skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=review+of+lob#!/story/forever/0/re...
In a diurnal cycle like Facebook's, you'd have one start-stop per day, which should be well within the rated specs of hard disks. A few years back I looked at the idea of treating disk lifetime as a resource and explicitly managing it: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MSST.2011.5937221

That's assuming that the servers have disks at all, which they probably shouldn't.
Surveillance, Sousveillance and Anti-Surveillance Artistic Responses To Watching
Except...

Freezing point of water: 32°F
Average human body temperature (oral): 98.2°F

So that's 66.2°F, not 64°F.

Those two temperatures were the original reference points for the Fahrenheit scale, and body temperature was defined as 96°.

The current definition is relative to the melting point of ice (32°F), and the boiling point of water at standard atmospheric pressure (212°F, which is exactly 180°F higher than the freezing point). Except now body temperature is 98.2°F instead of 96°.

If you want a thermometer calibrated in Fahrenheit, you have exactly the same problem as you do with Celsius. You just have to put 178 markings between the two reference points, rather than 98.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156322
I suspect make more sense to build in a hashcash check into the protocol. It would be easier to implement and wouldn't tie the protocol to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Congrats, its a very clean app.

I was watching the intro to tactics video and I wished there were more visual queues signaling the transition between topics. ie skewer, fork, etc. Maybe its cause I had to think a little longer about the previous topic and couldn't easily stop that train of thought.
Let's make games.
Or anyone who is self-employed or own their own business.
Stop screaming!
It appears that this algorithm specifically targets RSA and El-Gamel by crafting inputs that would produce different numbers of multiplications (among other ops) depending on the input.

This should be a wake-up call for the move to elliptic curves, as GPG and OpenSSH allegedly support them. Windows support is lacking for remoting into Linux hosts with elliptic curve based ciphers. I found that while PuTTY does not support this directly, evidently the Gpg4win agent can work with putty, and that might allow ECDSH/ECDSA. I haven't tested this, however. And another terminal client, Tera Term, purports to support elliptic curve algorithms.

Unfortunately for GnuPG, it looks like the only supported curves are those defined in NSA Suite B (the NIST recommended curves). That set is considered tainted by some community members. There's some discussion of GnuPG supporting Curve25519/Ed25519, of implementing it, but I can't tell if it's implemented or not.

Edit: I've played with Tera Term and can confirm that it works with Ed25519 along with OpenSSL 1.0.1f. I'm pleased with the result.
Thanks!

Also the answer to the implied question is PROBABLY no; I really hate doing commissions, and don't need the money from them right now. That said if the idea is something that really feels like a thing only I or about five other people could do justice to, I'll consider it.
But coincidences are covered by his (3). By definition coincidences are low probability events, if one does not account for coincidences, then yes, with low probability it will get it wrong. I think this gets more into the probably approximately correct (PAC) learning domain.
Gibson has always been amazingly prescient; so much so that it seems almost churlish to dwell on what he missed, when the breadth of what he observed is so astonishing.

It's like he pulled us into the future, like a strongman pulling a battleship, overcoming the inertia with sheer force of aesthetics, and if we've veered off the precise course, well, yeah, that's human events.

I think it's also important to always remember that Gibson's books are well written; the ideas shine through because of the clarity and precision of the language.
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Anything non linear or multivariate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence

Ie unemployment is not correlated with age since both young and old people tend to be unemployed...it is a non-linear relationship.
The key point is that there is more to science than statistics. To reword: statistics alone are not sufficient to create scientific knowledge.

To create scientific knowledge you need to make a prediction (aka a hypothesis) and test it. To make an hypothesis you need some notion of a causal mechanism; to run the experiment you observe an interference in that mechanism to see what happens.

If all you have is a statistical correlation, and you haven't identified or altered a mechanism...you really don't have much. That is what this author is getting at.
The five modes of self-tracking
Or Netflix.
I think I'd have to reassess my opinions of Walmart if they started to carry porn and hookers in-store.

I still wouldn't shop there though.
You can never rule out hidden variables.

Edit to add: because they are hidden.
And...three posts down on the author's homepage we get to race and IQ, then a little further down a cross-post deal with Unz Review. HBD-curious at best. I take his musings on Austronesians with a consequent grain of salt.

I think the key is here:

"The Austronesian advantage seems to have been threefold: (1) a more flexible and innovative approach; (2) a less present-oriented time orientation that extended further into the past and the future; and (3) a less individualistic approach to life that made collective goods and goals more possible."

First of all, these three traits are even less in evidence from the archaeological record than the alleged farming practices he is criticizing. Flexible and innovative is basically meaningless. The second one ("present-oriented") in particular is a staple of Austrian-economics-type diatribes against the poor (especially black poor), so it is likely to be a back-projection of present day arguments rather than a genuine window on the past.

But anyway, none of the three points are given any significant support - just a short handwaving paragraph each.

"Couldn't have been agriculture" - I can go along with that - "must have been racial superiority of this particular type" EDIT: those are my paraphrases, not direct quotes - that is a step too far. It's too far not so much because arguing racial superiority is wrong (although it is) but because the evidence adduced is flimsy and does not support it.
Those are valid points. I'll only address one point below, because I see a lot of your reasoning as being that all technological advancement is a net good, which I feel is often the divide between those who are for and against anti-aging.

As for passing on to others. Its not memories or genetics. It's inertia. As we go through life we set other things in motion. Our interactions with each other and the world around us causes changes in direction and speed. Everything we do sets something else into motion, infinitely unique from what would have happened without us. No matter how small the action.
I love this. I would donate, and continue to donate for as long as the interface progresses.

Something I would definitely pay membership for: The ability to see before & after photos for any two points in time, anywhere, with the ability for users to create wiki-like entries on points or sets of points on the globe. I'd just love the ability to learn about what's going around spaceship earth, and there ought to be a way for locals to become more active towards conservation efforts.

Also, if there were a live version some time in the future, it would be cool to have a live globe to see where the clouds are. Severe drought in California, and I've been wanting to see where the clouds are headed.
Here's an alternative that is more efficient at large scales (eg. if you have one order of magnitude more entries than just an English dictionary): performing Approximate Nearest Neighbor search [1] over a pre-computed Levenshtein space.

- hash all your dictionary entries through a Levenshtein-locality-sensitive hash function [2] with a well-chosen hash size. Any two words within a Levenshtein distance D of each other will have the same hash (you pick D).

- store the hashes into an efficient DB for quick lookup. Each hash will map to one or several (levenshtein-similar) dictionary entries.

- when presented with a new input, compute its hash, retrieve the entry for the hash in your DB (if it exists).

- finish by sorting the retrieved dictionary entries by Levenshtein distance to your input... you just recovered all dictionary entries closer than distance D to your input (approximately).

Pretty much unbeatable, and works over spaces that have hundreds of millions of dictionary entries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearest_neighbor_search#Approx...

[2] Can't find one? Build your own by computing the pairwise distance matrix of your entries, then reducing this matrix through PCA to an appropriate number of components (the length of your hash). The coordinates of each entry in this new space is the entry's hash.
I like the ChessU app for iOS. It's got ~100 courses for download, each $0.99 or $1.99. A course is typically 10-25 annotated games focused on some theme, and includes lots of variations, expository text, and quizzes. Courses are available for basics, tactics, specific openings/defenses, and famous games/championships.

I was always uncomfortable with D4 (queen's pawn) openings, so I went through the course on queen's pawn. It had 25 lessons covering everything (Slav, Albin, Benko...) and now I play D4 with confidence. It's made chess a lot more fun because I can play more varied games.

(Disclaimer: I've no connection to the app or its author, except as a happy user.)
It's true that on a long enough time line we will all inevitable get cancer or some degenerative disease, fine. But does that mean that we should just give up and not attempt to further prolong life? More importantly, curing some prolific diseases like dementia, arthritis, and osteoporosis could dramatically improve not just quantity of life but quality of life as well.
Causal calculus, mutual information, random forest importance scores, various hypothesis tests and other methods can all imply causation as well or better (especially in the case of non-linear or multivariate association) then correlation. All these methods and more are widely used in literature.
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I think this is somewhat of a very well funded (and quite cool) pet project for several hot shots from Genetech partially funded by Google.
Libertarian Fantasies
> More precision than necessary.

What? The precision of $2.40 and 240 cent is exactly the same. Two significant digits.

It's kinda funny, every time this debate comes around, I see that the people advocating imperial are always confused by the concept of precision, which is handled very naturally in the metric system, but people advocating metric are confused about the way the imperial system uses subdivision.

For a metric person, a measurement such as 13/64" looks weird, and for an imperial person, a measurement such as 5.2mm looks weird, when in reality they are very close, and of the same precision.
Sure but it no longer has any meaning as a significance test unless you somehow bound the complexity of the relationships you allow yourself so you're left with cross validation. Ie I can non parametrically relate any two variables.
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Pseudo-science is a strong term indeed, but I'm not sure what's a clearer term for an approach that uses a dose of social authority - indeed the mantle of science, to make statements that clearly fly in the face of facts that real scientific processes have established with some accuracy.

The properties of photons are very well documented. Consciousness has not been found among them. Claiming that photons have "a little bit" of consciousness based "we don't know what consciousness is so it must everywhere/in-everything" seems to rather clearly like an abuse of logic.

I am not claiming the mantle of science myself to tell someone what their subjective experiences are. I'm just saying the someone merely referencing their subjective experiences doesn't refute a long string of scientific experiments.
> searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work

HELL NO, I expect searches to return "result not found". This is important information, as important as actual found results. I dont mind clearly labelled suggestions, but NEVER EVER give me what you think I want, instead of what I actually ask for.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Where I'm from, nobody uses stones, a few people use catty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catty), some people use pounds, most people use kilos.
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Do you have a citation for that? (I work applying non parametric statistical methods to molecular disease data and i'm doubtful to say the least.)
That is my point exactly though I am extremely skeptical of any test for non-correlation. Gelman actually has some other articles worth reading on how dangerous it can be to make policy decisions based on such tests with real world examples including traffic laws.
Jimmy Wales is wrong: we do have a personal right to be forgotten
The Chinese have also brought their ghost cities along. There was a CNN thing done a couple of years ago about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8HyDGCNxpo
The First Year of Marriage, Part 1
No way. Driving on the left makes so much more sense than driving on the right.

If you're driving a manual transmission car on the left side of the road, you'd steer with your right hand and change gears with your left. This works out nicely for right-handed people, i.e. 90% of the population.
You must check http://quora.com/
Solving the lost cause of English spelling
Advanced procedural world generator tool for Oort Online demonstrated
The book Causality by Judea Pearl is kind of an extended answer to this question.
What correlation proves that the movements of the stock market are causal?
According to the article, the shortage is industry wide. The result of what you suggest would be a bidding war for the existing truckers, until the point the bidding has devoured all economic profit. We don't see that happening, clearly.

My hypothesis of implicit or explicit collusion among the dwindling number of trucking firms to drive down wages instead of drawing on supposedly elastic supply manages to explain that, on the other hand. The only other possibility would be an industry wide miscalculation that just happens to look the same as widespread collusion.
but in some respects, it's more than a VC funded startup. Not the concept, but the main stakeholder and one of the key providers of the data needed to make it truly competitive...

Telenav. TNAV ticker. Sinking to new lows recently.
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This will just put a lower-bound on the market for spam emails, at the cost of making legitimate email more expensive (especially at scale). It doesn't matter if it's a micropayment through bitcoin or hashcash. The only real way to solve the spam problem is a web-of-trust where spam is disincentivized because it harms your reputation in the system. That is kind-of the situation we have now, except encryption isn't baked into email yet (if it will ever be).
Can't read because of a paywall.
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It's kind of re assuring that religion and prostitution have such shitty representation ---- kinda says something about those things eh?
I grew up in a metric country. The metric system is totally fine for everyday use. We know that 1.8m is tall, that anything below 5 celsius is cold, and that 100kg is heavy.

The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units - fuel efficiency being the worst offender.
Religious Children Struggle To Separate Fact From Fiction
>How will these trucks be fitted out against good ol' fashioned highway robbers in remote areas that are barely on the grid?

They would handle it the exact same way the ones with drivers do. They would do nothing while it is happening but contact the police and claim insurance. The only difference is no one is at risk of dying and they will likely have video evidence.
> So if you’re on Google, you get a doll that says ‘This doll came from Yahoo.’ Then you hand it to the next layer and they open it up and say, ‘This is for Alice.’ Then when Alice opens it up, Alice gets the whole message.

And where does Alice store her private key?

A very large percentage of email users currently use either webmail (e.g. Gmail) or a vendor-provided app (again, Gmail) to access their email. In order for Google to show you the content of your emails in such settings, it needs to be able to open up the last layer. So your private key gets stored on Google's servers, and they can capture your passphrase every time you log in.

Remember that Lavabit used your passphrase as the key to your auto-generated private key, which was stored on their servers. This was necessary, not only for compatibility with existing IMAP clients, but also in order for the webmail to work at all. Other companies like Hushmail developed a workaround using Java applets and/or a copious amount of JavaScript cryptography, but all of that is also rubbish because you can't guarantee that they aren't serving you a backdoored version of those scripts.

The only way end-to-end security could possibly work in the context of webmail would be for everyone to install a vendor-neutral browser plugin that does all the heavy lifting and that is completely beyond the control of the webpage on which it works (you can't allow the webpage to fetch the decrypted content back into the DOM). But if you're going down that route, you might as well install a standalone email app. It's basically going to be Thunderbird + Enigmail on steroids. Anybody who doesn't want to do that will be stuck keeping their private keys on someone else's machine. Guess what, most users really, really hate having to manage their own keys.

tl;dr: This proposal means either the death of webmail as we know it, or little more than an illusion of security.
I actually would support changing the divisions of the dollar to a non-base-ten standard. Specifically I would make it dollars and quarters and dispense with anything smaller. We used to have a half-penny coin. We got rid of it when a penny was the same value as a quarter today.
Ramachandran's ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind
Nah, 6'4" at 240 lbs is not good shape.
I don't get it - is this supposed to be a mocking type of thing? Because the horrible state of English writing and speaking is actually quite close to my heart...
Not one of the downvoters, but working in (hundreds of) centimetres (240cm) as opposed to meters (2.4m) is not as crazy as it sounds. Tape measures or carpenter's rulers will have centimetres on them all the way.

Also, people consider it a matter of precision. If I ask for a piece of wood that's 2.4m long, I am probably less concerned with the precise length than if I ask for one that's 2400mm long.
So many little things always always pop up to remind you that Bill Gates got rich in an unsavory manner.
This juicy gossip fails to die, please see, e.g. http://www.snopes.com/science/nobel.asp for a nice debunking. For one thing Nobel never had a wife. Also, he emigrated from Sweden in 1865 when Mittag-Leffler was a student and rarely returned to visit.
That is very insightful. Why have you been downvoted? 'Time-orientation' as an 'evolutionary trait' is pretty much a new dress over eurocentrism.
"must have been racial superiority of this particular type"

The article does not contain that phrase. Please don't use quotation marks on HN when you are not quoting.

It's particularly bad to put words in someone else's mouth when the words are so inflammatory.
A kingdom for a layman exposition on how [2] is to be computed.
Here's a good article from *Mathematical Intelligencer" on the topic (sorry, a bad scan): http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~ljc/mittag2.pdf.
My comment was about the bad map. The map makes it seem like metric is a binary condition: you use it or you don't. That is not true, even though metric is the primary measurement system in most of the world. Many non metric units are in common use in primarily metric countries, just like the U.S. doesn't only use customary units.

The UK should also be highlighted on the map since they use stone and pints, as well as Canada and apparently Singapore and other countries in southeast Asia that use other units like catty and pounds. That Singapore or Australia don't use stone doesn't disprove my point in the slightest. I am just listing examples of non metric units in active use, in countries that the map claims use metric.
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Degrees are no more precise than radians. If you're a human you use a certain number of digits and they both work. If you're a computer using integers you're far too imprecise either way. If you're a computer using floats they are equally precise. If you're a computer using fixed point you're better off with something like 2^32ths of a circle.
Thanks for sharing, this reminded me of an article[1] in a similar vein.

Excerpt: "Today, a novel class of illnesses is on the rise, and neither theory sufficiently explains it. TILT shows how a person can have a toxic exposure and never recover. Exposures trigger a bewildering array of symptoms that many people never trace back to synthetic chemicals in their daily life. They may experience cardiac and neurological abnormalities, headaches, flu-like symptoms, bladder dysfunction, asthma, depression, anxiety, pain, cognitive dysfunction, and sleep disorders"

[1]: http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/is-the-world-making-you...
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Oh good an article about complete bullshit. I haven't read enough bullshit lately.

Edit: Oh good the pseudo science crew is here to downvote me. Good lord people read the article; you can tell by the opening paragraph it's complete bullshit. Look at the studies they reference and how shitty their controls are. Good god people try being skeptical for once.

Edit2: Today I learned Hacker News is a great venue for spreading pseudo science and quackery. That kinda makes me sad.
The strength of the argument changes with market elasticity.

If a single company has trouble hiring, they can raise salaries. However, if the pool of workers remains finite, all you are really doing is switching which company has the hiring problem. If two people need an all day plumbing job done today, and there's only one plumber in time, one of them is not going to get it done, regardless of how much they pay.

So when we look industry-wide, what the salary increases do is make people change professions. If it takes the same effort to become a truck driver than a cab driver, but the truck driver makes 4 times as much, everything else being equal, we'll have more trouble finding people to be cabbies, as long as there's an opportunity trucking. People then decide which training they get to choose. But the real demand problem is not solved until the workers are trained.

We don't even need workers for this. Imagine that we suddenly need 60 million gallons of 25 year old scotch every day. It doesn't matter how much we want to pay: There isn't enough scotch to meet demand today. If we paid a million dollars a bottle, it'd not make a difference: We'd only get an increase in supply as time goes by, and people just put more scotch on casks, and don't open the casks at 15 years, because 25 makes more money: But nothing is going to make this demand shock get fixed earlier, no matter how much you pay.

So the harder it is to actually perform the job, and the longer it takes to train, the stronger the immigration argument gets.