skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gosh, I have a few!

Fistly, wavelet trees! Wavelet trees with something like RRR encoding for the bit vectors lets you work with massive datasets in positively tiny space and constant time. They're not even expensive to construct! My favorite introduction to the whole space of rank/select-friendly structures is Alex Bowe's tutorial: https://alexbowe.com/wavelet-trees/

I constantly agitate for people to realize that we now have an algorithm for O(n) generalized sorting. It's called discrimination sort, and while it's a complex subject its quite elegant once you internalize the algorithm. There's a talk by Prof. Henglein here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9ZlZIRDAg

2017 saw the recommendation of a truly phenomenal approach to indexing data, using simple leaning structures. These indexes are poorly explored, there's still a ton of headroom here, but the paper is an incredibly cool read and very approachable: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208

Another really cool family of algorithms and associated structures in distributed systems is CRDTs. They're poorly understood, but in research they have largely superseded operational transforms. The Wikipedia page branches off into lots of good research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...

If we slightly broadened the lens of what is an algorithm, my favoriate category-theoretic approaches to solving problems include Recursion Schemes which are a technique to totally separate the specification of recursive algorithms over data structures from both the structures and the code that the algorithm runs to compute a result (Patrick from Github has a great series on them here: https://blog.sumtypeofway.com/). I also love the modern and rapidly growing "Ghosts of Forgotten Proofs" as a way to let the compiler assert you've properly built and/or terminated values: https://github.com/matt-noonan/gdp-paper/releases/download/j...
I mean, this is why things like "secure elements" and "trusted platform modules" exist.

You have a piece of hardware that stores encrypted data, and it can't be accessed until that hardware is convinced that the operator is requesting the access. The simplest example is a U2F key. It will not even sign an authentication request for a website until it detects that a human operator has asked it to do so (by touching it while flashing). That prevents malware from authenticating on your behalf. (You can still be tricked into authenticating, through, and then the malware will just steal the cookie you got. That is why things like secure boot exist; if the hardware verifies the OS and the OS verifies the hardware, then you can be reasonably sure that security protections are in place and that random software downloaded from the Internet can't interact with secure areas of your hardware. Modulo bugs in the OS, which is hardly a guarantee given how complex they are these days.)
How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2
Ask HN: How to replace Excel?
Morning HN!

I'm just another Biz Analyst that's getting tired of building CRUD in Excel. However, the more I look at web-based solutions, my inherent fear is that PoCs and new and complex features are going to need full on developers, rather than our analysts just putting something together for quick use.

So what's a good way we can replace Excel and deploy stuff quick and dirty? Excel is good for BI and ad-hoc analysis, not production grade stuff we don't have the time or expertise to develop in SAP / APO.

The team is proficient in SQL, VBA and not super against Python.
I picked it up at about the same time for some English class, and I remember being a bit shocked that something so obviously Deep and Literary could be quite so much fun. It's not the only example, of course, but for me it still occupies a special intersection between "flip through it when I'm not up to anything heavy" and "reread it carefully to see something new".

I first picked up Lem not long after, and got the same feeling. I wonder if the "literary vs. genre" dichotomy is less engrained outside of English writing - or perhaps I was just mislead by our stereotypes about the weight of "Russian Literature".
A new method to instill curiosity in reinforcement learning agents
The specific quotation being discussed from the article is "today it seems pretty clear that the Odyssey wins hands down in the mass popularity stakes".
> You don't oppose a government's efforts to counter radical Islam

The government found a final solution to the Muslim question! Why would anyone oppose it?
I will not do business in California or NY due to excessive costs. Many others are either already moved out or are scaling back in high tax areas; Florida, Puerto Rico and Texas seem to be the top tax-friendly destinations currently.

There is still plenty of activity in CA & NY on a sheer volume basis but the barriers are high, the types of businesses are shifting[1] in a detrimental manner and the overall trend is declining.

Don't get stuck in a purely domestic perspective. Absentee ownership is rising in many major cities due to international capital seeking safe havens for preservation of wealth - empty dwellings purchased at high rates results in elevated prices for working individuals, ensnaring them in a life-long debt cycle. If CA & NY continue resorting to taxation as the primary method for increasing revenue, they will end up like Detroit.

Rome's final collapse occurred over the span of approximately a decade and offers a glimpse at what is likely to occur: taxes became oppressive and property owners simply walked away because it no longer made financial sense - the benefits are outweighed by the costs.

How much more revenue loss can be endured by property owners in NYC before capitulation? They can hold out for a while and everything will appear to be doing alright, then the stampede begins and collapse takes place so fast you'll wonder what happened.

[1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/10/how-manhattan-became-ri...
There's some places around the world (including some places in the U.S., I think New York is one of them) where if you form a corporation, you have to publicize it in a newspaper. It can be expensive.
A tag applies to an individual commit, and is unique (i.e. you can't have the same tag on multiple commits); a named branch is applied to all commits in a branch and persists after merging. In the example mentioned by @krupan, the users tend to (and some team even require it) prefix each commit with the ticket name or similar identifier.
I don't particularly care about what's official so much as what people use in conversation, but seeing the name of a country change within my own lifetime is an unusual and interesting experience.
People have been trying to kill email for 40 years and failing. Their reinventions are usually worse than what they're trying to replace.

Unix, vim, emacs, lisp, the shell, and even the web itself is all old tech at this point. Old doesn't have to mean bad. It's tech that's stood the test of time.
- VCs won't invest in LLCs or LLPs. They invest in C-Corps. The possible arrangements you described don't apply to VC backed companies.
- You only get to set the terms when you don't need their money. This won't apply to you unless you've bootstrapped to significant revenue or you already have a previous successful exit under your belt.
39 million vs. 36 million. Not a big enough difference to matter.
It's one of the most fundamental concepts in computer science and underpins decades of research. You can decide if it's useful.
Please don't be a jerk on HN ("Oh come on", "modern art installation"). Your question would be just fine without those bits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anything other than a yes, is a no.
Security updates forever just like we expect from desktop operating systems would be nice too.
Or you could use a raspberry pi and an SD card for like 10% of the price of this device.
An irretrievable loss to whom?
This is insane. and awesome.
Automating upstream releases with release-bot
I wonder how the attack would handle touch input. A touch event could happen anywhere on the screen, not just at the pixel under the mouse pointer.

I think I'd try using a window that is equal to the screen size, hide it, take a screenshot, and unhide it with the screenshot image displayed.
Eu:CROPIS – Growing tomatoes in space
I can see the messages from Minea as Lark, but when I click "SUBMIT FLAG" I get "Invalid Flag Submission"
I would guess it depends if they're left whole and in-tact or not.

/s
I have no struggle. Those events were hard. No doubt. Not the point.

It was an answer to the question of why bad parenting discussions often are met with angst.

People get questioned on parenting, and suddenly they are in the middle of a mess and they are there because other people said, "bad parent" essentially.

Understanding how that can happen is germane.

Here is all it would take in many States:

Those parents just leave their kids with an iPad, and do not watch their kids. Follow that with just about any scary scenario and it is likely to trigger people at your door asking questions.

What I did here was share a little from the other side of some of those events gone bad. None of those should have happened. They all were rooted in literally, "bad parent" allegations created out of thin air with basis as thin as "screen time."

Parents here should be aware of what can happen. Comments to the effect of, "WTF is it with parenting discussions?" These potential events are part of WTF.

Frankly, I only shared difficulty to underscore complete disapproval, and I should have shared we quit due to how out of control and abused it can be, and is regularly. Some if those families were of non trivial means too.

"It won't happen to me." Know I have seen otherwise, and that is all.
Munchies can be about eating anything. Just make sure you got plenty of fruits and veggies or go for a long session of oral sex. Nobody ever got in bad shape for eating a full bag of baby cut carrots or a whole tray of peaches.
This whole thread makes me think of Alan Cooper, and how he bashes developers in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum basically as people out of touch with the rest of humanity in that we got used to rudimentary tools and our love for them and maybe the time and pain spent learning them makes us victim blame users, not that your comment is doing that, but maybe we do that unconsciously.
I was going to comment on the whole persona thing he started but it’s to early in the morning for such things
One of my very favorite basic ones: Point in polygon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon
So no-one in San Francisco has any rights b/c it's within 100 miles from SFO ;)?

- I'm just kidding..
An upcoming release should have continuity of service with a 2nd box, which is not a perfect solution I realize.
What do you mean by blocking "wholesale"? I started hosting an email server in EC2 and the worst I've had is my emails going to a spam folder if that person hasn't received an email from my address yet (and never after they've marked me as not being spam). That happened surprisingly rarely and didn't feel like much worse than I would get by just sending people email from gmail with an address they don't know. I don't think things are as bas as you make them out to be.

edit: I guess I should be clear that I have an elastic IP (which is free) and setup reverse DNS and DKIM and SPF, but I think those are fairly standard now a days (I don't know honestly I've only run an email server for a few months).
please dear lord not BASIC! Those of us who learned to code on 8-bit micros back in the day never used BASIC anyway & ended up writing everything in machine code.

You could use an emulator: the Jupiter Ace for example, which ran Forth (quite a good first language to learn)

I'd suggest Wolfram langauge on the Raspberry Pi, or Squeak Smalltalk
This is an interesting project. I've been following FreedomBox for ages hoping it would end up as a good way to do this, but development has been slow. I do have some questions about the technical details:

1) Is email access provided through the Helm App, SMTP/IMAP, or is there a webmail interface as well? Can you use this device without a smartphone?

2) Which Linux distro is this based on?

3) What file system is used? Is it something like ZFS or BTRFS, which could protect against corruption? Since there seems to be only one drive, I assume there is no RAID-like redundancy included to protect against drive failure?

4) Where are the encrypted backups stored? What is the procedure for recovering them? I expect that the backup recovery keys are also stored offline on the flash drive?

5) How are software updates performed? Are they pushed from a managed system that you control, or does the device itself pull updates automatically on a schedule? How long will you guarantee software updates for? If you stop providing them, or are slow to patch a vulnerability, is there any way for the user to patch the device themselves? Local SSH access perhaps?

Lastly, a comment, please consider not overriding the scroll behaviour on your website. It may look slick when it works, but when it doesn't (as it doesn't on my Firefox), it totally breaks the website. In the case of your technology page, it is super-annoying, since the details I want are at the bottom, and I'm forced to watch the slideshow before I can see them.
SEO Poisoning Campaign Targeting U.S. Midterm Election Keywords
as a Dutch national, I have to comment that it panned out really well here. Would highly recommend this start up.
I didn't know IBM acquired WU from The Weather Channel three years ago:

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/weather-underg...
I learned this while hanging out in the library (Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American). I put it to good use years later in college: I decided to implement a Nim playing circuit (out of RTL logic gates, yuk!) for my digital design lab course final project in 1975. It was a complex sequential circuit, but the result was quite remarkable. It played perfect Nim with up to four piles of 1 to 16 tokens.
Would it be possible to elaborate more on the problems pointed out by the OP of this thread? Like clean outgoing IP?
Moreover what happens exactly when the box melts? Because sooner or later some box will crash. Where will the service run in case of disaster? How long will I stay without email?
Neat! Who's Privacy Labs, Inc?
Can't give any because there are Government Agents just waiting to pounce if I do.
$99/yr is insane for this. Here's the reasoning they provide in their FAQ:

> Internet service providers normally don’t provide their customers with networking capabilities that are required to run an email server. In most cases, upgrading to an expensive business class internet service is needed. The subscription service that is part of the Helm service handles this for you without you having to upgrade your ISP.

> We handle all fees associated with domain registration and renewal when you create a new domain for your Helm. In addition, we also provide storage for offsite encrypted backups and include access to new features, service and security patches.
Twitter releases archive of 10M tweets from state-backed troll accounts
https://east.bigsnowtinyconf.com

This one has the cost listed as $595/person. That’s probably above the running costs, which are likely anywhere between 50-80% of 595*11.
Lumen: Custom, Self-Service Dashboarding for Netflix
>They wouldn't even notice the signal if it kicked them in the head, because they live in the noise.

This is a pretty apt description for that entire group, really. Many people live exclusively in the consumer world and have largely abandoned foundations of society like building a family or participating in local community, and I think it manifests in the internet tribalism we see.
Membership is the past of journalism aa well.

I think my parents have been sunscribed to the same newspaper since before I was born, and before there was any sign of computers in daily life.
Project Borealis: Continuing Half-Life in UE4
Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize (2005)
Show HN: Estipad – fast and easy project estimation
Unfortunately I don't have specific code examples. I was operating in stealth mode at the time and the code was closed source. I could dig some examples probably later today?

From memory, data might return normal json but with "" empty string instead of metric forecast but imperial forecast is there. Or the other way around. Or both empty. Or 0 values for variables that shouldn't be 0. Or error state json with not much info. Things like that.
Hi guys. I’m the founder and sole developer of Estipad.

Estipad is a web app that lets you break down a project into small tasks for easier estimation. When you’ve finished, you can download a PDF estimate ready to send to a client.

Estipad started as a basic CodePen that I used to calculate project estimates for my freelancing clients. A few of my developer friends liked it, so I decided to build it into a web app.

I’d love to hear your feedback and will happily answer any questions you may have.

--

Pawel Decowski

Founder, Estipad

PS. I’ll be writing more about Estipad on the blog: https://medium.com/estipad
Yeah, I guess the Barbican flats don't look as bad as the theatre bit etc.

I prefer the Lloyds building to the Pompidou. Less Fisher-Price colours.
That’s not how memory works.

You don’t read something say that false and ignore it. You ignore or remember something independent of it’s true and then latter when trying to recall something make an association. So you might recall Election Day, 7th, false or just Election Day, 7th.

As Election Day changes (2020 in on the 3rd) many people have a rather weak recall of the date so it’s easy for people to get confused.

PS: In terms of politics these Twitter accounts don’t actually have a liberal following so banning them helps republicans.
So this is a bet that people will value their email privacy at $99/year. The last time I went from not paying for something to paying for it was when I started paying for streaming services instead of downloading media. The cost difference was around the same (although $10/mo. feels cheaper than $99/yr), but the benefits feel a lot stronger -- say instead of waiting for a download to finish over the next hour, I can start watching content immediately. Even as a privacy minded person (no social media accounts, etc.), I don't see myself or a big market subscribing to this. The confidence factor is also pretty important since I'm not going to subscribe to a service that I feel has a high chance of shutting down in the next couple of years and possibly suffer email interruptions / data loss.
> The preschool costs around $3k/mo at least.

You're out of your mind if you think most people with children are paying $3k a month for child care. $3k a month is the entire income for a minimum wage couple with a child isn't it? I don't think your experience is typical.
No other factors are provided: were you in an affluent area? What other demographics influenced your school? Is there a high ratio of homeschooling or private schools to public schooling?

Your anecdote is one data point, nowhere near enough to draw conclusions about the entire state.
After 39 Years, All About Beer Magazine Is Dead
Some people like my parents only use their phones to get directions, group chat socially, and send pictures. There's like nothing interesting to steal from them.
Helm was built specifically for you. I know because I had to run dozens of mail servers myself for email-to-blog platform Posterous, my startup 10 years ago. It was terrible.

I've been up and running with Helm for the past month on my garrytan.com email domain and it's been zero maintenance.
Here's another framework, that raps around a library, that wraps around another framework, that wraps around another library.... please... stop making me learn new things to keep myself relevant in the vertigo-inducing swirling vortex that is Javascript.
What else runs on that EC2 instance?
Writing a faster Jsonnet compiler
Using a hardware root of trust, secure boot and a Secure Enclave for managing keys used for full disk encryption, it will be very difficult to extract decrypted data from a Helm server. The keys never leave the Secure Enclave, they aren't available to the application processor or memory.

Most cloud-based email services hold email in the clear - we believe this means you don't really own your data. Encrypted email services have challenges around search, access via proprietary protocols and the risks of running highly sensitive operations in client-side javascript.
Ludovic Courtes created a Boot-to-Guile image a few years ago, packaged using Guix:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-02/msg001...
Hey, since you're here already, I have some questions (in case you're able/allowed to answer them):

What's the base operating system and hardware architecture the box is based on? It says "Linux" on the page but doesn't go into specifics.

Why not just use regular hardware, e.g. Intel NUCs, or even allow people to run your software on their own hardware (like OwnCloud does)?

In Germany there was/is a startup, Protonet (https://protonet.com/), that had almost the exact same idea a while ago. They went bankrupt though and one of the reasons was that it cost a ton of money to design and produce their own hardware, which also looked very cool (orange hexagon!) but didn't provide much added value beyond what a normal, boring-looking compact PC could provide (at 500 € less than their box for the same specs). They also marketed their own OS, which was based on a modified Linux distribution, modified open-source software and a shiny management layer on top as well. They found out that developing and maintaining a Linux fork isn't so easy either, so they eventually canned it. So what's different about Helm in your opinion?
Yea, I think showing your work is substantially more important when people's lives and finances are on the line as opposed to the thrill of victory for a go master.

If you're making algos for that directly affect another human's basic needs, I think it's really important to be able to back up why the algo did what it did. I feel like you're probably opening yourself up to massive liability (regardless of region your operating in) if you can't explain to a court why your system did X to a person that resulted in them suing your company.
Awful name, there are so many projects called helm already.
Open-Source Decred Blockchain Puts $22M Treasury in Its Users' Hands
I think the only times I lost data in the last 10 years or so was because someone accidentally deleted stuff on a shared Dropbox (luckily I had a local backup, so only the most recent changes got lost). Oh and I lost some photos that I uploaded to a Facebook clone because they more or less shut down.

Data loss is more or less a solved problem. You don't need Google for that. ;-)

On the other hand, even without putting my tin hat on: I get customized ads best on my email contents, WTF?! Everybody can see based on the browser ads what kind of sites I'm surfing to.

> Internet and power outages mean you won't send or receive any email.

Except if you have a charged battery and LTE. ;-) In fact just a charged battery is needed when network is down to read old mails.

> Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it.

Solved problem. Encryption...
Wow, $500 for the device and $100 per year for service? AND the usual concerns about keeping the device up and running?

What honestly makes this more appealing than $50 per year for Fastmail?
Most games on consoles setup listen servers, which is essentially the same thing.
If you want more, search about "inverse problem"