skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am actually most sympathetic to the idea that the military is the single really identifiable point where large-scale waste is identifiable. However, even that spending is dwarfed by health and welfare transfer payments, and procurement is a fraction of military spending. So... yeah, procurement is big and wasteful. But in 2013 (the last year that Wikipedia had) we've got around ~100B of procurement out of 610B of military spending and out of 3.45 trillion dollars of spending.

That's like 1 dollar out of 34, probably not all 100% wasted either.

I'm not going to argue that there's not a lot of wasteful government spending - transfer payments that don't need to happen, waste in healthcare, etc. I just don't see much of a path towards a really substantial change in tax rates that would emerge from 'cutting waste'. Tackling transfer payments IMO is a much bigger deal, but this is also likely unfixable for political reasons (essentially the middle class have to be bribed to support anti-poverty programs by including them in the transfer payment merry-go-round).
Online Paula Temple BLOC 2015 Techno Live Set Podcast
Since writes are required to be the last step of a transaction, I suspect there wouldn't be much of a point in having nested transactions.
Is the encrypted storage free on ACD?
The essential building brick of programming is the function, simply because -- unlike the class/object -- it is also a perfectly valid basic building brick for a turing-complete axiomatization.

Once you know this, you can [1] search for existing functions [2] compose new functions [3] and debug them, in order to solve the particular problem at hand.

Is that what you learn at school? No. Never.

At school, you will not do any deep sea fishing. You will only read about deep sea fishing. So, someone with a degree in deep sea fishing, is not a deep sea FISHERMAN at all. He is an avid deep sea fishing READER.
Curses Hawaii Can’t Get Tourists to Stop Sending Back Lava
> I guess

They made a choice to treat multiple applications as one. That's not what I would prefer and is less useful in my opinion. There are some CDNs and payment processors that are in operation, that use the 200 error response, so I tried it. I think it's clearly superior. YMMV
It could be one back-end, with the malware authors paying a cut to the spearfishers. The spearfishers could monitor the bitcoin address to ensure they get the right cut.

Some level of trust would be involved.

I think the spearfishing industry and the malware writing industry aren't one and the same. The former is the marketing department, the latter is the tech department.
How is that so? I believe Wine processes have r/w access to the user's home directory.
Computers run on DC
That's not really in the spirit of the question. That same famous child prodigy with chaperone might be upset if you brought them a coke without pouring it in a crystal glass. My reading of the "Why?" question was curiosity about more typical clients.
Even state law paid leave is often uneven in aggregate, but for arguably good cause (e.g., California has equal paid bonding leave for natural or adoptive parents, but women giving birth also have paid pregnancy disability leave.)

While companies may not explicitly divide parental leave up the same way, they may be driven by similar concerns when creating unequal leave policies.
People always say that math students don't learn about applications of math.

This was never the case for me. When I learned trig ratios, I always understood some basic things that trig ratios could be used for. The teacher always introduced some applications, we always had a lot of word problems, and I could fill in the gaps myself.

Same for calculus. When I learned calculus, I always understood some things that calculus could be used for.

So I understood how those things could be applied to general, everyday sorts of problems. What was missing, though, was that I had nothing to which I could apply those techniques, besides homework.

Learning math (and reading STEM papers) has become easier for me since I now have actual problems to solve. Don't get me wrong: I'm not solving particularly challenging problems or using particularly advanced math. Nothing that tens of thousands of people haven't done before me. But I do need to understand the problems, solutions, and some of the context in order to successfully implement them. This provides a motivation that was always missing before.

I suspect this general narrative is true for a lot of people: that having an actual problem to solve is almost necessary to get a student to really learn the material, instead of just coasting along for a grade.
Toward a frozen operating system
The ransomware reportedly hit Chinese police networks today, and is causing significant issues.
Where / in what way is it implied that pixels don't have size? What is "redefined"? I think the article explained the concepts very well.
It's just a bookmarklet for Chrome on OSX, using the Alex voice from the operating system. I put inside it a ton of JS, to find text and read it back, while changing the color of words. You can trigger it with clicking on a word. The script would also restyle text so it is easier to read.

https://gist.github.com/Visarga/e6597edcb7ec6993521829ef5c17...

The code is uglified for bookmark use, but the original is not something I would be proud to share (it's almost a mess).

By the way, I have special treatment for YC, reddit and arXiv. Only the posts are converted into speech, skipping other texts.
It's not that simple though. What so you consider "data" when it comes to self driving cars? Waymo collects high resolution data with every car (multiple GB or possibly TB of data per car per day).

Tesla hasn't sent very high resolution data back home yet. Though they are looking to get video from customers now to help make this go faster[0].

So while Tesla has more vehicles on the road, that doesn't mean they are getting better data for self driving car research.

[0] https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-col...
One thing to consider (and I swear I'm not (a) claiming this is necessarily in reality the case or (b) implying that if it were we shouldn't have a "Ryan's Place") is that there is homelessness due to different causes, some of them more amenable to help than others. If someone's homeless because they were dependent on a partner who was abusive and so they left that environment and are basically a functioning member of society who nonetheless isn't on their feet, it's a whole nother story (though arguably not more tragic) than someone who's a drug addict and therefore isn't on their feet.

For one of these two, a roof over their head and hot meals a couple times a day for a period of months is going to be extremely beneficial including in the long run, since they'll reliably be able to support themself thanks to the homeless shelter's infrastructure. For the other hypothetical case, it's still the right and humane thing to do for them, but the "bang for your buck" is lower to put it in crass terms.

If it just works out that women outnumber men in the former group, and the gender discrimination does a huge amount of work in selecting for the most efficient candidates to keep in the shelter, I'm in favor of the discrimination.
Prototype layout of hum station. stations like these will be widely distributed
This usecase is more about running it as a homeserver, where i guess that limitation is not that important. Of course there are a lot of usecases where the Pi is the better choice.
Avoid these 5 Mistakes on your business website
> It then seems strange that, by contrast, writers of math books don't seem to be playing the same game.

Oh, but they are playing that game. It's just a very difficult game. Everyone wants easy math books and lots of people are trying to write easy math books (for example, my buddy Ivan and his No Bullshit guides: https://minireference.com/ ). It's just a very difficult game, and very few have come close to success. When they do succeed, it's usually only for one kind of audience and not another. For example, Spivak's Calculus is widely admired in the mathematical community for its presentation, but I wouldn't be surprised if HN derided it for being stuffy, too mathematical, elitist, and full of itself.
{{citation-needed}} but perhaps. In my observation land has predominantly been used for rubber plantations rather than bananas. However, the rubber price crashed in recent years so a lot of the profits never materialized, maybe they are switching. Also, there are vast tracts (literally mountain after mountain as far as the eye can see of monoculture) of bananas inside of China (particularly in Wenshan prefecture, close to Vietnam), so on the fact of it it makes little sense to import them over bad roads from bad infrastructure regions in Laos.
> that the Republicans are trying to kill women, children, and the elderly

> literally trying to murder them

I don't understand how people can believe that that is the intent behind the actions taken.

Do people really believe that the outgroup is comprised of inhuman monsters?

The people in the outgroup are people, individuals each with their own beliefs, preferences, tastes, values, experiences, relationships, etc.
False

http://www.newgeography.com/content/005610-d-j-vu-and-dilemm...
As of 2013 Google's self-driving cars collected about 1 GB per second of data [1], today it must be even more. There is no way Telsa can upload nearly as much data from customer's cars. I also belief that their team is smaller and they started much later.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...
Military spending serves two purposes. The first is as a jobs program for the poor and nominally educated. The second is a sieve through which we pour ginormous sums of money in the hopes of creating technological breakthroughs such as computers, solar panels, nuclear power, etc. None of which would've come to market nearly as quickly, if at all, without seemingly insurmountable government waste. The United States wouldn't even have been conquered by Europeans without massive government waste shipping some people across the Atlantic.

It's important to keep these ideas in mind when we talk about government waste.
> This is part of a worrying new trend. Increasingly you can't buy software anymore, only rent.

More or less agreed, but you'd probably have to concede that the existence of papers like this one and some of Google's other Spanner publications are admirable; they're being more open about the system's design than they have to be.

Of course Google knows that the system's secret sauce is not the concept itself, but the cost of its implementation, the infrastructural harness to support it, and the resources to reliably operate it. Even with a rough understanding on how Spanner works, it's still going to be difficult to ever migrate off it for practical reasons alone — who else is going to be able to build and run an alternative?

I have huge respect for what the Spanner team is doing, but this is a reason that Citus [1] is also very interesting to me right now. You could conceivably start out with nothing but Postgres and migrate into a Citus cluster when (and if) you need to.

If a point comes where you realize that you need out, you could either (1) see if you can scale back down to simple Postgres, (2) host your own cluster on your own infrastructure with the Citus source code, or (3) migrate onto your own Postgres sharding scheme à la Instagram. At no point do you lock yourself into custom GRPC APIs which are going to be ~impossible to get off of.

GCP and AWS provide hugely useful foundational IaaS, but they're incentivized to move beyond that layer and provide more custom solutions that (1) provide better margins, and (2) lock you into their services. As people and companies building on top of these clouds, we should be looking for whatever opportunities we can to keep our stacks generic so that AWS <-> GCP <-> Azure migrations are possible, even if a last resort.

[1] https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud
> Have you ever tried to statically link a program on Linux? I'm guessing not.

This is where autotools helps: ./configure --static. There are also equivalents for CMake.

Aside from that I also statically compile Golang programs all the time (specifically runc which is a container runtime that uses cgo and a bunch of other magic). If static compilation didn't work, neither would our releases.

Just because Rust only lets you statically link binaries if you use musl doesn't mean that nobody else knows how to link things statically.

> because glibc cannot be statically linked

This is patently false. It is true that glibc will make static linking _hard_ but it's definitely not impossible. You need to set some magic settings (that autotools does for you) which disables all of the dynamic loading stuff glibc does.

> It's not as simple as "windows programs include their dependencies".

But it is. If you ignore the core system libraries, and included all of the other library dependencies with programs, most of these problems would be fixed.

> Windows has far better forward and backward compatibility than Linux

glibc has symbol versioning so in principle (I have had to use this once or twice) you can use an older program (linked against an old glibc) on a newer glibc.
Yes and no. In the bay area and other big cities Teslas are definitely there but there are a lot of other areas in the country where Waymo probably spent the money to drive and collect data. So we probably will not know the reality.
HTML5 audio-video experience consisting of a single TCP packet
I am trying to understand impact of crypto currency. Sorry for my ignorance, and or impertinence.
1. Is it possible to run such large scale ransom demands without cryptocurrency?
2. Do we know if the attacker is using a single BTC wallet, or if ransoms are being collected in a distributed fashion.
3. Is it possible for BTC n/w to hijack BTCs going to the ransom wallet(s). That is to say collectively overwrite/override the transactions and may be reroute the coins to some non-profit wallet? I know it will be a very bad precedent, but I am trying to understand if it is technically possible.
Turn on caching. That's it. Even at #1 on HN, you're looking at no more than 10-20K visitors in a day. It's not that much traffic.
It's worth noting that SE and Wikipedia are two of the most valuable reference resources human civilization has produced, ever in history. Maybe the reductionism contributes to their high level of signal.
My personal view is that the rates should be set such that tipping is not expected. That remains the main draw of Uber for me.
>They were GIVEN control (despite the pervasive belief that campaign money would win the day for the presidency, but maybe it did?)

The fact is, the majority of the voting public did not vote for Trump.

Whether by gerrymandering or by unfortunate coincidence, Trump had a deficit, but the minimum votes needed in the areas that mattered.

He's not opposed to -everything- the American people want, but he is the less popular of the two least popular candidates of all time. So yeah, he goes against the majority of America on a huge amount of policies.

> there are many aspects of the Republican party that continues to support what the American people want via the status quo and initiative that people in blue states tend to not like.

Aspects yes, but the I'd wager most of the decisions made have nothing to do with what the electorate actually want, and are more to do with what their corporate donors are pushing for. There are a lot of "safe" areas where it really doesn't matter what they do, voting repub/democrat is a way of life, not a choice.
The Microsoft Playbook:

* Predicate the commercial viability of your software on the basis of technological illiteracy

* Blame the technologically illiterate 'luser user' when things go wrong

* Try and profit from it even as you blame said 'luser user'

The best lesson for Microsoft would be if it incurs a tremendous loss to its reputation, and more importantly its bottom line, because of some issue like this.

It is strange to see people talking about how they took an exception and released a patch for Windows XP this time. Generally, such an exception is the very definition of CYA. If not, why don't they do it for all patches? Read: if the security hole can be used as a way to convince the 'luser user' to pony up more money, don't release a patch. But if the issue is so high profile (for example linking MSFT to a three letter organization), then better issue a patch and CYA.
> 3. Is it possible for BTC n/w to hijack BTCs going to the ransom wallet(s).

No, by design that's not allowed as part of the protocol for bitcoin. Every transaction must be signed by the private key for that address in order to be valid. You could in theory do it if you can get a majority of the miners to agree to the change in the protocol but it wouldn't happen since it'd require forking the whole blockchain to insert new transactions without the private key. And then you'd have to get everyone to agree on where those would go.
I've seen it done in networking apps:

http://cnp.neclab.eu/clickos/

I doubt anyone is doing it in normal clouds right now, though. The L4 microkernels and L4Linux work might be worth looking into for people interested in foundations for building such things. The TUDOS demo could almost load instances as fast as I could click them on an older computer. That probably wasn't even very optimized given it's an academic prototype by academics that run through all kinds of prototypes and designs.
#neverconsiderdell
The car analogy a very poor one. Software doesn't wear out-- physical stuff does. Defects in software are present when it's created. It doesn't "age" or "break down".

(I am making no comment on the issue being discussed-- simply that this is a very poor analogy.)
Big data, machine learning and things like facial recognition in the public space is exceedingly leading us toward a society of total control.

We are not there yet, but I personally fear, that all it would take is the political realization, that the ability to predict behavior leads to more efficient governance.

Technology has the ability to "set us free" or "enslave us", but it's up to the people to decide which they want in a democracy. In the current conservative climate, we're certainly heading more toward dystopia, racing rapidly to make some of the darker cyberpunk come true.
I used to tutor some 16 and 17-year olds in math. It was always heartbreaking to see the school curriculum requiring students to essentially know the "name of a thing" e.g. commutativity, without really ever understanding it or using it. Reminded me of Feynman's account of learning from his father, and the difference between really learning something, and just learning the name of a thing: https://haveabit.com/feynman/knowing-the-name-of-something/
Just polished off JavaScript array compression to string algo, would love feedback :)
This could be a longer term death blow for Lyft, ironically. If Google has the self driving tech, the car & car partnerships, the money, maps, access to end consumers, what exactly does it need Lyft for? Lyft will be a vehicle for Google to kickstart and test this out with a current ride sharing network before Lyft is cut off ...
Interesting. HBR has a recent article on the topic, so they don't think its dead:

https://hbr.org/2017/05/your-brain-can-only-take-so-much-foc...
> Web server error codes are for web server failures and application level errors are communicated via a 200, properly.

No, expressly in the HTTP spec, 5xx error codes are server errors. 4xx codes are all different kinds of application-level (usually resource-specific) errors.

2xx codes are full-stack success codes.
Sandboxing and tighter security are orthogonal to app stores. The same security policy should apply to every app, regardless of whether it was installed through the official store or from another source.

What the grandparent is suggesting is akin to UAC, which received much hate when it first debuted in Vista but has now become a mostly accepted part of the Windows user experience. It has been done before, and it can be done again, with every Windows app, not just apps from the Microsoft Store.
Did you post a writeup of this somewhere online you can link to?
The Rise of Superstar Firms Has Been Better for Investors Than for Employees
Edit: HN groupthink says I can only hate Amazon. I must comply. God this place is toxic.
Perhaps it would mean that theorems are sometimes known to be true or false before anyone understands why. Digging through automatically generated proofs looking for interesting insights seems like a rather different experience than groping in the dark, not knowing whether a proof is possible?
There are indeed less resources available for protocol analysis, and I'm always on the lookout for them myself as this is an interesting topic.

So far, it's mainly been studying existing protocols, as many protocols reuse the same ideas and techniques.

Additionally, here's 2 resources that I found interesting and related:

So you want to hack radios talk @HITB 2017, offering a good methodology for basic RF reversing. Very good talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeoGQwT0Z1Y

The upcoming book of James Forshaw on attacking network protocols, there are already some chapters available through early access: https://www.nostarch.com/networkprotocols

If you have good references, I'd love to hear about them.
College Degree, on Sale
The Free Software Federation spends so much of their energy fighting against commercial operating systems and expends almost zero effort on embedded systems where catastrophic failure can equal death.

Ironically one of the biggest problems with "Internet of Things" junk appliances is not that they run locked-down DRM-saddled operating systems, but that they run free ones like Linux.

Linux itself isn't a problem, but that they're often bundled with tragically out of date versions of everything and there's never any thought given to how to update them.

This malware incident is simply relating to a commercial operating system. Imagine when someone's hacked your lights by worming into the Linux install on the controller and demands $50 in Bitcoin to return control to you.
How AI Could Make Urban Bicycling a Whole Lot Easier
If only Lyft could expand to more countries I'd love to try it.
Yeah, he took a lot of liberties to support the title statement. The fact that many thousands of pro-NN are variations on the same sentences, because the template was provided by J. Oliver, also means implies that part of the anti-NN bulk could have been registered by humans working off a template as well.

I would like to know the number of unique sentences and the stats on these.

The only sane conclusion from this debacle is that these things are highly unreliable and better ways to get the population opinion are desirable.
What is inflammatory about the comment ? It surely brings a new perspective into things. Your warning seems ill motivated.
Oh dude, downvotes on Hacker News... double-plus-ungood!

Much disdain! Such taboo!
That's because a lot of technology is coming up with new ways of using energy to do useful things. See: light bulb, internal combustion engine, etc. And a lot of technology is new methods that reduce the cost of building these energy-consuming devices allowing us to produce more of then for cheaper (and more of them then consumer more energy).

I feel like you are trying to say "no, it's just consuming more energy. It's not 'technology'". But I think you've missed the point. We can't just dump more coal and oil onto a field and burn it and expect that energy to increase production. We need "technology" to turn it into something useful.
What does physics have to do with ML/AI?