skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy is the MPEG chairman.

Usually I'd expect someone in this position to toe the party line pretty hard, but he actually sounds reasonably level-headed to me. He even cautions the reader not to get their hopes up that anything will improve.
Yep. And when an agent reports excessive force, or corruption, they are often fired. Sometimes those firings create terrorists, like Christopher Dorner. So I'd say the police have the incentive thing figured out, even at an expensive cost to society.
There isn't really an "iCloud backup" on macOS. That's an iOS thing. I'd like to see an iCloud Backup-like thing for Macs, or perhaps an iCloud Time Machine. They seem to have enough trouble getting it to work well on local hardware, though.
A Letter to the Strava Community
Stay organized- Work online with Evernote
we are techies, if we can program artificial intelligence, we can figure out ways to avoid giving money to an evil entity that produces concentration camps that today houses China's minorities, tomorrow maybe your children.
Privacy by Design (2010) [pdf]
Why would you assume the converse? Hedgefund managers and more junior employees deal with ie sell to the rich, be they extremely wealthy or others in the finance industry. Do you think that's going to work better as Dennis Rodman or James Van Der Something with the accent and style to match? Dennis got a game to rack up his astounding numbers because he's very tall. He wouldn't get a game as fund manager as 25 year old no matter how smart he was.

I'm a CFA, I have grades, never got a look in for fund manager jobs. Pivoted to computing at the age of 30 where I "look the part" or whatever.

Don't kid yourself about this stuff. I'm not from an underprivileged background by any stretch of the imagination and nor do I have any time for socialism and socialist posing.

Young Dennis will get a game somewhere and put up compelling numbers and will likely get to the NBA. The equivalent can't be said for young potential fund managers who won't get a chance to impress. Positive discrimination is not the answer to this, but neither is the ostrich strategy.
IME, most people want to craft a narrative that lets them feel OK about themselves without too much introspection. If their lives are good, they'll take credit for their fortune like the people in the article. If their lives are bad, they'll blame everyone but themselves.

I've made a small jump in socio-economic class, and I try and keep it in perspective. I try and remember the bits of help I got a long the way. And at the same time I'm trying to let go of my resentment about people whose parents set them up with cars, tuition and house deposits - because one day I hope to be that parent.
Twitter and HN already serve this purpose. I have used both to do the same exact thing as the author has done here. I actually think that it is part of HN's purpose.
More than 250 million Windows PCs are sold every year and the installed base is over 1.5 billion. The largest botnets number in low single digit millions, or less than 0.5%.
Don't leave us hanging, where is the real deal now, then?
Facebook to Promote Local News in Drive for ‘Trusted’ Content
> I haven’t used TimeMachine in a few years. I kind of figured it was deprecated with iCloud backups.

Wat?

Time Machine is for backing up a macOS machine incrementally to local/local network storage.

iCloud Backup is for backing up iOS devices to remote storage.

There is zero overlap between these tools.
Canada to pilot new blockchain ‘digital identity’ prototype
I suspect their metric is probably time taken to answer, so coming back to someone with a non answer that deals with them for another few days probably makes the metric look okay.
Federal 5G Network Proposal Is Panned by F.C.C. And Industry
Once again: Use the TSA as an electronic waste recycling program, and donate your old phones to them by carrying them through checkpoints.

When they confiscate them, 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.
If you find yourself in a situation like this hire a lawyer and file complaints already, if they're keeping you waiting for 5 months it means they don't care about your issue.
This post is by the author of the dask parallel computing framework, which is written in Python and getting some traction in astronomy circles.
Pope Francis' Message on Fake News
High Times Beckon for Using Hemp to Build Houses
Ladders sound hard for neural networks. IIRC the original AlphaGo had a ladder-solver hardcoded that would determine if a ladder position is winning or losing and feed this bit into the neural network.
I can see only one reason why any government would ALLOW cryptocurrencies. While they could someday be used as a digital currency, right now they have very little positive value, and significant negative value. So the ONE reason I can see why government support them is for their own nefarious needs.
> You would also have no way (that I know of) of only selling to people like teachers, firefighters, etc because of fair housing laws. There’s may be an exception for military.

Isn't the San Francisco school district doing precisely this for teachers? I also recall reading that Stanford was securing housing nearby and 'selling' to faculty members by granting them loans with super generous mortgage payments, with the expectation that said faculty member will never actually pay off the mortgage.
Which has inspired https://leanpub.com/elementsofclojure
That would be interesting to look into of one had the data. I would bet insurance companies have investigated it.

The only evidence I could find was this study: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1087054706288103

Although I can't access the article, the abstract says that teens with ADHD had higher attention to driving when using a manual transmission vs an automatic.
Lagos
I'll be visiting the US in April this year, and I'm worried about the border crossing.

I'm guessing the best I can do as a non-US citizen is to have my previous phone on me with convincing-enough amount of dummy data in it. Is there any better way?

I will be entering the US via car from Canada by the way.
> Just because you can flag isn't carte blanche to post anything

Just because you have certain preferences isn't carte blanche to launch off-topic diatribes in threads on articles that don't adhere to them about how you prefer HN should be focussed.

> I like the site much better (and I'm sure many others too) when it stays in its technical oriented wheelhouse.

That is neither the official focus [0] nor, evidently—from what the community submits and keeps on the front page—the consensus of the community.

[0] From the guidelines: “On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” Obviously, whether any particular article meets they standard is subjective, which is why we have upvotes and flags and algorithms taking them and other factors (e.g., the flamewsr detector) into account.
In my (perhaps myopic) experience, over-engineering is a rare situation. And statistically we can assume most "engineers" fall in the 40-80% behavior range. The 1%ers write entirely inline Python scripts, and the 99%ers write Java EE structures.

The 40-80% try to find some balance between "now" and "the space of potential futures".

Point being, most developers aren't maniacs nor idiots.
But you request the translation per message. It does not happen automatically.
Previously on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861136
What we think the government should have the power to do based on a common understanding of it's basic legal principles is very different from the actual, literal power that a person and institution has. If someone is doing something and getting away with it, they have that power whether or not it should be viewed as legitimate power or illegitimate power. The actions of law enforcement exist in physical reality, and what you are referring to is what they should have. The EFF is seeking corrective action to bring reality in line with the constitution. "Is" instead of "ought."
For now, the law is on a collision course with technology.

Taxable events need to happen in fiat, there is too much incentive to obfuscate these events on blockchains.

Transactions in cryptocurrencies will become increasingly hard to trace.

I'm not sure governments know what they're up against.
If Hacker News Was BuilderNews
Is this surprising, that you can con gullible people into something. One cannot reliably question every single thing for fear routine will allow a false result from loose heuristics. Plus, many people are very trusting and will be taken advantage of at one point or another in life, IRL or online.

If you put up enough effort, sure, you can trick people into believing all sorts of near-realities.

The bigger story would be a review site complacent about fake reviews or tacitly allowing fake reviews undermining people's confidence.
I'd say nowhere. Contract manufacturing has been a declining industry since its peak 10 years ago. The fewer small factories there are, the less refuse goes to street market.

You best bet is to go to the few remaining factory districts in Shajing, north to the airport and look what garage factories are selling. Also try going to districts north to S3 if you are a try-hard. Stuff there is mostly generic light industry goods, and not electronics per se.

It may worth going further north to Dongguan, but I myself rarely ventured there.
Our company's full-time job is to shrink our customer's codebase size aggressively. Your team will not do that because it's a job security to them. Let us make your company where it's easy to fire anyone without risking major drawdowns.
> Who truly starts off with nothing?

No one; everyone starts off in a particular social context with a particular set of assets and opportunities and limitations.

There's no need to draw a line; there's no valid binary classification here.
Autonomous Semis Could Help Solve Trucking’s Major Labor Shortage
> You could say that teachers are so important that they should be paid more and in a free market education system they might be paid differently than they are now.

What is the present value of a teacher's pension? How much would you have to save to produce an investment stream that cannot be exhausted no matter how long you live? What value is attached to having it guaranteed by the government instead of being subject to market returns?
It’s unfair to say that this is the only way to get a conpany’s attention.

The vast majority of companies are run reasonably well. Coinbase is an outlier, a total shitshow.

They’re going to get destroyed by Robinhood and similar because they’re a terrible company that was printing money despite themselves, so there was nothing forcing them to admit how utterly terrible they are.
How many individuals would we need in order to make it worthwhile? Asking for a friend.

Maybe we could work together with people in another country - because we all want to pay "the full taxes we owe".
Ask HN: How do I bill my client?
The prospective client is creating a product and have decided to outsource their product development.

As a company, we decided to give it a try so that we can fund our own product which is under active development. Having said that, we are unaware of the economics of project development as we all have background in SaaS product companies.

I have come to the conclusion that we should charge them on manpower basis so that we don't get slowed down i.e
$x per developer per month + $y
where x is subjective to skills and experience
and y = cloud infrastructure cost.

This is in contrary to the hourly task based approach.

Please advise.
Solar with batteries $40 (that only last 10 hours max then blackouts).

Gas turbines $4.80.

> renewables are cheaper

Storage prices have fallen by about 7% per annum over a long period, with some fits and starts. This is no Moore's law.

This article is very slanted, expected from a player in the process.
Ethical Ads on ReadTheDocs
I know this is (becoming) an (even more) niche industry, but does anyone know of add-ons, plugins, or dedicated supplemental tools for more mainstream development tools (GitLab, Jira, etc) that caters for embedded development?
Ohh so they take credit for dash already!:)))
What's Hiding Inside Egypt's Great Pyramid? Tiny Robots May Find Out
Very similar to the "the principle of least power":

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power

- https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html

- https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/

I also would like to add this blog post by Li Haoyi (from Scala.js fame)

-
http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/StrategicScalaStylePrincipleofLe...

I think the tradeoff is maintainability and flexibility. I think code cannot be allowed to be complex. Complex code will eventually be broken during maintenance.
I fear you're taking this article too personally. No one is discounting your personal sacrifice. You work damn hard. You stay in when others go out drinking. You've done this for a long time, and you're working towards the payout. That takes an immeasurable amount of perseverance.

The Guardian is not discounting you or your efforts. The Guardian is saying: there are those with a safety net to experiment, and there are those without a safety net. When we look at the achievements of both populations, is it truly fair to compare those with such different circumstances?
So you're with a consulting company specialising in refactoring!?

How do you sell that to people?
I'm currently doing Andrew Ng's course and wrote a short review of course 1 here [1]. If you have the mathematics and statistics background and want to go through that rigorously enough then it's exceptional. If you are not the mathematically inclined it is still accessible but I can imagine fast.ai being more appropriate, although I have no personal experience.

[1] https://dandermotj.github.io/post/review-deeplearning-ai-cou...
Our startup, Fabrica.city, is trying to solve housing problems by focusing on the financial side of it, and "attacking" the issue of how to handle titles digitally (and therefore, save costs, etc.).

It's early in our journey, but I hope that we'll be able to show some real progress soon. Wish us luck :)
ATT CEO: Consumers Need an Internet Bill of Rights
The disabling system becomes another attack surface, and unless it is pretty independent, is itself disabled by a sophisticated attack. But scared as we are of external attack, allowing the government to shut off all cars is like letting Mubarak shut off the internet in Egypt. That's a bigger danger than foreign enemies in many countries.
It's not by the author but Rich Hickey (creator of clojure) has a great talk titled "Simple Made Easy"[1] which I always recommend.

Furthermore I have been using Golang and would say it is very simple language that anyone could pick up and become productive with quickly. One of Go's proverbs is "Clear is better than clever."[2] At the expense of a little verbosity there is much less ambiguity in the intent of code.

1. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
2. https://go-proverbs.github.io/
You can’t program AI, just some mindless feedback models that have the name “AI” slapped on them. You also can’t sway a group of skeptics with corny lines such as, “tomorrow your children...”

Get real. I don’t want to live in China right now, but evil? I live in a country that has destabilized country after country after country in the name of ideology, fear, and greed. This country kills civilians on a regular basis, and calls it acceptable.

We’re all evil, if you want to be hyperbolic about it, or human I’d you want to be realistic. Pointing fingers at external “devils” is just a non-starter to anyone with a rational bone in them.
I would suggest folks to watch netflix tv series “Dirty Money".
Many middle aged people are giving their entire lives to the generations older and younger. That general happiness curve over a lifetime seems to correspond with the level of responsibilities one has.

But I suspect also that we are very much more programmed as far as our values and goals than we realize, and middle age as a natural point in life where depression sets in, a subconcious rebellion/angst against a life we are living that is fradulent not in tune with our true selves.
I tried opening a business account more than six months ago and it's still not verified. I've uploaded files, my driver's license, everything they've asked for... still nothing.
AGPS uses data service to get the almanac.
How a&s Adria used Freshsales to automate inbound lead management
> There are clear and massive positive externalities to fossil fuel, and anyone arguing otherwise needs to take a deep breath. They are the foundation of modern civilisation, and we all get non-economic benefits from the era of unprecedented peace and prosperity that we live in. If we price in all the externalities, fossil fuels probably do deserve a subsidy. The renewables debate is about whether we have an alternative that is better than the historically magical substances we call fossil fuels.

I think you'd have to be pulling a pretty long bow to argue that fossil fuel extraction and use has no environmental externalities - this paper for example (http://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2015/measuring-fossil-fuel-hidd...) shows that for 2008-2012 "the implicit subsidy exceeded post-tax profits (averaged over five years) at all 20 of the largest oil, gas and coal producing companies studied".

We're already (globally) subsidising the fossil fuel industry, I think it's only fair to ask for some of that money back - it's not like they would 'unpollute' the sky and sea if they could anyway.

While they may be the foundation of the modern era, fossil fuels are also a dirty relic that should be left in the past. Leaving aside the environment impact I don't think I'd have to argue so hard that they have a not-so-great legacy when it comes to huge injections of capital into the middle east and it's concomitant propping up of dictators and despotic dynasties.
The nutritional info I found online has, for a particular size, 215 Cal, and 11 g of fat. 11 g of fat is 99 Cal, which is 46%, not 36%.
And any direct war that happened after 1945, had one belligerent that did not possess nuclear weapons, who turned out to be loser. That's the reason victor decided to wage war against him, citing some puny reason for the aggression.
Yeah, but don't worry, there's some consultant you can pay to give a class that will totally make all these determinations objective somehow.
As a drug user, the first scene of the show is one of the most fantastic and accurate descriptions of the ineffable effect of psychedelics.
It is often the case that the simplest solutions require the greatest skill in achieving. Thus, I agree immensely with avoiding unnecessary complexity whenever possible, but not "We should endeavor to write code that a novice programmer can easily understand without explanation or that a maintainer can understand without significant time investment." --- which tends to lead to extremely verbose, inefficient, and dumbed-down code.

In other words, if you only ever use the very simplest features of the language, you are effectively reducing micro complexity but increasing macro complexity. One of the best examples of this is the classic arguments over the use of the ternary/conditional (?:) operator --- those against say it's hard to read and should always be replaced with if/else, while those for say it simplifies the code by removing redundancy and should always be used in place of an if/else with a single assignment statement with the same LHS in both clauses.

Similarly, if you believe programmers are almost completely incapable of understanding operator precedence, or that it "makes code hard to read" and restrict expressions to only one operator (and mandate that variables be created for all intermediate results), then you will get code with all the verbosity of Asm but none of the benefits.

In other words, good code may not be immediately obvious; but your reaction when you do understand it should be one of pleasant enlightenment, and not "I can think of a simpler way to do this."

A somewhat related article: http://typicalprogrammer.com/what-does-code-readability-mean
Apparently the author mistakes dumb for simple.

Usually dumb code is layers upon layers of needless complexity, grown because the coder had neither time nor inclination to understand the problem, and kept tweaking.

Such dumb code becomes a huge support and troubleshooting cost, letting alone quickly modifying it.

Don't write dumb code. Write simple code. The recipe is known: think about the data first, untangle and minimize dependencies (including any global state), write simple, orthogonal functions over these data. Use the language's standard library and built-in data structures. Crave for these negative line count PRs.

It takes much shorter time than working with dumb code.
Bingo. Blockchain systems are ideal for tracking & control, even beyond credit cards and the like. Bitcoin is simply so much more accessible.
> Software is the currency that we pay to solve problems, which is our actual goal. We should endeavor to build as little software as possible to solve our problems.

Amazingly well put. I’m gonna try and not forget this so I quote it when discussing with people who love to come up with bloated, overengineered solutions.
Firmware updates on Bitmain miners are unsigned tars with shell script as root
what are dilution drinks?
Good point; why sell drugs or arms to fund your black budgets when you can move digital funny money in a shell game? Or in some places it could be a version of, “Letting a hundred flowers blossom...” with a similar, if less fatal, end.
I'm in the same boat. At this point, "growing pains" is not a legitimate excuse for this level of incompetence. I (wrongly) assumed that since Coinbase is based in SF and funded by YC, that they would not be able to get away with this level of negligence. This reflects very poorly on YC and specifically YC leadership.

Serious question for YC insiders: has YC leadership made any effort to advise Brian on this, and how poorly this negligence reflects on YC as a whole, or does no one care because they're getting such a high return on their investment?
DIY Chromebook for ThinkPads
I use maps.me for offline use. Is there an official OSM app?
>Your team will not do that because it's a job security to them

Every team I've ever been on [albeit that's only two], it's the opposite, if the devs had their way they'd spend all day every day simplifying and refactoring. The only reason we don't, is because actual business needs demand attention.
Ah, but this is the magic! It's how you disenfranchise voters. Very effective.
I just migrated and dashbot is amazing.
I support it in this extreme case. But as someone who does tons of all-hands support at companies with _really_ good support, please start with normal channels. Starting out publicly paints you as really aggressive and hard to work with. To diagnose anything complex, and for your own privacy, you'll need to move to email anyway. You'll get good support either way because we're professionals, but there's no need to start any interaction with a middle finger.
There’s also a closed form for the Fibonacci numbers. It runs in O(1).

http://stsievert.com/blog/2015/01/31/the-mysterious-eigenval...
Amazon ad teases new Alexa voices debuting on Super Bowl Sunday
How to reduce unconscious bias at work
How to Backup Data on Your Computer in a Safe Way
Mostly because one could afford good lawyers or the laws they break are harder to prove.
My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger. — E. W. Dijkstra

One of my favorite quotes :-)