skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Facebook now believes that users won't abandon them and they can really start to use/abuse their position to increase their revenue.

I read that Facebook experimented with injecting random crashes in their Android and iOS apps to measure how much app stability affected user retention and usage. The answer was there was no effect! People wanted to use Facebook so much that the experiment's random crashes did not deter them.
Cupping, the Rio Olympics Health Trend, Can Do More Harm Than Good
There is a way: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
If security has been penetrated that far you are already owned.

What really scares me are things that can live in firmware; not just on mass storage drives but also in host system firmware. We've let too many dragons breed in dark places in the name of Digital Restrictions Management.
Mm, probably best if the next time I have that sort of urge, I try writing it up and see if what I'm suggesting is even compatible with what the author sought to accomplish.

I momentarily forgot how difficult it can be to stay tightly focused on the parts that the author wants to emphasize. It's an important result, and hinted at directly by the derivation, but ultimately it's not my decision to make.
I think Facebook is going to face the same problem that Youtube does. They have a lot of skilled users who can easily read through their code and find a loophole.
Intel aquires deep learning chip startup Nervana
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12242628
Software is eating compliance – now in debt collection
You can boot an original IBM PC off the keyboard port. Look for the MFG_BOOT function here:

https://www.iee.et.tu-dresden.de/~kc-club/DOWNLOAD/DISK401/R...

Basically, the device connected to the keyboard port has to reply with code 0x65 when it's initialized, then the BIOS will read some bytes into memory and jump to it. Not sure whether this was brought forward to newer models or clones, though so it's just some fun trivia...
Why would you (Facebook) go and advertise that you changed something that crucial. It's like saying 'hey, I have $1000 in my pocket, bet ya can't take em from me, my new pockets are pretty tight'. Eventually someone's going to try. Had you said nothing...
That's really not a counterexample to my point. This was a conspiracy involving over a dozen people. It's a plot that unraveled because someone leaked the details.

This is why technology has changed the balance. You don't need dozens of people to gather enough explosive material to pull this off today. And with fewer people involved, traditional detective work is harder, and those involved are less likely to leak details.
I tried to use the Range header feature to resume downloads in an autoupdating app once, and it worked beautifully...for about 90% of users; the others had all kinds of weird issues thanks to transparent proxies and caches not handling the Range header correctly. This was years ago, but I'm not surprised they chose to be safer than sorry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot
I'm constantly amazed by the competence of these 'big cloud' teams, I can't imagine the amount of preparatory work they put in. It does, however, make it clear how badly the Internet is starting to creak.
And as that happens they'll lose users who have become accustomed to the conveniences of ad blocking and open web pages.
Yeah. The annoyance of having to give copyright assignment to the FSF to have patches accepted to Emacs probably helps a lot that nobody has tried recently to violate its copyleft.
I'm not sure if the option is there on iOS, but on Android N, you can revoke the Microphone permission. I use the web app on Chrome but relented on installing the Messenger application ever since they crammed using that on mobile users. Yes, I admit defeat.
Godot reaches 2.1 stable
At least at Red Hat, it is easy for us to have open source side projects outside of the Red Hat suite of products.
Behaviours Design Pattern in Automated Testing
> Heh I gave a talk at DefCon Skytalks last week on this exact exfil method and C&C structure with a live demo using code we wrote....interesting.

> Kaspersky researchers still aren't sure precisely how the USB-enabled exfiltration works. The presence of the invisible storage area doesn't in itself allow attackers to seize control of air-gapped computers. The researchers suspect the capability is used only in rare cases and requires use of a zero-day exploit that has yet to be discovered. In all, Project Sauron is made up of at least 50 modules that can be mixed and matched to suit the objectives of each individual infection.

You remarkably have the exact exfil method when that's not disclosed information?
The problem seems to be in understanding the overall meaning over long periods of time. We can understand general structure quite easily and a single sentence might make sense, but overall it never ends up cohesive or meaningful.

Maybe we can do that with just words, but humans certainly don't. Words are related to concepts first, then we figure out the meaning of the rest.
Neon has been fast in benchmarks because of hand optimised kernels, but their kernel guy (Scott Gray) recently left to OpenAI. I wonder why
The problem is I'm at work right now, and I wanted to get results for where I live not where I work. (Which might still be unavailable, given, but at least let me type it in!)
I agree that AI is possible from text alone but only with the added stipulation that full understanding of text requires a very sophisticated learner. In order to predict what a human will say next, you need the ability to maintain extended context, use world models plus deduction to narrow and maintain multiple possibilities; all while being able to infer the state of the thing you are trying to predict (which means the AI itself has complex internal state far beyond anything an RNN or Neural Turing machine could manage today).

If I said "That is one huge fan", could you predict what my next word will be? It would depend a lot on context and the ability to reason within a complex world model. Depending on whether I had gone to a concert or to a wind tunnel, your distribution over guesses would alter. If I had gone whale watching you might even suspect I made a typo. Changing huge to large would lead to major to no adjustments, depending on each guess.

So while I agree an AI could emerge from text alone, it would have to be very sophisticated to do this.
And there are countless examples like my anecdotal one I gave above, you just need to go into any institution or company office, look at how people work on their computers and realize that the world needs millions of small programs like mine that would substantially increase productivity. The problem is, like the OP said, that us, "programmers", like to keep the playing field only for ourselves.

You're going to need a better example than that. This program already exists, it's called diff(1), md5sum(1), or cmp(1). You could wrap its use up in a shell script to make it even easier, or the companies/people could spend some money/time to learn how to use the tools already at their disposal. In a lot of cases, lack of training is the issue that should be addressed. I've said before "Those who don't learn /bin are doomed to reinvent it, poorly"

This isn't to say you're wrong about a lot more little, customized programs that could be written. The focus needs to be on the specific processes of a particular company, because every company's processes are unique (maybe not on all axes, but on more than one). Enterprise software often errs in either of the two extremes: either it's overly customizable and doesn't fit anyone's needs completely; or it's highly specific and tries to force working its way. And this is done out of a desire, from the software vendors, to capture market share. Customized software is highly expensive, and people are expecting something tangible for that purchase. What they should be concentrating on (at least from an efficiency standpoint) is empowering their own people to automate the processes they do: after all, they are the experts in these processes.
Yes the government needs to strike a balance somewhere, but paying effectively zero is not anywhere near the right balance. Personally I would pay the jury the same as what the public defender is earning as this would make it clear to everyone how little they earn.
> Yes, that's kind of the point. And that's ok.

I think your viewpoint is at the crux of the debate. We run into a few ethics questions with no obviously correct answers:

(1) If discrimination based on sex is wrong per se, then isn't it unethical for the government to engage in it? (I.e., is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelette? Is it okay to sacrifice one innocent virgin to spare the whole village from the volcano?)

(2) Is there an aspect of vengeance to this? And if so, isn't it collective punishment against today's young males, because of some perceived benefit their fathers had (but they don't)?

(3) If the goal is to restore some kind of equilibrium, then how would we know when to stop? And what do you say to those young males who are discriminated against during a period of over-shoot? "I'm sorry Johnny that we wouldn't spend as much time teaching you math as we would your sister, but think of all the girls who benefited!"

(4) How do we choose which supposed social good to prioritize? For example, why is it preferable to increase women's incomes, at the expense of men's opportunities?

(5) Is it truly just for the government to address one perceived inequality (by preferential treatment of girls in school), without putting equal effort into addressing areas where men have traditionally been at a disadvantage (child custody, incarceration rates, etc.)? If the government's policy is only to address those inequalities where women come out behind, then the end-game is apparently not equality, but something else. (Matriarchy? Vengeance? Collective punishment?)
> It was a magnet school that had resources

I guess that makes sense. It's not just "better" in the sense of different schools in an area may be better or worse, but also highly directed in certain areas. I can see the draw of that.

> meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop

Yes, come to think of it, people that rode the bus at my school probably had at least a 40-45 minute ride in the earlier stops just from this. I think I rode the bus once when going to a friend's house after school, so this didn't come to mind. The rest of the time I always walked (High School was literally across the street from my house, Middle School was a 20 minute brisk walk). Like I said, alien.

Thanks for your explanation. :)
FIOS may have been expensive to roll out, but the quality of service was good.
I used it to learn APL, and it really is a great resource.
It was not easy to get enough poison to kill hundreds. You get some hemlock, dump it in a well, and it dilutes enough that a dozen people get stomach aches and one elderly person dies. It's feasible to pull this off on a larger scale, but you'd need a lot of poison, and therefore a lot of resources.

Fires? I'm not sure it was that easy to set an out of control fire that would consume enough of a town to kill hundreds. Does everyone just fail to notice as you splash pitch on buildings all day leading up to the final act of starting the fire at night?
Lol. Yeah, their track record is only slightly worse than Betamax at this point. HP 9000 or 3000, whichever did high-level machine, was actually kind of neat. Destined to die at that point, though.

"I don't suppose you know of any material covering the details of passive failover in process pairs?"

Not on-hand. Not compatible with heap allocation make me think it's for reactive stuff like real-time control. Working soon but might try to look it up next day in whatever I downloaded before.
So you trust the black boxes someone sold you?
Why not just unplug the USB header if you want a physical solution? The idea that you're shoving glue in there is incredibly ridiculous. You can chip that off easily with your finger or a key. I seriously doubt this is a real story because it flies in the face of published STIGS and basic common sense. Nor would it stop a remotely determined attacker/idiot.

That said, I could see glueing a panel to block them as a visual to remind people that those ports are off, but not as a primary blocking device. More than likely its done via security policy.
Such as?

I'm thinking any ways that do exist are extraordinarily difficult to do, at least for the common lay man.
I wouldn't think. Its more likely that 3.5 just hits all the right bullet points and people are excited about it.
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bit.ly/look-app
> It is funny how every AI post on HN turns into a speculative discussion forum full of words "I think", "likely", "I suspect", "My guess" etc

This is probably due to the fact that the field is very interesting and has lots of undefined boundaries, so people like to take educated guesses based on the knowledge they might have and on their intuition. Fair enough for this discussion.

> maybe language understanding will be solved in the coming years

maybe? :)

OK, here comes my guess: I think reasoning about and producing computer programs should be easier than reasoning about and producing natural language. So if that's possible (big if), then it should come first. And then maybe the NLP will be solved with the help of code writing computers. Or maybe just by code writing computers, and nobody here has a job anymore :)
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Living on a gravel road, I drive them every day. If ever there was a cure for highway hypnosis, it would be driving on gravel...
Law enforcement has well-developed capabilities to surreptitiously follow the movement of people and objects through the physical world and wield whatever force necessary to sieze them where desired.
To be clear, I'm critical of the argument for many of the same reasons you are.

However, the counter argument is that libtool is an existence proof that there is a simpler cross-platform interface that developers can work with and generally prefer for making libraries & shared libraries. At the very least you can accomplish what it does.

Honestly, I think he's absolutely right that it is possible to correct the problem in ld, but it require orchestration of a lot of work that a) isn't a priority, because libtool already solves the problem "well enough" b) most platforms have little incentive to do so, and c) that's not the Cathedral in the Cathedral & Bazaar model.
The BIOS may access USB devices e.g. during boot or config.
Over a dozen involved, zero lives lost (excepting the conspirators).
But they don't need software. You are doing that work for them by giving away your core platform for free. I would imagine that if you change that now your userbase would likely rebel and/or clone/fork your software. Do you plan on hardware locking Andromium?
Yes you are unlikely to get a fail trial, but when you are facing a life sentence of being on the sexual offenders register if you plea I would still take the chance on a trial (I am of course assuming here that I am innocent).
Good code often doesn't add value to the business or generate revenues. Getting a feature done does. (Doesn't mean I advocate writing below average code though!)
The Merc changed their headline after publishing - see the URL, and how it was originally syndicated: http://www.topix.com/com/google/2016/08/google-fibers-silico...

Also, in the second paragraph, it specifically calls out to other SV cities where delays are confirmed - Palo Alto and Mountain View.
What really annoys me is that I always have to see the stupid face of good ol' Zuckerberg.

Facebook always suggest to "follow" him. Facebook does not allow to block him. To have his pic removed by an ad blocker does not work well. They seem to change the image URL of his pic a lot.
Anecdotal thought, I find practical guides and tutorials like this far more useful for learning machine learning than any of the public MOOCs like Andrew Ng's machine learning class. There's a lot of dense content shown in video lectures and very little practice. I almost had to google every topic and find a write-up like this to drive each concept home.
My tip for selling a side project is not to lose a huge commission.
I found that Noscript was causing it.

The best solution is to go into Noscript options > advanced > HTTPS and add .netflix.com to "Never force secure".

The other way is to go into about:config and set noscript.httpsDefWhitelist to false. But that's less secure.
How one GMO nearly took down the planet
True, but this doesn't change the fact that the statement in the article is factually untrue.

Moses preferred roads over all other transport mechanisms, and was shockingly effective in his ability to basically make everyone do what he wanted (even if it involved clearly terrible ideas). He was, though, responsible for many New York state and city parks, and really got into road building as a method to get people out to the new parks he was creating.

Now, his definition of "park" as a very developed area with landscaping, sports facilities, playgrounds, etc. with all previous plant life getting killed with a bulldozer is another matter that hasn't really held up over time, but I'm digressing at this point. The Power Broker really is a fascinating read.
A beautiful rainbow glimmering gently in the sky after a summer shower.

What do you see?
What do you smell?
What do you hear?
What does the landscape look like?
What memory does this bring up?

These are messages that the language is communicating. If an AI can't understand at least some of the content of the message then can it compose one effectively? I'm not certain it can understand the meaning from words alone, but we can certainly try.
heck they tore up our yards in my sub, sent mail prior that we are getting fiber, only to now state there is no fiber in our area.
Well, end of story. That's it then. No more discussion can be had!
"Computer vision" doesn't yet appear in the comments. The FTC dictates that FB make it possible for humans to determine what's advertising and what isn't. If humans can tell, computers can too. In the limiting case, ad blockers can run computer vision algorithms on pages and block advertising using graphic overlays that are undetectable for the page hosting the ads. In the end, clients always win.

If you want to defeat adblockers, you first need to ban general purpose computing.
Why are you redirecting the output of the script which would otherwise be printed to a program that does nothing but print the output?
Reminds me of how a couple years back I wrote a simple django site for Windows 8.1 Live Tiles to show word counts (from the NaNoWriMo API) and daily goals.

https://github.com/WorldMaker/NaNoWriMoAtGlance

I haven't ran it in recent years, but I'd think it would still work with Windows 10 with maybe only a few updates.
The Planning Fallacy: A Flaw in Our Thinking We Could Do Without
In my opinion employers should listen to those complaints. Most likely the only way to increase my salary would be to swap jobs, which I'd rather not do, and I don't see it being good for my employer either.

If there are millions to be made from programmers then must it not follow that programmers are actually underpaid (or that the services are over priced)?
> we still have no idea how these work.

I'd actually just say that we've not really defined these very well, and so arguing about how far along the path we are to them isn't that productive.
But I don't see any reason a "universal grammar" couldn't be learned. It may take something more complicated than ANNs, of course. But it would be really weird if there was a pattern in language that was so obfuscated it couldn't be detected at all.
Perhaps. But he didn't screw up the parks, NYC has aworld class park system in many respects.
So if language comes from the structure of the brain, what would stop us from simulating that structure to give a machine mastery of language? And specifically what would imply that a machine which had some of that structure would need to learn by interaction as the top level comment suggests?
This is a falsehood. One of many sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203211 (HN discussion of Snowden using wget to scrape NSA internal sites)
It's been unsuable in the past. It segfaults gdb, the maintainers refuse patches and don't fix etc. If everyone is using it I guess the anointed committers got around to fixing all those null pointers..? Either way nice that something as important as gdb is actually being maintained for segfaults - assuming it is. I got burned by the segfaults and then the patch rejections so gave up.
> The controller could be re-enabled from a lower level, etc

In a managed environment you could do it via the BIOS trivially, which is most likely locked as well. I mean, glueing the ports is especially stupid. You can chip glue off with your fingers or a key. If you're doing physical things to the PC, you'd most likely just remove the USB header from the mb and call it a day. Pop-open the case the case, remove it, bend down the pins, or cut it and go about your business. Messing with stuff that takes 60 minutes to cure is ridiculous. Ignoring the OS security policy is ridiculous. Ignoring BIOS controls is ridiculous. Ignoring how security is handled in managed environments is ridiculous.

It would take two minutes for a stoned teenager to pop-open the case and plug in his own USB connector into the header in this scenario. Less time for a determined attacker.

I imagine some middle-manager asshole asked for a piece of plastic to block the panel to make it 'look nice and remind people they're blocked' and some paper-pusher took it as "OMG THEY GLUED THE PORTS TO STOP HACKERS" He was just ignorant of how IT security is really done.

I think its obvious HN is mostly web-devs, not sysadmins or security people if stuff like this is widely believed and comments contrary to it get instant 'disagree downvotes.' If you think the NSA and the DoD just glue ports instead of doing real security, then I don't know what to say here.
I'd like to add, as someone who is a novice programmer and trying to get more and more immersed in this world - it's posts like these that give you a small peek into thinking/being a programmer as opposed to doing programming as a job/profession/etc. Part of what makes programming and computers scary to beginners, speaking from my experience, is the notion that there is an infinite amount of complexity hiding just behind your IDE (things far beyond your grasp/ability to comprehend - i.e. You'll never know really how your program goes from the pretty syntax highlighted code in the IntelliJ window to x y or z app, or worse as in this case, when something goes wrong god forbid something with a sinister sounding name like 'segmentation fault'). Breaking that barrier down through the use of seemingly simple yet extremely powerful tools (Emacs, gdb, bash, etc) really helps, at least for me, feel less raw intimidation and self-loathing and more and more wonderment and inspiration to continue learning and hacking away.
Python has the idiom he describes as a builtin.

with open(filename) as f:
...your func goes here

If you want to create your own custom one:

@contextlib.contextmanager
def with_a_foo(...):
foo = ...
yield foo
...cleanup the foo...

It's less terse (and in my opinion more readable [1]) than J, but same idea.

[1] I very rarely find point free programming to be comprehensible. This may be my mental limitation.