skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much does it cost to maintain a petition site like We the People?
White House today announced it would temporarily shut down We The People, saying a new platform would save $1mm. The site is basically a petition site where users can create and sign petitions and the president could personally reply after the signatures reach a certain threshold.

How much does it normally cost to build and maintain a site like this? Is there any information about how much the White House spends on this site? Is the number normally inflated because it’s a government site?

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/365521-trump-admin-to-temporarily-take-down-petition-website

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/
Exactly what this exchange has done : "The exchange added that the hackers did not manage to steal all the digital cash it held because a lot was lodged in a "cold wallet" - a secure store used to hold the assets that were not being traded."
In terms of rural areas, this will be an interesting challenge. When you drive cross country in the USA, you can expect to find gasoline reasonably close to even the most remote areas. The distance to the next gas station from anywhere in the USA is well below the range of the typical car.

However, in regards to cities, you are presenting a situation where the charging station comes to the parked car, rather than the car going to the charging station. While that would be quite convenient, if the charging times are rapidly decreased, there’s no reason car owners in cities would not be able to drive to stations to charge up, as drivers do with gas stations today.
Yes, there are already quite a few ongoing ports to WebAssembly, including TypeScript dialects.

https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm
> That is not as true as it sounds at first glance.

No. It is exactly as true as it sounds.

The conclusions one draws from facts are whatever they are. But the facts themselves are not racist, and it is not racist to say things that are factually correct. Ever. Full stop.

Also it’s ok to be white. Saying that it’s ok to be white is not racist.
On the site, under '3. Slow Computing':

"Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the "Attention Economy". In just trying to watch one youtube video, a typical user is confronted with dozens of other appeals to focus somewhere else: comments, ratings, related videos, advertisements, video responses, etc. Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else. When we remove the screen (and by necessity, simplify the interface) we introduce a new form of temporality, where the speed of interaction might more accurately reflect our ability to percieve and understand information."

I think this is the important part of the whole idea.
On the other hand, and, in my opinion, you can achieve a similar experience as:

1. use a laptop and/or desktop

2. disable your notification system on your desktop

3. browse the web with an extremely simple browser, like w3m

4. one display

5. full-screen mode

6. don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown

I found this the best way to focus on content and work, however, most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications.
I guess I mostly agree. I just think that theoretically it should be able for web applications to be open source just as much as our GNU systems are, and that it's a shame that in practice, this is often not the case.
Suv/minivan/wagon aren't wealthy cars, they are suburban/rural family cars.
I'd say that there's a dearth of desktop apps, creating them in a cross-platform way is easy enough. Not that the situation got a whole lot better, but if you're doing web UX i.e. don't give a damn about native UI guidelines anyway, minor deviations that UI toolkits introduce pale in comparison.

And yeah, I think there were three waves of sound apps on Linux: mp3s becoming commmon/computers fast enough (mid-90s), Amarok switching UIs and everyone writing a retro-replacement and recently music moving into the clouds, thus requiring players that connect to Spotify et al.
Totally agree. It's an interesting case - I never would have expected to see laws interpreted to protect public art such as this.

Why should any public artist have an expectation of their art being preserved? Just because a property owner grants permission, I would assume that property owner reserves the right to change their mind at any time, no?

If it was a sculpture in the parking lot, would we feel the same way? Can the property owner demolish that without the 90 day heads-up?

Can previous artists at that site turn around and sue the last wave of artists for doing the exact same thing?
"And in this matter they HAVE to be perfect. It's not hard."

How arrogant. It's seem that even you struggle with being perfect...
120miles is the capacity of affordable EV today. We hope it gets better.
How would that fix the problem you still can't save data from users from the EU.
Having had to use REISUB just last week for the first time in a long time, this is rather useful knowledge about the penguin.
Yes, if people accept fractional reserve banking for bitcoin. I'd actually assume that's how most exchanges operate under the hood but many people who buy into bitcoin for ideological reasons won't accept that.

A consequence of making that formal is that the total owned amount of bitcoin would be more than 21m, because the hacker would own bitcoin and the users would own bitcoin on the exchange.

As long as there isn't a bank run, that discrepancy would not be a problem, but it would deflate the currency, also seen as unacceptable to bitcoin purists.

edit: access -> accept.
Please let's stop spreading this "elixir is like fast/better ruby". The syntax is not even that similar, and the runtime is completely different, the patterns and tools available not the same at all.

I know it's probably a hill on which I'm gonna die and get a lot of downvotes, but we should really try to not force Elixir into being a new, fast ruby and let it evolve and solve problems in its own ways.
One way to way too seed activities would be to let professional organizers advertise on the platform (also solves monetization). E.g. a local sports club could offer a trial training session for small groups through the platform.

Trying something new is usually slightly uncomfortable when you're the only newbie (and everyone else has to accommodate you); and in the clubs I've been a member of, those who stuck around for longer were almost always already friends with another member.

Having whole groups sign up at once gives the club a better chance at retaining them and should also provide a fun experience for everyone even if they don't decide to stay.
Native multi-model databases are gaining popularity
Haidt: What the Current Political Climate Is Doing to Our Country and Universities
Perhaps technology can help answer this.

E.g. if a large number of facebook users "like" a photo of the artwork, then it can be considered art.

If someone wants to know if something is art, they can take a picture, and submit it to facebook, and they can then photo-id it and determine its "art" status.
Show HN: A Platform for Many-Agent Reinforcement Learning
اون اي on e بث مباشر
The reasons were more social than technical. I think PostgREST is a wonderful piece of software and not lacking in any regard that I am aware of.
How a workflow management system can transform you into a model worker
https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/7klree/aws_visual_moni...
So far, it seems like a decent enough business idea to start an exchange, wait for the wallets to warm up nicely, then get "hacked".
This is really beautiful. I love the idea of designing interfaces that pinch off the flow of information just a bit so our attention can’t be forced to jump around as fast.
One small piece of this has reignited my desire to build something similar to the BERG Tiny Printer [1]. My only issue with such a thing is that I don't want to use thermal paper.. or any paper if I can avoid it.

Going forward, I think there may be a market for a small eink tablet (~4.5" or so) that presents curated news, articles, etc -- something ideal for commuting by bus, plane, or any other passive time without loads of animated ads, popups for newsletters, and absolutely nothing 'social.' This leads me toward a desire for proper epub releases for magazines like The New Yorker and stuff that could scale to a smaller screen.

Services like Zinio [2], which most libraries provide, would be an excellent tie-in for a small device like this.

[1] https://vimeo.com/32796535
[2] http://zinio.com
I rememeber us getting a telegram from an aunt who lived abroad in the 70s. The local post office phoned us with the message and the written telegram itself was delivered by the postman, next day. I kept it for awhile.
Ever heard of Western Union, the company that does money orders? They were the big telegraph company a century ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_union
You can do this is most small countries.
Very interesting, never knew such a thing existed.

https://www.7cups.com/about/howitworks.php
Twitter is soaring today as its stock hits a high for the year
I guess I don't understand the original post then. Of course if you live in a rural area you'll need a car with longer range than an EV. Most people don't live in rural areas, so most people won't need to own a gas powered car to go alongside their electric car.

It just seems like an unfair complaint about electric vehicles - the problem isn't the EV's, but people buying them without having a good use for them. I don't buy a jackhammer and then complain that I have no use for it
Mozilla changed this somewhere down the line (I don't know when). Firefox Sync, back when it was called Mozilla Weave, used 2 passwords.
It really depends on what your workload is. I would assume for most people 64 GB is going to be more than enough for the next 5 years.

For me the real concern is with the GPU. As soon as apple comes out with a 32GB macbook pro I'll probably upgrade and just attach an eGPU to it.
I second that. It’s absolutely impractical.
Actually getting tens-hundreds of millions out of the traditional banking system is _hard_. Transactions can always be reversed, and you'll never pull out millions in cash without some serious questions asked.
"Rats with wings" - you mean pigeons?
Comments Are Essential for News Sites. We’re Making Changes to Improve Ours
Kotlin/Native v0.5 released: calling Kotlin from Swift and C, LLVM 5 and more
Then you've just got Meetup again though, where you get a different group of people going each week (that's my experience anyway)
ya that is correct, i take common things like print/control statements, function definitions, etc and make sure i see them a lot so i dont forget them (haskell is a language im trying to learn, i do not use it for work so i dont see these things as much as i would)
I just keep following things in mind while building product.
avoiding mainstream ideas
working demo/prototype
creativity
feasibility and viability
Making sure it adds value to what organizers wants
Burning dollars is achieved by issuing more bonds.
> At some point Bitcoin exchanges will have to realise that they need to be ~as secure as a bank is~ orders of magnitude more secure than a bank. For exactly the same reason.

Fixed that for you. Banks can accept risks to liquidity pretty readily because cash is centrally controlled. Considering that cryptocurrencies are hyper-liquid and are unrecoverable short of a hard fork in the event of a catastrophic event (e.g. with eth after the DAO hack), exchanges need to have measures in place which would be unheard-of at most other firms.
what big players emerged after the tulip bubble?
Red (and Rebol) are fantastic but unfortunately the learning curve is very steep for people that don't know it. I spent a month reading everything on the internet about Rebol, then Red was obvious but before that it's really hard to get into that world. IMHO Red should have something like a definitive book covering all aspects in one place (like [0]) because it has a vast array powerful features (URI, money, time literals, parse and other dialects) etc. Without concise but a complete guide the language appears to be just a weird "let's use [ ] instead of { }" construct.

[0]: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do
I know, right?! This is the first I'd ever heard or read about it and I've been using linux now for ... wow. since 2000? I remember several distros had ctl+alt+backspace mapped to something that would kill your X session and boot you back to the graphical login but I haven't seen that in a long time.

(edit, I had to google REISUB: http://blog.kember.net/articles/reisub-the-gentle-linux-rest...)
Ah hah! Now _that's_ a conundrum... How can it be grafitti if it's not subversive? Grafitti as art would vanish in a puff of logic.
It's not sad: it's illegal - as long as the EU is concerned.
Use a code beautifier. JavaScript code isn't encrypted or compiled to binary. It is just text.
https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript/blob/master...

This doesn't look like traditional TypeScript to me. The explicit loads/stores give away the whole trick.

https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript/blob/master...

And it requires JS twice the size of the TypeScript to actually use the output generated by AssemblyScript. I personally don't see WASM a valid target for AssemblyScript for another year or two, until either the gc or host-bindings proposals lands.
You can still reason by analogy with something you can visualise. You can't visualise 3+1 = 4 spacetime dimensions, but you can pretend that space has 2 dimensions so that you can visualise it as 2+1 dimensions. Blind algebra rarely works. I think that many have an optimistic view of blind algebra because proofs are often stated as algebra without geometric intuition, even when the author of the theorem almost certainly used geometric intuition to come up with it. This can give a false impression. I've seen people struggle tremendously with simple proofs in Hilbert spaces, when the corresponding proof in 2 dimensions is easy by drawing a picture and translating that into algebra that works just as well in the more general setting. For example, let S be a closed subspace of Hilbert space H and x in H. Prove |x-y| is minimised over y in S iff x-y is orthogonal to S.
Actually met my oldest friend on ICQ random chat. Lost touch with everyone from High School, University but still chat to him most days and visit when we're in the same country.

Maybe there is hope for it.
First drive: Renault Symbioz autonomous prototype
If you look at the specific issue that provoked this law, you will see issues that can - and should - be regulated. the city was using DNA matching software that turns out to have demonstrable errors, yet the office of the medical examiner stonewalled all attempts to have it audited until, thankfully, the courts forced the issue.

This sort of unjustifiable secrecy (the accused absolutely have a right to examine the premises of the accusation) can be regulated. Unfortunately, this law substitutes nebulous criteria which, no matter how worthy, are likely to turn a clear-cut situation into a tar-pit of legal wrangling that the victims cannot afford to enter.

The chief medical examiner is still holding fast on the very dubious claim that these flaws raise no doubts about the convictions in other cases where it was used, another area where I think specific legislation is needed.

> How do you regulate algorithmic learning when we don't fully understand how learning works?

This was not one of those cases. There are, however, cases - and this would be one if it applied - where it is reasonable to say that you can't use it until you can explain how it works.
Mattermost 4.5: Zoom plugin for video, audio and screen sharing
Let's Code Physics
It actually robs some of the ephemeral mystique of graffiti. It's really gutsy to put effort into art you know someone can destroy the next day.

I consider it one of the unique constraints of the form.

Of course, in this instance, there was an inviting space for it. As laws go, 90 days to come and preserve the art is pretty reasonable to the property owner, but I can also see that given the unique form, he assumed it could be destroyed.
New technology starts with the above-well-off, using tech you currency consider "absurdly unattaible to the masses" (like cars in the 20s, or telephone in the 40s, or computers in the 60s, or 24/7 internet in the 90s): for instance, when you just get a basically free gigabit connection straight into the backbone (like in a new upscale Japanese apartment building) the very idea that latency could even be a problem just... disappears.

In that context, just attaching an interactive window to a remote running process (as long as it can stream faster than whatever is your minimum acceptable framerate at your minimum acceptable resolution) is literally indistinguishable from running locally. So I frankly do hope that comes to pass (as long as I also get to keep being able to build a desktop computer for working offline).
The hat fastener actually works quite well.

Not because I know he invented it, or anything of the like. More that a paperclip & upside-down comb taped to the inside of a hat was a trick we used in media.

Apparently it got patented in the US [0]... Which probably means the patent is still valid. (Incidentally, going through those that reference it, you can see patent-files' transition from mostly-technical to mostly-legal.)

[0] https://www.google.com/patents/US715600
> Pretty much everything in (...) JS is an object

Except primitives that are not objects but (some) can be autoboxed to behave like objects.

A riddle:

var a = 2;
a.b = 3;
console.log(a.b);
> I think it's something we just don't quite understand.

There was a period of relative calm between the instantiation of post-1929-crash banking regulations and the repeal of Glass-Steagall (Gramm-Leach-Bliley) and the deregulation of derivatives (CFMA) in the late 90's/early 2000's. Perhaps finance is better understood than is recognized.
> Rob talks about how complex numbers are just another kind of "fake number" on top of negative numbers, fractions, square roots...And this is a good thing to point out.

I agree. I think complex numbers are best explained in the context of motivations for number systems (and I made a comment explaining complex numbers this way about a month ago[1]). This way takes longer than just answering the question, “what’s a complex number?”, but it also builds a better intuition of why complex numbers aren’t silly (or at least, why they’re only as silly as anything that isn’t a natural number). If you can get a student to be okay with the idea that we define new number systems to resolve problems in prior ones, you can get them to be okay with a construction of complex numbers from the reals, just as they’ll accept a construction of the irrationals from the rationals, and integers from the naturals, etc.

I find that a really rigorous (albeit...spartan) first pass for understanding complex numbers can be developed by reading through Chapter 1 of Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis. He doesn’t go quite as far as developing Peano arithmetic from first principles, but he does build up the number systems successively, beginning with the natural numbers if I recall correctly. That was the first book I read where I felt like I really understood what complex numbers were, because up until that point I was only dealing with them algebraically using an explicit i in the form a + bi. Rudin’s development of the complex plane and representation of real and complex numbers as points (a, b) is much better for intuition, in my experience, and it lights the way to an even deeper intuition of what complex numbers are in the context of Euclidean spaces later on.

That said, Rudin is terse to the point that many would call him pretentious, so if there is another book that does the same thing with better exposition, that might be a better choice...

> But there is one further thing to note, which is the inherent ambiguity between i and -i. We can't tell these apart. John Conway says this well, when asked about the square root of -1 his reply is "which square root of -1 do you mean?" (paraphrasing.)

It’s been a while since I did this exercise, but if I recall correctly this ambiguity is part of the proof that we cannot order the complex field, right? We end up with an absurdity because i should be greater than -i, but i^3 = -i, which evidently resists coherent ordering. And similarly i x i = -1, but -i x i = 1.

____________________________

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729381
Polio – Our World in Data
in the same way the imaginary numbers are more than the real number line, i * ℝ != ℝ.
Update: added a few lines about the books than just a name listing

From the ones I read in 2017, I would highly recommend (non-IT):

1. The hidden life of trees- Peter Wohlleben Why forest trees are different than the ones you plant, how the communicate, how they care for their friends when they are not well, how mother trees protect their young ones by not letting them grow too fast, the fungi network, etc. The book is very easy to read- there is no scientific terminology overload. Things are told very simply. Not restricted to students of the subject. Learned something interesting every couple of pages.
Another aspect is that the love shows. It is very clear that the author is in love with the subject. The author manages a wild forest in Germany and talks mainly about trees in terms of beeches, firs, oaks, etc. The author is politely insistent that we should protect the natural wild forests and let them be.

2. Why the allies won- Richard Overy Probably the best book I read on WW2. So many more factors went into winning the war than actual fight. Probably appealed to my analytical mind.

3. India After Gandhi- Ramachandra Guha As the author says history ends for many Indians with freedom. Very good chronicles. Started appreciating Nehru more.

4. Re-read Gone With The Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Godfather and a few P.G Wodehouse- all of which I like.

Currently, halfway through Stephen Fry's Mythos which seems good enough to recommend. I am pretty new to the Greek Mythology and he is a good story teller. Don't have much to compare it with, though.

Also, by choice, I read quite a few books in rural Marathi(an Indian regional language) and was surprised how good the story telling was. Also noticed that I had gone quite far from my mother tongue but was happy to see how easy it was to go back.

Please answer my similar question https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15960188
Submitting this because it has interesting information about historical treatment for polio.
This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights prevail.
Off topic, but this stack exchange post convinced me that the Roman's didn't have the metallurgical skills to truly enter the age of steam[0]. They didn't have the ability to mine enough iron nor the ability to cast (and definitely not mill) it precisely enough for proper steam engine parts.

[0]: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/98363/26525
Facebook: Post more to feel better about yourself
Pocket is still there, enabled by default.
> steam engines, trains, intercontinental ship travel and a whole range of things

Trains? Trains haven't died out. What are you on about?
Shit as a service
While generally I'd agree, this is a pretty respected (guest?) writer.
In Germany politicians drive around in bullet-proof BMW/Mercedes.