pythonaut_16

This is one of the things Microsoft really got right in Windows 10. Tablet mode works well for when you want to have a single app on the screen at a time (and even works for normal desktop apps), while traditional mode works great when you've got a mouse and a keyboard hooked up.

Lucifer comes from the Latin words for light bearer, so Luciferase and luciferin make plenty of sense I think

For 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, weren't those appearances after the people were already prominent and/or in office?

The 30 Rock/Al Gore example in particular happened years after he was done running for public office.

And even Parks and Rec wasn't so much advocating for Joe Biden/Michelle Obama as having a left leaning, political character be excited about the opportunity to meet them. I can also remember John McCain appearing on Parks and Rec.

What's the difference between emailing it instantly, and doing a transaction that takes time and costs a transaction fee?

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty excited to see private companies trying to tackle the issue. Plus, when you look at the relative amounts of funds being spent right now (the linked article mentions Virgin Hyperloop One raising $50 million), it's still a relatively small number compared to the billions spent on social media and advertising companies and the defense industry.

If these private early companies can prove the concept is viable, there's plenty of money out there to implement it and work through the problems.

Google does a lot of things but they've never betrayed my trust by installing an extension in conjunction with a third party without telling me.

Google does track a lot of my data but they provide useful services in exchange, and in addition they make it pretty easy to see what data they have on me. Also Google's data is its competitive advantage so our interest in protecting my data from 3rd parties is aligned.

In short, Google tracks me sure, but they're pretty transparent about it. I do think some of the things Google does with Chrome and it's market position is less than stellar so I'm still exploring other options. If you have any suggestions I'd be happy to hear them.

If you're still using Firefox after this it's probably safest and best just to disable everything under Firefox Data Collection and Use

Just checked and saw the Looking Glass add-on installed on my work laptop.

I've uninstalled Firefox and will be removing it from all of my computers. I had just started slowly migrating back to it with the performance enhancements in the latest update, but honestly I don't think I can get past a breach of trust at this level.

You just reminded my that my main screen name I use for everything was the one I originally came up with for AIM in like 16+ years ago.

If Verizon/others start throttling Netflix again they (Netflix) should just start making ISPs the butt of the joke in some of their original content, or make content directly calling them out.

Could we create a self-regulating internet? One where the desired outcome of Net Neutrality is ensured by the protocol itself? What would it take?

I know there are projects like IPFS and Zeronet, but I don't think any of them are targeted specifically at avoiding throttling based on source/destination pair.

You should be able to tie that in as a Proof of Work of some sort on a blockchain right?

Not to bring everything back to buzzwords, but that actually seems like an interesting application of blockchain tech, letting people rent out their otherwise idle desktops to process and serve web services.

I'm actually somewhat satisfied with how they're ramming this vote through right now. Not because I want to lose Net Neutrality, but because if it is going to happen, it's best that it happens now, early in Trump's term, and that the process of forcing the vote is messy.

Two possible silver linings if it does get removed on the 14th:

1. We were wrong the whole time and reversing net neutrality launches us into a golden age of fast and cheap internet for all. (Very unlikely)

2. We were right, and reversing net neutrality is as bad as we feared. While it will be painful in the short term, hopefully it's bad enough to The Internet/Net Neutrality a relevant election issue for more people.

Either way, the sure silver lining is that by hashing this out now the consequences will be fully felt by the time the next presidential election rolls around.

Can you imagine if they were trying to shove this through in the lead up to the 2020 election when everyone is distracted by all the other issues at stake in the election?

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out; as we've seen before, there's often a long path from the president providing a directive like this and actually getting traction and accomplishing the mission.

Still, this is exciting news for space exploration. I've always wondered why everyone is so eager to jump directly to Mars and the asteroid belt when we've still done relatively little on the moon.

For human vs AI there will have to be APM rate limits otherwise the AI can win with no real strategy[0].

For AI vs AI it could be interesting to see what strategies develop with two opponents with the ability to perfectly microcontrol their units.

[0]Zerglings vs Siege Tanks when controlled by AI with perfect micro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

I used Google Express for the first time over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday period and I was quite impressed. There are still a few rough edges, but I was impressed. The website definitely functions better than Amazons, and shopping from multiple major retailers was a nice change of pace from Amazon's monopolized marketplace.

I don't find Instagram to be that bad. It definitely depends on who you follow though. Personally I use it to post cool pictures, photography, I take with my phone, and I tend to follow people who do the same.

People who start posting excessive "Look at my life" posts tend to get unfollowed pretty quickly.

That works if you need to communicate with them one-to-one. But does Signal let you easily add any other Signal user as a contact? What about when your kid wants to talk to their friends on the app?

To me the appeal of what Facebook is doing here is that it lets you give your kids freedom to use the app while letting you as a parent create the whitelist of who they're able to talk to.

I'm shocked by the overwhelmingly negative response here. Honestly I expect better when I come to Hackernews.

Facebook announces a novel app trying to solve common problems with kids using and communicating on the internet and everyone in the comments just comes out with their personal ax to grind with Facebook.

I get it. You hate Facebook, Facebook is a drug, Facebook kicked your dog. All of those might be valid criticisms, and if this was an article titled 'Facebook is destroying everything' I would be very interested in reading those opinions.

But as it is, all I see are shallow criticisms of Facebook as a whole rather than any kind of nuanced discussion of the Messenger for Kids app.

Personally I'm intrigued by the idea. Kids want to communicate using the internet (and before the internet it was phone numbers and texting), but this is the first time I've seen an approach that really helps parents to monitor who their kids are connecting to on the app.

Maybe Facebook is the wrong company to present this app; maybe the connection to Facebook is concerning. But the app itself I think represents the right direction to go in designing apps that minors can use to communicate and helping parents to keep their kids safe online.

Vertical integration shouldn't be an outright concern. Even if GM can integrate its entire supply chain, if they're still competing with other companies the consumer should come out alright in the end.

If monopolies start to hurt consumers then we can hope that the anti-trust regulators will step in, and hopefully in the case of a car manufacturer the anti-trust violations would be well defined enough for regulators to actually act.

Isn't most money used as purely digital anyway? When you get a mortgage, it's not like $300k of physical money changes hands.

So at a basic level quite a few (most) transactions are happening on a digital, abstract level anyway, so really the question is can blockchain be used to improve this model, and is there sufficient incentive for existing players to do so, or is there enough opportunity for someone else to come in and do so.

I think the former is what we're seeing banks start to explore today, while BTC and other cryptocoins have been exploring the latter.

That could be a cool exercise for your home. Document the various quirks and routines in a Github repository, then the new owner can gain access by forking it. Taking it a step farther, your family could submit issues or pull requests for various issues as they come up, generating an easy list of things that should be documented or fixed.

Now realistically the person buying your house probably doesn't know how to use Git and your family probably isn't gonna make pull requests, but it seems like a novel use of Git and Github. Maybe if it were effective enough a wrapper could be made?

Could blockchain be used to replace/side step aging mainframes written in COBOL? I'm not expert in the legacy systems or in blockchain but my understanding is that the reason transactions in traditional systems take so long to complete is that the COBOL mainframes are still set up to do batch processing. I wonder if using a (regulated) blockchain to record and process transactions could work to replace or enhance the legacy systems to process transactions in more realtime.

I have had similar thoughts. Also just an option for people who don't have families or live far from their families (e.g. single and moved to a new city for work) to prepare and share meals together. Like maybe I know that I'm cooking for ~6 people every Tuesday as part of a meal sharing, and someone else is cooking on Thursdays. Or maybe one night a week, I know that I'm cooking on the first Tuesday of every month, and someone else is cooking the second, etc.

I've thought about this before. Does it mean that our libraries aren't good enough? Do we just not know how to use them?

I often wish there was an intermediate between writing a fully custom piece of software for something and using excel. This about how many times you've worked on a web service (or other technology) and how much of the code is basically identical to every other webservice in that technology minus some unique data models and a few functions of custom logic.

Do you have any suggestions on where to get started with Pandas? I already know Python, but every time I try to get into Pandas I have a really hard time getting any traction. I'm particularly interested in using it to migrate Excel workflows.

And I think a big part of Linus's point is that if you break userspace for security now people will be less likely to upgrade their kernels in the future.

So they'll be secure from a hypothetical possible bug today, and completely vulnerable to real demonstrated security exploits in the future.

It might be interesting to see this concept used for a distributed housing collective. A group of homeowners across the country pool the value of their houses to buffer against economic downturns in any particular market.

Seeing how Tesla struggles with new car production I would love to see them take a role like Samsung; they can still make popular flagship cars, but they can also become a primary battery supplier to other automakers, just like Samsung has extremely popular flagship smartphones, but also is a primary supplier of parts like OLED screens. I think selling their battery tech could help them become and stay profitable while smoothing over the wrinkles they have in car production.

This could also free up cash flow to give them more resources to work on self driving tech. Honestly, the idea of an electric Honda or Subaru with a "Powered by Tesla" logo could seems really exciting.

Well shoot, if they can deliver full self driving capabilities, can I just buy one of these to live in instead of a house, cruising the freeways endlessly?