skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firebase creates lexicographically ordered random-looking UUIDs so you can always check relative entry order: https://firebase.googleblog.com/2015/02/the-2120-ways-to-ens...
Mervellous. Maybe this is true for a lot of DMSes, as well. But marvellous. :)
What's the alternative? It's far from perfect, but has no significant competition yet.
Geeks aren't as smart as they think they are. Particularly when it comes to business requirements. I'm guilty of that as much as anyone.
Yet as usual, the clarity is provided by responses that got downvote-bombed.
Redeeming+the+Time+-+Dr+Myles+Munroe
Airbnb employees not happy with my comment I guess, but it's true. I don't want to have to give you my passport before I can go stay somewhere that I already booked like 6 months ago.
The Step-By-Step Process for Startups Planning Their Finance Stack
If that were the case, doing it right would be hiring someone external at a reasonable rate to demonstrate and ensure impartiality, given the gravity of the subject claims. Even if the good intentions were there, the optics are all wrong (particularly the fee), which is what will matter to the jury. Throwing him under the bus while paying him to investigate the driving habits of the bus is a pretty interesting smell.
Most people don't want their own server. Consider the person whose only computer is a phone. (That's, for example, most people in Japan; most people in the West under 15; etc.) Do they want to serve documents from their phone? No, because their phone doesn't have an always-on high-upload-bandwidth internet connection!

Only certain computers make good servers. It's more likely that everyone will get an automatic slice of a good server somewhere (i.e. the ISP-hosted "cloudlets" concept—your phone can launch edge-hosted VMs as if they were threads) than that people will suddenly, after all this time, start wanting to host things directly on their crap low-availability hardware.
Home assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) combined with zwave devices gives you an open source controller and a LAN only network of things. You can also to in to hundreds of existing devices/platforms. The platform is growing rapidly in capabilities and integrations.
> The issue is not how to get rid of Excel, it's how do we make a better spreadsheet...

Or how do we better support custom tools integrating with Excel.

Excel has a number of extensibility models... maybe too many;

* VBA,

* XLL add-ins (which is a C++ API, but check out the excellent Excel-DNA [1] which is a C# wrapper around this),

* Visual Studio Tools for Office, which doesn't support the ability to implement your own custom functions (e.g. =MyAddIn.GetStockPrice() unlike the previous two options, and

* The more recent 'Apps for Office' extensibility model across the whole Office suite, which is basically an embedded web browser instance in your Office app which gets a Javascript API for interacting with your Office document. This is also getting custom functions support in Excel [2]

At the energy consultancy I work for we have built a suite of Excel add-ins that allow analysts to get the data that they want easily into their sheets, but don't impose any (unreasonable) restrictions on how they work with the data.

[1] https://excel-dna.net/
[2] https://dev.office.com/docs/add-ins/excel/custom-functions-o...
Excel sheets aren't very maintainable. You get a big grid, plus named ranges. There aren't good tools for generalisation or abstraction, so big sheets have all the usual problems of bad software: hard to understand, hard to change, full of inconsistencies, etc. There are also no good options for source control, modular reuse, etc.

I work on a desk which has a lot of vital calculations in Excel spreadsheets. They work, and we make money, but it takes a lot of human effort (expensive trader effort!) to keep them working properly. If we want to scale up - more people, more products, etc - we need to move more and more of those calculations into software.

Improvements to or replacements for the spreadsheet as tools for non-programmers would certainly be helpful. But better tools and techniques for programmers to port functionality from spreadsheets to 'real' software would also be helpful.
I got a few copies of my daughter's (California) birth certificate a few months ago and it was printed with a laser printer. But: the border of the papers were intaglio printed, each certificate has a unique barcode, and was embossed. You could counterfeit it but it seems like a fair amount of work and would have issues with the unique ID on each one.
In most states, no form of ID is required to vote. You walk in to your polling place and tell them your name and address. The vetting takes place during the voter registration process which either puts your name on the Voter Roll or not. You walk into the designated place that has your name in the book, and then you sign in as having received a ballot, on the line listing your name and address.

The last poll worker who asked me for an ID, I told them ID was not required in order to vote. They handed me my ballot, without even a single word of argument. It's not illegal for them to ask either; it's just a form of voter suppression instituted by either the Country Registrar, the District Supervisor or the Precinct Head.
Braking with the intention to cause an accident is illegal in some places. I can't find any law making it illegal to suddenly brake because you mistakenly believe that it is necessary to do so.
First thing I noticed too. Quite sneaky how they missed that. Speaking of headers, really want to use this one next: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2823.
Depending on what kind of firm or sector of the financial industry you're in, financial models have a problem of constantly changing. Web apps and other programmed solutions work well when you have to repeat the same model over and over, but they don't work well if you're constantly adjusting the model or changing its parameters/calculations.

In that case Excel's instant update and flexible (but quite powerful) formula scripting is often the best tool for the job because it means you remove the programmer middle man. I know some shops prefer to just teach the analysts how to write code.
​ttyasc – ttyrec to asciinema translator
Bad on twitter forsure, but do you really think a 'Tech person' gets to make that decision?
I don't know your background but "taking an Excel workbook and using that as requirements to drive an implementation" is not speedy. I've done this several times in my career and it's very, very difficult. Not because there is any "idealization", but because the reason the spreadsheet works is because a human is doing half of the work. These spreadsheets are not some "hello world" easy to understand product - they are the result of months/years of effort by a team of individuals which has grown beyond Excel's ability to handle. Translating that into code is not "quick and speedy" even if one is doing a like-for-like implementation.
Raptor won't fly on the Falcon, so it depends on the arrival of the BFR. Elon wants that to be doing Mars missions in the 2022 window, so test flights would have to precede that by some time. Construction of the first BFR is due to start around Q2 next year; when it gets in the air is anybody's guess.
If people didn't routinely fail simple "can you think and write it in code" problems like fizz buzz I wouldn't ask them. But they do so I do.

Dijkstra observed that the majority of working programmers can't even write a correct binary search. I tried using it as an interview question and gave up because nobody got it right.
Something about multihash makes me worry it's a security risk. Like I worry that it encourages this mistake:

1. Define a new protocol with multihash somewhere in it.

2. Import a super convenient multihash library.

3. Verify all hashes with a simple library function.

That sounds super natural and convenient to me, but if it means that you support MD4 by default, then you've introduced a downgrade attack into your protocol.
I see a lot of early stage companies spending way too much on marketing before they have a product to launch.

Because the marketing team is ready to boom it, the product has to even more stable than it otherwise would be. So ironically, they keep adding more features and launch too slowly. Or they could have some fixed launch date and developers end up hacking in buggy features to meet a deadline. The pressure costs a lot more in terms of engineering as well.

I've seen some budget around $50k marketing to get around 1,000 downloads.
An interesting question this raises is--what determines when the training has overfitted to the noise/error in the input image? If that's another NN that provides a perceptual model of quality, how was it trained? ;)
If anyone is wondering there is a mostly-free-as-in-free-speech, self-hosted alternative: Eclipse Che.

https://www.eclipse.org/che/
Google Cloud Brings in Former Intel Exec Diane Bryant as COO
could be hush money for some kind of sexual thing
Citation? I haven't been able to find any instance where this is true except where the driver was found to have braked suddenly with the intent to cause an accident, which would clearly not have been the case with a self-driving car.
If you enjoyed this article, you might like HN'er tptacek's https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
Depends on where you get it. My replacement is laser printed and notarized on very fancy certificate paper (California).
Or seek greater adoption of standards around spreadsheets, such as FAST [1].. Flexible, Appropriate, Structured, Transparent.

[1] http://www.fast-standard.org/
I was unable to find such a flag last time I had this issue. It’s not black magic, but most other platforms don’t require you to build on the oldest platform you support. That can be quite a pain if that version hasn’t backported newer versions of the tool chain you are using, requiring you to do a custom build of that instead of using the package manager. So not quite an apt-get away.
Real wish or drunken regret? A “Do Not Resuscitate” tattoo throws doctors
You could be like a familial relation of mine, who didn't have a social security card, driver's license, or birth certificate. He lost them a long time ago.

Birth certificate was impossible to replace because the courthouse or whatever burned down before the records were computerized.

You can't get a social security card without a driver's license, and vice versa. He literally had tried almost everything.

In the end another family member photoshopped a social security card so he could get a driver's license, which he used to get an actual social security card.

The whole system is stupid as hell. It's easier to navigate if you lie than if you act truthfully.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYQWAdAbdfA
That lens mount looks super dodgy.
Can you give an example of a good practically focused question?
>
It also violates decency and common sense as well, and veers into plain old brutality.

Yup.

This should result in a large settlement, and punishment ranging from minor discipline to jail time for the officers involved.
I think you missed the point. The comment you replied to is stating that excel does not have these things. Proper software engineering will have these. Excel is fast, but also easy to repeat a mistake. With unit tests, software is much less likely to repeat a mistake. Once the mistake is made, found, corrected, unit tested, making the mistake again is likely to be caught by the unit test.
In my experience, the fact there is a human being staring at the output all day goes a long way towards mitigating the lack of automatic tests.

As programmers, we write tests because we can't see what's happening inside the program while it's at work, so we have to give it a thorough exam before letting it do that. Spreadsheet jockeys can take a radically different approach to validation.
maybe policy shouldn't be based on a minority of insane religious zealots.
I've had the feeling that Alphabet has been using Lyft as a cat's paw in its war with Uber. Given its buckets of cash and what Alphabet perceives as the opportunity to dominate the next big market, can't Lyft expect almost unlimited funding? Or even an acquisition once its independence is not an asset?
RSNA 2017: Be skeptical of implausible claims about deep learning
Just found this, because the sickill [0] "creator of asciinema" starred this project on Github.

I think this is really neat, especially when you like to record something on a constrained environment, that might have ttyrec available, but not asciinema itself.

PS: I wonder if there is anyone who's using self-hosted asciinema (for example at work).
> 2) Protections for criminal defendants in the US are the greatest in the world:

Other countries (such as Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) have weaker protections for criminal defendants during the trial, yes. But, assuming you are convicted, prison sentences tend to be shorter on average and there is no death penalty. On another point, to compare Australia to the US, the High Court of Australia has basically full appellate jurisdiction (even on state law questions) when it chooses to exercise it, whereas the US Supreme Court's jurisdiction is limited to appeals on points of federal law only, and AEDPA has limited access to federal habeas corpus. So I think the convicted have greater rights of appeal under Australian law than US law. So it isn't clear to me that criminal defendants actually have more rights under the US system overall – they have more rights prior to conviction, but less rights afterward.
As much as I am a sucker for such gadgets (owner of Psion 5 in the past; those memories of playing Infocom games on a Psion are difficult to forget), I don't see a point apart from a bunch of enthusiasts...

It lacks the pocket factor of a smartphone, usability of a full-sized keyboard and a screen size to support practical apps beyond basic browsing etc. Couple this with a prohibitive price point (which can buy you a high-end smartphone, a very solid Chromebook, or a "generally practical" laptop)... I just cannot find a solid use case for this kind of device...
Wasn't there an issue with JWT that was summarized as this:

"This is a good idea, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem: attackers control the choice of algorithm" ?

Here's another quote from the Wireguard paper[1]:

"Finally, WireGuard is cryptographically opinionated. It intentionally lacks cipher and protocol agility. If holes are found in the underlying primitives, all endpoints will be required to update"

[1]: https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf
Ah, ok. That makes sense. Thank you for the clarification.
My definition of "doesn't work" here is: the security guarantees that the consensus protocol provides stop applying. Just because nobody has found it worthwhile to attack Ethereum "not a currency" stuff yet doesn't mean that it's safe.
I wonder if the $20K settlement is a contractual sanction against the vendor for making an identity error.
I also wonder if there is a middle way here... in encouraging greater use of interactive notebook computing such as that espoused by Mathematica, Jupyter Notebook, IPython, etc.
Literally none of the old assumptions will apply. Let's go through some of them.

1. Maintenance. Electric vehicles require far less maintenance than ICE vehicles. (First thing I found on Google: https://insideevs.com/ev-vs-ice-maintenance-the-first-100000...)

2. Vehicle size. Once these systems are up and running, do you think Waymo & Uber, once their systems reach any level of maturity, are going to send you a 4 person vehicle to pick up 1 person? This reduces:

a- the capital cost of the vehicle

b- its cost of maintenance (less parts, etc)

c- the amount of energy required to get from point A to point B

Which brings me to...

3. Price of electricity. Waymo, Uber, et al will get their electricity at wholesale rates.

4. Low cost of capital. The cost to access the capital to buy these vehicles will be lower than anything a peon like you or me could ever access.

5. Bulk-buying 1,000,000 vehicles. No dealers, no dealer commissions, zero customizations, less parts, smaller vehicles, no car manufacturer marketing budget...

6. Maintenance scaling. The need to scale maintenance operations country-wide is going to lead to its own interesting effects. With a hard limit on the types of vehicles in a network, most cleaning and general maintenance will, in time, be doable by human-monitored robots.

7. Ride subsidization will effectively crush any margins any of these companies could ever hope to have.

8. Shared depreciation. Depreciation will be significant per vehicle but overall, cheaper, as each vehicle will have more utilization.

I'd hesitate to guess at the effects of all of the above, but it's not much of a stretch to anticipate an additional 50% reduction here, barring any unforeseen taxes, of course.

You might pay more for the network with great coverage and lux vehicles.

You might pay less for the crappy network with dirty cars and plastic seat buckets.

Etc.
There is still a good chance they might do a FH Raptor-powered second stage :)
I was talking about thing he was working on in 2014 - 2015, which his website described as:

> On the surface, Eve is an environment a little like Excel that allows you to ‘program’ simply by moving columns and rows around in tables. Under the covers it’s a powerful database, a temporal logic language, and a flexible IDE [Integrated Development Environment] that allows you to build anything from a simple website to complex algorithms.

Now, I guess they're doing something completely different.
I wonder why would a bar be considered a reasonable place to be looking for a future spouse (vs., say, for a good chat or a one-night stand).
How do you handle authenticating to the financial institutions?
> I am opposed to a national ID on a very specific point: It can be used as a tool for voter suppression if not done correctly.

Having a free, low barrier, nationally accepted ID would help to disarm the weapon of voter suppression by ID demands.
As someone originally from Jakarta, thank you for sharing this! Some of it resonates with my experience (esp. the rejection of colonial buildings) and some of the observations never occurred to me before.

Tidbit: "Pancasila" actually means "Five principles" so "The Five Pancasilas" sounds to me like Hugh Grant pointing out "The La Trattoria" in Mickey Blue Eyes.
This is something I would love to see. As evidenced by the netsec person you spoke to, not everyone's comfortable with electronics. But a pre-built thing or kit that leaves little to no chance of user error would provide a great deal of value to a great many people.
There's still hope that they will make their first static test fire in December, though! This will be their first time lighting all 27 engines, so it could be very exciting.

A FH static fire can only be done on the pad: there is no test stand big enough to do it.
If you don't make type mistakes, good for you, but why not let the compiler or interpreter provide a safety net, just in case? In addition, static typing makes refactoring easier because you can confidently redesign your code and let the implementation tell you which types you haven't yet adjusted. Besides, type inference means that you do not even have to write out the type yourself in many cases. (However, to do so is better for documentation.)

Also, why do you think that Microsoft is secretly pushing static typing? /Maybe/ it's shilling for TypeScript, but there are a lot of other statically typed languages that compile to JavaScript, such as Elm.
Sounds extremely low. They violated his rights.
The other ride hailing apps are in the business of selling hailing services to taxi firms and have sales teams dedicated to doing so, are not despised by taxi firms, and provide solutions optimised for regulated taxi firms. If they tend to provide surprisingly few drivers and poor price estimations and the app companies are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of revenue and geographic spread, that's probably an indication the licensed-partnerships-with-cab-firms market is more awkward and less lucrative than it sounds.

And the taxi firms usually won't and often legally can't use Uber's pricing algorithms which is pretty much the only secret sauce to the app, they don't want to ignore bylaws that Uber has cheerfully skirted around and they don't want their expensively-licensed drivers competing for leads on an equal footing with new Uber drivers.
Yes, it doesn't use binary-encoded decimal. I guess the precision is good enough...
Just to put things in perspective, a quick google search gives a number of 380k-442k detentions per year [1]. The article states 2,840 citizens identified for deportation since 2002 (or average ~190/yr)[^]. Giving us an error rate of ~0.046%, averaged over the 15 years.

[^] were these people detained? Does it count in the data set?

[1] http://www.endisolation.org/resources/immigration-detention/ (these numbers may be wrong, I haven't fact checked this site)
Never useless. "Junk hacking" be it for security or for hardware hacks like this. It often ends up being surprisingly important and useful in expected and unexpected ways :)

See: Travis Goodspeed - A Keynote in Praise of Junk Hacking. It is a very enjoyable talk.
See my response above. The buyers of these vehicles are going to be the networks themselves, which will eliminate most if not all car brands.

The car brands know it, which is why they're panicking.

(Why ALL car brands? Because you're going to have companies like Bosch and Foxconn competing. I'd like to see Ford beat Foxconn at a challenge like this.)
The aluminium coating is so thin that the resistance is high enough that it actually isn't a great signal blocker.

My phone still gets both GPS and LTE inside a similar bag.

You can see how thin the bag is by holding it up to sunlight - you can see through it!
Ok, but that's different from including crypto at all. I'm surprised Go uses those algorithms in its standard library TLS stack, but they're not made available as part of the standard crypto packages...
Great suggestion with Sushi go, basically functions as a smaller game space version of Dominion/7 wonders/MtG draft.

Also not surprised to hear that our group isn't the only ones playing a "Razz" (poker variant where you try for the weakest hand) variant of Sushi Go.

I found reversing points to make the game chaotic and more casual.
National data breach notification law introduced by Senate Commerce Committee
Wow! Thanks! It's great to know there're DIY solutions. I will try to approach them and see what they have to say.
Ya'll hiring?
Im not sure what you mean by 'They could be food'?

Any start up could build this, but most companies don't want to deal with an MVP and the bugs that come with it, or a startup that may or may not exist in 6 months, etc... Companies will over pay for enterprise grade software if it has a history of just working. This is why Uber has an advantage, software that has a track record of doing what it says it does.
> I am opposed to a national ID on a very specific point: It can be used as a tool for voter suppression if not done correctly.

We can solve it by making it the duty of the government to provide everyone with ID cards, not the other way. This is an even easier problem than universal healthcare.

But of course, "the government is always inefficient!" crowd will fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening.
Yeah, the guy was clever but clearly cheating and he deserves to be fired. Now, about that reporter:

> Aluminum is not a great conductor—it heats up when a lot of power is pushed through it—so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to try to block a strong radio signal from inside.

Uh... what? I mean, I guess, if you're operating a tracking radar or long distance microwave transmitter inside that snack bag, sure. But a LTE radio with a GPS? Are you serious?
Only some bookmarklets that go to a data URL on top level are affected. They should be easy to modify to open them inside an iframe or to replace the existing document instead.