skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Worker who sent Hawaii missile false alarm believed threat was real
It's more of a PR issue. It seems the large community of scientists, disagree strongly with Trump's positions on nearly everything.

Bill Nye circumvents that community completely but yet still represents an entry point of science for many(most?) laypeople.

I don't think laypeople are nuanced enough to know that a "science guy" isn't a "scientist". So it's setting back scientists a little bit from a PR perspective by having this hack be seen publicly associating with the Trump administration.
If someone should get fired, it's the person who put "This is not a drill" in the auditory warning that tricked the operator, and the person who didn't put in a "We messed up" text alert button.
If you like this idea, definitely watch Space Station 76. A 70's version of the future with a very smart but realistic theory bot.
Seems like the local government can still make it difficult for them to enforce the subpoena, but I imagine Hong Kong will be pretty amenable. [1]

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vl90MA...

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just found this from a cursory search.
Among many other reasons, due to the listing of Bitcoin futures on CBOE and CME the CFTC now has some oversight on the spot market.
> In Russia parents teach kids that you can never play "find the clever technicality" with the government, because you will always lose.

In America, the system of jurisprudence is adverserial[1] -- in Russia (and most of Europe), it's inquisitional[2]. This means that the court's only interest is in applying the law as written, not investigating any facts of the case. This distinction is why, in America, you can "win" vs. the government on technicalities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial_system
Why unattractive - all the the SEC oversight actions we've seen under the current adminstration/Congress indicates it's going to be all in on Wall Street deregulation - it's a lot of Goldman Sachs' former employees at the sprinkled throughout the administration (this part is probably not a lot different from what Clinton would have done, tbh). The cryptocurrency surge is mostly out of Wall Street by design which makes it a relatively harmless enforcement action (to entrenched interests on Wall Street).
Re "the 2-5 person capacity mass transit vehicle":

Lots of cities have enough density to support good dense tram / train / bus networks in the centre, during the day. But quite a lot of the people who would use that, also have to go further out sometimes, or need to get home later at night sometimes. If mass transit can't do this too, then they need to make a whole different plan... often meaning a car, and a house further out to afford parking.

This seems like the opening for smaller vehicles. They can perhaps fill in the gaps between lines, and the long waits between night busses, in a way that couldn't be done before, essentially because human taxi drivers are too expensive. It's possible this could help make proper public transport viable in lots more places than it is now.
Not so ridiculous.

He has a purpose in wanting to be there. They have a purpose in wanting to have him there. Both purposes will get served. Generally not equally. You have to look at the combination, and decide whether you like what happens overall.

Look, for example, at the example the offer gives where he debated a creationist. His purpose was to be able to present the science to people who normally reject it. Their purpose was to raise funds for a religious project. Both happened. But most third parties agree that his helping the Ark get built made a bigger difference than his getting a opportunity to present science to people who were unwilling to listen to him.
That is amazing. So, the exchanges turn USD into USDT, and the reason they sucker people into that trade is because you can buy more BTC on them... Because BTC is the only way that you can get wealth out of the exchange.

So, USDT is not actually useful to anyone, except people trying to fleece crypto-traders. I love we are re-inventing all the best parasitic parts of the fiat financial ecosystem.
Prior discussion / link to arxiv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220376
I am not a psychologist but to me it seems like you have anger issues perhaps and you direct that to your plates which you can destroy?

Anger always finds a target, and when you don't allow yourself to be angry at someone or something the target becomes yourself and (mostly mental) illness results.
How long ago did u post it there? You should give it some time. Do you have the link?
Why does the state of Hawaii even need a man in the middle for issuing ICBM alerts. It would seem the military or at least something centralized at the federal level should be able to trigger this alert. Basically have it patched through directly.

I can't see a benefit of an extra person in the loop. It could at best delay sending the alert, send the wrong alert. At worst is obviously missing sending the alert altogether. One might say, well one benefit is the state could prevent a bogus alert from being sent. But does the State of Hawaii have its own independent monitoring network of satellites or radar? I am guessing it doesn't.
Colorado uses or used lots of sand.
Hip Hip Array
Good summary. There’s also the accusation that a lot/most of those tethers were not paid for at all and simply minted and used to purchase Bitcoin.
Another key bit: Tether's website claims "frequent audits", but their auditor a) never completed their first audit and b) just severed their relationship.

https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-audito...
Correction. ICOs that function as securities and are not running under Reg D 506(c) and/or Reg S (for non-US investors) are not allowed.
More context on the shadiness—notice this was called out in October of last year but we are wayyy beyond rational markets for these tokens:

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-never-repaid-their-t...
ARM is not just one company - it's a semi-standard.
I disagree. The judges held that it was "inconsistent with EU law". That means it is illegal because it goes against the (higher) EU law. They held that the reason it was inconsistent was because it lacked "prior review by a court or independent administrative authority" - basically, due process. It seems clear from the language of the judges that rights were violated without due process. That's no minor offense.
Ask HN: What do you use to jot down random thoughts and ideas at any time/place?
Preferably a cross platform app.

Back when I lived on only one computer at a time, I used Microsoft OneNote. It worked real well until I realized the pitfalls of proprietary software and formats, and sure enough, I was bitten by them when I found I couldn't access any of my old notes files on the Mac version.

My next favorite was Ulysses [0] because of its drawer/shoebox UI and the plaintext Markdown format, but since they moved to a dumb (IMO) subscription model, the deprecated paid version has been mysteriously or coincidentally becoming too buggy for me on newer macOS versions.

I'm looking for something that basically just puts a pretty interface around a folder hierarchy of plaintext (and possibly image/sound) files, and is compatible with any cloud storage providers (iCloud Drive, Dropbox etc.) so that macOS-only will be enough if it saves in regular plaintext, but ideally it would also have iOS [+Android/Windows] versions.

I'm currently looking at Quiver [1], and would like to see what HN uses.

[0] https://ulyssesapp.com

[1] http://happenapps.com/#quiver
Terence here. Jeremy's role was critical in terms of direction and content for the article. Who better than he to describe the math needs for deep learning. :)
pacbio has this fundamental problem that it's a single molecule process (as does MinION) and deconvoluting errors becomes a problem of unit parallelization.
Using Deep Learning to Decode Mysterious Voynich Manuscript
FCC says false missile alert in Hawai'i sent by employee who thought it was real
Unless they get so big they affect the economy as a whole.
Visual introduction to Fourier Transform
> it’s almost certainly in need of some regulatory fire and brimstone

Sure, but it pains me to see American securities regulators’ already-strapped budgets going after, almost alone, an international problem. Regulatory focus has an opportunity cost. More attention to cryptocurrencies means less to everything else.

> the state can’t really afford to let money laundering on this scale continue

The Treasury and Secret Service are the principal enforcers of U.S. anti-money laundering law. This action is being brought by the CFTC.

In any case, there is lower hanging fruit (in terms of ease of prosecuting, volume of funds laundered, and politics vulnerability) than cryptocurrency-facilitated money laundering which, by its nature, leaves a convenient and immutable public record in fact wake.
Amazon is the place I'd least like to see adds. I want the environment where I'm making the purchasing decision to be the one with the least psychological manipulation.

Amazon needs to spend its money on improving its search, ranking, and review systems to customers can find the products they want themselves, not on adtech. Amazon's search is trash and it's always been trash. It's 2017, why does sort-by-ratings still rank products with a one 5-star review over products with 1000 reviews and an overall rating of 4.9 stars. There are better algorithms out there [1]. It also needs to put serious effort into fixing its fake reviews problem and counterfeiting problem.

Amazon's core search and shopping experience hasn't improved much in at least 10 years, possibly more. That needs to change.

[1] https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
Your probability has to be out of some set of events. You want to talk about a fraction of space where an infinitesimal phenomena is happening? Zoinks! How about a fraction of time? Zoinks!

You don't realize how silly the question you are asking is, when considering infinitesimals and infinities.
I wouldn't be so sure. In the article linked they mention that J. Christopher Giancarlo, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, stated "The SEC is devoting a significant portion of its resources to the ICO market..." just a few days ago.
Probably easier and faster to just buy a used car yourself to tinker with. A used Ford Taurus can be ~4k.

You can dive into polylith forums and find guys that thinker with the code in the OBC to 'improve' some of the aspects of the car. Think Dieselgate, but more hacker-y/backfire-y.

Example for Scoobys: https://www.carid.com/2017-subaru-wrx-performance-parts/?fil...
I am happy to see this issue getting so much attention outside of tech circles. Apple has mostly gotten a pass for their anti-consumer behavior recently and I hope the negative publicity from this forces them to improve things.
The flip side of never taking a fixed bid contract is when it turns out someone really just didn't RTFM, and it takes you 15 minutes of real work to fix their problem. Thousands of dollars of benefit to them... and one billable hour to you.
Kaiser is great compared to other US providers (although that's not such a high bar).

The issue I see is that they are very reluctant to refer you to specialists even when the issue seems way over the GPs head. And they are somewhat fast-food-ish. Go in, do whatever it needs to be done quickly, then off you go.

But still way better (and cheaper) than the competition.
Ford patent details system for autonomous police cars
Who would have known or even cared were it not for this denounciation?
Lots of other great video on the same channel, many of them previously discussed
Which, Waves DEX has USD as an option in their wallets. Bypassing the need for Tether altogether, but their exchange is also rather limited..
They claim to have the USD in a bank somewhere which means the US can come after them. This is why Wells Fargo dumped them (which is saying something!).
Also, 'aspirationally' is doing a lot of work in the grandparent post. Each instance of USDT is supposed to be backed by 1 USD in tether's accounts, which is what's supposed to peg its value... However.

1. Tether will not convert your USDT into USD. You can only offload it to a bigger fool.

2. Tether's accounts have yet to be audited.

3. Tether has lied about #1 and #2.
Typographic advice: the body text has very long lines in a desktop browser, which makes it a bit slow and tiring to read. I’d say the ideal is somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 this length. I’d recommend keeping the same width on screen but bumping the font size up by 30%.

As an extra minor nit, italicizing functions like sin, etc. is also somewhat unconventional in mathematical typesetting.
Ask HN: Recommendations for tool to manage optional tasks?
Hi, I'm starting to think about an approach to minimal documentation/tracking of tasks when tackling software work and I'm curious about any tools that might make this easier.

The core concept would be something like a checklist manager where each thing you want to get done (let's call that a workItem) gets a consistent checklist of tasks.

Each of the tasks must be addressed in some way, either by completing the task OR by stating why you're not going to complete the task.

The workItem should contain a minimal record of the work done and choices made.

e.g. one task might be ROI Assessment - For some features this might be a formal document with assumptions, for a bug it might be very cursory. For something like a piece of work related to compliance it might be totally irrelevant.

The point is that no one forgets it, or assumes that it's unnecessary. The decision to do or not do something is always taken positively and transparently.

I guess this could be hacked into any number of management tools, I was just interested if anyone had heard of something purpose built like this or a system that favors this approach?

thx
Nice one - the neural network infra behind functions/lambdas!
Microsoft gives infrastructure which can PUSH the events to your Event REACTOR listening for any events (including Azure-native events)! No more polling code!
> and I don't think we want to introduce more delay in the critical path of a live alert without clear and massive benefit.

If that delay reduces false alarms, when false alarms erode public trust in and concern about the alert system, then the massive benefit is clear. With such a system, drills and tests are going to be massively more common than actual events. Designing the UI so that the one-in-a-million option is as easy to invoke as the once-every-week option is a UI problem.

Notwithstanding it not being a primary issue in this particular case, I believe it's still an issue worth discussing.

Also, bear in mind that correcting the "deeper planning and procedural problems" would introduce delays as well. Anything but a purely automated system, or a big red button would introduce some delay.
This happened to my family as well. My wife broke her ankle and is an avid amateur sports nut. She wanted to go see a top sports doctor (KP has none) and couldn't get KP to cover any of it. To pay out of pocket was anywhere between $20k-$30k. We ended up flying to the UK because it was cheaper and she had a trusted top tier sports injury surgeon she knew there.
A Century-Old Dairy Ditches Cows for High-Tech Plant Milk
The three breaking changes are interesting in how, one by one, they describe flaws in the Go language (and I say that as someone whose day job is Go development).

The first breaking change means unkeyed literals such as Foo{"bar"} no longer work. This particular Go feature (which arguably came from C) is so open to future compatibility breakage that I wish it had never been included. I prefer Rust's approach here, where fields always have to be speciifed, but a ::new() constructor can be furnished to make fieldless construction possible through the type (as opposed to Go's NewFoo() style which is semantically disconnected from the type).

The second one, about structs no longer being usable as map keys or comparable with ==, is a bit more esoteric, but it does demonstrate how Go's type system is too weak to allow such a change to be made without breakage. In Rust or C++, this would presumably have been accomplished with an equality trait, so that the new struct could be made comparable with ==.

The third one, about breaking reflect.DeepEqual(), also reveals how the lack of trait support at the language level exposes cracks in the language. When a user is forced to use a blunt tool such as DeepEqual(), which disconnects the equality code from the underlying type being used, then this is what you get. That said, I'm not sure why Protobuf can't optionally generate equality methods for the types it generates in the first place, which is something Gogo can do [1].

Go is a great language, but it's things like this that give me Rust envy.

[1] https://github.com/gogo/protobuf/blob/master/plugin/equal/eq...
Am I the only one who wants a five point harness so I can lean forward into the harness and sleep in my chair? I currently use the tray table for this and it's less than optimal.
Only an exchange that is somehow on-the-hook to redeem USDT for actual USD at parity would have problems.

An exchange could offer USDT trading but still have negligible exposure to its value itself. And then if USDT goes to zero – radically breaking the intended parity-with-USD – direct losses should be confined to USDT holders, not exchanges.
Thad first one doesn't seem very good. It seems like there are many places states could be merged. Eg, there are 4 different "^0" states and 3 "^1" states. or am i misreading something?
There's another reason for having belts that they don't mention: body identification. If bodies are still strapped to seats they at least have a chance of determining where to send which remains. Without, it'd be nigh on impossible, which would be a compounding PR nightmare on top of the obvious PR nightmare of an aviation disaster.

Source is my mum, who was an air stewardess for a decade, and explained this to me when I questioned the purpose (she also mentioned turbulence etc., as the article does).
Meet the Crazy New Yorkers Who Completed Five Triathlons in Five Days
I hear you and this whole situation is clearly shady af, but at the end of the day BTC is fungible with USD, so I'm not sure at this in and of itself is that big of an issue (besides any explicit legal concerns that I can't speak to). If you're providing a currency pegged to the USD, then selling tether for BTC might be one piece of a strategy to do this- The issue for me is more that no one knows what's happening to the USD/BTC/etc after such a sale happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War

> The Albanian Civil War, also known as the Albanian rebellion, Albanian unrest or the Pyramid crisis, was a period of civil disorder in Albania in 1997, sparked by Ponzi scheme failures. The government was toppled and more than 2,000 people were killed. It is considered to be either a rebellion, a civil war, or a rebellion that escalated into a civil war.
Apple delaying major iOS features to focus on reliability for iOS 12
I created this instead: https://regexper.com/#((%5B0-9%5D%5C.)%7C(%5B1-9%5D%5B0-9%5D...

The repetition count seems to be displayed off-by-one though.
> Is a machine learning algorithm capable of getting better results than a PID? Is the extra effort worth it?

Potentially yes, but by it being a component of a completely different control paradigm (MPC). ML itself will probably not improve on PID while still keeping it PID.

So, there are two parts to a control system:

1) The predictive model (prediction)

2) The feedback control law (action)

ML primarily concerns itself with function approximation from data, y = f(x, p), where p are parameters -- in the parametric model case. ML practitioners create predictive models but don't really consider feedback loops. That is more the domain of control theory, which is concerned with system behavior when exogenous inputs (actions) act on the system. The math is different.

ML can be used to fulfill the role of (1). It has nothing to say about (2).

In the PID case, (1) is extremely simple -- it is simply an error function (difference). (2) is where the magic happens... based on the error, the controller computes the right action. The beauty of PID control is that it is technically "model-free" (if you don't consider an error function a model). You can apply it to systems where you have very little data, and still be able to do fairly good job. You could replace (1) in PID with an ML model, but then you would defeating one of the some of attractive qualities of PID control: effectiveness under uncertainty without a model. You can use ML to guide the tuning of PIDs, but that's about it.

That said, ML models have a place. In advanced controllers like MPC, (1) is typically a dynamic (state-space, FIR/FSR, physics equations-based) causal model of the system under control. (2) is an optimization algorithm.

You could conceivably replace (1) with an ML model. This is done in many cases -- in many plants, there is a predictive model that infer states based on images and sound (for instance, using Near Infra Red sensors to inferentially predict certain chemical properties). But that's no longer PID.
Great article! This Lehner guy is an absolute inspiration.
Helping ChartMogul Understand Your Unorthodox Stripe Trial Data
Thank goodness the cloud came along. When friends/family ask me about computer problems I now explain that I work on computers that nobody sees.
correct. phil potter is director at both bitfinex and tether. tethers get deposited straight to bitfinex upon creation as far as i understand it.

source: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/82024464
Yes, I am aware of that. One major goal of autonomous vehicles it to reduce that number.
Exactly. I used to work in the securities regulation world and you'll be surprised at how long some investigations take - I've been involved with cases that went on for TEN years.

The SEC will take the position that the vast majority of ICOs were unregistered offering of securities. Just because they don't act today, doesn't mean they're not actively investigating. And they will go after the ICO offerers.
For the video in [1] are you continually adjusting the throttle to maintain altitude or does that quad have some sort of altitude hold?
I used to do this as a kid, but the combination of decreasing seat pitch and a growing spine had led to this no longer being possible for me.

Also, unless youre also strapping your head down, holy neck pain, batman.
Issuing USDT when there's no USD backing it up is an issue when you claim that it is backed 1:1. That is called fraud.
> Ponzi schemes also only harm those who inflict it on themselves

Ponzi schemers lie to their investors. (Madoff purported to run a reputable shop.) It’s harder to argue, to the broader public, that someone buying Tether with Bitcoin could reasonably think they made a legitimate investment.
> This is good news for quality cryptocurrency organizations.

Are there any? I’m being honest and not snarky here: I’ve yet to see a single company in the space that’s not at least somewhat shady.
Another poster claims that most of the people who currently own Tether have no idea that they actually own Tether. [1]

If that is true, then the point of it seems to be enriching the people running exchanges, at the expense of their users.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16264371
I don't know if 5-10% difference in write speed and 75% in read speed is "so close to C implementation." These are both operations that will be happening thousands/millions/+ times per day, so it feels incorrect to say they're close.

These read/write differences will compound to make the rest of the data processing pipeline slower.