skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This gets close to something else I've been pondering lately - how to deal with immutable data structures in the realm of GDPR.

Recitations in GDPR require systems to be designed with privacy in mind. Immutable structures like the Bitcoin blockchain or Merkle trees in other applications would seem to be fundamentally incompatible with some GDPR privacy requirements.

Let's say Google receives a valid right to be forgotten request for an entry in one of their Certificate Transparency logs? Then what? I don't see how it can be dealt with without destroying the integrity of the log.
Recent CMU alum here and I probably would have lost my mind if Mr Rogers helped move me in.

With that said, the freshman orientation experience involved pulling in volunteers across the school to help move people in. After going through it as a freshman, I got a chance to volunteer for the next two years of students. I remember one particular family had made an entire trip out of it by doing a multi-state bike-and-drive to get to Pittsburgh.

While I get this isn't particularly unique to CMU, it really helped to know that there was a group of people who were excited to see me there. And it felt good to be the person doing the welcoming to the university.
Show HN: Slidewriter.io – Create presentations as fast as you type
Meh? Really?
The three eras of pre-digital recording in 18 photos (1877 – 1975)
They no longer seem to have a community offering, only paid. Also, having asked at one point, they say their pricing starts at $25K/year.
It depends on what you do with the money. If it's just a number on a statement you get every month that's probably true.
I have had some side projects make a little bit of money, but never enough to make any sort of headway toward replacing my full-time job.

My current effort is also a side business while I continue to work my FT job. It is definitely detrimental to the business to continue to devote 40+ hours per week to something else, but I need to feed my family (if I was young and single with no other financial obligations, I would totally just quit the day job and live on canned meat and potatoes) :/

My advice - if you're young, take your financial risks now. It only gets harder to do later :)
My thoughts exactly:

"The network management software interpreted the empty field as a 'wildcard,' meaning that the software understood the blank field as an instruction to block all calls, instead of as a null entry. This caused the switch to block calls from every number in Level 3’s non-native telephone number database."

WTF kind of crappy design is that?
The abstract claims there was no difference only 70% of the time. So 30% of the time there was a difference. Unsurprisingly it greatly limits the kind of data analysis that was allowed, which greatly reduces the applicability even if you believe it. I'm pretty dubious of this work anyway.
Or maybe it's a metaphorical expression of sadness over the recent death of a respected idol?
There is a possibility of a technical solution:

- You create a special rule for a block known to contain illegal data.

- The illegal data in the block gets NULLed. The other transactions are left untouched.

- The checksum for the next block is no longer calculated, instead it is hardcoded. This means there is no way of verifying the transactions in that block. Perhaps you add a new signature for the block with the NULLed data to make it harder to tamper with.

Once you start doing this workaround once you will probably have to do it repeatedly.
Electricity costs probably are no factor in test location choice. It looks like each kWh of electricity costs about NZ$0.29, which is US$0.21.

But, I wonder what the energy cost / carbon footprint is for such flying devices?

Risk management has to be part of the choice of test location. The US is lawsuit-happy compared to other jurisdictions. And, the sponsor of this project has what lawyers like to call "deep pockets."
to use an AR-15 you need quite a bit of training, for an actual battle scenario.

an "assault" anything, just means it looks badass (or scary).

the problem is when AR15s are used to shoot fish in a barrel, aka people in school corridors.

machine guns are very well regulated on the contrary.
There are a lot of things in the world I want to know, I can decidedly say I could go my entire life without knowing that and be perfectly ok.
I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe.

I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answer questions like yours. For example, you can filter to only show businesses started as a side project: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?commitment=side-projec.... I'm still working on improving the accuracy, but it's coming along.
How to create self hosted Heroku like server in 5 simple steps
Great writeup. And, if the author is here, congrats on profitability!

As a tip for other aspiring bot developers, though.

I've been writing a lot of bots lately and I've been convinced that for Slack bots Serverless really is the way to go. Pay for what you use, no infrastructure to run, and mostly seamless scaling.

I know the infrastructure is already lean based on this article but with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB each user would be pennies a month.[1] Profitability would only require about 1 user.

Ultimately, though, the most important thing is to launch and if RoR gets you their fastest or offers some features that are critical to your app and can't be done in serverless then that is what you should do.

[1] When you consider the DynamoDB free tier. Which I'd venture you can get to a huge number of users before exhausting your free tier with a chat bot.
Employee => academia (PhD in AI) => open source (Gensim) => ML freelancing (radimrehurek.com) => ML consulting company (rare-technologies.com) => ML products (pii-tools.com, scaletext.ai).

Looking back, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to jump right into full-time products, skipping the intermediate budding steps. Is it a burden to understand the whole process, from accounting, legal, HR, management, ops, sales, support? Better to outsource them right away?

It's definitely true that all that ancillary stuff is a distraction, a (stressful) time sink. Especially when you're just starting out and clueless, like I was. Bootstrapping slows you down. On the other hand, it felt kinda natural, but took many years. Not the standard (?) SV path of rapid growth.
It's quite hard to examplify once I actually think about an example, but I'll try. It's more a global vibe of a piece of code rather then semantics but they do play a part (using Python as example):

A young person (say 24), has experience coding of a few years, but very enthusiastic, loves reading programming blogs, a real stickler of doing it the "right" way, and sometimes forgets other people might have to read their code. They are not as pragmatic as they would be 10 years down the road. They would use vim or emacs in vim mode because that's more pro.
Their code might have a good few "clever" one liners that do something complex in a very concise manner. Took a while to compress into a single line and will take a week to read back and understand. Clever, but only if it never breaks or never needs maintenance. They write factories, sometimes of factories. They have 110% test coverage, including trivial stuff that doesn't require it. They would refactor a piece of code many times until it feels it's the right shade of clever. I like these coders because I can learn something from them, but if you have tight deadlines they might actually get in the way. Great to have a couple of these in your car, but don't let them drive.

from itertools import chain
first_set = set(['one', 'two']).union(set(chain.from_iterable([next.key for next in some_yielding_iter()])))
other_value = make_value_factory_factory(first_set).make_value_factory()

10 years down the line these guys realise you write code once and it's read many times over, and the
above turns into a more vanilla multi line readable expression of the same idea.

A less enthusiastic version of said 24 year old, codes because they knows how to, but has no aspirations
to get better at their craft. Less organised individual. Pep8 is a new variation of Pepsi Cola?
They are not bad coders, just sloppy. Their code works but can be better. They would benefit pairing
with the above person.

def someFunction(value):
if (type(value) == ThisClass):
processObject(value)
elif (type(value) == str):
processString(value)

After pairing, maybe they were inspired a bit. Maybe they refactor to this:

from functools import singledispatch

@singledispatch
def process_value(value):
process_object(value)

@process_value.register(str)
def _(value):
process_string(value)

def some_function(value):
return process_value(value)

I think a good exercise is to look at a person you know and try ot match their personality to the code
style. Then look at some code which might or might not be theirs and try to assert if it is.
Definitely, but when working with a local sqlite instance where your OS is page caching pretty much the whole thing your IO cost isn't necessarily that high. The trivial case of query-by-id almost boils down to a btree lookup in RAM I would think?
> I copy paste the same links, over, and over. There's always more like you.

That’s both dismissive and intellectually insulting. Please tell me how this is “PR” and not honest altruism:

1. The Gates Foundation’s philanthropy is partly responsible for a 25% reduction in malaria diagnoses from 2005 onwards: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mal...

2. Their efforts have dramatically reduced polio, nearly to the point of eradicating it entirely: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Developmen...

Let’s start with those two. I gave you links directly from the foundation’s website. Please, by all means, enlighten us.
Its is exactly doing what you tell it to do, update without filter, it updates all.
My favorite NFS story: many many years ago (mid 90s) I was part of the staff for a physics department's IT group. At the time, affordable Alpha workstations had just started appearing on the market, while most users still relied on "semi-dumb" X Terminals/thin clients. Everything was attached to our 10Base2 network, capable of a BLAZING 10Mb/s.

We started seeing weird whole-display freezes on bunches of the X Terminals one day. It took a while to correlate that these happened at the same time one of the newly-installed Alphas in a far-off office was doing a lot of file I/O over NFS - saturating the entire coax segment and freezing the displays...

IIRC the "upgrade to 100BaseT" project got scooted WAY up on the priority list right after that. :)
It's like one of the most common user errors with cisco cli. When you want to add an interface to a vlan you would type:

switchport trunk allowed vlan add $vlan

But if you by accident omit add keyword you would replace all interface vlans with $vlan

switchport trunk allowed vlan $vlan
Pik can synthesize noise. https://github.com/google/pik
One of the reasons it has never taken off is that GUI editors and layout managers that have come out for the web (and there have been a few), have never quite gotten the code right. They would produce a page that looked like the designer... but with terribly written HTML/CSS. So web designers and developers prefer to make their own markup.
Yes, but they don't enforce it for new packages.
Designing Eastern Arabic Magnetic Ink Numerals
MBOX to PST Converter Software REVIEW
Since when changing jobs is an indicator of anything? This is not the time to spend 40 years in one company. So many people jump from company to company to feel the thrill and challenges which they currently do not have it does not mean that they burn bridges behind themselves or are bad at what they do. It's like climbing... but differently.
From the team who know basically nothing about ops? (unless they've hired actual ops people in the last year)
My take is to focus on polishing and promoting the single best project...where 'best' is defined by potential users. People are more likely to care about one pearl than a tonne of oyster shell.
Since Firefox is open source, instead of just waiting for Mozilla engineers to get around to it, couldn't someone just open a pull request?
We have so many better systems with tons of literature. We -- us, the humans in bulk, as a species with brains -- have so, so many things figured out for this.

Googling for "random walk" and "sybil attack" will dump so many solid research papers in our laps it's just a tragedy nobody can be arsed to do something useful.
I’ve actually written a book on this topic: π
I thought the same thing about PGP/GPG keyservers. They are supposed to be immutable so if someone uploaded a key containing a jpeg attachment depicting illegal content, the only course of action would be to wipe every server in the network.
We don't want a finitely long MUID, otherwise we couldn't represent infinite universes. A quantum bit represents infinite states. The "fiction" part is that we (currently) need to collapse quantum bits.
wouldn't the country's scenery (elevation etc) help with the demand, it's also slightly horseshoe shaped and narrow, so could accommodate flying transport to the sides, and it being narrow means you can't have much road traffic.

there's a bit of a bottleneck getting from the south island to the north island.

but maybe i've underestimated the size of the country.
>> even though I don't believe, that his foundation is really doing so good

Why?
Now I’m pretty sure GitLab has a focus problem. It’s already very complex with somewhat unrelated things. You can’t be everything for everybody.
This will even further decrease quality of individual parts of the system. It has been unusably slow for a long time. If they try to do everything, they will have way bigger quality issues than slowness.
> The FCC report said Level 3 subsequently adopted measures to prevent a recurrence of the problem - measures in accord with best practices.

What is the "Best practices" to prevent someone from leaving a blank field, since this field was interpreted as a "*" and blocked everyone ?

Would a "send an e-mail telling to never leave this field blank again" enought ?
Making Music from Data with Node.js
> There are supposedly numbers that correspond to illegal jpg images in the bitcoin block chain.

How did they come about? Do you have a source for this?
> Of which 70% is water.

That would put the population density per square kilometer with 13 billion people up to 68, roughly that of Ireland (which has lots of rural areas and farms).

> But I think you'll agree that most people don't want to live in a desert, or Antartica, or on top of a mountain.

The United States has plenty of mountains and deserts, but many parts of it still have vastly higher population density that the number the alarmists are worried about. The population density of California (which has deserts and mountains all over the place) is about 93. The population density of New York State (which still has quite a large amount of farms and woodlands) is about 159.

Heck, the population density of Indiana, which to a first approximation is just a big corn field, is about 71 per square kilometer. That's still less than the 68 per square km that's being touted as a doomsday scenario.

> Maybe nutrient-rich soil? Clean water?

Wrong, and wrong. Modern farming doesn't require "nutrient-rich soil", and water shortages are a regional thing, not a world-wide thing.
Master passwords have a very narrow threat model that they are actually protecting against: it's protecting against people who have access to the password database (i.e., filesystem access) but not people who have access to ptrace-privileges (i.e., the ability to read the password directly out of process memory). Which pretty much means the only realistic use case is someone stole your laptop, but full-disk encryption is a much more relevant solution.

Mozilla has known for a very long time that the master password system isn't very effective. Even a decade ago, I remember them recommending not using it.
Is it that it's not considered, or that getting a whole suite of "work nicely together out of the box" tools from a single vendor is looked on as a better option in most cases?

Especially when things go wrong, having one contact point can be quite valuable, instead of having to go through the cat-herding that is getting someone to agree it's their component that's the problem.
There might be something to that. IIRC, intestinal flora synthesize serotonin [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4393509/
Marketers who prioritise digital advertising have delusions of effectiveness
Contributor Spotlight: Nadav Biran – The Blogging Musician
>Now, when a device is linked to a user, both should be on the same organization, right? I don't see how to easily do that as a constraint

I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to SQL either, but in this case wouldn't it be better if the "Device" table had two columns: "UserOwner" and "OrgOwner" which in turn have FK connections to "Users" and "Organizations".

If the logic is that every device is only owned by a user or an org (never both) at any time, you could constrain: check(UserOwner is null or OrgOwner is null).
But we are talking here about not exactly "possession". Imagine I sent you a funny video, but somehow, I appended it with child pornography image, which your video player will easily skip, unless you are specifically looking via forensic measures.
You don't even need the ability to record metadata on-chain to encode arbitrary data. An agreed-upon method of encoding it into ordinary transactions is enough. Even if BTC-style transactions were just inputs/outputs (they're not), you could still encode information down into the satoshi-place of the inputs or outputs themselves. It's even worse for something like Ethereum: essentially the whole point of that blockchain is to encode abritrary (executable) metadata in the form of the contracts themselves.
Does anyone know how they are going to maintain seperation from other aircraft?
One would expect to have to specify that with an asterisk or something and have blank just give a syntax error.
> We have 20 years of reporting about the mischief of Microsoft. What more do you need?

Reporting from where, precisely? And how does it negate Gates’ philanthropy? We need to see details. What may be obvious to you is entirely unobvious to us.

> Why do we even have to, yet again, bring the burden of the proof to fight a PR orchestrated with millions of dollar?

Because claims require the burden of proof in general, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. What is your claim exactly? That the Gates Foundation has not, for example, nearly eradicated polio? That they weren’t even involved in the 99% reduction of its incidence? We’re debating with you in good faith by explaining what we see, it would be nice if you acknowledged us as intellectual peers and bothered to humor us with some evidence. You’re refuting our evidence with...nothing, and you haven’t given us evidence to refute. What are we supposed to do, just believe you?

> It's an impossible to win fight to tell the sky is blue to people if the minute they don't look at it anymore, they doubt it and ask for proof.

Look, if you want to rant into a void, continue carrying on like this. If you want to seriously convince people, you need to make an effort with falsifiable claims and some evidence instead of going on about a grand conspiracy to make Bill Gates look good.

What an incredibly effective conspiracy, to spend billions of dollars helping people. How nefarious of them, who would have thought of that!
The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks?

I'm not convinced that we can't have the former without the latter. But that would mean limiting the latter and there is not much political will to do so.
> It doesn't cease to amaze me how a few years ago social media was the beacon of democracy, back when they were part a wave of political revolution in the Arab world

Almost all of those revolutions failed or dissipated. Similar "social media driven" revolutions in the US, like Occupy Wall Street also died with a whimper. The enabling power of social media has always been greatly overrated. The effect of social media, and in particular Facebook, has largely been a net negative.
Bennett Foddy (maker of, among other things, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and QWOP) said that he enjoyed porting QWOP to Luxe [0].

As somebody who has worked in Unity for a number of years, I am really excited to trying out the new engine. Unity is incredible for rapid prototyping and pretty good at making certain types of games, but there is a lot of bloat if you don't use all of their systems. Seeing something more modular is super exciting, and I can't wait to try it out.

[0] https://twitter.com/bfod/status/975492015860236288
Jupyter doesn't support search as far as I can tell, so you can't tag and search for notes.

Happy to be proven wrong though
Code Beam 2018 – The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science – JOE ARMSTRONG
> To mention a few, we now get microplastics from our tap water

There is no evidence that "microplastics" (which are just the latest entry in a long, long, history of things that are going to KILL US NOW) pose any health risks.

> How can you say that the life is better when were at 407 PPM of CO2 and counting

There is no evidence that current CO2 levels are harmful to animal life, and plenty of evidence that higher CO2 levels are beneficial to plant life.

> Our way of farming is killing the soils

Nonsense.

https://plantsciences.missouri.edu/grains/corn/graphs/USA-co...

> There was a life before domestication by, for and in our culture.

Yes. It was nasty, brutish, and short.
> Just ask any gamer what happens when someone starts using netflix while they're playing a game...

Enable fq_codel on the bottleneck device.
> slash-and-burn farming

Slash-and-burn farming is a "traditional", "organic" method.

They don't do slash-and-burn in Iowa.
From hobby to agency: The Evolution of Unicorn