skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sent this email to the FCC (directly to the chairman, Tom.Wheeler@fcc.gov, although maybe there's a better address). Feel free to re-use.

Hi! I'm writing about the regulations described at https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/kdb/forms/FTSSearchResultPage.cfm...

I personally use OpenWrt on my home wireless router because it provides more capabilities than the firmware that came pre-installed. It also has a consistent interface, so I didn't have to re-learn how to configure my router when I upgraded. This gave me a lot more choice when upgrading—I didn't have to worry about staying with the same manufacturer to avoid loosing certain capabilities or having to learn a new interface. Also, OpenWrt, being open source, encounters far fewer vulnerabilities than manufacturer firmwares, and existing vulnerabilities are fixed quicker, meaning my home network stays more secure.

Not being able to install OpenWrt on newer devices will make setting up my home network far more frustrating the next time I upgrade my hardware. And on a broader scale, it'll stifle competition—upstart manufacturers will have trouble selling their solutions because businesses won't want to migrate to new software. If OpenWrt eventually becomes defunct because no new devices support it, then the situation will be even worse, because new manufactures won't have a reference point to base their firmwares off of. So these new regulations are actually very anti-competitive given the place open-source firmwares like OpenWrt play in the market.

Allowing end-users to install open-source firmwares is really important. Please reconsider your regulations against it.
Stripe gets funding from Visa at a $5B valuation – Fortune
Vendors having to come up with an actually secure remote update procedure (rather than ad-hoc secret protocols and "factory passwords")? This is beyond the "greats" like Samsung or LG even.
HN submission from 440 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7737648
Consider that every single cell in the body is essentially a teeny tiny distributed system with on the order of 10 million moving parts only counting proteins (RNA is probably as important for storing and encoding the state of various cellular processes) with a bare minimum of 23k distinct types not counting splice variants. We have barely begun to understand the computations that occur within a single cell for tuning, learning, and transmission of information and metabolic load balancing.

I suspect that there is some additional computational overhead needed to run the requisite biological processes in neurons but ANNs are astoundingly far from even a single neuron let alone a network of neurons (perceptrons are sometimes compared to dendritic branches and even that is a stretch).

The real question to me is whether we actually need to replicate all the biology underneath to get some of the higher level abstractions that we recognize as intelligence. I also have to point out that it took nature on the order of 2 billion years to develop the set of rules that are used to run cells and coordinate multicellular systems and it may very well be the case the some of them are purely empirical. I know the AI guys gave up on rule based systems long ago, but even if you aren't going to fill them all in by hand you need a way to find the rules that work and the search space is monstrously large (keeping in mind that even a hyper intelligent being remains bound by the laws of physics, it would still have to do a whole bunch of experiments in order to develop a model that might let it predict what rules it would need to operate more effective).

edit: The assumptions that go into the calculation of the computational complexity are gross simplifications. His average firing rates are also about an order of magnitude too high (though this apparently is Kurzweil's fault).
Maybe custom firmwares make it too easy to enable wifi channel 14, or channel 12 and 13 under higher power settings.

When routers are insecure and could be easily updated over the internet by a malicious entity, one could imagine a scenario where a state hacks a lot of routers and tries to cause as much interference as possible.
I don't think so. I just read the tivoization section (section 6), and skimmed the rest. The only thing allowed to prevent modifications is if it is physically not designed to do so.
I suppose I just disagree with the sentiment that "something is pretty bad already, so we should allow regulation to make it worse".

I don't think that is a good idea.

Right now, not all control is given to the WiFi firmware (where it exists), but I don't expect the situation with regards to WiFi firmware and open source will improve at all with the FCC adding more requirements.
All I'd need is a ghostwriter, a joint and a whisky. We'll write a series of future chronicles that become self-fulfilling prophecies :)
Me too. Maybe our skill-set isn't best suited for these problems?
Unflashable firmware means you cannot remove backdoors. Given that the NSA has abused router backdoors in the past, it's not far-fetched to see this as a push from the NSA and related agencies to protect themselves. We've also seen around the world that governments are ready to great lengths to protect their surveillance abilities.

This goes far beyond the standard limitations of restrictions preventing people from innovating. It directly inhibits their ability to protect themselves or avoid conflicting interests between the manufacturer and the user (example: many wifi routers are now, without consent of the household, public access points). Especially if firmware is going to remain closed source (I see no reason why it wouldn't), this is troubling news.
I'm so happy you like this. I really do try to stick to the truth in things that aren't obvious put-ons!
Looks OK from here, Archlinux+Chrome.

Either you need to update your OS, or there's a MITM in your connection (can't rule that out, can you? That's what SSL has been designed for.)
I've spent a fair bit of time reflecting on it. I don't think it would work if resurrected:

1. Usenet was small. Somewhere between 50k and 500k users, based on my own and Gene Spafford's guestimates. More solid numbers appreciated (~1988-1992 or so).

2. It was selective. You had to be a student at a research university, or work for a tech company, or have government access, or be able to gain access to systems provided by same. Which meant you were at the tail end of a highly selective filter.

3. It crumbled under the face of multiple attacks: spam, abuse, trolls, etc. There were some defenses, but ultimately insufficient.

4. It was a pain to administrer, and for little or no gain. Which meant that few providers would, those who did charged, and they recouped minimum benefit for the effort. Ultimately it fell prey to the problem of shrinking usage and ready substitutes largely via mailing lists (relatively comparable) and Web-based forums.

5. Limited rich-format support, limited permanent content support, limited collaborative effort support. A Usenet-type functionality with _some_ support for post formatting, for images, video, and audio (but not to the point of being readily abusable), and for permanent content (FAQs, Wikis, etc.) to be usefully co-related to the primary discussion, would be useful.

I don't know that we'll ever have "one" conversation platform again. And no, Facebook doesn't count.
Growth vs. Retention
I assume he made a bunch of variations, this was just one of them. That way he could get placement in every spot on the page.
edit: I get what the organisation is trying to do now. Just doing the survey put me off a bit though, even once I read through other parts of the site. IMO there's a lot of hand waving and not enough hard info - particularly keeping in mind the target audience is students - on exactly what sort of social impact each role has. To me it looked like the site was just saying hey... you can become a researcher at a think tank... then doesn't solve the main problem for students, as they still have no idea how that contributes to society in a meaningful way as they aren't presented with any concrete examples.

I do think that more career paths should be featured. The main one that comes to mind is education. I'll note that think tanks have been harping on about it for years with little progress. The attitude towards it in the US is bizarre; people from overseas are shocked when they find out how little money teachers are paid and even more so how teachers are looked down upon as a result. Hence the average quality of teachers is lower compared to other countries and the impacts on society are subtle and widespread. Having police in schools seems completely insane to outsiders.

Becoming a teacher would make a small difference. Convincing talented graduates to enter the field and transform it would make a larger difference. I strongly recommend including some professions that may not be sexy or lucrative, but have the potential to make a difference.
It seems that there's an enormous amount of awesome stuff that comes from China these day that U.S companies would never make because they're scared of the feds. Another example would be these new highly advanced consumer drones.
Metafilter's highly underappreciated.

Sometimes I think that's a good thing.
But if no one does create that app then my app never gets written... So it's not really a working argument.

And if I charge for it and no one buys it, what then, should I give up or make it open-source?

What if that 'person' can use my software for free and in doing so save some money so that they can write the software they want to?
The Internet Makes You Think You’re Smarter Than You Are
I'm curious how much water they actually take down the mountain (especially since I believe they have another well down the hill in San Bernardino... or "San Bernadino" as the article says half a dozen times). Even if it isn't much, it is seems silly since the communities up there have to import water from elsewhere, and a big part of the cost of doing that is pumping the water up to an elevation of ~1 mile.

That said, you're probably right that they're sending down a negligible amount of water, especially compared to what the water agencies up there pump locally or even compared to the declining water levels of the lakes in Arrowhead and Big Bear
I modified the galactic map of the golden record and have an updated version tattooed across my back.
A lot of these suggestions seem really...douchey (for lack of a more precise term). I guess theoretically you can have a great social impact being a hedge fund quant or a startup founder, but the more traditional goal of those careers (and the people who undertake them) is making yourself filthy stinking rich.

I know the 80,000 hours people have this idea of earn-to-give, but do they have any stats on how many people actually follow through with that? It's very easy to imagine a bright, young college grad heading for Wall Street planning to donate 75% of his income, but once he gets there he finds he quite likes the taste of caviar and all his friends and coworkers have a couple BMWs, anyway...
Cats are obligate carnivores, dogs are not.

That is, there are several nutrients that cats have completely lost the ability to manufacture in their own tissues which are only found in animal sources (and whole animals, certain things are only found in certain tissues).

Vegan or vegetarian diets for cats have to be heavily supplemented with nutrients which are either animal-derived or entirely synthetic (and the type of people who want to feed their cats vegan food are also the type of people who have big problems with synthetic chemistry as food).

Dogs (and humans) do a bad job at manufacturing many nutrients with animal sources, where cats don't do it at all, we just do it poorly. Supplementation and careful diet design make it possible to thrive on plant-based food.

If you tried making your own plant-based cat food without a chemistry lab and a PhD, you'd be literally killing your cat.

If you tried to make your own plant-based dog food (or baby food) you'd probably end up with huge risks of malnourishment, but it's still possible with careful monitoring.
The T-shirt that changed the video game industry
" There's no way to use these HLS tools unless the third parties feel like writing a model for their IP in your choice of HLS tool language."

I worried about that as it's a common problem in any domain integrating different languages or models. Sounds like hardware equivalent of wrappers in cross-language, software development.

"The rest of us idiots are doing straight Verilog RTL because SOC level is more about gluing a lot of different modules together with low level logic."

That's actually good news and hopeful for people my research supports given stuff you worked on. If it's really grunt work, then all these amateurs digging into actual HDL wanting to do great things might get it done if they leverage FPGA or ASIC-proven I.P. With at least one pro on team, maybe two if mixed signal. People like me wanting to cheat it without RTL are apparently screwed lol.

"Being able to discover a bug via verification is the skillful part."

Two have said that in one day. The other person said this: "People can do a design without much skill and it might mostly work right. People screwing up on verification can mess up the whole thing." Rings true as I think of mask costs and Intel's recall.

"This is where the cosimulation that MyHDL supports is so handy."

All this time, I thought co-simulation (i.e. equivalence checking w/ tests) was standard in your industry. I know Sandia's HW people did it and high assurance does it between abstraction levels too to catch their gaps. It was essential to me in the latter as an assumption or structural detail would change to throw off safety/security properties. You saying equivalence checking at each layer is not normal in commercial, SOC design? That it's essentially only the shops using the best EDA tools and such?

Just surprising is all. Would also seem easy if you just use the execution-trace-based, equivalence checks. You can script those to a degree in most domains and languages. They're not perfect but I thought that MyHDL feature was a knockoff of what industry was already doing haha.
This also engenders a "Sim City" kind of urban planning that keeps commercial spaces or jobs very far away from homes and makes it impractical to not own a car (simply necessary for survival).
Redesigning Chrome Android. Part 1 of 2
> When I was in the Navy, my ship visited Petropavlovsk during the summer and they were on UTC+13. That was weird to begin with, what with the theoretical limit on only twelve time zones each direction from Greenwich.

New Zealand routinely goes to UTC+13 with the aid of daylight savings.

Our business team are in Germany, so we have three different time offsets between us over a year as daylight savings in both countries come and go.
It isn't super-rich people who shop at Walmart, eat at McDonalds, or patronize most other low-wage businesses, so I don't think your "wealth distribution" theory is correct.
Government failed us yet again. Remind me, why am I being forced to pay 30-35% of my paycheck to these idiots taking payouts and working like fat slugs off my dollar? This is why the climate is so screwed up. Government isn't responsive. You have to make industry pay true cost for use of finite resources. Similar to taxing the finite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases. Externalities should be priced in economics. Duh? You build a model to computer GDP but you don't take off future survival. Then what is growth but short winded elations. Anthropocene needs to wise up before sixth extinction sets us free, brutally.
Isn't this as ridiculous as saying all Android phones should be un-flashable and locked-down since you could increase transmit power in the Linux shell, or laptops are no longer allowed to boot Linux, since you could just use your built-in WiFI to jam others. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, how do you really classify a router as a router?

The more "dangerous" WiFi modules are probably not router chips, since they are usually based on closed-source drivers/firmware, but rather ones like the ath9k ones.

Possibly the only good thing that this will accomplish is the emergence of open source hardware/software "routers".
Congratulations to Patrick, John, & the hardworking team @ Stripe! Looking forward to more stellar growth in the future. An investment by AMEX is acknowledgement of an interesting company in the card space. However, an investment by Visa is essentially an industry nod of approval. Seriously can't wait to see what else they have in store.
Well, bugs will come back later if he does not updates his knowledge.

But, yes I was thinking the same myself. Whatever, I lost the war.

In fact, I prefer a boring life with less bugs on the long term and a bad reputation. But, it does not seems like a wise choice given the reactions.

I fully acknowledge my inadaptation to the actual era.

I think, I prefer to focus on the agenda of tomorrow and the tasks that must be done. You are right, customers come first.

There are battles that are not worth to be fought after all.

Well, tomorrow is another day. Thanks you all.
I know that in accounting there are some very clear rules about being hired by a company you were previously meant to help oversee. According to [this](http://pcaobus.org/Standards/EI/Documents/ISB3.pdf) (I don't have personal experience as to how things work in the real world) if an accountant is hired by a company they had audited in the past year their work has to be reviewed by a group of auditors unconnected with the work that had been done. The auditor is also legally required to publicly disclose any employment conversations they've had with someone they've audited and for any financial ties linking the audit company with the new company to be broken.

The point is that this is a concern whenever you're moving from a place of privilege and trust to the person you were meant to be regulating (okay, it's not exactly regulating with audit). This is doubly so for government because of the extent of their power and potential for abuse. What are the laws regarding conflict of interest here? What's the waiting period for switching jobs? What reviews are done to ensure everything is above board? Because the article makes it sound as if there was no review and if there was, they'd have shown some fishy coincidences.
Just a_text
OK. That's how I interpreted your sentence: "It doesn't matter if they can't work in the industry afterward; let them retire and live off their retirement."

Which raises all kinds of practical concerns. What if you study and love a particular field, start working for the government, but can't stand working for the government once you get there? What if the government downsizes and eliminates your position? What if you want to move someplace for family or other personal reasons and can't take your gov't job with you? What if you get fired?
Thanks!

It can take on several roles. I think the most prominent are devops / debugging live apps. It gives you a bit more leeway than having to just rely on what you logged before you deployed the app. If you are missing data, it can let you jump into a remote REPL and find out more.

Another one is helping while you are developing an app - you can call functions you are working on and play around with application state. That's why I originally put it together for myself.

But I'm sure others can think of even more inventive uses - that's why I made it extensible so others smarter than me can write plugins.
I was fortunate enough to witness his speech live when he came to our school in 2007. It was held in our school grounds, which was full with about a 1000 people, with students, teachers & parents, all listening to his speech with rapt attention. During the Q&A session a young boy stood up and asked him, "Why does all the politicians are so old?" After a general murmur of laughter, he asked, "Well students, let me ask you what you want to be in your life?"..Lots of hands shot up, shouts of "Engineer", "Doctor", "Scientist" echoed through the ground. After the clamor died down, he simply said : "See, that is why. I see many engineers, scientists, doctors among you. But none of you want to be a politician. Which is good, as the nation needs its youth to carry them forward, while we old people manage the politics of this country." - Such simple & humble answer from a great man. He did a lot for this country, and more over, he inspired many generations to follow their dreams. He will continue to live in our minds as the perfect role model of modern India.
Ctypes.sh, a foreign function interface for bash
Instagram Mobile Ad Revenues to Reach $2.81B Worldwide in 2017
(Background: I'm a computer security lawyer at Stanford. This ain't legal advice.)

This is a misunderstanding. The FCC has not tried to ban Wi-Fi device modding. What it might be requiring is locked-down radios. And only radios.

The phrasing of the recent guidance is unfortunately ambiguous, and calls out DD-WRT by name. But the original rules are clear [1], and staff guidance cannot trump Commission rules.

What's more, an attempt to ban third-party software would be inconsistent with the FCC's previous policy. The agency fined Verizon, for instance, when it tried to block third-party tethering apps [2].

[1] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-14-30A1.pd...

The software must prevent the user from operating the transmitter
with operating frequencies, output power, modulation types or
other radio frequency parameters outside those that were approved
for the device.

[2] https://www.fcc.gov/document/verizon-wireless-pay-125-millio...
I don't think it's clear at all what you meant by "pulling the race card". I don't know what you are recommending nor who should do it.
We really need to recall this thing before it gets us all killed
I don't know if there are no ill effects! I have heard countless admissions of "I jacked up the power" and "I enabled channel 14."

If I am not mistaken these are some of the "features" of DD!
It's much more than a static exhibit. I've been out to SF-88 and had a tour of the control and radar trailers, with their analog computers and consoles powered up [2], but the radars not emitting. They can run the missile lifts up and down and raise a missile to firing position.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg3sjXUr-yg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssY11Dujaog
Like the tone, the dynamic of your writing. Looking forward to your next insight. I am just starting at WV, not sure where this is going but always curious and eager to try new venture :)
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith
That is a bad definition of "active"

Both Enge and I address both the definition of "active" and of "invisible" non-public activity.

1. We're limited to directly observable public actvity. Given the sitemaps providing a population of profiles to sample, that means looking at actual public posts. Anything else would be Making Shit Up, which I prefer not to do.

2. It's possible get some sense of non-public activity by looking at followers and views for profiles with and without public activity. Evidence is that profiles without public posts have about 4.3% of the activity of those with. That gives roughly 4% of the total G+ userbase, or about 95 million users.

Again: showing activity at any time. That about doubles the active users count in total. (112 million + 95 million). It doesn't speak to recent activity, though.

My initial G+ "public activity" analysis:
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ

Follow-up "active" public sharing accounts vs. "inactive" non-public-sharing accounts
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnK...
The nice thing about Stripe is that they have really shaken up the online payments here in Australia. They are 1.75%+30c per transaction here, and that caused the others to drop down to that as well (even Braintree which was one the last IIRC).

eWay is still 2.6%, hopefully that changes too.

So thanks Stripe for your awesome API & team.