skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Afghanistan was a base of operations for terrorists. Now you can define that a lot of ways, and countries and police forces do define it however is convenient at the time.

What matters for this however, is that it was a state sponsor and safe haven for people who'd go random places and blow economic interests up (from planes to tourist locations), located in a place where they actually had a shot at making stuff happen (ie. could have easy access to a lot of places). So Afghanistan had to go, both for it itself having to go, and to serve as a warning to other states what happens if you don't cooperate in the war on terror. The war on terror, of course, being the war to keep congress' economic interests safe.
The problem is that the interviewer asks for a number. If the question was phrased as "How would you go about finding out the GoogleAds B2B revenue in Italy for 2017, which tools and methods would you use", I'd totally go for that question.

The reason is that to many people (myself included) your answer above is nonsensical.

“With ~50M people capable of clicking ads, and assuming they click one ad a day at 20cnt CPC, it would be around 3.6bn. I think my assumptions are on the high side, but order of magnitude is probably correct”

Where did the "people capable of clicking ads" 50M estimate come from? Why one ad a day on average? Why not 0.2? Or 15? Why 20c CPC and not 0.001 euro cent? Why not 1USD?

I'm all for "first-principals based structured thinking" but asking someone to demonstrate that by generating a rudimentary formula, that won't survive any contact with reality, and populate it with almost completely random values, seems like a weird way to go about it.
Really depends on what we talk about as the tool or the problem.

To the extent the claims is "JavaScript the language is the problem"... if somehow Scheme or Python had become the de facto scripting language of the browser in the mid 90s, we'd be having the same conversation. If JavaScript is obliterated by WebAssembly... we'll be having the same conversation (in fact, I predict webassembly -- along with every other effort to treat the browser primarily as nothing more than the universal VM that succeeded -- will exacerbate this problem).

If the conversation is about the fundamental problem of the various incentives to utilize the full computing potential of the browser as a platform even when a document model will do, then "JavaScript" is just shorthand for that since it's the primary language of utilization, and it's pretty easy to realize the tool is the role it fills rather than a specific language.
There was also something called Pneumen for a while.
NPD: 67% of Americans play games average 12 hours per week
For pasting of passwords, there is no security benefit. password managers ignore it.

"They" often also disable pasting of other duplicated fields, like bank routing number, email address. So this shows why it is done (but misapplied to password). It's so you don't just copy and paste a wrong value that is hard for them to verify and leads to support calls. By forcing you to retype from scratch, the theory is you will either get it right twice or the error will be flagged.
If someone is sending emails about golf balls and school busses, it's probably spam. ;)
This is... a thing??
Shove them back into the DOM with little bit of JS? AJAX allows for some legitimate improvements if you need to work around the document model, but these days, it's abused to extreme levels.
not very familiar with apollo, but I don't see why not. But just be aware that Watermelon works best as a full local database copy (that synchronizes with the server), not just a cache.
Stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, stopping and starting, is tedious and not a good experience. In my experience, transmission makes no difference.
Cost isn't the only factor. There's a limit to how much battery you can physically cram into the car. If a new technology can give you 2-3X more range for the same volume of battery, cars made with that will have a competitive advantage. It might be more expensive at first but you do the same thing Tesla did: start with expensive cars and work your way into higher volume.
On Chrome, you can install the 'don't fuck with paste' extension.
Excellent article, Reginald.

I followed it entirely with one exception: I can see that `maker(maker)` has the right type, but why is it the right value? How do we know, as we fill in the blanks, that this is the implementation that yields the right result?
I remember the quote "There are two types: women and people. When a woman acts like a person, she is accused of wanting to be a man". Who wrote that? I forget
I wasnt aware this was being worked on. This is great news. Best case scenario though this would come in 12?
I had a bit of a rant in a job interview about how storing plain text passwords was something only idiots do. I got the job and lo and behold the main feature being worked on when I started 3 weeks later was "encrypt passwords field". So even inadvertant direct private shaming can effect change!
Supposedly, it's newsworthy because Audi was going to discontinue manuals much sooner, but one of their execs pushed for continued offering because of "demand in the US".

Porsche got a lot of backlash in the US when they discontinued manuals, to the point where they engineered a brand new manual gearbox with parts sharing with their PDK just because of US demand for the latest generation.

Audi thought there was also demand for Audis with manuals, apparently there wasn't.
Well designed software focused on user happiness doesn't make money. All those things that we hate, they are put in there because they make money.
It de facto does. If the government is running off one interpretation of a piece of the Constitution and the supreme Court rules that that interpretation is incorrect, it's been neutered
that actually is secure ... if you have a secure display
I'd like to use Ada for an embedded project, but I've got a few concerns - that development time would be considerably longer, that finding other people able to maintain the codebase would be hard, and that the resulting code would be considerably less performant than equivalent C.

Has anyone worked with Ada or deployed it in a real product? How does it compare to "microcontroller C" with no strings and statically declared memory?
Awesome work Vincent! Glad to see more automation using drones in pilot-less commercial scenarios.

If a customer had a structure without a preexisting 3d model how would you create the flight plan to operate close enough for your defect detector to work? Do you have issues with moving structures/obstacles (e.g. a wind turbine rotor offset from its orientation in the model)?

Full Disclosure: I work on the SDK Platform for Skydio R1 (a fully autonomous drone doing real-time visual SLAM and motion planning). If you're interested in chatting more I'm at roshan [at] skydio.com
Only under a closed world assumption. If e.g. Mexican and Canadian farmers start seeing real cost reductions by using drone technology there will be some very real market demand to sort out any legal obstacles for doing the same in the US. Basically this article is about the Swiss being a bit more pragmatic here. It's probably not the only part of the world where this is the case. I imagine the Chinese are very eager to get a head start in this market as well.

So, the only effect of this legislation will be that likely successful companies in this space may not necessarily end up being US based companies and that the US will end up being late to the game. That in itself might be enough incentive for this to get fixed sooner than later.

In the same way, self driving cars are being invested in despite legal obstacles that currently make operating them illegal in most places.
Protecting software against exploitation with DARPA's CFAR
Could be real, but I’m not sure how much signal investment gives. Even without theranos level fraud, investors throw money at long shots all the time.
The idea came from wondering what a Lisp-like language might look like if you based it on 'everything is a table' instead of 'everything is a list'. A few old comments where this came up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2554764

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3291065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544926

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11677344
I'd like an automatic transmission in cities and on highways and a manual one up and down hills and off-road, when I want to be sure about what the car will do. So what about a sequential transmission? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_manual_transmission
It's the one we use in videogames when we select "manual". In real cars they usually have an automatic mode. Car2Go Smarts used to have that transmission, activated by a stick.
You were fired for simply asking for a raise?

I was once in a position where a new director came in and brought in a bunch of his own people, as he starting letting go existing staff. I quickly found out that they were all making a lot more than I was, although not quite a $50k difference. I was on thin ice just for being an existing employee. I liked my job and my company, so I took the strategy of not letting them get rid of me by means of performance. I didn't concern myself with salary differences.

Within some 3 years, my salary had almost doubled. When you're the lowest paid, and you're outperforming those at the top, the money can start to shift on its own.
Intel Execs Address the AI Talent Shortage, AI Education, and the “Cool” Factor
It's not that trivial, yeah you stick it back into the DOM somehow eventually. But you might not be getting back full HTML, you might need to modify it by adding some css classes, or event listeners. You might only be getting back data which you generate the DOM from.

Basically you need a full programming language and DOM and events etc like we have now. But I fully agree that it's abused currently.

Full disclosure I contribute to the madness by developing ReactJS applications.
That they allowed that person to be a representative of the company when someone is interviewing the company to decide if they'd want to work there... that's a bad PR move. Yes, the company extends an offer on their end, but really, both parties are making decisions. If they can't put their best foot forward.... that's a problem. If they think this was their best foot forward, that's another problem.
"shadow banning" generally means a ban the person banned isn't told about, which doesn't apply here.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17491521
You simply cannot buy clothes online. It's far too unreliable in every way. Even if they deliver what the advertise it's hard enough determining what size to buy when in person, the amount of work it takes to buy something int he right "size" online is astronomical. Easiest examples are shoes and pants. I can wear size 8.5 to size 11 shoes or 29 to 33 pants. These all fit the same.
UK TV Licensing website was processing customers' data insecurely
PayPal will instantly pay businesses after they make a sale
> The problem with this is that most of the questions were not things that are inherently secure, things like "what was the name of your primary school" are easy to guess or research.

They're also inherently unanswerable in many cases.

As an example, I went to two different primary schools. I don't have a favorite musician or sports team, and the answer to "where did you meet your wife" might be the school, the city, or "in class".

Last time I had to update my Apple security questions a good 80% of the questions weren't ones I felt I could answer in a way that'd be memorable a few years later.
Shameless plug - I'm actually working on a small tool at the moment to help with this[1] (the repo is a mess as the project is very much under development).

But my new approach to cookies, especially with Google (I use Firefox over Chrome actually), is to just remove them from their physical location - the sqlite database that browsers put on your computer.

I imagine Google plays all kinds of tricks and games in their browser to prevent their cookies from going away (another reason I stay away from Chrome).

[1] https://github.com/ralston3/moz_cookies
Some years ago, Brammo developed, but never sold, a 6 speed electric motorcycle:

https://www.wired.com/2011/05/brammo-six-speed-tranmission

The idea was that you got the low speed torque of an electric motor and the high top speed of a ICE.

It was probably a marginal improvement though, and really more of a manual transmission nostalgia play.
This seems like a step in the wrong direction :/
Been looking at a cheap alternative to my MacBook when traveling. Bought a 2 year old Thinkpad for under $400. Replacing keyboard - pleasantly surprised at how serviceable this machine is. Upgrading RAM and storage is actually doable, and took about 10 minutes. Dual batteries, up to 32gb of ram (2 years ago!), and supported LTE more nice touches.
I work on an auto repair shop and was just thinking the same thing. We use a high pressure foam for fire suppression currently. The vendor says its a mix of soap, water, and co2. Only used it once but man is it messy!
Comparing Our Micropatch with Microsoft's Official Patch for CVE-2018-8440
I suppose your one of those “plain text should be used as an interface everywhere” developers, eh?

Did you even try using images? It’s not like it’s hard like learning VIM or something.
Sure - in America, healthcare is far from a free market because:

1) We don’t pay our own healthcare bills, we pay for our healthcare through insurance. As a result, there isn’t a pricing system in place, much like there is for other critical goods and services with price-inelastic demand like food and housing. This is caused by regulations that require employers to provide health insurance for their employees, and most recently the mandate that requires individuals to purchase insurance. We’ve essentially forced a world in which insurance is the only way one can pay for healthcare.

2) Our healthcare supply is artificially limited, which forces higher up prices. The MRI “certificate of need” is one such example, there are countless others. Medical licensure, in general, drives up the price to see just a primary care physician. In the US, just becoming a basic physician that prescribes antibiotics takes at least 8 years of expensive schooling. As a result, doctors in America earn more than their counterparts in every other country (adjusted for PPP)[1].

There are a couple solutions that the market can bring about. One of them is to get rid of the employer mandate. The fact that I have to worry about losing my insurance if I get fired or leave my job is totally bonkers. I don’t have to worry about that at all with my car insurance, it’s a cheap monthly premium that adds on to my cost of living, just like my monthly food expenses or my shelter expenses (read: rent). The reason why non-employer provided healthcare is more expensive is that the pool of people buying that type of insurance is much smaller than the pool of people that are happily receiving their employer-provided health insurance. If every single one of these employees participated in the same insurance market as those that are either unemployed or self-employed, premiums can come down.

The other solution is cut out insurance for most healthcare. We don’t use car insurance to pay for oil changes and servicing, we only use it to pay for catastrophic accidents. Absent the regulations we have today, the market might look the same for healthcare: you pay out of pocket for basic healthcare like going to the doctor when you’re sick or other preventative care (sort of like an oil change for your body). Insurance might kick in when you get cancer or heart disease. I come from India, where it costs about Rs. 500 out of pocket to see a good doctor that has an MBBS. This is the price of a movie ticket, in India. The concept of using insurance to pay for such care is unheard of. In America, paying for a general checkup, without insurance, can cost $300 out of pocket - absolutely absurd.

Singapore is a great example of a country that has a largely market driven healthcare system. Unless you’re poor, you pay out of pocket for all healthcare, in a private market. The government steps in and pays for healthcare for poor people, and for catastrophic care (think: universal high deductible healthcare plans).

[1] https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/how-much-do-do...
> since you have to pay attention more to the road

I'm teaching an attention-impaired teenager to drive, and we're doing stick for exactly this reason: extra cog load reduces daydreaming? Perhaps that's a controversial idea. But for him, so far so good.
> Not sure what "audi" (a German company) has to do with America but what ever

Audi sells cars. Cars are sold in America. Audi sells cars in America.

> Truly nothing can stop me!

I hope stop signs can
One thing I’ve noticed over the last 10 years is how action films with car chases in have started cutting to shots of the driver shifting gears. It’s as if the manual gear change is becoming an exotic thing, used only by getaway drivers.

As someone who lives in a country where automatics are still in the minority, it’s very odd.
Plex Cloud to be discontinued
Evidence for the Coming Apple Car?
Expected 'is water wet', was pleasantly surprised.
I get that sentiment, but man would that be an easy thing to abuse systemically. Having a car is very essential to life for most Americans.
To make happy a small but important segment of the customer base. Consider how before Apple give some love for music, composers or scientific users. In the great scheme of things, them are not big numbers but is good to have them.

Is not as if Apple do this and suddenly most consumers will buy it instead of a simpler/soldered machine. And if it "Cannibalize" is among Apple products, so is not as big of a deal.

I not buy that Apple is not doing this because money. I think the reality is more sad. Them truly believe that what them are given make happy this small segment of the customer base too.

Is pure denial, plain & simple. That is why when aknowledge that the mac pro was a mistake I think them get "shocked".
Sometimes it works though. At the Kings Cross Waitrose off peak there isn't a queue and the whole process is pretty quick. The good ones don't even bother weighing the stuff which speeds things.
Leaked Google employee's email reveals effort to boost Latino vote
Wait three months and pay list price in all probability if you order custom rather than take a car on the lot. Not always with high demand vehicles but I’ve always bought a car off the lot st a discount.
Patents are only a problem for technologies with successful application. Ideally, once you have covered the R&D cost, it should be free for all.

Technologies without successful application is the interesting case. With patents, like in this case, they are locked for a while, but at least someone can pick them up. The alternative is to become lost in the archive of some R&D department.

That said, that's difficult to say. We have patents, companies haven't had to find a way to live in a modern world where obfuscation, secrecy are the primordial part of their DNA. Would we have had OSS before, or not at all? I guess that NDA and anti-compete contract laws would be much stricter maybe at a stifling level, medieval guilds style.
I agree and I realize now I need to say this explicitly instead of picking on JS directly.

I thought long about this in the past, and I think JS itself is not a problem - it's just a poor language. The problem is JS + DOM API + CSS + bunch of other things that browsers provide. I feel there's too much creative control allowed for on the web. The language itself matters little; what does is that publishers can shove ridiculous amount of code with little effort, and that the user/publisher balance over control of rendering is so heavily tilted towards the latter.
Just because something is difficult to quantify doesn't meant it doesn't exist or is unimportant.
You are right, a ombination of Hi-res cameras + Accurate GPS + Collision avoidance on basic off-the-helf drones means that Software such as Sterblue can now perform jobs that previously needed custom drones with custom sensors.

There are lots of companies in the drone security landscape. This is not our market as we are not too much sold to the idea of drones tracking people and potentially using weapons... We are more than happy with our mission of helping the development of clean energies and a more energy-efficient future.

However I know a stealth company that uses drones to assist firefighters, their solution is impressive and saves lives!
It's like they want marketers to post fake reviews. We've all seen the so-called users who write "I was very disappointed in the Ronco Widget Tensioner. I returned it and bought a Spacely Sprockets(tm) Grommet Guard instead. That worked perfectly!"
Sounds interesting. Do you have a link or something?
Heh, yes, that's true about the FPV pilots. I'm pretty sure I've got an FPV camera kicking around here from China that actually transmits on the amateur bands, although it definitely wasn't marketed as a ham transmitter :). I also suspect that it'd be way out of spec, but I haven't actually hooked it up to the spectrum analyzer, nor do I use it. It's a curiosity that came in a kit a long time ago.

And I suspect the reason the people on long range UHF do so within spec is because, in my experience anyway, the ham guys get more and more grumpy as you go down in frequency. That video transmitter above operates in the 1.2GHz/23cm band, and no one (around here at least) seems to particularly care too much about it. Going downwards, the UHF (440MHz/70cm) band and the VHF (146MHz/2m) band are used pretty frequently for voice communication, so someone splatting all over the band would have people enraged. Going lower into the HF (<30MHz) bands, you've got people worldwide using those for communication, and they're more than happy to get the FCC or Industry Canada or whatever your local regulatory body is on your ass for breaking the rules.
We Can Stop Pretending LTE-M Is a Low-Power WAN
11 JavaScript Data Visualization Libraries for 2018
Surprised me too!

Only reason I can think of is that the real enthusiasts bought them early on. Now, most people buy them because they want a 'sports car'; only 10% are actual enthusiasts.
I'm curious if anyone knows if there is a significant difference between #36 "Be (religiously) silent" and #115 "Exercise (religious) silence."
> Software was never about making users happy, it was about tricking users, manipulating them into giving you either their money or their time

Calm down a bit with your generalities. If you sell the software (or the platform it runs on), there is no manipulation or trickery involved. It's only the "vast majority" if you look at freeware/ad-based.
"Oftentimes I see this in reverse. People think solution first. And when the customer they thought doesn't like their product. They try and find some other, random customer who does. They might even have some completely different problem. And they try shopping around their solution. Because they think their solution is the genius part. I think the problem is the genius part."

Words of wisdom ;)
You definitely are! And my other two replies in this thread will probably shed a bit more light on both the video bit and the "local ham activists" bit :)
That bums me out, but I get it. My first non hand-me-down car was a beat-up Audi A4 (manual) off craigslist that I loved for years and years as a ski bum. I am definitely one of the many "manual transmissions are more fun" people. But once I got that office job, even 15 minutes a day in city traffic with a manual angered me, so I transitioned to an automatic. Now that I am out of the city I would love a manual again, but when most people live in big cities with traffic issues, and drive to and from work every day, it makes sense that manuals are not that popular in the states.