skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So the engineering problem could be solved with a micro-controller and some binary communication protocol - yet now you're solving the same problem, but need a system-on-a-chip, so you can run a linux distro, so you can run a web-server, so you can serve JSON. Because... why?

I can actually walk you through each piece of this and explain why things are better now, just because I've been in this swamp for so long.

1. Raw socket communication is bad because if the socket is dropped, you have to reinitialize it. On mobile it's going to get dropped alot. Plus new commands require lots of custom dev instead of using a standard REST library.

2. Binary packets are simple but also not flexible. "Hey we need to change device name to allow 64 characters now instead of 32, but you can't break all older hubs that still restrict to 32 characters in the binary packet, this means battery level could start at offset 108 or 140" Now repeat that for 5 other properties over the course of a year.

3. The bridge data was stored in a custom vector format instead of sql, so we can't get the engineers to cleanly migrate that data as new requirements come down from management. Testing takes 4 times as long to make sure nothing breaks.

4. I had a different client who built an entire bridge around udp thinking this would mean everything would be 1 or 2 milliseconds faster for home automation. In the end they had to rebuild tcp on top of udp to ensure correct state.

5. Custom firmware, they used to just download new firmware over http, check the hash and then apply it directly. If anything bad happens during this process the bridge is bricked, there's no rollback mechanism, no integrity check, just a dead hub. Moving to a micro linux distro at least brings in sanity checks for updates.
I think we have two problems at the moment.

1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident.

2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.
He kind of looks like Christopher Walken.
Ask HN: What are the quintessential jobs of a manager?
In your opinion, what's the quintessential job of a manager?

I've heard in the past, for example, that a job of a manager is to create the condition for people to do their best work, and make it hard for them to stay if they suck.

I'm not sure this is right, but this fits a single description.
Why does your startup exist?
It's imposible to divorce the effectiveness of government from global phenomenon and long-term knock-on effects from previous governments. For example, the brownout crisis - was it because the ANC government mismanaged funding and refused to repair, renew and build electrical power plants, or was it because the situation left by the apartheid government was unsustainable, and the ANC was left with a "you deal with it" post-it note? It's difficult to know without getting into the specifics of each issue.

My point is that comparing government effectiveness is not as easy as looking at results. This was exemplified by many of the communist satellite states to the USSR, which it sponsored for political gain to its own economic detriment. The satellite states flourished under communism, and as soon as the regime collapsed they suffered - was it the newly-elected democratic government's fault that industry had collapsed and there was rampant inflation, or was it just a long-term effect of previous government policy?
I have previously seen The Telegraph as a relatively serious publication, but we were approached by a person from them who reached out to us for an interview. Only after the interview, they told us that it was for an ad-campaign and that they wanted money for it to be published.

Looking back at the email conversation, they weren't blatantly lying but used weasel-wording to make it appear as being editorial content.

Having a background as a journalist, this was shocking for me.
Thank the Planet's Shifty Magnetic Poles for Runway Renaming
> There was no obvious pattern to the servers which produced these mystery core dumps. We were getting about one a day on average across our fleet of servers...The probability that an individual server would get a mystery core dump seemed to be very low (about one per ten years of server uptime, assuming they were indeed equally likely for all our servers).

Does that tell us that Cloudflare has about 365 * 10 servers in their fleet? I can never quite work out probabilities but I figured they'd have more.

EDIT:

> all of the mystery core dumps came from servers containing The Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4. This model belongs to the generation of Intel processors that had the codename “Broadwell”, and it’s the only model of that generation that we use in our edge servers, so we simply call these servers Broadwells. The Broadwells made up about a third of our fleet at that time...

So at least 3 times the number of servers the above probabilities would suggest, and for edge nodes only. Not sure why I find working out this info fun but there you go.
Well, using figures from http://time.com/money/4746795/richest-people-in-the-world/, if we take the top eight, sum their fortunes (conveniently expressed in billions), and divide by 3.6, we find that a maximally equitable redistribution would allocate, to each of the lucky recipients, the princely sum of $165.38 US.

So, I'm going to guess the problem may lie somewhere other than with eight really rich people. But we don't really need to do the math on this one, do we? It doesn't even pass the sniff test - "these eight people are LITERALLY THE WORST" is just far too uncomplicated a proposition to accurately reflect the reality of a human world which, though many things, is never simple.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/28/240317
Maybe easier to ship patients ?
What average person has a need for blockchain? I seriously don't get the comparison.
The dissatisfaction comes from makework that displaces meaning. Without it, meaningful work could happen.
They're sharing their situation. Indicating to others that there's a problem is a part of getting it solved, and if that problem is systemic it's probably one we're all going to need to work together on.

The world isn't kind. But there's no reason we can't work to make it less so.
Since I read about this a few years ago I really want to try it, but I don't want to buy an extra GPU for it. I hope AMD [0] brings their SR-IOV implementation called MxGPU down to their mainstream GPUs, which allows to split a single GPU between host and guests. Apparently this would also be more secure than passthrough?

In order to not affect their pro GPU sales they could maybe limit the number of virtual GPUs from 16 to 2, which would be enough for the host and a single guest.

[0] or Nvidia, I don't care, but since Nvidia is the market leader they have less incentive than AMD.
Practical advice to minimise risk after Meltdown/Spectre
That is a really cool project. I have a question which might be off topic but here goes. In a startup like yours how do you price? Do you price for the average case and leave it at that? Also do you start with a good margin of safety and are somewhat flexible with the pricing as you are a new startup? Kind Regards.
Exploiting cheap labor under the guise of free trade is a good start.
This looks like https://www.marmoset.co/hexels/ (which is awesome)
Oops, thanks. I've always had struggle remembering these terms because they are so confusing. "Specific" means that something only relates to one particular element X in a set of more than one thing. Given that meaning, one would expect specificity to mean "how good is the test at correctly reporting the thing it is designed to report X rather than confusing a different thing (an element from the complement of X) for X", but that is sensitivity. Instead, specificity means that with respect to the complement: "how good is the test at correctly reporting all the other elements in the set ¬X as negative rather than confusing an element from ¬X for X".

"Sensitive" has a clearer intuition: For example when you want to detect a weak signal, then if your antenna is more sensitive, you can better pick up the signal, thus you are better at telling whether the signal is really there (you have a better true positive rate).

I cannot think of a better name for TNR, though, other than simply sticking with TNR and TPR.
It actually kind of does. It just tends to come with starvation in the present society.
If you inspect the account/brand listed as the seller, it is much harder to get fooled by a counterfeit. Amazon-brand items sold by Amazon are pretty hard to mistake, in my experience.
The final piece of course is the cultural reform required for UBI.

What will you spend your UBI on if the goods and services are not being produced, because no one is being paid to do them?
Oh sure, but it's the wage earned for those hours worked after expenses I have a problem with. And aren't there penalties if the drivers simply cannot complete their delivery runs?
Money paid for information seems like it would be part of the transaction costs.
While you can certainly become rich by accident, usually what we call "accident" are quite rare. Are you saying dumb people getting rich are rare by calling it an accident ?
I think we would need more study to establish if there is a correlation or not, looking just at the people you met is not enough.
It's a reference to the notion that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of something like 105, so have more 140+ IQs, and as such they are disproportionately represented in Nobel Prize winnings in the 20thC. Etc etc. I won't source for them (theres a Wiki article) since I think most of the variance can be accounted for by culture.
Raw binary protocol lighting tech from the 1980 was stateless, but nobody is willing to accept that nowadays for home automation.

"Turn device on" - Great I can do that fast

"Turn device off" - Great I can do that fast

"Is device on or off?" - Hold on while I poll a serial rf signal device by device while I determine state.

All of the slowdown coming from our tech and others that I've seen is because hardware guys still think these old stateless solution are acceptable and then have to hack something dirty on top to turn it into a stateful solution.
You ought to watch "Zero Theorem" for some comic reflection...

That aside, I think work has been debased because the values of currencies have been debased by central banks. The 1% fully and significantly invested in the stock market may be feeling somewhat differently, though.

Also, I think to some extent that the tech dreams promised by my childhood have largely been replaced by corporate simulacra that are in no way as satisfying.
To be fair, money as a signalling mechanism is a useful tool, but it can't be as neatly separated from politics as libertarians believe. Most politically relevant agreements are either made behind closed doors or benefit from insider information, so their signaling does not improve market efficiency for all involved - just the well-connected clique; and the "creative accounting" by major firms is responsible for distortions in what companies are being considered efficient, again allowing a small oligarchy to gain market advantages even when nominally participating in a free market.
Why do you assume that not being paid means that no goods and services will be produced?
Measuring Transactional Integrity in Airbnb’s Distributed Payment Ecosystem
If you have children you can't complain if you have to work more. It is a decision, kids cost money, everybody knows that. Same goes for location to live in, what you eat, if you want a car...my point is : you don't NEED much. Most people could live comfortable with less work, the problem is people WANT too much and that is exacerbated by this throw-away society. What most don't get is: the world owes you nothing, you should be happy with the minimum, anything beyond not being hungry and having shelter is an WANT that's extra you don't NEED. People are spoiled
You're not extrapolating.

Thats just the top 8 people...Take the sum of the rest of the the global 1% or even 10% and do your math...

OH nm, the math has already been done.

280 trillion in global wealth / 6 billion people = 46k per person

And the top 10% has 86% percent of it, and the inequality is just growing exponentially.

I'm not advocating that wealth should be equally distributed OR that capitalism is all bad..however, that in-equality is STAGGERING....unregulated capitalism with no income redistribution is a one way ticket to a third world PLANET.

https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/articles/news-and...
Maybe you should write an article on a popular website where you off-handedly promote your preferred pronunciation of asymptotic.
My suggestion is to double down on what you know already (iOS, swift, etc) and do homework on about 10 companies that pay well and have a need for that skillset. Then, a couple months before your bond gets over, approach these companies and start interviewing. If you are good, you will get at least a couple offers and will be in a good position to negotiate.

Note - the key is to approach these candidate companies more or less in parallel, and not serially. If you have multiple offers, you have a much better chance to make much more than what you are making today, compared to learning a new skill at this point.
Is there a website where people can post their annotated hospital bills and talk about them? If not, someone should make one.
Duck Pond – gravity game
Enriched uranium is one of the few supplies for which it's probably economically sustainable to provide continuously from Earth.
As long as you are physically capable of trying to make changes to your context, activities and expectations, there's a way out of that routine. Your "ideal life" may be way out of reach, but it is about as far away, from your current situation, as the opposite end of giving up. If you can consider walking in one direction, please consider the opposite as well.

The inertia of your current situation probably drains your energy and motivation to even experiment with making changes, but it is worth to find a trained professional that can help break that cycle. There's no shame in seeking therapy or support of some kind.
Duck Pond is a casual game which takes advantage of your phone’s accelerometer: complete the levels by tilting the screen and send the ducks into the pond of their color, avoiding obstacles, collecting coins, unlocking amulets, special ducks and other surprises.
Most of the new cycle superhighways are just lines painted on roads, the handful of segregated routes have come almost entirely from the roadspace. It is very rare for cycle paths to come at the expense of pavements, in fact I have only heard of it in the context of CS9. Can you provide another example?

The 'grip of a cycle paths fetish' is excessive.
Note this is not about WebGL, but about WebGPU by Apple, claiming it "generally offers better performance" than OpenGL/WebGL.

I'm not an expert in this area, but isn't it a bad idea to introduce another standard if there's already WebGL with great cross-browser and -platform support? It reminds me of what people have been raging about towards Microsoft for years...
Really surprised that Gestalt Laws are not listed.
(Law of Proximity is one of them).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology
Anyone have a transcript?
Research from the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that in 2012 alone 27 Billion dollars was spent by US Pharmaceutical companies to promote their drugs to doctors and patients.

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheet...

This is money that could have been spent on R&D instead of advertising if we moved to a non-profit pharmaceuticals model.
I'm from ex-Yugo (Croatia) and even though I'm heavily biased, completely agree.
> Jacob's Law: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

This should come with the footnote "unless you're Facebook". I wonder if they're fully aware of the power they wield in defining what normal/expected UX looks like to a so many people? (e.g. popularizing the mobile three lines 'hamburger' menu, then later moving away from it themselves)
Is there are place where you can simply download pages already "perfected" in its UX and you can simply add your own custom business logic to it?

Something in this direction would be Bootstrap's templates:

https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/

I dunno about you, but I'd rather not have to think about how to make project sites look like every time, but at the same time not necessarily use the same purchased template (because said template may not actually have a good UX).

The fact that there are no standards here is part of the problem, IMO. Novelty drives views and therefore revenue so some sites are incentivized to be overly complex, imo.
In which country do you do office work 12 hours per day ?

More importantly : no one is forced to look at their computer screen for 8 or even 12 hours a day. You can take a break when you want. You can stare at the window or the roof or your nails every 5 minutes if you want. On the contrary, with a VR headset, you would have to pull it off even for a 2 seconds break. It would be a nightmare, no one is going to accept that and no one should be forced to do that (except maybe in North Korea ?)

This is one of the reasons VR will disappear once again. On the contrary, AR (augmented reality, e.g. hololens) may very well be the next big thing, once they resolve the current issues with hololens (resolution and most importantly field of vision)
If the parent is a guy, he probably wouldn’t ask.

I’ll print out maps prior to business trips. Does anyone still print backup transparencies?
You should read about the overcrowding!

I’d like for there to be more interesting opportunities and challenges here. Doing what I can.
I live in the most corrupt and poorest country of all Western Society, I come from a poor family, my whole life was fighting, I have been starving, I have been freezing (couldn't afford heating, sleeping bag in winter). I don't blame anyone, I don't expect anything from society. I spend years acquiring skills, knowledge and experience and now it pays off. The whole knowledge of the world is available online to anyone, if someone can't make something out of that then they have to try harder.
Same here. But I find code reuse problematic: people tend to build large libraries with complex APIs and too many options (typically also lacking sane defaults) instead of small, focused code "blocks" that can be well understood and tested and do one single thing very well. It's like having to fasten a nut and being offered 3 types of swiss army knives as your available tools. Same with operating systems, web development frameworks etc. ... Too many options, too little thorough understanding, stable interfaces.
I think it is worse in the US.

India goes as far as waiving patents if a drug is too expensive.
Is Apples WebGPU proposal still being actively developed? I haven't seen any signs of life since the initial reveal nearly a year ago, or from Mozilla's Obsidian proposal for that matter.

At least from an outsider's perspective, the only active proposal for a WebGL successor seems to be Googles NXT: https://github.com/google/nxt-standalone
>New York: The capital city of decay. The ancient cities of Europe are beloved and treasured, but in the New World, things that were once beautiful are left to rot.

>And the people! My, the people. Like eight million lone wolves penned in the same cage. They gnaw at each other and themselves. They’re skittish yet vicious. Angry but afraid. Helpless because they’re all fighting for the same scraps from too small a table. This was my kind of place.

Maybe people wouldn't act so "lone-wolfish" towards you if you weren't an arrogant sod who moved to their city and country to document Rot and Decay. In general, people are usually a bit uncomfortable around entropy fetishists.
Maybe you are thinking of Gentoo? Arch’s core and community software are distributed as binaries that have been compiled for you.

The AUR provides additional software you can compile yourself but most of what makes the system run already built.
Two things that came to mind while reading this essay:

- The effect of a surprise when facing unexpected complications/details is because our brains tend to simplify things, or rather simplify the model of the world that we maintain. When you first hear that water boils at 100º your brain really really wants to assume it's that simple, no more than that. Simplifications are crucial for optimising the brain's power consumption, which it tends to minimize all the time.

- The amount of detail in human built stuff, as well as in our understanding of the world is a result of many centuries of perfecting and improving those things. Go a few millenia back and look at the stairs we were building then, they were awful. Or the fact that the process of boiling is so complex is a result of relatively recent discoveries in physics, just a few centuries ago.

Funny thing is, the details of the reality around us will only get more complex over time. Suppose in a few centuries from now stairs will be so complex and so perfect that no individual will be able to build them on their own.
There's an atreus62 variant available (I have one, love it). You can order the components (or prebuilt models) from profetkeyboards.com

Personally, I shift the letter keys out to the sides by 1, so the pinky's only have 1 column to deal with, and there 2 extra rows in the middle. This also has the effect of rotating the wrists outwards even more - comfy!

As it turns out, I don't even need the full 62 keys (and have even pulled 8 keycaps off!). Depending on your preferred layout, you might also get away with <60 keys.

But a low-profile variant would be nice :)
>The Internet was very clearly useful in many ways, from very early on.

I don't agree, take a look at this video from 1994:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVKRSsrIqpA

It's anecdotal, but people clearly had no idea of a use-case for internet, i.e a billboard ?
> So what happened? It’s impossible to say for sure (CBP doesn’t release specifics)

I wonder how they know it was the suitcase that's causing this when... CBP doesn't release specifics.
Christmas 2016 saw my family make quite a few Amazon purchases. Christmas 2017? One. One single item. It was a combination of the prices being lousy coupled with no longer keeping a Prime membership because why would I? The shipping promises didn't keep up and the video service is downright awful.

My distaste for Amazon mirrors my distaste for all tech companies--the dream is dead folks. It's a cult of personality, just like Google, Apple (sorry, but Tim Cook is just an idiot--the cost cutting Tim, the cost cutting), Facebook, Microsoft... Bezos has his typically left-leaning feel-good hypocritical politics, with the Washington Post as his mouthpiece, spewing garbage corporatist propaganda. Amazon, police thyself!

Next, there is my growing lack of concern about consumer products and consumerism in general. Everything you buy contributes to the destruction of our environment and our ecosystems: Every single bit of Chinese plastic is another dead animal, another cubic foot of pollution, more ocean pollution, you get the idea. We should be far more circumspect about how we're contributing to the problem. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. But ignorant Americans have to fill their empty lives with consumerist crap because.
Unless it's doing a lot of miles, energy cost of building new car > energy use difference between new and old.