skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't a systematic problem at Boeing. This is standard corporate operating procedure applied to company that had nonstandard qualities.

The previous CEO [1], who had done a tour corporate America positions, joined the company "with a focus on cost cutting" and made the decision to produce the 737 Max.

The standard approach has become to gut, deskill, out-source the operations and return the resulting profits. The problem is that this approach can't be maintained for long by company producing high-tech, high-quality, safety-critical merchandise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
I am not restricting your right to speech - I am saying you are flat out wrong.
Blizzards (including Nor'easters) are a valid, natural danger for NYC and the rest of the Northeastern U.S.
What is the purpose of this questions?

You purchase electricity with clean production guarantees.

That doesn't necessarily mean the electricity you use comes from that, or any, clean source, but that clean sources are used to contribute to grid supply equally.

If that's not actually happening then we can call that fraud, but that's a separate issue.

Are you claiming you were not aware of this?
As I understand it, if you join an open assembly of people who engage in armed hostility against the US, you could be "levying war" against the US, and thus liable to a treason charge.
I think of supermassive black holes, SMBH, as the ultimate progression in the variety of ways matter convects together into denser and denser objects. So if we want to call a black hole or an SMBH a star, I am fine with that. And, since I think Planck plasma can emerge from the most dense matter-energy which is generally found inside the event horizon, we then need to talk about what Planck particles are. I model them as dipoles containing two charged particles - an electrino and a positrino, which can be combined in various ways to form all of the standard matter particles. So now, if a Planck level energy particle is one of these dipoles, well that is not a particle in the standard model. It may be the equivalent of a Gen III photon, but we don't have generations for photons yet. And the vibrational or oscillation frequency of a Planck particle is the Planck frequency, which we definitely can not detect. So all that said, the description of a "vibrating star" is ok with me.
Interesting how they are trying to drain the last bit of performance from 14nm while others double down on 7nm.
What Randomization Can and Cannot Do: The 2019 Nobel Prize
Why not OpenBSD?
I like my iphone fingerprint unlock. I have not upgraded because of face unlock.
My low cost provider of GPUs is out of stock. Any good alternatives?
If you're a writer people value your hard work and long hours. If you're an athlete people value your commitment to your performance. But if you work in business? People think you're an idiot for working hard. I don't know what the difference is. I think people who are miserable at work struggle to understand that other people take joy in it.
Something you forgot, something you lost, something you were.
Biometrics are not a password, as they are not 'something you know'. Neither are they like a username, as the implementations for challenging biometrics often cannot guarantee either uniqueness or lookup capability.

They are rather one of the three classes of authentication factors, all of which have fundamental drawbacks. This is why you should always require more than a single class of factor as part of your authentication. For example, mobile devices typically require both physical possession as well as a knowledge or biometric challenge.

Leaving fingerprints on your device is why fingerprints aren't the best factor for mobile devices. Captured biometric data being snooped and replayed is why remote biometrics are weaker than biometrics done locally.

You can have a Web Authentication authenticator (e.g. FIDO 2 key) act as multiple different credentials, all unlocked with the same biometric. Biometrics being tied to a single account (or an account being tied to a single biometric) is an implementation detail, same as having only a single account per email address on a site is today.

A good portion of the revolutionizing is trying to optimize the UX, not authentication. The core fundamentals of authentication have been known for a while, to the point we have government standards such as NIST 800-63b. Of course, some of the revolutionary UX turns out to not implement the fundamentals correctly, because it's the tech industry.
No information we capture has infinite precision anyway, so fractal based compression falls under lossy compression. It is a much more complicated task to identify fundamental limits on lossy compression performance and an even harder task to have a collective agreement on "good enough" for a given purpose.
Can you refer to any sources discussing Boeing killing people with criminal negligence?
Yes! There's a quote that resonated with me:

"Some people do the dishes to make them clean. Some people do the dishes to do the dishes."

Valuing the experience that is happening, whatever it may be, has power.
These kinds of people see their careers the same way someone creative gives their life for that you mention.
I think I admire the energy and dedication behind this, but I can't see getting one.

I've been involved with eBooks for over 15 years. It began when my then employer decided all IT staff members should have PDAs. A Handspring Visor Deluxe running Palm OS 3.1 appeared on my desk. I started looking for stuff that would assist in my work as a Sysadmin.

An early discovery was Plucker - a desktop program and Palm client. Plucker was designed to spider websites, and convert what it grabbed into something that could be viewed on the Palm device. A good deal of the documentation for stuff I dealt with was in HTML, and Plucker desktop could convert locally stored HTML files to versions viewable on the PDA. I could carry a documentation library in my pocket.

It was a hop, skip, and jump to realizing I could read other things as well, and a good bit of Project Gutenberg and other things issued under licenses that permitted it joined the party. (I still have about 4K converted Plucker documents in a 7Z archive.)

While I still have a working PDA, the next step was a 7" Android tablet. A variety of eBook viewers for Android existed. My choice was the open source FBReader for Android. I had previously used a version of FBReader written in C under Windows and Linux. FBReader for Android was a Java port, but worked pretty much the same was. The win for FBReader was multiple format support. I prefer ePub, but FBReader can display Mobi, FB2, and a few other things native, and display PDFs, DjVu files, and CBR/CBZ files using plugins. Effectively, I didn't have to care what format a book was in. On the old PDA, I could read a variety of formats too, but each had a dedicated viewer app, and I had to remember which book was in which format displayed by what program. FBReader on Android was a breath of fresh air.

I do not use eInk devices. I understand the advantages - they are battery friendly, and viewable out of doors. But too much of the content I read requires color support. A color LCD screen is a requirement.

I also need a device that can do other things besides display eBooks. There are limits to what I want to carry around when traveling. I already take a laptop and a cell phone. A device that displays eBooks, but can do other things in a pinch like check email, Look Stuff Up, or display MS Office files is a major plus. (I do not use a phone for that. The stuff I tend to view needs a larger screen size than a practical phone can have.)

And while I prefer open source, I am not wedded to it. I will cheerfully pay for closed source software if there isn't an open source offering that does whatever I require, or there is, but the closed source version is simply better. (And a major part of "better" is UX. Open source software tends to have less than optimal user interfaces. The folks who wrote the programs wrote good code for performing the function, but are not UX designers.) I feel the same about open source hardware.

This is a worthy effort, and I wish it all success, but I think it appeals to a rather small niche market. Amazon, Kobo, and the like are not exactly threatened.
______
Dennis
Ask HN: Why doesn't the USA have a great car insurance comparison site?
I recently (2 weeks ago) moved to San Francisco, and am excited to be here. But lots of things seem backward compared to places I've lived before (UK, China).

In particular: I was looking for car insurance last week. I left the UK in 2010, and even then there was more than one car insurance comparison site that showed firm quotations from many insurers. So I only ever had to fill in two forms: one on the comparison site, and another on whichever insurer turned out to be cheapest.

Perhaps I'm just missing something, but I haven't found anything similar in the US. I found a couple of comparison sites, but:

- instead of asking for all the information needed for underwriting, they ask for <10 pieces of info, AND

- instead of returning a sortable list of quotations from multiple companies, they return a list of insurance companies and indicative price ranges. To get actual quotations, I need to visit each individual site and fill in each individual application form.

I must be missing something: either this exists and I just didn't find it, or there's some structural reason why no one has started (or succeeding in building) a proper comparison site that does something similar to the UK's Money Supermarket.

Curious to hear from anyone working in auto insurance or who has looked at this problem.
Personally I would choose ASP.Net Core, hosted on a Microsoft Azure App Service with continuous integration from AppVeyor.

Benefits
- Azure App Service free tier is awesome. AppVeyor have a 14 day trial that supports deployment directly from Git to Azure and .Net Core is awesome.

Here’s a blog I wrote recently which covers this exact implementation -

https://www.simongilbert.net/xunit-ci-azure-appveyor-aspdotn...

In terms of a database implementation, Azure’s NoSQL table storage is super cheap and awesome, as covered here -

https://www.simongilbert.net/dependency-injection-aspnet-mvc...
Yeah, "collect all the pieces of the macguffin[0]" is a really common plot device, especially in anime and obviously RPGs. It's a really simple way to show "progress" without needing to bother with character development or power scaling. Bonus points if each piece of the thing has a unique power that turns out to be the cause of the conflict of the week.

[0]https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DismantledMacGuf...
No apologies needed, we're all in agreement on the broad strokes! Your proposal is good: I would be quite surprised if it generalized, but that is definitely the way to find out.
Amazon Prime Video is confusing its customers with bait-and-switch tactics
First Demonstration of a 1 Petabit per Second (1M Gbps) Network Node
Show HN: Automatic app usage stats and ability to name/manage Spaces on macOS
Libra Finds a Facebook Friend in Congress
That assumes your disk is not provided over network. Which may or may not be true.
Plus Khronos, as usual, was too C focus while Apple wanted to go into another direction.

Note how all proprietary shading languages are actually C++ dialects.

Only after loosing to the multiple language CUDA eco-system did Khronos start discussing about supporting C++, and even today it isn't as if OEMs are racing to bring SYCL drivers into the market.
This is hard to respond to, because I don't know what you think I think. I don't think viruses have some sort of “neural or neural analog” or coordinate in some way, so I suspect you don't understand what I'm saying.

I just think, on average, an individual virus particle will mutate at a certain rate. If there are a million times the population, a virus as a whole will then mutate 1 million times faster. So, if a certain virus would given a certain mutation, would jump to another species, and that had a certain chance to do so, then that same virus with 1 million times its normal population would have 1 million times the chance to do so.

That's about as spelled out and basic I'm able to make it.
What a beautiful, well designed and informative explanation of the complex earth / sun relationship. Well done!

One thing I would love to see is the path of the sun across the sky for different times of year, and different locations on earth.

Here in Seattle, the difference is fairly dramatic between winter and summer, and I've come to realize that the sun is never directly overhead, not even in summer. It would be interesting to see the difference between polar regions vs in the tropics also.
Pygame is still alive and great. It even has built-in support for game controllers, and nice stuff for managing sound effects.
It won't be quite as fast to get off the ground as Django since it's not batteries included, but as an async Python fan I like to spin things up with aiohttp + Postgres like here: https://github.com/francojposa/aiohttp-postgres or here: https://github.com/francojposa/aiohttp-auth

The upside is that aiohttp's built in server can be put up in production with a lot more confidence than Django's built-in server, meaning one less layer to configure
nbsphinx is super handy! A cool tool to combine with it is jupytext, so you can keep your notebooks as rmarkdown files, which is a bit more human readable / GitHub editable.

I did this with a recent library, siuba, and have not regretted it!

https://github.com/machow/siuba/tree/master/docs
Money Shame: Getting Real About Our Relationship with Money
Connect the Dots – A Sci-Fi Novel Outline
The following is fiction.

STOP BATTERING ME SCUMBAGS

Any feedback on an outline for a sci-fi novel based 5-10 years in the future?

connect the dots Part I, v1:

- subvocal vocal cord vibrations when things go through one's head
- extract vibrations using "powerless" antenna (powered by microwave radiation, see Top Hat Embassy)
- what if we could use part of the body or something people naturally have on them at all times as the antenna instead?
- pretty difficult? try sitting a team of scientists down with unlimited funding for a couple decades and see what comes of it. Being able to listen to stuff passing through adversaries' heads could prove to be quite useful after all.
- what about your own population? what better way to test.

Plausible explanation for what was happening at the embassies? Probably not. After all, official reports claim they're microwave weapons, not privacy invading devices.

---

Full outline went over the limit so I'll release this as time goes on.

The above is fictional.
Neat!

Unrelated: Here are some cool visualizations and simulations for pathfinding we have used in the past for trade shows and mall wayfinding.

https://qiao.github.io/PathFinding.js/visual/

https://clementmihailescu.github.io/Pathfinding-Visualizer/

https://www.growingwiththeweb.com/projects/pathfinding-visua...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/78of3s/pat...
What a great resource! The first example is perfect:

> Aircraft landing

> Evolved algorithm for landing aircraft exploited overflow errors in the physics simulator by creating large forces that were estimated to be zero, resulting in a perfect score
The French have a term for this - vie quotidienne.

Literal translation would be "everyday life", but the French term has an aspect of positivity in it that I don't think carries over to the English version.
To me it's the same thing as writing 'greetz' in some sort of software release. It's letting people know that it's not just a monolithic release but had inspirations and ideas that extend beyond the immediate.
https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/Multi_Factor-Authenticat...

> MFA

> Definition(s):

> Authentication using two or more different factors to achieve authentication. Factors include: (i) something you know (e.g., password/PIN); (ii) something you have (e.g., cryptographic identification device, token); or (iii) something you are (e.g., biometric). See Authenticator.

> Source(s):

> NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 4 under Multifactor Authentication
This stance is a little silly from tech circles.

Something you are is the perfect form of authentication.

If you had a guard sitting at a door with only biometric information about the people they’re supposed to let in: faces, fingerprints, DNA samples, voice samples, etc. you could not fool them. Why? Because they can authenticate that the reading is coming from the actual person.

This is the revolution. If your phone can with good enough accuracy determine that it’s looking at a real alive attentive human face or a real finger then it’s game over. It’s an auth cred that can literally only be used by you, it can’t be copied, stolen, hacked, phished, and can be totally public while being useless to an attacker because they can’t mint a live human with real matching fingerprint.

If you think of biometric auth as “present a picture of your fingerprint” and not “present your actual finger” then of course you arrive at the conclusion that they’re useless as a credential.
None of that conflicts with what I said.
The point, if such a thing exists, is to accept any and all of those possibilities with equanimity.
That may be preferable to broken ones, but no I don't think that will be the outcome. The outcome will be that companies will still follow the money and that executives will make it very plain that we're all playing by the same set of rules.

Rules without accountability and enforcement are meaningless.
So either China is Lying, or Silver. Hard to see a way either side backs off their statement at this point. 100% agree on the weirdness of the whole situation
Gesture controls are tricky, only a few applications of them make sense (like hand-to-fist for camera). Something like this would be the modern version of butt dialing 911, back when users would speed dial 911 unintentionally from sitting on their phone.
That's definitely not true. That legitimate interest loophole people think exists really doesn't.
Yep. Purchased in 2013 for $1.1B, sold in 2019 for <$3M. More than 99.7% value lost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr
Definitely by later (early Windows) games, this is true. Neverhood was a very fun one where it was advertised that there was only one way to die. And that was marked, "don't do this, you will die".
2019 Best of the Midwest: Startup Cities Rankings
Likely some trash or debris. At 3:35, after the camera cuts to the machine turned around, you can see a couple more similar white objects underneath the front of the Walker that appear to be blown about.
> I feel really bad for Hurd and his family

His family yes. Hurd though is not around anymore.

> Why work that hard?
It's not hard if you enjoy it. I work just about every day. I enjoy what I do and being at the office. Not every single thing but very generally most things and most days. Not working feels strange to me. Would I work less if I had more money? The thought of that scares me. I enjoy working. Part of the reason is the positive feedback of making money but part of it has nothing to do with that. After all people play games on the computer. They are addicted to that and they in most cases don't get any money at all. Well for some of us work is play. And you make money from that. It's very enjoyable vs. being at a vacation home (I have one and have for a long time).

> The job is so demanding and so hard it seems like Mark worked himself to death, literally.

Well as others have pointed out that is probably not what has happened. Now could an illness been exacerbated by lack of rest and focusing only on work? Sure. Maybe not enough sleep or denying some basic thing that is needed. But not because you didn't take time off to relax and smell the roses. He died very quickly. Could he have ignored some symptoms? Sure but maybe not. Maybe it just happened.

> He probably could have retired happy and rich at like 40 years old...

You seem to be tying everything to making money and of course assuming that someone having enough money to not work is going to be happy. Not all of us are like that as my comment is suggesting and as others have said.

> I understand when an artist or someone creative gives their life to their work: it's an obsession that is personal.

Why? What makes what an artist does that is creative make it different than someone in business, entertainment or anything else? Business is an art and enjoyment. Maybe not to you but certainly to many people (me included).

> But giving your life to Oracle

Implies that some companies might be worth 'giving your life to' or some causes. Not the case. Nothing is worth (even your example of art) giving your life to. Of course you can think that some social cause is worth 'giving your life' but that means you are also doing the wrong thing to your family if you have one. They will maybe suffer when you are not there.

> Even the day to day workers over there get to go home and see their families every night. At the C-level, you basically live in a private jet and never see your family... Very sad.

Sad to you. Maybe they like it that way?
I played with a simple program like that for the Amiga when I was younger, and then I discovered that there was an O(n log n) algorithm[1] rather than the obvious O(n^2) one. Never was up to writing a program to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%E2%80%93Hut_simulation
AWS Infrastructure Map
Direct mail keeps me warm in the winter.
The visualizations in this article are really well done. I've read a bit about hierarchical pathfinding before, but this is the first time I feel like I actually "get" it.
The issue is that entropy isn't actually expended by generating a large amount of random data from a CSPRNG. Therefore, the only time there is a need for blocking is prior to the initial seeding of the generator. Later on, entropy counting is just hoodoo and cargo culting.
Such generalizations do not help, and one need only to look to history to know that this isn't true in the least.

Lining up all Germans against all Americans is the kind of silly stuff that leads to confrontation, recognizing that all of these are individuals and that both on the German and on the American side there are plenty of good individuals that do care is a first step towards a solution. You can then decide on a plan to ensure that those make it to the front of the line on both sides of the Atlantic.
Neverhood and Samorost are also fun. The latter is by the Machinarium creators.
To which one? They all do it.
Always nice seeing a fellow submariner here at HN. :) I feel the same way, though I was in Radio on a fast attack out of Pearl: Checklists are the way to go. Now as a civilian, I'm always extolling the benefits of (regularly updated) checklists to my co-workers.
There's a couple of 100 bodies as proof. Paper is so much weaker than blood.
Hi there HN - developer here! A bit of context:
Five months ago I launched this app, and so far I've had 850 installs and 55 in-app purchases.

The daily install rate bottomed out a few months ago at an average of ~2 installs per day, currently I'm around ~5 installs per day. I get a bunch of emails from users (I include a Feedback button in the app, and probably the most successful feedback forum was posting in r/Apple on their "Self-Promotion Saturdays" deal. ( https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/by86cy/theres_an_app... )

I've pushed out over a dozen updates so far, but am transitioning into a slower release cadence, I wrote about that here ( https://spencerdailey.com/2019/10/18/about-currentkey-2-0-an... )
If anyone has any questions, shoot away! :D
Virtual Accounting and Bookkeeping