skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why, when new to a subject area, I prefer reading older papers before trying to read anything recent.

Gratuitous complexity builds over time. (And there is no subject area where I have seen such gratuitous complexity as with computers.)

I have always thought this was because either authors assume knowledge of the earlier papers and/or they have become "too familiar" with the concepts, but I could be wrong. In the later case, perhaps an analogy would be a singer who has to perform the same song thousands of times. When an artist sings it for the 999th time it may sound different and maybe there is assumption everyone has heard it before.

Whatever the reason, it is common to see the fundamental concepts either glossed over or not even mentioned in recent papers.

The exception to this, for me, where subsequent papers are helpful, is when they succinctly summarise prior research or track a subject area over time, e.g., annual reviews.

Anyway, when I am searching for older papers, it often feels "counterintuitive" since I see many people studying an area for the first time who want only the latest research. Perhaps an analogy here could be software. There seems to be a fascination on HN with software that is "new" and being changed on a daily basis versus software that is finished and has been in use for a long time.

A related idea is university textbooks. Many students believe they must have the latest editions, for a variety of reasons. However the changes from one edition to the next may be relatively small and easily summarized. IME, sometimes a topic may be more clearly explained in earlier editions. Reading the earlier edition's treatment of a topic followed by the later edition's treatment is sometimes illuminating in ways that reading only the latest edition is not.

In summary, I find it easier to read the old, 1-3 page paper that lucidly discloses an original concept and then build understanding from there, reading subsequent research, than to read something written, e.g., this year and assume that old research, by virtue of it date, is just a minor detail and no longer important.
It used to be capitolists called political opposition communists now communists call political opposition racist.
I'm always genuinely surprised that we don't build down instead of building up, especially when it comes to cities. Sure there are drainage issues but the difference in heating and cooling needs would prove beneficial. The only real reason I can think of is the risk of collapse, which we already have with above ground buildings. This would provide more affordable housing to those in cities themselves.

While it wouldn't solve the immediate issue it might mitigate some of the issues that cause the flight to suburbs in the first place.
Can you kindly let me know some reddites that you found useful?
They have had several referendums over the years, and none have yielded a majority for statehood. This most recent referendum was in favor of statehood, but had less than 23% turnout. Yes, the low turnout was because the parties opposed to statehood boycotted the referendum. But anyone who boycotted the referendum would almost by definition be someone who was going to vote against statehood.

The 2012 referendum, in contrast, had 78% turnout. 46% voted to retain the current arrangement, and another 21% voted for either free association or full independence (i.e. increased sovereignty--the opposite of statehood).
This abrasive comment from the author really put me off from the piece. Doesn't help that I first read berium's reddit post which disagrees [1]. He seems to be involved in build2 which has implemented support for Modules which garners more of my trust in this conversation.

Coming from the C++ world and being fairly knowledgeable about the language (not a full language lawyer but someone people usually turn to) and learning Rust, I find it rare for there to be bad comments from the Rust folks. I don't understand where this is coming from.

Now for my own judgemental comment. I see a trend of people in /r/cpp and other places ignoring the differences (like safety) or misrepresent Rust.

To be clear, I fully accept people having differences in priority (how much safety needs to be compiler-enforced). Its people who don't recognize the difference that I'm bothered by.

Rust is also foreign enough that a trivial glance can be misleading like assuming exceptions are the equivalent of panics because someone got caught up on them having a similar implementation (stack unwinding by default) when in reality, Result is more what people should look at (transport information, ?-operator for unwinding, etc).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/75eqal/millennials_are...
This is a great response! But I think the person you replied to understands all this, and is wondering about the exact method (or a layman's explanation) of the same process in terms of elliptic curve crypto rather than the traditional RSA (I'm wondering the same thing).
The rise and fall and rise again of 23andMe
No, you still need to trust that Mozilla's deployment corresponds to the publicly available release—that they aren't using a version with changes nor have they been breached by an attacker who can change it to sample 1/n transactions.
Someone should create a scraper/aggregator w/ links back and synopsis... So google does spider the content.
At least on the federal level, considering the federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993, it does a pretty good job at covering the costs of roads.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/highwaytrustfund/
Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore would very much like to disagree with you:

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

Even the London tube does pretty well by this measure.
Is There a Future for Banking in a Cryptocurrency-Dominated World?
They're at least somewhat mobilized. For example the "medical treatment ship" Comfort is on the scene:

> There are urgent attempts to help. The federal government has sent 10 Disaster Medical Assistance Teams of civilian doctors, nurses, paramedics and others to the island. Four mobile hospitals have been set up in hospital parking lots, and the Comfort, a medical treatment ship, is on the scene. A 44-bed hospital will soon open in badly wrecked Humacao, in the southeast.

> But even as the Army Corps of Engineers is installing dozens of generators at medical facilities, and utility crews work to restore power to 36 hospitals, medical workers and patients say that an intense medical crisis persists and that communications and electrical difficulties have obscured the true number of fatalities directly related to the hurricane. The official count rose on Tuesday to 43.

> Matching resources with needs remains a problem. The Puerto Rico Department of Health has sent just 82 patients to the Comfort over the past six days, even though the ship can serve 250. The Comfort’s 800 medical personnel were treating just seven patients on Monday.

I don't really know enough to say whether our military is doing all it can, but it's certainly doing something significant. And they appear to still be hobbled by the laws of physics and the limits of human resourcefulness and endurance.
Am I the only one who thought this would be about housing in the Amazon rainforest?
I'm not sure what your level of understanding is, so I'll write this reply in a way I hope the average reader can follow, though I assume you'll know most of this already - I hope I don't come across as condescending.

TL;DR: the topology of these curves is quite different over finite fields.

I first encountered what I consider cryptographically unhelpful drawings/intuition when I studied lattice-based cryptography. There's a whole field where a fundamental hard problem is finding the closest vector to a point not on the lattice. If you try and explain this by drawing a 2 or 3-dimensional example over the reals, anyone who's paying attention and proficient in Linear Algebra will ask themselves, why don't you just transpose the whole thing and then take the orthonormal projection? The problem is that in a finite field, unlike over the reals or complex numbers, orthogonal projection doesn't get you any closer to your target, so the intuition over R^2 is in my opinion very unhelpful to understand exactly why SVP/CVP are supposed to be hard, and indeed had me confused for a while until my professor pointed out I should forget "the silly drawing over R^2" which he didn't like either.

For Elliptic Curve Cryptography, I find the example of a curve over the reals again misses the point of why exactly problems like DLOG are hard - for discrete-log based crypto at the 256-bit security level over finite fields, you need an about 15k bit modulus depending on which site you look at (NIST 2016 at keylength.com is a good place to start) due to speedups from Number Field Sieving etc. THis is the kind of structure that I mean you don't get.

On EC, to get 256 bit security you need exactly 2 * 256 = 512 bits of key (slightly oversimplifying, the factor 2 is because you get the "sign of the y value" for free). The number 512 pretty much stands for the conjecture "there is no other cryptographically exploitable structure to take DLOGs over these Elliptic Curves". In fact it's not just "we haven't found any such structure" but there's an argument about heights of points (Miller '85 I think - though I'm pretty sure I've also read something by Koblitz on this) why on certain kinds of curves such structure is unlikely to exist. (Of course, other kinds of curves for fancy bilinear group stuff exist and do have more structure. And supersingular curves are another topic altogether.)

The structure you obviously do get is a group, which you can extend to a vector space over the finite field so that (x \mapsto xP) is a linear function. The security property you want is roughly "you get this group, but only this group" (and the "sign", so add 1 extra bit to your keylength) and there is no useful concept of anything like points being close to each other, continuous maps in the usual sense etc. Plot the points on an EC over a small finite field and it looks like a random scatterplot rather than a neat and elegant curve - which is the whole point of using ECs over finite fields for DLOG-based crypto.
System.One's Max Claussen on Venture Confidential Ep. #8
Interesting to see parts of NJ highlighted in the list. NJ used to have a huge tech sector, accommodating RCA, bell labs, AT&T, etc. but hasn't found strong footing in the software age. The old bell labs complex in holmdel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex), recently redeveloped, is undergoing a "tech renaissance" of sorts now, finding tenants such as Nvidia. At it's peak it employed over 6000 engineers on site. And it sits on a massive plot of land (complete with it's own substation, road salt facilities, wastewater treatment plant, AC plant, etc.), which is unfortunately now being developed into "luxury" homes. But maybe if Amazon started looking earlier than now when the facility was still dormant they would have found a suitable home here.
also: Czech Republic has seznam.cz , which makes a big difference in their market
Some links and an interview that mentions Aquinas: http://www.sanduskyregister.com/story/201501160010
Interesting thoughts but ...

> It's my opinion that while the Jones Act probably does increase the cost of shipping goods two and from the island, its not a magic catchall fixit

No offense, but based on what? And then what is the impact of the Jones Act? If you have expertise in that industry to support the analysis, that would be great. Could you link to some of these reports?
"premature optimization"

In the article's defense, pretty clear and reasonable about when to use what.
To me the summary of that discussion seems to be simply, "budgeting failure". Unfunded liabilities are very expensive after they've accumulated for thirty years. They are not very expensive when regularly, progressively funded.
Oculus announces $199 ‘Oculus Go’ standalone headset
I developed a hypermedia browser called HyperTIES for NeWS that was scriptable in FORTH, and whose formatter could output FORTH code to layout and paginate an article for a particular screen size, which could be saved out in a binary FORTH image that you could restart quickly.

The FORTH code then downloaded PostScript code into the NeWS server, where it would be executed in the server to draw the page.

It even had an Emacs interface written in Mocklisp!

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/HyperTIES/ties.doc.tx...

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/HyperTIESDiagram.jpg
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/101
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.f
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.c
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.cps
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/fmt.ps
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/ties-2.ml
Who you talkin about “they?” The poor and working class people dying of preventable disease because the medical system is being allowed to collapse?
Lazy is often succinct.
An old-school pharmacy hand-delivers drugs to Congress
>They're on a tiny fixed income and can't afford the cost of living elsewhere. They're a public employee two years away from a pension and, if they move now, they forfeit a liveable retirement.

I keep hearing stories about this, but I thought that any such pension this absurd was illegal or retroactively corrected. Is it really possible to lose an entire pension for quitting some trivial amount of time before some cutoff?

I would think that it would, at most, mean that you would delay the pension[1], or lose a few percentage points off of it, or be required to make some "down payment" before it starts.

Where are these pensions where a huge value can evaporate over such a small thing?

[1] e.g. under an "age + years of service" rule, each year worked gets you two units closer to retirement, and if you quit, that just means you become eligible at half speed (age goes up but years of service doesn't).
Flying the Mail in Remote Idaho
Those are very different things. U.S. elections are set forth according to the law, are binding, and have legally-defined results. If people don't show up, it means they don't really care about the result and are fine with getting whatever everyone else chooses.

The Puerto Rico statehood referendums are not undertaken pursuant to any law and are not binding. It's like the government of Maryland holding a referendum on secession from the U.S. If only a quarter of eligible voters show up, that doesn't mean that everyone else wants to go along with the minority. It means that the majority don't see the effort as legitimate in the first place. (There is a reason why people would view the 2017 referendum as illegitimate. The ballot was biased against the non-statehood options, e.g. calling Puerto Rico's current status that of a "colony").
Is remarcable the over-cautious use of the word 'could' here.

There are tens of examples, from Achatina fulica to Aedes albopictus. Biologists study this since hundreds of years (and nobody listens).
I got claustrophobic just reading this.
Given the efficiency of information exchange over the internet regarding btc prices on numerous exchanges, I'd venture to guess that these arbitrages only exist because of market barriers that average investors cannot efficiently surmount.

Example: a few years ago there was a difference of a few hundred dollars between U.S. and Chinese exchanges. But you couldn't really trade on the Chinese exchange unless you were or knew someone who was a Chinese citizen.

I haven't researched it, but my impression is that arbitrage is only indicative of market inneficiency. And a corrolary is that by the time you get into a position to take advantage of significant arbitrage, someone will likely have beaten you to it.

In other words, efficiency is antithetical to arbitrage. I welcome alternative perspectives.
Thanks! Calendar sync is going to be one of the trickier parts, but hopefully in a few releases we'll figure out a useful solution for it.
I feel the same way sometimes, especially about parking garages (which IMO are an urban blight) but I believe the real reason is just cost. It's expensive to dig first, far cheaper to just build right there on the ground.

Even if the long term HVAC savings would make it cost-effective, we already know humans are all about that quick buck, save money now and beggar thy future.
Light, and you gotta move all that dirt, and the view out the window is less than inspiring.
I'm one of the Wagtail core developers. We made the mistake of spreading our support across too many channels (Google Groups, Stack Overflow, IRC, semi-private Slack) but we've made a clear decision to focus on Stack Overflow for developer-related questions:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wagtail

mainly as a result of this poll:

https://twitter.com/WagtailCMS/status/801384753589080064

Please feel free to contact me directly (details in profile) if you're not getting the support you need on SO.
At those rates, wouldn't it be cheaper to rent a car?
The reason I chose dogs is because it isn't an easy target.

Another example is Deer. I live in New Jersey and we have an overpopulation of Deer, to which the most common response is that we should cull them so they don't become dangerous to roads. The moral stance would be to design our transportation in a way that doesn't frequently kill other species. Another common response is that the overpopulation will lead to them dying anyway as their isn't enough food to sustain them, so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.

The Ainu people believe that their treatment of bears is just. I'm just pointing out that I'd rather see all of these animals free from human emotional projection.
a lot of these questions are awful, but "what do you do for a living" isn't a great question either.
Mark Zuckerberg 'tours' flooded Puerto Rico in bizarre virtual reality promo
Ask HN: Best Device Detection company?
Anyone here doing device detection for analytics and other processes?

Looking for the most coverage and fastest local implementation.

I have found these 4 companies:-

- deviceatlas.com

- 51degrees.com

- netbiscuits.com

- handsetdetection.com

Can anyone please provide some insights on their experience, which one is the best or perhaps offer some other (commercial) solutions?

Many thanks!
good job! what's the tech stack behind this?
Good question. You'll need to trust the company behind this, and make sure the scopes they're requesting are reasonable. Similar to any other app you use that asks you to "sign in with x". Luckily here, the company behind this (https://www.blockspring.com) is used by thousands of businesses, so a safe bet.
Is that historical aid or just for this year's hurricanes?
The Federal Reserve thinks that it doubles the price of shipping between Puerto Rico and the US Mainland:

> It costs an estimated $3,063 to ship a twenty-foot container of household and commercial goods from the East Coast of the United States to Puerto Rico; the same shipment costs $1,504 to nearby Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and $1,687 to Kingston (Jamaica)—destinations that are not subject to Jones Act restrictions.

Page 23 in the PDF (numbered 13):

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/regional/Puert...

Terrible for disaster relief but also on a daily level, terrible for imports/exports. How can you have a competitive economy with that type of anchor weighing on your Ex/Im?
Yep. Fortunately, though, you can simply refuse to set up the internet connection on your TV. This is what I have done. No wifi password = no outgoing data.
> whenever I see a down payment under 10% I assume its FHA

It's increasing common to see non-FHA loans in the 3% ballpark (among anecdotal evidence from my friends and coworkers who've recently purchased). My gut keeps telling me something is wrong, but no other indicators seem to agree.
I don't know. Mark Zuckerberg teleported there and it still looks pretty messed up.
‘Brilliant,’ 41 and Lost to AIDS: The Theater World Asks Why
libtomcrypt was started by Tom St Denis as he was learning programming, at the age of 15 years old or so. The exact history could be extracted by reading the Usenet sci.crypt group archives. In its early days suffered the horrible security woes that you can expect with these premises (e.g. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.crypt/j3EW_pt6pKA/u8PYkf...). To his credit, Tom St Denis was always very honest and prompt to fix the issues. Pretty recently, it still had very bad issues (e.g. https://github.com/libtom/libtomcrypt/issues/74)

I got no idea what to expect now, but I've never seen it used in anything I'd consider serious. To many people, it's forever tainted. The lack of CVE in libtomcrypt is not an indication of quality, just and indication of lack of usage. In any case, its lack of support for PKCS#11 means it's not suitable for use cases where keys must be securely stored.
The US President is not the leader of every facet of the US. He is Commander in Chief of the Military and head of the Executive Branch, but outside of those domains, he is not the 'leader'.
You're generalizing about a group (C++ pundits) in the same way that the author generalizes about another group (the Rust community).

There are C++ experts who display modesty, just as there are members of the Rust community who display modesty. There is no need to try to retaliate against one person's words by hurling generalized insults against an entire group.
The ISPs can do that, and they're pretty centralized.
If people from those ethnic groups were born in the US, they are from the same culture, the American culture.
If you're considering using this (or any similar) tool, please keep in mind that you're adding a lot of attack surface.

Your Ansible master is one of the most critical (if not the most critical) machine in your network. It has unrestricted access to everything, including a very detailed list of what and where everything is. If it's compromised, it's over.

Something like Ansible Tower adds a LOT of attack surface. Instead of a locked-down server exposing a public key-only SSH port, you suddenly have a whole web application stack in there. Your browser and every Chrome extension with full page access now has root access to your network (and don't get me started on potential CSRF or XSS vulnerabilities...).

If you don't need any of the enterprise-ey features, just might be better off with plain Ansible and Ara[1], with the latter running on a separate machine. A "sudoers" rule is much more secure than any ACL in a web application backend.

If you do want to use Tower, you need to think about these risks and how you mitigate them. Of course, this also applies to any similar tool like Jenkins, Rundeck, CircleCI or whatever if you give them production credentials.

[1]: https://ara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
It actually depends on the nature of your ground at both ends of the cable. The book by Ott, pictured but not referenced in the article, had a whole chapter on the subject if I remember correctly.

Also copper tape is wonderful but it will also cut the hell out of you so wear gloves.