skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a lot of potential in "smart contracts", even though that phrase is kind of meaningless now a days.

A simple example of what can happen in the cryptocurrency world: a simple combination of Shamir's Secret Sharing [1] and the public/private key model leads to very easy to use escrow services.

For example, you can create a new wallet with 3-keys, and require 2-of-3 keys to transfer money out. Alice, Bob, and Escrow get the three keys. Anyone can transfer money INTO the wallet and check its value through the public key.

Under normal circumstances, Alice transfers money into the new wallet. Bob then gives Alice a real physical good. Finally, Alice and Bob provide two keys to allow the wallet to transfer money to Bob.

Escrow comes in if any disputes come up. Escrow provides a 2nd key to break any disputes. If Escrow sides with Alice, Escrow + Alice can together use the two keys to transfer the money back to Alice.

While if Escrow sides with Bob, they together can provide two keys to transfer the money to Bob.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

----------

True, escrow services do exist in the real world. And arguably, a "real" enforcement mechanism backed up by courts, police, and the government... are far more important than a silly crypto-game.

But the silly-crypto game is automatic, and way cheaper to invoke compared to a full court case. It should be seen as a way to provide escrow services at a cost far cheaper than one backed by courts and lawyers.

For example, "Escrow" can be an automatic email system that gives the 2nd key to Alice after 30 days (encrypted with Alice's public key, of course). Perhaps that's not sufficient for buying a car... but it'd be sufficient Escrow for your typical $20 video game purchase from Steam. As you can see, Bitcoin / Blockchain CAN automate things that used to take courts to invoke. Yes, its of lower quality, but almost any transaction can benefit from an Escrow service (even an Escrow service with default terms)

-------------

The main problem with this scheme (and probably why it isn't popular, even if its technologically possible...) is that BTC or Ethereum's price could change dramatically, even in just 30 days. Cryptocoins simply aren't stable enough for this kind of mechanism to be useful.
In other news, CEOs are the highest paid workers in Silicon Valley.

This is a seniority thing not a "this function is more valuable" thing.
1. Because you can afford to lose it.

2. There’s a chance (however small) that you could lose the other $950m, but keep some of this other $50m.
Another racist anti-White article by The Guardian.
The reach is much larger today.

It used to be that the troll would be the loudmouth at the bar. He might get in a fight with someone else at the bar, or he might just annoy the other patrons, but it was a pretty small set of people.

Now the troll is saying the same things, but on Twitter, and the whole country can hear his trolling. He's no different, he just has a bigger reach.
People are allowed to post, people are allowed to vote.
If you're curious about your own exposure to air pollutants, I'd recommend Plume Labs. They also have a handheld device that I preordered and hope to take around my town to see where the hotspots are. https://air.plumelabs.com/en/
> Walking around the Upper East Side, where I live, I find it striking how many of the establishments still standing among the many darkened windows are hair salons, nail salons, facial salons, eyebrow places, and restaurants. What’s the one thing they have in common? You won’t find their services on Amazon. The internet won’t cut my hair

Ok, fess up: how many of you reading this just came up with a dumb startup idea?
If you get fired you might not qualify for unemployment benefits, depending on jurisdiction. Not applicable to executives I suspect, but there it is.
> Mass action is a form of democracy, if the mass is large enough. It doesn't have to mean violence.

An interesting issue. Mass action that demonstrates voter interest is a form of democracy. Mass action that threatens physical harm to people and property is not, it's anarchy and mob violence.
Show HN: Starchat – Self hostable chat program written in PHP
Fantastic news and amazing work, the site looks beautiful! I love my copy of PBR but it's always been a tad on the heavy side for casual reading :)

The image viewer works brilliantly and the renders are looking gorgeous. Looking forward to spending some hours with this on my iPad later.
A good PM knows that all they should own is the definition of "what" should be worked on, but the bad ones seem to gravitate towards the "how" as well. I suspect this has something to do with many PMs transitioning out of engineering roles, but it can be very frustrating to work with a "Product Micromanager".
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/

There are some large countries out there. Note that according to my sibling comment, Belgium isn't #1, or above 50%, right now.
Modernizing Transport Security
In her eyes spending expensive marketing dollars to bring people to see anything but a full featured product is a disaster.

The lean startup approach doesn't advocate spending a lot of marketing dollars showing people your MVP. It advocates being, well, lean, until you have a good reason to believe that you have "product/market fit". It's then that you crank up the marketing/promotion stuff.

After all, wouldn't it be a disaster to spend a lot of expensive marketing dollars showing people a product that they don't want or need?
I'm quite skeptical of the interdisciplinary approach. We already know that it's possible to create useful neural networks without any "preprogramming", i.e., creating AlphaGo zero without beginning with any knowledge of Go. An interdisciplinary approach seems backward in that it premises that we need to know something about the problem before we can build the tools to find the solution. That's increasingly not the case, and I think what will ultimately happen at this College is that CS researchers will wall themselves off from the rest, who will just slow them down. If you want to bring AI to other fields, educate the people in those fields or hire an ML engineer.
I like Roubini despite his arrogance but surely everything to do with currency speculation is about greed? That's essentially what bitcoin is, it has little practical utility in day to day life.
The blockchain world - which as others have pointed out isn't short of cliques and boasters - is more like the early days of the internet IMO. Lots of interesting ideas and ways to leverage new technologies and ideas. Lots of terrible ideas, incompetence, corruption and greed, just like the internet circa 2000...and a few ideas that changed the world
When will this horrible argument stop being thrown around? Tetris and minesweeper use a minuscule amount of power and typically provide many hours of entertainment. As technology has advanced, the power efficiency of these games increased exponentially.

On the other hand, blockchain mining responds to more efficient hardware by increasing difficulty in order to compensate for the impact of improved hardware on the hash rate, while still doing the same amount of work (i.e. processing the same amount of transactions).

The comparison is absurd and intellectually dishonest.
I'm from Levels.fyi - we have a couple hundred entries for PM salaries here as well. From just a glance, it appears that Software Engineers still have higher pay though we admittingly have limited data currently: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Product%20Manager
From a pollution perspective, is it better to have 1 coal plant generating electricity for an electric bus fleet, or to have a fleet of buses that run on hybrid-electric diesel or CNG?
Infiltrate? Quite a few are card carrying members.
> if the mass was a majority then they could use voting

In a system with perfect proportionality rather having systematic misrepresentation, sure; actual representative democracies tend to have structural biases favoring particular interests which means opposition to those interests often cannot succeed through voting merely with majority support, while the favored interest can remain dominant with a sufficient minority of support.

See, e.g., the US government, where this was dramatically demonstrated in the 2016 Presidential election, but has a more consistent impact in the federal legislature, particularly the Senate, and in the de facto “Constitutional legislature”—the body that can amend the Constitution—where, as in the Sense, voting is by State.

As such, a mere majority in the US favoring certain positions cannot succeed by voting alone.
So close, but ug [0]. A worthy effort (one I might pursue myself) is a self contained binary (or installer if I have to) that runs on Windows, daemonizes/service-izes itself w/ built in web server, dyn DNS's itself or other NAT punch approach, etc.

A laudable first step to be sure, but to decentralize we need to target desktops. Many have them at home and are willing to leave them on all day, especially content creators. And it needs to be as easy to setup and non-desktop-invasive as possible. So sqlite instead of postgres? In mem instead of redis? Built-in web server instead of nginx? Windows instead of not-Windows? UI instead of a bunch of scripts? Bandwidth concerns, now we can talk about the value of BT or similar, but lots of content has few enough users to leverage a home connection.

Or we can meet in the middle, find a quality hosting reseller, and have a UI that internally deploys containers/content for them for a couple bucks a month.

0 - https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/...
Yeah, meant to say buying a put - thanks!

My biggest caution against shorting a stock VS a put is the potential loss. At least with a put your loss is capped.
Yeah, I wondered about that. The PMs with whom I work all have 15+ years experience in the business. And for most of them, "the business" is our specific domain area, not just "software".

I would expect their salaries to be in the same ballpark as a senior engineer or line manager.
Technology Trends with Box CEO Aaron Levi
There is something to this idea that we want cities to be small, so that everyone knows each other and by virtue of knowing each other, we are less likely to deliberately hurt someone.

Thanks for the post.
An omnibus Docker container is preferable, and could even be run from always-on home gateways and NAS devices instead of transient desktops.

Targeting desktops natively (and the development effort required) would be a bucket of sadness, and IMHO, a waste of time.
I would be extremely surprised if the UK police hasn't infiltrated the EDL, Britain First, PEGIDA, and so on.
Has lots of utility for the people buying drugs.
> [...] if he looks into the looking-glass he sees every city and every country just as if he were standing over it. When I tried it I saw my family and my whole native land, but I cannot go further and say for certain whether they also saw me.

Google maps?
Where is "yes"?
Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
I'm trying to understand what the hardest part is for people new to programming? Is is understanding what source code means? Syntax? Was it variables or functions? How to think more like a programmer?
Censorship seems to be the main driving force behind users looking at other platforms at the moment. That being said, unfortunately, without the ad model, there's minimal incentives for users to fully migrate to other platforms like Patreon (for instance). If any new platform that wants to come online and compete, it will have to integrate the ad-model to provide any kind of real incentives for the users.
The argument of Sun's paper seems to be that CRDTs have hidden performance costs. Perhaps this is true.

This completely misses the main point. OT is complex, the theory is weak, and most OT algorithms have been proven incorrect (see http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00071213/). AFAIK, the only OT algorithm proved correct is TTF, which is actually a CRDT in disguise.

In contrast, the logic of CRDTs is simple and obvious. We know exactly why CRDTs converge. There are several papers proving that specific CRDTs are indeed correct.

Furthermore, I'm somewhat doubtful of the performance discussion, since Attiya et al. proved that there is a lower bound on the complexity of concurrent editing, independently of the technology used. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2933057.2933090.

Disclaimer: I did not read the paper in detail, just skimmed over it.
Bingo, Bango. Manufactured market manipulation.
> At the same time, economists usually aren't very wealthy people.. maybe they are overly sceptical of new developments.

That's a risible critique of expertise with little applicability to Nouriel Roubini in particular. Last time I checked, Nouriel was living in a $5.5 million penthouse in the East Village, and before that he was in Tribeca.
Allow all of that except for creating new items/assets. Release DLC which when purchased lets you use its assets in your own levels. Then others who want to play them have to also purchase the DLC.

See the game Trials Fusion for an example of this, I think it worked well for them profits wise?
Here ya go: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the...
Show HN: Prsnt.app, a browser-based tool for making mood boards
It’s time to abandon A/B testing
Furthermore, PMs are often customer facing. In my experience, they're often the people you bring in when the account manager wants to have roadmap and other relatively technical discussions.

There are degrees of seniority like everywhere else of course. But, in my experience (was a PM for hardware systems for a number of years), they're not typically right-out-of-school.
Let us know how you get it through airport security.
You sell them quality. Mods are shit quality, across the board. They’re full of broken English, half baked assets, and tons of bugs. Sure, fun can be had, but when it comes to my wallet, I want quality attached to fun.
I'm 70, push out production code every day (Horstmann style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Horstmann_st...), and I'm having the time of my life.
> They've infiltrated the SWP for nearly 40 years and yet have found no evidence of the organisation itself pushing violence or other crimes.

How do we know that they haven't found evidence?

EDIT: I should have RTFA more carefully.
MIT Is Opening a $1Bn AI College
Source for this? My understanding is that there is solid full-life-cycle analysis showing CO2 reduction from ethanol (35% lower on average), but a total mixed bag when it comes to hydrocarbons and various other air pollutants - some better, some worse: https://www.afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/flexible_fuel_emissions...
Patreon should become a supporter of PeerTube development when Youtube axes Patreon platform use entirely.
They need ethics training!!1
Presumably I won’t exchange it all at once, so now i’ll need a mix of coins and bars, taking up more volume.

The billionaire looking for security would already have a cache of stone and gold, but would appreciate other new forms of diversification.
Ever since I saw this book being sold, I've been eagerly wanting to read it. The physics-based approach is definitely the way I would prefer to learn any subject, and rendering is just one of the areas I wish I knew more about. Delighted to know that you guys put it online, thank you!
You can create a coin with very little effort and technical knowledge. An interview with one of the Turtlecoin developers was done where they created a new fork in a live 2 hour stream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7oqPL_4uXM

Or see the same developers post on creating the Athena fork https://medium.com/@turtlecoin/altcoin-101-create-a-cryptono...
Everyone wants to be the next Stanford.
> Virtually the same trappings and illusions of controls exist in China as well

Secret courts are a shame. Secret directives, on the other hand, can be compatible with the rule of law and an independent judiciary, provided they're lawfully authorized and can be challenged in a court.

At the end of the day, a private citizen (or foreign government) can challenge the U.S. government on equal grounds in a fair court. That is not the case in China.
It seems like, to many people AI = ML = Deep Learning. Depending on cluelessness level the executive you talk to they may add CV to the equality, too.

Back in the day we called ML "Pattern Recognition", I remember taking the course from Keinosuke Fukunaga at Purdue (good memories, I found out recently that his son is Gen Fukunaga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gen_Fukunaga).
Except of course that in the case of tether there has (AFAIK) never actually been a completed audit of their USD holdings.

the closest there has ever been is a letter from a law firm that was related to the owners and which clearly stated that it was not an audit.
In terms of energy in to energy out it is a lot more efficient. But the amount of particulate matter created by burning a kilojoule of coal is much, much higher than the amount created by burning a kilojoule of gasoline.
> Again, in order for that to work in generic code that convention needs to be blessed by the language.

Technically it only needs to be blessed by the standard library in this case.
Sinatra is the DSL/object model. Rack is the http request mapper.
> Well the moon has had artificial satellites in the past. I imagine it might not be terribly common, but not impossible either.

There are still artificial satellites around the Moon but the problem as stated in the paper is "long-lived" submoons, on stable orbits, which the Moon can't have.
This is a fine basic intro to the topic, but the whole argument is hung on a very sketchy benchmark (as noted by the article itself in a footnote).

Some things that'd help improve the argument:

1. Account for table/row locking in the benchmark: is it a factor or not?

2. Re-run the benchmark with for some of the proposed solutions, e.g. local connection pooling and PgBouncer.
I'm glad Chen attempted to give an intelligible quantity, but I'm not really sure what to make of the metric. "Years of education" don't seem like an intuitive metric for cognitive impairment. Checking the abstract gets us:

> Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 μm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 μg/m3) would move people from the median to the 63rd percentile (verbal test scores) and the 58th percentile (math test scores), respectively.

For reference, another study in China found that top-decile levels of lead poisoning (>10 micrograms per deciliter) cost children about two points of IQ on both math and verbal scales. That's not trivially convertible to percentile performance, and I don't know whether air pollution has long-tail effects anything like the horrible long-tail on lead poisoning.

But it does suggest that particulate pollution has effects on the same general scale as childhood lead poisoning, which is pretty striking.

Underlying study is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115

Lead study is here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667072/
Patreon is also censoring.
The diagrams were done with monodraw - https://monodraw.helftone.com/
Co-creator here. Would love to hear any feedback/impressions from HN folks.

We originally built this for the interior design/interior decoration market, but after we publicly launched it at the beginning of September, we've seen a surprising diversity of new users: everything from modeling recruiters to church social directors to event/wedding planners have come through the door so far.
Then stop using HN.

What's with liftbigweights and their endless spam and whining about interesting, on-topic submissions?

If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone.

liftbigweights has a massive HN spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter trolls.

If the "user" at liftbigweights don't like HN, go start your own version of "nice" HN and make billions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I appreciate the honesty of the readme
Of course this is just within the arbitrary distinctions of what constitutes a moon and a planet. A particle of sand in the Sahara desert orbits the earth's core albeit with a lot of collisions with other sand moons.
china number 1
is it crazy that i'm a web dev with more than 10 years and have never heard the term "markdown" before?
Tether is a well known - how do I say this politely - aberration.

Removing it from the equation would be very welcome.
Mars' moons are indeed much too close but our Moon is one of those listed in this paper as being capable of having a moon of its own.
Old school VGA animation using Turbo Pascal/DOSBox
Right wing and white supremacist groups exist to further societal sorting and ethnic cleansing implicitly and explicitly depending on the values of the particular group. To not see this as immediately threatening to the safety of pluralities of people is absolutely a subjective evaluation.

I personally don't think any state spy organization is funded or directed by people making objective decisions. They're not technocratic institutions, even if it feels nice to imagine they are.
New Blurb Blast: Alien Invasion, Live-Streaming Bitcoin Hacker and More [pdf]
So the moon has a moon, but I'd guess that the orbit is not stable over the long term.
Polyaxon, Argo and Seldon for model management and deployment in Kubernetes
Twitter has had (unofficial, via third-party services) user created blocklists for awhile now, but still feel like something only used by power users. And the complaints/anger over censorship still exist — IIRC, Wil Wheaton (the uber-Twitter power user) was hounded off of Twitter and Mastodon because of his promotion of a controversial user’s blacklist:

http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...

https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listenin...
I like the talk by Ryan Dahl, node.js inventor

Original Node JS Presentation, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY

In 2018 he gave a follow-up presentation "10 things I regret about node", but that presentation is more for experts.
Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used by Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything
Yup. Statistics does continue to be under-appreciated, nowhere more than among dudebros who read up about ML for no reason except that's where the money seems to be.

MIT alum here. I expect this new department to be a gross embarassment compared to the rest of campus initially. Then they'll enforce standards to bring it into line, which will suppress enrollment, and then the department will be merged into the CS department. Won't be the first time.
Is the official policy of all the groups that were spied upon 'the overthrow of the current government through violent means'? Some of them, surely, but all of them?

If not, then filling them with fifth columnists hardly seems proper.
These are the types of things that keep me worrying about self driving cars and if an entire system can be hacked to do the opposite of avoiding obstacles by malicious forces.
They were good at making noise and hijacking attention and demonstrations. But they were still tiny, and they're tinier by far now (as for 2014, some ex-members estimated there was a core of 200 or so left, after the Comrade Delta mess caused multiple splits). And they achieved very little: As you point out they were enthusiastically appropriating other peoples issues. They rarely did much of any consequence on their own.
George R. R. Martin, Fantasy’s Reigning King