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Ask HN: How can you save money while living on poverty level?
I freelance remotely, making roughly $1200 a month as a programmer because I only work 10 hours maximum each week (limited by my contract). I share the apartment with my mom, and It's a section 8 so our rent contributions are based on the income we make. My contribution towards rent is $400 a month.
Although I make more money than my mom (she's of retirement age and only works 1-2 days a week), while I'm looking for more work I want to figure out how to move out and live more independently on only $1200 a month.
I need to live frugally and want to know what I can cut more easily. I own a used car (already paid in full), and pay my own car insurance, electricity, phone and internet. After all that I have about $400 left each month which can be eaten up by going out or some emergency funds.
More recently I had to pay for my new city parking sticker so that's $100 more in expenses this particular month. I would be satisfied just living in a far off town paying the same $400 a month, I feel my dollars would stretch further since I now get 100% more privacy for the same price.
On top of that this job is a contract job so I need to put money aside to pay my own taxes. This $1200 is basically living on poverty level. Any ideas to make saving work? Is it very possible for people in the US to still save while on poverty?
A DNS hijacking wave is targeting companies at an almost unprecedented scale
> The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center issued a statement [1] that encouraged administrators to read the FireEye report. [2]
[1] https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2019/01/10/DNS...
[2] https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2019/01/global-...
Show HN: Generate dank mnemonic seed phrases in the terminal
From https://github.com/lukechilds/doge-seed :
> The first four words will be a randomly generated Doge-like sentence.
The seed phrases are fully valid checksummed BIP39 seeds. They can be used with any cryptocurrency and can be imported into any BIP39 compliant wallet.
> […] However there is a slight reduction in entropy due to the introduction of the doge-isms. A doge seed has about 19.415 fewer bits of entropy than a standard BIP39 seed of equivalent length.
Can you sign a quantum state?
> Abstract. Cryptography with quantum states exhibits a number of surprising and counterintuitive features. In a 2002 work, Barnum et al. argued informally that these strange features should imply that digital signatures for quantum states are impossible [6].
> In this work, we perform the first rigorous study of the problem of signing quantum states. We first show that the intuition of [6] was correct, by proving an impossibility result which rules out even very weak forms of signing quantum states. Essentially, we show that any non-trivial combination of correctness and security requirements results in negligible security.
> This rules out all quantum signature schemes except those which simply measure the state and then sign the outcome using a classical scheme. In other words, only classical signature schemes exist.
> We then show a positive result: it is possible to sign quantum states, provided that they are also encrypted with the public key of the intended recipient. Following classical nomenclature, we call this notion quantum signcryption. Classically, signcryption is only interesting if it provides superior efficiency to simultaneous encryption and signing. Our results imply that, quantumly, it is far more interesting: by the laws of quantum mechanics, it is the only signing method available.
> We develop security definitions for quantum signcryption, ranging from a simple one-time two-user setting, to a chosen-ciphertext-secure many-time multi-user setting. We also give secure constructions based on post-quantum public-key primitives. Along the way, we show that a natural hybrid method of combining classical and quantum schemes can be used to “upgrade” a secure classical scheme to the fully-quantum setting, in a wide range of cryptographic settings including signcryption, authenticated encryption, and chosen-ciphertext security.
"Quantum signcryption"
Lattice Attacks Against Weak ECDSA Signatures in Cryptocurrencies [pdf]
From the paper:
Abstract. In this paper, we compute hundreds of Bitcoin private keys and dozens of Ethereum, Ripple, SSH, and HTTPS private keys by carrying out cryptanalytic attacks against digital signatures contained in public blockchains and Internet-wide scans.
REMME – A blockchain-based protocol for issuing X.509 client certificates
pity it's blockchain based
It's unclear to me why you would want a distributed PKI to authenticate a centralized app. Or maybe it's only for dapps?
In no particular order, there are a number of blockchain PKI (and DNS (!)) proposals and proofs of concept.
"CertLedger: A New PKI Model with Certificate Transparency Based on Blockchain" (2018) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.03914 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:LF9PMeqNOLsJ:sc...
"TABLE 1: Security comparison of Log Based Approaches to Certificate Management" (p.12) lists a number of criteria for blockchain-based PKI implementations:
- Resilient to split-world/MITM attack
- Provides revocation transparency
- Eliminates client certificate validation process
- Eliminates trusted key management
- Preserves client privacy
- Require external auditing
- Monitoring promptness
... These papers also clarify why a highly-replicated decentralized trustless datastore — such as a blockchain — is advantageous for PKI. WoT is not mentioned.
"Blockchain-based Certificate Transparency and Revocation Transparency" (2018) https://fc18.ifca.ai/bitcoin/papers/bitcoin18-final29.pdf
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:oEsKmJvdn-MJ:sc...
Who can update and revoke which records in a permissioned blockchain (or a plain old database, for that matter)?
Letsencrypt has a model for proving domain control with ACME; which AFAIU depends upon DNS, too.
California grid data is live – solar developers take note
> It looks like California is at least two generations of technology ahead of other states. Let’s hope the rest of us catch up, so that we have a grid that can make an asset out of every building, every battery, and every solar system.
+1. Are there any other states with similar grid data available for optimization; or any plans to require or voluntarily offer such a useful capability?
Why attend predatory colleges in the US?
> Why would people attend predatory colleges?
Why would people make an investment with insufficient ROI (Return on Investment)?
Insufficient information.
College Scorecard [1] is a database with a web interface for finding and comparing schools according to a number of objective criteria. CollegeScorecard launched in 2015. It lists "Average Annual Cost", "Graduation Rate", and "Salary After Attending" on the search results pages. When you review a detail page for an institution, there are many additional statistics; things like: "Typical Total Debt After Graduation" and "Typical Monthly Loan Payment".
The raw data behind CollegeScorecard can be downloaded from [2]. The "data_dictionary" tab of the "Data Dictionary" spreadsheet describes the data schema.
[1] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov
[2] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
Khan Academy > "College, careers, and more" [3] may be a helpful supplement for funding a full-time college admissions counselor in a secondary education institution
[3] https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more
(I haven't the time to earn 10 academia.stackexchange points in order to earn the prestigious opportunity to contribute this answer to such a forum with threaded comments. In the academic journal system, journals sell academics' work (i.e. schema.org/ScholarlyArticle PDFs, mobile-compatible responsive HTML 5, RDFa, JSON-LD structured data) and keep all of the revenue).
"Because I need money for school! Next question. CPU: College Textbook costs and CPI: All over time t?!"
Ask HN: Data analysis workflow?
What kind of workflow do you employ when designing a data-flow or analyzing data?
Let me give a concrete example. For the past year, I have been selling stuff on the interwebs through two payment processors one of them being PayPal.
The selling process was put together with a bunch of SaaS hooking everything together through webhooks and notifications.
Now I need to step it that control and produce a proper flow to handle sign up, subscription and payment.
Before doing that I'm analyzing and trying to conciliate all transactions to make sure the books are OK and nothing went unseen. There lies the problem. I have data coming from different sources such as databases, excel files, CSV exports and some JSON files.
At first, I started dealing with it by having all the data in CSV files and trying to make sense of them using code and running queries within the code.
As I found holes in the data I had to dig up more data from different sources and it became a pain to continue with code. I now imported everything into Postgres and have been "debugging" with SQL.
As I advanced through the process I had to generate a lot of routines to collect and match data. I also have to keep all the data files around and organized which is very hard to do because I'm all over the place trying to find where the problem is.
How do you handle with it? What kind of workflow? Any best practices or recommendations from people who do this for a living?
Pachyderm may be basically what you're looking for. It does data version control with/for language-agnostic pipelines that don't need to always redo the ETL phase. https://www.pachyderm.io
Dask-ML works with {scikit-learn, xgboost, tensorflow, TPOT,}. ETL is your responsibility. Loading things into parquet format affords a lot of flexibility in terms of (non-SQL) datastores or just efficiently packed files on disk that need to be paged into/over in RAM. http://ml.dask.org/examples/scale-scikit-learn.html
Sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline API: {fit(), transform(), predict(), score(),} https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.pi...
https://docs.featuretools.com can also minimize ad-hoc boilerplate ETL / feature engineering :
> Featuretools is a framework to perform automated feature engineering. It excels at transforming temporal and relational datasets into feature matrices for machine learning.
The PLoS 10 Simple Rules papers distill a number of best practices:
"Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research" http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
“Ten Simple Rules for Creating a Good Data Management Plan” http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...
In terms of the scientific method, a null hypothesis like "there is no significant relation between the [independent and dependent] variables" may be dangerously unprofessional p-hacking and data dredging; and may result in an overfit model that seems to predict or classify the training and test data (when split with e.g. sklearn.model_selection.train_test_split and a given random seed).
One of these days (in the happy new year!) I'll get around to updating these notes with the aforementioned tools and docs: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/data-science#scienti...
IDK what https://kaggle.com/learn has specifically in terms of analysis workflow? Their docker containers have very many tools configured in a reproducible way: https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-python/blob/master/Dockerfi...
Ask HN: What is your favorite open-source job scheduler
Too many business scripts rely on cron(8) to run. Classic cron cannot handle task duration, fail (only with email), same-task piling, linting, ...
So what is your favorite open-source, easy to bundle/deploy job scheduler, that is easy to use, has logging capacity, config file linting, and can handle common use-cases : kill if longer than, limit resources, prevent launching when previous one is nor finished, ...
systemd-crontab-generator may be usable for something like linting classic crontabs? https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron
Systemd/Timers as a cron replacement: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers#As_a_cro...
Celery supports periodic tasks:
> Like with cron, the tasks may overlap if the first task doesn’t complete before the next. If that’s a concern you should use a locking strategy to ensure only one instance can run at a time (see for example Ensuring a task is only executed one at a time).
http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/periodic-t...
How to Version-Control Jupyter Notebooks
Mentioned in the article: manual nbconvert, nbdime, ReviewNB (currently GitHub only), jupytext.
Jupytext includes a bit of YAML in the e.g. Python/R/Julia/Markdown header. https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext
Huge +1s for both nbdime and jupytext. Excellent tools both.
Really enjoying jupytext. I do a bunch of my training from Jupyter and it has made my workflow better.
Teaching and Learning with Jupyter (A book by Jupyter for Education)
Still under heavy development, but already useful. Add we accept Pull Requests to add items or fix issues. Join us!
A small suggestion.
Since Jupyter Notebook can be used for both programming and documentation, why don't you use Jupyter Notebook itself as the source of your document?
It is actually very easy to setup a Jupyter Notebook driven .ipynb -> .html publishing pipeline with github + a local Jupyter instance
Here is a toy example (for my own github page)
https://ontouchstart.github.io/
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io
The convert script is here (also a Jupyter Notebook)
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io/blob/...
You got the ideas.
BTW, to make the system fully replicable, I use docker for the local Jupyter instance, which can be launched via the Makefile
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io/blob/...
Here is the custom Dockerfile:
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io/blob/...
Margin Notes: Automatic code documentation with recorded examples from runtime
Slightly related are Go examples - they're tests, and documentation at the same time. It'd be nice if someone hooks in a listener to automatically collect examples tho
And Elixir's doctests https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/docs-tests-a...
And Python's Axe!
I mean doctest: https://docs.python.org/3/library/doctest.html
1. sys.settrace() for {call, return, exception, c_call, c_return, and c_exception}
2. Serialize as/to doctests. Is there a good way to serialize Python objects as Python code?
3. Add doctests to callables' docstrings with AST
Mutation testing tools may have already implemented serialization to doctests but IDK about docstring modification.
... MOSES is an evolutionary algorithm that mutates and simplifies a combo tree until it has built a function with less error for the given input/output pairs.
Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer review being entirely driven by the quality of the work.
As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore. Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based on output.
Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more broken nature of academic research.
What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.
Open publishing and commenting would be a good start---having a dialog, like is done at conferences. Older academic journal articles (pre 1900) read much more like discussions than like the hundred dollar word vomits of modern academic publishing. The broken incentives are at the core of this rotten fruit, though. Just making journals open isn't enough.
We have (almost) open publishing and open commenting. Did that improve anything?
There's open commenting? I've never seen the back and forth of the review process be published. It should be published.
https://hypothes.is supports threaded comments on anything with a URI; including PDFs and specific sentences or figures thereof. All you have to do is register an account and install the browser extension or include the JS in the HTML.
It's based on open standards and an open platform.
W3C Web Annotations: http://w3.org/annotation
About Hypothesis: https://web.hypothes.is/about/
Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?
There are a lot of fields I'm interested in, such as machine learning, but I struggle to understand how they work as most resources I come across are full of complex mathematical notation that I never learned how to read in school or University.
How do you learn to read this stuff? I'm frequently stumped by an academic paper or book that I just can't understand due to mathematical notation that I simply cannot read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols
These might help a bit.
But as someone with similar problems, I'm beginning to think there's no real solution other than thousands of hours of studying.
There are a number of Wikipedia pages which catalog various uses of symbols for various disciplines:
Outline_of_mathematics#Mathematical_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_mathematics#Mathema...
List_of_mathematical_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols
List_of_mathematical_symbols_by_subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols_b...
Greek_letters_used_in_mathematics,_science,_and_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_letters_used_in_mathemat...
Latin_letters_used_in_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_letters_used_in_mathemat...
For learning the names of symbols (and maybe also their meaning as conventially utilized in a particular field at a particular time in history), spaced repetition with flashcards with a tool like Anki may be helpful.
For typesetting, e.g. Jupyter Notebook uses MathJax to render LaTeX with JS.
latex2sympy may also be helpful for learning notation.
… data-science#mathematical-notation https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/data-science#mathema...
New law lets you defer capital gains taxes by investing in opportunity zones
I believe the way that the program works is you can defer taxes from your original capital gains (and the cost basis gets increased so your deferred taxes are less than you would pay otherwise), reinvest them in an "opportunity zone", and not pay capital gains on your investment on the opportunity zone, if you hold it long enough
e.g. Bob bought Apple stock for $50 a share back in the day, and sells it for $200/share. He defers his taxes until 2026. Instead of paying capital gains tax on $150/share, the cost basis is adjusted by 15% so in addition to benefiting from the time value of money, future Bob will only be taxed on $142.50 of capital gains. Bob can buy a house in an "opportunity zone" (from scrolling around the embedded map, there's plenty of million dollar+ houses in these areas. There's also lots of sports teams and stadiums in these areas, so maybe Bob buys an NFL team or a parking lot next to their stadium), rent it out for 10 years, sell it, and not have to pay any capital gains tax on the appreciation. Definitely not a bad deal for him!
Yes its more akin to a 1031 exchange, but opened up so that non-real estate capital gains are eligible.
Is it just capital gains? Wondering if it applies to any other forms of active or passive income.
How are profits from these investments treated?
Can you "swap til you drop" like with a 1031 exchange?
> Is it just capital gains? Wondering if it applies to any other forms of active or passive income.
I would also like some information about this.
+1 for investing in distressed areas; self-nominated with intent or otherwise.
If it's capital gains only, -1 on requiring sale of capital assets in order to be sufficiently incentivized. (Because then the opportunity to tax-advantagedly invest in Opportunity Zones is denied to persons without assets to liquidate; i.e. unequal opportunity).
How to Write a Technical Paper [pdf]
A few years ago i found a great version of a similar piece that proposed something like a 'sandwich' model for each section, and the work as a whole. A sandwich layer was a hook (something interesting), the meat (what you actually did), and a summary.
I failed to save it and i haven't been able to dig it up again, but I liked the idea. The paper was written in the style it described, as well.
5 paragraph essay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-paragraph_essay
> The five-paragraph essay is a format of essay having five paragraphs: one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs with support and development, and one concluding paragraph. Because of this structure, it is also known as a hamburger essay, one three one, or a three-tier essay.
The digraph presented in the OP really is a great approach, IMHO:
## Introduction
## Related Work, System Model, Problem Statement
## Your Solution
## Analysis
## Simulation, Experimentation
## Conclusion
... "Elements of the scientific method" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Elements_of_...
no, it was on arxiv somewhere. It was written as a journal article.
edit: AH! it was linked upthread on bioarxiv.
JSON-LD 1.0: A JSON-Based Serialization for Linked Data
JSON-LD 1.1 https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/
"Changes since 1.0 Recommendation of 16 January 2014" https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/#changes-from-10
Jeff Hawkins Is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research
Cortical column: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_column
> In the neocortex 6 layers can be recognized although many regions lack one or more layers, fewer layers are present in the archipallium and the paleopallium.
What this means in terms of optimal artificial neural network architecture and parameters will be interesting to learn about; in regards to logic, reasoning, and inference.
According to "Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.0004... , the human brain appears to be [at most] 11-dimensional (11D); in terms of algebraic topology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_topology
Relatedly,
"Study shows how memories ripple through the brain" https://www.ninds.nih.gov/News-Events/News-and-Press-Release...
> The [NeuroGrid] team was also surprised to find that the ripples in the association neocortex and hippocampus occurred at the same time, suggesting the two regions were communicating as the rats slept. Because the association neocortex is thought to be a storage location for memories, the researchers theorized that this neural dialogue could help the brain retain information.
Re: Topological graph theory [1], is it possible to embed a graph on a space filling curve [2] (such as a Hilbert R-tree [3])?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_graph_theory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_R-tree
[4] https://github.com/bup/bup (git packfiles)
Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
It's too bad we're not ready to launch probes to visit and explore such transient objects at a moment's notice.
I think it would make sense to plan a probe mission where the probe would be put into storage to stand by for these kind of events. It would still be a challenge and might be impossible to find a launch window and reach the passing object in time, but it would be worth trying.
Just imagine how tragic it would be, if an ancient artifact of an alien civilization drifts by earth and we don't manage to have at least a look at it.
Wouldn’t such an object be emitting radio signals that earth could receive?
Not if it's something like another civilization's Tesla Roadster.
> Not if it's something like another civilization's Tesla Roadster.
'Oumuamua is red and headed toward Pegasus (the winged horse) after a very long journey starting longtime in spacetime ago. It is wildly tumbling off-kilter and potentially creating a magnetic field that would be useful for interplanetary spacetravel.
They're probably pointing us to somewhere else from somewhere else.
If this is any indication of the state of another civilization's advanced physics, and it missed us by a wide margin, they're probably laughing at our energy and water markets; and indicating that we should be focused on asteroid impact avoidance (and then we will really laugh about rockets and red electromagnetic kinetic energy machines and asteroid mining). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
"Amateurs"
[We watch it fly by, heads all turning]
Maybe it would've been better to have put alone starman in the passenger seat or two starpeoples total?
Given the skull shape of October 2015 TB145 [1] (due to return in November 2018), maybe 'Oumuamua [2] is a pathology of Mars and an acknowledgement of our spacefaring intentions? Red, subsurface water, disrupted magnetic field.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_TB145
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua
In regards to a red, unshielded, earth vehicle floating in solar orbit with a suited anthropomorphic creature whose head is too big for the windshield:
"What happened here?"
Publishing more data behind our reporting
Publishing raw data itself is definitely a good start but there also needs to be a push towards a standardized way of sharing data along with it's lineage (dependent sources, experimental design/generation process, metadata, graph relationship of other uses, etc.).
> Publishing raw data itself is definitely a good start but there also needs to be a push towards a standardized way of sharing data along with it's lineage (dependent sources, experimental design/generation process, metadata, graph relationship of other uses, etc.).
Linked Data based on URIs is reusable. ( https://5stardata.info )
The Schema.org Health and Life Sciences extension is ahead of the game here, IMHO. MedicalObservationalStudy and MedicalTrial are subclasses of https://schema.org/MedicalStudy . {DoubleBlindedTrial, InternationalTrial, MultiCenterTrial, OpenTrial, PlaceboControlledTrial, RandomizedTrial, SingleBlindedTrial, SingleCenterTrial, and TripleBlindedTrial} are subclasses of schema.org/MedicalTrial.
A schema.org/MedicalScholarlyArticle (a subclass of https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle ) can have a https://schema.org/Dataset. https://schema.org/hasPart is the inverse of https://schema.org/isPartOf .
More structured predicates which indicate the degree to which evidence supports/confirms or disproves current and other hypotheses (according to a particular Person or Persons on a given date and time; given a level of scrutiny of the given information) are needed.
In regards to epistemology, there was some work on Fact Checking ( e.g. https://schema.org/ClaimReview ) in recent times. To quote myself here, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15528824 :
> In terms of verifying (or validating) subjective opinions, correlational observations, and inferences of causal relations; #LinkedMetaAnalyses of documents (notebooks) containing structured links to their data as premises would be ideal. Unfortunately, PDF is not very helpful in accomplishing that objective (in addition to being a terrible format for review with screen reader and mobile devices): I think HTML with RDFa (and/or CSVW JSONLD) is our best hope of making at least partially automated verification of meta analyses a reality.
"#LinkedReproducibility"; "#LinkedMetaAnalyses", "#StudyGraph"
CSV 1.1 – CSV Evolved (for Humans)
Well, if you want to improve tabular data formats:
1. Add a version identifier / content-type on the first line!
2. Create a formal grammar for this CSV format
3. Specify preferred character-encoding
4. Provide some tooling (validation, CSV 1.1 => HTML, CSV => Excel)
5. Add the option to specify column type (string, int, date)
6. Specify ISO-8601 as the preferred date format
7. Allow 'reheading' the columns in the file itself. This is useful in streaming data.
8. Specify the format of the newlines.
CSVW: CSV on the Web https://w3c.github.io/csvw/
"CSV on the Web: A Primer" http://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/
"Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web" http://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-model/
"Generating JSON from Tabular Data on the Web" (csv2json) http://www.w3.org/TR/csv2json/
"Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web" (csv2rdf) http://www.w3.org/TR/csv2rdf/
...
N. Allow authors to (1) specify how many header rows are metadata and (2) what each row is. For example: 7 metadata header rows: {column label, property URI [path], datatype URI, unit URI, accuracy, precision, significant figures}
With URIs, we can merge, join, and concatenate data (when e.g. study control URIs for e.g. single/double/triple blinding/masking indicate that the https://schema.org/Dataset meets meta-analysis inclusion criteria).
"#LinkedReproducibility"; "#LinkedMetaAnalyses"
Ask HN: Which plants can be planted indoors and easily maintained?
Chlorophytum comosum (spider plants) are good air-filtering houseplants that are also easy to take starts of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophytum_comosum
Houseplant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houseplant
Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem
"Classical Verification of Quantum Computations" Mahadev. (2018)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01082
https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1804.01082/
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10138991277567750...
The down side to wind power
>To estimate the impacts of wind power, Keith and Miller established a baseline for the 2012‒2014 U.S. climate using a standard weather-forecasting model. Then, they covered one-third of the continental U.S. with enough wind turbines to meet present-day U.S. electricity demand. The researchers found this scenario would warm the surface temperature of the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius, with the largest changes occurring at night when surface temperatures increased by up to 1.5 degrees. This warming is the result of wind turbines actively mixing the atmosphere near the ground and aloft while simultaneously extracting from the atmosphere’s motion.
I am confused: How does the warming work exactly and is this actually a global climate effect? Because this part of the article makes it sound to me as if it's just a very localised change of temperature caused by the exchange of different air layers, which can't be right? Because you couldn't really compare that to climate change on a global scale.
The example is clearly hypothetical only. We're never going to cover one third of the continental US with wind turbines.
The more important information to me is that neither wind nor solar have the power density that has been claimed.
For wind, we found that the average power density — meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant — was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts
...
For solar energy, the average power density (measured in watts per meter squared) is 10 times higher than wind power, but also much lower than estimates by leading energy experts.
Then you have the separate problem that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, so you need a huge storage infrastructure (batteries, presumably) alongside the wind and solar generating infrastructure.
IMO nuclear is the only realistic alternative to coal to provide reliable, zero-emission "base load" power generation. Wind and solar could make sense in some use cases but not in general.
> IMO nuclear is the only realistic alternative to coal to provide reliable, zero-emission "base load" power generation. Wind and solar could make sense in some use cases but not in general.
How much heat energy does a reactor with n meters of concrete around it, located on a water supply in order to use water in an open closed loop, protected with national security resources, waste into the environment?
I'd be interested to see which power sources the authors of this study would choose as a control for these just sensational stats.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17806589 :
> Canada (2030), France (2021), and the UK (2025) are all working to entirely phase out coal-fired power plants for very good reasons (such as neonatal health).
Would you burn a charcoal grill in an enclosed space like a garage? No.
Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki
"Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h...
> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer's state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.
"The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy" (2011) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10123
Landauer's principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
"Thin film converts heat from electronics into energy" (2018) http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/04/16/thin-film-converts-heat-...
> This study reports new records for pyroelectric energy conversion energy density (1.06 Joules per cubic centimeter), power density (526 Watts per cubic centimeter) and efficiency (19 percent of Carnot efficiency, which is the standard unit of measurement for the efficiency of a heat engine).
"Pyroelectric energy conversion with large energy and power density in relaxor ferroelectric thin films" (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-018-0059-8
Carnot heat engine > Carnot cycle, Carnot's theorem, "Real heat engines": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine
Carnot's theorem > Applicability to fuel cells and batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna...
> Since fuel cells and batteries can generate useful power when all components of the system are at the same temperature [...], they are clearly not limited by Carnot's theorem, which states that no power can be generated when [...]. This is because Carnot's theorem applies to engines converting thermal energy to work, whereas fuel cells and batteries instead convert chemical energy to work.[6] Nevertheless, the second law of thermodynamics still provides restrictions on fuel cell and battery energy conversion
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Is there enough heat energy from a datacenter to -- rather than heating oceans (which can result in tropical storms) -- turn a turbine (to convert heat energy back into electrical energy)?
Is there a statistic which captures the amount of heat energy discharged into ocean/river/lake water? "100% clean energy with PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements)" while bleeding energy into the oceans isn't quite representative of the total system.
"How to Reuse Waste Heat from Data Centers Intelligently" (2016) https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/05/10/how-...
> There are two big issues with data center waste heat reuse: the relatively low temperatures involved and the difficulty of transporting heat. Many of the reuse applications to date have used the low-grade server exhaust heat in an application physically adjacent to the data center, such as a greenhouse or swimming pool in the building next door. This is reasonable given the relatively low temperatures of data center return air, usually between 28° and 35°C (80-95°F), and the difficulty in moving heat around. Moving heat energy frequently requires insulated ducting or plumbing instead of cheap, convenient electrical cables. Trenching and installation to run a hot water pipe from a data center to a heat user may cost as much as $600 per linear foot. Just the piping to share heat with a facility one-quarter mile away might add $750,000 or more to a data center construction project. There’s currently not much that can be done to reduce this cost.
> To address the low-temperature issue, some data center operators have started using heat pumps to increase the temperature of waste heat, making the thermal energy much more valuable, and marketable. Waste heat coming out of heat pumps at temperatures in the range of 55° to 70°C (130-160°F) can be transferred to a liquid medium for easier transport and can be used in district heating, commercial laundry, industrial process heat, and many more. There are even High Temperature (HT) and Very High Temperature (VHT) heat pumps capable of moving low-grade data center heat up to 140°C.
Heat Pump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
"Data Centers That Recycle Waste Heat" https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-centers-that-recycl...
Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
> Also, to foster research on this topic we have built a wiki, combining lists of papers, websites, events pages, etc. We highly encourage people to visit it, sign up, and start improving it; the more scientists get involved, from the more fields, the better!
Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki https://centre.santafe.edu/thermocomp/Santa_Fe_Institute_Col...
Justice Department Sues to Stop California Net Neutrality Law
Sorry if I get some basic understanding of the law wrong but...
Isn't this the same thing as regulating car emissions? Doesn't 822 only apply to providers in the state itself? Wouldn't it be that the telecoms are welcome to engage in another method of end-customer billing in other states?
What am I missing?
> Like California’s auto emissions laws that forced automakers to adopt the standards for all production, the state’s new net neutrality rules could push broadband providers to apply the same rules to other states.
I think you're right, the motives are very similar.
> Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that California’s net neutrality law was illegal because Congress granted the federal government, through the F.C.C., the sole authority to create rules for broadband internet providers. “States do not regulate interstate commerce — the federal government does,” Mr. Sessions said in a statement.
I thought Republicans were pro-states rights and limited government? How does their position on this jive with their ideology?
Expansion of federal jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause is an egregious violation of Constitutional law.
Does the federal government have the enumerated right under the Commerce Clause to, for example, ban football for anyone that doesn't have a disability? No!
Was the Commerce Clause sufficient authorization for Federal prohibition of alcohol? No! An Amendment to the Constitution was necessary. And, Federal Alcohol and the unequal necessary State Alcohol prohibitions miserably failed to achieve the intended outcomes.
Where is the limit? How can they claim to support a states' rights, limited government position while expanding jurisdiction under the Interstate Commerce Clause? "Substantially affecting" interstate commerce is a very slippery slope.
Furthermore, de-classification from Title II did effectively - as the current administration's FCC very clearly argued (in favor of special interests over those of the majority) - relieve the FCC of authority to regulate ISPs: they claimed that it's FTC's job and now they're claiming it's their job.
Without Title II classification, FCC has no authority to preempt state net neutrality regulation. California and Washington have the right to regulate ISPs within their respective states.
Outrageous!
Limited government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_government
States' rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights
[Interstate] Commerce Clause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
Net neutrality in the United States > Repeal of net neutrality policy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United...
The limit is established, and constantly reevaulated by the Supreme Court. For example it was held that gun control cannot be done through the Commerce Clause.
Car emissions and ISPs are different. As ISPs are very much perfect examples of truly local things (they need to reach your devices with EM signals either via cables or air radio), the Federal government might try to argue that the net neutrality regulation of California affects the whole economy substantially, because it allows too much interstate competition due to the lack of bundling/throttling by ISPs.
Similarly, the problem with car emissions might be that requiring thing at the time of sale affects what kind of cars are sold to CA.
Is the Commerce Clause too vague? Yes. Is there a quick and sane way to fix it? I see none. Is it at least applied consistently? Well, sort of. But we shall see.
ISPs are the very opposite of local, as the only reason I have an ISP is to deliver bits from the rest of the world. Of course, the FCC doesn't seem to understand that...
To summarize the points made in [1]: products can be sold across state lines, internet service sold in one state cannot be sold across state lines.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111651
In my opinion, the court has significantly erred in redefining interstate commerce to include (1) intrastate-only-commerce; and (2) non-commerce (i.e. locally grown and unsold wheat)
Furthermore - and this is a bit off topic - unalienable natural rights (Equality, Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness) are of higher precedence. I mention this because this is yet another case where the court will be interpreting the boundary between State and Federal rights; and it's very clear that the founders intended for the powers of the federal government to be limited -- certainly not something that the Commerce Clause should be interpreted to supersede.
What penalties and civil fines are appropriate for States or executive branch departments that violate the Constitution; for failure to uphold Oaths to uphold the Constitution?
The problem is, someone has to interpret what kind of economy the Founders intended.
Is it okay if a State opts to withdraw from the interstate market for wheat? Because without power to meddle with intra-state production, consumption and transactions, it's entirely possible.
White House Drafts Order to Probe Google, Facebook Practices
This sounds like they want the equal representation policies that the Republican Party got rolled back in the 80s (ruled unconstitutional iirc). It’s what allowed the rise of partisan “news”. It seems like any “equal exposure” policies would hit the same issues.
That said the primary “imbalanced exposure” seems to be due to evicting people who simply spend their time attacking minorities, attack equal rights, and promoting violence towards anyone that they dislike. For whatever reason the Republican Party seems to have decided that those people represent “conservative” views that private companies should have to support.
i. e. : People who are exercising their right to free speech.
'Right to free speech' does not exist outside the government. It never has, unless there's an amendment to the first amendment that no one is telling us about..
Repeating what I said in an earlier comment....they were able to grow to the size they have become because they are exempted from liable laws under safe harbor. The argument for that was that they were neutral platforms. They no longer are so they either need to remove the protections or be subject to the first amendment but they should not be able to have it both ways.....and I don't think there is case law to back this one way or the other yet...
> they were able to grow to the size they have become because they are exempted from liable laws under safe harbor
This was not a selective protection. When the government grants limited resources like electromagnetic spectrum and right of way, they're not directly making a monopoly, but the FCC does then claim right to regulate speech.
In the interest of fairness, the FCC classed telecommunication service providers as common carriers; thus authorizing FCC to pass net neutrality protections which require equal prioritization of internet traffic. (No blocking, No throttling, No paid prioritization). The current administration doesn't feel that that's fair, and so they've moved to dismantle said "burdensome regulations".
The current administration is now apparently attempting to argue that information service providers - which are all equally granted safe harbor and obligated to comply with DMCA - have no right to take down abuse and harassment because anti-trust monopoly therefore Freedom of Speech doesn't apply to these corporation persons.
Selective bias, indeed! Broadcast TV and Radio are subject to different rules than Cable (non-broadcast) TV.
Other regimes have attempted to argue that the government has the right to dictate the media as well.
Taking down abuse and harassment is necessary and well within the rights of a person and a corporation in the United States. Taking down certain content is now legally required within 24 hours of notice from the government in the EU.
Where is the line between a media conglomerate that produces news entertainment and an information service provider? If there is none, and the government has the right to regulate "equal time" on non-granted-spectrum media outlets, future administrations could force ConservativeNewsOutletZ and LiberalNewsOutletZ to carry specific non-emergency content, to host abusive and offense rhetoric, and to be sued for being forced to do so because no safe harbor.
Can anyone find the story of how the GOP strongarmed and intimidated Facebook into "equal time" (and then we were all shoved full of apparently Russian conservative "fake news" propaganda) before the most recent election where the GOP won older radio, TV, and print voters and young people didn't vote because it appeared to be unnecessary?
Meanwhile, the current administration rolled back the "burdensome regulation" that was to prevent ISPs from selling complete internet usage history; regardless of age.
Maybe there's an exercise that would be helpful for understanding the "corporate media filter" and the "social media filter"?
You, having no money -- while watching corporate profits soar and income inequality grow to unprecedented heights -- will choose to take a job that requires you to judge whether thousands of reported pieces of content a day are abusive, harassing, making specific threats, inciting specific destructive acts, recruiting for hate groups, depicting abuse; or just good 'ol political disagreement over issues, values, and the appropriate role of the punishing and/or nurturing state. You will do this for weeks or months, because that's your best option, because nobody else is standing in the mirror behind these people who haven't learned to respectfully disagree over facts and data (evidence).
Next, you will plan segments of content time interspersed with ads paid for by people who are trying to sell their products, grow their businesses, and reach people. You will use a limited amount of our limited electromagnetic spectrum which the government has sold your corporate overlords for a limited period of time, contingent upon your adherence to specific and subjective standards of decency as codified in the stated regulations.
In both cases, your objective is to maximize profit for shareholders.
Your target audiences may vary from undefined (everyone watching), to people who only want to review fun things that they agree with in their safe little microcosm of the world, to people who know how to find statistics like corporate profits, personal savings rate, infant morality, healthcare costs per capita, and other Indicators identified as relevant to the Targets and Goals found in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals Indicators).
Do you control what the audience shares?
Ask HN: Books about applying the open source model to society
I've been thinking for some time now that as productivity keeps growing, not all people will need to work any more. Society will eventually start to resemble an open source project where a few core contributors do the real work (and get to decide the direction), some others help around, and the majority of people just benefit without having to do anything. I'm wondering if any books have been written to explore this concept further?
> I've been thinking for some time now that as productivity keeps growing, not all people will need to work any more.
How much energy do autotrophs and heterotrophs need to thrive?
"But then we'll be rewarding laziness!"
Some people do enjoy the work they've chosen to do. We enjoy the benefits of upward mobility here in the US; the land of opportunity.
Why would I fully retire at 65 (especially if lifespan extension really is in reach)?
> Society will eventually start to resemble an open source project where a few core contributors do the real work (and get to decide the direction), some others help around, and the majority of people just benefit without having to do anything.
Open-source governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance
Free-rider problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
As we continue to reward work, the people who are investing in the means of production (energy, labor, automation, raw materials) and science (research and development; education) continue to amass wealth and influence.
This concentration of wealth -- wealth inequality -- has historically presaged and portended unrest.
How contributions to open source projects are reinforced, what motivates people who choose to contribute (altruism, enlightened self interest, compassion, acceptance,), and what makes a competitive and thus sustainable open source project is an interesting study.
... Business models for open-source software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...
... Political Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_science
... National currencies are valued in FOREX markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market
> I'm wondering if any books have been written to explore this concept further?
"The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" (2005) contains a number of extrapolated predictions; chief among these is that there will continue to be exponential growth in technological change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
... Until we reach limits; e.g. the carrying capacity of our ecosystem, the edge of the universe.
"The Limits to Growth" (1972, 2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
"Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" (2010) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781927
Who owns what and who 'gets to' just chill while the solar robots brush their teeth? Heady questions. "Tired yet?"
The Aragon Project has a really interesting take on open source governance:
""" IMAGINE A NATION WITHOUT LAND AND BORDERS
A digital jurisdiction
> Aragon Network will be the first community governed decentralized organization whose goal is to act as a digital jurisdiction, an online decentralized court system that isn’t bound by traditional artificial barriers such as national jurisdictions or the borders of a single country.
Aragon organizations can be upgraded seamlessly using our aragonOS architecture. They can solve disputes between two parties by using the decentralized court system, a digital jurisdiction that operates only online and utilizes your peers to resolve issues.
The Aragon Network Token, ANT, puts the power into the hands of the people participating in the operation of the Network. Every single aspect of the Network will be governed by those willing to make an effort for a better future. """
Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back
Here's a quote from this excellent article:
> An error rate of even one percent will still mean tens of millions of acts of arbitrary censorship, every day.
And a redundant -- positively defiant -- link and page title:
"Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-inte...
Firms with 50 or less employees should stay that small, really.
VPN providers in North and South America FTW.
> VPN providers in North and South America FTW.
Article 13 will affect the entire Internet, not just people in Europe. Most people on the Internet use large, multinational platforms. Those platforms will set rules according to the lowest common denominator, because it's the easiest to implement.
This means that people all over the world are going to have a much more difficult time with any user-generated content. That's true even for user-created content, even if there is no other copyright holder involved (look at how badly Content ID has played out).
Or they just stop doing business in Europe.
Since europe is a quite big market, maybe not an option and easier to geolocate and restrict just EU-Traffic
Or just not, if there's no nexus to europe. I suspect for a small business, the right thing to do would be to simply ignore EU directives. I would not be surprised if the US passes a law to make judgements against US companies without a European nexus (users in Europe would not count) unenforceable in the US. That was done with the SPEECH act to stop libel tourism.
Technically, the phrase "Useful Arts and Sciences" in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution applies to just that; the definitions of which have coincidentally changed over the years.
The harms to Freedom of Speech -- i.e. impossible 99% accuracy in content filtering still results in far too much censorship -- so significantly outweigh the benefits for a limited number of special interests intending to thwart inferior American information services which also currently host "art" and content pertaining to the "useful arts"; that it's hard to believe this new policy will have it's intended effects.
Haven't there been multiple studies which show that free marketing from e.g. content piracy -- people who experience and recommended said goods at $0 -- is actually a net positive for the large corporate entertainment industry? That, unimpeded, content spreads like the common cold through word of mouth; resulting in greater number of artful impressions.
How can they not anticipate de-listing of EU content from news and academic article aggregators as an outcome of these new policies? (Resulting in even greater outsized impact on one possible front page that consumers can choose to consume)
For countries in the EU with less than 300 million voters, if you want:
- time for your headline: $
- time for your snippet: $$
- time for your og:description: $$
- free video hosting: $$$
- video revenue: $$$$
- < 30% American content: $$$$$
Pay your bill.
And what of academic article aggregators? Can they still index schema:ScholarlyArticle titles and provide a value-added information service for science?
Consumer science (a.k.a. home economics) as a college major
> That's why we need to bring back the old home economics class. Call it "Skills for Life" and make it mandatory in high schools. Teach basic economics along with budgeting, comparison shopping, basic cooking skills and time management.
Some Jupyter notebooks for these topics that work with https://mybinder.org could be super helpful. A self-paced edX course could also be a great intro to teaching oneself though online learning.
* Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)
* Food Science (nutrition, meal planning for n people, food prep safety, how long certain things can safely be left out on the counter)
* Productivity Skills (GTD, context switching overhead, calendar, email labels, memo app / shared task lists)
There were FACS (Family and Consumer Studies/Sciences) courses in our middle and high school curricula. Nutrition, cooking, sewing; family planning, carry a digital baby for awhile
Home economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_economics
* Family planning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning
> * Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)
Personal Finance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finance
Khan Academy > College, careers, and more > Personal finance https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-fi...
"CS 007: Personal Finance For Engineers" https://cs007.blog
https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki
> * Food Science (nutrition, meal planning for n people, food prep safety, how long certain things can safely be left out on the counter)
Food Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_science
Dietary management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_management
Nutrition Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition_Education
MyPlate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyPlate
Healthy Eating Plate https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...
How to make salads, smoothies, sandwiches
How to compost and avoid unnecessary packaging
* School, College, Testing, "How Children Learn"
GED, SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, GRE, GMAT, ASVAB
Defending a Thesis, Bar Exam, Boards
Khan Academy > College, careers, and more https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more
Educational Testing https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/educational-testing
529 Plans (can be used for qualifying educational expenses for any person) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/529_plan
Middle School "Glimpse" project: Past, Present, Future. Present, Future: plan your 4-year highschool course plan, pick 3 careers, pick 3 colleges (and how much they cost)
High school literature: write a narrative essay for college admissions
* Health and Medicine
How to add emergency contact and health information to your phone, carseat (ICE: In Case of Emergency)
How to get health insurance ( https://healthcare.gov/ )
"What's your blood type?" (?!)
Khan Academy > Science > Health and Medicine https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine
Facebook vows to run on 100 percent renewable energy by 2020
Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First
Now, now, let's focus on the positives here:
- more pollution from shipping routes through the Arctic circle (and yucky-looking icebergs that tourists don't like)
- less beachfront property
- more desalinatable water
- hotter heat
- more revulsive detestable significant others (displaced global unrest)
- costs of responding to natural disasters occurring with greater frequency due to elevated ocean temperatures
- less parking spaces (!)
What are the other costs and benefits here?
I've received a number of downvotes for this comment. I think it's misunderstood, and that's my fault: I should have included [sarcasm] around the whole comment [/sarcasm].
I've written about our need to address climate change here in past comments. I think the administration's climate change denials (see: "climate change politifact') and regulatory rollbacks are beyond despicable: they're sabotaging the United States by allowing more toxic chemicals into the environment that we all share, and allowing more sites that must be protected with tax dollars that aren't there because these industries pay far less than benchmarks in terms of effective tax rate. We know that vehicle emissions, mercury, and coal ash are toxic: why would we allow people to violate the rights of others in that way?
A person could voluntarily consume said toxic byproducts and not have violated their own rights or the rights of others, you understand. There's no medical value and low potential for abuse, so we just sit idly by while they're violating the rights of other people by dumping toxic chemicals into the environment that are both poisonous and strongly linked to climate change.
What would help us care about this? A sarcastic list of additional reasons that we should care? No! Miami underwater during tourist season is enough! I've had enough!
So, my mistake here - my downvote-earning mistake - was dropping my generally helpful, hopeful tone for cynicism and sarcasm that wasn't motivating enough.
We need people to regulate pollution in order to prevent further costs of climate change. Water in the streets holds up commerce, travel, hampers national security, and destroys the road.
We must stop rewarding pollution if we want it - and definitely resultant climate change - to stop. What motivates other people to care?
Free hosting VPS for NGO project?
The Burden: Fossil Fuel, the Military and National Security
Here's a link to the video: https://vimeo.com/194560636
Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise
The actual document title: "Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 drafted by the Group of independent scientists: Invited background document on economic transformation, to chapter: Transformation: The Economy" (2018) https://bios.fi/bios-governance_of_economic_transition.pdf [PDF]
Why I distrust command economies (beyond just because of our experiences with violent fascism and defense overspending and the subsequent failures of various communist regimes):
We have elections today. We don't choose to elect people that regard the environment (our air, water, land, and other natural resources) as our most important focus. A command economy driven by these folks for longer than a term limit would be even more disastrous.
The market does not solve for 'externalities': things that aren't costed in. We must have regulation to counteract the blind optimization for profit (and efficiency) which capitalism rewards most.
Environmental regulation is currently insufficient; worldwide. That is the consensus from the Paris Agreement which 195 countries signed in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
Maybe incentives?
We could sell tokens for how much pollutants we're allowed to f### everyone else over with and penalize exceeding the amount we've purchased. That would incentivize firms to pollute less so that they can save money by having to buy fewer tokens. (Europe does this already; and it's still not going to save the planet from industrial production externalities)
So, while I'm wary of any suggestion that a command economy would somehow bring forth talent in governance, I look to this article for actionable suggestions that penalize and/or incentivize sustainable business and living practices.
Sustainable reporting really is a must: how can I design an investment portfolio that excludes reckless, irresponsible, indifferent, and careless investments and highly values sustainability?
No one likes to be driven by harsh penalties; everyone likes to be rewarded (even with carrots as incentives).
Markets do not solve for long term outcomes. Case in point: the market has not chosen the most energy efficient cryptocurrencies. Is this an information asymmetry issue: people just don't know, or just don't care because the incentives are so alluring, the brand is so strong, or the perceived security assurances of the network outweighs the energy use (and environmental impact) in comparison to dry cleaning and fossil fuel transport.
How would a command economy respond to this? It really is denial and delusion to think that the market will cast aside less energy efficient solutions in order to save the environment all on its own.
So, what do we do?
Do we incentivize getting inefficient vehicles off of the road and into a recycling plant where they belong?
Do we shut down major sources of pollution (coal plants, vehicle emissions)?
Do we create tokens to account for pollution allowances (for carbon and other toxic f###ing chemicals)?
Do we cut irrational subsidies for industries that don't pay their taxes (even when they make money); so that we're aware of the actual costs of our behavior?
Do we grow hemp to absorb carbon, clean up the soil, replace emissions, and store energy?
Who's in the mood to dom these greedy shortsighted idiots into saving themselves and preventing the violation of our right to health (life)? No, you can't because you're busy violating your own rights and finding drugs/druggies and that's not allowed? Is that a lifetime position?
"Go burn a charcoal grill and your gas vehicle in your closed garage for awhile and come talk to me." That's really what we're dealing with here.
Anyways, this paper raises some good points; although I have my doubts about command economies.
[strikethrough] You can't do that to yourself. [/strikethrough] You can't do that to others (even if you pay for their healthcare afterwards).
Where's Captain Planet when you need 'em, anyways?
The problem may actually be solved by a free market... But it has to have different optimizations.
"Value" or "Quality" of a company has to stop being measured in unconstrained growth and instead measured in minimized externalities, while achieving your stated goal.
Accounting has to become a hell of a lot more complicated. We're talking "keep track of your industrial waste product", possibly even having to take responsibility in some manner for dealing with it directly.
There also needs to be some societal change as well. We need to Look at how we've stretched our supply and industry chains worldwide and start to figure out ways to minimize transportation and production costs.
Competition may need to fundamentally change it's nature as well. Trade secrets need to be ripped out into the light of day. It's not a contest of out doing the other guy, but to see who can find a way to make the entire industry more efficient.
Definitely a lot of change needed. That is for sure.
Firefox Nightly Secure DNS Experimental Results
> The experiment generated over a billion DoH transactions and is now closed. You can continue to manually enable DoH on your copy of Firefox Nightly if you like.
...
> Using HTTPS with a cloud service provider had only a minor performance impact on the majority of non-cached DNS queries as compared to traditional DNS. Most queries were around 6 milliseconds slower, which is an acceptable cost for the benefits of securing the data. However, the slowest DNS transactions performed much better with the new DoH based system than the traditional one – sometimes hundreds of milliseconds better.
Long-sought decay of Higgs boson observed at CERN
Furthermore, both teams measured a rate for the decay that is consistent with the Standard Model prediction, within the current precision of the measurement.
And now everyone: Noooo, not again.
(Explanation: it's well-known that the Standard Model can't be completely correct but again and again physicists fail to find an experiment contradicting its predictions, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo... for example)
Well, the standard model can be correct. It is correct until some experiment proves otherwise.
It is full of unexplained hadcoded parameters, indeed, which need an explanation from outside of the SM.
> It is full of unexplained hadcoded parameters, indeed, which need an explanation from outside of the SM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)#Unn...
> The term magic number or magic constant refers to the anti-pattern of using numbers directly in source code
Who is going to request changes when doing a code review on a pull request from God?
But which branch do you pull from? God has been forked so many times, it's hard to keep track. There are several distros available, so I guess you just get to pick the one that checks the most of your needs at the time.
Sen. Wyden Confirms Cell-Site Simulators Disrupt Emergency Calls
Building a Model for Retirement Savings in Python
re: pulling historical data with pandas-datareader, backtesting, algorithmic trading: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/7zxptg/pulling_stoc...
re: historical returns
- [The article uses a constant 7% annual return rate]
- "The current average annual return from 1923 (the year of the S&P’s inception) through 2016 is 12.25%." https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/the-12-reality (but that doesn't account for inflation)
- https://www.quantopian.com/posts/56b62019a4a36a79da000059 (300%+ over n years (from a down market))
Is there a Jupyter notebook with this code (with a requirements.txt for https://mybinder.org (repo2docker))?
New E.P.A. Rollback of Coal Pollution Regulations Takes a Major Step Forward
Would you move your family downwind from a coal plant? Why or why not?
Coal ash pollutes air, water, rain (acid rain), crops (our food), and soil. Which rights of victims does coal pollution infringe? Who is liable for the health effects?
Canada (2030), France (2021), and the UK (2025) are all working to entirely phase out coal-fired power plants for very good reasons (such as neonatal health).
~"They're just picking on coal": No, we're choosing renewables that are lower cost AND don't make workers and citizens sick.
If you can mine for coal, you can set up solar panels and wind turbines.
If you can run a coal mine; you can buy some cheap land, put up solar panels and wind turbines, and connect it to the grid.
Researchers Build Room-Temp Quantum Transistor Using a Single Atom
"Quasi-Solid-State Single-Atom Transistors" (2018) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201801...
New “Turning Tables” Technique Bypasses All Windows Kernel Mitigations
Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to do stuff
Interesting project. I believe these two shell functions in the shell's initialization file (~/.profile, ~/.bashrc, etc.) can serve as a poor man's um:
umedit() { mkdir -p ~/notes; vim ~/notes/"$1.txt"; }
um() { less ~/notes/"$1.txt"; }If you write these in .rst, you can generate actual manpages with Sphinx: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/configuration.html...
sphinx.builders.manpage: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/_modules/sphinx/builders...
[deleted]
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Extremely interesting take, with a lot of good stuff to think about.
I'm unclear about the claim that less economic growth would be better, though, and the author seems very committed to it. I wasn't able to find the article they reference as explaining how less growth is what we really need (J.W. Forrester, World Dynamics, Portland OR, Productivity Press, 1971), and it comes from almost 50 years ago, which might as well be another economic era altogether.
Does anyone know what the arguments are, what assumptions they require, and whether they still apply today? My understanding is that "less growth is better" is a distinctly minority take amongst modern economists, but the rest of this article seems very intelligently laid out, so I'd like to dig deeper.
I've always thought that for any dial we have, there's always an optimal setting, whether it's tax rates, growth rates, birth rates, etc., and blindly pushing one way or the other (like both political parties tend to do) is not helpful, or at the very least merely indicates different value systems.
The book is called "limits to growth", and it's a work of the Club of Rome. You can watch this video to have an idea of their work [1]. At first it's a very strange idea, afterall we work and consume everyday in order to grow the economy. But every healthy system as a homeostastic point, a point where it doesn't need to grow, only to be maintained. We are now a fat society and we need to get our health back, we need to degrow. We need to work much less hours and consume much less. Reducing working hours is a great leverage point. People will start to have time to care about the community, and take care of their own health. Maybe have more time to take a walk instead of using the car. This can improve health and environment but will not contribute to economic growth, healthy people that don't use cars are not good friends of economic growth based on GDP. English is not my mother language, Ursula Le Guin had an eloquent post about this on her blog, but was removed to be on the last book. The post is called "Clinging to a Metaphor" (the metaphor is economic growth) and the book is called "No Time to Spare". [1] https://youtu.be/kz9wjJjmkmc
"The Limits to Growth" (1972) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
"Thinking in Systems: a Primer" (2008) https://g.co/kgs/B71ebC
Glossary of systems theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory
Systems Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
...
Computational Thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking
Which of the #GlobalGoals (UN Sustainable Development Goals) Targets and Indicators are primary leverage points for ensuring - if not growth - prosperity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
SQLite Release 3.25.0 adds support for window functions
https://www.windowfunctions.com is a good introduction to window functions.
Besides that, the comprehensive testing and evaluation of SQLite never ceases to amaze me. I'm usually hesitant to call software development "engineering", but SQLite is definitely well-engineered.
This looks great, but I couldn't get through the first question on aggregate functions. Are there any SQL books/tutorials that go over things like this?
A lot of material I've seen has been like the classic image of "How to draw an owl. First draw two circles, then draw the rest of the owl", where they tell you the super basic stuff, then assume you know everything.
Ibis uses windowing functions for aggregations if the database supports them. IDK when support for the new SQLite support will be implemented? http://docs.ibis-project.org/sql.html#window-functions
[EDIT]
I created an issue for this here: https://github.com/ibis-project/ibis/issues/1597
Update on the Distrust of Symantec TLS Certificates
Is the certifi bundle (2018.8.13) on PyPI also updated? https://pypi.org/project/certifi/
https://github.com/certifi/certifi.io/issues/18
> Are these still in the bundle?
> Should projects like requests which depend on certifi also implement this logic?
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3
Academic Torrents – Making 27TB of research data available
All the .torrent files are served over http so with a simple MITM attack a bad actor could swap in their own custom tweaked version of any data set here in order to achieve whatever goals that might serve for the bad actor's interests.
I really wish we could get basic security concepts added to the default curriculum for grade schoolers. You shouldn't need a PhD in computer security to know this stuff. These site creators have PhDs in other fields, but obviously no concept of security. This stuff should be basic literacy for everyone.
> This stuff should be basic literacy for everyone.
Arguably, one compromised PKI x.509 CA jeopardizes all SSL/TLS channel sec if there's no certificate pinning and an alternate channel for distributing signed cert fingerprints (cryptographically signed hashes).
We could teach blockchain and cryptocurrency principles: private/secret key, public key, hash verification; there there's money on the table.
GPG presumes secure key distribution (`gpg --verify .asc`).
TUF is designed to survive certain role key compromises. https://theupdateframework.github.io
1/0 = 0
1/0 = 1(±∞)
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/960508624849244160
> How many times does zero go into any number? Infinity. [...]
> How many times does zero go into zero? infinity^2?
Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially.
However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy).
Allow me to give an example: currently we have a drought in Belgium (or at least Flanders). We are not landlocked, there is plenty of water in the sea. Desalination is energy intensive. Instead of only looking at energy storage, why can't we increase the processing capacity (more desalination sites capable of working in parallel), and desalinate say sea water during the energy flood? I don't expect this to be an ideal real world example, only a pattern for identifying such examples: any product (could be composite parts, or bulk material) which is relatively compact and has some high energy per product volume processinng step. Just do the process (desalination, welding some part to another part...) when the sun shines, and store them for later.
Products with very high step energy density are good candidates for storing, and could help flatten daily variations, and perhaps even seasonal variations!
Now some companies would prefer avoiding risk if they don't have guaranteed orders far enough into the future, then perhaps there should be a market for insurance or loans, so that the company is encouraged to take the risk, instead of wasting the cheap energy...
Capital costs vs. marginal costs.
You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs.
(This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle)
Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs. Desalination is not one of those.
A desal plant is a useful thing and can be run around the clock off traditional energy sources. The "free energy" hours would help lower the costs.
I can even imagine a SETI-like application where people who over-generate power are able to donate it to causes of their preference...
But if you are using traditional energy sources to run it all the time, it is no longer 'solving' the problem of burning off excess energy during peak renewable times.
Someone is having to build a lot of highly wasteful, redundant infrastructure.
Rational cryptocurrency mining firms can use the excess (unstorable) energy by converting it back to money (while the sun shines and the wind blows).
Money > Energy > Money
> Someone is having to build a lot of highly wasteful, redundant infrastructure.
We're nowhere near having the energy infrastructure necessary to support everyone having an electric vehicle yet.
Energy storage is key to maximizing returns from renewables and minimizing irreversible environmental damage.
Kernels, a free hosted Jupyter notebook environment with GPUs
Hey Ben, are these going to support arbitrary CUDA?
At the moment, we're focused on providing great support for the Python and R analytics/machine learning ecosystems. We'll likely expand this in the future, and in the meantime it's possible to hack through many other usecases we don't formally support well.
How do you handle custom environment requirements, whether it’s Python version, library version, or more complex things in the environment that some code might run on?
Basically, suppose I wanted everything that I could define in a Docker container to be available “as the environment” in which the notebook is running. How do I do that?
I ask because I’ve started to see an alarming proliferation of “notebook as a service” platforms that don’t offer that type of full environment spec, if they offer any configuration of the run time environment at all.
I’ve taught probability and data science at university level and worked in machine learning in a variety of businesses too, and I’d say for literally all use cases, from the quickest little pure-pedagogy prototype of a canned Keras model to a heavily customized use case with custom-compiled TensorFlow, different data assets for testing vs ad hoc exploration vs deployment, etc., the absolutely minimum thing needed before anything can be said to offer “reproducibility” is complete specification of the run time environment and artifacts.
The trend to convince people that a little “poke around with scripts in a managed environment” offering is value-additive is dangerous, very similar to MATLAB’s approach to entwine all data exploration with the atrocious development havits that are facilitated by the console environment (and to specifically target university students with free licenses, to use a drug dealer model to get engineers hooked on MATLAB’s workflow model and use that to leverage employers to oblige by buying and standardizing on abjectly bad MATLAB products).
Any time I meet young data scientists I always try to encourage them to avoid junk like that. It’s vital to begin experiments with fully reproducible artifacts like thick archive files or containers, and to structure code into meaningful reproducible units even for your first ad hoc explorations, and to absolutely always avoid linear scripting as an exploratory technique (it is terrible and ineffective for such a task).
Kaggle Kernels seems like a cool idea, so long as the programmer must fully define artifacts that describe the complete entirety of the run time environment, and nobody is sold on the Kool Aid of just linear scripting in some other managed environment.
Each kernel for example could have a link back to a GitHub repo containing a Dockerfile and build scripts for what defined the precise environment the notebook is running in. Now that’s reproducible.
Here are the Kaggle Kernels Dockerfiles:
- Python: https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-python/blob/master/Dockerfi...
- R: https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-rstats/blob/master/Dockerfi...
https://mybinder.org builds containers (and launches free cloud instances) on demand with repo2docker from a (commit hash, branch, or tag) repo URL: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.ht...
That’s a great first step! Adding the ability to customize on a per-notebook basis would be impressive.
Solar and wind are coming. And the power sector isn’t ready
I don't know that fatalism and hopelessness are motivating for decision makers (who are seeking greater margins regardless of policy and lobbies).
Is our transformation to 100% clean energy ASAP a certain eventuality? On a long enough timescale, it would be irrational for utilities to not choose both lower cost and more sustainable environmental impact ('price-rational', 'environment-rational').
We should expect storage and generation costs to continue to fall as we realize even just the current pipeline of capitalizable [storage] research.
Solar energy is free.
Solar Just Hit a Record Low Price in the U.S
Relevant bits:
> “On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”
> There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”
(emphasis mine)
>> Relevant bits:
>> “On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”
>> There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”
I'm assuming that's without factoring in the health cost externalities.
Yes, this is solely for cost of power. The healthcare savings and quality of life improvements are an additional bonus on top of very cheap power.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/air-pollution-triggering... (Air pollution is triggering diabetes in 3.2 million people each year)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-... (The Other Reason to Shift away from Coal: Air Pollution That Kills Thousands Every Year)
Causal Inference Book
Causal inference (Causal reasoning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_reasoning )
Tim Berners-Lee is working a platform designed to re-decentralize the web
Does anyone have some links on Solid that aren't media articles? I can't find anything, not even in Tim's homepage.
Home page: https://solid.mit.edu/
Spec: https://github.com/solid/solid-spec
Source: https://github.com/solid/solid
...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679 ( https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679 )
> ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).
> Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.
Mastodon has now supplanted GNU StatusNet.
More States Opting to 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays by Computer
edX can automate short essay grading with edx/edx-ora2 "Open Response Assessment Suite" [1] and edx/ease "Enhanced AI scoring engine" [2].
1: https://github.com/edx/edx-ora2 2: https://github.com/edx/ease
... I believe there's also a tool for peer feedback.
Peer feedback/grading on MOOCs is pretty bad in my experience. There’s too much diversity of skills, language ability, etc. And too many people who bring their own biases and mostly ignore any grading instructions.
Peer discussion and feedback are useful in things like college classes. Much less so with MOOCs.
Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course
I want to build an online course on graph algorithms for my university. I've tried to find a solution which would let submit, execute and test student's code (implement an online judge), but have had no success. There are a lot of complex LMS and none of them seem to have this feature as a basic functionality.
Are there any good out-of-box solutions? I'm sure I can build a course using Moodle or another popular LMS with some plugin, but I don't want to spend my time customizing things.
I'm interested both in platforms and self-hosted solutions. Thanks!
Maybe look at Jupyter Notebook? It does much of this out of the box, but may not be exactly what you are looking for.
nbgrader is a "A system for assigning and grading Jupyter notebooks." https://github.com/jupyter/nbgrader
jupyter-edx-grader-xblock https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-grader-xblock
> Auto-grade a student assignment created as a Jupyter notebook, using the nbgrader Jupyter extension, and write the score in the Open edX gradebook
... networkx is a graph library written in Python which has pretty good docs: https://networkx.github.io/documentation/stable/reference/
There are a few books which feature networkx.
There is now a backprop principle for deep learning on quantum computers
"A Universal Training Algorithm for Quantum Deep Learning" https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1806.09729/
New research a ‘breakthrough for large-scale discrete optimization’
Looks like it may be this paper:
"An Exponential Speedup in Parallel Running Time for Submodular Maximization without Loss in Approximation" https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1804.06355/
The ACM STOC 2018 conference links to "The Adaptive Complexity of Maximizing a Submodular Function" http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N651970 https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ericbalkanski/files/the-ad...
A DOI URI would be great, thanks.
Wind, solar farms produce 10% of US power in the first four months of 2018
Take note: 10% PRODUCED, not 10% CONSUMED.
This is counting all output by wind and solar regardless if it is needed and usable when the power is being produced. This is quite important because wind and solar are not on-demand sources of power.
> This is counting all output by wind and solar regardless if it is needed and usable when the power is being produced. This is quite important because wind and solar are not on-demand sources of power.
I think you have that backwards: in the US, we lack the ability to scale down coal and nuclear plants. Solar and Wind are generally the first to get pulled offline when generated capacity exceeds demand and storage.
TIL this is called "curtailment" and it's an argument that utilities have used to justify not spending on renewables that are saving the environment from global warming (which is going to require more electricity for air conditioning).
Solar energy production peaks around noon. Demand for electricity peaks in the evening. We need storage (batteries with supercapacitors out front) in order to store the difference between peak generation and peak use. Because they're unable to store this extra energy, they temporarily shut down solar and wind and leave the polluting plants online.
Consumers aren't exposed to daily price fluctuations: they get a flat rate that makes it easy to check their bill; so there's no price incentive to e.g. charge an EV at midday when energy is cheapest.
The 'Duck curve' shows this relation between peak supply and demand in electricity markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
Developing energy storage capabilities (through infrastructure and open access basic research that can be capitalized by all) is likely the best solution. According to a fairly recent report, we could go 100% renewable with the energy storage tech that exists today.
But there's no money for it. There's money for subsidizing oil production (regardless of harms (!)), but not so much for wind and solar. There's money for responding to natural disasters caused by global warming, but not so much for non-carbon-based energy sources that don't cause global warming. A film called "The Burden: Fossil Fuel, the Military, and National Security" quotes the actual unsubsidized price of a gallon of gasoline.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of computer workload that could be run whenever energy is cheapest ( 'energy spot instances') so that we can accelerate our migration to renewable energy sources that are saving the environment for future generations? If there were people who had strong incentives to create demand for power-efficient chips and inexpensive clean energy.
Where would be if we had continued with Jimmy Carter's solar panels on the roof of the White House (instead of constant war and meddling with competing oil production regions of the world)?
It's good to see wind and solar growing this fast this year. A chart with cost per kWhr or MWhr would be enlightening.
FDA approves first marijuana-derived drug and it may spark DEA rescheduling
Perhaps someone from the US could help me understand the federal vs state legality of cannabis in the USA?
Can a state override any federal law?
Could federal-level law enforcement theoretically charge someone in a cannabis-legal state for drug offenses?
states cannot override any federal law.
the federal government merely tolerates the semi-autonomous nature of states in order to maintain order. but the legality of the federal government's supremacy is well evolved, its power and might is extremely disproportionally higher than any collective of states, and at this point the semi-autonomous nature of states is pure fiction as the federal government can assume jurisdiction over any intra-state matter if it wanted to through its interstate commerce laws.
yes, federal level law enforcement can theoretically charge someone in a cannabis-legal state for drug offenses. this still happens. the discretion of the words of the President, the heads of the DEA and DOJ prevent the MAJORITY of it from happening and also guide the discretion of the courts and public sympathy. so right now, for the last two administrations it has not been a priority to upset the social order in cannabis-legal states. but it can still happen.
> states cannot override any federal law.
Not actually true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_(U.S._Constituti...
> not actually true
a concept which requires agreement from the federal courts themselves, who have never upheld a single argument related to this concept.
not actually what?
Selective incorporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
10th Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
> The Tenth Amendment, which makes explicit the idea that the federal government is limited to only the powers granted in the Constitution, has been declared to be a truism by the Supreme Court.
Supremacy clause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause
> The Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties made under its authority, constitute the supreme law of the land.[1] It provides that state courts are bound by the supreme law; in case of conflict between federal and state law, the federal law must be applied. Even state constitutions are subordinate to federal law.[2] In essence, it is a conflict-of-laws rule specifying that certain federal acts take priority over any state acts that conflict with federal law
Natural rights ('inalienable rights': Equal rights, Life, Liberty, pursuit of Happiness): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights
9th Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
> The Ninth Amendment (Amendment IX) to the United States Constitution addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. It is part of the Bill of Rights.
If the 9th Amendment recognizes any unenumerated rights of the people (with Supremacy, regardless of selective incorporation), it certainly recognizes those of the Declaration of Independence ((secession from the king ('CSA')), Equality, Life, Liberty, pursuit of Happiness), our non-binding charter which frames the entirety of the Constitutional convention
All of these things have been interpreted by the courts and their conclusion was not like yours
It is nice that you are interested in these things, but they simply cannot be read verbatim and then extrapolated to other things.
This isn't educational for anybody, this is a view that lacks all consensus and all avenues to ever garner consensus in this country.
Again, I ask you to explain how the current law grants equal rights.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401906
> We tend to have issues with Equal rights/protections: slavery, voting rights, [school] segregation. Please help us understand how to do this Equally:
>> Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights.
Abolitionists faced similar criticism from on high.
States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules
I have a hunch that this will, in the end, be a massive win for large retailers vs. small ones. The task of figuring out how to calculate tax for all states is more or less the same amount of work regardless of size, which means for someone like Amazon it's more or less trivial, but for a mom-and-pop store it's a major hassle.
Thankfully with Shopify it is extremely easy and straightforward to manage for my wife's small online store. Their platform does a great job properly charging taxes by state, county and city in certain situations. Then using an inexpensive plan from https://www.taxjar.com/ the entire filing and paying process is 100% automated.
In 10 minutes I was able to file and pay all the sales taxes to several state, dozens of California counties and a handful of cities that charge additional taxes on top.
So you assume. As a small business you are unlikely to be audited, but that software could easily be wrong creating a huge minefield and potential liability.
So that would be the software companies' liability. And such business practice can differentiate good ones from the bad ones. I'm seeing a new business market here even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
There is zero economic gain from more complex tax rules. Further, the software does not absolve you of liability. At best they may agree to cover it, but that's unlikely and they can also go broke if they get it wrong.
Actually, current sales tax software provided by South Dakota and other states does absolve a merchant for liability if used to calculate sales tax due.
I agree with this approach!
Actually, the federal government should oblige each member state to provide the algorithm, and sign it cryptographically and have it expire every X fixed time interval, and have signed algorithms for the current and next time interval, so that software can automatically fetch and stay up to date.
Then the "business opportunity" of navigating FUD evaporates. Currently any such enterprise charging for such a service can spend a fraction of their budget lobbying against harmonization...
Since it would be an obligation of the states to the federal government, these algorithms (provided by each member state) should be hosted on a fixed federal government site.
Time to start a petition?
This would reduce costs of tax collection for all parties.
What is the most convenient format for this layered geographic data? Are the tax district boundary polygons already otherwise available as open data? What do localities call these? Sales tax tables, sales tax database, machine-readable flat files in an open format with a common schema?
How much tax revenue should it cost to provide such a service on a national level?
States, Counties, Cities, 'Tax Zones'(?) could be required to host tax.state.us.gov or similar with something like Project Open Data JSONLD /data.json that could be aggregated and shared by a server with a URL registry, a task queue service, and a CDN service.
While the Bitcoin tax payments bill passed the Senate and House in Arizona, it was vetoed in May 2018. Seminole County in Florida now allows tax payment with crytocurrencies such as Bitcoin:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-seminole-county-florida-to...
> According to a press release, the county will begin accepting Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to pay for services, including property taxes, driver license and ID card fees, as well as tags and titles. The Seminole County Tax Collector will reportedly employ blockchain payments company BitPay, which will allow the county to receive settlement the next business day directly to its bank account in US dollars.
This could also help reduce the costs of tax collection and possibly increase the likelihood of compliance with the forthcoming tax bills!
these are all very good questions, and only a community discussion of people with the right skills and interests can draft a petition, if enough people contribute to the discussion we can make the proposal more reasonable and robust against valid criticisms... but I believe we can make this happen by just starting the discussion. We can bitch on Hacker News, or we can draft a proposal for the different government levels. The more reasonable we draft it, the higher the probability the petition will be a success. I think it wouldn't be hard to argue against this proposal that a legally enforced computation should be open source, i.e. not just the algorithm for the computation but also all the data lists and boundary polygons used in the algorithm...
Ask HN: Do you consider yourself to be a good programmer?
if not, why? how do you validate your achievements?
> For identifying strengths and weaknesses: "Programmer Competency Matrix":
> - http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
> - https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/
> - https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
Don’t read too much into that. TDD for example is not leveling up it’s an opinionated approach to development.
Automated testing is not a choice in many industries.
If you're not familiar with TDD, you haven't yet achieved that level of mastery.
There's a productivity boost to being able to change quickly without breaking things.
Is all unit/functional/integration testing and continuous integrating TDD? Is it still TDD if you write the tests after you write the function (and before you commit/merge)?
I think this competency matrix is a helpful resource. And I think that learning TDD is an important thing for a good programmer.
There is absolutely no need to follow TDD to be good at testing.
This is all unfounded conjecture: it seems easier to remember which parameter combinations may exist and need to be tested when writing the function; so "let's all write tests later" becomes a black box exercise which is indeed a helpful perspective for review, but isn't the most effective use of resources.
IMHO being convinced that there's only one true and correct methodology (TDD, Scrum, etc.) or paradigm (functional, objective, reactive programming, etc.) is a sign of being a bad programmer.
A good programmer finds common attributes and behaviors and organizes them into namespaced structs/arrays/objects with functions/methods and tests. Abstractly, which terms should we use to describe hierarchical clusters of things with information and behaviors if not those from a known software development or project management methodology?
And a good programmer asks why people might have spent so much time formalizing project development methodologies. "What sorts of product (team) failures are we dealing with here?" is an expensive question to answer as a team.
By applying tenets of Named agile software development methodologies, teams and managers can feel like they're discussing past and current experiences/successes/failures with comparable implementations of approaches that were or are appropriate for different contexts.
To argue the other side, just cherry picking from different methodologies is creating a new methodology, which requires time to justify basically what we already have terms for on the wall over here.
"We just pop tasks off the queue however" is really convenient for devs but can be kept cohesive by defining sensible queues: [kanban] board columns can indicate task/issue/card states and primacy, [sprint] milestone planning meetings can yield complexity 'points' estimates for completable tasks and their subtasks. With team velocity (points/time), a manager can try to appropriately schedule optimal paths of tasks (that meet the SMART criteria (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and Time-bound)); instead of fretting with the team over adjusting dates on a Gantt chart (task dependency graph) deadline, the team can
What about your testing approach makes it 'NOT TDD'?
How long should the pre-release static analysis and dynamic analyses take in my fancy DevOps CI TDD with optional CD? Can we release or deploy right now? Why or why not?
'We can't release today because we spent too much time arguing about quotes like "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." ("Self Reliance" 1841. Emerson) and we didn't spec out the roof trusses ahead of time because we're continually developing a new meeting format, so we didn't get to that, or testing the new thing, yet.'
A good programmer can answer the three questions in a regular meeting at any time, really:
> 1. What have you completed since the last meeting?
> 2. What do you plan to complete by the next meeting?
> 3. What is getting in your way?
And:
Can we justify refactoring right now for greater efficiency or additional functionality?
The simple solution there is to simply not use specific parameters (outside ovious edge-cases, ie supplying -1 and 2^63 into your memory allocator). Writing a simple reproducible fuzzer is easy for most contained functions.
I find blackbox testing itself also fairly useful. The part where you forget which parameter combinations may occur can be useful since you now A) rely on documentation you made and B) can write your test independent of how you implemented it just like if you had written it beforehand. (Just don't forget to avoid falling into the 'write test to pass function' trap)
IMHO, it's so much easier to write good, comprehensive tests while writing the function (FUT: function under test) because that information is already in working memory.
It's also easier to adversarially write tests with a fresh perspective.
I shouldn't need to fuzz every parameter for every commit. Certainly for releases.
"Building an AppSec Pipeline: Keeping your program, and your life, sane" https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_AppSec_Pipeline
I mean, I general don't think you should write fuzzers for absolutely everything (most contained functions => doesn't touch a lot of other stuff and few parameters with a known parameter space)
The general solution is to use whatever testing methodology you are comfortable, that is very effective, very efficient and covers a lot of problem space. Of course no testing method does that so you'll have to constantly balance whatever works best (which is why I think pure TDD is overrated)
> Is all unit/functional/integration testing and continuous integrating TDD?
No. They differentiate in the matrix.
> If you're not familiar with TDD, you haven't yet achieved that level of mastery.
That's not true - I've worked on teams with far lower defect rates than the typical TDD team.
TDD can help keep a developer focused - and this can help overall productivity rates - but it doesn't directly help lower defect rates.
> TDD can help keep a developer focused - and this can help overall productivity rates - but it doesn't directly help lower defect rates.
We would need to reference some data with statistical power; though randomization and control are infeasible: no two teams are the same, no two projects are the same, no two objective evaluations of different apps' teams' defect rates are an apples to apples comparison.
Maybe it's the coverage expectation: do not add code that is not run by at least one test.
Handles are the better pointers
A few years ago I wanted to make a shoot-em-up game using C# and XNA I could play with my kids on an Xbox. It worked fine except for slight pauses for GC every once in a while which ruined the experience.
The best solution I found was to get rid of objects and allocation entirely and instead store the state of the game in per-type tables like in this article.
Then I realized that I didn't need per-type tables at all, and if I used what amounted to a union of all types I could store all the game state in a single table, excluding graphical data and textures.
Next I realized that since most objects had properties like position and velocity, I could update those with a single method by iterating through the table.
That led to each "object" being a collection of various properties acted on by independent methods which were things like gravity and collision detection. I could specify that a particular game entity was subject to gravity or not, etc.
The resulting performance was fantastic and I found I could have many thousands of on-screen objects at the time with no hiccups. The design also made it really easy to save and replay game state; just save or serialize the single state table and input for each frame.
The final optimization would have been to write a language that would define game entities in terms of the game components they were subject to and automatically generate the single class that was union of all possible types and would be a "row" in the table. I didn't get around to that because it just wasn't necessary for the simple game I made.
I was inspired to do this from various articles about "component based game design" published at the time that were variations on this technique, and the common thread was that a hierarchical OO structure ended up adding a lot of unneeded complexity for games that hindered flexibility as requirements changed or different behaviors for in-game entities were added.
Edit: This is a good article on the approach. http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy...
> The final optimization would have been to write a language that would define game entities in terms of the game components they were subject to and automatically generate the single class that was union of all possible types and would be a "row" in the table
django-typed-models https://github.com/craigds/django-typed-models
> polymorphic django models using automatic type-field downcasting
> The actual type of each object is stored in the database, and when the object is retrieved it is automatically cast to the correct model class
...
> the common thread was that a hierarchical OO structure ended up adding a lot of unneeded complexity for games that hindered flexibility as requirements changed or different behaviors for in-game entities were added.
So, in order to draw a bounding box for an ensemble of hierarchically/tree/graph-linked objects (possibly modified in supersteps for reproducibility), is an array-based adjacency matrix still fastest?
Are sparse arrays any faster for this data architecture?
> django-typed-models https://github.com/craigds/django-typed-models
Interesting, never came across it. But I've got a Django GitHub library (not yet open source, because it's in a project I've been working with on and off) that does the same for managing GitHub's accounts. An Organization and User inherit the same properties and I downcast them based on their polymorphic type field.
ContentType.model_class(), models.Model.meta.abstract=True, django-reversion, django-guardian
IDK how to do partial indexes with the Django ORM? A simple filter(bool, rows) could probably significantly shrink the indexes for such a wide table.
Arrays are fast if the features/dimensions are known at compile time (if the TBox/schema is static). There's probably an intersection between object reference overhead and array copy costs.
Arrow (with e.g. parquet on disk) can help minimize data serialization/deserialization costs and maximize copy-free data interoperability (with columnar arrays that may have different performance characteristics for whole-scene transformation operations than regular arrays).
Many implementations of SQL ALTER TABLE don't have to create a full copy in order to add a column, but do require a permission that probably shouldn't be GRANTed to the application user and so online schema changes are scheduled downtime operations.
If you're not discovering new features at runtime and your access pattern is generally linear, arrays probably are the fastest data structure.
Hacker News also has a type attribute that you might say is used polymorphically: https://github.com/HackerNews/API/blob/master/README.md#item...
Types in RDF are additive: a thing may have zero or more rdf:type property instances. RDF quads can be stored in one SQL table like:
_id,g,s,p,o,xsd:datatype,xml:lang
... with a few compound indexes that are combinations of (s,p,o) so that triple pattern graph queries like (?s,?p,1) are fast. Partial indexes (SQLite, PostgreSQL,) would be faster than full-table indexes for RDF in SQL, too.
Neural scene representation and rendering
This work is a natural progression from a lot of other prior work in the literature... but that doesn't make the results any less impressive. The examples shown are amazingly, unbelievably good! Really GREAT WORK.
Based on a quick skim of the paper, here is my oversimplified description of how this works:
During training, an agent navigates an artificial 3D scene, observing multiple 2D snapshots of the scene, each snapshot from a different vantage point. The agent passes these snapshots to a deep net composed of two main parts: a representation-learning net and a scene-generation net. The representation-learning net takes as input the agent's observations and produces a scene representation (i.e., a lower-dimensional embedding which encodes information about the underlying scene). The scene-generation network then predicts the scene from three inputs: (1) an arbitrary query viewpoint, (2) the scene representation, and (3) stochastic latent variables. The two networks are trained jointly, end-to-end, to maximize the likelihood of generating the ground-truth image that would be observed from the query viewpoint. See Figure 1 on Page 15 of the Open Access version of the paper. Obviously I'm playing loose with language and leaving out numerous important details, but this is essentially how training works, as I understand it based on a first skim.
EDIT: I replaced "somewhat obvious" with "natural," which better conveys what I actually meant to write the first time around.
I, literally just 15 minutes ago, had a chat with a friend of mine exactly about how what we are doing right now with computer vision is all based on a flawed premise (supervised 2D training set). The human brain works in 3D space (or 3D+time) and then projects all this knowledge in a 2D image.
Here I was, thinking I finally had thought of a nice PhD project and then Deepmind comes along and gets the scoop! Haha.
"Spatial memory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_memory
It may be splitting hairs, but I think the mammalian brain, at least, can simulate/remember/imagine additional 'dimensions' like X/Y/Z spin, derivatives of velocity like acceleration/jerk/jounce.
Is space 11 dimensional (M string theory) or 2 dimensional (holographic principle)? What 'dimensions' does the human brain process? Is this capacity innate or learned; should we expect pilots and astronauts to have learned to more intuitively cognitively simulate gravity with their minds?
New US Solar Record – 2.155 Cents per KWh
"Cost of electricity by source" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
"Electricity pricing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
> United States 8 to 17 ; 37[c] 43[c] [cents USD/kWh]
Ask HN: Is there a taxonomy of machine learning types?
Besides classification and regression, and the unsupervised methods for principle components, clustering and frequent item-sets, what tools are there in the ML toolkit and what kinds of problems are amenable to their use?
Outline of Machine Learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_machine_learning
Machine learning # Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning#Applications
"machine learning map" image search: https://www.google.com/search?q=machine+learning+map&tbm=isc...
Senator requests better https compliance at US Department of Defense [pdf]
The "Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator" has a checkbox for 'HSTS enabled?' and can generate SSL/TLS configs for Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, HAProxy, AWS, ELB. https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generat...
You can select 'nginx', then 'modern', and then 'apache' for a modern Apache configuration.
Are the 'modern' configs FIPS compliant?
What browsers/tools does requiring TLS 1.3 break?
Banks Adopt Military-Style Tactics to Fight Cybercrime
> In a windowless bunker here, a wall of monitors tracked incoming attacks — 267,322 in the last 24 hours, according to one hovering dial, or about three every second — as a dozen analysts stared at screens filled with snippets of computer code.
> Cybercrime is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most lucrative industries. At least $445 billion was lost last year, up around 30 percent from just three years earlier, a global economic study found, and the Treasury Department recently designated cyberattacks as one of the greatest risks to the American financial sector.
Is this type of monitoring possible (necessary, even) with blockchains? Blockchains generally silently disregard bad/invalid transactions. Where could discarded/disregarded transactions and forks be reported to in a decentralized blockchain system? Who would pay for log storage? How redundantly replicated should which data be?
How DDOS resistant are centralized and decentralized blockchains?
Exchanges have risk. In terms of credit fraud: some crypto asset exchanges do allow margin trading, many credit card companies either refuse transactions with known exchanges or charge cash advance interest rates, and all transactions are final.
Exchanges hold private keys for customers' accounts, move a lot to offline cold storage, and maybe don't do a great job of explaining that YOU SHOULD NOT LEAVE MONEY ON AN EXCHANGE. One should transfer funds to a different account; such as a hardware or paper wallet or a custody service.
Do/can crypto asset exchanges participate in these exercises? To what extent do/can blockchains help solve for aspects of our unfortunately growing cybercrime losses?
Premined blockchains could reportedly handle card/chip/PIN transaction volumes today.
No, Section 230 Does Not Require Platforms to Be “Neutral”
> It’s foolish to suggest that web platforms should lose their Section 230 protections for failing to align their moderation policies to an imaginary standard of political neutrality. Trying to legislate such a “neutrality” requirement for online platforms—besides being unworkable—would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Ask HN: Do battery costs justify “buy all sell all” over “net metering”?
Are batteries the primary justification for "buy all sell all" over "net metering"?
Are next-gen supercapacitors the solution?
> Ask HN: Do battery costs justify "buy all sell all" over "net metering"?
> Are batteries the primary justification for "buy all sell all" over "net metering"?
> Are next-gen supercapacitors the solution?
With "Net Metering", electric utilities buy consumers' excess generated energy at retail or wholesale rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering
With "Buy All, Sell All", electric utilities require consumers to sell all of the energy they generate from e.g. solar panels (usually at wholesale prices, AFAIU) and buy all of the energy they consume at retail rates. They can't place the meter after any local batteries.
Do I have this right?
Net metering:
(used-generated) x (retail || wholesale)
Buy all, sell all:
(used x retail) - (generated x wholesale)
For the energy generating consumer, net metering is a better deal: they have power when the grid is down, and they keep or earn more for the energy generation capability they choose to invest in.
Break-even on solar panels happens sooner with net metering.
Utilities argue that: maintaining grid storage and transfer costs money, which justifies paying energy generating consumers less than they pay for more constant sources of energy like dams, wind farms, and commercial solar plants.
Building a two-way power transfer grid costs money. Batteries require replacement after a limited number of cycles. Spiky or bursting power generation is not good for batteries because they don't get a full cycle. [Hemp] supercapacitors can smooth out that load and handle many more partial charge and discharge cycles.
Is energy storage the primary justifying cost driver for "buy all, sell all"?
What investments are needed in order to more strongly incentivize clean energy generation? Do we need low cost supercapacitors to handle the spiky load?
Are these utilities granted a monopoly? Are they price fixing?
Energy demand from blockchain mining has not managed to keep demand constant so that utilities have profit to invest in clean energy generation and a two-way smart grid that accommodates spiky consumer energy generation. Demand for electricity is falling as we become less wasteful and more energy efficient. As the cost of renewable energy continues to fall (and become less expensive than nonrenewables), there should be more margin for energy utilities which cost-rationally and environmentally-rationally choose to buy renewable energy and sell it to consumers.
Please correct me with the appropriate terminology.
How can we more strongly incentivize consumer solar panel investments?
Here's a discussion about the lower costs of hemp supercapacitors as compared with graphene super capacitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16800693
""" Hemp supercapacitors might be a good solution to the energy grid storage problem. Hemp absorbs carbon, doesn't leave unplowable roots in the fields, returns up to 70% of nutrients to the soil, and grows quickly just about anywhere. Hemp bast fiber is normally waste. Hemp anodes for supercapacitors are made from the bast fiber that is normally waste.
Graphene is very useful; but industrial production of graphene is dangerous because lungs and blood-brain barrier.
Hemp is an alternative to graphene for modern supercapacitors (which now have much greater [energy density] in wH/kg)
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp...
> “Our device’s electrochemical performance is on par with or better than graphene-based devices,” Mitlin says. “The key advantage is that our electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.”
> Graphene is, however, expensive to manufacture, costing as much as $2,000 per gram. [...] developed a process for converting fibrous hemp waste into a unique graphene-like nanomaterial that outperforms graphene. What’s more, it can be manufactured for less than $500 per ton.
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=hemp+supercapacit....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
I feel like a broken record mentioning this again and again. ""'
Portugal electricity generation temporarily reaches 100% renewable
Currently we are passing through an atypical wind and rain period. Our dams are full and pouring out water as we are producing more energy than we consume.
Despite all of this energy prices don't drop as they are bound to one of the few legal monopolies in Europe: the grid operation cartel (REN in the article, there is only one allowed for each EU country).
Also this feels as fake news since we have a few very old (and historically insecure, like sines power plant and carregado power plant) fossil fuel power plants that are still operating with no signs of slowing down while making profits through several scams in chemical engineering their way into the 0 emissions lot.
are batteries (or some sort of storage) in the infrastructure plan for the future?
Hemp supercapacitors might be a good solution to the energy grid storage problem. Hemp absorbs carbon, doesn't leave unplowable roots in the fields, returns up to 70% of nutrients to the soil, and grows quickly just about anywhere.
Hemp bast fiber is normally waste. Hemp anodes for supercapacitors are made from the bast fiber that is normally waste.
Graphene is very useful; but industrial production of graphene is dangerous because lungs and blood-brain barrier.
Hemp is an alternative to graphene for modern supercapacitors (which now have much greater power density in wH/kg)
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp...
> “Our device’s electrochemical performance is on par with or better than graphene-based devices,” Mitlin says. “The key advantage is that our electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.”
> Graphene is, however, expensive to manufacture, costing as much as $2,000 per gram. [...] developed a process for converting fibrous hemp waste into a unique graphene-like nanomaterial that outperforms graphene. What’s more, it can be manufactured for less than $500 per ton.
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=hemp+supercapacit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
I feel like a broken record mentioning this again and again.
If you're going to be mentioning this again in the future please correct your usage of power/energy density. Power density is measured in W/kg, energy density is measured in Wh/kg. Supercapacitors tend to excel in the former but be poor in the latter. You mentioned power density but used units for energy density. This happens so often in media that I feel the need to correct it even in a comment.
> please correct your usage of power/energy density. Power density is measured in W/kg, energy density is measured in Wh/kg. Supercapacitors tend to excel in the former but be poor in the latter.
I'd update the units; good call. You may have that confused? Traditional supercapacitors have had lower power density and faster charging/discharging. Graphene and hemp somewhat change the game, AFAIU.
It makes sense to put supercapacitors in front of the battery banks because they last so many cycles and because they charge and discharge so quickly (a very helpful capability for handling spiky wind and solar loads).
I think you may still be a little confused. Power density is the rate at which energy can be added to or drawn from the the cell per unit mass. So faster charging and discharging means high power density. Energy density is the total amount of energy that can be stored per unit mass. Supercapacitors are typically higher in power density and lower in energy density than batteries[1].
You're right that it makes sense to put supercapacitors in front of the battery banks for the reasons you said.
[1] http://berc.berkeley.edu/storage-wars-batteries-vs-supercapa...
I must have logically assumed that rate of charge and discharge include time (hours) in the unit: Wh/kg.
My understanding is that there's usually a curve over time t that represents the charging rate from empty through full.
[edit]
"C rate"
Battery_(electricity)#C_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(electricity)#C_rate
Battery_charger#C-rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rates
> Charge and discharge rates are often denoted as C or C-rate, which is a measure of the rate at which a battery is charged or discharged relative to its capacity. As such the C-rate is defined as the charge or discharge current divided by the battery's capacity to store an electrical charge. While rarely stated explicitly, the unit of the C-rate is [h^−1], equivalent to stating the battery's capacity to store an electrical charge in unit hour times current in the same unit as the charge or discharge current.
It does sound amazing and economical, like almost too good to be true, but I very much hope it is true. What are the downsides? Is there a degradation problem or something similar? Other than the stoner connection in people's minds, what kind of resistance is there to this? Why isn't it widely known?
You know, I'm not sure. This article is from a few years ago now and there's not much uptake.
It may be that most people dismiss supercapacitors based on the stats for legacy (pre-graphene/pre-hemp) supercapacitors: large but quick and long-lasting.
It may be that hemp is taxed at up to 90% because it's a controlled substance in the US (but not in Europe, Canada, or China; where we must import shelled hemp seeds from). A historical accident?
GPU Prices Drop ~25% in March as Supply Normalizes
How do these new GPUs compare to those from 10 years ago in terms of FLOPs per Watt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
The new ASICs for Ethereum mining can't be solely responsible for this percent of the market.
(Note that NVIDIA's stock price is up over 1700% over the past 10 years. And that Bitcoin mining on CPUs and GPUs hasn't been profitable for quite awhile. In 2007, I don't think we knew that hashing could be done on GPUs; though there were SSL accelerator cards that were mighty expensive)
Apple says it’s now powered by renewable energy worldwide
As this article [1] explains, Apple does not (and cannot) actually run on 100% renewable energy globally, as any of its stores/premises/facilities that are connected to local municipal power grids will use whatever power generation method is used on that grid, and that is still likely to be fossil fuel in most locations.
But they purchase Renewable Energy Certificates to offset their use of non-renewable energy, so they can make the claim that their net consumption of non-renewable electricity is negative.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/9/17216656/apple-renewable-e...
This is weird. So if I run a wind farm that generates 1 MW(...h? why is this an energy unit and not power? but whatever...) and I use all of that electricity myself, I can also sell 1 REC to someone else so that they claim they run on green electricity. Which means that now either (a) I have to legally claim I run on dirty electricity (which is a lie on its face and make no sense???) or (b) we both claim we run on green power, double-dipping and screwing up the accounting of greenness.
Am I misunderstanding something? How does this work?
No that's how it works. That's also the reason why Norway, despite only using hydro, has only 40-50% renewable energy in some statistics. They sell green energy certificates to consumers abroad (e.g. in Germany). Officially, Norwegians then use coal power whereas in reality it's all hydro power. There isn't even enough transmission capacity to the south to get that kind of exchange physically.
Wow! And I just realized there seems to be another loophole: that means (say) a company like Apple could start a separate power company in Norway based on hydro power, have that company completely waste 100% of the energy it produce there, and yet "buy" the equivalent REC in another jurisdiction where they run on coal and suddenly get to 100% "green" power... potentially even making more money in tax credits, if there are any, all while consuming more and more dirty power without actually helping anybody shift to renewable energy. Right?
I think it comes down to giving them credit for funding the construction of massive clean energy projects, even if they don't exclusively use the electricity from that project themselves.
Look at Microsoft. They just funded a deal to build out an absolutely massive solar farm in Virginia.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/03/21/new-sol...
They do have facilities in state that will only need a fraction of that power to be 100% green, and the excess will be pumped into the local Virginia power grid and used by consumers there.
Basically, Microsoft is saying that they funded the project to generate excess green energy in one place to offset the dirty energy they consume in areas where there is no local green power option available.
100% renewable energy by purchasing and funding renewable energy is an outstanding acheivement.
Is there another statistic for measuring how many KWhr or MWhr are sourced directly from renewable energy sources (or, more logically, 'directly' from batteries + hemp supercapacitors between use and generation)?
Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts.
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
There's an open call for papers/proposals for handling the deluge. "Funding will be provided as an unrestricted gift to the proposer's organization(s)" ... "Twitter Health Metrics Proposal Submission" https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org
Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?
It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon.
There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce.
Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues.
It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.
Mastodon is a federated system like StatusNet/GNU Social.
So, in your opinion, Mastodon nodes - by virtue of being federated - would be better equipped to handle the spam and harassment volume that Twitter is subject to?
I find that hard to believe.
ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).
Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.
“We’re committing Twitter to increase the health and civility of conversation”
First Amendment protections apply to suits brought by the government. Civil suits are required to prove damages ("quantum of loss").
There are many open platforms. (I've contributed to those as well). Some are built on open standards. None of said open platforms have procedures or resources for handling the onslaught of disrespectful trash that the people we've raised eventually use these platforms for communicating at other people who have feelings and understand the Golden Rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
The initial early adopters (who have other better things to do) are fine: helpful, caring, critical, respectful; healthy. And then everyone else comes surging in with hate, disrespect, and vitriol; unhealthy. They don't even realize that being hateful and disrespectful is making them more depressed. They think that complaining and talking smack to people is changing the world. And then they turn off the phone or log out of the computer, and carry on with their lives.
No-one taught them to be the positive, helpful energy they want to attract from the world. No-one properly conditioned them to either respectfully disagree according to the data or sit down and listen. No-one explained to them that a well-founded argument doesn't fit in 140 or 280 characters, but a link and a headline do. No-one explained to them that what they write on the internet lasts forever and will be found by their future interviewers, investors, jurors, and voters. No-one taught them that being respectful and helpful in service of other people - of the group's success, of peaceful coexistence - is the way to get ahead AND be happy. "No-one told me that."
Shareholders of public corporations want to see growth in meaningless numbers, foreign authoritarian governments see free expression as a threat to their ever-so-fragile self-perceptions, political groups seek to frame and smear and malign and discredit (because they are so in need of group acceptance; because money still isn't making them happy), and there are children with too much free time reading all of these.
No-one is holding these people accountable: we need transparency and accountability. We need to focus on more important goals and feel good about helping; about volunteering our time to help others be happier.
Instead, now that these haters and scam artists have all self-identified, we must spend our time conditioning their communications until they learn to respectfully disagree on facts and data or go somewhere else. "That's how you feel? Great. How does that make your victim feel?" is the confrontation that some people are seeking from companies that set out to serve free speech and provide a forum for citizens to share the actual news.
Who's going to pay for that? Can they sue for their costs and losses? Advertisers do not want a spot next to hateful and disrespectful.
"How dare you speak of censorship in such veiled terms!?" Really? They're talking about taking down phrases like "kill" and "should die"; not phrases like "I disagree because:"
So, now, because there are so many hateful economically disadvantaged people in the world with nothing better to do and no idea how to run a business or keep a job with benefits, these companies need to staff 24 hour a day censors to take down the hate and terror and gang recruiting within one hour. What a distorted mirror of our divisively fractured wealth inequality, indeed.
"Ban gangs ASAP, please: they'll just go away"
How much does it cost to pay prison labor to redundantly respond to this trash? Are those the skills they need to choose a different career with benefits and savings that meet or exceed inflation when they get out?
What is the procedure for referring threats of violence to justice in your jurisdiction? Are there wealthy individuals in your community who would love to contribute resources to this effort? Maybe they have some region-specific pointers for helping the have-nots out here trolling like it's going to get them somewhere they want to be in life?
Let me share a little story with you:
A person walks into a bar/restaurant, flicks off the bartender/waiter, orders 5 glasses of free water, starts plastering ads to the walls and other peoples' tables, starts making threats to groups of people cordially conversing, and walks out.
Gitflow – Animated in React
Thanks! A command log would be really helpful too.
The HubFlow docs contain GitFlow docs and some really helpful diagrams: https://datasift.github.io/gitflow/IntroducingGitFlow.html
I change the release prefix to 'v' so that the git tags for the release look like 'v0.0.1' and 'v0.1.0':
git config --replace-all gitflow.prefix.versiontag v
git config --replace-all hubflow.prefix.versiontag v
Sure.. will add the command log
Ask HN: How feasible is it to become proficient in several disciplines?
For example to become a professional in:
- back-end api development
- DevOps
- Data Engineer (big data, data science, ML, etc)
It is feasible, though as with any type of specialization, you're then a "jack of all trades, master of none". Maybe a title like "Full Stack Data Engineer" would be descriptive.
You could write an OAuth API for accepting and performing analysis of datasets (model fitting / parameter estimation; classification or prediction), write a test suite, write Kubernetes YAML for a load-balanced geodistributed dev/test/prod architecture, and continuously deploy said application (from branch merges, optionally with a manual confirmation step; e.g. with GitLab CI) and still not be an actual Data Engineer.
After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat
Cryptocurrency mining is about to consume more electricity than home usage in Iceland.[1] I assume it's similar in other places that have cheaper electricity.
Seems that power companies should encourage consumers to mine Bitcoin. Problem solved.
[1] https://qz.com/1204840/iceland-will-use-more-electricity-min...
> Seems that power companies should encourage consumers to mine Bitcoin. Problem solved.
Blockchains will likely continue to generate considerable demand for electricity for the foreseeable future.
Blockchain firms can locate where energy is cheapest. Currently that's in countries where energy prices go negative due to excess capacity and insufficient energy storage resources (batteries, [hemp/graphene] supercapacitors, water towers).
With continued demand, energy companies can continue to invest in new clean energy generation alternatives.
Unfortunately, in the current administration's proposed budget, funding for ARPA-E is cancelled and allocated to clean coal; which Canada, France, and the UK are committed to phasing out entirely by ~2030.
A framework for evaluating data scientist competency
Something HTML with local state like "Programmer Competency Matrix" would be great.
http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
Levi Strauss to use lasers instead of people to finish jeans
Chaos Engineering: the history, principles, and practice
awesome-chaos-engineering lists a bunch of chaos engineering resources and tools such as Gremlin: https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-chaos-engineering
Scientists use an atomic clock to measure the height of a mountain
Quantum_clock#More_accurate_experimental_clocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_clock#More_accurate_ex...
> In 2015 JILA evaluated the absolute frequency uncertainty of their latest strontium-87 optical lattice clock at 2.1 × 10−18, which corresponds to a measurable gravitational time dilation for an elevation change of 2 cm (0.79 in) on planet Earth that according to JILA/NIST Fellow Jun Ye is "getting really close to being useful for relativistic geodesy".
AFAIU, this type of geodesy isn't possible with 'normal' time structs. Are nanoseconds enough?
"[Python-Dev] PEP 564: Add new time functions with nanosecond resolution" https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-October/14...
The thread you linked makes a good point: there isn't really any reason to care about the actual time, only the relative time. These sorts of clocks just use 256- or 512-bit counters; it's not like they're having overflow issues.
Resources to learn project management best practices?
My side project is beginning to attract interest from a few people who would like to hop on board. At this point I am just doing what feels familiar and sensible, but the project manager perspective is new to me. Are there any sort of articles/books/podcasts/etc that could clue me into how to become better at it?
Project Management: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development... ... #requirements-traceability, #work-breakdown-structure (Mission, Project, Goal/Objective #n; Issue #n, - [ ] Task)
"Ask HN: How do you, as a developer, set measurable and actionable goals?" https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-15119635
- Burndown Chart, User Stories
... GitHub and GitLab have milestones and reorderable issue boards. I still like https://waffle.io for complexity points; though you can also just create labels for e.g. complexity (Complexity-5) and priority (Priority-5).
Ask HN: Thoughts on a website-embeddable, credential validating service?
Reading Troy Hunt's password release V2 blog post [0], I came across the NIST recommendation to prevent users from creating accounts with passwords discovered in data breaches. This got me thinking: would a website admin (ex. small business owner with a custom website) benefit from a service that validates user passwords? The idea is to create a registration iframe with forms for email, password, etc., which would check hashed credentials against a database of data from breaches. Additionally, client-side validation would enforce rules recommended by the NIST's Digital Identity Guidelines [1], which would relieve admins from implementing their own rules. I'm sure there are additional security features that can be added.
1. Have you seen a need for this type of service, and could you see this being adopted at all?
2. Do you know of a service like this? I've looked, no hits so far.
3. Does the architecture seem sound?
[0]: https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/
[1]: https://www.nist.gov/itl/tig/projects/special-publication-800-63
blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js: https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js
> A library to enable parsing and verifying a Blockcert. This can be used as a node package or in a browser. The browserified script is available as verifier.js.
https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer
> The cert-issuer project issues blockchain certificates by creating a transaction from the issuing institution to the recipient on the Bitcoin blockchain that includes the hash of the certificate itself.
... We could/should also store X.509 cert hashes in a blockchain.
Exactly what part of such a service would benefit from anything related to a blockchain?
Are you asking me why blockcerts stores certs in a blockchain?
Or whether using certs (really long passwords) is a better option than submitting unhashed passwords on a given datetime to a third-party in order to make sure they're not in the pwned passwords tables?
I was just reading about a company trying to make self-sovereign identity including actual certs (like degrees and such) an accessible and widely applicable/acceptable technology using Ethereum blockchain. I thought it showed some real practicality and promise. I believe it begins with U- forgot the name.Perhaps UPort? Anyhow, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone here about why that might be a bad or good idea. I don't personally have the skill in that tech to know.
Known Traveler Digital Identity system is a "new model for airport screening and security that uses biometrics, cryptography and distributed ledger technologies."
Blockcerts are for academic credentials, AFAIU.
[EDIT]
Existing blockchains have a limited TPS (transactions per second) for writes; but not for reads. Sharding and layer-2 (sidechains) do not have the same assurances. I'm sure we all remember how cryptokitties congested the txpool during the Bitcoin futures launch.
Thank you. I looked into "clear", one of the airport known traveler ID systems. (I'm assuming there are others) It's pretty cool/concerning. Takes ~ 8 min to load a traveler into its system. Thanks for reminding me of TPS---the info on read vs write.
Ask HN: What's the best algorithms and data structures online course?
These aren't courses, but from answers to "Ask HN: Recommended course/website/book to learn data structure and algorithms" :
Data Structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure
Algorithm:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
Big O notation:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation
Big-O Cheatsheet: http://bigocheatsheet.com
Coding Interview University > Data Structures: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university/blob/...
OSSU: Open Source Society University > Core CS > Core Theory > "Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part I" [&2] https://github.com/ossu/computer-science/blob/master/README....
"Algorithms, 4th Edition" (2011; Sedgewick, Wayne): https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/
Complexity Zoo > Petting Zoo (P, NP,): https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Petting_Zoo
While perusing awesome-awesomeness [1], I found awesome-algorithms [2] , algovis [3], and awesome-big-o [4].
[1] https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness
[2] https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms
Using Go as a scripting language in Linux
I, too, didn't realize that shebang parsing is implemented in the `binfmt_script` kernel module.
Does this persist across reboots?
echo ':golang:E::go::/usr/local/bin/gorun:OC' | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/registerNo, but different init systems may autoload formats based on some configuration files. Systemd, for instance: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-bin...
Guidelines for enquiries regarding the regulatory framework for ICOs [pdf]
This is a helpful table indicating whether a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid coin/token: is a security, qualifies under Swiss AML payment law.
The "Minimum information requirements for ICO enquiries" appendix seems like a good set of questions for evaluating ICOs. Are there other good questions to ask when considering whether to invest in a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid ICO?
Are US regulations different from these clear and helpful regulatory guidelines for ICOs in Switzerland?
> Are there other good questions to ask when considering whether to invest in a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid ICO?
This paper doesn seem to cover that, only on how regulators should treat investments.
On investing in ICOs, the questions are the same as any other IPO. And, in most cases, just speculation.
The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
> Read your programming book as normal. When you get to a code sample, read it over
> Then close the book.
> Then try to type it up.
According to a passage in "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" (1791) regarding re-typing from "The Spectator"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_...
Avoiding blackouts with 100% renewable energy
I notice that cases A and C require batteries for storage.
Should there be a separate entry for new gen supercapacitors? Supercapacitors built with both graphene and hemp have different Max Charge Rate (GW), Max Discharge Rate (GW), and Storage (TWh) capacities than even future-extrapolated batteries and current supercapacitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
The cost and capabilities stats in this article look very promising:
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp...
> “Our device’s electrochemical performance is on par with or better than graphene-based devices,” Mitlin says. “The key advantage is that our electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.”
> Graphene is, however, expensive to manufacture, costing as much as $2,000 per gram. [...] developed a process for converting fibrous hemp waste into a unique graphene-like nanomaterial that outperforms graphene. What’s more, it can be manufactured for less than $500 per ton.
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=hemp+supercapacit...
To be clear, supercapacitors are an alternative to li-ion batteries.
"Matching demand with supply at low cost in 139 countries among 20 world regions with 100% intermittent wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) for all purposes" (Renewable Energy, 2018) https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Comb...
Ask HN: What are some common abbreviations you use as a developer?
These are called 'codelabels'. They're great for prefix-tagging commit messages, pull requests, and todo lists:
BLD: build
BUG: bug
CLN: cleanup
DOC: documentation
ENH: enhancement
ETC: config
PRF: performance
REF: refactor
RLS: release
SEC: security
TST: test
UBY: usability
DAT: data
SCH: schema
REQ: requirement
REQ: request
ANN: announcement
STORY: user story
EPIC: grouping of user stories
There's a table of these codelabels here: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development...
Someday TODO FIXME XXX I'll get around to:
- [ ] DOC: create a separate site/organization for codelabels
- [ ] ENH: a tool for creating/renaming GitHub labels with unique foreground and background colors
YAGNI: Ya' ain't gonna need it
LOL, lulz
DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself
KISS: Keep It Super Simple
MVC: Model-View-Controller
MVT: Model-View-Template
MVVM: Model-View-View-Model
UI: User Interface
UX: User Experience
GUI: Graphical User Interface
CLI: Command Line Interface
CAP: Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance
DHT: Distributed Hash Table
ETL: Extract, Transform, and Load
ESB: Enterprise Service Bus
MQ: Message Queue
VM: Virtual Machine
LXC: Linux Containers
[D]VCS, RCS: [Distributed] Version/Revision Control System
XP: Extreme Programming
CI: Continuous Integration
CD: Continuous Deployment
TDD: Test-Driven Development
BDD: Behavior-Driven Development
DFS, BFS: Depth/Breadth First Search
CRM: Customer Relationship Management
CMS: Content Management System
LMS: Learning Management System
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning system
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
HTTP STS: HTTP Strict Transport Security
REST: Representational State Transfer
API: Application Programming Interface
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
DOM: Document Object Model
LD: Linked Data
LOD: Linked Open Data
URI: Uniform Resource Indicator
URN: Uniform Resource Name
URL: Uniform Resource Locator
UUID: Universally Unique Identifier
RDF: Resource Description Format
RDFS: RDF Schema
OWL: Web Ontology Language
JSON-LD: JSON Linked Data
JSON: JavaScript Object Notation
CSVW: CSV on the Web
CSV: Comma Separated Values
CIA: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability
ACL: Access Control List
RBAC: Role-Based Access Control
MAC: Mandatory Access Control
CWE: Common Weakness Enumeration
CVE: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
XSS: Cross-Site Scripting
CSRF: Cross-Site Request Forgery
SQLi: SQL Injection
ORM: Object-Relational Model
AUC: Area Under Curve
ROC: Receiver Operating Characteristic
DL: Description Logic
RL: Reinforcement Learning
CNN: Convolutional Neural Network
DNN: Deep Neural Network
IS: Information Systems
ROI: Return on Investment
RPU: Revenue per User
MAU: Monthly Active Users
DAU: Daily Active Users
STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics/Medicine
STEAM: STEM + Arts
W3C: World-Wide-Web Consortium
GNU: GNU's not Unix
WRDRD: WRD R&D
... The Sphinx ``.. index::`` directive makes it easy to include index entries for acronym forms, too https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/genindex
There Might Be No Way to Live Comfortably Without Also Ruining the Planet
"A good life for all within planetary boundaries" (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4
> Abstract: Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.
> "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet," [...]
> "These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality.
> "Our physical infrastructure and the way we distribute resources are both part of what we call provisioning systems. If all people are to lead a good life within the planet's limits then these provisioning systems need to be fundamentally restructured to allow for basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use."
Perhaps ironically, our developments in service of sustainability (resource efficiency) needs for a civilization on Mars are directly relevant to solving these problems on Earth.
Recycle everything.
Survive without soil, steel, hydrocarbons, animals, oxygen.
Convert CO2, sunlight, H20, and geothermal energy to forms necessary for life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars
Algae, carbon capture, carbon sequestration, lab grown plants, water purification, solar power, [...]
Mars requires a geomagnetic field in order to sustain an atmosphere in order to [...].
"The Limits to Growth" (1972, 2004) [1] very clearly forecasts these same unsustainable patterns of resource consumption: 'needs' which exceed and transgress our planetary biophysical boundaries.
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (#GlobalGoals) [2] outline our worthwhile international objectives (Goals, Targets, and Indicators). The Paris Agreement [3] sets targets and asks for commitments from nation states (and businesses) to help achieve these goals most efficiently and most sustainably.
In the US, the Clean Power Plan [4] was intended to redirect our national resources toward renewable energy with far less external costs. Direct and indirect subsidies for nonrenewables are irrational. Are subsidies helpful or necessary to reach production volumes of renewable energy products and services?
There are certainly financial incentives for anyone who chooses to invest in solving for the Global Goals; and everyone can!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
[2] http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-develop...
Multiple GWAS finds 187 intelligence genes and role for neurogenesis/myelination
> We found evidence that neurogenesis and myelination—as well as genes expressed in the synapse, and those involved in the regulation of the nervous system—may explain some of the biological differences in intelligence.
re: nurture, hippocampal plasticity and hippocampal neurogenesis also appear to be affected by dancing and omega-3,6 (which are transformed into endocannabinoids by the body): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109698
Could we solve blockchain scaling with terabyte-sized blocks?
These numbers in a computational model (or even Jupyter notebooks) would be useful.
We may indeed need fractional satoshis ('naks').
With terabyte blocks, lightning network would be unnecessary: at least for TPS.
There will need to be changes to account for quantum computing capabilities somewhere in the future timeline of Bitcoin (and everything else in banking and value-producing industry). Probably maybe a different hash function instead of just a routine difficulty increase (and definitely something other than ECDSA, which isn't a primary cost). $1.3m/400k a year to operate a terabyte mining rig with 50Gbps bandwidth would affect decentralization; though maybe not any more than it already is affected now.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_... (51%)
Confidence intervals for these numbers would be useful.
Casper PoS and beyond may also affect future Bitcoin volume estimates.
Ask HN: Do you have ADD/ADHD? How do you manage it?
Also, how has it affected your CS career? I feel that transitioning to management would help, as it does not require lengthy periods of concentration, but rather distributed attention for shorter periods.
Music. Headphones. Chillstep, progressive, chillout etc. from di.fm. Long mixes from SoundCloud with and without vocals. "Instrumental"
Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth.
Less sugar and processed foods. Though everyone has a different resting glucose level.
Apparently it's called alpha-pinene.
Fidget things. Rubberband, paperclip.
The Pomodoro Technique: work 25 minutes, chill for 5 (and look at something at least 20 feet away (20-20-20 rule))
Lists. GTD. WBS.
Exercise. Short walks.
Ask HN: How to understand the large codebase of an open-source project?
Hello All!
what are techniques you all used to learn and understand a large codebase? what are the tools you use?
What is the best way to learn to code from absolute scratch?
We have been hosting a Ugandan refugee in our home in Oakland for the past 9 months and he wants to learn how to code.
Where is the best place for him to start from absolute scratch? What resources can we point him to? Who can help?
Here's an answer to a similar question: "Ask HN: How to introduce someone to programming concepts during 12-hour drive?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15454421
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python3/ (Python3)
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/ (Javascript)
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/git/ (Git)
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/markdown/ (Markdown)
Read the docs. Read the source. Write docstrings. Write automated tests: that's the other half of the code.
Keep a journal of your knowledge as e.g. Markdown or ReStructuredText; regularly pull the good ones from bookmarks and history into an outline.
I keep a tools reference doc with links to Wikipedia, Homepage, Source, Docs: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/tools/
And a single-page log of my comments: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/
> To get a job, "Coding Interview University": https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
Wow, thank you so much. This is incredibly useful.
Tesla racing series: Electric cars get the green light – Roadshow
Tesla Racing Circuit ideas for increasing power discharge rate, reducing heat, and reducing build weight:
Hemp supercapacitors (similar power density as graphene supercapacitors and li-ion, lower cost than graphene)
Active cooling. Modified passive cooling.
Biocomposite frame and panels (stronger and lighter than steel and aluminum (George Washington Carver))
> Biocomposite frame and panels (stronger and lighter than steel and aluminum (George Washington Carver))
"Soybean Car" (1941) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean_car
What happens if you have too many jupyter notebooks?
These days there is a tendency in data analysis to use Jupyter Notebooks. But what happens if you have too many jupyter notebooks? For example, there are more than a hundred.
Actually, you start creating some modules. However, it is less convenient to work with them compared to what was before. It happens that you should code in web interface, somewhere in similar to the notepad++ form or you should change your IDLE.
Personally, I work in Pycharm and so far I couldn't assess remote interpreter or VCS. It is because pickle files or word2vec weighs too much (3gb+) and so I don't want to download/upload them. Also Jupyter is't cool in pycharm.
Do you have better practices in your companies? How to correctly adjust IDLE? Do you know about any possible substitution for the IPython notebook in the world of data analysis?
> what happens if you have too many jupyter notebooks? For example, there are more than a hundred.
Like anything else, Jupyter Notebook is limited by the CPU and RAM of the system hosting the Tornado server and Jupyter kernels.
At 100 notebooks (or even just one), it may be a good time to factor common routines into a packaged module with tests and documentation.
It's actually possible (though inefficient) to import code from Jupyter notebooks with ipython/ipynb (pypi:ipynb): https://github.com/ipython/ipynb ( https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/N... )
> Actually, you start creating some modules. However, it is less convenient to work with them compared to what was before. It happens that you should code in web interface, somewhere in similar to the notepad++ form or you should change your IDLE.
The Spyder IDE has support for .ipynb notebooks converted to .py (which have the IPython prompt markers in them). Spyder can connect an interpreter prompt to a running IPython/Jupyter kennel. There's also a Spyder plugin for Jupyter Notebook: https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder-notebook
> Personally, I work in Pycharm and so far I couldn't assess remote interpreter or VCS. It is because pickle files or word2vec weighs too much (3gb+) and so I don't want to download/upload them.
Remote data access times can be made faster by increasing the space efficiency of the storage format, increasing the bandwidth of the connection, moving the data to the code, or moving the code to the data.
> Do you have better practices in your companies?
There are a number of [Reproducible] Data Science cookiecutter templates which have a directory for notebooks, module packaging, and Sphinx docs: https://cookiecutter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html#da...
Refactoring increases testability and code reuse.
> How to correctly adjust IDLE?
I don't think I understand the question?
"Configuring IPython" https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config/index.html
Jupyter > "Installation, Configuration, and Usage" https://jupyter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/projects/content-pr...
> Do you know about any possible substitution for the IPython notebook in the world of data analysis?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface :
> > "Examples of the notebook interface include the Mathematica notebook, Maple worksheet, MATLAB notebook, IPython/Jupyter, R Markdown, Apache Zeppelin, Apache Spark Notebook, and the Databricks cloud."
There are lots of Jupyter kernels for different tools and languages (over 100; including for other 'notebook interfaces'): https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels
And there are lots of Jupyter integrations and extensions: https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education/blob/m...
Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice
The article is about this study:
"Eradication of spontaneous malignancy by local immunotherapy" http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/426/eaan4488
> In situ vaccination with low doses of TLR ligands and anti-OX40 antibodies can cure widespread cancers in preclinical models.
Boosting teeth’s healing ability by mobilizing stem cells in dental pulp
Tideglusib
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tideglusib
> "Promotion of natural tooth repair by small molecule GSK3 antagonists" https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39654
> [...] Here we describe a novel, biological approach to dentine restoration that stimulates the natural formation of reparative dentine via the mobilisation of resident stem cells in the tooth pulp.
This Biodegradable Paper Donut Could Let Us Reforest the Planet
"These drones can plant 100,000 trees a day" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16260892
Drones that can plant 100k trees a day
> It’s simple maths. We are chopping down about 15 billion trees a year and planting about 9 billion. So there’s a net loss of 6 billion trees a year.
This is a regional thing [0] though. We need to plant the trees in Latin America, Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The rest of the world is gaining forests.
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/23/deforestation-whe...
Now, the question is, which industry sector cuts the largest percentage of trees. Now, answering that question, is there a way to do the same thing without cutting trees?
Answering that question and then executing a business plan is probably worth billions.
Planting trees to combat 6 billion trees lost every year is a pure expense, no profit to be made at all. At least not if you won't cut them down a few decades later.
A very good way to absorb atmospheric carbon is to plant new trees and cut down and use old ones for anything else but burning it.
"This Biodegradable Paper Donut Could Let Us Reforest The Planet" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261101
I think this kind of thing is funny for us westerners. I recently found this tech has been used in arid countries for possibly hundreds or thousands of years.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ollas+gardening&t=lm&iax=images&ia...
I do realize the ollas are for more permanent gardens, but it's the same concept. I do hope the paper version gets used, there are plenty of places that could benefit from it.
What are some YouTube channels to progress into advanced levels of programming?
There are some cool YouTube channel suggestions on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224165 But I wanted to know which of those are great to progress into advanced level of programming? Which of the channels teach advanced techniques?
These aren't channels, but a number of the links are marked with "(video)":
https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university/blob/...
Thanks
Multiple issue and pull request templates
+1
Default: /ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md
/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/<name>.md</name>
Default: /PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/<name>.md</name>
You can leave the last S for off (for savings) if you want /ISSUE_TEMPLATE(S)/ or /PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE(S)/
Five myths about Bitcoin’s energy use
Regarding the proof-of-stake part: Ethereum devs are also working on sharding which will make scaling on the Ethereum Blockchain way easier. I really think that Ethereum will be the No.1 cryptocurrency in the near future. Bitcoin devs showed plenty of times, that they are not capable of keeping pace with demand (couldn't even get the block size thing right). Bitcoin is virtually dead. No one can really use it for real world transactions. Plus Bitcoin in reality is a really central coin, completely in the hands of the miners. Even if the Bitcoin devs decided to go with PoS, the miners wouldn't agree.
Proof of Work (Bitcoin*, ...), Proof of Stake (Ethereum Casper), Proof of Space, Proof of Research (GridCoin, CureCoin,)
Plasma (Ethereum) and Lightning Network (BitCoin (SHA256), Litecoin (scrypt),) will likely offload a significant amount of transaction volume and thereby reduce the kWh/transaction metrics.
> But electricity costs matter even more to a Bitcoin miner than typical heavy industry. Electricity costs can be 30-70% of their total costs of operation.
> [...] If Bitcoin mining really does begin to consume vast quantities of the global electricity supply it will, it follows, spur massive growth in efficient electricity production—i.e. the green energy revolution. Moore’s Law was partially a story about incredible advances in materials science, but it was also a story about incredible demand for computing that drove those advances and made semiconductor research and development profitable. If you want to see a Moore’s-Law-like revolution in energy, then you should be rooting for, and not against, Bitcoin. The fact is that the Bitcoin network, right now, is providing a $200,000 bounty every 10 minutes (the mining reward) to the person who can find the cheapest energy on the planet.
This is ridiculous. The economy is already incentivized to find cheaper electricity by forces far more powerful than Bitcoin. By this logic, you would defend a craze for trying to boil the sea.
If the market had internalized the external health, environmental, and defense costs of nonrenewable energy, we would already have cheap, plentiful renewable energy. But we don't: the market is failing to optimize for factors other than margin. (New Keynesian economics admits market failure, but not non-rationality.)
So, (speculative_valuation - cost) is the margin. Whereas with a stock in a leveraged high-frequency market with shorting, (shareholder_equity - market_cap) is explainable in terms of the market information that is shared.
So, it's actually (~$200K-(n_kwhrs*cost_kwhr)) for whoever wins the block mining lottery (which is about every 10 minutes and can be anyone who's mining).
But the point about Bitcoin maintaining demand for and while we move to competitive lower cost renewable energy and greater efficiency is good.
What we should hope to see is the blockchain industry directly investing in clean energy capacity development in order to rationally minimize their primary costs and maximize environmental sustainability.
It is kind of missing the point though. If everyone was competing to make electrical single-person planes to help people commute to work it would also increase demand for renewable/electrical energy - but can we agree, that just using electrical cars instead of planes is going to take a lot less electricity overall?
Yes, and then energy prices would decrease due to less demand. Blockchain energy usage maintains demand for energy; which keeps prices high enough that production of renewables can profitably compete with nonrenewables while we reach production volumes of solar, wind, and hemp supercapacitors for grid storage.
> Throughout the first half of 2008, oil regularly reached record high prices.[2][3][4][5] Prices on June 27, 2008, touched $141.71/barrel, for August delivery in the New York Mercantile Exchange [...] The highest recorded price per barrel maximum of $147.02 was reached on July 11, 2008.
At that price, there's more demand for renewables (such as electric vehicles and solar panels)
> Since late 2013 the oil price has fallen below the $100 mark, plummeting below the $50 mark one year later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_fr...
... Energy costs and inflation are highly covariate. (Trouble is, CPI All rarely ever goes back down)
Bitcoin's energy use will tend to raise to match the mining profits. As long as both BTC's price and transaction fees keep raising, the energy miners spend will continue to raise. BTC's price is going up due to speculation, and transaction fees due to blocks being full.
Even at current levels, BTC's built in block rewards dominate tx fees (12.50BTC built in + 1.38 tx fees). The 12.5 built in reward is essentially a subsidy for mining.
Ask HN: Which programming language has the best documentation?
Ask HN: Recommended course/website/book to learn data structure and algorithms
I am a full-time Android developer who does most of his programming work in Java. I am a non CS graduate so didn't study Data structure and algorithms course in university so I am not familiar with this subject which is hindering my prospect of getting better programming jobs. There are so many resources out there on this subject that I am unable to decide which one is the best for my case. Could someone please point me out in the right direction. Thanks.
Data Structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure
Algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
Big O notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation
Big-O Cheatsheet: http://bigocheatsheet.com
Coding Interview University > Data Structures: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university/blob/...
OSSU: Open Source Society University > Core CS > Core Theory > "Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part I" [&2] https://github.com/ossu/computer-science/blob/master/README....
"Algorithms, 4th Edition" (2011; Sedgewick, Wayne): https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/
Complexity Zoo > Petting Zoo (P, NP,): https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Petting_Zoo
While perusing awesome-awesomeness [1], I found awesome-algorithms [2] , algovis [3], and awesome-big-o [4].
[1] https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness
[2] https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms
Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice?
The top-voted response is helpful: throwing away constants as in Big-O notation is misleading, average cases aren't the case; Sedgewick Algorthms book.
ORDO: a modern alternative to X.509
There are a number of W3C specs for this type of thing.
Linked Data Signatures (ld-signatures) relies upon a graph canonicalization algorithm that works with any RDF format (RDF/XML, JSON-LD, Turtle,)
> The signature mechanism can be used across a variety of RDF data syntaxes such as JSON-LD, N-Quads, and TURTLE, without the need to regenerate the signature
https://w3c-dvcg.github.io/ld-signatures/
A defined way to transform ORDO to RDF would be useful for WoT graph applications.
WebID can express X509 certs with the cert ontology. {cert:X509Certificate, cert:PGPCertificate,} rdfs:subClassOf cert:Certificate
https://www.w3.org/ns/auth/cert
https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/
ld-signatures is newer than WebID.
(Also, we should put certificates in a blockchain; just like Blockcerts (JSON-LD))
Wine 3.0 Released
Kimbal Musk is leading a $25M mission to fix food in US schools
Spinzero – A Minimal Jupyter Notebook Theme
+1. The Computer Modern serif fonts look legit. Like LaTeX legit.
Now, if we could make the fonts unscalable and put things in two columns (in order to require extra scrolling and 36 character wide almost-compiling copy-and-pasted code samples without syntax highlighting) we'd be almost there!
I searched for Computer Modern fonts and they're all available here: http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/
I am surprised why these beauties are not widely adopted on websites and such. I agree, they just look very disciplined and professional.
I'd hope someday these relics are hosted on Google Fonts.
What does the publishing industry bring to the Web?
Q: What does the publishing industry bring to the Web?
A: PDF hosting, comments, a community of experts
FWIU, Publishing@W3C proposes WPUB [1] instead of PDF or MHTML for 'publishing' http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle .
How do WPUB canonical identifiers (which reference/redirect(?) to the latest version of the resource) work with W3C Web Annotations attached to e.g. sentences within a resource identified with a URI? When the document changes, what happens to the attached comments? This is also a problem with PDFs: with a filename like document-20180111-v01.pdf and a stable(!) URL like http://example.org/document-20180111-v01.pdf, we can add Web Annotations to that URI; but with a new URI, those annotations are lost.
Git is a blockchain
Bitcoin is very much inspired by git; though in terms of immutability it's more similar to mercurial and subversion (git push -f)
Git accepts whatever timestamp a node chooses to add to a commit. This can cause interesting sorts in terms of chronological and topological sort orders.
Without an agreed-upon central git server there is not a canonical graph.
You can use GPG signatures with Git, but you need to provide your own keyserver and then there's still no way to enforce permissions (e.g. who can ALTER, UPDATE, or DELETE which files).
Git is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Not a chain. Blockchains are chains to prevent double-spending (e.g. on a different fork).
Bitcoin was accepted by The Linux Foundation (Linus Torvalds wrote Git): https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/
It's always been a mix of inspiration in my mind:
- Torrent P2P file sharing.
- Git like data structure and protocol
- Immutability from functional programming
- Public key cryptography
Show HN: Convert Matlab/NumPy matrices to LaTeX tables
LaTeX must be escaped in order to prevent LaTeX injection.
AFAIU, numpy.savetxt does not escape LaTeX characters?
Jupyter Notebook rich object display protocol checks for obj._repr_latex_() when converting a Jupyter notebook from .ipynb to LaTeX.
The Pandas _repr_latex_() function calls to_latex(escape=True † ). https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/blob/master/pandas/core...
†* The default value of escape ️ (and a few other presentational parameters) is determined from the display.latex.escape option: https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/options.html?hi... *
df = pd.read_csv('filename.csv', ); df.to_latex(escape=True)
Or, with a Jupyter notebook:
df = pd.read_csv('filename.csv', ); df
# $ jupyter convert --to latex filename.ipynb
Wouldn't it be great if there was a LaTeX incantation that allowed for specifying that the referenced dataset URI (maybe optionally displayed also as a table) is a premise of the analysis; with RDFa and/ or JSONLD in addition to LaTeX PDF? That way, an automated analysis tool could identify and at least retrieve the data for rigorous unbiased analyses.
http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle
#StructuredPremises
A Year of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom
What a great article about using Anki during class in a Language Arts curriculum.
NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Round 1 Submissions
Are there any blogs that talk about what’s required in a crypto algorithm to withstand quantum computing? Is a straightforward increasing the key size enough? Or are there new paradigms explored? Are these algorithms symmetric or asymmetric?
This paper lists a few of the practical concerns for quantum-resistant algos (and proposes an algo that wasn't submitted to NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Round 1):
"Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them" https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10377 (~2027?)
A few Quantum Computing and Quantum Algorithm resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16052193
Responsive HTML (arxiv-vanity/engrafo, PLoS,) or Markdown in a Jupyter notebook (stored in a Git repo with a tag and maybe a DOI from figshare or Zenodo) really would be far more useful than comparing LaTeX equations rendered into PDFs.
What are some good resources to learn about Quantum Computing?
Quantum computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing
Quantum algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm
Quantum Algorithm Zoo: http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/
Jupyter notebooks:
* QISKit/qiskit-tutorial > "Exploring Quantum Information Concepts" https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/QISKit/qiskit-tutorial/b...
* jrjohansson/qutip-lectures > "Lecture 0 - Introduction to QuTiP - The Quantum Toolbox in Python" https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/jrjohansson/qutip-lectur...
http://qutip.org/tutorials.html
* sympy/quantum_notebooks https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/sympy/quantum_notebooks/...
https://github.com/topics/quantum
krishnakumarsekar/awesome-quantum-machine-learning: https://github.com/krishnakumarsekar/awesome-quantum-machine...
arxiv quant-ph: https://arxiv.org/list/quant-ph/recent
Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing
In all honesty this is what I've been waiting for in terms of a useful cryptocurrency. Now if we could only decentralize the control of what projects the processing goes towards with smart contracts then we could have a coin with more actual utility. Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
> Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
""" CureCoin Reaches #1 Ranking on Folding@home
As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques. """
> Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
Unfortunatly BTC mining now runs almost entirely on ASICs that can't be used to compute anything but SHA-256.
Imagine and equivalent amount of computer power in an alternative future. I mean, you're right, and this limitation is a flaw in bitcoin, but you've also missed the point.
It's also hard to call it a flaw in Bitcoin, considering it was an intentional design decision.
Even intentional design decisions can be flawed.
There's a pretty hard limit bounding the optimizability of SHA256. That's why hashcash uses a cryptographic hash function.
There may be - or, very likely are - shortcuts for proof of research better than Grover's; which, when found, will also be very useful for science and medicine. However, that advantage is theoretically destabilizing for a distributed consensus network; which is also a strange conflict in incentives.
Sort of like buying "buy gold" commercials when the market was heading into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
SSL accelerators may benefit from the SHA256 ASIC optimizations incentivized by the bitcoin design.
"""The accelerator provides the RSA public-key algorithm, several widely used symmetric-key algorithms, cryptographic hash functions, and a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator"""
GPU prices are also lower now; probably due to demand pulling volume. The TPS (transactions per second) rate is doing much better these days.
How would you solve the local daretime problem in order with Git and signatures?
Power Prices Go Negative in Germany
The article doesn’t actually answer the questions it purports to answer. Better source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-....
Energy markets are artificial markets designed to create various price signals that result in certain incentives on both generation and demand, subject to numerous constraints. One constraint is that demand and supply must balance. The grid can’t store much energy. Oversupply can cause grid frequency to go above 50/60 Hz, threatening grid stability: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/705. Power prices go negative when there is too much generation capacity online at a given instant, relative to demand. That creates incentives for generators that can shut down (like natural gas) to do so.
Negative power prices are not a good thing for consumers. A negative price in the wholesale electric markets does not mean the electricity is "less than free." Obviously, even wind power or solar always costs positive money to generate in real terms. Instead, it signals a mismatch between generation capacity, storage capacity, and demand. In a grid with adequate storage capacity, negative prices would be extremely rare.
I think you're missing the critical piece of your explanation of why negative prices aren't good for consumers:
The reason that negative power prices look like they would be good for consumers is that it seems like they should lower their monthly bills. But in practice their bill should stay the same, even if there were significant periods during which energy prices were negative. Why? The negative prices don't indicate that the cost of power production is negative for the power company, so the power company is losing money. The power company has to recoup those losses somehow, and they do it by charging more when power prices are positive.
In order to take advantage of negative power prices, a power consumer would have to dynamically increase their power consumption in response to the negative prices. If they have any significant power storage capacity, maybe they could store power and sell it back to the grid when prices go positive, or maybe turn on their mining rig while prices are negative, if they go negative frequently.
I'll just add in some empirical results. German power has risen to be some of the most expensive in Europe since they started the Energiewende. They have very low wholesale prices (driving the coal producers out of business) combined with very high retail prices (might be top 3 in Europe?).
The high retail price appears to be driven by the mechanisms driving the Energiewende ie transition to wind and solar.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...
The NYT article reads as though Germany is benefiting from the switch to renewables, and that the only problems are that sometimes there's so much power around that they have to pay people to use it.
It mentions high cost of electricity, and that it's due to fees and "renewable investment costs" but then immediately hand-waves that away because "household energy bills have been rising over all anyway."
When combined with your information above (those hand-wavy fees actually account for fully 50% of the costs, with 24% being the renewables surcharge) it would seem that the NYT is being misleading. It seems they want to convey the idea that the renewables are an immediate good thing for everyone (which I do not take issue with politically) while downplaying the significant costs to consumers. Am I missing something?
If I'm not, then this does nothing but contribute to the current view of American media as being intentionally misleading when it suits their interests.
No, I don't think you're missing something here.
The price for electricity is indeed very high in Germany, rising to new heights with the new year, again.
The problem is, unsurprisingly, regulation and policy, i.e. the fees you already mentioned, and the subsidies for industrial usage, etc.
So, yes, it actually seems that the NYT is misleading here.
Let's leave this as an exercise for the reader, to judge if anyone should really be surprised here.
I always think of this old "Trust, but verify" quibble, and that it is actually based on an old Russian proverb. The irony.. :)
> The price for electricity is indeed very high in Germany
It's not only very high, but the second highest in the world, and we are about to take over the first spot [1]
> The problem is, unsurprisingly, regulation and policy, i.e. the fees you already mentioned, and the subsidies for industrial usage, etc.
The problem are the subsidies for all the green energy. It's not only the direct costs but also the costs for grid interventions (turning on/off capacity), paying for renewables even if they are not producing because there is too much energy available, the huge requirements for new energy lanes from north to south, getting rid of nuclear power etc.
Subsidies for industrial usage is often quoted as increasing the costs by interested parties, but it's also a direct need of the Energiewende, because the economic damage would be gigantic. Unless you want to get the energy intensive factories out of your country, you have to factor in those costs.
> So, yes, it actually seems that the NYT is misleading here.
Yes, as does most media - especially in Germany. Those negative prices are no win for any german. Why else is it, that we will soon pay the highest prices for electricity in the world?
[1] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/energiekosten-in-oecd-...
"Several countries in Europe have experienced negative power prices, including Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland."
> Yes, as does most media - especially in Germany. Those negative prices are no win for any german. Why else is it, that we will soon pay the highest prices for electricity in the world?
AFAIU, it's because you're aggressively shaping the energy market in order to reduce health and environmental costs now.
The technical issue here is that batteries are not good enough yet; and [hemp] supercapacitors are not yet at the volume needed to lower the costs. So, maintaining a high price for energy keeps the market competitive for renewables which have positive negative externalities.
Bitcoin is an energy arbitrage
In addition to relocating to where energy is the least expensive, Bitcoin creates incentive for miners to lower the local cost of energy: invest in renewable energy.
Renewable Energy / Clean Energy is now less expensive than alternatives; with continued demand, the margins are at least maintained.
> In addition to relocating to where energy is the least expensive, Bitcoin creates incentive for miners to lower the local cost of energy: invest in renewable energy.
We have lots of direct and effective subsides for nonrenewable energy in the United States. And some for renewables, as well. For example [1] average effective tax rate over all money making companies: 26%
"Coal & Related Energy": 0.69%
"Oil/Gas (integrated)": 8.01%
"Power": 29.22%
"Green and Renewable Energy": 26.42%
[1] "Tax Rates by Sector (US)" (January 2017) http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...
X-posting here from the article's comments:
The price reflects the confidence investors have in the security's ability to meet or exceed inflation and in the information security of the network.
Volatility adds value for algo traders: say the prices are [1, 101, 51, 101, 51, 201]:
(101-1)+(101-51)+(201-51)=300
(201-1)=200
For the average Joe looking at the vested options they're hodling, though, volatility is unfriendly.
When e.g. algo-traders are willing to buy in when the price starts to fall, they're making liquidity; which some exchanges charge less for.
Enigma Catalyst (Zipline) is one way to backtest and live-trade cryptocurrencies algorithmically.
There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions
At 20 transactions per second it's a delay of 3 hours. (200000/20/60/60)
"The bitcoin network's theoretical maximum capacity sits between 3.3 to 7 transactions per second."
The OT link does say "Transactions Per Second 22.54".
The solutions for this 3 hour backlog of unconfirmed transactions include: implementing SegWit, increasing the blocksize, and Lightning Network.
I think the link counts incoming transactions. I.e. you can always schedule more, but it doesn't mean they're going to be acted on in a reasonable timeframe.
What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
ORMs:
- Are maintainable by a team. "Oh, because that seemed faster at the time."
- Are unit tested: eventually we end up creating at least structs or objects anyway, and then that needs to be the same everywhere, and then the abstraction is wrong because "everything should just be functional like SQL" until we need to decide what you called "the_initializer2".
- Can make it very easy to create maintainable test fixtures which raise exceptions when the schema has changed but the test data hasn't.
- Prevent SQL injection errors by consistently parametrizing queries and appropriately quoting for the target SQL dialect. (One of the Top 25 most frequent vulnerabilities). This is especially important because most apps GRANT both UPDATE and DELETE; if not CREATE TABLE and DROP TABLE to the sole app account.
- Make it much easier to port to a new database; or run tests with SQLite. With raw SQL, you need the table schema in your head and either comprehensive test coverage or to review every single query (and the whole function preceding db.execute(str, *params))
- May be the performance bottleneck for certain queries; which you can identify with code profiling and selectively rewrite by hand if adding an index and hinting a join or lazifying a relation aren't feasible with the non-SQLAlchemy ORM that you must use.
- Should provide a way to generate the query at dev or compile-time.
- Should make it easy to DESCRIBE the query plans that code profiling indicates are worth hand-optimizing (learning SQL is sometimes not the same as learning how a particular database plans a query over tables without indexes)
- Make managing db migrations pretty easy.
- SQLAlchemy really is great. SQLAlchemy has eager loading to solve the N+1 query problem. Django is often more than adequate; and has had prefetch_related() to solve the N+1 query problem since 1.4. Both have an easy way to execute raw queries (that all need to be reviewed for migrations). Both are much better at paging without allocating a ton of RAM for objects and object attributes that are irrelevant now.
- Make denormalizing things from a transactional database with referential integrity into JSON really easy; which webapps and APIs very often need to do.
Is there a good JS ORM? Maybe in TypeScript?
I've used http://bookshelfjs.org/ but I'd stay away from it, only felt cumbersome. No productivity gain.
It's built on top a query builder Knex (http://knexjs.org/) which is decent.
Objection.js and the Knex query builder are excellent. Think ORM light with full access to SQL.
Show HN: An educational blockchain implementation in Python
> It is NOT secure neither a real blockchain and you should NOT use this for anything else than educational purposes.
It would be nice if non-secure parts of implementation or design were clearly marked.
What's the point of education article, if bad examples aren't clearly marked as bad? If MD5 usage is the only issue, author could easily replace it with SHA and get rid of the warning at the start. If there are other issues, how can a reader know which parts to trust?
Even if fixing bad/insecure parts are "left as an exercise for the reader", learning value of the article would be much greater if those parts would be at least pointed at.
OP here.
erikb is spot on in the sibling comment. This hasn't been expert-reviewed, hasn't been audited so I'm pretty confident there is a bug somewhere that I don't know about.
It's educational in the sense that I tried as best a I could to implement the various algorithmic parts (mining, validating blocks & transactions, etc...).
I originally used MD5 because I thought I would do more exploration regarding difficulty and MD5 is faster to compute than SHA. In the end, I didn't do that exploration, so I could easily replace MD5 with SHA. I'll update the notebook to use SHA, but I'm still not gonna remove the warning :)
I'll also try to point out more explicitly which parts I think are not secure.
> I'll also try to point out more explicitly which parts I think are not secure.
Things I've noticed:
* Use of floating point arithmetic.
* Non-reproducible serialization in verify_transaction can produce slightly different, but equivalent JSON, which leads to rejecting transactions if produced JSON is platform-dependent (e.g. CRLFs, spaces vs tabs).
* Miners can perform DoS by creating a pair of blocks referencing each other (recursive call in verify_block is made before any sanity checks or hash checks, so they can modify block's ancestor without worrying about changing its hash).
* mine method can loop forever due to integer overflow.
* Miners can put in block a transaction with output sum greater than input sum - only place where it is checked is in compute_fee and no path from verify_block leads there.
Those are all very good points I didn't think about, thanks for these.
I'll fix the two bugs with verify_block and the possibility for a miner to inject invalid a output > input transaction.
I'll add a note for the 3 others.
For deterministic serialization (~canonicalization), you can use sort_keys=True or serialize OrderedDicts. For deseialization, you'd need object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict.
Most current blockchains sign a binary representation with fixed length fields. In terms of JSON, JSON-LD is for graphs and it can be canonicalized. Blockcerts and Chainpoint are JSON-LD specs:
> Blockcerts uses the Verifiable Claims MerkleProof2017 signature format, which is based on Chainpoint 2.0.
https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js/...
FYI, dicts are now ordered by default as of Python 3.6.
That's an implementation detail, and shouldn't be relied upon. If you want an ordered dictionary, you should use collections.OrderedDict.
It's now the spec for 3.6+.
> #python news: @gvanrossum just pronounced that dicts are now guaranteed to retain insertion order. This is the end of a long journey.
https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/941709626545864704
More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/7jyluw/dict_knownor...
OrderedDicts are backwards-compatible and are guaranteed to maintain order after deletion.
Thanks! Simplest explanation I've seen.
Here's an nbviewer link (which, like base58, works on/over a phone): https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/julienr/ipynb_playground...
Note that Bitcoin does two rounds of SHA256 rather than one round of MD5. There's also a "P2P DHT" (peer-to-peer distributed hash table) for storing and retrieving blocks from the blockchain; instead of traditional database multi-master replication and secured offline backups.
> ERROR:root:Invalid transaction signature, trying to spend someone else's money ?
This could be more specific. Where would these types of error messages log to?
My mistake, it's BitTorrent that has a DHT. Instead of finding the most network local peer with the block identified by a (prev_hash, hash) hash table key, the Bitcoin blockchain broadcasts all messages to all nodes; which must each maintain a complete backup of the entire blockchain.
"Protocol documentation" https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation
MSU Scholars Find $21T in Unauthorized Government Spending
Unauthorized federal spending (in these two departments) 1998-2015: $21T
Federal debt (2017): $20T
$ 20,000,000,000,000 USD
Would a blockchain for government expenditures help avoid this type of error?
We already now have https://usaspending.gov ( https://beta.usaspending.gov ) and expenditure line item metadata.
Would having traceable money in a distributed ledger help us keep track of money collected from taxpayers?
Obviously, the volatility of most cryptocurrencies would be disadvantageous for purposes of transferring and accounting for government spending. Isn't there a way to peg a cryptocurrency to the USD; even with Quantitative Easing? How is Quantitative Easing different from just deciding to print trillions more 'coins' in order to counter debt or inflation or deflation; why is the government in debt at all?
re: Quantitative Easing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
Say I have $100 in my Social Security Fund (in very non-aggressive investments which need to meet or exceed inflation) and the total supply of money (including paper notes and numbers in debit and credit columns of various public and private databases) the total supply of money is $1T with $1T in debt; if 1T is printed to pay for that debt, is my $100 in retirement savings then worth $50? Or is it more complex than that?
[deleted]
Universities spend millions on accessing results of publicly funded research
Are there good open source solutions for journal publishing? (HTML abstract, PDFs, comments, ...)?
Yes- quite a few beyond what's already been listed, in fact:
http://www.theoj.org/ https://plos.github.io/ambraproject/index.html https://v4.pubpub.org/
Ambra is being discontinued! http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2017/12/ceo-letter-to-the-communi...
Edit: And theoj doesn't really appear to be maintained anymore either...
> Ambra is being discontinued!
The article mentions the discontinuation of Aperta but nothing about Ambra?
https://plos.github.io/ambraproject/Developer-Overview.html
I'm sorry, I just realised that as well - my mistake.
An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
Part 2 mentions two quantum algorithms that could be used to break Bitcoin (and SSH and SSL/TLS; and most modern cryptographic security systems): Shor's algorithm for factorization and Grover's search algorithm.
Part 2: http://davidbkemp.github.io/QuantumComputingArticle/part2.ht...
Shor's algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm
Grover's algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm
I don't know what heading I'd suggest for something about how concentration of quantum capabilities will create dangerous asymmetry. (That is why we need post-quantum ("quantum resistant") hash, signature, and encryption algorithms in the near future.)
Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them (ECDSA, SHA256)
"Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them (ECDSA, SHA256)" https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1710.10377/
> […] On the other hand, the elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027, by the most optimistic estimates.
From https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Post-Quantum-Cryptography :
> NIST has initiated a process to solicit, evaluate, and standardize one or more quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms. Nominations for post-quantum candidate algorithms may now be submitted, up until the final deadline of November 30, 2017.
Project Euler
After hearing about it for years, I decided to start working through Project Euler about two weeks ago. It really is much more about math than programming, although it's a lot of fun to take on the problems with a language that has tail call optimization because so many of the problems involve recurrence relations.
I like that the problems are constructed in a way that usually punishes you for trying to use brute force. Sometimes there's a problem that doesn't have a more elegant solution, though, as if to remind us that brute force often works remarkably well.
I agree with Project Euler being mostly about math. I prefer Codewars for practicing programming or learning a new language.
Euler was a mathematician after all. Now thinking about it I wonder what project Djikstra would look like, or say maybe project Stallman.
There's a Project Rosalind (named after Rosalind Franklin) which is sort of like Project Euler for bioinformatics: http://rosalind.info/about/
I like https://rosalind.info bioinformatics problems because:
- There are problem explanations and an accompanying textbook.
- You can structure the solutions with unit tests that test for known good values.
- There's a graph of problems.
Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short
Wall Street being able to buy Bitcoin might increase demand, but they might also do things that would at least at times amplify sell pressure like panic selling, shorting it, leveraged shorting, margin calls
Statement on Cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings
A little emphasis, focusing on the aftermath from the SEC's July report on the DAO:
> "Following the issuance of the 21(a) Report, certain market professionals have attempted to highlight utility characteristics of their proposed initial coin offerings in an effort to claim that their proposed tokens or coins are not securities. Many of these assertions appear to elevate form over substance. Merely calling a token a “utility” token or structuring it to provide some utility does not prevent the token from being a security."
I think people are viewing this as an attack on crypto, when its actually just common sense. People put too much faith the 'Contract' half of 'Ethereum/Smart Contract'
Basically. Today ICOs are selling tokens as shares of equity in their company, or similar. Which you can then sell on.
The problem is these companies essentially reserve the right to disregard that contract and could then sell their company, domestically or overseas, for cash, without recompensating any token holders.
Securities regulation and law stops that. But the tokens do need to be lawful securities in order for the court to recognize them.
Otherwise how can the court help you, and who else is going to help you?
> I think people are viewing this as an attack on crypto, when its actually just common sense.
> […] The problem is these companies essentially reserve the right to disregard that contract and could then sell their company, domestically or overseas, for cash, without recompensating any token holders.
> Securities regulation and law stops that. But the tokens do need to be lawful securities in order for the court to recognize them.
This. IRS regards coins and tokens as capital gains taxable things regardless of whether they qualify as securities. SEC exists to protect investors from scams and unfair dealing. In order to protect investors, SEC regulates issuance of securities.
Ask HN: How do you stay focused while programming/working?
I often find myself "needing" to take a mini-break after just a few minutes of concerted effort while coding. In particular, this often occurs after I've made a tiny breakthrough, prompting me to reward myself by checking Twitter or HN. This bad habit quickly derails any momentum. What are some tips to increase focus stamina and avoid distraction?
It's not exactly new and exciting, but I found that listening to calm, instrumental music helps me focus. Mostly Ambient. If you do not like electronic music, Stars Of The Lid or Bohren & Der Club Of Gore are very much worth checking out.
Also, https://mynoise.net/ has worked wonders for me.
In both cases, it seems that unstructured audio input, like, occupies the parts of my mind that would otherwise distract me.
> It's not exactly new and exciting, but I found that listening to calm, instrumental music helps me focus. Mostly Ambient.
Same. Lounge, Ambient, Chillout, Chillstep (https://di.fm has a bunch of great streams. SoundCloud and MixCloud have complete replayable sets, too.)
I've heard that videogame soundtracks are designed to not be distracting; to help focus.
A Hacker Writes a Children's Book
The rhymes and illustrations look great! Is there a board book edition?
Other great STEM and computers books for kids:
"A is for Array"
"Lift-the-Flap Computers and Coding"
"Computational Fairy Tales"
"Hello Ruby: Adventures in Coding"
"Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction To Programming"
"Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things"
"Rosie Revere, Engineer"
"Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine"
"HTML for Babies: Volume 1 of Web Design for Babies"
"What Do You Do With a Problem?"
"What Do You Do With an Idea?"
"ABCs of Mathematics", "The Pythagorean Theorem for Babies", "Non-Euclidian Geometry for Babies", "Introductory Calculus for Infants", "ABCs of Physics", "Statistical Physics for Babies", "Netwonian Physics for Babies", "Optical Physics for Babies", "General Relativity for Babies", "Quantum Physics for Babies", "Quantum Information for Babies", "Quantum Entanglement for Babies"
"ELI5": "Explain like I'm five"
Someone should really make a list of these.
Ask HN: Do ISPs have a legal obligation to not sell minors' web history anymore?
I guess COPPA is still in place and in theory it applies to ISPs, although they may be allowed to assume that all traffic from a household comes from the bill payer who is presumably over 13.
http://kellywarnerlaw.com/childrens-online-privacy-protectio...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill...
Tech luminaries call net neutrality vote an 'imminent threat'
> “The current technically-incorrect order discards decades of careful work by FCC chairs from both parties, who understood the threats that Internet access providers could pose to open markets on the Internet.”
Paid prioritization is that threat.
Again, streaming video content for all ages is not more important than online courses.
Ask HN: Can hashes be replaced with optimization problems in blockchain?
CureCoin.
From https://curecoin.net/knowledge-base/about-curecoin/what-is-c... :
> Curecoin allows owners of both ASIC and GPU/CPU hardware to earn. Curecoin puts ASICs to work at what they are good at–securing a blockchain, while it puts GPUs and CPUs to work with work items that can only be done on them–protein folding. While still having a secure blockchain, it supports, and thus is supported by, scientific research.
...
From "CureCoin Reaches #1 Ranking on Folding@home" https://www.newswire.com/news/bio-research-loves-curecoin-ga... :
> As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843795 :
> Gridcoin (Berkeley 2013) is built on Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Research. Gridcoin is used as payment for computing resources contributed to BOINC.
> I doubt that volatility would be welcome on the Gridcoin blockchain: Wikipedia lists "6.5% Inflation. 1.5% Interest + 5% Research Payments APR" under the Supply Growth infobox attribute.
Ask HN: What could we do with all the mining power of Bitcoin? Fold Protein?
Instead of buzzing SHA-512 in circles like busy bees ad infinitum, is there any way we can use these calculations productively?
Instead of algo-trading the stock markets?!
There are a number of distributed computing projects (e.g. SETI@home): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...
The Ethereum White Paper lists a number of applications for blockchains: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper
(BitCoin is built on SHA-256, Ethereum is built on Keccak-256 (~SHA-3))
Proof-of-Stake is a lower energy alternative to Proof-of-Work with tradeoffs: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
Unfortunately, IDK of another way to find secure consensus (blockchains are consensus protocols) in a DDOS-resistant way with unsolved problems?
> Unfortunately, IDK of another way to find secure consensus (blockchains are consensus protocols) in a DDOS-resistant way with unsolved problems?
Gridcoin (Berkeley 2013) is built on Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Research. Gridcoin is used as payment for computing resources contributed to BOINC.
I doubt that volatility would be welcome on the Gridcoin blockchain: Wikipedia lists "Supply growth 6.5% Inflation. 1.5% Interest + 5% Research Payments APR" under the Supply Growth infobox attribute.
No CEO needed: These blockchain platforms will let ‘the crowd’ run startups
How much energy does Bitcoin mining really use?
The Actual FCC Net Neutrality Repeal Document. TLDR: Read Pages 82-87 [pdf]
Here are some links to the relevant antitrust laws:
Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp. (1985) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Skiing_Co._v._Aspen_High....
Transparency in network management and paid prioritization practices and agreements will be relevant.
"We find that antitrust law, in combination with the transparency rule we adopt, is particularly well-suited to addressing any potential or actual anticompetitive harms that may arise from paid prioritization arrangements." (p.147)
If antitrust law is sufficient, as you've found, there would be no need for Title II Common Carrier regulation in any industry.
We can call phone numbers provided by any company at the same rate because phone companies are regulated as Title II Common Carriers. ISPs are also common carriers.
"Public airlines, railroads, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, internet service providers,[3] cruise ships, motor carriers (i.e., canal operating companies, trucking companies), and other freight companies generally operate as common carriers."
The 5 most ridiculous things the FCC says in its new net neutrality propaganda
> The Federal Communications Commission put out a final proposal last week to end net neutrality. The proposal opens the door for internet service providers to create fast and slow lanes, to block websites, and to prioritize their own content. This isn’t speculation. It’s all there in the text.
Great. Payola. Thanks Verizon!
Does the FTC have the agreement information needed to hear the anti-trust cases that are sure to result from what are now complaints to the FCC (an organization with network management expertise) being redirected to the FTC?
Title II is the appropriate policy set for ISPs; regardless of how lucrative horizontal integration with content producers seems.
FCC's Pai, addressing net neutrality rules, calls Twitter biased
No. Censoring hate speech by banning people who are verbally assaulting others (in violation of Terms of Service that they agreed to) is a very different concern than requiring common carriers to equally prioritize bits.
If we extend "you must allow people to verbally assault others (because free speech applies to the government)" to TV and radio, what do we end up with?
Note that the FCC fines non-cable TV (broadcast radio and TV) for cursing on air. See "Obscene, Indecent and Profane Broadcasts" https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
How can you ask social media companies to do something about fake news (the vast majority of which served to elect the current administration (which nominated this FCC chairman)) while also lambasting them for upholding their commitment to providing a hate-free experience for net citizens and paying advertisers?
"Open Internet": No blocking. No throttling. No paid prioritization.
It would be easier for us to understand the "Open Internet" rules if the proposed "Restoring Internet Freedom" page wasn't crudely pasted over (redirected to from) the page describing the current Open Internet rules. www.fcc.gov/general/open-internet (current policy) now redirects to www.fcc.gov/restoring-internet-freedom (proposed policy).
ISPs blocking, throttling, or paid-prioritizing Twitter, Netflix, Fox, or CNN for everyone is a different concern than responding to individuals who are threatening others with hate speech.
The current policy ("Open Internet") means that you can use the bandwidth cap that you pay for for whatever legal content you please.
The proposed policy ("Restoring Internet Freedom") means that internet businesses will need to pay every ISP in order to not be slower than the big guys who can afford to pay-to-play (~"payola"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
A curated list of Chaos Engineering resources
Never having heard off 'Chaos Engineering', this seems like a bad case of 'Cargo Cult Engineering'.
That starts with the term 'chaos', which has a well-defined meaning in Chaos Theory, where it is quite obviously borrowed from: small changes in input lead to large changes in output. Neither distributed systems in general, and especially not the sort of system this engineering strives to build, fit that definition. In fact, they are the exact opposite: every part of a typical web stack is already build to mitigate changing demands such as traffic peaks or attacks.
The mumbo jumbo around "defining a steady state" and "disproving the null hypothesis" seems like a veneer of sciency on a rather well-known concept: testing.
A supreme court justice once said: "Good writing is a $10 thought in a 5 cent sentence". This is the opposite.
"Resilience Engineering" would be a good alternative term for these failure scenario simulations and analyses.
Glossary of Systems Theory > A > Adaptive capacity:
> Adaptive capacity: An important part of the resilience of systems in the face of a perturbation, helping to minimise loss of function in individual human, and collective social and biological systems
Technology behind Bitcoin could aid science, report says
Bloom is working on non-academic credit building and scoring.
Hyperledger brings together many great projects and tools which have numerous applications in science and industry.
Is a blockchain necessary? Could we instead just sign JSONLD records with ld-signatures and store them in an eventually or strongly consistent database we all contribute resources to synchronizing and securing?
That's just the centralization or decentralization question.
We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data.
Less nodes you need to trust the better, in a centralized solution where everyone can contribute you need to be able to trust everyone.
In a decentralized system where everyone can contribute, you don't need to trust anyone but give up benefits of centralization such as speed, performance and usability.
> We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data.
There are plenty of ways to minimize trust required with traditional cryptography though, this is not all or nothing, we have been doing this since PGP. You can get the overwhelming majority of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.
But how else are you going to hype an ICO with claims about the size of a market and get people who don't understand how blockchains work to give your their BTC/ETH?
Git hash function transition plan
> Some hashes under consideration are SHA-256, SHA-512/256, SHA-256x16, K12, and BLAKE2bp-256.
Not sure what K12 is (Keccak?), but BLAKE2 is a very attractive option.
Vintage Cray Supercomputer Rolls Up to Auction
Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth
+1000.
TIL this is called "Corporate Renewable Energy Procurement". https://www.google.com/search?q=Corporate+Renewable+Energy+P...
PPA: Power Purchase Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_purchase_agreement
Interactive workflows for C++ with Jupyter
QuantStack/xeus-cling https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus-cling
QuantStack/xwidgets https://github.com/QuantStack/xwidgets
QuantStack/xplot (bqplot) https://github.com/QuantStack/xplot
Vanguard Founder Jack Bogle Says ‘Avoid Bitcoin Like the Plague’
Over the past 7 years, Bitcoin has outperformed every security and portfolio that Jack Bogle has recommended.
This is pretty disrespectful to Jack Bogle.
Vanguard is almost singlehandedly responsible for returning trillions of dollars of costs, in the form of fees and underperformance by active managers, back to investors. Millions of investors have benefited.
Bitcoin has been a bubble since $1 and $100 to these people.
What evidence is there that it isn't a bubble? People buy Bitcoin only because they think they can sell it higher. Eventually, you will run out of greater fools.
Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
My guess is that this is probably pretty meaningless.
There are a few things going against them.
- The CBOE and CME are both much larger futures exchanges and are going to be offering futures first
- since you can't net out futures contracts from different exchanges this means they tend to become winner take all
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person.
This might be interesting as one of the things that everyone is worried about is price manipulation.
If you haven't thought about how futures work with respect to margin and marking at the end of the trading day you need to know that you can be required to deposit more money into your margin account if the futures trade moves against you on any given day.
This means the marking price is very important and lost of institutional money is worried that the exchanges are easy to manipulate.
see: http://openmarkets.cmegroup.com/3785/understanding-margin-ch...
> Nasdaq’s product will reinvest proceeds from the spin-off back into the original bitcoin in a way meant to make the process more seamless for traders, the person said.
This is awesome,, right now the CBOE and CME both have punted on the question of forks saying, they'll have a best efforts to figure it out.
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person. That appears to exceed CME’s plan to use four sources, and Cboe’s one. Nasdaq’s contracts will be cleared by Options Clearing Corp., the person said.
BitMEX bitcoin futures are already online. IDK how many price sources they pull?
Aren't there a few other companies already selling Bitcoin futures?
In general, when the CME enters a market for futures, they take all of the air out of the room. I don't think it's realistic to believe NASDAQ can compete with them.
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/935900326007328768
Well John McAfee thinks bitcoin will hit 1 million by 2020.
Pump and dumpers gonna pump and dump. https://medium.com/@DEFCON_2015/why-mgt-was-delisted-from-ny...
Or, large investment banking houses will step in and create naked shorting opportunities to inflate sell pressure creating 'death spirals' to drive prices down and scoop them up and extreme discounts. This happens in the traditional public markets everyday.
> Or, large investment banking houses will step in and create naked shorting opportunities to inflate sell pressure creating 'death spirals' to drive prices down and scoop them up and extreme discounts. This happens in the traditional public markets everyday.
Is there a term for this?
Yes, this can happen in a few different ways and is the reason why Ycombinator created SAFEs. When you have a public company you will get offers for what are called "credit lines", "debt financing" or "convertible notes". They are traditionally used to create death spirals https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/deathspiralbond.... as the size of your float increases by you, executive director (CEO/CFO), as a public company "issuing" more stock to cover the loan. The more you issue, the less you're worth until somebody comes along scoops you up and re-engineers the cap table which is a restructuring. However, manipulation can occur within institutions as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=KasianFranks&next=14...
Ask HN: Where do you think Bitcoin will be by 2020?
I have a friend who believes it will be $100,000 per BitCoin and his reasoning is 'supply and demand'.
There will be around 18M bitcoins in 2020. [1][2]
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply
This paper [3] suggests we'll be needing to upgrade to quantum-secure hash functions instead of ECDSA before 2027.
[3] "Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them" https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10377
Hopefully, Ethereum will have figured out a Proof of Stake [4] solution for distributed consensus which is as resistant to DDOS as Proof of Work; but with less energy consumption (thereby, unfortunately or fortunately, un-incentivizing clean energy as a primary business goal).
[4] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
Ask HN: Why would anyone share trading algorithms and compare by performance?
I was speaking with a person years my senior awhile back, and sharing information about the Quantopian platform (which allows users to backtest and share trading algorithms); and he asked me "why would anyone share their trading algorithms [if they're making any money]?"
I tried "to help each other improve their performance". Is there a better way to explain to someone who spends their time reading forums with no objective performance comparisons over historical data why people would help each other improve their algorithmic trading algorithms?
Catalyst, like Quantopian, is also built on top of Zipline; but for cryptocurrencies. https://enigmampc.github.io/catalyst/example-algos.html
Zipline (backtesting and live trading of algorithms with initialize(context) and handle_data(context, data) functions; with the SPY S&P 500 ETF as a benchmark) https://github.com/quantopian/zipline
Pyfolio (for objectively comparing the performance of trading strategies over time) https://github.com/quantopian/pyfolio
...
"Community Algorithms Migrated to Quantopian 2" https://www.quantopian.com/posts/community-algorithms-migrat...
- "Reply to minimum variance w/ contrast" seems to far outperform the S&P 500.
Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?
Can you please point me to some papers that you consider very influential for your work or that you believe they played significant role on how we structure our software nowdays?
"The Architecture of Open Source Applications" Volumes I & II http://aosabook.org/en/
"Manifesto for Agile Software Development" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#The...
"Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/
Fowler > Publications ("Refactoring ",) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler#Publications
"Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (GoF book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns
.
UNIX Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Plan 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
## Distributed Systems
CORBA > Problems and Criticism (monolithic standards, oversimplification,): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_A...
Bulk Synchronous Parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_synchronous_parallel
Paxos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)
Raft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) #Safety
CAP theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
Keeping a Lab Notebook [pdf]
I'd love to hear some thoughts about keeping a "lab notebook" for ML experiments. I use Jupyter Notebooks when playing around with different ML models, and I find that it really helps to document my thought process with notes and comments. It also seems that the ML workflow is very 'experiment' driven. I'm always thinking "Hm, I think if I tweak this hyperparameter this way, or adjust this layer this way, then I'll get a better result because X". Thus, I have a bit of a hypothesis and proposed experiment. I run that model, and see if it improved or not.
Then, I run into an issue where I can either: 1. overwrite the original model with my new hyperparameters/design and re-run and analyze or 2. keep adding to the same notebook "page" with a new hypothesis/test/analysis loop, thus making the notebook pretty large. With number 1, I often want to backtrack and re-reference how a previous experiment went, but I lose that history. With number 2, it seems to get big pretty quickly, and coming back to the same notebook requires more setup, and "searching" the history gets more cumbersome.
Does anyone try using a separate notebook page for each experiment, maybe with a timestamp or "version"? Or is there a better way to do this in a single notebook? I am thinking that something like "chapters" could help me here, and it seems like this extension might help me: https://github.com/minrk/ipython_extensions#table-of-content...
These are ASCII-sortable:
0001_Introduction.ipynb
0010_Chapter-1.ipynb
ISO8601 w/ UTC is also ASCII sortable.
# Jupyter notebooks as lab notebooks
## Disadvantages
### Mutability
With a lab notebook, you can cross things out but they're still there.
- [ ] ENH: Copy cell and mark as don't execute (or wrap with ```language\n``` and change the cell type to markdown)
- [ ] ENH: add a 'Save and {git,} Commit' shortcut
CoCalc (was: SageMathCloud) has (somewhat?) complete notebook replay with a time slider; and multi-user collaborative editing. ("Time-travel is a detailed history of all your edits and everything is backed up in consistent snapshots.")
### Timestamps
You must add timestamps by hand; i.e. as #comments or markdown cells.
- [ ] ENH: add a markdown cell with a timestamp (from a configurable template) (with a keyboard shortcut)
### Project files
You must manage the non-.ipynb sources separately. (You can create a new file or folder. You can just drag and drop to upload. You can open a shell tab to `git status diff commit` and `git push`, if the Jupyter/JupyterHub/CoCalc instance has network access to e.g. GitLab or GitHub)
## Advantages
### Reproducibility Executable I/O cells
The version_information and/or watermark extensions will inline the software versions that were installed when the notebook was last run
Dockerfile for OS config
Conda environment.yml (and/or pip requirements.txt and/or pipenv Pipfile) for further software dependencies
BinderHub can rebuild a docker image on receipt of a webhook from a got repo, push the built image to a docker image repository, and then host prepared Jupyter instances (with Kubernetes) which contain (and reproducibly archive) all of the preinstalled prerequisites.
Diff: `git diff`, `nbdime`
### Publishing
You can generate static HTML, HTML slides with RevealJS, interactive HTML slides with RISE, executable source with comments (e.g. a .py file), LaTeX, and PDF with 'Save as' or `jupyter-convert --to`. You can also create slides with nbpresent.
MyBinder.org and Azure Notebooks have badges for e.g. a README.md or README.rst which launch a project executably in a docker instance hosted in a cloud. CoCalc and Anaconda Cloud also provide hosted Jupyter Notebook projects.
You can template a gradable notebook with nbgrader.
GitHub renders .ipynb notebooks as HTML. Nbviewer renders .ipynb notebooks as HTML.
There are more than 90 Jupyter Kernels for languages other than Python.
https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...
How to teach technical concepts with cartoons
There's not a Wikipedia page for "visual metaphor", but there are pages for "visual rhetoric" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_rhetoric and "visual thinking" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
Negative space can be both meaningful and useful later on.
I learned about visual thinking and visual metaphor in application to business communications from "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/
Fact Checks
Indeed, fact checking systems are only as good as the link between identity credentialing services and a person.
http://schema.org/ClaimReview (as mentioned in this article) is a good start.
A few other approaches to be aware of:
"Reality Check is a crowd-sourced on-chain smart contract oracle system" [built on the Ethereum smart contracts and blockchain]. https://realitykeys.github.io/realitycheck/docs/html/
And standards-based approaches are not far behind:
W3C Credentials Community Group https://w3c-ccg.github.io/
W3C Verifiable Claims Working Group https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/
W3C Verifiable News https://github.com/w3c-ccg/verifiable-news
In terms of verifying (or validating) subjective opinions, correlational observations, and inferences of causal relations; #LinkedMetaAnalyses of documents (notebooks) containing structured links to their data as premises would be ideal. Unfortunately, PDF is not very helpful in accomplishing that objective (in addition to being a terrible format for review with screen reader and mobile devices): I think HTML with RDFa (and/or CSVW JSONLD) is our best hope of making at least partially automated verification of meta analyses a reality.
DHS orders agencies to adopt DMARC email security
From https://www.cyberscoop.com/dhs-dmarc-mandate/ :
> By Jan. 2018, all federal agencies will be required to implement DMARC across all government email domains.
> Additionally, by Feb. 2018, those same agencies will have to employ Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) for all .gov websites, which ensures enhanced website certifications.
The electricity for 1BTC trade could power a house for a month
The article seems to imply that a 1BTC transaction requires 200kWh of energy.
First, what is the source for that number?
Second, what is the business interest of the quoted individual? Are they promoting competing services?
Third, how much energy does the supposed alternative really take, by comparison?
How much energy do these aspects of said business operations require:
- Travel to and from the office for n employees
- Dry cleaning for n employees' work clothes
- Lights for an office of how many square feet
- Fraud investigations in hours worked, postal costs, wait times, CPU time and bandwidth to try and fix data silos' ledgers' transaction ids and time skew; with a full table JOIN on data nobody can only have for a little while from over here and over there
- Desktop machines' idle hours
- Server machines' idle hours
With low cost clean energy, these businesses are profitable; with a very different cost structure than traditional banking and trading.
PAC Fundraising with Ethereum Contracts?
I'll cc this here with formatting changes (extra \n and ---) for Hacker News:
---
### Background
- PAC: Political Action Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee
- https://github.com/holographicio/awesome-token-sale
### Questions
- Is Civic PAC fundraising similar to e.g. a Crowdsale or a CappedCrowdsale or something else entirely, in terms of ERC20 OpenZeppelin solidity contracts?
- Would it be worth maintaining an additional contract for [PAC] "fundraising" with terminology that campaigns can understand; or a terminology map?
- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the risks of a token sale for a PAC?
--- Is there any way to check for donors' citizenship? (When/Where is it necessary to check donors' citizenship (with credit/debit cards or cryptocoins/cryptotokens?))
- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the costs of a token sale for a PAC?
--- How much gas would such a contract require?
- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the benefits of a token sale for a PAC?
---- Lower transaction fees than credit/debit cards?
---- Time limit (practicality, marketing)
---- Cap ("we only need this much")
---- Refunds in the event of […]
### Objectives
- Comply with all local campaign finance laws
--- Collect citizenship information for a Person
--- Collect citizenship information for an Organization 'person'
- Ensure that donations hold value
- Raise funds
- Raise funds up to a cap
- (Optionally?) collect names and contact information ( https://schema.org/Person https://schema.org/Organization )
- Optionally refund if the cap is not met
- Optionally change the cap midstream
- Optionally cancel for a specified string and/or URL reason
Here’s what you can do to protect yourself from the KRACK WiFi vulnerability
> But first, let’s clarify what an attacker can and cannot do using the KRACK vulnerability. The attacker can intercept some of the traffic between your device and your router. Attackers can’t obtain your Wi-Fi password using this vulnerability. They can just look at your traffic. It’s like sharing the same WiFi network in a coffee shop or airport.
From reading the articles:
( https://github.com/vanhoefm/krackattacks ; which is watch-able )
> Against these encryption protocols, nonce reuse enables an adversary to not only decrypt, but also to forge and inject packets.
https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/228519
> Key reuse facilitates arbitrary packet decryption and injection, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection, or the replay of unicast, broadcast, and multicast frames.
The Solar Garage Door – A Possible Alternative to the Emergency Generator
Is it possible to apply the https://solarwindow.com ($WNDW) glass coating to a non-glass garage door?
Using the Web Audio API to Make a Modem
Ask HN: How to introduce someone to programming concepts during 12-hour drive?
I won't go into details to keep this brief, but I'm going to spend a week with this client of mine's kit, and I'm supposed to teach him enough about programming for him to figure out if it's something he might be interested in pursuing.
He's about 20, and still struggling to finish high school, but he's smart (although perhaps a little weird).
I thought about introducing him to touch typing just to get a useful skill out of this regardless of the outcome. Then, I thought that during this week I'd teach him HTML and enough CSS to see what's used for. I'm thinking that if he gets excited about typing code and seeing things happening he'll want to study more and learn more advanced stuff in the future and perhaps even make it his profession (this is what my client hopes will happen).
Now, part of this trip is a 12-hour drive. I thought I could use this time to introduce him to simple programming concepts. For instance, if asked to list all steps involved in starting a car, most people would say:
- turn key - start car
That could turn into an infinite loop, though. A better way would be:
- turn key - start car - if it starts, exit - if it doesn't start, repeat 3 more times - if it still won't start, call a mechanic
Stuff like this—that anyone can understand, that can be explained without looking at a computer, but that it's still useful.
Any idea what I could talk about? Examples, anecdotes, anything.
Computational Thinking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking
> 1. Problem formulation (abstraction);
> 2. Solution expression (automation);
> 3. Solution execution and evaluation (analyses).
This is a good skills matrix to start with:
http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
https://competency-checklist.appspot.com
"Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist"
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/index.html
K12CS Framework is good for all ages:
For syntax, learnxinmyminutes:
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python3/
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/
Good one, but that's kind of hard to do while driving, though.
To get a job, "Coding Interview University":
https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
This is actually pretty awesome :-)
Start simple, start small and start with something he's interested in.
There's the part about helping him discover whether he likes to create things through computers and whether he actually believes he can create things through computers. You're spot on that he might be interested about typing code but you'll have to figure out whether he's a visual person, a logical person, etc. For example, I got started learning to code once I understood what code can do to help automate things. A friend of mine got interested after seeing what websites he can build. Everyone is unique so you'll have to learn about him as you're trying to teach.
Good advice. Do you have any tip of how to figure out if he's a visual or logical person, etc.?
You can learn about a person's internal representation by asking Clean Questions and listening to the metaphors that they share; in order to avoid transferring and inferring your own biased internal representation (MAPS: metaphors, assumptions, paradigms or sensations).
It's worth reading this whole article (and e.g. "Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Language
"Metaphors We Live By" explains conceptual metaphor ("internal representation" w/ Clean Language / Symbolic Modeling) and lists quite a few examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
Our human brains tend to infer Given, When, Then "rules" which we only later reason about in terms of causal relations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Given-When-Then
It's generally accepted that software is more correct when we start with tests:
Given : When : Then :: Precondition : Command : Postcondition https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development...
... "Criteria for Success and Test-Driven-Development" https://westurner.github.io/2016/10/18/criteria-for-success-...
I believe it was Feynman who introduced the analogy:
desktop : filing cabinet :: RAM : hard drive
Here's a video: "Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture" (1985) https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA
Somewhere in my comments here, I talk about topologically sorting CS concepts; in what little time I spent, I think I suggested "Constructor Theory" (Deutsch 201?) as a first physical principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
> Constructor Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory#Outline
Task, Constructor, Computation Set, Computation Medium, Information Medium, Super information Medium (quantum states)
The filing cabinet and disk storage are information mediums / media.
How is the desktop / filling cabinet metaphor mismatched or limiting?
There may be multiple desktops (RAM/Cache/CPU; Computation mediums): is the problem parallelizable?
Consider a resource scheduling problem: there are multiple rooms, multiple projectors, and multiple speakers. Rooms and projectors cost so much. Presenters could use all of an allotted period of time; or they could take more or less time. Some presentations are logically sequence able (SHOULD/MUST be topologically sorted). Some presentations have a limited amount of time for questions afterward.
Solution: put talks online with an infinite or limited amount of time for asynchronous questions/comments
Solution: in between attending a presentation, also research and share information online (concurrent / asynchronous)
And, like a hash map, make the lookup time for a given resource with a type(s) ~O(1) with URLs (URIs) that don't change. (Big-O notation for computational complexity)
Resource scheduling (SLURM,): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15267146
American Red Cross Asks for Ham Radio Operators for Puerto Rico Relief Effort
Zello trended up during hurricane Harvey:
> Push the button for instant, radio-style talk on any Wi-Fi or data plan.
> Access public and private channels.
> Choose button for push-to-talk.
> [...] available for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows PC and Windows Phone 8
...
> Connects to existing LMR radio systems
> All Radio Technologies
> Interconnect conventional and trunked analog FM, ETSI DMR, ETSI TETRA, MotoTRBO, APCO P25 FDMA, and NXDN.
They probably need some batteries, turbines, and solar cell chargers to get WiFi online?
> This phone needs no battery
http://www.techradar.com/news/this-phone-needs-no-battery
> [...] “We’ve built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power,” said Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW and co-author on a paper describing the technology.
> Instead, the phone pulls power from its environment - either from ambient radio signals harvested by an antenna, or ambient light collected by a solar cell the size of a grain of rice. The device consumes just 3.5 microwatts of power during use.
> [...] “And if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cellphone coverage everywhere."
(Also trending on HackerNews right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350799 )
That's not at all useful, nor is it relevant.
Probably also worth mentioning Shelterpods and Responsepods for disaster relief deployments to this crowd; they're designed to take a lot of wind and rain:
https://store.advancedsheltersystemsinc.com/?___store=shelte...
https://store.advancedsheltersystemsinc.com/responsepod/vip/...
Technical and non-technical tips for rocking your coding interview
This is also a great resource, if you're into studying yourself:
"Coding Interview University" https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
Django 2.0 alpha
Can someone who uses Django, review this release? What are the most anticipated changes etc?
There's new `path()` as alternative to `url()` that allows one to use easier to remember syntax for url params like `<int:id>` instead of past `(?P<year>[0-9]{4})`. But if you need it, there's still `url()` for you to use power of regex in your urls.
And your shop still runs on Py2k, you'll need to move to Py3k to use Django 2.0. This also means that websockets support will not land on Django version that works for Py2k.
</year></int:id>How is <int:id> identical to (?P<year>[0-9]{4})? I'm talking about the {4}. Just an error in their blog post?</year></int:id>
Does it support negative long integers?
EDIT: I am without actual internet or mobile tethering and an unable to `git clone https://github.com/django/django -b stable/2.0.x` and check out this convenient new feature.
It's still regex under the hood, the 'int' is just syntactic sugar for "[0-9]+":
https://github.com/django/django/blob/dda37675db0295baefef37...
Ask HN: What is the best way to spend my time as a 17-year-old who can code?
I'm 17 and I can code at a relatively high level. I'm not really sure what I should be doing. I would like to make some money, but is it more useful to me to contribute to open-source software to add to my portfolio or to find people who will hire me? Even most internships require you to be enrolled as a CS major at a college. I've also tried things like Upwork, but generally people aren't willing to hire a 17-year-old and the pay is very bad. Thanks for any advice!
My GitHub is: https://github.com/meyer9
Pick a #GlobalGoal or three that you find interesting and want to help solve.
Apply Computational Thinking to solving a given problem. Break it down into completeable tasks.
You can work on multiple canvasses at once: sometimes it's helpful to let things simmer on the back burner while you're taking care of business. Just don't spread yourself too thin: everyone deserves your time.
Remember ERG theory (and Maslow's Hierarchy). Health and food and shelter are obviously important.
Keep lists of good ideas. Notecards, git, a nice fresh blank sheet of paper for the #someday folder. What to call it isn't important yet. "Thing1" and "Thing2".
You can spend time developing a portfolio, building up your skills, and continuing education. You can also solve a problem now.
You don't need a co-founder at first. You do need to plan to be part of a team: other people are good at other things; and that's the part they most enjoy doing.
Democrats fight FCC's plans to redefine “broadband” from 25+ to 10+ Mbps
The FCC redefined broadband as 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up as reported in the 2015 Broadband Progress Report (from 4Mbps/1Mbps in 2010).
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progr...
Ask HN: Any detailed explanation of computer science
Any detailed easily understandable explanation of computer science from bottom-up like Feynman's lectures explanation of physics.
Bits
Boolean algebra
Boolean logic gates / (set theory)
CPU / cache
Memory / storage
Data types (signed integers, floats, decimals, strings), encoding
...
A bottom-up (topologically sorted) computer science curriculum (a depth-first traversal of a Thing graph) ontology would be a great teaching resource.
One could start with e.g. "Outline of Computer Science", add concept dependency edges, and then topologically (and alphabetically or chronologically) sort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science
There are many potential starting points and traversals toward specialization for such a curriculum graph of schema:Things/skos:Concepts with URIs.
How to handle classical computation as a "collapsed" subset of quantum computation? Maybe Constructor Theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
From "Resources to get better at theoretical CS?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15281776 :
- "Open Source Society University: Path to a self-taught education in Computer Science!" https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
This is also great:
- "Coding Interview University" https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
Neither these nor the ACM Curriculum are specifically topologically sorted.
Ask HN: What algorithms should I research to code a conference scheduling app
I'm interested in writing a utility to assist with scheduling un-conferences. Lets take the following situation for an example:
* 4 conference rooms across 4 time slots, for a total of 16 talks.
* 30 proposed talks
* 60 total participants
Each user would be given 4(?)votes, un-ranked. (collection of the votes is a separate topic) Voting is not secret, and we don't need mathematically precise results. The goal is just to minimize conflicts.
The algorithm would have the following data to work with:
* List of talks with the following properties:
* presenter participant ID
* the participant ID for each user that voted for the talk
* fills all time slots with the highest voted topics
* attempts to avoid overlapping votes for any particular given user in a given time slot
* attempt to not schedule a presenter's talk during a talk they are interested in.
* Sugar on top: implement ranked preferences
My question: where do I start to research the algorithms that will be helpful? I know this is a huge project, but I have a year to work on it. I'm also not overly concerned with performance, but would like to keep it from being exponential.
Thank you for any references you can provide!
Resource scheduling, CSP (Constraint Satisfaction programming)
CSP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_satisfaction_proble...
Scheduling (production processes):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(production_process...
Scheduling (computing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(computing)
... To an OS, a process thread has a priority and sometimes a CPU affinity.
What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?
- The internet (TCP/IP) and world wide web (HTML, HTTP).
History of the Internet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
History of the World Wide Web:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
- Relational algebra, databases, Linked Data (RDF,).
Relational algebra:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra
Relational database:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database
Linked Data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data
RDF:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
- CRISPR/Cas9, CRISPR/Cpf1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
Cas9:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas9
CRISPR/Cpf1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR/Cpf1
- Tissue Nanotransfection
- Time, Calendars
Time > History of the calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time#History_of_the_calendar
- Standard units of measure (QUDT URIs)
How about Tesla?!
Nikola Tesla > AC (alternating current) and the induction motor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#AC_and_the_induct...
Induction motor:
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? (2017)
Was just Googling around for whether Excel (sans VBA scripting of course) is Turing-complete, in order to decide whether telling a layperson that Excel (or spreadsheeting in general) can be considered very much like programming. Came across this 2009 HN thread, "Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?" from pg:
> One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you'd like to be able to do that you can't currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429477
What significant advances -- in Excel/spreadsheets, not the Turing-complete thing -- have been made in the 8 years since? What's the YC startup from that cycle that "is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet", and what is it doing today? I remember Grid [0], but that was from 2012. Any other companies make innovations that would overturn the spreadsheet paradigm, or at least be copied by Excel/OO/GSheets?
A commenter mentioned "Queries", since many spreadsheet users use spreadsheets like a database. I just recently noticed that GSheets has a QUERY function [1] that uses "principles of Structured Query Language (SQL) to do searches). The function has been around since 2015 (according to Internet Archive [2]) so perhaps I ignored it because its description then was simply, "Runs a Google Visualization API Query Language query across data."
It appears that "Visualization API Query Language" has a lot of SQL-type features with the immediately obvious exception of joins [3].
edit: Multiple people said they would like Excel to have online functionality, i.e. like Google Sheets, but being able to accept VBA and any other features of legacy Excel spreadsheets. There's now Excel Online but I haven't used it (still sticking to Office 2011 for Mac if I ever need to use Excel instead of GS). How seamless is the transition from offline, legacy Excel files to online Excel?
[0] http://blog.ycombinator.com/grid-yc-s12-reinvents-the-spreadsheet-for-the/
[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20150319144449/https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
[3] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage
Topological sort on cells based on formula references.
Excel sheets are often highly convoluted in cell cross-references in formulas. It would help to have a clean-up mechanism that performs a topological sort on all the cells with formulas and puts them in a more natural order. It would help to be able to identify the backward references even if the cells are not automatically rearranged.
+1 for Topological sort of formulas (e.g. into a Jupyter notebook; as e.g. Python)
https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/2arevn/how_to_u...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1739oc/imp...
[deleted]
The real data structure for financial reporting and analysis is hyperdimensional, like it or not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL
After a 15 year struggle, digital financial reports are a success in the U.S and the Europeans are following up.
---
Also, many people use a spreadsheet when they really want a database. In the office world that would be Access instead of Excel; I like the idea of Access but the implementation is an uncomfortable place of having a complex GUI and having to know some SQL.
---
Finally, decimal arithmetic. Financial calculations should not have the artifacts that come from trying to represent (1/100)th in base 2.
W3C RDF Data Cubes (qb:)
https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge-engineerin...
> RDF Data Cubes vocabulary is an RDF standard vocabulary for expressing linked multi-dimensional statistical data and aggregations.
> Data Cubes have dimensions, attributes, and measures
> Pivot tables and crosstabulations can be expressed with RDF Data Cubes vocabulary
And then SDMX is widely used internationally:
https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/3402#issuecommen...
Linked Data.
> [...] 7 metadata header rows (column label, property URI path, DataType, unit, accuracy, precision, significant figures)
https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibilit...
Specifically, CSVW JSONLD as a lossless output format.
CSVW supports physical units.
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/901990866704900096
> "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web" (#JSONLD, #RDFa HTML) is for Data on the Web #dwbp #linkeddata https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-model/
> #CSVW defaults to xsd:string if unspecified. "How do you support units of measure?" #qudt https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/#units-of-measure
Elon Musk Describes What Great Communication Looks Like
" The world is flat! "*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat
Check out Thomas L. Friedman (@tomfriedman): https://twitter.com/tomfriedman
Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science
List of important publications in computer science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications...
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love#other-good-...
Ask HN: How do you, as a developer, set measurable and actionable goals?
I see a lot of people from other industries, say designers or sales people, who can set for themselves actionable and measurable goals such as "Make one illustration a day", "Make a logo a day" or "Sell X units of Y product a day", "Make X ammount of dollars seeling product Z by date X", etc.
How do you, as a developer, set measurable goals for yourself, being it at work or in your side hobbie?
some companies use some kind of agile methodology to manage the work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
two of the most widely used being Scrum and Kanban
which could be used to track how your doing against your self. although recommended not to be used for evaluating employees so take with a grain of salt.
Burn down chart (each story has complexity points; making it possible to estimate velocity and sprint deadlines):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart
User stories in a "story map" (Kanban board) with labels and/or milestones for epics, flights, themes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story#Story_map
Software Development > Requirements Management > Agile Modeling > User Story: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development...
Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
... Speaking of environmental externalities,
In the US, "Class C" fire extinguishers work on electrical fires:
From Fire_class#Electrical:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Electrical
> Carbon dioxide CO2, NOVEC 1230, FM-200 and dry chemical powder extinguishers such as PKP and even baking soda are especially suited to extinguishing this sort of fire. PKP should be a last resort solution to extinguishing the fire due to its corrosive tendencies. Once electricity is shut off to the equipment involved, it will generally become an ordinary combustible fire.
> In Europe, "electrical fires" are no longer recognized as a separate class of fire as electricity itself cannot burn. The items around the electrical sources may burn. By turning the electrical source off, the fire can be fought by one of the other class of fire extinguishers [citation needed].
How does this compare to carbon-intensive resource extraction operations like gold mining?
(Gold is industrially and medically useful, IIUC)
See also:
"So, clean energy incentives" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070430
Dancing can reverse the signs of aging in the brain
"Dancing or Fitness Sport? The Effects of Two Training Programs on Hippocampal Plasticity and Balance Abilities in Healthy Seniors"
Front. Hum. Neurosci., 15 June 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00305
Adult neurogenesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_neurogenesis
IIUC:
{Omega 3/6, Cardiovascular exercise,} -> Endocannabinoids -> [Hippocampal,] neurogenesis
"Neurobiological effects of physical exercise" (Hippocampal plasticity, neurogenesis,)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_phy...
"Study: Omega-3 fatty acids fight inflammation via cannabinoids" https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/532158 (Omega 6: Omega 3 ratio)
scholar.google q=cannabinoid+neurogenesis https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cannabinoid+neurogenesi...
Functions of the ECS (Endocannabinoid System):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocannabinoid_system#Functio...
- #Role-in-hippocampal-neurogenesis, "runners high"
Rumours swell over new kind of gravitational-wave sighting
This might be a naive question, but I'd like to clear it out.
Do gravitational waves travel at the speed of light?
I know the theory says nothing can travel faster than light. I also know that photons can be seen as quanta or as waves. So my guess is that gravitational waves travel at most, at the speed of light.
But do they? or do they travel slower? faster? Is there a doppler effect for GWs?
I ask because I would think ripples in the space-time fabric itself might be a bit different than light waves or other more studied phenomena.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
These PBS Spacetime episodes should help:
The Speed of Light is NOT About Light - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo
Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfmgyXs7z8
The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlXdsyctD50
Pilot Wave Theory and Quantum Realism - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlXdsyctD50
The Future of Gravitational Waves - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ2RNBAFLj0
Thanks!
"Neutron star": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star
New Discovery Simplifies Quantum Physics
OpenAI has developed new baseline tool for improving deep reinforcement learning
https://blog.openai.com/openai-baselines-dqn/ (May 2017)
Deep Learning RL (Reinforcement Learning) algos in this batch of OpenAI RL baselines: DQN, Double Q Learning, Prioritized Replay, Dueling DQN
Src: https://github.com/openai/baselines
[deleted]
https://blog.openai.com/baselines-acktr-a2c/ (August 2017)
ACKTR & A2C (~=A3C)
(The GitHub readme lists: A2C, ACKTR, DDPG, DQN, PPO, TRPO)
... openai/baselines/commits/master: https://github.com/openai/baselines/commits/master
The prior can generally only be understood in the context of the likelihood
Bayes assumes/requires conditional independence of observations; which is sometimes the case.
For example:
- Are the positions of the Earth and the Moon conditionally independent? No.
- In the phrase "the dog and the cat", are "and" and "the" independent? No.
- In a biological system, are we to assume conditional independence? We should not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence
...
"Efficient test for nonlinear dependence of two continuous variables" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539721/
- In no particular sequence: CANOVA, ANOVA, Pearson, Spearman, Kendall, MIC, Hoeffding
From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-inductive/ :
> It is now generally held that the core idea of Bayesian logicism is fatally flawed—that syntactic logical structure cannot be the sole determiner of the degree to which premises inductively support conclusions. A crucial facet of the problem faced by Bayesian logicism involves how the logic is supposed to apply to scientific contexts where the conclusion sentence is some hypothesis or theory, and the premises are evidence claims. The difficulty is that in any probabilistic logic that satisfies the usual axioms for probabilities, the inductive support for a hypothesis must depend in part on its prior probability. This prior probability represents how plausible the hypothesis is supposed to be based on considerations other than the observational and experimental evidence (e.g., perhaps due to relevant plausibility arguments). A Bayesian logicist must tell us how to assign values to these pre-evidential prior probabilities of hypotheses, for each of the hypotheses or theories under consideration. Furthermore, this kind of Bayesian logicist must determine these prior probability values in a way that relies only on the syntactic logical structure of these hypotheses, perhaps based on some measure of their syntactic simplicities. There are severe technical problems with getting this idea to work. Moreover, various kinds of examples seem to show that such an approach must assign intuitively quite unreasonable prior probabilities to hypotheses in specific cases (see the footnote cited near the end of section 3.2 for details). Furthermore, for this idea to apply to the evidential support of real scientific theories, scientists would have to formalize theories in a way that makes their relevant syntactic structures apparent, and then evaluate theories solely on that syntactic basis (together with their syntactic relationships to evidence statements). Are we to evaluate alternative theories of gravitation (and alternative quantum theories) this way?
>"This prior probability represents how plausible the hypothesis is supposed to be based on considerations other than the observational and experimental evidence (e.g., perhaps due to relevant plausibility arguments)."
I guess I don't know about how "Bayesian logicism" differs from "Bayesian probability", but this is totally false in the latter case. The prior is just supposed to be independent of the current data (eg devised before it was collected). In practice info almost always leaks into the prior + model via tinkering. That is why a priori predictions are so important to proving you are onto something.
Bayesian logicism is the logic derived from Bayesian probability.
Magic numbers are an anti-pattern: which constants are what and why should be justified OR it should be shown that a non-expert-biased form converges regardless.
The use of the term prior probability in that paragraph is not consistent with its use in bayesian probability, so something is wrong.
Also, I am not sure what magic numbers you are referring to.
Ask HN: How to find/compare trading algorithms with Quantopian?
I found this, which links to a number of quantitative trading algorithms that significantly outperform as compared with SPY (an S&P 500 ETF):
"Community Algorithms Migrated to Quantopian 2"
https://www.quantopian.com/posts/community-algorithms-migrat...
Why even build a business, create jobs, and solve the world's problems?
... "Impact investing"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing
"Is this a good way to invest in solving for the #GlobalGoals for Sustainable Development ( https://GlobalGoals.org )?"
Ask HN: How do IPOs and ICOs help a business raise capital?
Ask HN: How do IPOs and ICOs help a business raise capital?
IPO: "Initial Public Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering
ICO: "Initial Coin Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering
"""
IPO: "Initial Public Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering
ICO: "Initial Coin Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering
"""
Solar Window coatings “outperform rooftop solar by 50-fold”
MS: Bitcoin mining uses as much electricity as 1M US homes
So, clean energy incentives.
> That means 1.2% of the Sahara desert is sufficient to cover all of the energy needs of the world in solar energy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power...
Nearly all other animals on the planet survive entirely on solar energy.
Ask HN: What are your favorite entrepreneurship resources
Hey everyone, I'm teaching an undergraduate class in the fall at a local university here in Miami (FIU) and would love your recommendations on what books or articles or frameworks you think the students should read. My goal for the class is to teach them how to identify problems and prototype solutions for those problems. Hopefully, they make some money from them to help pay for books, etc.
I put these notes together:
Entrepreneurship: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/entrepreneurship
- #plan-for-failure
- #plan-for-success
Investing > Capitalization Table: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/investing#capitaliza...
- I'll add something about Initial Coin Offerings (which are now legal in at least Delaware).
AngelList ( https://angel.co for VC jobs and funding ) asks "What's the most useful business-related book you've ever read?" ... Getting Things Done (David Allen), 43Folders = 12 months + 31 days (Merlin Mann), The Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki), The Personal MBA (Josh Kaufman)
Lever ( https://www.lever.co ) makes recruiting and hiring (some parts of HR) really easy.
LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com ) also has a large selection of qualified talent: https://smallbusiness.linkedin.com/hiring
... How much can you tell about a candidate from what they decide to write on themselves on the internet?
USA Small Business Administration: "10 steps to start your business." https://www.sba.gov/starting-business/how-start-business/10-...
"Startup Incorporation Checklist: How to bootstrap a Delaware C-corp (or S-corp) with employee(s) in California" https://github.com/leonar15/startup-checklist
Jupyter Notebook (was: IPython Notebook) notebooks are diff'able and executable. Spreadsheets can be hard to review. https://github.com/jupyter/notebook
It's now installable with one conda command: ``conda install -y notebook pandas qgrid``
CPU Utilization is Wrong
Instructions per cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle
What does IPC tell me about where my code could/should be async so that it's not stalled waiting for IO? Is combined IO rate a useful metric for this?
There's an interesting "Cost per GFLOPs" table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
Btw these are great, thanks: http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
( I still couldn't fill this out if I tried: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-08-23/linux-perf-tools... )
It's not that your code should be async, but that it should be more cache-friendly. It's probably mostly stalled waiting for RAM.
Ask HN: Can I use convolutional neural networks to clasify videos on a CPU
Is there any way that I can use conv nets to classify videos on a CPU. I do not have GPUs but I want to classify videos.
There's a table with runtime comparisons for a convnet here: https://github.com/ryanjay0/miles-deep/ (GPU CuDNN: 15s, GPU: 19s, CPU: 159s)
(Also written w/ Caffe: https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw)
Esoteric programming paradigms
Re: "Dependent Types"
In Python, PyContracts supports runtime type-checking and value constraints/assertions (as @contract decorators, annotations, and docstrings).
https://andreacensi.github.io/contracts/
Unfortunately, there's yet no unifying syntax between PyContracts and the newer python type annotations which MyPy checks at compile-type.
https://github.com/python/typeshed
What does it mean for types to be "a first class member of" a programming language?
Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles
So, schema.org, has classes (C:) -- subclasses of CreativeWork and Article -- for property (P:) domains (D:) and ranges (R:) which cover this domain:
- CreativeWork: http://schema.org/CreativeWork
- - BlogPosting: http://schema.org/BlogPosting
- - Article: http://schema.org/Article
- - - NewsArticle: http://schema.org/NewsArticle
- - - Report: http://schema.org/Report
- - - ScholarlyArticle: http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle
- - - SocialMediaPosting: http://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting
- - - TechArticle: http://schema.org/TechArticle
Thing: (name, [url], [identifier], [#about], [description[_gh_markdown_html]])
- C: CreativeWork:
- - P: comment R: Comment
- - C: Comment: https://schema.org/Comment
Fact Check now available in Google Search and News
So, publishers can voluntarily add https://schema.org/ClaimReview markup as RDFa, JSON-LD, or Microdata.
Ask HN: Is anyone working on CRISPR for happiness?
"studies have found that genetic influences usually account for 35-50% of the variance in happiness measures"
No doubt there are many reasons why this is extremely complicated
Roadmap to becoming a web developer in 2017
Nice.
- https://github.com/fkling/JSNetworkX would be a cool way to build interactive schema:Thing/CreativeWork curriculum graph visualizations (and BFS/DFS traversal)
- #WebSec: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web-development#websec
- Web Development Checklist: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web-development#web-develo...
-- http://webdevchecklist.com/
- | Web Frameworks (GitHub Sphinx wiki (./Makefile)): https://westurner.org/wiki/webframeworks (| Wikipedia, | Homepage, Source, Docs,)
Ask HN: How do you keep track/save your learnings?(so that you can revisit them)
- Vim Voom: `:Voom rest` , ':Voom markdown`
- Jupyter notebooks
- Sphinx docs: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/research#research-tools src: https://github.com/wrdrd/docs/blob/master/docs/consulting/re...
- Sphinx wiki (./Makefile):
-- Src: https://github.com/westurner/wiki
-- Src: https://github.com/westurner/wiki/wiki
-- Web: https://westurner.org/wiki/workflow
interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!
Use a spaced repetition flashcard program like Anki or Mnemosyne or one of the others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flashcard_software) and use it on a regular basis, preferably every day.
[deleted]
Ask HN: Criticisms of Bayesian statistics?
In tech circles, it seems that Bayesian statistics is often favored over classical frequentist statistics. In my study of both Bayesian and frequentist statistics, it seems that the results of a Bayesian analysis are generally more intuitive, such as when comparing Bayesian credible intervals to frequentist confidence intervals. It also seems like Bayesian analysis avoids what I think is one of the most serious problems in analysis, the multiple comparisons problem. It's been easy for me to find any number of Bayesian critiques of frequentist stats, but I have rarely seen frequentist defenses against Bayesian stats. This may simply be because I mostly read technology related sites as opposed to more general statistics oriented sites. As such, I would really appreciate hearing some frequentist critiques of Bayesian stats. I feel like the situation can't be as cut and dry as one being better than the other in all things, so I would like to acquire a more balanced perspective by hearing about the other side. Thanks!
~bayesian logicism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-inductive/ :
> It is now generally held that the core idea of Bayesian logicism is fatally flawed—that syntactic logical structure cannot be the sole determiner of the degree to which premises inductively support conclusions. [...]
80,000 Hours career plan worksheet
> What are your best medium-term options (3-15 years)?
> 1. What global problems do you think are most pressing?
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets w/ statistical indicators, AKA GlobalGoals, are for the whole world through 2030.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
"Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141 could make it easy to connect our local, regional, national, and global goals; and find people with similar objectives and solutions.
World's first smartphone with a molecular sensor is coming in 2017
> Looking at the back of the phone, you'd be forgiven for thinking the sensor is just the phone's camera. But that odd-looking dual lens is the scanner, basically the embedded version of the SCiO. It uses spectrometry to shine near-infrared light on objects — fruit, liquids, medicine, even your body — to analyze them.
> Say you're at at the supermarket and you want to check how fresh the tomatoes are. Instead of squeezing them, you'd just launch the SCiO app, hold the scanner up to the skin of the tomato, and it will tell you how fresh it is on a visual scale. Do the same thing to your body and you can check your body mass index (BMI). You need to specify the thing you're scanning at the outset, and the actually analysis is performed in the cloud, but the whole process is a matter of seconds, not minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy
... Tricorder X PRIZE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder_X_Prize
Ask HN: How would one build a business that only develops free software?
So I was reading Richard Stallman's blog on why you should not use google/uber/apple/twitter etc and I understand his reasoning. But what I don't understand is how would one go about building a startup or business that develops and distributes free software only and make good money doing so?
For example, would it be possible to build a free software version of uber/twitter/facebook etc? How would that work?
By removing all restrictions on the software, what is the incentive to not pirate the software? The GPL can be enforced, but that is clearly not practical especially outside the US.
A business is more than just the source code. The source for Reddit, for example, is OSS. So anybody should be able to put Reddit out of business in a few days, right? But yet... nobody has. Hmmm....
So yeah, you can distribute source code and still make money. Lots of companies do it. Red Hat, SugarCRM, Alfresco, etc.
In some ways it's probably even easier for an online service to both be OSS and be successful, exactly because it takes all the other "stuff" (hosting, devops, marketing, network effects, etc.) to be successful. And, in fact, there are OSS replacements for things like Facebook and Twitter. The problem is, very few people use them for whatever reason (probably mostly network effects).
So at least in regards to the Facebooks, Twitters, etc. of the world, the first question you'd have to answer, is how to get people to switch to your service, whether it's free software or otherwise.
> The source for Reddit [...]
Src: https://github.com/reddit/reddit /blob/master/r2/setup.py
Docs: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/Install-guide
"Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES)" is donationware: https://github.com/honestbleeps/Reddit-Enhancement-Suite
"List of Independent GNU social Instances" http://skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_GNU_social_...
> [...] the first question you'd have to answer, is how to get people to switch to your service, whether it's free software or otherwise.
"Growth hacking": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hacking
"Business models for open-source software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...
...
- https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes (Apache 2.0)
- https://github.com/apple (Swift is Apache 2.0)
- https://github.com/microsoft
- https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement
...
- "GNU Social" (GNU AGPL v3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social
... http://choosealicense.com/appendix/ has a table for comparison of open source software licenses.
http://tinyurl.com/p6mka3k describes Open Source Governance in a chart with two axes (Cathedral / Bazaar , Benevolent Dictator / Formal Meritocracy) ... as distinct from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance , which is the application of open source software principles to government. USDS Playbook advises "Default to open" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play13
Anarchy / Budgeting: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/budgetdata
Ask HN: If your job involves continually importing CSVs, what industry is it?
I was wondering if people still use CSVs for data exchange now, or if we've mostly moved to JSON and XML.
Arguing for the CSVW (CSV on the Web) W3C Standards:
- "CSV on the Web: A Primer" http://w3c.github.io/csvw/primer/
- Src: https://github.com/w3c/csvw
- Columns have URIs (ideally from a shared RDFS/OWL vocabulary)
- Columns have XSD datatype URIs
- CSVW can be represented as RDF, JSON, JSONLD
With CSV, which extra metadata file describes how many rows at the top are for columnar metadata? (I.e. column labels, property URI, XSD datatype URI, units URI, precision, accuracy, significant figures) ... https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibility#csv-...
... CSVW: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/knowledge-engineering#csvw
@prefix csvw: <http: csvw#="" ns="" www.w3.org=""> .
</http:>Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?
I'm in my late twenties and I'm having a bit of a tough time dealing with my level of programming skill.
Over the past 3 years, I've released a few apps on iOS: not bad, nothing that would amaze anyone here. The code is generally messy and horrible, rife with race conditions and barely holding together in parts. (Biggest: 30k LOC.) While I'm proud of my work — especially design-wise — I feel most of my time was spent on battling stupid bugs. I haven't gained any specialist knowledge — just bloggable API experience. There's nothing I could write a book about.
Meanwhile, when I compulsively dig through one-man frameworks like YapDatabase, Audiobus, or AudioKit, I am left in awe! They're brimming with specialist knowledge. They're incredibly documented and organized. Major features were added over the course of weeks! People have written books about these frameworks, and they were created by my peers — probably alongside other work. Same with one-man apps like Editorial, Ulysses, or GoodNotes.
I am utterly baffled by how knowledgeable and productive these programmers are. If I'm dealing with a new topic, it can take weeks to get a lay of the land, figure out codebase interactions, consider all the edge cases, etc. etc. But the commits for these frameworks show that the devs basically worked through their problems over mere days — to say nothing of getting the overall architecture right from the start. An object cache layer for SQL? Automatic code gen via YAML? MIDI over Wi-Fi? Audio destuttering? Pff, it took me like a month to add copy/paste to my app!
I'm in need of some recalibration. Am I missing something? Is this quality of work the norm, or are these just exceptional programmers? And even if they are, how can I get closer to where they're standing? I don't want to wallow in my mediocrity, but the mountain looks almost insurmountable from here! No matter the financial cost or effort, I want to make amazing things that sustain me financially; but I can't do that if it takes me ten times as long to make a polished product as another dev. How do I get good enough to consistently do work worth writing books about?
For identifying strengths and weaknesses: "Programmer Competency Matrix":
- http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
- https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/
- https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
... from: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/software-development#compu... )
> How do I get good enough to consistently do work worth writing books about?
- These are great reads: "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" http://aosabook.org/en/
- TDD.
[deleted]
Ask HN: Anything Like Carl Sagan's Cosmos for Computer Science?
Is there anything like Carl Sagan's Cosmos that talks about the history of computing in an accessible way? Pondering Christmas gifts for my niece.
Computer #History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
Outline of Computer Engineering #History of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_engineerin...
History of Computer Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science
Outline of Computer Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science
History of the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
History of the World Wide Web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
... maybe a bit OT; but, interestingly, IDK if any of these include a history section:
#K12CSFramework (Practices, Concepts): https://k12cs.org
- "Impacts of Computing" (Culture; Social Interactions; Safety, Law, and Ethics): https://k12cs.org/framework-statements-by-progression/#jump-...
"Competencies and Tasks on the Path to Human-Level AI" (Perception, Actuation, Memory, Learning, Reasoning, Planning, Attention, Motivation, Emotion, Modeling Self and Other, Social Interaction, Communication, Quantitative, Building/Creation): http://wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview#Competencies_and...
Code.org (#HourOfCode): https://code.org/learn
Not really in keeping with the idea of a gift suitable for a niece.
No, but particulary more comprehensive and informative than any one video. These links (to #OER) would be useful for anyone intending to try and replicate the form and style of the "Cosmos" video series with Computer Science content.
Cosmos was also a dead tree book. [1] It was not uncommonly given as a gift.
The original TV series was broadcast the same year as its publication, 1980, but I don't think it was readily available on consumer tape until several years later and then not at normal holiday gift prices. Back in those days, most video libraries were built by the librarian directly recording broadcasts. But most people would just wait for a rebroadcast.
Learn X in Y minutes
this has been shared/posted a hundred times before... nothing new here.
Eh, I can't honestly tell if there has been more X's added since the last time it was posted and I don't feel like putting in the time into the wayback machine to find out.
The source is hosted on GitHub; there's a commit log (for each file and directory): https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-docs/commits/ma...
Org mode 9.0 released
I love Org mostly for its ability to link to stuff. In my mind it's the big feature that sets it apart from using, say, a separate application to do my task management. For instance:
- When I'm reading email (in emacs), I can quickly create a TODO that links back to the current email I'm reading (most of my TODOs, in fact, link to an email, so this is very useful),
- For my org file where I keep notes about the servers I'm running, I might link to a specific line on a remote apache config,
- For a bug report I might link to a specific git commit in a project to look at later
Any TODO that is important gets scheduled, so that it is linked to from the agenda view. In this way it's very hard for me to lose track of anything, despite most of my work communication happening through email. In fact I now prefer email over using something like Basecamp, because org makes it easier for me to manage!
Because Emacs is an OS the way it should be — an extensible system with a unified UI instead of a pile of separate and hardly interoperable applications.
"b-but the UNIX philosophy!"
The more time I spend with UNIX and hear the "UNIX philosophy" used in place of argument when someone doesn't like the feature set of some software, the more I realize that we need to move on from UNIX. We should take more ideas from things like Emacs and the Lisp machines when designing our software, and less from UNIX.
Emacs has very few self-contained mega packages; in its own way, Emacs software is built by chaining together smaller packages. Many packages are little more than extensions to other packages.
But their interop is better. Besides Emacs packages having much greater "contact surface" (packages can augment other packages, if needed), the biggest problem with UNIX philosophy is using unstructured text as exchange medium. It leads to huge waste and proliferation of bugs, as each tool or script you use has to have its own custom (and bug-ridden) parser, and outputs its own unstructured and usually undocumented data format. This is one of those moments the history of computing took a huge step backwards. All that recent push for passing JSON around instead of plaintext? That's just rediscovering what we've lost when UNIX came along.
Filenames may contain newlines. JSON strings may contain newlines.
The modular aspects of the UNIX philosophy are pretty cool; the data interchange format (un-typed \n-delimited strings) is irrational (and
dangerous).
JSON w/ a JSONLD @context and XSD type URIs may also contain newlines (which should be escaped)
Note that, with OSX bash, tab \t must be specified as $'\t'.
And, sometimes, it's \r\n instead of just \n (which is extra-format metadata).
And then Unicode. Oh yeah, unicodë.
You don't have to use $'', you can also use literal tabs (ctrl-v to insert literals). The main difference between macOS and Linux that people notice is that macOS sed doesn't itself interpret \t (so you have to use literal tabs or $'' there).
\r\n is Windows, not Unix.
What about Unicode? (Btw, UTF-8 was created by unixers Rob Pike and Ken Thompson https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt )
That's not a living wage (or a full time job). There are lots of job search sites.
Spending some time on a good resume / CV / portfolio would probably be a good investment with positive ROI.
Is there a nonprofit that you could volunteer with to increase your hireability during the other 158 hours of the week?
Or an online course with a credential that may or may not have positive ROI as a resume item?
Is there a code school in your city with a "you don't pay unless you land a full time job with a living wage and benefits" guarantee?
What is your strategy for business and career networking?
From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-17894632 :
> Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)
Personal Finance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finance
Khan Academy > College, careers, and more > Personal finance https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-fi...
"CS 007: Personal Finance For Engineers" https://cs007.blog
https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki