skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blog author from Keybase here. Always game for a Hacker News discussion!

There's a subtle point I cut from my post for simplicity reasons, but which feels perfect for HN. I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team that the classic "blockchain" works great for native tokens but is extremely dangerous for anything with counterparty redemption. For example, imagine the shitshow after a truly contentious fork, if there are tokens which are supposed to be redeemable with a counterparty.

Let's say Deutsche Bank had put €1 billion into colored coins on Bitcoin. Suddenly, after a fork (e.g. bitcoin vs. bitcoin cash), there would be €2 billion IOU's in the wild. The people on each side of that fork would not roll over and die, and it's not simple to say "Oh, whoever Deutsche picks wins." Or even "Whoever has the strongest chain wins." I have a hard time imagining a company would ever take that risk. I worry big companies would never dare to put anything real-world redeemable directly onto, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum, for this reason. They'd just get sued over and over again.

The Stellar federated consensus story (HN debates about SCP below [1][2]) has Deutsche Bank as an actual player on the network. If you want DB redemptions then you would include them in your trust lines / quorum slices, and if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side. All said, it seems significantly faster and more stable for cryptocurrency-to-real-world mappings, both for the consumer and counterparty.

Fun discussions:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687 -- of particular note, because it has David Mazières, Vitalik Buterin, and Greg Maxwell all weighing in.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16125920
Interesting paper. Do you work in the area? I'm working on proving that memories are in fact stored in genetic material, as was believed back in the 60s.

Drop me an email (gauravvman at gmail) if you're interested in this kind of stuff! Would like to know how you came across this paper.
Since Slack's APIs are open to use would it not be possible to make an IRC/XMPP 'proxy' server?
I think learning is more about losing neurons, not creating it. Or meatspace neural netowrks are less about changing weights and more about pruning connections.
Did you investigate deploying the bot as a Github App?
I can very much relate to the pain points and benefits mentioned in the example.

Last year we had a project in which we had to take a stream of data that needed to be verified with several calls to an external system before being partitioned, transformed and inserted in batches to a relational DB. The system processes ~100 million messages per day (message length is ~1.5 KB) on 2 nodes each with 4 cores and 16 GB memory.

We built the routing and partitioning logic using Akka cluster since we wanted to have consistent hashing as we scale the number of stream workers horizontally. Initially, the stream processing was also done via Actors, which are a fantastic concurrency tool, but we soon found ourselves reimplementing a lot of the features mentioned in the article and needed to handle backpressure between each of the steps since the rates at which the producers put data into the system often burst for short periods of time. Last but not least, we suddenly had a huge amount of non-business logic that needed to be tested and maintained.

At some point we decided to rewrite the stream processing part to make use of Akka streams. I have to admit that I was initially skeptical given that no one on the team had previously worked with it and since some of us already had experience with Apache Spark, which could also be used to process the data.

Long story short, it was a breeze to rewrite as it consisted mainly of removing the non-business code and using the Akka streams stages to handle the batching, rate limiting and end to end backpressure for us. And similarly satisfying, our codebase was much smaller and readable.

Soon we will begin work on another project of similar nature, and while we are considering a couple of alternatives depending on the final requirements, Akka streams is definitely on the top of the list for us.
James Dyson gives a great NPR interview on how he developed the Dyson Vacuum and his approach to engineering. It is really interesting to hear how he got started. If you are into podcasts check it out; How I built this with Guy Raz and scroll to James Dyson[0]

[0]https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
It's not the advertising per say, but the winner take all nature that's inherent in distribution that seems to be the problem.
Is there another viable free & open source 3D API that I've not heard about?
Wikipedia articles that do not lead back to Philosophy
The Battery Will Kill Fossil Fuels – It's Only a Matter of Time
> Say you have a conversion rate on a landing page of 5% and you want to get it up to 5.5%. That’s a 16% increase.

Isn't that a 10% increase?
PG says a lot of interesting things, but he sure is invested in the idea that the solution is a startup, for darn near every problem. He seems to think it's something virtually anyone can do with some hope of success. I don't think that squares with how hard people report having to work to make a serious try of it, and the high rate of failure.
Processing doesn't have to be real-time
Crypto Zealots
Svart Energy-Positive Hotel
no thanks, when you go would you really want your last statement of who you were to be created by some random medical practitioner who decides on your behalf that the sum of your life was "he died a sad lonely man".

> he died because he was homeless and couldn't find his way to the help he needed.

taking your approach, you'd also have to allow at least some of those death certificates to list cause of death as: "he died because he was homeless, and he was homeless because he was a drunkard and an addict who was horrible to his family and most everyone he dealt with."

or is the intent to permit maudlin sentiments only?
Politics on Hacker News usually gets flagged.
C/C++ has text-based inclusion, which is just not a sane form of importing stuff from other modules. This is why we can get crazy stuff like broken partial builds. Most other languages are saner to build and some even come with tailor-made build tools.

Using a saner tool than plain make for C/C++ is worth it every time in my book.

make can still be very useful for other stuff, though.
Graphhopper is the routing engine itself, not a service.
Really nice. I think with the right marketing, there could be huge market for this.
For some services I agree with your sentiment. But we don't have metrics so there's no way to know if this is a fair deal.

Remember, they're showing us ads in addition to collecting volumes of information on us, so we're paying in two ways.

And frankly I don't mind the ads, by principle, but I do mind that a few companies are able to use them to track us nearly everywhere online without allowing me to review what they're collecting and who is collecting it.

Here in the US, we cried tyranny when our security agencies were collecting metadata to monitor threats. And then we gave everything we had to Facebook and Google and didn't bat an eye as they sold us to anyone who pays.
There are probably well over 10 trillion photos taken. Less by professionals, but they are more likely to take the same photo.

Anyway, that low probability applies to every other photo. So, the first photo is compared to every other photo and by the end your talking ~50,000,000,000,000,000,000 comparisons. The odds would have to be mind boggling tiny for this not to happen all the time.
Well it was a two bedroom apartment...
The SaaS is not ongoing, it was released 2 days ago. And in November they sold us the only existing version, the wordpress version knowing they will soon release the better SaaS version.

This what their FAQ on website originally said about the Wordpress use: (they changed it recently)

"However keep in mind we're focusing the most resources on our new version going forward."
I'm not dead yet.

USA's credit reporting agencies are a bight on humanity. All the power with none of the accountability, ambiguous rules ruthlessly enforced, profiting from other people's misfortune.
This is political? Please explain.
Annoyingly, it was edited from something much more timid and factual.
I see the problem but this feels like a bad solution. The way I see it there are two real problems here.

(1) Google, Facebook and the like do have a cost, just that it's data instead of money. The fact that we're one step removed from money obscures the true cost associated with the services. And when you combine that with the fact that the services themselves obscure what data they're collecting/have, there's no way for an end consumer to know if they're getting a 'good deal' since they have no idea what they're paying. A fix to this would be radical forced transparency - every consumer should be able to find out what data any company has on them - both collected and bought (and bought from whom for how much.)

(2) Data is too large a competitive advantage in certain industries. It seems similar to me to utilities. Barring local law I could try and start up a new water company and displace the incumbent but it would never work - the huge fixed costs make the industry prone to natural monopolization. Same here except with data. There are absolutely ginormous costs associated with collecting user data that could rival Google's or Facebook's (if it's even possible). You could start a company to try to beat Google but you'll never get the data to make it good enough to compete and since you're not good enough to compete you'll never get the data. The free market here has done it's work - it's generated something new and useful and beneficial to society, now we should nationalize it so that it stays that way.
>it's affiliated with and at least partially funded by the state-owned Shanghai United Media Group.

what's the motivation for the chinese government here? if anything it makes china look bad because the sequence of events are:

1. force foreign company to relocate data there

2. apple moves user data there to comply

3. surprise! china facility gets hacked
We went to paid Slack because it was, functionally, a hosted IRC server. I even recommended it to others on that basis.

Looks like we're going elsewhere. What else is there that does the job? IRC interface, archives messages you missed.
Please clarify ...
Depending - you might be able to take them to small claims court. Given the small value, they likely wont fight it.

You'd have to come with the terms of service though.

Given the value, it'll be a huge headache for them to fight it. They'll likely just convert you all over. If not, they'll have to pay damages, which would be awful for them (if there's a few thousand people).
This does not bode well for real VR surgery. Imagine if this were surgery day for someone, and because of an expiring certificate the rift shuts down ...
> I wonder if it will be as big a success as FTL, and if so, whether it will be on its own merit, or the mass following they have due to FTL.

It's a very different game than FTL so while I'd expect previous FTL owners to check it out I wouldn't necessarily expect all of them to be interested (I was, and I really like ITB though I'm quite terrible at tactical games) (then again I'm also bad at roguelikes).
I think the parent commenter has a pretty straightforward point: the services are "free" in the common sense of the word, meaning you need not directly pay for them. You can reason about abstract value transfer relationships involving the concept of "free", but the core idea is that people are getting something in return for their money, and most people are observably okay with it.

> You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits.

I don't think this is falsifiable. It sounds sort of feasible in the abstract, but how can we empirically measure that effect? As it stands, I could just as easily respond that, no, these companies make prices more efficient, because their advertising methodologies are more effective so companies spend less on their platforms than they would for equivalent ad campaigns elsewhere. Then we'd have to figure out how to investigate whether modern companies advertise more due to growth of the market, or because they have to due to catch up with everyone else using the tech advertising platforms. Narrowing down the answer, if there is one, would be nontrivial. Then I could also say that advertising makes tech services cheaper, because Facebook and Google earn more from user data than they would if they forced everyone to pay $20/month.

Which of us is right? We can't really say, it's effectively an opinion because, even if technically falsifiable, these claims are far from being empirically demonstrable.
> I was excited when this came out, but I'm ambivalent about it now. First of all, it doesn't actually solve the issue I mentioned, since it's not actually "native" in the sense I was talking about; it's just a cross-platform Go app.

"C. There's also some Objective-C for macOS UI."

> Second, it's not open source, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable trusting such an app with my login credentials.

"eul doesn't ask for your passwords and doesn't store them anywhere. Authentication is performed in a browser directly on the messenger's website."
One area to explore is the editor listed as David Paulk. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpaulk/
https://twitter.com/davidpaulk

At first glance his twitter feed looks pretty normal for a journalist from US living in China.
> There are always exceptions, but houses generally do not appreciate. Much like a car, they become outdated and wear out.

Erm....have you seen what the property market is like in the UK. Most, if not all, property appreciates with little or no major expenditure.
Am I the only one who finds this completely trust breaking?
But this isn't very political, is it? An influential individual in computing gets modern recognition. Just because NYT article says that obituaries were "dominated by white men" doesn't make this political content IMO.

In any case, we don't need to be dogmatic about "rules" like the ones governing political content.
He used to be a prolific commenter here on HN, but he hasn't posted for 2.5 years[1] though he did write three short essays in 2017[2]. I assume that middle age, wife, child, and running a startup incubator/accelerator are major impediments to anyone continuing with comments, essays, and programming.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
Nature is a research journal. In fact it is one of the premier research journals. A publication in Nature can make a career.

Nature is not a specialist journal however. Most fields publish in it.
Why are so many coders musicians?
Another issue is that you wouldn't have any sort of active responses that may induce or attenuate any effects of the radiation. An example from the auditory world is that for much of the history of auditory system research, it was thought that the cochlea was a passive system (with a little more nuance, the idea of an active cochlear mechanism was theorized but not confirmed). But that was because the technological limitations of the time only allowed experiments on dead cochleas (primarily by von Bekesy) - once otoacoustic emissions were first recorded (70s or early 80s) we finally had verification of the cochlear amplifier.

More, if interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_amplifier
What is a legitimate use case for a binary deliverable without a timestamped signature?
Great list, saving for later!
It's a pity it doesn't support Oracle.
Some corps force developers to use it.
What was the lifetime license for? Updates? If so, are they still updating the plugin? If it's still being updated, and they didn't just abandon it altogether a few months after you bought a lifetime subscription, it seems to me that you got what you expected and what they told you you were getting.
assumes there is a singular root cause. "he died lonely of a broken heart?" but why was he lonely? "he died because in his entire life he failed to develop relationships with people" or "he died of loneliness because he was a terrible human being" etc.

and "he died of being homeless"? why was he homeless? because society was so cruel and uncaring? sure, he had nothing to do with it himself.

the other comment is right, this path inevitably leads to judgment and speculation.
Adding new historical obituaries specifically to address the issue that those other than White men were historically ignored in that section of the paper certainly seems at least related to a currently active area of identity politics.

Not that I think the comment on politics usually getting flagged was useful or necessarily accurate.
I wouldn't recommend using JAWS and IE for CI. For this purpose, I think it would be much better to use NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/) with any browser that can be controlled by a test framework like Selenium. (NVDA supports all the major browsers now.) Then, to feed the text-to-speech output back into your test framework, you can write a simple TTS driver for NVDA, in Python.
I'm not sure you understand what differential privacy is. Apple still has your data. If there's a breach, an attacker gets your data. It's probably encrypted, just as it is with pretty much any modern system where user data is collected, but differential privacy doesn't have anything to do with what data is collected or stored. Differential privacy is just a method for limiting how much information can be reliably inferred about an entire dataset from limited queries on statistical properties of the data.

It's basically this. Imagine I have two data sets that are identical, except one has your specific data and the other doesn't. It's possible in some circumstances to infer information about you by asking for things like averages on the datasets. Differential privacy is a method for defeating attacks that rely on that type of "leakage" of information. It assures that if two datasets are close enough, queries on those datasets will not yield significant information about their differences (i.e., the presence or absence of one particular data point won't be detectable).

It's all about how queries of the data perform, and not at all about the data itself.
The problem is that the ads model works for a while, then they realize it doesn't anymore and they change the free tier. This seemed to have happened recently with gmail. Impossible to know what the eventual monetization model will be when signing up. I think this is the justified cause of the mistrust. Also there are the observations 'free as in beer' and 'if you're not the customer you're the product.' Both of which have merit.
I once plugged my usb cable in on the first try. Goes to show you anything is possible!!

Edit: upon further inspection it turns out it was USB-C. Nevermind, all is right with the world :)
First, do you or anyone you know directly or indirectly profit from these types of services? Because I find your emphatic endorsement hard to understand.

To be fair, I do use some of these services, too (carefully). But, that’s only because often I can’t find quality alternatives. For instance, I would pay for a high-quality service like Mint (I don’t use it) that kept my data private, but there is none.

Since gathering / ad-selling services are so lucrative, they essentially subsidize the development of the highest-quality products in the market. The best engineers work for these companies. They have massive teams of people refining their products. And, these companies use IP laws to prevent clones. Essentially, they lock out for-fee competitors.

Because of this, I’m a strong supporter of consumer protection laws and regulations. Capital often flows toward deceptive and unethical practices. And, all companies are eventually forced to follow the leader, otherwise they disappear. Laws are the only ways to prevent this.
Some background on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/insider/overlooked-obitua...

On the topic of NYT obits, there’s a really great episode of the Longform podcast with NTY’s senior obituary writer Margalit Fox: https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-43-margalit-fox
Really? Because rent control certainly myself and everyone I knew in a similar situation with a chance at class mobility.

Rent control allowed my mom to stop being a cab driver and go to nursing school. Rent control facilitated me getting a really great education and career.

I grew up needing food stamps, handmedown clothes and even shoes. How can you, with a straight face, tell me that bullshit?
Personal experience and this has nothing to do with New York City but I can understand the article POV.

I recently moved to an island in Greece. The small town am living in, has the exact same issue that the article is describing, yet even worse.

Everyone, literally EVERYONE, has their apartments/houses/properties that they don't live in, turned into Airbnb's. Doesn't matter if its in the town center or 30 miles out of the town center. Government only just now sort of regulated airbnb renting. (Average rent per month is 300 euros. During the busy period which starts at April and ends November someone can make 100euros a day from that apartment)

Up to now the town I am living in and every single village in its radius, had a massive housing issue. You couldn't find anything to rent. I had an issue with renting as well, and I was well willing to pay way above the normal to get something as I do work for a foreign company that pays me the salary of a western country.

I don't know how much of this applies to New York and if the article is going the right way with it, but I can most definitely reflect my own experience to that article.

I think Airbnb and anything that is similar should get regulated. I think Airbnb came in at a time where laws/regulations weren't in place for such a thing, or were very light, and it made sense for people to rent out their 2nd homes for it.
Although it has created a massive issue with finding a home. As I mentioned above someone can make 3 times or more the money that he'd be making in a year of rent from 3-4 months of renting to airbnb.

Another massive issue that Airbnb and similar sites have also created in the area I live in is that the small hotel owners and family hotel owners are getting slowly out of business. That is happening because obviously the massive hotels can offer full packages and whatever and will always be profitable, but smaller ones still have to pay a lot of money on tax, licences and offer some sort of services that an airbnb owner didn't have to up until now in my area. Even now that its sort of regulated, airbnb owners are still going to have a better time than the small hotel owners.

So yes all in all, airbnb and similar sites, create a massive issue and I feel like something should be done about it.
Exploring, visualizing, and analyzing human neurophysiological data with Python
9 seems mind-blowing to us all at first. When you unpack it a bit more, you realize that there are literally tens of thousands of different kinds of business selling so many different kinds of products and services. Ask yourself, how many of those tens of thousands of businesses are/would you be a customer of? Your immediate answer is that you're only ever going to be a customer of a very, very small percentage. Then you ask yourself why are all the others still in business, then? And it is because of this reason. There are so many different kinds of needs and wants people have that are unlike your own and therefore, what you might not pay for, many others very well might (and do).
Still really good news for people who want to understand and experiment with graphics on a fundamental level, I guess.