skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article failed to mention the original reason why Codec2 is invented.

In digital amateur radio communication, currently the most widely-used codec is AMBE. But AMBE is a proprietary codec, covered by patents, unhackable - the counter-thesis of amateur radio. Codec2 was born to bring freedom to digital amateur radio communication, and technically even better than AMBE.
So where do you place Aethaer who are selling bottles of "fresh" air? http://www.aethaer.com/shop There are companies selling other nationalities of air. (It's bad enough just writing that out)

Aethaer seem to have grown since their little bit of viral fame a few years ago.
The impression I got is that he is more of a technology philosopher than an actual technologist. He dreams up things, but he doesn't realize them and he hasn't managed to convince others to implement his vision either. In terms of software there is precious little to show for 50 years of thinking about this.

And it isn't like this is some recent brainwave. By the time the web rolled around he'd had 30 years to do something. And as the web came into being he had an excellent chance to make it a vehicle for his ideas, but he didn't.

One thing I remember from a (longish) chat I had with him is that some elements of his ideas exist today, but perhaps not where you would think about them. For instance in non-destructive media editing software you have concepts that remind me of some of his ideas.

I think the one key takeaway I got from his talk and the chat afterwards is that only what you do really counts. Ideas really are worth less though not worthless.
I used the VoiceRecognition API to control my music player using voice commands - works great for cooking!

https://smalldata.tech/blog/2017/11/15/building-a-voice-assi...

I also wrote my own little VPN kill swtich - great for ensuring that my browser shuts down if the VPN dies.

https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/04/11/building-a-vpn-kill-s...
It says fonts should be 24 pixels tall, but obviously readability then depends on screen resolution.
I do this for many years now. My one check is that when the credit bill comes (electronically) I sort it by size and check that at least all the big charges make sense. Also I have alerts on my cards for any charge over a few dollars.
Do you think VAR is good for football?
That's a horrible article coming from the economist. It is short, empty on details and plain stupid.
Here's the start of the series: https://technicshistory.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/the-transis...
Thanks for sharing your learning approach - could you elaborate a little more with some examples on how you tackled difficult subjects?
For the bath, couldn't you add a sensor that detects water level in the bath and use it to override the lights? Even something as simple as measuring the weight of the tub would work, and would simultaneously cover the shower cases too.
You realize that what you read was first page or of special report you must buy to see?
The Jews weren't merely fellow Semitic speakers, they were neigubours to the Phoenecians. And rivals.

In fact this is a point in favour of the Jews, in that even if such practices were not common among them; they would still have a strong reason to bother condemning them because there hated neighbours did it.
IANAL, but the UK's copyright laws appear to me to have many of the same restrictions as the DMCA when it comes to circumventing copyright protection measures. And it wouldn't surprise me to find other countries had passed similar laws.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_and_Related_Rights_R...
It's a point of you dishonestly misrepresenting your own interest in FileZilla installing malware for any users still foolish enough to download it.
How do you think most estates started? Profiting off crime and leaving it to their family. The fundamental problems of capitalism include exactly this scenario.
This Article sums it up well (2015): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11936981/Who-in...
Solarcity no longer exists (Tesla/solarpanels does)
http://www.solarcity.com redirects to tesla.com
What does [Flagged] mean? The news part here is that Tesla bought SolarCity back in the days, but now transitioning to no longer use their business model, tech (all in for solar roof panels) and as of today the name SolarCity. You could say that they didn't really need to buy SolarCity in the first place, with all its debts. At least, that seems interesting to discuss.
> Kahn (DARPA)

Like... while getting his Ph.D so I'm not wrong about the academic link. Though sure, it was literally built by the military industrial complex, but the original implication that the military somehow has a primacy over an idea that was going to take off one way or another is still absurd.
You're genuinely unaware that the U.S. has done the same thing for decades?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt...

One point the NYT briefly tries to make — which is all I'm addressing in the rest of this comment — is that the U.S. in (very) recent years has mainly interfered to support more democratic candidates, and oppose more authoritarian candidates. And Russia, NYT claims, interferes to support totalitarian candidates and sow chaos. Implying subtly that Trump couldn't possibly be anything other than a strong-man or chaos candidate. That there couldn't possibly be any legitimate democracy-respecting reasons to support him over Hillary (campaign donor influence apparently is perfectly democratic, when it's your candidate receiving the donations aka bribes). Trump may be many things: A nationalist, a pathological liar, in need of a fitness regime and a better diet, and a not very nice person (by most accounts)... but I have not seen any attempt by him to subvert democracy or separation of powers. I have not seen him act particularly chaotically, either. (Weren't Democrats afraid he would start a nuclear war the second he got the nuclear football?) To the extent he's a horrible president, that's the fault of the 2-party system and his catastrophically awful opposing candidate.

So, The NYT basically says, yeah, the U.S. interfered in a lot of elections, but recently we've been doing it for the good of democracy. Russia, meanwhile, interferes to the detriment of democracy.

First, that doesn't change the fact that it's intervention, and intervention itself is anti-democratic. If another country wants to democratically elect a strong man, that's not so good, but do other democratic countries have a right to interfere? Maybe the populations of those countries understand something intuitively about their politics that we don't, and the candidate that looks more authoritarian is really the better of two evils?

Second, when we have interfered — in Libya, in Iraq, in Syria — and it turns out that the "democratic" "freedom fighter" opponents of the existing strong-man leader are terrorists or aligned with terrorists, or the country simply devolves into chaos and faction warfare in the absence of that more totalitarian leader, what then? Is interference justified to support a more freedom-loving candidate when we have no idea (or we know perfectly well, but don't care) that the country is not currently viable as a more open democracy, and needs either a totalitarian ruler or to go through the cleansing fire of a long civil war to cement the concept and importance of democracy in the people's minds?
Although it's good to realise "you can't tell people anything", it's also good to be aware that "people can't tell you anything". As in: you're (and I'm) probably not exceptionally special, so we should take into account that we're probably not able to grasp the full picture when someone describes us something, and thus might do well toning down some of our inherent reflexive scepticism sometimes.

Somewhat related: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes
Using those numbers, it is extremely unlikely that you will fail to meet anyone of >145 IQ if you attend any of those top 50 schools.

Compare your earlier claim, "statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter". That is the opposite of the truth. If you are at a place that selects for high IQs, you are very likely to meet multiple people with IQs greater than 145. You are very unlikely to manage to avoid those people.

> sorry for rounding up

You were closer than I was, so touché. That said, the accurate figure is still quite far from your rounded estimate; while it may look like 99.86% is close to 99.9%, a 0.14% cutoff selects 40% more people than a 0.1% cutoff would.
GitLab offers a blanket checkbox on signup with a bunch of legalese, there is no fine grained opt-in to the data collected. Worse, as you said, it is all opt-out.
My bank gives only readonly access by default with the username/password. Any transaction (transfer, operation) requires a one-time pin (TAN) anyway. So I'm not particularly worried about leaking my password.

I wish they had an API but I just use a selenium script essentially. Luckily(?) logging in to this particular account only requires user/password and no fancy codes etc. I guess when the system is built with readonly default and OTP for anything else, then the login can be kept simple.
I'm going to be so amazed if the API (PSD2 if you want to Google it) turns out to be what we want.

I'm fully expecting banks to throw extreme security hurdles and probably registration fees in the way if they can.

Hopefully I will be wrong.
YOUTUBE STOP PAYING MILLIONS OF CREATORS WITH SMALL INCOME BY THE FACE, BY THE FACE. WITH YOUR CHANGES NOW ADD METHODS OF PAYMENT, AND NOW YOU WANT TO REDUCE CHARGES.

Well if that is not to take advantage of the user. What is it?
To me, as long as you are not DDOSing their product and apply some delays while fetching the page I think scraping is okay.
I loathe seeing articles from The Economist appear on this site. A low quality, shallow, ideologically driven rag.
Yes. The Romans they accepted as inevitable that vast numbers of infants would be killed all the time. The Carthagians would have also had to deal with this reality. Perhaps they did so by framing it as a sacrifice to Moloch -- a practice which the Romans found nearly as abhorrent as we do.

But then, given that the killings were happening anyway, the existence of an infant necropolis does not prove that sacrificing was going on.
German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says (2016)
Couldn't agree more. See my comment above. My online bank only provides readonly access with a password. Anything else requires a one-time-password anyway.

I'd be much more worried about my email getting hacked though.
NASA reveals new plan to stop asteroids before they hit Earth
You're already hinting at why it doesn't make sense to you:

> from what I understand WASM offers from pretty big performance boost over JS and I think that is really where it will shine.

That's exactly the problem WASM was designed to solve. It wasn't meant to solve the perceived problem of a fractured development landscape, it was meant to achieve near-native performance on the web.
You should email the mods - hn@ycombinator.com - when you have questions about the operation of the site.
I read the whole content on the page. There are three emails, all from the same person. I quoted his latest conclusions.
I was more referring to crypto in general ; some are very fast and low fees, but yes I see what you mean. Are you in Berlin or Copenhagen?
This is not how most of the law works, though.

If you are a weak person, does that justify the actions of a few armed robbers that are going to mug you on the street? Do you mean I had to take care of my own security by hiring someone all the time? Then why am I paying my taxes to support the police force?

Most of the businesses in the real world operate on a combination of trust and optimism. The moment you take away that stability, businesses suddenly become way less efficient.

Let’s be honest: security in IT is just like security in the physical world. Stealing a car that had an open door is as illegal as stealing a car by picking it’s lock. In such a scenario hacking is just another dimension to physical warfare - and frankly warfare belongs to the military.

The fact that most of the bigger companies had to deal with security themselves is just another matter: they had to operate in the world where the authorities were yet not good enough at tracking hackers. Today though - I can see where businesses that don’t think their security matters would just not bother. It’s not their area of responsibility and I would rather they did what they do well - make money.
Would it though? I'm guessing something like the OpenGL spec would be standardized across browsers, and `<div style='background:red'/>` would be replaced by `glClear(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)`.
In UK you can and also in most(all?) EU countries and without 10-15 years wait time.
Reminded me of an old news article (2009): The dark side of Dubai [ https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-har... ]
Can you please give some more info about this eu regulation? I'm really interested to see if my bank has an API in place.
this is part of the special report, but reading the other titles does not justify the fairytale image painted here. https://www.economist.com/sections/special-reports
No. I remember uk TV shows in the 1980s which featured people going through the official channels to get a problem resolved and it magically only happened when the guy from the company concerned was invited onto the show to explain what was going on.
One idea would be to create a cryptocurrency where the currency supply increases following a Gompertz function rather than a log function. If you could magically guess the right variables so supply approximately followed adoption rate, you'd create a currency where the supply/demand was near enough constant, and the price would hardly change after the market had given it a rate. Lets say you expect demand to double each year for N years, where N is where peak adoption rate occurs, then your function would be 2^y for N years, after which you have a gradual decline in the supply. The earliest adopter who mines for N years would gain at most (assuming equivalent mining power), twice as much as someone who mines during year N only, since each year effectively doubles the entire supply up until N.

The real question is, who would mine for N years when it is basically unprofitable? Since everyone else can have the same mining opportunity and the value is approximately constant. An early adopter would only get up to a 2x advantage over someone joining in year N, but would need to put in N years of mining to get that. Also, if demand does not increase as expected, the currency value will half year on year. Nobody will invest in this kind of currency when there are many others "promising" potential 100x gains by overly rewarding early adopters.

You'd also never actually guess the right rate at which adoption is going to grow, and you'd jinx whatever values you expected by specifying them, because there'd be an attitude of "If I can start mining in year N, and still have essentially the same opportunity as everyone else, I'm not gonna bother investing right now, I'll do it when it's close to the time." As a result, you'd end up with nobody actually participating initially, smart people would invest during peak supply, and everyone else would FOMO as the supply rate is declining, which is effectively the same as happened for Bitcoin.

Of course, the process Bitcoin underwent can't really be repeated. Most altcoins are get rich quick schemes, which utilize the log function of coin supply to pre-mine or whatnot to give the "founders reward," with the expectation that if the currency gains any popularity and has liquid markets, the founders can cash out before anyone realizes their currency is useless.
Setting up a Bitcoin node in a remote village doesn't "bring banking capability to the entire village". The node doesn't offer a badly-needed credit facility or the ability to turn remittances into local banknotes (at least not without an actual bank account...), the stuff that can be bought with Bitcoins can't be shipped to the village anyway, a foreign language software program that doesn't run on dumbphones certainly isn't an improvement on their existing cash, mobile and IOU payment systems and is an unimaginably awful way for a technically and financially unsophisticated population to store their life savings. It does offer hope to wealthy Westerners who bought Bitcoin in December that they might recover their losses by dumping on the global poor, I guess.
Show HN: A components-based game engine in Swift
Virus Signatures are taken from VirusShare.com

And it's different from ClamAV because it's written in Python and has own command line user interface
Fun history there and if you ever get a chance to watch it, there is a nice episode of Connections ('Countdown', https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e09) that uses this as a key point for one of Burke's nice random walks through the history of technology. Nitrocellulose was initially a failure as an explosive, but when mixed with a few other things it was used to replace the ivory in billiard balls as hunters were decimating the elephant populations. Nitrocellulose ended up being the base for smokeless gunpowder that had a huge impact on guns and cannon later in history, but the other big thing it was used for was early film stock. One source of so many fires in theaters (and film storage vaults at studios) in the early 20th century was due to this particular type of film stock.
wasm is not just about using other languages in the browser, it allows you to reuse many different libs that are well-written in other languages. For example, in my company, we compiled ffmpeg in wasm so that people can actually edit videos in the browser.
A Primer on MySQL Schema Change
Make a Mess, Clean it Up!
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Make_a_Mess,_Clea...
Simple Habit is hiring our second product designer
It was one heluva invention.

> They were doing just fine with ...

Writing books by hand, letter by letter? Not really.

I sometimes wonder what the romans could have achieved if they had a printing press.
Trustworthiness plays at least a minor role in this kind of sells, even though you could say it's not the point. His good nature, honest appearance, and probably knowledge of science could confuse people, so he shouldn't sell the product himself to prove a point.

Did you know that spruce resin, nature's own goodie, is highly effective in curing wounds? Or is it? 20$ a bottle. It works like this. These and these compounds make it work. Do you follow? 20$ a bottle.
Rich sovereign rulers from Arab states are perfect targets for grand project hustles. You need to convince only one very rich man that he is a visionary and that the idea you sell to him is his. If McKinsey provides $10,000 per page PowerPoint and pdf, it's all good to go.

Dubai did many things right to lure in business and traffic. Dubai's DIFC Courts (independent English language common law judiciary) [1] were a really good idea for example. Still the Dubai as a business is not sustainable. Of course you attract business and traffic if you subsidize it with lavish infrastructure, low bureaucracy and no regard for human rights.

Dubai is oil and gas subsidized business hub. The vision is to build something that lasts when the gas runs out, but there is no evidence that this enterprise will ever be sustainable. It's build on the sand both literally and figuratively.

[1]: DIFC Court is for business. The civil law in the Dubai is medieval.
IRC is centralised as well, but the protocol is documented. So it is possible to apply encryption on top of it within your client with a plugin or whatever. I'm not sure if that's possible with Slack? Look at it from this angle: would you want a for-profit entity to have access to your internal debates about development? Including the potential security implications? Things like these are a goldmine of data, and a time bomb waiting to explode.
Poster and Trailer Debut for the Domestics
From the US side, it appears that interference in other countries elections is coming more from the political parties and NGOs than from the government itself, although the NGOs do attempt to get funding for these activities from the government. Consider the recent case of foreign meddling in Israel's elections.

http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=66198

http://thehill.com/policy/international/236565-netanyahu-pol...
Not here, they are different trucks completely.

This city also has 3 systems which require at least 2 different truck types just for mixed garbage.
(bags, underground container and bins)

Then there is the greens bin and the trucks for that.
The paper bin and the trucks for those.
And the plastics are picked up as bags or from a big collection container, so I guess thats 2 different trucks as well.

note: also there are big collection containers for paper and glass, which have different trucks as well.
Dubai, the new resort for tax evasion and criminals.
Map: The Population of Every Civilization in Europe Every Year Since 400 BC
A counter-article that just came out:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/24/fraudsters-tur...

>Fraudsters ‘turning Dubai into the new Costa del Crime’

>Emirate being used to hide millions in tax, say UK investigators
Oh, everyon can create their own cash. The problem is not printing some form of currency. The problem is getting other people to believe in the value of your money.
Exhibit of Ray Harryhausen’s dinosaurs and other stop-motion models in London
Ask HN: Why don't all websites allow sign-ins with temp code sent to mobile
I expect so. But there is still an interesting point: witch and heretic-burning likely tap into much the same psychology as ancient human sacrifice. Even the rationales overlap:

"Devine will demands these deaths; we will ensure the safety of our community by ritually killing these people."
CIA Official: Cloud Is More Secure Than Old Tech, Less 'Soul-Crushing'
Dubai is still an attractive location for people who are making money, because they don't levy income and capital gains tax. I know a few proven but relatively unknown entrepreneurs (people with exits in the tens or hundreds of millions) living there and doing well.

That might change in the coming years / decades (as I also believe VAT is being introduced) but nevertheless a good base if you're operating internationally.
My objection was that the previous designs provided exactly the same real-time information, used client-server architecture as well, but were fast.
I use several banks. Here in the UK, I use Starling & Monzo. There are also international providers such as Skrill and Transferwise. Check what is available to you. Do not be discouraged by nominal account fee. You will save much more money than bank account fees.
OP here. The engine is far from done and I have yet to finish making a full game with it, it’s at a point where I figured it might be useful to others looking for the same thing: working in an ECS architecture with Swift.

Although some people have objected to the defilement of “pure” ECS by keeping logic inside components, I found this way easier to wrap my brain around (it’s more intuitive to have to write just one class for one “unit” of behavior, and I think it probably increases performance a little bit because system classes don’t have to keep calling component property accessors.)

Even if Swift/game dev isn’t your thing, I could use any feedback re: the presentation, license, documentation (such as it is) and whether you find this a neat way to write games in.
I don't know what technology it is specifically, but it's a brand name they used for actual high quality calls. Think, 128 kB/s MP3, rather than the standard cups-and-string quality.

It only seems to work on mobile.
OK to be fair most of the worlds largest banks including HSBC have laundered money for drug cartels, ISIS etc. at scale that dwarfs whatever is mentioned in this article and basically just got a slap on the wrist for it.