skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you care about this, then put the laptop in a tamper-evident bag. Those are necessarily imperfect too; but there's work making tamper-evident seals to resist up to state-level attacks, since that's relevant in stuff like enforcement of nuclear weapons treaties. That succeeds to the extent that you can find a physical effect that's easy to create and measure, but hard to recreate deterministically. (In concept, dump a pile of glitter over your thing. The effort to dump the glitter, take two pictures, and compare is small. The effort to recreate a given glitter distribution flake by flake is large. Likewise for laser speckle from random rough surfaces, and many other effects.)

You could check a laptop for malware later by reading out literally every bit of nonvolatile state, including the BIOS and stuff, and confirming that all changes had expected form (to files you meant to work on, etc.). Of course, then you have to trust the equipment you use for that...

A little weird that he ran the experiment. Did he really suspect that malware was routinely getting installed by attackers with physical access to laptops during business travel? If yes, then why didn't someone notice it calling home or whatever?
The optimizers were the crowd in this business model. Some of them made good decisions, others made bad. But since the amount of money available was limited, those bad decisions brought down the performance of the campaign and ultimately the advertiser gave up.

An expert would've made better decisions.

I think the wisdom of the crowd can sometimes be effective, but there are a lot of ways it can go wrong. Some things I was thinking of:

1. the crowd wasn't big enough

2. the time frame was too short to be effective

3. the heuristic was too complex or poorly tuned to lead to a good outcome

4. creative endeavors with high rates of failure lack enough signal to properly optimize (a strategy might look terrible till it suddenly works)

5. misaligned incentives undermine the goal

To illustrate the last case, in high school I had a teacher tell us that he would scale the test by the highest score. For example a 95 would give 100 and +5 to every other score in the class. With incentives like that, if everyone in the class answered no questions, everyone would get 100. (but then all it would take would be one individual to screw the whole class)

Crowds are complex, difficult to understand and hard to predict.
An important factor to consider in seeking to regulate such things is the ease with which they can be produced. Marijuana is a weed and wine is fermented grape. And what about the obesity epidemic? I’m inclined to agree with your views, but there is a practical aspect that needs to balanced against the desire for more effective public policy.
Facing a window with natural light can help, if you take regular breaks from close-up focusing.
The first year of a new car design of any model of any brand having qc problems is actually so common that sometimes buyers will actively avoid them. Tesla buyers know what they're getting into, they've seen the issues model X has gone though. This is completely normal.
"It's been medically shown that some drugs cause aggressive and violent behavior. Why should we allow an increase in that kind of behavior if it could be largely prevented as it is now?"

Alcohol is one of those drugs. Do you want to go back to Prohibition? It is widely acknowledge not to have worked, just as the current War on Drugs hasn't worked to prevent use of other drugs.

"If all drugs become legalized, what's to prevent addiction to certain drugs sweeping across an entire population and devastating productivity?"

Drugs were legal in the US and other countries for most of their history, and yet productivity was fine. The US War on Drugs was mostly started in the 1970s. Before that, most drugs were legal, and before the 20th Century, all drugs were legal. US productivity did fine.

The only major counterexample that I know of is the massive opium addiction prevalent in China around the time of the Opium Wars. My impression is that it did impact productivity there, but I don't know a lot about it, and would need to research more.

Anyway, I think we have to look at the root causes of addiction. Many of those causes are social in nature, and have less to do with the legal status of drugs than things like poverty, despair, hopeless, etc. Those could be addressed in better ways than by making illegal the substances that make the miserable lives of drug addicts bearable.

"It seems like whether drugs are legal or not, if you get addicted to some types of drugs you become effectively unable to earn an income. Even if legalizing drugs reduces the prices, aren't the people addicted to them still going to commit crimes to make the money they need since they still can't work normal jobs?"

Just because you're addicted doesn't mean that you can't work a normal job. I've read of a 20-year study of doctors in the UK who were addicted to heroin. The study found that as long as the addicted doctors were provided a steady supply of the drug, they actually performed slightly better than their unaddicted colleagues.

Anyway, addiction is not the inevitable result of drug use. Some people can use drugs and not get addicted. This is especially true of psychedelics, which can actually be used constructively and to the benefit of the user and of society.
I am definitely not a Thiel fan, but I strongly agree with him here. The best managers I've had were always ones who deeply understood something besides management. The supposed universality of management theory, plus the training toward slick presentation and glib self-promotion, makes it very easy for people to not only not know what's going on, but have a strong personal interest in not knowing what's going on.

This definitely leads to short-term gains as people work the obvious levers to make the profit graph go up and to the right. But I think it's antithetical to the sort of deeper investment that builds real businesses and provides sustaining innovation.

Toyota, for example, was run by engineers, who came up with a deeply different theory of business. It was so fundamentally strange to American MBA thinking that US car companies were unable to comprehend it despite many attempts to learn it in the 70s and 80s. Toyota went from Japan's post-war decimation to become the world's leading car company, while US carmakers have needed government bailouts just to stay afloat.

This stands in deep contrast to the way MBA-style approaches kills established companies by over-extracting short-term profits in ways that destroy long-term value. Toys R Us is a recent example, and Simmons is a good historical one: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...
>Crime in the pursuit of drug addiction exists

Drugs are artificially highly priced due to their illegality. Legalizing drugs would drive down the price, removing a major motive for crime. People will still be addicts, but in my experience bums who have alcohol as a drug of choice manage to get by without engaging in muggings/robberies to feed their habit.
I know scientists are terrible at PR, but why not say:

"Used as foundational block of the Sage library, used in the following papers: [...]" then list every paper that used sage. No one can't prove that Singular wasn't called at least once in the writing of that paper.

Then sage gets more recognition, singular gets way more recognition and the suits in admin are happy.
awesome, reminds me of ‘how is babby formed’
Was Theodore Kaczynski the Zodiac Killer?
Why not put a bounty of bitcoins on your laptop? If it's large enough it becomes worth taking even though that will alert you.
The fun thing is that especially for the early C64's the reason they were better shielded was that Commodore had problems meeting emissions standards for them, and so if you open them up, you'll find RF shields like this [1] (from [2]).

Some earlier models had a foil-covered cardboard wrapping it instead.

I think later models reduced the shield to cover just a small set of components instead.

So they survived better because Commodore failed to figure out how to make them produce less interference.

[1] https://images.pcworld.com/images/article/2012/07/c64_shield...
[2] https://www.pcworld.com/article/260232/tweet_from_a_commodor...
TLDR version: Best case is a 45-45-90 triangle, and sqrt(2)/2 = 0.707.
I would suspect that being deprived of sensory input, you would become a vegetable after going crazy at some point.
Just to add to this, WalMart is primarily a grocery store. Like most grocery stores, it has a net profit margin that hovers around 3%.

The Waltons are not rich because each WalMart vacuums money out of a community. The Waltons are rich because there is a metric shit-ton of stores that do a high volume of business, and they get their 2-3% slice of it.
why do you think the market is there?
More like 30 years ago.

But yes, now would be good too.
LumiWatch smartwatch turns your arm into a touchscreen
I'm curious just how "optimized" and the paid version is (or how crippled the free version in comparison).
I feel like there's always a little crotchetyness in older engineers. I remember being in school right when companies were putting all of their literature online. For electronics, that was such a huge leap forward from having to buy entire books of data sheets for integrated circuits. People on the other side of that divide had the same complaint about a different subject.

"You only looked through the data sheet for 4 hours? Back in my day it might take 4 hours to get the thing to even turn on!"
I agree - 5 hours really isn't that much. I've spent much more time than that on single issues in the past, and it's by no means something that's scaring me out of the field. I should've spent more time in a single session hunting down the issue, but I didn't quite have the time (or motivation after seemingly making no progress) when it was only one of a few things I had to work on that week. One of my issues with that class in general was the complete lack of guidance on how we should go about debugging our operating systems' issues. The only method mentioned by my TA was to print more variables, which isn't incredibly useful if the kernel won't boot or if the print function isn't working. And the issues would compound as the projects were often dependent on previous projects. One of the tasks was to implement asynchronous signal handling through registered callback functions, which is quite difficult to do if you didn't get the scheduling algorithm working properly in the previous project. It felt like the class was designed to be difficult and not designed for me to learn. I was pretty excited to take an Operating Systems class, despite what I'd heard, and it was the class that left me feeling let down, not the content.

I would personally love a debugging class to get some more varied ideas on how to approach difficult problems. Seeing someone's thought process when debugging something like a kernel would've been really useful.
I hope s/he ran it in a VM or on disposable hardware. I'd be very leery of any software available for purchase by tourists on North Korea.
Problem is, it can't be a downtown unless there is a nearby uptown. Without residents within walking distance, it's just a shopping mall.
It will be interesting to see if Geoffrey Hinton signs.
Google’s Sergey Brin Warns of the Threat from AI
What defines a downtown? My town has what I think is supposed to be a downtown and I don't really like it. I hate street parking (both doing it and the fact that it creates dangerous situations of not being able to see around a corner and making the road too narrow), there are too many pedestrians, and traffic is slow. Something feels very wrong about having to use metered street parking to go to a post office.

I like spread-out malls/stores a lot better. I hope they find a way to reverse the trend. Besides simply economic concerns, I think the human factor has to be considered. Malls/mini-malls and countrysides/suburb-like environments are a lot nicer for many (I'd guess most) people. I don't think the fact that the budget balances better on a spreadsheet with more density means it's worth it. Preserving a better way of life is an appropriate case for subsidies.

At least drive-thrus probably aren't going anywhere for a while.
Seconded with gusto. One of the best things I've ever listened to.
As mentioned, Hire & Develop. Its required for leadership positions (sr IC or people managers). May not be obvious, but also applies to yourself; continual improvement and whatnot.
Legalize, educate, regulate, tax and treat abuse as a medical problem. Subsidize the medical treatment and sponsor research for mitigating abuse from the tax revenue.

People will pay obscenely high taxes on this stuff if it’s made legal.

Dismember the government apparatus setup to deprive so many of their liberties.
Besides arguments about subsidization by social safety nets, Wal-Mart would at least mean local jobs, unlike Amazon.
Yes, was just about to post this. Very good series.
"Many alcoholics are born that way. They do not have the same liberty with regard to alcohol as others do. Their agency is impaired when confronted with decisions about alcohol."

I'd really like to see some studies that show this is the case.

Even more, I'd like to see some studies that show this is the case for all the drugs that are currently kept illegal due to reasoning of this sort.

Plenty of drugs that are illegal, like psychedelics, aren't addictive. So such reasoning, even if true for certain other drugs, should not keep the drugs that aren't addictive from being made legal.

As far as alcohol is concerned, are you in favor of going back to Prohibition? Because that's the state that many other drugs are in.
Re: Nixon using drug laws to criminalize dissent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885281
Brutal truth:

You have zero confidence in your own product.

So yes, shut this down as gracefully as possible.

Taking on the entire world is hard enough even if you do believe in your product.
Please provide your definition of product market fit.
Red Star 3.0 came out in 2013. There was a demo of it at CCC 2015 congress, at https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting_the_fog_on_red_star... .

This Business Insider piece is dated 19 Apr 2017.
I don't get the name, but more power to them.

I cut my teeth on FreeBSD and BSDi long before Linux, and Solaris was always this solid, go to OS for prod databases and firewalls.

HPUX - I guess it was ok running OpenView when it would actually not panic
Irix - Terribly insecure but very pretty. Still have an Indio2
AIX - Meh. Everything abstracted away via smit and its brethren
Tru64 - Never really minded using that for Oracle and didn't need to pay Veritas for a clustered file system

If you want a walk down memory lane: https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems

I am not affiliated with the site and I have no idea if you can legally download this stuff.
Not from recordings. From a second-hand quote by a single person, now deceased, who was hung out to dry by Nixon after Watergate.

It may be true, but it’s worth considering who the source is, their motivations, and why it took so long for the quote to come out.
Show HN: A fast, hopefully accurate, fuzzy matching library written in Go
Interesting, but hard to follow accent for me.
> Does that outweigh the whirlpool of violence that the War on Drugs has stirred up by its very existence?

Did anyone imply in the slightest that it does? No one defended the War on Drugs. They suggested that some drug use poses a public health problem, and thus that zero regulation is inappropriate. To equate that with support for the War on Drugs is plainly dishonest.
Burningman’s Founder Larry Harvey Passed
> The implication is that police and courts are racially profiling or being racist. But you shouldn't believe that without evidence.

It sounds like not even all the evidence that exists would make you believe it. Racial profiling is real.
> Cupertino had no commercial core that was left to decline.

You need only look to Vallco to see what an abandoned mall is like. It’s really dystopian in a way.
Fair enough I only saw the 25c price not the "$3.25", however I cannot find the $92,000 figure, where did they pull that from? i'm wondering if they are mincing "business revenue" with "counterfeit revenue", they seemed happy enough to mix physical goods fraud terms to IP and not the reverse so I wouldn't put it past them.

In the article the only reference to making more than 25c per disc is:

> Records, however, show that Lundgren had sold several thousand to one buyer for $3-4 each

But "several thousand" * ~$3 doesn't sound much like 92k.

> I don't know how much an average HN user is gaining, but that is a lot of money for me.

Me too, but note that the term revenue is often used ambiguously and does not necessarily refer to net income, often people abuse this to inflate or deflate the number to help their narrative. _If_ that is the case here then 90k gross for a sole proprietor could be quite a low income depending on the margin... then again if this figure is really all about the discs, then ~90k - (flights + manufacturing run + shipping) could be quite profitable.

I can't find the real figures, happy if someone can enlighten us.

To be honest I don't have much empathy with this guy i'm just playing devils advocate now... My main argument was against your implication that hurting a business's revenue is automatically illegal, which is very close to saying capitalism is law. Perhaps you didn't realize you were implying that. The fact that this guy may or may not have profited from this is separate from the legality of the impact of restoring bought and paid for software against microsoft's profits, it's an important distinction.

Again just to be clear: Microsoft's loss should have no bearing on this case (because they are legal), the case is about someone potentially making money off something they shouldn't, much like selling GNU software (I know that comparison seems rediculous but I'm trying to highlight the separation of illegal profit from legal losses).
Ask HN: What are some good resources for the ssh authentication protocol?
Alcohol causes all those 3 things and yet it's legal. But when you are aggressive and violent, you get arrested for that. If drugs are legal, they will actually be harder to get. Kids can get drugs easier then getting alcohol because the black market for alcohol is not as big (since it's legal). In the Netherlands, weed is seen as not really cool by the youngsters and so they aren't as keen to take it up. If people have no money due to drugs, they can also have no money due to gambling, or no money due to internet shopping, but we don't call them crimes, if someone commits a crime for no money, arrest them for the crime. But it's more a health issue, if someone gets addicted now to say computer games etc and has no money we treat that as a medical issue like normal.
It's a 20min+ video about a guy soldering a NAND flash chip to a board designed to accept said NAND flash chip. Amazingly, Scotty manages to still make it interesting by giving you an unpolished view of his process; he documents his failures, successes and his interactions with people in Shenzhen.

If you're looking for the engineering side though you might be disappointed, there isn't much technical content here. It's more of a hackers guide to getting something working.
Could we do this on Venus to start terraforming?
False dichotomy: either you have shit code or you coddle the feelings of your junior dev, which you helpfully outed as female for no reason.

There is a way to have high standards, not be an asshole, and not "coddle" people. As they say, it's not what you say, but how you say it.

This usually comes up with new employees because they haven't learned that one senior dev on your team "has a heart of gold" even if they are a super-asshole in text. "Everyone knows he just cares so much about the code." Already heard it.

Don't forget there's a long history of men talking down to women and using what seems like neutral language, but subtext that implies that she's incompetent, doesn't deserve the job, slept her way to the top, etc, etc.

Clearly though, you've decided that the problem is her. Hopefully she found a more supportive team elsewhere.
That is only true for property tax which is slightly lower in the city than the suburbs. If you include Sales tax Chicago is higher.
At work, a respectful culture is better than a nice one
From what I understand the software for EMRs isn't very complicated (message queue + message parsing + encryption). What is an issue is integration with other provides who....

1. Have the data you need
2. Charge a huge premium for integration
3. Don't like giving up their data
4. Always have their slight twist on message format

This is a huge step forward still. This kind of software is not easy to get right. Soooo many variables and sooooo much demanded customization as well as almost mandatory adherence to incumbent UI designs
I watched his video and legitimately had a smile on my face when he finally got it to work.

I feel that it tells the story of many makers, and I see myself in it. I can feel his face wearing out and I see it in my face when I couldn't get something to work so badly. I'm sure anyone who has ever worked on a hard project can also empathize. At least this project I can feel like it's just small hardware that is the obstacle, the flash chip probably has a datasheet somewhere to make the whole process possible.

Watching his other memory upgrade video, I couldn't imagine how much work that is to reverse engineer the flash memory contents of the iPhone chip to change its configuration. I wonder how much sweat, labor, and ingenuity went into that software. And we probably will never get to know who it is that is behind that software.
I am looking for some strong server side programmer volunteers (and volunteers of _all_ types)! Email is in my profile.

Be a force for good in the developing world !

https://open-emr.org/welcome/

-Matthew (OpenEMR Admin)
The two most rigorous experiments in the wisdom of crowds are:

- the stock market

- democracy

They beat technocratic efforts every time.
I have seen this. I tend to question whether they actually did it, and whether this represents an authentic film.

Consider, say, the space race. They have a clear motivation to demonstrate superiority close to this era. I have also gotten the impression that the classic soviet government didn't exactly have a reputation for sterling honesty, and this doesn't seem wildly far afield from something you could achieve with practical effects.

I have limited specialist domain knowledge, but the head doesn't really have a power source. Blood can give the brain oxygen, but hours seems a bit far-fetched. They definitely skip a lot of detail here, like where/how they oxygenate the blood without lungs. The head has the brain, which takes a lot of energy to run for its size, and probably doesn't carry out the metabolic processes of energy production, with the blood/brain barrier. So, you have a big power draw, and no engine. Hours of observable or verifiable life seems like a lot for stale blood with no power source and a big power draw.

I also don't know the authentic history of the video to verify it didn't come as a complete fabrication of a historical curiosity at a later date.

I would like to see credible verification, but it doesn't really add up.
Did he really suspect that malware was routinely getting installed by attackers with physical access to laptops during business travel? If yes, then why didn't someone notice it calling home or whatever?

I doubt it but his job is to suspect all sorts of things. If you are going to attempt to quantify risk then some experimentation is in order rather than simple speculation. As to "notice it calling home", it is surprising how much is missed. For example, Meltdown n Spectre were predicted many, many years ago ...
What regulation is appropriate, then?