skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before industrialization, land that mattered was farmland. Then as industrialization took hold, urban land became more important as the grouping of people together allowed for economies of scale in manufacturing. But then the petrochemical revolution put things in reverse, as people could live anywhere and travel by car. Suddenly, open space was economically desirable, as it made more sense to build a factory in super-cheap Nowheresville, Arkansas than crowded, expensive Philadelphia.

But the rise in global supply chains - the shipping container in particular - meant that it makes more sense to build just about everything in a few massive hubs (Shenzhen as the prime example), and then ship things all around the world, at a much cheaper rate than if the widget or smartphone were made at home. Likewise for services, like IT and finance, it makes much more sense for all of these professionals to work together in the same places, which is why a handful of cities are crushing the Information Age while hundreds of other towns and cities are either dying slowly or are on life support (higher education economy, tax-break-driven manufacturing, etc)

Will we see the same resurgence of sprawl as followed the petrochemical revolution? I'm not sure. Remote work has its niches but I couldn't imagine a serious major company like Google or IBM existing without a lot of corporate real estate and proximate workers. And as I've argued elsewhere on HN, today's professionals have professional needs: doctors, lawyers, teachers, all things they expect to have within their area. Rural areas and even small to medium sized cities have trouble competing for the best-in-class services that the upper echelons of professionals demand (and given that this class is both responsible for and generally the beneficiary of globalization, that makes it very hard to say that, say, Rochester, NY could become the next great tech hub (a decent tech hub perhaps, but no Silicon Valley) without a LOT more to attract the highest end professional class.

Maybe self-driving cars (personally I predict RVs) will be able to make sprawl great again, but even then it would still be a concentration around a (albeit larger) major metropolitan area.

Urban/rural was the most important divide of the 19th-20th centuries. It looks like it will continue throughout the 21st.
Between resistance from the chemical, oil and auto industries, their bought government, and the more favorable conditions in China, this might be another core tech we lose forever if we don't pay attention now.
GMT games are awesome. And awe-inspiring. I'm on a Victory Point Games kick myself at the moment. A little less intense than GMT. But I'm no stranger.
Yeah the graphs here are a visual mess. Who decided on displaying the data this way?
Thankfully Mozilla works with the Tor Project so that Tor Browser patches to Firefox get uplifted to mainline Firefox, you can read more about those efforts here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift And the Tor Uplift tracker: https://torpat.ch/uplift

In this case the relevant preference is privacy.firstparty.isolate = true. Another worth pointing out pref is privacy.resistFingerprinting = true.
Consider also that there are arms manufacturers and state militias all across the country. If it's California, they have (some of) Northrop Grumman. If it's Virginia, they have General Dynamics Mission Systems.
What I do on some projects (not using vagrant) is install samba on the dev VM so that it can be mounted from a Windows workstation. Obviously much simpler and easier to do if you're developing on Linux (nfs / sshfs).
"this ability to change from functioning as a bit of memory to being a bunch of functional logic on the fly at the speed of a memory read?"

My excitement is tempered by considering the areal demands on the silicon for the putative "smart memory". Suppose, just for the sake of argument, you want your smart memory to be able to take a 4K block of 64-bit integers and add them together. It happens incredible quickly, sure, though you'd have to get an expert to tell me what the fanin can be to guess how many cycles this will take. But you're now looking at massively more silicon to arrange all that. And adding blocks of numbers isn't really that interesting, we really want to speed up matrix math. Assuming hard-coded matrix sizes, that's a whackload of silicon per operation you want to support; it's at least another logarithmic whackload factor to support a selection of matrix sizes and yet more again to support arbitrary sizes. In general, it's a whackload of silicon for anything you'd want to do, and the more flexible you make your "active memory" the more whackloads of silicon you're putting in there.

It may sound weird to describe a single addition set of gates as a "whackload", but remember you need to lay at least one down for each thing you want to support. If you want to be able to do these operations from arbitrary locations in RAM, it means every single RAM cell is going to need its own gates that implement every single "smart" feature you want to offer. Even just control silicon for the neural nets is going to add up. (It may not be doing digital stuff and it may be easier to mentally overlook, but it's certainly going to be some sort of silicon-per-cell.)

Even if you were somehow handed a tech stack that worked this way already, you'd find yourself pressured to head back to the architecture we already have, because the first thing you'd want to do is take all that custom silicon and isolate it to a single computation unit on the chip that the rest of the chip feeds, because then you've got a lot more space for RAM, and you can implement a lot more functionality without paying per memory cell. And with that, you come perilously close to what is already a GPU today. All that silicon dedicated to the tasks you aren't doing right now is silicon you're going to want to be memory instead, and anyone making the smart memory is going to have a hard time competing with people who offer an order of magnitude or three more RAM for the same price and tell you to just throw more CPUs/GPUs at the problem.

RAM that persists without power is much more interesting than smart memory.
> Rochester calls Jane a “little niggard” in jest.

That is not in any way related to the other N-word. It means stingy.

Furthermore, the "dark skin" in question eleswhere was of white people not priveliged enough to avoid the sun, as judged by the outmoded standards of a long dead culture.

You can't recast everything from the past with a modern lens.
In Antarctica, Two Crucial Glaciers Accelerate Toward the Sea
The United States was once seen as uncultured, unrefined, and frankly quite weak by most of Western Europe until the late 1800's. And in many respects it was. Now the US is the richest country in the world, and is where wealthy non-Americans send their children and make land investments.

My point is that trajectory is more relevant to these discussions than current state of affairs. The quality of life of the average Chinese citizen (and more so the upper-middle class Chinese citizen) has increased DRAMATICALLY in the last 40 years. So when people talk about China's potential, they aren't talking about the situation in the next 5 or 10 years. They're talking about who is going exert massive international influence in the next 50 years. So you're right, most westerners aren't buying speculative property in Beijing (despite the fact that housing in central Beijing is nearly as expensive as New York City), but I'd wager there's a good chance of that changing in the next 50 years.
TLS with Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral actually specifically works against (1)
Videos are taken mostly by those out in the streets, so there are obviously biased towards one side. Is it so hard to believe that both sides exert some kind of violence? Do you really believe that one side is entirely pacifist and the other is aggressive? That kind of narrative should be hard to believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_g4-4fMoMs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ak9224HG_E
How much $$ do they still make from "Coca Cola" ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands

What is Google gonna buy, especially now that EU antitrust is on their tail?
Star’s magnetic field could turn habitable-zone planets into magma soup
Why don’t these publishers band together and launch their own news aggregator if they think that’s something people want? I don’t see Facebook owing them a platform here and from a personal perspective politics can’t be removed from my _social_ feed fast enough.
Those weapons only win if you don't care about civilian losses (that is one way to win a counter insurgency, see Mandatory Palestine) - but by not caring about civilian casualties I mean you have to be willing to commit genocide (again, see the British actions in Mandatory Palestine).

If you do care about civilians (and I assume the US armed forces would be forced to care) a jet is probably not worth much against an AK-47, as long as that AK-47 is in the hands of a guy who is willing to hang out close to a bunch of civilians.

Again you can win a counter insurgency either by winning over the local population or by utterly destroying it (see manda, the Island of Melos).
Laws of Singularity
Mysterious object seen speeding past sun could be from another star system
I've never understood why people don't get more excited about memristors.

Probably because they have been promising them too long. I remember watching a video lecture in 2008 about how IBM was on the verge of revolutionizing everything with them.

Meanwhile in the same timespan GPU/DNN have upended the computing landscape.
EVO 960 isn't even in the same league as this. EVO can maybe possibly burst to a double digit percentage of this performance at its best moment, but under long-term mixed load is more than an order of magnitude slower.
For our company (http://fairpixels.pro) it was productisation. We used to operate like any other UI design agency, prospecting, talking to potential clients, going to networking events etc. But by productising our service, building a sales funnel and treating the entire flow as that of a SaaS. It enabled us to:

* Lower prices (Since we didn't have to spend time networking, prospecting etc.)

* Create predictable sales funnels

* Spend more time working on the stuff we love, instead of wasting time with prospects that weren't interested in the first place.
The second group I worked with that was earnestly interested in mature testing developed the 5/8ths rule.

To move a test one level down the pyramid, it takes about 5x as many tests. But the tests run 8 times as fast. So moving a test down takes more than 35% off the run time, and it fails the build minutes sooner. If you drop it down two levels it's 60% off the run time.

Interesting enough on its own, but maintaining those tests after one requirements change, plus the cost of rewriting them in the first place, is less work than the cost of maintaining the original tests. We didn't come up with a number for this but the difference was measured in man-days and missed deadlines about once a month, and we were convinced by the evidence.

I also agree with both your 'braindead' comment and your 80% estimate. The big payoffs come between 75% and 85% and above 85% you start getting artifacts. That 'data' distract more than it helps.
Oh, this requires server modifications too? I had thought it was only client-side.

If that's the case then it makes it especially useless for the smart contract oracle use case. If you're going to have to change the server anyway, you may as well make it offer very tiny signed messages instead. You could even use secp256k1 and make it directly compatible with Bitcoin.
s/Democrat/Democratic/

If you choose to ignore proper naming, you're just exposing your bias.
I keep a ranking of decentralization projects in terms of how likely they are to succeed and catch on. Camlistore and Upspin have been near the top of my list for years now (Camlistore was the one that originally inspired me to quit my job at Twitch and do decentralization advocacy full-time). I am now slighly less excited about both projects, although they still have incredible potential and I would be overjoyed if either of them met with minor success.

At this point, I get the sense that Upspin/Camlistore don’t really _want_ to succeed in terms of catching mass-market success and disrupting the innovation-stifling tech giants. It seems like they’re more interested in scratching their personal itch and being content with that. Totally fine, but I’m going to be slighly less excited about releases from both of these projects in the future unless I get indications that the core team members are willing to escape the same trap that plagues all standardization schemes (https://xkcd.com/927/)
Amazon just added a FedEx. Stock up nearly $62B in a single day
I think I've said this before but its 3 things that all end up having the same effect.

1) Meditation to get my mind in check

2) Fitness/Diet, making sure I'm at an appropriate weight and fitness level

3) Sleep, shouldn't require any explanation.

Having these 3 things in check is the equivalent of 10+ IQ points. The last two items shouldn't require any explanation but Meditation is one that people often have issues seeing the value of.

For me meditation does 2 things,

1) it allows you to master the art of "staying in the zone". Lots of meditation is just accepting that you mind has many thoughts at once, acknowledging them and continuing on with what you are doing.

Once you can master the art of acknowledging your thoughts but not letting them disturb you, it lets you maintain a flow state in the real world.

I can now get interrupted and almost without fail immediately get back into a productive work state.

2) I've noticed that as I get older that most of what makes a person look smart in a conversation is that they've already had the same conversation and thought through their opinions.

When mediating on an idea, its very similar to having these conversations about ideas. You get to flesh out your ideas by having this conversation with yourself. It's an invaluable took to have.
I wonder if there was any update to this in the last 4 years.

>But the most pressing issue isn't who might be behind the murders, but that the Indian government's apathy is potentially putting their high-value staff at even greater risk. Currently, these scientists, who are crucial to the development of India's nuclear programes, whether for energy or security, have "absolutely no protection at all. Nothing, zero," Madhav told me. "Which is amazing for people who are in a such a sensitive program."

That strikes me as odd, the possibility not mentioned in the article is that the Indian government is responsible. The behaviors of the Indian government in the article do sound suspicious. I understand not wanting to signal to your scientists the level of danger they're in but, given how valuable an asset these people are to the country, that India would've tried to protect them if it was aware at all of a threat and not complicit.
They're very cute. Utterly impractical as public transportation. But cute :-)
It's been quite a while since I've needed to, but when I was setting up HA databases, I just set the auto increment amount to some number more than the number of databases, and set the starting offset for each database to sequential ints (1,2,3...). This results in databases that can't generate duplicate ids. As a bonus, you know what database was used to create each record.
Motor: Finite-State Machines in Haskell
What Worries? Big Tech Companies Post Glowing Quarterly Profits
> world leader in a field by simply pouring money and support onto the problem

Look at their debt and then tell me they dont try.
Counterpoint: it is only a year after their facist dictator died: Germany in 45 and 95 were very different places.
> I'm still waiting to be able to buy a 2000 ppi display like IBM's R&D announced creating back in the late 1990s or so...

You're not thinking of this and mistakenly adding an extra 0, are you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors#His...
Not sure you want to go down that path, but if so:

If you are employed in a tech job somewhere in the United States, , you are very likely in the top 20% of Americans in terms of income, and the top 1% in the world. Perhaps much higher.

I take it you are willing to give all that up in the face of the crushing poverty in the rest of the world.

Bay area housing shortages are nothing compared to the critical shortages that cause massive human suffering in the rest of the world.
Their new monetization scheme.
Well there's meek-amazon[1] which seems to work there. Also I remember I talked last months to some guy on irc at #tor who was using some obfs4 bridges successfully in China. There's also another pluggable transport named Snowflake[2] where everyone can become a bridge by just running some JS in their browser, which may prove to be a good solution (it doesn't work yet in China since it uses Google for domain fronting).

[1] : https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek

[2] : https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake
Currency? Is it a crypto-currency that runs across it? :)
Not of course, we are proud of not having death penalty here.
The secretary problem and investing have one important difference that throws this all out the window - you can meet with multiple startups without rejecting them, and make a decision when you've met them all (or all the ones you want to meet). There's no requirement in the real world to accept/reject immediately post-interview without any possibility of recall.

> Of course, this would be a jerk move. I'd be wasting the time of a lot of founders if I knew I was planning to pass on their startups no matter what.

On a macro-level, this isn't a jerk move at all - the other way would have you 'waste' the time of 29 founders instead of 11.
It's not client-side only; it requires a server component of which a possible / proof-of-concept implementation can be found here: https://github.com/tls-n/nss-tlsn

It's a modification to NSS, which isn't widely used for TLS at the server side, where OpenSSL dominates.
A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free (2015)
You don't need to take me seriously and I couldn't care less. The "mambo" is an expression that CUP and the like have used to define violence in the streets. So if you want any further definition ask your friends.

What I think will happen? Apart from what they themselves will do, nothing. Public officers, including regional police, won't resist since their payroll depends on them obeying orders. Politicians might play some games but they know that a single death will trigger the rebellion prosecution and get them jailed for 30 years.

So it will most likely amount to some unrest, demostration, vandalism and all the noise we're used to.
So you're saying that John Q will search 30% more next year and Google will own (with FB) say 85% of the ad market. How long will that last before enemies succeed to get the state involved?

Goog is valued at $700 BILLION right now. Will it be $1.5 Trillion in 5-10 years?
So you are presumably agreeing that snowflake makes sense?
My sweet spot is local type inference (inside functions, methods) and explicit type annotations (for types, parameters, etc), and a way to have a dynamic type with low ceremony, like just sugar over a hasmap....
Static Types are Coupling?
Isn't it obvious that this is either Pakistan or the CIA at work?
Yeah, this seems like the exact same problems that we already have with FPGAs.

1. They're really hard to program for in a way that is easy to understand and scale.

2. They eat a ton of power. Heat = power = max speed. If you can't make it better then today existing ASICs are still going to be used.

The intersection of ASIC + reconfigurable serial processes(aka sequential programming) strikes a really sweet point between power and flexibility that I think is going to be hard to unseat.

I think FPGAs are incredible but if this were true I think we'd already see them taking over the world.
Not to be a dick about it, but a fallacy is a mistaken belief while phalluses are penises. So a 'phallacy' might mean a mistaken penis, which is oddly self-referential. :P
"Note that this happened all over Spain, it was not just Catalonia suffering this."

But they probably suffered much more than others. Definitely more than spanish thinking people.

"Resentment may fuel nationalist feelings, but makes a bad argument in the current setting."

It is not about resentment, but about the fear that those who suppressed the catalans still would do it, if they can. Openly or behind doors. And it seems that there is some truth to it, with police bashing unarmed people who just want to vote.
I could see a profanity list being more useful. How many people really try to register with the username "projects"?

As other people have mentioned, namespaces for user URLs solves this better.
Nobody uses buses anymore. They're too crowded.

(apologies to Y.B.)
You can run it on the Rinkeby test network, just switch to it via your wallet (metamask, mist, ...) and reload the page.
I Pay Tax. I Have No Idea Where They Are Spent. How to Bridge This Gap?
Sure they are. The idempotency key is simply a representation of a promise. The E language and the Waterken server implement promise semantics exactly like this: bind the results of a local or remote computation to a durable representation, and that representation is used to store the result upon completion. All future requests return the that stored result, ie. idempotency.

In case of network partition where the client doesn't receive a reply, it can safely and simply retry the operation on the promise, which returns the stored result.

The E language popularized futures/promises, and it's still the gold standard.
More details on what coulda, woulda, shoulda been: http://hoodline.com/2017/03/that-time-san-francisco-tried-to...
I doubt that, it's quality content apart from the link :)

probably just a never updated, but originally legit wordpress site.
That's one way if you're using sequences to generate ids. If you're encoding information in UUIDs, you also have to take into account how many bits you want to allocate to the database (shard) id. One method I've used is to hard-code the shard id as the return value in a function: effectively a constant. (Edit to add: This serves the same purpose as setting the starting offset of the sequence.) You do have a bit of custom code on each database instance in this case, which is its own tradeoff.
The advantage of course is capital flowing to the country: someone sold that house and now owns currency that was introduced from outside the system

Assuming it was true that this is such a net positive benefit to a city, it sounds like it stops working very quickly. The second sell on the property is now a foreigner to either a city local, which would siphon the money out of the city, or from a foreigner to another.

So this would only work to increase the city's cash flow temporarily, or in the case where the property depreciate and the foreigner incurs a less.
Etherscan is nice for this: https://etherscan.io/address/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d1408c...
I've always liked this problem mathematically but I'd never used it for actual hiring (though I have happily used it for certain statistical sampling).

When actually hiring, I care about the time value of opportunity cost. That is, we interview and get hire the first candidate that we feel can do the job well and we all otherwise like, then the benefit of having her on the job ASAP exceeds any possibly value from another candidate that might show up some uncertain time later.
Post I replied to was imagining a world where margins go down, which seems very plausible, compute is a commodity.
A similar recent answer on Smalltalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518746.