skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why so much incertitude in your words for documented facts ?

Ha, well in part because I am trying to frame this position for the HN audience. And also because it's an extremely serious claim, though even without the foreknowledge component there is clear criminal behavior on the part of multiple US administrations.

I didn't know about the French journalist you mention, but I am aware of

* Dozens of foreign governments warning the US in advance

* The CIA puting a memo on Bush's desk a month before detailing an imminent terrorist attack involving hijacking planes

* Identification of the hijackers by multiple FBI agents, who in some cases had informants living with the hijackers and who were aware that in flight school the hijackers were uninterested in learning to take off and land planes.

* Able Danger, a SOCOM and DIA effort that identified 2 of 3 Al Qaeda cells active in the 9/11 attacks, including ringleader Mohammed Atta up to two years prior to 9/11

* William Binney claiming that the NSA did have the raw intelligence to uncover the 9/11 plot, though that intelligence may not have been processed in time.

* Historically similar plans for a false flag like Operation Northwoods

* The death of Iraq weapons inspector David Kelly, just two days after being questioned aggressively by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee

* Various whistleblowers like Susan Lindauer who claim to have had foreknowledge and tried to warn their superiors

* Wire transfers from Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the US under Bush, directly to two hijackers. Bandar is also implicated in illegal arms dealing and is so close to the Bushes that the family themselves nicknamed him "Bandar Bush".

* War games on the day of 9/11 that were remarkably similar to the real event, and confused the response effort.

So, I agree. It's more likely than not certain people had foreknowledge and exploited it for the purpose of war profiteering. Even though I have been reading about this for a long, long time, sometimes it's still hard to imagine that anyone could be so wicked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-k...
That absolutely does mean it's enabled on all parts. They also don't validate the chips against FreeBSD - does that mean you can't run FreeBSD on their chips? Or do you think it would be ridiculous to expect them to test scenario's outside of the market they're targeting?

Do you have any idea the cost of running validation tests? I'm not the least bit concerned that they haven't "validated" the ECC functionality. It's enabled, they know it works, it's the same ECC they use on server class chips, and if someone found a bug I have no doubt they'd issue microcode to fix it.
I had always wanted to do a webaudio port of:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/SingingSynth.html

but never got around to it. This is great!
When Google introduced that button, I'm aware of some commercial sites that didn't use DRM and saw in the region of a 500% increase in the number of paying users grabbing whatever they could rather than paying for further views, continuing subscriptions, etc. Typically they soon implemented alternative methods of serving their videos, and the problem then disappeared again. It's a myth that such measures don't reduce piracy. They may or may not eliminate it completely, but piracy is not a binary problem and even eliminating a large amount of the casual piracy can be highly beneficial. Equally, even a significant incentive inviting casual piracy that was already possible but was not actually happening can be very damaging.
Okay, I admit I found it hard to read the beating transcript in detail so I just skimmed. Could someone tell/confirm for me: is he actually beating her because of a software/design problem?
I uprooted this not because I think any of us should take purist interest in the tragic events of someone else's life. The article is interesting on many levels.

This how an abuser works, subtly and forcefully both. The dialogue is also bizarre in that it focuses on technical details as a vehicle (and would be almost incomprehensible 10 years ago.

It shows how the justice system works at the retail ("end user") level, when most discussion of justice issues happens at a macro level.

And it shows how ubiquitous cameras/recording devices change not just police and politicians, not just big airlines, but the justice in proples' lives. Ubiquitous surveillance cuts both ways.

(Plus there's the weirdness of the court being in "fabled Palo Alto" -- wtf?)
A public company generally cares about quarterly performance. A private company might have its sights as far as a few years out. However, with education it takes about 20 years to start seeing a return on investment. It just doesn't make sense to approach education from a business standpoint, both because the ROI is very low, and you need to have stability in education, you can't have someone like ITT Tech all of a sudden deciding to close their door to tens of thousands of students and leave with a bunch of useless credits that won't transfer.
No, he is using a software problem as an excuse and a tool.
Children are the primary beneficiaries of education. They aren't consumers choosing between different products. Their parents are able to choose where they go to school (to some extent), but there's always a free option -- as there should be.

The secondary beneficiaries of education are everyone else is society. Education has the highest ROI out of anything the government spends, and it keeps all of us safer and healthier.
Static Site Generators and Reviews on Where to Serve Your Sites
I used wording from others, maybe it's a bit strong I don't know.

I know the runners' high too, the runners' crave also. And long walks (forest + small hills) does something a bit different because it's a low intensity effort. Yet after 40+min you can go from depressed to a thin and constant "life is beautiful" background emotional state. That's all.

All in all the takeaway point is: doing something stupidly simple for long can change your mood quite surprisingly.

May I add that when my cardio vascular system was fubared, this kind of walks (moderate uphill) was the only thing that could interact with my body the right way. Being almost bed ridden, but an ex athlete I tried running, jogging, biking, indoor biking, taichi, stepping. They were either too demanding and injuring (for my very weak self) or of low efficacy. Yet walking had the right rhythm, full body muscle use, right intensity to circulate blood everywhere. You can guess how good it is to finally feel warm blood reaching your fingers or toes. It also helps your breathing, lungs ..
Figures are for quarterly sales in both cases, of course.

Sources

Apple: investor.apple.com
IDC: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, April 11, 2017
I took it to mean "third parties politicize CBO reports" rather than "CBO reports are created with ideological slants," because, well, that's the truth of the matter. You can't criticize a CBO forecast for being slightly inaccurate when politicians decide to change the parameters after the fact.
He was sarcastically alluding to Bill Gates.
RetroChallenge 2017/04 Entrants
Web apps are great for most intranet apps. Especially if you already have a single sign on solution. Deployment and maintenance are easier, as is replacing the thing when it becomes obsolete. With a desktop app, once it's out there, it's out there with all the headaches that brings. Otherwise, hard to make a recommendation without any specifics.
All the discussions about Twitter's problems seem to lack the perspective of what it feels like to use the service if you're not already a public figure. For this purpose, a magazine author qualifies. Anyone with enough clout to be taken seriously on the subject is already part of the problem.

Twitter's great at marketing, PR, and sales. It's also a fun way to make a quip, if that's the only thing you do. However, it's pretty lousy as a means to have a discussion. Anything over a full round trip exchange gets lost in the noise so quickly as to be useless.

To the article's credit, it was no surprise for me to read that the current CEO made it his top priority to make the platform interesting to advertisers. Job well done, I say. He has succeeded spectacularly. But at what cost?

Unless you have thousands of followers you're invisible. This encourages caustic hyperbole in order to illicit responses. Why is anyone surprised that spam, negativity, and the friction of trying to communicate with actual friends isn't interesting after the novelty wears off? I agree that they shot themselves in the foot with killing the API, but I think that only sped up the inevitable.
Here is a comparison from 2015
http://www.mytechlogy.com/IT-blogs/8685/top-5-open-source-se...

Interesting that Lucene still holds the top position (didn't know that twitter is using it for search, amazing - so it should be able to deal with a lot of data)

Also now there they seem to be using more C++ for this kind of projects (the page says that Lucene also has a c++ port), in 2009 Java seems to have been prevalent.
Just about any story about Twitter mixes people who don't get it and then people who rave about it.

Perhaps it's just a different way of getting news. If there's a topic that is interesting, it's much easier to find a niche subreddit to follow or go straight to the source. I don't know what experts or subject areas avoids the inevitable "now let's show how clever we are", "share our personal life incessantly", or "argue with some Internet idiot over something really dumb with 140 characters".

If one of those experts has something really interesting to say, it's not the Tweet, it's a blog post, it's a site, etc that will bubble up through other sources already curated and Twitter can be skipped. Again, it's very possible there are specific subjects where it's great, but personally have yet to find them. I've never seen a Tweet that had value by itself and the site adds nothing of value to my Internet experience. I hate it when people link to tweets because you wonder what can really be said in that medium which isn't just some witty retort.

Do people just consume the net differently?
Disruption (REAL disruption) happens when janky, poorly-featured products come along and do one key, valuable thing much better than their established, mature, full-featured competitors.

The janky upstart uses that small edge (and its much lower costs, price points, or other efficincies) to get a foothold, then steadily builds out a complete solution that is more compelling than the status quo...which then finds itself disrupted.

With that context in mind, here's the opening line of Bloomberg's Terminal Info page:

"The Bloomberg Terminal brings together real-time data on every market, unparalleled news and research, powerful analytics, communications tools and world-class execution capabilities — in one fully integrated solution."

I'd like to draw your attention to that first two parts: "real time data on every market, unparalleled news.."

To gather and process that data and unparalleled news, Bloomberg employs an army of human news gatherers. The company is private, so I don't know their financials, but I'd be willing to wager that its news gathering organization is one of the top contributors to Bloomberg's COGS.

Meanwhile, how many trades (and how much $$$) in equities, currencies, and commodities happen every day based on information about something that just happened in the world?

How much of an advantage does having that information first confer to the person who gets it?

Is it not conceivable that, had Twitter had focused 100% on turning the one billion-plus everyday humans with smartphones into news gatherers and leveraged a mix of software and professional analysis to turn it into data and info that traders would love to pay for...that it could have beaten Bloomberg at the "real time data and unparalleled news" game with a MUCH lower cost structure?

And then...
Yeah I skipped a beat on the bow -> poisonous arrows.
The paper fails to discuss the fact that the data for a given patient is biased by the preliminary (likely unrecorded) diagnoses of the doctor. The doctors are trained to systematically order certain sets of tests depending on their preliminary diagnoses. If some doctors have a pretty good idea of the final diagnosis, the deep learning classifier is simply learning what doctors do when they suspect a particular disease. It is not learning to predict a disease. A truer test of the deep learning method would also require that the deep learning algorithm orders the tests, or that we randomly select tests for a patient -- both of these possibilities are highly unethical.
So they're not working hard and they're at the top?
This article raises some interesting points but I think ultimately misses the mark.

Twitter's problem is that it does and always has lacked discipline. It spends an enormous amount of money on product and engineering and has almost no velocity to show for it. If they could have reigned it in and taken a careful approach from the get-go, things would have been very different for them.

2012 was way too late to actually right the ship. Costolo was chosen to try to bring meagre profitability to the money fire. Whatever decisions they made at that point were nearly immaterial. If instead Twitter had exercised careful hiring and engineering discipline, it could have greatly cut costs, which would have given it significantly more leverage and more options by the time 2012 came around.
"The correct choice" was only correct after the application was created and iterated upon and somewhat widely adopted. Would any of the rapid feature iteration and widespread adoption have happened if this theoretical application was _initially_ created as a native app?
> Are you talking about the fact that Zcash has, as a feature, the ability to make non-anonymous payments as well?

Last I checked virtually none of Zcash's transaction used the anonymous payment feature (presumably because the performance of it is very poor).

So it's plausible that monero transactions could practically end up with a larger anonymity set in absolute terms than zcash (especially for current monero, which has CT and a minimum mixin size).

I think it would be more accurate to say that Zcash, has, as a feature, a way to make anonymous payments, but it is rarely used.
I love this guy's stuff! He puts out some great information!
I am definitely very excited about this. Blanket statements like "government is too inefficient and such a waste" or "we need to raise more taxes to fix this problem" are statements that are irrefutable due to the convoluted nature of government. Now we can have a little more insight into what is efficient and what isn't. Also the opaqueness and division of data makes it difficult to make meaningful and economical decisions in a macro sense. I feel like there are lots of untapped opportunities to create services that involve gathering specific data that may also be sold anonymously to government in order to make better decisions along with helping customers.
> there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today

You mean like my 2012 laptop, upgraded to 16GB RAM, which is perfectly good at web browsing, Google docs and html/python/postgres dev ?
Great course. I would also add the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. They go hand in hand and overlap a bit but yet I feel they are complementary to each other.
TLDR; the reason per article is that Twitter killed their developer APIs. This in turn was caused by the event when board removed the visionary founder Ev Williams and instead put in place a guy who saw Twitter as pure media company and had a job to turn it in to ad revenue platform. This meant no other properties can compete with Twitters own properties. Williams instead had envisioned Twitter as massive real time data collection system which can be monetized for insights which required welcoming all 3rd party apps it can. So bottom line is re-occurring story of board ejecting founder and his/her long term vision and replace with someone who is specialized in milking the product for quick profits.
> “How many people work for government in the United States?” he asked, with the excitement of a child showing off a new toy, before displaying the answer. “Almost 24 million."

Directly, sure. Indirectly, a lot more. By indirectly, I mean companies that do government contract work.
The address bar in Firefox will run a search if you enter something that doesn't look like a URL.

But it won't send whatever you're typing to the search engine looking for search suggestions, for example. You need to use the search field to get search suggestions.

In contrast, in Chrome, you can either have search suggestions and your search engine seeing every URL you type, or no search suggestions at all, depending on how you set your prefs.
Commits aging over 6 years. Repo is not maintained at all. Is there any production ready version of this thing?
Retrochallenge is a friendly competition where people spend a month working on a retrocomputing project and posting updates about their progress. For most entrants it's more about working on something fun and enjoying the enthusiasm of the other entrants / the drive of the event, rather than anything seriously competitive.

I entered the last one but didn't get very far. Wasn't prepared to enter this one, unfortunately, but I intend to try again in the future. I like retro-stuff because I can focus on one particular machine, with no complex libraries and APIs, no cross-compatibility issues to worry about, etc... All the fun of programming without the fuss of practicality.
> ZCash is pretty explicit about the difference between shielded and transparent addresses....

This is an important point. Having two very distinct addresses (different lengths, different prefixes, different RPC APIs) makes it very obvious to users when they have the benefits of shielded transactions, and when they don't. Thus users make an explicit choice to forgo privacy when they use transparent addresses.

The problem of only 28% of transactions currently being shielded (https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/network https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/timeseries?hashrate=fals...) is a separate ecosystem problem, where usage of shielded addresses with third parties (like wallets and exchanges) requires them to use new APIs, instead of just interacting with the new block chain via the Bitcoin API. IIUC Monero has also encountered these issues, and it is something we are both working on improving.
This will be a much needed site. Thanks, Steve!
I suspect that when everyone but you gets a team jacket, the direction is pretty clear?
Download 514 Royalty-free Music tracks for all your videos
There are a fair number of companies (and governments) who would pay a LOT of money ($$ hundreds of millions/year) for an accurate picture the real time state of the world every day.
One of the hardest views of government budget to come by is per-category over time or per budget proposal. So you could see, for example, how much police funding has gone up or down over time. Or for different budget proposals the increase/decrease of each category compared to the current baseline. That data is never available when proposals are debated in Congress every year. The best you get in the news is when some interest group digs deep to find the most click baity possible shocking line item. I think even the politicians just vote based on party and don't really have any idea about the budget big picture. Hopefully this Ballmer will provide that kind of view.
Damn shame. EEVblog is one of the shining examples of the sort of program that could only come about on a platform like youtube. I've often wondered why netflix or amazon haven't picked it up or made similar programming, and yet I have a hard time seeing them producing content of such quality and depth.
Why? He will just go be a rich asshole in India, we should take his money and than deport him.
I prefer RSS - twitter is too chaotic for my taste.
For those who aren't aware, Git is actually a fully decentralised system. It doesn't require a central server as such - though most teams use one, as it's a convenient setup for most projects.

Even if you are hosting on github/bitbucket/et. al. though, that repository is just one of many equals. You can push and pull from multiple peers as long as you have access set up appropriately.

I recommend the chapter on distributed workflows in Pro Git:

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...

There's also an explanation of the different supported protocols here:

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...
Seems to me lots of companies make $

Do they all get a derogatory psuedonym?

adob$ amaz$ face$ goog$ mailchim$ etc etc etc

or is the negativity reserved for M$

Suggesting there is something wrong with a software company because it makes money seems to be a blow in from 1990's militant open source philosophy and probably best left in the 1990s.
I'd say you want whatever can get you to start writing NOW.

If your goal is content, then you should worry about being consistent with content.

The platform will only matter later in the future.

I'd go with WordPress.com and that's it. From 0 to 60 in a second.

Most people will spend time playing with platforms and tech and forget the most important part which is writing.
I don't really know how the game works so the article was confusing. But this jumped out:

> Linda's stone-cold on arithmetic.

So easy to say but from what I could understand, I believe it.

My grandfather attended school through the third grade. But the 1930s being what they were, with a head for numbers, he became an accountant for the South Australian Railways. On week ends, to make ends meet, he would go to the racetrack and compute odds for the bookies. That's right: if someone placed £20 on a horse, the bookie would ask him what hedge bets to place. And they all asked him to calculate the changing odds as betting proceeded.

Which he did in his head. In pounds, shillings and sixpences. I can't imagine this.

But when I read this article I could believe this couple was capable of it.
How is this different to the US/Britain meddling in the French Election? - http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-john-oliver...
What a shame. EEVblog and AVE have been some of my favorite engineering channels on YouTube for some time now, hopefully Louis Rossman isn't next.
All I can go on is my personal experience which was putting older workers into jobs that have inherently high rates of context switching didn’t do well, while younger workers doing the same job thrived.

I agree with you that there maybe other confounding variables and that there are certainly older workers that are able to thrive in such jobs, just my experience makes me wary. I am also wary of putting younger workers into positions where sustained focus is required. Ultimately neither old nor young workers are bad, they just have different strengths and weaknesses and you need to match the best person to the job.
By "the correct choice" I mean the correct choice for a desktop application.

Having a desktop application doesn't mean you can't/shouldn't have a web application. It also doesn't mean they need to look/behave exactly the same.
Conservative AM radio, I can hear it now: "You know who the largest employer in the country is? It isn't WalMart, it's the US guberment!"
Do we have to use the word fuck? Can't the author be a little tolerant of other views and use the word duck instead?