skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> New slots can be easily created by adding runways or building new airports.

I wouldn't call that "easy". How many new runways are going to be built next year? How many new airports? I'll make a guess that the answers are "none" and "very few or none".
Ask HN: Should this video be banned from HN?
Saw this post on the the front page earlier, noticed it got deleted when I tried going to comments. I'm curious what the community thinks about the deletion and contents of this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP6uyX9hDc0

It's a woman's perspective on being ostracized in the Atlanta tech scene. Author claims she was falsely accused of doxing and stalking people in order to get her banned from meet ups and event spaces, because of her political views.
I'm sure the baby will be thrilled about this
Ah, but the applicant does not have to prove that the invention is nonobvious. I think that objective evidence of nonobviousness should be required, not at the time of application — the needed evidence might not exist yet at that point — but as the first step in an infringement proceeding. As for what would constitute objective evidence of nonobviousness, I think the Graham factors [0] are a great starting point:

* commercial success

* long felt but unsolved needs

* failure of others

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._John_Deere_Co.
I think they only use weight to screen people specifically at risk to determine if they need to take a closer look.

An easy, fast, cheap test which usually means a more expensive test or exam doesn’t need to take place.
The problem we have is that fewer and fewer people are choosing to pursue hard engineering skills, partly because they're, well, hard and partly because soft skills seem to provide an equal or better living.
I have nothing against philosophers, musicians and poets, I spent most of today being entertained by them on the radio, but without the hard skills the comforts of civilisation like running water, electricity and internet will disappear.
From my personal experience I would recommend Andrew NG's courses. (I am on the second one right now). I have done fast.ai's first course which is low on math and more practical (you directly jump to coding, and then try to make some sense of things.) CS231n is definitely a great option, however I chose coursera because I needed deadlines/reminders of Coursera to keep me motivated and finish something. If you are looking for more options, there are lot more courses listed here in Machine Learning category : https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses however I don't know if someone has reviewed them.
I'd infinitely prefer a manager with at least some hard skills than one with none. My most frustrating managers were the ones you describe, because they just weren't at all qualified to make decisions about what we were doing. I don't think I'm alone among engineers in that opinion.
One of the main reasons we got off the gold standard is in fact the scarcity of it was a shackle. Imagine if, say China decided to hoard gold, how much of an influence that artificial scarcity would have on all the other economies that could only value things in gold?

The US has 75% of all the world's reserves.

http://www.usfunds.com/investor-library/frank-talk/top-10-co...

Also, there is finite value in the total amount of gold available, so at a point, there is no room for growth. If there is say 1 billion worth of gold on Earth, the value per weight of gold would go through the roof. buying everyday items would be valued in specs of gold (or 18ths of specs). It's probably really easy to lose a spec of gold.

Finally, without inflation, it doesn't make financial sense to buy anything. Why buy a truck for 1oz of gold today when I could buy two for the same amount next year?
Deleted is a bad characterization. I guess your comment is about these articles. They are marked as duplicates and hidden.

---

* Why Ajit Pai Is Right (Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II) (stratechery.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800851 (14 points, 29 days ago, 3 comments)

First comment is:

> Is this not a repost? I could of sworn I saw this posted an hour or two ago.

> edit: It is! Here's the discussion from the previous post.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15798960 .

the linked post is an exact dupe and has 211 points, 29 days ago, 295 comments

---

* Y Combinator Quietly Ends Relationship with Peter Thiel (gizmodo.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15726550 (21 points, 40 days ago, 1 comment)

First comment is:

> Dupe; more comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15725108 .

the linked post is very similar and has 185 points, 40 days ago, 147 comments
Donald Knuth's Christmas Tree Lecture Tackles a 'Curious Problem'
They essentially can via the WebRTC api, albeit in a more cumbersome way. There's nothing inherently insecure about it and the onus rests on the serving party and the browser itself to ensure no foul play is happening.
you might want to consider ignoring removal of query parameters for the "recent url changes" section...
Also, IMHO, one of the best designed robots ever to appear in cinema[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_the_Robot
Completely agree, and I'd posit that if you have you never faced a manager with ONLY hard skills and no soft skills, you're lucky. They're miserable to work for. I worked for one who was promoted because he was really, really good at ServiceNow (the service du jour of our company), and he literally thought management was threatening people until he got his way....

...until he was forced out when none of the departments succeeded, that is.
Even now, Ubuntu releases start largely by forking debian unstable.
What Each Myers-Briggs Type Is Like at a Party – Astroligion.com
Sigh,

Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad.

The author lost me when they said "Massive amounts of data is still hidden behind firewalls or not online at all."

Except: Sci-hub, pirate bay, project Gutenberg, wikipedia, IMDB and even here on hacker news (I could go on but these are big ones).

Technology (in all forms) doesn't change humanity, technology enables humanity to change. It is just a tool and we have to decide what to do with it.

If for every Peter Theil we get one Ellon Musk, one space x one step toward progress then by all means I consider it a victory. This is progress, and compared to previous generations the price has been fairly low.
Interesting. Perhaps adding some random variance between common settings from different browsers would help to prevent this?

Assuming the vast majority of the time the settings are pretty arbitrary and don't need to be set to anything particularly specific, when specific values actually are needed, they should blend in fairly well.
I agree it should cover them (in theory). I would even agree that healthcare should be a human right. But even under a zero profit model, for the cases where the treatment is so expensive, what would the financials look like for all the insurance payers? Is it actually even possible?
Insightful. Thank you.
This would probably be true if China didn't subsidize delivery of packages to the US. In many cases it is cheaper to send a package from China to the US than send the same thing within the US.
Show HN: I'm making a Desktop Cryptocurrency App to manage your assets
I'm not absolving anyone of anything, and I'm curious what I might have said to suggest I am. I've met far more, as you say, "social assholes", and been thrown under buses by them far more often than by technical folk, of whatever caliber socialization they had to offer.
It's only fair...
Uber drivers have much lower operating expenses.
Ctrl+f "preventative care", 0 results. Gonna have to disagree with you.
I love my little microserver. I've ran Ubuntu for a while, then FreeNAS and now Alpine Linux though I've been playing with FreeBSD on my second laptop and am tempted to try running it instead. I'm already using ZFS for storage (migrated the pool between each OS).
That's correct. Given a polynomial time approximate algorithm for Ek-SAT (note, by approximate algorithm I mean along the lines of the formal definition of approximate algorithm, that the solution given by the algorithm falls in some fraction of the real answer for all instances, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness_of_approximation), you would show P=NP.

My first concerns, namely the usage of analog methods to solve NP-complete problems, lies along the same lines as this post:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2212

Moreover, from what I can see, and as you mention as your original concern, the extent of proof for the 'exponential-speedup' claim exists in the form of some benchmarks, hardly a proof that their method actually works on all instances, which would be needed to show that it is a approximation algorithm as commonly defined.

The purpose of my post was to highlight that for some problems (for example, TSP), even a really crappy approximation algorithm would imply P=NP. As highlighted by the authors of this paper, MAX-EkSAT is in a similar situation, though judging by https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~hungngo/classes/2006/594/notes/..., unlike TSP, approximation to SOME ratio is possible, though there exists aratio >1 which cannot be beat unless P=NP.

I was simply trying to address the statement: "So it appears that they're finding approximate solutions, so already it's rather less significant than the title suggests.
", since an actual approximation algorithm for some ratio really WOULD be significant (showing P=NP).
There are plenty of indicators that could be monitored in various patients for various diseases, but a lot of them may require doing things that are beyond the ability of someone who is not medically trained. Some of them require intravenous blood samples, for example. But others are like example you mention (which only requires that the patient weigh themselves at a given time each day).

It would be nice if we could make it simpler for people to measure things like their own hemoglobin A1C, blood urea nitrogen/creatinine, blood flow around organs/extremities, etc. and send the data to a service that can be used to alert medical staff if something looks like it's getting worse.
I read your post as objecting, not agreeing. Perhaps others have the same confusion.
Both doctors and hospitals are financially incentivized to avoid rehospitilization. It is actively tracked and directly impacts billing. Check out the "Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program" that Obamacare introduced.

I’m sick of people spreading FUD about medical billing based simply on the ridiculous “the man is out to get me” narrative.
I tend think of compassionate use more in the context of medical devices and biologics (e.g. synthetic antibodies) than small molecule drugs. And to reiterate FDA regulation has more to do with marketing (and prescription/reimbursement) than use.

For example, nutritional supplements are often recommended by doctors and incorporated in their practices, but are marketed as "promoting general health and wellness" and not treating a particular condition. Here you don't need any evidence of efficacy (or even safety), you only need to be able to show a "history of use". Many "structure-function" claims push the envelope (ex promotes liver health), but are still legal and FDA has been pretty consistent and clear about where they draw line.
Calcium pills almost definitely are not making your bones stronger
Your iPhone has a feature to improve productivity that youve probably ignored
Off topic: any chance you'd be willing to discuss your transition from algo trading to what you're doing now (per your profile)? As an ex- algo trader and pilot, I'd love to get your perspective.

Posting this from a throwaway because my colleagues read HN, but the email in my profile is valid. Thanks!
> If you provide value, people (myself included) will happily pay for it.

If it has no value, stop accessing it instead of blocking the ads.
A former boss once scheduled a meeting to discuss another meeting later that day. The subject of the meeting was "Pre-meeting discussion".
I understand your frustration, I believe your experience, no personal attack was intended.

I only hope we can agree that generalizations about good and bad character traits is tricky business, even if all this was not anecdotal. I hope there can be more agreement because there truly is life changing work that needs to be done, but as with so many things in life, it sometimes requires effort to remember our previos experiences may not always predict our future ones.
Take a look at http://www.openflixr.com - it is definitely overkill but it will give you an idea about many popular self hosted apps.
I may agree with your general sentiment, but I think the OP actually avoids the specific mistake that you are criticizing. Let me highlight a few key quotes:

> There always remain various hard [technical problems], of course, which are critical and which can’t be solved by any number of inexperienced people except by them getting experience; that’s why we need to continue to build and grow our technical skills. But if you continue to grow your skillset, you’ll quickly discover that the amount of time that needs to be spent on these extremely difficult technical problems tends towards significantly less than a full-time job; instead, the crucial (and incredibly hard) problems that affect a system have more to do with how that system interacts with the outside world — which is, more and more, people.

> Interestingly, there’s a lot more crossover between hard and soft skills than many people realize: when you start to see your system as a component of a larger system which includes humans as elements, and you start to ask how humans interact with each other and what their behaviors are, then many of the same “hard skills” systems design approaches not only make sense, but can provide even better answers to traditionally purely “soft” questions.

Eric Raymond said something similar recently[0]:

> Whole-systems engineering, when you get good at it, goes beyond being entirely or even mostly about technical optimizations. Every artifact we make is situated in a context of human action that widens out to the economics of its use, the sociology of its users, and the entirety of what Austrian economists call “praxeology”, the science of purposeful human behavior in its widest scope.

Also see Pieter Hintjens' book _Social Architecture_[1].

This is a sensitive issue, because it comes down to the question of who is at the top of the hierarchy, and it's part of human nature to be highly sensitive to our relative position within a given hierarchy. For those of us who have technical skills and an analytical temperament, we naturally want to be in an environment where those qualities are most advantageous in moving up the hierarchy.

I think Zunger's point is that, even within such an organization, there certain skills (which are not specifically technical) which are necessary to being maximally effective at the top of the hierarchy.

[0] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7745

[1] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...
Is this similar to what Berkeley MPC Lab is doing with quadratic programming using electricity? I.e. that nature has means to solve optimization problems in an instant and our approximations of this process in the form of differential equations allow us to do something similar, albeit not 100% accurately?
Have you tried to benchmark writing out a page with Go templates, vs GO producing a JSON API that prints out into static HTML pages with JQUERY/Handlebars? How many RPS can you get with either scenario? What is Time to First Paint and when does the page finish printing for the user?
> when they asked to have 22 types of records available.

Meh. I am sending my kid to pre-school, and the amount of paperwork we need to submit is around that amount - waivers of responsibility, medical history, acknowledgement of procedures, etc., etc., etc.

There's an expression - "well, that's just the cost of doing business."

Paperwork is just "the cost of life."
Is this an online survey? Do you have any good reason to trust your results and that this isn't just ballot stuffing?

The article linked talks about Stephen Bannon being upset. If you don't consider that guy fringe, who do you? David Duke?
Why not just sign up for free RealMailNotification emails and know exactly when your mail arrives?

In most areas, you can also sign up for Informed Delivery and have pics of exactly what is arriving today, too.
Ryongsong Residence
> But there's also "building the right thing", and that is a completely different set of skills. Many of which get lumped into the "soft skills" bucket.

Actually, I think Zunger makes the explicit point that they are not completely different skill sets. I'm inclined to agree with him.
There's a Peter Drucker quote, I believe, that I can't manage to find, but goes something along these lines (totally paraphrasing):

Businessmen tend to use fancy jargon for mundane things, which gives more exciting and important trappings to what is, in reality, a tremendously dull job. We should let them have it -- somewhat obfuscated language is a small price to pay to let them feel a little bit better about the boring tasks they accomplish day in and day out.
Even manager doesn't mean much. There are managers (manage people) and manager (managed a business, process, product, etc).

"Management" is manager (business). An engineering manager isn't management, is just a people manager.

Engineering phrases made it to business, and business phrases made it to engineering, that is normal. Berating a profession because you don't understand their lingo is pointless.

And the issue isn't you accusing me of being a manager, but implying that that is bad in some way.
I've been talking to some banking innovators, and they're not really sure what it is they're doing with Blockchain.

There's promise in the concept, but not in the current iteration. It's not suited for actual banking requirements at this time.
Perhaps the successor will see actual adoption, and not purely marketing-jargon adoption.
Thank you, but be careful. It sounds wiser because that last line is so pithy.
You can pattern match streams of values, and those values can be any lexical form that Red supports.
Nice to see a sort-of transcript of this delightful talk. Knuth's talks are always a delight to me, but to my surprise a few people seem to not like hearing him speak.

Discussion from when the video was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15898919 (Some people asked for transcripts; hopefully those people will find this one.)
"BIOS PSP Support disabled" is the only statement we have, in the form of a new option in the BIOS Setup.

That sounds like the equivalent of "HECI Disabled" for Intel BIOSes, which has been around for years.

It doesn't do anything to shut down the hidden CPU (PSP). It just sends a command to disable the bridge over to the main CPU. All the other ways of talking to the PSP remain open.
U.S. Test Pilots Head to Taiwan to Begin Testing Their Badly Needed F-16s
In this context, "not technical enough" means "not being able to accurately estimate technical costs." I posit that there is a correlation between being technical and being able to estimate technical costs:

One example I have seen a lot is the "exactly as I want it" design. What that means is foregoing using any standard web components (like Bootstrap, jqueryUI, ...) because they don't work exactly as the product designer wants, so you have to build something from scratch. Then you run out of time because building a complex web site without relying on any ready-made components is a lot of work, leaving the web site in a decidedly half-assed state.

As you can see, in my opinion "being technical" is not only about programming. It is also about YAGNI, being lazy and very much being a realistic pessimist.
I'm away on Christmas vacation, but my home IP has been banned. Never been clear why, except that I have expressed some views about banking, Tesla and some well-known posters who like to bully people that aren't part of the Hackernews hivemind.

I enjoy the site as a news aggregator, but this place is an echo chamber.
It's, again, anecdotal, and no small amount of confirmation bias, but I've been a technologist for over 20 years now. In all that time, most of my favorite technical colleagues, including their "hard" skills, were film majors, sociologists, historians, &c.

You do not need a STEM degree to be an outstanding technologist, or even a competent one. Far and away, the most valuable skill for this kind of work is critical thinking, and I've never seen classes teaching that offered outside the "liberal arts".
He's stated it's because he doesn't understand it, but unpacking that...

Buffett's investment strategy is to run a discounted cash-flow analysis on the stock's fundamentals to figure out its "true" value, and then only invest in it if this is significantly above its market price.

Most consumer software companies have cash-flow graphs where they spend 5-10 years with zero revenue just gaining users and building a monopoly, then they turn on the monetization strategy and instantly start making $10B/quarter or so, and then they continue to make massive profits until some younger, cooler software company comes along and takes all their users, and then they either buy that company for a good fraction of outstanding shares or they die. In other words, their cash flows are unpredictable and back-loaded, and depend upon a number of factors that are unknowable early in the company's life, like 1) is there a viable monetization strategy? 2) when will the founder/CEO turn it on? 3) will they run out of capital first? 4) how big will the userbase be at the time? 5) will they be replaced by further developments in technology?

For an investor who wants predictability and rationality in investing, these are anathema; it's like going to a casino where the house holds the information advantage and hoping you can play enough rounds that you win.
I realized this as well. On my to-do list is to build the "Difference Engine". The Difference Engine does the following:

- When you go to a website the response of the request is saved.

- When you go to the website again, the new response of the request is saved and compared to the previously saved version.

- Finally, when you go to the website a third or subsequent time, the Difference Engine is invoked, which uses some sort of easing function in addition to calculating the "difference" between the responses.

- The point of all of this is that similarity between responses will result in some response, let's call it 704, which says "hey, nothing has changed, cut it out."

- The Difference Engine could be saved, resulting in near instant results, telling you nothing has changed. This saves you time, but more importantly, will slowly wean you off the site in question.

- This is implemented via a VPN, so there's nothing to install.

Basically, the point of the Difference Engine is to instantly tell you to stop if nothing meaningful has changed. The hope is that you'll stop checking so much as you realize nothing changes usually.

Feel free to steal this idea, hah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

Foreign automakers can't sell trucks in the US.
I think his argument was that there is enough competition (and inovation) in all markets.
You should still be able to find Amstrad PCW and CPC systems in working order, although the 3" drives will probably need replacement rubber bands by now.
>Now Crossrail, THAT'S something.

On time and on budget. Yet they still won't give the green light for Crossrail 2.