skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I study orbital debris for a living - I'd like to assure you that you don't need to feel too worried about that. Orbital debris is generally consolidated in very thin altitude bands. Rockets on an escape trajectory spend very little time in these shells, only in passing. Compare that to satellites with lifetimes of 15 years.

Niel's statement is analog to saying "The LHC could create a black hole that kills us all". Yeah... I guess on some theoretical level it's possible... but it's extremely unlikely. Same concept applies here. I'm quite disappointed in him saying "There's a very good chance", because that is far from true.
Prioritise your use-cases dude! I don't think this "bug" needed to be fixed.

I mean if the RPi were running a space probe, the thing would unblock, long long before it got to its destination in a galaxy far, far away.
Wait, you're just now starting to doubt their neutrality? This feels like an Onion headline in the making -- "Local Man Starting To Think Wikileaks Might Not Be Unbiased Source Of News"
Thank you. I'm reading over it now and for the next few days (to really grok it). I do wonder how bad it will be for low write situations. At the same time I'm open to switching to BigInt and using Postgresql-xl.
That is so awesome... you have a door?!?
Interchange fees dont go directly to bank providing the card afaik. Visa/Mastercard network take a cut, I recall reading 0.25% on CC in Europe? Then the merchant bank takes a cut (merchant services and shouldering last man standing chargeback/fraud risks - hence why sometimes merchants pay 4%+) and then hmm anyone else?? I doubt any more than 1% is remitted to the bank providing the card given I know some physical retailer (small) paying ~1.4% in UK.

In the UK they also market you for $. They ain't sending you that exclusive "loyal VIP customer" introduction/bonus offer for virgin wine, or some fitness club, or breakdown out the goodness of their heart..Which is probably another nice earner on top of everything else
I finally gave up on virtualbox and bought vmware instead for my mac. It works much better.
You must not be a gamer. The salt refrences are already off the charts, in that case referring to salty (upset) players.
Italy court blocks Uber services in Italy
Area man! :)
So you live in one of the best case parts of the world, and it still barely works out?
I should have written libre not free. That has a clear meaning (and it's what I use in the followup comment). Do you have a better suggestion than "open" for "no restrictions on use"?

> Personally, if I'm writing a hobby project then I want it to be copyleft.

Totally up to you! In the context of Haskell projects though, I really, really want to see Haskell businesses succeed as well as the open Haskell ecosystem.
I found it very confusing, too. In particular, the headline makes no sense at all -- ultimately the "miles" they sell are for the very same "seats". Framing it as though the "miles business" is distinct from the "flying business" is nonsensical.

What I think it's getting at is: airlines are increasingly selling their services (i.e. seats on planes) indirectly, via loyalty programs instead of directly, via ticket sales.

Selling via the loyalty programs has benefits probably because consumers over-value the miles they receive, because (a) some portion of the miles will expire or never be redeemed, and consumers don't internalize that fact, (b) the airline collects from from the bank as soon as the issue the miles, but they don't have to pay for the seats until some point in the future, and (c) they can take advantage of some psychological factors/gamification by encouraging people to earn "gold" or "platinum" status, etc.
Eh, if it becomes a real problem I'm sure someone will figure out how to vaporize it with a big laser.
And then you get run over by a bus.
Local only with no cloud support. Hallelujah.
Ask HN: Older engineers, do you see a future in tech?
Using a throwaway account for obvious reason.

I've been a software engineer for a decade, and I've been in ad tech for the past 4 years. The going has been good so far, but I can't help but notice a glass ceiling.

This whole time I've chosen to stay an engineer because I enjoy the technical challenges. What once seemed like a career path of boundless opportunity, now strikes me as a dead-end. Promotions have been very hard to come by, most of my career "progression" has been lateral moves.

What's more, it's not like I'm gaining many more skills. In fact, what I see happening is many of my skills becoming irrelevant or automated. For example network programming and programming languages. It has all become automated and packaged in pristine libraries.

Even in ad tech specialization has not been a savior. Machine learning has become more and more standardized, such that anyone with just 2 years experience can easily train models and deploy them to production (luckily, debugging ad delivery issues is still not easy, so I still have a safe haven there).

At length, I'm really worried about my future as a software engineer. I feel like I'm constantly running on a treadmill hanging off a cliff edge. If I ever stop running, or slow down, I might fall into the precipice.

And slow down I have. I'm almost 40 and I don't have the energy, time, or mental acuity I once had. I've been handsomely compensated for my work so far. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid that I will grow obsolete and that the young guns will catch up to me and depose me.

I have a wife and kids and a mortgage. I can't just up and move to the newest job hub. I can't undertake a grueling 5 year training sequence to switch careers. But should my fears come to pass, I won't be able to maintain my lifestyle. All those high-earning years were merely borrowing from my future. And now the bill has come due.

To close my meandering diatribe with the actual question.
HN, do you see a future in tech?
What they sell miles for only gives you a soft upper bound on what miles are worth.
"I'm often frustrated by the extremely cautious attitude some people have toward technology with the potential to have negative consequences, when it seems much more likely to create positive ones."

This trait, like all other traits, has been selected for over eons.

It appears to be very well preserved.

We might step back and consider the good reasons that this trait would be so well preserved - regardless of how uninspiring or inconvenient it appears to be.
In general: don't fix a non-existing problem. You don't know beforehand what the problems of the future look like. Fancy technology X of today is technical debt in 10 years. So do invest in solving technical debt along the way in products you keep.
I agree with this article; however, there are considerations that can be made early on, to ensure an easy path for future scalability, that don't waste any time or money during the project's nascency. For example, if I know I want my app to scale at some point in the future, I may opt to build it in Elixir, or I may choose to use a Riak cluster rather than of MySQL.
They would make some stupid shit up I'm sure. Sadly, I didn't have the resources to take them on legally. Never going to Portugal again, that much is certain.
Qualia and the hard problem are just dualism disguised. Dualism is rife with contradictions and has been largely abandoned, but now it's trying to gain acceptance again under new names. The idea that there is something special about internal states of brains, that can't be explained away, puts mental states on a special place, apart from everything else - a dualism.
FYI - It's about a dollar a dose at Costco.
That's quite a clever idea.
It is more about ideology.

The 3.x is catching up, but still not fast enough as the community wants it to. But 2.7 is here for a reason, and shaming people that used 2.7 to push 3.x adoption, in my opinion is a bad practice.
Title should include (2016). I remember when this went around last year.
To be fair, you don't have to try very hard to get someone to believe something they already believe.
It's an average bloggers come up with based on potential and actual redemptions. They even do really dumb stuff like counting the face value of a seat nobody would pay cash for. Like "I got this $6,000 seat for 100,000 miles, so they were worth 6 cents per point."

What value you personally actually get out of miles is individualized and taking a valuation from a rando blogger at face value is incredibly stupid. Especially from bloggers like The Points Guy (which was linked), because they get kickback when you use their referral links to sign up for credit cards.

If you offered me the choice between 10 AA miles and 1,000 Delta miles, I'd choose 10 AA miles, no matter what bloggers say. I'll always use AA miles and I would have trouble doing anything with Delta miles.
I don't think "~1%" is a fair summary of that link, especially not "in the best case". You're trying to breakdown what happens to a 4% fee, and many of the airlines have miles valued at >2% at that link.

I also don't know where you're getting that 7 miles/dollar number from.
Collisions are the problem. When to large things collide they create hundreds of little things. So any space janitors, as large things themselves, would only increase the number of collisions and thereby exacerbate the problem.

The relative speeds of any two objects in low orbit means that physically catching much of anything is horribly inefficient. The DeltaV requirements for a robot grabbing one thing, then moving to grab another, means you are probably better off launching a separate robot for each target. Any complete answer must therefore involve some means of moving debris without physically touching it. Magnets and lasers are the only hope.
Put it in another way, consciousness is selecting actions that lead are associated with maximal predicted rewards. So it's a system that has perception and ranks possible actions. Its role is to make us more adaptive to external states.
Pretty much, and that's only because my office is 10 minutes walk from BART.
I've said said elsewhere in this thread, but the cost is about a dollar a pill at Costco. (Costco is amazing.)
Agreed on this point.

Many a times there is heavy lifting - recommendations, machines learning etc. However that is don't using specialized technologies in a non user facing process and the results are then dumped into a DB available for a CRUD app.

I am hoping that products with such requirements will have some obvious tools for such tasks (Hadoop, Hive etc) and they would find a way to scale such processes with time.

So their stack might be go+*sql+Hadoop.

Can you please suggest some use-cases which don't fit the above pattern and maybe we can brainstorm. Seems like a fun exercise!
Many buildings in areas with lots of defense and medical industry will be set up to be all offices.
I've

I don't know much about security so I really have no constructive criticism, obviously, one can easily make lots of investigative inferences from the information Wire collects and that is troubling enough.

If I understand correctly signal stores only metadata. My question whats the format of the metadata what kind of information does it retain. Is it anywhere close to what Wire is storing?

I would appreciate clarifications on this.
Data Structure Problems and Solutions
Fair enough. But if the alternative is setting up a consumer grade PC on a consumer grade internet connection in a (non environmentally or power controlled) corner of a room at home, then surely we are looking at a similar situation?

Given that spooling up a RDS instance is quicker and cheaper than buying all the hardware and spending time installing and configuring an SQL server, then if time to market is a critical factor, you would choose RDS over a home grown solution, wouldn't you?

[Edit: I just realised that this is actually the point you were making, and I got sidetracked by my above question]
its just arbitrage.

airlines sell a mile at an average of 1 cent, banks charge merchants 3.5 cents for every dollar.

consumers can win if they pay their credit card off on time. many of them are able to churn by putting business travel from their employer on their credit card and getting it reimbursed in time.

banks can win double and triple if consumers don't pay their credit card balance completely one time, just once.

since the credit card aspect was already there whether there were good loyalty programs in existence or not, its actually a decent ecosystem!
> just because these things can conceive consciousness does not make them consciousness.

I like the car example. If I have a pile of car parts, they don't make a car. They have to be put in a special way in order to function. What is "car-ness" and where does it lay? In the parts, or in the configuration, or in the whole action of driving it?
> ultimately the "miles"
> they sell are for the very
> same "seats"

No figure to support the following claim, but I'd expect 50% of miles to expire without being redeemed.

But also: I recently stayed at the Conrad Rangali "for free" having accumulated enough points. Food, a small upgrade, transfer to the island, etc conspired to add an extra $5,000 of spend on a five night stay. Don't underestimate the upsell!
The Algebra of Types
I actually spoke with my homebuilder about leverage. His company took out a loan to purchase the (now my) property with a downpayment of I think 10% of the undeveloped value. It was common for him to do that, and interest payments could drain his profit margin if it took too long to sell a new home. So at least he was levered 10x. But even if all builders did that, it would still carry less risk than the too-big-to-fail banks by virtue of being distributed across many small independent organizations. No single collapse eould trigger a cascade.
The headline reflects airline's point of view, not consumers'. The money quote on credit card subdivision: "it accounts for more than half of all profits for some airlines, including American Airlines Group Inc., the world’s largest"
Brain cancer patients live longer wearing electric cap designed to zap tumors
It would be really nice given that Schell originally quoted 2 years per system on a verified kernel. The verified ones did always take 1-3 years but just using safe languages on verified kernels could be quicker. Google, Facebook, and Apple have nobody from high-assurance that I'm aware despite their resources. Microsoft Research snagged quite a few but they just build prototypes or tools that most of Microsoft doesn't use. None of the big names care overall that I can tell even though it would help them on certain components. Microsoft at least deployed SLAM intro production for drivers and applied formal verification to parts of Hyper-V. IBM had Paul Karger work with them on a security-enhanced CPU and smartcard OS (Caernarvon) with pieces of both being sold to customers.

Otherwise, I don't know of anything happening with big companies and high-assurance tech. Only smartcard vendors seem to do it regularly for specific components in the hardware (esp MPU's) or software (esp JavaCard or MULTOS).
> self-organizing behavior of a chaotic assemblage of electro-chemical relations within the brain

That seems about right to me. Add that the organism itself is part of a complex environment, with all its sensations and reward signals, and that the organism has to adapt in order to survive/exist in the first place. With these constraints, the self-organizing behavior leads to consciousness.
> I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. First focus on building what people love. If people love your product, they will put up with the growing pains (e.g. Twitter used to be down a lot!).

They haven't failed (yet), but I think gitlab.com would be a lot bigger if they scaled faster. Lots of people have been rejected using it because it was too slow.
Well, yeah. It's the Maldives.

I've used points for five-night stays at the Conrads in Seoul and Tokyo without having a single dime on my invoice at checkout.
Most attempts at pointless pedantry are incorrect. In this case, I have at least one credit card where I've put down a deposit of twice the spending limit of the card. At no time am I in debt to the bank, or borrowing money to them. Yes it's a credit card, not a debit card.
"scale" here, as with all conversations on HN about "scale", refers to the technology required to service a large number of users or usage.
If you need your employees to work 60-80 hours per week, you need to evaluate your business plan and if it's actually viable.
Before people panic and again try to claim that HTTPS does not help here, note that the leak here is not in HTTPS itself per-se: it's in DASH and VBR encodings. Segment sizes can be predictable and are unique for each video. Higher variation in bitrate leaks more unique fingerprint information, and Netflix happens to support high variation in bitrates. HTTPS still does guarantee integrity and confidentiality.

Stepping back a bit, although this paper is definitely valuable, it isn't that startling, because we already know that encrypted communications are vulnerable to passive attacks when the contents are predictable. It's a good reminder that "vanilla" encryption isn't necessarily the best way to protect privacy when the attacker can simply guess what we're transmitting because the search space is so small; in this case, it's easy to compare the length of what is being transmitted against a corpus -- and bam. There's only ~42k entries...

Entropy entropy entropy. It is your friend. Just so happens that VBR and DASH weren't designed to increase entropy when transmitting segments.
Desperate humans are a great fuel for any type of change. Those desperate people will not care about the world burning around them, or prevention of it burning.

Walmart, insurance, and shipping companies are one of the top 5 or all in the top 5 as employer's for a frightening number of States. All of these are ripe for AI disruption.
Friendster's problem was that instead of fixing its problems, it decided to re-write.
Kenneth Arrow and the golden age of economic theory
A significant percentage of younger (as well as non-younger for that matter) people have practically no exposure to mainstream media, so naturally one should expect propaganda (from the various players) will be brought to online forums of all kinds.
Cash has embedded costs as well. Precautions are taken against employee theft or robberies. Somebody with an armored vehicle is also getting paid to drive the cash to the bank at the end of the day and bring enough coins and paper currency in proper denominations so that cashiers can make change the next day.
I wonder if there's a way to collect and recycle it, especially the larger objects, since from what I know aerospace components contain plenty of exotic/expensive materials.
What's the role of the brain if decisions are handed down from the API? Couldn't we have made due with just the spine and a few extra parts of the brain. How does it communicate to the API? Is the API vulnerable to physical effects, being linked to the brain? All these considerations have been explored thoroughly since Descartes and dualism.
When did you last write a project in PHP? Your thoughtsmight have been valid ten years ago, but they aren't now.

fwiw, I find the PHP stdlib more complete than many other languages.
‘Mowgli girl’ found in January, cop says was clothed, no monkeys.

"There were no monkeys. She was not naked, and she wasn’t using her hands to walk. I don’t know how these stories are being spread.

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/mowgli-girl-found-in-...
Grinding the salt might not accomplish much, but... I still enjoy doing it. I don't think I'm going to stop.
Would you sacrifice five years of your life if the odds of a financially independent exit was less than 10%? Less than 10% of startups succeed, and that's before breaking that cohort into startups that barely succeed and ones that'll leave you independently wealthy.
Those are answers to the question "how can I keep my employees in the office longer without increasing their productivity?" The answer to the actual question is "you can't."
Some FOSS developers who still use it, should move to Diaspora*.
E31AA E39DI Eritrea
Very interesting that they can get a video fingerprint without even downloading the video. So they can fingerprint 44k in 4 days (7 seconds each) instead of downloading each video which would be very demanding. I wonder if Netflix had any monitoring that noticed them initiating a stream of every single video. I wonder if they used multiple Netflix accounts.

They mention they used Silverlight. I wonder if this also works for videos when viewed with HTML5, and if the same fingerprints can be used.
Is that true? I avoided ever joining startups because I assumed everyone worked 60 hours every week.
I remember (probably around 10 years ago) of a compromised server with a couple of strange files ". " and ".. ". After looking into it I realized that they were a ftp server and a process name changer.
I would say your guess is correct, this script is probably used to spot weird file names which would pass unnoticed with a simple "ls".
You're refusing to learn from someone who lived it. I also know of zero services which failed because they couldn't scale their technology. But I know of 100s that failed because they couldn't get enough users or usage.

Your example about the DB tables is exactly the trap to avoid while you are iterating rapidly to try and find product/market fit.
> They also use paid "pro-government" rally attendees.

Christ, even the Canadian government does this, and we're about as unsophisticated as it gets.

The naivete of people getting their panties in a bunch over the revelation that The Evil Russians participate in hacking and propaganda, how can you be so unaware of how the world works?
Image hosting is so much heavier
And of course a bunch of those miles will expire, or some customers will never reach enough miles to make a flight. And at least in the past some airlines have had pretty high fees for redemption flights ("fuel surcharge") that might even cover most of the cost
I agree with this article only for launching new products. But if you already have a product which is serving millions of customers, you better worry about scale while you change anything.
The baseline for comparison here is not an airline that is selling an enormous amount of miles to the credit card networks.

The baseline is an airline that has no credit card program. If air travel purchases hit a headwind, it has no alternative sources of cash.
While I do love KVM, it takes a lot more to get running properly than installing Virtualbox and Vagrant and being up and running with a whole ecosystem of every type of prebuilt box you could imagine.
(author of Dgraph)

It's based on GraphQL, which is definitely not a hack like XML => language and currently catching on faster than a forest fire. Dgraph's derivation, GraphQL+- (for lack of better name) is a lot more powerful than Cypher or Gremlin. Both of the latter allow only returning lists of results; while GraphQL+- returns back an entire subgraph. Thus, all the relationships are maintained. It also allows expressing complex joins using a function like variable blocks; feeding results from one into another like you'd do in any popular language.

You can try running some complex queries with GraphQL+-, it might change your view.
http://play.dgraph.io/
The firmware signature ensures the updates are authentic, but not that they are fresh. An attacker could force devices to stay on an older authentic but vulnerable piece of software.

The Google Omaha design docs discuss this a little bit: https://github.com/google/omaha/blob/master/doc/cup.html

I think plain HTTP is not appropriate for most update schemes Interestingly, Google Omaha actually chose not to use TLS to ensure freshness, but has something custom.
The evidence showing that “dark matter” exists
How long have been taking ? Can you explain your stack & schedule ?

How have managed to avoid tolerance ?
Isn't Meteor a framework? I'm assuming you meant Javascript instead of Meteor