skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author apparently doesn't understand sh&t about the computer science
background of blockchain, since he constantly throws "decentralized consensus"
term to mean as a wrong thing. Blockchain does not do that (consensus problem,
as stated by computer science, requires the protocol to actually terminate
with an output; then, Lamport et al. in their original paper over thirty years
ago proved an impossibility theorem that blockchain would break if it was
solving the stated consensus problem).

All that blockchain does is to timestamp documents (transactions), the
purpose of which is to tell which of the two documents was earlier. Then, the
only purpose of proof of work and its derivatives is to artificially slow down
signing the documents (transactions), so everybody would have about the same
processing speed. This single assumption (that no single entity has computing
power comparable to a significant portion of all the others combined) is what
allows to choose longer chain in the case of double-spend incidents. When this
one breaks, the whole protocol breaks.

There are also other dumb ideas, like that "blockchain is supposed to have
a single linear history of transactions". It's not. It would if there was only
one party that issues the transactions, so of every two transactions one would
be marked as earlier than the other. It's wrong, since there can be
incomparable transactions (usually concerning unrelated wallets).

> With proof-of-work, you can have multiple computers make additions to a blockchain without having them trust each other. That’s decentralized consensus.

No. That's distributed timestamping. Again, consensus is totally different
problem (and well-defined at that), but author apparently doesn't know that.

> Instead of a network of miners, you use a single host. That host maintains a secure ledger which contains the host state and its activity log, including all requests and their results. That ledger is then published for clients to actively sync and monitor.

Congratulations, you have developed a centralized timestamping service and you
have discovered that centralized service is functionally equivalent to
a distributed one. Mind you, you're not the first to think about those.
I figure it's harder to download a video from Facebook (for the average person, anyway) than it is to download a still image, which makes it more likely that someone will just share the post instead of saving and posting the image.
> We have more resources than we know what to do with but can't even help people who are literally dying on our doorstep.

Who's this "we?" The vast majority of people are barely getting by, and are a handful of missed paychecks away from poverty. The middle class is shrinking fast. There are a small number of people who "have more resources than they know what to do with". But, they're off yachting over to Belize to buy their fifth vacation home and figuring out how to shelter their wealth so their families remain perpetually among the elite. Ask them to fix homelessness--the rest of us are busy trying to survive.

I'm tired of being asked to sacrifice while the ultra-rich are buying their pet dogs $20K diamond encrusted iPhones.
This is wrong.

Nearly every unit has a Protoss in it.
Its 2017 and I wait for my computer. I wait on Linux, I wait on Windows. This sucks hard. It is still complicated to search for stuff or to morph data from one representation into another. The web is even worse. And lets not talk about sharing data or other computer-resources with others.

When looking back at what people invented in the 80s till today, I hardly see much progress.

I don't care much about how much RAM an application takes, I care about speed. The next big OS should have a golden rule, never make the user wait. That's the ultimate goal which all OS's fail to address today.

What I want in the end is most times some text which is layout in a visually pleasant way, some images, some videos. I thought multiple times about writing a program which would fetch all data from all the websites I'm interested in, messengers, email-accounts and so on and store them somewhere – so that I could later view them (with whatever program) without any fucking delay.
Yeah I know it goes down over time and then won't be an issue anymore. We did in fact get a van that I plan to keep for Peak Kid.

I fully expect to be using at least one driverless vehicle before they leave to college. I'm just not sure if it will be exclusively a rented driverless car or something else.
Public opinion should never be used as a weapon, least of all by journalists. That's not to say that it doesn't happen, or that the feeling of schadenfreude when it does isn't justfied, but what you are suggesting amounts to an expectation that the public will do your job for you.
Actually I think it called more attention to their capture of the elected officials in Anaheim than they would have liked so perhaps more than a PR hit.
Former NASA astronaut Richard “Dick” Gordon Jr. has died at the age of 88
Well, I wouldn't be so sure. When SNAP had their first big miss a few quarters ago, I asked my 13-year-old (who I noticed hadn't been using Snapchat as much as he used to) about his usage. His response was that "Dad, no one uses Snapchat anymore!" (It's "all about insta", according to him.)

While it is certainly anecdotal, it also fits both the data (the declining growth and difficulties monetizing) and the general perception (that Instagram stories obviated Snapchat). But then again, if my son were a kingmaker, Funky Karts would be a unicorn -- so take this for what it is!
This is a cool job, but the rules of the site say job posts go on the monthly hiring thread. There are lots of cool public-interest jobs opening every month, and if we had them all on the front page, the site would be little more than job ads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Please do not post job ads as story submissions to HN.
Medical implant? Maybe something like the Orthrus[1]?

[1]: https://hackaday.io/project/20772-orthrus
> I'm claiming that decentralized consensus gives only a minor gain over a single node maintaining a well-monitored blockchain.

Do you also claim that a one-way hash function only gives a minor gain over
a B-tree? Because document timestamping and establishing consensus are
different problems.
If most websites are faster on chrome than on firefox, why does it matter that the reason is people optimize for chrome? An end user doesn't care WHY chrome is faster, just that it is for their usage.
Chess is a nice example in this analogy because there are rules that people are less familiar with and might well forget about or implement incorrectly. For example, the complete castling rules are not trivial, like with the king not passing through a square currently attacked by an opposing piece

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling#Requirements

and some people may neglect or misimplement en passant

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

and the rules related to repetitive situations in the end game:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty-move_rule

(Implementing the threefold repetition rule requires maintaining historical state of a different kind than any other chess rule!)

I've seen impressive hyperminimalist chess implementations that were missing these things, but that totally felt like real chess almost all of the time.
Plus can even understand cyclist that can keep their bike stopped but no feet on the ground.
Seems like this should be a Sputnik moment for the US if the Russian understanding and execution on social networks are so superior to our own that low six figure spending budgets can have any significant influence when hundreds (thousands?) of other entities are spending much more.

Anyone have a good source for an estimate of how much corporations and individuals spent on political advertising last election cycle?
The funny thing is that it is not difficult to prove the exact cause with a debugger and symbols in cases like this either. I wonder if doing what Process Explorer does (quickly suspend/resume threads and display call stack) would be easy in Linux though.
I don't know about Origin or the Battle.Net client. Origin has a terrible reputation. Blizzard doesn't like to share, they're slow to move, and even though they're great at making games, they're not so hot at the services that go along with those games, generally speaking (remember VOIP in WoW?).

Discord seems incredibly well-positioned to take on Steam directly. They've got huge adoption in the gamer community. They're great at the community management side of things, as far as I can tell. They've figured out how to provide a better voice experience than pretty much any other service out there, so they're smart. If it's possible to provide the same thing that Steam does at less cost (which I strongly suspect it is), Discord could do it and probably make a killing at it.

And they'd save game developers a ton of money.
instead of pretending to release a new version, it might be better to just call this fork sqlite-failed.
Uhh, IoT devises you can run apps on? "Programmable IoT"?
Theresa May to Abolish Contracting Profession in April 2018
Thanks for sharing this, I feel a few steps closer to the answers I'm seeking.
Snap plunges as losses continue
The piece seems to suggest that a) multiple processes were the performance problem and b) that a field trial was causing that and "mak[ing] my computer unusable".

Multiple processes do take more memory, but there's a good reason for them. While it's possible that it was a field trial that was causing issues here, there's no evidence to support that. Sadly, it was probably just excessive resource usage independent of any trials: Chromium did have a period where memory usage especially was allowed to drift and that was an oversight that Speed team are correcting (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkcr/docs/s...).

On the other hand, field trials produce important feedback. One example just from today: TLS 1.3 draft 18 had significant issues with middlebox bugs to the point where it wasn't viable to deploy it. Chromium has been using field trails to test variants of TLS 1.3 intended to work around these issues and allow TLS 1.3 to be used for real. This has resulted in concrete changes to help TLS 1.3: https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg24908.h...

These sorts of things require large-scale testing. We brought all the middleboxes that we could find for local testing, but that cannot account for the variety of firmware versions and configurations used in the wild.
From a rational and removed standpoint, it is clearly not acceptable. There are some confounding factors here, however. For one, Google specifically advises to use their hosted version of the font instead of self-hosting. Another issue is that these people are clearly frustrated by the nonchalant attitude of the maintainers when it comes to breaking others work.

If you are telling people to use your hosted version of your open-source contribution yet have no care for responsible stewardship, you are being irresponsible at the expense of others.

If you don’t want emotional responses after purposefully breaking the hard work of many, you are being unreasonable. While we should strive to be respectful and courteous under such tension, I can understand that not everyone is successful every time.

In other words, I think empathy should go both ways here. Usually, I find that others act very unreasonably and rudely towards maintainers of open source contributions. In this case, I think both parties have made mistakes that deserve forgiving (but not ignoring), including the rude emotional reactions. Both parties should apologize to one another.
Applying for existing h1b transfer is already fairly trivial (or at least it was before Trump) if your company has a lawyer firm on retainer. Most h1bs I know switched jobs at least once.
If 'for' and 'while' loops vary in speed that much between browsers, isn't that a defect in the browser? If one way is faster in chrome than firefox, why doesn't firefox change how it is doing the slower version?
100 Trillion dollars? I think you are using the cost of solar and wind 20 years ago, not where they are and where they are going.

By the way, do you also agree with Trump that global climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to destroy the US economy?
While you can certainly turn off these sorts of features, I just want to emphasize that these are intended to make the product better, and Mozilla abides by a fairly strict privacy policy (when comparing to most tech companies at least):

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

The intention is to ship features that people actually want, and to ensure that Firefox is actually working for people (not everyone can/will file bug reports or post on twitter or hackernews etc)
All I'm saying is that just because the market might prefer to burn lots of coal to do so, that might not actually have the best outcome for society.
Hard to know what to suggest as you make it sound a bit like you've seen everything! If you've read everything on iq's site and followed all the links then you've covered a lot of the the available material.

This is a gold mine: http://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/

Beyond that - just going through everything you can find on Shadertoy line by line.
There is a thriving market in amateur adult modeling and porn.

I am thinking of writing an e-book about it.
Well, Apple has a monopoly on Apple customers, and their recent products sure seem to have been the result of a nullified incentive to care for quality, so that seems like a fair assessment.
So it makes abstract objects into more abstract objects? Is that the idea?
Recent HN thread (3 days ago, 70 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881
The newspapers can criticise Disney's business actions while simultaneously praising their artistic output. It's different parts of the newspaper, different aims on informing the public. That's fair and unbiased and the job of a journalist.

While Disney attempts to punish the commercial arm of a newspaper by attacking their entertainment division, because of the actions of investigative journalists in a different field.

Disney is resorting to extortion, the newspaper is simply doing their job.
lack of window functions kill it's usefulness for me.
Am I the only one who gets car sick when reading or using a computer in a car? Everyone keeps talking about working while on a long commute in a self-driving vehicle. Doing more than 30 minutes of it is not really an option for me.
I really hope this doesn't become reality. Otherwise, you can look forward to the phishing mail which will try to get your nudes. "DANGER! We found potential nude pictures of you! Upload your pictures to verify your identity, find who uploaded them without your consent, and block the pictures from being published. If you do not act the pictures will be published." ...
He's made more than he would've gotten. Insiders sold way ahead of the game, though not all their shares.
It also had a Streisand effect on the LATimes article. Which many people (including myself) would not have otherwise read.
Facebook anti revenge-porn program asks users for their nude photos
churnalism! That's a fantastic pejorative I've yet to hear of until now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism
VeriSNES Verilog SNES Emulator on FPGA [YouTube]
Just some irrelevant feedback. I was unable to read the text of the story without inverting screen colors. The contrast was too low and lines too narrow.
Hard cover. Paper(back) not yet released.
I don't have much sympathy for the lecturer because it's probably safe to bet she has made a conscious decision to maintain her homeless lifestyle. I find it very hard to believe that someone with a PhD could not find extra work, or do something else entirely, to afford an apartment.

She presumably has other options given her education, unlike other psychologically disabled people who have no other option but to live on the street. Of course pathological stubbornness could be a disability.
The point of the post is that there is no way to opt out. We all understand more datapoints the better. But I also need to not be fucked with when I'm trying to work.
When I most recently looked for a job, I got most of my leads through linkedin (from recruiters reaching out to me), and from seek.com.au (which is similar to indeed, I think). I actually got my current role from a recruiter who reached out to me via seek, since recruiters can search candidates on the platform.

Seek is also making a new platform called Onploy, which is an inverse job search platform, where you put your profile on, and companies apply to you. I wasn't on it long enough to really determine how good it was, but it was a fairly novel concept.

I think the best way to get to the front of the queue is to actually ring the recruiters/hiring managers, often there's a phone number on the job listing, by ringing them, you force them to put your CV at the front of the queue and look at it.

Maybe it's location though, but I found that I didn't even really have to look for a job, I was getting contacted by at least one recruiter per day just by signing up on seek, and from setting linkedin to looking for opportunities.
You are surprised because it is not true. I can prove that you can write two-way interop just check the library I've written and posted above.
Steam's monopoly is also why it sucks, I think. It seems like a textbook example of what happens with monopolies -- it produces an expensive product that could be much better and much cheaper.
I agree Disney absolutely resorted to extortion, and I agree the newspaper absolutely was simply doing it's job.

Now tell me... what happened next? If you consider it deeply, does it make you feel at all uncomfortable? Or because the "good guys won" are we just supposed to be giddy that Disney got rightly put in their place by the MSM?
I assume stasis in the rest of the ecosystem, yes. It's hard to predict exactly what the repercussions would be. Yes, it's unrealistic. What else can we do? Also, the GOP wouldn't have repealed this exemption in the bill if it didn't mean increased tax revenue, so the money has to come from somewhere. In the end it's a reduction in funding for higher education.

Universities compete with each other for research talent, but they also compete with private industry for graduating BS/BA students. If the amount of money flowing to higher education in general is reduced, it may be harder for graduate schools to compete for the best students against private industry, even though they continue to compete as best they can with each other.
This is truly disappointing.
No no no no. Kotlin provides a lot of tools to make your library usable from Java and it works.
that’s very true. i read somewhere that something crazy like 30% of traffic in city areas are people looking for car parking. don’t have a source on it, but the parking situation definitely shouldn’t be ignored, at least as far as the most built up/problematic areas are concerned
Pagerduty.
Not a problem for me. Started to study web development last November, got a job as a junior frontend web developer last June. My first senior peer was 22 and taught a lot of stuff. I am older than everyone in the tech team, but everybody is super supporting.

I did hear from a potential employer before I got this job a "You know, you will be competing with young, energetic developers, who are coding since they are 13 years old. You have a lot of catchup to do."

It maybe was some ageism, but I think the guy was just try to get some leverage for the shitty salary he was paying. I just ignored him and moved on to another job.
Ask HN: How do I know my software is working for my clients?
I'm the sole developer of a piece of software that solves a niche problem. People like it, and it's continually being used by old and new users alike.

Every time I release an update, I get complaints about various new features not working as expected, which is normal.

I try my best to address these issues with software updates, but since the software is growing more and more complex, this approach is getting less and less successful.

My way to deal with software updates is to listen to as many reports as possible, figure out common problems and try to address the biggest problem with a successive update.

However, I'm starting to realize that people only reach out and complain if they're actually having a problem (why send an error report if the software is working correctly?) Because the user-base is growing bigger, the chance that a person is experiencing a one-off problem -- a problem specific to their setup, environment or handling -- increases, while the chance that theirs is a common problem decreases.

So I know that _some_ users are experiencing a bug, but I don't know if it's a common bug, a rare bug, a design error or if the feature is even working for anyone at all!

I'm unsure about what to do here. The error reports I get are vague because of my closed-source "if you have a problem, it is the developer's problem" business model/mentality, client-side log files up to this point haven't been detailed enough, although I am working hard to improve that part a lot.

Is collecting anonymized user-data the answer to a problem like this?

TL;DR As my software grows more complex and the user-base increases, I start having more uncertainties about dealing with updates, stability, vague bug reports and "fixes".

Have any of you had similar problems? Do you know of any good resources dealing with software stability? Or does this sound like a clear indication of <insert common mistake>?
It's probably a bit late to worry about graduate education being destroyed. 30 or 35 years ago might have been more helpful.
ditto. Even searching on video platforms is a dicey operation. I remember seeing at a dental office this patient table's video screen turned away from the patient while the tech searched for "Leap Frog" videos, and in the prefix tree search landing on "lea.." hit some leather bondage trash. Then when the searching was complete the screen rotated back to the patient thereby sparing them the unpredictably inappropriate content that had to be navigated past.
And how does a simple modification such as a watermark not break the hash?
Thanks for the suggestion, added it to our issues... https://github.com/distillpub/template/issues/62
Hasn't really been my experience - I've found it pretty easy to write eg. Hadoop classes, Rome plugins, servlets from Kotlin. You do need to be aware of what code Kotlin is generating for you, and there are occasional warts, but in general you just implement your interfaces and enjoy the boilerplate that Kotlin frees you from typing.
Thanks for the heads-up! We are not sure there is a standard for this, but we now include the DOI in our bibtex citation.
Teaching people what you are good with is one of the best way to connect with others. You get the respect and also help others. Make a list of 10 things you are good at and teach the top 3.
Also Try http://LetsLunch.com to setup lunches with entrepreneurs.
Disclaimer : i'm the founder.