skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my discarded project ideas was exactly this, but on a smaller scale. A steerable mirror on a mount with a camera for targeting. The idea was to place one on the ground outside a north facing window. The device would then busy itself reflecting the sun up into the room making a nice sunny patch on the ceiling to light the room. They could also be used to deliver extra light to windows with plants in them to grow plants which require more light than is available or to modulate the daily light to fake a different season.

Sitting in 2020 the technology is near trivial. The problem is that some knucklehead would point a bunch of them at the same window and set curtains and pigeons on fire. (You’d do this because you had a large room with few windows, so dispersed mirrors would give you multiple dispersed lighting spots in the room… and incinerated pigeons.)

I was unable to make the leap to what happens if you are a deliberate and well reasoned knucklehead! In a controlled situation a megawatt of light might be just the thing.

Addendum: The mass field of mirrors introduces a lot more work. Some of the immediately interesting problems:

• you need a “everyone stop shining at the target” mode for emergency stop, but the mirrors need to move away from the target in such a way that they don’t create convergences elsewhere. Obviously sweeping your portal to hell down the tower would be a bad idea. So you have a collection of autonomous, free thinking mirrors, but when commanded to stop hitting the target they need to not make the same decisions.

• your camera probably needs to be able to stare into the heart of a thousand suns (literally). But it also needs to see in ordinary daylight. Maybe a pinhole filter that moves over the lens would be appropriate.

• with 999 mirrors shining on the target, you will not be able to see your own contribution to aim. There probably needs to be a “hey! Everyone else look away for a second” command for unit to aim and calibrate itself. See complexities from the first bullet and not incinerating things you like.

So yeah, they could have started with my garden heliostats, but then it would be a crack the knuckles, bring in the eggheads, and get to work operation to solve all the hard problems.
Reachy open source interactive robot for creating real world applications
This is well done!

> Support error recognition and recovery.

I totally agree with this. You have to teach critical concepts a couple different ways in case one gets skimmed over or misunderstood. We rely on visuals for this--the text should stand independent of the photo / diagram, and vice versa.

I wrote a handbook on technical writing summing up what we've learned over many years of writing iFixit repair guides. https://help.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing/chapter/0
Note that all of the locks tested here are unfair, which is why they all show very high waiting variance. Until recently many mutex implementations aimed for fairness, which made them much slower than spinlocks in microbenchmarks like this.
In not an expert, but the analoguy that came to mind seemed worth sharing.

It sounds like a gas fee can be reframed as a "bribe" in this case, for your security, and if the attacker paid a higher "bribe", well...

And since the gas fee apparently goes to the remote miners, it sounds like you are otherwise bribing the network for your own security, hoping to not have your bribe beaten? Maybe the attacker can't know what your gas fee was, but the article outlined a possible DoS attack in which, in a span of 15 seconds, they could (incrementally?) surpass your gas fee without knowing what it is.

Am I seeing this wrong? Something about this approach doesn't sit well with me.
> There is no “overreaching area”. Amazon Aurora falls under RDS along with all of their other database offerings.

You mean AWS Aurora serverless?

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

You're underlining the failing of buzzword-driven development.

> No one on HN would accept an argument that technology is “confusing”

Good. No one other than yourself ever made the mistake of doing so. If you have a hard time arguing the facts then refrain from making up fiction.
No, that doesn't sound right. It doesn't matter which particular algorithm you're thinking of. The issue here is at a different level.

Let's consider an AI that weighs in on hiring decisions. Let's consider what it might make of maternity.

Decades ago, it wasn't unusual for a prospective employer to ask a female applicant whether she was planning on getting pregnant. Society decided that wasn't acceptable, and made the practice unlawful (as well as forcing employers to offer paid maternity leave), despite that, from a profit-seeking perspective, that is valuable information for the prospective employer to have.

Let's suppose an AI has been trained on a dataset of previous hiring decisions, and some measure of how much value those employees went on to deliver. Let's suppose it's also told the age and sex of the applicants. It might notice that female applicants within a certain age range, have a tendency to have a long period of zero productivity, some time after being hired. Having noticed this correlation, it would then discriminate against applicants matching that profile.

But wait!, I hear you think, Why did we provide it data on sex and age? Remove those data-points and the problem goes away. Not so. There could be non-obvious correlations acting as proxies for that information. The system might detect these correlations.

In a parole-board context, suspects' names and addresses could be proxies for ethnicity, which could correlate with recidivism rates. The 'correct' behaviour for a correlation-seeking AI is to detect those correlations, and then start to systematically discriminate against individuals of certain ethnicities, even when their crime and personal conduct is identical to another individual of a different ethnicity.

Back to our maternity leave example, then. It's an interesting exercise to come up with possible correlations. The ones that occur to me:

* Given names (if provided to the AI) generally tell you a person's sex

* Given names also fall in and out of fashion over the decades, so there's a correlation with age

* The topics a person chose to study at university, can correlate with the person's sex, as well as their age, as some fields didn't exist 40 years ago

* The culture a person is from, may impact the statistically expected number of children for them to have, and at what age. Various things could act as proxies for this.
You can get receive at any address on a domain forwarded to whatever email you want if you're registered with Monicker.

I imagine most other registrars offer the same thing.
Your “proof” is an anecdote that was easily disproven by a link.

If it takes your developers two weeks to host an API in a Lambda when I showed you a link on how simple it is. It says more about your developers than AWS.

My time is far from cheap and any time that we can spend letting someone else do the grunt work is valuable.
For a moment, I thought that they were talking about this project:

https://kono.store/products/input-club-symbolic-keyboard

For those too lazy to click, it's a project to resurrect the Space Cadet Keyboard. It's still in the planning stages.
Yes! The MCS spinlock, the name eluded me. The paper is actually a pretty good read (it is linked in the lwn article).
Floppy disks physically degraded pretty easily. Seems like it could be a safety issue.
A New Decade. What is your prediction for yourself?
Saw another post where people were predicting state of world in next 10 years. I was writing too, but realised may be I should write prediction for myself first. The first statement was "If I am not dead, then...." - and scratching my head for last one hour.
That's why we have Harvard classics so we can skip nonsense that gets irrelevant overtimes
Trying to understand how you “compile a book to JavaScript”. Just write code based on the examples or what? Oh well, you got a subscribe so I can finds out...
"English Canon" would be more precise.

For example he specifically mentions the King James version of the Bible (rather than just "The Bible" in general). This translation had a large influence on the English language - just as say the translation by Martin Luther had on the German language.

For the non-English works, it is clear he has selected the ones which are known and influential in the English-speaking world, not necessarily the ones which are most influential in their home country.

Nothing wrong with that - he was en English professor after all - but calling it the Western Canon is a stretch.
> If you're interested in buying one of these, Unicomp ...

Or get a used Model M at a flea market, on eBay, or the like. They are relatively indestructible, and generally still work fine 30+ years after production.

> if you find [a Model F] in the wild, it'll be really expensive

This is a recenct phenomenon. The price e.g. on eBay has gone way up in the past 10 years. You used to be able to buy them for quite cheap. It’s absurd that people will spend >$100 for an XT keyboard with its overlong spacebar, terrible layout, and obsolete communications protocol.

There were hundreds of thousands if not millions of Model F keyboards produced (both XT and AT varieties). The keyboard being recreated in https://www.modelfkeyboards.com is something different: a very obscure banking keyboard, cf. http://kishy.ca/?p=648
A fighter jet doesn’t need to crash to suffer millions of dollars of damage
Or use a mutex and let the scheduler implement equitable dispatching.
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religio...
Drugs boosting concentration and memory will be in offices by 2030
Fresh New Talent Bela Snow Talks About Love for Her Craft, Style and More
First, no, I haven't edited the post. Second, I'm not really sure what you're trying to say, you may need... to edit your post and try again.
Lisp: Symbolics Macivory 3
I think that would depend on how precisely they need to be calibrated, right? IIRC even military GPS is still only accurate to within a few feet.
In the era of data collection, even Box Tops has an app for that
I am in exactly the same boat as you. I downloaded Head Ball 2, as 1 used to be a very entertaining game, and in 2 I spend 90 seconds in a match and two minutes watching ads, scratching scratchers and opening "free gift packs".

I ended up buying Planescape Torment for those 50 hours of engrossing story with no ads or payments. If you find any other games, please let me know.

I should create a website called "no-bullshit games", actually.
They are betting so hard on A.I., but a bank only has to do a couple of things.

- transfer money cheaply, fast and easy

- fix/ detect abuse and stop malicious wire transfers

- advise rich clients

- make it possible to automate things ( eg. An API )

- give loans

I'm not really sure how A.I. would give the edge. Some things can be automated, but if everyone would do this. The one who doesn't automate and gives more personal advice will have the client's preference.

I think the minimum should be an open bank Api though.
How do you turn it without the risk of running someone over, or getting into some other kind of accident? The headrest makes for one seriously huge blind spot.
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the story of a seaplane having to get back to LaGuardia from New Zealand the day after Pearl Harbor: https://medium.com/s/story/the-long-way-round-the-plane-that...
How does this compare to Little Snitch?
I think I have the Linux version of this game in my attic.

Steam and GOG had big sales through the end of December that had me looking at some old games like this. I thought about getting some Microprose games to spare me the trouble of copying them from 5.25" and 3.5" floppies (if they're even readable anymore), but I figured it was just as well to leave the graphics and gameplay to my rose-colored memory.

It did get me thinking about what it takes to bring classic games to a modern audience. Grim Fandango and Age of Empires have gotten updates, primarily to the assets. The negative reviews tend to focus on old-fashioned gameplay, or bugs that still haven't been fixed after umpteen years.

A project like this reminds me of the ScummVM engines, which basically provide a new platform for old assets. It's harder to get excited about this, because it's just one game.
Ssh, hacker news hates simple solutions like fiducial markers. I wonder if HN would dare to ride a spaceship that uses neural network to perform docking alignment.
Show HN: Use Zoho? I made a better Mac client
How hard have you looked? There are full games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Knights of the Old Republic, Chrono Trigger, and more ported to iOS.

Don't be too surprised that free games are shovel-/ad-ware.
If you're down to one engine, you opt for the nearest safe haven, independent of how long you're rated to fly on one engine. You don't tempt fate.
Recently used https://www.photopea.com/
Photoshop in browser (reliably) and also support Sketch

Also on UI side, liked it more than Gimp.

You might want to give it shot.
And here's another point where we may disagree: money is not a thing to be worshiped at the cost of everything else.
I thought SES is the cheapest of all since it's the lowest level? (Compared to Mailgun etc)
The Art of Selling and Prospecting – EBrand Me
English is for everyone, but as a degree it is really only for those that need concentrated experience with a vast amount of cultural wisdom and experience. I would recommend English to a wealthy student who is destined to oversee some sort of philanthropic, corporate, or political enterprise, but not the working class.

That said, we can all have a richer, more meaningful experience of ourselves and the world by spending time in great stories and myths, so I would still recommend it as an independent study for the average person, just not a degree.

Plus, in nations with high levels of social mobility, studying great works of literature may come in handy when you try to insert yourself into higher levels of society as an adult.
I feel rick-rolled, please warn about linking to Linus, I only open his videos in incognito mode!
Mutexes are faster than spinlocks
> And people here are very biased towards Dart.

"Here" as in HN? Some of the comments on every Flutter post are people complaining about Dart, "why didn't you choose Kotlin," etc.
Should anyone build a product around Google APIs in 2020, given their record here?
Kontena Shutting Down
A friend of mine’s dorm room at college was a thousand years old.
Oh don't get me wrong, I think it's a fantasy even that the US/EU would implement a carbon tax on imports like this in the next decade anyway. It's too easy for us to offload the problem elsewhere and then do nothing because "we're nothing compared to China" even though our consumption drives their emissions.

I'm just looking for more realistic methods to slow emissions, I think it's more likely a carbon tax will be implemented than Western nations going to war over emissions, so I'll push for the more likely scenario that will slow the problem hopefully enough that I won't have to suffer the worst of the consequences.

Honestly though, my wife and I have decided against having children because we believe there's a high enough chance they won't have the quality of life we've been able to enjoy, so I agree with you that nothing significant will be done in time to curb the problem.
Heroes 3 did have multiplayer via LAN, and IIRC it had online multiplayer as well. It worked pretty well for the time; the fact that the game is turn-based probably helped in that regard.
Gaffer by GCHQ: A large-scale entity and relation database
Algorithm = Logic and Control (1979) [pdf]
Survey quality GPS is able to have centimeter accuracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic
Ask HN: Did anyone else notice LOTS of traffic from 103.0.0.0/8
https://twitter.com/Andrew___Morris/status/1213190796364713984

started noticing weird traffic for a couple a days now and now I find this
GCHQ is the UKs signal intelligence and security agency, similar to the NSA. They have open-sourced Gaffer, a graph database framework which provides fast queries across a large number of nodes and vertices.
The idea of having a chatbot as a service strikes me as what would happen if you had matrix of trendy ideas in both the rows and columns and someone must have thought "oh, chatbot... As a service? Looks like it hasn't been done before" And seeing the perceived lack in the market was enough to create it without considering if it was even worth creating.

I haven't used this service but I have a feeling this could easily be executed poorly.
A plane sitting on the ground costs revenue.

The highest revenue per hour route is JFK to Heathrow at $24,639 [1]. A 787-800 costs about $8000/hr [2]. So that's about $277/min of revenue. Yeah, $125/min sounds about right for an average route.

[1] https://www.planestats.com/bhsw_2014sep

[2] https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1398091
I went to a very large state school about 10 years ago, and was in school for six years and got two degrees. I'm really confused at the picture of university life this person is painting:

> nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high school at age 18

> It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other.

> Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes

I'm not sure where this author went to college, but outside of a major city like London or NYC, you'd be hard pressed to find a more experientially diverse place (in America, at least) even amongst freshmen. Sure, there is class self-selection, but this seems like a really naive statement at best, and propaganda at worst. There were dorms specifically for married students, and the state gave tuition breaks to people older than 30. The only way you'd meet people who'd taken your classes is if you hung out in your department socially. There were many colleges in the university and hundreds of undergraduate courses: if you wanted to meet people who had no idea about what you were studying you just had to go to a different dining hall at a different time.

To be honest it seems like this person is observing that, in a large group small sub-groups will form based on all sorts of criteria like geographical closeness and experiential background, and within those groups "memes" will spread efficiently the more similar people are? This doesn't seem novel or the basis on to which to extrapolate that somehow the result is negative or in any way new in society.

Anyway,

> Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead.

now that is some advice I can get behind.

EDIT: After finishing the article it strikes me that this person may have gone to a school that would be in the set he describes as "elite." I think this might have warped his worldview because they're the only places where people can unironically imagine America as a "meritocracy" as described.
I remember hearing a similar story circa 2003-2008. Some BigCo was spending a bunch of money to automate their inter office mail and was hung up on OCR of handwritten stuff. Some consultants come in to look and one asks if they can just use different color envelopes/baskets. The answer was “yes”.
> I’ve been working on a small side project that involves processing incoming email. In particular, it’s an app that needs to do something for each email it receives from (hopefully paying!) users.

I wish you all the best! Mind if I ask for the link?

> With (1), there is no need to worry about overages, but scaling the mail server might be challenging.

Honestly, quite the opposite.

1. Duplicate your MX box.

2. Duplicate your MX record.

That is it :)

> I am writing the mail processing daemon ... in Rust...

You might like to take a look in https://github.com/mailman/mailman for ideas/inspiration. It's a great tool for processing emails too, but cannot deny I'm now curious to see how one in rust will look like.
Oh? If you're so confident Bitcoin has demonstrated utility for other categories, It should be pretty easy for you to demonstrate it. The original goal was peer-to-peer electronic cash: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Real cash usage is gradually declining, but approximately zero of that difference has been taken up by Bitcoin: https://www.frbsf.org/cash/publications/fed-notes/2018/novem...

Merchant adoption is not just stagnating, it's in reverse: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/bitcoin-a...

If you contrast this with the speedy rise of M-Pesa, it's obviously a failure as digital cash. It's also a failure as compared with things like Venmo, which are all popular with people doing cash-like things: https://money.com/venmo-cash-app-zelle-better/

So if it's not good for the stated purpose, what's it now good for? No speculation about the future please. Just name a specific, significant group of users, state their problem, explain how Bitcoin solves it better than alternatives (better on their terms, not yours), and link to statistics showing sustained, rising adoption.
A simple port of Heroes 3 is currently available on iOS (though only iPad, not iPhone)
> but it does shoot down the cache line containing the lock in all cores other than the one that acquired the lock.

Well, as long as you do the test-CAS instead of the pure-CAS approach not every loop iteration results in cache line bouncing.

Plus intel has introduced the MWAIT[0] instruction to implement something similar to futex in hardware, i.e. the hyperthread can sleep until another core updates the cacheline in question.

[0] https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/mwait
Again, we've been able to do this with four photodiodes for something like 30 years.

Of course it worked the first time they turned it on - they were using 4 photodiodes. The "AI" and "computer vision" is just to get funding and hype.

I'm going to start taking solved problems and applying BS "AI" to them to get funding, sheesh.
Ghosn fled Japan after security firm hired by Nissan stopped surveillance
A piece of hardware you may have never considered if you are security conscious
A handheld RF spectrum analyzer is probably your best friend and possibly a RF jammer. It's now cheap and easy to broadcast radio signals to take advantage of the piezoelectric effect in IDTS and listen in on what is happening in any given location. A small number of HAM radio operators have been able to do this for decades but it is now becoming cheaper than ever to do this. My company (a major bank) was able to independently verify this is possible and we're now in the process of finding out ways to mitigate the problem without going into the tinfoil hat realm.
Instead of your own language, I suggest using the Red language. It's similar enough and has a history of being used in RAD/spreadsheet software.