skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The good will generated by the stream of customer testimonials of this process we hear about is priceless.

The proposition seems to go something like this: it's a new thing, mistakes are statistically expected, you make an honest one and plead "oops!" and we refund you, no doubt pointing you to resources on best practices and account throttling. As long as the customer takes the lesson to heart, everyone wins.
Figure there's malicious wi-fi capable of doing the same, since it's possible to read lips and detect keystrokes via passive snooping of wi-fi reflections.
Apple Is Pulling the Plug on iTunes After 18 Years
This is why I always use many providers. I'm talking about $10/month or so packages, this is pretty cheap. They're also not all on the same card in case one gets locked

I use 4 for my current company and have redundancy spread over them so that if, say, AWS goes down or I get an account locked or whatever, nothing is lost, things continue to be operational, slight degradation happens and that's it.

This really isn't that hard to set up. Under a day or so and then just do stuff in ssh config and the shell rc to act as helpers so you remember how to do things.

It's super cheap, pretty easy, and robust.

It's awful what happened to this guy but it's kinda like the person who backs up to the same harddrive as the originals. Awful to lose stuff, it shouldn't happen, but also don't do that.
Apple to shut down iTunes Store – no more downloading music?
Or even better, have contracts with the companies. Maybe unlikely for them, but I think “scraping” is too often assumed to be “bad” in some way. The company I work for does a lot of web scraping, but we have contracts with our partners to scrape their websites. They may still have robots.txt that ask users not to scrape some areas, but we are allowed to bypass those.
Thanks, the answer my confusion. Very cool!

I saw other projects say they were 'supported' by some things when in reality they simple used free stuff.
Not entirely but it crosses over. Appsync (from what I could tell) has a hacked version of Apollo for the front end and then it’s a configuration based system to provide graphql on top of dynamodb (someone can correct me in all of the above). But if you think of the backend of appsync as being a graphql engine with subscriptions and and a permissions system then there are a lot of similarities.
There are plenty of implementations and how-to’s Out there already.

If I remember correctly it is basically a way to calculate a random walk through a network without having to do the walk.
Do you live in a parallel universe where it was Ballmer and not Steve Jobs that founded Microsoft and was its CEO in 1995 ?
No, I wondered about the passive taking and calling if support or actual involvement of humans who decided to support the project.
I realize that not everyone understands how matrices work, but this is ridiculous. The abstract of the patent:

"... the rank of a document is calculated from a constant representing the probability that a browser through the database will randomly jump to the document."

And the specific claim is:

"Looked at another way, the importance of a page is directly related to the steady-state probability that a random web surfer ends up at the page after following a large number of links."

This _explicitly_ describes a Markov Chain, which is naturally represented by a matrix. A variety of versions of the linear equation are explicitly given in the patent.

To claim you can implement the patent without matrices is, for all intents and purposes, wrong. You can implement the same equations in a variety of ways, but they are still matrix equations.

They patented the idea to apply random walks to ranking webpages. That's arguably reasonably novel, though Wikipedia lists a number of predecessors. But it was also an inevitable invention, because there is a large number of people familiar with Random Walks/Markov Processes, they are routinely taught to undergrads, and are used to model and analyse a vast number of processes [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Applications
Some specs:

* ATSAMD51 (Cortex-M4 with 512KB of flash and 192KB of RAM)

* 8 MB of QSPI flash

* Micro SD Card Slot

* 1.8" 160x128 Color TFT Display

* 1 thumbstick

* 4 buttons

* 5 NeoPixels

* triple-axis accelerometer

* light sensor

* stereo headphone jack

* mono speaker driver
Why? That centers power in the hands of the few. And what happens after they die, the project does with them. Imagine if he wasn't a billionaire and neither were any of the space expeditioners. They would probably be working together to come up with a more stable set of plans for space development.
This is why I never rely on just one provider. Brutal to find this happen to your company. I can’t imagine the heart sink feeling you had with this.
Cut a corner at an oblique angle and it makes the perfect implement.
Being wrong is not bad, being wrong after everything pointed to you being hilariously right is a bit embarrassing.
It's been done many times, and it's easy to implement for small graphs.

Example: https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...
A service like BlaBlaCar (in Europe) is what can legitimately be called ride-sharing. Uber is fleet of pirate taxis.
I once read that lead-free solder is not allowed in medical equipment since someone’s life depends on it’s reliability. Is that still true?

As for consumer stuff you probably don’t see that problem because nobody keeps it long enough anymore. Everything is throw-away.
> As a mathematician

You don't need to be a mathematician to see that the current system of IP is completely contrary to the nature of the universe. It will be over soon.
Trivia: UN and EU proceedings are the perfect translation dataset as they are already translated paragraph-by-paragraph into all their official languages. However, they are all highly formal and have a legalistic vocabulary that won't be useful for most translation users.
If you like this, you should definitely read "Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir" by Bryan Burrough. It's an amazing portrait of the disintegrating immediately-ex-Soviet space program, and the disintegrating space station they were trying to keep flying.

This article mentions other countries buying seats on Mir. The book explains how this was a deliberate international effort to keep the Russian space program alive with infusions of hard cash. This was to avoid huge numbers of scientists with, effectively, high-level missile experience dispersing across the world in desperate need of money (rockets==missiles; that was the point of the whole original space race).

It's an eye-opening look at an astonishing time, and it culminates in heart-stopping descriptions of the various in-flight accidents, including the mid-space collision with a supply craft that knocked a hole in the station and nearly killed everyone aboard.

If you prefer video, the author gave an extended interview about it when it was released:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?115419-1/dragonfly-nasa-crisis...
What bothers me is the hypocrisy of Norway. On the one hand they wage war against cars and fossil fuels domestically. On the other hand they refuse to stop exploring new oil deposits or reduce oil production and exports. They are not bothered with all this oil burnt elsewhere. They are doing very little about that.
People have been saying this about most new technology for a long time. Between the printing press and the television this isn't new. The University abides.
I am not super pro-patent, but I don't think it's totally wild to patent an algorithm.

Algorithms can be extremely hard to discover and extremely valuable. Together these facts are why the patent system can usefully apply, same as traditional patent classes.

And lots of traditional types of patents are "algorithms" too, really.

It's not that different from, say, patenting a drug. The algorithm to manufacture [insert expensive drug here] probably isn't that hard to follow, but it was very hard to discover, and we want to encourage more people to discover more algorithms like this.

The real issue is that the people in the court system can't understand the different between trivial, straightforward, somewhat advanced, and truly sophisticated algorithms. Also, since you don't need to risk health and life to test them, computer algorithms are typically easier to test than drugs, so it's likely that few-to-none of them satisfy the "difficult to invent" standard that drug molecules do. It costs like a billion dollars to develop a drug; PageRank was made by a few guys in a room in a matter of months.

As another interesting point of comparison, a lot of old weird gun designs from the late 19th/early 20th century were made to get around patents. It's dumb to make a "blow-forward" pistol but there was a time when the straightforward "blow-back" system was patented. Whole countries used quite weird and suboptimal weapons for a long time simply to avoid patent entanglements. I'm sure to them it seemed similar - how can you patent putting these 2 pieces of metal together in this shape? These systems were not very complicated.
>If there shall ever be an acceptable degree of individual space consumption in a city, that city needs to define a limit on population density.

Acceptable to who? You?
For the competency and powerful the public administration, I think part of that it is really hard to compete with the private sector in the US, unless for prestige or political capital.

As trust goes, I am not sure if it is any different than most of countries in Europe except maybe Scandinavia?

For international best practices, at least in my subsection within IT, the US is the main driver for it. Most of people I talk to in terms of regulation see the US as its own jurisdiction but it is not like things there don’t make sense from a regulatory stand point, but they are just different?

Anyways, those are just simple observations.
I read it, my response was intended for the Derek Lowe comment.
Uber also has overhead costs for each driver. Currently this is minimal, probably just the cost of operating the web service. Let's say $X is 20, $Y is 15, and each driver has a $50 a week overhead cost. So Uber drivers have to drive for 10 hours a week to make even.

No, you're talking about Uber breaking even — not the drivers. If you're worried about the drivers, how much does their individual health insurance cost versus a group plan for a large company like Uber? How about the rates they'd get with an IRA versus a 401k that only a W2 employee is eligible for? The employee's share of the costs go down when they are classified as an employee and not an individual contractor.

You're conflating the costs of driving for Uber (most of which Uber has shifted to their pseudo-employees) with the costs to run Uber. Uber itself loses money on every ride, it's entirely subsidized with VC money. That's why their stated goal is to develop autonomous vehicles and dump the drivers ASAP.
Netflix’s ‘How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)` -Creators on the New German Original
Practically this is a blessing and a curse. I really wish there was a better story for GC'd apps on WebAssembly because a GC is super expensive at the moment.
I agree with your later sentences, but I have doubts that it implies the former. It's possible you have no physiological addiction to alcohol but you do have an addictive behaviour that involves alcohol.
Every patent and even every technology is basically an algorithm. And they are valuable because they are true (not sure how mathematical truth is different from any other type of truth).
I basically want to do this _without_ javascript though. My implementation is in Go: https://github.com/Xe/olin
What you quoted is not what the patent “claims”. The claims are the numbered points in the section “Claims”. They are the only legally enforced section of a patent and they are written in a very specific language. Everything else is background or embodiment and has little to no legal value.
I think just leaving your kid to compete normally is the best option. Don't skip grades, only put them in summer classes and advanced classes if the explicitly ask for it. If a kid actually is extremely intelligent, they should have no problem succeeding amongst their peers. If the additional work given to them isn't their idea, all you're doing is impeding their social life, and status. Don't run around telling them how amazing they are all the time. The creation of an ego starts early, and if your kid is to function happily for the rest of their lives, you want it to be a good one.

As an aside, calling a kid with ADHD neuro atypical is a bit much. I hope the kid doesn't know their parent uses that terminology about them. That could be crushing, or set up a crutch to use in justifying failure, or the perceived lazyness associated with ADHD.
To add some anecdotes; the local hunter organisation in my village (south bavaria) has to dispose almost 50% of the killed boars due to the radioactive contamination, many of those over 10 times the legal safety limit. And that's only the boars that are measured, there is likely a huge dark number of radioactive boars being consumed or hunted.
Discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378567
Acceptable to the city, of course.
From everything I hear from him, Judge Koh is consistently one of the better judges I have seen in some time.
Back to keywords in meta and h1 then ? /s
Then what IS the explanation for all of our lightning cables quickly developing blackened and pitted power pins? This was the only explanation I could find.
I just found this on Netflix and have had it on in the background while I work.

Supposedly based on real life, and it seems pretty legit.

I'm pretty excited to give it a closer look.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80218448
agreed ! Also their is a lot of hard work and engineering in offering the solution as well... Just knowing the algorithm wont help.
I have a personal website hosted on GitHub Pages and I’d imagine your mentee could use something like that or Netlify to host his portfolio.

As for the portfolio itself, I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of advice other than encourage him to build things he’s interested in versus things that would make him more marketable (although if those two intersect, all the better!).
I have been looking at doing things like arbitrarily limiting the WebAssembly execution engine to only run an instruction per microsecond. This would then make full execution speed something programs have to be configured to do rather than something they get by default. I still don't know though, this stuff gets tricky.

I think the ultimate goal for my implementation of this stuff is to remove anything higher than seconds resolution of time unless the program actually demonstrates a need for it. I'd like to have javascript and the browser processes be in separate machine processes, with javascript artificially only allowed to use 10% of the CPU time at max. Honestly I think that letting everything run at full speed on the CPU is probably a mistake.
What is your argument? It is clearly happening and it is not surprising given Google's business incentives. It's slow enough that there is a large chance of many falling for it, which is what makes it so dangerous.
> For instance if there is heavy snow they’ll clean up the car roads but not necessarily the bike ones.

Isn't that just a logistical issue though? If it snows, suddenly a huge area is affected. You would need an unreasonable fleet of cleaners to clear all pathways in time. I think they can only concentrate on the main roads, most "car" roads aren't cleared, too. But I may be off here, are there cities that clear all bike lanes?

I'm in Munich too btw., I think the bike infrastructure is pretty okay (try biking in Stuttgart)? I rarely use public transport, its just too slow and inflexible. I also don't think it can be improved to a point where it can reasonably compete with biking. And thats ok, biking is fine. Just take the bike, its more fun and healthy anyway.
Maybe they should have their own physical server in a datacenter. In addition to more flexibility, it would also be cheaper. Cloud providers are trying to convince people it is easier by using them, but in the end, if your cloud grows a lot, you are still going to need a team dedicated for management, etc. They are trying to convince it is cheaper to use them, but I can easily have 32GB of RAM or far far more on a single node at the fraction of the cost of the similar virtual offering (if they even offer such big VMs).
The Art of Anticipation
> I'm just reporting what the German statistical office reports

... which is meaningless when you compare it to the official US statistics (as you did) because they count things differently. The harmonization helps make the numbers comparable in the first place.
Would you, as a mathematician, prefer a world where innovative theorems become covered in secrecy if it means such things couldn't be patented anymore?
Why is it 'premature' brain development? This seems to have picked a particular lens to interpret the results.

I grew up in a European country and moved to a developed western nation at age 10. The first few years of school were a really jarring experience because the kids in my class were infantile and mentally under-developed compared to where I came from. This was also reflected in a huge gap in curriculum, we were covering skills that were taught 2-3 years earlier where I came from. Parents in western nations infantalise their children and prevent them from developing autonomy/responsibility for far too long. It's even reflected in the law, 10 year old me was shocked to learn that it's illegal to leave children under 12 unattended at home.

A different interpretation of the same findings is 'lack of adversity causes delayed brain development'.
Isn't economic retraction the opposite of economic growth?
I have to say: this is one fancy title that is fun to pronounce!

The meaning is less fun.
Also see the 32blit by Pimoroni:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/32blit-retro-i...
Are there any best practices I should follow when using AWS, GCP, Azure, DO, and others to avoid these sorts of situations?

I have heard although can’t confirm that using on account billing rather than using a credit card makes them less likely to just disable your account for billing issues. Things like that would be helpful to know. Should I be letting them know more contact info about us, asking for an account manager, etc?

Does it make a difference in how they react to you if you are spending low thousands a month vs tens of thousands a month vs hundreds of thousands etc? Or is everything always automated to death?
We have the chance to participate in the US too, now to what extend it is effective, I don’t know.

For example, even in big cities like NYC, there are public meetings about the projects, etc. Yet, I still believe that past certain point, people just stop either caring or not having the energy to follow thru the whole process.

Just a side note, it might sound pedantic but after living in Scandinavia, one thing I noticed that the expectation of “participation” during the decision making is not same even here. I bring this up because somewhat it contributes for more or less polarization and inefficient processes, I’d say.
I totally cannot bend my mind around this. It is irrelevant if patents on algorithms are useful and good for society in some cases. They are so much self-evidently wrong that the point is moot. The fact that "trivial" algorithms can be patented is a different question that I am not addressing. I am talking only about the non-trivial algorithms that require a stroke of genius.

Imagine that Euclid's algorithm was patented? Or Pythagoras theorem? Or the definition of exterior derivative? Or the expression of a function as Fourier series? All of these are valuable ideas that are non-trivial to come by. The same argument for software patents applies to each of these cases, and in all these cases it is evident (to me) that these mathematical constructions cannot be patented, and that society cannot grant monopoly of their usage to their discoverers.
Or just copy backups away from your cloud provider, to local storage, another cloud such as AWS or dropbox. No point making backups if you can't access them.
Did they suddenly forget the court cases oh say oh crypto? Those held that yes we do have a US right to non public free speech.
AT&T Sues Cali to Prevent Oversight over IP Based 911 Calls Using State Law
Not quite: manually assembled search directories like the old Yahoo! were already passé before Google came out. The increasing size of the Web and the arrival of AltaVista had already made automatically-indexed search engines an established thing. The problem was simply that the AltaVista results were overwhelmed with spam. Early on Google search results were very well-ranked, but quite narrow since the engine only crawled and indexed a relatively small proportion of the Web. AltaVista's coverage was much better, iirc, and Google's limited scope was often remarked on in places like Slashdot.
Copenhagen for example prioritizes major bike lines over streets afaik.
Or talking to a friend on your mobile phone. Your phone company is not allowed to wire tap the conversation.
I do not understand what you are talking about.

In our world, you cannot patent theorems but people publish them anyway. Why? for the honor of human spirit, or to impress chicks, whatever.
> Most of those stories are from 2016.

Here are a couple from 2018 and 2019:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-electric-buses-201...

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/electric-bus-...

> Technology improves over time.

This is bus technology, not rocket surgery. The BYD buses in Albuquerque had door malfunctions, cracked and missing welds, brake issues, exposed high voltage cables, etc.:

https://www.cabq.gov/mayor/news/mayor-tim-keller-byd-will-be...

This doesn't have anything to do with the technology. It's just bad bus manufacturing.
Fisher Yates for shuffle?

What is the key scheduling used for multiplayer?
Our entire idea of "agency", "individuality" and even "freedom" needs to be re-thinked. Basically all of what we have built resides in one way or another on the idea that individuals bar exceptions such as with physical drugs have some sort of inalienable agency to them. That entire rockbed is simply not really true, and more like highly idealized thoughts from thinkers of the 1800's

Policy makers and politicians have been struggling with these problems for the last +150 years, and increasingly so in the last 30 ever since the creation of political microtargetting and the perfection of advertising, cambridge analytica and digital microtargetting+psychographics is just the cherry on top

Planet Money released an episode touching on all of these subjects "Ep 915 How to meddle in an election"

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/24/726536757/episode-915-how-to-...

Also, anybody that hasn't should absolutely watch "Century of the self" by Adam Curtis
AppSync is a managed service and you use whatever GraphQL client you like.