skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Note that there are few software innovation identified in recent times. I believe that part of the reason is that over the last number of years some key software markets have been controlled by monopolies. Monopolies typically inhibit innovation; a monopoly has a strong financial incentive to keep things more or less the way they are.

I disagree. It is hard to talk about software innovation without mentioning Xerox PARC. The PARC existed because Xerox was a monopoly with too much money on their hands. Kind of like Google X today.

Monopolies in the software industry are actually quite fragile. Today's monopolies started small and took over the monopolies of the past in a relatively short amount of time. And the same fate will happen to them unless they keep innovating.

Tech is not like railways, where you can't build tracks anywhere you want because of things like land ownership and city planning. It is not like heavy industry where capital investments are huge and margins are low. Even their trove of personal data doesn't mean much: these get outdated rather quickly and machine learning rely less and less on huge datasets (see AlphaZero). Unsurprisingly, AlphaZero is a Google initiative, that's the kind of innovation that could be disruptive in someone else's hands, so they invest in it in order to keep their position.
The author clearly missed the memo that lack of net neutrality is a long term threat, not an overnight thing. There was never an expectation that ISP's would immediately start upcharging for service X and discounting service Y and throttling service Z, because that would be idiotic and would have triggered immediate backlash (ISPs aren't movie villains who enact a master plan the moment they get a chance). The consequences are going to show themselves over multiple years.

Plus, we've got lots of smaller locales still fighting the good fight to block ISPs from implementing much.

This article boils down to "haha u were wrong, eat it", and that's not really constructive for anyone.
Fab Equipment Challenges for 2019
A Computer of One’s Own
Begs Toccata and Fugue in D minor
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7997225/colin-croll-cause-of-d...
I'm surprised ASCII/Unicode or some sort of encoding isn't on the list.
I agree. Lots of Python programmers use "_" as a variable name to indicate (by convention) that they don't intend to use the variable yet are syntactically required to give it a name[1]. Some common examples:

for _ in range(10):
...

red, _, _ = rgb(color)

first, *_, last = some_list

This convention conflicts with the use of a global variable named "_" because the first time a programmer uses this convention and rebinds "_" to something arbitrary it will mask the "_" imported from pampy. Of course a programmer is free to give it a more conventional name:

from pampy import _ as placeholder

But for my money pampy should have given "_" a real name and left it up to the programmer to give it a short alias if so desired:

from pampy import placeholder as _

This is in line with common conventions around say, numpy, which is conventionally aliased to the shorter "np" on import:

import numpy as np

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5893163/what-is-the-purp...

EDIT: So it turns out that pampy already has a more explicitly named alternative to "_" called "ANY". So anybody who doesn't like the _ syntax can use "from pampy import ANY" and use that instead.
I keep an eye on a lot of tech stocks, and I think it's crazy how much crap companies like IBM and Oracle got 3-5 years ago for their stock buybacks [1] contrasted to how praised stock buybacks are now [2]. The impact back then was the market was great but IBM/Oracle/etc's share prices weren't doing great. The impact now is the market is not doing great, and stock buybacks are a band-aid over the inevitable decline.

Anyone who doesn't see that is going to be caught off guard when the money runs out, the buybacks stop, and the market crashes "overnight". In reality, the market is crashing right now, it's just hidden behind trickery designed to artificially inflate the value of the market. It's like if I lost my job but kept financing my same lifestyle out of my savings account. Eventually that savings will run out and reality will hit like a ton of bricks, and no one will have seen it coming.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/12/05/share-buyb...

[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/12/09/why-investors-shou...
From the article:

it’s difficult to identify the “most important” innovations within the last few years. Usually what is most important is not clear until years after its development. Software technology, like many other areas, is subject to fads. Most “exciting new technologies” are simply fashions that will turn out to be impractical (or only useful in a narrow niche), or are simply rehashes of old ideas with new names.

Maybe that's the reason it's not in list (yet?).
5G Is Poised to Revolutionize Industries Beyond Telecommunications
Stop Learning Frameworks
Blockstack App Mining: The game theory behind fairly funding decentralized apps
a one-man office or other service provider that can buy the individual stocks

In the given scenario, you aren't just hiring a guy to buy stocks for the Vanguard expense ratio. You're also buying all their financial and information security processes. You're buying risk mitigations like regular audits and SOX compliance and SP800-53 controls. To safeguard a billion dollars, that overhead is totally worth it.
Aircraft autopilots and fly-by-wire systems are vastly more simple than self-driving cars.
^-- This right here.

This article is from 2012 but illustrates the point (it's also why I left the company, they restructured debt, issued a dividend which, even though they're publicly traded they were(are?) 75% held by Carlysle Group so it was basically a self bonus, then cut employee benefits) https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2012/07/11/booz-alle...
considering money is fungible, you could make the case that any buyback done close to a loan could be construed as being "on margin"
Would be interesting to see some examples of this - and if so - what collateral if anything sits behind the loan?
It's an unsustainable way to prop up a share price in a declining market. The market could stay in decline longer than you can stay fiscally solvent.
Seems AWS has added T3 RDS instances for MySQL in Stockholm now. Not for PostgreSQL yet, though.
Design Thinking is just solving problems (and creating new solutions) from the end-user's perspective. Some people are naturally good at it, but others need some structure to make it happen.
Massachusetts Seeks to Disbar and Silence
So this appears to be a language to specify logic systems. This makes it especially odd how unstructured the website appears.

If the language is so simple and uses only 3 or 4 operators, why not just start with a short definition of those operators, and maybe a list of short examples? That would go a long way towards explaining to me as a casual visitor why I should care about this.
"Objectively false".

I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Yes, clearly, just like they did in Japan. Oh, wait, no, Japan only proved that the Government is fully in control of the bond market.

The private sector wants Government bonds. If they won’t buy all of them at the interest rate the Government wants to sell them for, there’s no practical reason they can’t just sell excess bonds to the central bank (except for silly policy in some countries).
People in flammable houses shouldn't complete the fire triangle?
Google's $1B NYC investment shows it's looking past Silicon Valley for growth
Considering how this and my comments have been flagged we hit right on the mark. You can't casually use sexist remarks towards women, but apparently not only is it OK to use them towards men, but mentioning it as negative results into flagged post.
What version did you try? When I tried QNX 4.24 on my desktop computer, I think it might've been on a 125 mhz pentium? Or a 486. The Photon GUI was snappy.
Was thinking the same thing, but I'm sure they still want to have a portion of their portfolio in high risk high reward investments. I also wonder if they can get better deals (Warren Buffet style) by taking large positions direct vs. buying indexes through a broker.
Also of note is Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System[0], which finished placing its 4 satellites in October 2017. These provide GPS coverage from near-vertical angles over Japan at all times, giving accurate location fixes despite Tokyo's deep urban canyons. The geosync orbits designed for this are pretty cool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System
I think doing this points to a dysfunctional system.

You're betting that your company's financials and stock price will improve, so you get debt to buy back the stock. It's no different than an individual getting into debt to buy say Nvidia stock because they think the price of the stock will keep rising. This is always a mistake in the long term, and it should be discouraged - for both individuals and companies.

It's even worse when you see companies like Apple with tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in cash getting debt to buy back its stock. Come on. This is a disaster waiting to happen. We shouldn't have to wait until the economy slows down/a recession arrives to figure this one out. It's clearly dysfunctional/a bad thing to have in an economy.
Modern smartphones almost weigh nothing, so I'm wondering why is a VR headset so heavy?
The Judith Miller article had a horrible humanitarian toll. It's definitely not a conspiracy theory or something to joke about.
What's the disadvantage of using an American factory? Too expensive?
> I don't think you would be hard pressed to find professionals with experience in addiction and pharmacologist who would agree with me.

I'd be inclined to strongly disagree with this considering my own in-depth personal research on the topic. I'm also having difficulty sourcing anything you've said in your comment; are you able to help me out a bit here?
Who are the European Internet companies, social media companies or mobile application companies? All I can think of are a few game companies, but nothing approaching the size of even the larger game companies.
A question to the creator: is the fungus growing respecting the rules of Conway's Game of Life? It seems very much like that.
Very nice app!
Some things aren't worth debating. If someone says that protesters should be shot, they're not worth debating. They're an asshole. If someone says Sky Daddy waved his hand and created the world 5000 years ago, they're not worth debating.
Taking the opportunity to post the video of Knuth mishearing the question "What makes a good teacher?" as "What makes a good T-shirt?" at my uni.

https://youtu.be/74BfHoE66rc?t=42m17s
Stunning Figures on Energy Efficiency
Howdy, I have a slight correction to the page. You note "no patent identified" for Ken Thompson's regular expression work from 1968. To the contrary, Bell Labs was granted a patent in 1971 for ken's work, with a priority date of 1967. See https://patents.google.com/patent/US3568156A/en.
To be fair though, Peter Norvig is a lot more than just a "Google guy". I'd happily read an article that's nothing but Norvig quotes.

I thought that the article was pretty decent, considering it is aimed at an audience of people who aren't computer scientists and who have never heard of Donald Knuth.
There is a link to exactly that at the end of the second paragraph: http://io.livecode.ch/learn/webyrd/webmk
Cornell Graduate School Helped Make New York Appealing to Amazon
Buy Facebook Vote – Buy 100 % Real Facebook Vote
>Simple test for this is to ask some one to describe the positions of the other party and why they feel the way they do without using any disparaging or cynical terms

That doesn't work because liberals are unable to understand and empathize with conservative views. They lack the same fundamental values, and so they are unable to see conservative views as being within a set of values that are different from their own. Instead they see conservative views as being contrary to values, period. Liberals being asked to answer a survey the way they think a conservative would will answer agree/disagree questions like "one of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal" with disagree, but actual conservatives say agree. On the other hand, conservatives are able to accurately answer the same survey as a liberal would. Moderates are able to answer accurately as either a liberal or a conservative.

https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...
Ask HN: Gear for Remote Programming
I'm going to start coding from the road more, and while I can live without a big secondary monitor and mechanical keyboard, I'm looking for ways to improve efficiency when not coding from my desk.

I've been looking at things like 15-inch, USB-C external monitors, keyboards that don't take up too much space without compromising typing comfort, and noise canceling wireless headphones.

So I thought I'd ask here: What gear has made your "work from the road" lives better, and do you have your eye on any specific items (links appreciated) to solve pain points?
Hey, thanks for your awesome job. I'm looking for the best SSR option for my next SPA. I have some questions. Rendora is production ready ? I have some risks to use it with lot of visitors ? And how about SEO impact ? What are your results ? Thanks in advance :)
homoiconicity is not an innovation or even a desirable feature in most cases.
Sounds accurate to me, but I'm interested if people will downvote you because they don't like the IT line.
This is the general mantra of Bunnie Huang's book The Hardware Hacker. He goes into lots of detail on why you need to be on-site, all the things you can expect to go wrong/get misinterpreted, and red flags when shopping factories. It's a really captivating read if you're interested in the minutiae of hardware manufacturing.
Show HN: Argson – easily set flags for your Python script from JSON
>Or do they provide significant or important insights that are there anyway, but we can't reach them in our regular state?

Compare how many important insights that changed the world were obtained on psychedelics to how many were obtained not on psychedelics.

Psychedelics most likely simply trick the brain into thinking things are insightful, while dulling one's sense of reason and accuracy, making such insights fade once reason and accuracy return.
You will or you'll pay (a lot) for it.
Vanilla - the Smallest JavaScript Library
A Christmas Cover Story: 55 Classic Computer and Video Game Magazine Covers
My favorite Knuth story, attributed to Alan Kay (if you're around, would love confirmation):

When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s] one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a computer programming contest with people on research projects in the Bay area. The prize I think was a turkey.

[John] McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur system. And he basically beat the shit out of everyone.

And they asked him, "How could you possibly do this?" And he answered, "When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the program going, it just had to be written right. So people just learned to program like it was carving stone. You sort of have to sidle up to it. That's how I learned to program."

[0] http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Knuth/index.shtml
It's extremely interesting - you're not interested in the investments of someone who buys investigative journals and makes rocket/space exploration companies? While these may be little side-projects to you and Jeff, to the rest of us they are very very important.
If they'd take the business at all
It's probably just Rit dye or a similar brand. It's a pretty stable dye.
That was an excellent book!

I got the book and couldn't put it down. Luckily when I got to the contest at the back I found myself with a couple of weeks of summer holidays with Pascal and my 286 and no internet connection.

I cracked the manual ciphers with computer programs. I started on the Engima cipher, but did not create an accurate Enigma machine (the drawings in the book were incomplete and I didn't know that and had no internet access).

A couple of years ago I chanced upon the book again and set about solving the Enigma part. https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/145830743193/my-...

Fond memories! :D

The book is warmly recommended.
Best of open source smart home: Home Assistant vs. OpenHAB
How do you start if you have no contacts or expertise in this space? I'm seriously asking because I was trying to source something way simpler than a keyboard - a couple thousand meters of simple brass chain in spools - for months without luck.
As a side note, this came to mind when I opened the link. A sad state really..

https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/9pmqxb/typical_...
The S&P 500 publishes changes to the index in advance of the changes taking place, so all of the affected stocks have prices that reflect the change at the time of the change.

Most tracking indexes, especially the ones Vanguard uses, do not do that and thus do not allow the markets to front-run them. If you adopt the strategy of "do what Vanguard does" and you do it immediately after Vanguard says they did something, you are already too late to get the prices that Vanguard got and can kiss at least .05% goodbye just based on that. I would expect to under-perform by at least .25%, if not more.
Certainly not cryptocurrencies. They're still a solution in search of a problem.
Well you're right it's actually not thinner than my previous phone, they are both the same at 7.9mm . It did "feel" thinner in that it's easier to use one handed which I guess is due to the Pixel3 being close to half a centimeter narrower and the edges being more rounded.

Somehow I perceived the narrowness as being thiness. In terms of weight though the Pixel3 is 12 grams heavier.
Pagenode – No Bullshit Content Management
OP here, the years were appended by HN to the title that I submitted, wrongly IMHO
> But, the second interest is being charged then the demand of money back exceeds the actual money supply.

Not true, and I'm having a hard time finding your argument. You think if I loan you 1$ at 0% that's fine, but 1$ at 1% now exceeds the world's money supply? Even debt > total money supply is payable as long as interest payments are < payments being made.

> once you get on this treadmill it just goes faster and faster and faster, and there is no way to get off without a disaster (bubble).

Not strictly true. I have taken on debt with interest and paid that debt. Why is a disaster needed?
There is additional value that can be added by forgoing an index fund, though. Tax management can be enhanced by rolling your own Total Stock Market index fund, since individual names can be harvested for capital losses, increasing the after-tax returns of your portfolio relative to a vanilla index fund. I'm not sure quite how to quantify that, but I'm sure someone has been able to do so.
Frankly, you can napkin math all of this you want, but it's very likely he has very smart and very well paid financial consultants who do all of this specific math weight against the cost of debt/capital/etc for him.

In other words - let's stop speculating here and simply say "I hope he continues to focus a large portion of his wealth towards X initiative that I like"
Hah funny enough my story is about the same. My wife and I spent much of the last 10 years traveling (although only for a few years together). Since I was working remotely I worked from a few countries in South America, Australia, New Zealand, and a variety of countries in Europe.

We finally settled down in Boulder in 2016 although we still travel a few months every year with our 2-year-old son. Boulder is a really amazing place (but very expensive). For us, we wanted a place with easy access to nature, a ton of sun, good tech scene, and walkability. We love that we can easily walk downtown, to the library, to the farmer's market, and to the grocery store with ease. We both grew up in Arkansas where you have to take a care everywhere which we dislike.
Can you provide the actual study? I find this anecdote hard to believe.
> Where is that extra $10k coming from?

Spending money doesn't destroy it, it can be spent more than once in a year; even with no additional money, you just need higher velocity of money for their to be more money spent in one year than another. The extra $10K doesn't need to come from anywhere, the same way the base $100K (which was already spent the first year and thus "consumed" if you mistakenly assume money is single-use) doesn't.
It's still morally bancrupt, hijacking ads and replacing them with their own, then holding the money hostage until the actual creators give in to whatever cut this software-enabled protection racket demands.

It also does nothing against the fear of a Chromium monoculture, since it's just yet another reskinned fork.

Very "Brave", indeed. Kinda telling when you have to come up with the laudatory adjectives yourself.
What is the field of view?

(Note that humans have 210 degrees FOV, and from the looks of those goggles, it seems to be a lot less, but I could be wrong)
Sounds like a job for existing facial recognition capabilities paired with additional security on a inventory supply management infrastructure. Aside from the computer vision, none of this is rocket science, and FR of the type you'll want can be acquired from companies like my employer.
High-Velocity Decision-Making vs. High-Quality Decision-Making'=
> The debtor explanation seems like it would be fine to me because it seems like lenders would not be likely to want to renogotiate their loans every time the money is debased,

The paper doesn't explain this in the clearest way, but they do have a strong incentive to negotiate: they can capture some of the money that the debtor would spend on seignorage.

Suppose Dave owes Carol 5 francs, and that old franc coins contain 4 oz of gold, while new francs contain 2 oz gold. So Dave can take 3 old francs (= 12 oz gold), convert them into 5 new francs (= 10 oz gold, with the mint taking 2 oz gold in gross seignorage) and pay off his debt that way. But if Dave and Carol renegotiated, Dave could pay only 11 oz of gold, and they'd both be 1 oz of gold better off than if Dave had paid his debt in new francs.
The US has 325m people. The EU has 512m people. Let's conservatively assume that half of these spend $10/month on entertainment (e.g. by going to the movies once a month, or paying for any sort of TV subscription). That's already over 400m people, and that's before we start considering other developed countries with a lot of people (e.g. Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Japan, South Korea).

That's just a back-of-the-envelope estimate, but yeah, I'm absolutely confident that there are over a billion people right now who already pay $10/month for entertainment media.
ya I am curious on this one too, we love the people here? Just a nice university town like where we grew up in Arkansas.
Fascinating isn't the word I would use... :-|

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-229...
Killer robots: AI soldiers will develop 'moral compass' and defy orders
Facebook’s Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching
> At age 19, Dr. Knuth published his first technical paper, “The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures,” in Mad magazine.

I'd say she did something positive with the opportunity.
[pdf] an assessment of the Internet Research Agency’s U.S.-directed activities