skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They run very few servers, but the machines they use are huge dedicated servers, with as much RAM as the board would support. They published descriptions of their hardware stack several times.

This is very different from the typical modern architecture, with many smaller nodes scaled on demand in a cloud.
He's probably referring to Centaur Chess, where a team of a human assisted by a chess computer (or perhaps more accurately a computer assisted by a human) competes against another similar team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess
Even dash/litecoin?

Maybe dpos will win e.g steemit kevin ross just joined
What I mean is that you can't tell easily tell where 'information' is coming from, not that it's hard to verify the information itself.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are easy to game. A recent study claimed that up to 44M Twitter accounts were likely bots--even Twitter grants that many of the accounts are fake. [0] This is kind of like the email spam problem but harder because besides some genuinely difficult technical problems it raises a lot of tricky issues about things like free speech that we're still working through. It's also not just a social media problem. "Cheap and easy publishing" was a design goal of the World Wide Web.

https://www.cnet.com/news/new-study-says-almost-15-percent-o...
That logic could define almost anything as addictive, including food, books, conversation or travel.

People come to HN because it's interesting. If something more interesting arrives (like children!), then they often stop coming as much or at all.

So wake me up when there is a large collection of stories about people who lost their job, their wife, or who neglected their kids because they were posting to HN.
For the Pi, there is RISC OS.

https://www.riscosopen.org/
> I think his channel only hit 100k subscribers last year, so it looks like he might finally be getting some well-deserved recognition.

No kidding. Even if he hit 100K subscriber 2 years ago or at the beginning of 2015, he is at 500K subscribers now. If his growth hasn't slowed too much, he could be looking at [close] to a million subscribers before this decade is done.

His videos are pretty cool so far. Happy he is able to do this for a living.
> As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we’re seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model.

Advertisement as a revenue model exacerbates this problem, but I submit the problem stems from how we define success for mobile apps and websites. We directly designate "engagement" as success, rather than customer value provided or even asking our customers if they like the service.

We assume if they are there that they have made a clear-eyed assessment about the value proposition of our product compared to every other aspect of their lives and decided this is the best use of their time.

Because of that hidden assumption, our UX folks are encouraged to ruthlessly push by any means available to get more of that time. There is an assumption that the cutoff switch is somehow built into the user; that the user will say, "Enough is enough" if the engagement every reaches a toxic level in their lives.

And I think what many of the people in this article are trying to say is: That is a bad assumption. We're making our products so sticky that we're starting to surpass some our user's ability to say, "No."
I'd recommend the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks. It contains some pretty powerful AIs.
is blindsight considered hard SF?

It's been a while since I read it, but I don't recall a big focus on science, and some things are pretty explicitly hand waved ("we are lucky they have that issue with right angles")
Ask HN: Pleas can AI detect bad food，i Suffer from diarrhea by Shanghai takeout
How to make a deep neural network to detect bad takeout foods?
You get social security benefits back, regardless. It would be comparable if you took away my benefits once I opted for a 401k. I guess it's somewhat comparable to those that use NHS for most things, but supplement with private. But social security isn't enough to retire on for most, so "marketshare" isn't dominant. It sounds like NHS is enough for most healthcare needs.

HUD would be comparable, if almost everyone qualified for it. They don't. A monopoly implies dominant marketshare.
> Now all that's left is the superfund site..

https://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/ViewByEPAID/c....
But the "new normal" includes very low price inflation, while his analysis is based on a period of high inflation and high dividends. With that overlook, his predictions look very shaky to me.
> Moreover, its not a scalable solution, and I'm fairly confident that it will show all the problems of trying to avoid market behavior: it might be hard to get in to the fund, it might end up causing a run in the case of a big down-turn where many people need to sell but the fund has overpromised, etc etc.

What you're describing sounds exactly like the housing market under the rule of cheap mortgages and speculative investment. People having a hard time getting in, people having a hard time getting out without going bankrupt, these are all exactly what happened in the "free" housing market during the last decade.

Anyway I don't understand how this program "avoids" market behavior. In your mind, is the free market somehow incomplete without a rentier class?
I think you have changed Bob's scenario halfway through--he has a monthly salary of 1.5btc, yet somehow has 2btc to spend?
"When HARLIE Was One" by David Gerrold had a fair amount of technical detail IIRC. Also "Destination: Void" by Frank Herbert.
STARTUP Heatmap Europe 2017
In addition to 'jasode's line of thought about employers not countering because giving notice means you've checked out, you should also understand the corollary, which is that even if you're retained through a counter, you might still be "damaged goods" and excluded from promotion, incentive compensation, and the most important projects.

There was, a dozen or so years ago, a notion that you should never accept a counteroffer for exactly this reason. Your employer would be buying optionality on retaining you. What they want isn't you, but the right to decide when to replace you and a longer grace period to do that in.

This definitely does happen; it happened explicitly to me in a previous job (I was told a few years after I left, a year or so after accepting a counter and then being marginalized).
Just because it's "like banks" doesn't mean it's invalid. That was my first impression, too when reading: can't we be slightly more on Layer 2?
Compassion – An efficient alternative to rigid Code of Conducts
No academic endeavor has been more disappointing for me than Machine Learning. At some point I realized it was just statistics, it was prediction, it was regression... So why not just call it that? Where's the artificial "intelligence", where's the "learning"? The only intelligence to it is from the scientist who does the data mining, does the feature selection, and chooses the problem category.
It was an awful lot less than most 60 year periods in human history.
The sentient ones are famously docile, cowardly and manipulative. I don't think calling them female would've been striking a great blow for progressive literature.
You are wrong in a subtle way. Robots playing baseball would be silly and useless. Almost as bad as athletes who use steroids (ha!). But baseball is a sport. Sport and art are similar: by humans for humans is usually the winning formula.

Typography can be art. It can also be utilitarian. Most typography is. Imagine if the entire WWW used either Comic Sans or Times New Roman with 1.x or 2.x line spacing. Just no. I am willing to bet you have published stuff online (even this comment; how meta), and your publications have benefited from having good typography. Typography that you didn’t have to think about or arrange or pick out. Making utilitarian typography more beautiful is a benefit to everyone. If only a select educated and experienced few could use beautiful typography because it was an arcane art, as you seem to want it to be, then well, we’d be using Comic Sans. If using more advanced mathematical models results in 99.999% of the readable web being more beautiful, I am for it. It doesn’t preclude someone from doing work by hand to either stand out more or to create art. But it certainly would be good for everyone if more advanced models existed. This is the same as how it is better that we have Google Fonts as opposed to every website owner having to create or commission a from scratch font.
Loads of them. And not just Wikipedia articles, longwinded articles from every other source under the sun. Usually ones on sites with minimal CSS and Javascript, because they use less data than the alternatives.

Admittedly a lot of people would probably just stick to browsing Facebook or Twitter most of the time, but even then, they'll look up tons of small facts and trivia pieces through Google whenever they don't know something too. In the olden days, that wasn't possible. Even less people looked up stuff they were curious about, since it meant either having to go home and online (before phones) or bringing out the encyclopedia (before computers in general).
I'm in the opposite group. I really think it is that obvious that good health and exercise is the key to a long life.

I think all you really have to do is take a look at nearly anyone over 80+ .. the vast majority of the people who make it to these ages or older have a few things in common, and we can call it coincidence, but it's probably not.
One might ask: are humans too stupid to justify having a Nobel Prize in physics?
Man, I always say Argentina is anachronistic: we've had 15 years of no mortgages and we are starting to have them now, while there is an anti-mortgage sentiment in the world.

> In the UK is that housing has become unaffordable for most of the population - precisely because mortgages made it possible to buy property as an investment.

Without going too deep, there is a problem with saying unaffordable. Are we talking about indigents? Or that the middle class 25-35 doesn't have the access to houses the previous generation had? They are very different propositions.

I would take for granted that mortgages raise the price of housing, simply because it helps foster demand more than supply. But it also means more houses are sold, which also means more houses are built. The goal is not to have cheap housing, is for the biggest amount of people getting housing, and banning mortgages will reduce both prices and people getting housing.

> At the same time the market has been deliberately starved of affordable housing as a matter of national policy.

I can't comment or debate about this for UK because I don't know what this is about. Any government that puts a policy to control what is built is likely going to have bad effects. It is true that luxury housing is providing higher returns than affordable in the U.S. In argentina its a bit different, due to historically no credit: basically the only buyers of new property in Argentina are investors, because those are the only ones that had the capital to purchase in advance. Hence for a decade, the market was flooded with cheap-construction rental homes. I expect the introduction of mortgages to create a market for long-term quality housing.

> So your point makes no sense. What are you going to do with capital while you're saving it for a property purchase? Keep it under a mattress?

Probably low-yield money funds if you are sophisticated. Home-owners are ill-advised to mortgages their home to invest in the stock market: using your capital to buy a home to invest in stocks is basically the same.

> In reality, without mortgages, there would be far more investment cash available, because the money would be out there doing something useful, not trapped and congealed inside a fixed asset.

If a man buys a house at 100k, his capital is now owned by the former seller, so the amount of capital in circulation is the same. The point is what happens when someone wants to buy a house: they have decades of saving money in low yields. This can be seen in Argentina again, as there is a mortgage boom, 30 year olds are making cash-down payment, even though market participation is almost non-existent. People were saving the cash in their mattresses.
Eh, I think it should unlock when you play enough but I have no idea how long that takes or if it even works anymore! Thanks tho!
The same approach was originally used at Hanford in the US.[1]

I've been on a couple of tours at Hanford, and the guides told us that the Soviet weapons programme was a carbon-copy of the one in the US - just scaled up, with many more plutonium-production reactors - so it's not surprising that they made the same mistake about the cooling.

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/buttinger1/docs... - pages 9-10
Why would SS need to take away your benefits to be comparable? It’s not like government health systems kick you out if you ever go to a private hospital.
The Manifold Series by Stephen Baxter are some of the hardest SciFi books I've ever read.
> ...if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it.

This is completely unrealistic. If the [local jurisdiction government] is after your data, they'll have your host, ISP, and anyone else give it to them.

(Inexplicable downtime = your server being imaged.)

Believing anything else, IMO, is purely delusional.
Are there photos anywhere of the underground city mentioned in this writeup? It sounds amazing, but I've been unable to find any - just the surface-level city.
> Fuck academia and their fucking higher than thou bullshit

Geez, you messed up your citations. Take the L and remember wikipedia is an aggregation that has to get citations too.

Going, "All academia is bad because I got a bad grade can't they see how right I was" is childish nonsense. You'll be better off if you just take the L.
It may not be Hard, but it's great writing.
The Apollo Guidance Computer used core rope memory [1] as ROM and magnetic-core memory as RAM. Both are non-volatile.

The command module did not have a redundant computer or memory, but the lunar module came with a second computer [2] of a different type and running different software.

What you remember is probably the Gemini Guidance Computer's tape drive system, which consisted of three identical tape drives that were connected to the computer through a voter circuity.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Abort_Guidance_System
IMO integrating this into a system that already knows these things about a user would be super powerful.

Obviously you can start with the most basic things like name, address, birthdate, etc, but to the extent that you can capture data every time a user fills out a form it becomes akin to a field linking problem that you can generalize across users.

Obviously the privacy folks here will hate this idea, but a system that could fill out forms for you because it already knows most of the structured data about you would be amazing.
It's half novel, half related series of 9 short stories, but Accelerando is great. The Martian by Andy Weir (movie based on it) was quite good. Daemon I think also qualifies, though it's SF dressed up as a thriller. Oh, Blood Music by Greg Bear probably counts? Except maybe the ending?

Tempted to mention The Diamond Age, but not sure that qualifies as "Hard", though closer than some other Stephenson maybe...
The big difference between Layer2 and the banking system is that Layer2 is still a trust-less protocol in the same way Layer1 is. There's no counterparty-risk in Layer2. Yes, most supernodes in Layer2 will probably be big payment-insitutions, but nothing will prevent you (or anyone) to become a Layer2 node as well, either.
The punchline from the abstract:

Our results confirm the exposure of bees to neonicotinoids in their food throughout the world. The coexistence of neonicotinoids and other pesticides may increase harm to pollinators. However, the concentrations detected are below the maximum residue level authorized for human consumption.
Many places if you ask for more money you'll get "sorry you're at the top of your range". "we can only give raises during performance review". Then when you turn in your 2 weeks suddenly it's "if it's money you're looking it's no problem to give you a very large out of band raise. Why didn't you say something?"
A lot of people lost not only promotional credits on DO, that you get for free, but referral credits too, that you get by sending traffic, which, you know, actually worth something. So, yeah, trust is something DO doesn't deserve.
I want my five minutes back.
"Schild's Ladder" by Greg Egan
The Crystal Trilogy (Society, Mentality, Eternity) might prove interesting.
The only good scaling/high throughput consensus algorithm is Byteball.

The block-chain does not scale, DAG coins suffer form various issues, the only DAG-coin with semi-trustless distributed "consensus" is Byteball.

The implementation sucks, the algorithm is nice and innovative.
Well, one easy way when using Ubuntu-like distributions is to simply place your `/home` folder on a separate (persistent) EBS volume [1].

With a few on-boot scripts to attach-volumes / start-containers, it should be fairly easy to get going as well.

[1] https://engineering.semantics3.com/the-instance-is-dead-long...
See 'synecdoche'.

Russia was the important part of the USSR.
"I still see plenty of unnecessary data shuffling and other things no sane human Asm programmer would ever do."

OK, but in the general case, at scale, in a complex program, compilers are better able to make register allocation decisions than humans. Some compilers may not be as good as others, and I would love to see some examples, but it has been a long time since this debate was settled.

"A compiler can analyse dataflow and somewhat understand, but especially when external functions are involved, the knowledge is still incomplete."

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

Sure, dynamic linking throws a wrench into things, but equally true for humans who may not understand how the function they are calling really works.

"making one part of the code smaller, although somewhat slower, could allow another more critical part to fit completely into cache and improve performance overall."

I am sure it happens. It is far more common for that sort of optimization to be irrelevant due to the size and complexity of the system. Compilers are also capable of optimizing for code size, it is similar to optimizing for speed but not important in most cases.
His Permutation City is also good.
I really enjoyed this book. I was unfamiliar with quite a lot of the material, so I can't really evaluate it in terms of other references. As an introduction, it's fantastic. Nice coverage of practical, modern tools. Theory stuff is covered at a high level, but with a ton of references for further study. The author is pretty opinionated about a lot of the more hype driven "web-scale" marketing claims. I really appreciated that, as there's typically some kernel of truth behind the marketing fluff, and Kleppman brings these out with moderation and context.

Great book if you'd like to finally understand Jepsen.io articles.
What's hard Scifi?
The entire Gridlinked series by Neal Asher is set in a universe where AIs run government and are generally interacting with humans in a space opera / secret agent series of books, quite good IMO
Pay-As-You-Go Keycodes: From 1000m
My favorite (for certain values of “favorite”) was the British Windscale reactor, which was air cooled and just vented out a big smoke stack. Predictably, it caught fire and turned into a major disaster. One guy’s insistence on installing filters in the chimney, over the objections of many others that it was pointless, prevented it from being a Chernobyl-scale event.
I think the "lead" in this case is nonprogrammability. We in the professional tech world design our development tools for other professional programmers. Very few of us take the time to make those tools consumable by a first week coder.

And we all have a good excuse: there are great tools and best practices for publishing a development tool to other professionals. If you want to design something for a first week coder you have a lot more work to do, few examples to follow, and no obvious personal benefit.

Except the end result of that is that we sell computers to people which are useless for actual computing. All they give the average consumer is the opportunity to follow a path worn by someone like you or me.

We barely notice this, because we do have the ability to do real computation. We forget that it's something we are hoarding for ourselves.
> I've never had to make a context switch between clojure and clojurescript. If differences in semantics means I have to change how I think about solving the problem at hand, then that has been pretty much non existent in my experience. Of course with one you have browser APIs and the other is java, but when it comes to building up and transforming datastructures everything I've been doing works the same on both.

In clj:

> (+ 1 "1")

java.lang.ClassCastException: java.lang.String cannot be cast to java.lang.Number

In cljs:

> (+ 1 "1")

"11"

Now I get it...not that big of a deal, right? That's what I would say given a trivial example of something like this. Sure, this problem might not come up very often. In fact, for a team that I worked with, it only ever came up once...it's just that that one time that it came up, it corrupted 3 months worth of data. Would tests have caught this? Of course...but if you are confident in your knowledge of the clojure language, and you assume clojurescript is semantically equivalent, you would expect an exception to pop up in your repl during development, so if it works fine in clojure, why write a test for it in clojurescript?

I understand why the cljs designers would do such a thing...think of the performance implications of having to generate type checks code for every possible arithmetic operation! But it absolutely was a context switch for that team (full stack clj/cljs), and the consequences of the developers not correctly context switching was horrific. Nothing quite burns bridges with entire languages like silent errors do.

I'm fine with people trying clojurescript. FWIW, my personal experience with it was never as bad as that one team's experience. Maybe they'll never come across such a dangerous situation, hopefully they don't. But on the rare occasion that some third party web service dependency decides to serialize BigDecimals as Strings instead of Doubles, they deserve to be warned.
We did have that in feudalism. The world was much better off once that was over.
> It costs a lot to find developers, then to hire good ones. It can be $5-20k + the domain knowledge you have so it’s not cheap to replace a good developer.

My experience is different. Avalanche the expensive and experienced devs with more and more work until they signalize that the team requires upsizing, make them resign. Fish for students, contractors. Hire contractors exclusively through a chain of intermediaries, so their salary and employee rights will be minuscule and they will have no leverage to say "no" to the most ridiculous bullshit.

Please tell me there exist companies which appreciate their specialists, which offer a significant payrise to make them stay. I have yet to encounter and work for one.
Could someone help explain how this is different from a regular debugger that lets you step back in the call stack? Does Chrome dev tools debugger (that lets you step back in the call stack, even for asynchronous calls) come close to TTD?
There are weirdly similar signs on smaller roads in southeastern New Mexico.