skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Inclusivity is one of those things that you just have to do, and not talk about

i agree, marching under any banner makes me extremely uncomfortable.. even one of inclusivity

what should be talked about instead though is the exclusivity

i actively seek paradox

i think there are profound truths to be found therein

one that endeared to me long ago was 'exclude exclusion'

> I sincerely hope the irony of excluding this man in the name of inclusivity is not lost on the crowd.

you can easily exclude excluders without your noted irony.. just offer for thaem to exclude thaemself

for a while the posts and articles about this decision lacked any information as to the catalyst to this decision

now what i am seeing is a complete lack of any mention about what the talk was intended to be

what i want to see is this:

first, the topic for the individual's talk.. maybe offer slides or notes as more information will aide in preempting subsequent objections, also if requiring one, then require all speakers to do the same..

if it is purely technical, then great!

if it contains specific elements that people say make them feel excluded, especially that add little more than some intended humor.. see gonads'monads argument..

then offer the speaker an opportunity to either make changes, or to choose to keep the talk as is instead of giving it

why does this whole thing seem predicated on assumptions of universal knowledge and understanding?

what is even the message the conference organisers are trying to express here? progress comes from discourse intended to explicitly develop understanding, stead some assumed a priori posturing

trust is expected, respect is earned

i trust anyone can grow personally, but if someone wants to double down on an inconsequential element of their message that adversely affects others then i'll withhold my respect

that applies to both parties in this as yet farce
If I had to pick one, I'd say cost leadership. Amazon grew through cost leadership, and that's still the company at its core as it a) achieves high asset utilization b) keeps costs low, and c) controls most of its supply chain. What might seem like AMZN using a differentiation strategy is actually just focused cost leadership in mid-up market segments.
Guess: OpenBSD has wide embedded use, so they may want to keep the base image as small as possible.
Actually, PNG supports 16 bit channels (as well as 1, 2 and 4 bits for paletted or greyscale images). TIFF meanwhile is kind of a kitchen-sink container format, so you can do quite a bit of strange things with it (store JPGs inside it, support tiling), but I don't think many viewers support everything in the TIFF standard.

> The standard allows indexed color PNGs to have 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits per pixel; grayscale images with no alpha channel may have 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 bits per pixel. Everything else uses a bit depth per channel of either 8 or 16.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Pixe...

> TIFF is a flexible, adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file, by including the header tags (size, definition, image-data arrangement, applied image compression) defining the image's geometry. A TIFF file, for example, can be a container holding JPEG (lossy) and PackBits (lossless) compressed images. A TIFF file also can include a vector-based clipping path (outlines, croppings, image frames).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#Features_and_options
The real problem isn't storing the data, it's accessing it. There is no way to address DNA, you can only "shotgun sequence" it. In doing so, you get random fragments of around 200 bases (400 bits). You can't get one such fragment, you get half a billion in one go, currently at a cost of around $5000. (Older, much more expensive technology, got up to 1000 bases... sometimes, and only 100 fragments per machine run.) So how are you going to access your archive? By sequencing the whole thing and (temporarily) storing it on a hard drive?

The manufacturers of modern sequencers (both Illumina and ABI) have been talking about this for at least 7 years (i.e. as long as they've been selling high throughput sequencers). They actually made a weaker claim: According to them, it makes no sense to keep a sequenced genome, because just sequencing it again would be cheaper than storing the data. In these 7 years, it hasn't happened. Instead, ABI's SOLiD technology all but vanished. Actually storing data in DNA is one step further, it's not going to happen for a long time.

(Source: My employer does a lot of sequencing. I talked to sales representatives of both companies, and I work on data sequenced using Illumina's machines. We store that data on spinning rust.)
Though I never met her when she was at Michigan State, I've got a number of friends that did and she was a rockstar developer at the school even as an undergrad.

She gets mentioned on my Twitter on at least a monthly basis and it's kind of neat to see someone who was once a local on the front page of HN.
i thought the SAT solver was a PHP port of libsolv.
Twitter blocks, why no last message?
Someone on Twitter blocks you. You think he made the wrong decision. But there's no possibilty to tell him about that: no possibilty to tell him that you want to offer your excuse, no possibility that you just made a joke. Why doesn't Twitter allow blocked people one last tweet to people by whom they've been blocked? Sorry for my bad English!
You are right for most use cases - which is why json is so popular. Sometimes however there is very good reason to have non-hierarchical data - and YAML fits this use case.
Ask HN: Isn't machine learning just a special case of curve fitting?
I'll be honest, I am busy doing other physics things (involving actual curve fitting) but from the little I've read in my little free time, it sounds like ML is just multilinear curve fitting. Is this true?
Scripting languages shouldn't be confused by this either
Given the studies on things like Head Start, it seems unlikely that the effect of earlier school starts is this powerful.
Switch to Dvorak.
We could fix that problem instead of allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to a new benefit that accrues primarily to the middle and upper classes.
I'd argue the chances China cares about Tor being used to attack US based firms is an order of magnitude lower than when it is used to circumvent HR restrictions. If Tor is marketed as a general anonymity tool, it seems less likely to be targeted than an HR specific tool. Remember, these policy makers and enforcers aren't typically the most technically savvy.
People do pay attention to these things: https://www.profwoodward.org/2016/02/what-just-happened-on-t...
> 128 MB of L3

Wow! I suppose when you have 64 cores to feed...

But what's the play here besides promoting indigenous development? Alone, these cores are not remarkable, and getting 64 of them fed constantly is only useful for long-running HPC workloads.

To me the most interesting thing here is the 'Hawk' interconnect that allows some of these dies to be replaced with custom processing units; hardware encode/decode blocks sn a common option in consumer devices today, but any custom block can be made for specialized workloads.
The basic way to do it is just to allocate and delete things without the safety of a GC. ;) PreScheme did that among other things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PreScheme

The medium approach might be using linear types like in ATS language:

http://www.ats-lang.org/

http://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/PAPER/LDD-plpv07.pdf

The heavyweight approach is integrating one with a theorem prover with C extraction like in COGENT:

https://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/TS/cogent.pml

https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nictaabstracts/8956....

Hope these give you ideas of how it can be done with what benefits and effort.
> Tellingly I have seen that fallacy used overwhelmingly when it comes to sexual misbehaviour.

This is because unlike most other categories of criminal conduct, allegations of sexual misconduct are particularly damaging to the accused, owing to the enormity of the crime and its effects on genuine victims. We might expect, then, to require a higher quality or quantity of evidence versus 'lesser crimes', no? But this isn't the case.

If somebody in the public sphere is accused of shoplifting, f.i., you would hear many a person declare said somebody "innocent until proven guilty!". In the case of sexual assault and rape, however, there exists a very loud minority that appear to hold we should accept all allegations without reservation – or, at least, those we deem "trustworthy" based on a vague nothingness. After all, if they were a friend of yours, you would take their word for it. Right?

Regardless, I am not in fact saying we should necessarily require evidence before we believe any allegation. I am more concerned with how we communicate our beliefs, especially in public. I might happen to believe Appelbaum's accusers are telling the truth, but it's decidedly not okay to assert that he is "a rapist" on the basis of nothing. People like to turn rape accusations into a little game of odds, but at the end of the discussion the fact remains: anybody can accuse anyone of anything.
Just buy a USB cable that simply doesn't have those wires. I bought a retractable one that isn't available anymore, but other people have posted many links to products just like it.
I'm not familiar with Head Start, what is it?
An Octane is still much more powerful than your average consumer router. Don't underestimate the value of memory bandwidth.

That said, the real reason these platforms continue to exist because volunteers continue to maintain them. You would have to ask those individuals what value they derive from the hobby.
I've seen this in code I've reviewed before, where people will check for `== "empty"` instead of just using types like `null` which were designed for this (in javascript).
If you've got read and write for remote process memory, and you're OK with living dangerously, you have execution control (and thus breakpoints) as well; you can just do what Detours did, and install trampolines.
The Ubiquiti "EdgeRouter" series features Cavium Octeons. They're moderately fast MIPS64 SoCs with hardware offload for a lot of common network operations.

OpenBSD does have a port for the ER series, but it's separate from the SGI MIPS ports:

https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html
Federally funded preschool.
Wired must listen to NPR http://www.npr.org/2016/04/02/472716929/bluff-the-listener

Edit: or the other way around if you read the dates...
> But hey, if you decide to use a proxy that screams "I'M A POLITICAL DISSIDENT" with every packet you send they might just get interested.

Hit the nail on the head my good sir.
real men use Colemak, right? /sarc

I tried Dvorak for a couple of weeks and got to OK speeds, but in the end it wasn't worth throwing out the countless hours of experience with qwerty, or the slight discomfort of using other computers and having to switch mentally.
How is that relevant to the comment you are replying to?
Any proof-of-work based system has this problem, especially when the PoW is outsourceable.
However, I believe you are missing the point of Byzcoin,
which is that if there is a set of decentralised miners we can still get the strongly consistent, final guarantees of Byzantine agreement in a scalable way.

ByzCoin has PoW to be Bitcoin compatible, but it can change to PoS or PoA or even permissioned systems (e.g hyperledger).
my guess is that companies are pushing this (rather than customer pull) because:

1) product differentiation, more vague tick boxes on the product comparison chart that your competitors don't have.

2) vendor lockin/ecosystem lockin. If the devices are not going straight to a remote server you'll need a "hub". your brandA lightbulbs will only talk to a brandA house hub which is incompatible with brandB security locks.

3) product churn. (did you really really need to replace your ok tv with one that does 3d? lots of people did).

4) clip the ticket. build a platform that involves transactions and take a cut.

5) data. paraphrasing: if you aren't paying for it, you aren't the customer you're the product.

none of these really sound like a utopia for the average person.
> mbti discredited

Do you have any good citations?

A majority of hacker news readers are INTJ and intp, 2 types that generally find mbti useful in understanding themselves and others.

I doubt hr puts much stock in mbti anyway, because it would be an easy test to game if it was officially considered.
I made a similar observation, critical thinking seems to be something undesired and it easily gets suppressed. However I truly believe it can work but it needs some sort of personal communication strategy. For example timing is critical. An obvious example is when shit hits the fan and coming up with reasons what could have been done better in the past. It's better to postpone that when things are fixed.

But when working with people that generally dislike critical input, one needs to combine this with other things. Like saying such criticism only 1:1 (never in meetings), staying cool and thinking out things before saying them. Sometimes it's better to not answer certain people instead of giving a half baked answer that can be used for attack ground.

Yeah, life isn't easy but there are ways.
You really can not have a large 'inclusive' group unless you lower the expectation that the people in that group share your personal definition of what is offensive and what is friendly etc. Thats what makes it inclusive, you have a wide range of people with different opinions and viewpoints that are in a group to share some common interest. Not everyone in the group is going to like or respect everyone else at every level. Thats simply the reality of a large group.

What we see with the SJW purges is the opposite of inclusion. There is a very narrow ideological purity test being applied to anyone who wants to be in the group or be a speaker.

You end up with a group that is an intellectual and cultural monoculture with a strict power hierarchy and 'punishment' for anyone who does not agree with the gospel handed down by the authority.

The community eventually falls apart because they rightly see that the organisation has been taken over by a power hungry clique who wants to impose there one true way to participate on everyone else.

Its a really corrosive dynamic. Just because the people doing this have some clever rhetorical devices and use 'inclusion' and 'equally' does not make them any less self serving and power hungry. And they really are trying to make exclusive monoculture with only the 'right' kind of people allowed in.
I remember being taken on a tour of one of my companies data centers in 1987 (I was a newly inducted Ops Staff on MVS systems, back then) and when walking past an ICL mainframe, the guy showing us around pointed out a knob at the top of the casing; told us it was the volume control for a speaker. They used it to listen to the sound of the CPU (it was somehow wired up, I don't recall the specifics) and could tell if it had crashed or not.

Anecdotally, this was not an unknown concept to me. As a teen learning assembler on early 80's Z80 machines, one could literally hear the CPU fizzing through loops, copies etc, if one listened closely enough (80's Z80's were not fast :) )

Using sound, for monitoring of distributed systems was a hack-day project at work a couple of years back, but sadly never went anywhere. I'd much prefer to monitor my systems through an audible interface than a visual one, but I wonder how much of that is connected to my having been interested in audio in general over the years (in the capacity of audio engineering, music etc)
Yes - but that is how corporations are organized.

As an employee, your primary goal should be to make your boss happy: and any changes or initiative will hurt your career. If you are young you might make mistake, but people are not stupid they learn from their mistakes.

So you have to go the point where your "boss" are customers / users of your product. Then critical thinkings works well.
Europe, Apple, and the money burning a hole in Silicon Valley’s wallet
Why Some Suburbs Are Trying to Be More Like Cities
When I pair my Android phone with a rental car via Bluetooth, the phone asks permission to share contacts and messages with the car (of course I deny them). Are folks saying that sensitive data is still shared in spite of this access control? This seems like a problem with Android / iOS rather than the car.
Exactly. Thankfully nobody is claiming that paracetamol is not killing people - quite clearly, it is. As is MDMA, even if it's quite safe (and fun) to use in most cases.
Yes, ALL lossy codecs have some "killer samples" -- the source material always matters.

It's a sad fact that there are so many sub-par AAC encoders around. Best to use either Apples implementation, or either of those from Fraunhofer -- FhgAAC (free version distributed with Winamp), or the Open Source FDK-AAC that was developed for Android.
a wordpress installer
> Nodevember were told that having Crockford speak "sent a message that women are unwelcome".

I saw the tweet, my point here is that's a single tweet raising a red flag about what is undoubtedly an issue that was talked about to a greater extent behind closed doors with relevant parties. If you find that justification to be insufficient irregardless of whatever the backing details may be, then feel free to outrage on, but I think that's pretty lamentable.

The fervor over this issue seems to be predicated on the belief that what appears on twitter is the only set of events that lead up to him being disinvited, which cannot be demonstrated and conflicts with Nodevember's statement on the issue.

> This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm making things up.

Yes, I think anyone who has come to the conclusion that the only reason for this is liberal virtue signaling instead of an actual aspiration to create an inclusive environment is actually making things up, since there isn't enough evidence to draw that conclusion.

> Crockford doesn't need to do anything. You're implying that he's the only one who should be bothered.

I'm implying he should at least be the first person to be bothered, unless the full details come to light. Otherwise this is a lot of rage stoking over absolute bullshit.

> But the whole point of incidents like this is to show that people like Crockford aren't welcome. Linus Torvalds gets the same s... from the same people for the same reasons.

I think there's a legitemate reason to disinvite people like Torvalds who have a long history of being brutally condescending. And more importantly has been asked ad nauseam to please be kinder to people and has been firmly obstinate. Disinventing a personality like his works precisely towards the goal of being more inclusive. Hell I see a blog post every other week on HN about "imposter syndrome" and how that debilitates people in our community, so it makes complete sense to me that people who are dramatically negative towards others are toxic and harmful to the goal of creating an inclusive environment. This notion that we have to accept egotism and profound condescension in this community is extremely backwards.
This is the funniest article I have ever read on HN. Christopher Null, you are a wonderful humorist and you may be destined for immortality (at least in some circles).
relays:

* https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/46022AFBB0B1A771EE3CB3...

* https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/AD00FAC2AB97E310ECAB25...
Potentially getting people killed shouldn't be news to anyone who's been involved with Tor over the past decade.
I've been thinking about this lately: what's the difference between how China supports companies, and the U.S. giving Intel a big DOE contract?
This is my main reservation with doing things like mapping number keys to be symbols by default. With great customization comes great configuration burden.
> I'm an individual with personal interests and everyone should stay out of my business as long as I do not harm others.

While I'm sympathetic, I believe you mean "do not directly harm others". Many of the arguments people have are actually about indirect harm—virtually no-one argues that people should be able to directly harm others without provocation or fear of retaliation.

And once you start talking about limiting or otherwise prohibiting/reducing "indirect" harms, things get MUCH more difficult to deal with and "live and let live" don't apply so much—again, assuming you want to do something about indirect harm at all (not everyone does).
How the Apple iCar could crack the automotive industry
I love the "Falsehoods programmers believe about X" articles. They are basically ready-made failure test cases. Whenever a junior co-worker would say something like "I know! I'll just write our own date and time handling code." I'd point him at [1], let him stew on that for an hour or so, and then, sure enough, go back and lo and behold he's convinced to just use a ready-made third party library instead.

1: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...
Προκριματικά Μουντιάλ: Η ώρα της Σερβίας
> and the former still writes to the common variable before the latter reads it.

This is not true. At no point in your induction is it proven that it is always the last process that writes x before the first reads it, nor is it necessarily the case.

> then at least one of the two following things must happen:

This, too, is untrue. The events may occur in the precise opposite order. If this were true, then it would have been an invariant that either process N-1 or process 0 would necessarily write 1, but this is not the case.

> No analysis of the program counter was required, and as a result we get a far more beautiful proof. You used a sledgehammer, I used a sculptor's chisel.

Excellent, except that my "sledgehammer" is a proof technique that's been proven complete, i.e. if a program property is provable, it is provable via an inductive invariance, which is amenable to mechanical proof checking (and, indeed, I mechanically checked it in TLA+). Good luck getting your proof (which is called "behavioral") -- even if it were correct -- to verify formally.

Chord is a distributed algorithm that was published in 2001 and quickly became popular. It got thousands of citations and plenty of industry implementations. In 2011 it even won a "test of time award". Its authors said, "Three features that distinguish Chord from many peer-to-peer lookup protocols are its simplicity, provable correctness, and provable performance". They, of course, provided proofs. However, in 2012, Pamela Zave, using a model checker, showed that "of the seven properties claimed invariant of the original version, not one is actually an invariant". The point is that when algorithms are concerned, "proofs" are often not proofs.

See: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/03/08/model-checking.html and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRqE59VXT0

> I never claimed that I could delegate the entirety of the formal verification task to a type system like that of Haskell or SML.

Just to be sure: proof with pen and paper isn't formal verification. It is pretty the very definition of informal verification. Formal proof means using natural deduction or sequent calculus. This is too hard, so a machine-checked proof is acceptable. But any proof or any other kind of verification not carried out or verified by a computer is not formal.
In England and Wales all the air ambulances are charities, though receiving government funds. Much like the lifeboat provision by the RNLI it is a story of very different service provision than a purely state run institution would provide.
I'm not aware of any language that coerces the string `'null'` to the value `null`. Are you aware of any?
Or, someone who enjoys getting things done can move to another company, where the management goals are aligned with the corporate goals.

Sometimes I don't want to sell my soul.