skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That could be a solution, but many startups will balk at your ask for full cash compensation and say you need some equity to "have skin in the game and to show you believe in the company."
>seconds

At PoS systems in the US, it's typical to have to wait 30+ seconds for chip cards to go through. I'm guessing that this has more to do with the PoS system / slow internet connection for the store / slow network on the back-end card network, but cryptocurrencies would need to be sub-minute to be ~acceptable for in-person retail transactions.

Until that is solved, until cryptocoins are more than speculative securities where the value is only the current market price on a handful of exchanges, and until you can use them to realistically buy and sell things instead of using cash or a credit card, I don't consider them a "real" currency (by my own definition). I DO hope that it gets there some day, but I don't see that happening for at least another 5 years, likely with quite a few people who put a significant amount of money into it getting burned quite badly.
Remember the old greek that knew he knew nothing? You don't sound like him. If you don't approach the issue - unawareness of one's incompetence - with humility, I'm sorry, but there's really one thing you are. You're confident. Now of course. Me pointing this out is moot, or is it? Maybe: I don't claim I knew anything other than what both of us already know, which is what, according to the former greek, actually counts. Or is it?
> I just don't generally know what Dropbox has been building

Customers.
Bingo. People think its hard to self host. Its not. They have an omnipackage that you install. You run updates. You enable the automatic backups. Problem solved!
Which is why you have to help explain to her that the police state has absolutely nothing to do with keeping you safe.
I haven’t looked at this yet, but my gut reaction is that this is absolutely ludicrous… I’m answering you because your gut reaction seems to be similar to mine.

What happens if somebody consents and then decides to toggle the status later? What if somebody is coerced into it? What if while raping somebody also gets their phone stolen and the ‘contract’ toggled?

What if somebody is OK with some activities but not OK with others and they get forced onto them?!

Not that I support this but… what if somebody wants to remain anonymous? What if somebody doesn’t want their blockchain litany of conquests and trysts to be totalled up?!

This is just so wrongheaded I am stunned.
no paywall for me.
This is related to a different effect, which is even more dangerous than DK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect

Humans cannot evaluate competence objectively without formal performance testing. (And sometimes not even then.)

But we can evaluate confidence, charm, persuasiveness, and social proof.

So we tend to use them as a proxy, and choose leaders who lack competence but can demonstrate them, over leaders with genuine competence who can't.

This is a very bad thing, and possibly the single biggest cause of political, social, and economic problems in our history.
Hah. I have only achieved lucidity in a dream once, after a period of trying to induce it. I can't really remember what was happening prior but when I realized I was in a dream I thought:

"I am in a dream, I want to fly."

Turns out my body doesn't actually know how to fly and I woke myself up it seems, in the process of trying to take off.
Skype is proprietary software. Even if it encrypts my messages E2E, it still needs to display them with its proprietary UI and see them in plain text. There's no way I could trust that or recommend anyone else to.

The thing about E2E encryption is that you still need to have reasonable trust in each E.
Giardia isn't particularly tasty.
> Few would refer to them as intelligent.

Few would refer to a coffee table as intelligent. You seem to be inconsistent in what sort of arguments you will accept.
According to the CDC, the average weight [1] of a black woman aged 20-39 years in the US is 179 lbs, 158 lbs for a white woman. Converting to BMI (to adjust for height differences), the story is the same with an average 30.2 vs 26.7, or 'moderately obese' versus 'overweight.'

Remove any notions of race and compare the stats based entirely on equivalent weight/BMI I you will find nearly all differences would disappear. Fatness is literally killing our nation (with our life expectancy continuing to decline) and currently blacks are the fattest group in America. This can lead to false correlations laden with completely unjustified identity politics.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad347.pdf
Good thing Dropbox is one of those "good companies" that doesn't require exercising on leaving.
Indeed. The latter end of end-to-end may not be the end intended by the user.
The author of this post isn't properly characterizing langsec:

The basis of language security is starting from a programming language with a well-defined, easy-to-understand semantics. ... This approach is taken, for example, by Google's Caja compiler to isolate components from each other, even when they run in the context of the same web page.

From what I can tell, he's talking about the broader area of "programming languages and security". That is not the same thing as http://langsec.org/, which is essentially about using grammars to recognize network PROTOCOL formats.

As far as I remember, one motivating vulnerability is that there were two different parsers for SSL certificates, which allowed attackers to trick browsers into accepting invalid certificates. That doesn't have anything to do with programming languages per se; you can write this vulnerability in any language. It's analogous to the fact that using a safe language doesn't prevent you from SQL injection.

Some examples of what they are trying to address:

http://langsec.org/papers/langsec-cwes-secdev2016.pdf

I wrote a critique of langsec a few months ago here:

https://lobste.rs/s/uyjzjc/science_insecurity_meredith_l_pat...

tl;dr I think they are using the wrong formalisms.

I found it odd that the author was assuming that langsec is a widely used thing when I think it is nascent research.

Even Google Caja, a totally different project outside of langsec, is not widely deployed, although I very much like its ideas.
Here's a more optimistic take which is unavoidably a plug.

Urbit is maybe a sort of "extreme langsec." "Immune" is a dangerous word. Urbit is "premitigated" against Spectre for the following reasons, some cool and others stupid:

(1) The Nock VM has no O(n) data structures, ie, arrays. This was not anything to brag about till now.

(2) Urbit events are interpreted in their own process, which is one trust domain (one process, one "personal server").

(3) A personal server isn't a browser and doesn't habitually run code its owner doesn't trust.

(4) Urbit is purely functional, so you only know the time if someone passes you the time.

(5) Top-level event handlers are passed the time of the event. This is easy to fuzz.

(6) If you are running untrusted foreign code, it is probably just a function. Giving this function a measured time interval from top-level event times would be strange. And it would need another channel to exfiltrate the stolen data.

Never say never, but this combination of premitigations makes me worry about Spectre very little. Although, when we do have a less-trusted tier of applications (walk before run), ain't nobody is going to be telling them the time.

Besides the plug, the lesson there is that one of the reasons Spectre is a problem is that langsec is an imperfect bandaid.

Urbit is premitigated because it was designed as a functional system from the ground up. The JS environment is functional lite -- it allows typeless functional programming, but it also retains many mutable/imperative systems design tropes.

It's these tropes that have become clever attack vectors. If you don't want to get Spectred, build systems that are formal and functional all the way down.
It was so cutting edge that they participated in PRISM!
I want to say it depends on the job, but for white collar work I definately agree.
It depends on the use-case. If you look at credit card transactions, they are only "confirmed" after 120 days (when chargebacks become harder...not impossible). A 0-conf transaction will work for all scenarios where you would trust a credit card with about the same amount of certainty. For those other scenarios, 10 minutes is better.
>Are you implying that brown and black people don't value education?

He is. It's incredibly ignorant and hateful to ascribe to the individual problems caused by systemic divestment from black and brown communities. We have to fight for every cent, our teachers are not only expected to be social workers, they're also held to different standards in ways that they wouldn't be if they were teaching in wealthy white districts.

From the article:

"Whether channeling more money to schools in underserved communities will help improve the quality of education is a subject of academic debate."

This isn't a question in countries where public schools are succeeding, it's obvious. Public schools in France have enough to serve their kids multi-course meals. Public schools in Sweden have small classrooms. Everyone gets enough to make their kids thrive. Not so in America, where the primary source of funding is local property taxes.

"simply increasing the salaries of all teachers in a high-need school district won’t have as much of an impact as identifying high-performing teachers and increasing their salaries."

This is exactly the kind of comparative stack-rank culture that breeds toxicity in a workplace. Why should high-need school districts have differing salary standards?
Where's the API?
Let’s see how long they will take to fix
>HFTs cannot see a customer’s order before it executes on an exchange. They cannot “jump in front of” an atomic order.

I'm pretty sure this is what bid stuffing was all about.
Oh not at all! Thanks for this; I also find it very interesting, and was glad for the correction.
“The internet is the ultimate form of interstate commerce,
which is clearly only within the authority of the F.C.C.,”
said Bret Swanson, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (...)

Hilarious, but not really surprising to read, as a non US-ian.
State in a Functional World with Elixir Agents
steemit.com :) everyone pays each other!
In reality, we don't know if Trump - or anyone else - was "wire tapped" - and we won't ever know thanks to the passage of this bill. One of the crucial elements of the Amash amendment was that those who were unconstitutionally spied upon via 702 authorization would have to be eventually notified that they were spied on - now they don't. That's one of the many things that's so awful and frightening about these police-state powers. There is no oversight and no notification.
Not me, but I've met people who have nightmares quite often and for them I imagine it would help them sleep a lot.
Debit and credit-card transactions don't confirm for about 120 days, which is when chargebacks become slightly more difficult. Those chargebacks also cost the merchant not only the price, but a $15 chargeback fee.
Private Prison Sends Detainees to Solitary for Refusing Voluntary Labor
If this can get down to the $2-3000 range every upper middle class household in the country will buy one...
Same question: Are they using XRP?

Answer: No.

Brad Garlinghouse reminds me so much of Dick Costolo. He'll keep allowing Ripple Deals(bots) to increase the valuation of the company unwarranted.

The banks and no-one I've talked to in fintech has indicated to me any serious adoption of XRP.
Bitcoin Mania
It was #1 earlier today; with 595 points it's now #123. Presumably mods have adjusted it somehow? I can't imagine HN has enough anti-"politics" zealots to flag it down to that point.
It's easy to be paternalistic about another persons expenses. There was nothing more humiliating then going through expenses line by line when I needed help with an electricity bill.
Yeah, I paid for cable, but the vast majority of expenses were housing, food, and predatory fees. Digging out of a financial hole is very hard and it's easy to lose all your progress when certain bills are due afew days before you have money.
Cable was practically free because I need to buy internet for my job.
Huge! congrats Drew and Arash on the first YC IPO
11 minutes, 2 points, and its not on any of the pages.. Hmm... Was this put into high gravity?
I'm not claiming competence in anything. All I am doing is saying that when evaluating competence that you should test the thing you are looking for - competence - and not accept confidence as a substitute or proxy for competence.
Nobody was accepting Bitcoin as a payment in 2009. I wish I'd cared about it more then.
Show me your white paper :D
He also tweeted support.
Great, on iOS is a single interaction and again it has been there for ages. My dad switched from Android and actually likes this specific feature.
The levels of delta-v we're talking about here aren't nearly enough to knock these objects out of the solar system. When they leave the Moon or Mars they're still in orbit and will remain in orbit until they collide with something. In the case of a moon rock that means either hitting the Earth or returning to the Moon in what is likely a single orbit so 2 weeks. In the case of Mars it will either hit Mars again or the Earth. Or possibly the Moon, one Mars's moons, or an asteroid but probably the first two. The odds of this collision taking place on any given orbit around the Sun are low but the object isn't going anywhere and eventually, possibly millions of orbits later, it will end up hitting something. So no, the probability that it will eventually hit the Earth doesn't really go down with the distance in this case since we're only talking millions of years for a collision to occur rather than billions.
I recommend Stephen LaBerge’s work.
Finally someone gets it. At least a little. :)
The project is still early stage, but still it promises to be what bitcoin should have been from the start : a decentralized, feeless and instantaneous means of transferring value.
Exactly. You could buy assets that produce things people need or you could buy a random string of numbers and letters.

Obviously we are in a post scarcity world and therefore producing something of value is really a net negative. All hail the inert string of chars! It’s better than something because it does nothing.
> It's really not fine at all.

Actually, it really is. I've been accepting 0-conf transactions for nearly a year and had negligible double spends. https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/zeroconf-payments.htm...

The small number of double-spends that did occur since I wrote that blog post I think are mostly due to bad luck (and opportunism) rather than malicious intent upfront, and represent only ~0.1% of payments.
About Johann Hari's claims on antidepressant medication
As requested, my white paper:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0858/9696/products/122_102...
A more detailed article:

https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/11/undercover-video-t...
> the "shake to undo" thing? :-)

"You appear to be shaking your phone in frustration. Would you like to un-delete that?" :)
Why not simply use pure osmisis water, then add in some friendly pro-biotics and minerals. All the upside, no down-slime. I'll call it: Engineered Unfiltered Water. Who's with me?

I'll even add a weight loss tape worm as a $100 DLC. Ultra-gut-cleanse Giardia for $300.
Curiosity is getting the best of me, and I figured HN is a good place to scratch the itch.

Has anyone done a study or solicited information from the government that shows the impact of legislation such as FISA or better yet the Patriot ACT's post provision sunset (what's left of the act) parts? Namely - hard numbers that shows in a numerical fashion the fact based evidence to keep overt invasions of privacy in check in the name of security.

Being from New York, I always try to question politicians here - more specifically Gov. Cuomo on the quantifiable evidence that supports the SAFE ACT's passage in our state - on such things, to have a better impact on things that affect me regionally vs. worrying about broad stroke Federal things that rarely do.
>> You don't need a new textbook to study anything about physics math or history below the college level

You need iPads or Chromebooks or whatever they're pushing now
Maybe.

Many people still think homosexuality is a choice, not an inherent trait. The genetic argument may just be ignored entirely.

People somehow believe stranger things about the flatness of the Earth.
I hope the authors were being tongue in cheek.

I saw it as the younger generation not learning and repeating the mistakes of the past.

The first order being like neo-nazis to the empires nazis.

The republic failing and the rise of trade federation again.

Very cyclical and nihilistic.
I've seen two in my lifetime one in 2008 and one in 2013, both at night. they lasted about 3-5 seconds and both were at night
I know this probably sounds like a stuck record at this point, but Lightning Network can solve this, and will relegate the actual blockchain as an arbitration/settlement layer where the 10 minute blocktime isn't a problem.
So? As was mentioned in the excerpt from the article I quoted Ryan would not allow the House to consider a compromise from the House Judiciary Committee. How many of those Democrats would have gone for that compromise bill if that had been on the table?

We need both privacy and surveillance. The harm from too little privacy tends to manifest on a longer time frame than the harm from too little surveillance, so when considering a good balance between the two is off the table it is understandable one might go for the option that looks like it will be the safest short term.

Pelosi is indeed quite aligned with Republicans on surveillance issues. If she had been speaker she probably would have supported the current bill. But would she have blocked consideration of the compromise, like Ryan did?

That seems much less likely, because despite Pelosi and a few other Democrats being quite pro-surveillance the fact is that the party as a whole is quite a bit less pro-surveillance than are the Republicans as a whole. She would have had a harder time than Ryan keeping the compromise from being considered because she would be going against the majority of her own party, unlike Ryan.
I read the quoted statement as I wrote it. So I strongly disagree that it is wrong. And: please be more civil. See the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it takes courage, because people will only pay if you provide some real value for them. Give out things for free and you might build a nice user base even if the offering is not so interesting.
I believe you can make a process noncacheable today, and maybe even disable branch prediction. This would totally shut down Spectre and Meltdown. You can disable SMT, and there's a whole host of other things you can do to isolate your "secure" process on an existing chip. Nobody has done these things because they like performance.

For most of what most people do on their computers most of the time, performance is fine without speculative execution or branch prediction

I think you underestimate the importance of branch prediction.
I think this is the most important takeaway. It's especially true for smaller libraries and commercial libraries. And even for huge ones like Rails, questions answered 6 years ago might be little more than a catalog of improper practices by now!

For a hard numbers example of "trends" being poor, I develop a JavaScript diagramming library, GoJS: https://gojs.net

It has competition, such as JointJS, jsPlumb, etc. If I look at StackOverflow tags, I would think we're in big trouble:

* 180 questions tagged gojs

* 449 questions tagged jointjs

* 518 questions tagged jsplumb

These aren't even enough to show up on StackOverflow's trend tool, and they make the case look pretty dire for GoJS!

But behold, Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=gojs,joi... (ignore the last, partial-data month)

In search interest GoJS is clearly ahead of these other two libraries. What's more, if you compare the forums for each product, you'd see that GoJS gets 10x-100x the traffic of the others.

StackOverflow is simply not the a good place to gauge library interest and activity over the long term, and its not a good place as you say to ask or find answers to questions for products that have ecosystems which continuously improve their APIs and evolve.
I don't think it's an issue, but it'll be harder for your tool to be at the top of search engine results, so some rebranding might be beneficial for your visibility.
> The competition is full confirmation transactions on a debit card or bank account in seconds with much lower or zero fees.

No. Those do not compete with trustless digital money. If you think that then you don't understand the point of Bitcoin. It's like saying landlines are better than mobiles because you can never misplace them.
> you have to realize that reality will dictate the distribution of the best candidates for these jobs

That seems backwards—a company would be better off hiring from demographics that are underperforming versus expected, and then finding a way to get them to perform as well as their innate talent would allow.
Music isn't any more 1D than language is.
What? From a Fortune article about this [1]:

> The partnership will see MoneyGram pilot the use of XRP through a new Ripple service, called xRapid

[1] http://fortune.com/2018/01/11/ripple-moneygram-xrp-cryptocur...
Recently I found a way to induce lucid dreams nearly 50% of the time I try.
I start by closing my eyes and looking at the blackness. Usually there is something else there, like a field of dots. I will the field of dots to uniformly move or become a tunnel. After a while more objects form, I try to control them in some way, or just observe them. Eventually this turns into a lucid dream or a deep meditative state where I am aware of my body but time passes faster.

It does not work when I cant get any images to form because I am not tired or distracted.
It also requires a fair amount of attention to redirect yourself to 'keep looking'. Its easy to drift off and do normal sleep.
Is India's Aadhaar System Really “Hack-Proof”?
This is a common fallacy, that freedom and safety are in opposition, that increasing one decreases the other, that freedom puts you in danger and a lack of freedom saves you. In this debate people often say there is perfect safety in prison, but if I imagine myself a prisoner, versus my daily life right now, I'd feel a lot less safe in prison. I've read that some prisoners go to the bathroom with one pant-leg undone, just so their legs won't be tangled at the ankles if they get violently attacked. I can't imagine my daily life being this dangerous.

Freedom leads to the most security. If you scatter plot graph "free countries" and "safe countries" you'll find an unmistakable positive correlation. Whether the dangers are religious police kidnapping people for "virginity tests," people being disappeared for criticizing the government, or routine industrial accidents in places where expendable people aren't free to demand workers rights, a lack of freedom increases danger.

You're pretty safe in Switzerland, not so much in Iraq.
SFB is in my opinion just Lync still. They just changed the name and the design. Nothing else that I can see changed.
I'll assume spoilers are fair game here, since this article is pretty much a spoiler in its entirety.

The authors take many liberties in interpretation to fit their viewpoint. For instance, Luke didn't "hallucinate" Yoda's presence on Ahch-To, unless you think his previous force ghosts (as in ROTJ) were hallucinations, as well. Perhaps Rian did mean for Yoda's force ghost in this scene to be a hallucination, but I don't think he did. The authors just twisted this scene to fit their interpretation, which is disappointing.

UPDATE: The piece is satire https://twitter.com/smcohoe/status/951474247104307200