skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The same reasoning has prevented light rail from expanding further in the St. Louis metro, too. Unfortunately, the extension to one of the area's largest malls did by all accounts attract at least some new crime:

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/out-of-control-shopl...

I haven't followed the stats since then (and there could be other explanations for the reports in that article), but the perception in the region that transit brings crime is very strong.
> Because all this free video is just so great right? A world full of nobodies blathering on about themselves?

Just because that doesn't appeal to your taste doesn't mean that it is bad. Stop judging what other people like to watch.

You argument is essentially "people who make videos that I don't like should be pushed out".
That's what libertarians want so desperately though. Because in their mind, they'll be the gilded elite in the boom-bust cycle. If it wasn't for the nasty government, all the hard-working brilliant libertarians would be billionaires.
ULTIMATE GUIDE: Best Paid Video Streaming Services U Cannot Live Without in 2018
Excuse me while I enjoy a nice hit of dopamine for writing this witty response. mMMMM dopamine. What was that about damaging my mind now?
Blockchain Demystified (A legal perspective)
Microcode can definitely be loaded by the OS.
I’m from a different generation, but at 18 I don’t think I had a clue. I took whatever loans my dad told me to take. Luckily for me my father can do basic cost benefit analysis and could see a MIS major is worth a 40k loan.

I guess what I’m saying is I blame their parents for letting 18 year olds take a 100k loan for their gender studies degree.
Yes, Coinbase allows you to configure repeated buys or sells of a specified dollar amount.
> Tracking does not increase content revenue.

It does, it increases marginal advertising efficiency, which makes more ads economically viable, which then increases ad spending, and creator revenue.
Microcode is updated by OSes as well as BIOSes. I explained this in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075376
I wonder what will the next big security hole.

I'm becoming very pessimistic about how I can trust computers.

Computers can do amazing thing, but software seems fragile, unreliable and untrustworthy.

I have been keeping notes on paper for years now, and it doesn't look like it's going to change.
Do you know what is the tax situation for non-residents using an US exchange to convert to fiat? Should non-citizens, non-residents also pay capital gain tax?
It's just another superlative to "one-up" whats already been there: "What's better than a factory? The megafactory! And whats even better than that? The gigafactory!".
I understand wanting to show off your latest project, but comparing a large framework like Rails to your couple hundred lines of crystal is not an honest comparison, not even taking into account the concerns of startup time as others mentioned.
Philips releases a headband that plays white noise to help you sleep
I literally just pointed you to the law in question.

It is illegal to prevent someone from "engaging" in politics, as per the California law I just linked you.

It is not legal to fire someone for "basically any reason" if it was for the illegal reason that I have linked.

Maybe what he did does not count as politics. You could make that argument.

But your argument about how it is possible to fire someone for any reason is untrue, as per the law.
Economics is a social science. It could be argued very few things have intrinsic value. It could be argued all markets are down to purely human psychology.

Birds, for example, don't really care how much you paid for those 3000 tonnes of wheat, only that there's a hole in one of the train carriages transporting it.
Most people suffer from the same problem, it is very hard not to see all the faults with an idea in its infancy. Whether these are perceived problems or real ones, and whether these problems are products of our own self-doubt or legitimate concerns is difficult to discern.

I can't decide if it is a form of stupidity or intelligence that allows people to confidently throw themselves behind their own ideas.
I think Angela Walch on this tweet was able to capture what James Dimon regret means:
https://twitter.com/angela_walch/status/950792583705497600
Arguably x64 assembly code is the same...

A privileged process (the microcode) enforces restrictions and converts it to micro-ops which execute on the real processor.
The thing I find funny is that they aren't acknowledging the fact that they used to solve crimes before cell phones existed. What did they do back then? Hell, even phone calls could be made rather anonymously. They have way more metadata to pour over these days than they did in the past.

Their truly sick desire to undermine the privacy and security of ordinary citizens is just that.... They won't solve more crimes by breaking encryption.
> This seems like an extremely common problem in computing.

I agree—I see it all over the place. It's what you get for a UI by default, if you don't take any extra measures to seek an effective design: you just expose program internals.

I think the situation with git is slightly different from that all too common, naive pattern, though. The best comparison I can make is to graphics APIs like OpenGL (or even better, Vulcan), which are there in large as a means of giving access to graphics hardware, very low-level and a horrible impedance mismatch for actually describing moving images. However, they are necessary because the variety of things people might want to do with a graphics card is so vast, that 'nicer' abstractions will always also be restrictions on capabilities. So, you get OpenGL/Vulcan and rather than using it directly to build applications, it's the basis for building other graphics libraries which actually have good usability. (But also like git, there are many cases where people just need to use the low-level APIs directly, despite poor usability.)

Git seems to be addressing a similar issue in that any abstraction over the internal core data structures ends up limiting the vast spectrum of potential use cases, so it makes the compromise of providing (relatively) un-abstracted access to the program's core data structures, which maximizes use-cases covered, and sacrifices usability. But, the generality it provides leaves open the possibility of building higher-level abstractions on top of it... I know a bunch of these exist in various forms, CLI and GUI, and for me anyway, none that I'm aware of cover everything I need to do with git—but I believe such an application could be built and the community would stabilize on using it for 90% of cases instead.

As far as visualization of its data structures goes, I see it fitting in as training wheels essentially: it would be an effective way of teaching people how the program works by allowing them to see the direct impact of particular git commands on the git data structures. Eventually you stop using it, except for troubleshooting really weird/obscure situations, as you mention. (More generally, I could see open source projects offering a flag so that their core data structures are visualized or not as a means of more effectively/enjoyably teaching new developers how data moves around in the app at a high level.)
Are you a nervous wreck? There are lots of things more dangerous to you than driving a car. A little less than 40,000 deaths a year sounds like a lot, but I think perhaps we are just not good at comprehending what that number means in the context of a country with more than 300,000,000 people.
Suicide is very common. Suicide is more common in people who are male, and who are middle aged. There are also elements of "contagion" around suicde.
I deal more on the marketing/branding front. (it's being redone, don't panic lols)

We have a hardcore CPA/IRS founder on team, I will ask them and get back to you.
Building a Language(2015)
> The stories used to be primarily about tech (or related subjects), with a minor focus on politics. But lately I think it has been the opposite. There is much more emphasis on general politics, with tech being a minor focus, in my opinion.

I left for basically the same reason, but quite a while ago. I forget which of the editors it was, but he would interject politics into everything. And even after people asked for a politics section (which could then be turned off), to keep politics out of the tech stuff, he would still put political stuff all over the place.
> not working along side of women
Women able to read and comprehend at high school level would have no problem working along side him.
Free content, sure. But also ads for penile enhancements and dialog boxes that go "Congratulations! You've won $100,000 in Amazon gift cards! Click here quick [obvious phishing link] to claim your prize!". Scams, pure and simple. Not claiming that tracking prevention is going to solve these problems, but any move that at least attempts to reign in the worst excesses of a scummy industry is a step in the right direction IMHO.

Anil Dash had a good thread about this recently, and he puts it much better than I:

https://twitter.com/anildash/status/949476770922844161
You could do that sure. But if someone sues you, and you are required to give up your emails as per discovery laws, and one of those emails says "I fired him for being a Democrat/republican", then you would lose the court case and have to pay lots of money.

Google explicitly fired the guy for the memo. They aren't hiding as for why they fired it they explicitly gave the reason.

If you explicitly give a reason for why someone is fired, and that reason is illegal, them you will lose the court case.

Similarly, you could also find someone hiking in the woods, and just shoot them or something, and you might get away with it. Or you might not.

That's how the law works.

Google has been very clear as for why the guy was fired. Now the only question is is their stated reason equivalent to firing someone for politics. And if so, that's illegal.
Latest version on downloadcenter.intel.com is 20171117; no microcode update has been published since Spectre/Meltdown have been disclosed.

edit: see below, not true; they haven't published it on their own site but have pushed microcode updates to redhat.
It used to be that way, now when I try it F1 is a sign-in screen, F2 is my main GUI, F3-F6 are normal virtual terminals, and F7 is some process that I don't recognize.
AMD CPUs have pretty poor single threaded performance.

Perhaps that because they haven't taken the speed short-cuts that Intel took...?
Yes, sorry, I thought I was being obviously facetious. That strategy obviously does not work for drug addicts, so how would it work for phone addicts?
This is only Spectre, not Meltdown. Meltdown requires KPTI, which depends on your OS. For OSs that did not enjoy months of advanced disclosure (which is: any OS that isn't Windows, MacOS or mainline Linux), that work is ongoing and will depend on the OS. (Speaking for SmartOS/illumos, that work is reasonably far along and making promising progress -- but we don't yet have a functional prototype.)

As for Spectre, these are just the microcode updates that have the additional MSRs that allow system software to mitigate certain variants of Spectre attack against the system software itself. They are necessary, but emphatically not sufficient -- and it would disingenuous for Intel to pretend that this in any way means that 90% of systems are protected from Meltdown and Spectre.
New Opportunities for New Deep Learning Practitioners
My mom's pension is $400 / month (Eastern Europe). She browses the Internet on an old hand-me-down Thinkpad. I suppose she should just get off the Internet if she cannot afford to buy website subscriptions. Anything to make the online experience of wealthy IT professionals better.
It's odd to publicly state that they didn't know about it, because now if they don't do the same after the next big flaw comes out, the implication will be that they indeed knew and were quietly exploiting it. I thought that was why they generally don't comment on these things. The less-charitable assumption is that they'll make this claim every time regardless of whether it's true.

The claim that "the U.S. government would never put a major company like Intel in a position of risk" is obviously bullshit. TAO's job necessarily involves exposing companies both in the US and overseas to that kind of risk on a daily basis.
All that effort, and it's a tripod-gait (one leg moves at a time) walk and a slow bound (front and back legs move as pairs) run.
It's mirroring the users motion, like the General Electric walking truck from 1965.[1]

There have been many fast-running robots. Boston Dynamics gets the most press, but there are others. I have an old patent on this from the early 1990s. It seems quite possible to do much better at legged running than people are doing, but there's no market and it's too expensive for the toy market. The Marines rejected the Legged Squad Support System, the militarized version of BigDog.

If you're going to build a big four-legged machine, it would be interesting to do it with double-ended air cylinders. Then you have adjustable compliance and energy recovery. A muscle can be thought of as a spring with an adjustable spring constant, zero point, and damping. Humans get back about 70% of running energy as elastic recovery. Cheetahs, about 90%. So energy recovery is crucial to fast running.

It's hard to implement that mechanically (there are mechanical kludges that do it, but not very well) but straightforward pneumatically. Carrying an engine and air compressor is usually too bulky for mobile robots, but in truck size, it would work. The control problem is different. You have to work in force space, not position space. It's not a good exoskeleton system, but it's a good robot.

When Google bought all those robotics companies, I was expecting great things. But nothing happened. Top management lost interest. Last year, Google sold off Boston Dynamics and Schaft to Softbank. Maybe they'll do something.

It's quite do-able today. When I was working on this in the early 1990s, gyros were big and expensive, as were accelerometers. Getting enough mobile compute power was hard. Nobody had 3D sensing good enough to profile terrain. Batteries were still NiCd. Motors were weaker. Power MOSFETs were bulkier and more troublesome. All those hardware problems have been solved. There's also been a lot of progress in control theory. Back then, it was mostly PID. Adaptive feedforward control was exotic and rare. Now advanced control is common. It takes smartphone levels of CPU power, which is a non-problem today.

But there's still no market.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coNO9FpDb6E
Physics 1230: Light and Color (Lecture Notes)
Youtube existed for several years prior to becoming the massively monetized behemoth it is now. Furthermore, numerous alternative video providers exist or have existed, everywhere on the scale from amateur to enterprise.
surprised SourceForge is still alive
Relevant: "privacy is the right to be human" https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8797-social_cooling_-_big_data_s...
Oh I flat out refuse to deploy it, no point letting Google get it's tendrils around my sites. If it was purely a specification for speed then maybe but it's not
You're right, but it's also true that some exist.

* Idle Words http://www.idlewords.com/ (while we're on this topic, http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm is worth reading)

* Programming In the 21st Century http://prog21.dadgum.com/

Are both extremely fast, filled with interesting content and amazingly manage this without loading any javascript from a google domain.
What I'm worried about is that it will be hard to avoid these security patches when you don't need them. Say you have a non-virtualized, non-shared server that only runs your own trusted code. I don't want to be forced to pay the performance penalty but it might be unavoidable without resorting to maintaining your own linux fork.
lol ok we'll check back then, you and i

edit: haha!! just got what you said and realized my mistake :o
If you want a truly internal-only text chat system for security reasons, you're not looking at Slack to begin with.
You are absolutely correct. Pain is far more than a simple signaling mechanism to tell you to take your hand off the stove.

One of its more interesting applications is as a pathway to mystical experiences. In the Christian tradition for example one uses one's own pain to come into a kind of spiritual alignment with Christ's experience and in that way become closer to God.

I'm not particularly familiar with other spiritual traditions, but I'd be shocked if every single major one doesn't have some kind of mystical algetic praxis.
Fantastic post! I'm also curious about Atlassian's new and improved enterprise chat solution.
So you're stealing binaries from GH and calling it your own? Sort of like what every download site already does. "Every day, SourceForge sees over a million visitors and serves 4.5 million software downloads." So everyday a user on average downloads 4.5 software packages? I highly doubt your numbers. Personally, I've downloaded perhaps 5 within the last year and I am an rabid consumer of OSS. I am not impressed with your performance.
From a different source...

(One possible barrier is a magnetic field of 50nT at or beyond 4 km. To create such a field using an electromagnet requires very large-scale engineering, for example a circular electromagnet 300m in radius carrying 10^5 amp-turns. While such an electromagnet is not impossible, it would likely be so massive that the relatively modest thrust coupled from the solar wind would provide accelera tion too slow to be of interest.

http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/PlasmaMag/

So we just need some novel superconductors, a portable fusion plant, and then we’re set! /s

More depth: http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/860Sloug...

Edit: Corrected formatting errors. Thanks for the heads up!
Yeah, this put me off from reading the rest of the essay.
15 transactions a day? I'm guessing that number is in the thousands, easily.

Manual input at restaurants alone should hit that threshold. As you correctly pointed out, reversing the transaction is very low friction, which is something I've not yet seen presented in any blockchain based solution.
10% equals how many billions of chips?
A few great things Recursers did in 2017
So many answers here already - but simply:

1. Very fast natural light shutter speeds (i.e. beyond 1/8000th second), whereas most leaf shutters might hit 1/500th or greater. He talks about some very expensive lenses that can go to 1/1600th, but this is fairly extreme.

The downside is a slower (1/200 - 1/250th) flash sync speed.
> But generally speaking, this protocol issue is of little interest for end users.

> What is of interest to them is the fact that their data can become decentralized with the blockchain

I'm not really interested in putting my emails in a blockchain, or did you mean some kind of... different data?
DDG is a just a re-skin of Bing search. They don't do indexing.
“Giga means large, and factory means factory!”
This is basically the position of the alt-right, neoreaction, and similar "movements."
How is the long term not gambling?

No one knows what going to happen tomorrow let alone in ten plus year.

My bet is: it all comes down to risk tolerance. In the long term some forms of investments have shown, historically, to be consistently less risky, or more risky, than others.
The App Store is penuts. The average user spends nowhere near as much on Apps as they do on their phone and accessories and Apple has even better margins on those sales.

Remember, Apple loses out on credit card processing frees from their '30%' and phones are several hundred dollars.
> but maybe they were trying their best in a difficult situation

Then let them prove it! That's one thing an ethical code will ensure.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394
PCs often (mostly?) ship with third-party anti-virus software because AV companies pay them to install it.
Are you operating under the belief that humans can only assign a single emotion to another...?

I said that he was a bit disingenous about some thing and then said that he "lacked understanding about...", yet, sure, cut that off, rip out the context in the interest of being snarky to a complete stranger. Why not?
His comments on tooling at the end of the article apply equally to all development projects not just games. Tooling had an enormous impact on productivity for developers but far too few organizations spend enough time on it.
Perhaps project zero wasn't the first to discover the vulnerability. If they discover it 2nd, I think it is only reasonable for the initial discoverer to set the disclosure process.
You mean, "giving them means to live in a tent near an Amazon fulfilment centre."
Well I made my point poorly, too. It takes some effort, some cognitive effort and some curiosity to look at the world this way. I would say, on an everyday personal level, every choice makes sense if you listen. And listening to those choices can enrich your own live.

However, looking, thinking and listening takes effort. Not much, but it does. And I guess thats where social media wins. Social media takes no effort. It's pre-made, pre-processed choices and satisfaction right there.

Saying it like that, it's like cooking. Ordering acceptable food is easy. Making your very own, really good burger takes like 2 or 3 tries. But afterwards, it's just amazing.
Ask HN: What's the right structure for geeks starting a software project?
I’ve been doing solo consulting work and development under my LLC for a while (in the SF Bay Area).

Recently, a few ex-coworkers have expressed interest in working on one of my projects with me.

I’ve been wondering what the right structure is to harness work from a bunch of geeks with various commitment levels (some would be full time, others part time), in order to ensure that:

- the structure/entity is neither expensive nor paperwork-intensive (not sure it makes sense to spend $$ on a new C-corp before we can see traction in the market)

- the work from each of us is assigned to “the entity” (to prevent problems later on with early member claims)

- we aren’t transgressing any labor law (min wage, etc) while we work “for free”

- we can have a reasonably clean transition into something more mature (C-Corp?) should we reach some success milestone

- we have liability protection

This is a group of people who have worked well together in the past and would likely work on another project together even if the first one failed, but by the same token, life changes happen, and it’s also very possible that some team member(s) will decide to go off and do something else.

Ideally there would be enough written down for people to know what to expect if/when we kick it into high gear, as I want to make sure that people get rewarded fairly for the sweat they put in, and to minimize surprises/disappointments.

I do struggle to come up with the right concept to express a promise in case of success, especially when there is such a disparity in commitment levels. Is it expressed in “x% of the company per hour of work”? Is it right to look at it from a time investment perspective?

Surely many ventures start with a bunch of geeks working out in a “garage” with no pay, right? How do people typically do this?
I would say it all depends on why the do it, if there is a clear motive (like if they depend on it...then it makes sense for me and them and builds trustworthiness). But just sponsor something out of the blue - no. I don’t believe in random goodness when money is involved.