skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple's response in the CNET article linked to by Ars:

> we suggest using one of the many beautiful cases available to protect iPhone

Why is it acceptable to design a product to need a separate case? Smartphones are beautiful and I don't want to wrap mine in cheap-looking rubber or plastic. I'm clumsy and have accidentally dropped pretty much every generation iPhone since the 3gs, sans case, onto concrete from ~3ft. Only one broke. Based on these reviews, I'll have to either buy a case or skip the X.
Trolley problem. First mistake could be to do nothing at all!
Here in Shenzhen I believe the government sponsors the installation of a new charging point wherever you want it when you buy a car. About half of the taxis are electric, and that is growing. The electric taxis are cheaper (combustion taxis have an extra per-trip tax) and more spacious, and manufactured by BYD.
dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15633528
Bjork the Singer Is Giving Away Free Cryptocurrency with Her New Album 'Utopia'
Comcast has been so unreliable for me the last year, that I pay for a second backup DSL connection from AT&T.
Two of my colleagues were in on the Bragi Kickstarter. They were buggy and went through many firmware updates, but those couldn't fix the poor BT connection between the two.
Why Engineers build crappy Products
I'm a little bit surprised that Amazon are mapping vCPUs to HyperThreads, instead of to cores. It seems to me like, if this is targeted at compute-intensive workloads, that it may be overcommitting a bit. Or is there recent research saying that an HT thread is equivalent to a core for compute-intensive workloads?
I mean, the polyglot thing was cool the first time, cool the second time, only slightly less so the third time, and and so on. But by the 16th time, when the PDF size has blown up to 48MB hosted on a slow server, and I’m watching a seemingly-endless spinner as my phone tries to download the whole thing over a poor LTE connection, just so it can throw away all the extra stuff and let me read the few KB worth of text in the issue… as best as I can, at least, when (as with all PDFs) their fixed line width is terribly suited for phone screens, and not all that well suited for any commonly used electronic display…

…well, I start to think that they could do a better job of showing off their savvy and old-school-ness by using a plain old HTML page. Maybe without any CSS - that seems like their style.
My argument is that since apple can move the price, if you tax the company they increase the cost of the phone as much as makes sense and eat the rest. If you tax the phone, they leave as much as the increase on the cost to the end user as makes sense and lower the price beyond that, eating it. In neither case are profits or demand going to zero.
fascinating write up. Is it normal for wifi-drivers to have such an enormous code base? like, nearly 700k loc? And how much of it is generated code? I'd love any links to stuff on this if anyone has them and time to post, thanks.
Attention itself is a choke point.

How many such platforms can you name? How many such platforms would a typical member of the public be able to name? What is the distribution of traffic across such sites? (Hint: Zipf's Law applies.)

Why is it that the information / comms world continuously, since at least the early 20th century, seems to settle on a single dominant provider, or at best, a handful of leading contenders within a field? Telegraph, telephones, television, computer equipment, computer languages, operating systems, social networks, "Web portals", etc., etc.
>As said above: look at what happened to fatpeoplehate and friends.

Right. Did they shrink? No. As I said, they grew. They are out of your sight, out of the sight of more reasonable people who might argue with them, who might give them a sense that their views are not accepted or correct. And they're getting more numerous because of this. And they're drawing people who don't even agree with their primary objectives but simply feel disaffected by the other places that will smack their hand and call them names just because they asked a question. They're so big that we get Pizzagate. They draw so many that we get Trump. For years they were just tiny subreddits you didn't have to go to unless you wanted to. People act like Reddit is some place where people get shunted into subreddits unawares. That is not how it works. You have to search or seek them out. And they remain as 'contained' there as they do at Voat. The difference is the barrier to entry of people who oppose them is lower.

>And where do they find these mothers? On Youtube and on various Facebook groups, mostly

No, we're not talking about tech savvy people. Facebook maybe, but more likely they see daytime talk shows or read celebrity news magazines or they actually talk to the other mothers in their kids day care and such. They do not trust things like 'online resources' and the more authority the site has, the more they distrust it. They are seeking to be emotionally swayed, not to research a topic. Intuition is their guide.

>Google keyword suggestions are dangerous, and they do influence society.

I don't know enough about how those suggestions even work to say much about them, honestly. Given how weird they often are, it can't be a popularity thing. (Or are they often gamed to insert weird searches?) I don't think many parents would actually be searching Google. They'll ask their coworkers, their friends, their family, but they're not going to ask Google. Then all they'll get is "garbage" from doctors and other disconnected ivory-tower reason fetishists like the ones who said thalidomide was safe.
You don't hang out with any sailors or fishermen, do you...
Differential Privacy [pdf]
Heh, yeah, that's pretty much exactly how I think of it :) I didn't mean to state my previous comment as a disagreement, just an elaboration.
They still exist, they're just not called that anymore. The modern term for them is PBNs (private blog networks) and they fulfill the same purpose.
It's based on KVM: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#compute-optimized

(sorry for crappy link, can't figure out how to link directly to the appropriate question. Search for "What is the underlying hypervisor on C5 instances" question).
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#compute-optimized

"
Q. What is the underlying hypervisor on C5 instances?

C5 instances use a new EC2 hypervisor that is based on core KVM technology.
"
Been waiting for this for years. It's so great.
My most common pattern is "Siri, remind me to ____ when I get home". The geolocation-"awareness" really hits my soft spot.
I am suddenly very uncomfortable, imagining myself as a roiling blob of goo.
Beats was Dr Dre, not will.i.am.
> AMD is deeply mismanaged and shareholders should lobby for change

I don't know about that...
Sure they've had to liquidate some things but that made them survive long for Ryzen and Vega to come out which has enabled them to claw their way out of the red and into the black for the first time in forever.

PS: Am I right to assume that by "bad decisions" you mean things like the "Bulldozer" architecture with that wonky resources-shared-between-cores-thing?
Love that guy. Worth watching just for the comedy.
This was caused by a misconfiguration at L3 NETWORKS which btw i should add is now owned by centurylink. Go figure.
How to Fool Americans on Twitter
Yup. Kept my old Wireds for a decade or more, but I think I eventually let them go.
This was the case back in 1997 as well.

The only thing that's changed about shady emulation sites in the last 20 years is that they no longer give you ill-conceived legal advice about ROM ownership being legal if you delete the ROM within 24 hours and/or are not affiliated with law enforcement.
I agree when I was in the royal free renal ward (London UK) one of the guys in the bed next to me was in his mid 80's and had robot surgery to remove a problem kidney - his doctor had told him that he was the oldest patient in the UK to have this op I suspect that the older style of surgery might not have been possible.
At least popup blocking has an opt out if you need it.
Probably less invasive surgery has less side effects and better outcomes
You are correct that it’s conjecture. I did include the weasel word “probably.” I certainly do not have inside info.

But, in the real world, if he were interviewing for a new job, the prospective employer would surely have this conversation:

Q: So, why did you leave Tesla?

A: Oh, just felt like it was time to go. Wanted to start my own thing.

Q: Ok. But, didn’t your departure coincide with the announcement that the Model 3’s primary production bottleneck was with assembly of the battery pack?

A: Yes, but that was just a coincidence. I had been talking about leaving for a while.

Q: Ok. Would you mind if we talked with 3 references from Tesla? Perhaps your direct manager, a peer, and one of your subordinates?

A: Sure.....
Unless it's paid out in dividends and executive compensation and stock buybacks. Which is what happened with the last tax holiday under Bush.

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/27/bush-already-tried-trump...
Agreed. Still, $117 MILLION seems really excessive. How many people do you need to build, ship, market and support an AI Chatbot?
The highlighted comments from the Google agent are very jerkish, but to be honest,

> But in Chrome we’re fundamentally unwilling to allow the mobile web to continue to die from performance bankruptcy. Other browsers are less aggressive, and people who prefer to be more conservative (preferring maximal compatibility over being part of moving the web forward aggressively) should prefer to use a more conservative browser.

is very true.

The mobile web is dying. Native apps are obscuring it while it is made irrelevant by very poor website performance.

Now I don't know how to solve it.
I highly recommend the book "The Machinery of Life" by David S. Goodsell. It isn't too long, the text is interesting with out getting too bogged down in the details (there simply would be too much to cover in detail), but the highlight is he a professor of molecular biology, he is an excellent illustrator, and the book is packed with detailed illustrations that alone make the book worth it. $18 on amazon. (get the 2nd edition, not the 1st edition)

Just do a google search for images on the book title and author name to see what is inside.
The Economics of Getting Heard
FWIW, only the second bullet point applies here

> both are a free product that locks users into the company's revenue stream (ads in AMP for Google, Windows for MS)

Ads on AMP sites don't have to be from google

> both onboarded developers with promises to better user experience while locking them into a non-standard platform.

AMP, while a particular subset of HTML/JS, is still just a subset, aka part of the standard platform and can run in any browser. Calling it non-standard would be like calling it non-standard to use React. It's just a library/framework.
Yeah. These accessibility vs. design issues were what immediately came to me mind to. Though, as simply another tool in the bag, accurate real-world sizing capability seems like it could be used too actually help those issues.

Would like to hear more from designers that on the issues and challenges of creating accessible designs.
It depends on where you apply I guess.

I work at a startup and we get a mixed amount of applications with a photo and without, doesn't really make a difference for us.
This reminds me of the time YouTube introduced a more lightweight version of their video page code and were distraught to find that the average load times for the lightweight page were drastically higher than the standard page. They eventually figure out that this was because most of the people switching to the lightweight page were people on very slow internet connections, since people on fast internet connections didn't find the video page slow enough to bother switching.
Pretending to give a robot citizenship helps no one
he was involved -
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobil...
> asking for the other user's password

What? Why would the other user ever provide their password to this user?
Yes, of course. How is this even a question?

If we had the resources to give 500,000 people a living wage, a home, health care, in exchange for performing a completely meaningless task then that would be a pretty good deal (that many would also be happy to take).
Who cares how many Bolts are sold, if the average Tesla sells for two or three times as much. As they used to teach in business school, its not your share of the market that counts, its your share of the market's profits. Also, maybe no one is making a profit yet but the point is, if you can charge a lot more than your competitor you don't have to outsell them in units.
lol yeah i was about to point out nautical miles and knots, but you beat me to it.
I think it's just as simple as it gives the appearance of more for less. A marketing decision, not a technical one.

And, since the competition adopted the same terminology, it's now a quasi standard to call them vcpus.
Neat, I've always been into speed running, but my neighbour introduced me to TAS not too long ago.

This is all super cool, thanks everyone.
“Clarification” on the Upcoming Bitcoin Segwit2x Fork
The part that has been highly efficient for me, is that I can still build my resume today. Adding to it will not break it, and it is just editing a text file then running make. Printing it next year will print the same as this year. Stability is very comfortable.
Anything can be described both fancifully or dreadfully. One can say we are blobs of goo, biological automotons living on a speck of dirt in a googlplex of a cosmos. Or one can say that we are the result of billions of years of evolution on top of natural laws that first produced symmetries, conserved quantities, and higher level order like atoms and then stars - that then birthed heavier elements that eventually became us. So when you look up at the hard mineral made stars, remember that goo is just a mindset, for those very stars are effectively the embryonic stage of life itself..

You may enjoy Alan Watt's take on this: https://youtu.be/SOKwgP1Hte8
If this requires highly trained doctors then of course it will cost more but it should require less skill overtime until its an automated consultation where you gently fall asleep, then wake up feeling rested and refreshed with some minor soreness but not a scar can be found and you go on with your day.
The solution to many of these questions might be for the "dead-man's switch" discussed in the article to require interacting with an email account with a public/private key system.

E.g., if someone doesn't log in to an email account after, say, a year, it starts auto-replying with that information suggesting the person might have died or is otherwise incapacitated, setting into motion a process to verify what happened (like just being burnt out on open source development). It could also trigger a similar email to the inheritors of the project.
No pricing info on c5 or whether c4 has changed in either the blog post or https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand
Timer 15 minutes. I use that all the time. I would use it (siri) a LOT more if it didn't suck so much.
> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.

You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook.

That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense:

1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!"

2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them.

I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this.

You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.
But this article and research is about laparoscopic surgery vs robot assisted laparoscopic surgery. If a case is too complex for manual laparoscopic does the robot assistance suddenly make it operable? It seems like we aren't quite to the point where robot assistance (in laparoscopic surgery) would make a procedure less complex.
> will.i.am has raised $117 million [...] as it announced its entry into the corporate computing market with a voice assistant for customer service.

Voice assisted AI startup from a pop star receives $100mm financing? Guys if this isn’t bubbly then I don’t know what is!

If you’re an IC, I hope you can take a little off the table while the gettin’ is good.
Let's not forget Raven Ridge (Ryzen Mobile).. It targets lower power and lower performance, but it's still 3x faster than Intel's current solutions when it comes to graphics.
I just downloaded El Capitan today from the App Store from the same machine I installed from.
Honestly I’m jealous of what is taught these days.

But until the stuff I was being taught became practical (because it paid for dinner), I wasn’t really able to retain much once I had finished a class. So I don’t think it would have mattered time much if I had learned about clock skew in college. I’d have forgotten about its importance the next semester anyway.

Information without relevance is hard to maintain.
Sounds great! Along these lines, I've really enjoyed some of the iBiology[0] videos, especially the ones about molecular machinery. It's the 3blue1brown[1] of molecular biology.

0. https://www.youtube.com/user/ibioseminars

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw
> In most cases, you have to factor in the distance to
> the viewer. This is, probably "projection angle in the
> retina" is a more useful invariant.

That's actually exactly what CSS specifies:

"The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length. For a nominal arm's length of 28 inches, the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees. For reading at arm's length, 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch)."

Of course this means "pixel" is kind of a misnomer, but at least the semantics of the unit are about what you want.
Really happy to see even small versions of these instances having large NICs.
Nothing is wrong on the internet.

Something is wrong with parents who don't care what content they put in front of their kids as long as it looks like a cartoon and it shuts them up for a while. Then again, Looney Tunes characters were a lot more violent than this and no one got traumatized, so maybe the effect of this is blown out of proportion.

Yes, this stuff is vapid, and some of it is disturbing, and I suspect might be lowkey fetish porn, and it definitely infringes on copyright (who cares though,) but... the internet isn't your babysitter.
They won’t admit they have a fake account problem because it would admit they been selling ads to bots and ripping off their advertisers. Too bad it’s true.
Backdoor.txt (circa early 90's)
The best size is dependent on the distance between the eye and the content. You would use letters less than 10mm on a smartphone screen but you could very well use an inch or more on a big TV screen. As a designer you have no idea whether your web page will be displayed on a tiny screen of a low-end smartphone or a big TV.
Do you genuinely believe that building a brand with that kind of power is "trivial"?
Force, not power.

Basically: for an internal combustion engine the force is the force of the explosion averaged over time, so the higher the RPM the shorter the time between explosions the higher the average force (until you get to a point where your cylinders are moving so fast the start fighting against each other).

For an electric car the force is the voltage, there's no impulse to average out, it's just continuous force.

Now of course in reality it's not that simple and you actually do have a torque curve, but compared to ICE it's basically a square wave.
Amazing, the article still contains a grammatical mistake. Terrible quality on the part of the reporter and editor.
What's the difference between local variable, cell variable and free variable?
Yes, releases older than Sierra can still be found if you had previously downloaded them, but Sierra is gone and presumably High Sierra will be as well once it’s been replaced.
I thought Star Trek was considered Utopian, at least inside the Federation.
23 Oct: Coinbase will continue referring to the current bitcoin blockchain as Bitcoin (BTC) and the forked blockchain as Bitcoin2x (B2X).

25 Oct: We are going to call the chain with the most accumulated difficulty Bitcoin.

Really?
Given that Nintendo wasn't able to keep them in stock for the longest time, lowering the price would have simply left money on the table. And not lowered the cost for consumers--this spring people were buying them and reselling for $120ish.
I generally use Firefox myself. What I think is hilarious is that a lot of sites are half-broken by my NoScript settings, but I never realized they had a preference for Chrome because that code doesn't even run.
One problem with mm as a unit for type is that it's not immediately obvious what we're measuring the length of. The point specifically refers to the maximum height of the minuscule 'm' or something like that.

Then with things like antialasing and hinting, the intrinsic size of a font ends up both physically and psychologically a different size.

I'm not yet convinced the problem is as clean and obvious as it seems at first glance.
I think the medium article has a different and interesting take and conclusion about what the real issues may be. I agree it is quite long.
How to Use Technology to Help Plan a Wedding
> Or is there recent research saying that an HT thread is equivalent to a core for compute-intensive workloads?

This is a fun question. Processors that have hyperthreading duplicate the parts of the CPU needed to maintain state, but they don't duplicate the parts that run the actual logic. So if you compare a single core hyperthreaded processor with a dual core processor without hyperthreading the dual core one will be faster.

However it gets a bit more complicated than that. Oftentimes processors sit idle while waiting for the rest of the system to catch up- for instance it may have to wait for memory to get loaded from RAM. Processors with hyperthreading see a boost in performance here because they can run the second thread while waiting for the operations needed to run the first thread- thus making these processors about 30% more efficient.

So while more cores are definitly better, if you are comparing two processors with the same number of cores and all else is equal the ones with hyperthreading will perform better.

One thing to note is that AWS provides vCPUs in pairs, so even though they are giving you the number of threads you can always be sure you're getting individual cores along with them.
Um, the person simply defined a problem into existence. There is no agreed upon basis of thinking like this.
Measure all not-actually-dependent-on-real-size elements in em or rem, and measure all actually-dependent-on-real-size elements in cm or in.
Unique technology is absolutely not a requirement to build and ship useful and impactful product.
IPFS plan to archive the CERN LHC dataset
What is it like to live full-time in a remote cabin?