skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To that end, I agree with your basic point: you need an interface to the outside word that has similar properties to the core model. At least, trustless, transparent, auditable. Probably anonymous as well.

Which is impossible because at some point the entire thing needs to interface with humans and human processes -- neither of which is infallible. The entire premise of Bitcoin, Ethereum and "Code Is Law" is broken at the core. They all try to get rid of "trust" by replacing it with computer code but at some point you need to interact with meatspace and meatspace is not logical, and not at all trustful.

In other words, trying to make everything trustless is futile because at the end of the day, you eventually have to trust other people.
The stagnation become with the end of the USSR. No need for physics anymore, no one was building missiles, or going to space.
Then the Internet happened and smart people made money off that.
Looks like the wages for developers is going down. China, Japan, etc., art going to space.
Physics will pick up again.
I don't know why you are vilifying government housing, it is very obviously the solution. Housing initiatives have always been a target for budgetary looting by politicians looking to solidify their legacy with more glamorous and superficial endeavors, but properly managed they are the only way for affordable housing to happen in cities that are already grossly affordable even for full time workers.

The market will never fix this, either. Why should a developer spend money to build something and wait far longer (if ever) to recoup their initial investment from affordable rental rates, when they can just price right along with the market and be out of the red sooner? Real estate booms and crashes, no one wants to wait for their goose to lay its first egg a decade after the local real estate market cools off. The market always favors the most rapid turn around on investment, and in cities like SF where tech companies gladly hand 22 year olds more money than they've ever seen, the quickest and safest buck for a developer are these cheap, fast, luxury builds that can command rents at the top of the market because the units smell like new paint.

The current favorite strategy among local governments is to offer developers large tax incentives to tack on a small percentage of low income units along with the luxury build. It is hardly even a half measure, as the rest of the luxury build will surge the rest of the local real estate market. Instead of offering tax incentives to attract luxury developers, local governments should instead let the market dictate what level of luxury building will be profitable, and focus on building low income municipal housing that is properly managed, and it's budget protected from raiding. Maybe something modern, and modular such that a family unit can be cheaply reconfigured into studios as demand dictates. In my city, the downtown YMCA has low income apartments in the dozen or so floors above the recreation facilities, and it works to keep these residents off the streets and employed.
> Also, iPhone 3g is ancient.

Released 2008. If I get an x86 laptop from 2008, I can install a modern Ubuntu on it with approximately 0 effort. If anything, it'll usually be better than cutting-edge hardware because the drivers have already been developed and released in a stable Linux version. iOS still loses this comparison.
Oh! G-API seems nice! It looks like something I had to implement imperfectly at one point (and I suspect many OpenCV developer also did it). The ability to describe a pipeline and having it run automatically it really a good thing to have.
>"1 event per day per 10^12 transistors"

Why is this in such an inconvenient form? If I have x gb of ram how many unavoidable memtest errors should I expect per hour of testing? It seems like that could be used to tell us the minimum amount of time to run the test.
I would be more shocked if corporations weren't overtly bribing people. Billionaires and PACs as well.

Church's other investigations were bigger, worse and also forgotten by the public.
Usually the complaint is that road money is misallocated to surface fixes that result in more potholes in the long run. In some states and municipalities, this has to do with how government employees steer construction contract awards. I see wanting to change this as analogous to the desired reforms in public transportation.
I mean they aren't political by definition. They exist at a lower layer and are apolitical by default. They can be used or corrupted by politics - and are.
Whenever I visit a non-English page I get a popup saying "do you want to translate this page". I assume the user in this case clicked the "Always translate" button.
I am not sure why the message from 'bhengaij' was flagged, as it was largely accurate (although perhaps worded poorly). This is an unbelievably ignorant and insensitive move on Jack Dorsey's part. He got involved in a country's cultural politics in the worst way, impulsively holding up a sign that has a very biased, potentially violent message, targeting a religious minority that makes up < 5% of India. This is jumping straight into complicated local issues whose nature can be very hard for foreigners to understand without knowing local history, culture, and language, no matter which country we're talking about.

From what I am seeing on Twitter and in various articles on this topic, Hindus have been under attack from all sides in India, stemming all the way back from colonial era divide-and-conquer tactics that put the country's traditional systems and culture into disarray. These have since been exacerbated by Western-influenced education systems/textbooks, the cutthroat populist politics of India, attempts by the Catholic church to replace Hinduism with Catholism (https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-11-08-991108...), overwhelming affirmative action policies (with 50%+ reserved quotas at educational institutions and government jobs), and more recently, even Western (leftist) activism. Moreover, despite claims of oppressive power, 65% of Brahmins live below the poverty line (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119889387595256961), as compared to 60% of India overall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India).

That's a lot to think about, and obviously Jack and his people did not think about it at all when they chose to meet with these activists privately or take a photo with this poster.

More generally, leaders of companies need to stop getting involved in politics or caving to the pressures of activism. They need to focus on their fundamental business goals and know where that line is where they start to favor the ideologies and political missions of one slice of their customer or employee base. Google is probably the worst example of this, where it seems a strong ideological echo chamber has been formed by a vocal minority, who want to use their political activism as the new decision-making framework for the company and also the new guidelines for what ideas are allowed to be voiced. It's bad for everyone, especially so when entities of such enormous wealth, power, and influence start to take sides. Twitter is a platform of similarly tremendous scale and needs to avoid falling into the same trap.
Caltech's most famous prank is the Rose Bowl prank. The instructions for which cards the audience would hold up were altered so they would spell out CALTECH rather than the team name. It's the only time Caltech ever was at the Rose Bowl :-)
> “Get a GC and then start working on your startup idea”

Practically speaking for many foreign tech workers, a visa such as the H1-B is pretty much the first step to getting a GC eventually, so advising they skip the H1 and go “get a GC” isn’t going to be all that helpful for many.

It’s pretty hard to go straight to a GC for most foreigners, even among those with excellent academic qualifications. How hard this is also often depends entirely on your passport lottery result - be unfortunate enough to be born with an Indian one and you are easily looking at a minimum 10 year wait times in a great many cases, and to live and work in US during that period you are likely going to need some kind of work visa like the H1.

Even for the best case scenarios (passport from a country with a current GC priority date etc) it still realistically often takes at least a year to complete the GC process.
Frequently they are also fishing, and will be thrown onto a different track if you say no. Code can be made to do most anything, but just because you can doesn't mean it's worth doing. Frequently I find that people bend over and overpromise shit that isn't built, isn't scoped, and is of questionable use, because prospective customers mention something in passing. Then you are on the hook for that ill-conceived feature forever.
How to PASSION TWIST ( LONG LASTING )
Okay, I have seen this 10 times or so when I tried to compare various binary-to-text encodings and basE91 is the only one without a format description. Probably it's time to directly look at the source code. Amazingly, this one turns out to be the only binary-to-text encoding with the input bits groupped by varying number of bits I have ever seen. More specifically:

* The input bits are packed in the reverse order (e.g. 1A 2B 3C is packed as 0x3C2B1A) unlike most other binary-to-text encodings. The last bits are padded with preceding zeroes.

* A pair of basE91 alphabets encode a number 0 through 8280. The first alphabet is least significant: `AB` encodes 91 and not 1.

* 91^2 = 8281 > 2^13 = 8192, so groups of 13 bits are read and encoded as two basE91 alphabets from the least significant to the most significant. But it's not always the case. Occasionally a group of lowermost 14 bits will be read if the bits are less than 91^2. As a result, the first 8281 - 8192 = 89 values (0..88) and the last 89 values (8192..8280) actually encode 14 bits, and it includes all-zero bits. Its average overhead is therefore 22.93% (16 / lg 8281 - 1) and can reach 14.29% (16 / 14 - 1) when all bits are zero.

It reminds me of Ascii85 [1] which had a shorthand for all-zero groups and all-space groups, but this one is more general. Speaking of generality, probably a binary-to-text encoding with arithmetic coding is now viable?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85#btoa_version
Assuming a podcast is 50MB, that would be 300k podcasts. If I'm about to jump on a flight, I may download 4-5, which would put that at about 60k people. I just found an article saying 53 million people flew through SFO in 2016. If we distribute those evenly (unreasonable, but ballparks it), we get just under 145k passengers / day.

Obviously web pages and mp3s are much lighter than a typical podcast, so this isn't the best methodology. 15TB is a lot, for sure, but on the busiest travel day of the year, I can rationalize it.
I've made this point before; there are 5 PR people for every reporter in the US.

https://muckrack.com/blog/2016/04/14/america-now-has-nearly-...

That and the fact that various parts of the 'expert class' has largely discredited itself; from the replication crisis to the death of physics as a field .... we don't need to blame bots; the trust level is low.
Long to short, the "pollution" from large scale factory animal farming is poisoning the downstream vegetable farming. Is that it?

Given the disconnect between the FDA and the EPA can't the CDC step in? Is there no authority at the state level?
There's a number of flaws in your argument.

If automation will make agriculture more competitive, then food will get cheaper. Governments will be able to subsidise it.

Capital needs consumers to make a profit.

Politics will solve any kind of food crisis. Otherwise there will be a revolution.
Just FYI your site is VERY broken on my mobile device (iPhone se Ios11 safari). First the home page loads nicely then before I even have a chance to scroll I’m redirected to home.brain.fm where it loads painfully slow (js heavy?) and when it loads is missing ~60% or content and just looks like a empty template. Totally unuasble. It does sound cool as an idea though.
I wonder if you are actually disagreeing. One of the biggest problems with BTC, in particular, is that it is inherently deflationary. This encourages the thinking that its value will inevitably rise. BTC was originally popular with people who also thought that it was a good idea to buy up and hold gold and silver.

BTC solved an actual financial problem, though. There was a desire to make distributed financial transactions. The most obvious application was to make purchases where moving the money through central, regulated banks was undesirable (e.g. buying drugs or money laundering).

However, there were other applications as well. For my part, although I've never actually spent any BTC (I have a small amount that I actually mined with my CPU, if you can believe it!), the attraction was the possibility to make payments online because as non-permanent resident foreigner, every credit card company refused my business. It's slightly easier to get a credit card now, but I still don't have one.

In other places in the world, the banks are corrupt. My friend's wife had her employer pay her with BTC because she would be sure to actually receive payment. In some places, depending on who you are it is literally impossible to get a bank account. This is a form of marginalisation and discrimination. BTC (or something like it) can solve this problem, presuming you can find a way to convert it to fiat currency.

But the problem here is that despite the potential (or even because of it) the field is littered with fraud. The banks do not want a distributed payment processing system. They want to be in control. Especially in countries where they are abusing the customers, or actively marginalising parts of the population -- it's not an accident. They don't want to fix the "problem".

So the existing regulated industry wants no part of cryptocurrency (at least from the perspective of an actual decentralised payment processing system that removes control from them). This creates the vacuum that attracts the fraud. It also makes the adoption for beneficial transactions (e.g. not drugs and money laundering) very difficult because legitimate vendors have to adhere to the regulated system and cryptocurrency does nothing to make that easier. At best it doesn't make it harder. As many cryptocurrency nouveau-riche can identify with, figuring out how to pay your taxes with the capital gains/losses from FOREX is not trivial.

While I'm hopeful that a distributed payment solution will eventually arise, I think the OP's point that the pains we are experiencing are pretty much inevitable is correct. Though we could make our lives a lot easier if we used an inflationary cryptocurrency (because then you'd be forced to spend it quickly).
Or the externalities are properly priced and the vast majority of the miles of transport are done by train, which would be cheaper if trucks had to pay for the road maintenance they cause. And cause less pollution (both in ton-miles and from reduced emissions during repaving). And the potatoes end up costing what they cost to get to you?

I'm not sure the potato subsidy is worth distorting the transport economics.
Good luck with that. It's buried in the supplemental materials, but mainstream media may be more reliant on social media bots to spread than the low-credibility stuff based on their data.
>[...] the parallel subway line could easily have the car lengths and train frequency doubled.

What do you mean by car lengths? I thought all nyc subway trains had the same # of cars
> You do know how journalling works, yes? Unless the drive lies about the state of data being written, in which case not even COW will save you, a journal is just as good as COW. Exceptions being coding errors but those can occur on COW with the same devastating result.

Yes, I'm aware of how journaling works. The problem with your description is that it requires both data and metadata journaling. This is rarely the case because data journaling requires that you write all of your data to the disk twice (which also requires additional seeks as well). So, nearly all in-place filesystems default to only metadata journaling for performance reasons (this is the case for ext4). This means that, in practice, if you get a system crash mid file write, you will end up with a partially updated file. On a COW filesystem you are always guaranteed the old file or the new file.

> Maybe you don't know as much about filesystems as you want to appear to?

That is possible, although I'm not sure how much I want to appear to know :P. More seriously, this is extremely condescending. Why is this necessary? If you think I'm wrong, just tell me I'm wrong. There is a pretty decent chance I'm wrong about most things. So, condescension shouldn't be required.
Hacker news running on a single server is a very bad precedent. Wish people running the show address it quickly since its being used as a bad example.

When building a business you should take care of having an environment which is resilient. I agree it's not for everyone. But its quite essential when you have a huge customer base and care about unpleasant experience. If someone is running an important business and leaving it to chance - its just pure arrogance or gross incompetence.
This is somewhat ignorant.

NYC is not just for rich yuppies. The city is home to a lot of middle and lower middle class families as well as the working class who can’t just leave and rely on public transportation for work or school. Look beyond midtown and north Brooklyn and you’ll see that.

It’s entirely fair for people to want to improve things.
> why expect it to be constant between a money and food?

Because sometimes all I want to do is buy a bigmac with some cash and not worry about put options or hedging risk in currency fluctuations?

Why expect the government to keep a predictable exchange rate between money and food? Because then I don't have to worry about that and neither does anybody else. That adds incredible value to an economy.
Establishing Your Goals
I guess that's because the greater Vancouver area is made up of multiple localities officially designated as cities, even though in many cases there are no visible gaps between them anywhere other than on the map. The transport system is divided in zones, so travelling to, say, Coquitlam will cost you twice as much as travelling within the Vancouver downtown.
References? It's rather simple and obvious math.

If your city's population doubles, and the homeless portion started at 1%, and ended at 1%, your number of homeless people on the streets doubled.

We like to focus on per-capita figures/%ages because they can make us feel good about ourselves. Except the problems you see on the street are not constant when their incidence %age stays constant, as the population grows. For them to stay constant, the %age must shrink in proportion to the growth, which is practically impossible.

Growth applies to everything, including your problems.
It's funny that an investigation over "bribes" paid to Nixon led to laws changing and a system where US politicians are the only legal "bribery" target.
I appreciate the response, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic but the operative word here is "nominally". While it's nice in theory to view law enforcement and the government as some kind of trustworthy body whose purpose is to serve and protect, in reality that kind of power is often abused.

Look how long it took for bodycams on police to be used and even then, they get conveniently broken, battery dies, or just blatently turned off.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? and all that.
It's interesting, I've always taken Lin at face-value -- I don't think he's being ironic at all. Especially in Trip, I see someone who is trying to full-on embrace and figure out life w/o a hint of detachment or irony in a way DFW would've appreciated.
Embedded people deal with this all the time. One class of solutions involves a checker task running continuously, which verifies the integrity of the data structures, kind of like a poor man's ECC. Really important code generally does everything three times, so there's a tie breaker in case there's a temporary fault in code or memory. I've seen this done with macros in ways that result in pretty wild code, like running a computation three times, storing each of those results three times, and then comparing the resulting nine outputs three times. That was in a diving related application, so it's not crazy to do all that work over and over since it had to be right.

Complex embedded systems like your cellphone's baseband processor usually just give up at some point and suicide a task or even the whole OS if they detect a problem. For a while I had a Qualcomm debugger attached to the internal cell modem I had in a netbook I was working on, and the baseband crashed all the time due to hardware faults. I thought I had a bad chip for a while until I realized it never happened when I left it in an underground parking lot.
Thanks.

Though, to my mind, the willpower and desire is part and parcel of what I am talking about when I say social infrastructure. That sense of community and social responsibility etc is something we tend to see closely tied to religious groups and tend to not see to that degree for, say, government run social programs.
I also have a lifetime subscription through some deal years ago, I find the most benefit is the music doesn't catch my attention. I can't listen to classical, traditional or other instrumental music without getting caught in the tune. (Music with lyrics is right out for me when I need to concentrate).

I regularly have problems with the ios and Android apps not downloading or connecting, and generally just work with them "offline" with my few successful downloads.

I use the sleep music whenever I travel, combined with my Bose QC20s it's great for blocking out aircraft noise or even as I discovered on a boy's weekend the snoring off my bunkmate who people in other rooms complained about.

I don't know about their scientific claims, but for me it does what I want, which is distraction free blocking of the (audible) world around me.
I agree that "virtual server" isn't a problem. Neither was "horseless carriage" or "radio with pictures". All of them were steps forward. But they're transitional states on the way to new paradigms.

When servers were expensive things that had full-time staff, the old ways of installing software made a lot of sense. But as server power got cheaper, they became impractical. A virtual server was at least familiar; slicing big machines up let us turn the clock back to when servers were less powerful. But that didn't really solve the problem, as we now had to do something to manage the explosion in the number of servers, real and virtual. Things like chef and puppet jumped in to solve this, but they are IMHO clumsy; it's all the work of managing a lot of servers the old way, even though it may be a small number of physical boxes.

Containerization says: Forget about installing apps on servers; just wrap the app up with what it needs. Things like Kubernetes takes that further, saying: Don't worry about which apps are running on which servers; it'll just work. The impedance mismatch between modern hardware and the 1970s-university-department paradigm that underlies Unix gets solved automatically.

I'm not sure if that's the end state in the paradigm shift. But I'm convinced that the approach to sysadminning I learned in the 1980s is on its way out.
I believe a key fact that's ignored is that the cities where this is happening are the most hospitable. Above freezing all year, plenty of areas to setup camp that are protected by the city, and poor enforcement for street crimes (there's no money in jailing a homeless person unless they're committing a felony). Homelessness in Seattle is much worse than New York for a number of reasons, but the fact that camping outside in New York during winter would kill you helps work the numbers a bit too. If it's too cold to be outside, you'll opt for a homeless shelter where you're required to follow rules that inevitably help you to get back on your feet.