skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Please suggest a side-project idea that can help to solve a problem
Invoke-Adversary – Simulating Adversary Operations – Windows Security
Is it really that relevant whether randomness is true* thanks to quantum effects rather than obfuscated-enough pseudo-random based on really hard to predict entropy sources; or is this more a PR stunt? I mean, is it realistic that someone would ever manage to predict e.g. electronic signal noise in a useful enough manner?

* To nit-pick, the question whether quantum mechanics are truly random boils down to Bell's theorem, which has been experimentally supported, but still leaves some loopholes open: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopholes_in_Bell_test_experim...
What about all the work that goes into maintaining the ad network and distribution, advertiser acquisition etc? That isn't free either.
So my phone can use these satellite navigation systems: U.S. GPS, Russian GLONASS, European Galileo, Chinese BeiDou and Japanese QZSS.

I guess one more doesn't hurt, huh?

It's curious how major powers all want to have their own satellite navigation systems.

Edit: QZSS is a regional system, and not due to start until November 2018, yet my phone detected one of those satellites earlier about 2-3 weeks ago. Interesting, especially considering I'm nowhere near Japan. Unless, of course, it was a bug or some weird error case. Or maybe QZSS was doing some early testing?
If it'd be pure economics, then yes. But Japan and China are not necessary the best friends, so there is a strong geopolitical factor at play. China has the (quasi) monopoly and China with strategic embargo/tariffs/creative strings attached could easily grind the tech manufacturing in Japan to halt, impacting it's economy severely. This is not theoretical, they already impacted Japanese economics this way.

So now Japanese politics has a strong incentive to change the situation, creating a second source. It might be more expensive as long as the supply lines are still open, but it's a strong hedge against politically motivated supply line disruptions.

Simply said, exploiting these deposits even if they are more expensive than the market price can be seen as an insurance. It also strengthens Japan's negotiating position when their industry can't be held hostage so easily.

ps.: Also keep in mind, that it takes considerable time (years) to develop a mining and refining operation, so they can't just wait until a disruption occurs before starting with the mining.
NO. Your attention span is limited, if it gets saturated with "things I'm likely to buy" or "things I need", then I'm not going to see:

(1) new and interesting things that could really open new possibilities (even if 90% of them are irrelevant)

(2) things that might actually be a better deal for me, but that would otherwise not be targeted to me because the targeting algorithm might've guessed "this guy can afford better version Z, why suggest him cheaper version B instead"

It's just as annoying as shop assistants that come to you with those ultra-annoying "how may I help you", "what are you looking for exactly" or "are you interested in X, Y or Z type products". And all I want to do at that point is squash their heads into minced meat with a baseball bat because I'm just fucking browsing to discover new things... If knew exactly what I wanted, I would have ordered it online and it would be at my door already! If I wanted advice I would have either done "serious" research going through reviews from multiple less biased sources, or just asked some friends around.

Targeted adds are like having the creepy shop assistant following you around everywhere instead of discovering new things you would've never thought of and instead of finding better deals that would've never been pushed to you and being bullied with information instead of actually taking your time to make research before your attention budget and capacity for critical thinking gets fully spent and not having to actually interact with people and get some authentic mouth-to-ear feedback from friends with "skin in the game" (people actually motivated to have you enjoy and benefit long term from your purchase).

I want businesses not trying to rob me of my limited attention span and limited ability to do critical thinking based selection. I don't really want what I "need". Fuck "what I need". I want what I (me, myself, just me, not someone trying to instill a message into my head) want. Pseudo-random, unoptimized, unfiltered and mostly useless information helps me keep being crazily and uniquely me.
Top Most Popular Shopping Cart Software
Like taking out puts and allowing them to expire?
Our Design Nerds at Work
Thing is, I do less than 1 lesson per day. Probably 3 lessons per two weeks. Meaning that I press Practice button about 100 times in that two week period.

After about 40 days, I went back to go through some of the previous lessons, given their new Crown update, and realized I haven't seen some of the words at all.

Despite having around 400 words learned so far.
> There is another one. Vaccines.

Vaccines are absolute shit from a business perspective. They're expensive to develop, generally cheap to produce, and their administration is a single or limited event point. Sure you've got breadth but you've got no depth, once an individual is vaccinated they're done, or maybe they'll need an other round years from now.

Big pharma companies absolutely hate vaccines, having people pay for repeated treatment is way more business-beneficial.

And as other commenters have noted, herd immunity is a well-studied concept, and vaccines have very much proved their worth multiple times over.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned this.
In theory, market will drive things so the cost of one-shot cure will become equal to the capitalized cost of life-long therapy. Either by making the former more expensive, or the latter cheaper. Until the latter becomes a direct money loser.
> If I put my data there, that's my problem, but you're not allowed to do that.

is it really? that's a part I did not really understand about the regulation and can't find anything about voluntarily relinquishing control of personal data.

i.e: I leave my personal name and email address on a public forum. Google later add that post to it's index, or another random company like Web Archive or archive.is scrapes it.

What are my rights? What are their obligations? is the forum owner liable for my action if I didn't explicitly agree for my data to be shared by him to all unforeseeable future scrapers?

> as a controller holding my data, you're responsible for safeguarding the data

this confuses me even more. say I'm running an analytic system. I track users trough a cookie. tracking cookies are, for some reason, personal information. if an user delete the cookie from their browser and then ask to fulfill my obligations about erasing his data from my system, how do I identify him? who's liable then?
Uber drivers are in a bad position relative to their client. The contractor loophole lets Uber exploit that fact much farther than it would otherwise be able to, effectively undoing a century of hard-won labor rights progress. We are blaming contracting law for the latter, not the former.

> Oh, and contractors should always set up an individual 401k

You say that like you think they don't know the option exists. That's not why they don't do it. They don't do it because they don't have the money to do it, which is the real problem.
Not just sleazy but also illegal. And subject to discovery in an Apple lawsuit.
I don’t care about your ideas. I care about your skills
Getting rid of patents would need to be done in the context of a much larger change, which needs to address where will the money for research comes from. Today it comes from expectations of huge returns if the drug turns viable. It's solvable, but it needs to be addressed. Naively abolishing all patents will halt a lot of research overnight.
Also known as the Scunthorpe problem[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Wow I did not know about that. I will go and check it out.

I don't quite understand how Telegram can host the content. If it is just distributing the links, it does not count.
Even as a fairly educated decently paid software engineer I got screwed over by a somewhat similar situation..

I took a job where I was paid through an international company (well 3/4 of my pay was that way, and the rest was a normal contract) here in Spain.

When I saw my pay go in before taxes it looked significantly more than what I had seen before, and I though I was doing well out of the deal. Of course I had to pay all the taxes anyway. It was only a year later when I got changed to a full Spanish contact I started checking numbers (to make sure they were equivalent) that it occurred to me that I would only have been getting 1/4 of the pension payments before then, which in Spain is a significant amount.

I doubt most Uber employees are seeing noticing anything like that (though to be fair I have no idea how those extra are paid in the US).
How about "when you don't offer content". For example, netflix outside of U.S. is ridiculously low on content.
> If your ultimate goal is sustainable profit, it would be rational to not even look for a cure at all.

If you have a monopoly.
Nor too bothered about the speed.
Sydney’s plan to split into three cities in as little as 20 years
Hi, I'm running https://stretchyourannualleave.com where people enter the number of days they like to book and the site calculates the maximum number of days off you can have, using public holidays and weekends.

What I notice is, people are looking to book 5, 10 and 15 days off and especially at the end of the year.
London is a great city, and I think that if you could offer most people the opportunity to own a house (or even rent) near their work for a reasonable price, they'd jump at the chance.

The problem with London is that it's simply too expensive, and as such it's tricky to land experienced developers. It's also an expensive place to set up shop, due to high cost of office space and higher salaries expected.

If you're looking to move to the UK I'd look into another city. Bristol is probably the biggest tech hub for startups outside of London, and even though house/rent prices are skyrocketing in recent years the tech scene is growing at a crazy rate. It's also growing at a crazy rate, due to Londoners choosing to leave the capital to settle down. Finally, there's a handful of solid VC's in the area. Manchester has also had a lot of success in recent years, probably thanks to MediaCity.
Pixel, a hand-crafted 2D game library in Go
A Dutch journalist drove for Uber for various months. They advertise that drivers can make loads of money. After expenses, the journalist barely made more than minimum wage.

He also found that drivers often handed out business cards to encourage repeat customers to pay them directly (avoid taxes+Uber, etc). Further, customers abused drivers various times (e.g. it's used as a cheap moving service incl expecting you to carry boxes), etc.

Entire article (use Google Translate): https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2017/uber/
" If you could cure any illness with a $5 pill, I'd guess no one would get health insurance."

It is highly unlikely we'll ever get there, especially for genetic disorders and things like that. But who knows. Nevertheless, people will still get run over by a car and be injured, along with a multitude of other, very common accidents. Of course there would still be insurance.

Besides, a good amount of insurance in the world is government-funded. (non-us countries, medicaid, subsidies for private care). Another portion is at least partially paid by employers. These folks don't need the certain level of "damage probability". Employers get an extra bonus with decreased absenteeism, and they might possibly be able to stop paying for insurance altogether.
That requirement is quite common in the "branded chauffeur" space though... Take the drivers that Emirates send when you fly business - They're never employed by Emirates (either employees or subcontractors of the cab company that has the Emirates deal for that airport), and yet the requirements are very strict: Black E or S class, less than 3 years old, magazines and water bottles etc.
> Firefox, Safari and Edge

Given how much Microsoft has been pushing ads in W10, we're not going to see this push coming from Microsoft anytime soon.
HPC Provides Big Bang, but Needs Big Bucks, Too
The situation is an interesting case of economic realities quietly trumping political ideology.

Uber thinks they are offering a reasonable deal. The people doing the work obviously think that it is the best deal they have available. The government is going to need to stamp down pretty heavily to stop that, because the actors in this situation have no particular incentive to change anything.
China engaged in massive theft of US technology, analysts reveal
"It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ..."

So, how would you employ the engineers instead?

Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume. The huge churn of capital and labor creates as it's byproducts from time to time items of actual human value.

But those things would be fragile and complicated without the industrial economy surrounding them. If we look at this stage in our species history from far away, currently the industrial economy is supposed to be predictable and mundane.

So, "producing useless crap" is a required feature of our economy so it can occasionally produce science, art, medicine and the other things that actually improve us as a species.

Now, consumer goods fall into two categories: physical and digital. Physical consumer society is turning our biosphere to shit. Digital commodities, on the other hand, are much more lenient on the environment.

So, if we look at it this way, and presume that producing consumer crap is necessary for economic growth and stability, it's much better to work in producing digital goods and services rather than physical ones.

Within this framework, the actual question is not why do the brightest minds work at facebooks, but, will our economy ever develop beyond the point where producing useless crap is not so much a necessity for systemic stability rather than an occasional indulgence.
The Evolution of Hyperconverged Storage to Composable Systems
I don't think the argument here is that the primary aim of ads is undesirable - nobody particularly benefits from seeing or showing people irrelevant ads - but rather that the side-effects are destructive enough that a ban is justified.

Consider an analogy: Asbestos is some of the best fireproofing you can get; corporations and customers alike benefit from buildings with effective fireproofing; and it's perfectly safe as long as you don't disturb it or inhale the dust. But nobody uses it any more, and its use is banned in many countries, because it causes cancer.

Sadly, we can't get the asbestos of targeted adverts without the cancer of multinationals incentivised to track our every move online.
If that were true all ads would simply be a bullet point list of features - branding would not exist, there would be no pretty models in the ad, etc etc etc

The argument that ads are about informing consumer just doesn’t stand up to reality. The whole concept is flawed.
My boss is deseperately trying to convince me that my project wiki can painlessly be replaced by Microsoft Team (build upon share point). Yet this is utter bullshit every workaround he proposed to replace missing feature look like regressions that will make us spend more time on solving share point issue than on actually writing documentation.

You seems satisfied with FB for business and you claimed it could advantageous replace multiple wikis. Can you develop your though cause from the outside it look like the same bullshit that salespersons will use to sell MS Team to gullible boss.
If you build your missiles to work using gps (as another poster pointed out), then you also want those to work if the US decides to not let you use the gps system.
Nice, wow those batteries are tiny!!

Replay attacks might be acceptable for insignificant tasks light lights and Air Conditioning I suppose. Also gives a much simpler architecture to the system.
Imagine we could choose between living miserably and never progress, or let one person die one hour earlier than they normally would and the rest would live immortally and thrive in luxury forever. I think most people would pick the latter.

Now, we're in a situation similar to this, although much much less extreme. But the point is, trade-offs exist. And this is one of them.
It would still require that the company that develops the cure could make more profit off it than it would make with chronic treatments.

So if you went purely for profit, you could only develop a cure if:

- you could price it higher than the price of the chronic therapy over the full lifetime of a patient.

or

- you could sell it to more patients than you could have sold the chronic treatment. A lot more, because every patient will only buy the cure once.

So even then the incentives would probably lead do driving the price of drugs up significantly. You'd also still have no incentive to actually eradicate a disease.
I feel the same way — my identity is not at all attached to the nationality listed in my passport — but in the context of working for a defence-sector corporation, the argument still applies. Whoever the corporation sells stuff to is, for the purpose of the argument, “your” country.
Also, survival aside, I'm of the opinion that "just because" is a perfectly valid reason to set up colonies, terraform planets etc.

I wasn't born for the moon landing. I feel like I'm going to be upset if I make it to old age and we haven't accomplished anything as great as that in my lifetime.
My first thought before reading the article was: "What is targeted advertising anyway? I could choose to target a specific demographic by placing my billboard in a certain spot, or choosing which magazine to take my ad out in."

Thankfully, the author does state his suggested law explicitly:
"The ban I propose would be rather straightforward: The U.S. would disallow all individually targeted ads, with large fines or even removal from the public airwaves for repeated violations. Nothing tied to a user’s identity should be used to serve them a particular message. Companies would have to make all ads on its networks publicly viewable and searchable, so regulators can oversee them."

It's perfectly possible to achieve a very targeted system of advertising without going down to the level of targeting an individual explicitly. In fact, this sort of similarity and demographic targeting is the most effective form.

IMO, the correct approach is to regulate what is advertised, not who is targeted, or how they are targeted. The point is that political advertising is potentially dangerous. People don't complain too much about craft beer and coffee adverts, right?
I doubt the average user generates more than a few euros worth of advertising per month

We know exactly what the number is. Take Facebook’s revenue and divide it by their number of users.
Vaccines provide, a nice, predictable, ever increasing demand. It is even possible to create arbitrary demand in the case of preventive measures such as these.

Profit from any normal drug is dependent on chance that a certain number of people will fall sick of the corresponding disease. The company cannot also count on outbreaks since it will have no clue when, where and for which disease the outbreak will occur. The expire date for drugs means that the companies will not be able to stockpile these drugs in hopes that there will be an outbreak some point in future..
It's enough if you already have a sustainable business selling chronic treatments. Which I think would be likely for the kind of companies that have enough resources to be able to research a permanent cure at all.
Thanks. Figures that's the reason for public companies and stock exchanges in the first place. However where lies the boundary? I assume all institutional middlemen are prohibited? You mention family and friends. While family is a legal category, friends is extremely vague.

Would a sale between unrelated persons be regulated? For example between a stranger and a confirmed ex-employee with stock? Does one have to be an "accredited individual" for any outside stock transaction?
It's also quite weird when it linkifies a two-letter word (non-English) because it thinks I might be referring to a week day, which has never been the case so far.
Very interesting. Although in this particular case: seems like it would still not qualify iOS as a monopoly?

Didn’t know this, though. It makes a lot of sense, in fact.
Well, now they teach made up nonsense about "fronted adverbials" ("Stupidly, they do it too early.") in primary school, they spend quite a bit of time on sentence structure and labelling the parts of speech. It's too much IMO and comes easy too early.
Experience couldn't be more different for us. We also use the "Faceplace" as it has become "affectionately" known.

Everyone just turns off the notifications on the freaking thing, so really important things are still sent out via email.

It's corporate/business thing, right? And yet they kept the useless alrgorithmic feed. Just yesterday I couldn't find an important management post because it was buried below random crap from a dozen or so groups, and people, and events, and...

Well, it also sends email for some (not all) notifications. The email preview contains a total of 6 words from the original text and forces you to go to the crap.

Every single post including the really important ones are five lines of text with a "see more" link. Oh, and half of those texts are created as documents/notes (which are different from regular posts), reposted to half a dozen different groups that all show up in your timeline (nothing like seeing the same text 10 times I guess).

And it continuously nags you to get their crap good-for-nothing Chat App (just look at the f*ing thing https://grumpy.website/post/0PSSXS3k8).

Facebook cannot even imagine that business needs of business clients are not driven by engagement numbers, or by MAUs, or by LTVs or by any metric that is relevant to Facebook.

EDIT: Rephrased some sentences

EDIT 2: Re: replies to my comments. "Oh, it's da bomb, only you need to <a list of multiple things to setup before it's even remotely useless>". Stockholm syndrome in full swing
I would like to have a piece of that for wholly non-hype reasons. The space business is limited but the bussiness potential for Starlink, an integral part of the company, is simply monstrous.

If it pans out, Starlink can disrupt a massive, $1 trillion/ year telecom market that is itself booming. Depending on how well they can productize long-term (miniature receivers embedded in laptops, tablets etc.) they stand to capture whole percentage points or even tenths of that market, giving Starlink itself a valuation in the trillions.

It's also an ultra-high moat business, a truly global monopoly. Once you have 12.000 sats in the sky amortized and own the only launch service capable of servicing them, you are impossible to budge.
How to decouple your drupal website
The World Clock. Current date and time around the world
Ask HN: How common is preferred dividend in a seed round nowadays?
An investor asks for a 6% cumulative dividend. I've been reading up but there seems to be a disagreement whether this is a common term or not and whether to accept or avoid in a seed round. Any thoughts?
I was thinking the exact same thing.

In the eyes of the State you are ONE or the OTHER. Can't have only the good halves of the bad halves. If the State hasn't figured out what 'Uber drivers' are, then this discussion will lead only to more confusion and pain.
Case of typical uninformed journalism. The basic use would be independent and reliable GPS guided munition.