skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For fun, though, I'll dust off an old concept since you're talking printing. One might start by printing them to a virtual screen like in Nitpicker GUI with the untrusted reader. Aside from isolation, there could be a feature to convert what's on the virtual screen or page into a compressed image. A PDF with N pages becomes a zip of N images or a single image of some size. That itself could be distributed to run in the trusted, safe viewers we already should have, right?

Which is literally what Qubes "Convert to trusted PDF" does.

> My first solution would be improving reader security by starting with one with decent code (Espie suggested MuPDF), compiling it with something that makes it memory-safe, and running it in a sandbox on separation kernel (eg Genode or Muen). Then, a memory-safe conversion tool turns it into something more trustworthy.

It would of course be preferable to have a secure PDF reader to begin with, but the complexities of the PDF format doesn't isn't really conducive to that.
What is the end goal? A headless /dev/null? (pardon my exaggeration). As far as I can see, this direction won't attract a lot of customers. People want the simplicity of usage (and it does not necessarily means simplicity of underlying implementation).
A candid take on the future of AI and job automation
"Windows is my favorite desktop OS ... I really enjoy the ease of use that I get with Windows where everything that I need to do just works."

I was in 100% agreement with this up until maybe a year or two ago, having flirted between Windows and Ubuntu for at least a decade. But now, I find Ubuntu 16.04 (MATE being my variant of choice) to work better out of the box than Windows, even with third party peripherals.

As one anecdotal example, I've a basic EPSON printer / scanner combo on my network. It's always been a fiddle to make work with Windows - you need to go to their website and download their driver and proprietary application so that Windows can find it and produce scans, and it's not all that reliable. The other day, I needed to scan something, and typed "scan" into my MATE menu fully expecting there to be a problem to solve. I opened up the Simple Scan application and not only was the scanner detected and online, but it just worked immediately with no quibbles. I get these sorts of pleasant surprises all the time now, to the point that I can honestly say it's easier to use than Windows.

All of the Applications I use have native Linux support (Firefox, Thunderbird, Spotify, Steam, Unity with VS Code, etc) and work as well as their Windows counterparts. Lots of things I find are easier to set up compared to Windows such as Python programming with virtualenvs, CUDA support for TensorFlow and so on.

Plus - no UWP, no forced updates, no dodgy telemetry, no obnoxious adverts for OneDrive and Office popping up in Explorer... add all that up and it's a done deal. No Windows in this house.
Elon Musk's flamethrower will star in the next Borderlands game
Changing the color of 3-D printed objects – MIT News
> ER overuse is a thing

The ER department should redirect people to less expensive alternatives if they think the patient isn't actually in an emergency situation. If they can't figure out if it's an actual emergency just by asking a few questions, then how is the patient supposed to know?
Seeing some of the reasons that people go to the emergency room and the cost of going to the emergency room I can understand the reasoning behind the policy. Emergency rooms are often crowded with non-emergent ailments. The problem is there isn't any triage before being admitted to the ER. A kid with a fever and a somebody that cut off their finger get treated the same when walking into the ER. The kid with a fever might get put at low priority but the hospital is still going to charge for the visit and every doctor that stopped in to say hi.
At best, it's something that arises organically from requirement elicitation without involving a UX team.

At worst, it's completely off the mark.
Was the nurse wrong? Aspirating water can cause dry drowning.
Or, alternatively, the thumbs put on the scale by any other government for any energy source. Maybe the Trump admin tacking a 30% tariff on non-US solar benefits non-US solar in other markets -- there's less demand for the current supply.
Apple halves iPhone X production after poor sales
Are you a vegan?
The thing is, a lot of the "legacy" stuff actually works fine, and much of the rest of it has suddenly started being addressed due to real competition from MacOS (for web developers) and mobile.

They're worried that people will stop making native windows apps and move to "cloud" or "mobile". Sure, but people are definitely not going back in the box of their proprietary store without a really good offer. What's the unique value proposition here? The value proposition of win32 is "you get to run all your old and new stuff, locally, without a middleman".
Amazon is becoming its own university
Again, I'm not defending C++ or disparaging D but saying that this style of abrasive advocacy doesn't leave the reader knowing anything more about D than they already knew. Your last sentence is a great example:

> My second link does that, compares Mir to a bunch of other numeric libraries, most in C++.

This is technically correct but not helpful because it just shows a bunch of benchmark results. If the point is to demonstrate how D is more powerful for this kind of programming what would be useful is something which shows the same function written in modern C++ and D so you could see how they differ.
Why the second sentence? Don’t editorialize. The article states that frictive losses due to turbulence in pipes could be reduced by up to 90%. That’s a massive efficiency gain in energy transport.
I don't understand how this can't be standard operating procedure at an ER. Abdominal pain? Immediately go through a list of questions to determine whether it's an emergency or not. This is just as much in the interest of the hospital, which wants to keep the ER open for life-threatening emergencies, as it is for payors, as it is for patients.
I agree that Anthem is in the wrong by denying ER coverage in some cases, but let's keep the discussion free of hyperbole like this:

> insurance companies are dropping support for expensive ER visits, and instead supporting "preventive care" by only covering a $100 annual checkup instead

This is quite far from the facts of the story and does not belong in an honest discussion (note: I'm not arguing that Anthem is in the right at all, I'm just arguing that this is not a good description of the situation at all).
would be surprised if such a thing did not exist for those that run the system

It is very common in London to see late-teenage to mid-twenties children of wealthy families in conservative regions behaving very, very badly. I’m sure there’s a similar scene in Paris and NYC. The rule is you can do what you like there but never, ever back home.
Africa Union Launches Single African Air Transport Market
someone has to pay for all those people working in your insurance company and billing dept of the hospital so they can sort out how much to charge each other.
Opps. Yah I messed up the naming, I meant exes, but just started typing 64 vs 32 which really is only a memory thing, if you simplify it.

Converting a Win32 exe using UWP Desktop Bridge is stupid easy though. Older exe with a lot of legacy dependencies may be more difficult or lack of source code. In which case they need a virtualization to run those legacy app.

So even though all games/apps fall into this category most companies could have a UWP build ready very quickly.
"War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations."

I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).

Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
For navigation, what would be nice if they had a standard sized blank spot on the dash where you could attach 3rd party tablets, a bit like car radios. Or even a blank spot where you can put a phone nicely (with usb power source).
That's kinda what I'm getting at. My understanding is that brain waves are more akin to a CPU clock, with various processes being synchronized, than to a sound wave. If that's the case, then you wouldn't have any reason to expect sound to make a difference in your brain's clock rate, but you could reasonably expect light pulses to.
If you live in an area with reasonably priced electricity and access to plentiful water. I lived in Honduras for 3 years (2009 - 2012) and laundry consumed far too much of my time because water in the community came twice per week, and electricity was expensive. I had a cistern which was connected to the water main, and I installed a floating shut off valve so that I could leave the valve open to fill with water when it came without notice and invariably I was out working. I couldn't afford a dryer due to high cost of electricity and I was volunteering without any spare income during that period so I had to wash and dry clothes on sunny days. There were people in the community that still washed clothes by hand using a scrub board and I know that they spent many hours weekly on it.
This is so uncool!

This is again going to take up my weekends just like their previous course. :D

Congrats on the new course! Thank you. :)
For me, it is not about ER overuse or not. These types of problems are the symptoms of an overall flaw with the US healthcare system which is that it is no longer about the Doctors and Patients directly. Too many things are decided by the insurance company which leaves patients and doctors both at risk. I personally have doctors in my family who tell me straight that they cannot decide what to charge their patients because ultimately the insurance companies decide that for them.

As far as ER overuse is concerned, sure there are folks who may go to ER for everything but majority don't because ERs are a pain the ass. You may have to wait hours before a real doctor actually sees you unless you are literally bleeding to death on the floor. Nowadays there are urgent care centers that are supposed to be ER replacement for smaller issues but they are severely limited. My wife had a severe headache and we wanted to go to urgent care first but they said to go to ER preferably because they don't have CT scan machines. Not to mention that most urgent care centers are not opened after a certain hour in the evening.
Yup, at least in Europe. Tapping on top right (i) in Apple Maps shows a TomTom logo along with an "and other data providers" link that gets you there[0].

[0]: https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution-94.html
Notable:
"And these prices do not represent just a few one-off, left field offers. All told, there were more than 100 bids combining wind and solar, or both, with battery storage, and 20 gigawatts of such capacity.

The “median” means that half the bids were cheaper than the median price cited above."

I realize most readers of HN know what a median is, but the fact that this was not just the lowest bid in each group was worth highlighting.
Here's an analysis of the data from North Korea:
https://www.northkoreatech.org/2018/01/29/strava-heat-map-no...
Hhjjjjj
Sadly, the idea of running WINE on Windows for better compatibility isn't as funny as it used to be.
> I had a nurse hotline tell me to go to the ER because my daughter was coughing after swallowing some river water. My insurance company paid the bill. Can I get Vox to write an article about this wasteful use of resources?

Probably not, because that river water could've killed your daughter, depending on the condition of her immune system and the biological composition of the river water (slower and warmer = more bacteria).
Collabora and Linux Kernel 4.15
The IQ thing is the Flynn Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect), which is pretty cool, if a little puzzling.

The laundry one is also good, because I hadn't already heard of it :)
Yes, I use offline maps for navigation all the time when on holiday
The font rendering is ugly too, for some inexplicable reason. Microsoft haven't even the courage of their own convictions to convert all of Control Panel to UWP.
It shouldn't be that hard, either

I write some words in an unpronounceable, inhuman tongue. I speak these words to a special stone covered in tiny, intricate runes too small for the eye to see and animated by bottled lightning. If either the words are the runes are off by even a single stroke, then nothing happens.

But if I get it exactly right, then I can see through eyes which are not my own. I can communicate across countless leagues as easily as across the room. I can bind daemons to watch over the world around me and act on my behalf. I can gaze with godlike clarity over the past, and even discern shapes and motions in the clouds of the future. I can bind my work to an inanimate physical object and give it false life under my command.

We teach these Arts to small children, and often use them to show how cute our pets are to one another. It's so easy and so commonplace in our world that we've ceased to register it as Strange. But computers still let us do real, honest to goodness Magick and anyone who tells you differently isn't paying attention.
This is an extremely common tactic for insurance companies. Deny claims first, then reverse that decision for the small number of customers who dispute the denial.
Yes, it seems as bad to me as the similar ”We think in a voice in our head. Anyone trying to read has to speak out what is written.”, which was considered true until the invention of “silent reading” (https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/S...)

However, there may be some half truth in that statement: to type as fast as text spoken at top speed you must use stenotype.

I’m not sure that means speaking, in general, _is_ faster than typing, though, as a) it involves the extra handicap of having to process the spoken sound, and b) typing may be faster in the common/average/mean case.
I truly agree with this. I still remember the first time I heard of that idea of thinking in words. It was from my Portuguese teacher (I'm Brazilian) on 6th or 7th grade in school.

I was blown away by that idea so I started observing my own thoughts.

In very few occasions I had words come to my mind that described what I was thinking. Most of the time, thoughts were very abstract and indescribable, or simple sensorial information (shades of colours whose name I didn't know, smells that I couldn't name or describe even if I wanted, sounds, etc).

Regardless, there seems to be people who think everybody thinks the same way, and the most vocal ones seem to be the ones who consider thoughts to be 100% language-based.
> War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations.

While this may have kept the 'superpowers' from engaging in direct warfare with each other, it has done nothing to deter them from engaging in proxy wars with eachother. And in the process, devestating the proxy countries. It seems Bill Gates, through all of his philanthropist work, would have realized this first hand.
I'm confused by this response. This is par for the course.

Anecdata: I have never had my insurance company cover anything in the last three years.

The best they ever do is claim to negotiate a slightly lower price, for which I still pay out of pocket.

And when the annual "maximum out of pocket" gets surpassed, they gamble (correctly) that I won't incur the costs associated with litigation when they inevitably continue to deny claims after "maximum out of pocket".

There's very very little we can do.
It’s more fun to play what-if with your fellow devs. We like to blame everyone else for feature creep but we add plenty of our own too.

That’s a big part of what personas are for. To get out of analysis paralysis, and stop adding features that add combinatirally to the complexity of the app.
You can try what i did...put it to a test!

1. Set up private test room on riot.im/matrix.org server.

2. Have family members download mobile riot.im app/client.

3. Have them play around with the system - specifically within the private room that you set up - and see what they like/dislike.

4. If they like it, and you aren't too worried about privacy, keep using that private room on the riot.im/matrix.org server.

5. Alternatively, for maximum privacy, set up your own matrix instance - using the reference synapse server - on a private VPS that you control, etc. Because of federation (for the win!), you can always later connect with other servers/rooms (that are not on your server, think like email federation).

Honestly, the UI on riot.im is so very intuitive, and has a very low learning curve; quite newbie-friendly (in my opinion). Good luck!
I remember something called like frontpage or coverage effect; by the time mainstream people talk about something big, it peaked.
Old nonsense never seems to stop....

If you can’t run that shit 24x7, you need coal anyway, and in addition to whatever subsidized crap you’ve built alongside it...
Show HN: Search Google from your shell
50 Best Digital Marketing Experts to Follow in 2018 (By Category)
While I think this is a good idea, I don't believe it would have worked in this case as the patient was highly symptomatic of a ruptured appendix and should have received Emergency Room attention none-the-less.
Some of these cosmetic options become popular with certain player types because of effective camo uses as well. For instance, a lot of the darker and blacker item skins in the CS series have always trended strongly on the marketplace for that reason. Certainly more games try to mitigate against that (the rarest are often the brightest/most peacocky), but there are still utility choices in the cosmetics based on how they appear to opposing players.
> The "real problem" exposed by Meltdown and Spectre is running untrusted software on the same hardware where sensitive information resides.

Well obviously. Which is why people try to avoid that as much as they can when they are handling actually sensitive information.

> Moving away from physical coupling defends against potential sidechannel attacks.

... is a correct deduction, but using cloud VMs hardly qualifies as following the principle (except if they are only used for lowest-privilege stuff, but even then, the system now requires connectivity). Now you don't know who else is on your hardware, and you don't even control the hardware in the first place.
I bought a second hand 2009 audi A6 a few years ago, some of the maps were out of date as some new motorways had been built in my area. Queried with my dealer how much to update the maps, they wanted €250 for the DVD and €250 for the install + licence key. Reason for the DVD is that even a main dealer doesn't stock it. Next car will have android auto.
What the Count of Monte Cristo Can Teach Us About Cybersecurity
I can’t imagine that running games which are very old would be much more painful in a virtualized environment given the computational requirements are minimal compared to today’s modern applications.

In fact, it could even be a better experience. For example you wouldn’t need to patch it up to the latest version, just run the image with the latest code. Finished? Delete the image. No registry bloat.

So I feel you but it’s hapenning and you should probably get used to it because you’ll need the security patches unless you have an air gapped gaming machine.
Nobody. That's the point.
> "War is illegal. This idea seems obvious.

Yet that one rule is broken multiple times a year by multiple nations in multiple regions on earth.
We live in a strange time where our access to clean power is limited not by technology or product cost but by politics, dedicated lobbying dollars and the entrenched old guard in federal but more importantly state and local level government.

I'm still waiting on my clean coal...
Last year Bill Gates recommended The Vital Question (found this on HN):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OD8Z4JW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

One of the best books I have ever read.
The title is misleading, perhaps a mod could switch to the subtitle fragment "VMware could buy Dell in massive reverse-merger"

While legally it would be VMWare buying Dell, practically Dell already controls VMWare. The manoeuvre is a reverse IPO, a way for Dell to go public without the rigmarole.
Designing Distributed Systems E-Book
This exactly. I play an online game that uses ranking, and your best bet for breaking a 1500 is actually playing the game at odd hours when there are only a small amount of players online. Because of the distribution of the player pool, you're more likely to match with lower-ranking players (as there are limited number of similarly-ranked players). Then you slowly but surely creep up your ranking with very little risk.
Whatever do you save with your blood, sweat and tears will be burned on medical expenses in the end.
Chance versus Randomness
You can't update between Mobile and Desktop editions, or between Desktop and Xbox, or between Xbox and Hololens, etc.
Talk time and the like introduces even more variables (OS version, manufacturer's test conditions), so it makes comparisons to competing devices harder. Furthermore, if one plans to replace the manufacturer's OS with another version, these numbers become even less meaningful. On the other hand, one can be reasonably sure that a device with twice the battery capacity, same OS, same settings, SoC, display, etc will last roughly twice as long with the same usage.

Comparing hardware specs across ecosystems makes little sense, since all modern smartphones are generally fast enough, so it comes down to what kind of walled garden you prefer.
That would be a huge chance for WINE to become the de facto platform for legacy Windows compatibility.
It already does wonders: https://appdb.winehq.org/
Well, the mathematics describes reality. If humans can't agree about whether one way of interpreting the mathematics in human terms is more or less complex than another way of doing so, then that's a human problem and potentially insoluble. But I don't think things are actually that bad: people are generally capable of reaching consensus about what a given piece of mathematics "means", and the relevant cases here are pretty clear-cut: either we interpret the wavefunction as being physical reality, or we interpret some derived structure as being physical reality, and the latter gets us further away from the wavefunction.
The most crazy thing I find, outside of the cost, is the doctors were uncertain and ordered those tests, but then the insurer say : the tests were negative so we will not pay.

It's not like she decided herself to administer those tests ...
Maybe things have changed, but last time I checked you can't easily publish UWP apps without going through the Windows Store, and the Windows Store requires you to give 30% of your revenue over to Microsoft. That's a huge change from Win32.