skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EU revenue isn't that high. The US Federal budget is $4,000b, the EU budget is $170b

Over 4.5 years, from 2013 to 2017, EU fines totaled nearly $10b. That's $2b a year, or just over 1% of the EU's total revenue.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/27/the-largest-fines-dished-out...
I mean on some sites I make, I just don't care if its encrypted. I hate that I have to just because all you mofo's have forced me.
A Causal Learning Case Study: Identifying Factors That Influence Software Costs
The Zenbook Flip S is relatively good competition for the XPS 13. Price fixing, or not, you can get an 2.4lb 0.5" thick 1080p 13.3" 8550U 16GB 512MB machine for about a grand, less if you find the right coupons. Can run hot with lots of disk traffic, but otherwise a very slick design and a joy to use. (I actually got mine for $700 as a manufacturer refurb on ebay.) It's NOT for gaming. But it's also not cheap feeling in the least.
"Pull up to the lights, engine shuts down, and doesn't start back up. Genius."

In every car with stop-start I've ever driven, the stop-start system automatically disables if there is any question about the health of the battery (low state of charge, etc), if the vehicle is stopped on a steep incline, if the air conditioning is on, etc.

Besides, there is also a button to disable stop-start if you really had a problem with it.
> There's barely a state budget for prisons and voters don't want to pay for it

But boy do they love watching people get locked up. What a bad approach for treating the ills of society. Let's lock people up at the drop of the hat, make it the most miserable thing possible, and then expect them to come out well adjusted and fully functional. People went to jail because they were neither of those things before hand.

But I guess as long as the prison system gets to turn a couple of bucks it makes it all worth it, right?
I taught at a university for a couple of years. TBH, that feels normal-ish. I have plenty of folks including my parents with whom, depending on how often we've been communicating lately, I will share trivia.

If you think that is bad, wait until you have to speak with some 20-year-old's mom who is thinking that her kiddo should be getting an A for C-level work and you have to get litigious about supporting your grades. I had to write a policy into my syllabus saying that I won't (and, IIRC, legally was not permitted) to talk with other folks than the student about grades and assessments.
Sell, or just (pretend to) don't notice it being taken away.

The story I've heard several times from different people about how it's handled in Poland - your operator usually subcontracts their support & telemarketing to a third party; some spammer will pay an employee of that third party to "liberate" their customer database as they end their employment.
“POSIX advisory locks are broken by design”
It might be upvoted because people find it catchy. But if you have ever wrote code in your life, you know that person who wrote about it got no idea whatsoever about software development.

I'll upvote it as well, as it is possibly the thing with the least amount of intelligence that I've read so far in my life.
Could someone share a few examples of KPIs,excluding the well know AARRR metrics, tracked by successful startups ?
As a teacher of ages 4 up until 14, I think parents and people in general need to be concious toward what constitutes "over" parenting. Too often we as teachers see students that are behaving poorly, or having more trouble in school, because they do not have enough help or consistency at home. Parents reading articles like this might take them too literally and step too far from their child's life. Parenting should be a balance. You should know, as a parent, what is happening with your child's schooling, and be there to help. But you should not micromanage the child. Parent involvement leads to more academic confidence and success[1], and more behavioural[2] success.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020099/
[2] https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/sm6/McCormi...
I get calls daily for work from Microsoft support, often from India or Mexico. Wish it could be as simple as blocking international calls :/
Fair point. I think the Elm devs knew that, so they created https://github.com/avh4/elm-upgrade for the 0.17 to 0.18 upgrade. It's fixes _almost_ everything.

It will be updated for 0.19 as well!
I stopped writing in cursive the minute I graduated from high school and never looked back. I understand the point and purpose of cursive, I just never liked it.

By the early 90s, my ability to write began to atrophy, not that I couldn't write fine, but that I couldn't write much without my hand getting tired. Now, I can't write more than a few sentences before my hand gets really tired, but I very seldom have a reason to write anything more than a short note. I still make hand-written notes while working (as a software developer), but I find I'm doing that much less than even 5 years ago.

At this point in time, I'd be more concerned about people's ability to compose good communication than their ability to physically write. If social media is any indication, a lot of people can't write simple sentences that follow basic grammar and spelling rules.
Show HN: Aha mobile app (built with React Native)
How many examples do you need of "treating the symptoms rather than the problem" before you concede it's an actual issue? Let's not just blame this on doctors.

Heart disease is the number one killer in the US, and it's preventable. But it's much easier for people to pop a pill than to change their lifestyle.

Pain killers are also massively overperscribed for back and neck pains which can often be resolved with adequate movement, posture, and stretching (i.e. yoga). But after a long day of sitting still in an office chair they prefer to just go home and remain sedentary (i.e. lay on the couch and watch tv), all of which also contributes to heart disease/circulatory problems as well.

The field of psychiatry is almost entirely geared towards treating symptoms with perscriptions.
> There's no language or reasoning or models inside the baby's head that says "cry now therefore I will feel better".

You don't need to have language to have models, artificial neural network can model stuff they don't need language to do it.
The text "I cry cause i know that will cause me to feel better." is simply my explanation of the models behavior.

> Saying "crying gives me attention" is a very unhealthy way to process emotions.

I definitely agree :) But that does not mean that it is not true.

Here is just a question to you that popped up when reading your text :)

Do you think that babies/animals are conscious?
Diekmann was professor in a military university. It's mentioned in the beginning.
Quick note taking chrome extension
I'd expect NPR to not use the word "crisis" in this context. There no obvious juncture, no imminent, looming problem that demands decisive action. There's just yet another op-ed pop-psyche piece about kids failing to learn "how to adult."

I'm not surprised by the existence of the article, it's as inevitable as my curmudgeonly response. I'm surprised NPR stooped to publishing it.
I'm pretty close to being completely free of proprietary software at home.

I have to use the proprietary bootloader for my newer machines and the wifi firmware the machines I haven't gotten around to replacing the wifi cards for yet.

About half of my machines are on coreboot and atheros cards.

Otherwise my user space is pure free software.

For games I play open source ones like 0ad when I have the time, which isn't often.
Cryptocurrency users and developers are very much aware of the importance of privacy. For many, it's the primary concern.
Who's forcing you?
Oh man that's really terrible to hear. I remember starting my linux journey with Slackware and 13 years later I couldn't imagine using anything other than linux for my work!

So how would one go about donating to him?
The story behind the smallest plot in New York City
Chrome, mostly.
That is a fantastic tidbit, TIL. This is pretty much what I had in mind to refute the assumption the earlier parent made about rewrites being desired so code doesn't have to be grokked. IME, the tech debt we complained about was in situations where we knew what we had to do to write a new feature, and why it wouldn't work because of the decisions made previously, and the monumental amount of work involved in putting just one more bandaid on that system, instead of just fixing the dang data model.
But then it can be over emphasized, and no one in your organization trusts any links or attachments because of phishing. Then it all becomes a horrible mess of skype/slack IMs with the actual links to Sharefile or Dropbox shares. Then you wave goodbye to async communication because everytime someone sends you a hyperlink they _absolutely need_ to know if you were able to get the file...
What I mean is that it's not these wars that will bring you autonomous vehicles. It's war in general, the idea of using autonomous machines of any kind for war is very old, and so is the study of it. But Iraq has been a war zone for decades now (with intermezzos). And although some of the tech was there since before the Gulf War we still haven't progressed that far in ~30 years.
This kind of war brings slightly accelerated incremental progress, evolution.

Something like a WW or a cold war where you question whether your city will be the next Hiroshima brings you a jump: the nuclear bomb, the ICBM, man in space and on the Moon, and so many other Sci-Fi tech. That's what I meant.

Yes, today we have slightly better autonomous vehicles than a decade ago but this is natural evolution and it relied on progress in so many other (not necessarily war driven) improvements: computers, electronics, etc.

I would rather not see the war that brings you the AI for autonomous machines.
You sir. Have no idea about software development.

Extensibility is just as important as Bugfree software for some businesses. Actually, for most of them.

Technical debt hurts much more the extensibility of your code rather than raises the number of bugs.
There is nothing wrong with that!
yes, that’s why a CA law was recently passed that when ownership of the real estate owning company changes hands, that is a) a change in ownership of the property and b) such changes must be reported to CA.

unenforceable, eg there’s no way for CA to find out when foreign (non-CA owned) companies change hands, but at least the law is on the books.
> The smog from China is not under the control of CA...

Right, which is why it's not relevant.
In extremely cold climates (Alaska, Alberta, etc) people usually have engine block heaters if they're parking outdoors in the winter.
4 best practices for creating a UI pattern library
Define “unjustified.” What does it cost to write iOS? Because in the case of Apple, you have the cost of the parts and assembly, but you also have the engineering costs to even create the product. A product price isn’t just the sum of parts + assembly + profit.

Regarding €1000 — if a country like France wouldn’t have a 20% VAT, prices would be lower obviously. So perhaps we should “investigate” the 20% VAT? Maybe we should “investigate” the French labor laws that contribute to the cost of goods sold? There are a lot of things we “could” investigate — or we can just accept that companies will price their good appropriately based on the market demand. This isn’t like it’s an essential item required for basic life. Maybe we could investigate why France has strict milk quotas that necessarily increase the price of milk? Investigating milk prices has a lot more relevance to people than the pricing of a luxury item like a high end smartphone.

To be clear, I am not suggesting we investigate anything, only pointing out the absurdity of complaining about smartphone pricing when the EU has plenty of other products that are subject to price manipulation based on political interests. The EU has had tariffs for decades on imports, making everything more expensive. But sure, let’s complain about Apple and Samsung while ignoring textiles, food, cars and machine parts all of which are subject to tariffs that raise prices.
Top Women in Cybersecurity and InfoSec for 2018
PostgreSQL: Batch Updates and Concurrency
Counterexamples:

Optimization: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public/pull/24/files

Improvement in build system: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public/pull/33

Bugfix in build system: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public/pull/34/files

Making code more standard compliant (assigning a function pointer to a void pointer is undefined behavior): https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public/pull/43

Enable building on FreeBSD: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public/pull/50

Bugfix: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public/pull/51/files

Improvement in console system: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public/pull/62/files

---

Also concerning your "homework solutions" argument: The fact that these PRs are not closed is also a strong point for my argument.
Distributed Objects Everywhere
I strongly dislike these nihilistic views of markets where consumer happiness (ie, reviews on Amazon, tech blogs, friends/family etc) is never factored in and people expect companies to merely look at price as the one and only factor. It's a very popular perspective today and common critique of modern corporate culture, but still ultimately a naive one that ignores how markets work and over-simplifies things to the point of being inaccurate.

That's not how markets work, except in the lowest of the low end (where margins are already awful).

That doesn't mean the entire company/product lines operates this way or the market as a whole is incentivized to do the least amount work effort possible.
In Russia we have qr codes on receipts

http://www.itpremier.org/admin/ckfinder/userfiles/images/XMU...
If digging up all existing water infrastructure, regardless of not knowing where it is or what is built on top of it is a "mild inconvenience" ... why don't you just quickly take care of it ?

Hell, I'll help you. We should be done in an afternoon, right ?
It's not a battle it's a legitimate point of view. It's also backed by evidence.

Also I balance it with the variety in my submissions.
I think a lot of parents don't know how to effectively parent and make up for that with enthusiasm. Too much involvement, not enough parenting. I am guilty of this.
Those are very good points.

I haven't stated my own personal views. I think I'd call myself a kind of disaffected libertarian. I don't use the L-word much anymore because it's been twisted and debased just like every other word in political discourse that used to mean something. I'd say I'm disaffected because I've sat here for a few years with my mouth hanging open watching a large number of libertarians put on Nazi brown shirts without blinking. That's a little weird given that libertarianism is supposed to enshrine ideas like voluntarism and equal rights. It makes me doubt the basic functional integrity of the human brain.

I also kind of consider myself a liberal, but like the other L word I don't use that much anymore either. It's also been debased to the point that it basically doesn't mean anything.

Put those words together and pretend they mean something and you could say I'm a voluntarist who is skeptical of authority, believes in minimal government and decentralization, but also believes our goal should be to improve the condition of the world for conscious beings.

That means I'm willing to entertain the possibility that consistency on libertarianism might at times merit compromise in favor of a higher consistency on topics like basic human dignity and well-being. I think health care might be one such case. Extreme environmental problems might be another.

The inverse is also true from time to time. There are times when we must tolerate awful things (child porn on encrypted networks, money laundering with cryptocurrency, gun violence if we are free to own guns) because the only other practical options on the table involve too great an intrusion into liberty and personal autonomy or tend to lead to a slippery slope where further intrusions are inevitable.

As such I can find plenty to dislike on both the left and the right and there are definitely "onions" on the left.

But the alt-right is something else entirely. I have never in all my years on this planet seen a more repulsive and vile political movement. I consider the movement evil, and I think this is the first time in my life I have ever actually used the E-word to describe anything in the political realm. I have a tough time thinking of any left-wing movement that's quite as bad and that has more than a tiny handful of followers. I guess totalitarian communism might work but when I scan across the Internet I am not met with countless totalitarian communists sporting anime avatars spewing memes adorned with Lenin and Stalin quotes praising gulags.

I really think you just have to disown people like that, especially if you have associations and positions that might label you as a supporter. It's the political ideology equivalent of having a best friend who turns out to be a serial murderer. People are going to ask questions.
Maybe try reading the article, at the very least.
> and finding that the world has apparently settled on venmo

Correction: the world is not limited to the USA.
I wish we could learn more about that. The article said it was Russian IPs and tools, but that doesn't account for the local ATM activity.

It also seems like you'd need a lot of domain knowledge to make this happen. If you gave me an open machine in a bank I'd have no idea what to do.
well if he/she is such a fantastic earner they should be held personally liable for the banks losses stemming from their reckless conduct (clicking on email links or opening strange documents)
I don’t follow.

1. You don’t have to write any code to use HTTPS, it has already been written.

2. Are you saying that since HTTPS isn’t perfectly secure you’re gonna use the definitely insecure HTTP? What kind of logic is that?
That is an excellent idea. I hope it catches on in the US.
Programming exercises for learning Q# and quantum computing
> Thank goodness criminals are dumb!

Are they all dumb, or is it that only dumb ones get caught and you end up reading about them, while the smart ones carry on undetected?
There are both long outstanding bugs and sorely missing features in the currently released version.
Making a Geodesic Dome
Ah yes, silly me. "[...] in 1975, still under 40, he secured a position at a new research university of Germany’s armed forces" - must have missed that earlier. Thanks.
Some telescope networks like Slooh [1] are essentially crowdfunded, and offer remote access on a per-hour basis. There are also telescope hosting services out there, SpaceOBS [2] being an example located in Atacama (probably the best observing conditions available for an amateur), and iTelescope [3] in the Siding Spring Observatory.

[1] https://www.slooh.com/

[2] http://www.spaceobs.com/

[3] http://hosting.itelescope.net/
Nebula Level06: A Newbie's Approach
On the upside, AV ages pretty well so second-hand models are quite attractive unless you need 4K video or something.
www.com is a short, easy to remember, parked domain I tend to use. It has some text ads, but is probably reasonably light on bandwidth.

neverssl.com, mentioned below, is one I seem to for some reason always struggle to remember it's name when I need it. I end up typing things like nossl.com or neverhttps.com and such...
I use the Microsoft Office Lens Android app. It uploads to OneDrive, which has a pretty basic UI, but a quick full+text search.
I don't have that many. But when I need to OCR a receipt or in general get text from an image, I use the Copyfish extension and then copy & paste from there to the accounting software:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copyfish-ocr-...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copyfish-%F0%9F%90...
In theory, yes, or more directly, it's a discount for contributions. But in practice, it's more complicated.

I don't even know where all the EU money goes to. Bailing out Greece and co? Subsidies?
> This is possibly a downfall of Fordism and mass manufacturing in general.

I don't think "Car manufacturers have to make cars better for everybody, not just some people" will lead to the downfall of mass manufacturing.
Aren't colleges or textbook publishers price fixing too, then?

Price fixing is a serious allegation, you can't just come up with price history and throw allegations around.
That seems a bit like a catch 22 to me - if you get hacked enough, it must be your fault, so no payout.
> In most normal cities,

In most _US_ cities, perhaps?
I took several classes in Chinese literature in college. One semester was specifically on the Cultural Revolution. I don’t think my dislike stemmed from an insufficient (for an American) knowledge of the Cultural Revolution.

The characters ranged from caricatures to boringly malevolent, the plot dripped out like an icicle half a degree above freezing, and the aliens, which were at least interesting, got about 20 pages of attention.

I just don’t get the hype.
>It sounds like the kind of state where you pay your taxes and just hope the government leaves you alone,

That has much more to due with how the people and the government believe government should act than it does with the taxes themselves. ME and VT are fairly high tax but politicians would be hanging from bridges (edit: it should be obvious that this is an exaggeration) if the ME or VT government tried to behave like the NY or MA government because the people simply don't see that sort of government style as how things should be and the government is a large organization made up of people.
Meanwhile in Europe we're still in the prototyping phase. I feel like the electric car market will belong to China and established European car companies will become irrelevant over the coming decade. Right now they seemingly spend more effort lobbying against change than keeping up with innovation.
Your shields can't repel sarcasm of this magnitude.
Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
Medical Implications of Open Source Neuroscience
> That's the popular story behind neural networks. Like any good popular explanation of a STEM concept, it's as useful as it is inaccurate.

To be fair, our own understanding of "how it works" in practice is not necessarily set in stone. Approximating our belief in how it works is the best case scenario, and expecting it to perfectly mirror human reasoning is unrealistic and frankly not all that appealing from a problem-solving stance.

Human reasoning has a lot of built-in buffers and fault tolerance, and it is, itself, a fairly narrow AI.
S&P 500 actually returned 10% between 1988 and 2018. If you invested $10K in S&P 500 in 1988 it would be worth $205K today. If you use a compound interest calculator you can see this corresponds to 10% growth per year.
Obviously. But lazy buggers won't drive me cheap enough. ;-)
I'm not convinced this is a real problem. The term helicopter parenting was first used in 1990 [0]
New Yorker article on same topic from 2008 [1]

Articles and posts like this are chock-full of anecdotes and head-nodding, but short on studies or other data to even correlate against. Seems like this "crisis" has been happening for a long time.

Is there a longitudinal study on children who have been "helicopter parented?" vs those who were raised "free-range"?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/17/the-child-trap
But people don't want that. People want the symbolism, even if fake, that the looks project.

Doesn't that matter ?