skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's tons of actual productive work that could be done though. Cleaning trash from streets and parks, filling potholes, fixing sidewalks, pulling weeds, painting over graffiti. These things would would make everyone's days a little nicer.
I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine. We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that always springs to my mind is the possibility of using aerial imagery. It doesn't have to be exactly that, though.

I think this need, a real need that is, can potentially make millions for the enterprising type, here.

Why don't I try the same, you might ask. But, while I have some ideas, I am may not be able to raise the resources needed, at the moment.
Author lost me on doorman. Doormen absolutely bring value and saying that doormen is bullshit job is the same as saying that waitress is a bullshit job - in the end customer is fully capable of bringing the food from the counter to his table on his own.

Doormen
Can accept packages when you are not in your apt (leaving outside is not an option in NY)

Can accept laundry delivery

Provide security by screening people out at the entrance

Virtually eliminate burglaries/theft

Can provide key to housecleaner/installer/plumber/etc

Keep parking spot in front of building available for short time use by residents (often semi-illegally)

Can help brining up heavy suitcases/bags to the apartment

Doormen absolutely provide value and apts in buildings with doormen sells for more than equivalent apartments with only intercall.
one nice template from themeforest + jekyll deployed on s3 with cloudfront + formspree.io + calendly (mailchimp for newsletters). it's super fast and costs peanuts
A lot of ship cargo consists of things that (1) we need a steady supply of, and (2) have a very long shelf life. For such cargo it doesn't matter how long the transit time for any particular shipment is, as long as shipments are arriving at the destination often enough.

I wonder if we could make unmanned cargo boats that spend most of their time drifting?

Drifting can be quite effective at long distance ocean transport. For an example look at the Friendly Floatees accident [1]. A ship accidentally lost 29 000 floating bath toys in the middle of the Pacific. Over the next 15 years they reached land in on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America, the Pacific coast of South America, Australia, and Europe, and came close to Japan.

I'm imagining a ship that drifts, occasionally using an engine to get into known currents that will help it toward its goal or avoid currents known to hurt.

Places where two or more significant currents pass through the same region could be used to route traffic. They could have tow ships stationed there that can move drifters between the currents

We could have a large fleet of such drift ships carrying suitable commodities with very little environmental impact, with a smaller fleet of normal cargo ships providing fast transport to fill in the gaps caused by the randomness of the drifting fleet arrivals.

The above idea is based on the proposals I've seen to do something similar in space. Briefly, there are orbits that can move an object from Lagrange points of one pair of bodies to Lagrange points of another pair using very little energy, but they can take a very long time.

The proposals are to start using those to regularly send supply ships to various moons and planets that we think we may want to send humans to later. Suppose the path to some particular moon takes 30 years. If we start sending supply ships down that path now, sending one every 6 months, say, then 30 years from now they start arriving. Then we can send the humans. The ship with the humans only needs to take enough supplies for the trip out, making the trip much more feasible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees
People mean different things whey they talk about emissions. Shipping is particularly dirty because of the low-grade fuel that they've been using. Its very high in sulphur content, and typically contains a higher fraction of heavier compounds that don't burn as well.

So the ships produce more unburned hydrocarbons (smog precursors) and sulphur oxides (acid rain precursors).

So even if the total CO2 emissions are similar, the other toxics are still greatly reduced.
I guess that's good, but I've always found properly positioned mirrors, and turning my head to give me a good ability to assess if there is anything that I need to be aware of when changing lanes. It's a little unclear what value add the camera gives you. Blind spots can be very small if the mirrors are well adjusted, and then turning your head allows you to fill in the blind spot.
Chromium has a ton of external contributors. Have you read the AUTHORS list? Sure, it’s not all on GitHub but a number of its parts are.

It’s a pretty hackable project.
There are two old commonly used programs that have their own database - BIND and Sendmail. Both have problems because their database is crappy.
> Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection.

Unfortunately for me, when you live downtown near a radio station that leaks into all your audio equipment, better EMI rejection definitely sounds better.
Crystal has repeatable structure over space. Its lattice is the same shape over and over again.

Time crystal is a kind of crystal that has repeatable structure over time. It just means it changes its "shape" in a repeated fashion over time. Usually an external force is required to force a crystal to change its shape over time such as with the piezoelectric effect. Time crystal is supposed to just keep changing its "shape" over time by itself. In the Yale case, the changing of "shape" is the flipping of the nuclear-spin magnetization periodically.
Depends on if, by "start small", you mean small effort or small money. Having those things I mentioned shouldn't be expensive, but are huge effort. I want to start small, but if I can't do something as simple as delegate SSH access or search my logs, I can't even test my idea. What I'm talking about is meant to increase the ability to start small for those of us w/out dedicated ops teams.
Honda LaneWatch (blind spot camera) is easily my favorite car safety feature.

Unfortunately, it's more expensive to manufacture, compared to standard blind spot warning systems, and the average customer does not appreciate it (by sales). Instead, Honda has received many angry complaints that the radio/media console is unavailable when changing lanes or when the user has left the blinker on.
Is this for Quorum, their fork of Ethereum?

Did they just fork ethereum, add untraceable private data privacy on a private chain, and try to patent it?

Hasn't ripple been doing basically exactly this -- what the patent application describes -- for more than 5 years?

Note: I read the quoted claims from what is probably this patent application on CoinDesk a day or two ago. I thought "isn't that basically what ripple does, except on a 'private chain' and therefore both prior art and obvious?"

AFAIU, the USPTO only searches their own database; other people have to explain that prior published art exists and that 'but on a private chain' and 'but on a blockchain' are very similar to 'but on a PC'.

Without reading the patent application, I'll have to rely on someone else to compare this patent application with, say, a dated copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_(payment_protocol)

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bitcoinpriorart
That's too broad of a definition, it effectively reduces the term 'targeted advertising' to just 'advertising'. For example, even if my advertisement isn't trying to target broad categories of people (roadside billboard, etc) any ad will have a target in mind: consumers of my product.

So no, targeted advertising is not any ad with a target in mind, that is just advertising. Targeted ads are distinguished from regular ads based on targeting a specific individual. An ad in the WSJ may be aimed at a broad category of people interested in business news, but if I know for a fact that 'Letmesleep69' happens to be a reader of that paper and I take out an ad that specifically refers to that user name, then it would be a targeted ad.

edit: formatting
This has always worried me. Once you're through the scanner you're free to loiter at the end of the conveyor belt. No one will bother you and I doubt TSA will blink an eye if you were to grab something and put it in your bag.
Not all targeted advertising is bad. Would you try to stop a local high school fundraiser for intelligently reaching out to the community? Or your family's local small business from advertising to the audience most likely to want to shop there?

Targeted advertising in some shape or form has existed for a hundred years. Just open any magazine that is targeted at a specific audience and you'll see widely different ads running in those magazines. McDonalds or Coca-cola aren't going to waste ad dollars running campaigns in hunting or boating magazines for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel
Designing a better ship is easier than overhauling global trade.
Pocket Casts Gets Acquired
a somewhat similar situation happened with a friend of mine in LAX. It is not the same because the laptop was not stolen, what happened was that he picked someone else macbook pro and the other person picked his.

He only realized that upon arriving here in Brazil. After phoning the airport and having a friend from LA walk there. He got hold of the real owner of the laptop (he noticed before flight and filled a missing item request at the airport). After some back and forth they managed to exchange their laptops back over FedEx.

So in the end, nothing but money was lost as they both got hold of their own laptops back but this should have never happened in the first place if the TSA or whoever is in the scanning machines took care of what is happening. If we can put with all the trouble regulation and schemes, they can do a better job of paying attention to the process. There are more than one person per machine already...
The opposite is true. At some point in the past, elevator operators served a useful function, since elevators were hard to operate. Today, even the existence of automation (i.e. accessible elevator UI) has not completely driven the elevator operator extinct, but has transmuted his job into bullshit. Same goes for gas pump improvements (I suppose we can thank New Jersey and until recently Oregon). The entire "Flunkies" category seems to exist only because of the existence of automation.
I had a really good experience designing an RTOS initialization system that both depended on static initialization, but didn't have issues with ordering either (and in fact didn't even have a main, post init just went right into the idle thread).

Basically I only let children of one class be statically initialized (and enforced this with a tool that goes through the generated binary and type information). These 'subsystem' classes then gets callbacks after all of the static initializers have run which allows them to find the other subsystems they depend on, and then that dependency graph is walked to initialize the full system (the dependency graph has to be a DAG or the system faults). Combined with a code review rule that static initializations only happen in one compilation unit in an anonymous namespace, and nothing else can happen there, means that no one can really touch other subsystems before they've all been initialized, and therefore the order doesn't matter.

I was really happy with how it turned out, despite being completely off the wall compared to how C++ normally works.
> partly copied from an internet source

Ah the ol' stackoverflow copy/paste.
How unfeasible would folding solar panel arrays be? The ship could fold them out like a satellite once they left port if the seas were favorable.
The half-life of code and the ship of Theseus (2016)
Just because you replaced 1 thing with 2 things doesn't mean you've increased the system's reliability. In this case, you've also added a lot of complexity in the shafts, seals, and gearboxes. That means more things that can go wrong. Most of those things can affect both screws when they fail, so there isn't any gain in reliability due to redundancy at all.
I have AT&T internet, and the BGW-210 gateway with the latest firmware. And my area was upgraded to native dual stack ipv6 about a year ago. So I tested it out and the ipv6 CloudFlare DNS (2606:4700:4700::1111 , 2606:4700:4700::1001) works perfectly fine. https://imgur.com/a/grUzeDD Its only the ipv4 1.1.1.1 that dose not. And AT&T made a statement why that is.

""With the recent launch of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service, we have discovered an unintentional gateway IP address conflict with 1 of their 4 usable IPs and are working to resolve the issue,"

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/att-i...

A few of you will be disappointed to know its not a evil attempt to block you from using it. Same way they have literally never blocked the ability to use any other DNS service before.It's simply a bug caused by the way the BGW-210, and Pace 5268AC operate and make use of 1.1.1.1 internally in some way and it will be fixed with a firmware update.
Can you find a blacksmith, period?
That's a wonderful headline.
It is, but they improved and maintain it.
Kudus to NYT for stating the TL;DR right at the top, instead of exhausting the reader with meaningless paragraphs.

> The review concludes that, contrary to widespread belief, a long, tiring workout or race can amplify immune responses, not suppress them.

Would be even better if that was reflected in the title, but alas, my expectations from a modern website are not so high.
Hydration was completely insufficient, I realized much later. Nutrition was the typical medium-to-large meal after a shower/nap. There was often a long car ride home, an hour or so.
It is over-hyped. Has been for decades.

Is it also alive and well? Yes. They aren't mutually exclusive.
I left BOTH of my laptops at the TSA checkpoint at O'Hare a few weeks ago. The TSA folks actually went to the trouble of opening the laptop, saw my flight info which happened to be on the screen, and contacted the gate, who called me up so I could go get it.

Experiences vary. In my case, the TSA went above and beyond to save me from my own stupidity.
I'd consider selling, or a partner to help build a user base for, my CherryPC Business apps (https://cherrypc.com).
The best minds of previous generations were fighting wars or leading battles. I personally do not think either of those activities is specifically better or worse.
I think it generalizes. Having a personal advocate will almost always yield a better personal solution than even a well intentioned bureaucrat. The law is complex, and the ability to afford a personal advocate is a very sharp privilege.

I think I've even seen this dynamic at play in international negotiations, with poorer countries being swamped by the experienced legal teams of larger countries, or being forced to effectively delegate their authority to an NGO that maintains a competitive legal team.
How is one of these different from an ordinary piezoelectric crystal oscillator?
On open source and standards Google has been a leader. Contributions:

1. VP8, VP9 and 90% of av1

2. WebRTC

3. Nacl/Pnacl that was killed by W3C for no technical reason, in favor of an inferior wasm

4. SpyDy inspiring http2

5. V8 js runtime

6. Angular js

7. ProtoBuf and grpc

8. Android

9. Huge contributions to the looking kernel, and many many open source libraries, like boring ssl

10. Brotli compression and other related tech

11. Go language

12. Tensorflow

13. ...

It's a bit sensationalist to label Google an "extinguisher". If anything, they're a huge enabler in software.

Now, all the above doesn't make itself. A company pays competent software engineers to work on this full time. I'm in complete support of Google's attempts to monetise Gmail, one of their largest services. After all someone needs to pay for those engineers, and most of all, Google is a for profit enterprise

You're free to transition to any of the other million standards compliant providers, there's no data lock-in. You can download your email via imap, another standard that was pushed by Google when the competition was only offering web-email
Not easily across cloud. If as part of this package, it included a "cloud functions"/"lambda" component, cool. There are a few vendor-independent ones out there. But I need to search logs, store data in a database, etc. I don't want to go to the Google console to see my logs. Also I think traditional apps have many benefits wrt cross-request state management that are not as easy to do generically when serverless.
Not even close. It's highly unlikely that you burned more than about 3300kcal (and probably less). You can check out calorie counts from hikers with similar times on Strava.

https://www.strava.com/segments/8428908
The analogy is amazing
We can. I've never made a decision to read a book due to its author having won a Nobel prize, nor watched a film because of it being an Academy Award winner. The opinions of people in those particular insider-groups are not interesting to me (except indirectly, in how they affect broader society; that's quite interesting).

Actually sometimes after hearing about a book or film I think I might be interested in I'll go and read a load of 'normal people' reviews on Amazon or IMDb and they might sway me one way or the other. They may not be skilled reviewers but they use their own words and it helps me ascertain what kind of persons they are and whether their opinions are likely to be in tune with my own. Also I get a spread, rather than niche view.

So I suppose that means that for me, normal people's opinions hold more prestige than the Nobel Committee's.
Journalism needs a WYSIWYG editor for stylized content -- content that is more visually diverse/interesting than the linear text+image+embed format, but not SO so custom/new as to truly require a developer to build it.
I'm a programmer working at a big-tech company. I make ~$350k/year, even though my job could be done equally well by a college intern. I only do ~2 hours of productive work in an average day. My previous jobs were far more interesting and challenging, and I had apparently done extremely well in my interviews. Hence why I got an offer with an extremely good compensation package.

However, the team that I go put into, is one of the slowest moving and least useful I've ever seen. I spent my first couple months trying to make things better, and be more productive - only to have my team-lead actively micromanage and stonewall me in order to bring my productivity down to a crawl. I tried talking to my manager about it, but they started blaming me personally every time I pointed out any ways of improving the way we do things.

Eventually, I stopped trying at all, did the best I could (~2 hours/day of productivity), and just zoned out the rest of the time. Apparently this has pleased my manager/team-lead, and everything has been smooth (boring) sailing ever since. It still boggles my mind that I'm getting paid $350k/year to essentially browse HN and post stuff like this all day.
There's generally a difference between "static initialization" copying .data from ROM to RAM, and running static initialization functions out of the table. That table doesn't really have ordering constraints generally.
In embedded applications a lot of things happen before you can even attach a debugger. Most microcontrollers go through a non programmable hardware initialisation sequence which initialises enough hardware for the processor to run. The processor then runs from a section of read only (or at least write protected) memory. This code performs a further stage of initialisation and patching. This can be used by the manufacturer to implement their own bootloader or to perform configuration of the hardware to get around certain hardware bugs. Finally this code jumps to a known memory/flash location where the code that the engineer has written is located. It is from this point that you can usually start debugging.
That's really the problem, at least here in SF. The tech industry needs highly skilled employees, rather than local residents. So wherever they land, they bring in a bunch of new people who also need housing (and have high incomes.) I don't think that's inherently bad - but if your city has a bounded housing supply like SF, it's inevitably going to lead to rising rents and displacement of existing lower income residents.

(Contrast that with say, auto manufacturers, who would maybe bring in some managers when opening a plant but would also employ tens of thousands of locals, raising the incomes of the existing resident more than bringing in new transplants.)
Ideally building from scratch because the platform relys on taking a small percentage of each transaction for revenue.
What's your opinion on current healthcare startups like zocdoc or Oscar insurance? I've seen a lot of new doctor review sites popping up but like you mentioned that's only 1 problem out of many/bigger issues
I think it's interesting this category is simply defined as "goon". This really has been the definition of our entire existence as a species. We have competitors and if they take our resources we attempt to kill them off.

Even today the military encompasses the largest industry in the world. All of the technology we use has been rooted in the Military. Engineering Departments everywhere are subsidized by the Military more than any other department because they know anything you engineer has the potential as a "goon" application.

I don't think "goon" is going away anytime soon, it's a core part of our evolution as a species.
Bullshit jobs is what the antiquated capitalist system gives us in return for the increased efficiency in other human activities. You automate the production of essential goods and services with increasingly less people needed to support it, but you still need to employ everyone, so you invent jobs just for the sake of them.

The system should be designed to reward us with more spare time, not to make us busier with ever more mundane tasks.
Ask HN: Do you have a do-nothing job?
If you have a do-nothing job, what are the positives and negatives of it? Any advice on getting a do-nothing job like yours?
I lead analytics in retail banking and the most rewarding part of my job is using data/analytics/technology to improve business performance. Nothing sexy about retail banking but I hope to gain invaluable experience and help either shape the culture from within or start a bank of my own. The possibilities of what might come in the future is what excites me. Solving problems through technology also gives me great joy.
Judge the value of what you have by what you had to give up to get it
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112449
> I wouldn't be surprised if they even run Windows servers somewhere.

I would be a little, because they seem to proud to do it. At least their public facing infrastructure seems very well selected and uniform.
Portable computing devices suffer a lot of abuse. It's very rare to drop your desktop PC in the toilet. Battery runtime is not inflating as quickly as CPU performance gains (which is now thermally limited). Non-user serviceable batteries is entirely on manufacturers.

Smart users get a case to make up for the inherent fragility of glass.
What We Think an Honest and Transparent Privacy Policy Should Be in 2018