skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Claims that a previously-hyped technology is now uninteresting are pretty standard for this phase of the hype cycle.[1]

Of course, the fact that other technologies have gone through both a peak and trough before settling between them isn't confirmation that any particular technology will. (I bet Theranos won't rebound.) It should cause one to discount the sheer volume of disillusionment, where not accompanied by evidence, just as one should previously have discounted the volume of hype.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
Alien Abduction Insurance
Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market.

So they could afford a Mac and internet access, but they couldn't afford the extra $74?

As far as excluding people and organizations that want to use a single codebase - good. If they didn't want to take the time to customize their apps enough to make it work on my platform of choice, it's not an app I wanted anyway.

My takeaway from this is that you've not met a lot of developers outside the U.S. or who have ethical concerns about mandatory hardware / software purchases as prerequisite to market access.

And the market is at work - they chose not to take the time to make an app optimized for my platform of choice, and I'm not stuck with an app that isn't optimized for my platform of choice.
>It's the trend of turning software into services. [...] But it also makes you no longer in control of your data, and the code that runs on it. The availability of your work becomes completely dependent on business decisions of third parties, which can - and frequently do - disappear suddenly.

Here's a thought experiment I'd like people to ponder: Suppose we had this decentralized hardware utopia where every homeowner had his own web server node ... such as a "FreedomBox"[1][2] or a hypothetical ISP smart router with builtin 16GB RAM and 10 terabytes of disk to hold Sandstorm[3] or whatever self-hosting app stack you can think of.

Even with those favorable conditions, I'd argue we'd still evolve towards Youtube centralization. I'd encourage people to think about why that counterintuitive result eventually happens. (As a hint, Youtube does things that localized technology installed in the home doesn't solve and can't solve.)

>If technology is meant to be [...] empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that.

To further explore if eventual mass migration from home self-hosted videos to centralized Youtube is inevitable, we have to be open-minded to the idea that thousands of people will conclude that "putting my video on Youtube instead of hosting it on my own server is what empowers me." Why would people think that opposite thought?

[1] https://freedombox.org/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html

[3] https://sandstorm.io
I am now seriously worried about Coinbase after this baseless acquisition.
This is similar to what competitive Counter Strike has become. Even though Valve has been talking about some interesting anit-cheat methods [1], third party matchmaking services rely on such client software to try to combat cheaters [2].

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/

[2] https://www.faceit.com/en/anti-cheat
Not a recommendation, but kano is a cute raspberry pi kit.
Have you documented this with video? I'd love to see it.
Self riding rc car :-) i thought it would be a ‘simple’ side project... 2 months ago
Yes, most definitely I was pointing why Amazon's calculus is to not invest in people. I was not saying that people should be worked like cogs in a machine, where you try to go on the cheap without oil for as long as possible.
$500 a month is basically a 4 year loan on a $20k car. That's a lot in a real sense but not a lot today in terms of a car. The only good thing is that cars post 2002 seem to be more way more reliable on average, however, finding low mileage cars is difficult. Suburbans/minivans and other family transport vehicles tend to hold their value fairly well (except maybe Dodge minivans)...
So, as much as I hate to hate on somebody here, Igor is... somewhat unreliable with regards to these issues.

Igor is infamous for disabling virtually every setting. 7-Zip has no ASLR, compiler-stack checks, or anything what-so-ever. Igor refuses to use a modern VC++ (Visual Studio 2015 and later have FREE versions available for open-source code) that would solve a lot of security issues and bugs.

I'm not entirely sure if this is a Win10 problem, or if its a 7-Zip problem. Any complaints from the 7-Zip dev IMO will require a very careful eye: 7-Zip code is not necessarily in the cleanest state or using the best practices.
I used to interview would-be students for Lambda School (we now have a team that does that), and we had many GA grads that couldn't even pass our code challenge we required to start.

It wasn't outrageously hard stuff they were tripping up on, if you don't grasp closure or recursion or something that might be OK, but most couldn't code fizzbuzz. After having paid $10-15k in tuition and being trained for three months, I would at a minimum expect a student to be able to write a for loop.
I don't agree with this sentiment

Okay. Google study technology interferes with learning and do some reading.

If you personally know you're going to spend most of that time in the classroom going on Facebook or Twitter, then you should have the self-control to not bring your laptop to class.

And everyone should have self control, optimal intelligence, etc. But that's not how the world works.

As for Facebook and Twitter, how about the 20 minutes spent in every trig class making sure that everyone's TI-82 was set to radians and not degrees, and running around the class addressing errors caused by typos? That's time that could be better spent on classic analysis. What about the complete rabbit's hole that is Wikipedia?
Onyx eReaders are quite fancy, runs android, has pencil support, still pricey tho:

https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp...
Then the Chinese also have robots? I haven't read those two works of fiction, maybe you could expand on what you think happens?
Author here.

Maybe Java fans, or Sun/Oracle employees and fanboys said that. That doesn't really mean much.

I did predict years ago that open web technologies will destroy native (desktop) apps, Flash, and Silverlight. In hindsight, I was correct.

I am predicting the same thing with regards to native mobile apps: they will largely disappear, and web apps will again win.
> They're not. The mainland pitch is the PRC and ROC are a single country. Taiwan and the rest of the world politely (very politely) disagree.

It's more complicated that that. Traditionally, the ROC also claimed that China was one country, but that ROC was its legitimate government, not the PRC. This has started to change recently as the younger generations have felt less connection to the mainland and have supported newer parties (the pan-Greens) that advocate for the independence of Taiwan as a separate county.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Blue_Coalition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Green_Coalition
My point is that there might be kickbacks from pipe operator to content mill.
How much of this is the fault of the Electron runtime and how much is fault of the developers?

It's completely the fault of the developer for choosing Electron when there are better tools available.
Hey sabertoothed,

If you are planning on training a generative model on vector graphics data, in a sequence-to-sequence style (like sketch-rnn), you might find it difficult for an encoder to capture all of the spatial elements in a coherent manner. One way is to also (as the other commenter pointed out) rasterize the input vector image and feed it into a convnet to extract features, and get the decoder to also use those features. This has been attempted in this paper [1] where they extended sketch-rnn to have a convnet encoder and showed better results.

But if you want to just have a lot of fun, try to train a plain vanilla "char-rnn" model just on SVG text files and see what it generates. The results might look more interesting than you would have initially imagined. Kyle McDonald has tried this before on a dataset of raw twitter SVG files [2].

Good luck with your blog post, and please share when it is out!

[1] Sketch-pix2seq: a Model to Generate Sketches of Multiple Categories
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04121

[2] Emoji generated with char-rnn and the Twitter twemoji svg files.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kylemcdonald/24308833950
A little effort, pays massive amount of dividends.
Exactly. I write the main code on my Linux machine, then switch to the MacMini for testing and UI finalization.
GitHub internal A/B test failure?
It was short lived but I was unable to push code for about 10 minutes.
I've never personally owned a car, but I did grow up in a pretty car-centric area and am generally aware of my parents' purchasing decisions, in an environment where there wasn't a lot of money to go around.

If you must have a new car (we bought used fairly often, with good results), there are a dozen cars you can buy for around $15k, which works out to $270/mo with a 3.1% loan. I'm really stacking the deck here: I ignored cars that are too small, since I assume a family with children, I'm using a pretty high interest rate, and I'm ignoring used cars. Bear in mind that the _average_ payment means that it's ignoring the substantial amount of people who don't have kids and would be fine with a smaller car, or those with better credit who can get a better rate.

That being said, I don't know enough about the distribution of the discussed figure to say whether it makes sense in the way we're using it: $500 is the mean payment, not the median, so it would be a mistake to assume that there's an "average person" who pays $500. It's just as likely that some people have higher payments (that they can afford easily) and poorer people have lower ones.
I said “significantly” — macOS and Linux have existed for ages, yet Microsoft is starting with WSL just now. Also, as far as I know, WSL is a by-product of the Poject Astoria - not something Microsoft set out to do. They probably thought, “We’ve done most of the work anyway, might as well get something out of it.”
low enough that humans could manipulate the stuff, behind several feet of steel, lead and concrete shielding, without immediately lethal radiation doses.

Wait, for real? I have zero training in handling fissile material, but I didn't think any significant level of radiation could make it through that much shielding.
Plenty of love :)

Work is in progress, looking good so far.

I plan to release it in a couple of weeks
I mean we can run through the math. In March of 2015, 21.co/Earn.com raised $115m from a16z.

In June of 2015, the price of BTC was about $240 each.

If we assume half the investment went into bitcoin, it means they acquired $115m/2/($240/BTC) = ~240,000 BTC

At today's price of $8000/BTC, assuming they never sold, those coins would be worth $1.9B. So it is plausible they hold more than $1B in bitcoin.
https://www.alleaktien.de (though it's German)
My doctor uses a sedative also to make sure you don't freak out during the treatment. I think most doctors do this. You need to factor that into the cost too.
i just had a similar problem... saw the same thing while trying to commit. and was unable to commit.
> Like what situation? To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99. He didn't blink at paying $25 to access MacInCloud.

You're from eastern europe, south america or SEA, and $99 is a serious chunk of money.

The latest Xcode requires sierra which runs on a late 2009 macbook (or even older using sierra patcher), and you can use that for other things than just publishing your application.
The figure is for purchase, not lease. You can get more car for your lease dollar because at the end of the lease, you have no asset that you own.
You AREN’T making things better for your users — you aren’t making things better for you.
How reliable is your CI machine? I don't have the log entries anymore but in the past I've seen Mac Minis that were set up as Jenkins nodes throttle hard, leading to variable job results. The Minis were running VirtualBox VMs which would arbitrarily report long running test failures. I remember thinking perhaps it was VirtualBox specific behaviour until I search for "mac mini cpu throttle" and found similar results.
Open standards aren't "good" if they provide an inferior user experience.
We could have said the same thing about facial recognition technology back in 2011 when Android debuted Face Unlock. Here we are, 6+ years later and Apple introduces its Face ID technology which does the same thing. Just give them time, they have a finite number of paid engineers and they're competing against an ever-growing pool of unpaid open source enthusiasts that enjoy working on Android.
I see your point. but, I'd rather live in a small apartment trailer (which could have heating, water, electricity, etc) than a tent.
In reality, Open Source often ends up being charity for corporations. So many projects run by developers who can barely keep the lights on, which are then used by huge corporations for free.
Isn't this exactly like Blizzard's Warden? Things like this are sort of necessary to police a large scale game because of how damaging cheating can be to the integrity of the game. You give informed consent by continuing to play.
> “we found the suspect’s fingerprints at the scene, is it possible the suspect wasn’t there?”

This is a perfect example of "begging the question"! Hopefully we can ammend the question with "we found a fingerprint at the scene that matches the suspect" and get that number down to 11/12.
Extreme poverty is defined as someone living on less than $1.25 a day. Do you think that exploitation isn't occurring as long as someone isn't living in extreme poverty?
I know they offer advancement programs like this one: https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/career-choice

Where they pay for your tuition.
I agree with this. Everyone using the internet today can learn SQL and store all of their personal data in their own SQLite database, with blobs pointing to folders in their hard drives. Which sounds impossible, because it is.

The middle ground is instead of a few major players in a given market, we have thousands of players in a market that people can move between easily. Kind of like mastodon, but every node is a different community with different interests. It would be like if we “upgraded” all of the existing forums on the internet today.

So instead of Facebook, we should have 10,000 smaller “social networks” all competing. This sounds like a much better outcome than never trying to compete with Facebook or twitter or google.

How can these large tech companies today serve the interest of every “user”? They can’t.

Decentralization is nice, but you don’t even need it to solve this problem.
> For example, breaking open standards like "you can't play more than one stream of audio", or "you're not allowed to play audio if your app isn't in the fore"?

What standard requires these things? And even if one does, it's not clear that users would be well-served by that standard.

Apple has a rich native API for background audio playing, which covers things like whether the output stream should mix with other apps, what should happen on route changes, etc. AFAIK the web audio specs are much weaker, so Apple is going to make the most conservative choices here.

> iOS's new PWA support actually reloads your whole page - losing all context and execution - every time you bring it to the fore. It kills all execution when putting the app into the background. This is beyond security; it is actually hostile to users and developers.

"Hostile" is much too strong. We don't know what's a deliberate decision, and what's just a limitation of the first iteration of this stuff. And as a user, unrestricted background JavaScript execution sounds horrible to me: I definitely do not want that on my iPhone.

Apps on iOS are only allowed to execute in the background in controlled ways, and there's no web APIs providing similar coverage, outside of Service Workers. So what do you think Apple should do here?

Two points I guess:

1. Native APIs will always be more capable, and have better platform integration, than cross-platform layers built on top of them, including web APIs. It's specious to build on a non-native API and then complain that its capabilities and platform integration are inferior to native.

2. Every tiny piece of web capabilities gets used in a user-hostile way, that is hard to anticipate. For example, AudioContext's authors did not anticipate its browser fingerprinting uses. PWAs invite more of this stuff into my devices. Apple is right to be very conservative with what it allows these apps to do, at least initially.
Ebola vaccine appears to provide long-lasting protection
Sounds familiar. BBSes is what got me interested in coding. I would mod the BBS and I got to show everyone and release mod files to other BBS owners. We ran C-NET variants at the time.

I switched to PC in the 1990s and WWIV was the closest to CNET, and if you registered (paid) you got the source code. There was also inter-BBS networking available that predated (public) email and newsgroups.
That's fine. The question is not "are there good reasons to invest in your employer." It's "are you rational enough to treat $1M equity and $1M cash the same."

Also, it is uncontroversially a bad idea to invest "everything" you have in one company.
[NB: this leads into it because GW2/Arenanet is a subsidiary of NCSOFT, a Korean company; NCSOFT uses all this stuff on all their games too]

Virtually every single multiplayer/MMO-like game does this. All of Asia does it - every country there, for instance, and a lot more invasively and insecurely.

Hackshield and XIGNCODE outright read through your process memory for content and keyword searches, not just hash matching - I've been issued bans for browsing security forums because of a freetext process title match in Firefox.

Gameguard, hackshield, xigncode (all 3 are Korean) send data insecurely, unsigned, over plaintext HTTP including PII across the public internet, run boot-mode driver rootkits, and are leaps and bounds worse than anything like Warden. They are also insecure and provide holes for actual malware to hide in with their awful client side rootkit process/file-hiding hooks.

League of Legends, for instance, runs outside of Asia perfectly fine, with a reasonable anticheat that detects its own processes being screwed with, not very invasive, not insane.

In League of Legends Korea, a Korean company basically installs one of these invasive rootkits - and even requires browser plugins to log in.[0] The founder of that company previously run for president in Korea and have virtually a monopoly on this crap. Some of it is required by local law.

[0] http://static.leagueoflegends.co.kr/common/js/aosmgr_common.... - note the plaintext http everything too
> The cheapest way to give 100 books to someone in the third world is to give them a laptop (and a way to power it.)

I doubt it. Have a look at these prices[0]. The most expensive books do not exceed ₹150. A 100 of those costs ₹15000. $100 = ₹6500. Plus add the power source. You get very close to ₹15000. And as we saw, $100 was nowhere near enough to make a good usable laptop/educational device. So you need to spend more. And that is when compared to Amazon! Buying books wholesale (or printing them) will be even cheaper.

[0] https://www.amazon.in/Books-NCERT/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A97...
> Having no knowledge on the matter, what's the price comparison to just buying ketamine illegally and taking it without a doctor's help?

It's way cheaper on the black market. The actual cost of manufacture isn't very high, and I don't think it falls under any patents needing licensing. Probably you're mostly paying for the labor.
VCs read pitch decks, not whitepapers
> Now it started again but this time the power management tools report no reason for the wake.

I ran into this after building a system and it was very frustrating. IIRC my problems were related to my network card and having virtualbox installed. Also turning off wake for my mouse helped (bumping the desk would turn on the computer).
Clean up of anything, be it your code base or home, always feels good. Reminds me of my favorite quote:

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code. -Ken Thompson
Thinking about what "owning the robots" might actually look like, the easiest way I can think to solve it would be for the government to buy index funds and use the proceeds to fund basic income.

This wouldn't own any robots from privately-owned companies, though.
That's a very niche problem in comparison - we're talking hundreds of millions of people leaving poverty across the globe compared to under hundreds of thousands dying of opioid overdoses. Perhaps it's because I'm not American, but I just don't find it that concerning when put into the larger picture.
Sedatives (probably benzodiazepines) are also very inexpensive (on the order of less than a dollar) compared to the $375 figure.
NirSoft Freeware (2008)
I said insider dealing. I just meant that it's an indication of sketchiness.

And I'm not actually sure that's true (though I did before googling it just now):

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e24dc4ab-2a77...

https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersinsiderhtm.html
You can't do that. We do not have rear fogs lights in America.
Oh I was wondering why T-Mobile discontinued the ZTE smartwatch so quickly after releasing it but I think I understand now. Shame it looked like it had semi decent specs.
From an enterprise standpoint, I was lead of a team with engineers both in Oregon and Hong Kong. What made us successful was a few key things.

1. We ended up with dedicated BAs and QAs on site in HK so the engineers could get their questions answered in real-time. Those colleagues collaborated with their counterparts in Oregon in the same way the engineers did. I think this was the biggest success factor.

2. We had a daily synch-up video conference at end of day Oregon time, which was beginning of day HK time. This face to face time was great even though most days it was only 5-10 minutes long. It made us feel more like a team and helped morale.

3. The engineers were all self starters (as others have mentioned) meaning they could operate under ambiguity or without direction as needed.

4. I, as lead, managed most of the merging of code (this was before our org used GIT, so we weren't really doing PRs as much as old style, manual code reads).

5. Occasionally, maybe twice a year or so, we'd fly out the HK teams to Oregon to join us for major events (important project meetings, etc...). During those occasions, we'd also hang out after work quite a bit, again to keep up the camaraderie.

Those things worked pretty well for my team.
I frequently see children bend their necks at a full 90 degrees to stare mindlessly at an iPad rested on their laps. I would not be surprised if they grow up to have spinal issues. Parents don’t seem to care.
It's an interesting response because it shows that not only were they tracking program usage over a period of time ("significant number of hours during a multi-week period earlier this year"), but _also_ shows that they quite possibly could have banned people who _weren't_ cheating ("We targeted programs that allow players to cheat and gain unfair gameplay advantages, even if those programs have other, more benign uses."). I use Cheat Engine all the time to mess around in single player games, and quite often leave it running in the background or forget to close it -- that in no way means I'm cheating at other types of games. Further, it's just a memory editor -- unless GW2 is trusting the client where it shouldn't, would it even work on an MMO?