skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of what the author talks about here makes me wonder about a potential application for visualizations like this (especially since I'm working on a general purpose 'structured data' visualization system).

If seeing these visualizations of algorithms can significantly speed up human understanding, how beneficial would it be for onboarding people to (e.g.) open source projects, if the codebase had its central algorithms visualized?

For instance, consider introducing someone to the Git codebase for the first time. What if the first step was allowing them to just use Git, while they could see the data comprising the working tree, index, commit tree, etc. changing as they performed various actions? After that, they could go to the code and see which parts were responsible for producing the visualization.

Or, what if library/framework/language maintainers incorporated it to teach people how to use/debug their systems. E.g. the 'state_machine' Ruby gem. How valuable would it be if users of the library could turn on a debug flag and just see their state machines being constructed and operating?

There's a video of the visualizer I'm working on running here (including another visualization of quicksort towards the end): http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd
this is a great perspective and post, thanks
I'm reminded of this Twitter exchange, in which Alan Kay graffiti'd YCombinator's "Make something people want" poster to say "Make something people need" and Paul Graham retorted that "making something people need but don't want kills startups".

https://twitter.com/sama/status/656892679817527296

The point of business is to create a customer. For that to happen, there has to be someone out there who has voluntarily decided they want to use (and ideally pay for) your product. The same goes for political movements - to build a mass political movement, you need a critical mass of people who voluntarily decide that this cause is worth investing time and money into.

By definition, addiction means that your voluntary choices are going to serve the furtherance of your addiction. So there's no customer there, and no profit potential, unless you're a drug dealer. Social interventions like drug treatment clinics could perhaps work, relying on the desires of loved ones, but it's very hard to help someone else unless they make choices to help themselves. When your brain chemistry has been altered so all it wants is more of the drug, that's not a given.

It's a hard problem. Unfortunately history hasn't been kind to populations with mass drug abuse; when I think of countries with a societal drug problem [1][2] or even subpopulations within a larger nation with widespread drug abuse [3][4], the cultures involved all basically collapsed. For countries, the general pattern involved top-down reforms -> military defeats -> revolution -> conquest by another power. For subcultures within a larger nation, it's the total marginalization of the group in question, assimilation into the larger population of the remaining productive members, and then long-term decay and blight on the remnants of the subculture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans
You've already established an implicit trust of the DNS at that point to even make that first trust with a paypal.com or bankofamerica.com. The various DNS-pinned certificate proposals aren't necessarily the right answer either, but the proponents are correct that the "first contact" with a server isn't with the server at all, but in DNS name resolution. If you trust DV certs at all, a lot of it is because you trust DNS, for the most part, and the DNS-pinning certificate advocates are at least correct that if we're all relying on that as our identity+trust database then they already are our most important CAs today in identity+trust discussions.
Any software that does this all for you?
Am I obligated to give them my phone's password(finger print I know you basically are) or will they hold me indefinitely until I do?
You're right. Thanks for the correction.
Any thoughts on rewriting iTerm2 in Rust?
Trustless, distributed, scalable, redundant, anonymous cloud storage with a market-driven pricing scheme? Why _wouldn't_ you want that? For me that's pretty much the ideal cloud storage system.
Parity Wallet Hacked. $105m ETH Stolen
https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...

It looks like if there is a hardfork then Coinbase will just keep your coins on the chain that they don't want to continue supporting. I would move coins to a wallet that you control (preferably something or somewhere not network accessible) beforehand so that you keep your coins on both chains.
Unless you have an add on that isn't compatible, like the one that ubuntu for some reason bundles with the browser out of the box.
>But even then we spoke in terms of world coordinates vs. joint coordinates.

World vs. joint coordinates might also generate some confusion, since joint coordinates are "world" coordinates too. And you can refer to the coordinates of a joint using "world" coordinates, which someone could easily refer to as a "joint coordinate". Of course, you can formally define exactly what these terms mean, but then you've lost all of the advantage of using common terms rather than more formal terms since you've replaced the common meaning of those terms with a formal one.
Won't it arouse suspicions to have a clearly used, but blank phone?
I would expect a "dumb shuffle" to randomise the order of playing songs in the list but play each song once.
Dragon, Falcon. Can't they be original in their naming?
Well put. I can think of no better way of explaining our situation than this.
My S7 has this thing called a secure folder. Basically a hidden phone with all its own apps and data. It's pretty nifty for situations like this.
Referenced in the top comment of the Gambler's Fallacy discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805939
They should definitely add a fan or compressed air to simulate blowing on the dice. For accuracy, of course.
Yeah, that seems to be the case especially if you aren't a citizen.
Perhaps prop-making in the movie/tv business, prop-makers build one-off things all the time, use them in whatever show/movie they are making, and after filming they are not needed any more.
I can't recall a similar degree of concern and push for treatment during the crack/cocaine epidemic in the 80-90's and the meth epidemic of the 00's. What is it about the opioid/heroin epidemic that differentiates it from those prior?
Unfortunately I am way too busy lately and I feel I would only leech and not contribute, so better keep me out for now.

I have a very keen interest in the area however! What is most interesting for me recently is how exactly is such data represented in computer structures? Since I know that drawing example graphs and giving good examples would swallow huge amounts of time, I asked if the code is open-source so I could reverse-engineer the data model myself and not pester anyone. =)

I fully understand you not wanting to OSS it yet. I'll be extremely interested if you do that one day in the future.
Yes, this advice is daft. You are far better off just letting them read your boring emails, however much it (justifiably) irritates you.
I wonder why they did not use this common variant,

"Facebook to launch news subscription product. -TheStreet"
I don't use Firefox because it's a power hog compared to Safari.
You could have a fake backup.
Thank you!
As soon as Pocket was "included" and the response to everyone complaining was a politely worded "fuck you" then I removed FF and haven't looked back.

It's understandable they have to find ways to make money, but those experiments alienated users. Once you've started down that path, there's no returning in a lot of users eyes, mine included.
Always welcome :)
You had a bad time with shared hosting, and your solution was... a different kind of shared hosting?

CPUs and ram are guaranteed on VMs, but disk/network IO isn't. A noisy neighbor on a VM host can soak up all the disk bandwidth and slow you down to a crawl, even if uptime is reporting 0.00 load.

I like the referer tags on the VPS hosting links, too.
Those use cases can come after the technology has proven itself reliable. You don't have to have the perfect solution with the first production car.
I cannot find it on-line - but I have received a following message from Coinbase (<no-reply@coinbase.com>):

"""
Dear Coinbase Customer,

The User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) is a proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size scheduled to activate on August 1. The UAHF is incompatible with the current Bitcoin ruleset and will create a separate blockchain. Should UAHF activate on August 1, Coinbase will not support the new blockchain or its associated coin.

The User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) is a proposal to adopt Segregated Witness on the Bitcoin blockchain and could result in network instability. It is scheduled to activate at the same time as the UAHF.

To ensure the safety of customers’ funds, we will temporarily suspend bitcoin deposits, withdrawals, and buy/sell starting approximately 4 hours before activation of either fork.

If you currently have bitcoin in your Coinbase account, and do not wish to have access to UAHF coins or have immediate access to your bitcoin, you are not required to take any action.

If you wish to have access to UAHF coins or you wish to have immediate access to your bitcoin, you should send your bitcoin from Coinbase to your external address by July 31.

For more information on how to send bitcoin from your Coinbase account, please refer to this article: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/971437.

Thank you,

Coinbase Team
"""

This is very worrying. If a split happens each bitcoin will exist on two forked chains, that is it will become two coins - both will have some value (even if minimal). And now Coinbase announces that it will let users withdraw only one of them. What will they do with the other? Sell it somewhere?

Maybe the email is fake?

Update: Looks like on their blog they changed the message:

"""
Customers who wish to access both blockchains at the time of the hard fork should withdraw their BTC from Coinbase since we cannot guarantee what will happen during the hard fork or when this access may be available.
"""
https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...
that sounds a lot saner.
I can't read the implication of this, but to clarify, I haven't personally encountered a problem that fit Mongo best. I can imagine one.
Great post! I love reading pre-company autobiographical accounts from successful founders, as I find it to be a great way to get ideas for what pre-company experiences might best prepare me to be successful myself.

Some additions I would make to Michael's list for "Why to start a start-up":

- As a founder you get a level of control over what problem you're solving that you'll rarely have as an employee.

- You also get a level of control over who you're working with that you'll rarely have as an employee.

- You also escape having your income determined by the market for labor, and instead have it determined by the market for your product.

Those three things are very, very important to me, and I suspect also to many other founders.
It's magnificent!
It's a math paper so I would expect proofs, not experiments. But interesting conjectures are still valuable even if they haven't been proven yet.
This - and possibly also a reminder that the same words may mean different things for people with different backgrounds.

If someone with no specialized knowledge about math and probability requests their songs in a "random" order, I don't think one should assume they are insisting on an order sampled from a uniform distribution.
> We can do better! We MUST do better!

"..and we will do better, and we will start this moment today!"
Maybe I wasn't quite clear with what I've been trying to say: even when Firefox is slower, it does not matter to me.

If it took a minute to render, it would matter. If it's a matter of a few seconds, it doesn't.
>If anything I'd say it's an economic and community issue

And nobody with political power will admit it because it will make them the enemy of both camps on both issues.
Put 6 weights in the die, one per face. A mechanism controls each weight individually, moving it from near the face (likely to land down) to near the center (likely to land up). Combine it with something that can detect roll outcomes.

This would probably cost a lot of money to fit in a normal sized die.
ISO OSI OCI I see a pattern
Why do you think decentralized storage could ever work on excess capacity? I cannot imagine any incentive for it. It's either profitable enough to do it on a dedicated capacity, kind of like a hosting company, but without all the hassle and marketing. Or it's a burden.
If you have the entrepreneurial itch and don't have the financial security to back it up, becoming a bootstrapped micropreneur is a great first choice.

Start your business on the side, when it revenue is high enough to live on, make the jump. It's slower than a funded startup, but a lot less risky. Does come with a high social opportunity cost due to lack of time, however. But so does starting a startup.

If your sidehustle does well, you can even leverage it later to fund your big startup idea. Or, hell, live a good life on a lifestyle business making a few hundred thousand per year.

$150k/year revenue won't get you any headlines, but it's plenty to live on and run a solo business.

Get to $500k/year and you prob have a higher expected ROI over N years than any startup founder.

Disclaimer: my sidehustle is at the $50k/year level, but that's on 60 hours per month. If I didn't insist on living in SF, I could have a very cushy life back in Europe.
Lots of people buy used phones. If you install a bunch of apps and set a photo of your dog (or a random internet dog) or kid as the background, it probably wouldn't be all that suspicious.
> I have used Math.random, Random.org and other sources, but have always received numerous complaints that the dice are not random enough. Some players have put more effort into statistical analysis of the rolls than they put into their doctoral dissertation.

I seriously doubt that high-quality electronic randomness is non-random enough to have a noticeable effect on the outcome of board games. It's nice that the guy is accommodating enough to go to all this effort, but it seems unnecessary. Cool project, though.
You're overselling the complexity here. Yes: mating analog specifications to line drivers/receivers requires per-process design. And at the very top end of achievable technology (USB 3.1, PCIe 4, DDR4...) these designs are likely to be NDA-level IP you have to get from the fab or its partners. But come on, "slew rate" matching is a matter of looking up some capacitance and I/D curves and plugging them into a SPICE model. Literally everyone does this in school.

But that's not remotely where we are with RISC-V designs in the market, where we'd be very happy to get a LPDDR2 controller and a USB Hi-Speed link with an open interface that doesn't require junky proprietary drivers or crazy workarounds for undocumented hardware bugs.

(Also FWIW: I can't find a DRAM controller implementation in that VexRisc tree. That line you point to looks maybe like an abstraction layer for plugging one in that's already on the FPGA?)
Is anyone else amused by the irony of using machine-learning-trained image generator in order to provide data to a machine-learning-trained image recognition program? I'm sure the researchers themselves and plenty of people here could come up with all sorts of logical reasons why this is fine, and very possibly given the right protocols it would be fine. But this sort of approach seems to lend itself toward increasing the risks of machine-learning. ie, you're doubling down on poor assumptions that are built-in to your training criteria or which creep into the neural net implicitly, because you are using the same potentially flawed assumptions on both ends of the process. Even if that's not the case, by using less real, accurately annotated data, you're far less likely to address true edge cases, and far more likely to overestimate the validity of the judgments of the final product compared to one with less synthetic training. And if there's one thing the machine learning community doesn't need any more of, it's overconfidence.

Edit: oops, turns out I mistakenly responded to the content of the paper instead of the fact that it exists and the form of its existence. Sorry.
Maybe, but it's trivial to take a few pictures and send a few boring messages if you're concerned about this. Also just tell them the truth. You don't want government agents going through your private personal data. We need more people standing up to this crap.
What I don't understand is how this will guarantee the existence of these files. How do I know my files are secure? If my files are spread over several machines, and one or several go offline, are reinstalled, whatever. How do I know my files are secure?
I have a jupyter notebook about a similar game "Penguins on Ice", solved with rotation of numpy arrays:

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/denfromufa/9a5e1fdeaf611dc...
I did some regulatory work as well, for an upcoming regulation called Reg CAT. CAT will require all brokers, traders, exchanges, etc. to report essentially everything that happens--orders, cancellations, trade executions, etc. Right now the SEC really has no way to catch the majority of regulatory hijinx (look at the years-long attempt to track down the cause of the 2010 "flash crash").

Hopefully this will improve the ability to regulate in the future. But it probably won't result in significantly more enforcement--the regulation is written in such a way that the exchanges and FINRA will carry the primary regulatory burden rather the SEC itself. This means that despite there soon being a system that could, say, give you every reg NMS violation via a database query matched to a log of historical latencies, very little will likely change.
That's exactly why I wrote "YMMV" and put a big focus on stressing that this is how things work for me. I'm not a web developer and so my usage pattern is certainly much different from yours (if you are one).

I'm glad to hear that you found a web browser that makes you happy. So have I.
What if it was 1/10th the price of normal storage?
Being a successful business is not all gambling luck, it's not always working long hours for crap pay, and many, many people have started companies with families and without losing everything they put in. Also, "90% of people choose not to work at a startup" seems like a really bad guess.
Have they announced the ICO yet? Or has it already passed?
Sometimes. The screenshot I showed was when Avast specifically offered me Chrome. Not the Comodo Chrome knockoff. Avast offers up different things at different times depending on who is paying what. Chrome has been bundleware with a ton of software.
You shouldn't .
So it was just a misconfigured NGINX setup?
Catan cards take that in account.

They basically made one card for each possiblity of pair of dices, so there is a 7 card for 6+1, another for 5+2, and so on...

Playing with it is MUCH better than with dice... when I played with the dice that came with my copy with catan, the dice were clearly defective (rolls weren't just random-looking, they were WILDLY wrong, it rolled 10s 2 times the amount of 7s...), and the game was super boring, it would end with everyone having the same materials and not having others, so not even trade would fix the game, we had stuff like 10 turns in a row where noone had one particular item while the 'bank' ran out of the other items because everyone had lots of them.
Online, from a reputable vendor. Long ago.
Ask HN: Self-hosted news aggregator that supports Google Reader exports
I've been making do with Feedbin since Google Reader shut down a few years ago. It has been working fine for me - but I am getting a bit restless to implement something on my own server.

Is anyone still using Fever? Any other recommendations?
Is the desire to transform as a person a good enough reason? Very few endeavors are as challenging as solving a problem by building a profitable business around it, and having the pleasure of meeting and working with a variety of people.
Neat project!

You don't really need a lava lamp for this. The Raspberry Pi has a built-in hardware RNG. As long as you have the right module loaded, a Pi is a pretty good source of randomness.
Thank you. This was a nice Rosetta Stone language comparison using an interesting problem with beautiful diagrams.
$4k Renault compared to Tesla Model 3
You achieve reliability with erasure codes, not with more replication. And failure rates are likely to be identical if not better, since incentives are the same as with hosting companies, but since it is decentralized there are a lot more availability zones.
At least on the Mac, I resolve this for browsers and other tools with the Keyboard pane of System Preferences (very powerful, if you've never dug through it). For that matter, I also tweak other things I don't want to easily hit using the keyboard, such as making it harder to Minimize.
Uruguay’s Marijuana Law Turns Pharmacists into Dealers
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford
Insufficient randomness from random.org?

Odd. Seems like the only way it wouldn't be random is if the code transforming the output into die rolls was wrong, or if the inherent unfairness of dice with pips carved out of them is truly desired (which, it seems, could still be modeled from a truly random source).

A cool machine though. I was expecting the captures to take place somewhere other than the lifting chain though, but it makes sense for the setup.
The irony is that Chrome bundles (Pepper) Flash, so a Firefox user would download the Flash installer, which downloads the NPAPI Flash plugin, Chrome, and Chrome's Pepper Flash plugin. The NPAPI Flash plugin would be downloaded but never used after the Flash installer changed the user's default browser to Chrome.
The market probably isn't going to be comprised mainly of individual people. They're going to be farms in russian, china, and anyplace w/ cheap power and proximity to a backbone or population center.
And let seemingly innocuous things incriminate you in their eyes? I think this advice should hold true in this case too: never voluntarily talk to a police or let them in your home without a warrant.
Hi! Sorry for the very, very late reply, I thought this post had been buried by the time you got to it.

You can only join a debate once you're actually on the debate page, where you can see whether the opponent is Pro or Con to the issue based on what side of the page they're on. Pro is always on the left, for instance. I forgot to actually put "Pro" above their head, though; I'll be sure to add that :)
Privacy not absolute, says Supreme Court
If it works, it's going to drive the price of storage to near cost. So you'd use it because it will be dramatically cheaper than the alternatives.
Who would win and lose by addressing the Opioid crisis or not? Consider their relative power (wealth) and organization/unity.

It's the same for basically every issue. Humans can be altruistic, but organizations rarely are.

Simply: change happens when expending power leads to a greater expected increase in (relative) power than doing nothing for a sufficient amount of power-brokers to overcome costs of change and opponents(those who expect to lose from the change). This is a structural issue, not human nature.

Blaming the addicts helps to reduce the cost of doing nothing. The good(?) news is that this is tending to hit wealthier people than past epidemics and so is getting correspondingly greater attention.

Rejoice! The problem is far worse than these sad, bullshit excuses.