skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that's disingenuous at all. Incidentally, most of the big tech companies are in the US. But there's some in Europe that are hit equally hard by this regulation. Examples: Booking.com (Dutch, but American owned, pays taxes primarily in the Netherlands): between 60 and 90 billion USD worth; Spotify (Swedish) purportedly worth 30ish billion USD.

In other words: I really doubt that this is a targeted attack on the US/US companies.

Finally, I think a lot of GDPR is at least as hard to implement for non tech companies as it is in tech/information type companies. The latter at least have lots of in house expertise in both tech and usually tech related law. It's just really expensive for them. More traditional companies that run some crazy IT system built by an outsourcer 20 years ago might have a bigger problem.

Disclaimer and source: implemented several GDPR components when working at Booking.com.
Wonderful! I detest the UEFI/secure boot schema in use on post-Windows 8 systems
Optimizing hash tables: hiding the hash code
Elon Musk should do an ICO of a new cryptocoin he could call Marscoin. People would buy it in droves.
Thanks, that's a great link. There was some other research posted to HN recently on the claims about violent deaths too:

http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...

I think it's easy for the likes of HN readers, most probably sitting in their comfortable western strongholds to feel like we are bringing progress in the world with our fancy tech. I believe the reality feels very different to a lot of people in a lot of other places - where things as basic as even food or clean water might still be hard to come by - and it's kind of insulting for fussy old rich men living in comparative luxury to be telling these people otherwise.
Not OP, but as a reader of both Sapiens and Homo Deus, I feel like the latter is a bit of fluff already covered by the end of Sapiens.

Not a bad book, but more baseless theorizing while Sapiens was a really rich examination of history where he author definitely applied a lifetime of study and research.
I don't think Pinker is against activists making the world better. But activists need to convince people that their ideas actually will improve things. Lots of activists have made the world better, but some have made it worse, despite having good intentions (see: eugenics, communism).

If you're trying to sell people on the idea that status quo institutions like capitalism are bad, you have to compare it to the alternatives. You can't just say "bad things happen under capitalism, therefore we need to do away with it." That's comparing capitalism vs. utopia, but utopia doesn't exist, for all kinds of practical reasons.

Pinker makes the case for what the world as we know it has achieved. An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.
Ah, in that case I pretty much agree with you. We'd be in a much better world if middle class Americans and up had higher deductible insurance that only covered true major issues and then payed for everything else out of pocket. Let's get some capitalism and price competition on!

Unfortunately we're stuck in this rut where people mostly feel that healthcare should be "free" (meaning no out of pocket expenses) and also the system handles private payers very poorly (just try to get a hospital to tell you in advance what a test will cost). It sucks and have no idea how it gets better.
I wonder who's paying for SCOs lawyers after all this time
I have to say I was skeptical but this sounds pretty legit,
far beyond some shady Chinese company registered in BVI at least. https://blog.trusttoken.com/trueusd-faq-18dbc563fb67
Not sure you linked to the right story. FCC chairman opposes nationalizing a 5G network, is it because there would be no competition, or because the gov would be making its own provider, or what?
*Lifetime is defined as the TTL setting on our DNS records.
It can be pretty toothless, but the mere fact that it exists as a platform for discussion, expression if views and the firmation if consensus is a huge improvement compared to nothing. I think the experience nations get of working together on issues is also pretty valuable.
Tesla can already change its cars' performance with OTA updates. You know what that means, right? It means that all software can be changed with a single OTA update. And much of this system's security depends on how secure Tesla's servers are.

How cars were designed 30 years ago is completely irrelevant, because that's not how all or most new self-driving cars will be designed. They will be designed so that the software can be changed on the go.
Could someone please post the code in the tweet? Twitter's not letting me see it.
I think the main trouble is centered directly on Bitfinex, the exchange that mints Tether. According to Bitcointy's charts[0], Bitfinex trading volume over the past 30 days is roughly 1.59M BTC as of this post – that equates to over 30% of the BTC trading market. As I understand it, despite this massive volume Bitfinex will not convert to/issue any fiat in the form of withdrawals. This is why they created Tether (USDT) with 1:1 parity to USD. (I'm sure you know all of this, but I am much less knowledgable about modern crypto markets so I have to explain it to myself as I type – sorry if I am coming off as patronizing.)

If Tether is not legitimate, and the price suddenly crashes, I think the effects would be hard to predict. My assumption is that Bitfinex is not liquid enough in any coin to cover the losses of a crashed Tether as trust in their entire exchange is tied to that particular coin. But at this point I have no idea what would happen, I don't think anyone really does. If there was a run on Bitfinex, the world's largest BTC exchange, I think the effects would be pretty dramatic.

0. https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/30d?c=e&t=b
Title would make more sense if it was "Making Sense of Super Smash Bros. Melee". Not everyone plays this game.
I've got an idea. Why don't you form your opinion of the work based on its own merits by reading a sample from it?
Nope we're not writing our own blockchain. This tutorial was just a friendly walkthrough helping developers dip their toes into blockchain.

We're building on top of Ethereum and also actively exploring side chain solutions like Tendermint.
Agreed. Long live ladder logic!
Open Source Program Guide: Shutting Down an Open Source Project
I think of Bob as a team communication tool. Hopefully, most people on the team are familiar with Bob. When I'm working with someone else on that critical thinking thing about the end product, I can ask "What about Bob?" and teammates know what I'm talking about. Bob is a mobile user might not be complex enough to warrant a persona. I think personas are more likely to be a useful tool as the number of user types/goals increases.

Personas can also be a kind of checklist as a change is made, ensuring that the change makes sense (and doesn't break) in the most common product scenarios.
It's not the amount of auditing. Nobody wants to be associated with it. It's just not worth it from the auditor's perspective.
If you need to “over-parametrise” to make a class testable the problem is not in the unit test, it’s in your design.
Tether claims on its main webpage to be 1:1 backed by "by traditional currency held in our reserves. So 1 USD₮ is always equivalent to 1 USD."

If they are really just "backing" it with bitcoin then it is fraud.
Check Ron Minnich's talk explaining the why:

https://schd.ws/hosted_files/osseu17/84/Replace%20UEFI%20wit...

(The video of the presentation is linked in the OP).

There's already two and a half obscure OS's running underneath the OS for booting. So this replaces all that crap with something lean and good.
The US and Russia avoided conflict with each other before and after the atom bomb, and also before and after the UN made it illegal. I'm not sure either were essential or even effective deterrents.
But now we're all fat.
Well you don't have the option for off peak hours in a tournament setting. There's also obviously a high increase in risk as you progress towards the finals of a tournament.
> The problem is that the matchup disparity matrix is difficult to derive.

Well, TFA had no bones about calculating one.

> Is HBox just the best player ever

The current data says pretty definitively, yes.

If other players can learn how to get his winrates vs Fox, then the matchup matrix would end up reflecting that. The matchup matrix doesn't need to reflect the perfect ("objective") state of the matchup, just the current one.

(The system I'm talking about would look more suspicious if HBox wasn't considered the best, because it would probably put him at #1 anyway.)
They do compete against each other. They also compete with other forms of energy generation. Did you think there was only a single company in USA that made solar panels?
> Those who exchanged Bitcoin for Tether will be holding worthless Tether tokens and will want to quickly exchange it for something else... like Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency.

One could unwind USDT slowly. It needs to in the end be converted to USD to actually unwind. Does Tether.io have $2.4B ready to be cashed out?

If you exchange USDT to another cryptocurrency someone is still holding USDT.
Americans are saving energy because fewer people go outside
Good points. From a consumer's perspective, I do hope that they would eventually choose to build on a public blockchain. The fact that consensus is provided by miners worldwide (or stakers in PoS chains) instead of a couple of diamond-related companies means that there is one less thing for me trust.
A Native American Turns Up at Your Anti Immigration Protest Rally
Bleak House (BBC 8 episodes) is on Amazon Prime, easily one of my favorite period dramas ever.
True story: I looked into a company in the vehicle automation field that had OTA upgrade on and didn't bother to check whether or not the vehicle was in motion or not during the upgrade. You really can't make this stuff up.
Yeah I don't necessarily seek out solitude, just noticing as a personality trait that I'm more OK with it than many other people. I always have something going on whether it's work, personal projects, etc. so I don't mind if, for example, I'm sitting in an office by myself. Whereas others want more of a 'buzz' around them. That kinda thing.
Massive Cryptocurrency Heist Spurs Call for More Regulation
Let me clarify what I meant: it's not wrong that it's Western/American because it's where it happens to be coming from, which is just the function of US being currently the biggest economic and cultural influencer. But I say it's wrongly called because at its core it's not American - it's older than America, and lots of its part have nothing to do with the US or the Western world.

The universal culture is, simply, what wins on the cultural market.

Looking through this lens, McDonald's and Coca Cola, and cars and Internet shopping, are present worldwide not because of American imperialism, but because they are better, in many aspects, to what they replace locally. People find utility in fast food restaurants, sweet beverages, urbanization, "western" healthcare, etc. The US isn't parking its aircraft carriers in the Baltic to tell Poland that we have to open Starbucks (and similarly structured competition), nor does Sweden threaten us with another Thirty Years War if we don't start buying prefab furniture. All of those won on the cultural market, and they're only associated with the West because the West is leading in economy and innovation, contributing the most to the universal culture at this time.

> In other words, you don't mind a base monoculture and the loss of untold regional treasures and ways of human expression.

Actually, I don't. Or put another way - I'm not particularly fond of trying to artificially protect existing local cultures and old traditions. Cultures are mostly arbitrary anyways; I don't care much for what kind of folklore dance I am supposed to engage in at weddings. But I accept that other people do, so I'm also against forcing the choice. But not forcing the choice is also precisely what makes universal culture universal - it's the set of things people adopt on their own over what they did previously.
Similar philosophy to Petitboot, for which the rationale is given here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQueOHKO58M

Obviously it's a heavy weight solution, but the idea of having more drivers and better support is compelling— it's a much easier path to exotic boot setups, eg over wifi, off a SAN, whatever.
Tyson Joins Bill Gates, Cargill to Invest in Lab-Meat Producer
I don't understand why it doesn't follow. If there is an adversarial attack that causes the autonomous software that controls the self-driving cars to crash then they need to be updated.

> This should not, under any circumstances, be a reasonable justification.

That presupposes that humans cannot make mistakes, which they do. Whether it is hackable software defined radio, or just plain oversights.

The levels of abstraction that programmers deal with do not allow for the necessary security you propose.

> Cars should not have any external attack surface, period.

What you advocate for is a car with no ports, no radios, and a perfectly secure component manufacturing chain. It isn't doable. There is a reason the ship sailed.
I think you are disregarding the degradation of the human attention span that modern media has brought to our minds. If you really think there is no difference in capacity between the minds of that time and now, just google "technology and attention span" and spend some time with the results. If you can manage to hold your attention long enough to read through them :) I know hardly anyone anymore who can sit on a couch and read for even 5 minutes without a break in attention to do something on their phone. The capacity absolutely is not there.
3 Super Simple Tactics to Reduce Your Blogs Bounce Rate
I launched the site. When I was building it, I never expected it to be attacked.
Using Synthetic Data Modeling to Enhance Machine Learning
Yes, there are lots of off the shelf enclosures. I've been using Hammond aluminum extrusions with laser-cut black acrylic end plates to fit the connectors. The result is a nice black box.[1]

Many Arduino/Rasperry Pi type boards have connectors on every edge. It's hard to box those things. That's what motivates these two-plate "cases". If all the connectors are on one edge, it's easier to package the unit.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ttyloopdriver
Is there any chance of a big player like Dell getting behind this project? Will servers ever ship with this firmware?
Eh, it reduces the memory overhead to run it in your existing browser rather than run a separate browser runtime just for Riot.
But if you look into their eyes, you can still see the progress bars…
Actually, the US has an entity called the Department of Energy that does foster solar research. [1] If you're not US based, you may not know about this.

[1] https://energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources/renewab...
When I was younger I had this friend (cof, cof) who used to war-dial 0800 numbers (telephones beginning with 0800 are national toll free numbers in Brazil) looking for modem tones.

The biggest share of toll free numbers with modem tones were fax machines and but many were 9600 baud terminal for some CLP. I guess these were remote maintenance accesses for isolated machinery - I wonder if people still do this (may be an updated version with 3G or 4G).
A while ago, I answered the same question on Quora[0]. I listed my favorite ones there. And if you are interested into database systems checkout [1].

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-books-on-Distribute...

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-reading-list-for-distributed...
>Would any of these matter at all to a different intelligent species?

That's not how mattering works.

On the other hand, I just noticed your username, and you know, it totally fits. How did I not notice that the guy proclaiming the pointlessness of life is calling himself, "Rasengan"? Come on, please tell me this is all some jocular TTGL reference.
why boot linux then boot linux again, rather than just booting linux once?
Appraisal rights lawsuits are essentially trolling in the M&A world. It's a nuisance markets, bankers, lawyers and courts have to deal with, but they're not relevant to anyone who isn't a party to the deal.

Dell going public again in no way indicates there will ever be another private buyout. That may or may not happen, and both the market and the industry have changed much since Michael Dell took it private.

Different groups of shareholders argued different things... appraisal rights are weird, and at the end of the day 99% of people in Finance will argue that the judge's decision on that case is entirely inconsistent with even the most basic principles of corporate finance and capital markets. Just because one guy who happens to have the power to decide the lawsuit's ultimate fate says his version of the facts is right doesn't mean he is in fact correct.
With most car brands you're lucky if the car repair shop even bothers to tell you when they installed an ECU update. There is, obviously, no change log available anywhere. Sometimes people whipser behind backs, though.
I went to an "elite" private high school. The handful of kids who chose to take a gap year or to gasp not go to college at all were looked upon with such scorn. But no one was more looked down-upon than the kids who only got into "safety schools."

That said -- being in an environment where your intellect was directly correlated to your social standing was pretty nourishing and really encouraged the best in (most) people.
Why everyone is freaking out about White House plan to nationalize 5G networks
I don't get it. Can someone explain to me what's so notable about this that it made it to the front page?
4 Strategies to Boost Your Email Click-Through Rates
Re GoI and defunctionalization, is "On the relation of interaction semantics and defunctionalization" by Schopp a good reference? I've just started reading the literature regarding applications of GoI to pl theory and would love to add this line of research to my queue.
On top of that, I would argue that war was able to be made illegal because the major world powers found war among themselves to be incredibly ineffective. Many years, massive amounts of money, and hundreds of millions of working/reproducing aged citizens died for almost no gain by most countries. It makes a lot more sense to work things out through international policies and economics than by bombs and guns. All that being said, Russia still invades Crimea and Georgia, maybe because it's just easier and faster with absolute overwhelming force.
5 Steps to a Faster WordPress Website
The Trump Administration said it has no plans to build a 5G wireless network
Of the 103 coins currently trading on Bitfinex[0], the exchange most likely to be full of users who need this kind of coin, I don't see TrueCoin listed. Am I missing it, or has TrueCoin not been added to Bitfinex?

0. https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bitfinex/
The people I've worked with who are operating power plants can't read code. Perhaps they can read a schematic and could understand ladder logic. They are usually quite skilled mechanically though.

Even the automation professionals I work with whose jobs are to write and maintain PLC programs look at the 'structured text' PLC logic I've written (a constraint solving algorithm) and can't be bothered trying to understand it.

Controlling a physical system is different from programming computers. The simpler the logic is to read and understand the better. Direct and verbose is better than layers of indirection and abstractions.
Wind and solar projects have the lowest overrun risks of all utility-scale electricity projects:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...

A 500 megawatt solar project is, approximately, 100 5-megawatt solar projects tiled together and sharing a transmission line. There are large parts of the project that can be built in parallel without scheduling dependencies. There are multiple vendors available for each equipment component (racking, tracking, inverters, modules) and there's a lot of mix-and-match flexibility. You don't have to buy Panasonic inverters and monitoring software just because you went with Panasonic modules. Large projects usually start generating power before their official commission date, because you can energize completed subsections as soon as they're connected to transmission.

Nuclear projects are pretty much the complete opposite. There are tightly coupled dependencies. A delay in one component (like a coolant pump) means that the entire project timeline slips. You can't play mix-and-match with reactor components -- no Westinghouse core plus Mitsubishi containment system. Unlike a large solar farm, a large reactor can't start generating partial power when the project is only 50% (or even 85%) complete, so financing weighs more heavily on the project economics.

Reactors that are up and running are great, and I deplore their premature retirement. But building new reactors is a slow process where the payoff comes only at the end.
> There's zero support for the notion that it was "Chinese" flooding

You'll have to take that up with Obama then, since it was his administration that specifically targeted China. It's amusing that I'm being attacked by both people who say the flooding was done not only by China and also people who say it was only by China. I think my main sin was implying on this board that Trump did something that wasn't evil.
Hey there! Sounds awesome, I'm with Status and would love for you to check out more about what we're all about. https://wiki.status.im/The_Status_Network_Whitepaper

We're super supportive of matrix and their protocol, Riot will be getting a huge overhaul from how I understand

https://matrix.org/blog/2018/01/29/status-partners-up-with-n...

their latest blog post on this investment goes over the details of what all they are hiring for.
For Modula II.
the cist of tye war to Russia was also ruinous and maintaining that level of conventional forces would have been a real priblem. Bear in mind they got a lot of material support from the Allies during the war and continuing without that would have been very painful.

One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.
Not to mention adversarial attack vectors. I don't see AI working on mission critical systems while you can still remotely control the ai's decisions with what looks like white noise.