skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UK: petition to reject the ratification of the Unitary Software Patent
The idea is great, the implementation not so much. Add a simple code block in markdown and the engine gets crazy with quotes getting converted to HTML entities, etc.
Is this more than an SMTP server? Those are services designed to send emails as an API service for many different parties. Is that what "Postal" is? Or is it a another SMTP server like Postflix or something? It's not at all clear from your description...
A brief on choosing best mobile app development company
In today’s ever-connected internet world, it is more than important to have your business app. Fulfilling the requirement gets easy with the services of well-known mobile app development companies. Apps help to remain connected to the users also.
If Forbes is accurate, then so is Sacca, although I imagine some non-trivial amount of that is in Uber, which is facing downward pressure on its private market valuation.
Show HN: Cheaper flights when flying multiple destinations by route optimisation
Others have mentioned this, but this PatentSheield scheme is not useful against non-practicing entities (NPEs or "trolls). It is intended to be used by startups who are at risk of sued by big incumbants. For example, if an IoT startup participates in this program and is sued by an established IoT company, the startup can take title to the portfolio and counter-sue the incumbant for infringement of the portfolio patents. At that point, the companies agree to a cross-licensing deal and both parties live to fight another day.

This kind of arrangement is not useful for countering NPEs because NPEs are non-practicing by definition. Since they are non-practicing, you can't countersue for infringement.

Your note about cooperation between potential defendants is spot-on. The difficulty is in getting them to cooperate. Accused infringers are likely to be competitors who may not be inclined to cooperate. Further, it is to the advantage of each to simply license the patent and wait for another accused infringer to do the work to invalidate the patent, at which point they can all stop paying license fees. (A classic "free rider" problem.)

By the way, a company can buy patent infringement insurance that will pay for litigation or settlement costs, but it isn't clear that it is worth the premium.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Flamewars are not welcome here, especially not the religious and racial sort, which are poisonous and have no place on HN. Unsubstantive and uncivil comments, which you've posted more than your share of, are also out of line.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that this won't happen in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
It was technically supported by the hardware, but not by many motherboard and BIOS's.
Nothing is know to be possible until it is actually done. So I agree with you that we don't know the answer, but I don't think that's a true limiting concern. Instead, we can estimate based on historical past, and project into the future.

I don't know that the car I get in tomorrow will drive, but I can project that it will based on history. Similarly we don't know that we can simulate a cell, however, we can look at the rate of improvement in technology, see now physical limitations and project that in the future we likely will. In contrast if the question had been can we travel faster than light, while still unknowable, we could see the known limits in physics and project that we won't.

The other important question which you raise is "what does accurately mean?". The two values of accurate that I see are what I'll call the "Turing Model" of accurate and the "Psychic Model" of accurate.

The Turing model of accurate is that I were to observe the behaviors of this simulation of you, I wouldn't be able to tell it was a simulation of your or the real you.

The "Psychic Model" of accurate would be if I were to feed the simulation the exact same inputs as you, it would product identical outputs until the day you both (simultaneously) die.

I argue that the only meaning that matters for practical use is the Turing Model of accurate. If no one can tell it's not human, then it's equivalent to a human.

So back to your original question of accuracy w.r.t. quantum phenomena. I do see reading of quantum data as a possible physical limitation. But my best (admittedly still laymen's) understanding of quantum behavior is that results can be accurately modeled probabilistically. We easily can produce the same result distribution.

So my final argument rests on the question "Do we think that human intelligence depends only on the probability distribution of quantum events, or is there a hidden interplay in the specific "values" produced?"

Based on what we've seen so far from QM, I lean towards a dependency on the distribution as sufficient - ie there isn't an underlying structure hidden in the values we need to try to replicate.
I think AT&T was also the reason I started using a bulk mail delivery service for my low volume personal mail when 1&1 migrated their datacenter after I had been using them for a decade or something (thereby changing my IP address).
Cambodia through the eyes of local startups
UXSS in McAfee Endpoint Security, www.mcafee.com and some extra goodies
I failed my first try because a guy in a BMW didn't wait until I pass before he turned left and I waited - they said I was too unsure and thus failed.

Same experience with the speed target/limit in the Czech republic.
>> "Among other things, they contain the world's earliest known system of flush toilets." [1]

>> "With a number of courtyard houses having both a washing platform and a dedicated toilet / waste disposal hole. The toilet holes would be flushed by emptying a jar of water, drawn from the house's central well, through a clay brick pipe and into a shared brick drain" [1]

Amazing. This was about the Indus Valley Civilization in 3300–1300 BCE.

It's interesting to note that how much a civilization, like Rome after the collapse as shown in the below thread, can lose much of cultural or technical advances it made earlier.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_of_the_Indus_Valley...
Well there definitely is no criminal law against starting a company with student loans. It would be up to the actual contract he signed which might not say anything about how you spend the money as long as you you aren't lying about anything in the application(ie. amount of income you make, actually being registered for classes etc).
> "And the examples tend to the arcane, like importing food, not activities most people engage in."

Another common one is people borrowing parents from their parents to make a down payment on a house. Lots of people do it, but the sentence for using such a loan and not disclosing it is 30 years.

This particular violation is referred to as a "head shot" by investigators looking for something with which to nail a suspect.

http://davidsimon.com/kwame-brown-another-federal-case-anoth...
5 Things not to do when sending push notifications
> He[Ajit Pai, current Chairman of the FCC] said he would also seek public comment on how to preserve the basic principles of net neutrality — the prohibitions of blocking, throttling and paid priority for online traffic.
usually its cheaper because of server market forced upgrade cycle surplus. Problem is its mostly Buffered/Registered ECC which cant be used in desktop motherboards.
I meant something like taking a physical map and representing it as bits in the memory of a computer. That's still a map; you can orient yourself with it. I'm just saying that there are things whose simulation is still a thing of the same kind. Perhaps minds are like that.

In everyday life, we treat other minds more like "maps" than like "nuclear reactions". We interact with nuclear reactions by getting radiation sickness and dying. We interact with people through more indirect channels. A simulation could be at the other end of the channel and we wouldn't know. Maybe he wouldn't now, either!

We don't get electrocuted when our interlocutor's neurons are firing, the effects on us are only through his external behaviour. It's the abstract informational flow what seems to matter.
> Our brain doesn't contain any 'data'

It absolutely does! Where do you think our memories are stored?

It doesn't store it in 1s and 0s like computers, but I think it's fairly non-controversial to say that all of everything you know is encoded in the physical state of the cells and atoms of your body.
Unless the operator is going out of his way to use a critical frequency as carrier it should actually be relatively trivial to signal-jack the drones, assuming you do it in a narrow beam (thus that you know its position) rather than blanketing an area.
Sure, but in that case they're also passing a Turing test.
I am completely with you. I know what you mean. I have the very same problems.

From the history of Markdown, why it was invented? It is dead simple. John Gruber said: "I am en editor and HTML is to clunky for me, so I will reinvent the wheel and make it easier." It is basically the very same reason why we have HTML these days, because Tim said "SGML is to clunky for me, so I will reinvent the wheel and make it easier."

You need to remember, that John Gruber is a journalist/editor he writes articles for magazines (and now for the web). Presumably, he learned as a journalist to write simple plain texts with only a few marks to indicate headlines, comments, and alike. Then the layouter would do the job and layout the text for the magazine. It is even so today how most journalists work.

Also, I have been in the industry now for some time and I see that pattern over and over again. There is some kind of standard that evolved over time, because of feature requests in-cooperated into the standard. Then there comes some guy/girl with a very simple use case and thinks "This standard is way to complicated for my simple use case. I can do that better." Then this new way gets some attention and other people are speaking out loud "Yeah, we have the same trouble for some time. Lets make that new way standard and improve from that on, now." This new way will now become a standard. Lots of people having new feature request, because this old standard can do this cool feature the new standard can't, so lets in-cooperate that into the new standard. And so on, and so on. And the wheel will start over again with a new person.

BTW, you can apply the same pattern to programming languages. Remember why and how PHP started? Because Perl was a go to at the time, but it was to complicated for some people. Then came Ruby on Rails.
You don't need security scanner any more
Pretty sure that a drone carrying a chunk of metal or stone, and crashing itself into one of the jet intakes of a plane that is taking off is a great way to instill terror into airline passengers.

Most drone pilots would have no problem placing them in the path of the jet intake at the last second.

Replace the slab of concrete with a grenade, for added fear.
In the case of the carrier preventing the transmission of patches or OS upgrades you would be punishing the OEM for a problem created by the carrier and out of the control of the OEM. Tangentially, If I was a carrier I would use this to my advantage when negotiating. If you thought carriers were bad now, just wait until they have the power to withhold Google Play services and apps to an OEM's future phones.
If there's a lower limit before every turn you've ever encountered, many people don't even think about it.
Random tidbit: Cackalacky is a synonym for the Carolinas, but the origin of the word is uncertain:

http://carrborocommons.org/?p=2490

http://www.word-detective.com/2010/09/cakalacky/
No, but if they don't have any better leads, they may feel that they want to start investigating the person who knows the most about the crime.
Would you please not @reply people? HN has threaded comments; the usernames are right there. Repeating them is redundant and has the same cloying effect that it would on regular conversation.

(I'm one of the mods here.)
So now I can blatantly disregard, copy, and infringe upon on any patents I want while building my startup, simply by paying the price of giving a small amount of equity to Google?
TiDB Brings Distributed Scalability to SQL
That's a pretty usurious interest rate for single people.
Free wordpress themes
India cracking down on OneCoin – Bank accounts seized
Fantastic!! I feel that one feels most alive when you're involved in some struggle. And if you've really achieved a high level of excellence in your field...may be the right time to trying something new! Michael Jordan tried baseball!

That said, I feel getting involved in political issues is mostly a losing situation because your power (even the power of the president as we've seen perhaps thankfully in the past 90 days is highly limited) to get something accomplished is so limited. Also, the solution to most problems is not new laws or new politics. I remember a professor at my college spent years getting the exam dates shifted three days earlier from a Tuesday to a Friday...that's the speed & work of politics, frustrating.
For servers this is more or less a no brainer: it's not a huge extra cost and a failure will cost you more than the extra cost.

For a regular desktop system for personal use it's not so easy. The data volumes are much smaller, the temperature environments are usually better, they aren't running (other than maybe idling) 24/7, most of the stuff that is in ram isn't going to be mission critical (i.e. you don't have 32Gb of RAM filled with customer database records, you have it filled with read only FPS textures, compiler caches etc).

Unlike a business that has tons of data that is mutated, my data is mostly immutable such as photos etc. It's not a continuously changing dataset where a bit flip in memory is likely to find its way into my data and then into my backups which would be the case e.g. for databases or big creative work (movie editing etc).
Because it means rebuilding everything every time, rather than just the relevant .o and re-linking.

On a large enough codebase, being able to rebuild only what you touch and relink is the only way to get acceptable build times in dev.
Thanks for the pointer, I assume you meant http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 ? That was a fun read anyway :-)
'walk the dinosaur' narrative

Never heard this term before, what does it mean?
> in practice nobody encrypts their email.

I work in the defence industry. All attachments must be encrypted. Also, all customer data must be stored in the same country.
Yes you can. Rewriting a transaction is exactly what a double spend is.
The harder it is to get by, the less empathy you're going to have for other people. Because you can't afford it. That sort of behavior is pretty common in poor countries.
I thought that it is the norm for M$ to hand out the zero-days to the 3-letter-agencies for "a while" and patches them ONLY when someone else gets hold and starts using the same vuln.. so it makes PERFECT sense that they would do something like that.

Also who in their right mind allow Word/Excel/Powerpoint to access the internet? (oh yes it's called "365" and it makes software, that is completely unfit for the task, to access the internet)
The most horrific toilets I've ever used in my life were public toilets in India. Overflowing. They cost 2Rs as well. Even in hotels the toilets are pretty gruesome.
Sure. My apologies.
>We can find the maximum head-size that fits through a vaginal canal, or the maximum metabolic rate a human body could support, and try to determine if these factors imposed any limitations on intelligence during human evolution.

Head sizes have been larger in human history and some human relatives with larger brains died out. Energy consumption on the other hand is a limiting factor for every computational device and energy efficiency tends to be a key category where Nature still wins. In particular, the liver and enzymes of various plants and microbes can perform chemical reactions in water at ambient temperature that we can't do at all; resilin is still a more efficient elastic material than any synthetic elastomer; artificial piezoelectric muscles have less than a tenth the energy efficiency of real ones, and of course lots of animals are able to run around in polar and desert regions we still can't traverse because of the fuel and material costs etc.

One particularly revealing example is to calculate the ratio between:

* the performance per watt of the most efficient supercomputer (7 GFlops/watt) vs the human brain (38 petaflops / 20 watts = 1.9 petaflops per watt)

* the performance per watt of the human brain vs the Landauer limit at body temperature (don't remember)
That's different, because there are specific rules against arms races in schools, that people typically adhere to. If there was a battle scheduled in advance, I'd bet on the nerds.

But what's more, if they both have guns then everything's about even. Strength doesn't really help if you've been shot, and most high-schoolers don't have much experience shooting guns.
You're still assuming that the assistant cares about doing what I mean, rather than doing precisely what I say or doing what I programmed it to do. That only happens if we're really, really careful about how we programmed the AI in the first place. I grant you 100% that the AI probably knows precisely how many paperclips I want, but you're assuming that it wants the same number of paperclips that I want.

What an agent considers to be "good" is orthogonal to how intelligent that agent is. An agent of arbitrary intelligence can have arbitrary goals; the goals of an intelligent agent need not in principle look anything like those of a human. The only reason a superintelligent AI's goals would look like those of a human is because the humans very, very carefully programmed them into the AI somehow. Very, very careful programming is not a feature of how humans currently approach AI research.
In Finland, about 85 % use studded winter tyres, 15 % use tyres without studs. Sweden is similar but somewhat less studs.

Studded tyres are more noisy, and they do eat the road more. They are more consistent - in snow, there's no difference; when the road is clean, studs do slightly worse; when the road is particularly slippery and icy, the studded tyres are much better. However, I can deal with that, so I prefer studless tyres. Last winter I had studded ones because they came with the used car I bought. I'm switching to studless for next winter.

It would be good to reduce the number of studded tyres, but people like them for the consistency. However, it wouldn't be good if all switched to studless tyres, because then the roads would sometimes become extremely slippery and polished. The studs remove the ice so that main roads become safer also for studless tyres. I think that a ratio of 30 % of studded tyres would be good for the whole.

If everyone had studless tyres, there would need to be substantially more salt and grit on the roads, and then there would again be more dust and damage to waterways.

(Currently we can see the polishing impact on bus stops: buses are heavy vehicles which do not have studs, and they sometimes get stuck on bus stops at a slight uphill, as the area is polished ice, while everyone else drives by normally.)
> He says that the smarter concept is ill defined

Which isn't a contradiction like he claims it is. It just means that there are many different ways that a future AI can be smarter than us. That intelligence could be multi-dimensional.

But guess what, we can easily take that multi-dimensional input, and find a formula that reduces it to a single scalar value based on our practical valuation of these forms of intelligences (almost like an intelligenc 'utility function' from economics), and problem solved. We're right back to a single order dimension for ranking intelligence.

It was a really weak argument he put forward.

Additionally a weak argument was the branching / fan pattern of various species. Yes all living species are at the peak of evolution for their environment, but they weren't all pressured to evolve more intelligence. Some evolved strength, speed, flight to their environment.

If instead natural selection began only selecting for intelligence (like humans searching for AGI will), then you would could definitely rank all animals linearly on a single path of intelligence.
Here's some numbers[0] from a study done by the Natuonal University of Ireland.

They conclude that "the power currently used for Bitcoin mining is comparable to Ireland’s electricity consumption."

[0]: https://karlodwyer.github.io/publications/pdf/bitcoin_KJOD_2...
It's unnecessary. If you want to prevent something from being patented, just disclose it in a publication. That publication will bar anyone else from patenting your invention. As long as you don't patent it yourself, it will become dedicated to the public.
> Feelings are irrelevant.

Thank you. I am tired of these so-called arguments that start with "how would you feel if". If we're going by my feelings, you're all in deep trouble.
Their first business was mining with their own miners. And they moved a lot of blocks leading up to their jumbo round. They apparently hoped to use that chip set for the whole "an energy sink in every device" business plan which was obviously never going to work.
instead of sending jamming signals, they could deploy a bunch of "bouncer" drones along the perimeter to knock down the unwanted drones. don't know if its going to be very effective, but at least it will be fun to watch. XD
This is very true, since the idea of meritocracy doesn't do a lot to overcome business inertia of being in a Microsoft Environment.

If there is a Linux solution that in every way exceeds a Microsoft Solution from a technical and price standpoint, you still need to weigh in the transition costs, employee costs, and the long term effect of changing. It's not always as simple as "X is better than Microsoft's Y, people will use it." There are far more things that get considered, and you can get tied down pretty heavily when your entire workflow and operations rely on a single product or vendor.

The longer you've been using a product, the harder it is to get away from it. It's not that Linux isn't good or making a lot of cool progress in all realms, it's that Microsoft does "good enough" and the transition isn't seamless enough for many use cases.
In British Columbia over 50 new hydro electric plants have been built in the last 30 years by private industry. People may say they are subsidized since they often get $100/MWH for the first 30 years of operation but that is the price that must be offered to mobilize investment and it isn't much higher than the projected construction cost from the site C dam which would have much better economies of scale and the Construction cost doesn't include the 30 years of studies and consultation BC hydro did whereas that is covered by the 100$/MWH for the private hydro plants.

Here is a list of Independent power producers in BC
https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...
Scala Native 0.2.0
I don't want anyone to be able to shutdown and/or withdraw software that I'm using for any reason. That cure is worse than the disease.
You got it reverse, since when Node started getting adoption npm wasn't even a thing or was still small. Back in the Node early days it was all "we can run JS we know on the server now" (plus some cargo cult hype about it being "fast because async").
Geeks know the score. Regular users really don't. The brand awareness of "OpenOffice" is still stupendous and this terrible zombie software still steadily gets around 100,000 downloads a day. https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/over_200_million_download... So make sure people know! LibreOffice is catching up, but 100,000 all-but-unmaintained security hazards a day are an ongoing disaster.