skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There really isn't that much difference between US free speech and other western democracies' free speech, despite the first amendment. Yes, it's a little better if it makes it to court, but compared to something like what's going on in China, it really isn't that much different.

However, there's still plenty of limitations on free speech in the US. Look at obscenity laws, for example - nudity is much more acceptable in Europe than in the US. Or if you're a 'freedom of expression' fan rather than just 'freedom of speech', why is sex work still illegal? It's not in plenty of other western democracies.

As a non-American, it just gets tiring hearing the Americans constantly crap on about how much freer they are than everyone else, when there's really not that much difference.
> recurring theme in doctor who stories

For others confused like me: recurring theme in the Doctor Who stories.
Not exactly that service -- too much uncertainty about when quantum computers will get cheap enough -- but https://defuse.ca/quantum-computer-time-capsule.htm
I've participated in design of application similar to that (it is already on the market): voice, video, camera desktop sharing and textual chat. First version was made in 9..11 months: core UI team - 3 developers for desktop. 2 developers for mobile clients, one for each platform. Server side 3-5 as it supports video transmission for 1000 and more participants. Platforms: Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android and iOS. Small, manageable and so effective professional team.
AI is really exciting. A computer system modeled after the human brain and nervous system detects neural connectivity issues in the human brain and nervous system brought on by Alzheimers. And, we are just scratching the surface of this technology. I believe the pace and acceleration of innovation for AI will be like nothing we've seen before. At some point, and we have seen a little bit of this already, it will basically build and enhance itself. This may become an arms race of corporations and countries having the largest neural networks. At first, these networks will be aggressively learning and making themselves more intelligent by modifying themselves.
So, for the non financially savy, how can I set up my portfolio to bet on index funds?
Amid Opioid Crisis, Insurers Restrict Pricey, Less Addictive Painkillers
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249851

I'm sure it's been posted more than that, though.
>Why would you ever free an object if something else might be pointing at it?

Hi, welcome to programming /s

This is the crux of the entire issue for high-performance multi-threaded programs: how to tell when memory can safely be freed without introducing expensive synchronization?

The simple solutions are obvious:

1. Don't share memory
2. Use a lock

The real tricks are in forms of reference counting or garbage collection that avoid taking locks as much as possible. For really high performance you also need to avoid atomic operations and fences as much as possible. A "pause the world" garbage collector is easy (relatively) to get right and you can be confident it will work. Doing a concurrent pauseless GC is another matter entirely. Inserting a memory fence on every write is not great for performance.

For both GC and reference counting schemes weak references are an additional wrinkle. Swift's original weak reference scheme solved this by inverting control and maintaining parallel reference counts: when the last strong reference is released it ran deinit and set a flag in the object header but otherwise left the memory allocated. Only once every weak reference was touched (or itself deallocated) was the memory actually freed. That's trading greater high-water memory usage for performance. (I don't know off-hand why the implementation was changed though).
My point is more that it isn't obvious that any engineers who actually do this for a living day in and day out are giving useful feedback.

I know this because, for example, the shipping API exists at all--that being something that a lot of companies have very particular use-cases about.
Try https://danluu.com/file-consistency/ for one point: the filesystem isn't really even viable for data persistence.

The filesystem's "you can only persist uninterpreted bytes" policy means software can't maintain any kind of data invariant across runs; everything has to be revalidated if your process ends.

ACLs (e.g. unix permissions) are widely regarded as a mistake.

File locking is broken: https://gavv.github.io/blog/file-locks/

File metadata is easy to accidentally mangle (e.g. atime) and hurts performance (even "relatime" is slower than not causing a write for every read).

The filesystem is used both for users to organize their data files and for sharing of machine-interpreted data between programs (e.g. shared libraries and system configuration). Humans need human-readable names, and machines get confused by humans renaming things (and should probably be addressing by content, rather cryptographically or in terms of type signatures or specifications).

There are no asynchronous syscalls for interacting with the filesystem itself (e.g. `stat()`; for file contents things are onl slightly better).

Probably I'm still forgetting a number of problems, but these come to mind offhand.
My dream: AI applied to scientific research.

For years now, if not decades, we've been creating science - as measured in publications - much faster than any human being, or group of humans, can keep up with. Granted, lots of those papers are probably bogus, but then you don't know which is which until you actually sit down and read it...

I believe we're missing tons of insights and discoveries that we have all the necessary components for making, and it would only take a smart person to read the right three papers to connect the dots. Alas, chances that any human will do that are fast approaching zero. I think the only way to tackle this is to employ computation.

What I would love to see, therefore, is an AI system that would a) filter out bogus/bullshit papers and mark shoddy research that probably needs to be redone, and b) mine the remaining ones for connections, correlations, discovering which research supports which and which research contradicts each other.
Yes, exactly. These extreme laws are only possible because china has "rule by law" rather than "rule of law." They are not applied very aggressively, only to take down enemies when needed.
Is Social Media a Failure?
Tools for Teachers
I've always believed that the price of freedom is that from time to time some of us are killed. Obsessing over making that number zero is essentially handing your freedom back, saying, "no deal..."
That is already very easy:

https://github.com/nh2/nix-binary-cache-proxy

Allows you to set up (using NixOps!) a caching proxy for the nixos binary cache in your local network.

It can also serve your own custom packages if you sign it with your own package signing key and tell your machines to trust it.
Its as simple as imagining any scenario where your interests are at odds with the oem, the government, or literally any interested party with money and time.

If Verizon wants to sell you a device with GPS but rent you the feature for 10 bucks a month.

If the government wants the privilege of censorship unobstructed by the inherent technical impossibility of controlling every aspect of user owned devices.

If you want to avoid planned obsolescence and use your device longer than 18 months.

If you are a keirig owner if you want to buy the coffee of your choosing.

If you want to refill your ink cartridges.

Any obnoxious thing that people would trivially bypass if they had full control of their own stuff.

The fact that you an otherwise intelligent individual could ask such a staggeringly ridiculous question is why the free market is a worthless answer to any of the above.

There is a reason standards are developed by knowledgable parties rather than hoping that buyers will navigate the quagmire of complicated topics to demand sanity from merchants.
I don't know what is blowing my mind more: Those numbers, or reading someone on this site reacting to them with a "so what?".
Openflow in ns3
Mattermost[1] is an existing open-source[2] Slack alternative.

[1] https://about.mattermost.com/

[2] https://github.com/mattermost
The real question is: why buy Slack when relatively equivalent solutions such as Mattermost or even Discord exist?

Seriously, the only thing that could convince a company is either lower admin cost (vs Mattermost) and way better customer service when something fails. (vs Discord) Pretty sure big co mc corp wouldn't like a potential competitor running its comms.

Additionally a strong competitor is as always email. Perhaps enhanced with scheduling and mailing lists.
If you don't like to set it up, you could pay Google for example.
And both Google and MS are improving their chat/IM offerings.

They can and will undercut such a start-up instead of buying it, unless they see enough value in an acquihire.
... given a definition of "San Francisco" as including discontiguous regions like Oakland(!) and San Leandro and Alameda and San Lorenzo and Hayward, and then compare that to a definition of San Jose that omits the broader contiguous communities of Cupertino, Mountain View, Milpitas, Saratoga, etc.

Um, okay.
Setting up a production bare-metal setup of a distributed system is going to involve a number of steps the first time. We have found there is a large range of existing automation and basic infrastructure in different people's environments.

Generally folks try out our Tectonic sandbox (vagrant based)[1], or Tectonic on AWS/Azure/etc before diving into bare metal to get a sense if the product. This can all be done really quickly because of the consistency.

What sort of data center automation infrastructure do you have in your environment?

[1] https://coreos.com/tectonic/sandbox
> The right to publish any media, no matter how obscene or political, is free speech. And the US has the closest to free speech of any major country.

When it comes to freedom of the press, Reporters Without Borders rates the US quite poorly - it's down at #43, with the UK at #40. When it comes to anglo cultures, the highest any of the 'five eyes' gets is New Zealand, at #13.

There is a difference between law and implementation.

https://rsf.org/en/ranking
No, GC shouldn't take that much time.
If a corporation chooses to, there are numerous ways they can ruin you, with little to nothing a human can do about it. The legal system is stacked to trust corporate entities far beyond the legal power a single citizen or any family of private citizens that may try to defend them. Most criminals never actually generate the notice of a corporation for their interest to focus on them. They are very aware of organized crime, but there is little corporations can do about them. However, the economic combat taking place in some industries actually is the stuff of espionage spy novels.

This thread has a lot of sensor speculation about what if scenarios. As a person working in FR and security, I can tell you we already have giant databases with millions of people in them. They are actively searched 24/7 with cameras located in public high traffic areas. Private spaces are filled with them. Retail is filled with them. You already see the cameras everywhere and do not think about it. We have systems that can search a 8 billion facial records on a single server in under 10 seconds, working with more realistic sized galleries, we have deployed and operating systems performing real time searching of everyone in a sports stadium or retail mall repeated 30 times a second for the duration of the public use of the space.
Apple bought PrimeSense- the company who’s tech MS Alice SEs for Kinect. So no.
> In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and for making a living on top of them.

"...they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime."

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.6
I Turned a Camper into a Giant Camera and Portable Darkroom
If knowledge is, as one common philosophical notion goes, 'true, justified belief', then Newton clearly 'knew' nothing about 2060 as he fell severely short of justification.

It's a shame we can't be equally confident about the prediction also failing the 'truth' aspect. Depending on what exactly one might mean by 'world', it's uncertain to an uncomfortable degree that our world won't end by 2060.
Softbank invests in Slack at $5.1Bn valuation
This link contains a sort-of market analysis.

Is it too much to ask to name actual services that meet the description given? That is:

> print-your-own support and produce good binding on quality paper at good prices

I know it's a bit subjective, but I want to know, which services do that?
Does this mean if your wallet (or backup) is stolen the hacker will be able to deterministically guess your keys for all time?
If you already own the servers and can do without them, then that'll be a fast option for sure. That said, that's quite a bit to insure on the shipping (that's a quarter to half of a million $ of discs alone?). Hate to think of the damage if one of those servers were dropped. Plus you're shipping twice, so that's double the cost.

You can probably do via tape for circa $50k. Probably a lot less if you buy in bulk. Also depends on the kind of compression you can get on that 8pb.

If you can handle tape (500-1,000 tapes is a lot to do manually), I'd consider shipping the tape. Then try selling the tape at the destination (surely there is a decent market in SJC).
Rolling Stone, Once a Counterculture Bible, Will Be Put Up for Sale
Definitely suggest reading through their docs, it's fascinating. One of the features I'm most excited about is storage management.

From "What is ledger?" [0]:

> Each data store is transparently synchronized across devices of its user through a [cloud provider]. Any data operations are made offline-first with no coordination with the cloud. If concurrent modifications result in a data conflict, the conflict is resolved using an app-configurable merge policy.

I'll note that although they use Firebase as the sync provider, it should be fully possible to host your own if you wish to avoid the cloud.

Keeping stuff in sync can be a huge pain sometimes, especially when you're just dealing with scattered files. I like having this functionality as part of the core system, and getting developers to handle our multi-device world.

The Ledger design docs are worth reading, they're short and approachable. Architecture [1] explains how it's implemented, and Conflict Resolution [2] covers how to handle when things go wrong.

[0] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/#what-is-ledger

[1] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/+/HEAD/docs/architec...

[2] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/+/HEAD/docs/conflict...
You might be interested to read the white paper that was linked in TFA.
Hey, it's a fellow Doctor Who fan (seems rare)! Also binge watching recently, and yes, good point.
I now worry that coming up with a cure for all cancers is a magical belief.
Yunit in LTS base (Ubuntu 16.04 and Qt 5.9.1) and other project updates
Congestion control is required to be enforced at the browser level as an anti-DoS measure. You could just have the browser API limited to 15kbps, but that seems like a silly limitation when the way around it has already been implemented...
Even though Efficient Market Hypothesis doesn't take into account some short-term subtleties and inconsistencies of human behavior, the insights it provides tend to dominate in the long term, which seems to be the case here with Mr Buffet's winning bet.
Good thing they aren't paying $0.09/GB for data transfer!
> > Rust is way more complicated than it should be

> People often make this statement, but I don't know exactly what it means.

I can't speak for op, but you're right: people often make this statement. I'll try to explain what I might mean:

C is way more complicated than it should be.

The things we want in a language are tools that allow us to tell the computer what to do, but because people are bad at that, language design is taking us in the direction of telling the computer what we mean so it can tell us whether we're talking gibberish or not.

I don't need a type system. I don't need "warnings" about converting floats to chars: I know what I'm doing and why. I have a good idea what kind of machine code the compiler is producing, and yes: I often objdump to make sure.

If I need a FSM, I'll use erlang. If I need any kind of data processing, I'll probably use K/Q where I can. I can write some fast stuff in C where I need it. If I just need to bosh some stuff together I have perl. Maybe I want to fantasize about a DSL? It'll probably be a lisp or a forth. If I wanted a strong type system for units I want to get from some model nerds, I'll use OCaml.

I don't see the point in Rust when doing these things takes more code and runs slower, and worse:

> Rust is 2 years into it's stable life. It's young.

I got burned by Python when it was" two years into its stable life" sometime around 1.5 and again around 2.2, and so I hesitate even looking at rust unless in a decade it can still run and compile rust programs written today.

This whole "let's rewrite everything in rust" is good practice. I'm watching you guys do it, and I know afterwards you'll try to beat the performance I'm getting in other languages.

Once you're writing programs that are smaller and faster than me, then we'll probably talk.

> C: I've met more undefined behavior that makes me not agree.

I don't write C like most people, so perhaps I don't have trouble with it like most people. My C programs don't leak memory or crash, and I tend to use a belt+braces approach to security that is very difficult in languages without good multiprocess support.
But honestly, that kind of verification is going to cut into a big chunk of the userbase. Nobody wants to submit 3 different forms of ID to buy some drugs or launder some money.
Given that Google has autonomous vehicles running on all the streets of Mt View, it seems like that would be the natural choice.
When they say stored 'online' they mean 'not in cold storage'. 98% (according to that article) of the crypto held by Coinbase is in cold storage and is not insured.
This is tragic.

The anniversary of the crisis Petrov saved us from is coming up soon, on September 26th. There's a ritual/ceremony that I and some others have been observing yearly on that day, which I recently put online at http://petrovday.com/, which talks about that (and the world's other close calls, and historical context).
Mars research crew emerges after 8 months of isolation
That's not a necessary property of philosophical writing, as evidenced by the writing of Hume, Locke, Descartes, Peter Singer, and many others.
That’s how you get 'em to sing.
They're embarrassing once you realize what's been done in the past, with incredibly smaller 'stacks' in much simpler systems, producing more powerful capabilities.

HTML and CSS require that a large amount of information be pre-shared and implemented by different systems (i.e. all browsers need to implement ginormous standard with all subtleties). After all that, you don't even get much interactivity, you need Javascript.

A better design would be to share a tiny set of primitives that are designed to compose nicely and that can be used to build up much more powerful apps.
I don't mean that they ever had a workable implementation. I mean that it wasn't just cloud talk. They did multiple implementations, of Xanadu itself and other components, some of which was open-sourced.

So it's a lot more than just visionary talk, and a little more than just design.
> If you're not okay with them running a miner while you use their site, don't use their site.

The onus is on the site to not serve up content if they don't trust that I'm running their code as-is at full speed. Nothing about the design of the Web says that servers should trust unauthenticated clients or that clients should prioritize the server's wishes over those of the user. Server operators have no standing to complain when a user agent ignores the server's request for the user agent to do something that is against the user's interests.
>Now turning lead into gold is pure 100% unmitigated magic

Alchemy is not useful, but what you said here is not a magical belief. All elements were in fact created through the fusion of lighter elements before them through nuclear transmutation. Stellar nucleosynthesis is the natural process creating the variety of elements in the universe.

In other words, we do conceptually know how you can turn lead in to gold, and even heavier elements than gold have already been artificially created.

Wikipedia has a periodic table with the origins of each the elements.-1

1-https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis#Key_...
With this simple hack you will get your Logitech Brio 4K webcam CS lens mount
You can build it today. The docs to build and run it are there and easy to follow.
Hmm. You could be right. I’ll have to verify with him. Perhaps I misunderstood him.

I’ll get back to you!
No topics. I need career guideline from someone experienced in tech field.
Is Amazon comfortable enough to create single point of failure. What if DDB goes down assuming they run same stack for both retail and AWS?
> A study conducted by Consumer Watchdog in March found that for 61% of Amazon AMZN, -2.48% products, the pre-discounted price or “reference price” used for comparison with the new sale price was higher than what the products had been sold for in the past 90 days. This means the amount Amazon advertises under “you save” could be inaccurate. Amazon said the prices reflect averages of prices listed by competitors and other sources.
> How many secrets are you sitting on, bound by your NDAs

Zero. I don't sign NDA's.
9:05-12:30 I'm sold. A mindblowing vision for what the universality of computation can truly do... Thank you.
As long as the economy is good, the party will remain in power. If they lose control of that then you're right. The question then is, what's the probabability of a major prolonged financial crisis in China starting over the next two decades. 5% is not an unreasonable probability.
Simply return an HTTP error code if your server doesn't want to spend resources with my request. HTTP 500 perhaps.
If that car alarm system stupid enough to have static unlock code that can be replayed, it deserved to be hacked.
The idiom is: "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey."
I'm not sure this argument works -- many democratic states (including the US) were also created by violent revolutionaries.
You can take that up with the Office of Management and Budget, I guess (they're the folks who define the MSAs in the U.S., not me). My point is pretty clearly that there are better ways to compare cities that don't rely on political borders. I don't have strong opinions about the way the OMB chops up the SFBA. As I said before, that's just one way to do it.
I knew a person that didn't want to understand how a car works. Drove it without an oil change until the engine died fast.

For cars, software and generally living on this planet, the more one doesn't understand, the more they'll pay.
I think GP is referring to these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray

whereas you're thinking of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimeter_wave_scanner.

They are compating technoogies; the former employ ionizing radiation, the latter do not. I don't really know which ones are employed on US airports right now, but backscatter X-rays were employed at some point, which generated a bit of media shitstorm few years back.
When I read that I thought holy heck... on DynamoBD, if it's not a case study about Amazon then that company is in serious financial trouble.
We're very, very far from a good discovery AI. Currently world is at a stage of "not get trapped in a local minimum when optimizing known decisions", which is very far from actually generating decisions.
Latest research in sparse reward games is a good step forward, as research is generally one.