skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The claim isn't that slaves weren't involved?

The very first thing you see when loading the page is "Who Built the Pyramids? Not slaves.".

Later on, the article says (of Lehner): "He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves."

Near the end, it says "Slaves or not, as the last season of his dig began, Lehner still did not know where all the workers slept."

So I think my original comment was salient and reacting to how the article actually presented things. It makes clear statements that slaves weren't involved. Then it leaves the possibility open at the end. It's common in many articles to overstate a claim in the beginning to grab readers, and I don't care for it.
The Minitel service was rolled out 1978-1982, about a dozen years before widespread commercial adoption of Internet connections for consumers in any country. So the Internet penetration is not really relevant here.

Yes, existing legacy technology sometimes works so well that newer things have a hard time replacing it.
Pragmatic iOS Development: In defence of MVC
Paypal will happily do the FX for you "fee-free".

That's because they fleece you with the exchange rate. You're paying a many-points worse exchange rate, even against a stabilised market average.

For one recent actual example, Paypal recently gave me 1.339 USD for 1 GBP in a transaction. The raw market rate that day was 1.421. The week mean was ~1.410. Paypal already holds this cash, they're not exchanging jack on the open market.

A pre-pay FX card —shop around— would have given me $1.40/£ on that date.

Paypal work like a bookmakers. They cover the entire spread with very little risk. Nothing on Paypal is really free.
It's a bit confusing that win32 is 64-bit savvy since, at least, its DEC Alpha release.
Agreed. Many state of the art control strategies nowadays are based on optimization techniques (e.g. Model Predictive Control, MPC, optimizes a convex cost function of the state, setpoint and input to your system over a certain time horizon).
This has become a viable control strategy for fast (>1kHz) processes only in the past 15 years, since the optimization can be computationally intensive.
Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2018 edition
Joshua Schachter started this thread on HN for discussing hosted useful services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1769910

It's been years since then. These days, lots of that stuff is available as SaaS.

What are the tools and services people use instead of hosting their own?
The SoC timeline is not uninteresting but it's lacking at least one of the major events: Apple switching from ARM-licensed to internally designed cores with the A6. It should also outline the A7 more, that wasn't just Apple's first 64b SoC, it was an industry-wide-first of shipping 64b cores in a product, that took the industry very much by surprise (64b products were planned for 12~24 months down the line before that IIRC).

These are the events which genuinely placed Apple on a serious footing as a chip designer, the A4 was Apple-branded but only a preparatory step.

The essay also lacks other silicon acquisition of Apple, like Intrinsity, whose work actually showed up as early as the A4 (before it was acquired).

It's also oddly padding the timeline with X-variants.
"Quality of education was identical. However, children attending low-exposed schools had slightly better maternal education; had less behavioral problems, obesity, and foreign origin; had more siblings and residential greenness;"
My wife had exactly the same issue. We went to ER with pain that looked like appendicitis, but after the tests and a night at the hospital (they checked her in for the night) they found out it was just a cysts and we could go home with some painkillers. The twist to that story is that this happen in UK and on the end of the day we just said a big "Thank you" to whole staff that took care of her and that was it.

Couple days ago there was discussion here on HN, how we, Europeans, are so braging about our health and support for citizens systems but we still earn peanuts in comparison to US. Well this is exactly the reason why I prefer to earn £50k in UK rather than $150k in SV. This $12k bill from the article is not that bad, but it could easily end up with $120k if she would have something that require surgery.
> You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance

That's a limitation on Windows (and macOS?). On Linux, CAPS LOCK + é = É ; etc.
Apparently there are quite some differences between between HN & Reddit.
For some reason, here you would get downvoted
> If the new approaches work, phage therapy could eventually become a mainstream option for treating bacterial infections.

Phages were the mainstream option for treating serious antibiotic infections in the USSR prior to 1990, but this was never commercialized in the west (AIUI it couldn't be patented because of the glaringly obvious prior art so nobody bothered) and disappeared after 1991 — collateral damage due to the end of communism (you could make more profits selling antibiotics to Russian hospitals).

It's kind of ironic that this technique is now being rediscovered, although the synergy with the arrival of cheap nanopore RNA/DNA sequencers should be noted (these devices make it much easier to rapidly identify the precise strain of pathogen causing an infection, and thereby choose the correct phage).
On Linux, CAPS-LOCK + é produce É. Ithink it works on Mac OS too. Only windows doesn't handle it.

But I do agree, Azerty is not that good most of the time. Especially when it comes to programming.
> you can get a full human genome sequenced at high coverage for between 1000 and 3000 USD

This is not a "full" human genome, but a collection of 150bp fragments that can be realigned to an existing human genome. You cannot take this and infer the whole diploid genome of the individual. There is a huge amount that will be missed, and all of our current knowledge is based on this gappy picture of what's going on in single genomes and human populations.

> It can give very long reads, which are useful in some niche applications. But it’s been massively over-hyped (and over capitalized).

I think you're dismissing the technology out of hand because of biases derived from much more limited short-read technology that only allows us to reliably see small variants <50bp.

Without these long reads we can't see structural variation (SVs). There is an increasing amount of evidence that much of adaptive variation is driven by these kinds of variants. If you want recent evidence, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0010-y. There has long been evidence that there are huge copy number variations in humans, but these are still not evaluated reliably: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/641.

We should be open to the possibility that our observational techniques are limiting our understanding how how genomes work. This has consistently occurred in the history of every observationally-driven science.

It's amusing to me that people assume that SVs are "niche" when even the limited surveys of genomes we've been able to do with short reads show that roughly an equal number of base pairs in the human population vary due to small variants like SNPs and indels and big ones like deletions, insertions, and large scale copy number variation: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/641
Garbage collectors open a library with abandoned books
I think the point here is to break with legacy. It's expensive to keep it, error prone and it creates a lot of security issues. By shifting part of the work to software vendors, Microsoft forces the market to move on to newer APIs.
If you think kids don't have a lot of biases factoring into such decisions or don't hash situation into solutions, you don't interact closely with kids. They have different, more simplistic, set of biases, but biases nevertheless and they tend to be very strong.

Kids very often just repeat whatever worked last time in very superficially similar situation and the smaller they are, they less likely they are to actually think through those situations. It seems like inventing something novel only if you don't know the kid and don't know what situation the kid is repeating.
iCloud drive isn't a backup service. Its a file sync service. Sync != Backup.
Show HN: BuddyHR's Slack app for logging leaves with your team
Recently launched this app with my team. Ask for your feedback! Just a week ago we added there cool feature- team travel map. If you've got some other ideas how to make it better - you're welcome!
> Good luck getting devs and enterprise IT on it.

Make an easy migration path for SAP, Oracle and Visual Basic and the problem is mostly solved.
If you buy a Unicom "Cross-border SIM" in Hong Kong, it will work unfiltered in mainland China.
A year ago, that was how I last read it. I would read just one chapter, each night, before I went to sleep. There were many nights where I would want to read the next chapter. (I recall reading it was not released a chapter at a time; but, that was the easiest way to break it up.)
Thanks. Looks interesting but there's no list of sources I can find on your homepage. There's the screenshot from the app.

Also I'm not sure if you provide all the content from these sources or just a selection.

I'm curious because of the price. 15/months seems very low so I'm expecting limitations.

Can you elaborate?
Cloud-based Solution for Telecom
The Count of Monte Cristo is a truly magnificent accomplishment, but I found the prison part to be the weakest and slowest part of the book. It's also really cliche by now.

The book only really takes off after the prison part is over.
Convert animations to videos via keywords
I trust Monsanto is on it.
> It's easy to get this working the naive way with an hysteresis of say +/- 2 degrees

Yeah that's a bang bang controller. Those actually work really well as long as you don't mind the temp swing.

It mostly sounds like your temperature control is via the fan and the heating element.

The heating element is the simplest to control with a PID loop. Just use a PWM output to control the heater power. Use a solid state relay to switch the power to the heater.

Once you have that you need someway to record and plot the setpoint and temperature.

Once you have that simplest way to get started is just play around with straight proportional control. Then add integral control with some sort of anti-windup. You don't actually need much theory to implement and tune a PI controller.

Three bits. For your case you likely only have to run the control algorithm at 10Hz. Second when tuning don't adjust your tuning constants linearly, instead double or halve them. On a Raspberry Pi use double precision floating point.
Yet having more people sat in congestion is going to have a negative affect on societies overall wellbeing. The problem is we look at it from the perspective of the immediate economic benefit and ignore the costs of poorer health outcomes and increased environmental degredation.
> you can go to jail for 5 years and have to pay very high fees for running a VPN service.

To clarity this, only VPN providers within China mainland is subject to this. VPN users are safe, for now.
> tell the TSA to keep it because it’s garbage, and make it clear, your intent is to waste as much of their time, energy and resources as possible

Wouldn't it be more effective (and safer!) to waste their time and resources without them noticing?
Hundreds of comments before someone addresses this part of the article, shameful. The other aspect to 'low code' solutions is, as software developers we have to chase the next hot thing, for employability and career development. No one wants to be stuck knowing only cold fusion when that goes away. I make the argument that web frameworks like Rails and Django are the 4GLs of today. 4GLs are roughly analogous to 'low code' I believe.
This post totally flew off my head. Didn't even get a gist of what's going on.
How to strike the perfect balance between marketing and tech
100+ Blockchain conferences of 2018
Assuming that "flat-earthers" potential to cause harm is fairly limited, but that "anti-vaxxers" potential to cause harm is rather significant - population immunity comes to mind - I would rather say it hurts me to see the "flat-earthers" term thrown around so loosely.
Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized
Consider using Adminer from https://www.adminer.org instead of phpMyAdmin, it's an one PHP file that you can upload anywhere without installation and just type the address in the browser and it will work out of the box. It even allows for visual customisation trough CSS files. Just download desired skin and put the CSS file in the same directory as downloaded PHP and it's done. Great little script.
India's ride-hailing firm Ola enters Australia, its first international market
Fake Meltdown and Spectre Patch – Beware of Malware
You think people who go to Eton can't be left wing? Gosh, the Cambridge five.. seriously. If you think it's 'just an act' I don't think you understand British left politics at all. The establishment has had a left wing since before the second world war. Even the daily worker had people from Oxbridge working for it.

It's left wing, not working class. The sun is working class, tits and all.
While software patents impact every company's long-term survivability, short-term survivability for startups strongly hinges on investors. European investors are more risk averse and investments in Europe tend to be smaller than in the US. American investors prefer to invest in US companies for obvious reasons.

So a good portion of the startups you're imagining die early due to a lack of investment or incorporate in the US at some point in order to have a better chance of finding investors. And then some of the rest simply aren't as growth-focused because they need to focus on short-term profitability to survive, which means they'll likely end up silently dominating a particular industry niche rather than making a big entrance on the global stage.

Software patents are only a problem if you can survive long enough to be sued. If you're not exceptionally unlucky, you're more likely to go bankrupt before that happens.
IANAL, so this is not legal advise!

First: I think it is ethically better, because you are not giving your user's data to a large company that builds profiles of your users for their own purposes.

Second: if you pass the data to an analytics company, you share responsibility in ensuring that that data is processed according to the GDPR. Article 83 states on imposing/determining fines:

the degree of responsibility of the controller or processor taking into account technical and organisational measures implemented by them

It is up to you (as the controller) to ensure that you use a data processor that is GDPR-compliant (Article 28):

Where processing is to be carried out on behalf of a controller, the controller shall use only processors providing sufficient guarantees to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures in such a manner that processing will meet the requirements of this Regulation and ensure the protection of the rights of the data subject.

(By the way, it seems from the same article that you also need a written contract with the data processor that specifies exactly what data is provided, for which period, etc.)

---

tl;dr: it seems much easier to fulfil the obligations of the GDPR when you do not involve third parties.
'Counter-Strike' match breaks Twitch's streaming record
I feel complete opposite to the author. I believe that open soruce patent free codecs will drive innovation and produce better solutions in no time, more then MPEG does over those years.
Hire a contractor to help you learn the ropes/make a plan. I don't recommend an oursourced firm until you have a firm product market fit.
I lived in Shenzhen for 2 years before moving back to Europe. Man, the pace is glacial here… Popped back there for another trip a few months back and suddenly there was no more cash, and the ratio of electric-to-gasoline cabs shifted from 20/80 to 80/20
> No other security agents in the world require you to take off your shoes, or do anything more than a standard leg pat down

False. At least when flying from Schiphol (Amsterdam) you'll be taking off your shoes and you'll go through an X-ray. Not sure about other airports but it wouldn't surprise me if this was a European thing instead of just a Dutch thing - I can't recall if they required it in Spain as well.
I'm reminded of head binding practices at this point.
High Sierra broke AFP searching on our server
I don't understand why you are being downvoted. Well, maybe I do, but I want to believe that HN is not so techno-obsessed that they can't fathom what you are saying.

I agree. Let's not plant a lot of trees that goats and cows will just eat up.
Not even for Masters in control programs. It's state space all day!
Sure, but for such systems even a simple on-off controller works fine, if the sensor is close enough to heating element (and if it's too much decoupled, PID won't help either).

The biggest issue for me was spending a lot of time trying to achieve a better system response (fast settling time with minimal overshoot) for system that was just designed badly.
US Navy grabs old-fashioned sextants amid hacker attack fears
Ok, wow, I did not know about this. It seems promising at first glance, but...

I can't find a list of partners anywhere (not counting the header image)? There's also no mention of how (much) the publications get paid. I don't want to support this if they take say 30%. I might as well pay with a credit card.

There doesn't seem to be any backlink from the publications to the inkl service, which makes me a bit suspicious.

The fact that they filter stories is weird too.

Overall, I'd prefer sort of an embedded platform where I can visit any news service and pay for an article there. Ideally it wouldn't be tied to news at all.
Ethereum Startup Vanishes After Seemingly Making $11
New Website Ranks 600 Cryptocurrencies by GitHub Activity
I wonder what happened before the smart phone era. Didn't the armed personnel phone back to their loved one to let them know they were ok? I am sure they did it in a controlled environment. When you set up a base, should you not take into account the parameters responsible for your safety? For, example, register all the smart phones and impose strict rules for sharing data. Who ever get anything out, should get the shaft or get discharged from the service. And finally why would anyone upload their personal details to an unknown source? Are people so silly?
The problem is that you pay for a lot of content you're not going to read. I'm going to assume that no one reads everything from 15 sources. And 15 subscriptions are expensive. NYT for example is relatively cheap (like 10$/month) but the large newspapers in Germany and Switzerland are more like 40€/month each.

I'd never pay that because there's at least 60% of content I don't read because it doesn't interest me or I have no time. To get a full picture I'd need multiple subscriptions which is prohibitively expensive. So instead I pay none (at least no daily) and just read what's free on the net.

A flat rate subscription model could also prevent a bit of the filter bubble because it would allow me to read at no further expense different views from paper that I'd never pay to subscribe to separately.

I disagree with your assumption as well. Maybe they have room their numbers but in my opinion their are missing out on a new business model. Feels very much like the early music business.

All these new digital portfolios (including okay ones like the guardian) are only the very first and limited step the industry should take. They are really very limited in functionally and vision.

I know there are others like me but I'm not sure how many. I'm hoping for a change. Good information and well paid journalists are getting more and more important I think.
Well it can't happen without price transparency. Transparency is good on it's own.

Why does Google not want to make all salary and compensation information public? Why do insurance companies want to keep their contracts and payouts with hospitals secret? There is zero reason for these things to be secret. These things should be required to be public.

We can't fix problems if we can't see them.
How so? Really asking, I've only had good experiences with them.
“C gave us similar advantages over writing in assembler.”

This is a profound misunderstanding of both C and assembler: C gave us portability, not reusability; writing shared object libraries with reusable code in assembler has been the bread and butter of programmers for decades, and it takes no longer to do in assembler than it does in C. A stereotypical example of this is the Commodore Amiga, where most of the shared libraries are written in assembler.
Do you likewise think anyone is unaware that education incurs costs?
Well, if they really really wanted it, they might be able penalize you. How about everytime you travel, make sure the country won't extradite you. How about your employees? Is that risk acceptable and fair to them?

I don't like what is happening here, but when people want a particular outcome strong enough, they tend set aside more principled concerns.
It's like Gillette, HP and Keurig got together to collaborate in the sequencing game.
Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?
I keep seeing reports of stuff breaking as a result of upgrading to High Sierra. Does anyone know why this new version of the OS breaks so many different things?
Clickbait, thought it was about a garbage collector open source library!
I have only skimmed the article but two things jump out:

> Recently the company got a fresh incentive to go all-in on silicon: revelations that microprocessors with components designed by Intel Corp., Arm Holdings Plc and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. are vulnerable to hacking.

Apple isn't immune: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394 (indeed seems iOS devices suffer from Meltdown where AMD devices do not).

> The result: a chip powerhouse that could one day threaten the dominance of Qualcomm Inc. and even, eventually, Intel.

Surely to threaten dominance Apple needs to start selling it's chips to other people? Whilst it's possible it would run counter to the way Apple likes to do things, namely get as much in house a possible to get maximum control and seamless vertical integration, they've never shown any interest in selling bits of their technology to others (well recently anyway).
The best length for fast reading is not more than 60-70 characters per line. That's why you have columns in newspapers. I have a 4k 26 inch monitor. Full width texts are harder to read, I have to shrink my browser to make the text not so wide.
VP9 support is mandatory in Android. If you want to ship Play Store, that is. So it is not due to mobile Chrome installs.

The amount of Android devices dwarfs iOS devices and Apple knows that it is not viable position in long term. That's why they joined AV1. People in near future would not give a fuck about the Apple, if they couldn't play their Youtube or Netflix videos in 4K on them.
I'm reminded of how the Chaos Congress organizers persuaded the Leipzig public transportation agency to run around-the-clock service to the congress: He showed them the curve of devices logged into wifi for the last year. It has a steep decline somewhere at night, which is when people leave.

With all the location data Google & Co have they should try their hand at making plans for public transport systems (if they haven't already).
I thought it was ancient aliens...
The opening paragraph also glosses over the fact that some of Apple's chips are also vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre.
It's when the mother of all revenges develops, for sure.

Maybe it's become cliche because of its very brilliance, I don't know. Thing is I wasn't all that familiar with the plot before I read it, hadn't seen any of the cartoons or movies, so I was sort of "unpolluted", maybe that made me enjoy it more.