skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It takes a couple of hours to build a GUI that calls the GCP API's to provision an instance for you

Yes, but you will hit all the same problems with different hardware generations, different configs with different limitations, etc. If anything GCE and AWS have more complex offerings than most bare metal hosts. And you have all the same maintenance issues as you run stuff over time and hardware and software updates get released.

> Capacity planning and forecasting is complicated

AWS and GCE certainly don't make it easier. And if you can't capacity plan accurately on cloud and take advantage of spot pricing and auto-scaling then you will be paying 10X price, which describes most smaller players.

> I severly doubt that [bare metal is more secure]

I am saying that shared hosting is fundamentally insecure. No matter what else you do, if you let untrusted people run code on the same server that is a huge risk that assumes many, many layers of hardware and software are bug free.

> cloud isn't competing with just providing you compute

I agree on this. But not all of those services work as well as advertised either.
The flag is only enabled by default on hardened gentoo profiles. Non-hardened profiles has it disabled.
Defining a function is already a mechanism of abstraction. You take a snippet of code and give it a name. Usually you generalize by adding parameters. Maybe you can even make it generic (C++ templates, Java Generics, Haskell typeclasses, etc). Removing the abstraction of a function means to inline the code. You could do that manually (copy&paste).

I wrote more on this here: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/precise_abstractions.html

Abstracting is not everything there is to programming, but modern code consists nearly completely of abstractions.
I've sometimes wondered why patents and copyright have diverged so greatly. The latter has been inflated to near-eternity by corporate lobbying whereas patents still, in practice, have a limited lifetime which itself also hasn't really grown over the years.

Is it somehow easier to lobby for longer copyrights than longer patents?

Is owning copyrighted works more profitable than patents, yielding more funding for lobbying?

Is the amount of turnover from copyrighted works so much greater than the turnover from patents that while both proponents are lobbying for longer durations the copyright guys beat the patent portfolio owners 10x (or 100x) in numbers and they cross a threshold for lobbying money where they get at least something done?

Financially looking, is the lack of lobbying an indication that patents aren't really worth anything because nobody is willing to put money into protecting theirs by lobbying for longer durations?

Is it somehow legally more difficult to lobby for longer patents as opposed to longer copyrights?

Patents are especially rotten when it comes to "software patents" but their founding ideas would be a fresh gust in the copyright land. Limited duration, requires active renewals, any secrets are put on the open table straight from the beginning which ensures that the fall to public domain will actually be possible.
I imagine treating me like that for the first time would also be a good way to have it be my last time.

I already had to stop going to two stores because their self-checkout kept insulting me (I have one item, it does not need to go in the bagging area, because I don't have a bag for one item).
I'd assume that parity is checked on access, which may give enough time to flip more than one bit before it's detected.
You are correct, both matter, but the genetic part definitely plays a role, and it snowballs (less intelligent parents will not teach their children as well). The point remains, when you see a random black person and a white one and an asian, and a jew, your average racist will factually be right in guessing their relative intelligence, regardless of the cause. The point I'm trying to make is that we shouldn't treat people like shit, just because they are less intelligent - it's rarely their fault.

There are other factors, like the brain size, which is again negatively correlated with black race.

None of that matters, I think. In a few decades all humans will be dumb in almost every field, even if don't invent general AI (which we likely will).

Peterson actually talks about low-IQ people in the increasingly automated world, and he is predicting they will be the earliest victims of automation, not only because they tend to work manual repetitive jobs, but because it's nearly impossible to train them to do something that requires higher intelligence. We won't be seeing millions of truck drivers converting to programmers and surgeons.
Show HN: Bitcoin Arbitrage – Kraken vs. GDAX
I can relate to the pain of going through an interview knowing that the interviewer is expecting a specific approach/answer (an OO answer!) that my hard-won experience has already long ruled out. And morals and/or my sense of identity — and/or a fear that the Gods are watching — refuses to allow me to play the interviewer’s game (at my own practical loss).
Created this for myself (along with an email alert if the difference exceeds the defined trigger) and figured I'd share it.
Let me know if you wish to receive the emails.
how does it get around apple's policy of not allowing another browser engine in the OS?
Apple IDS: What if anyone can be you?
Introducing bitlib-rs for Rust and Cairo
It is not my favourite talk, but it is the one I almost happy about discovering:

Andy Wingo's talk "Channels, Concurrency, and Cores: A new Concurrent ML implementation"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcI6sl5oBc

Because it made me discover that concurrent programming can actually be nice.
More gold:

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and third arguments"
I've been surprised with how authoritarian the UK has turned lately.
It's a new model of journalism in search of a rare breed of news consumer: one who cares to read reporters' profiles, source documents, and descriptions of how reports are gathered.

Lofty goal, to say the least.
Ask HN: It’s 2018, what to build now?
Enough is enough. It’s now 2018 and I’ve spent months trying to come up with good side business/product ideas and have hit an analysis paralysis point with no good ideas. I’d like to focus on small business problems but just can’t seem to find any. I’ve emailed businesses, scoured the web and am having little luck. My last product was a hypothesis that never gained traction so I’m now extra cautious (maybe too much) about jumping into any new unvalidated ideas.

Any entrepreneurial advice on how to get out of this funk? And also any advice/approaches on how to identify a good idea?
>> Being a "creative worker" doesn't mean the market owes one a living.

Of course it doesn't. The starving artist trope is very much real.

Creative workers are mainly entrepreneurs, and they take massive risks for little reward. They work 15 hour days just like any startup owner.

>> Abolishing copyright would make competition and innovation easier, as well as allow creative people more freedom without fear of legal repercussions.

No it wouldn't. The flip side of copyright is that it prevents someone from going in a ripping up or destroying artwork without legal repercussions. This is why many street artists can become famous, which would be impossible if their work was simply painted over by the next artist. In many cities, the next building owner cannot even paint over it legally.

>> This would benefit consumers in the long run by driving costs down and forcing quality to win in the marketplace, rather than letting a few big companies assert control over valuable IPs.

You read the same internet as I do. Low quality work has won the content war through the shear force of quantity.

>> Many of us believe the right to freely edit and redistribute software is fundamental, why would that right not naturally extend to all forms of media?

Some creative workers believe the same, and there works of art of all forms that follow the open source philosophy.

However, there is a big difference between modifying (which is allowed under copyright laws) and outright theft. If someone clones your repo on github and takes full credit for your work, you wouldn't be happy about it. If they put ASCII dicks all through the source and said it was your work, this would probably offend you.

>>> Especially given that most creative output nowadays exists as software.

eyeroll -- most programmers aren't creative professionals or engineers.
How do you prove you are a citizen?
How do I create cookies in without putting them before header
How am I supposed to set this cookie and read it
> Yeah, it's ok to just "ask questions" about black people being subhumans. Right?

So... where did you get the idea that this is a credible takeaway from his work?

(Also, he'd probably be the first person to agree with the assessment that university employment or credentials doesn't necessarily mean that your claims or research are any good...)
Hopefully the FBI already has their hooks in this, and uses it to work up the chain. Along with incredibly graphic violence, this has been the darkest part of the internet since day 1.
2017 safest year on record for commercial passenger air travel
Why go through the trouble of writing a better Harry Potter? You could simply take the existing story and sell it yourself - or put it on the internet so that no one needs to buy it at all.

I agree that it might be beneficial for society if all media were available for free and I agree copyright is probably not the right tool, but that's why said more thoughts effort needs to be spent to find better alternatives.
This has been a generally known technique for identifying leaks for at least three decades (and certainly much longer---Tom Clancy described it in a novel in 1987). The use of non-printing characters is an obvious extension of the idea. Any journalist who has published copy/pasted material from a confidential source since then is provably incompetent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
> the books and movies could still make money on name recognition alone.

Books, maybe. But without copyright, what keeps movie studios from just turning J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books into movies without paying her anything?
Formula One race: positions change over time
Notably, some zero width characters tend to get removed, especially in systems that try to remove excess whitespace. I made a very rudimentary PoC of encoding data in zero width characters, but was hit by a few things:

- Some characters affect word wrap in unexpected ways, depending on the script of the text.

- Some characters impact glyph rendering in minor ways. For example, the ligature between f and l may be interrupted.

- Some characters are outright stripped. For example, Twitter strips U+FEFF.

- Zero width characters often trip up language detection systems. I noticed that Twitter detected my English message as Italian with the presence of some zero width characters.

So it's not necessarily as useful as it seems. If you pick specific characters to strategically avoid these issues, it's hard to make the encoding very efficient.

Still, it probably has it's uses.
What would the internet evolve into in 2018
I don't hate copyright and patent laws, I really don't.

But, are you telling me that the choice is between "no patent or copyright, everyone has the right to copy whatever you do and make all the money in the world from it" and "even if the creator is long dead, you will have to wait the better part of a century"? If that's my choice, then it's no copyright.
"Mobile" is just British / Commonwealth English for a cell phone, regardless of performance or features. Maybe the author is based in such a country.

I can believe 430M, compared to a few years ago it seems every other person in a developing country now has one.
Interesting, when trying to access above site get security warning that site is unsafe.
Oh please. As if the interviewer's next question wouldn't be "make it faster/more efficient" anyway. The interviewer is the problem here because he wants to build a chess game in an extremely stupid way using OOP for no other reason than to use OOP. I'd say most applications of OOP fail in similar ways in real life, creating monsters of complexity where simplicity could have existed. The author should consider himself lucky: this sounds like an extremely shitty company and the interview has shown him that. It probably wouldn't even be worth it for him to complete the interview at this point. No one wants to work for idiots.
There is a slight issue with the provided code: if one sentence ends with a given word, then this word will always "terminate" any sentence, even if it is almost always inside a sentence.

Ex: "I like the letter i" will put "i" in the END dictionary, and as soon as this "word" gets picked up the sentence will be terminated, leading to incomplete / low-quality results :/

I like the trick of not using a weight or probability but just the number of occurrences of the world for in-sentences words (that don't scale well but are totally useful with small size training sets), maybe there is a way to reuse the same trick to not always terminate on such END words.

Good article :)
In Denmark, for such products, you have been required to scan them at a scale (which may be near the products, otherwise good lucking find it) and put the printed barcode on the bag for that item (always located near the producet) and then put in on the checkout -- and it has been so for, what, 20+ years now.
Okay I understand. I see from this thread and a thread from a couple of years ago that some people are using this as a background noise. I tried doing this but it's too sporadic and the talking is distracting for me to focus on programming. It also makes me feel a little anxious for some reason.

I didn't mean to offend anyone's interest, I just wanted someone to maybe show me a side I'm not seeing. I should word my questions with more thought and empathy in the future.
> Some people may not like the lack of features in that browser however, e.g. no history, no cookies saved, etc.

That's kind of the point of Focus, it's meant to be a private browser. You can also get regular Firefox with uBlock Origin to have a similar experience with these features, if this annoys you.
You do not need to prove you are a citizen to vote. Voter registration requirements vary state to state. Typically states will request some form of identification, like a social security number, or a birth certificate, or something like that, if you do not have a photo ID, so they can verify who you are and that you did not vote twice. A government issued photo ID, or other proof of citizenship, is not required. That would be unconstitutional.

Edit: California will even allow you to use a utility bill with your name and address as valid ID to vote, for example. No photo ID or citizenship requirement, and no voter fraud happening in California either.
TL;DR : To read 200 books, author estimates you need 417 hours a year reading. Assumes 50,000 page non-fiction books and 400 word per minute. Supposedly, average American spends 2250 on social media + TV.

The author also mentions multi-medium, which is what I do too (reading on phone, Kindle, and audiobook). And amazon whispersync pairs your kindle book to Audible narration, and lets you easily switch between reading and listening.
Because we generally only accept mathematical proofs from highly-trained experts, and no one would hire the kid next door, who taught himself math and seems to spend a lot of time fooling around with calculators to do professional work in mathematics?
Don't forget about GitHub Audio!

https://github.audio
I don't see anything weird when I search for those keywords (from Poland, in English).
The problem is that the vast majority of creatives today do not use IP as their primary income source. The vast majority of professionals are employed - their income comes from an employer, not through execution of a copyright they hold.

There is a lot of fanticization of IP whenever discussions about getting rid of it come up - about how regular people can utilize courts and the legal system to enforce their copyrights. In practice, the only way to even realistically produce creative works and then try to use copyright as a means to profit is through the cooperation of a corporation promising to act as the middle man distributor and enforcer of said copyright. Even the largest of private creative endeavors don't have the resources to go pursuing violators of their copyright in court.

And the only real victim of copyright abolition becomes those large media corporations who suddenly lose their ability to artificially constrict distribution as a revenue source.

There is certainly an argument that people want Star Wars, but I'm not convinced a post-copyright Disney would die, either. They have a reputation now for quality production. If they came forth seeking investment to create things people want, there would still be billions of dollars flowing in to see things people want made by them, but the logistics would be completely different.

But in practice, you make money today as a creator by having something people want where you can get them to pay you for it - beforehand, after the fact, with tertiary merch sales, whatever the means. You survive off your popularity and the willingness of others to see you funded to keep creating. Without copyright, nothing about that fundamental changes, and its not like the trillions of dollars spent on entertainment today suddenly dries up. If anything, it would be a creative renaissance - the things people want to make being made by the people who want to make them, where everyone gets what they want (a good standing of living and new media) versus today where creativity is shackled by government and for most creative endeavors the individual has little to say about what is being made - because artists expect their livelihoods to come after the fact.
How 5G and Progressive Web Apps may fix Microsoft's app gap
Is this for real? The solution he proposes is specific to Chess!

I mean, does this guy really think the company cares about efficiently representing chess game states??

Obviously, obviously, OBVIOUSLY, the Chess aspects of this question are irrelevant. What they are trying to find out if how well you will work on their actual codebase, which is presumably not comprised of global functions operating on bitfields
The CPU does not care about your abstractions. Abstractions are entirely wrt the human dealing with them. A good abstraction is only “good” with respect to some context/purpose—there is no such thing as a universally/generally good abstraction. And often a “great” abstraction will hurt your performance — so then is it so great?

But setting aside performance concerns, when we speak of a “good” abstraction we are usually (or should be) saying this is good for some purpose—good for readability, for example.

But even better—or of utmost importance in the real world-is this: is the abstraction under question “good for business”? And that is entirely asking this: does the abstraction allow for rapidly acting on business ideas, creativity, needs, etc.

However, I believe that once the context is fixed/agreed upon, that there is an objective answer to which of this or that abstraction is better. However experience in the practical world of today’s software development painfully has shown me that the “better” abstractions are harder to come by...and when “found”, don’t tend to stick. This is because most practitioners don’t have the ability to produce powerful algebraic systems (which is what “good” abstractions are—“alegebras” over a business domain) because practitioners are generally not mathematicians, even have a philistine dislike/disdain for powerful systems if they have a whiff of mathematical-like power to them at all.

In this sense one could argue for an abstraction being “good” with respect to the social context in which they are operated in (i.e., if your team members don’t understand how to correctly wield an abstraction, is that abstraction good?) However I don’t like these kinds of arguments bc a lesser system is still capped in its power even if all its users understand it.

There are limits in what you can do with, say, Euclidean Geometry, even if it is much simpler to understand than other Gemotries. An often retort to this is No it isn’t. But that usually comes form perspectives with limited imagination. That said, many businesses are fine and thrive with limited imaginations.
I like idea of renewal fee, with an exponentially increasing scale as time passing by. Real properties are already being taxed twice, once on the rent produced and once on the property itself. Intellectual properties should be "taxed" the same way.
Show HN: Read and pray from the Bible everyday
Interesting observation. One thing that people who are fans of donor-funded BI don't realize is that there are reasons for the minimal standards of living required to sustain a $22 a month budget.

a) Donor funding causes poorer members of society to turn a blind eye to inept leadership who misappropriate taxes and who don't really care about effecting sustainable change. The fact that they can live on $22 a month doesn't change the fact that their village has shitty schools, shitty hospitals, and non-existent public infrastructure... and the Kenyans responsible for fixing that get richer by the day.

b) Efforts by East African countries to build sustainable industries are curtailed by the same economies that purport to support them. Kenya had to back out of a plan to prevent the importation of second-hand clothing (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/world/africa/east-africa-...) because the States threatened to review Kenya’s eligibility to export textiles to the US.

I think it's nice that 3rd parties are so keen on being helpful... but I think that change will have to come from within.
What do you do now? I found problems at work.
have you checked HyperScript?
Let's say black pawn takes the white queen: Unset the bit representing this black pawn, set the bit where the black pawn is now, set the white queen long to zero. One load and two write operations to memory. The bit fiddling is probably neglible in terms of time on a modern CPU.
If I understand it correctly this only species an API that implementors of the different solutions must follow, so that in your program you may import different vendor implementations. This allows easier change of vendor.

But no wire protocol is specified or anything like that. It is the duty of the vendor to create all the different programming language bindings and API implementations, and store the data from whenever it comes.

From my point of view it is the second part that would be more interesting: a standard logging protocol with tracing incorporated, and standard ways to pass along the tracing id (spans) to other services.

Is there anything like that?
“How to Say ”No“ to Clients” – [Episode #104] Make Money Online
Same problem if you have the honor of copypasting "smart quotes" from .doc or .html
I completely agree that JBP is a strong advocate of the idea that individual dignity and worth is not based in IQ.

I'm having trouble recalling places where he's drawn any correlation between race and IQ, except some rather narrow cases like the Ashkenazi Jews.

And I'm not familiar with any research that conclusively establishes a connection between racial categories (as often constructed in US/western discourse, anyway) and IQ:

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-...
Please don't mistake my comment to mean that Chinese companies are "lesser", by any means. But companies which succeed wildly with the popular there may not succeed with the population here. This is more of a social thing than anything due to superiority.

As governments start to realize how powerful these international corporations are, and start laying down more regulations, it will be less and less practical for a company to operate globally anyways.
There is no need for secret comms

Most common thing heard on a police scanner around here: "Call me on my cell."