skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Warning: totally subjective opinions to follow...

The PHX community is "much better" in my opinion because the people I meet at various Dev groups aren't doing it because they want to be "software-developer famous"...if you know what I mean. When I was in SV I went to tons of meetups where it seemed like the devs were just trying to create something to get themselves "likes/favs/PRs/followers/etc" on HN/GitHub/Twitter. It was a weird kind of in-group celebrity that I detest.

Here in PHX, I don't really see any of that. I went to a Linux Users Meetup and it was pretty chill, nobody was pushing their GitHub repo/blog/Twitter on the audience, it was just a laid back discussion on the latest happenings, but not the software-developer-gossip nonsense. When I go to a .NET developer group meetup, we discuss .NET Core and Azure...just the facts. We don't discuss the latest thing Scott Hanselman said on Twitter, or what so-and-so said about the latest <insert topic>. The discussion tend to be about the tech, how to use it, and what the new features allow us to do, that's it.

Some of us don't want to be famous for our GitHub, we want to work with nice teammates on cool engineering problems that matter. I found my current employment (working on electrical grid software for a major SW utility company) to fit perfectly with my interests and background.
Very interesting and possibly scary for LIDAR startups (e.g. Luminar). If I'm not mistaken, the Strobe LIDAR is a flash LIDAR?
Show HN: BaqMan – BigQuery Manager, a JobTracker for BigQuery
> We have tried VERY HARD to incent app devs. Paid money.. wrote apps 4 them.. but volume of users is too low for most companies to invest.

The problem is that no customer I knew was keen to have to pay for the same app three times. Android and iOS cost enough money. Windows Mobile only choice would be to overcome one of those two platforms quickly, but it started the race way too late. Everybody was hoping it died quickly. A market split evenly in 3 would be a budget nightmare.

However let me say that only one platform would be unhealthy. Nothing good comes from mono cultures, as IE demonstrated after winning the browser wars some 15 years ago.
MS is experimenting with deals to have apps pre-installed on Android phones. e.g. An HTC/Lenovo phone with MS Launcher, Edge, OneDrive, Office, Cortana, Bing will be enough of a Microsoft phone. They don't need to go and fork the OS.
> Chasing Utopia, while not having answers how to get there, and for that matter even not knowing what this utopia looks like.

I'm not sure whether you have much prior knowledge of the author, but he has advanced plenty of ideas on how the situation can be improved.

> American experiment is longest surviving thriving experiment of democracy, security and prosperity to date. We are not going to change because you don't like the results. This election worked despite commercial media, it shows that American democracy is surviving and thriving. Any proposal to "fix" the situation must come with enormous proof of it working, and at reasonable cost, and with no significant downside, otherwise we would rather keep what we have, thank you very much.

This is only really true if you frame "democracy" as being whatever America has been, at any given time. The extent to which American security and prosperity have anything to do with democracy is debatable.

> Democracy needs to be fixed because Clinton lost. Is that the argument here? This just got ridiculous.

No, American democracy failed because a complete charlatan is president. The fact that this is the case, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, is only the final failure in a long chain of democratic dysfunction. I'd argue that an effective system wouldn't give voters the choice between two intensely reviled candidates, to begin with. And I also agree with Lessig that our media culture succeeded in commercializing a chaotic and shameful campaign, while failing miserably to focus the election of issues that actually matter.
Doesn't that just make the program opt-in instead of opt-out?

(And it separates the ActiveX stuff from the application too, which I'm happy to hear, applications that use it for decoding now shouldn't require the full WMP install)
Or expressed more frankly, try to eat the cooked dinner before it's cooked...
Amazon is a bit of a weird one and it's hard to really say they "failed"

Their Fire phone failed, for sure, but they have had success with some of their Fire products. Fire TV is nearly as big as Chromecast & Roku, for example, all 3 of which dwarf Apple TV, and of course Kindle was a smashing success. The Fire tablet is also seeing some success.

But these products don't hinge on app support, crucially, they are just content delivery platforms for Prime.
Money is energy in said current Matrix :)
Ask HN: Would you sell to Wikileaks?
Let's say that you ran a SaaS company that provides a service which would very helpful for a group like Wikileaks to parse and mine their data better. Would you sell you service to Wikileaks given the potential risks to you company? How would you think through this decision from a risk/reward standpoint?
I should have been more explicit: it won't be linear-ish. As you fill up any per-box sort of system, you start contending (pretend that you simulate 100 analysts) while the BigQuery results will be closer to linear. It does suck that to benchmark that "accurately", you have to make the queries different enough so that no reuse occurs (unless that's reasonable!).

Again, thanks for doing this!
What is the G5 price at Costco?
> You'd still know that your labor is worth only $3/hour, and if you're not starving to death it's because you're on this safety net.

But your labor is worth only $3/hour. The only way to change that is for the person to improve their skillset, but if that was practical in a given case then it would happen regardless.
Why do you say that? The dota2 bot open ai did earlier this year seemed pretty convincing and similar...
To quote part of a recent Alan Kay post here:

"We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality."
The saddest part of the story was that Nokia's amazing hardware division was lost because of this. Sure, Nokia made some classic innovator's dilemma errors, too, but they were still huge at the time Samsung got into Android (about 2x as big in phone market share). About a year or two later they decided to go with Windows Phone - the ever 2% OS of the mobile market, because it was "different".

It was stupid, and also the final fatal mistake that Nokia made. It was clear Android was well on its way to become the "Windows" of smartphones, which meant, ironically, that WP would be relegated to being at best the macOS or Linux of the mobile market. Plus, Android already allowed OEMs to be "different".

Nokia was basically making an argument for a "different ecosystem" at that point. But they should've known that it was too late to attract developers to a third ecosystem. Android had to fight hard to even reach more or less parity with the iOS ecosystem in terms of revenue for developers, even with its 5x larger market share. There was no hope WP would win in these conditions.
Huh? So how does Amazon actually make money?
> Or that you might waste a click on an article that you have read it before

Shouldn't that be the sole decision of the reader?

The year suffix enables everyone to make that decision on their own.

Some don't want to read anything twice. Some especially like good, old truths. And most are somewhere in the between, having differences preferences depending on the topic.
A lot of people rag on the extended warranties from places like Best Buy, but they are perfect for things like this. I spent roughly $200 on a pair of Bose earbuds almost a decade ago. They are in my pocket everyday and they therefore take a beating. Their general lifespan for me is 12-18 months. Sometimes the buttons start sticking. Sometimes the wire starts to fray. Sometimes one ear randomly dies. Sometimes I forget them in my pocket and they go through the washing machine. Whatever the problem, I take them to Best Buy and get a free replacement and re-up the extended warranty for $20. I am probably on my 6th or 7th pair at this point.
Goodness gracious.
> I think "most" people relate themselves to Rick, and can enjoy the show from Rick's perspective.

Yikes. This has never even occurred to me before. I certainly hope you're wrong about this.
AthenaX – Uber Engineering’s Open Source Streaming Analytics Platform
Presumably peering congestion would be one of the regulated metrics, just like voltage would be for an electric utility.
This is the major obstacle with semver. People aren't terribly psyched to increase the major version whenever incompatibilities happen, because other people have different expectations of major version numbers.
Now we have two garbage GUIs without pressure to improve. More competition is better!
Someone brought their tin foil hat today.
Unintended Consequences of Sexual Harassment Scandals
All genetic modifications aren't created equal. If you can get to it from cross breeding, it's probably not that foreign a trait, but if you to say splice pea DNA with mesquito DNA or something, that result could have consequences consumers would rather not worry about when buying produce. I'm not saying it's a fine dilineation or anything and I'm not anti science, but there are more nuanced regulations in food labeling today than GMO nonGMO.
I use Media Player for music, it just works. I have all my music organized by folders with proper metadata, so I don't need any fancy navigation. The startup is instantaneous, which can't be said of other music software
What is Peter referring to when he says there's no reproducible builds?
This could help explain the massive popularity of sandbox titles like Minecraft.
It looks like Groove Music stopped doing paid streaming, but it still works as a local media player.
Sounds like stating that we should all use assembler.
What risk would that be? Last I checked they were not a country and USA has no embargo against them
Snow Leopard was so good it was like exciting. I couldn't wait to get my hands on the final release and installing it felt more akin to getting a new video game.

You evangelized it to friends back then even. Like "Dude you have to get this"
Hold up there for a sec. Things like:

> Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general

There's been waaay too many stories of how technology like this will only be available to the rich and privileged, furthering their already-sizable inherited wealth and privilege.

That's kinda the... not condescending, but dismissive?... attitude that the article is talking about.

We kinda need to find ways of how to just start having conversations about this stuff, let alone suggest how to avoid going down the dystopia route. Agree with your other comments that something like TNG couldn't even be written now -- look at how the new one is about an unprovoked war with a primal-looking warrior civilization. Yeah, we got interracial female leads, but the conversation being had is about nothing more than space sword fights with space explosions.

> The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species.

That part is well-said though. Cheers.
Nihilism doesn't mean "uninhibited".
This is hilarious. Any chance of expanding this to other institutions? E.g. maybe you can charge parents $20 a month to send their kids a rejection letter from Harvard every day.
I think this is the main reason the Democrats got swept, and will probably continue to get swept. They aren't offering what most people want, honest pay for honest work. They are offering welfare, which most people are to proud to take, let alone want.

This isn't just a problem in the Midwest, this is a problem for almost anywhere that isn't a large city on the coast (with some exceptions). This problem affects probably 90% of our land mass and the problem has been consistently growing for the past 45 years or so.

Neither political party knows how to solve this, or if they do, don't have the political will to solve it.
They can be a safety hazard. Pedestrians wearing them don’t pay attention to their surroundings at all. The fact they are in ear means it’s hard to notice when someone is wearing them. I view non isolating as a necessary feature for earphones generally used on the go. I know people swear by them for long train and subway commutes but I think it’s pretty stupid wearing them for walking about, just like wearing headphones while cycling.
How would you opt-in?
Eventually you'll lose your drive, and therefore data if you don't backup.

In 58,000 years none of the data would be intact if not through pretty extreme efforts to preserve it.

I guess maybe we'll find ways to encode data onto physical media, but I don't think my facebook (or HN) posts are going to make the cut.
There are some ways to collect form data in the CMS using our public API, but you're right that the underlying system isn't optimized for "real time" data like this, yet.
Reinstalling Windows in itself does not necessarily imply reformatting, for all that matters you can just delete files in the filesystem and reinstall, but my note was more about the behaviour of format, up to XP when you ran format on a volume there was no way to 00 it [0], while since Vista it is the default [1].

Unless the /q parameter is used (or the "Quick Format" option is chosen) the format command will 00 the volume.

Of course if the task at hand is "reset a computer removing traces of what the old employee did and have a brand new OS" using a "Quick Format" is not particularly smart, I should have written "without reformatting properly".

[0] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302686/en-us

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941961/en-us
Great article, but I'm surprised it didn't mention the left-leaning politics. There is the alleged censorship by Twitter and Facebook of conservative views; the firing of the Google diversity memo guy; and even House of Cards raising the nefarious search engine manipulation meme. Silicon Valley is starting to get the "liberal Hollywood" treatment by the conservative media.
The avalanche I'm referring to there has to do with whether the company itself is for-profit or non-profit, and the legal, institutional, and PR ramifications thereof.

The non-profit competitive salary question is one which people endlessly debate. Some people think it is ridiculous that the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center makes a $300k salary despite SPLC's tremendous success and the fact that he could clearly command much more in the private sector.
Weak article but still surprised there's no mention of Open AI's foray into Dota 2: https://blog.openai.com/dota-2/
It has been a slow death for Windows Mobile. To think that my very first smartphone was an HP Windows phone way before we even imagined that there will be something called Android.
Hey, PalmOS was there early and with a decent UI. But the hardware was not up to the task.

It's really a pity that no one interested in mobile picked up Palm. HP - what did they do with it other than throw it away?
What my blog actually said about that was:

"I’ve had some experts tell me they thought the security level was 2^80 operations (very weak), while others (including Zooko himself) thought it was [more like 2^96](https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/curves/2016/000742.htm...). I’m not sure which figure is right, but the fact that there’s disagreement is a bad sign."

I made it very clear that it is an unsubstantiated figure, and linked to Zooko's analysis. To both yourself and the person you're replying too, please don't put words in my mouth.

> We provided participants with a reproducibly built and stripped down version of Alpine Linux, employed grsec, wrote all of our crypto software in pure Rust, etc. All of our software is reproducibly built, hashed and signed. There is nothing (software-wise) that cannot be caught in post-hoc review. All of it is open-source: https://github.com/zcash/mpc

I agree. But that's not what I said; what I said is that post-hoc review hasn't been done, even a year after the fact.
I'm still on the platform as well (typing this on a Lumia 635). To be honest I only bought it as I wanted a cheap smartphone but it's served me very well. I don't really use that many apps (Baconit and Metrotube are the two I use the most), but the WinPhone 8.1 UI is probably the best phone UI I've ever used (I prefer it over iOS and Android). Thankfully I've already got my next phone lined up (Librem 5).
Yeah, and what enterprise have done? It had to switch to legacy crap of JS and HTML(5). Sinofski was an evil moron.
I'm finding more and more of my friends and acquaintances are longing for a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, etc., and are taking the steps necessary to eliminate them from their lives. More and more people are reacting negatively to the digital leash to which they've attached themselves.

This pretty much follows the standard adoption pattern of technology. We always overuse and then over time figure out the acceptable use. Just as an example, I see the next ten years of iPhone as being dramatically different than the first ten years - and not in a way that would excite Tim Cook.
>You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code.

I'm sure you can't honestly believe this will work for the vast majority of people in the US. Either you don't value your trade, or you are simply unwilling to seriously discuss the issue.
Hmm, this is a nightmare. Why would I expect to receive a "Rejection Email" everyday in order to improve myself or accept a fact in real life?

This looks like a email collecting tool. No Privacy Policy, no Terms page. A giant input box to add email to a Mailchimp list?
The idea in those cases was worth a negative hundred million dollars.
> A Microsoft research paper on machine learning this year said that improving predictions of when a user will click on an ad by just 0.1 percent would yield hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue.

Do you really need a 'research paper on machine learning' to understand that?
‘Verdict’ Helps Databases Answer Queries 200x Faster with 99% Accuracy
How do you propose that we ensure that everyone can work in an increasingly automated world? How will we employ a quarter of the population if, for example, nearly any job that can be done by a person with an IQ of 90 can be done more cheaply by a machine?

Do we crack down on automation? If so, how do we do that? And if we do, how do we stay competitive with the rest of the world?

The thing is, UBI has the potential to solve this. With a basic income, you're less likely to have to take a full time job you don't care about just to make sure the bills get paid. The labor market will shrink (and UBI allows that to be tuned), so there will be more jobs available, and there's no longer as much pressure to take an unfulfilling job.

This gives people options. Maybe instead of working a dreary office job full time, you work it part time (leaving hours open for someone else to fill), and spend the extra time with your family. Or maybe you take the extra time to foster a project you're passionate about. Maybe you tighten your belt and work on that project full time. And depending on how high the basic income is (which would be largely a function of how many crappy jobs we've automated), that passion project doesn't even have to be profitable. You can do what's rewarding instead of what puts food on your table.

This is, to me, the ultimate vision of humankind flourishing, sans-singularity. The only realistic alternatives I see are a massive increase in poverty, as we continue to convince ourselves that somehow price floors and retraining will save us, or a regulatory morass in which we try to stay one step ahead of the loopholes, preserving jobs that simply shouldn't be done by humans anymore.
HP did a cheap tablet give away :P.
Follow the directions provided at the bottom of the article for asking Windows to install it.
Starcraft is a much larger, more complex, more freeform game than Dota 2. It's like Go compared to chess.
The trust involved in the Zcash trusted setup is a significantly better type of trust than what you're suggesting, because you only have to trust the people involved once. Signing messages is an ongoing trust, which is far more vulnerable to attack.
I am on high Sierra. Just today I clicked on an update which broke while updating. First it was displaying Mac os not found. Restart again. Restart would hang up and say some installer is missing. I had to Google, run some commands to eventually make it work.

On clean of windows I used to download drivers from ubuntu since windows did not load them.
> It's not, it's a package manager for a package registry.

>> npm is not a package registry. Is a package manager with a package registry.

Not sure what point you're trying to make. Yarn is a package manager for the npm package registry.

> Are you following the painful mess Facebook has been doing lately with their own projects? Broken react, broken react native, broken metro-bundler

I do React for a living. It's not broken. I don't do React Native, but not aware it's broken. I don't care about metro-bundler.

> I'm sure yarn doesn't help with it.

Yarn did help matters for a long time, it's a great package manager. Now that npm 5 is mature, I don't use Yarn anymore, but I'm glad it existed to stir up competition.

> And if you are not sure how facebook profits from yarn and its open source ecosystem

We're talking about yarn specifically. The context was choosing to build yarn vs contributing to npm.
Ebola vaccine tests hailed a success
Because they provide a valuable insight that is currently being systematically ignored, which can allow businesses to meaningful engage with and provide useful services to a currently poorly serviced market segment.
What about the Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence? This is directly relate to why math works so well on the real world. CT and pure FP languages seem to tap into this fundamental workings of our mind and possibly the universe (CT is used in quantum mechanics). In contrast things like OOP are modeled based on intuitive patterns that solve specific problems, and which are often based on metaphors or abstract analogies, but not a fundamental abstraction of nature. In other words CT seems to capture the patterns of computation itself.
JavaScript Functions (Basics)
> I am particularly interested in how much AliOS deviates from mainline Linux.

What could be the benefits of not using the mainline Linux for a stack like that?
I actually admire your request and also the new word, that replaced the "old guy". Will try to stick to it.
The Moto G5 Plus is around $220 at Costco, but has been as low as $180 depending on sales that may be running in any given week.
I thought you still need at least an affiliation which is why the crackpot version (which doesn't require anything) exists? http://vixra.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViXra
It's not funny at all. It's totally logical that you'd have competing clients.
Yup. Also the model of Thinkpad I used was vulnerable to the Intel management engine backdoor.
This isn't only about HSMs or dedicated services. To anyone reading this thread: the key thing to understand here is: How do crypto-anchors help against attacks that allows `select *` from a database? A: Per-record encryption mediated by a dedicated microservice.
There's definitely a shortage of apps compared to Android and iOS but I have WhatsApp and Instagram installed on the Windows Phone I'm writing this comment on right now. You can tell the Windows Phone version of apps are not a priority for the developers though.