skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting article! My doubt is about how to use a "problem roadmap" in practice.

It seems to me that a client problem is rarely completely "solved". So how to decide when it is time to move on to the next problem? It is clear when a feature is "done", it is less clear when a problem is done.
I’m not sure, though not allowing “crypto mining” specifically is also pretty unusual.

In this way, they can protect their power industry and still remain attractive to other businesses who might bring other benefits to the area without having to redefine who is and isn’t allowed.
This solves the rogue operator problem, but doesn't solve the bit where an operator comes in expecting to build a large mining installation. Even if they paid something close to the export premium (perhaps lower due to diminished transmission losses), the asks are larger than the utility currently provides.

This leaves the utility with a dilemma. Bitcoin miners can up and move pretty easily, but the hydro dams are stuck for life. If somewhere cheaper pops up, or if a double spend attack causes a bitocalpyse, the utility has little recourse but to pass on the costs to remaining consumers.
tiling and vectorizing are well known.
> Well, doubles can represent all the numbers a 52 bit int can, so there's not a huge reason to not use doubles for whole numbers.

Not exactly.

> It also means that new programmers don't get confused when they do 1/3 and get 1

Is this (actually, getting 0 from 1/3) really more surprising than doing 2+2 and getting 3.9999999999999?

Floats are mostly inexact and introduce errors with almost every operation. It's something you have to constantly keep in mind when doing any kind of math with meaningful comsequences. I for one think that exact types are both more useful for many practical cases, as well as significantly simpler in use.
It's irrelevant what the customer wants to use the electricity for. The increase in electric cars is already challenging how we manage our power grids. If it's in demand, charge more.
That's really neat. It looks like the company is defunct -- what happened?
There is a difference between untrusted and unverified or informal.

Do I expect visitors to my personal blog to have any security or privacy problems because I use Google Fonts to make it look nice? No.

Do I have any sort of formal agreement that is binding on Google to guarantee that, or that obliges them to notify me if they change their privacy policy in this respect? Also no.

And exactly the same applies to, for example, numerous popular JS libraries that are hosted for free on reputable CDNs.
I didn’t downvote you, but reading your comment it looked like you treated interest-based incomes as somehow morally “bad” (at least judging by your use of the term “usury”) and you contrasted that with stock-exchanged-based incomes which, as a result, were painted in a morally “better” light. There were probably some HN-ers who didn’t like that emotional approach.

Now, your opinion in itself isn’t wrong, it’s what the majority of long-term investors suggest, afaik, but I personally think that those investors (including Buffet) have been “blinded” by the exceptional economical and political run of the US as a country in the last 70 or so years. Had they been active at the start of the 20th century and had they invested in the Russian, Chinese or even German stock-exchange their funds would have been completely wiped out by now, after they themselves would have probably died horrific deaths because of the capitals they held (the case in Russia after 1917 and China after 1948).
Interesting that one of the figures we see most positively went from believing in violence to believing in nonviolence.

De Klerk similarly had a great moderating influence. The alternative to the nonviolence of him and Mandela would have been a racial civil war in which tens of thousands died.
Israeli's Self-Flying Cormorant (drone) Whisks Wounded Soldiers to Safety
You’ve generalized to a point of nonsense, I’m afraid

Amazon and Pets.com didn’t possess truly novel tech, to a trained eye

I don’t think truly novel tech matters much to most people.

I think ease of utilitarian life is good enough

We don’t need the energy sucking monstrosity that are the data centers we have if we looked at different models of commerce

This is just getting people to be tribal over something that appears magical but will fade out

Goodhart’s Law, Buffets Institutional imperative, and similar ideas, will win out. Human quest for novelty will end bitcoin and its tribal urges for nostalgia and fetishizing their LEGO train

Humanity doesn’t care to ogle dead men’s workshops showcasing their individual brilliance for long
My guess:

Probabilistic Scraping of Plain Text Tables (edinburghhacklab.com) 92 points by tlarkworthy on Sept 5, 2013 | 12 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334178#6337769

http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/09/probabalistic-scraping-o...
A synopsis of a short story where the protagonist writes -1 every day.

Can’t find the story, nor the comment. My memory of this is also very fuzzy at this point so it might be a completely different idea.
there's only 4 billion possible IPs, you can reverse the entire search space in a few hours

the only way round this is to make the webserver spend a non-trivial amount of time running some derivation function on the IP for each and every request (remember you can't cache the result if the entire point is not to store the IP)
Aren’t energy prices supposed to pay for that? In France for example, in addition to per kWh rate you also pay a subscription charge corresponding to the maximum amount of current you can draw from the grid. The miners who need more power would pay for higher current and thus pay for the upgrades to the grid.
Oh, I care a lot about privacy. Because of that I made many choices to never even start using services like Facebook or carry a cell phone with me. I also run white-list only javascript in browser and host all my own services (web/mail/voice chat/etc). These things have made it harder to stay involved with friends, harder to use the web, but it was my choice and the right one.

The idea that people have to be protected from themselves and their choices is at the heart of GDPR. It prevents people from making the correct choice of not using services you disagree with and keeps those services profiting and ever more centralized.

But digging even deeper, there's this delusion that your usage patterns of someone elses' property are yours and to me it seems crazy. You wouldn't say that physical grocery stores cannot keep track of who enters their premises and what they bought (or how long their phone SSID was in range of $x aisle). Or that they should be fined, and have those fined backed up with government violence, if someone demanded the grocer delete the data.
What is money really? Is it just people's attention? Isn't that what Facebook is capturing then selling off to advertisers?

Isn't that what Bitcoin is doing as well? Capturing people's attention as well as development resources (minds/energy) from some of the smartest people right now?
Crypto and the AI boom are funneling money to Nvidia for R&D and to ramp up production.

If you want advancement in graphics cards to come more quickly, it’s not a bad trend.
Maybe the problem is that most of the articles nowadays could be shortened to just a few sentences as the rest of the body is just a filler and people just don't want to waste time going to the linked sites to ingest it?
An article about an MIT student and his friend who eventually committed suicide, talking about the n+1.
Of course violence is acceptable? Are we honestly at a point in society where we need to ask this question? Do people really believe the state is entitled to a monopoly on violence? Not all problems can be solved by talking it out or by "working within the system"

Humans are obsessed with violence and conflict. Though sports, movies, video games, debate, and fighting have somewhat sublimated this obsession.
Cold brew at Trader Joe’s makes it even easier.
I built out a ruby-ffi test immediately upon seeing this. I want to put a little more effort in to it (I need to run some errands and spent all of 5 minutes on this), but... 2 samples/runs, 500M calls: 51050, 50853. No surprises there, really.

edit/ Ran this on my desktop (gaming rig) i7-4790k, 16GB RAM, gcc 7.3.1 20180406, Arch on Windows Subsystem for Linux. I have a machine closer in specs to the original authors that I'll test it against later today (hopefully).
Why You Can't Just Block EU Visitors, EU Customers, or Any EU Traffic Under GDPR
"The government" probably doesn't say it; people who are negatively impacted or forced to take on extra risk because of mining activity are the ones to say something.

For example, the electricity provider probably objects precisely when the current you're drawing exceeds the safe limits of their equipment and wiring. If they're particularly on the ball, they at least come investigate as soon as they notice an unusually high current-draw for that individual residence.

You're generally free to exceed the safety limits of the equipment and wiring within your own structure, since you pay all the costs of any resulting incident/accident. But if you're covering those costs via a homeowner's insurance policy, that policy/company might have some things to say about current loads and building codes, as prerequisites for covering you.

In a rental property your ability to run mining rigs would depend on the lease, and the landlord's degree of vigilance in monitoring unusual electrical loads. If there's an incident or fire due to current-draw nobody noticed, it probably ends up in court. If you promised (by signing a lease with a relevant clause in it) that you wouldn't engage in excessive current-drawing activities, you lose that case pretty much instantly. Otherwise it'll be up to their side to prove that your negligence caused any losses or damages to the landlord's property, not to mention other tenants' property if they also sue you.
Is there a basis to this claim that Bitcoin is a lie?
It's odd how a word can feel "on the tip of your tongue" and intuitions about its number of sounds and their characteristics can be remarkably accurate, especially if you consider the interposition of linguistically similar sounds. And it can be totally misleading when your memories are incorrect, to the point for me at least of making it nearly impossible to recall a word until I have shifted focus to something else.
>while maybe slavery was long ago to have been "worked out" of the genes, it was roughly just two or three generations ago that there was segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings etc.

Slavery in the US was only two human lifetimes ago. My grandfather has living memory of older relatives who were born slaves. And then white people who's grandparents were homesteaders, farmers, or small business owners wonder why black people today have no wealth.
Thanks rmk! This looks to be perfect for what I'm looking for.
But... but, its math, and new. So it must be cool. Right? Plus when they talk about it they get to say 'crypto' which sounds hackeresque.

Humans are hilarious. Anyone here old enough to remember the dot-com boom with absurd business models, that, when questioned, got the response that you obviously just don't 'get it'.

Proof of energy consuming work as currency is a sure path to environmental catastrophe.
Today one would use reflink with xfs or btrfs for a finer-grained "hardlink trick" solution.

But that still won't deduplicate renamed files if you're using something like rsync w/--link-dest for the backups.
People trade stocks like they do Pokemon but we call them 'shares'. Does that make it less like Pokemon than calling them 'coins'? Also, you trade coins all the time. It's called coins. Fiat coins.
Probably this demo: http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528797

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988
I have met plenty of bitter older single women.
And yet, starting tomorrow, we might be at the start of another down cycle like the one that ran from 1966 to 1982. That was 16 years. For any actual living individual, it would be life changing, in a bad way. Even for young people. From 1966 to 1982 the nominal stock market index declined slightly, at a time when inflation was in the double digits, so the real rate of return was horrible.
> risk of fire

Is it actually riskier than a resident living in the same place? I don’t think so.

A faulty mining installation would catch fire early on, and if that doesn’t occur then it’s mostly safe. A resident on the other hand would be using risky appliances every day (cooker, oven, heating, hair dryer, etc), which combined with the potential human error, seems like a bigger risk.

> environmental impact

How does zoning change this in any way? Whether you’re drawing tons of energy from a residential or commercial building doesn’t change the fact that energy could be damaging the environment. I’d argue that in this particular case though, the energy we’re talking about is from a hydroelectric plant and so fully renewable.

> the county will be left holding the bag

What would that “bag” be? Sure, the miners would pull out, but then the town would be back at the exact situation as before mining, albeit with an upgraded electrical and network infrastructure paid by the miners - I don’t see how this is a bad thing.
I suppose the author means that the population is plateauing, and with it, the demand.
It is a thought provoking question. Take Gandhi, he succeeded because of British sensibilities, the same strategy wouldn’t have been as effective against the Nazis for example. A great deal of it depends on the adversary.
Nothing to do with MS, as far as I can see.
> I don’t see how that’s possible. If two regulations are in completely unrelated areas, how can they combine to destroy something?

Let's take three unrelated regulations. Factories can't pollute the environment, vehicles have to undergo crash testing, and buildings above a certain height are not allowed in a particular area.

Now we look at a local newspaper. It has to buy newsprint from a factory, the factory's costs have gone up due to environmental regulations, so the price of newsprint goes up. Then it has to deliver the print edition to readers, the safety standards cause vehicles to be more expensive, which raises its delivery costs. Then its rent is higher because the zoning regulation prevents the construction of more commercial rental properties.

The local newspaper is struggling to survive as it is. It can survive any two of these regulations but the combination of all three puts it out of business. (And having too many newspapers go out of business may put the newsprint factory out of business etc.)

So we need to prioritize. Environmental regulations and vehicle safety are pretty important, so we should have those and not the zoning regulations.

> There are plenty of cases where regulation benefits all of the involved parties.

You're talking about the consequences of the regulation, not the compliance costs. Even if everyone is better off -- even if the regulation is worth having -- it still required everyone to spend some amount of resources on lawyers and safety equipment and so on. You can only do that finitely many times before you exhaust your available resources.

Which means the regulations we have should be only the ones that yield major returns.
The technology keeps advancing and once the efficiency reaches a place that some consensus network can become
a democratized cloud (the SAFE network is a strong contender) then there will be actual value behind the tokens. For now bitcoin represents the belief in that dream.
There was a thread about interviewing, someone talking about how hard interviewing was and failing dozens of them even as a senior engineer. (there is a thread about that once every month or two, indeed) A commenter responded saying something along the lines of, "When you find the right fit/role, the interview will seem suspiciously easy."

I thought it was interesting because it's such a huge anecdote without any ways of backing it up, but for some reasons it does match my own experience in the past decade+ for almost every job offer I've landed (a handful). For every interview where I felt like I struggled really hard (even though in the end I was able to solve the problems the interviewers asked), I did not get offers. For the ones I did land, it always seemed really easy and somewhat like "what? is that it?"
I didn't understand anything but man those pictures were beautiful. Would be pretty cool to print them out and hang them on a wall.
Don't most areas charge you less for the first X kWh? I understand that you have 3 tiers, but wherever I went there was always 2.
I last built a gaming rig in 2012 and just this January decided it was time to upgrade. It took me a bit to figure out why the hell a mid-range graphics card was $700 minimum.
Sounds like pdf2htmlEX. Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988

Pdf2htmlEX – Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format (github.com) 161 points by coolwanglu on May 5, 2013 | 48 comments

http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html (Demo of research paper)

http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/
Now waiting for the Arduino based open source version ;)
Why do you like it? To me it sounds stupid, it's the same electricity, it costs the same to produce and all other side effects effects like network load or pollution are the same too. Why first X units would cost less?

Even more idiotic is that it apparently depends on the size of your house, so if you have a larger home, you get more cheap electricity.
Ghostery Email Incident Update
Howdoo: Revolutionizing social interactions
There is an ultimate application of social-networking the “Howdoo”, a completely secure, transparent blockchain and cryptocurrency based social site, completely revolutionized the formal and informal mode of communication along with offerings of earning the crypto-tokens. There will be no breeching of user’s personal details and created content unlike existing platforms such as the Facebook. The “Howdoo” is basically decentralized social forum designed for messaging but with a crypto token known as µDoo token. The utility token is meant to be used for howdoo transactions requested from users, advertisers, those who generate content, product/services sellers, gamers and operators. The token can be easily transferred and can be converted into fiat currency as it has monetary value.
The advertisement here will be bigger yet better than ever before, where the promotional power will be under the control of platform’s users, as they can set volume traffic of ads in their feed and they will also get paid for watching/clicking/responding the ads. Howdoo along with µDoo’s will be redirecting advertisements in better way by giving them fair, honest, direct and transparent feedback from the customers.

Howdoo introduces itself with transparency as there will be POC (proof-of-contribution) for every users as they are going to get rewarded for the participation in the network in any way.
The µDoo sale is live for users to purchase it. Around 60 % of the hard cap has been raised. Token sale is ending on 12th June. Invest in this revolutionary project when you still have time.

If you are more likely to take interest in getting involved in a platform where there is free account then let me tell you that you are still paying them by allowing them to interfere with your lives and given personal data. So, wisely choose network for personal social communication.

ETH address: 0x895F650c7CDA6930600f34343f409b103893C403
The idea behind self-documenting code is that much documentation that would normally be required because the code is so poorly written, becomes unnecessary if the code was rewritten to more clearly express what it’s doing.

It is absolutely true that code cannot be fully self-documenting, and the idea of writing self-documenting code isn’t to suggest that it can be. E.g., why things were done a certain way is not readily expressible through code. And it’s often helpful to give a plain-language overview of the purpose and responsibility of a class, for example.

In my experience, writing as “self-documenting” code as possible is vastly preferable to a culture which cares more about writing comments for everything than writing readable code. People end up writing obligatory but worthless comments; comments are strewn everywhere making it even harder to read or skim code; and you end up getting vastly more comment rot.
But overall a building wall is pretty effective at shielding from that kind of noise.

I’d very much prefer a quiet white noise from the racks in the above unit than someone arguing at 3am or a stupid toddler screaming. You can easily tune out “stable” noise like the one produced by fans, but you can’t for irregular noise like people talking or someone dropping heavy stuff at night.
It's making your company's products and services irrelevant, as we'll just shrug and move on. That's got to hit the bottom line.
If it’s a public municipal utility, any dividend in lieu of price reductions, should go to the local government, not the individual residents.

The local government could then issue out checks to everyone if they want, but more likely it would go towards general budget and benefit everyone.
No, this was someone who was still in good health and wanted to be proactive about avoiding possible future sickness and even just aging. But thanks for posting that.
The problem with Stackoverflow answers of the form "You asked about doing X, but it looks like you are trying to do X to achieve Y, and X is not a good way to achieve Y. You want to do Z. Here's how to do Z" is that later when people who actually do need to do X are looking for help, their searches keep turning up these damned answers that don't tell how to do X.

SO needs a flag on questions that is set if there is an answer to the actual question as asked and clear otherwise, and that can be used as a search filter.
Declining to date someone fat is seen as bullying? That's a new one. I know stupid, controlling people who would say that declining to date someone of a different race is racist, although it's clearly not, but I've never heard this level of stupidity. Maybe there are some extreme morons who really think like this and don't understand the concept of personal choice or even the concept of personal taste and attraction but these idiots are certainly not the majority not do they dictate what is and isn't acceptable as far as dating. In fact the idea of someone else dictating who one dates or not is beyond stupid, controlling, infuriating, and authoritarian. I don't doubt that such shitty people exist, but their hate-because that's the only thing that drives such insane ideas-does not dictate culture.
> But what are you gonna do about it then? Ban snippets? Tax snippets? Wait for Google to be the web? Specially regulate Google?

I think I would ban search engines from doing other things, ban or regulate targetted advertising, require social networks to be interoperable, and ban social networks from owning other social networks (so Facebook would have to sell off Instagram).