skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Damn, you're right. And if people use smart contracts to do things that are technically allowed, but have unexpected downsides, we should have a review system in place where impartial third parties review the contract language. Two people should be assigned to speak for and against the unexpected behavior, and then maybe a panel of 12 regular citizens could render the actual verdict.
I think it's important to distinguish a major change from an impactful one. The APFS change is major, but not necessarily impactful in any meaningful sense to users. Apple's not the kind of company that's going to emphasize non-impactful changes to its customer base.
Justice Dept. Revives Criticized Policy Allowing Assets to Be Seized
I've been saying this for years, that Chrome's market share is mostly caused by
Google's aggressive advertisement. Many users don't even know exactly what a browser is, they just clicked that button at some point because the text next to it told them to do so.
> Unmarked functions default to public in Solidity

Facepalm

Wasn't this lesson learned long ago? C# defaults to private on unmarked members. Why would you ever want to default public?
What has been going on with Mozilla as of late, as well as Gnome and various other FOSS projects, is a overton distraction on "social". This in the form of "helping" the third world etc. Mostly all this ends up doing is adding to some execs ladder climbing scorecard, and draining the project of focus and manhours.
I believe that was a mention of something like that in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
If it's a paper tiger then why are legal teams blocking teams from adopting it?

There's the theoretical risk of patent infringement that this post addresses, but the more important point (imo) is that the current state of affairs is stopping React adoption for teams that, without the input from their careful lawyers, would gladly adopt it. Or the fact the ASF legal team banned this type of license as a dependency for any of their projects.
Yes kind of, SpinalHDL is a from scratch fork
Ahhh safety, driving, and the developing world. Ugh. I haven't tested the hypothesis but I think the switch from mopeds to cars has resulted in a huge number of traffic fatalities. This was super evident in Thailand as it's quite clear that non tuk-tuk/rickshaw or motorcycle transport is a very new thing. There's an obliviousness to the fact that they're driving thousands of pounds of steel and nobody else on the road is protected in the same way.

India's drivers are actually pretty awesome, but they've had cars for a lot longer. Still. More people driving and perhaps being the first in their families to actually own a car means bad news.

Not that I see any good solution other than waiting a few generations, widespread driver's ed is probably cost prohibitive. Still. Ugh.
Bandwidth is effectively free for many users (no data cap), and the amount of processing power required for something simple like file storage is pretty trivial. You're right that it's non-zero, but I'd imagine it's probably on the order of pennies a month.
Can you please elaborate on why you think BigQuery's streaming inserts are not particularly reliable?

Separately, you can always use BigQuery's federated query capability of Bigtable.

(work at G)
It is similar to Chromes memory usage, add one tab after another and you will hit memory wall pretty fast (100 tabs?), with firefox 1000 tabs is not a problem.

That's why I switched back from Chrome after using it for a month few years ago.

Now I would switch because Chrome is the new IE, some developers don't test on Firefox, they say "just use Chrome", no WAY.
I can literally feel how Ethereum changes the law. I mean, seriously, no need for lawyers anymore. On ethereum it's is simple: You got fucked, live with it. "Bad faith? It's the code, didn't you read it?"
Hmmm... That's similar to, but not covered by this submitted fix https://github.com/paritytech/parity/commit/e06a1e8dd9cfd8bf...
Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
Ask HN: How real is the skill barrier for self-taught/bootcamp devs?
Stories about self-taught devs or bootcamp devs that get into web development or mobile development are very common these days. While they may eventually coast well in those areas, they may probably find themselves unable to cut it anywhere else.

Someone can say self-taught people can break into the software industry with ease but I haven't heard of cases where they shift focus to less common but still respected roles, for example, network programming, HFT, systems engineering or embedded programming. Is there a big skill barrier here? How hard would it be for a self-taught person to break that skill barrier and transition outside of web or mobile apps?
What is "unpredictable behavior"? Per ethereum, the code is the specified behavior. Would a contract with function "GiveMeAllYourMoney" be unpredictable behavior if it did what it said. What if instead it was named "Execute"? So now we have a contract whose "unpredictable behavior" depends on how you name functions and variables. However, that is something that cannot be checked by a computer, but would have to be human checked. "Unpredictable behavior" likely would ultimately have to be adjudicated by a court. In that case, what has the smart contract bought you?
ARM has a patent on AXI bus, but sure if it's expired, but whoever uses AXI with this CPU may need a license.
Discussed in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626092.
Better safety for the driver of the car, not the poor bastard on a scooter that gets mowed down ;)
I'm not sure you actually read this because it's pretty obvious that it actually tells many people not to do a startup and makes it clear that 'getting rich' or 'succeeding' isn't a very good reason for doing one. It gives three pretty clear criteria for starting a startup that most people won't meet- those that do might be worth considering it.
Fiix (YC W17) Launches VLOG
I know this is a joke, but what would prevent the thief from attaching high transaction costs to the withdrawal of ETH from the target wallets? Say they place 50% of the value into the transaction costs - miners would assume a healthy profit off of the theft and it wouldn't be beneficial for them to rollback the chain.
I work at a company that has a pretty comprehensive suite of PDF templates we fill out, so if you want some feedback from someone who would have been a perfect customer 3 years ago:

The biggest thing that costs us time is schema validation. We ended up building a tool that rejects uploads if the text fields don't match, or if you forget to include a radio option, etc. It also has "recommended" fields which issue warnings if they are not implemented.

Radio options, checkboxes, and images (for signatures) would be a welcome addition that I didn't see in the editor.

The documentation / online demo doesn't make it clear how I would go from fields -> API access (because how do I name the fields?).

[append]

An API endpoint to get the unfilled PDF template would also be good, especially if bundled with a client library that handled the call to pdftk. Some of our documents are HIPAA and I don't want to deal with having the client data leave our machines.
As long as the consumer is aware of the lack of safety there is no reason why it can't be sold.
In that future, ironically, Gold acquires even more value as a hedge
Seems like something a code review would have caught. Then again, code reviews and other slow processes are probably not the par for startups.
Let's play hypotheticals.

If you were the attacker and you now have the ETH in your wallet, how do you cash out without anyone identifying you and maximising your profits?

Also has the attacker broken a law by exploiting a bug in the contract?
Why so? What if I have an okay solution to a okay problem but see an opportunity to monetize the market gap and band together some folks to create a business around it? Does it have be "inspiring"?
I'm pretty sure a hard fork can undo anything on the block chain. You can start over from the block before the hack. There's probably a cleaner solution than that though.
YC doesn't capture "the vast profits", they take ballpark 6%. That leaves the founders with the vast majority of the windfall, depending on how much outside money you need to make your idea work.
That was traumatizing to watch. The Tsuru looks like a 90s Nissan Sentra though that might just be appearances. It makes me sick to see the passenger compartment just plain collapse.
How Scientists Preserved a 440-Pound Blue Whale Heart
Can you verify that with some sources/stats?
And what's your definition of a "middle class" in India?
I don't follow Ethereum closely at all, but I don't really understand a few things about this:

- Who's the "white hat group"? Why do people have confidence in it?

- Why does everyone believe they'll give back $75M+? If they decided to just keep it, what could anyone do?

- How will people even be able to claim ownership of the ETH in a way that's verifiable so they know they're giving it back to the right person?
This is a very common complaint, and it's not valid. You cannot have privacy without some form of trust or identity.

There's no reason that "Only $KEY can read this" and "$KEY belongs to $READ_WORLD_ENTITY" have to be tightly coupled.

Just because you need [the network operator to think you have] some form of the latter, does not in any way mean that the former is "not valid" unless it has one particular form of it baked in.

Tight coupling is evil (ref. dependency injection), and complaining about it is not in any way not valid.
"It's all there black and white, clear as crystal. [...] You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir."
Magnetically tunable quantum oscillations in graphene superlattices
Here's one easy rebuttal: on the Sia network, renters are able to choose which hosts their store data on, and they will use a number of factors to decide which hosts to use, not just price. For example, low latency is important for some applications (e.g. a CDN), so it's not acceptable for host in China to be serving content to users in Europe.

Another way of thinking about this is to realize that the centralization of all data storage in China has not happened already. Why not? A motivated company (one as big as Amazon or Google) could move their datacenters to China if price was the only consideration. But they haven't, because latency (among other things) matters.

I'm not sure if this rebuttal applies in the case of Filecoin, since it's not clear to me to what degree renters are able to choose the hosts that store their data.
Seems like a chicken and egg problem. The crypto currency space is currently so fraught with fraud and crime that I assume no sensible insurer would touch it with a long stick. Insurers need a boatload of seed capital and - if they would be to act as expert intermediaries as you suggest - must invest lots and lots of R&D to due diligence. But as long as ETH mostly remains a get rich quick scheme for computer criminals, any such insurer party would only stand to loose all seed capital they invested.
If you're on a scooter you get mowed down regardless if the colliding party is a scooter, a car or a truck. And even if the colliding party is a scooter, there's still all the traffic behind it. So it doesn't matter.

That is a job for the government to actually hire and train cops to enforce traffic rules (red lights, DUI, right-of-way)...
Black hat hackers nabbed $31MM in ETH. Not a bad payday due to a coding error.

https://etherscan.io/address/0xb3764761e297d6f121e79c32a6582...
This is somehow the top comment, but doesn't deal with the issue at hand. In fact it entirely ignores it.

The theft wasn't due to an issue in the core protocol of Ethereum, it's due to faulty code in a single piece of software (as you can see throughout the rest of the thread).

It's a matter of poor engineering practices, not a flaw in the fundamentals of the protocol.

If an engineer designed a bridge, and it failed due to a flaw in the design -- say the math on a strut's angle was bad and the bridge collapsed causing millions in damages and took a few lives. Do you blame steel, all steel, and everybody who uses steel in construction as foolhardy? Or do you blame the engineer, the safety inspectors, and the company that oversaw the project?
In new circular economy, sustainability is good business, tech leading the way
> Still, better safety rating than a scooter

Is it? I mean maybe it is, I don't know, but I'm guessing you don't really know either. I can imagine that maybe a scooter could be safer than a very bad car. You can get crushed in a car, cars go faster, you've got less situational awareness.

I'm not sure this is one of those things that is just obviously true.
Um, the vast majority of companies don't have cutesy nicknames of their employees yet manage to write thousands of documents about them without any problems.

If I'm talking to someone uninitiated and I say "I am a Stripe" they would look at me like am have 30 heads. Not a good way to make outside friends. I would say "I work at the payment processing company Stripe."
Design... before Solidarity I had never seen such an abuse of the word.
>> Filecoin miners can do the same by (a) registering as service providers and (b) complying with blacklists and takedown notices as mandated by their legal jurisdiction.

That would be a huge overhead to be replicated across participants, driving out smaller players, lowering the "distributed" aspect of the system, creating larger points of failure and increasing the price.
> The Swarm City Core team is more committed than ever to the development of Swarm City. The real value of our token lies in the community, and the technology the developers are creating. Black hat hackers, vulnerabilities, and bugs will not stop us from creating the decentralized sharing economy our community and the world craves.

What?!? That seems like a pretty relaxed response for someone who just lost 8m dollars.
Look at crash test videos posted above. We have regulations in place where they do not.
Looking at the video of the Nissan Tsuru vs. Versa posted above, it seems to me that an airbag might not have been much help in the Tsuru - the passenger compartment in the Tsuru just plain collapsed whereas the Versa's remained whole.
Have you filed a radar bug?
There is surely something to be said about Renault as a company brand's responsability and ethics here.
That's how casino dice work right?
Here, I have an idea for how to sell this to the CAs: establish a perceptual distance metric, and the larger a perceptual distance "moat" a customer wants, the more you charge them.

then if the customer is google.com, and they've paid for a moat of width 5, and somebody tries to register these domains:

domain distance
=====================
google.com 0
google.co 1
goegle.com 1
gargle.com 4
gaggle.com 9
example.com 40

then all those with distance <= 5 will get flagged for manual review and the CA will offer google a chance to +1 or -1 it. The person trying to register goegle.com can show trademark paperwork to try to override the -1 decision.

OK this is actually not a great idea (too easy to abuse). But what else are all those sweet, sweet EV cert fees going towards?
That assumes they have control over the DNS. Sounds like they don't with many end customers.
they are starting to sound more like a media company than a camera company
Did you know you can buy baby formula in third world countries for a fraction of the price here? All because evil regulations make companies make use actual safe ingredients and manufacturing practices.

When will this big government madness end. When will the US admit their regs are too strenuous so we can finally buy our cut rate industrial runoff baby formula in peace.
Traffic speed in cities is usually so bad that you will rarely if ever meet with a major accident using these cars. That doesn't mean that safety isn't important. It's just that we are not talking about 70mph American freeway speeds.
IT'S MY BIRTHDAY and FUTURE VIDEOS
The I want to say (counter sunk) dice always have rounded corners too. I think the cost might outweigh the randomness benefit for Vegas.
The fact that he offers to melt and mail a die to any player who complains of non-randomness is a giveaway he's having fun.
The 10fps potatocam footage made me wonder.
Also, the Takata airbag debacle affecting a variety of automakers but primarily Honda (1) is an example of how using a single supplier and developing relationships can be a bad plan.

1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-honda-results-idUSKCN0Y40...
Or just dumb fuzzing. Or a testnet. Or whatever the fancy word for static verification is nowadays.
Yeah, I don't understand how this is disruptive. Except for few improvements, this sounds very much like other cars in the market. The delivery process full of rituals is a standard practise in India, so that doesn't make Renault any different either.
$10,000 is a pretty arbitrary line to draw, such that we should consider anything above it "so expensive."

It'd probably be very easy to strip out the catalytic converter, airbags, ABS, no-stick upholstery, and a bunch of other modern stuff from a Toyota Yaris to get it below the $10k line. It wouldn't make a huge amount of sense, even if you didn't care about safety and emissions. A lot of that modern stuff (engine management! corrosion resistance!) is responsible for cars lasting so much longer than they used to, with relatively little maintenance required.
Maybe it was a feature not a bug.
IANAL but if someone leaves their front door open, it's still illegal to walk in and take their possessions. I would imagine this falls under a similar ruling.
I don't know where you fall with Net Neutrality, but you can't have Net Neutrality and updates exempt from data caps.
I honestly believe drug addiction is a symptom of a greater issue in someone's life. There is no person who wakes up and says "I think I'll get addicted to heroin today"; it becomes a means of escape and relief from something that gradually turns into its own monster and creates a terrible cycle of dependence.

By cutting out the time and money needed to "feed the beast" while providing professional help, they can break this cycle and move towards bettering themselves when they don't have the nagging of addiction voicing itself at every turn.

Of course its not simple and perhaps there will be people who refuse to better themselves. My biggest point is that it not only will save money from going underground, but allow potentially productive members of society to have a means to break the cycle.
Billionaires make it rain on Plenty, indoor farming startup
Probably. Even the extra security features probably make them cost a lot more than cheap dice, and there's a lot more QA like spinning them on various axes to make sure they are balanced.

They make up a bit of that on the backend though, selling the dice to all the tourists. :)
Interesting - just perusing those links, it sounds like a multi-armed bandit problem, in which you reason that if something has worked out before, you should tilt your bets more in that direction. In the context of the urn model, you'd return more balls of the same color for every successful draw. In the context of medicine, you can balance between proving or disproving a treatment effect and actually supplying that treatment to the test subjects who need them.

Relatedly, there's a Bayesian interpretation to overweighting successful past draws. A model where you return one extra ball of the same color to the urn gets you a Dirichlet-multinomial distribution, which is a die-roll distribution where the weights to each face are not known for sure, but are given a probability distribution and revised with observed evidence. In other words: here's an n-sided die, I don't know its weightings, but as I observe outcomes I'll update my beliefs that the sides that come up are more favorably weighted. The number of balls in the urn you start with correspond to your priors; only 1 ball of each color means a very weak belief that it's a fair die, 1000 balls of each color means a strong belief, unequal numbers mean that you start off believing it's weighted.
Automation? Guaranteed immutability?
Well for one, perhaps systems should not be designed in such a way that a single flaw or mistake brings down the entire system...
Very interesting post ! The 3 questions really resonate with me. Usually when talking startups, people talk about changing the world, having and impact etc. Your take seems much more personal, and also that's the way I feel it (although I can't explain that to me rationally).

The 3rd is so true - in big corps, you think you're responsible for this and that because you're the tech lead, project manager or whatever. But most of the time, that's not really true - nothing bad will happen to you if you don't deliver. When you're starting a startup you suddenly realize what personal responsibility means.

Anyway, thanks for a great post !
It would be cool if the online game showed you the actual photo of your dice roll.
That ceremony looks monstrously tiring to an introverted westerner like me.

Well, I guess it's a good thing the article isn't about westerners, let alone introverts...
Here is a practical reason to start a startup:

You are married to someone who makes enough money to push your marginal tax rate on income to the point (it can hit 55%+ in places like CA) that you might as well take a flier on a startup rather than pulling a W4.
There are mixers where you can get close to not being traced and then can move through monero and then to bitcoin.
Show HN: Virtual Go
Also:

- don't play too many songs from the same artist in a row (and too many is probably 2)
- don't play too many slow/fast/sad/angry/... songs in a row
- ... instruments
- ... genres
- ... "feel"
- ...

Deep AI is definitely needed to create playlists that "feel random". :)
> outside of the blockchain

The blockchain offers characteristics (immutability, consensus, distributed backup) that allows entities to trust each other efficiently.

But when you introduce a non-trivial smart contract, there is a chance that it (a black box) has behavior that is not obvious from its source code.

Since the behavior of the contract will cause immutable changes to the blockchain, and since humans can't perfectly mentally model all conceivable source code behaviors and interactions, there must be some other mechanism for establishing that the behavior of the contract matches the common understanding of what the contract does.

This could be sandbox testing, parameter range verification, formal verification, star ratings, etc. As the would-be user of a contract I generally want some reason to trust it.

Ethereum offers the building blocks to create an elaborate vetting, verification, simulation, etc. system. Thusfar, existing institutions have leveraged their own reputations to make users of Ethereum comfortable trusting their contracts. The DAO is an example of the folly of this, but many other contracts are examples of the reasonableness of it.

Over time, Ethereum will build the right meta building blocks to create very rich trust mechanisms which put the meatspace hedging/insurance industry to shame while also shedding much of the inefficiency that ambiguous legal enforcement creates.
virtualgo, a tool to add workspace based development to go projects
Inside Philip Morris’ push to subvert the global anti-smoking treaty
I believe the market right now tells you that people value neither redundancy (creating business for file recovery services) nor privacy all that much.

They do value simplicity of use above all and they do trust large companies (for better or worse).

What makes this system better than the other systems that fulfill essentially the same purpose? What does "getting it right" mean? Are they getting it right and how so?