skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a cashier, some systems allow you to type a quantity before scanning an item to simply multiply that scan. I wish self checkouts would let me scan my former employee badge and "unlock" all the features of a full checkout
The basis of that statement, in my opinion, is human bias. Experts protect their reputation to the external and internal (psychological) world by saying that nobody could have predict the specifics that led to that event.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, as much as people here seem to dislike his personal style, has written extensively on these types of events. He calls them Black Swans, and says while we may not have predicted the 2008 crash, we would be wise to assume there exist unforeseeable/non-modeled events that would have non-linear impact on the system.

I think of it this way: future events* will occur that will invalidate our models and have outsized/nonlinear impact on the KPI we care about. Our blindness is because there are so many baked-in assumptions and possible futures we can't mentally model for them. Any single "Black Swan" event has a vanishingly small probability of coming true, but the sum of the Black Swan probabilities is the important metric, not any given one.

Taleb's thinking is filled with judgement of his peers, and his egotistical writing style is bombastic. His themes, however, from his trilogy of books, marries human psychology with rare outcome events to form an interesting contrarian take on the world.

* 1987 crash, dot-com crash, the Great Recession, etc.
Creating an Equal Height Pricing Table Using CSS Flexbox
Are you going to start lobby to make it illegal for companies to put anti-class action clauses in their ToS? Are you going to lobby to make it illegal for a company to force mandatory binding arbitration on their customers? If not, then you're just trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're trying to keep the government from punishing wrongdoing, and trying to keep people from the very few remedies they have.
What's the etiquette for disclosure timeline on something like this? It feels like 99.9999% of end users won't see this public disclosure, and waiting enough time for auto-updates to be applied would be ideal. Public disclosure as soon as the patch is available lets bad actors know about it while the vast majority of users are still vulnerable.
Ah right - texodusmedia at gmail dot com should work for now.

I don't know the Cakeshop developers personally, but it looks slick!
In three years software like this would absolutely change front-end development. Already is front-end development constantly progressing every year.

PSD to HTML services were outsourced a decade ago for a reason.
Except Dart is a worse language than Kotlin.
I would guess the relevant metric is called "real returns": capital appreciation plus dividends minus inflation.
This actually helps stabilize the rocket. Lawn dart, and all that ;).
But that's just syntax. As you say, it doesn't mean an arbitrary library written in OCaml will actually run in the browser due to dependencies. It doesn't matter if you can link the code if it won't actually work.

I'm reminded of GWT where there is client-only Java, server-only Java, and portable (shared) Java. It's all Java but you definitely have to keep your desired platform's constraints in mind when looking for a library to reuse.
Sorry, I misunderstood you. In that case, the way I'd break it down is:

Is that dialog a "security feature"? Sure. (Actually, that's a stretch, because it's just lipstick over the API, but...)

Is it intended to block someone from being able to do something? No.

I'm not saying these criteria are all inclusive - for example, if the buttons were mislabeled and "Cancel" actually applied ACL changes, I'd still call it a security bug. It seems like the bug this thread is talking about clearly does meet the criteria, though. If you look at the man page for kill[1] it says unless you're root, you're only allowed to kill processes running under your user, but the bug allows a low-privilege user to kill other users' processes.

[1]https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Dar...
I love the simplicity of that solution, but the hacker in me wonders how hard it would be to duplicate the token...
You seem really upset about a time someone made you cookies.
It supports virtualization, and it is utilized by both plugins (Hypergrid and Highcharts).

N levels of pivoting on both axes.

Should work on all browsers - if not, please open an issue!
Ask HN: How do you find cofounders?
Hi everyone, I'm currently working on a startup idea I'm personally really excited about and I'm looking for a cofounder but it has been really tough. I've convinced some of my peers of the viability of my idea, and managed to enlist their help intermittently (we are all CS graduates) but I have thus far been unsuccessful in convincing any of them to commit to it full-time unless I can afford to match their current salary as many of them have long-term financial commitments. As a result, I'm the only full-time person on the project and things are moving along much slower than I'd like. I managed to come up with a working prototype which is live right now, but having another technical cofounder I can work with would multiply my productivity by magnitudes.

For teams out there with full-time cofounders, how did you find them or each other? How did you manage to convince them to commit full-time?
> I assumed that it's up to the user's discretion, and they would set their computer settings appropriately

My computer is configured correctly, but it's rather common for an application (especially a phone app) or website to ignore those settings, or to think it knows better.

04:30 UTC means 04:30 UTC, or 05:30 in Denmark. Not 17:30!

The same can happen if I type something like "04:30 Catch flight" into an appointment in my Google Calendar. It is converted into a new appointment "16:30 Catch flight".

It's not just Google. "Your Office 365 subscription will automatically renew on 1/19/2018." and the admin interface is a mix of date and time formats.
As a fellow backend developer I certainly hope so. I think web assembly gets us very close. Only two things I missed were direct canvas access from C++ without going through a JS shim and access to some kind of blob storage api in the browser.
Guessing it's http://jrnl.sh ? Seems to written in Python though, while you say shellscript.

Sounds like a useful script, care to share it here?
Stripe’s carbon-neutral journey
> Failing to constrain may lead to a null reference exception. Just like passing a reference to any method anywhere in C#.

But you can adopt a small set of rules that are locally enforceable (and practical to use in an automatic linter) to prevent this happening (just as Haskell is safe even though unsafePerformIO exists, because you can adopt a small set of locally enforceable rules like "never use unsafePerformIO"). Unfortunately one of those rules has to be to never use default().

> That is not the same as returning a dynamic value, which is a type that propagates dynamic dispatch wherever it's passed. A failure to capture a null reference bug means on first usage it will blow up - so you fix the code and everything is type safe.

Unfortunately default() isn't fail-fast in all cases - when used with e.g. a struct type containing a reference type, it will create the value in an invalid state (containing a null reference) but you won't necessarily notice until you come to use the value, arbitrarily many compilation units away. So it's just as dangerous as a dynamic value.

> All throughout this frankly tedious discussion you have somehow conflated having a bug in an application with having no type system at all.

In almost any language you can have polymorphic return values without complete type safety. The feature that Haskell has here isn't that you can have polymorphic return values - it's that you can have polymorphic return values safely. Showing an unsafe implementation of polymorphic return values in some other language is pointless and irrelevant.
Waiting for Netflix to produce a TV show to explain that to the people. [And yes, I really mean it. It is not just sarcasm].
First, let me say this looks awesome! I’m curious if your considered React.js for the presentation layer (i.e. the js/html5 parts) - on the surface it seems like it would be a good fit - and if so, what you saw as the benefits or drawbacks of it vs the approach you went with.
The Richter scale measures and describes impacts, so you already know the impact from the 6.4 rating itself.

I'm sorry, this is not quite true. The Richter scale measures the amplitude of seismic waves; the description you highlight is what might be expected generally, but doesn't give us any indication of the actual on-the-ground impact that any particular quake might have.
> Beyond cryptocurrencies? Go on, I'm all ears. I'm always amazed by how often I hear that claim (on HN and elsewhere) and yet nobody seems in a rush to be specific about it.

A Byzantine fault-tolerant, distributed NTP protocol that does not rely on a trusted third party. That is a concrete, legitimate use case for a blockchain that meaningfully improves through a trustless, permissionless and decentralized system. For example, this could augment Google's RoughTime NTP protocol.[1]

More abstractly, blockchains resolve many hard problems in cryptographic protocols that would otherwise require trusted third parties. There has been nontrivial academic attention for this particular possibility, including support from DARPA and the NSF.[2]

Now you have heard someone making this claim and being specific about it on HN.

________________

1. https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/09/19/roughtime.html

2. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/935.pdf
In diabetes war, Novo Nordisk aims to break mold with new pill
We do some benchmarking just for catching performance regressions and validating assumptions against the non-WebAssembly version, but definitely need more in this regard.
[benchmark for wasm build](https://jpmorganchase.github.io/perspective/examples/benchma...)
I love the logo. Making something as scary as a { look friendly.
I'm surprised we haven't seen more consolidation of companies whose primary product is related to developer experience.

I always thought either Github or Microsoft would start snatching up all these small companies to integrate them more tightly to sell as end to end packages.

Anyone in this space have any insight into why that hasn't happened yet?
How Rust Is Tilde’s Competitive Advantage [pdf]
There is perhaps a technical reason for this. Computer languages are described using BNF notation, apparently invented in the 20th century, but others have noted that Panini did this 2500 years earlier, describing Sanskrit with a similar notation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form

The idea of describing the structure of language using rewriting rules can be traced back to at least the work of Pāṇini (ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian and a revered scholar in Hinduism who lived sometime between the 7th and 4th century BCE).[1][2] His notation to describe Sanskrit word structure notation is equivalent in power to that of Backus and has many similar properties.

Citation:

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=363165

I can't copy the text here, but it's worth a read:

https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machin...

Knuth is mentioned in the same letter as Panini, regarding the naming of "BNF".

https://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_rao-t_s...

Knuth invented LR parsing of context free grammars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LR_parser

LR parsers were invented by Donald Knuth in 1965 as an efficient generalization of precedence parsers. Knuth proved that LR parsers were the most general-purpose parsers possible that would still be efficient in the worst cases.
Josef Frank’s Modernist Vision: 'Accidentism'
The challenge helps explain why the user experience for desktop printers hasn't changed much in 25 years.
But that way they would never have comments at all..., you'd have to at least store them as long as comments could be entered, so until the thread enters archival state.
You say that, but it doesn't take engineer levels of understanding to read the instructions in big, bright letters on the screen, which seems to be a skill many people lack when facing these devices.

I think it just comes down to yet another example of smart people forgetting how to function when faced with an electronic device, regardless of past experience with critical thinking and problem solving. It's willful helplessness.
Presumably – hopefully – people save anyway to avoid plunging into said safety net. It might be unpleasant, both the knowledge of having not been able to provide for yourself, and the standard of living that you might be limited to if you're deep in the net.
A certain type you say?
It's not just a gripe over imprecise language... This is a serious logic error about wrong language that many people make, and it conveys absolutely the wrong information.

There was a highly commented article here a month ago which said a person bought litecoin at $67 and had achieved 570% gain at $387.

That's absurdly wrong due to a similar misunderstanding about math. Many people didn't understand _why_ that is wrong - even after a couple people jumped in to help explain the reason.
> even a single Merlin engine is too powerful for the almost empty rocket to hover

Indeed. For their last launch, they decided to try landing the booster with three engines rather than one, which brings the whole 'hoverslam' concept to the next level.

This was considered so risky that they didn't try landing it on the barge, for fear of damaging it. Instead, they soft landed on the ocean.

But much to everyone's surprise, it actually worked! There's a picture of the Falcon 9 booster floating awkwardly. Musk said they'll try to tow it to shore.

And all that is really the core of why I love SpaceX: continuous improvement. It's a grand thing!
Couldn't this be used to automatize fire weapon aiming?

Or worse : a laser beam aiming automatically to the eyes. It'd be quite bad since it'd be cheap and unlike fire weapons, lasers are easy to build or acquire.

How long until a mass shooting uses such technology?
Uber doesn’t want jury to see report, but judge says Uber is “stuck” with it
It's hard to overstate the value I've gotten out of Freenode IRC over the years. The #postgresql channel is chock-full of contributors and PG gurus willing to generously spend time explaining concepts and best practices. A real gem. Same thing with #clojure and #haskell . ##networking is great as well. Pretty amazing to drop into the same channel for 6-7 years in a row and see the same faces every time.

One of the first things I used to teach devs on our team was how to ask questions on IRC to get the answers they were looking for. When you're working with niche tooling, building personal connections and relying on the community becomes irreplaceable.

Wish people IRCed mode, wonder what the trend with that has been recently with Slack taking over.
Native Instruments GmbH | Senior Data Engineer, Technical Product Owner - Data Infrastructure | Berlin, Germany | ONSITE | Full-time

Native Instruments is a leading manufacturer of software and hardware for computer-based audio production and DJing. Our mission is to develop innovative, fully-integrated solutions for all musical styles and professions. We push technological boundaries and open up new creative horizons for professionals and amateurs alike.

We're looking for people with both the left and right brain fully engaged – exceptional individuals with strong analytical minds and a passion for music and technology.

Senior Data Engineer to build a new and modern Data Infrastructure to enable everyone at Native Instruments to make informed decisions.

Technical Product Owner to work with a team of Data Engineers and stakeholders, to set the foundation of this new infrastructure.

Find out more and apply here:
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/career-center/berlin

recruiting@native-instruments.de
Also geology is very important. Bedrock vs landfill will significantly affect impact. Marina distract vs Laurel Heights.
Strong Earthquake topples buildings in Taiwan
It looks like you are correct. They seem to have taken the design from Donald Knuth, who put the N in upside down.
Minicloud: The FREE OpenPOWER Cloud by Unicamp
Well, yes, but it's the same thing, really. It's what my last paragraph above is about.

E=mc² is not about nuclear reactions, it's about every reaction. A chemical reaction of combustion transforms some fuel molecules into new molecules. If you compute the mass of the products of the combustion and compare it to the mass of the fuel before burning, you will notice a sliiiiight difference (probably negligible, barely detectable). The disappearing mass has been converted to kinetic energy (and heat, but who cares).
Mixmax raises $10.35M to improve email
I have this thought a lot. Elon Musk is in charge of a rocket ship company. "Rocket Ship Company". And now he has competition! Soon we'll be able to go to the moon or mars and it'll all seem completely normal.
I think the Taiwanese companies we can think of (huge ODMs like Quanta and Foxconn) do almost all of their manufacturing in China, not Taiwan.

Edit: oops, not Samsung of course.
Loved the logo :}
With some of the entities that you'd expect to take the lead in this absent-without-leave it just might come to that. But it is a pretty sad realization that the likes of Netflix are low looked at to inform the general public about such important topics.
Microsoft trying to poach Dropbox and Google customers with free OneDrive deal
My HomePod Review (Om Malik)
The Authority Principle
My first thought was that there might be some sort of risk of a conflict of competing interests between justice and the profit-seeking motive. And because having an aggressive sales/marketing team trying to draw in more customers might encourage false accusations.

But then I realized I was reacting emotionally and that many law firms already have to advertise and sell themselves and I'm applying some sort of cognitive bias to startups that I'm not applying to the law profession.

Which actually caused me to have a more interesting realization: the notion of being a tech entrepreneur is new enough that I think it lacks some sort of slowly built cultural trust in the ethics/morals/impartiality of the profession.

People kind of trust doctors, (some) lawyers, judges to be above any sort of greed or profit-seeking immoral actions.

But I don't think there's any trust at all that startups will "do the right thing".

Obviously big business and corporations have proven to have a poor track record with labor rights, environmental protections, etc.

But does the Silicon Valley startup deserve the same distrust? Or should it be given more of the benefit of the doubt?

I'm not sure. But it's interesting that we're so quick to jump to mob mentality distrust of tech.

Maybe the reason we trust law or medicine is their codified ethics - for lawyers it's the law itself and for medicine it's hundreds of years of cultural tradition and teaching and the Hippocratic oath. And many people and organizations have proposed an equivalent for scientists and engineers.

But I somehow think the pace of change and cultural values we have today make it much more difficult to really foster that sort of occupational "culture", at least in the tech world.
How is Samsung Taiwanese?
Last week a relative of mine mentioned that "the new Windows" I gave her is so much faster and easier to use. I had helped her fix all kinds of issues with Windows for years, usually updates causing BSOD/boot errors. Over Thanksgiving I just came over for another tech support session but brought an Elementary USB and put that on a partition and gave her Google Chrome, Spotify, and set up her printer/scanner. She says her old PC (Core 2 Quad/6gb ddr2) is faster than the day she got it and she likes the dock of apps instead of the Windows taskbar. I'm very happy with Elementary and I don't mind at all donating to a project that's really putting Linux on the desktops of regular people.
"lowering the barrier" or building awareness among the audience that a photograph may not be what it seems at first glance.
This Apple Watch clone has GPS and 45 days of battery life for $99 – The Verge
I think we were talking about a space station. If it ever lands, I assume it'd be unintentional.
Samsung is Korean
Bay Area part-time profs:  why they work at Safeway, live out of cars
I would go to this, happily on both ends of the conversation.
Given appropriate context, I find it hard to see someone confusing the two.
In my opinion, this is an excellent presentation. I've watched this video in 2012 and have recommended it to a lot of people.
Even though not many people will be able to use these tips on a daily basis, it's a "must watch" in my eyes. So inspiring and fun to watch.
Watch it, when you have time! :)
2 hours to bet ETH on if Elon Musk's rocket will launch or nah
The following features made wasm compelling here

a. Filter / Pivot / Aggregate moving clientside means a lot of load off the servers.

b. Performance in wasm is surprisingly close to same C++ code running natively on the desktop.

c. Ability to reuse existing C++ codebase and use it to build both native and web apps.
And that’s what I love about IRC — if there’s a topic I’m interested in, I can hop into freenode and find a channel focused on it.
It is not an indicator of stupidity, but if you haven't seen people lose all problem solving skills when faced with an automated system, you may need to expand your social circle.

When it comes to technology, some people have realized that screaming for help and blaming the system is an option, and seem to always pick that over reading a simple instructional sentence presented in bright colors directly on screen.

If you've ever been "the family tech guy/girl", then you likely have experienced this or understand.
The USGS data clearly tries to make intelligent guesses in that direction (they try to guess at shaking, and local population, and local building standards, etc to predict the damage) but imho what matters is what actually happened rather than what the USGS computers think could have happened, and reports of building collapses are probably more "real" than whatever the USGS thinks is likely.
Great stuff, like all of Bret Victor's talks.
My favourite: is "The Future of Programming (2013)": https://vimeo.com/71278954

(I also liked this satirical blog post about that talk: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=797)
Ask HN: How to decide which idea to work on?
How do you decide which idea is worthwhile to start, if you have several ideas worth exploring?
He asked for a specific thing, and you answered with nothing at all.
Developing Games with React, Redux, and SVG – Part 1
Why would you pay capital gains tax on a money transfer?
“Project Things” – An open framework for connecting your devices to the web
World's oldest prosthetic body parts
Streamline Icons – 3,000 Vector Illustrations for Interface and UX Design
From what I gather watching UK TV there's also the charming and efficient use of "half X" to refer to thirty minutes after hour X.
Indeed. I was thinking about this, and would argue this should really not only exist... but be the only way extensions with this level of wide-sweeping access should be permitted to be published.

Chrome team, if they were security-focused, would not permit any closed source extensions which have access to all website data.

People don't seem to understand sometimes that if an extension has this sort of access, you need to be able to trust your browser extensions as much as you trust your browser itself.
TSMC is based in Taiwan... If that's not 'huge', I'm not sure what is.
Is something comparable available for Firefox?