skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Advertising is a symptom not of excess consumption but of excess production. And all communication is a form of mind control.
They certainly already are.[1]

The double-edged sword of encryption is that anyone can use it. With the recent paranoia of leaks, politicians now have a legitimized cover story for the use of apps like Signal, Confide, and the like.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/9/14561786/confide-messaging-...
"I'm not a conspiracy nut but..."
Automation doesn't reduce costs toward zero. It reduces them toward their irreduceable inputs.

It's a bit like Amdahl's Law of Parallelisation.

In some cases, that irreducible input is fairly small -- microchips and software can do a great deal (though at scale, they also represent some of the most expensive, and energy-hungry systems we've ever built).

In others ... not so much. Heating water from 0C to 100C will always take 100 calories per gram (and markedly more to convert it to steam). Casting a 22 kg iron weightlifting plate will require 22 kg of iron (and all its embedded energy). Food has its inputs, including sunlight, water, nugrients, land, topsoil, pest control, sowing, and harvesting. You might move that into a lab (I tend to doubt that), but there's still going to be some irreduceable residual.

(Actually, the story may be far worse in that we've taken a system which produces 2-8x the human labour energy inputs to one which consumes 5-10x the food energy output, largely as fossil fuels. Discounting soil and nutrient inputs.)

I strongly suspect your fruit prices are asymptotically approaching some lower bound other than zero.
> I think you're overlooking the broader point I'm making by focusing on that one line.

Sorry if my comment read that way. I was only critiquing the one line, not the entire post.

> But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.

I think you are getting cause and effect backwards here. In my experience, there were plenty of tech employers in Toronto, just not for the really interesting & challenging stuff. For example, IBM has had a very large presence there for decades, but twenty years ago the coolest software project they had going on up there was the Visual Age IDE's. Alias Systems was a big deal back in the day, but even that ended up being bought up and by Autodesk...
So using the word "psychopath" is "offensive" or something? :D

Give me a break.
Quality paid VPNs don't reduce speed enough to be problematic in that context. Free VPNs are sometimes throttled. And some ISPs may throttle VPN traffic. If you have problems, you can see if port 443 is better. Or TCP vs UDP.
Do you have any references at all for a winged stage being feasible in any way? Considering that there are plenty of rocket stages out there that can't even be moved horizontally unless they're pressurised I doubt anything vaguely resembling the Falcon 9 could ever be retrofitted in the manner you describe. What form would these, presumably retractable, transonic capable, necessarily light wings even take? How would they ever be as light as the remaining fuel load in an ASDS landing, especially when wheels are added?
Discrimating between companies leads to communism. Good opportunity for isps to gain market share by offering privacy protection.
> now, I shall admit my ignorance...

You've already demonstrated it in spades.

When something seems odd, maybe you don't have all the facts that would instead paint a much better picture. You're like someone with two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle who's convinced it's something perverted but really it's just a fruit bowl.
I first learned how to program by reading - nearly cover to cover - the TI-83 instruction manual. Fantastic.
People that are very good at hiding money for the ludicrously and criminally rich are also, not surprisingly, very good at making money disappear.

If your biggest client just got killed in a coup do you really think you'd go through a lot of trouble to track down his various relatives as they're being systematically captured and/or executed by the uprising? No, you'd quietly wrap up all those trusts and funnel the money to safer places, like the bank accounts of yourself and people you trust.
Given that is the case, the business is worth close to $0
You're totally right. I clearly wasn't thinking straight when I made that comment.

There is still plenty of inherent value in accumulating wealth at a faster pace though.
You can open a hair salon without venture capital.

You can start a tech consulting company without venture capital.

You can start a construction company, a law practice, an auto repair shop, or a dental practice without venture capital.

Oh, you mean that you can't build a multi-billion dollar company overnight without venture capital?

Thank you for your insight.
The point of the static fire is to see if the engines work, and make sure that the rocket fueling sequence works. It does not stress the rocket with any aerodynamic forces.
Don't spread unfounded, crackpot rumors. Thanks.
No source code, as usual.

How difficult would it be to duplicate these results with TensorFlow? Would something like this require more than the building blocks that TF and other toolkits provide? I have zero experience with machine learning, so I'm just curious.
There's a wide gulf between what can be captured and what is being captured.

I guarantee you anyone with a roof and a rain barrel is not hurting for water for their plants.
> I think in a perfect society, this sort of cash flow would be severely tempered.

The problem is if we had your society, there would be no Jeff Bezos or similar capitalistic-minded entrepreneurs to create these mega companies in the first place. Remember it started out small.
Many other multi-billionaires in the US have signed the Giving Pledge [0], promising to give away more than half of their net worth to charity. Gates, Paul Allen, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, Michael Bloomberg have all signed. Even Larry Ellison! But not (yet) Jeff Bezos, or for that matter Sergei Brin or Larry Page.

[0] https://givingpledge.org/
Those are called VPNs.
"and they every major network has robust safeguards in place to prevent you from working back to a single person’s web history."

hahaha.
THat's quite a talking point.
What would these "Robust safeguards" be?
The history of pretty much every study on this, ever, is that it's pretty easy to deaggregate and deanonymize data.

But look i'm sure, verizon, at&t, etc, those great bastions of "doing it right", have done this right too!

20 bucks says if someone buys large amounts of the aggregated data, they can extract significant information that can be pinpointed to individual congresspeople.
"and they every major network has robust safeguards in place to prevent you from working back to a single person’s web history."

hahaha.
THat's quite a talking point.
What would these completely unmentioned "robust safeguards" be?

The history of pretty much every study on this, ever, is that it's not all that difficult to deaggregate and deanonymize data unless people are amazingly good at being careful what they give, and even then, it assumes you can't combine it with other data.

But look i'm sure, verizon, at&t, etc, those great bastions of "doing it right", have done this right too!

20 bucks says if someone buys large amounts of the aggregated data, they can extract significant information that can be pinpointed to individual congresspeople.
I contradict myself and mis-quote Whitman.
This very much fits with my perception on how most company's lawyers understand open source licenses today. But then I would say that, as my organization (CNCF) requires our projects to be licensed under ASLv2 and I wrote this justification for it: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/
Google searches have the query in the URL... probably most "important" people google themselves occasionally.
Another one is GNU find assuming the current directory if omitted, while BSD find explicitely has to be told the directory to search in.

It's nothing complicated, but breaks many scripts if you only test them on Linux (more or less the same problem like case-insensitive filesystems).

I'll have to add, though, that one could argue that OSX is the one behaving like "traditional UNIX", since most of it's tools derive from BSD-Versions. GNU tools are the ones that deviate from this (which I still find more convenient in day to day use).
Could it be that the float on this stock is so small that when index funds try to buy the stock, the price is pushed up massively?

A theoretical problem with market-cap-weighted index funds is that a fund that holds x percent (usually very small) of the world's wealth will want to buy x% of each company. If a company has less than x% of stock outstanding, the fund will push the price up indefinitely
This sibling post on the author's blog gives valuable perspective for his background: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/05/13/What-Open-Source-M...
Here's one I wrote in Go, though I just noticed I never bothered putting on a license. Let me know if you want me to. https://github.com/lkesteloot/trs80
> they can use government to actually offset the power that corporations have (through plain capital and through regulatory capture)

You're saying people can "use" the government to compensate for the government itself preventing competition with their cronies.

Isn't that a bit of a fool's errand, even disregarding the fact that in reality we don't use the government - the government very much uses us.
A ball
Why are important people searching google without https?
You mean people will get the opportunity to pay their ISP not to sell them out? Sounds pretty consumer friendly to me.
Yes, I fully understand your point and I don't think anyone will take my comment as an advice, it's just my opinion.

The problem is quite complex and hard to solve in one shot.
The solid rocket boosters (SRBs) for the Space Shuttle provided 83% of the thrust at takeoff. The main engines were the other 17%, and continued to fire after the SRBs dropped off and parachuted into the sea. The main engines perform the function of part of SpaceX's booster stage and also SpaceX's upper stage.
An important difference between buying ads on 400k sites and 5k sites is the margin for the middlemen. The money is going to get spent anyway, so the middleman needs to optimise his take.

The bigger the sites; the more leverage they have over middlemen. The lower the fees exchanges/ssps can collect - for big sites (ones people have actually heard of) the fee is effectively zero, and are needed by exchanges as loss leaders to attract any demand. Little sites with no leverage will expect to pay around ~70% to the middlemen (although not all of that will be disclosed).

True story: about 250 domains will get you above 98% of online population in most countries. This is plenty large enough for dvertisers to do all kinds of fancy targeting and optimisation within this pool.
What the OP describes is really long, drawn out, complicated mud wrestling.

I've been a good TeX user from the beginning of TeX and love TeX.

For the problem the OP addresses with LaTeX, there is a much easier solution: And the candidates are ..., and may I have the envelope, please? [drum roll].
And the winner is ["rip"]: Just use just TeX, that is, D. Knuth's TeX with his standard macro collection Plain. If get into trouble, then just get and read his book, The TeXBook -- as software documentation, it is exemplary.

I'm guessing that a TeX file sent to people who accept LaTeX will work fine. That was the case the time I published in the Elsevier journal Information Sciences.

Want some cross reference macros? Okay, I put my TeX macro source code for cross references at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630570

in two parts in two posts where the
above URL is for the first part and
the second part is close in the
same HN thread.

The OP goes on and on about what
text editor to use for typing in
documents in TeX. No problemo!
I just use my favorite general purpose
text editor KEdit with a few macros
specific to TeX.

With the TeX distribution I have is
the spell checker ASpell. I use it
for nearly all my spell checking, in
blog posts, e-mail, sure, TeX,
source code documentation,
own notes on random subjects, etc.
ASpell was written by a bright,
hard working person -- it's darned
nice software, one of my favorite
tools. I use ASpell just for
English, but IIRC it also can
work with French, German, etc.

TeX is fixed and unchanging,
rock solidly standard, essentially
totally bug free, beautifully designed
and documented -- what's not to like?

LaTeX? Just to start, need at least two
books, each about twice the size of
Knuth's one book, and IMHO nowhere
nearly as well written
(likely the case since next to nothing
in software or computer science
is written as well as Knuth's book).
For more, of course there is the
TeX source code documentation
in Knuth's literate programming
which I've long regarded as
just exemplary software
development -- that is, IMHO
the most important part of software
is the documentation, clear enough
to make the actual programming
language statements obvious because
otherwise when the code is written
"only the programmer and God
understand it and six months later,
only God".

TeX was good enough for Knuth's book
and, then, his series The Art of Computer
Programming and, thus, should be
up to the needs of a journal.

Or, in short, just use TeX, with
your favorite editor (hopefully
a good one that lets you write
some macros), write some
TeX macros, use ASpell, and
otherwise avoid the mud
wrestling and relax!
The safeguards might just be that they won't sell you "large amounts of" the aggregated data unless you're clearly a profit-driven multinational corporation rather than a ideologically-driven individual. KYC and all that.
I think most of the big players today would have started out just the same. People like Jobs & Woz, Page & Brin, Bezos, and Musk didn't get in the game to make billions, at least at first. They wanted to change the world, or maybe pursue an interesting opening, or perhaps chase after a fascinating new technology. In a more equal society, these instincts would hardly be curtailed.

And even if you're right, maybe a world without mega-companies wouldn't be such a bad place after all?
And in order to support clients that don't support SNI, you need to have one domain per IP address so an attacker can just try and connect to that IP and then look at the SSL cert that's sent back to get the domain name.
> it is not about the government being objectively awful, it is about the government regulating.

Well, the government is no more awful than any other Mafia.

Think about it. If you don't pay protection money / taxes, you get kneecaps busted / imprisoned.

Neither is something you want to happen, so you pay up. Government is essentially just a vehicle for exploiting people on a massive scale.

Your average mafia couldn't possibly pull off extorting 300 million people, but a government can and does, because people believe it's necessary "for the common good".
> So instead of having a livable minimum wage, you pay people under a livable wage, then tax the business/business owner and use that tax to pay food stamps to the worker. Makes way more sense!

No, that makes zero sense. You are assuming the business owner is evil and rolling in cash when the case is exactly opposite.

Costs are costs. Even taxes. If a business makes $100K at the end of the year and government takes $90K of that in taxes that business has no money to hire people, expand, innovate or survive market downturns. We can't just grab money from people and expect no consequences.

I suggest to fire-up a spreadsheet and run through some calculations because, if you are serious about the above, your view of how things work is quite distorted.

> I thought companies couldn't raise their prices? So pick one, either prices go up or costs don't.

There is no universal law. It all depends on the competitive environment a particular business inhabits. Some have no way to raise prices. Others do. I think I can say that the vast majority of products you find at places like Walmart or BestBuy come from companies who have nearly no freedom to raise prices. Competitors kill each other on margin and there's no room to go up.

I'll give you an example of a company that has some room to increase pricing: Storage companies. This just happened to me. We have a 10 ft x 30 ft storage unit full of business equipment. We started a few years ago paying $285 per month. I just got a notice that it's going up to $340.

When the cost of switching suppliers (or the pain) is such that the customer is kind of stuck the supplier has some room to climb. When mobility is easy and competition is plentiful there is no flexibility.

The example I concocted in post you referred to mentioned that a business might have suppliers who raise prices. This is possible for a certain class of products within limits. For example, if one of the components being purchased to manufacture a product is single source (there are no substitutes) they have the ability to raise prices within limits because the buyer has nowhere to go.

So, yeah, it's a dynamic and variable landscape but the vast majority of businesses in reasonably competitive product segments have no freedom. In fact, in most cases they are under downward pressure.

Here's an easy exercise to confirm this: Go to Amazon and search for any household product. I don't know, forks, plates, screwdrivers, light bulbs, trash cans, toilet cleaner, etc. You will get thousands of results with products within the same price range. Anyone outside a certain range isn't selling well at all. That's just reality.
Not having net profits does not mean that parts of your business are not profitable.

You may want to take a closer look at Amazon's financials and see what kind of free cash flow they're generating before they reinvest that cash in expansion and new businesses. Net operating cash flow for 2016 was $16B and the trend is strongly upwards.

https://secure.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/AMZN/financia...
Me too. It's also extremely flexible, at the cost of not in fact always generating correct LaTeX and sometimes needing a whole lot of debugging.

I use LyX because, although I'm a programmer and perfectly capable of littering my text with braces, somehow that completely ruins my writing flow. I need the text I'm writing to look clean and a bit formatted (big text for headings, italics and suchlike) -- and not like code -- to get anything meaningful down on paper.
An easy way to think about this stuff is:

DNSSec => Authenticity of resource records
DNSCrypt, DNSoverTLS => Privacy of the connection
I see. What you mean is that the average employed developer in Greece is better than the average Greek developer due to competition for jobs and culture of attachment to the homeland.

This may be true, but it has little relation to quality of the average developer in Silicon Valley.
>The reason? Advertising.

Or the ability to accurately direct users to the nearest POP.
Well, no. If we're going to be pedantic, we should say MiB (mebibytes), because file sizes on disk are expressed in multiples of powers of 2, but the SI prefixes are multiples of 10.

So a 1 megabyte file (as reported by the file system) is actually 1048576 bytes, which technically - sorry, I mean pedantically - speaking, is 1 mebibyte.

To make matters worse, disk manufacturers use the decimal prefixes, so our nice 1 terabyte drive is 931 mebibytes, but is reported by the file system as 931 megabytes (not MiB).

Finally, memory manufacturers use the binary prefix, so 1 megabyte of RAM is actually 1 mebibyte (1048576 bytes).

A bit of a mess, no?

All the above is, IMHO, a consequence of imprecision. If we get used to being loose with our terminology, we risk carrying that attitude over into our work product, with sometimes regrettable results.

So I'll continue to strive to be pedantic (translation: precise).
F9 FT can launch ~ 5.3 metric tons to GTO with landing, or ~ 8 metric tons without. I'm not sure if I'd call that a relatively small penalty. It does allow SpaceX to launch most GTO satellites. I expect Block 5 will do a bit better.
Because the resources for colonizing space with .01% of the population will be synonym of the death of the reminder.

Resources are bound.

And it will not be viable to send resources from space.

Space colonization is just an excuse for subsidizing the military industry nowadays.
would it not just cause economic chaos?

what is more baffling to me is that as people in our generation are not as regularly living as couples leaving huge amounts of people either stuck sharing a house with strangers or living with their parents into their 30s that there is not a push towards more reasonably priced single bed flats and studios etc yet every building development here is 2, 3 and 4 bed houses.

more so many of us dont need the space we used to, i live in a 2 bed terrace myself and the vast majority of it is dead space. all i really need is somewhere to cook, somewhere to wash and somewhere to sleep, my laptop handles most everything else so i dont particularly need much space to store things. id move somewhere smaller if i could but in many cases smaller places are actually more expensive

im not sure id actually want to own a house either, it can become an anchor, if i want to move right now all i have to do is give notice and leave, if you own then you cant really move until you have managed to sell your current home which may well not be as quick as you want/need.

id argue a better solution would be to allow only one loan on a property per person, ban buy-to-let mortgages, or restrict them to being no profit, the owner is already getting the mortgage paid for by the tenant so theyre basically getting the house free anyway
That will be an interesting lawsuit to follow whether you are allowed to be discriminated against because of not being a profit-driven multinational corporation.
Agreed. Fun fact: Wolfram alpha understands Mebibytes, which is useful if you want to quickly convert between networking specs (say megabits) and "real" computer units.

Then again, maybe doing more simple math by actually using one's brain wouldn't hurt either. :)

Edit: And yes, I'm aware that you'll never get the converted speed of what is written on the network device's box. But sometimes it's nice to have an upper limit you can compare to at least.
What would happen if trained on 2 or 3 voices for the same amount of time?
Ah, I didn't see your comment before I wrote mine. And I agree violently with your point of view.
I think implementation can be done with TensorFlow but hardest part is to provide relevant training set to model.
You might still wonder whether, insofar as modern society works due to a sort of non-aggression pact, all of us are getting the same benefits from that pact.
> The right applications depend on the exact problem, and even problems that are not a fit can be re-stated so that they become good enough for Redis, and similarly, problems that in theory are a great fit can be mis-implemented easily

How about adding something about this in the documentation, if you haven't already?

- Do use Redis for <X>
- Do NOT use Redis for <Y>