skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I describe this in the "Security in numbers" paragraph in the last part (Part Three):

"As pointed out before, giving rewards for creating blocks creates an arms race in computing power. Transaction fees only magnify the effect. This is very healthy for the security of our system — anyone can add blocks, so anyone can do it according to their own agenda, but to have any kind of significant effect on the whole thing they would have to invest a tremendous amount of resources.

Remember, the only way to determine which version of the transaction history is the commonly accepted one to look for the longest one. In theory, someone possessing 51% of the computing power of the network is able to completely control the system, as they can just start their own branch of the blockchain and create new blocks faster than anyone else. The resulting branch will become the longest and therefore accepted one, invalidating any blocks mined on other branches. Performing the 51% attack is however uneconomical even for actors the size of a government or a multinational corporation — it would simply cost too much for the trouble."

To give you some numbers, an Antminer S9 costs $3k and provides 14 TH/s. Current Bitcoin network hashrate is around 7,700,000 TH/s. Assuming a 51% attack is not underway already, an attacker needs to have at least the same hashrate as the rest of the network. This would cost over 1,5 billion dollars in non-reusable single purpose hardware alone. Add to this the ginormous power costs and additional costs of housing, maintenance, cabling etc. and you start to get the idea.

A sizeable entity who doesn't have complete majority can still make life harder for users by censoring specific transactions (simply deliberately choosing not to include them in their blocks), but this is more akin to a DDoS attack than a security breach.
> My theory is that any technology that can be simpler will be replaced by one that IS simpler.

This theory is correct. It explains why virtually nobody ever uses C, let alone C++, and all of our internet infrastructure is built on top of Scheme.
if you have machines that do grids well (vectors, simd), and you have a problem that you can get into that form, then clearly you do. its actually kind of stunning how things you wouldn't think could be phrased that way can.

i'm extrapolating from the talk, but i think the point is that architectures that can tolerate dynamic flow control (mimd) are more performance general than ones that cant. and while no, they aren't mainstream, I think the historical jury is still out.

since the cost of keeping an instruction pointer per unit is (largely) absorbed by hardware, its pretty easy to argue that they should win in the limit. unfortunately there are other costs, the memory interface is vastly different. caching becomes interesting and potentially prohibitive.

but is mimd dead forever because gpus can be used for some things and are clearly the cheapest ops you can buy today?
This would come under bribery and I'm pretty sure it can be prosecuted if Instagram wants to. They may not want to prosecute due to the negative attention it would attract.
So besides bugs in the code, theoretically speaking the 51% computing power is the only real "vulnerability"?
Porn intros keep getting weirder.
As the author says there are definite counterexamples. If what you're selling is technology itself (like Docker) you should invest heavily in it.

I know a startup operating right now with 10 engineers and not a single salesperson. I have no idea how they're going to survive.

Aside: are you going to continue your ML in JS series?
SEO was the idea behind it, authority websites etc.

Was a long time ago so could not give authoritative answer on traffic, the aim of post was to highlight that staff at orgs can be er, pliable it seems.

For the record I never dealt with someone at the BBC just a chap who said he could get links added - took a punt for a few grand and he came through.

Interestingly I have just googled the guy... and the company is more formal now but still offers 'natural' editorial links including the BBC as an example.
- Deep Work

- Sapiens
Alabama vs. Florida State Live Stream [pdf]
Can't upvote this enough.
If you are using spinlocks because "mutexes are slow", please reconsider since the contended case makes much more sense with mutexes than spinlock, and the uncontended case is exactly the same.
Would you be willing to write this talk out in longer form? I realize it's a lot of work, but the slides are fantastic and even an intermediate textual version that just fills in some of the explanatory gaps would be fascinating.
If I give you permission to walk into the Y Combinator offices, you're still trespassing. The tenants had no ability to grant legally meaningful permission.
> There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole

The intro by Asimov was a delight to read.
oneThird doesn't return a decimal expansion, just one digit in a number. Still waiting for the 1 / 3 decimal expansion you claim it exists. The best I can do is:

def oneThird(place):
if place >= 0:
return 0
else:
return 3

def printOneThird():
for x in iter(int, 1):
print(oneThird(-x))

Unfortunately, it didn't finish before I edited this response. Perhaps you have more patience, please let me know when you have a link to the decimal expansion of 1 / 3.
I assume that was sarcasm
40 hours a week - tim ferris, this book, even though its dated and not applicable in my life, there's a chapter that really boost my confidence about what is the worse things that could happens, it really help me experimented with new stuff, break out my conservative mind, realize its ok to be weird and have made me perceive a different views on problems.
I know from personal experience that they are working on very cool and important problems at the forefront of the deep learning space. Seriously, talk to them.

Disclosure: I am friends with the founders.
The next article I have planned is neural networks -- but I have no idea when I'll actually be able to write it! Thanks for reading!
Why would Cuban military or government do that on purpose?

What’s the motive? What do they win and what’s their end game?
A Retrospective View of the Laws of Software Engineering [pdf]
No, a slower lens (higher f-number, or, actually, T-number) is safer than a faster lens. It's only a practical accident that a long "telephoto" lens is usually significantly slower than a lens closer to normal for the format (and that the long end of a consumer zoom is usually slower than the wide end). A 600mm f/4 lens is an eye-wateringly expensive hulking monster; a 50mm f/1.8 lens is the proverbial cheap-as-chips (with some exceptions), but will let about 5-6 times the amount of light through to be imaged on the sensor - it'll burn a smaller hole, but do it much more quickly. Should you be able too find a 600mm lens with the same T-number (similar to the f-number, but taking transmissivity losses into account), it'll do the job just as quickly, but much more thoroughly.
Have you tried therapy? Because I moved here as a new grad, I know a bunch of others who moved here as new grads to work at Microsoft and Amazon, and almost none of them have ended up entirely shunned by the city. (Exactly one guy I know describes it the way you do, in fact. And I don't hang out with him because he's really prickly and difficult not to offend.)
I might have to "Godel Escher Bach" again after reading these comments. I found it incredibly dense and hard to read..

My own pick for a book that made me think differently is "crucial conversations".
It reached 114F just south of SF yesterday, SF is always going to be colder, surrounded on three sides with water.
In case you didn't know: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/go-back-with-backs...

Not really a "configurable option" but very close to it, it achieves the same goal and has been released along with the Backspace modification.
You could check this repo for more sources: https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs

That's what's left from a similar site to yours
I would have sworn I had heard something about a "stolen election"? Supposedly this was done by publishing someone's emails? Apparently there were lots of "bots" on social media? Also there may have been a power company in Vermont that got hacked? Did the rightists come up with all that bullshit?

Actually, I don't think "the right" came up with the term "fake news" either...
Correct, as far as I know. Breaking the cryptography with quantum computers is often raised as well, but Bitcoin can transition to a quantum-resistant algorithm if that proves to be a real danger.
> but you'd have to waste more brainpower (or introduce more bugs) by trying to manage it all yourself.

I'll be honest, I've never wasted much brainpower trying to remember the difference between covariant and contravariant, or whether I want Try[Future[String]] or Future[Try[String]], or anything like that, when working in a dynamic language. You just don't do shit like that.
Wow.
What a difference.

Congratulations. This is definitely a huge step forward. The UI finally looks as good as the other guys, and it's fast, too!

If you had finally figured out that private mode's UI is too similar to the normal one, too, I'd even be amazed (let me help you: make the address bar and tabs dark instead of light).
Thank you, that's a pretty alarming case.

I think a good argument against all of this massive surveillance for common people is that governments are usually pretty incompetent and a bureaucratic mess... it's a very asymmetric battle with massive blob holding a lot of information about you vs. you without few resources and picking up clues here and there about what might or might not help you in a lawsuit.

Thanks again, much appreciated.
He only has 4,391 followers, he failed.

https://www.instagram.com/mchafkin/
Technically that shouldn't be difficult, right? I don't know what kind of database they use but the difficulty should come with the review process before blocking and unblocking, not the act of doing it
I'm pretty sure you could make it realtime with more than 10x improvement:

Scan a thinner section of the video because the sky/ground is useless, and process every 10th frame.
The local or municipal government should put the onus on AirBnB. If they made rental illegal, and fined the site for allowing a posting to go up, they would fix it immediately.

It's amazing why AirBnB insists on being the antagonist here. There is already a clear bad faith actor, and everybody wants to see them punished / fail. but AirBnB insists on inserting themselves as a side-plot, rather than simply recognizing the situation for what it is, and doing everything they would want someone else to do if they were in that position.
It's a distinction without a difference. The end result is the same, along with the resulting Streisand effect.
On all architectures, releasing a mutex requires at least a branch (to see if you need to wake up sleeping threads) that you don’t need with a pure spinlock.

But if you don’t have a guarantee the lock owner won’t be preempted, well, spinning for a whole timeslot is quite a bit more expensive…
What if they created the 57 line project, and spent $86 million to improve OpenALPR?
> Outside of hard realtime code, there's zero reason to use spin locks.

That is just not true. You _must_ use them in the case where the kernel is non-preemptable. Additionally, if the locked resource is held for a very short time, a spin lock is likely a more efficient choice than a traditional mutex.
Germany has been a totalitarian dystopia, though - 30 years ago. I don't think you can say anything about a society that is less than a generation or two old.

It's not about a totalitarian dystopia, though. It's about limiting some people's rights in favor of other people in general. We believe that this is wrong to do, not just harmful to society.
An influential math text is getting a beautiful, minimalist edition
I am baffled by the ignorance of your views here.

It is not trivial to secure digital systems. If anything, it’s far harder to ensure digital systems are secure, because of the number of moving parts. I can be fairly confident that if I pack my physical money into a safe, a vulnerability is not going to be discovered that allows an arbitrary person thousands of miles away to empty it without my knowledge. Quite the opposite is true of digital systems!
shameless plug: i made https://github.com/epoyraz/Awesome-Youtube-Channels a while ago.
feel free to make pull requests :)
I think the All Writs Act as written would say yes. There's nothing in it about amount of work. The government does, I think, have to pay you.

Now, in response to the use of the All Writs Act about iPhone decryption, a couple of people raised the argument that the 13th Amendment, which prohibits "involuntary servitude," might prevent the government from just telling you what your job is (even if you're paid for it). I don't know that any court has had an opinion on the validity of this argument.

Also, I think the All Writs Act only applies to things that the Western legal system considers "writs," which is not clearly defined in statute anywhere. So you'd have to ask an actual lawyer who understands Western caselaw about whether "decrypt your hard drive," "write and sign firmware for an iPhone that doesn't lock you out on incorrect passcode attempts," and "dig stone for four years" count as writs. I have no idea.
Με όπλο την άμυνα η Εθνική Ελλάδος
That and native containers knocks out two extensions for me. Three if you count Testpilot.

By the way, is multi-process going to make it more feasible to introduce a more robust profile feature like Chrome?

I have it working mostly on Windows but it still feels pretty rudimentary.

That's the only major feature for me that Chrome is really just so much better than Firefox.
Tree Style Tabs.
This was a great read
Well Pirsig's Zen and the other ones related to eastern religions and science, are around the idea that there is no locus of reality or meaning, the reality is how everything interrelates. It's kind of like word2vec, the context of other words and real-world situations in which each word is used tells you everything about what it means. Take away a particle's charge and mass and the other numbers we associate with it, and is it still a particle? Those numbers describe how it interacts and all we can really say about it is how it interacts. Plato was off the mark when he talked about the ideal form of different objects. There is no ideal form of a chair, except that chairness is an abstract idea about how things (asses and furniture) interact.

Then I think that Grammatical Man and Penrose are around the nature of information, and what can be communicated and understood. And I sort of think that question is at the top of the tree of abstraction about what we think about. Then comes computer science and math which are about any symbolic systems or formal systems that can be computed and reasoned about. Then most everything else is applying those systems to various problems.

Then I think The Naked Ape and Hayek and Flow are around the notion that humans are their own thing. They are tribal and hierarchical and territorial and violent and not nearly as self-aware or even aware of our surroundings as we think we are. You get a lot more mileage out of just observing what they do than about listening to the rationalizations of why they say did it, things like God and blood and soil, i.e. superstitions and us-and-them-ing arbitrary physical features of a pack of mongrels and arbitrary lines on maps. Invitation to Sociology by Berger was another big one on those lines.

And the Heilbroner and Durant are basically inventories of major mental models that people have come up with in philosophy and economics.
Elon Musk frequently cites this one among his favorites and a key book that taught him rocketry.
What is wrong with that? The owners of these systems should have made sure that they don't run shitty and (vulnerable/old versions of their) programs.

Bullshit argument. It’s trivial to break into most houses, for example, but it’s hardly regarded as an acceptable practice.
I vaguely suspect they're holding him because they expect to get either a stronger conviction or more evidence for other cases from the contents of the external drive (e.g., maybe he's producing child porn or knows people who do).
That's definitely true, but I meant actual university courses e.g. CLRS. Some University grade literature, mostly in CS, of STEM subjects is almost non-mathematical e.g. A. Tannenbaum's OS book/s and S. Muchnick's compiler are both mostly mathematics free.

One can find very nice, textbook quality, lecture notes for free all of the web too (http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/yang_mills.pdf for example).
> Are foreign calls assumed to be non-pure?

Yes.

> Can they be marked pure in the case that the foreign (likely C) function doesn't reference global mutable state?

Yes. Here's an example:

https://github.com/dlang/druntime/blob/master/src/core/stdc/...

It's true that the C Standard does not actually guarantee that they don't access mutable global state, but in practice they don't. We're not aware of one that does, and don't know why anyone would write one that does.
A.I. ‘Bias’ Doesn’t Mean What Journalists Say It Means
Thanks! Tyler Rogoway can certainly relate a story.
I know where it will not come from. It will not come from the mainstream AI community. They are married to and madly in love with deep learning. Deep learning, the supervised kind, is a red herring.

AGI will require a revolutionary breakthrough, most likely from a maverick, probably a lone wolf rebel, who is used to thinking outside the box.
For people that need legacy addons like I needed LastPass, go to about:config and toggle extensions.legacy.enabled to true
This is a replay. Start at https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII/status/903355299096141825
Ask the property owner. If the owner can produce a signed contract proving there is a tenant and who the tenant is, then the fine goes to the tenant.

This will, of course, motivate owners to use contracts when leasing their properties.
I'm the same. Been using since Phoenix 0.3 and am stoked about these changes, and the thought that Rust, and the major perf and safety improvements that come with it, are beginning to find their way into Gecko. Amazing work from a team that many had dismissed as irrelevant.

Prove them wrong!
Show HN: From Google Sheet to Full Blown Tech Conferences and Events Website
Based on the number of signatures this petition is garnering, I'd say you're not alone in your sentiment: https://www.change.org/p/mozilla-save-mozilla-firefox-s-best....
`extensions.pocket.enabled = false` does not disable the "Recommended by Pocket" checkbox. I was not expecting Pocket telemetry to continue to work with this set to off.
Well read "Bad Samaritans" to see why the consensus amongst economists is wrong.

There isn't a single first world country that developed under free trade. The US and the UK were highly protectionist with steep tariffs, and it was only after they gained world dominance that they started opening their borders and demanding free trade from everyone else.

The economic "miracles" of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were all highly protectionist, and their now world-renowned industries were heavily subsidized by the government over decades. Toyota took 30 years to make a profit and 60 years to become a dominant player in the auto industry. Had these countries adopted free trade policies, these industries never would have developed due to being unable to compete with foreign competitors, and Korea and Japan would still be third world countries exporting textiles and refined sugar.

The developing countries that did adopt free trade policies (at the behest of the IMF/World Bank/WTO) all grew slower than they did before those policies were in place. Latin America's growth rate since the 80s has been a third of what it was prior, in Africa's case I believe it went from like 1-2% to .2% (don't remember the exact numbers).

The analogy in Chapter 3 titled "My six-year-old son should get a job" is brilliant. If a child is told to get a job and fend for himself, then he'll likely end up working low-productivity dead-end minimum wage jobs for the rest of his life. However if he's able to focus on his studies, get parental support, go to university, maybe do research for a professor on the side - then this insulation from the free market via parental subsidies will pay off in the long run as the child will end up doing much greater higher productivity work. Similarly, developing countries need to invest in high productivity industries to develop.

Highly recommend the book, it's a quick read. I took the same Econ 101 classes where I was taught that free trade is unequivocally good. This book changed my mind, while also helping me realize that much of economics is completely divorced from reality. Even if you ideologically can't let go of the theory that free trade is good, history and the data clearly say otherwise.
TechConfs was developed to solve a problem I had ... too many technology conferences I wanted to attend but didn't have an easy way to categorize, search and browse them.

This project started as a simple Google Spreadsheet but it was missing something.

Enter my "72 hours or less" launch challenge I gave myself ... over a month ago.

Let me know your thoughts and I'll keep this thread updated as I go through all the comments.

Also if I'm missing any event or conferences, just leave it in the comments and I'll them added ASAP.

Right now doing this all manually makes it difficult to scale, but I do think this can become a very valuable resource.
I've just had my "last straw" moment with Firefox after over a decade of using it. Several addons broke with their developers saying, in effect, F-it, and then it lost all of my saved logins. So, yep, F-it. Firefox has been moving toward becoming a clone of Chrome for years. I just skipped to the chase and started using Chrome. Congratulations, Mozilla. Nice work.
GPU -> parallelism -> fast linear algebra

graphs -> linear algebra
Makes you wonder what kinds of juicy stuff could be found by a web crawler that specifically looks for inadequately redacted PDFs.
I won't be happy if it were to fail but certainly I won't despair either.
I don't want amazing performance improvements at the cost of huge functionality losses. This update is simple a regression: almost every add-on I have been using will stop working and has a stupidly limited or no replacement at all. There will really be no reason for me to still use Firefox over any other browser now.

The only option seems to switch to the ESR version, at least for a while it will work.
Yes, that's the point of the security overhaul. But at least paper votes can be recounted and verified.
This sums up my feelings re. Firefox 57: https://www.change.org/p/mozilla-save-mozilla-firefox-s-best....

Sorry Mozilla - for the reasons expressed above, 56 will be the last version of your browser I'm able to effectively use given the demands of my browser workflow. If my use-case no longer fits your business case, then we will part ways.

Currently, it looks like my best options are either Waterfox (with its pledge of continued XUL extension support), or Vivaldi.
Domain names, .com
Google and Microsoft Are Building Software to Identify Influencers and Trendsetters
> As for email, is it possible to even send an email via tor?

There's onionnail[0] whose author I can personally vouch for from the point of view of his intentions. About the security of it all, I have to admit I'm not qualified to judge.

[0] http://en.onionmail.info/