skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not quite a sweepstakes- it’s just a standard March madness pool. The one interesting thing is that each bracket confirms to the ERC721 token standard, which means you can trade, buy, or sell brackets.

In that sense, using the ERC721 standard allowed me, a simple dev, to assertive/tokenize a simple digital good. Pretty fascinated by that possibility.

And yes, all written on ethereum. I can post the solidity source of people are interested.
Right - you claimed mere imperfection, in a limited case. But we also know that experts making predictions outside their field are on average more confident but less accurate than non-experts. So the "folk mythology" version of D-K actually does apply at times, just not to "people of low ability."
Code Refactoring or Complete Rewriting?
There are rumors about foveated rendering being demoed around the same time.
Thanks for the reminder. Clear Channel is/was a sort of corporate vampire, moving from local radio, to billboards, to concerts, using one monopoly to leverage the next, extracting its value, and leaving the corpse to rot. I wouldn't be surprised if Sinclair Broadcasting is now trying a similar play with local TV.
Fast-playing, trash-talking, chair-throwing, high-stakes world of online chess
And give up all EU-based revenue too?
I don’t think you had to be a biomedical engineer to have called this one, even years ago. Its attributes hit HN (and the gushing tech media) in all the soft spots: young, female founder, college dropout, wore black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs, disruptive tech, attacking a stodgy conservative industry, order(s) of magnitude claimed improvements. It was simply too good and aligned perfectly with the HN zeitgeist. Just like the poster: “I Want To Believe!” Everyone’s blinders were on, and nobody wanted to recognize the obvious signs of fakery.

This has been my favorite tech story of the decade. Watching a rich, well-connected phony get knocked down and called out on all the bullshit fills me with glee. It excites me in ways we don’t talk about in polite company. So many hard working smart people out there toiling away in obscurity while these “elite” fakers get all the recognition and money. The schadenfreude in watching one of them finally and spectacularly burn up is too good to bear.
Calculating Pi with Real Pies
5 best practices for getting modal windows right
And what about the democratic deficit of first past the post? 2/3 of the population in this country vote in safe seats so their vote doesn't matter. Time and time again we've seen the country as a whole vote for one thing yet end up with a majority for something else.

Personally I think it's more democratic for the government to reflect the will of the people than a local representative to represent the largest minority in an area.
Can you give an example of what you find horrific?
Agree that “crypto” is generally short for “cryptography” and not “cryptocurrencies”— i myself have been annoyed by that in the past. But now that I’ve drunk the Kool Aide .... ;)
Markdown + git should offer great value to attorneys. They can manage versions, etc,etc. They can always export to word if the courts require/mandate a print layout, but everything else you've mentioned exists in some version of markdown (like pandoc).

I do agree that coders think the world is like them - wanting to memorize and master markdown syntax and git commands. But, reality has no tolerance for such chicken shit. If markdown+git can be packaged in an easy to use app, easy enough for a 5 year old, it stands a chance
Yeah, like for example I really adored the Brio railways a sister comment mentioned, but I never saw anyone have more than maybe a figure eight with a bridge, presumably because they're intended for younger kids that will want the more complex Lego stuff a year or two later anyway.
Function Gateway “Gloo” serverless, microservices and monolithic
Free ads.txt analysis tools – bulk validation for exchanges
For people wondering if Antriez is following DHH's example, he is. He announced it in this tweet: https://twitter.com/antirez/status/966052769391153155

DHH wrote about his series in this blog post: https://m.signalvnoise.com/on-writing-software-well-aee37807...

Link to his playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5i1gdwe1Ls&list=PL3m89j0mV0...
I've programmed my own simple synthesizer [1] by following along "The Audio Programming Book" [0].

It gives a concise explanation for the techniques and theories for signal processing while showing practical code examples.

[0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book

[1]: https://github.com/badosu/sine_synth.lv2
I would expect the truth exists somewhere in between. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that:

* Holmes started with the best of intentions

* Theranos raised capital from starry-eyed investors that didn't carry out proper due diligence

* Realization set in early on that it wasn't going to work out

* Theranos got scared as so much of their time and other people's money had been invested

* The questions mounted

* Stalling became outright deception

* The realization of the consequences after the WSJ article became starkly obvious

* Theranos got spooked and doubled-down on covering up out of fear

.. but this is all speculation, and we'll never really know.

It does seem though that this didn't turn into fraud (which by the end it's quite clear it was) until late on.

It's a bit tragic, really. It seems Holmes could have come clean early on and avoided the worst of the fallout (but for whatever reason that didn't happen).
A lot of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (most aired and streamed songs in the past week) are over 6 months old, including "Thunder" at #19 and "Perfect" at #2. "Today's top hits" is not "today's newest songs".
That is an interesting idea. I have not read the book so just wondering what will be his solution for concentration of power within the sphere or it is just a lesser evil system.
...i see what you did there ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> Black hat activity specifically refers to criminal activity, which we can demonstrably perceive and attribute

stock manipulation is clearly criminal, if you want to take the 'letter of the law' approach..

beyond this, this gets into the same debate as letter of the law vs spirit of the law, which has both nothing and everything to do with this topic.. black hat is not 'defined exclusively' anywhere, and of course one leaning to a 'letter of the law' argument would then also look for 'exclusive definitions'

as to your point:

> free to call security researchers black hats if they don't give vendors advance notice.

if they are doing this for malicious purposes, yes

if it is for an ideological stance, then, well, it depends on how you view their ideology.

what happens if the law is incorrect?

again, letter of the law vs spirit of the law.

"normative argument about whether or not something is ultimately unethical"

laws are normative arguments about whether or not something is ultimately unethical.. not neutral 'things' that exist in a vacuum. and they can be correct or incorrect, and also incompletely defined..

how does acting completely unethically yet entirely within the law for malicious purposes fit into your framework?

Say for example, actively portscanning (legality nebulous) for already infected computers and then overcharging 2000% for cleanup? Then spamming virii from a jurisdiction where it is not illegal in order to grow this 'business'? All legal.. so it's "white hat?" or is it 'grey hat' because it is in a legal 'gray area'? I don't think that's what grey hat means either..
Machines are coming for your March Madness office pool
>but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive in homes or education.

Compatibility mainly, being able to take your work home and continue doing it.

There were a few software 8086 emulators for the Amiga that could run DOS and a few productivity applications, and there was a sidecar for the A1000 which had a full blown PC & 5.25" floppy drive in it for compatibility.
Great stuff! Thanks for it.
It did a really poor job on the pictured cat sample. No separation on the back legs and the back is nearly a straight line. It doesn't seem very good at separating like colored objects.
I honestly believe Holmes, as a sophomore at Stanford University, believed she had come across an idea that nobody had ever thought of before (low-volume microfluidic immunoassays).

The exception is that this science had already been explored, for decades, by the major companies that specialized in this technology. There simply was nothing to show that worked, yet, so there was nothing to commercialize. And the big players aren't going to publish their interim research, or Holmes wasn't motivated to actually do the homework.

She wasn't the first to think of it, but had enough traction (combined with a vaccuum of commercial products) to convince people she had, or had some mystery secret sauce that was going to make it work.

The fact that Theranos hired Cass Grandone, an Abbott Diagnostics exec that pioneered the previous generation of microparticle immunoassay/ELISA technology, and Grandone walked away after six months shows that he knew their science never worked, and was never going to work.
I feel like sentiment toward the iPod HiFi is less "hate" and more "why does this exist". It was a perfectly solid piece of hardware, but Apple tried to enter a market that was already saturated (iPod docks) with a far more expensive product that didn't offer any significant advantages.
> When private actors behave badly, you can opt out and go for competiting services.

Except when they're a quasi-monopoly, then people find it more difficult to opt out. Hence anti-trust laws, and more recently, GDPR.

> It is a pure attack on Freedom.

By definition, all laws are exactly that. The question is never "does this law restrict my freedom?" but always "on balance, am I happy with the way this law restricts my/others freedom, and what might be the (un)intended consequences?".

So while it's a dumb proposal, it's hardly more stifling to creativity than 70+ years of draconian copyright protection.
Crypto-Debate Is in a Sorry State: Google, Lagarde and Winklevoss Twins
They would have to be, right? Otherwise I just don't see the point.
+1, if you really care about learning just the math OpenGL is a lot simpler from an API perspective. Once you start caring about performance then dig into Vulkan to understand the various render commands/pipelines/etc.
Absolutely.

There are tons of things that I don't "approve of", but I would never be in favor of using the force of government to force those views on others.
Yes, have to trust the contract owner. You can imagine other scenarios where it’s some voting scheme, but generally feel like decentralized != trustless for a lot of things. You have to trust something at some point. What’s cool (imo) about smart contracts is that the terms (ie, code) are transparent and that enforcement of those terms is automatic.
Cool. I'm in. This reminds me of another business idea that I had. A way to track down all the places I have ethereum stored. For loved ones. If I get hit by a truck. I don't understand why a unique browser is needed to store ethereum. Couldn't there just be an add-on for chrome/firefox/safari? Sorry, just talking out loud, I'm sure that's for a different post. Let the games begin!
Weird, usually HN will show an error or make a redirect when submitting something that's been posted, but it didn't happen this time.
I think what we're seeing here is a class difference? For some people, if the grocery bill is higher than expected, you just shrug and try to do better next time.
Release it with silence for the voice acting, and include the script and a utility that lets you and your friends record yourselves doing the voice acting and inserts that into your installation.

Make a way for people to distribute their versions of the voice acting for others to use.
That sounds plausible in a world without contracts. But with them, the upstart will lock-in a few customers at a decent rate, which they will have to pay even when the big company drops theirs.

A more plausible explanation here, in my humble opinion, is that it's only unprofitable for some of the suppliers. By squeezing the margins in the market, Amazon forces everyone except the leanest out.
Very nice! These days think of something and someone somewhere has not just thought about it already but also making money out of it :)
Makes you wonder if with a bit of luck, the Viking presence in North America could have been a lot more. NB is certainly more hospitable than Iceland or Greenland (or Newfoundland for that matter).
Celebrating Stephen Hawking
Android Wear, it’s time for a new name
Same article but on a different URLs, both Google sites.
It's great book. I liked it too.
Their model is if you have a lucky event you have P(talent) chance of doubling your capital and if you hit an unlucky event your capital is halved. Any step in time where you neither experience luck or unluck you are left unchanged. It seems wrong on face for several reasons:

- You need to be "lucky" in order to ever increase your wealth, which makes the "finding" that luck is more important than talent completely obvious from the way the model was designed

- Capital only changes by multiplication and division, so the fact that this model "recreated" the power distribution we see in wealth in the world is obvious from the setup. It was designed to be a power distribution and couldn't be anything else

- Talent has no effect on your life during unlucky or neutral periods in their model. This obviously fails to conform to the real world.

tldr; they designed a power-distributed model where luck was clearly more important than talent, and "discovered" that it showed a power distribution where luck is more important than talent.
This is good.

Emacs is best thought of as a special-purpose virtual machine, a little bit like the JVM och Python VM. Maybe this will help people understand that something like Magit is not just a Git integration for Emacs users -- it is a full, standalone end-user Git interface that just happens to be written for the Emacs VM.

I'm not too keen on oackaging the VM with an application for easy deployment, but I do hope it helps people view Emacs modes as not just "an X for Emacs users" but rather "an alternative X that happens to run on Emacs".

Calc is another thing a lot of people could use to great effect but don't because it runs in Emacs.
I think the real mystery here is that it's considered a sport. Can someone explain that to me? I mop the floors in my apartment with a Swiffer all the time. No one ever shows up to give me a medal...
Right.

Can you give me an exact, explicit, description of exactly how use of blockchain would have prevented (eg) the oft-cited melamine milk poisoning scandal in China?

> It's basically by-passing a lot of bureaucracy

That bureaucracy caught the problem. Physical testing of the product uncovered the bad actor. How on earth would blockchain have helped?

> cut some of the news reporting middle ware

???

> give a central source of truth (or lie) for a given issue

There already is. And obviously the problem is when it's a lie. What value does blockchain bring? What good does it bring if the lie is more visible? And if there's no bad actors then there was no problem anyway.

> It's not a silver bullet, but it's a damn good improvement.

It's not any kind of bullet. I just don't see any improvement. Exactly what has improved and how? Consumers can reassure themselves that every step in the chain says everything is OK, rather than relying on the manufacturer to do that, which they do. And? If the manufacturer did not believe everything to be OK, the product would not even be on the shelf. The consumer will never see anything other than "everything OK!".

> Technology and social progress goes hand in hand.

Hype and money also go hand in hand. I don't think you've refuted my point successfully. As always, I want to be convinced otherwise, but I'm just not hearing anything compelling.
And appropriately for this story, "illusion never changed / into something real" :)
Think Google is going to need to develop some custom silicon to drive this level of resolution and not going to be easy.
Hmm. Maybe Stuxnet wasn't the best precedent to set...
Since when has the BBC become squeamish about "unprintable" (which itself is a strange choice of word on the web, by a non-print publisher like the BBC no less) words like 'fuck'?

It's not like the haven't been using it before: https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=fuck
Mastering Linux performance: CPU time and CPU usage
A free tool for exchanges to validate their publishers in bulk.

Step 1: Enter a list of publisher domains, and your exchange domain

Step 2: ...

Step 3: Profit

See which publishers should authorize your exchange but do not.

Feedback welcome!
This is an undead trope: Mass-media radio was shoved down people's throats to some extent back before there was any serious alternative to radio in general, but there are so many ways to hear music now it isn't justified anymore. It reeks of hating something simply because it's popular, as if you're wounded by the notion that popular music is popular because a lot of people like it, as opposed to some vast conspiracy.
Maybe. I'd much rather fall closer to the "just-world fallacy" that you mention, than to the "your success is based mostly on 'luck' so we must resort to a 'higher power' to make things 'fair'" side of things.
I guess there is nothing that can be done about existing processors.
Roughening the surface by sweeping thins the film at many points. Your latter two points are more interesting; flow is unlikely, but directional "surface tension" effects (actually organized Van der Waals forces) are certainly possible, given that water is an asymmetrical molecule (which is why surface tension happens at all.)
From what little I've read on Supreme Court jurisprudence it seems like the Commerce Clause has just gotten more and more broadly read over the years. When has it really swung back to more narrowly read in a significant way?
This is a standard Netflix feature. Netflix runs the same code on almost every (TV) platform: consoles, TVs, set-top-boxes, etc.
Sadly, most journals that I might submit to require Word. I published a paper in transportation a while back, and happily submitted my manuscript for review as an immaculately formatted PDF.

It was reviewed and accepted, which meant that they sent me the final, accepted paper submission guidelines that stipulated... Word.
”I wish people would try TeX out first as well.”

Do you by any chance have any TeX tutorials to recommend?
I apologize for the formatting issues. It is one of the reasons I shut this blog down. But here are some of my thoughts from a few years ago:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/05/theranos-cul...
So I got this message:

Medium follows DNT but we track to
personalize your experience and send
data to select third-parties to make
our features work.

That's a novel interpretation of DNT. Not sure I ever want to visit "medium" again.

Actually, pretty sure I don't want to visit again.
Bain didn't invest. The played a financial game and made a bunch of money out of it. Who cares what happens to these companies from Bain's point of view afterward. They extracted money out of company doing actual business and employing a lot of people for their rich owners. The rich got richer and not-rich people will lose their jobs. This is how our corrupted "finance industry" works.
JVM might be much more involved project but here is a simple virtual machine - https://github.com/skx/simple.vm
Printing from Linux works now??
Yes. Context matters.
I've always thought of mind maps as spatially confused trees, and Org already does trees very well. This package introduces the "friends" concept -- is that the fundamental difference between trees and mind maps?
Really. I'd like to see Google take on a war against the entire world. This is something the US is prepared to do constantly. And even win such war (not that there would be much left afterward).
There are a number of things in Bing Maps that really help travel planning and in general directions:
a. For long road trips, "search along the route" lays out gas stations, restaurants, hotels and points-of-interest
b. unlike Google, all locations searched get tabbed...you can easily switch between locations. Really helpful when exploring multiple locations
My (limited) understanding of people like this is that they're not really thinking.

Among startup founders, puffery is endemic. You have a vision and you try to talk it into being. Whatever you're doing probably won't work, but you can't say, "Well, there's a 90% chance we'll fail," because nobody gives you money or labor then. You have to develop this (unjustified) confidence, and a deep understanding of what people want to hear. Silicon Valley culture definitely encourages this.

To succeed, one also of course has to develop an equally deep understanding of the reality of the business domain. But as we see with Theranos or Hampton Creek or uBeam, you can get surprisingly far on vigorous self-promotion and creating the appearance of success.

The thing that really keeps me awake at night is that there are surely a lot of companies that faked it nearly as much but managed to find a real business before things caught on fire.
Fear not. I was just kidding. It was too good of a pun to pass up.
I often see trailers on Prime before a show starts. Really annoying.
A founder's guide to conversations with Midwestern VC firms
> Money, in other words, mostly measures trust. This is less obvious for precious metals or cryptocurrencies because they have an intrinsic value of their own as well

Cryptocurrencies have intrinsic value? Did the author intent to write that or was it an accident? S/he has grouped precious metals, which have purposes from engineering to jewellery - with solutions to arbitrary cryptographic problems, which are useless for everything except swindling.
All tease, no tale: Hollywood's misplaced lady lands
It’s extraordinarily destructive, but HN has a soft spot for government privacy directives, no matter how ineffectual or costly.
I also have a background in biomedical engineering, and worked on actual diagnostic equipment for several years, and I would like to second this opinion. I only wish I had written down my rants about Theranos for future reference!

Theranos' claims fundentally misrepresented the state of medical diagnostics, and showed at best a failure to grasp the nature of the industry, and at worst a deliberate misrepresentation. Apparently it was the latter.

If any of the investors now saying "gosh who could have guessed" had taken 2 seconds to ask anyone who worked on or with real medlab tech about Theranos' claims, they wouldn't have touched that company with a 10 mile pole.
Tangentially related: I recently learned that Satoshi's original paper on bitcoin was not actually written with LaTeX. It seemed to have tricked a lot of people (including myself).

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-anything-...
"[product x] is, from an intellectual perspective, a mish-mash of awful ideas. But it's a really good tool for quickly producing documents that are bear a passable resemblance to a [desired outcome]" is about the most ringing endorsement possible for a product that has to be used by as broad an audience as something like Word.
Hi, looks great! Yes, can you please post the solidity source code? I've just started learning solidity last week, and I like any understandable real world example I can get my hands on. Thanks!
They really do! I was impressed. (I'm the reporter who wrote that article.)
It's small compared to paid subscription offerings (or ad-supported free tiers of something like Spotify). Which means it basically works fine as background music but isn't great if you want to listen to specific things, especially current music.