skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mentioned 1991 issues with the Patriot Missile were due to an issue converting integers to floats.

The [system's] prediction of where the Scud will next appear is a function of the Scud's known velocity and the time of the last radar detection.
Velocity is a real number that can be expressed as a whole number and a decimal (e.g., 3750.2563 . . . miles per hour).
Time is kept continuously by the system's internal clock in tenths of seconds but is expressed as an integer or whole number (e.g., 32, 33, 34 . . .).
The longer the system has been running, the larger the number representing time.
To predict where the Scud will next appear, both time and velocity must be expressed as real numbers.
Because of the way the Patriot computer performs its calculations and the fact that its registers are only 24 bits long, the conversion of time from an integer to a real number cannot be any more precise than 24 bits.
This conversion results in a loss of precision causing a less accurate time calculation.
The effect of this inaccuracy on the [system's] calculation is directly proportional to the target's velocity and the length that the system has been running.
Consequently, performing the conversion after the Patriot computer system has been running continuously for extended periods causes the [system's estimated Scud position] to shift away from the center of the target, making it less likely that the target will be successfully intercepted.

See also http://cs.furman.edu/digitaldomain/themes/risks/risks_numeri...
Ask HN: Why is repatriating iconic artifacts to Egypt a bad idea?
I'm sorry if this question is a bit out of context, I'd just really appreciate opinions of people who do not specialize in museology or any other related subject (archaeology, Egyptology, etc.). Although opinions of the professionals will be also very welcome!
Yeah, I mean it only makes sense. It's about price discrimination - they don't want to give you a discount if you're willing to pay full price, same reason companies send out coupons or mobile app offers. They want to offer discounts only to bargain hunters and those who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford the service because that's where it's worth spending the money for them.

If you're not already, find yourself a local deals site - it can really help you avoid getting screwed over by stuff like this. You can also wind up staying if you're willing to call your current provider back and say "here's what they're offering, beat it or I'm leaving".
I'm in complete agreement. This may very well hurt their business by making their customers angry but I don't feel right telling them that they shouldn't be allowed to do this.
Last time I saw this here in 2016 I tossed my wire brush and got wooden scraper. It works pretty well.
That book looks promising. My German's not the greatest, but I tend to have an easier time with reading it.
To add another use case: I know a lot of military people who throw all their stuff in storage when they deploy. Faced with no costs except a storage unit and low-mileage car insurance, a lot of them come back after the better part of a year with a down payment on a house.
Or intentional trivial incompatibility to sell _more expensive_ cables and ports :)
The average Developer/Engineer/etc works about 60 hours a week, they work on things that generate millions of dollars. They, for the most part, get paid less than the accountant does. I've literally made a company millions in profit, the entire IT department probably earned less than 10% of the amount of that profit amount. The ROI in IT is extremely high, yet you'll see salespeople whose ROI is much lower making a lot more money. A lot of people will say our salaries being below that of accountants, lawyers, etc is because our barrier of entry is much lower. I believe this not to be true, look at the average job board and you'll see a lot of companies who are literally only looking for seniors. Once you get in, you're fine, but getting in when you don't have the qualifications can be a lot harder. It seems like those industries have spent decades/centuries building prestige into their industries while IT seems to put up with an OK salary with lots of pressure and overtime.

For the majority of skilled workers, IT workers are poorly paid. While we make more than the median salary, the amount of skill, effort, the time it takes to become good at the job is a lot higher than those making the median. You then have the culture of overtime. It's not uncommon to see PRs from people at 10 pm, be told you need to work the weekend, for projects that aren't fully defined and/or have months left to go in development.

Overall, I feel that as an industry, we've massively undersold ourselves and made top-level execs not fully appreciate the value that we as an industry bring. Nevermind the average person, they completely don't value the industry what so ever. The amount of people who default on Web Agency bills who would never default on any other vendor bill is massive. People wanting an ecommerce website for a few hundred pounds.
My question is if your conclusion is that blockchain is a solution in search of a problem, what was all that effort being spent on (not just in finance, but everywhere blockchain is being considered)?

I'm not saying that blockchain is not a valid solution to a problem, but as a veteran of the online industry, I can say I've seen a lot of hype around new technology, actual effort being put into it, and then the realization that the effort was for nothing. Either the solution is no better than the old solution, just different, or the solution is so obscure, that the cost of maintaining it is greater than the value it generates.

In the end, the costs of the choices of these institutions are being paid for by you and I, and I hope they don't go too deep into their project before realizing: “Basically, it became a solution in search of a problem,”
The Switch has many logos on it, but a USB-C logo is not one of them. Nintendo does not use the term "USB-C" in its literature for the Switch.
We've come to a point where everyone can make object-triggered security systems
Is using recv not a problem as there is the recv(2)?

Do I understand correctly that there can be only one instance of a module? Why then use string identifiers instead of an enum?
Ask HN: What are some good tools for programming a 6502 Teensey Board in C?
Assembly is hard... I would rather use C haha
Storage Wars tv show is my guilty pleasure.
As far as I'm aware, the data only flows one direction, from the 3rd party data partner into facebook, not the other way around.
Facebook data is not necessary real, or updated. Me as an example, I have a facebook account which have a fake birthday and never updated my profile data after high school. I still add new friends and communicate on facebook, but I don't interest to add new demographic information in my profile.

What it means is insurance company or credit company does not explicit state how do they use my data to evaluate my price on certain insurance or credit to mortgage. If I applied for mortgage. By some random parameters in the model, I may be deemed not credible to have a mortgage. And I don't even have real profile data except my name, photos, and posts.

On the other side, if some insider knows what parameter contribute success mortgage, they can game the model by adding fake information to the facebook profile, or even sell this information for profit.

Facebook by no mean represent real identity, although it usually does. I don't think it is fair to use facebook information without consent from customer.

I am interested that if facebook states that using facebook will affect your credit history, how many people will still willing to use it?
I suspect the best option is pumping sea water up the sides of a mountains in the south west for pumped storage. Except rather than then using it to run generators they use that same pressure to operate desalination plants 24/7.

Reverse osmosis uses (600–1200 psi) for seawater = 1400 to 2800 feet of elevation which is taller than what they have available, but sill very viable. Further, as reverse osmosis already needs to pump salt water to high pressure the only change is simply slightly larger pumps and a big pit plus some piping for massive amounts of energy storage.
plausible? hardly.
More that cheap it was convenient: You solve the whole power, video output and external devices problem with a single chip on both side. And it also look nice compared to any usual docking port.

It solved enough design issues for them to let go their old habit of having proprietary connectors for charging. Which made them a lot of money.
There is a difference between wanting more cash and feeling underpaid. The fact the stat says only a percentage of people feel underpaid kinda rules out your statement that "Everybody feels underpaid".
Same here. It was the lack of an open format that stopped me from pursuing it further.

The Lytro founder's Ph.D thesis is extremely well written and informative on lightfield imaging as a whole.

Thank you, Lytro, for existing and showing us a new way forward. May the patents be licensed easily to keep the ball rolling!
I've had a thing ever since grad school (I lived in a 400 sq. ft. apartment, so it was necessity then) that if I buy a thing, I have to donate something else -- particularly for clothes. It's amazing how much less crap I've accumulated than friends and family of a similar age.
They are [1]. Planting trees alone is not enough.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-tree-pla...
Building a system with the specific goal of making it impossible to follow the law does not make it acceptable.
I use a steel brush intended for cleaning off welding residue. It has much thicker, longer steel wires that would be difficult to miss if they came out of the brush head (which hasn't ever happened yet).
Further, unless you did a full install, that audio clip had to load off of the CD. Which meant if your CD-ROM was slow to spin up, often you'd be dead on the floor as that audio clip played, after a brief freeze.
Presumably this investigation was prompted by the Nyko dock catastrophe.

I'm a software guy; what do these revelations imply about which other accessories may or may not be unsafe to use, whether they work or not? In particular, third-party charging cables. My girlfriend uses her MacBook charger to charge her Switch sometimes, and now I'm worried it could brick it one day.
As someone who earns their living writing articles and web copy for brands, this frustrates me no end. I'm often asked why I charge so much more for web copy than a blog article, when a blog article is often 1000 words plus and web copy might be 200 words or fewer (sometimes just a couple of sentences with a strapline).

The answer is that I can write a competent blog article about as fast as I can type. Decent web copy that boils down the essential benefits and features of a product and expresses them concisely and compellingly takes much much longer to get right.
The file system does not lie, it just does not provide guarantees of ordering.
This is a really interesting question, and makes me wonder how robust the patch is to scaling, different lighting, etc.

This also reminds me of using makeup and hair to prevent automatic facial recognition. I believe this is the project: https://cvdazzle.com/

> The name is derived from a type of World War I naval camouflage called Dazzle, which used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual continuity of a battleship and conceal its orientation and size. Likewise, CV Dazzle uses avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs to break apart the continuity of a face. Since facial-recognition algorithms rely on the identification and spatial relationship of key facial features, like symmetry and tonal contours, one can block detection by creating an “anti-face”.
Moreover, Diamond argues that the reason that Native Americans were largely killed due to disease rather than Europeans was because of the much broader range of domesticated animals in Eurasia. Most of these pandemic diseases hopped from livestock to humans and were able to evolve into especially virulent forms due to the high population density. The Americas didn't have the range of animals that could be domesticated, (or the range of plants that could support the high population densities of Eurasia) so similar diseases never evolved there.
4 Technical Books for Any Stage in Your Tech Career
> If you want to compile C code to include in your project, you'll need those tools.

Just curious, but if you're already built on top of llvm, why not bundle clang for that? Licensing issues? I thought NCSA was pretty permissive.
7 Creative Ways to Increase Customer Retention Using Social Media
So you know more about these guys? I have heard some rumour that the ones behind this search engine are living in constant fear being raid by Google henchmans
This looks great and very useful. Thank you!
I think you underestimate good engineering. The Festo Smartbird is a good counter example (https://www.festo.com/group/en/cms/10238.htm). I'll agree that we still have a way to go with bipedal robots, but other biomemetric robots (Boston Dynamics) are very impressive these days.
With a broken implementation, their connector is effectively proprietary.
Another part of airline pricing that makes zero rational sense is when a one way flight costs $x, but a round trip flight (which includes the original one way flight) costs <$x.

For instance, (at the time of writing) this Lufthansa one-way flight from Prague to Budapest at 1pm on May 20 costs $425 [0]. But this round trip flight from Prague to Budapest (which includes the 1pm May 20 flight) costs $343 [1].

[0]: https://www.google.com/flights/#flt=/m/05ywg.BUD.2018-05-20....

[1]: https://www.google.com/flights/#flt=/m/05ywg.BUD.2018-05-20....
> the article talks about "dining out" and doesn't distinguish based on your restaurant classification

I think the gist of this discussion is that lumping together fast food and restaurants muddies the study. It is like saying "eating mushrooms increases levels of poisoning" because one didn't differentiate between edible and non-edible fungi. These findings are applicable for people who regularly eat industrial food, to whom I can't imagine this is surprising.
"My question is if this is your conclusion is that it's a solution in search of a problem, what was all that effort being spent on (not just in finance, but everywhere blockchain is being considered)?"

That strikes me as a very rich question that would be interesting to investigate. Yes, we know people can get involved in hype cycles, but what was it about this technology that made it the thing that got hyped exactly?

Perhaps a subconscious association with BitCoin and getting rich quick hit the people most prone to hype? Some of the blockchain projects being proposed, I honestly couldn't see how they were planning on profiting from it. I don't just mean profiting enough, but profiting at all; what was the mechanism by which money is transferred from some set of customers to the blockchain creators? Preferably with the transfer of some valuable good or service in the other direction, but, you know, technically that's optional from a business perspective.

I understand the answer for new cryptocurrencies; the creators start with more of it than the incoming users and that becomes valuable as the currency becomes valuable. The non-currencies I didn't always see an answer. Which is why my best guess is some sort of subconscious belief that anything that has a blockchain will automatically somehow become wildly valuable via (underpants gnomes step 2 here). It's kinda a copout answer but it's the best I've got. Improvements? (Again, beyond just "people do hype." Why this hype and not something else?)
My Mobile Phone Is Sacrosanct
What sense does that make?

Or, China could feel threatened by the project because they want to get to Mars first?
> Stacks in Linux grow dynamically

I think Linux can defer committing memory for the pages of the stack until they're used, but you need to reserve the entire virtual memory in the first place don't you? Otherwise how can you have the ability to dynamically allocate more stack virtual address space to an arbitrary thread, without relocating it? Or if you do relocate how do you update pointers to the stack?
My major questions have always been: where is the business value in blockchain applications? what can a blockchain app do that can't be done by non-blockchain (beyond decentralization - bc I don't think this produces much business value)?
You have to be careful here though that you don't incentivize the creation of a powerless, exploited underclass.
If you're interested in this project, I made some surveys to try and drive more feedback. Help me out!

Sales Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VTMT6TC

Developer Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/37H5XBC
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of tech workers never had a
Facebook account in the first place.
Why not require some kind of USB-C compatibility details on all USB-C related products? So you know if you use the device/cable what will actually work/not work?
This was the case when the original USB came out first too. It took a good couple of years to mature. I think these are normal standardization issues...
Note the "...respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says..." in the site guidelines. Calling parent a "redneck screaming about alien mind control" is definitely not this. Many developed countries have either stopped fluoridating their water or never chosen to add fluoride to their tap water supply, for various reasons.
OT: How did you find that flight?
So _that's_ why my monitor doesn't wake up.

I got the new xps13, it only has thunderbolt/USBc-C ports and it's pretty much 50/50 whether my external monitor will wake up.

I figured it was the cable and was about to buy another one but you saved me the trouble.

I also got a hootoo adapter that's supposed to support power delivery but that hasn't worked either :/
Build Systems in Sublime Text 3
> what was all that effort being spent on

Not being left behind if you're wrong.

I'm in a tech-adjacent industry and see it all the time. Competitor A comes out with "shiny new technology" and markets the hell out of it. My company panics because we're suddenly lagging behind and rushes a competing project into development. Competitor B sees all of this and hops in too. All of a sudden it's the new direction of the industry and dominating trade shows, despite the origin being a mediocre product with some clever marketing. 5 years later it's never spoken of again.

I'm not familiar enough to say for sure this is what happened with "blockchain", but from a distance it has a lot of familiar markers.
I've foundyself using cabs a lot more recently. My daily commute to the office is ~£12 each way in a cab, £8 at normal Uber prices but they seem to be perpetually surging the last month to an estimate of £10-£13 so I may as well jump in a cab.
Companies are not people. They are single-purpose, amoral, profit-optimizing entities.

The larger the company and the more detached the ownership, the less sensitive the company is to any negative effects.

Like gut flora, they can be useful to humans -- but they are not like us.
Aluminum smelting does NOT handle shutdowns very well, though. Aluminum smelting really needs a constant power source because shutdowns can actually damage the electrolysis pots.
You are probably right about recv; i'll change it to "receive" as soon as i get home (patch welcome though).
There can only be one instance, you're right.

String identifiers are human friendly; moreover i can't see how an enum could fit there, care to explain? Thanks!
Btw you can have same module name in different contexts.
I just spent two years experimenting with laser ablation of various metals with a high powered fiber laser that can concentrate its output into picosecond pulses (MOPA).
I do think that something like silver plating would make a target vastly harder to destroy. That said, it's one more thing that needs to be added to a weapon that likely also needs to be hard to lock onto with conventional countermeasures, survive high speeds in atmosphere, handle high heat of engines and launch systems, etc.
Rain might largely dissipate the laser over any distance. The wavelength of these lasers tends to be in the infrared. Having a second laser of a different wavelength would drastically reduce the number of materials that could be used to reflect it. Use of some kind of flak to dirty up the target could help a lot. I've found that something as simple as some pen marks on mirrored silver can make it easy to ablate.
The real advantage of this tech is that it's light speed and very accurate. It could slice up a swarm of drones in a moment, or be aimed into a jet engine to avoid reflective coatings.
Consider this code:

fn foo_no(v: &[i32]) -> std::iter::Cloned<std::slice::Iter<i32>> {
v.iter().cloned()
}

fn foo_impl<'a>(v: &'a [i32]) -> impl Iterator<Item=i32> + 'a {
v.iter().cloned()
}

fn main() {
let v = vec![1, 2, 3];

let () = foo_no(&v);
let () = foo_impl(&v);
}

Given the let ()s, this will fail to compile for both. For the first, you get

= note: expected type `std::iter::Cloned<std::slice::Iter<'_, i32>>`

for the second, you get

= note: expected type `impl std::iter::Iterator`

The former gets longer and longer based on how many iterator chains you do, the latter will be the same no matter how many you add. It's also just generally way more clear, "I was expecting something implementing Iterator, and I didn't get it" vs "I was expecting this exact chain of nested iterators".
Thanks, I think my claim was a bit sloppy and underspecified there. The typical anti-GMO concern that I was addressing is that a gene, once introduced, could spread into any plant in the ecosystem and into the weeds that compete with farmed plants, i.e. beyond the species with which the organism can pollinate. The paper you linked shows:

> that a weedy form of the common rice crop, Oryza sativa, gets a significant fitness boost from glyphosate resistance

which I believe is a much narrower claim. If the anti-GMO claim was that "GMO crops can share their genes with wild/weedy/non-GMO versions of those crops", I don't think anyone would be freaking out in the same way.

But my specific claim was about gene transfer to unrelated species, which (to my understanding) is not likely. (There's also horizontal gene transfer to worry about, but this is very unlikely in eukaryotes, e.g. see https://www.ebr-journal.org/articles/ebr/pdf/2008/03/ebr0742...)
But to do that you need to increase the salinity of the nearby ocean for years.
ArangoDB Reaping the Fruits of Its Multi-Modal Labor
An example from the top of your head ?
Convert Encrypted PDF to Word Using Node.js SDK
> Appellate courts do not lightly overturn jury verdicts using highly fact-specific reviews of evidence. There is a reason they call a jury a "trier of fact".

Just to get this straight, because I think I roughly know the legal system works in the US, from TV and movies, but then when I apply it to a real world case such as this, it seems too ridiculous for words: by "jury" you're actually referring to a group of about 10-12 randomly selected laymen with no background in law whatsoever, and even specifically selected to also have no background in the subject matter (because knowledge equals prejudice /s), and they get to decide on the outcome of a billion dollar case?
A Cruise car got a traffic ticket–GM says it did nothing wrong
There's no advantage for Uber to do so - they'd be criticized no matter the amount, so why make the information public?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799025
3 points, 8 months ago

Amazon launches Spark, a shoppable feed of stories and photos (techcrunch.com)

1 Comment: Yes, a new way to help people shop! It's just what we needed ;)