skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Because you are taking an asset class that can be converted into shares/bonds which has a higher expected returns than an annuity because it can compound.

The annuity can compound too, if you treat it like you would any other 6% dividend and reinvest it.

Once you see that, the two become almost functionally equivalent. It comes down to a liquid million dollars with market returns or an illiquid million dollars with a guaranteed 6% return.

Which is better comes down to luck. If its 2006 and stocks are at all-time highs, then the 5% guaranteed will definitely return more over 10 years, and maybe over 20 and 30 years. If it's 2009 and stocks have cratered, the liquid million in the market wins handily.

The liquid million has a slight edge in expected value, as 7% > 6%. But when you consider the 6% is a lower bound and the 7% is an average, it becomes clear that there are situations where the guaranteed income stream could win.
The stakes are colossal too. Ultimately we're talking about owning transport infrastructure for the solar system. I think Bezos see's it this way too. Musk is all about settling gravity wells, while Bezo's is about O'Neil type space colonies. Interesting dichotomy.
What's wrong with using XPS? I picked one up for $1200 last time I bought one, that's not too high of a price.

You'd typically want the flagship device to be at least mid-tier to show off the best features and support for new mainstream technology, like the HiDPI stuff other people are talking about.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Dismissable Notifications

- DESCRIPTION: I have been using Ubuntu from 10.04. One thing that makes be curse Ubuntu is when my notifications cannot be dismissed. I expected it at-least when it moved to Unity but that never happened. Although I have been living with it, this is something which catches me frequently.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software engineer and maker
Were those failures plain lying? As a person who tried to be critical in both 2003 and in retrospect I'm not so sure about that.

I would encourage you to read the actual papers and the later analysis to come to your own conclusion. The OPEDs leading up to the war are particuarly interesting. If you have a NYTimes membership (I'm sure they have some form of free trial) you can access the "timesmachine" which is great UI they built to navigate archived papers back to the 1800s

There is a lot of rhetoric flying around on both sides today. As in most conflicts I find the reality to be much more nuanced and less clear cut. The temptation to omit details to fit the narrative is in my opinion the only thing you can count on from all media sources.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Better multi-monitor support for XFCE4

- DESCRIPTION: A default configuration that recognizes additional monitors in a plug-and-play fashion would be a game changer for me.
I was always told that the MBA is about the network. Someone in your cohort has a friend who gets you your next job. And there is also some diversity in the class since everyone worked for a few years prior to taking an MBA.

The network effect is very important. It allows you to grow and to attract smart ambitious people to your own adventure.
You do you realize sometimes these people getting elected actually write or enforce the laws? Perhaps even change them, by lets say reducing the number of refugees being taken in.

But to get to the heart of your point "enforcing laws" Legality is in no way equivalent Morality. People use terms like "enforcing laws" as a sort of dog whistle to imply we should not and are not going to be listening to minority voices.
> Not at all! Happiness _is_ correlated to shorter door-to-door time, but higher speed does not equate to shorter times if the distance grows as well.

Exactly! This is also related to the The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: building new roads just allows people drive more. (See Duranton and Turner.)

You can view this as an equilibrium. People will prefer uncongested roads until they become congested.

Surprising, yet simple when it's pointed out.
If you're running updates weekly it will fill up on Ubuntu. This is a recent problem, and I've only experienced it on my laptop with full-disk encryption.

The update process generates on the order of 100mb/month.
Someone already created that: http://suicidemachine.org/

The even got a cease and desist letter from FB.
+1 to all these points.

A couple of related issues that cause me frequent problems...

- In addition to detecting when monitors are removed, detecting when they are there from the start. If I have a monitor plugged in at boot, it is generally not detected. I instead have to wait for the login screen to appear before connecting the external monitor.

- When opening a new window, there seems little logic as to which monitor it will appear on, and where (particularly annoying in combination with being limited to a single DPI setting across multiple monitors despite each needing different scaling (sudden unexpectedly huge or tiny windows) - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14003160 )

Role: Developer
FLAVOR: Desktop

HEADLINE: Make Wi-fi less aggressive about switching bands, and prefer 5ghz

DESCRIPTION:
For access points with 2 and 5ghz bands which are both weak my laptop will continually jump between them every few seconds. This makes for very poor connectivity, and if it just stuck with the 5ghz it would do fine.

If it preferred a 5ghz signal that would do wonders for connectivity too.
Is this really that different from Verizon phones having Google services enabled by default (if that's even true -- I don't use Verizon). Why is Verizon spying on you any worse, or better than Google or Facebook?

No one should spy on you. Period.
Are you seriously citing the New York Post to make a point about media bias and integrity? I read the nypost for fun but it's barely a real newspaper, and to the extent that it is it's extremely biased and unprofessional.
I created something similar yesterday afternoon [0]. Instead of opening a new tab, it just requests pages through a hidden iFrame and drops the headers so the request goes through.

It doesn't click on anything, because it would be awkward if this by chance started sharing things on logged-in Facebook profiles etc. I plan on adding sequential requests over the weekend so the traffic is more realistic.

It's open source and on Github, so you can download, install and modify it from there if you wish [1].

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/decoy-requests/aeh...

[1] https://github.com/marvinkennis/Decoy-Requests
These laptops ship with broadwell/skylake/kabby lake processors, which support both DDR-3L and DDR4 memory.

But for price/power-budget reasons, they ship with the DDR-3L option.
Turns out one can only "manufacture consent" within certain parameters which are not far from the bounds of physical reality.

The media lost a lot of credibility from the second Iraq war which (almost to the publisher) they were cheering for. So when Washington Post (among others) started the Ra Ra for invasion of Syria to topple Assad more than a few eyebrows went up.

The public might be generally uninformed and uninterested but they aren't flat out stupid. And memory isn't quite as short as is apparently believed in some quarters.

This leaves an information vacuum. Which predictably is filled with anything that can match up with what people already "know" or otherwise want to believe.

Less is more when it comes to propaganda. Make it unreasonable and it all stops working.
"No" what? Could you explain what do you mean by that. Just to be clear, I didn't make any statements about control.
SpaceX Launches a Satellite with a Partly Used Rocket
Thinking about the problems with client-side SQL seems informative[0]:

* Security; allowing evaluation rather than a describing results.

* DDL; Data Structure and Types need to be learned out-of-band. Ideally we want a sort-of interactive INFORMATION_SCHEMA over http, so our tools can inform us about types/structure and we always have updated info as we write queries.

* Performance; Stored Procedures (server-side) protect against a client making poor joins; ORMs requesting too much data, etc...

* Info about Security: client side SQL doesn't know what rights it has, or you could say that a client account can't see the big picture of DDL. The understanding of rights is all communicated through non-API means.

* Info about Performance: clients don't know rate limits, current system load, what system admins consider reasonable data sizes or reasonable analytic calculations, etc...

I don't know what GraphQL does for each of those issues, but I'd love to hear.

[0] I recently setup InfluxDB which has a (private) web interface that takes raw SQL-ish, and it's so convenient.
>Experts can’t even agree on who is a hate group and who is engaging in protected speech.

Probably because the experts struggling over this aren't expert enough to notice that borders of those categories are not questions with answers that can be investigated, but instead they're categorizations people choose to apply. (Oh, and the author should know better than to casually drop the implication that they're non-intersecting categories.)

And to the extent discussing "protected" speech introduces the legal questions, there is no amount of experts expert-ing that can come up with a mathmatical proof to replace a nation's amalgamation of different societal philosophies figuring out where to draw legal boundaries.
Why do you have a /boot partition?

$ mountpoint /boot
/boot is not a mountpoint

I don't know if this is the default, but my KUbuntu machines have been fine for many years without a separate /boot.
Oh, ya not sure if I've ever even seen that. I live in an old (by American standards) 1950's apartment building with plaster walls, but pretty sure still hollow underneath.

Seems like that would make it harder to frame a new subdivision in under a week.
> I find it a particularly odd design choice to not make GraphQL spec match the JSON spec.

I can't speak for the original authors, but I can kind of understand it just by virtue of the fact that JSON is quite an ugly format that's hard to write for humans and comes with plenty of opportunity for error (missing quotes in places and the like). Their language also allows the introduction of some higher level semantics like an `Int!` to indicate that an argument can't be null.

Finally, GraphQL's query language has one major feature that makes it worth alone: you can comment things! This is something that you could never hope to do in JSON :/
Jeff Bezos is also an MBA, though I do concur with they guy who said all those people have MBAs in addition to engineering training.
Keep Metro Bleak
When everyone has a degree, it just shows that undergrad level should be tought in HS. Oh and yadda yadda 'everyone has a degree, except subhumans with GED' is partly becoming true in peoples eyes...
Yes, this is by design and it works as intended.

I typically use this with doubles and DBL_EPSILON, which is much much smaller than FLT_EPSILON.

With FLT_EPSILON this roughly equals to "zero" being "less than 0.001". If the zero check is omitted, there's going to be a division by near-zero which will make the results nonsense (and you have to draw the line somewhere). With DBL_EPSILON "zero is less than 0.000000001".

If this is too loose, then `zero(x) = abs(x) < FLT_EPSILON` makes it much stricter (about 1e-7).

This is good enough for my purposes, I don't deal with very small numbers in float and doubles give more than enough precision.

NOTE: I usually use this kind of comparison in testing by comparing known "gold" figures against the results of the code being tested. I don't test accuracy, I test for "in the ballpark" because the stuff I deal with has built-in inaccuracy in the algorithm and numerics.

The version you posted will always return false if I read it correctly.
For Ubuntu Desktop, it may make sense for the package manager to keep only the latest 2 or 3 kernels, and automatically purge the rest.
Why is boot still a separate partition. I most cases it doesn't need to be.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Wayland Support

- DESCRIPTION: MIR is almost a bigger joke than GNU/Hurd and will never be complete, I hope Ubuntu includes Wayland as default
Ask HN: How to put together a fast concurrent image downloader in python
I am interested in developing a python CLI app which efficiently downloads a large number of image URLs (http/https protocols). I am currently using the tool aria2c (https://aria2.github.io/) which appears to be decent. However, I wish to put together a python application leveraging big data technologies (Are AWS spot instances a good choice for this type of application?) to develop a downloader program which is concurrent and possibly even distributed. What would you recommend I take a look at? I am willing to put in the required effort to learn as well as release the code as open source for the community. Thanks in advance for your suggestions/help.
For safety stuff I've worked on, the source had to be vetted, and then someone goes through line by line and confirms that the assembly generated for each line of code matches the source code. For C or Ada with conservative optimizations, this is fairly mechanical (and extremely boring), but means that trusting the compiler is not a requirement.
If it is a Linux kernel update, then it's either Livepatch or you reboot.

If it is a system library, then for the apps to use the newly installed library, they need to be restarted (sometimes logging out and logging in again should be enough).

If that library is the system "libc" library or something similar, then it has to be reboot (not relogin).
The only way that I can think for reboot-free updates, is to save the full state of the system, then silently restart everything to the previous state.
Flavour: Ubuntu desktop

Headline: DisplayLink usb3 dock support

DisplayLink dock support for single or multiple monitors is poor on Linux systems. Fixing this would be great!
At the very least, if we're holding people responsible for their software, we should be holding car manufacturers responsible for crashes and firearms makers responsible for murders. "Oh, you were drunk and crashed your Prius? Put the engineering team in jail!"
Could you summarise some of the 40% that was useful? Might be interesting to hear.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: On installation, handle existing UEFI partitions more intelligently, or at least better equip the installer to remedy related problems

- DESCRIPTION: Realistically, I'm going to be installing Ubuntu Desktop on a modern commodity machine that previously had Windows installed. This will mean there's an existing UEFI partition that the installer should be able to take care of / co-opt / replace. It doesn't. The tools necessary for editing EFI records aren't on the installer desktop out of the box. Sorting this out myself becomes a colossal time-wasting pain.
BlackBerry's profit beats expectations, shares surge
I +1 this one. ubuntu should be a force to push this forward.
The Galaxy S8’s facial scanner can, unsurprisingly, be tricked with a photo
I'll share the money with you! All you have to do is....
apt autoremove will clean it up.
Dropbox Loses Market Share to Google and Microsoft
It probably varies (country by country inside Europe, and even company by company), but being asked about marital, family status, hobbies and picture seems unusual to me.

Gapless CV, degree transcript and references are more common.
A few counter points:

- Manufacturing in general in the developed world is in serious trouble. I'm not sure anything could really reverse that;

- I agree about having a sovereign wealth fund. Norway has this. It's such a lost opportunity by pretty much everyone else that allows the looting of natural resources by a wealthy few.

- As for fiscal responsibility, I think your view of the Howard era is somewhat slanted. The spike in resources prices didn't really begin until the mid 2000s [1], the latter days of the Howard government. I tend to largely ignore the Sydney Morning Herald when it comes to criticism of conservatives. It comes off as anything but impartial.

There were definitely attempts at buying votes in the last Howard term but most of the rest was tax reform, paying down debt [2], using asset sales to fund superannuation obligations (ie the Future Fund).

- There was definitely a problem with how the slices of the GST pie were calculated. Western Australia and to a lesser extend Queensland really got the shaft on this one. As resource prices receded, WA is now down to retaining something like 34 cents of every GST dollar collected.

- There was a somewhat complicated system for CGT inflation indexation. This was "reformed" to being a straight gain that was discounted by 50% if held for over a year. Son in the medium term, the effective rate is lower but I'm not sure this leads to the result you claim.

For one thing, flipping properties isn't really a thing in Australia largely due to stamp duty levied by the states (something the GST was meant to replace I might add, which the states largely reneged on).

At the height of the property boom (mid 2000s) it was probably the case that prices were rising so fast that even paying stamp duty it was possible to make a lot of money by holding property only for 1-3 years but this is exceptional. More to the point, I don't think the CGT changes were the cause.

Property prices in the Australia largely stagnated since the recession we had to have (1991). In Perth, for example, it was possible in 2000 to buy a 1970s 3 bedroom house 8 miles from the CBD for <$100k and this hadn't changed in years.

So partly this changed because the market was (still) oversold.

Another factor: the mining boom. Capital projects soaked up a huge amount of supply. The cost of construction in Australia massively increased as a result. This inflation was (IMHO) largely responsible for the 2000s price boom. 20 years ago it was possible to build a house for $100k in 3 months. Now? It's more like $350k and it takes a year.

- As for recent price booms in places like Sydney and Melbourne, this is part of a global trend where foreign money is driving up prices in urban centers in the developed world. I'm not sure immigration has much to do with anything here.

[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=iron-ore&mo...

[2] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/australia/government-debt-to...
You say that the tool has obvious non-infringing use and the article claims that security experts who have examined NanoCore say there’s nothing in the code to disprove Huddleston’s claim that he intended it for lawful use.

I looked at a youtube video of NanoCore [1] and it's immediately obvious that all of the above is bullshit. This is just a modern version of Sub7. [2]

Some features that NanoCore offers:

* Disable webcam indicator light

* Lock computer with a password of your choosing and show a message on the computer. The youtuber says it's for ransom.

* Swap mouse button functions

* Open CD tray

* Keylogger

* Extract passwords of various applications

* Send SYN floods from all your controlled computers

What exactly is the legitimate use of disabling the webcam indicator remotely? Combine this with the fact that NanoCore was originally launched on HackForums and I'd say this is a slam dunk case of a tool being purpose built for illegal activity.

Now whether someone should be held accountable for building such tools without using it themselves is an interesting question. However please don't try to act like this tool was built for anything other than malicious activity.

--

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1uzu6hzSQQ

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub7
Deploying 2048 OpenShift Nodes on the CNCF Cluster
Start an arms race, use ML to generate fake traffic.
Realistically more people could learn to run a CNC milling AR-15 parts, than could learn to write code of similar efficacy.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Work out-of-the-box on Chromebooks

- DESCRIPTION: Turns out you have two choices for a well-built ultralight notebook: a MacBook (£1250) or a Chromebook (£250). The Chromebook can run Ubuntu, and run it well. But right now it requires a specially optimised version of Ubuntu (GalliumOS) and faffing around with firmware versions. If Ubuntu was easy to install on Chromebooks as it is on desktops or regular notebooks, that'd be a massive selling point for the OS.
No Unity. I dunno if that's a stilo thing but that turned me off from ubuntu, probably forever.
Oddly enough, I know many people who privately admit this is the main reason they go to church: networking.
- FLAVOR: Xubuntu

- HEADLINE: A release entirely focused on performance

- DESCRIPTION: Profile Linux daemons and Ubuntu services which run full time. Fix performance issues from biggest to smallest. Reduce memory footprint for all services across the board, making it much nicer for those of us with 4GB laptops.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Developer who uses KDE Neon at work and Xubuntu at home.
FLAVOR: all

HEADLINE: More stability

DESCRIPTION:

On systems that have very little customization, I regularly get 1-2 crashes after the login that ask me to report them again and again. Systems regularly fail to boot after upgrading the kernel when proprietary Nvidia drivers are installed (the ones Ubuntu suggested to me), because stuff is not properly recompiled. The file manager crashes when connecting to a SAMBA share for the first time during a session.

I can fix this crap (although I'm getting tired of it), but for regular users, they go straight back to Windows. Stuff like that simply can't happen in a stable release or at least it needs to be fixed ASAP.

I like Ubuntu, but think that you are handling the support for multiple releases poorly and it might be better for everyone to switch to a rolling release, like Windows did. The users would get better support and updates and your developers would have more time to improve the software, instead of managing broken releases. As it is now, you are getting buried in bugs and there's no end to it.
Chargebee works on top of payment gateways like Stripe or Braintree. They give you more flexibility around subscriptions than those payment gateways support out of the box. Plus they don't charge you a fee (excluding payment gateway standard fees) until you make your first $50k in revenue with them.

Your other best bet is Recurly. They have lots of options for subscriptions but it may not make sense if you don't have any revenue yet.
Google and Facebook are private advertising companies at heart. So yes, they get to decide what (in theory) is best for their business on this issue. If they believe curbing what they view is "fake news" is best for business, they have every right to do so.

Someone can set up a social network entirely funded by the "fake news" Google and Facebook rejects, if they believe that this is a valid business model too. Again, they have every right.

It only leans "fascism" or "North Korea" style if news editorial direction becomes dictated by the government, and dissent is stifled by force.
Default "Maker Integrations" for platforms like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D Printing, CNC Routing, Laser Cutting, etc.

Basically and open source fabrication should be included in the optimal open source operating platform. Keep the world of innovation open for hardware and software.