skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yeah, that's why the number of "natural monopolies" is a tiny fraction of all monopolies exist.

Natural monopolies are also not as tough as the incumbents want you to think they are.

If you have a sufficiently crappy water company (i.e. prices are more than double the cost of an efficient operator), it's not totally infeasible that someone else could put in a competing water main, do a better job and take half their customers.

Then both companies would have to charge twice as much per customer as an efficient monopolist would to cover costs, but that still may be less than what an inefficient monopolist (i.e. the incumbent) would charge. So there's an upper bound for how bad they can get in an unregulated environment.

But having a competitor show up is a catastrophe for the incumbent. If an efficient monopolist can provide service for $50,000/street but their mismanagement causes their costs to be $150,000/street, a new competitor that shows up with costs of $50,000/street can match the incumbent's price, take half their customers and still turn a tidy profit. But losing half their customers would bankrupt the inefficient incumbent due to their higher costs -- and that creates even more incentive for someone to do it, because then they can expect to ultimately gain 100% of the customers.

The result is that the incumbents lobby hard for rules that either establish a statutory monopoly or otherwise make it as difficult as possible for anyone to challenge them. Because the barriers to entry are higher than in most other industries, but so is the cost to the incumbent of anyone clearing them, so they rely even more than other industries on the government to impair competition.
Unless there are some major details missing here it sounds like the author got terrible legal advice.

One cannot cause another party to onw their own business through essentially a clerical error. Contracts are created out of a meeting of minds, without a shared understanding there could be no agreement. It might have been a gnarly account / tax mess to clean up, but that should have been the extent of it.
Does that mean we get a day off?
I should have said "any disclosure": EFail was coordinated (6 months notice [1]) and yet GnuPG officially downplayed the risk [2], launched #effail counter-campaign and blamed researchers for bad disclosure [3].

With regards to any of the existing SKS exploits specifically: even if any of them were to undergo coordinated disclosure, it wouldn't have helped: trollwot has been available for 5 years, both keyserver-fs and sks-exploit -- for more than a year. Embargoes don't last that long. All three tools still work.

What GnuPG Project effectively tries to do is to stop people from writing about any security problems period, especially those that are hard to fix.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/2ef6bce7d16e9d3e76d790fd99c9618...

[2]: https://twitter.com/gnupg/status/995936684213723136

[3]: https://twitter.com/gnupg/status/996856990818283521
I think your sample might be a bit skewed. In the west, I find people typically associate "mahjong" with mahjong solitaire.
You probably, by luck or design, bought decent gear.

The biggest killer of windows systems was drivers and bad hardware.

The average punter bought some garbage device at retail and plugged in his software modem, software printer, and god knows what kind of software. Those boxes died.

Enterprise software was usually even worse, as companies were uniquely unskilled to produce it.
That’s the point. Advertise the hazards of smoking in the places where people smoke.
One of the ways Windows would corrupt itself was an optimization it used to reduce the size of the VM swap file. On many OS, when a program is loaded into memory the executable code pages of memory are the same as any other memory page: the VM might write the page to the swap file, and later reload that memory from the swap file to restore the memory page.

On windows, code pages were not sent to the swap file, because that data already had a copy of that data in the program's original .exe file! Instead of writing the memory page to the swap file, simply freeing the memory was much faster and saved a lot of space on the disk reserved for the swap file. The code pages were supposed to be read-only, but some kind of bug(s) would cause the memory pages to be seen as normal memory, where writes would mark the page as "dirty" and eventually the VM would write those changes to the swap file. Unfortunately, for code pages, the "swap file" was the original .exe, so the changes to the memory page would corrupt the .exe, probably requiring it to be reinstalled.

> always divide the bootable system install off to its own untouched C: partition

They might have been using 'ghost' to restore the C: partition over the LAN at boot time. This was very common in professionally-managed settings.
Doesn't do a thing for metadata. Average Australian has 15,000 datapoints collected daily and stored for warrantless access by virtually any govt department, most of it cellphone location.
Citation? How do you implement it with automata?
i would say yes. so are blogs,forums,chats,etc. networking itself is social in a form. media is perhaps key.

media definition
"(Communications & Information) the means of communication that reach large numbers of people, such as television, newspapers, and radio"

and internet i would say and i would say broadcasting not necessarily interacting. now social is the means of people interacting with other so anything with like comments would fall into social media but pure social would be like chat. social media would be very forum in function but can of course be more distinct like face book though it may fall more under a social paradigm.
On my Thinkpad X240's touchpad, 2-finger touch is quite natural feeling. To right click, I just have the second finger touching somewhere in quadrant I. Just an example.
Find Best Statement of Purpose (Sop) Samples
The general method illustrated here (rearranging a sufficiently uniformly distribution over 100 into a very-close-to-uniform distribution over 10) is a special case of a topic in information theory called randomness extraction:

https://cs.haifa.ac.il/~ronen/online_papers/ICALPinvited.pdf

https://people.seas.harvard.edu/~salil/pseudorandomness/extr...

The problem being solved is trying to obtain a distribution arbitrarily close to uniform from sampling a known random distribution.
I've always like Kubrick's films, but this one was lost on me. I kept looking for some deeper meaning than a big secret get together where rich people have sex and for some reason everyone finds it sinister and titillating.
Some have argued it is on the basis that it's online and people are writing stuff.

In the absence of any useful definitions I'd say it's not because few here seem attached to the name of people commenting.

Personally, you all have the same face, the same voice and are one and the same person.

Way too many people to feel anything social about it to me.
>You can pay them for a safe deposit box and they can properly _hold_ your money if you want

Depends on what your threat model is. A safe deposit box is safe from bank collapses/bail ins, but not against theft.

>but that money won't be worth much in 30 years.

In that case you'd probably be stashing gold rather than bills.

>Unless I'm wrong and some banks provide a fully backed savings account? Doubt it would be worth the effort for them.

because right now there's no demand for it. if there was a period of zero/negative interest combined with low confidence in banks, I'm sure that non-fractional reserve banks would pop up. Either that or people stash their money overseas.
If the children grow up in an environment that (unreasonably?) values birthdays then they'll (unreasonably?) resent that their parents weren't with them.
This being terminal based means it can be used easily over ssh.
Eh, the bar is set low for men. Stick around, hold down a job, and actually parent, and you're considered amazing.

It's the flip side of the "women with careers are neglecting their children" and "men at the park are paedos!" mindset.

It's nice having positive feedback, but I'd prefer a society where it's unremarked upon.
I didn’t think people could be that naive.
I assure you that many developers are being paid to produce shit.
Except IBMs products are a contract, maintenance and usability nightmare, much worse than the other options
Right! This sort of "ugly hack lore" more generally is why it's extremely difficult for third-party word processing applications to handle old Microsoft Word .doc files, and in fact is why Microsoft put so much effort into backward compatibility for modern versions of Windows: Microsoft Office actually contains the document-rendering engines of old versions of Microsoft Word, in order to handle documents which are in the old formats.
He wrote 'Fuck Arbcon' in the entry for the arbitration committee. He had other warnings. He got banned for a year.

Makes sense. I do not know from were the 'freedom' argument comes from our relates to this.
Wow, two, three whole days without a crash!? Imagine!

At the time, people running Linux on the same hardware resented being obliged to shut down after six months to upgrade their OS or disk storage. Back then, Linux was much less professionally maintained, but if it ever crashed at all it was a big deal. OS/2 likewise.

Windows crashes were not just for tinkerers. In any office, secretaries and receptionists were very used to re-booting in midday, despite shutting the machines off every night. They considered it completely normal.
I'm familiar with Second Life's distinctive traits. I played there for years, and did contract programming for the Linden Department of Public Works for a couple of them (including coding around those janky region crossing issues you mention).

They pay an incredibly high price for some design decisions that I think users don't even get much value from. It turns out that most users would rather have a private island than live on a continuous continent where neighbors are always putting up eyesores. If you were to start with that fact, remove the requirement that private regions even exist on the global map, and let them spin down when no one's home, then you could give paying users a lot more space for their money while also reducing the company's spend on servers.

While I take your point about work on Second Life not being super transferrable to any of the AAA game engines, it seems like it would be very transferrable to creating such engines themselves. And what engineer wouldn't want to help build the world of Snow Crash or Ready Player One?

I think the deeper problem is that Linden Lab has stopped prioritizing investment in the SL platform. They've set their sights on creating VR-focused Sansar instead. But it's tough to convince people to move over to a new world when it means leaving behind the bigger community, the bigger economy, and all the clothes in their inventory.
Daycare is not only great fun for the kids - playing with their peers is fun - it's also fantastic for their development.

We have an excellent daycare. My daughter spends three days a week crafting, playing outside with kids, baking, doing make-up etc. The carers have skills that I don't have and my kids get to enjoy that.

We both work four days a week so the kids get lots of parent time and we get a bit of a rest from them.
Excommunication / shunning whatever is incredibly harmful to the teenagers it's frequently applied to. I've seen the aftermath.
Farmers are typically fairly wealthy, and hate paying taxes, mainly because they pay about 10% of their land value in property taxes each year.
Check into Containerise. You can setup wildcards and get the same effect with a lot more bad actors. Facebook properties are the worst in my opinion, with Google being a close second.
I have long been enamoured with the idea of building a series of educational science toy sets were in some way better than those I remember growing up. Seems like a nice pastime.
> Cause maybe she is tired of the routine. Has made enough money and is watching the effect its having on kids.

Yeah, maybe Zuckerberg is tired of the routine as well and both of them don't want more money and more power.

But probably not.
OS/2 had a big advantage over Windows in that it was an OS designed from the ground up.

Windows started out life as nothing more than a GUI designed to make MS-DOS look more like the Apple Macintosh.

One of Windows 3.x big strengths was it's ability to run a large number of MS-DOS programs.

But that was also it's weakness because it also meant it had to run MS-DOS and that OS was not much more than a boot loader and nothing like the modern looking operating system like OS/2.

However a big reason why OS/2 failed was because OS/2 1.x could only run a handful of MS-DOS programs and it ran them very badly.

People would use Windows 3.x ahead of OS/2 because Windows could run their MS-DOS programs.
That is a beautiful logo/icon. Also nice tool; will have to try it out.
The reason I complain about the lambdas is the lack of readability what the function does (the name), the lack of a speaking stack trace and finally in most languages this pattern also allocates memory.
Also, it is in line with the hacker spirit.
It's about the status-driven whores we all are.

Everyone in the movie is clearly from one social class or another and is made starkly aware of it.

The men are buying power over one another while the women are literal whores - even the doctor's wife - sex toys & arm candy for whomever they can gather the most status/money from.
If electric cars become more popular, they're going to dwarf any other household use anyway. A Tesla's batteries already hold more energy than the average household uses in a weekend.
I had a response and even posted it for a few seconds but deleted it because the back-and-forth would continue so I just wanted you to have the last word peacefully.

But since you posted a second time I'll at least tell you why I didn't give you an in depth response.
Yes, there is a possibility that the sample is biased. But that does not matter for this experiment.

The OP says that the model should be built with people in the same room than him, and then the human RNG should be executed with the same people.

As a consequence, OP has to capture the bias of the people in his room to make his RNG work.

The model would break only if the people in the sample change their strategy to pick random numbers after some time.

The data from Reddit is just used as an example of how to make a human RNG from redditer random picks.

As long as the training and testing are done from the same group of people, there is no issue, even if this group is biased.

Moreover, I don't see any prior reason to believe that redditors and HN readers would have different biases. That would be an interesting experiment, though. However, the predominance of the number 7 in article's data might be a western culture thing.
The only way this is going to move forward is through open standards. Something something webfinger, mail 2.0 and trusted recipients.
US officials weigh encryption crackdown
If I may give another piece of feedback, I think you need to have a “pricing” entry in the main navigation somewhere. That’s where everyone looks for that information as that’s where most other products have it.

(I looked, but I couldn’t find the pricing information in the main text (did I miss it?))

I am happy to do a free trial for an interesting product, but I’m not going to invest the time for a product I can’t afford after the trial, so I like to know the pricing information before I start.
@pjmlp I am going to hijack this and ask you somewhat off topic question:

Most of the OS books teach in a very Unix centered way. Can you recommend some books or resources which describe non-C non-Unixy Operating Systems? I really liked the Blue Book of Smalltalk, and looking for more!
“What I don't know is: am I just wrong about this, or are you, or is it just pure subjective preference? ”

Yes. It’s subjective. It probably also depends on the people you work with and the nature of the things you are working on.
I've been happy with the Keyboardio Model 1: https://shop.keyboard.io

Note that the keys are in columns and not staggered, so there is a learning curve.
7 is our special number.
The looping you describe sounds similar to how teletext worked. You would enter a page number, and wait for the page to load. If it was a common page (e.g. the default page '100') it would be transmitted more frequently, so the average wait time would be lower.
Hong Kong protesters go offline to dodge China's digital surveillance
That’s kind of my point. It seems like it will on backfire, thus leaving it at a lot of bluster, but no one actually enforcing it, which then just encourages everyone else to leave as well, and then the threat is revealed to be a paper tiger.
There are three ways to outcompete your peers with skills:

(1) Be best

(2) Be first

(3) Be the only person in a unique niche (a useful unique niche)

(2) & (3) are far easier than (1).
What? Dissenter browser extension that works with most browsers has been available for several months.

Install the extension or the browser and see how it turned out. Or don't.
This looks a lot like Transit (transitapp.com), which also has a similar crowdsourcing feature. And I believe other apps like Citymapper and Moovit also rely on users’ reports. Does this app have anything new in particular?
How to Find Journalists for Your Startup
So you’re both of some money, but in the end, nothing was actually enforced, and their reputation is trashed? This is exactly what I thought would happen at worse.

Meh. Next time, have the new employer cover the legal costs. 5k is not much to spend when onboarding a new employee. That’s basically IT costs.
By smoking it.
10% drop in the teenage smoking.. not needing to save for buying music / movies.

Kids need less money these days and are more focused on education vs work experience.
Why is this being treated as news as of now? Note the article chose to not mention a timeline or give any background at all. This bank was taken over on May 24 this year, with a very public announcement. Its purported major investor was arrested in 2017. The bank has not published an annual report since then. For details see: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8C%85%E5%95%86%E9%93%B6%E8...
Optimize to handle 150K signatures in reasonable time.
There is some overlap as the article mentions. There's also a synergistic secondary effect of residential solar not mentioned by the article: PV panels on your roof shade your house and the solar energy that was heating your house is now cooling it.

But the overlap is not perfect. Typically the hottest part of the day is a few hours after solar peak, and it's often still hot after the sun goes down. So you still need storage and/or grid power for complete A/C coverage.
India is now producing the world’s cheapest solar power
One way to do this is to tell feminists that men are superior to women as they are more disciplined and likely to go on a much needed social media strike for much longer because they don't quite have the same need for approval and attention from others. And then sit back and watch the fun. :-)
CON would be mentioned a lot in the KB article. They'd have to write it carefully.
Personalization makes it incredibly hard to "watch the watchers," because everyone is getting a slightly different view of what Google is doing. I would like to see a program where users submitted data about their recommendations to researchers so that we could uncover Google's opinions. It would have a lot of financial value to YouTubers and would make it harder for Google to abuse their role as censor.

I could imagine shadow-burning YouTubers without banning them by shrinking their recommendation audience.

Further, it would be good for Google. Every little shift in the weather is going to get blamed on them whether they deserve it or not, now that it's common knowledge that they weild this power in more than zero cases. Google is about to discover why judges write opinions. Administering justice from secret meetings leads to popular dissent more than it leads to justice.
It's not what I've said. My claim was more in the direction that the OS crashes happened, for properly maintained system, on reliable hardware, starting with 3.11 more like... never. The user space programs did crash, but it was often practically a "feature" of the design goals.

Linux? In 1993 kernel was not even v1? And the distributions didn't exist? Linux was a text based toy back then, with nothing for those who needed the user space GUI programs running on 3.11 or 95, and who couldn't afford to have a computer to run the NT which was released in 1993. Since 1993 there was a safe Windows system, anybody using a less safe one, like 3.11, 95, 98, Me did that as a trade-off in order to be able to pay less for the hardware. Or to use a program which had used something that NT didn't have (an Linux surely even less). But even 3.11 already had a stable 32-bit core. Hardware was expensive then. Your memory is definitely not reflecting the actual state of that time.
Several of their criteria are proxies for money, most particularly "Number of job offers". People employed to support use of a database naturally write much more about it than people who have other work to do.
Could you explain how you switch from DOS and then keep it active? I too have a toy OS and you've got me curious :)
This is actually a valid reminder that there is now a generation of people working in the online industry who have grown up without ever purchasing or using a CD, and do not know about the story of CD-Baby. We predicted it would happen back then - it is the reality now.

Sad, because a large part of the early history of the internet is wrapped up in stories about people like Derek Sivers and his company. Perhaps it is a pre-requisite for most startup courses to have a history lesson around those days?
We don't license software engineers, who essentially create the foundation of modern society. Just today, there was a news story about Boeing employing offshore contractors at $9/hr to write software for 737 MAX.

Nearly all large software companies utilize whiteboard coding quizz as a way to measure the quality of their candidates.

Imagine what would happen when the modern crop of javascript developers start working on avionics?

I don't know what's worse - an incompetent politician or an incompetent software developer. Think heartbleed, microsoft windows updating in the middle of surgery, Mars mission crashing because someone mixed imperial and metric units...

We may never be able to hold them liable (because people who write the laws are also corrupt and incompetent), and we will never be able to weed out incompetence in our technical infrastructure (because, frankly, most of us [me included] are lazy, incompetent, greedy, and selfish.
Anyone else used the wired ones like TFA, or the numerkeyless variant? Presumably these are simpler to get right than bluetooth (which I presume you're describing).
I think the issue is the community used to have a say in these bans, and that’s why ArbCom exists.

Now ArbCom is a bit irrelevant, the Foundation decides guilt in secret and hands out punishment as they see fit.
Otherwise you are subjective to survivorship bias: if people were silently quitting social media the ones who remain wouldn’t be aware there’s anything wrong with those social media.