skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting points, thanks.

> Clearly that's not related to the question at hand here

That's not clear at all, actually the opposite is clear. Health impacts of local people were discussed directly in the article. It's clearly a major issue that is directly "related to the question at hand."

> It sounds like you'd prefer that the port get completely shut down.

I absolutely would not prefer that! That's insane. Please don't put such ridiculous and insane things down as something I said. No way. The Port of Oakland should obviously grow in size as necessary to fit the economy. The Port of Oakland is obviously extremely important. So is recognizing the facts of health impacts of locals and not dismissing it as irrelevant.

> You'd be much better off moving away from the port and teh city that grew up around it.

I don't live anywhere near there. But I think you'd find that the people who live by the Port of Oakland are not there by choice, and have little financial ability to stage a physical move. It is an incredibly impoverished area, and to suggest people just 'move away' is insulting, rude, and does not even remotely fit the situation.
Given how blockchain operates the only viable use case is currency:

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-blockchain-is-hard-60416ea...
>"fairly ubiquitous"

If I'm giving a presentation to hundreds or thousands of people in 30 minutes and a laptop goes down/won't connect to projector, presentation wasn't loaded or was corrupted on the speaker laptop, things go sideways in a bunch of other ways (and they do), I don't want to be in the position of depending on the network to pull down a presentation from somewhere. Especially if I don't have my own laptop with me as is at least sometimes the case.

There should be various other ways to get to a presentation and I even have a setup to present from my iPhone (which I've actually had to use as a fallback), but a USB stick is a good, simple backup that I've used more than once.
Yep, we're not claiming this is the compute required for DL, and for specific tasks we expect compute required to fall over time. But better algorithms actually mean compute is more important, not less, and would likely make the growth in available compute more important.

For example, if a task is parameterized (by size or difficulty, say), then a better algorithm might change the asymptotic complexity from O(n^3) to O(n^2). A 2x compute increase for the old algorithm would take us from n -> 1.25n, but the new algorithm would go from n -> 1.41n.
Having a third participant that you can sue or subpoena is the important part. Is there a good word for this sort of thing? Facilitated by a third party with significant assets subject to the legal system? I heavily favor using such parties for my personal financial affairs - it's not that I trust them more, but it's that I have more recourse when things go wrong.
> There's lots of research on doing the same learning with much less resources (e.g. recent paper https://eng.uber.com/accelerated-neuroevolution/ , or the example visible in this very article of AlphaZero having much, much less compute than AlphaGoZero and doing better anyways), and even without that

AlphaZero could not have been created without going through many many iterations of AlphaGo, each one of which cost several GPU-years, and calling AlphaZero cheap is serious moving of goalposts as it required thousands of TPUs for days, and Facebook's recent replication for chess also used thousands of GPUs for 3 weeks. (Zero is cheap only in comparison to the previous AlphaGos using weeks or months of hundreds/thousands of GPUs/TPUs.) Note that that is a log graph; flip over the linear scale and you get an idea of how extraordinarily expensive Zero is compared to everything not named 'AlphaGo'.

If anything, this observation implies that AI risk is more dangerous than thought because it implies a 'hardware overhang': it will take vast computational resources to create the first slow inefficient AI but it will then rapidly be optimized (either by itself or human researchers) and able to run far faster/more copies/on more devices/for less money, experiencing a sudden burst in capabilities. Like model compression/distillation where you can take the slow big model you normally train and then turn it into something which is 10x faster or 100x smaller or just plain performs better (see 'born again networks' or ensembling).

> simple hardware progress means that random gaming GPUs can handle datasets that were inconvenient a few years ago.

...which means using a lot more compute, yes.
Have you ever written your own unicode library, or are you just parroting what you've heard?

I have written my own unicode library, normalizing strings as UTF-32 is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier than trying to do the same in UTF-8 or UTF-16.

not to mention casefolding, and it also allows you to design better interfaces, so that the actual algorithm only needs to be implemented once.
That's my real concern: old, out of date images. How will we handle another OpenSSL-level vulnerability in 7 years, with bad code buried in containers that haven't been updated in 4, and for which the build infrastructure is no longer functional?
> ... but there is chance it will be found...

Doesn't this completely ignore YAGNI?
I agree, but not all domains are fully fledged corporate entities - some of us just throw together fun things randomly and for that it's nice to have an $0.88 TLD.
Looking at the trend here, you can see why many business forecasters and economists have predicted that advances in artificial intelligence will create huge new returns to capital. That future is worth reflecting on because it suggests a fundamental change of labor-capital dymamics.

Take startups. Right now, many startups can compete on the same basis to hire talent as huge companies. But if companies with huge capital reserves can put their cash directly to work to train AI models, startups will be hard-pressed to compete with "smarter" products. Specialization will not even be much help.

Looking at Beating the Averages (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html), PG enthused that, since established companies are so behind the curve on software development technology, there is always a chance for higher-productivity techniques like more productive languages to give smaller teams a real chance at a huge market. Of course, that this was in the era when Google was not creating new programming languages and there were no Facebook to widely deploy OCaml and Haskell. And now, AI looks to make the averages even harder to beat.

Even today, if you round up the smartest members of a CS grad class, it is going to be quite difficult to directly compete with a machine learning model with access to huge amounts of data and computing resources. Looking further forwards, if machine learning is able to provide "good enough" alternatives to most human-created software, the software startup narrative — that a few talented and determined people can beat billions in resources — may not even be so relevant anymore.
> Next time you build or choose a system, consider one that can run free software.

The only workstation that boots with entirely free software is like, the Talos II PowerPC, with a minimum cost of $5000.

Everyone else requires a binary blob somewhere. Either a UEFI blob, BIOS blob, some kind of driver somewhere, or whatnot. Raspberry Pi, AMD, Intel, everybody.

And before the Talos II, I don't think an "Open PC" devoid of proprietary binary blobs even existed. At least, something that is reasonably modern (ie: 64-bit, decent security, decent support with modern OSes)
I assume HN readership has grown, with readers probably giving out roughly on average the same number of up-votes they used to for story submissions per any time unit (maybe some variability). The number of points it takes for a story to beat out sibling stories should then also increase. There may be other effects such as a wider-variety-of-stories-being-submitted than from before that would perhaps squash per-story-votes-needed-to-stay-on-front-page.

One might say "but there are more stories being submitted too" -- but the unique number of these wouldn't go up linearly as the number of readers goes up, since they're pulling from roughly the same universe of possible stories-of-interest.

EDIT: paragraph about "more stories submitted"
> Say a law like this comes into effect, then they'll need to change their practices / delete that data etc.

Oh honey.
I read just recently that one of Foursquares biggest revenue slices is selling their users check in data to hedge funds. On a previous HN post, one commenter claimed the app Robinhood sells their order flow through clearing houses, which the net result is hedge funds and other such firms trade off of — under the assumption that Robinhood investors are emotional rather than educated.

Hedge funds in general seem like a major consumer of retail data, which makes sense. Home Depot just announced earnings: imagine if you knew exactly how many people went into Home Depot, walked out empty handed, and then went to Lowe’s... how you could profit off that data in the market.
Brutal. Their most recent round was $275 mil at a $1.3 billion valuation.
The best option would be to require the data be properly anonymized before being stored, used, or sold. That way the companies can still sell it for profit, the buyers can still gain useful insights from the data, and the users location is not available to anyone with enough money.

I'm not sure how possible it is to anonymize that kind of data in a way that prevents it from being deanonymized, or how useful the anonymized data would be to the buyers, but this seems like a better solution than a blanket ban to me.
I have the opposite issue with namecheap. I have my domains on auto-renew, and every time they're about to be due for their renewal, namecheap sends me a scary email saying I don't have the funds to renew, and only the next day do they auto-renew my domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port
Which is fine when you're doing nothing but a simple operation on a string, then reencoding it.

Seriously, how many strings have you ever ran across that are more than 1kb?

how many strings have you ran across that are more than 256 codepoints?
CFengine, at least version 3, was probably the furthest away from string manipulation (and I was given the impression that text file content manipulation was considered a bad idea with it). What killed it was promise theory, which is actually a great theory and works quite well but made writing the bundles painfully hard and also hard to maintain. Also during the early days of v3 it was probably lacking a ton of essential functions so even if you were trying to do things the right way you would bump into feature limitations. I think this put a lot of people off adopting it widely and why Chef and Puppet did so well.

Puppet and Chef is actually quite good and I still prefer it to Ansible for a number of reasons. I've certainly run it fine in environments of many thousands of servers, though I can understand that it can implode for some people at scale if they design their deployments in a certain way or structure their manifests/cookbooks a certain way. That said I've certainly seen Ansible fold on much smaller infrastructure, but that is also down to a number of factors that can be avoided or mitigated. Idempotency with Puppet is really strong which is something you want if not every single system in your environment is ephemeral, with Chef it's almost as good with that but not always with the first run, with Ansible you have to specifically consider and aim for it when writing code for it in your playbooks.

The fact that you get used to having Chef or Puppet run e.g. every half an hour is a good thing, where Ansible runs are more ad-hoc. This leads me to another thing that bothers me and that is where people think it's a situation of having to use e.g. Puppet or Ansible as if they're conflicting choices for the same tasks. They have a lot of things in common, but Puppet is more for managing and ensuring changes in an idempotent, non-conflicting way while Ansible is more for doing something a bit like that but more for ad-hoc or orchestration tasks. I think it's good to use both but also be sure what you use it for, since one can do a bit of what the other thing is good at but doesn't do it so well.

For example, I would consider using Ansible to do deployments and releases, rotate SSH keys, execute failovers, or even to install the Puppet agent for the first time. I would use Puppet to deploy and update monitoring agents and configuration, user access, ensure directory permissions, configure system things like rsyslog, logrotate, Postfix, ntp, etc.
The gang of teen hackers who snatched the keys to Microsoft's videogame empire
Tweetbot will not pay that, they'll poll instead of stream and have a worse product because of it.
The court wasn't backed into a corner. If it wasn't a breach of fiduciary duty the case would have been won by the Newmark -- they can't just say, "They did something wrong so we have to punish them somehow, and you only gave us one option." That isn't how the law works.

The section you quoted makes clear that whether or not it was a breach of contract, it certainly was a breach of fiduciary duty because those duties were the sole basis of the complaint.
But the political problem is that you need far more money to build transit than can be achieved with VC money. Unless a startup has managed to somehow reduce the cost of right-of-way acquisition it's not a solution that keeps the cost of developing transit down.

There was a model that worked; transit has historically been used to allow property development. This was used in the development of London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, and the multitudes of inner-ring streetcar suburbs in American metropolitan areas. The problem is that whereas Hong Kong and Tokyo held onto the properties, Western companies that used this model tended to just sell off the property, requiring Ponzi-scheme levels of land acquisition. That collapsed when they ran out of money and the federal government started building free interstates to goose the suburb-building instead. And now in 2018 there's very little cheap farmland within sane rail commuting distance of metro areas, and the model doesn't work in places like New York where a block of property acquisition is equivalent to building an entire train line. Even Tokyo has stopped building new railways using this model because it just does not scale.
Thank you for your contributions in making the world a little more shitty! /s
I feel like this has a lot to do with the "cattle, not pets" mindset and disposability of modern infrastructure. For instance the author talks about patching a container. But that's not idiomatic- instead you would include the patch in your build pipeline and deploy the new image.
> The GP does this via a neat hack, but you can also do this in a much more understandable fashion by simply having the body of every Makefile rule start out by shelling out to some script in your favorite language.

I'm not sure what you mean? How would this allow you to use, say, Python as the language for recipes? Just having Make drop straight into Python kind of defeats the purpose of Make.
Yes, it's definitely not something related only to Docker, it's today's culture of trusting all possible code only because someone placed it on Github.
Wow. I am very out of the loop. What the hell is happening?

> exploding bullets that are causing severe injuries reported today and on other days

How is this okay?!
If Chicago is too violent then it's equivalent to 6 months in NYC which most people consider safe these days.
Oh, duh.

Still, javascript.
Well, I wouldn't say "perfectly" (I'm Greek). It helps if one has grown up with religious relatives and so was exposed to the language of the new testament for a few years. I was- I can read the new testament easily enough.

On the other hand, the further back texts go -Plutarch, Xenophon, Herodotus- it gets harder and harder to understand. Homer in particular is nigh-on incomprehensible to me. It's how I imagine Greek sounds to people who don't know any :)
Ask HN: How can one of average abilities become financially independent quickly?
You're missing the point - it's not about making receiving the cryptocurrency illegal. It's about making buying the cryptocurrency illegal or otherwise infeasible. The unit economics of ransomware stop making sense when more of the victims are unable or unwilling to pay. Making cryptocurrency illegal makes ransomware victims less able and willing to pay the ransom.
you're really harshing the buzz in this chain, bravo tango whiskey.
> The assets and design metrics were (for the most part) taken from an actual installation of Windows 95

DMCA pulldown in 3.. 2..

If you are thinking of using this, consider the fact that any assets ripped from Windows are copyright infringements.
What Made You Switch to DuckDuckGo?
Traditional ways of doing all those things are faster and cheaper than blockchain.

Transaction clearing between banks isn't particularly fast, but that's because of legacy legal issues more than it is anything technological. The actual transfer of large sums can happen very quickly.
What is the reason, in your opinion, that these people were born with an irrational hatred for coal? Something in their DNA maybe?

Or could it be that the consequences of coal negatively affects their community?
By the way, if you’re going to add SIMD intrinsics into the Rust standard, I think you better contact Intel and ask them whether they OK that.

Or seek legal advice.

According to google patents, Intel has 4537 patents related to SIMD. The reason why GCC is OK with their intrinsics, in 2002 they were put there by Intel employees. Intel obviously wants people to use them because this helps Intel sell their CPUs. But having them standardized can potentially decrease Intel’s profits by undermining these patents and enabling hardware and software emulators.
Is there an industry term for non-official APIs? I often find myself wondering if a third-party service already exists around some aspect of a platform's "crown jewels", but don't really know how to search for them.
Trump eliminates national cyber-coordinator job
Why? They don't have some special access to gambling that others don't and are known for losing phenomenal amounts of money.
The deVries estimate of ~2.55GW/26PH/s (mid Mar 2018) tracks closely with mrb’s lower bound estimate of 1.62GW/16.2PH/s (mid Jan 2018). In just two months the power consumption and hash rate has risen 60%. Two months later, mid-May 2018, the hash rate is around 31 PH/s, an increase of 20%.

This is on par with historical increases documented by mrb (325 TH/s in late Feb 2017 to 640 TH/s in late Jul 2017, an increase of 100% in 5 months). If we see an average growth of 100% each 4 months, then we will easily surpass 100 PH/s by year-end, which is around 10GW, or around 0.4% of the world energy production.
I feel Ghost is trying to be the ideal replacement for WordPress i.e. you have a lot of engineers who love JavaScript and node but also having a marketing team that wants a blogging platform.

I also agree it feels like static site generators are starting to take over (personally think its an awesome direction the web is headed towards for some sites) but not everyone is familiar how to use them so Ghost is another nice alternative.
To be fair, they are not completely locked down like I may have made it sound.

The usb port restriction is absolutely true for laptops, but colo desktops probably do not have this restriction, or just a more lax restriction. Also, its not true for all laptops of the company, but usb access does require explicit permissions and a new-issue laptop, so they do have a list of people who have riskier laptops, and may need to be issued a different travel laptop vs engineering laptop.

The laptop's epoxied ports likely prevent distracted traveling workers from having their laptops hacked with usb-keys inserted when they aren't looking.
> I can cite studies too.

Please post a meta analysis from the Cochrane Collab. That's a source that doctors use.

> By the way, the blogger is a PhD in biochemistry. You're not going to win a science battle with her.

Arguments stand on merits. There are plenty of professionals in their respective fields that advocate pseudoscience.
Great work and writeup at Ghost. I bookmarked it as an example to give to others wanting to do business and good things at same time. Far as ideas for reinvestment, two things come to mind:

1. Build more tools that solve people's problems created by others vendors. As in, move sideways a bit diversifying your operation. Even better if the tools/apps complement each other where you can increase benefit per customer while cross-selling. Although not endorsing them (not a customer), Zoho seems like a good example of this where they keep developing additional products that might benefit their customers on top of their original ones. Enough FOSS-oriented non-profits doing that in enough sectors can stop a lot of lock-in and abusive practices over time via the alternatives they provide.

2. Invest in maintenance or security improvements of dependencies, esp libraries or infrastructure. These are often treated as externalities leading to a lot of problems we see like in report below [1]. Ghost could deliver its good products/services on top of taking some responsibility for infrastructure it depends on. People buying Ghost get the immediate value plus knowledge they're supporting those things as well.

Just some ideas for you. Keep up the great work over there and good luck to you all! :)

[1] https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet...
It's worth noting that some prominent figures in AI/ML are saying we are due for another "AI winter" since it's being oversold again. I don't know if I agree with that, since we are seeing some interesting things, but technically Google is kind of saying they can tentatively pass the Turing Test with phones and meanwhile even a car decked out with extra sensors and 360 LIDAR cannot detect a simple stop sign with mud on it.
Just after I updated that comment I got another keyboard with multiple keys missing. I believe the keyboards are replaced for free as part of licensing them out.

I worked IT for a High School and kids would tear laptop keyboards apart. The school wouldn't replace them so I had to do my best to fix them. When I saw a keycap come off when I started here and they said replace the whole board I sighed with so much relief.
Since USB is how you debug on Android and even flash the software, that doesn't ring true. If the Uber case is any indication, they instead give you all the freedom but essentially rootkit the system and keep very comprehensive logs and access controls.
SHOW HN: Cobalt – fast, lightweight ethereum dapp prototyping
And hospitals (not the glueing part, but the blocking of anything that's recognized as a USB storage medium).
> That would raise all the same interstate commerce issues that led the judge to block the export ban in this case.

The judge blocked this on contract, not interstate commerce grounds.

FTFA: “The legal dispute hinged on whether the coal ban violated an agreement between the city and a company developing a bulk loading terminal near the city’s port.”
A strong law like the GPDR would actually shake things up - a lot.

As it is, the large players like Facebook, google, Salesforce and a bunch of others like our banks, credit card companies, internet providers are all extremely well established.

A GPDR-like law would open up entirely new ways of doing business partly because these companies could no longer do business the way they are. “Free” services could no longer make their money by selling your data.

We could end up with a more “honest” set of services. Like a social network that’s actually free or paid for by individual contributions.
Design systems will replace design jobs
Stallman is not a prophet and there are many valid arguments against his views.
WebAssembly: Up and Running (with C, C++, Rust, and Go)