skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>bypassing these centralized dinosaurs

The reason they are centralized dinosaurs is to ensure they are large enough to cover claimants in the case of disasters. They need to be large to mitigate risk. Even as large as they are, they sometimes still fail.

Insurance is pretty basic, unglamourous work. Do you think a system of insurance startups, going bankrupt every time there's a large series of claims, is the way to go?
My webpage get a few visits from NK every week. A bit curious wether this is common. Anyone else seeing this in their logs?
Teen Cool Sites #9
Another rationale is that you want the attack to happen, but you don't want negative repercussions for being the actor that caused it. This is essentially the first scenario you present.

The Cheonan incident followed a very similar path. S Korea and the United States identified N Korea as the actor. N Korea denied the involvement and offered to work with the nations to lead an open investigation into the incident. N Korea's official denial was enough cover for China and Russia to disagree that N Korea was involved in the incident. The ultimate UN statement on the attack was a condemnation of the attack, but no official party was declared responsible.

This gives N Korea the benefit of terrorizing the S Korean navy, while avoiding a direct military or economic response. It's a game of brinksmanship where they want to push their actions as far as possible to convince the world that their threats are serious, while still minimizing the negative repercussions that often follow from such actions.
Multi-modal computing is the future. One device to do everything fails just as much when that one device is a phone as it does when that one device is a PC. There are many things that a mobile device just can't do as well as a PC (not in terms of computing power, but in terms of user interaction). There are other things that can be done better by a specialized embedded computer than they can by a phone or a PC. The future is in seamless interoperability between different forms of computing devices; not in a single form of computing device taking over all applications.
Would you mind shooting me an email? I know some folks that are looking for work, and at the very least I'd be interested to hear more about what your business looks like.
> And who amongst us has grepped for a license?

Try packaging some software for Debian and you'll do a lot of grepping because Debian cares deeply about complying with the law. I've also poked Red Hat's lawyers to get some kernel code from GPLv2 to GPLv2+ because I wanted to reuse it in GPLv3 software, etc. If you're following the law, you're grepping for licenses. If you or your employer don't care about complying with the law, you're welcome to take that risk.

Here's the results of all the grepping I did for a Debian package recently, and this was relatively straightforward as software goes. Note the lines that start "Comment":
https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/p/prelink/copyrigh...

If you don't have the explicit right to reuse a piece of code, you can't assume you do. If you don't like this, get your lawmakers to remove your country from the Berne Convention. Or you can risk breaking the law and hope nobody notices; up to you.

It might be telling that there's an entire _company_ dedicated to grepping for licenses as a service, because people don't do so and then they get in trouble.
https://www.blackducksoftware.com/
Look inside IBM’s bold plan to save the Power architecture
I was always so jealous of the kids on Mr. Wizard's World that would get to play with the Heathkit HERO-1 robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT7nZwxb-DI Sad that the current owners are letting the name & IP languish.
That doesn't work in northern climates though. What would be great is if there existed RV parks with a large warehouse on site that you can move your trailers into for winter usage.
I was surprised to see a hit from the DPRK on my blog about math and programming. I wonder what the reasons were, though chances are it was an irrelevant search hit.
https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/546047647929229312

https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/546409624891424768

Not that I think infosec professionals are very much more qualified to make guesses than the rest of us.
The Icelandic Place Names Committee named it Surtsey,
after the Norse giant Surtr, who according to the creation
story Völuspá had come from the South with fire and fought
with the god Freyr at Ragnarök just before the end of the
world.

Isn't Nordic mythology just awesome! It would make a fantastic Peter Molyneux game plot.
I am far from an apologist for law enforcement, but this is a completely reasonable effort that I would fully support.

As an example, cops show up on most EMS calls around here. I must admit, I find it a bit disquieting when a cop wearing a camera walks in while I'm providing care... Especially since HIPAA does not cover cops, so there is no legal protection for the information that ends up on the camera, only department policy. I would feel much better if I at least knew it was going to be automatically redacted, with the original video only available under a subpoena.
This something I've been curious about for a while now. I don't have a lot of experience, but I've worked on a farm and with a research team looking at agricultural water management. It seems like there is a lot of potential in distributed small-scale farming, and later, small-scale automation. I just don't know what would be the most viable route to get into the business of... I guess I'd call it small-scale decentralized farming? But these kinds of ideas are getting me thinking about it again.

I'd guess the greatest interest comes from educated young Western homeowners. But I would rather dream of it breaking into the mainstream and becoming the new pattern of food production. I want to do the math and find out if it's a feasible future, because I suspect it will be, but the question is when. But I'm not sure where to start, or if the data to answer that even exists yet.
Some were, there are two intersections in Georgia, one is Windy Hill Road and I forget the other but it is in Gwinn ette county where they had real numbers to show the crashes went down. Windy Hill was just damn nasty and its a big intersection. I still prefer those where traffic is only going one direction.

Still I do think many are in place only for revenue, much like speed limit cameras. I would rather see red light cameras than speed limit cameras, however I want the later to come only under specific circumstances with full public accounting. I think if they really want to sell us on safety it should all go to charity.
Thank you very much for the information! Really cleared it up for me.
Probably.

Although Amazon is only using Kiva in 10 of its warehouses. So we're not really talking about all of amazon.

of course, I don't think that any Kiva's former customers were running all their warehouses using Kiva either...

IIRC the reason Kiva stopped selling outside of Amazon was because Amazon literally bought all of the units they were capable of making..
That does make sense. Since pip is managed this way, Ubuntu should probably classify pip as "not system software, actually flaky web-app-dev software" and not package it.
ZenQuery is now open source
Gonna need a citation on that T-bone decrease, buddy. Sorry.

"Scheinfeld said in an interview last week that the city's safety claims are based on "more basic," nonscientific comparisons of crash statistics"
The solution is well known - increase yellow light times. [0] It reduces accidents (both rear and t-bone) and violations.

But it's crap for generating more revenue, which is quite often seen as more important.

[0] http://www.motorists.org/red-light-cameras/timing-myths
And now they're being coerced the other way by the President of the United States. Why is that different?
Apparently the movie personally pissed off Kim Jong Un. Back in June they officially condemned the movie and threatened retaliation if it was released.

http://time.com/2921071/kim-jong-un-seth-rogen-the-interview...
Maybe metaphors are like short-selling: unlimited future downside in exchange for potential quick gains.
Several studies have shown that cities installing red-light cameras "coincidentally" have ridiculously short yellow lights. The yellow light should last long enough for anyone already committed to going through the green light to safely finish doing so. Otherwise, drivers in the intersection have to accelerate to avoid having the light turn red with them still in the intersection, and drivers not yet in the intersection have to slam on the brakes and effectively treat yellow as red.
>get rid of the red light cameras because they increase rear crashes.

A better solution would be enforcing a sane minimum yellow light timing on camera intersections. Shortening the yellow to the point where the normal traffic sometimes brakes hard to avoid entering the now yellow, soon to be red camera intersection is the reason for this increase in rear-ends.

Per the article, this is something Chicago was guilty of, in addition to placing the cameras in areas that had no problematic history of accidents.

The real problem with these things is that they are used as another way to milk money out of the populace, rather than as a way to modify behaviour and improve safety.

These cameras ( and short lights ) are something that really really annoy me as a motorcyclist. I can stop fast any time but the SUV-clad soccer mom texting behind me probably wont. I sometimes find myself dropping a gear and hammering through a yellow I could easily stop for because of this.

/rant
There needs to be a focus on the architecture of the entire system. What should be redacted and why? How do we ensure that only copies are redacted and that the original is always available?

The code used should be free and open source. The hardware it's running on needs to be known, inspectable, and tamper-proof.

It's probably a good idea to get these questions answered first/soon. Proprietary and secretive code can stay entrenched for a long time and I'm not sure we want that.
Unfortunately there is a tradeoff between two of HN's preferences: for original sources and accessible ones. In cases like the current one, where an article is clearly definitive and not so paywalled that none of the standard tricks can get at it, the preference for original sources wins. It's not a great situation but I know of no satisfying fixes for it.
Show HN: Fitsync, sync data between Fitbit and Google Fit
It made news around May when Glenn Greenwald's book came out
https://airvpn.org/topic/11564-fyi-nsa-actively-installed-sp...
I created this because I have a scale that uploads my weight to my FitBit account, but all my walking data is in Google Fit. This script copies the weight data from my Fitbit account to my Google account so I can see all my data in one place.
Is there a good reason to use upper case for SQL keywords?
This is actually a worthy terminology switch, capturing the uncertainty of software development.
You should try out: http://www.telesc.pe/

It will give you the same functionality as Hacker News / Reddit.
"Debt is predictable and can be managed, it’s just another tool."

Well, not really. For example, if you took usd-based debt in russia, you are now quite royally fucked.
Until you fold one half of it around back.
http://jamesaltucher.com... but I think he's "jumped" the shark recently.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQpc0QfBaMc
This is because the bay area is a pathological case in every respect. 20-something couples with a ~$250k household income are as rare in the rest of the country as parking spots are in San Francisco.
Hydrogen May Prove Fuel of the Future
That's not (only) debt, that's (also) currency speculation.
I would say, not so much any more. Most editors colorize key words these days, so you don't need to distinguish them with all caps. Although, it still seems appropriate to say SQL rather than sql, for some reason. Maybe I'm just overly traditional.... :)
It's pretty standard for one company to be responsible for sales and claims, and another responsible for actually underwriting. The latter is much more regulated in most places (what you can invest in, what loss ratio you have to maintain, pricing, etc). AirBnB could probably do the first if they wanted to.
Is Mozilla really a "top-notch team", though? When I look at their track record, it's not what I'd expect from a top-notch team:

* They've alienated many Firefox users thanks to many bad UI changes. They've continued to do this even after the users have strenuously objected to these unwanted changes. Firefox's share of the market has thus dropped from 35% to probably sub-10% these days.

* Many of the remaining Firefox users still point out that Firefox is slower and more bloated than other browsers. Although Mozilla often rejects or ignores these complaints, my years of software development experience have taught me that when many users say there's a problem, there very likely is one, even if we the developers can't reproduce it.

* Firefox for Android hasn't been picked up by many users.

* Firefox isn't an option on iOS. (Although I guess we can't fully blame Mozilla for this.)

* Firefox OS is floundering. The devices available so far have fared very poorly in reviews. Some of these reviews are among the harshest I've ever seen for any software or hardware product.

* Thunderbird is on life support.

* Rust is still pre-1.0, and will be like this for several more months, at the very least.

* Servo depends on Rust, so it being a viable option is still years away.

* There was that whole Eich debacle. It was pathetic, no matter how you look at it.

* Bugzilla is long forgotten these days.

* Despite absolutely massive funding from Google and now Yahoo, Mozilla hasn't managed to put out any other product that people actually want to use.

When I look at that track record, it's just one failure or disaster after another. It's not top-notch at all. So I'm not surprised that they have trouble using C and C++. They seem to be having severe trouble with pretty much everything they do!
This is really cool, but using coin flips really colors the answers. For example, if you pick the Broncos to win out, then it says they have a 75% chance of being the #1 AFC seed. 75% is obviously the chance Patriots will lose one or both of their last games if the outcome is random, but that’s extremely misleading; the Patriots might lose, but they will be heavy favorites in both games.

Having an option to predict based on Elo ratings would be nice, but even using existing records to predict game outcomes would be a much better simulator. Additionally, betting spreads are available for many games too.

I get why this is hard, but it would be a fun addition to have a setting to change how the likelyhood of an outcome is computed.
After all that's been happening, your first thought is still how to protect the cops from looking bad on camera?

Then we'll just get to a point where the situation with the camera recording is actually worse than what we have now, because the cops we'll get only recording that benefits the cops, and none of the recording that doesn't.

It seems the government can "swing the pendulum" as much as it wants against the People, but it seems nobody wants to swing the pendulum against the government too much. God forbid the People get "too much power".
The citation is given in this article, which says there's a 15% decrease, and not the 47% of the nonscientific comparisons:

> "But the Tribune study, which accounted for declining accident rates in recent years as well as other confounding factors, found cameras reduced right-angle crashes that caused injuries by just 15 percent."

It also includes the analysis that revelation calls for (the balance of severity and incidence rate):

> "The economic analysis examined the extent to which the increase in rear-end crashes negates the benefits for decreased right-angle crashes," the 2005 study concluded. "There was indeed a modest aggregate crash cost benefit of RLC systems."

which is why "The Tribune researchers also suggested that Chicago could reap much better results if it shut down about 40 percent of its cameras, located in about 75 intersections throughout the city where crash rates were lower to begin with."
I updated rust versions and submitted PR https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/pull/33
So, the correct answer here would've been that Viaweb--Graham's company that later became Yahoo! Store--was done in Common Lisp. I'm not really aware of any other example of Common Lisp in a real commercial setting other than Mirai (which I think is dead nowadays anyway).

Graham later made Arc, the language in which HN is written. To the best of my knowledge Arc's only major project is in fact Hacker News.

So, essentially, yes, you're correct.
I praise them for doing customer development before wasting money iterating crazily.

Therefore, I took their long, painful survey, b/c I'd like to see them win.

Although it seems very much like they're very out-of-touch with modern everything. It seems like they just want to keep making radio kits and other familiar, safe territory for them. I hope they can acquire and control that niche.
Cryptome contains a lot of interesting information. If you enjoyed the linked pdf, just navigate to the main site and check out the rest.
Hot Products Lab – Twitter Page That Features Hot Products
Unlimited future downside? Really? I would like to know on which context this is possible.

I don't know in which context the writer is writing, I'm a developer and have been mostly working on startup-style projects. If you fail, you don't make a buck, the product does not work or does not sell. The downside is the lost time and money.

I have also known couple of startups, which have had really good engineers who have invested lots to testing, maintainability etc. In the end however the business hasn't succeeded selling the product, and all that investment was worth essentially nothing.
Be cybercareful! You may have just cyberstarted a cyberwar!

Also, note that when the next forensic analysis of some hack occurs, the scanning IPs have now "communicated with IPs associated with North Korea". So any future activity of your IPs may be attributed to NK, by the FBI/etc.
Technical debt is actually a really good analogy, precisely because non-technical finance people understand the tradeoff pretty intuitively. Sometimes incurring debt is the right thing to do, but you'll want to pay it down or you'll have to live with the interest. This is true of both monetary and technical debt. For extra credit, you might assign notional interest rates to your technical debt... if they're in the double digits I promise you they'll scare the finance guy.
I thought about that, but I doubt this only happens in the US with multi-nationals at the helm.
He is talking about the privacy of the patients, not of the cops.
YouTube’s Chief, Hitting a New ‘Play’ Button
Reverse-engineering the Kayak app with mitmproxy
In the normal case of short selling (absent a large enough position to be subject to a short squeeze) future downside is not unlimited; your broker will close your position unless you put up enough capital.
North Korea Pleads Innocent to Hack
I think we are talking about independent samples of X and Y, not about time series. If X causes Y, then you model y = f(x, u), where U is a random variable independent of X (think: unexplained, e.g. noise). I don't think there can be any dampening effect in this setup. This model is generic: you can find a f(x, u) for any relationship between X and Y. But you may get a much simpler noise model (like additive gaussian noise) in one direction. It's no proof, but a strong hint (Occam's razor). There is also the family of algorithms like IC* and FCI that can recover a causal graph from statistical dependencies between random variables. As output you get a set of causal graphs that are still plausible given the observed dependencies, including constraints about the presence or absence of latent common causes.
Solvadi's patent is being challenged in India. I hope it is not granted, and generics come on board.
A cure would cost about $120 instead of the $64-$80k will cost in the US.

If India is smart, they can turn it into well organized medical tourism. Come and see India, get cured, and save $60k.
Avoiding Zombification from Notification
God, I want to short my codebase so hard.

What would the engineering equivalent of that be, I wonder?

Quitting and getting hired back as a consultant?
Apple, is USB allowed now?
For a second, I was hoping this was European and it was 1 and 1/8th dollars.
Facebook blocks Russian page supporting Navalny, Putin's biggest critic
I went ahead and put together a post. Check it out. "Apple, is USB allowed now?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8778010
I worked at a place where the VPE would talk about technical debt as a mortgage. Yet they had a culture that abhorred paying down the debt through refactoring, and so it was more like one of those interest-only payment mortgages. They paid higher interest in the form of reduced productivity and speed, and ended up with the same amount of debt as when they started.
Is it only me that finds it depressing that modern journalism would try to stir a controversy around the drug's price instead of celebrating a new and better cure for a disease that only had much worse, and no less expensive, cures in the past?
It was only playing in 8 theaters in the U.S. the last time I looked it up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735944

When I saw it in NYC, it was only at the Angelika.
Paul Irish: Getting to Fast
I'll be damned, I see I was wrong! Props to you and another commenter for pointing that out. It's fun how parts of the English language may be manipulated like that, however bizarre it may sound.
Except would you not agree that once they are integrated for free into the platform the 3rd party apps generally die?
I know there are two sides to every story.

I know that more positive public interaction with the police is a Good Thing.

I just wonder why, as developers, we build tools that are used to oppress and capable of supporting oppression.

Unlike people who built large infrastructure in the past, we aren't slaves. We aren't starving indentured servants. So we have other options.

Why do we develop Prism. We do we develop tools to erode net neutrality. Why do we start hacking at the tools to erase police action before we understand the how and why behind the use of those tools.

Maybe its just been a long Sunday.