skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting article I found in FT Alphaville's Further Reading section from yesterday [0]. The narrative around the likes of Tesla and cryptocurrencies is likely a tired one to many HN readers, but the broader narrative and arguments made by the authors make up for it.

I did not contribute to this article and am not affiliated with the authors in any way.

[0] Registration required: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/24/1524552922000/Further...
Yea but where was the web in 1981 or Arpanet in 1969. Bitcoin was just an idea in 2008, didn't gain any real significance until 2013 where it really started to enter mainstream consciousness. If we want to compare it to the web we're still far away from 1991 in terms of tech.
So basically, you make peds feel unsafe so that you can feel safe.
The article is arguing for a low complexity API. The complexity of an interface is only loosely coupled to the complexity of the implementation.

The article even hints at a better solution than what Linux or OpenBSD do: Add backlight control in a away that provides 1:1 (or 1:0) mapping between display devices and backlights by, for example, adding the backlight API to the display device file. A naming convention for device files would also work. So would a directory of device files associated with a given screen.

You could even have a device file that lets you tell the kernel if it should use ACPI or something else, assuming you don’t like the default.

What doesn’t work is the status quo in Linux, where there’s a 50% chance I have to implement a new shell script that futzes with some one-off device file in /sys every time I buy a new laptop. (And then use xbindkeys, or whatever to make the keyboard shortcut work)

Fixing this would require the type of thankless work that never quite gets done in the Linux kernel.

I suspect it is because no one has a financial motivation to fix things like this, but they do have a financial motivation to bring up new hardware and to strong-arm through platform lock in plays like systemd.

edit: and thank you for libbacklight. It works beautifully on the other laptops. :-)
"Learning from Data" is a real Caltech course on Machine Learning - http://www.work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html

It's sometimes offered concurrently with on campus sessions, and it is not a watered-down MOOC or a tutorial for some company's toolkit.
There is nothing altruistic about commercial shipping, it typically serves the needs of consumers. They could just as easily choose not to consume as they choose not to take a sightseeing trip from points A to B. It is most sensible to charge road users based on the wear and tear they cause to the road, and this means trucks would get charged quite a lot. Good. It's a business, and the cost of those roads absolutely should be communicated back to the wallet of the consumer benefiting from the ability to quickly ship product.
When Tsarist big Russia lost the war against the small Japan, the losses of the war were very demoralizing, and the seeds for the Soviet revolution were planted. Afraid of revolution the Tsarist secret police concocted the false flag plot "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to use the relatively affluent minority of jews as a scapegoat of all problems of the Tsarist regime. The fake news was not effective in convincing the local russian populace (who was best poised to understand the real source of their troubles) and the Soviets overthrew the Tsarists regime. However the fake news spread all over the world, and people started fearing jews, and their jewish plot. To the outside world, the fact that the Tsarist regime was overthrown may have seemed to confirm the plot...

Perhaps Hitler too, was against Nazism (after all he was no blonde). Perhaps as a geopolitical visionary he foresaw the future rise of China and allied with Japan to slow their future rise, perhaps he foresaw a twenty-year war, if he did not first slowly chase away jews like Einstein during the interbellum such that the latter would eventually be able to write an important letter to president Roosevelt. Perhaps he fully understood the "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to be a fabrication, and intended for the jews to have their own state, which would only happen if they were internationally regarded as some predominant victim of huge proportions. Perhaps he evaluated all paths to defuse the clusterfuck, but decided that a shorter premature 5-year war, and the irreversible tarnishing of his name and image was the smallest cost to pay. Perhaps he was so selfless.

Except I dont buy any of this crap.

Did Von Braun really intend to shorten the war with his rocket programme?

If my aunt had balls, she would have been my uncle.
I’m saying to step outside the “constant outrage” bubble that is the media and out into the actual real world people inhabit.

If I walked in to a Chick-fil-a in Manhattan, would I be aware of any controversy?
Show HN: Attendance Log (or Attendance Log Tracker on iOS)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.attendance...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/attendance-log-tracker/id136...

Hi HN!

I been working since February in this mobile app called Attendance Log (or Attendance Log Tracker for iOS. Somebody had the name first :/ )

I made this app for a friend that happens to be a personal trainer. He wanted an app that could take attendance in the spot from his phone. He explained that all of the apps from the Play Store that he used were either slow (performance wise), clunky interface or just too complex for his needs. I saw a need and decided to take a gander at it and made my app. I tried to make it to his needs and what he wanted most of all was simplicity.

Of course no attendance tracking app can be without someway to see the data. There’s a tab that shows the records of each of the users created and show it’s attendance, absences and attendance percent for each month. You as the owner can filter by month per year if you want to see other months too. After doing all that now he wanted a way to use that data in Excel. So as you can guess I made a way to export that data into your device so you can use the data as you please.

Functionality

The app is a way to take attendance as quickly as you can and keep the records in your phone so you can see them later.

Create and store unique users information in your smartphone’s storage

Attendance is shown in a table that can be exported to a .xlsx file (for you Excel and Numbers users). I also included the option to export it as a text tab delimited file or comma delimited if you wish to do so.

Privacy

All the data is stored in the user device and is not shared via my app to anyone, never.

If there’s bug you can email me through the email in the App / Play store that I shared.

https://attendancelog.xyz
AWS EC2 T2 Instances Demystified: Don’t Learn the Hard Way
So you're saying you don't like sharing the road with heavier, less maneuverable, and faster moving objects, so you bring your scooter/bike on the sidewalk?

Makes sense.
> @vbezhenar is bloody close to fluent in my language. "I'm an ethnic Russian" is better than "I'm ethnical ..."

"I'm ethnical ..." is a perfectly acceptable construction in Russian :) They likely think in Russian. When I was first learning English I had problems with English sentences like "I want them to do it", "Taste of things to come", "They are to be ordained" etc Such constructions are very ungrammatical and illogical in Russian.
I think this might be because you live in a relatively trustful world of the west. Trust and privacy online will only become harder and harder to come by with how our current systems are set up.
The ordering of Object.keys() is equal to insertion order of the keys into the object. So if you have an Object generation function, it can insert the keys in the proper order (and take advantage of stuff like v8 hidden classes)

http://2ality.com/2015/10/property-traversal-order-es6.html
Your startup should have ordered the laptop in advance of your start date. My company standardizes on the 16gb model. They never have them in store, we have to order them online, about a week or so before we need them.
Perhaps you were using 82 octane gas? When you get into parts of the Southwest, gas stations down there offer some really low octane gas. I personally always go for premium (92 octane) at a large chain like Costco when going cross country if the local gas stations are slinging anything below 87 octane gas (which is the lowest commonly offered on the West Coast), as it leads me to think the gas offered at that station/in that city is all of lower caliber. Obvs not selling lots of high or normal octane gas at least!
Kirsten Gillibrand's Ambitious Plan to Turn the Post Office into a Bank
Why do you assume they’re not?

Constraining the discussion to America, you’d be far more wrong to assume someone doesn't use the internet[1][2] or a cellphone.[3][4]

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/05/some-america... - Only 11% of American adults don’t use the internet. Of 18-24 year olds, only 2% don’t. 2%. Holding narrowly onto your assertion, the numbers are higher for poor, rural, elderly and non-high school graduates.

[2]http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-20... - 68% of adults use Facebook. 73% use YouTube. Looking at 18-24 year olds, 95% use YouTube.

[3]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/28/10-facts-abo... - 77% of adults own a smartphone.

[4]http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/ - 95% of adults own a cellphone.

Shopping at mega corps? Well, it’s well documented that Walmart has done a good job of decimating local economies and there is definitely a homogenization of retail options in the US - but even if you don’t shop at one of them, if you use a credit or debit card, a mega-corp is tracking you. Doubly so if you use a smartphone.
from the comments I've been seeing, people are well aware you can remove the keys

the problem is that they're (really) easy to break, and hard to replace.
Not using Facebook, or really any social media, has always been a viable alternative.
They also probably haven't repatriated most of the cash earned overseas (on which they paid the low taxes) so they can't really use it. If they did, you'd see a different effective tax rate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16921634
It is similar to twine. The Inkle games so far have either been adaptations of Choose Your Own Adventure-style books or very much like that. You read some text and then you have a few choices. They also have some very basic combat in the Sorcery! adaptations.
Part of its simplicity enables its metaprogramming, though. You decompose the problem downward while using metaprogramming to extend the language upward. A simple language with metaprogramming is never equal to one without because the former can be turned into anything its execution or compilation constraints allow. :)
> taxis were very often Crown Victorias,

Retired Crown Victorias were commonly used as taxis because they were inexpensive when purchased at auctions. When I first started driving for the taxi company (2012), they still had a few Crown Vics with police-style lights on the A-pillar [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_(car)

The Prius is a much better taxi than the Crown Victoria. Easier for old people to get into, hatchback, etc.
I also hold the opinion that MariaDB's failure to simply rename key "mysql" files/dirs to "mariadb" was intentionally confusing and an effort to steal market share.

Percona has been a much better citizen with its fork.
Maybe this wasn't the case before, but his name is in the link and he is on here (HN) now under his real name as well.
In practice, this is what breaking 'rules that don't matter' looks like - you break the rules that don't matter to you, but those rules were probably put in place for a reason.
"I got the Subaru STI, and now it just burns!"

Sorry, but the naming (and maintenance on Subarus) just makes pot shots so easy :P
Music programming language Musimat
Scientists Say Uranus Really Does Smell Like Rotten Eggs
I just wanted to share that I also had success setting a regular timer woth a short period: 3 minutes. If I do not notice the timer (it's just a small sound), then I am focused on my work. If I do hear i, then I realize that I am distracted and give myself 3 to 6 minutes (1 to two timers) of meditation or distraction, depending on what I feel I need at that moment.
It's racism, pure and simple. Which only goes to show how endemic it is. It's also a great example of racism given its obviousness, difficulty to dispute, and relative ease of admission--ease in the sense that coping to this attitude isn't [yet] considered an admission to being a full-on racist person.

Almost every American is guilty of this particular prejudice--perceiving Japanese as exotic oddities such that they're not only overly credulous about these stories and the degree to which they reflect the society, but actually prefer them to the exclusion of more substantive news, like the more prosaic social and business stories that circulate about the Chinese or French (notwithstanding political biases, etc). And it shows that racism isn't just something exhibited by rabid white supremacists; racism necessarily implicates neither ill-will nor hatred. Yet it shows how if you don't recognize racism early and honestly it absolutely can metastasize into acute acts of hatred, such as what happened during WWII where both Americans and Japanese committed atrocious crimes precisely because of pervasive, fertile racist attitudes that were seemingly benign before (and after).

At the same time, it shows that merely identifying racism doesn't mean that everybody is obligated to immediately address it (or, more often, hide it). Which is good in as much as it proves it possible to discuss racism without triggering the denialism that comes when people feel imposed upon. Like vegetarianism, people can be both accuser and perpetrator in discourse without feeling like a hypocrite or a morally bad person, which is hugely important for constructive dialogue and achieving incremental improvements--realistically the only kind of improvement possible.
Cool! Shows him sitting proudly next to a picture of gay-murdering, political prisoner-killing Che Guevara! Right on, man!
I don't understand why we can't blacklist domains on HN.
Just as an aside note, in Australia this "new" A2 milk has been around for at least the last five years: http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/cattle/dairy/b...
Paywalled but some background for readers outside Australia:

The supermarket duopoly Coles/Woolworths have had a pricing war by selling substandard 'milk' at a loss to encourage customers through their stores. The result has been many farmers and smaller dairies struggling financially, e.g the Murray Goulburn cooperative forced to sell its operations to Canadian Saputo recently. FWIW, I normally buy Jonesy's and the local deli has recently started selling St David's - processed in suburban Melbourne.

A2 is thus one smaller brand seeking market differentiation through improved product - it all tastes just like milk to me but I then don't have the protein intolerance.
> Look at how speed cameras and red light cameras get shouted down like it's some how unfair to automatically point out that almost everyone is breaking the law.

Probably because (a) in theory there are several good reasons for caution in automating law enforcement and (b) in practice speed/red light cameras often turned out to be unfair.

https://uspirg.org/trafficcamreport

http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-ci...

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/red-light-cameras-may-issuing-...
Caper (YC W16) Is Hiring Deep Learning Engineers
Bonus, if someone steals your laptop at home they won't get your code.
Ask HN: Do EU grocery stores track purchase histories subject to GPDR?
Do EU grocers have the same frequent shopper cards as in the USA?

If so, would the data collected by them, ie full purchase history at the product level, be made available to their customers to formally request?

Similarly can one ask for their history to be purged?
In all fairness, Uber's many shenanigans

1. Happened a lot over the early do or die periods of entering new markets.
2. Continued over a much longer period of time than Travis has been gone.
3. Happened while the company was being considered a darling and was not being critically scrutinized over every move it made.

Shenanigans are truly shenanigans only once the outside world gets to know about it. Paradox of sorts really.

Continuing business as usual in the context of the parent's comment though is less about shenanigans and more about the operating model probably. Drivers are still being duped. Earth scorching ride subsidization tactics are still very much in play. Although the CEO is gone and there may be some activity happening within the company to undo toxic cultures, the overall business has not truly changed. And the overall business really ought to change.
To facilitate the exchange of goods between individuals. To make it so that people can donate small sums to whatever they want. To make less costly the transfer of funds.

Why shouldn't it be cheap?
Braess' paradox, where increases in road capacity can actually reduce traffic capacity, relies on an important assumption: that people are acting rationally with perfect information. In other words, it is that individually optimal behavior causes the breakdown for the system as a whole.

Funnily enough, the blame on Waze might be on point: we might actually be experiencing Braess' paradox more often now, not due to building roads, but because people are more likely to optimize their routes due to traffic-aware GPS systems. And in that respect, Waze could be causing network-wide congestion while simultaneously providing the best possible service for its users.

Of course if that were true, it would also mean that you could also blame the road network and that Waze is merely using it as it was designed. Then we get into the the philosophical argument about the drunk jaywalker being hit by a speeding car: You can blame either party for 100% of the blame, 0% of the blame, or arbitrarily apportion blame between the two parties in any way you want, and no matter what, your judgment will be a pure reflection of your biases.
VW and Audi are both considered upmarket, but Audi has a bad rap for the whole "plastic gears" shenanigan, and VW's emissions scandal still dogs them. Most people go with BMW's if they don't care about maintenance and want to buy upmarket.
> In New Zealand, the average "milk" is pretty disappointing.

Genuinely surprised. One of the things I hate about living in the US is the terrible milk. I have a hard time drinking it. I don’t know what they do to it here but it comes with a gross, almost off aftertaste. (It also seems to have a surprisingly long shelf life.) New Zealand milk is amazing by comparison. It’s one of the things I love about going home. :-)
ErrGroup is nice, but it was created before contexts existed, and doesn't have support for cancellation. I have a bounded worker pool executor that handles cancellation that I'm currently extracting from a private project; shout out if interested.
Trailer Nite – Find something to watch tonight
How is calculating 1/3 of 100cm an issue?
Im living on California for 2 years and imperial system still make no sense to me :)
It's not just you. I use Visual Studio when I'm occasionally looking at C#, IntelliJ on the odd occasion that I'm doing Java, and otherwise it's emacs and I can't remember the last time I used a debugger for Go, Elixir, C, C++, JS, Python, Ruby, etc. Basically, unless the language's standard library is massive and over-abstracted, no IDE is necessary. There's no way I'll ever remember org.apache.some.deep.package.HttpClientBuilderFactory and its 6 constructor arguments, but "import requests; requests.get(...)" is pretty easy to write without an IDE.
Most americans don't want to buy manual cars. The in-laws actually got $8k off on their new Accord due to it being a manual, extremely hard to sell in Seattle.
does anyone know if the courses are actually free (as in free beer)? Universities have been making training courses "available to the public" for ages...

EDIT:

never mind, the small FAQ at the bottom links to the bigger real FAQ at https://academy.microsoft.com/en-us/faq/

there the section "How much will this cost" reveals:

"You must purchase Verified Certificates from edX.org as proof of the successful completion of courses in the Microsoft Professional Program. The cost for Verified Certificates varies by course. The prices are published in the course information on the edX site. You may always audit the course for free on edX.org, but "audit mode" does not provide MPP credit. Pricing is subject to change. Additional charges may apply."

this is clickbait advertising...

EDIT 2:

Oh its not that bad:

"Can I take the courses in the track and not sign up for the Verified Certificates of completion from edX.org?
You are welcome to audit any online course for free. However, the only way to receive completion credit toward an MPP learning path is to obtain a Verified Certificate from edX.org."
The market gives us Wells Fargo. The most profitable way to run a bank is to steal from your most vulnerable customers -- no executives go to jail, and the shareholders are perfectly happy destroying lives so long as the returns are good.

So then we get a government solution. Sigh.
87 / 89 were the two options (Iowa).
Yeah, though finding them should be fairly hard because all they will look like from a network traffic perspective should be a normal-ish etherium non mining node and no direct communication between owner and publisher should exist after initial setup. Anyone planning on using this for serious matters should make sure that their trusted publishers are hosted anonymously (as far as is possible) or so spread out jurisdictionally to make attacking them all impractical.
That's another big sedan with a powerful engine and good reliability and parts availability, the latter three points being very desirable to police.
And equally true, the real question is not who was at fault, but how to best solve the problem.
I speak three languages. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't understand how companies like Big Commerce and WP Engine, which have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have 10's of thousands of business customers are "growth stage startups." I don't understand how they are startups at all. They are businesses. Is the fact that they are unprofitable the thing that makes them startups?
Join us now and share the software....
Ask HN: When is the right time to incorporate your startup?
I am aware of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16093966
But I couldn't find any guidance for my case, which I think is actually not that uncommon:

I'm your typical Silicon Valley tech founder and I've spent some time building a prototype and designing a system/service. This prototype is enabling me to get potential partners interested, and I could certainly use their help to turn it into a product.

I'm trying to find ways to compensate them for their help, but without cash (for obvious "no cash" reasons). If I had a C Corp today, I'd probably be able to structure a contractor agreement that compensates them with equity, but without a C corp, I'm not sure what to do.

Ideally, I'd like to set up some kind of agreement that says, in layman terms: "You work on this project on a X hours a week basis, and in return, when we incorporate, your share allocation will be Y%".

If I incorporate now, it'll cost me a couple thousand dollars (even through the Stripe Atlas route) and some headaches that I'd like to not deal with until "the right time", so I can focus on building the product, while minimizing losses (time & money) if the project hits a dead end before launch.
"Found on roadside dead" is way too real!
So you're just being deliberately daft, got it.