client.

I have had it happen: I built a website/app for a guy and he was busy doing something else... I kept the web app on a private server and it was nearly done. He contacts me over 2 years later telling me he wants it to go live, but not before having a whole bunch of changes. I had to go in there, understand where I left off, and pick up where I left off to finish for him.

Anyways, my point of these stories is this: Know that once you develop it, you cannot guarantee what it will need in the future, or any bugs that might occur, but whether it needs monthly or yearly updates, you should incorporate that into your initial price, or monthly/yearly invoices, just so you can keep checking up on it, make sure everything is working, etc.

If they need things fixed during the course of the year, you can charge them by the hour, or just come up with a fair monthly price, even if you do no work on it -- just helps you keep everything in check.

You could also come up with an affiliate plan -- pay them a percentage for referring you to other potential clients -- on work completion, of course.
this really is a great vision that is both plausible and achievable within our lifetimes
Yeah, we used X-ray inspections to get away with smaller safety margins at my last employer. Plastic deformations start at the grain level (nanometers) though, and I don't think there's any X-ray microscopy to do this en masse.
Thank you for the clarification. I can see from your examples why binary transparency is a useful concept worth considering in its own right. I still suspect there is a huge amount of overlap between the problems the author is trying to solve and they ones that Nix/Guix has already solved (especially the way they want to use a hashing algorithm to identify the release). I'll bet a general solution for binary transparency could be built - a solution from which practically all software in general could benefit, not just Firefox in particular - by building on top of (or at least learning from) the base that the purely functional software deployment model, as pioneered by Nix, has already given us.

I am not simply saying "They should use Nix" as if that would magically accomplish their goals. I am saying that they could build on top of, or at least learn from, the novel techniques that Nix has contributed to the field of software deployment.
That's probably because the app store may offer a delta update patch instead of a full download.