skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We already have things that float in the ocean for long periods of time (ships, oil rigs) and which withstand ocean storms, so it seems like a solved problem compared to fusion.
Hypothetically, if a bad guy hacks the echo, it could only blackmail people based on their voice recording.

If he hacks the Echo Look, it could blackmail people based on some naked pictures/videos of the victims.
I must have miscommunicated.

Here is your website right now: https://i.imgur.com/CnChJns.png

You need to make changes such that it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/E2TsC1J.png
Good essay but I don't like it when people use market cap in these kinds of comparisons.

Don't forget that Amazon has 2x the market cap of Wal-Mart–but only slightly above 1/4 of their the annual revenue.
I know of Montreal Python:

http://montrealpython.org/en/videos

Julia Evans is a regular here (and at other local meetups).
If he is as successful as he sounds he has probably liquidated enough to last for far more than 20 years.
The UK government believe "1984" was a manual
Ask HN: Getting an internship as a freshman?
I'm currently a freshman in college, and for the past month or so I've been applying for internships in the Boston area with little success. I have experience with iOS programming, and I've independently developed and published an application using Swift, along with experience programming in Java, Javascript, CSS, HTML, and C. I've also taken classes such as data structures, which I've heard are important for getting hired. What else can I do to get noticed by employers? If I'm unable to get an internship this summer I'd like to work on an independent project to improve my skills for next year. What types of projects would be best to work on to land an internship in the future?
This is an interesting article from Dr. Jassby who has both patents and papers on Fusion going back to 1977 at least.

And there are at least two things that stand out for me, the first is that he goes out of his way to craft a narrative that is negative, and the second he doesn't mention the half dozen or so fusion efforts that are on going beside the NIF and ITER projects.

The interesting thing about the narrative is that it takes 'positive' things and puts them in a negative context. For example it takes power to run a fusion reactor, and while the reactor can generate that power it lowers the net output. At the same time, if there is a problem and the reactor turns off, and there is no 'cool down' problem like there is in a fission reactor. No steaming pile of intermediate fission products decaying to generate way too much heat long after you turned the off switch to off. You can portray that as "gee it has to waste a huge chunk of energy just keeping itself running." but that seems trivial given that things like cars have the same issue. Part of the engine power goes into run the fuel pump, or the alternator.

This sort of thing recurs in the article and is perhaps most egregious in characterizing the neutron flux as a proliferation hazard. While it is absolutely true you could design a fusion reactor whose purpose was to create fissile material for bombs, that design would look nothing like a power reactor, nor could you easily (maybe even possibly), actually 'convert' a design that had been built and deployed to generate power into one that could create fissile material. So what is the goal of combining the 'facts' that high neutron fluxes of low energy neutrons can weaponize U238, and that fusion power generation can generate high neutron fluxes, without also explaining that a fusion reactor designed to make power couldn't possibly be co-opted to make bombs? Why leave the inconvenient fact off unless you're attempting to mislead the reader? And what is the point of misleading them?

And that really makes me wonder, what exactly is Dr. Jassby trying to say here?
I could completely understand an article that says "Hey, while fusion has some desirable properties, it is going to be expensive, and from where I sit it is going to be more expensive than the power it generates is worth." That is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have and one that should be had with people looking at building fusion devices.

It also makes me wonder why he doesn't mention some of the other groups who are designing and building much simpler and perhaps more efficient systems (in terms of net energy production). Does he not keep up with the field or does he omit them because they don't add to the generally negative tone? All in all this article left me with more questions than insights.
It's called the "just world fallacy": everything that happens to you is because you deserve it.

Easy worldview to have if you consider yourself well-off.
Everyone is a designer and everyone should be sketching
Design Sprints and the Academia
At least in Scotland, they're predominantly used during road works (and they do vanish afterwards). I can imagine they're worried about incidents especially when there's at times only a line of cones separating cars from workers.
know: Javascript, C#, Bash, HTML/CSS, SQL, Powershell.

previously: Java, Groovy, VB.net.

been learning: Rust, ASM
Part of my argument there is that it isn't going to happen without regulation.
That isn't a good justification for calling JPEG "archival". HEVC outperforms h.264 just as BPG outperforms JPEG but like HEVC, support for BPG is still extremely limited and adoption is ultimately what determines whether something can be discounted as "archival".

Sure there are JS polyfills but those aren't going to work well on mobile devices and until content creation tools like Photoshop and desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac support exporting and reading BPG, it's unlikely to see much adoption.
I've been hearing murmurs about it for a while now, I think it's a great idea but thus far it's lacked sufficient business buy-in to gain traction.
When I first started getting into development I took a look at it because I heard of the great money you could get if you were an expert in it. From what I could tell at the time, 5-6 years ago, it was both a lot harder work to even learn anything more modern just due to the lack of a community that had put all of their knowledge online and a risky proposition. The money looked good, but you severely limited the number of places you worked and if the industry ever decided to get off its ass and change over in even low double digit percentages you were likely to be out of work and with skills that didnt really transfer
Could it be an example of a tragedy of the commons?

No one wants to drink water where someone shit but everyone would rather shit in the water than in a field somewhere far and away from the ability to clean oneself.
wouldn't it be great to have something like COBOL-grpc and rewrite everything in rust/scala/java/c# but not all at once, more like the simple things first?

I think that would probably be a good business.
Question: if they do go bankrupt then you still own your stocks, right? Do customers lose anything?
Spotify acquires blockchain startup to solve music’s attribution problem
ITT fashion illiterate techies doubting the success of a pretty genius product

(Almost) nobody cares about privacy. But (almost) everyone cares about how nice they look in public. And their Instagram. They are not like what I'm coming to realize the average HN user looks like or behaves. Use your imagination freely here...

The main problem I see with this is the quality of recommendations. Amazon only carries certain brands/looks/styles; will it try to suggest shitty fashion? Both the male and female models used on the product page were dressed awfully. Will Amazon just try to go for the lowest common denominator here?

The best way I see this working is for the device to categorize users into certain style categories and then recommend clothes out of that category. But I'm wondering if the ML is smart enough to recommend CDG pants and MMM knitwear for one user and then A&F for another.

Remember, your algorithm's quality is only as good as your training data and if they're training on outfits like they used on the product page...
Pour one out for BeOS. Unix-based, lightning-fast GUI, process isolation, and no user isolation on a single-user machine. They got quite a few things right 20 years ago.
Really the only reasonable world wide solar plan I've ever seen is solar power satellites. There has been a lot of work done there and they beam the energy back to the planet as microwaves where it is needed into the existing grid system. But so far the cost of getting all of that material into orbit to build them is something of a deal breaker.
financially naive speculators blow up their account with partially featured financial company

straight out of the onion folks.

Robinhood's gold account is still 100% less margin than other brokers and the regulations themselves allow! Yet they are getting people to pay for it! Have a laugh because it is hilarious, paying for the privilege to pay interest is the bigger article here.
CSS Custom Properties can replace CSS preprocessors
I'm not sure what's creepier - the privacy issues, or the fact that everyone seems to be assuming that machines can make better fashion choices than people.
Perhaps. But someone thought it was a good idea to put up a telnet port 23 default-admin-password interface. The point is, if you give that person two weeks to focus on securing the product, I'm not sure they would realize it's a bad idea to do that. People who are bad at security don't realize they're bad at security. Which is why it's probably important to bring in an outside team to break the product.

Or to put it another way, if we're not proposing to bring in an outside team to conduct a pentest, what's the alternative?
BackBlaze's lax approach to security and unreasonable requests for what data I should provide for them to debug a bug in their client is why I switched to CrashPlan.

(said bug also caused me to exhaust my 1TB Comcast cap several months in a row, BackBlaze was unresponsive and unapologetic throughout the whole process)
I'm curious on how Amazon will take the world. I can read and understand how the America buys a lot of stuff from it, how good the delivery is, etc., but in some countries they are barely beginning. And some local companies tried to do the same model and couldn't. They haven't bankrupted, but simply don't have the same size, same relevance as Amazon has in the US.

Will that model still be applied worldwide?
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-gates-educat...
A+ technical gifs
hahaha that is amazing!
True, but the condensed energy of fossil fuels would allow for tansportation and communication between otherwise isolated settlements, and greatly increase mining efficiency. As I recall the first steam engine was used to clear out leaded mines using steam pressure. Keeping existing people networked together allows for the exchange of people, ideas, services, goods, etc, drastically accelerating development
> Oddly I find pointers intuitive and easy in Pascal and assembler

Sure, sixy seven lines of assembly handily beats arcane crap like:

obj->ops.tbl[BLAH]->func(obj, &obj->x, arg);

Want to take an integer in a register, then add another register's integer multiplied by 8 or 4, and then a fixed offset?

Just use LEA (load effective address) and don't comment anything.

Let the reader figure out that no pointers are involved.
Excellent query, the path length of each stroke integrates and once it hits a threshold it returns for more paint. This threshold is brush-dependent so

The gcode relies on subroutines which aren't so common for 3d printers, take a look at the provided source for more details
damn, it doesn't work on lynx. should i update my browser?
There’s good reason to think that emoji are more like gesture than
language. When you crunch the numbers (and I have), the face, hand,
and heart emoji are by far the most popular — not the emoji that
represent noun-like items. Furthermore, the vast majority of emoji are
used beside words, not all by themselves in extended emoji-only
stories. People aren’t using emojis as a substitute for language,
they’re using it as an addition to it, just like you wouldn’t want to
talk in person with your hands tied behind your back and a paper bag
over your head.
[…]
Emoji are a universal language the same way that pointing at stuff and
grunting is a universal language. Useful, under a certain set of
circumstances! But what makes language really powerful is its ability
to talk about stuff beyond the here and now, beyond the easily
visualizable. In other words, abstraction.
[…]
For example, look at the tremendous difficulty that scientists have
had in communicating the fairly simple concept DANGER THERE IS NUCLEAR
WASTE HERE STAY AWAY in a way that will continue to make sense to
humans for the next 10,000 years. Circle with a slash? Nope, could be
a sideways hamburger. Skull and crossbones? Nope, could refer to the
Day of the Dead and/or pirates.

from http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... (via http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... )
I'm unconvinced that somebody who made their money in many cases exploiting the little guy ( https://lowercasecapital.com/posse/ ) is suddenly finding religion here in any meaningful way.

Action at the large levels is remote and indistinct, and boils down to status signalling and rich people games.

Paying for housing and food and shelter and schooling and grants and libraries and hospitals goes a hell of a lot farther...just see the good works of Carnegie and Kaiser, to name two.

Here's an interesting read you may enjoy along similar lines: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-dem...
Where do you draw the line, I could argue because we know that certain vehicles are remotely hackable we should just disable all the cars without regard to their status of use. Literally 0 difference in argument, yet the results would somehow dictate a different response.
You're absolutely right. But to start a decades-long project that may or may not work and has no near-term ROI is a hard thing to rally for. The cost of the project would eclipse what is being paid to the mainframe provider and to company personnel. And these companies have a difficult time bringing in top talent, so they don't really have many tech-savvy people to preside over it.

I've seen it attempted first-hand and it was a dismal failure. And it was their third or fourth attempt. And it wasn't even a full replacement! Just a simple data lake to dump things into. Google or Facebook or Amazon could do it, but few companies are like them.
Ok, I get what you mean.
Thanks for this feedback!
I'm sure there's at least one issue that you lean "conservative" on, yet you've not taken up conservative positions on other issues. Why would your friends behave any differently? From their perspectives, you frustrate them just as much as they frustrate you.
My impression (from talking to engineers at my local electric utility here in the southwest US) is exactly that: renewables can be unpredictable, and not always available when demand is high. NG generators, unlike coal or nuclear, are relatively easy to spin up on demand. (Perhaps someone more knowledgeable out there could fill in details.)

I do think there are many experiments with different storage technologies to smooth out supply, so this particular advantage of NG could change in the next few years.
YouTube users do not organize videos into channels. Channels are delivery mechanisms. Users organize them with Playlists, which is intuitive for the content.
> Poverty can't be solved by throwing money at it, children in poverty need a stable environment and loving adults to help them grow and become productive members of society.

Of course, this is basically the conservative argument with the added provision that the best people for this task are two parents in a stable marriage.
Out of my own ignorance on the subject of "buy some index funds": what happens when 50%, 75% or 90% of the market buys index funds? How will stocks be priced properly if no one is trading them directly?
Give notice, then take two months off under FMLA.
It is probably helpful to explain individual investment vehicles and why it is sane for someone new to invest.

VTI is an ETF that is basically representative of the entire US market. It is somewhat like holding a little bit of everything in the US market.

If you have a bunch of cash sitting in a savings account, and instead want that cash tethered to the swings of equities market, VTI is a reasonable choice.
Do you happen to know if CrashPlan's encryption is any better?

AFAIK AES in CBC-mode is a no-no because it betrays which blocks of data are identical, and that's what BlackBlaze uses.
It doesn't at the moment. But someone filed and issue for this and someone else has already begun work on this!

I <3 open source.
> Through an opening in the skin, the patient “clicks” the prosthesis onto a metal rod in the bone.

So he has a flap of skin that just spreads apart and reveals this metal rod? How does he avoid infections?
Sadly, they don't. What about a car that has vulnerable software? It's not a medical device but could have a real world effect if the same actions were taken.
Some of this is simply the fact that it's still the case that many cars in Europe don't have cruise control: it isn't driver perception, it's simply the car not having it. On many cars it's something still restricted to higher trim levels or an optional extra.

I'll also say that by and large my experience in the UK is on most motorways traffic is sufficiently busy that cruise control is of relatively little use: there's enough variability in the speed of the traffic in front that you can't actually stay at a constant speed and there's enough traffic that you can't just pull out to overtake.
It is just such utter bullshit. "fight on terrorism". This is why I just don't do political news. No one reports on "huh fight on terrorism you say, can we shine some light on this claim? How useful has Twitter been to home security...". Why isn't that the story?

I keep seeing stories build on just bullshit. The BBC will say "And what about housing Mrs May" and she will say "My government has created a white paper...... and councils are pissed about planning permission....."

There is no answer. Over and over and over again. There is no point in the BBC reporter existing, no point in anyone's time being wasted. Just report nothing.

Giving Governments access to public data has totally changed the dynamics of politics and the public is losing everything as a result.

Government just fabricates an internal memo leak, waits 12 hours to get some data back on public opinion and then depending on that, will deny it, or will go ahead.

Time and time again you see this. Our old Chancellor had no experience with finance, and during his term, it was found that he had dodged tax.... the day after he had given a statement that he was serious about tax evasion. Then, something about an old Veteran having cake was the main story that day across the whole media board. Forgotten.

David Cameron said one evening after a COBRA meeting "Lets send dogs, and fences to Calais to stop the swarm of immigrants" - That got bad data results, so by 6am the next morning he adapted it to "We will take 10000 and send aid". By 9am, it was all forgotten.

What is happening?? Where is reality?? Is no one responsible for anything any more?? Is this a result of the fragmentation of media outlets?? Like, I grew up with 4 channels. Now I don't want TV. Therefor there is no cross reference at all. You can say what you want and like 10% of the populace will hear it. That means government has never had it so easy.
This gripping app lets you 'walk a mile' in a 16-year-old refugee girl's shoes
The spokesman also called for social media companies to play a role in the government’s fight against terrorism.

Indeed. That role is to tell the government to GFTS until they have a warrant in hand.
Donald Trump to sign executive order withdrawing US from NAFTA
i don't understand why they went through all this trouble of encrypting things client-side if they're just going to store the private key on their own servers! what actual benefit is there to this service? the fact that data is encrypted in-transit? i assume every backup provider does that via https/etc!
you're in no position to judge and there's a really disgusting kind of cruelty in your comment.
I remember someone posting something like this:

https://github.com/awslabs/git-secrets
And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that’s never coming back: coal.

Wait! Hold it right there! Are you trying to tell me that "clean coal" is not coming back? </sarcasm>
Someone who trades frequently is more likely to upgrade to Robinhood Gold than somebody who buys an index fund once and forgets.
While I'd agree that its easier to start a new bank, thats not the case here. What you are doing is trying to recreate something that currently exists, and if it goes like almost every job I've had then there is no budging on any of features, they want stuff duplicated down to the same bugs, and none of the features are documented. You end up spending half your time just reverse engineering what currently exists before you can even begin work
You're right - in this case technology is not the solution. Building a simple outhouse is not that complicated and people in other parts of the world have been doing this for millennia.
I've brought this up to others, how would you feel if someone decided to brick / modify your car without you knowing? What would you do if that fix backfired and caused damage, hard locked the controls on your car, or worse, simply shut it off at the wrong time? We absolutely need to fix these issues, the governments of the world need to enforce standards on products, but vigilantism no matter how much you may agree with, has to be treated the same across the line.
> But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understanding of all the real implications and potential for exploit.)

Or perhaps more accurately, most of the people in question are members of the mainstream dominant culture and don't really have much if anything in their life that they worry about someone else finding out about.

Most people are average, by definition.
This is cool. Apparently it's been ingrained in their culture, and for over a hundred years!
Why is it "bad behavior" to ask people for change?

A lot of pandhandlers panhandle not because they enjoy it, but because they believe they have no other choice. And that is often times the case: they don't have the resources (logistical, financial, social or other) or stable enough health (physical or mental) to find and hold onto jobs. And since they've got to eat, they panhandle.

People with your mindset are usually unable to really put themselves in the shoes of a homeless person. Rather, they think, "gosh, if I became homeless tomorrow, I would go get a job somewhere!" because for them, getting a job is relatively easy. They don't understand what chronic homelessness is like.
Echo Look – Hands-Free Camera and Style Assistant
I've been using Robinhood for the past year and made a 14% return which amounted to an extra $1500 in my pocket that I wouldn't otherwise have. There is so much negativity surrounding Robinhood here and I think it's coming from speculative people who haven't actually used Robinhood and can't assess it empirically. They charge _0_ fees. What's so anti-robinhood about that? If you're concerned about them making money off of order flows, just use limit orders. I _only_ place limit orders.
I wonder how long it took for westerners to stop throwing their "night soil" out the window and start installing and using toilets.

What always struck me as strange is that the Romans had and used public toilets, but afterwards Europe went back to shitting in a bucket and throwing it out the window. Puzzling.