skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It likely wasn't the solicitation for murder that brought on the eye-popping sentencing (and that solicitation charge didn't make it into the final proceedings from what I read), but the entire stack of charges, but that is just my guess. This looks a lot like "throwing the book" at Ulbricht to "make an example" out of him, and try to clamp down on darknet activities. I'm not clear on the wisdom of this approach, as it seems as if it only encourages future darknet participants to increase opsec and "play for keeps", but as I'm just an outside observer, I'll defer to the judgement of the involved prosecutors and law enforcement who are much closer to the details. Would be fascinated to hear from others who follow this much more closely, and their thoughts on why Ulbricht got such a long sentence.
I'm curious if you have any personal experience with someone addicted to opioids? I think anecdotal evidence is actually relevant in this case, saying people have always done drugs and it's cyclic as if it's a fashion fad does a disservice to what's really going on here. The changes to the strength and how people are being introduced to the drug is far different than the past. You also speak of meth as if it has become less of a problem, while it has done nothing but continue to increase.
I agree that humans have always pursued mind alteration even if it was only spinning in a circle until dizzy. The thing is, I'm not sure if harm reduction will be enough as long as new addicts are being created at this pace. It's going to take a multi pronged approach that requires acknowledging just how bad this whole thing has gotten.
"We don't support Trump for his weaknesses but for his strengths." - Thiel at the RNC.

It was a pragmatic choice. Thiel is a libertarian.
I don't think it's just for a lifetime sentence for anything but murder itself... or someone who is an actual danger to individuals or society itself. I think what got Ulbricht in the end was the fact that he was acting like a drug kingpin and so they threw the book at him hard. It wasn't one of those things that did him in, it was all of those things combined that earned him a life sentence.
Yes to both.

But that's not why I do it. It may sound trite, but I really do want to help others get better at stuff, and if I have something cool to share that I'm excited about, I'll go out there and share it.

If I help just one person in the room, that's a victory to me.
In South East Ohio, things are particularly bad, true. Somewhere like Columbus? Not as bad as you're portraying it to be. There are definitely problems, but "hard to imagine from the West Coast"? You mean, like, homeless people shooting up in downtown San Francisco hard to imagine? It's cool that your friend goes to Ohio State. It's a great school. I'm sure he's seeing a lot of economic and social blight as he looks around and sees brand new construction, half-million dollar houses, and one of the youngest, most educated groups of people in the country. But hey! Let's paint a stark picture of those poor people in flyover country. That'll give us something to talk about.
There is no possibility of the number of crush deaths from vending machines rising like that.

Not unless some terrorist rogue scientist invents nano machines that turn everything into vending machines. Some bizarre gray goo scenario.
If you look, their losses are because of stock-based comp, not because of spending. It's generally a GAAP loss, not a cash loss.
I've read the LA Times article. It's full of misleading information and sensationalism. I'm not saying Purdue acted like an angel, but their actions are twisted into a sinister plot.

If Oxycontin didn't work with a 12 hour interval, why did the FDA approve it for that? Why is it in the label if it couldn't be supported by clinical trial data? Was the FDA asleep at this switch?

“There is no Q8 dosing with OxyContin,” one sales manager told her reps, according to a memo cited in an FDA filing. She added that 8­-hour dosing “needs to be nipped in the bud. NOW!!”

Is a great example of creating the narrative the LA Times wants to spin. Take a look at the documents that are in the article. The reason for the Q12h dosing is: 1) insurance companies won't pay for it [since it's not in the label], 2) some pharmacies won't fill a script for anything but Q12h dosing [because it's not in the label], 3) FDA/DEA oversight [because it's not in the label], 4) minimize diversion and abuse.

Those seem like real good reason to me!
I wouldn't say they never happen in Japan - after all, one of the most sophisticated terror groups/cults in modern history was from Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo). They were even able to synthesize VX and sarin gas.

I remember being a kid living in Japan, and watching the subway attacks on TV. It was scary.

But to your point, I agree, statistically, Japan is about the safest country there is in terms of human on human violence.
I feel overcome by the Dianne Kruger effect, to an extent I don't remember feeling any time recently. I'm becoming more and more interested in news about rocketry (due to SpaceX of course) but I'm still a full on space-pleb. I see something like this and my intuition screams "Woah! Of course! Why don't other rocket companies do this? What's wrong with them?!"

But the rational part of my brain kicks in and slaps me down for being so arrogant. It feels humbling to be reminded how stupid one can be.
Dianne Kruger......?????
Taken for a ride - https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4
They're NVIDIA!
That's crazy. I can't imagine how that must be. To have so much demand for your token that people pay 35m in 30 seconds to you for it. There were reports that people paid $6,000+ just to cut in line to get to buy some before the ICO time ran out.
This could enable NaN-tagging as an implementation technique.
Japan has absolutely had terror attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
I completely agree with what you've said here, however I'm not sure that the last part applies to the author of the article:

> I was a Director of Product Management, working on Creative Cloud, and also a member of the Adobe Seattle Site Council.

I don't think this sounds like a rote job. Once you get to a certain organisational level, it's no longer possible to be 'promoted' further without changing to a completely different job role.

I think the idea that to progress your career past that point, you must abandon the profession that got you there, is harmful and wasteful. A rockstar tech lead won't necessarily be a rockstar head of department. Forcing your best people to choose between ditching their core competency or being regarded as 'past it' is, I believe, a large source of the apparent incompetence that befuddles many large organisations.
"I strongly suspect the entire murder-for-hire story was either completely fabricated, or construed to kill any sympathy there may be for him in the public eye."

Incredible.
The two McDonalds restaurants that are on Seattle's 15th Ave NW (at Market and Mary Ave NW) are both doing this via Uber Eats. I suppose they almost had to get in on the game considering it seems like basically every other food-selling establishment north of the ship canal has signed up with at least two food delivery outlets.

I don't really see the attractiveness but, hey, options are options.
This is really amazing. In addition to the interesting project this individual has a great gift for articulating everything in a concise manner and with a very pleasant cadence. What a great teacher. Thanks for sharing. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of this series.

If you only have a limited amount of time I would highly recommend the control logic video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXdoim96v5A
Do you mean Dunning-Kruger effect?
Haha! *Dunning–Kruger :P
This is incorrect. We have had private hire vehicles in Australia for years. Many of them are now also taking rides via Uber, but I've had black sedans to/from the airport for as long as I can remember.

The only things Uber add to the service mix is an app and a bad attitude, neither of which create any value for me.
> Japan never has them

cough

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
Essential: We can unleash Android's power better than Google
The Dunning-Kruger effect: The idea that people of low skill or knowledge about something don't know how much they don't know and thus think they're much better at it then they actually are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
I just did a SaaS company serving SMB. We were an all-in-one security play. Well-regarded product.

One of the things that we encountered was a vice between "can you add this filter" and "but I don't need this, only that filter."

In a more general sense, my research suggests that "IT in a box for SMB" is a deadly place to operate. They make sense on many levels, but they don't sell.

I believe that SMBs favor point solutions because they are pain-avoiders. If they've been phished, they want a remedy. Firewall? Content filter" Maybe later...
Also worth checking out Shadowsocks, which was originally created to circumvent the GFW:

https://shadowsocks.org/en/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowsocks
With respect to the second point about hugely wealthy foreign investors parking cash in Uber-like companies, consider that the risk profile of a highly visible company like Uber with very high-volume cash flow, unprofitable though they may be, can often be much lower than the risk profile of keeping the money in the source nation's domestic vehicles. See also: foreign money parked in absurd condos in NYC.
If you're arguing that silk road's drug sales ruined lives, I'll posit a counter-argument that silk road may have saved lives. People who are drug addicts are going to find their drugs one way or another. I highly doubt there were many people who got their drugs on silk road that wouldn't have gotten them somewhere else.

And instead of purchasing them on the street from dubious sources where the drugs may have been cut or mixed or mis-measured or not even actually what they claimed to be, these people were able to purchase them from sellers who had been peer reviewed thousands of times. Not an ideal situation, but often far safer than purchasing from random people on the street.

In my opinion, the solution to drug addiction problems is not prohibition. That's what we have now and it's not working.
Yeah... a lack of delivery WAS the reason I had been avoiding McDonalds.
lyft somewhat had first mover advantage in SF. Uber had first mover advantage in every other city. Uber already existed in SF and was doing black car rides and a lot of people in NY/SF knew of it - which Uber used to leapfrog Lyft's first move advantage.
Both clock-for-clock and even more strongly for applications that can take advantage of AVX-512, Skylake can be a lot faster than either Haswell/Broadwell. Like the jump from Sandybridge/Ivybridge to Haswell/Broadwell, the jump to Skylake is a big one. For now the best comparisons are going to come from independent sources like Anandtech and hopefully from customers running their actual code on Skylake and publishing the results.
BackerKit (YC W13) Is Hiring Designer, Dev, Biz Dev in SF
Yes, absolutely. Also worthwhile to note that it's based on Thomas Schelling's model of segregation: http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg...
You were in excellent company, then! I've read other anthropological books from the period that took Castaneda more or less at face value...
It doesn't matter which laws. Silk Road was a large-scale public display of flagrant lawbreaking, which appeared to be impervious to enforcement action through clever use of technology.

Shutting it down and eviscerating the person behind it was a matter of preserving the belief that we live in a law-governed society. The stakes here aren't drug prohibition, they're the capability and reach of government as an idea. If darknet markets continued at similar scale and visibility, we wouldn't be the United States anymore, but something closer to Somalia.

You could make a comparison to Wall Street, I guess, but selling volatile securities that turn out to be wildly overvalued isn't an obvious crime in the way that selling heroin is. And even then, the fallout of the financial crisis did enormous damage to public trust in society.
Thanks for the detailed response. It must be an interesting time right now in that group, nice to hear some insight.
Unfiltered.news
Chelsea Manning is back
As someone who has been in many startups over my career so far, your journey sounds appealing in many ways.

Many of the best people I know have been at Amazon or Google for years.
How to market your book when you're a nobody
British Airways IT Outage Strands Passengers During Holiday Weekend
Ultimately, McDonalds will have to transition to being a full-service vending machine.

Realistically, in an automated world, their flesh-and-blood employees provide negative value.

I wish dearly that I could just enter my own order on the POS system when I am in such places
I've had a few students who were retired and were learning just for their own interest but most of my "older" students are going to school to get themselves to a paycheck. As someone who has learned programming on my own for some hobby projects, learning programming is probably not the fastest way to a stable income. Math, Sciences, and Computer Science are very demanding programs and can be challenging for "older" students, not because they can't do the work but because college is hard for someone with kids, mortgage, car payment etc.
Fascinated by Golem (GNT) when coupled with an orchestration layer http://blog.streamr.com/2017/05/golem-plus-streamr-equals-he...
Is San Fran really known for its public transport system?

New York, sure. Everyone's heard of their subway.

The first time I'd ever heard of BART was when I visited briefly, and in doing so I learnt 2 things:

1) BART is pretty bad: noisy and a small network
2) Talking to people during my short stay made it pretty clear San-Fran and the bay area was considered 99% car territory, and traffic/congestion/commuting around SF was a significant problem commensurate with that fact.

Edit: understand this is a genuine question asked as a foreigner who has only formed an impression from short visits.
I love Mr. Robot one of the best shows on TV IMO.
I did the same thing a few years ago! My fireflies didn't move around though.

https://www.michaelfogleman.com/static/fireflies/
FWIW, Common Lisp's macro system is relatively simple. I've been meaning to check out http://beautifulracket.com/ sometime to learn about the Racket way.

Maybe Datalog could make a cleaner base for your project? Just a random thought; bound to be lots more considerations.

Yeah, I have a project right now too where these questions come up -- https://github.com/darius/squeam -- though it's not really ready for anyone.
>Incredible.

Penetrating insight.
I've been following this series for a while now and it's been fantastic. In particular I recommend the videos on making an EEPROM programmer with an Arduino.

To help me understand everything better I've been writing a kind of emulator/simulator[0] (I'm never quite sure of the difference). It still needs work and some terminology changing to match Ben's, but it's got basically the same functionality as the real one.

It's actually a really nice way to be able to rapidly prototype new microcode because the instructions are defined as a slice of bit-fields representing which control lines are set for each cycle[1].

[0]: https://github.com/tomnomnom/eater-cpu

[1]: https://github.com/tomnomnom/eater-cpu/blob/master/instructi...
Has anybody tried launching a rocket from an airship/dirigible?
Thank you for the correction. I truly appreciate the importance of this distinction.
Tangentially related: is there a seasonal ebb and flow to Uber usage that could soften or sharpen this delta? I know I'm much less likely to want to walk 3 miles in February than October, but that's just one person in one city.
I find it curious that Richard de Mille, the person who helped permanently mar Castaneda's reputation, was a top Scientologist. Though this is pure speculation, I believe de Mille, being L. Ron Hubbard's personal assistant, would have been instructed to take down Castaneda. As an up and coming spiritual belief system/religion, Scientologists might have seen Castaneda's popularity with those on a spiritual path, as a threat.
I read a few books by Castaneda when I was younger, and enjoyed them immensely. So when I later found out that his research was "proven" to be a hoax it made me quite sad, and diminished in my eyes, one of the literary and spiritual heroes of my youth. But when I read up on de Mille's aforementioned involvement in a shady religion, one that spouts the most absurd things as gospel, it gave me a bit of comfort. Though it doesn't falsely de Mille's research, it definitely is a conflict of interest, or rather, it shows a blatant hypocrisy, and makes me wonder if he had an ulterior motive. How can a researcher, with a straight face, claim someone has promulgated made up information, when they themselves do so as well? Do I really need to give an example? Okay: Xenu.
I'm assuming Samsung and TSMC follow the same convention? So what does Samsung's 14nm chip map to in Intel's dimensions?
Warning: Uber counts the entire Uber Pool fare are revenue, which throws off these numbers a lot since I would guess that Uber Pool is the most popular option where available.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-14/embattled...
I focused on the accidental in my review of the cause, thank you for reminding me that for some, not working, and the threat of no income can push them to push them themselves with opioids to fall into the trap of addiction
> At what point do the transistors actually have to start dealing with (can they deal with) quantum/thermal/structural effects of being so small.

I think that was about a decade ago. These things simply cannot work if they ignore the quantum effects at their size.
While anecdotes are clearly anecdotal - the entirety of my company has started switching. The constant bad press, and quite frankly the CEO being such a jerk has been enough to get my colleagues to almost universally switch. The cost difference is about 3rd on the list of priorities for most business users.
humble enough to admit the mistake

So many of the worst tragedies in life seem to be caused by this. Arrogance, shame, saving face, covering your ass. Humans can be so cruel to each other when we try to do the right thing. We bow to peer pressure when we're 16 and end up wrapping mom's sports car around a tree. Ahhh, damn.
Is there any chance of further appeals or any way of a shorter sentence?
Elegant Way to Ruin Your Company's Day: Introduction to Public AWS EBS Snapshots
San Francisco's Sierra Club Is a Bastion of Faux Environmentalism
Rent out your musical instruments online
Exactly. I have been infatuated with F# for over a year, but it is very hard to abandon C# for my work projects. At least, it's a way of jacking the bus factor to one, which makes me nervous
Here's a remarkable official USAF film from 1974 about the air-launched Minuteman. Really amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b8LLcdBaQc
I'd love it if Ben sold a single package kit that had everything and printed instructions inside of it. It would be a fun thing for bored highschool students or university students.

Maybe it could even have a PCB that has everything socketed like a breadboard except closer together.
Nature's PLL.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop
We "need" one one supplier of self-driving tech for each large global car company. That's how previous technology transitions in automobiles have worked: usually everyone eventually figures out to build "it", whatever "it" is.
The silk road provided a place for anonymous discussion and review of goods. It provided access to transcendent experiences. I'd say it saved lives.
Why EFF Is Suing FBI for Records on Best Buy Geek Squad Informants
The biggest crime is that the people who wrote, voted for, and executed these laws won't see a day behind bars.
I do generally agree that terrorism isn't a threat worth changing our lifestyles over.

However, I wonder if it's a little unfair to average out the probabilities and compare to something closer to an actual random event, like falling vending machines; surely, a terrorist attack is significantly more likely to occur in a place like New York than Middle America, no?

I'd really like to see something like what's the probability of being killed by a "falling vending machine" IN NEW YORK vs a terrorist attack IN NEW YORK, than something country wide.
Drug was only one of the item on sale.

You had also assassination, children, organs, human trafficking, and more that I can't remember.

I agree with you on the point of the drug, but the rest... Is disgusting.
Interview with Yves Hilpisch – Author of PYTHON FOR FINANCE
I believe that the author's core point is that the SaaS business app space ("SaaS v2") is huge, but it has become a red ocean. He then proposed a viable "SaaS v3" space populated with the likes of Segment.

I don't agree with his v3 vision as I think that AI is a better lever than trying to build an integration platform. The latter is hard, usually involves open source, and has slow adoption.
Around where I live (SW Missouri) most of the McDonald's already have screens where you can enter your own order.

I wonder if McD's sees this delivery stuff as an easy way to increase revenue without vastly increasing cost. If they can pair it with downsizing in-building personnel due to automation could turn out to be a big win for them.

Then in a decade or something they can just automate the delivery with autonomous cars/drones.
That's a done deal at our local McDonalds, and it's horrible if you special order, they never get it right, not sure but I think it's the kiosk...

http://www.pcmag.com/news/349707/mcdonalds-pilots-mobile-ord...
I dont have the ablity to select cpu type from the GUI. Is that being rolled out gradually?
This is probably where cannabis would help, but I don't think even most medical states include anxiety/mild depression on their list of conditions for referral. Very few allow for pain without very specific parameters. Nah, instead we'll hit people over the head with hard drugs. Forever.
I live in an area with good roads, good cars. We get a bike fatality a few times a year. At dusk I find even the well-lit bikes a little hard to discern. We also have some bad drivers. In the most recent fatality the lead rider of a bunch riding on a road was decapitated.

I used to ride bikes all the time as a kid but I would not make a habit of riding on our roads. It's too much of a gamble.
1.2 billion dollars in drugs, making him a "kingpin".
> With the exception of a few niche domains (scientific research, pharma, etc), it doesn't take very many years to master a domain.

I'd argue many areas of tech are an exception as well, at least if you're doing some of the more complex foundational work (which admittedly many tech employees are not). For example, the people who have been working on Postgres for 10+ years understand both databases and that specific database extremely well, in a way someone who's been working on databases for 3 years doesn't.
> An attack with e.g. a biological weapon could cause, on a single day, 1000x the cumulative number of deaths we had over the past decade.

Perhaps. But it's virtually a certainty that opioid overdoses will kill tens of thousands of people in the US this year. (The most reliable recent figure I can find was ~30k in 2015.) Meanwhile, a terrorist attack in the US that kills hundreds of people -- let alone tens of thousands -- is a relatively low-probability event...
> Silk Road was a large-scale public display of flagrant lawbreaking, which appeared to be impervious to enforcement action through clever use of technology.

So is Uber.
Can the payload be dropped with a parachute? Is 200m/s safe for parachute deployment?