skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"Well, true, and the meta-point that I hope is coming across through my comment is that you should evaluate each opportunity according to the specific terms in front of you and your assessment of how likely the organization is to succeed in your future"

Yes of course that is just common sense and there is nothing in my comment that suggests you shouldn't apply common sense.

>"Nobody on an Internet forum can do that for you"

Well of course not and I was not attempting to advocate for someone else. I thought this was implicit when I stated "I think ..."
My biggest problem with the movie was using the hyperdrive as a weapon. Why couldn't that have been used on the first, second or third deathstar?
> More than that MoneyGram is a loss making entity with a negative equity

Their net income has been positive for each of the last five quarters and their operations and business produced net cash in the first three quarters of 2017 [1].

Their operations throw off substantially more cash than the $30 or so million in interest they pay each year, and their senior notes don't come due until 2020. Moody's and S&P rate them as highly-speculative, non-investment grade companies (B1) [2]. Not great, but not at risk of imminent default either.

It's not a healthy company. But it's not one in the midst of its death throes, either. Given the amount of dumb money chasing anything that smells like Blockchain, it's not particularly dumb to let shareholders sell their shares at a premium to uninformed buyers.

Book equity is a bad sole measure of the health of a business, particularly a financial business.

[1] https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMGI&fstype=ii&...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1273931/000127393117...

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Do not buy or sell any securities based on this Internet commentary.
In distributed ledgers, it doesn't matter who the leader is. The system only has to ensure that leadership is distributed in such a way that it is statistically infeasible or economically unprofitable to rewrite history.

PoW distributes the leadership (block creation) via crypto puzzles. PoS tries to use economic incentives to make bad behavior more expensive than good.

There's work being done (which I personally believe is the right way to go) in using a leader election-based system that works like a lottery (Algorand[0] is an example). The basis of such a system is going to be the creation of non-biasable pseudo-random number generation.

Along these lines one of the more intriguing projects is called RandHound[1]. It's a way of creating distributed randomness (according to the paper's title). I think chains secured via lottery leader selection protocol has more promise than PoS.

Edit: for clarity

A lottery-based system works because the "winning numbers" (imagine a winner being a node whose public key when XOR'd with the winning number is below a certain value) are known to all (a protocol like randhound ensures that all nodes know the winning number). A winner's bundle of transactions are validated as his/her's by cryptograpic signature (which can be verified using the same public key that is used to confirm this person is truly a winner). Those are the broad strokes. Obviously there's a lot more to getting it to work. I've been working on it for months and still haven't gotten around to putting it down on paper.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341

[1]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1067.pdf
> Congress has nearly no information on what impact the FISA program has

Apparently it has the impact that a big majority of congress will never vote against it. I wonder why that is?
This comes us every few months.
Just in case you're serious: Her basic case was a continuation of Obama-era policies: Expansion of access to health care; focus on climate change; level-headed foreign policy; etc.

I think you're right, in a sense. She had a 52-point plan on her website which outlined her position on any number of issues. At heart, she's a policy wonk. Leslie Knope for president. If she had been a bit more simplistic, it would likely have spoken to voters a bit more (ala Bernie Sanders -- Economic fairness! Medicare for all! Free college!)
I do agree with the author that there's a lot of generational shift in the deeper tangles of meaning buried in the new Star Wars movies. I disagree with some of his interpretations, however. Here's my view:

https://florin.myip.org/blog/edit-blog-entry-divisive-drama-...

TLDR: The story is basically re-told for the current young generation. There's less "magic", there's more "realism" (mind the quotes). Old mythologies are ignored. There are vast, sweeping cultural shifts such as the rise of feminism. And, yes, there's this youthful drive to declare that the past is dead, long live the future.
Optimizing just for salary doesn't add incentives for lower-pay but higher-reward-to-economy jobs (e.g. public-sector, research, etc.). Any sorting criteria is probably going to throw incentives way off.

What seems fair is to ban arbitrary "top-N" quotas. If you can get a job that pays you a living wage (such that you don't have to draw from subsidies), then you can stay without hassle. Tax forms generally give all the information needed to make this decision.
Do you have to move to the Bay Area?

I'm a professor at WashU and am interested, but I live in St. Louis.
> Asians who typically have a lower BMI than white individuals have higher incidences of Diabetes?

Perhaps I missed it but where in that link does it say Asians have "higher incidences of Diabetes" than whites?
"Time leaks are not fundamental to computing. They can be fundamental to running concurrent adversarial processes on the same core, though."

Wrong.

Even if you separate different privilege levels onto different physical computers, and they only exchange information by message passing, then they are likely to leak information merely from the message timing.

The message timing may indicate what has been cached or pre-computed on the privileged machine. So it's a matter of sending messages from the malicious machine such that they manipulate what is cached/pre-computed on the privileged machine based on the contents of privileged information.

Manipulating what is cached/pre-computed is generally not too hard for an attacker; the real trick is doing so based on the contents of privileged information. But it's conceivable that you could extract some information from a database by determining which pages of a btree got cached when you try (and fail) to look at something you're not supposed to. It might be hard to extract the 1000th byte of a big text field that way, but you might be able to find out whether "joe" or "sally" is the person you're looking for.

Sounds a bit difficult in practice, but computing (perhaps more than any other field) tends to quickly eliminate the difference between theory and practice when the motivation is strong enough.
The more investment and talent going into taking control of our biology and reducing disease, the better.

If using your tech skills to help battle disease in an ambitious way is interesting and you wanna learn about a new, quiet startup (top-tier funders, world-class bio folks already on board for you to partner with, rare advisors from tech/bio/pharma), ping me: kamens@gmail.com

We're hiring a couple more for our early team and specifically looking for data, infra, and ML engineers. No specific bio background required. Staying quiet for now, can share more when we talk.
I suppose the Skype client won't become open source with reproducible builds.
Why is Crypto Rising?
What makes it effective satire is it takes legitimate interpretations "The good guys in this story tend to shoot themselves in the feet and normal people get killed in the process," and stretches it to ridiculousness to highlight that point, like "Luke hallucinates Yoda's approval."
I don’t know why, but the first thing I searched for after reading this was: the CIA runs Ecuador.

Turns out, they do. I figured the overlords of the drug trade would want to make their home near the place of production. This is just theater.
> So Microsoft had to change the architecture (which wasn't designed with mobile devices in mind) into a more centralised approach that could work with mobile devices.

As an engineer and software developer, I find this to be extremely unlikely.

If "super-peers" can already route traffic for others, it seems very likely they could simply route all traffic for Mobile users through some "super-duper peer", instead of routing all traffic for all users through some "super-duper peer".
Ohio’s famous basket building finally sold
The key property of Ripple you have to understand is that the consensus is decided by a set of nodes controlled by the Ripple team and their partners, and those nodes don't care about the opinion of any other node that's not on their whitelist. Everyone else just listens to what they decide the consensus is and follows along. While in theory you could listen to a different set of nodes, it'd be daft to: if those nodes ever come to a different consensus than the default nodes then you're screwed, and who you trust has no effect on who the default nodes listen to or how their consensus is formed.
A mispredicted branch is incredibly likely to perform operations that would normally fault (consider misprediction of a null pointer check, for example...) I don't think it's feasible to have a (useful) version of speculative execution that can trigger a true fault, because the mispredicted branches are going to violate all sorts of software invariants.
In terms of a buffer overflow, how would any of that make any difference ? If you somehow manage to overwrite the length prefix due to some shoddy pointer manipulation (and buffer writes) and, subsequently, write past the end of the string buffer, how is that different from just writing past the end of the string buffer in the first place ?

With Pascal strings, you at least have a fighting chance in terms of knowing the actual size of the buffer.
>the reason Microsoft broke Skype so badly was because they used centralised servers with backdoors for countries who wanted them.

That seems like pretty unreasonable tinfoil. There is no reason for Microsoft to want to give information to governments. I assume they don't pay, and the cost is consumer trust. Makes a lot of sense to rearchitect such that you can't give in to government demands.
How to find the hidden hooks in your next product
I don't think it was a complete success. An AMD engineer mentioned the nature of the vulnerability on lkml before the end of the embargo, even though AMD was a party to the embargo.

Of course, it was probably unwise to discuss the code changes implementing mitigations in public anyways, but I don't have first-hand knowledge of how these things work in the Linux world.
Show HN: Micro-Learning for Leadership
> several new languages are working on ways to write code where you can actually assert and have the compiler check that the timing of the code you write is bounded and uniform.

I'm interested in how that would avoid the halting problem. Let's say I write code, compile it, and run some "timing verifier" on it. That verifier either runs my code and verifies that it's timing is correct on that run, or inspects the machine code against a known specification of the hardware I'm running it on right then and ensures all of the instructions obey my timing constraints. How would you check that the code's timing is bounded and uniform on subsequent executions? Or on other hardware? Or in the face of specifications that are incorrect regarding the timing characteristics of machine code instructions (CPU/assembly language specs are notoriously incomplete and errata-filled).

I suspect something fundamental would have to be changed about computer design (e.g. a "CPU, report thine own circuit design in a guaranteed-accurate way") to make something like this possible, but am not sure what that would be, or if it's feasible.
Right. Which, if it adds up correctly, is basically a 0% loan for the price of the phone.
Doesn't "profitable, excluding interest, taxes .." mean not profitable?
A 2 year loan for $500 is 24 chances for me to forget to make a payment, for a glitch to cause my bank / cc to not pay them on time, for them to somehow not notice that I have paid them when I actually did, etc etc etc, any of which will either result in me eating some costs (completely eliminating the benefit of the 0% loan) or burning 1-10 hours on the phone with some clowns.

What am I losing, whatever I would have made by investing that $500 over the same time period ? We're talking less than $50. I'm very lucky to be at a point in my life where I'd gladly give away "$50, 2 years from now" in exchange for "don't have to think about it, ever again".
>How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation?

"equally qualified" is not an objective, measurable quantity, which is the whole cause of the issue... If dev productivity could be unambiguously measured and ranked, the issue of late promotions,etc would never have been raised.

These are fuzzy metrics, and what you consider poor\unfiar treatment, I may consider fair (and vice versa)..
Check the historical data on this. In 1950 the % of unmarried black women was only 30%.....

You can see a flip occur around 1980 which would coincide with the beginning of the crack era, the failing war on drugs, and mass incarceration.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families...
I've not used MoneyGram in many years, but as I recall the friction is account set-up, authentication and funding the transation --> authentication and account set-up to receive funds. I don't think Ripple removes those choke points.
True. For a variety of reasons, cell phones in the US don't follow typical economic patterns of similarly priced items. Most people still lease and/or finance them, and insure them. Concerning insurance, using a shared risk pool to insure against an easily coverable expense (replacement cost) and fairly common event(damage/loss) is a bit of an anomoly. A combination of convienience and unfamiliarity with the technology have created(or allowed carriers to create/promote) this phenomenon
Yes they have. Now they have a set of (kind of weird) guides.
AppLink.io launches mobile app analytics platform for developers and marketers
Aren't there rumblings that the current administration wants to actually remove the opportunity to indefinitely linger on H1B/advance parole status while the green card application is pending ? Sounds credible as far as current administration goes, and would certainly be a huge long term problem for the US, but there we are.
I don't agree with many of his other positions, but Congressman Amash deserves credit for consistently standing up to his party and fighting government surveillance.
At first glance looks like another competitor for filecoin, storj, etc. Anyone know what the major differences are in the players in this space currently? I'm interested in decentralized storage (low cost), but really have no idea how to judge the different options.
My county has ~40,000 (aging) people and 5 public school districts. The notion of local control isn't going anywhere.

"(aging)" is just a remark about the demographics skewing away from children as the economy here stumbles along.
> My China-born colleagues seem to in general be more conservative, and Silicon Valley has become violently intolerant of anyone that holds an opinion different than the predominant view

What exactly does this mean? Are they evangelical baptists, libertarians, reactionaries, nationalist, homophobic, misogynist, racist, anti-atheist, pro family-values, pro corporation, skeptical of global warming, pro fossil fuel energy, war hawks, or something else altogether? It's really quite difficult to interpret your statement as anything meaningful without clarification, and there are ten thousand different ways to be "conservative".

And to be clear, "conservative" is anything but a dirty word or something I'm trying to critique here--just a context-sensitive one. It could be a pejorative or a value.

Otherwise it doesn't add much to the conversation--it is itself a reactionary statement.
Id also read the last annual report and any interims and also read anything about the companies and their competitors in the broadsheet newspaper you prefer - you do of course read a broadsheet newspaper?
I think "pull a Kodak" is an awesome term. I checked if it was already published on Urban Dictionary. It wasn't, so I submitted it and it was published: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pull+a+Kodak

I hope that's ok :-) If not, please let me know.
and the tips came from a shoeshine boy.
> Why is it hilarious?

Because the AEI is a right-libertarian propaganda mill (or, if you prefer, “think tank”) that generally (though there are some prior exceptions, too) is in lockstep with the general right-libertarian minimalist interpretation of Commerce Clause authority.

> To give you an idea of how new this idea is: at the time Prohibition [of alcohol] was enacted in 1919, it was a Constitutional amendment

Prohibition was first passed in 1918 as a statute law (the Wartime Prohibition Act.)

> enforced via the prohibition of "manufacture, sale, or transportation" rather than posession, because it was believed that the federal government did not have the power to outlaw possession of a substance.

Thst makes no sense; since the Constitution defines the power and obligations of the federal government, in adopting an Amendment they could have just added possession. Prohibition—both in it's statutory and Constitutional forms—addressed only manufacturer and trade and not possession or consumption not because of any concern about fundamental limits of federal power, but as a simple policy priorities decision.
The OpenWorm project
Why not just forward the e2e encrypted video streams through your servers? Encrypted or not, wouldn’t the amount of traffic be the same?
Oh god there really is.

Installed it to try, and it starts by asking sms and contacts permissions, which seems innocent enough to integrate with your contact list, only to realize "upload all your contacts to microsoft periodically" is on without asking.

Microsoft, you're really terrible at this.

(bonus point that I can't fully uninstall regular Skype because it's a "native app" on my samsung s7 edge, so at best I can disable it and remove all permissions from it, awesome)
they wouldn't say it if they didn't have to
Are you sure your company is not planning to use this as a utility token. Several companies ICO with this promise. For example Binance (a crypto-exchange) introduced BNB tokens. You can pay with Bitcoin but if you pay for your trades with BNB tokens then your trades cost 50%.
I should have been clearer: their external customers can and will use bad binaries inside their VMs, but everything else, especially anything at the boundaries between VMs, will not: it will have the appropriate mitigations in place.

Running a VM in a Borg task (container) does not add extra security in this case, but it does help with auditing and catching the snowflakes and stragglers that invariably end up taking a disproportionate amount of time with changes like this. That kind of auditing can be easily done organization-wide, instead of having every team reinvent the wheel their own way.
Shining a light on the future of automotive headlight technologies
ICOs are only fraudulent if you make them so. We don't know if you're based in the US either, which matters quite a bit since even the most well-intentioned ICOs constitute the sale of unregistered securities under US law. If you are, and since they're going ahead with it anyway, you might take a look at the SAFT Project [1], which is a legal framework for ICOs in the US created by the Cooley law firm.

In short, leave if you believe they are doing something illegal, and then sue them for creating a situation where you had no choice but to leave your job. But not all ICOs are, by default, illegal.

[1] https://saftproject.com/
That’s rights. XRapid removes the need for dormant FIAT sitting in Nostro/Vostro accounts.
I agree with you in general. A few observations:

Radio broadcast does scale "infinitely" in terms of the number of possible "clients" connected to the "server". It has no limits to the number of possible "connections" - because, of course, it's actually connectionless.

It does suffer from severe bandwidth limitations. For emergency communications this is not a problem.

FM (or anything above 30 MHz) also has very limited range - line of sight more or less. Frequencies below 30 MHz could and do occasionally reach the antipodes.

Also keep in mind there's a network of radio operators that is everywhere, and we are prepared to intervene in case of massive telecom collapse - the HAM radio operators. Emergency messaging should continue to function, at least for a while, even in the context of massive catastrophes.
leetcode is similar to the hackerrank website, it's a set of about 700 programming problems where one can enter a solution in almost any programming language applicable (there are some SQL queries). There is also a discussion forum for each question. Occasionally there is more writing by the problem creator with alternate solutions listed. I've found a few companies use the hackerrank for initial programming tests, I kind of dislike hackerrank because alot of the hackerrank tests rely on stdio input equivalent in each language which in some languages I never use in real life, i.e. I never use the Java command line prompt except for fooling around on hackerrank and some of the questions on hackerrank are ridiculously obtuse - I've skipped to the discussion and find that is the number one upvoted type of comment more than once.
No exit but Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) is doing quite well

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/14/gingko-bioworks-secures-27...
I think it was a patent issue. No one is allowed to use p2p for chat.
When I worked with Clearcase (which is terrible in many ways, this is just one), one of its nice features was that it changed file timestamp to the timestamp of commit, not the timestamp it was changed on developer's machine. The commit timestamp may be after previous commit but also before the compiled object file. Because of this, the only way to do a reliable build was to start from scratch. Which took 45 minutes.

Ceterum censeo, Clearcase must be destroyed.
Just move! It’s great here!
Agreed, but I have see a lot of people come away from the talk with an unfortunate disdain for ease. Ironically, in disentangling "simple" and "easy", Rich created a lot of confusion about the value of ease.
it's still making a loss though...
"When there were five vendors, 77 books were available for purchase and 24 of the titles were coloring books." They've added a sixth vendor, but it doesn't say how many titles are available now.

I think this is truly shameful. I can't think of any good reason to deny inmates books with a few exceptions. Much like increased costs to make phone calls or replacing in person visits with expensive video-conferencing technology this is just another way to extract some money from prisons.
How robo-callers wrecked the Do Not Call list
Same problem for me, not google fiber but a 100/100 mbit fiber in Denmark. Dropbox gives me 6-8 megabits upload (download is much faster) at max, google drive gives me between 40-50 megabits upload consistently.