skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like the cherished image of a startup beginning in someone's garage, $title has only a grain of truth. Sure, some open-source software was built on free labor. Much was built by people who were paid to do it, either willingly and intentionally, grudgingly, or sometimes quite unwittingly when developers used company time and resources to do something other than their jobs. Bored students are an interesting case. Is that "free labor" or an unstructured but still mostly intentional use of tuition dollars?

Myths and stereotypes aside, though, there is at least some subset of open-source software that has relied too much on altruism and needs to be put on a more sustainable financial footing. The example that comes to mind for me is not mentioned in the article: NTP. Here's an article about it.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/security/time-is-r...

The Core Infrastructure Initiative (mentioned in both that story and the OP) is great, but it's simply not enough. Maintaining a project like NTP is hard enough that acquiring the necessary domain and code knowledge is likely to mean years spent a long way from anything resembling a viable career path. Without guaranteed long term support that's a lot of sacrifice. This kind of thing needs a government-level (or Gates/Zuckerberg/Bezos level) benefactor to provide resources, salaries, and organizational support.
You were blown away by companies not wanting to enter a support contract with every little library they use?

And remember you are talking there about software, not infra. Software companies have tons of developers in-house. They probably don't need your support when they can figure out stuff themselves.

Maybe it was simply a bad business decision to open source a regex library and expect to get paid for giving "support".
A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Blockchain Universe
Do you believe Amazon's extortion would have stopped at the first $3 billion and they would have happily paid taxes in full after that?

http://fortune.com/2019/02/14/amazon-doesnt-pay-federal-taxe...
However scary they are they are not particularly effective agains enemy combatants. That's the main reason the ban sort of works.
My fiance is in the IG influencers game. And that few likes to that many followers definitely smells rotten.
Only thing I wish would change about Lazarus is the UI. It's too much like the old Delphi IDE UI, I'm thinking Delphi 7 and probably before. I would love to see it become a toggable thing or something. I hated that GIMP used to do the same.

Lazarus is great, I wanted to make my own basic text editor ages back with syntax highlighting, and it worked out really well. Unfortunately as it stretched further than I knew Delphi / FreePascal I left my project to die. I had redone it in Qt with C++ years later, but only got as far as building a Notepad cross-platform application (no syntax highlighting).

Heck if Lazarus did what VB6 did for managing windows, I wouldn't be as bothered, I just want to jointly contain all the available UIs so I don't lose a piece.
The X-Plane guy and his dozen person company went through hell trying their assess off to prove they were being trolled.
I really like the following article on ECS, as it shows the complete setup in a very compact way, making it not only easy to understand, but actually quick to implement yourself: https://blog.therocode.net/2018/08/simplest-entity-component...
ban is on use and not on stockpiling. it's all legal distinctions to avoid incurring penalties in the global economy. wars aren't even fought in the open anymore,you fight them via proxy "liberations" in failed nation states. for eg russia vs europe/usa vs iran vs saudi arabia in syria or china vs india via pakistan
Yes that was a silly omission. However, adding resistive losses doesn’t change the conclusion because the margin is so large (it does make it much closer though). And this is ignoring that the line losses we see now are based on the most cost-effective designs for nation-scale grids, when one can straightforwardly (for example) use a higher voltage for lower resistive losses (no point reducing those losses further on nation-scale grids), or even use existing medium-temperature superconductors, which is thing but not widely used for power yet.

And I literally acknowledged that I was excluding the cost, financial and political, of building and maintaining the lines in my first post on this thread.

I ignored those costs because my argument is, and always was, that solutions already exist. That the line losses — large as they are for a worldwide grid — are not a fundamental problem. It’s not like we can’t build pylons or have yet to invent a way to join wires together after they come out of a factory.

And we already have a lot of national scale grids, how hard is to join the existing ones together? Sure, it’s a bit close when comparing 2.155 cents per kWh * 20% line efficiency (which is worse than even my updated estimate!) to fossil, but that’s also your midnight cost, when you use least.
Blackmailing officials who have done something shady or embarrassing which has not yet been detected by the local authorities or the press.
As for your end statement I'd say it's the other way around. They are commonly controlled by your well backed PR firm and occasionally controlled by governments.
Related: Does anyone else remember the "How to use a mouse" programs on early Macs?

https://gizmodo.com/heres-how-a-macintosh-tutorial-taught-pe...
That text sent shivers down my spine. As for our mundane world: You usually can come back, but shit often gets in the way. I guess I'm getting kinda old-ish.
Who owns my medical information? Who controls how it's used, aggregated, disseminated, etc? If I want to be the only person who has my medical records, going around to every provider and getting a copy before having them all destroy theirs, is this possible?
There's probably not much audience overlap between "Mel Magazine" and people who select yachts by browsing IG?
A good portion of the tax incentives Amazon would have taken advantage of were through existing programs that any business could use. One of the real incentives offered was probably in the form of cutting down on red tape for construction of the new campus.
Drones are potentially lethal and autonomous, not sure how on earth that would be done.
Amazon’s Escape from New York
> Don't ask me which video editor I used because I did it myself.

Which editor did you use? :)

It would be interesting to read more technical details about the process. My guess is that the C++ program did the 90% of the work and then you have to do manually the other 90%.

Perhaps it's not a good idea to pick a global threshold in the greyscale for the whole film? Perhaps it's better to pick in each frame the value that get a 50% black and a 50% white? Perhaps it's better to smooth the change of the thresholds in each scene? Perhaps it's better for artistic reasons to keep the light scenes with more white than black, and the dark scenes with more black than white? It would be interesting to read more details.
It's not 'high stakes' if it doesn't have a real chance of blowing up!
This system is both accounting and transfers. All their other transfer systems (ACH, wire, Zelle) are run by third parties. As mentioned, we don’t know what the cost of building their own transfer system would be.

In the long term, using someone else’s code for your bespoke project typically means you run up against “square peg round hole” issues so it’s likely they are just deferring engineering costs.
I think you have provided a very good list, but I think the list contains actual showstoppers.

I know several OSS ecosystems where grants and commercial funding already destroy the original OSS spirit.

You get a set of bureaucrats who control who gets to work on OSS and what is being worked on. Often they take the credit for the results.

I think OSS should be result oriented: If someone can demonstrate that a piece of software he wrote is used widely, there should be a possibility of retroactive public funding.

But results rarely count in the current OSS boiler room atmosphere.
Broaden your scorecard. Time to completion is only one measure (although it is a very important one in many scenarios).

You can email me if you want to explore Rust for your work or interests. I have a Python background, too, and have open sourced work.
> Tesla and Waymo

Tesla and Uber, you mean. Unless there's been an incident with Waymo that I'm not aware of?
The post you're referring to has it backwards, in my opinion. I don't think this deal wasn't bad for the nation at large, it was bad for New York. The solutions presented don't reflect that.
>Which millionaire is going to decide to buy a specific yacht because they saw an Instagram picture of it ?

It's not about "that" yacht or boat. It's about "a" yacht or boat. It's about convincing the wealthiest people that that boating is a better way to spend their fun money than another vacation house or restoring antique cars.
It sounds fancier than "state"? Which is what was meant I think.
> Even the rulebreakers, like Israel, couldn't hide the fact that they were doing it and had to rely on America's UNSC veto to save them from the consequences.

A bit unrelated, but I couldn't ignore it. Could you expand on this one? In what sense is Israel a rulebreaker? What are the consequences?

I don't read the news very often, but I do remember there are some actors that are seemingly working towards obtaining nuclear weapons, and their leaders publicly claim they want to harm other countries.
To be sure I'm not totally detached from reality I googled a bit:

http://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-supreme-leader-touts-9-poi...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/22/iran-pledges-des...
Consequences. You risk suffering the consequences if you commit a crime. Society deems something as Bad (calling it crime), punishes those who commit crime.

We’re hoping society agrees that making autonomous lethal robots should be Bad and deserve punitive consequences. And hopefully, those who commit this crime will be caught and suffer the consequences.
I see the Ministry of Truth kept busy through the shutdown. How much longer until Russia is our ally?
IMHO delaying the inevitable is not a plan. We need to find a way to survive the inevitable use and deployment of technology by others. This stuff is no longer rocket science. Any idiot with a raspberry pi and some basic tooling can build some quite effective weaponry. Most of the AI you need for this is OSS and getting easier to use by the month. This is not at all like nuclear warfare where you need a lot of skills, knowledge, infrastructure, and capital expenses to be able to put a weapon together. All this stuff will take is a bit of ingenuity and access to commodity hardware and software.

IMHO hoping that others won't go there is not a plan because ultimately somebody will. We need credible defensive capability against this stuff. Given the adversary is going to be autonomous AIs with lightning fast responses, having humans in the loop when defending means being defenseless effectively.

Most current wars are asymmetric guerrilla wars where there is a powerful but reluctant to engage party and some highly motivated individuals fighting an unwinnable fight. E.g. the conflicts in the middle east are basically premised on men with primitive weaponry moving around the country trying to stay hidden from air surveillance, satellites, or simply hiding among civilians. Countries like the US are reluctant to go in and fight on the ground because things get ugly in terms of casualties and 'collateral' damage. You can bet drones will be popular on both sides in such conflicts.

Drone based warfare would make that a lot more one sided than it already is and would probably make this type of warfare a lot less attractive and potentially put an end to a lot of long running conflicts. This does not have to turn into the cliche dystopian mess. For that look no further than the current state of affairs in e.g. Congo, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Syria.

War is not about chivalry but about winning at any cost. When one side is fighting with their hands behind their backs thus preventing them from winning and the other side can't win, you have a stalemate. It used to be the case that the winner would execute/enslave surviving enemies. Brutal but effective. When the war was over, there was little chance of a comeback by the other side. These days we do a lot of damage to each other but it is rarely decisive. WWII was one of the last conflicts where the other side literally had no choice but to surrender unconditionally. I live in Berlin. The effects of that war are very visible still. It's also a very peaceful city these days. That war was really over when it was over.

Wars between nation states are subject to all sorts of international rules. The problem is that most wars these days do not necessarily involve nation states and nation states instead engage each other via proxy wars. E.g. the US, Iran, and Russia are not formally at war but actively engaging each other in a plausibly deniable way nevertheless. These wars are dirty, brutal, and cause a lot of misery precisely because they rarely are fought to a conclusion and fought using any means possible.
A Look at Autoencoders – Unsupervised Learning Technique
With exception of Iain M Banks novels.
> why single out lambdas specifically for this?

Because existing memory models have rules for object fields and rules for publishing objects.

These rules don’t apply to local variables.

They could do - but that’s what I’m asking.
"nation state"

Dictionary result for nation state
noun
a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent.

so you can call anything a nation state as long as that thing issues a passport i guess?
Almost all parts end up being used though - for the vast majority it's not possible to prove that it's never used.

KCalc would for instance pull in HTML rendering for the Help dialog, which would also add all available picture format plugins and also PDF writing support etc.
I'd pick Delphi over WPF/Winforms any day. Better cross-platform options, vector-based graphics via FMX, or traditional Windows graphics via the VCL. COM programming couldn't be easier. Performance is good, lots of components readily available, and finally Object Pascal is a joy to program in. Compilation speed comparable to a C# build.
Sure. Amazon being here would have been good for a lot of reasons. It's a mutually beneficial situation. Amazon should want to be here either way.
> I think USA has huge pile of banned weapons like bio and chemical weapons.

This is not necessarily true. We are disposing of them and last time I checked there are only two sites now that have weapons and their numbers are decreasing daily.

Sites that have since disposed of all weapons that I know about.

1. Johnston Island
2. Umatilla, Oregon
3. Little Rock, Arkansas

source: my father has been doing this for 29 years
Those aren't autonomous weapons in the sense meant here.

Both of what you mention attack a predetermined target - a target selected by humans.

This technology is about "smart weapons" going out and searching for targets. For instance, the Chinese helicopter drone I mentioned in another post could easily be fitted with an IR sensor, and could probably hit targets out to ~200 meters with the AK.

One challenge is IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), but if you just want the drone(s) to kill all "enemies" within a certain boundary that'd be easy. AK ammo is even cheap, unlike the $500K missiles we often use to blow up individual jihadis...

And of course, at any time a human could potentially take control or at least monitor activity.
I can't find the source, but I read somewhere that the average length of ownership of yachts over 60ft is only 9 months. Or something, maybe it's 100ft & 18 months. But astonishingly short.

Which points to these not being well-considered deeply researched purchases. So I can see instagram playing a pretty big role.
I would really like the opportunity to get into RL. At work my team uses GANs and RNN/LSTMs almost exclusively. Any suggestions for specific RL online classes at Coursera, eDX, or Stanford?

I especially like that this framework is set up for experimenting with four popular models and the means to measure how well your models are doing.
You Can Develop a Growth Mindset to Win at Business and Life
Do you have any evidence to support your claim? My understanding is that containerized processes are theoretically the same as any other process on the system in terms of runtime performance.
While the death toll of nuclear accidents is relatively low, their economic cost seems to be staggering. The Japanese authorities enforced a 30km exclusion zone around Fukushima; if an accident of similar size had happened to the Beznau nuclear plant, the entire city of Zürich could have fallen inside the exclusion zone. Just think of the real estate value vaporized.
Even if it's one event in a thousand years, I'm not sure it's worth the risk.
I don't see the problem, we've always been at war with Eurasia.
The Computing Needs of Earth Are Not yet Satisfied
No, by default, everything is included, at least in GCC. Go ahead and statically link against some unused .a of your choice and run objdump if you don't believe me. There are some special compiler flags that can be used to prune unused functions, to some extent, but they aren't on by default.
I'm surprised there is not a chrome extension to remove these.
But those few people who don't realize it (or whose acknowledgement and behavior are not aligned) are the ones who spend the lion's share of the money on it.

Saying that gambling isn't predatory because only a few people become prey is just nonsense. As long as gambling is eating entire lives, it's predatory. Everyone else who walks past the trap without falling in just wasn't their target market.
You may have posted personal info there.
Who is Amazon extorting in either of these cases? If you have a problem with Amazon following the federal tax code that's existed longer than they have, perhaps you should take it up with your congressional reps.
The U.S. could easily stop this by threatening to withhold or tax remittances to India if they move forward with it.
>As Steve Marquess, the former CEO of the OpenSSL Foundation noted in a blog post after the fact, the cause of Heartbleed was attributable to developer burnout and lack of funding.

I don't agree that you can directly draw a line between security exploits like Heartbleed and lack of funding. In fact, it's even possible that you have the counterintuitive scenario of providing more funding to OpenSSL will lead to more exploits -- because you now have more paid programmers making new exploits.

As counterexamples to Steve Marquess reasoning: Apple funded Facetime with fulltime developers and yet they had a recent publicized audio security hole, and Intel with its billions funded x86 chip development and yet it still had Meltdown and Spectre holes. All the various CVEs constantly issued every day mentions commercially funded projects (e.g. Adobe Acrobat, Java runtimes, Windows zero-days, etc).

It's seductive to to think that paying developers will naturally lead to "better security". It does seem logical that if we set funded OpenSSL with $250k/yr to pay a salaried programmer whose only job is to look for security holes, something like Heartbleed wouldn't have happened. The problem is that there would still be security holes found by a teenager in Russia; possibly Heartbleed or a different security hole.

It's easier to directly connect cause & effect of adding programmers will lead to added features. E.g. if software widget doesn't have a PostgreSQL db adapter, add an additional programmer to code it. However, the effort of removing security exploits lives in a weird area of (un)measurable and (un)observable work. It's difficult to assess that the security holes were really removed.

Maybe there's some game theory thinking about how to best fund security bug hunting. Is a fulltime security auditor the best use of money? Or is it bounties? I don't know. Does the industry have any empirical data connecting amount funding to number of security exploits?
The number 500 is a very rough estimate. The vast majority of deaths considered to be related to the nuclear failure involved old people who had to be evacuated, and then died due to stresses or medical problems during the evacuation. The number of deaths attributed to actual radiation exposure is ONE.
Roof-installed consumer-grade nuclear reactors
I keep hearing about Amazon getting "special treatment", but is that really true?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-amazons-hq2-means-for...

> For the Long Island City location, Amazon was going to receive $1.2 billion in refundable tax credits through New York State’s Excelsior Jobs Program if the company created 25,000 net new jobs in New York State by the end of June 2028.

> New York State had also promised a $505 million capital grant to reimburse Amazon for the costs associated with building its office space.

> Amazon also planned to take advantage of incentives through New York City’s Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program and New York City’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP). Unlike the incentive offered by state officials, these city programs are available to any businesses that meet their specific requirements. Tax breaks through REAP, for instance, could have added up to $900 million.

Most of the subsidies are coming from existing programs which every company can take advantage of. The only special treatment Amazon is getting is the $500M mentioned above. Which works out to $2000 per job, over 10 years. An amount which is recouped in a few months of NYC city taxes alone - a tax which most other cities do not have at all.

I can see why people outside of NYC would be cheering for this. But it's insanity for locals to be celebrating shooting themselves in the foot. HQ2 would have cemented New York's place as the country's #2 tech hub after silicon valley. Over the next 20 years, New York could have even challenged and supplanted silicon valley. For tech workers in the city, it would have given them greater bargaining power when negotiating compensation with their existing or new employers. And for startups, it would have offered another source of employees to poach from, and a company that could easily acquire them.

New York has always succeeded because it was a pragmatic city. But this entire debacle is the kind of political dysfunction that I would have expected from San Francisco, not NYC.
>Hobbyists have already mounted guns on quadcopters.

ISIS has actually already used (remote controlled) quadcopters to conduct grenade strikes.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/uas/2018/01/05/how-650-dro...

You can make a distinction between human-in-the-loop weapons versus human-on-the-loop supervision versus robots killing with no supervision. But of course landmines have been completely autonomous weapons since the US civil war. It's a place where it's really hard to make bright line distinctions.
I agree 100%. That's why I suggested that then-GP (now GGGP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167303 ) was right/relevant.
Yeah that works if your app is in the Debian's software repository (and Ubuntu's and Red Hat's and Gentoo's and etc. etc.). If that is the case it is trivial to update all apps that depend on libssl anyway, even if they use static linking.

In practice it is far easier for a lot of software to distribute Windows-like binaries where all but the most basic dependencies are included (e.g. Flatpak or Snappy). In that case dynamic linking doesn't help at all.