skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only really "dishonest" part involves people "lying to themselves" or refusing to cut the losses when all evidence points to it. All of the anecdotes are basically the same: "business in dire straits, we just need short-term financing to weather the short-term crisis". The people are "lying to themselves" by not making a more honest assessment of the situation. It's easy to read a situation and make a rational judgment when you aren't a participant, but a lot more difficult when it's your business
> The spam fax felt like a gift from God.

Did you ever think you would read such a sentence - and that it would be real?

> The advance turned out to be for $36,762, repaid in $800 daily debits from their bank account starting the day after they got the money. This would continue for about three months, until they’d repaid $59,960, amounting to an annualized interest rate of more than 350 percent. A small price to pay, Doug figured—soon he’d have all the money he needed in cheaper, longer-term debt.

totally speechless. $800 in DAILY payments, at 350% interest, for a TRYOUT loan that he didn't even need, in order to get a bigger loan of $800K. FROM A SPAM FAX. And to top it off - they didn't talk to their lawyer, or (i assume) accountant.

> Jerry Bush, who ran a plumbing business with his father in Roanoke, Va., signed confessions for at least six cash advances from companies including Yellowstone, taking one loan after another as his payments mounted to $18,000 a day.

A day! how could any small business handle that?

This is just heartbreaking. While these were horrible (or desperate) financial decisions - it's not their fault for being victims. This is what laws and regulations are for. We can and will eventually stop this from happening. I think this being a series of stories will help give it the spotlight it needs.
Overly centralized control of military power, economic power, and media distribution power are often bad and lead to corruption, while the distribution of the above generally lead to widespread benefit to civilization and society.

The biggest bang for the buck for benefit to the common man would be through the inversion of "Trusted Execution" or DRM technologies to enforce privacy policies on corporations and large organizations on behalf of the public. It will never happen, because the general public, and especially the tech portion of it, are emotionally conditioned against such technology. However, there are many mechanisms like this, which show this kind of asymmetry with regards to centralized power.

Some corporations have already taken a step in this direction, by giving up access to encryption keys and the ability to read their user's data. It would just be one step further for a corporation to cede control of privacy policy implementation on behalf of its customers by running code implementing those policies on trusted execution engines. This way, users will be able to revoke access to their data from corporations and large organizations.

The public will never go for this, however, because they're already conditioned against such technologies from its application by large organizations against the interests of individuals.
Physicists: https://www.xkcd.com/793/
> The worst part is, is that there is a viable market for short term business loans that don’t involve APYs over 300% or loan snarking

Yes, there is... but there are still people who those reputable lenders won't do business with because the risk is too high for the return. Those high risk people are the ones these predators are lending to.
Can anyone retire in their 30s? Meet the people who say yes
Eyes of CJD patients show evidence of prions
Well, it's a little different. Torrent sites didn't have centralized websites that would literally trade large sums of money for torrents.
Then I guess this is the trade-off you've agreed to. However, there are a whole lot of Linux and potential Linux users who complain about the lack of proprietary software ports, and package managers and their implications are one of the reasons for that.

Flatpak isn't even good enough, in my opinion, since it adds complexity to an otherwise simple scheme in an effort to accomplish some of the deduplication you and other fans of package managers want. Ditto its repo model.
Visited it a couple of years ago, really nice to see. Bit of a Flintstones feeling, with stone beds and cupboards.

I was impressed by it, but one should not forget that at the same time this was built the Great Pyramid was already 300 years old.
bitflips are also single char typos in ascii. I'm guessing that is what you saw
False; it is not the same time everywhere. Two people travelling at different speeds will disagree about what order events happened in, and there is no privileged reference frame.
Facebook releases Spectrum, an image transcoding library for iOS and Android
This will break, i.e. two consecutive rotations will no longer be the identity, if the number of valid characters in the BMP ever becomes odd. And there are still a few unallocated code points in the BMP. There is also an overflow in line 39 because of the check i <= BMP_SIZE in line 37 which, I guess, previously used Char.MaxValue instead of BMP_SIZE. But it does no harm here, U+0000 just gets filtered out twice.
depends, if you want your glorious mausoleum to last _forever_ then it lasting 4000 years would imply "correct" engineering to me
If someone is determined to be an example of sustainable living, having extra kids might be productive, even very much so, as it helps the signal-to-noise ratio of good values spread faster in the population; think of it as a multiplier. The actual weight of having more people is a rounding error compared to all the extra people who on top of it have questionable ethics and morals all around (most people including or especially westerners. Sure, poor people in developing countries are hopeless, but people from rich countries have more leverage used to exploit others.)
As someone who runs a very successful data business on a simple stack (php, cron, redis, mariadb), I definitely agree. We've avoided the latest trends/tools and just keep humming along while outperforming and outdelivering our competitors.

We're also revenue-funded so no outside VC pushing us to be flashy, but I will definitely admit it makes hiring difficult. Candidates see our stack as boring and bland, which we make up for that in comp, but for a lot of people that's not enough.

If you want to run a reliable, simple, and profitable business, keep your tech stack equally simple. If you want to appeal to VCs and have an easy time recruiting, you need to be cargo cult, even if it's not technically necessary.
Checkpoints prevents the chain from being reorganized after a large number of confirmations have already passed. This is to prevent several days of transactions from being reversed.

IOTA's coordinator in contrast defines when a transaction can be considered confirmed.

They are nothing alike.
You know, sometimes I wish we had a way to contextualise our upvotes, on HN, to add more emphasis when upvoting comments we find ourselves in particular agreement with- you know, the kind of comment that makes people watching you read it assume you're listening to ACDC on your headphones? That sort of thing. Perhaps we could have a way to channel some of our karma to the upvote arrow, and pass it on to the poster of the comment?

Anyway, sometimes I really wish I could upvote a comment twice of three times, etc. I mean, I know there's a way to do it but it actually feels like doing a disservice to the poster (and I'm pretty sure accounts get shadow-banned for that sort of thing anyway).

I'm digressing. Dude (I assume?). That's a good comment. Thanks.
I find this prevailing mentality incredibly troubling and the one truly broken thing about North American culture. Taken to its logical end, it is the underpinning root cause of all that ails the U.S.

In short: “I did it all myself” is always a lie. It could only ever be true if babes were left in woods since the time of birth to fend for themselves, and even then, debatable.
Apparently 95% of "bit flipping cosmic rays" are neutrons:

> At the Earth's surface approximately 95% of the particles capable of causing soft errors are energetic neutrons with the remainder composed of protons and pions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error#Cosmic_rays_creatin...
Intel NUC w/ DRM-free games from HumbleBundle, GOG if you're into supporting companies with refund policies that a judge labelled 'criminal' when Steam was confronted for inventing reasons you can't have a refund.

Valve was found to have willfully stolen from an estimated 20,000 people and were fined over two million dollars for it, if GOG can prove the software functions on your computer including demanding you install crap to help them prove that, they invent the right to deny what may be your legally-entitled refund.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/20/australia-fines-...
Big Damn Hero is a familiar trip back to Joss Whedon’s Firefly universe
2D barcodes such as QR and datamatrix certainly have their place, but I wouldn't say they're "massively resilient" to failure.

The codes use reed-solomon ECC and the symbology spec has different levels of error tolerance ranging up to a max of ~30% errors. That's certainly robust but it still requires a controlled optical setup to avoid operator frustration. Sometimes, in some applications, a nice big 1D barcode is better. Your 150 meter postage stamp example is an extreme use case that requires a lot of setup to work properly.

This color barcode appears to be an effort from a respected institution to increase information density. It doesn't have to be immediately accepted by major manufacturers to succeed. It just has to solve some problems for some applications. I think it's a compelling new symbology.

I work in manufacturing too.
The article contains some personal info[0] on a few of the sociopaths who are running this thing. Seems to me that if the government won't step in to do something, hackers certainly could...

[0] https://www.instagram.com/juan_zillaa/
Fax spam is super illegal, btw. Heavy fines per fax.
This, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
WHEN WE ALMOST GOT CAUGHT DOING
Person breaks into your car to escape violent gunman (let’s assume we’re in America), your car summarily executes them.

Alternatively: person is stealing your car, you have decided that theft deserves the death penalty, you execute them with your car.

Someone steals your car, your car accelerates and turns hard left, killing the occupants of other cars around them.

Seriously, I don’t get people who are so hell bent on trying to come up with ways to execute people for committing crimes.
Yes, you're right.

I was getting it jumbled up with the magnetic moment of the electron, which is predicted by the SM (well, the QED part anyway), to be slightly different to the 'classical' prediction.

Experiment measurement of this is accurate to one part per billion, and is consistent with the QED prediction.

The electroweak bits of the SM predict the W & Z bosons, along with their masses, which have also been measured, to around 1 part per 10,000, and match SM predictions.

EDIT: last but not least, the Higgs Boson was also predicted by SM, with a ballpark figure for it's mass, and other properties (how often it decays into photons, W bosons, quarks etc). So far all measurements of these properties are consistent with SM predictions.
You probably don't need kubernetes.

Lets be fair, it offers:-

> Orchestration of block storage

> Resource Management

> Rolling Deploys

> Cloud provider agnostic APIs*

If you don't need any of these things, and your stack fits on a single server or two, and you aren't already familiar with it, I'm not sure why you bother other than an interest.

That said, there's a world of companies that aren't FAANG, ub3r and Basecamp, and many of those paying reasonble sums of money have more complicated and resource intensive requirements that don't fit on a single server.

Government Departments, Retail Companies and Banks all likely have a number of different software development projects where giving a number of developers API access to a platform that offers the above advatanges is, in my opinion, a good thing. Once you get to FAANG level, who knows whether kube itself will actually help or hinder at that level.

* Personally I'd rather use the kube APIs than talking to any of the cloud providers directly. I imagine that's somewhat personal preference and somewhat because I've been able to easily run it in my basement.

*2 Namespaces also makes making more environments for CI/CD easier, so as soon as you have a team of developers and you want to do that sort of thing, it also makes sense. Not so much for a loan developer and his server.
How Amazon Used a Bidding War to Scrape Cities’ Data
How to use Webpack – beginners guide
It definitely is over-hyped, but it really gives you the knowledge of what type of tools and communication styles and techniques that other people in your organization are drawing upon since it contains all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit that HBR and other Harvard MBA (or Harvard MBA wannabes) you will probably encounter use and look for.

At the very least, the utility of the book is that it teaches you how to play the game.
GitHub Actions: Automating Serverless Deployments
I can't call myself too surprised considering that 'tumblr' and 'filtering' aren't so much strange bedfellows as perfect strangers.

I mean, hell, apps geared towards sexual encounters do a better job of filtering content. Grindr, Tinder, etc. Meanwhile, tumblr is pretty much unfettered access to whatever you fancy, not necessarily able to be bound by iOS' own filtering options such as Parental Controls in an elegant way.

Trouble is, if tumblr raised the app's minimum age to 17+ as with a lot of other apps with , that's a great deal of the app's userbase that can no longer access the service. On the other hand, heavily filtering content now means a huge backlog of content to sort through, with plenty of legitimate, if highly erotic, material ripe for getting falsely flagged as inappropriate.

tumblr's in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, though one entirely of their own design.
They weren't honest with themselves. High interest is difficult to pay. Only luck would have allowed them to pay
> The film is a straight up criticism of the book's pro-fascist (or at least pro-militaristic authoritarianism) undertones

It's not, both because the the film had basically nothing to do with the book except for some late alterations, and because the book isn't pro-fascist (or militaristic authoritarianism).

It does explore the concept of implementing the idea behind the draft, expanded beyond the narrowly military (citizenship requires submission to national service, which) and combining it with the (radical for the time) idea of freedom to opt out of such service completely, even military service for which one has volunteered during wartime.

I don't see it as endorsing the system it describes so much as using it as a vehicle to shine the light on the conflict between the ideas that citizenship should be tied to service and dedication to individual autonomy by stepping outside the resolution to that conflict that readers would be familiar with and unconsciously accept. Does the Terran Federation seem fascist or authoritarian? If so, what does that say about a “liberal democratic” society which does not even permit its members to opt out of service seen as necessary by the State? Does the state indoctrination (highlighted via the “History and Moral Philosophy” instruction) seem heavy handed? How, then, the indoctrination in the real public school system curriculum (which, even now is not apolitical, and was very much not in Heinlein’s time, either)?
How to build a camera kit for adventure photography
Containers are a mechanism to run your old machine[s], but with a reproducible setup script. A machine packed in a container happens to also run on your dev/CI environments. There isn't much logical difference between a physical machine, a VM and a container [0].

Serverless offers a large surface of APIs, some of them proprietary, tangled in an ever evolving dependency hell.

Historical note: Google Cloud started serverless with AppEngine, then focused on GCE [and later GKE] _because_ serverless was hard and AWS was eating their launch with VMs.

[0] For example, we can argue about security isolation issues in containers vs VMs. Eventually this will become a moot point as technology advances far enough that we can run each container inside a hardware-backed VM.
Read the article before commenting, please. He addressed that.
Bit flips in network surely is many orders of magnitude worse than in cache/memory bit flips? And I doubt it has to do with gamma rays.

Those with poor or long distance DSL do see a big increase in errors.

And while hopefully getting rarer now home routers could easily overheat and introduce errors as soon as they saw more than usual traffic.

We recently had issues with the power supply for our router and it also caused issued.
In C(++), the preprocessing is only way to portably declare directives. All others are vendor-specific. They are working on a common directive and module system now, but it will take at least two more years to be standardised fully.
The big companies like Square, OnDeck and Kabbage don't do this practice. It's the hundreds of thousands of scammy broker shops.
Cats use hollow papillae to wick saliva into fur
The only misunderstanding that's taking place here is how unproven you think the tech being discussed is.

No one is suggesting you spend sleepless nights troubleshooting beta software in production.

K8s is not beta software, and the fact that you have to misrepresent my position as such is a pretty good indicator that you don't find my actual position (use solid software even if it's new, as long as it's solid, which k8s is) to be objectionable. I wish you'd start there...
I hadn't heard of it until today. Glad it did.
Hell, if you can afford it, just buy a tow truck, the police would probably help you. (I recall a study from many years ago, where people would functionally help a car thief because of how annoying car alarms were)
How many fake books are sold on Amazon?
A quick search on Amazon for Gerardus Blokdyk will reaveal an amazing author. He managed to publish hundreds of obviously fake books. I purchased one by clicking (mistake) buy on a his book on zero knowledge proof but to my horror I have discovered that he has 400 pages with fake books on many interesting topics. Amazons seems to refund a sucker but this practice could probably hide money loundering or other shady practices...
i'm sorry i escalated? the person i was responding to cited the distinction between murder and manslaughter?

>I'm saying that intent informs morality. eg: Murder and Man Slaughter.
Hence the word analogous. They are both training wheels for their respective networks.
Maybe the cache should be made using Silicon on Sapphire for radiation hardening? But I am not sure if multi-process silicon fabrication is viable.
I don't. This person is a journalist. If you want to stop a journalist from writing a story, you kill them or you intimidate them.

China's already under intense public scrutiny. Killing a journalist, especially one who has already published the story in question, would be incredibly unwise!

One could rough her up but in most of these encounters she was in public. Many times they tried to get her alone. But she refused and had already published the story when they entered her hotel room. A beating would have been equally as unwise as killing her. Anything more intimidating than barging into her hotel room would have been a huge disaster for the Chinese government.
Where I can find your verified track record? Thanks!
Directional, and this one is apparently pointed about 30 degrees away from us.
I think we all know about view source. The risk lies exactly where you described it. I've never heard of being able to diff a running web page against a set of source repositories. Perhaps another HN reader will go invent that.
Yeah it would be redundant. the call to action once you generate a report is to send it to your provider.
Can we just say "Darwins law" and let it be?

In all seriousness... how do you protect naive people from scams like this? I guess my despair is that: you might protect them from this obvious scam. What if the scam is a little more polished?

I think this kinda thing will always happen to gullible folks. I'm not sure what the solution is.
I'm in no way endorsing this individual's proposal, but the argument you're using here is not as strong as you'd expect. A recurring trend in the past several decades has been that a contradiction in prediction is often simply massaged back into that prediction, at times quite arbitrarily. Then that previously contradictory observation can be used as 'evidence' for the newly retrofitted prediction. Of course that's at best circular logic and, at worst, something that can start sending us spiraling down the wrong path, faster than light.

So for instance the CMB did not support the big bang, it contradicted it. See: the horizon problem [1]. To reconcile this inflation theory was invented which arbitrarily suggests that the universe hit the accelerator hard, then slowed back down. There's no logic, mechanism, rationale or falsifiability. But it makes what we see fit what we predicted we'd see, so it's a pretty widely accepted part of modern physics. And this retrofitting now has a cascade affect that enables other theories to provide support for yet other theories -- such as what you're proposing here in that the CMB now 'supports' the big bang. It does so only if you add a very big asterisk there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem
> Last I heard text is visual... so then what is text but a form of visual programming?

But the author of TFA defines what he means: "A visual programming language is one that allows the programmer to create programs by manipulating graphical elements rather than typing textual commands."
We disagree k8s is solid, so no further discussion is necessary.

You questioned the maturity of an IRC client that was only 3 years old [1]. But that's enough time for Kubernetes to be a mature orchestration framework, to be relied upon as critical infrastructure? Yes, more development resources have been committed to Kubernetes, but that does not make it solid.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18408813
Does distribution of military power really lead to public benefit? My impression is that e.g. widespread distribution of small arms to local gangs, paramilitary mercenaries, etc. generally just leads to a lot of small scale conflict and death. Look at any of the most violent parts of the world, and they are generally awash with distributed military power.

Distribution of media power also seems like a mixed bag, especially if media consumers have poor media literacy. Social media (and the internet more generally) in the past few years gave pretty well any publisher the same direct-to-consumer distribution channel, and the result was many readers believing in nonsensical conspiracy theories because they couldn’t distinguish them from reputable news.