skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The obvious difference with Jobs' pitch or the breezy nineties hype about the world wide web ("information superhighway" was essentially: "a really big, fast library") is that they undersold the potential, even on the hardware of the time. VisiCalc launched the year after Sequoia invested in Apple...

By contrast, we've been assured that blockchain is going to fix transactions, financial asset storage, security, contract law, corporate governance, fundraising, logistics, bad government and hyperinflations that haven't actually happened and what we've actually got to show for the last decade is speculative assets some people use to make money off other speculators via means which sometimes look suspiciously like hyperinflation and a much smaller number of people to circumvent money transmission laws. (And the problem certainly isn't that we haven't got the hardware to support it or any means for blockchain enthusiasts to connect with other blockchain enthusiasts)
And still to this date not single spectre attack shown to work under real world conditions.

This had been the most overt blown security topic I've ever seen. All the POCs required higher help from the code being attacked: eg, known memory locations, nothing else running on the system.

There still has not been a single real world exploit developed for Spectre: eg somebody attack a running server. But yet all this time and effort has gone into a theoretical toy. It is so incredibly difficult to pull this off, that is should be one of the lowest priorities. I guess it gets ink because it pushes the security issues past all the software foul ups and lets people hate on Intel.

Developers gotta develop I guess.

Edit: down to -3 already for expressing an opinion, and nobody really responded except for a variation of the precautionary principle.

I wish more people understood that spectre isn't the bogeyman that we need to give up 5 to 15% of our CPU for (and meltdown was more of a bug and when easily patched is no worse than Spectre).

Maybe I should put an encryption key in a sandboxed system and play $1000 if anybody can use Spectre to recover it? Even then it probably would shut everybody up.
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What about the other two questions, especially #2. (It's not just your effort.)

Whenever I hear someone attempt to make the case of rebooting the Internet they never identify to what end, how to replace the old internet (because there will be resistance), or (which is annoyingly untrue but I get that you have to market it) come clean in that they're not really rebooting the internet, just how data gets shared across it.

IDK, good luck to you. FB, all social media has its hooks into everything. Upending that is going to be a monumental task. _Disclaimer: not a social media user so I really don't care._
$1B market cap for cosmos...
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/cosmos
This comes down to deciding whether mentioning "Tulips" is a memorable shorthand for discussing all kinds of bubbles, or if we are attempting to use tulips as a model that we can reason from ("If it's like tulips, then since tulips X, we can expect Bitcoin to also X").

Personally, I take all mentions of Tulip Mania as a kind of memorable shorthand for "Hyper-speculative, with little or no trading on the basis of the underlying utility."

Why Tulips instead of houses? Because we as a society have been using the tulip analogy longer, that's really the only reason. It's not an assertion that tulips fit better than houses.

It's much the same as expressions like "Grandfathered in." Nobody worries about whether a particular law or regulation is actually being enacted as a way to deprive ex-slaves of their right to vote while guaranteeing it for illiterate whites. To almost everybody, it's just a phrase.
"We don't care if you object and irrespective of your views, this project is going ahead."

The EU seems to have done this for at least twenty-five years, the prime example being their stubborn insistence on monetary union despite the mountains of expert opinion saying that monetary union made no sense economically.
I’m not terribly familiar with the history of RSS. In what way were you involved with its invention?
I have no idea how will it gonna work. First you squeeze it, put it into fridge, unsqueeze it, make it absorb heat, get it out of the fridge, and repeat.

Don't seem to be an easily automatable work
Yeah, like I said, not seeing much of a product there.

Doesn't mean it won't be successful, whatever that means in this space, but it doesn't look much like a 'product' to me.
You speak like an authoritarian, giddy at the thought of having nearly limitless capacity for activist judges to wield the justice system according to their whims.

Nearly every piece of land on the planet is within the basin of a regional river. We have regulations and laws so that people know what is okay and what isn't. Our understanding of what has significant impacts on rivers and what doesn't changes frequently. Our notions of what a "significant impact" is on the river change with cultural norms.

But under your system, activists merely need to seek the most sympathetic judge and punish nearly anyone they please in a kangaroo court.

We have plenty of laws which punish environmental damage, regulations that provide a standard of care to avoid damage, and systems for enacting new laws and regulations. Use those systems if you want to protect the environment.
The positioning isn’t a fluff piece exercise - it’s how you define what you are building, who it is for, and who it is not for. As a product guy, it’s your North Star.

Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of ‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely.

Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why we’re different ready at all times - even if your current audience is only true believers.

EDIT: Clicked through to your features page. Confused. Polar allows me to "manage my reading"... oookay. What does that mean? What pain point is that solving for me? Does my reading need managing?

What are the benefits to me as a user? You need to tell this story before you get to the fact that it's based on Electron (perhaps very much not a selling point) and uses PDF.JS. How is this better than Evernote for me, which, based on sheer longevity is probably going to be my first port of call?

Who's your audience? Answer: not 'everyone' - you mention Pre Med students, but then your screenshot has a load of growth hackery stuff. If I'm a med student is there latex support?

Getting out a notepad and making yourself clarify what this is, who you are building it for, and what benefit you see it giving them is going to be a big help for you.

This goes double for you, as you're effectively creating a double sided marketplace of consumers for your product, and sites willing to integrate with your metadata.
As a side note the GNU SD distro looks cool. I like the declarative way of doing things and it really seems to be following the infrastructure as code idea.
> because there are no such drugs

ISTM the advertising, entertainment and social-media industries are aiming to fulfil much of the role of BNW's drugs, and the pharmaceutical companies can probably cover most of the gaps.
This is blogspam copying a NY Times article from two days ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley...

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19711851
You're too wrapped up in the grand vision to invite us for the ride. Don't do that. Give us a quick and concise summary without jargon or marketing flair. If you can't express it in a few sentences, it's not ready.
Site needs a designer or at least better cookie-cutter layout. It just looks mediocre. Today marketing is everything...
Slightly off topic: why did HDMI become the de facto standard when DP and DVI have no licensing fees?
So are the people who bought Binance coin the only one not broken by this?
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ath
Article 10 is a bit weak as fundamental rights go.

Part 1 implies that you can say what you want. Part 2 then cancels that out with the proviso that national law can override your part 1 rights.

That's not so much a right, more of a "defined allowance".
Survivorship bias. If I had a nickel everytime I saw that argument from some conspiracy nut...
Rich Hickey gives the best talks. It's that simple.
Yes, easily. And the existence of an intermediary isn't a disqualifier. You're still sending USD when you send someone USD over Paypal, you're still sending Bitcoin when you send someone Bitcoin over Coinbase.

Bitcoin is responsible for moving hundreds of millions of dollars every single day[1]. That is not a reasonable definition of "failure". Similarly, your gran using it is not a singular definition of success.

[1]: https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/price_volume/30d/USD?t=l...
The post left me very confused, and the mission statement didn't help clear up the confusion.

While the document manager might be a nifty tool (it does look very interesting to me), I fail to see how a document manager/personal knowledge repo (or adding ebook reader support and mobile apps) would enable rebooting the internet.

This definitely needs more information.
> what makes it different?

It's GNU, others aren't.

There will be other well reasoned arguments in favour of Shepherd but it essentially boils down to the same reason Hurd (the kernel) is a thing when GNU/Linux is already widespread.

That all said, I don't see the harm in competing solutions. Better to have a choice rather than lock ins.
I stopped looking at notifications now
Yowks - I know systemd gets lots of hate and this is “real” programming - but it does feel a bit niche from a language etc perspective?
> No, since a proof is finite. When you enumerate Turing machines to generate a proof you execute the first n machines for n steps. At some point some machine must decide something, so some n is the bound.

Thanks. It's been awhile for me, so if you could bear with the perhaps simple question: do we avoid undecidability here by the finitude of the proof or by only running a finite number of steps? It seems to me like there are three states for any solver: (1) it responds in the negative (this is not a proof), (2) it responds in the positive (this is a proof, you're done), or (3) I'm still trying figure it out.

Do we fold the 3d case into the 1st by saying that we'll only iterate n steps before terminating? Or am I missing the point entirely?
I've never heard of Polar before. Tell me, in as few words as necessary, why I should care about it and what it is? (In that order.)
I'm from Germany - it depends a lot where you are and what kind of poeple are there.
Gosh those days. Tripod, angelfire, and geocities... young people wont understand it today
Generally a pretty shitty one at that, full of bullying, cliques, popularity contests and anxiety. Being constantly surrounded only by people your own exact age for 18 years isn't a great design.
This is a better description indeed.
A few thoughts after reading this as a mechanical engineer:

1. My understanding: this material relies on mechanical work (force x distance = work energy) to add energy to the material by compressing (or tensioning, or "magnetically stressing", which I don't understand) it. Some fraction of this energy is converted phase transitions which absorb heat, and some fraction is retained as spring potential energy. If the material is then heated by ambient air, and then the material is allowed to expand, it will now be at a temperature above the ambient temperature at the start of the cycle. In this way it is similar to a standard refrigeration cycle- just without pipes.

2. The cycle described in point 1 is not particularly unique to this material. You could do a similar process with any mechanical spring (google "rubber band heat engine"), and achieve similar results. This material is likely uniquely well suited to this application because it has usefully large amounts of heat associated with phase transitions at temperatures that correspond well with the temperatures used in a refrigeration cycle.

3. You want the material to dump heat to a hot reservoir while hot and suck heat from a cold reservoir while cold. Standard, fluid based refrigeration cycles do this by pumping the refrigerant to different locations (the condensor and evaporator). (I am assuming) This process would have to open and close dampers to get the hot reservoir air and the cold reservoir air to flow across the material; otherwise you have to move the material between the two locations. Both of these sound expensive/tricky to me.

4. A large challenge here is creating an electrical actuator that can compress the material. It would the following design objectives/constraints:

4a. The material should be shaped into long, narrow rods, or another shape with a large surface area, to be ideal for maximum heat transfer with the air of the hot and cold reservoirs.

4b. The actuator must recover the work energy provided when the material is allowed to expand.

4c. The actuator will have a very short stroke (solids do not compress very far), and large force.

4d. The actuator must last many thousands or millions of cycles without wearing out.

5. This style of refrigeration does not have any higher theoretical or actual efficiency than a fluids-based cycle. However, refrigerants have historically been environmentally damaging when released to the atmosphere. R-12 kills ozone, and is obselete/ outlawed. R-134a is currently in a lot of new systems, there are also newer refrigerants being put into new cars. The only thing particularly bad about R-134a is that 1 kg of R-134a equals several thousand kg's of CO2 in terms of global warming effect.
https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html

grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.
It flourished because it is installed by default and thus became the defacto standard.

There is a talk from Nodejs' creator where he mentions one of his biggest regrets about Node is that he made NPM the default.
I already have Mobirise builder as it's free. I would like to have their extension Code Editor but it's too expensive for me. Costs $69 https://mobirise.com/extensions/code-editor.html. But I guess that it's a really useful thing, one day I would get it.
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>They encompass every feature in the product

That's not a given. It's plenty common to have the most often used features (say, sub-pages, or key processes) optimized the best, with the rarely used ones lingering at low optimization. User behavior is non-linear; small changes around pivotal values can yield great results. Over-optimizing on the other hand yields diminishing returns. Making even just your home page snappy can greatly improve conversions (or whatever is your success metric).

Other than that you are right that a bit of optimization here or there can save a lot of costs. I distinctly remember certain popular phpBB forum that, while quickly growing the userbase, somehow managed to still improve performance on rather measly hardware - and without much horizontal scaling! - getting in return genuine praise from the users, and also keeping the cost & complexity in check.
either he wins big, or no big deal, the advantages of having money.
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How I can read this without a subscription?
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Sorry, which words do you mean?
As someone who has never heard about your product before I agree with the op. I read your text about how you wanted to raise money and “reboot the internet” but it’s meaningless to me because I don’t know what Polar is.

I know there’s a video but I’m not gonna watch it just to learn what the product is.
Hm, you are right. I was paranoiac.

Then, I'll bet on AV1. Final encoder method also sounds good.

Thank you for your reply!
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There is an upcoming Manning ebook for graph-machine learning. Its a lot less technical than the papers. Fingers crossed for them.

https://www.manning.com/books/graph-powered-machine-learning
Isn't one possible solution to this problem just not to allow untrusted programs access to clocks and timer features?
Not exactly the best written article. I think the author was a little out of his depth.

The original paper is in the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.06372#

Other related work of interest: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-017-0018-3
Modular Pie-Cosahedron
So today, even if we haven't gone far down the genetic engineering path yet, we do have the tools for massive-scale social engineering. I wonder which will prove the more critical enabling factor for our very own dystopia?
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“Redux” in 173 Bytes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopropyl_alcohol#Safety

Yeah.
Once the revision is published I welcome more comments/corrections. I have never worked with Clojure and could easily be getting some part of what I write wrong.
Is Julia actually used that much? I've been hearing people herald it as the next big thing for the last five years or so, but it doesn't seem like it has taken off. I personally don't know anybody who uses it professionally (I know plenty of people who use R professionally). The most recent SO survey also indicates that it is rather unpopular.
Which in context of his net worth is pretty much noise
The link provided by another user indicates that the problem with AC units is improper disposal of HFCs contained within.

"HFCs, the primary replacement, spare the ozone layer, but have 1,000 to 9,000 times greater capacity to warm the atmosphere than carbon dioxide."

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-man...
Ask HN: How do you learn a programming language (e.g. Rust) from a book?
The only issue for me is that the video iframe is so huge that everything else is made smaller.
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Exactly, Gab proves You made it up.
I recall that Walmart Labs uses their clojure graphql server library in production, for some definition of "in production".
Here's a better pitch based on your feedback and maybe more tailored to the Hacker News crowd.

The Internet is broken as content primary pools behind walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter. These platforms are not open in the sense that the metadata is locked up inside them. Additionally, they're not very respective of the rights and privacy of their user base.

Polar tries to reboot this by building out a generic datastore model where users can share content with anyone of their backend datastores.

The information/metadata model is free and portable and content and metadata can flow across networks.

Polar is implemented as a 'read it later' style app similar to an RSS reader where you can add documents directly (vs RSS subscribing to a feed) and manage them and keep track of your reading.

The key part is that Polar adds a metadata layer on top of PDF and the web and you can exchange the metadata with other users (still being implemented, initial sharing should ship next week).

This means that you can add content from anywhere on the web and also share it with anyone else.

We also archive the content and the actual content archives can be exchanged too. This means if anything is ever deleted you still have a copy.

Polar also adds support for features like spaced repetition (never forget anything) and incremental reading (never forget what you're reading and where you left off) to encourage you to use Polar to manage all your reading material.

The idea is that if people have a very valuable app to keep track of their content that they're more naturally likely to use it which means that the sharing and open content vision is directly powered by users.

Right now we support local mode and cloud powered by Google's Firebase. We're planning on adding other backend providers like Filecoin but we have to take baby steps now because we're still an early project.

Polar's design (though not yet implemented) can support end to end encryption and key sharing for group encryption. This means we can support fully end to end encrypted datastores.

You can use a system to store your data (that you don't trust) and only you have the key.

Additionally, if you want private group sharing we support one to many encryption where you can fan out content to anyone in a fully private group.

It's important that this remains Open Source so that we can rely that Polar isn't just going to vanish.
And yet leaving the left lane open isn't...
Looks really nice! I'm looking forward to trying this out.
Wait, you mean correlation doesn't equal causation? (I'm being sarcastic, of course)
Looking at the world like that is like plugging your ears and yelling "I can't hear you" whenever something goes against your preconceived narrative.

For example, when China announces they have landed on the far side of the moon, how exactly does their totalitarian governance impact the accuracy of this press brief? Is it not more beneficial for your own sake to pass on judgment (or at least defer on your judgment) based on the particular event over what their goverment is like?
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Who thinks that openly soliciting a destructive crime should be protected speech?
I don't think Guile is too niche. In fact, Guix has a quite active community. Nowhere as Nix in terms of activity, but it's pretty nice and very friendly too.
If they are going with isolation instead, can we have the high-res timers and shared buffers back?
Wouldn’t agencies like the NSA use it regardless of what regulations say? Wouldn’t policy be shaped by what large corporations saw as valuable? I think that big problem already exists to a degree, and it’s only a matter of time before this sort of thing gets uncomfortably out of hand.
I know... I'm not a designer and this is one of the reasons I'm raising funding ;)
> And still to this date not single spectre attack shown to work under real world conditions.

I find statements like yours difficult. Can we know that something did not happen just because nobody talked about it?

A vulnerability as deep and far reaching as Spectre is extremely interesting to nation-state level hacking groups as a means of warfare, we should not assume that we know about everything these actors are up to.
I don't see the point of disdain, Depardieu is a relatively well known Russian citizen and also a French public figure, so if you want someone from outside of the EU visa agreements, perhaps it's a good example of an individual like that?

In addition, there's substantial pressure from member states to secure the border, and make it as efficient as possible. The governments of Italy and Hungary have practically been screaming about border protection issues. It's not only limited to governments, many national and EP parties have publicly expressed the same viewpoint.

I also don't like these systems because of privacy concerns. But suggesting that it's disdainful or undemocratic, it is not. The democratic process is being followed.
Perhaps you're seeing something that is not there, or you just really dislike the EU institutions for some reason.
I'm sure there are many reasons, but one of the reasons is that after you IPO, your business decisions - indeed, the very direction of your company and what products you develop and sell - are dictated not by management, but by shareholders.

That's a lot of control to give up.
> Toilet paper is an essential for both genders.

In walked the bidet.
Systemd is licenced under LGPL, why would it lock you in?
Running them on in-order, speculation-free hardware would be quite sufficient, and come with additional benefits in power efficiency. The thing about Spectre or Meltdown is that there's really no case for the sorts of out-of-order cpus that raise these issues, unless you're truly bound by compute or memory bandwidth on some single-threaded task - which will never be the case for typical JS/WASM workloads on the "edge".
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