skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends. If the duplicated code is supposed to do the same thing in both places then the two pieces of code are already dependent. You change one of the duplicates, you need to change the other one two.
Here is another:

https://www.youtube.com/user/nutnfancy/search?query=van

Fair warning: that guy is a long way from Valley Values, but he knows what he's talking about and how to convey that knowledge as he travels throughout the western US.
What makes you think that such a consortium would ensure open access rather than simply privileging its own services?
The only principle I'm discussing here is that of consistency.

We interfere fairly regularly in other sovereign states' elections, and then act shocked that a foreign power does it to us.

We should either:

1. NOT conduct influence ops against sovereigns, and crack down on ops against us.

or

2. DO conduct influence ops against sovereigns, but fully expect to be repaid in kind.

Any other option is highly hypocritical. I believe that if FB et. al. get into the business of policing foreign influence operations, they should police them ALL.
That's whataboutism. Other harms existing does not make it okay for you to do harm.
Snips lets you build your own voice assistant to embed into your devices
State of Serverless Report 2017
After reading your comment, I loaded that up and played it for several minutes. I've never heard ACTUAL silence before. I have tinnitus from a couple of bad concussions when I was a kid, and I've always had at least a quiet tone in my ear. This is weird!
My intent was to clarify (what I perceived to be) the parent's argument, more than make one of my own.

I think if our process is "1) write the software in Java, 2) remove those lines", it's clear that we've probably changed the average bug density of the project. I agree that there is much reason for concern in generalizing that result to what would have happened if we'd written in that other language to begin with.
The point your canned response misses entirely is that it is non always a 'Good Thing'
What JavaScript library you use for the charts?
I suspect he also knows very well how to go past the line without leaving enough evidence to be convicted.
That's a long explanation of how nobody at a large corporation should be expected to make anything work properly.

I just recently was forced to use Windows again for some piece of software that requires it. Windows immediately proceeds to update itself after startup, fails midway to bluescreen. I ended up spending an hour to revert to the latest restore point instead of getting work done.

I don't see how Windows is getting any better than what I used 15 years ago. I think a lot of people using their tech have Stockholm syndrome and fear losing the sunk cost of their investment in that ecosystem. As someone who used to program exclusively in C and C++, I can say it's always worth switching...
> The typical doctor would not qualify to work at Google.

The top ones absolutely would. In fact, math and statistics (which includes CS, in their categorization) is the second-highest performing undergraduate major for medical school matriculants.

You're kidding yourself if you think that the top students aren't making career decisions between medical school or finance and STEM and factoring in the massive difference in both risk and reward in the process.

> Or, as I said before, lifting the pointless requirement to have an unrelated four year degree.

There is no requirement to have an unrelated four-year degree - or any degree at all. Medical schools could accept someone straight out of high school. Except they don't, because the top-performing matriculants are those with a degree in the humanities, followed by those with a degree in the social sciences. Pre-med, amusingly, comes in dead last.

> the fact that you have much higher social status in general that outweighs a lower net salary

This may be the funniest thing I've read in this thread. No, compared to the other options available for a bright, qualified college student, going into medicine is probably the worst option if you want to optimize for either wealth or social status.

But sure, if you want to propose an incredibly convoluted process for filtering away the top prospective doctors (incentivizing them towards finance and STEM instead, for the better pay and respect), replacing them instead with less-qualified, middle-of-the-pack, independently-wealthy people who are willing to take on an extremely large and risky debt load because they can afford to and they don't have any other well-paying options... fine, go ahead, I won't stop you. If you think that that's the answer, then that means there's no policy solution needed. Nothing's stopping you from finding those people and going to them and encouraging them to take on that debt load themselves and apply to medical school today. They can take out those loans themselves, or use their own money to pay their own way.

But then please stop derailing these conversations by talking about lifting non-existent requirements, or making rather pedantic quibbles about terminology. When we're talking institutional policy, it's perfectly fine to say that an existing subsidy is "the bottleneck", in the sense that, ceteris paribus, increasing it would alleviate the problem and decreasing it would exacerbate it.
Amazon’s Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace
It absolutely is going away. The courts ruled that those stipulations aren't enforceable unless ISPs are Title II common carriers.
Or when forced to pay for access to Facebook that is not rate limited people may not use Facebook as much....
>Never in the history of this country have we had a problem in where the government has too much power and private entities have too little. Not once.

I suspect the American Indian might disagree. I don't recall them being hunted down and massacred by a corporation. Also, black Americans before the 1965 civil rights act might have something to say on the topic of government power vs private entities. As would imprisoned Japanese sent to internment camps. Newspaper editors imprisoned for speaking out against Lincoln during the Civil War probably had a different point of view, as well. Shall I continue?
I don't know what the priors are, but Spotlight having missed the app for a 30 full days, and then suddenly finding it after the full registration, sounds very unlikely to me.

However, I do believe it's just an unfortunate bug, nothing more sinister there. Still would be nice to know: why?
Does it solve the equality issue? An epsilon tracker would allow you to say it's equal within the margin of error for the computation.

If so that makes them much more interesting to me. Floating point bugs manifest themselves at non linear parts such as equality and comparison operators.
When is it OK to remake a classic game?
Science vs. Religion: Travels in the Great American Divide
What DE do you use? Back when I used Unity in Ubuntu I found their search widget really hard to use. It was laggy and mixed in results from the web, their 'appstore', and my files.

Now I use dmenu in i3wm and I couldn't be happier. All I need is something that searches my path for applications... and that's what it does.
I will be in touch.

> It only came out in 1991 though — does Internet Archive host books that aren't public domain?

Yes. https://openlibrary.org/
You'd think that installing a new app would add it to the index right away.
The livestreaming you just partner with a CDN who serves the content for you. Questions and answers for 170k concurrents users isn't super hard, just make sure your backing datastore is a horizontally scalable kv store. Any of the cloud providers can give you a datastore capable of this.
One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of the vehicles when compared to human-driven vehicles" https://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/04/12.html

That being said, RAND released a study this month, targeted at policymakers, that models how many human lives would be saved given the introduction of non-perfect autonomous vehicles, including a little javascript widget to try out various settings: https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-p...

Crucially, this study models scenarios such as AVs being _half_ as safe as human drivers, yet still resulting in saving more lives over time. I think the question then becomes, who will be responsible for the missing 50% of safety when somebody gets killed by one?

Edit: Another question: if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? I have no answers to these questions... it's a hard problem.
The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.
>People who perform poorly at their jobs should either be transferred to another position or terminated. Why is this a controversial position?

First, because some random idiot on a blog post does not know whether the person "performed poorly at their job" in general. He just has a specific gripe. The other person might have done miracles in other parts of Cortana. There are such things as shipping priorities, and they're not determined by random blog posts or comments.

Second, because people deserve chances for improving. Anybody at any current position has "performed poorly" at this or another project earlier on. Terminating or transferring them only makes sense if they don't get to improve, which a random blog post can't determine.

>If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.

That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.
I've heard a number of conflicting arguments about the reliability of Ethereum switching to proof of stake... From "they will" to "this is difficult, why bother". There's also the other side of the equation - what's the value-add, and is it justified by the consumption? (e.g. the banks, trucks, etc. do something for the financial system, which has value. Is value / cost higher for BTC or lower?)

I do not know.
It's not the net neutrality rules that cause the expense, it's the Title II requirements. The FCC had to use Title II to get the net neutrality rule in place.

Title II is a pretty harsh regulatory environment. The FCC had to suspend most of the rules for the ISPs. Otherwise, the FCC would have to set price control rules, etc.
Not an expert, but it seems that proof of stake is just obscured proof of work.

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
If these questions are for what I think they are, I think you are on to something useful and becoming more and more important in future.
these are a really good set of principles. saving these to reflect on.
Website doesn't seem to be working in landscape mode on phones.
Most of what you read about Bitcoin (or most advanced topics in the press) is wrong or misleading. Eg. I read articles saying a transaction consumes x kWh or energy, but in reality a transaction does not consume energy. Transaction rate and energy consumption are independent. It would be like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "consumes fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck.

Only some high-profile individuals have labelled it a "scam", but the majority do recognize for what it truly is: a revolutionary technology and social phenomenon.
I would love to know what job you have in programming making $500k in your mid-30s.
Are there inexpensive technologies that allow line of site communication across 5-8 miles? Something that could be erected on the top of a barn or windmill, that would mesh and route among adjacent nodes?

Something like that would allow communication across the countryside and allow communities to interconnect irrespective of the existing monopoly infrastructure.
Then, as it was said in another HN comment, make ISP liable like facebook and twitter are. They have to detect and prevent DDoS from their customers, detect and prevent malware, as well as child pornography and stuff. If they want to look at what you're sending and receiving, they should be liable for it too.

If a law allowed all post office to take a look into your personnal mail, they should at least uses this power to prevent criminal activities.
I was curious about the idea of the Internet as a public utility several years ago, so I did some research. Specifically I looked into just how something is determined to be a "public utility" in the first place. Why is my water line regulated and the price of the water pegged to the cost of providing the service? Why do I get a letter explaining any proposed rate increase with a (required) explanation of how it arises from an actual increase in the cost of providing the service? Surely it wasn't always that way, not for water or electricity or anything else. So how did they go from being private services controlled by companies to public utilities generally either run by municipalities or privately owned utility companies answerable to a public utilities commission?

It turns out the answer is fairly simple. Although each utility followed its own path historically, it all boiled down to one question: Is the benefit society as a whole would derive from the cheap, ubiquitous availability of the thing greater than the damage which would be done to society by the elimination of competition and extraction of profit from the thing?

I think that question is a very easy one to answer for Internet access. The benefit to society would be incalculably greater than the damage done by eliminating the profit of Comcast and AT&T and Time Warner and whatnot. Just for one, we could close every physical government office in the nation and save billions by permitting the workers from there to work from home while citizens access everything via the Internet. So long as Internet access is a luxury, you can't do that. Then you have businesses. We don't charge restaurants 100x as much for water because they make soup with it, and "business connections" that transfer no more data than a home with a few teenagers shouldn't cost any more either. And if the cost was based on the cost of providing the service, then like everything in tech it would shrink with amazing rapidity.
Really?
This is not only a worse-than-useless, waste-of-user-time feature on its own, but it actively interrupts the user to get their attention!

So, this PM decided to put into a production environment a feature that interrupts a customer's workflow for no good benefit. It doesn't even benefit Microsoft, so he's not even being a bandit.

This is the very definition of stupid. Hurt the other guy, hurt yourself, for no benefit to either [1].

So, why would or should any employer continue to pay a person who performs such an obviously stupid action in a production environment to continue in the same position?

We may have a right to jobs if we continue to produce output that benefits the customers and employer, not simply because we continue to exist. Start harming your customers and/or employers, and why should you continue to receive their resources?

[1] http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/serendipia/Stupidity.html
"How much is used by all banks and armored trucks put together" is kind of meaningless unless you factor in the immense transaction volumes those banks handle every day.

Just consider the number of wire transactions that happen every day in a single country, or internationally. The amount of money handled by those transactions might even be smaller than the total BTC transacted daily, but the number of individual wires is enormous, and each one forms the basis of business transactions or charitable donations or government operations.
The full market potential for FinTechs in Germany is estimated at €1.7 trillion
Thanks! Had that wrong, or remembered it incorrectly. NYT says 10% in another article.

Its still considerable. Have to take into account that a 5% reduction in price can lead to a much higher increase of consumption than 5%, particularly on things like healthcare in the us that have clear excess demand.
Skype... I am actively trying to get rid of it these days. That ridiculous bloated and slow HTML user interface that many native clients have transitioned to (especially Linux and Android) is beyond description. Why does it need to take up 50% of one core when it is idling in the background? On an i7-6800k no less! On my note 8 it drains the battery in no time while managing to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive.

It somehow feels like MS is actively trying to destroy this product.
https://archive.org/scanning

http://blog.archive.org/donation-faqs/

I have temporarily added contact info to my HN profile. Please get in touch if you would like me to help facilitate the shipping, scanning, and return of your book donation.
This is not sustainable

And more than that, do they expect "card processor" speed and scale with this amount of resources being needed at current scale?

There must be a better way
None, just React and SVG elements.
Did you ever open the folder which contains the app? Spotlight at least used to use the Launch Services database which was … idiosyncratic … about updating things. The Finder displaying it would reliably trigger that.

The other thing was, naturally, it has a database behind the scenes which historically was prone to silently breaking with no UI cue. Back when I did Mac system administration one of our scripts ran this periodically to deal with missing or duplicate entries in e.g. the Open with… menu:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r -f -v -domain local -domain user -domain system

The other thing you can try is nuking the Spotlight database:

mdutil -E -a

That'll be slow for a little while as it reindexes whatever it's configured to index but it fixed a fair number of odd problems, which often turned out to be due to previously-unknown hardware issues.
I believe you might be right about the why. Windows used to be optimized around user experience. The deal was, I pay my $200, and I get a good operating system. Now, I still pay my $200, but what I'm getting is an operating system optimized to generate further revenue from me, at the expense of basic usability. This might be acceptable in a F2P model, but not when I've paid good money for it!

Meanwhile, all this stuff just works on desktop Linux, because its goal is still to optimize user experience rather than some monetization metric at the expense of usability.
Agreed that fanatical adherence to DRY is a mistake. I did this when I was first starting out: any code that looked similar at all would be factored out into a new hyper-specific function, regardless of how unrelated the original pieces of code were. But this introduces extreme coupling between components that have no right being coupled, and makes evolving the code a nightmare (suddenly all your DRY-borne functions grow immense lists of configuration parameters to account for unforeseeable differences).

At the same time, let's not take this dogma too far in the other direction. Repeating oneself is still undesirable, but DRY-related refactoring should focus on behavior and intent, not on how the code looks. And abstractions are still good (they're how we get anything done at all!), but leaky abstractions should be avoided, indirection-via-abstraction should be minimized, and we should be vigilant against extreme and overeager overapplication of abstraction (insert your blub joke here).
If only one entity has the signing key, why not just use a centralized database?
That's a fair point, but the larger issue is that your comment and others you've posted are in the genre of political/ideological battle, which is not what we want here. It destroys good conversation, which is what we do want.

That doesn't mean you can't express your point of view, just that you need to try an order of magnitude or two harder to do it with respect. This means respect for the ones you're talking to, for the ones who have reason to disagree with you, and for the community at large. That takes effort and practice, but it's an effort many of us have made, and it turns out to be pretty satisfying as well as a way to make the community better instead of destroying it.
Regarding the quote in the title: Don't leave $8,000 dollars worth of stuff in your car? I enjoy Oakland and SF because you do have to keep your wits about you. If I left my backpack in my car and someone smashed my window to grab it I would blame myself.
Wow I'm an idiot. I completely forgot about the other (mainstream) definition of White Elephant. I was only thinking of the one that I learned in college. Total brain fart, and now my comment above looks like an insult when it was never meant to be one. I meant they're luxuries that I appreciate having but could easily live without.
Just FYI... part of that regulation is that they are capped on the max profit they can make. In addition, rate changes must be approved by an elected body (the state's public service commission).
Even if we have better tooling to make updating dependencies easy, there's still the fact that there's a lot of applications in production that are not maintained. If there are no maintainers there will be no updates..
Could this be the begining of the end for Facebook? Is 2017 for Facebook what 2009 was for BlackBerry and Nokia (when they were still getting record profits and revenues - they were already toast, they just didn't know it yet)?

https://www.emarketer.com/content/snapchat-snags-second-plac...

The significant drop in engagement may also be why Facebook is dumping the media sites from the news (ha!) feed like a hot potato. Although that was a very Facebook thing to do, it still seemed a little desperate and like it was happening sooner than expected.
A Case Study in LASP and Distribution at Scale [video]
And it does so quite efficiently.
I posted this on a similar topic:

# kilowatt-hours per transaction
# https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change
btc = 215

# Transactions per day
tpd = 3e5

# convert btu to terawatt-hours
# http://www.dvirc.org/how-much-energy-does-an-office-building-consume/
officeEnergyPerYear = 1.4e9*.293071/10^12

# https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/05/24-7-wall-st-banks-with-most-branches/16648133/
nBankBranchUS = 94725

# Convert to kw-h to tw-h
btcEnergyPerYear = btc*tpd*365/10^9

> btcEnergyPerYear/(officeEnergyPerYear*nBankBranchUS)
[1] 0.6057412

I have no idea if the source numbers are correct, but this is a better statistic. Mining uses the same amount of energy as used for ~58k average office buildings. So the worldwide bitcoin mining energy consumption is about half of that currently used for banks only in the US. This is assuming banks are "average" (probably higher due to security concerns) and of course that banking doesn't consume energy in any other way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614966

-----END-----

Has anyone actually tried doing one of these comparisons yet? I mean going beyond just back of the napkin? Can we get estimates so about whether credit cards consume more electricity than many countries? Without that this type of article falls flat. Actually it is interesting that it is so easy to estimate the total energy consumption in this case.
Makes you wonder what we'll find out is being withheld right now, 50 years from now.
What do you want to do with BTC scripts that you can't do now? P2SH lets you use arbitrary scripts, at least.