skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great writeup on the under-belly of publishing!

The first 11 books I wrote were published by mainstream publishers (McGraw-Hill, J. Riley, Springer-Verlag, Morgan Kaufman). While I am grateful for the advance monies paid and great support in writing, I eventually decided that I wanted the freedom to write on whatever topics I wanted and all my new stuff is self published, first through lulu.com and now through leanpub.com.

I encourage people to write a book (or books). It is a really fun process. I would suggest using a publisher for a book and then also try self publishing using leanpub.com or some other platform. Decide for yourself with you prefer.
This is great. I could totally see "21 Transition 1420 Twm" appearing on an album as a self-deprecating joke. Mathematically generic techno and it still sound good :)
That doesn't sound like it was left there for the NSA. Sounds like a bug that the NSA found and exploited.
here's hoping that this leads to less labour arbitrage and exploitation, and more developing nations investing in their own locally-beneficial industries.
Making Sense of the ASP.net Core 2.0 Kerfuffle
Seems people are digging into your comment in a way that's going off topic.

I think you make a good point; we shouldn't fight that pay reflects time/effort put in.

But I think that when we 'engineer' society, we want to make sure we make it as easy as possible for people to make the decision between work or other endeavors. There's nothing we can do to get around that women give birth and men don't, but we can at least afford them both the same generous paternity leave. And on the other hand, the more we empower women to have educated careers, the less men will feel pressured to make as much money as possible just to support their family.
I have somewhat. I don't recall hearing "every single version of Microsoft Windows have intentionally left backdoors for NSA".
For me, Firefox's customizability is its biggest advantage. When this update rolls out and breaks many extensions and complete themes, I'm not sure what reason I'll have to choose Firefox over Chrome.
I don't speak German and I've been to every Congress since 2009. My favorite event every year. As mentioned most - or at least the majority - of the talks are in English, and the organizers very much cater to non-German-speaking visitors (e.g. the official wiki - main source of information - is mainly in English; here's last year's: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2016/wiki/Main_Page).

Also the price (iirc 100 EUR for a standard 4-day ticket last time) is ridiculously low given the massive amount of talks, often very high-caliber, and very varied. Check out last year's schedule to get an idea: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2016/Fahrplan/schedu...

And there's so much more besides the talks! They typically open the venue the evening before (26th), and then it goes on 24/7 non-stop until the 30th. Go if you can. I've persuaded various people to come over the years - techies and non-techies alike - and everyone's had a blast.
Yes, this is part of those efforts. The UI redesign and performance projects are part of a cross-functional group working on making Firefox faster. They've talked about how part of the reason for square tabs is that they're much faster to draw for example.

Weekly newsletters about the "Quantum Flow" performance project here: https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2017-03-09/quantum-flow-engine...
It's possible that people are taking the code, modifying it to add in a new kill switch address, change the bitcoin address and leave every thing else as it is. Usually because they don't understand the code but can do a ctrl+f, delete and replace with the necessary info. Script kiddies of the malware world.
I tend to take the view that if the law doesn't prevent it, it's ok to do. I don't need legal permission to do something, I just need to avoid things that the law specifically bans.
The wikipedia definition linked above says:

>Rent-seeking implies extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity. The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee (or rent of the section of the river for a few minutes) to lower the chain.

The company is the feudal lord and the chain is their claim on their IP. They made a base game for people to buy, they arranged bits in a very precise order. They sold those bits to consumers. They are not arranging the bits for mods, and yet they get the revenue for it (charging boats as they pass). It's easier to sympathize with game companies because people are indeed doing things free of charge because they like the game.

If you charge money for a mod of a game, you will get a letter from that company's lawyers.
If you're talking about an MRI machine, and you put it on the goddamned internet, $300 is actually a pretty cheap security tutorial.
The barge wouldn't be radioactive, it was just used to get the recovery device into the Glomar Explorer before it set out to recover the submarine.
When you you self publish can you stil sell kindle edition on Amazon?
This is an astute observation.

The world leaders during WW2 recognized this - basically, when critical work needed to be done, they knew whom they needed and roped in a large number of the leading "dreamers/thinkers" of the time to work on the Manhattan Project.

The thing that saddens me is that it is often conflict and animosity that awaken this recognition - other examples include the Cold War, artillery calculations in WW1, etc.
"Yours, cyphunk" or "kind regards, cyphunk" add hardly any length to the email, but indicate that you have in fact finished what you meant to say and that you didn't mash [send] by mistake.
I'm not sure why this is downvoted so heavily. It's an important clarification that they didn't claim they could cure disorders, only help with them. Yes, that's also not legal, but this comment wasn't disagreeing with that.

Claiming a cure would be a far bigger news story.
https://ninite.com/ Accept no substitutes when installing on Windows.
IIRC it came about during the last big redesign, australis.
>This new UI is entirely HTML – allowing the browser to be a lot faster.

No, that is definitely not true. The rewrite is, however, part of an effort to make the UI something which can be represented in HTML easily, and they may be working on making as much of it HTML as possible, but bits of the UI will be XUL for a long time to come.
If it cost $150K to replace a $50K/year truck driver then VCs would fund it. They'll then sell the solution to the publicly traded companies.

> We are very good at creating bullshit jobs[1] to fill the gradual innovative automation.

Midnight pizza deliverymen and administrators who decide how to spend resources are not bullshit jobs. They are both helpful and useful.

> The entire global movement towards isolationist nationalism and totalitarianism is centralized on the obsolescence of people and the rise of bullshit work. People feel abandoned, unfulfilled, or forgotten.

Your post doesn't make sense. The people doing the "bullshit work" aren't the ones feeling abandoned and unfulfilled. The ones promoting isolationism and nationalism are the ones lamenting the loss of their coal mining and steel production jobs, for example, which employ workers who are confident that what they do means something. Perhaps you mean that they lament the loss of these jobs? That would make sense but it doesn't seem to be very highly connected to the "bullshit jobs" argument- only the loss of satisfying jobs.
That, or they bring a work computer home, get infected, then bring it back to work. Could happen if the network they got infected on resolved all domains (so it didn't execute then), but their corporate network didn't.
Figures per minute? Same-process key-value should give millions per second operations (using one thread). And accessing via network, e.g. a la Redis, should be hundreds of thousands per second [1].

[1] https://redis.io/topics/benchmarks
And given the indications about how hard various Russian infrastructure was hit, that would be ironic.

Of course, if you were a nation state and you wanted to attack an adversary but you knew that if you did you would get blowback, you might "lose" some tools that you knew some script kiddies would be able to weaponize.

Interesting times indeed.
This is not precisely correct. You are required to disclose the existence of patents you hold, and whether or not you're willing to license them on royalty-free or FRAND terms. You are not required to disclose the patent numbers.

ISO/IEC and ITU have had a common patent policy since at least 2006. Here is their "Patent Statement and Licensing Declaration" form: https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/04/04/T04040000020004P...

On page 3, where the space for entering patent numbers is, it says they are "desired but not required for options 1 [royalty-free] and 2 [FRAND]; required in ITU for option 3 [refusal to commit to either of those licensing terms]". ISO actually allows you to claim you have patents on a standard, refuse to license them to anyone at any price, and not even tell anyone what the patents are, much less which part of the standard they cover. This has happened to at least one standard that was attempting to be royalty-free.

In general, you can assume the answer to the question, "Does the proponent of this technology have patents covering it?" is yes, for the reasons I outlined in the GP. So in practice the above disclosures provide nearly zero information. They don't help you evaluate alternative designs, because you don't know what you need to change to avoid the patents. You also don't know when one party might have patents on a contribution made by a different party [1]. The disclosure is at the level of the standard as a whole, and not by individual feature.

The disclosures are also not very specific about the actual licensing terms. I've had an expert lawyer who made her career on dealing with patent licensing tell me with a straight face that she had no idea what FRAND means. In some industries, it is common practice to require someone to sign an NDA before you will even tell them what your supposedly "non-discriminatory" terms are.

The actual licensing terms are negotiated well after the standard is complete, by which point it is too late to solve problems by excluding technology.

[1] This is quite common. People read the contributions of others and rush to file something based on the direction they think it is going. That ensures they have patents on the standard regardless of whether or not any of their own contributions make it in.
Are these new variants new compiles?

Is it possible that multiple variants with randomly-generated kill-switches are being automatically generated?
doesn't negate the problem stated as whatever the experience is, it's value is non-zero. Hence the benefit to later employers is also non-zero (could be argued) at the cost of earlier employers
It's unauthorised access, TFA says that he "obtained login credentials - without ever having been given them - and accessed the records without authorisation".

The phrase "hacking" doesn't quite sit right with me either but I guess it's close enough to the truth in this case. I'll personally give them a pass this time. ;)
Ask Sam: is it true? :)
Many of these systems infected are server systems, not End User Desktops.

That said, yes in a perfect world everyone would have perfect backups, and perfect imaging systems that makes ransomeware a non-event, we do not live in a perfect world and it is easy to monday morning QB the IT Staff.

Most IT depts are understaffed and corners are cut because you have to keep your head above water, business do not want to pay for proper staff or proper infrastructure,

IT is a "cost center" that should be cut every year in perpetuity, after all everything is working so why do I need to pay you to sit there all day
Functional Testing DynamoDB Services with a CI/CD Pipeline and Containers
Wow, that's crazy! You'd think that part of the ruling would include restoring the website to its former glory...
Strength of Hacker News is the network effect of a diverse, intelligent crowd. It would be hard to replace. A supplemental site tagging it and aiding search has value. Biggest problem I have searching HN, though, is Google mixing up stories and comments. The fix might be as simple as two domains that contain stories and comments cloned from HN, one domain for each, followed by Google Searches within those domains. Not sure if Google would automatically crawl it, though.
Show HN: Local DynamoDB Snapshots as Containers
> Centered around the knowledge that: 'you don't know you don't know,' we just have no idea which jobs will emerge as a result of new industries powered by automation.

everyone will become a youtuber and other "personality" based jobs.
He didn't just log in and start snooping. He defrauded the company while he was there and then used the credentials to deface the web site.
>>Until it mutates

Already has, twice
I'm doubtful.

There's a reason that rich folk who get elected are nominated by a major party.

It's because in a voluntary voting system, a large "Get Out The Vote" machine is necessary, even though it's not sufficient.

You don't get that machine with machine learning. You get it with thousands of organised volunteers managed by experienced party hacks.

But hey, it's a free country. Afterwards, having seen where the money goes, I suspect Sam will decide to invest in political consultancies.

(edited for clarity)
Overall I like it but the short centered URL bar, unused space around it, and trimmed URL are terrible.
> A new variant with no kill-switch recovered by Kaspersky as a virustotal.com upload — not detected in the Wild.

Uploaded to virustotal MEANS found in the wild. That's what admins do when they discover things.
Ah, right, thanks, just never stumbled across it.
You can report these bad ads by clicking the small X in the corner. Please do that if you ever see any of those, and they'll be replaced by other kinds of ads (and hopefully over time they'll get enough reports to be removed.)
FWIW, Kickstarter won't let you change the text of a reward tier as long as someone's pledged for it. You can change the text of the main pitch all you like, though.
What's the point? There's no way anyone could pay that.
It's being downvoted because it's a meaningless distinction.

The makers made a medical claim. They had no evidence to support that claim. They've withdrawn the claim.

It doesn't matter if they claimed "helps with" or "cures".
For those interested in learning more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The Idea Factory". It's a history of Bell Labs, focusing both on the biographies of the engineers and also a meta story about how you create an organization that consistently produces impactful innovation.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...
Clicking the advertisement does what you want. It doesn't download anything (at least the one I clicked on), it takes you a site with more information where you can download the advertised thing.
Advanced amazon search site jeviz.com is back online! More features on the way
Have you looked at http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/api/promise.map.html - which allows you to control the concurrency of Promises easily?
Personally, I find the visual weight that the tags have exceed their value to me.
https://hn.algolia.com/ does the job pretty well!
i'm kinda confused what the point of this writeup was? just something to have on your resume? i don't think anybody involved in research let alone data science had anything to gain from it, and it certainly didn't propose any solutions...
TweedJS 0.5 is out
The heart of this piece is the author's realization that (relative to their cover price) glossy, expensive cookbooks don't actually cost that much to print:

"Until one-day I got lucky. Just by chance I spoke to the print broker who actually worked on the exact bid for that famous book. And he told me precisely: that super amazing cookbook that I truly loved, which at the time retailed for $50 and had won every award imaginable, cost $3.83 per book to print, shrink wrap, and ship to the US. I thought he must be mistaken and I said so. “No way.” He replied, “well that was the first edition, I’m sure the cost has gone down since then.” He thought I was implying that $3.83 per book was too high!"

One implication of this is that the cost difference between digital and physical publishing is probably much less than most people think. While a weighty tome may literally feel like it's worth a hefty premium, this is due more to consumer psychology than anything inherent to cost of production.
If all I need is an ingrown toenail removed, or a prescription for an anti-fungal cream or something, I'd be totally fine with a doctor who went to a boot camp. Why would I want to pay for somebody who is dramatically overqualified - and correspondingly more expensive - to take care of a minor problem?
The MalwareTech article that documents this best, https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally-stop... , uses Necurs as an example of a trojan that uses randomly generated domain names, so probably not at technical reason.
Life expectancy, cultural changes.
You can store Redis on disk too. Not that you gain anything from doing so as persistence can be better achieved by clustering and I've never ran into issues where memory was a limiting factor, even with millions of records in Redis. Frankly if memory was a limiting factor then you'd probably want your KV store separate from your application anyway rather than the embedded approach that Badger takes.

I think the real advantage of Badger is that it's not as sophisticated as Redis. ie you can have Redis-like functionality compiled into your application so less faffing about setting up another daemon / cloud micro-service inside your NAT / VPC / whatever.
Stop letting danger pay attention to you
When I was in med school, married with two kids, every member of my wife's family told her to divorce me, not once, but on a regular basis. They all think I'm great now and wonder why we don't visit them much.
Well, BLEU is non-differentiable and not decomposable over sequence of translation decisions. Yet I wouldn't call methods reinforcement learning because loss is tricky.

But yeah, I guess there's more to it than meets the eye.
As a Bengali, I was hoping for more detail and context here.
And as unpopular as the idea is with geeks, I think this illustrates the need for a "walled gardened" for the majority of users where each app is sandboxxed. Something like this couldn't happen on iOS, ChromeOS or Windows 10s.

Most non developers would be served perfectly fine with a locked down OS.
Using the correct login credentials has been defined as hacking for many years.

See this clip from a 1983 film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2_h-EFlztY
Why did this get bumped down? The article is speculation, but Sam apparently asked the former mayor of San Francisco gave him advice.

From the article:

> Here’s an excerpt from Brown’s column:
>>
>> “I met up with Altman the other day. He was dressed in sneakers and jeans and was looking for advice.
>>
>> I told him California has a history of millionaires running for public office on their own dime. Most wind up paying consultants a whole lot of money and losing.

The original column is at: http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/williesworld/article/The-... , and it has more:

> Say hello to Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s worst nightmare.
>
> His name is Sam Altman. He is a 32-year-old tech investor and app innovator who believes that if used right, technology can help bring an end to income inequality and a host of other social and economic problems.
>
> And he’s looking at running for governor in 2018, a race that Newsom is already in.
>
> I met up with Altman the other day. He was dressed in sneakers and jeans and was looking for advice.

Can someone please direct me to which of the guidelines this submission has broken?

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

I personally think the original title is potentially clickbait, but I do not have a sense of what I would change it to. I read the article before I submitted, and I think the it is sound (it says Recode reached out to Sam Altman for comments). At best, if there was a checkbox next to the article to indicate that the original title should be examined.

2nd Edit: It's now 13:39 PDT , and while this article does not show up as flagged for me in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest?next=14337225&n=31 it's no longer on the first, second, or third pages. Can someone explain to me what is going on?
Brave is built with the same rendering engine and JavaScript engine as Chrome (Blink and V8). I think the speed increase is probably due to the built-in ad blocker.
This is pretty exciting. I would love to see comparisons between badger and goleveldb
Same first impression. No subtlety there
Congratulations to the team, although it seems the algorithm isn't very accurate, since this article[0] from 1997 was tagged with "Blockchain".

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html?source=tec...
leanpub is a cheap markdown printing. you don't get even bibliographic helpers. let alone full color bled pages. always saw it as printed github wiki pages (which seems to also describe most of their content)

...or am I wrong?
Many plan negotiated rates ignore regional inflation, so in some high cost areas the better dentists refuse insurance. In Manhattan for example, you can't​ pay rent on your dental office taking South Jersey rates.

Caveat emptor and all that. I opted out of dental insurance, even though I get my teeth cleaned twice annually. It makes sense to pay out of pocket for me.

Some plans also have bizarre reimbursement, or encourage worse treatment plans. Especially state-run Medicaid, but that's another story.
I've been loving the "minimized" tab theme that shipped recently (I can't remember what it's called - I can never find the "themes" stuff for Firefox... not prefs, not sure where you set it) - but one issue with it is you can't drag the window around by clicking a tab. I see they've addressed that by adding a few pixels above the tab now. I think this is a good idea, but I hope it means they've reduced the vertical size of a tab too: otherwise all the vertical-space gain is lost.

People here are complaining "stop changing the UI", but web browsers are our main interface to everything... and they are feeling very 90s - I welcome any efforts to do something different or updated!

One thing that I think would be interesting to try is to treat the browser as only the header by default: it doesn't have a "height". When you start the browser it's 80px high, and the window only shows after you load a tab. The landing pages seem like a waste/unnecessary to me. Annnyhooo.
New Collection Library of Congress: Japanese-American Internment Camp Newspapers
Design principle: the IKEA effect
Grabbing a share of the revenue by disrupting that industry with self-driving cars makes economic sense; the massive investment required to develop (and maintain!) self driving cars.

Even more, there's no definite proof (yet) that self-driving cars will even "catch on" and replace traditional human driven cars at all. OK, for shipping / transport and what-not, the economic drivers are pretty clear. But considering that at least some personal driving is actually recreational and that there's no super-strong economic incentive to favor self-driving cars, it's hardly out of the realm of possibility that the self-driving cars will just be a passing fad, or will never amount to anything but a niche market.

Note that I'm not saying that things will necessarily play out this way. Just pointing out that it is a realistic alternative to the prevailing "self driving cars are the future" narrative.
Downvotes are appropriate. HN isn't the place for in-jokes or pop culture references.