skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note: I am not a finance person, so please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something.

My understanding is that in futures markets, you make money by predicting what the price of something will be at a time in the future.

Let's say you know of a new battery technology that is much more efficient than anything we have today. Let's further say that this type of battery uses a lot of copper. You think that this will massively increase the amount of copper needed.

In this case, you buy a future (enter a contract) saying you will buy 250,000 tons of copper in January 2020 for $3.20 / lb (which is considerably higher than the price of copper today). Someone with a copper mine can take the other side of that contract and expand their operation (buy equipment, hire workers), knowing that in January of 2020 they will be able to sell that copper at a higher price, and expand their operations.

If the price of copper goes up, in 2020 you buy all of that copper from the mine, resell it, and make a ton of money. The owner of the mine makes a modest profit.

If the price of copper goes down, in 2020 _you still have to buy all of that copper from the mine_, and you lose a ton of money. The owner of the mine makes a modest profit.

You will only enter into such a contract if you have (or think you have) information that the person you are making a contract with does not have, thus allowing them to act on that information sooner and without risk. If your information is wrong, you are the person who loses out, not the person you contracted with, so you're taking on all of the risk for some of the possible benefits.

> A simple granary (sized to community) and enough cash to resow next year is usually enough. No virtual, hedged, liquid or funny stuff needed. It's as old as the hills as well, failing crops have been dealt with by humanity successfully in many civilizations through out history. Without a financial system that requires the farmer to bet on the price of grain next year, I might add.

If you know that the crops are likely to fail, you can buy futures in grain. It's the ultimate "put your money where your mouth is". If you buy grain futures, you are saying "There will be a crop failure. Plant more grain. I will cover the downside if I'm wrong." Thus you make the crop failure less impactful by prompting action earlier.

I agree that a simple granary is _usually_ enough. But a simple granary plus a futures market will be enough even more often.
Cool, sorry didn’t mean to come across as negative. I’m always appreciative when people share solutions to problems they’ve had. Thanks for clearing up some of my questions.
Limited upside; high chance of self-immolation.

I'm in.
Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.
I often incorrectly refer to C++ or worse, even C, as C+.

I hear others make this mistake, too. I think it's just a colloquialism?
Building a conversational business intelligence bot with Amazon Lex
Doesn't matter because every re-implementation of that old unix tool is made for same purpose and mostly accept same arguments.

For example you can make tar archive and pipe it to nc. On other server nc would accept data and pipe it to tar for unpack. This shows real power of unix pipes.
Why isn’t there a bash conference? Someone is missing a golden opportunity to organize Bash Bash.
If you cuss and scream at someone, and they subsequently do what you wanted, it does not follow that they only did that because you cussed at them.
This would be a great addition to hot air balloons for mild navigation.
Someone already suggested that (https://github.com/karan/Projects/issues/87), but it doesn't seem to be incorporated.
If you are just starting to get interested in cryptography, try and make a program that can break ciphers like this one or similar. Hint: Use frequency analysis on sample ciphertext and compare to known letter frequencies in english letter to match to plaintext. Then you can determine the offset and decrypt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTfu0hjVtzE

Carbon bike disintegrates at 107 MPH
Chairman Pai Proposal to Target Unwanted Robocalls and Spam Robotexts
"Goal accomplished"

- traditional media and anti-big-web-tech
For me it is, for someone with a 6-figure or higher income probably not though.

Hobbyist machinists, makers etc will spend several times that on a single machine.
In older gear using vacuum tubes, it was common to have an a battery to power the circuit, and a b battery to power the tubes.
Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pujo_Committee
> the mailing list has become much less hostile and more supportive then.

Glad to hear that! Running an open project is hard.

> [...] switched again (ClearSilver -> Genshi -> Jinja)

Genshi was current when I used it; I wasn't aware it had switched to jinja (or it slipped my mind by now..)

> Lack of Milestone customization: I'm not sure I understand.

Back then, there were no custom fields for milestones, and the code didn't make it easy to do. Of course, this means you need changes to search facilities, and any other parts of the codebase. I had to write that also, and the target workflow was not at all complex.

As for the performance, we had about 20k tickets and 2k milestones when the system was replaced. By then it had been completely unusable for a long time.

Honestly, the only positives I have to say about Trac concern real-world usage by a hacker. Once you've learned it, and hacked it to your liking, it's very productive. But to get to that point, it's a sixty feet tall stack of ugly hacks, and frankly I would not recommend it to anyone...

Again to be clear, I did not look at the trac repo in many years, nor do I intend to.
Announcing Drone Cloud, a Free Continuous Integration Service for X86 and Arm
That's why there's the Met police vs the City of London police, no? (I blame a wikipedia dive into policing in the UK for knowing that piece of trivia)
Can we not turn hacker news into Reddit.
Haha, don't worry, I didn't take it as negative. Just wanted to fully answer it, so my reasoning came across :)
That’s funny, because although the 420% statement seems more appealing, it doesn’t give any idea whether things improved drastically or just from terrible to slightly less terrible.
So we all have a finite amount of time and energy that we have to use wisely, but presumably you don't think no one should be engaging with these arguments. And then the question is: are we the sorts of persons who should bother, and which arguments should we bother with? It seems to me that the arguments with the most surprising/profound conclusion that nevertheless convince lots of smart people who you respect is the sort of arguments that should be at the top of your list.
The context was irrelevant though - it wasn’t a nice thing to say no matter what the context.
Leave me broken and just give me the six million.
I've worked at multiple companies where we created something like this internally for email and text messages.

Curl an API and out it goes. It's trivial to setup for yourself.
PlanGrid has (or had?) "unlimited" vacation time. Unlike some places they really encouraged people to use it. There was no issue with liabilities on the books since you weren't banking vacation days; it didn't make any financial difference to PlanGrid if you took 0 vacation days or 5 weeks.

Ryan was trying to make sure I wasn't over-working myself and I appreciated the thought (it just so happens I was waiting to take a long Christmas vacation).
The Updated Guide to Unicode on Python (2013)
There is barely even a community for it, the c language itself like golang has.
China is going all-in on this with their social credit system. That's being rolled out in Beijing. All Beijing residents will be judged on a point system by the end of 2020.[1] "Those with better so-called social credit will get 'green channel' benefits while those who violate laws will find life more difficult. Those deemed untrustworthy will be 'unable to move even a single step.'"[2]

""For example, when we drive, now we always stop in front of crosswalks. If you don't stop, you will lose your points."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-21/beijing-t...
[2] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/06/c_137235486.htm
They probably aren't obliged to speak to TechCrunh or any of the media about it, though.
This seems fairly obvious - good ai can do things like predict what you want, understand your speech, understand your intent, etc. All this requires tons of personal data. And any amount of personal data can be difficult to keep secure/used ethically/etc.
What on earth are you talking about?

Assembly. Java. Ruby. Python. The list goes on.

Could you explain your rationale behind this statement?
I really enjoyed the "cinematography" that went into this -- made it extra special. The little boop comment in the middle of a very crucial detachment made me laugh pretty hard. Well done!
Procedural Content Generation
Custom OpenSearch: search from your URL bar
This same thing happened to me, except I was in the USAF and I performed conventional munitions (non-nuclear weapons) maintenance.

As part of this work, detailed manuals were provided with maintenance routines, service intervals and all kinds of top secret detailed information, and they were maintained (by me) with updates regularly. These were absolutely fascinating reading, and on a slow week I found myself reading several of the "Theory of Operation" sections for various weapons.

A great deal of thought goes into killing people. Far more than your imagination would lead you to believe. Now you're imagining a lot more. It's WAY more than that.

I couldn't really stomach the work after that and I started getting heavily depressed.
^ is the most informative comment in the whole thread.

So by 'hosting' they mean being the rendezvous address?
What Founders Can Learn from Kierkegaard About Impact
RIDM: Your Personalized Health and Fitness Tracker
There was a great article from yesterday on securities fraud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498796
> Tangentially it’s not clear to me what relevance D should have for any greenfield projects where there is not already heavy investment in a code base to consider.

Another one of Cybershadow's articles on D that blew my mind is, IMO, one of the greatest arguments for why you should care about D. The beauty, conciseness and flexibility of the implementation here is extremely cool. And this is not a one-off case; there are many programmers in the D community that create awesome stuff like this all the time. Writing in D is like having superpowers, and going back to a less expressive language feels horribly constraining.
> But yeah nobody writes code at conferences

Depends on the conference, I suppose, but most I've been to include a healthy dose of that.

Certainly writing production code for work is rare, but for fun? Lots of it gets written there.
> send to multiple addresses

So this will need to be limited to just several addresses?

> rate limiting on... recipient domain

Including gmail.com and outlook.com?

I'd guess that the simplest option would be to require some sort of registration and requiring an "API token" with every request. Not as clean and easy-peasy, but far more practical for moderation purposes.

Alternatively, a self-hosted version of the same would solve these problems. But if you are planning on turning this into a $ service at some point, that's probably not going to work because of that.
> Steel is the best frame material for 95% of people due to its durability. Quality steel frames (not Schwinn travellers) are quite light.

I have a bike made with True Temper OX Platinum steel and it is my favorite bike by far. It is a very light frame, but that is not what I like about it. Steel (and titanium) frames can be made with tubing of a much smaller diameter than that of aluminum or carbon. I believe that the tube diameter (and associated stiffness) is what people are feeling when they talk about the difference between bikes.

If you make a steel bike with tubing that is indistinguishable from aluminum or carbon, I am not surprised that nobody can tell the difference!
Thanks! Really appreciate this.. always righting tiny things here and there, but only few I feel at all condifent to post on here :P
I certainly can write an bit about how/why I made it - Will send a link across when it's done.
Around monetisation, don't think that I'd ever bother. The cost of running it is next to nothing and would rather spend time working on new projects than having to deal with advertising and all that
I’ve seen people in Seattle ballyhoo this sort of thing as a subsidy to whoever the transit company would let the real estate to and consolingly they’d rather keep their car
Keep secure sure (although the same is true of all personal data not just that related to AI) but ethical use is not a computer science problem.
Quantum computing: A cheat sheet
Roli SOUL audio programming language announcement talk
Get things from one computer to another, safely. Over IPFS.
Read 'em and weep:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120622204303/http://www.cconf....

On second thoughts...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120728130108/http://www.cconf....
There seems to be a lot of influence between editors which to me is the most interesting part of all of this. Just looking at TKE's screenshots, it resembles VS Code to a not-insignificant degree, and VS Code and Atom both seem to have been inspired graphically by Light Table, and all of these as well as Alpha have a programmability that's heavily inspired by Emacs, although Alpha's GUI is closer to TextMate which was influenced by BB Edit, and the history of editors is something I'd love to see someone with more knowledge of the history do a more comprehensive write-up of it.
If you followed the dicussion you would see the big "both ecosystems are locked down and you are at the mercy of vendors" thread that goes on around here.

But it's easier to flag people as fanboys. <shrugs>

Since you are having trouble with getting what I said: I am saying that Apple in my eyes is the lesser evil of only two options. It's a very practical and time-saving decision to use Apple tech. But call it fanboyism if you like.
> HTML is the most popular language in the world.

Like x86 assembly is, sure. Though way less well-suited to its modern purpose than that is. It's alive by accident and momentum, purely.

If it did what we needed it to do we wouldn't have burned who knows how many (tens of?) thousands of person-hours creating half-complete solutions to its various plain-as-day shortcomings. Input wrappers, table sorters, sequential image viewers, and so on. We did finally get video but it's still usually wrapped in custom UI driven by JS. It's not complete and featureful enough to exist as a good rich document format without JS (due to its long stagnation) but is also really far from being a good choice for laying out and describing applications (because it was never meant to be).

Agree that browser vendors are the ones who'd have to fix all this. The time for that passed a long time ago, of course. I just think it'd be nice to have a hypertext document network that doesn't have on-client spying as a first-class, built-in feature that you have to go way out of your way to even partially avoid. Creating Javascript and giving it such wide access was what killed any hope of that. I consider that the original sin of the modern web, that the platform itself is fundamentally and irreparably insecure (from the end user's perspective).
That's actually pretty common in modern scifi. Mind you, I can't name one I'm certain of off the top of my head, but a lot of people like to get space explosions "right".
90+ Free Open Source Intelligence Tools
That threw me; I wondered all the way through when the author was finally going to get around to the part about acoustics.
Disagree. If you make an app and half of your infrastructure is rented out through third parties, that is a cost that you will ultimately pass on to the customer through increased price, trust placed in the third party services which implicitly gets inherited by the customer, or other means such as your internal codebase or your infrastructure becoming bloated in order to manage the interconnect with the third parties.
This stash is a collection of 90+ free Open Source Intelligence Tools for conducting a wide variety of research related investigations online.
> This is one of the less appreciated clauses of the GDPR

One wonders if this clause should have instead been its own, separate, narrowly focused legislation and enforced specifically as such.
Does it drive anybody else crazy when resume and CV are used interchangeably?
Dude... stop digging you (metaphorical) grave. You lost this argument five levels up. Pretending not to understand why someone could be compromised by a cool million and change for a few interviews makes it terribly difficult not to assume bad faith on your part.

It is, however, the sort of public humiliation one might be willing to accept as an employee of Completely Ordinary People for the Advancement of Motivated Reasoning and Large Paychecks.
Convert Photoshop curves to actual code
>The best gamedev experience I had was working on an indie title with a very small and tight team. But that enterprise went bankrupt and the team disbanded.

That's the hallmark of having gamers as your audience. They reward the copycat garbage and publishers that mistreat them and exploit them, but they would never think of buying an indie game. They get what they pay for, and unfortunately so do the rest of us.
Usually ML is used as a first-phase classification. It's not a silver bullet but it can be a good signal for further inspection.
If there are new languages being developed, their compiler/interpreter are likely being developed in C/C++, possibly Rust.

Also, any new database, OS, or AAA game is going to be written in one of those language.
Art meets science: the limits of neuroaesthetics
I'll trust your memories over mine, particularly as you've studied this and I had dinner-table conversations.
Useful for advertisers. If you have amazon.com open that good to know. But if you have amazon.com, sears.com, and appliances.com, then I know you are actively researching major appliances and I need to advertise my brand to you ASAP.
To summarize some of the answers here:

- Direct personal gain -- i.e. information for political engagement, investing...

- Fear of missing out

- To be able to participate in conversations with others

- Lack of something better to do.

Anything else?
Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Caused a Catastrophe
Big Poo would never describe these political views held by him as populist.
I work in adtech and we went into code freeze about 2 weeks ago because the holidays are crazy.
wow when he enumerates all the video's from the last two cppcon's it paints a dismal picture when you look at all the titles lol
PDF: Designing Distributed Systems
Riders can certainly be over-concerned about weight, but uh, it is pretty important. How much to these expensive beasts weigh?
Netflix probably provides data to Rentrak just like every other movie provider.
This has been posted a few times in the past month and a half. What's new in the latest version? Also, how does this compare to Transmit?
Well, why? The OP has asserted that NY transit delivers vast economic benefits that offset its loss making nature. Fine, I can buy that to some extent, but how big exactly are these benefits? How do we know they're actually so big and not in reality quite small?

Well, we could do some one-off studies and hope that Excel is used properly, but why? We already have mechanisms that figure out the value of things and allocate resources appropriately, they're markets. The unviable nature of public transit suggests systematic resource allocation problems, created politically. If there were really such huge beneficial side effects, it wouldn't matter if ticket prices rose a lot, that'd just get priced in to other things like cost of goods near transit stops.

For instance maybe every ride in NY should be 2x or 3x the current price for the costs of the system to be worthwhile, but public transit is usually government owned and politicians aren't willing to bite the bullet on that.
It is possible I am misunderstanding something, but I am pretty sure that is not cat(1) implemented in CakeML. It is an implementation of cat(1) verified using the same HOL libraries, tactics, etc. that they used to verify the implementation of CakeML. I didn't look closely enough to see if they have gone all the way and reimplemented HOL inside of CakeML.
I run a similar service (but for browser/mobile notifications instead of emails[1]) and take basically that approach. So far abuse hasn't been an issue with ~50k notifications sent.

[1] https://notify.run
His flight systems are all attitude control, not guidance to a target. It’s a silly distinction but apparently makes things OK. He’s talked with state dept people a lot to be able to sell his kits internationally.
The Forgotten Legend of Silicon Valley's Flying Saucer Man
Where would you put someone born with male genitals, but who identifies as female, and for whom brain scans show a brain that has female hormone responses and female processing patterns, who undergoes male to female sex reassignment surgery?
I've absolutely seen people from well-known companies and consulting groups sitting in a conference talk hacking on their work projects. Very frequently. For the past decade, easily. And as recently as last week, at RubyConf.
I really love this move! I'm glad that I'm part of the community and free contributors 8)
Low fueling (charging) costs would be huge if they could scale it up to passenger size. It sounds like they probably can't, but even a hybrid jet/ion plane that use substantially less jet fuel could be a game-changer.

(Also, the fact that it can be outperformed by a sparrow is only relevant if we can build a reliable, efficient artificial sparrow, which AFAIK we absolutely can't.)
I have three recommendations no one has mentioned yet:

1) Charles Stross, "The Laundry Files" series and the "Merchant Princes"/"Deep State" series.

2) Craig Alanson's "Expeditionary Force" series. Start with book 1, "Columbus Day".

3) Andy Weir, "The Martian" and "Artemis".
Cybersecurity Isn't Just About Hacks
needs 2016 tag.
> Whatever else one can say that cryptocurrency has accomplished, it has been one of the greatest destroyers of wealth in the financial history of mankind.

I'm not going to argue that cryptocurrency prices are in a great place, they aren't.

In early January 2018 the combined market capitalization of the measurable cryptocurrency tokens was ~$825B. Today's market capitalization is ~$146B, or about $679B in "destroyed" wealth. If you take Bitcoin's price movement from $19783 to $4508 from the start of 2018 until today, in isolation, investors have seen losses of $266B.

This is a lot of money, no doubt, but you don't need to go too far for examples using commonly described "good" assets with similar losses individually (a la BTC) or in aggregate (all cryptotokens) on a far shorter time horizon:

- Between October 3, 2018 and today, AAPL's stock losses have "destroyed" ~$262B in wealth.

- FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) have seen ~$822B in wealth destroyed as their stocks have fallen significantly from their high-water marks since the end of August 2018.

The ardent drum-beaters may say this is "good for Bitcoin" in some warped way (I don't agree) and I certainly can't argue that the current market outlook has many upsides, but hyperbolic criticisms aren't helpful.
Frederik Pohl wrote a novel about just such a creature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time
Comparing Open Source APM Tools Jaeger and Skywalking