skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WhatsApp showed us that running a paid, low cost, privacy oriented service can be profitable.

I'd probably pay for that, again, as soon as they were completely untied from Facebook and had apologized. (Yep, they made a very public promise.)

I'd probably pay similar or slightly larger amounts for a number of other things as well (actually I do, so my point is rather that I'd pay for for stuff :)

Now before anyone thinks: "great, lets paywall all the things!" here's an important catch:

1. I'm happy to pay for my newspaper. I'm happy to buy the occasional newspaper on a newspaper stand.

I do not want to subscribe to every newspaper that anyone shares a link to, just to read one single thing that is relevant to me. I love the idea of blendle but it seems media (and my feeling is even a lot of HNers) don't get it.

2. I'm happy to pay a certain large cloud company that I don't like as much as I used to do for an increased storage quota. I'm happy to pay reasonable amounts for apps, services etc. I'm happy to pay for usage for things I use less often. I particularly like the Jetbrains model of pay-to-own (even if I personally prefer their competitors products. ;-)

I still do not want every app to pretend they are a service that I should pay a monthly fee for.

Also: I don't really mind relevant ads. The other day I actually clicked on one. Because it was relevant.

But there is no reason to track me around the web: most ads I ever clicked on voluntarily (that would be 5 - 10 for the last 10 years ;-) could probably be inferred from context: I was reading a blog post about something related or searching for something related.

Also (and here I go against many HNers), ads should preferably be injected server side.
There are times when you need to think about the fix, and times when the problem is more obvious. If possible, I'd hack in a fix and, once the pressure is off, go back and validate it more thoroughly.

For instance, my company had a very important demo of our new system on Monday. Friday night my friend was tearing his hair out in the lab trying to find the cause of some network corruption. We had a race condition in the kernel between our network driver and inter-processor communication driver. We're a uniprocessor system, so I suggested just using an if-check to see if we were in the IPC code when the network bottom-half handler hit. It was a disgusting hack but we made the demo and no one had to work the weekend. The following week, my friend crafted a correct solution which was robust even if we enabled more cores. It's not the high-pressure straw man I mentioned earlier, but it's fresh in my mind and represents the sort of on-the-fly hacks that often need to be made to allow businesses to make money.
Awesome Funny Video Compilation №132 – FUNNY VIDEOS (VINES and COUBS)
We are not running on Iridium, but our own satellites and frequencies.
Would need to see your docs before making a comment.
> Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it.

Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air?

I mean, no offense, but I remember when Brexiters were claiming the same [1] earlier this year and it was quickly proven to be nonsense.

Maybe you can do a better job?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/housing-mini...
Nice!! Cool that it's open hardware. What's your business model considering you don't want someone buying large numbers from you? :-)
Played around with it and I love the interactivity. I can see this as a great FAQ and marketing tool.
Workin' on it! https://gist.github.com/shawwn/333540a1f0b02510d684394979d6b...

Those member / assoc / rassoc / rassoc-if / etc definitions come straight out of sbcl's lisp definition file.

I'm tellin' ya, Lumen is amazing. You can do everything you can imagine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIYNk4ARUR8

The best part is, it's additive work. The communities enhance and inform one another.
If we raised farm labor wages by 40% it would cost the consumer less than $25 a year.

”For a typical household, a 40 percent increase in farm labor costs translates into a four percent increase in retail prices (0.30 farm share of retail prices x 0.33 farm labor share of farm revenue = 10 percent, farm labor costs rise 40 percent, and 0.4 x 10 = 3.6 percent). If farm wages rose 40 percent, and the increase were passed on fully to consumers, average spending on fresh fruits and vegetables would rise by about $21 a year (4 percent x $530 = $21).

Giving seasonal farm workers a 40 percent wage increase, on the other hand, would raise their average earnings from $11,720 for 1,000 hours of work to $16,400, lifting the average worker above the federal poverty line of $11,770 for an individual in 2015.”

https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=2005
I absolutely could've. My college offered student loans to me as a means of paying for my education but if I had $0 to my name upon hitting 18, my life would've been radically different. As I mentioned in another comment a lot of that money went towards helping my family with FAFSA supplementing my school costs. I was effectively responsible for supporting my entire family and given my other health/mental issues at the time I don't know if I would've survived a full time job as well. Suffice to say dealing with a lot of these issues as a kid leaves your outlook fairly bleak without ways of helping yourself.

If you consider my situation to be the norm for a lot of poorer students, then you also start to see where the student debt crisis comes from and how it ties into the economic well-being for many people my age. There's a lot of people where they would have no choice but to dive straight into a lot of these predatory loans without prior education or finance knowledge and graduate knee deep in debt.

In another way, I was lucky that I graduated college with only $0 to my name. I could've graduated with -$40,000-80,000.
It works pretty well where I live.
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/regulation-health-and-di...
How about iOS?

I'd argue that's well designed software which is focused (albeit not exclusively) on user happiness.

Apple leaves a lot on the table when determining what to monetize and what trade-offs to make to avoid making users uncomfortable or infringing on their privacy.

Is that benevolence? No, but it doesn't have to be.
Software development as practiced now by a huge number of individuals and companies is closer to a craft, but it can be and must be more than that if we want to be able to tackle the growing complexity of software and improve its overall barely adequate quality.

Crafts don't scale and are a poor fit for highly complex domains.

The curse of software development is its huge financial success, anemic legislative specification and the observed reality that customers will still buy poor quality software.

These are preventing the craft-like programming from turning into software engineering, but the craft is already failing to reach expectations: countless security disasters, unethical programmers enabling spying on millions, software literally killing users. This stuff will only get worse.

And finally, we do understand software engineering well enough to teach it properly. It's just not done, because it's not considered necessary when one can get by with a computer science degree, no degree or a bootcamp certificate.
Apple interviews are team-specific, so I'm not sure that the existence of a single jerk on a single team's interview loop should reflect on a company with hundreds if not thousands of teams and tens of thousands of engineers.
Which, considering the small size of our dear country, basically makes "the stretch of land between EPFL and ETH Zurich" more or less the whole of Switzerland ;)
Lemun seemed like a nice name for the nightly / unstable version of Lumen, once things advance that far.
Count the war memorials in your city. Now count the memorials to the Stolen Generation, and try to find anything that acknowledges Australias own ethnic cleansing history.
I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm a libertarian and don't like regulations. On the second hand, these kinda regulations make sense.
If there B2B quality control is anything like what they offer to consumers, I’m not worried. They cannot pull the blind eye to counterfeit garbage like they do to their consumers.
How Fighting Wildfires Works [video]
Slaughterhouse is the right word. I'm not sure what you mean by a fishing factory but I suppose it would be a fish packing plant?
From "What Do You Care What Other People Think":

I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had “labs” at home, and we would do various “experiments.” One time, we were discussing something — we must have been eleven or twelve at the time — and I said, “But thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside.

“Oh yeah?” Bernie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in a car?”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Good. Now, tell me: how did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?”

So I learned from Bernie that thoughts can be visual as well as verbal.
Doesn't Wikipedia run on donations? Or are you saying you think that works for the majority of sites?
> Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect.

I think this is an important point that many people seem to gloss over when discussing what humans _deserve_ to be paid.

Many believe the uniqueness of a skill set or how much physical stress is inherent to a position should be the only factors which increase a salary.

But the point you highlight here says that the amount of soul-crushing misery a position entails should also play a significant role when determining salaries.

It seems that in many countries, companies can get away with paying soul-crushing positions so terribly because so many people are coerced into these jobs--forced to choose between incredibly soul-crushing, low paying positions or watch their families starve, become homeless, not be able to afford medical care etc...

Which leads me to wonder if there are any societal changes we could make in order to nudge salaries to reflect when a job is mentally abusive. Similar to how pay typically reflects when a job is physically abusive.

I'm guessing Denmark has a decent safety net which forces companies to actually factor in mental abuse of a position when they're formulating salaries which ensures their citizens are compensated accordingly?
Paisley Pattern Wedding Invitations – A2zWeddingCards
> There's little argument for manual transmission anymore except in larger vehicles.

Why has "having fun" disappeared from people's list of requirements in a vehicle?

CVT's are boring to drive. Extremely boring.
Microsoft is replacing feedback with “perspectives”
What really kills me with Amazon is that, leaving outside of the US, I always tick the box for "Deliver in $COUNTRY", and regularly (95% of the time) find out at checkout time that no, in fact, this seller does not deliver in $COUNTRY.

To be fair, I gave up on Amazon after that, except for Kindle's books.
Isn't that against the regulations?

We were taught that squeezing in is forbidden unless you're heading for an exit or something like that.
I'll concede widespread automatic usage here would lead to even more mobile phone usage.

It's common here to see people texting while driving and I don't understand what goes through people's minds to make them think this isn't a crazy thing to do?
Your story is very confusing. If (legal) immigrant workers were willing to work for a lower pay (because of the low-pay loopholes) why wouldn't they be willing to work now for a higher pay?
My experience with LTE in the US (primarily west coast) has left a lot to be desired but that’s not always the case overseas.

Random result in Stockholm, in a relatively built-up office district:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/2834370481

I’ve never found myself disappointed with LTE performance, even the RTT is “good enough” for 90% of my applications
That doesn't necessarily mean that it stores the password in plaintext. It can mail you the plaintext password based on your own input upon sign-up before storing a salted hash in the database.
One difference between adding women to the workforce and adding immigrants is that women were already customers of the economy. Women working increased the pool of workers but not the pool of customers. Immigrants would add to both.
When we say software development is a craft, we're saying that it's like shoemaking, pottery or woodworking.

Can the immense complexity of today and tomorrow's software be tamed by applying the same principles of building a cupboard? No, it requires an engineering mindset.

We're now limping along as an industry and it's not obvious because SW is bringing in massive amounts of money and we can basically get away with a lack of quality.
Recently I've been playing around with something like this, or really; getting back to something like this. Years ago I was an idealistic graduate student who didn't have any "free" (you-are-the-product) digital service or social media accounts - I used Lavabit (before it got shut down) for email and a couple of cheap VPS providers to run a little blog and IRC bouncer. I had a dumb "burner" phone, a RockBox-based MP3 player, ran Tomato on my router, and ran Debian on most everything else.

I think the main factors that killed it for me, that made me drink the Kool-Aid so to speak, were a combination of getting an Android phone and the shutdown of Lavabit (with all the hassle that incurred - notifying dozens of colleagues, mailing lists, etc of the change). Concurrently with this I had just gotten my first industry gig at a pretty large networking equipment company, on a team with mostly older, mellowed, senior engineers for whom programming was "just a job". I didn't want to seem like a "paranoid weirdo" who had some black-hat alter ego. I sold out.

Since, I've pretty much moved wholesale to Google. I still don't use any other digital services - Google has basically become my one-stop shop, for better or worse. I use Android, Chrome, Gmail, Drive, Music, Books, Search, Maps, Keep, Photos, basically the whole damn suite. It's a beautifully unified and seamless experience. I feel in-general, Google gets just about everything right (I don't use Docs - I still write docs in LaTex, haha). It's quite a 180 from what I had before.

But ultimately, I think this has caused me a lot of cognitive dissonance. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to "get back" lately, but this is tempered by how much control I've already given up and, well, what is frankly a pretty damn high quality and convenient experience and there are some things (like Maps, and Photos) which I really don't want to give up. I also don't hold any delusions that anything I do is going to be "more secure" from any threat model, really. I guess I just miss all the DIY. The creativity and control.

Anyways, recently I've been building an ARM64-based "mini-homelab" around an Archer AC1750 router running OpenWRT, a stack of three Odroid C2 SBCs, and an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (with a 50K LUT FPGA on the m.2 PCIe slot). I also have an ARM64 VM in the cloud. Once that's all set up, I've been considering how much I can "get back" under my control.
It sounds so easy when you just say it like that.
Yes, but packages from EU countries are often inspected and duties are levied when applicable. Given the added friction, it's no surprise that the majority of Amazon.de items/sellers in my experience don't ship to Switzerland.
> On the other hand, most of the commercial applications I've seen are around using drones for mapping. So basically taking pictures and then processing them (create orthophotos, build a 3D model, detect objects, etc...).

In my opinion, the majority of those applications are better served by either CCTV or manned aircraft.

Mapping use cases - If the area is big enough, manned aircraft mapping is much cheaper than drone mapping. Typical airplane ortho is around the 10cm/pixel, so it is sufficient for the majority of use cases. E.g. Check our nearmap. If the area is small, the machine learning is not going to make lots of $, as it's better to just use humans.

Monitoring use cases - e.g. "I want to detect if construction workers are wearing helmets" or "I want to detect poachers in the area". You can provide more business value by doing computer vision on CCTV camera.
I have a similar home setup, but don’t recommend using Pis for disk-intensive workloads due to SD Card volatility. My HomeKit setup, for instance, is Dockerized and runs on an ODROID board with EMMC storage, and the build server for my ARM containers boots from an SD card but has an USB hard drive.
He is saying they do need to care about algorithmic complexity in choosing data structures or implementations, but rarely need to figure out really clever algorithmic tricks (of the sort which tend to be tested by harder algorithmic questions, like the "find whether there is a loop in singly-linked-list", which relies on the running pointer technique which you never need to use in real life).
my2c. Docusaurus is another great choice!

https://docusaurus.io/
Reliable #ArtificialIntelligence with PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada
SquashFu – a backup solution, resilient to Crypto Ransomware attacks
Because merging early is worse. How is creating an artificial backup in one lane considerate?

I find it inconsiderate frankly, because it forces an arbitrary decision rather then just patiently using the available road as marked.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/mark-phelan/2018/07/0...
Aeroflot signs up for 100 Russian-built Superjets – Aviation
You can prove correctness of software, firmware and hardware and still have it all come crashing down the moment a bit flips.

There is no solution to such things as "bitflip in memory" because once that happens, all bets are off. Instructions could be entirely wrong, page tables could have been corrupted, pointers in kernel memory pointing anywhere but where they belong, fire and brimstone raining from the sky, the dead walking among the living and the local supermarket running out of chocolate.

You can however reduce the risk that such a bitflip results in a full system-, security- or application failure via various means (the Apollo 11 computer for example was capable of simply restarting a program at various checkpoints if they crashed and had multiple software and hardware safeguards against bitflips and random crashes).
If you think so, you've to state what the power use was of the chipsets you've used.

For example the well-known nRF51:
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/1657/how-to-mini.... It can be as low as 20 uA. Between advertisements 4 uA.
I still think that ditching the 3,5mm is a stupid idea.
Do I have to speak TeX to understand this? What's it with all the dollar signs and periods?

I recognize the graphics, though. Iteration paths of a polynomial modulo N graphviz'ed. These seemingly simple constructs don't cease to fascinate me.
Surprisingly SQLite does actually embrace formal methods in various places.

Such as, in their draft goals [0], under S30200, they outline a memory allocator goal by referring to a proof.

Though, if the parents goal was to imply that the whole of SQLite should be verified... I'm not convinced its entirely possible. Quite a lot of SQLite revolves around things around where the halting problem may come into play.

[0] http://www.sqlite.org/draft/sysreq.html
This reminds me of bureaucracy in India. As a foreign-born Indian I tried to get an OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) which is akin to a lifetime visa nowadays.

As part of the documentation they eventually required my father's birth certificate (since he surrendered his original passport). The city did manage to find his records even though he was born near the time of the partition/independence.

However, they required a letter from his birth parents who were long since deceased. They just didn't have the logic in their system to understand this was a possibility and know what to do.
I find that the best way to build docs is to use some sort of a static html generator and host the html yourself, which is not at all hard to do. There are free and open source themes available to host your own docs in various site generators.

My personal favorite is hugo. Previously I have built a documentation for a large project [0] using hugo and it gave us 100% control over how we design or host it. Outsourcing a doc to a SaaS seems like something I would never do if I cared about the product/software.

[0] - https://docs.dgraph.io
> This is just not true. Do you know the game? Are you speaking as a player? Or are you telling us what's written in the OpenAI blog post? There is nothing a player couldn't figure out.

A lot has been made of the 1v1 Shadow Fiend OpenAI player having figured out an edge case of Magic Stick recharging. (Casting spells while outside vision doesn't give charges to the enemy hero.) This mechanic was not previously known to the OpenAI team, but was known to professional players -- it's not the epiphany it's made out to be.
I would too, for the same reason and for other “paravet” diagnostic work on my unit.

That said, in cattle I found (with a bit of vet coaching) it wasn’t hard to recognise follicles, distinguish from (and gauge size of) a corpus luteum, etc by manual palpation, at least for someone who AIs reasonably regularly anyway.

Our vets seem no less accurate this way than with their expensive heads-up toy! (I doubt I’m as accurate - I don’t get anything like the practice they do - but very handy for quick sanity check.)
Curiosity doesn’t kill companies
Give a new life to your next app with these excellent frameworks
FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)
Pretty sure the 'No Spoilers' is a joke, sort of how people would joke about how they are ruining the titanic... "The ship sinks"

I mean, just like how we all know, in broad strokes, the story of the titanic, most of us have some idea of the plot to some works of classic literature that we haven't read.
Google Is Handing the Future of the Internet to China
The lady in the example is 33 has a diabetes, 3 kids to support, and presumably also have to support for her disabled mother. To make the matter even more sad she had no higher level education. I can imagine how hard and tough it is for her. But I don't think raising the minimum wage or a mandated salary increase/promotion is the real solution here. The real solutions would be to:
1. Educate parents on the importance of children education.
2. Educate people to not have kids before they're financially and emotionally ready.
3. The importance and responsibilities that come with having kids.

Having been born in a developing countries and went to US for university and work sometime there, I can say that US minimum salary and the other related perks are already significantly way better of most of emerging countries.
> The bots lack if fear in e.g. diving a tower before 5 minutes definitely paid off to a certain degree.

It paid off because the bots were familiar with the 5-courier format, and knew that they could ferry in consumables to recover quickly. This is not normal in DotA 2; the game was balanced around consumables being limited in the early game, and the human players OpenAI faced were not familiar with this new, unbalanced state of affairs.
> Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air?

I need a citation for "more people == more housing demand"?

I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality. The reality is that as a single, well payed software developer with no kids I'm now on the downward slope of paying off the mortgage of my small studio apartment. My father at the same age had 2 kids, a stay at home wife and was on the downward slope of paying off their 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and a pool, all on a minimum wage job.

Yet economists keep telling us how much richer this generation is.