skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...the previous POTUS, a constitutional scholar that campaigned on ending domestic surveillance..."

1) This line reminded me how fallible my memory is. I held a view of Obama as always toeing the line on government surveillance. Then senator Obama's 2008 vote in favor of the FISA Amendments Act and pro-surveillance actions as POTUS dominate my memory. I had completely forgotten his anti-surveillance rhetoric and actions from '04 - '07 [1][2].

2) How incredible would it be to candidly hear answers from Obama about what changed his mind?

3) I also wonder what it would be like to hear his candid thoughts now about handing over a surveillance state, that he directly entrenched as POTUS, to our current president.

Wishful thinking, I know, but it's something so few have any direct information about aside from conjecture.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gove...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/03/barack-obama...
I’m annoyed that the migration to “byte is uint8_t” from the “is a byte char or unsigned char?” mess is disrupted with std::byte.
I think it's fair enough editing comments like you did, mostly it doesn't cause any confusion.
Sample Chapter from "iOS and MacOS Performance Tuning"
Not really relevant, but there's no binary sort :P
.. of course it does.

Doubleplusgood!
There is a lot of trashing the idea, probably rightly, but it sounds a lot like NPR, PBS, WIKIPEDIA taking what amounts to donations. Not as unusual as the article paints it, except for being for profit.
This sounds like DJB's Netstring [1].

"hello world!" encoded as "12:hello world!,"

An empty string as "0:,"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netstring
it's like saying that Netflix sends "one million terabytes per day"... if you are looking at the decompessed bitmaps

Gorgon Stare is the platform to which the ARGUS-IS system is basically a camera upgrade. It works by "tiering" the data so objects of tactical interest get downlinked quicker and more frequently. You're certainly not sending raw bitmaps over the air

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

I would imagine that you would effectively take a "keyframe" image and then record "P-frames" on top of that like any other compression system. Only instead of a psychovisual model you have a psycho-tactical model, where you want to throw lots of bandwidth at the objects of interest and not so much to everything else.

But yeah, 6 petabytes per day is the throughput of the camera system. Most of the data will be compressed away especially on the live downlinks, and they will probably only retrieve a high-quality copy of the full "historical" data (with high-quality data on objects that aren't designated "interesting") at the end of the mission when the Reaper lands.

After all, you just can't beat the bandwidth of a Reaper full of tapes hurtling down the runway...

Time for napkin math! If you figure they are putting out 6 petabytes (6000 terabytes) of raw data per day, and let's say they are flying 20 commodity hard drives at 10 TB per drive... that gives you 200 TB per day of video, and you'd need to hit a compression ratio of 30:1 over the uncompressed bitmaps.

Seems plausible, like I bet you could get that out of a standard H264 encoder with decent quality (assuming it supports the resolutions - or you start chunking the video up). Even a more reasonable figure like 5-10 hard drives per day (60-120x compression) would probably still be within the reach of standard encoders. H264 is pretty good especially when your baseline is "raw bitmaps".

Remember, the US military doesn't give a fuck about money. Flying out a couple C-17s of hard drives every month to support a whole combat theater is chump change, especially if it means other hardware/wetware isn't getting blown up. And at least with the Gorgon Stare system they only retained data for 30 days, so we're not even talking about a huge throughput in terms of hardware for permanent retention.

edit: here is a more serious technical analysis of it that I dug up

http://ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com/2012/08/argus-is.html
I'd hesitate to include the Register among "sites in search of a business model", when they've been doing business without interruption since before the first Silicon Valley bubble.
Your discussing the non-classified capabilities. Keyhole had one meter resolution years before the public saw any imagery from it.
It's not that everybody here is using Google apps. They aren't. They all use WhatsApp or FB Messenger. But those options are terrible to me (particularly because desktop clients are bad or non-existent)

The reasons I hope Google gets their act together is because they are in the right place to do so. They have the mindshare, just need to execute better and network effects may kick in. It also doesn't matter if they have the best platform but none of my friends/family use it. Again, Google is better positioned to make that happen, IMHO.

I don't know what Skype Lite is. I use Skype for Linux Alpha. Is that it? It seems to be missing video calls, the chat interface is complicated (spent some time trying to find the chat while in a voice call), it doesn't integrate well with the desktop (it minimizes when I close, instead of hiding in the tray). Like I said, they are improving.

As for Signal and converting people to some technology I know is better... Sorry, tried that too many times. It's not worth the time invested. These companies will have to figure out how to increase their market share without depending on tech enthusiats.
So if I read the article well the gist is: instead of choosing leisure people chose to consume more and thus work more to afford more. And this then creates the need for administrative workers or as the article put it "paper-pushers" who are redundant and "pointless". It lists telemarketers as one example. I wonder if the author consulted people working as telemarketers in developing countries (not those involved in scams) if their jobs were pointless? Now I'm not the only one to gripe at the inefficiencies of mature businesses where management is often slow to act and mired in procedure but there is work to make things more efficient and perhaps the author could invest more time in thinking about that. Lastly, rational profit-seeking entrepreneurs will create positions for jobs like telemarketers where it makes sense. If there was not a supply of profit-seeking consumption-maximizing people there'd not be telemarketers for example. I'd rather work my 40 to 50 hours a week and set money aside and provide for my family than work 15 hours a week and have a tougher time. Also I like nice things. So...
> but you can just look at the menu bar for that.

Not if the lid is closed.
Every system has a quality of performance. In production (let's say steel) we can produce with a degree of quality. , for statistical models we have a degree of confidence, etc. Every machine we currently build will fail to a certain calculable degree. The less you maintain the machine the higher the degree of failure will be.
This is not a fair comparison: there're a lot more human driver than autonomous cars.
> If human pilots had a 15% error rate, and autonomous planes had an error rate of 5% - which would you fly?

Neither.
This doesn't seem to be a popular idea but I think it makes a lot of sense. The issue with the idea is that you're now halfway there to an all-in-one, and I think manufacturers will just keep adding components until they get there because theres way more consumer demand for that.
Good to have candid information online.
Donations aren't really anything new. "Pure Silicon Valley" is thinking that all transactions need to be for something.

Unrelated to that, Medium doesn't even work in Safari on the latest macOS, so it's hard to call it anything more than a shitshow.
I just want a computer that boots up reliably, plays audio and video, allows me to work for more than a couple hours before dying, and has a keyboard that doesn’t freak out on me.

You had one. You gave it to your brother.
Agree. I've done the same for a year and a half.
Bad governance also contributed. Ireland was exporting food while the locals starved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Causes_...
There is a long and proud history of writers promptly losing all common sense whenever asked to take on the topic of changing the current situation for aging, age-related disease, and death.

If you take a utilitarian view, every problem other than aging is secondary to some degree, usually a very large degree, just by looking at the number of people negatively affected, and the level of suffering involved.

Not that people who don't write for a living appear much better than the writers on this topic. If you ask most people, they proudly declaim their willingness to age to death on the same schedule as their parents. Not that they'd follow through on that declaration were the technologies of rejuvenation available when needed, since they go to the doctor when sick, or when suffering age-related disease, and do all they can with what is available.

People in general are, for the most part, profoundly irrational and/or hypocritical when it comes to aging and the near future of real, working rejuvenation treatments. They won't help to make these technologies a reality, they decry the idea, and they will run in their multitudes to use the therapies when they arrive.
Wow the bytebeat is fascinating!!
I do think the "drop it like it's hot" approach could work, but it would require browser vendor coordination, so that Symantic https stops working on all major browsers at the same time/day.

And honestly, banks should have the expertise and resources to change certs in a day or two, and if they don't that's on them.
I believe my info on Roman slavery was from this lecture series, chapter 38:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/history-of-ancient-ro...
Really? They seem like pretty decent things to build first.

Owned by a company so the failure of one isn't a huge deal (difference between at worst having to switch cabs compared to losing your own car for a few days).

Costs are already high.

Costs can be spread out.

Costs are very important to the customer.

People expect to be sharing the same space as others have used before them.

Limited expected range and run time.

Customers are already not in control, and taxis are not well known for careful driving in many places (fairly or unfairly).

Speed is not a huge issue (can't run trucks limited to 25mph).

Can pick locations city by city, so you could run an effective business if you can do London but not rural Wales.
Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies
There is a link in the second sentence. The rest of the article after that is basically just repeating recent issues around Uber. Guess they need to fill the space.
Because it is difficult, a lot of work and potentially very expensive (when you have traffic) to build your own.

If you are in tech, you should understand to use the right tool for the job.
WHY GETTING a NAS FOR Your HOME MAKES MORE SENSE THAN CLOUD STORAGE
Pardon me, but thats not a mutually exclusive distinction.
3D PRINTING: OVERRATED HYPE OR TECHNOLOGY OF THE CENTURY?
Can you compare to the stats for wordpress?
Positive Quotes about Life Rules Smile – Cute Relationship Life
Looking at the list, some people are certainly having a good time drawing those patches.
We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all machines are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of open source firmware, operating systems, & the freedom to connect via open standards.
I actually don't expect they'd be successful using arbitrary people's cars.

These marketplace companies don't tend to do very well when the supply side of the market isn't properly prepared for the nature of operating in the marketplace - i.e. most Uber drivers are exclusively Uber drivers - it isn't really car sharing any more.

The time and effort would shift away from dealing with drivers who know where they stand, to providing constant support to upset car owners. Quickly, it would switch to the supply primarily being provided by large businesses who own 1k+ cars because the economics stack up well in large quantities.

At that point, Uber might as well just buy the cars directly and cut out the middleman.
Nothing, unless you think that more money will lead to faster-than-light travel. However, that 1.5 trillion could probably eradicate poverty or homelessness.
Parent: "It's not fair to compare two things unless the sample sizes are exactly the same."
I do not agree with your point, for various reasons already elaborated upon in the comments section here.

Regardless of that, I find it very puzzling why you don't simply email the authors with your critique, instead of writing a pretty thorough comment on HN that they will likely not read? That would be far more constructive IMHO.

Keep in mind that this is a preprint. From my experiences in this field, preprints are usually very sloppy and are simply a means to lay "first claim" to a discovery. There are usually a ton of typos/other issues to be sorted out, or even worse, bugs in many key proofs - I am not saying this paper is guilty of this, just that expectations should be low regarding exposition quality in preprints.
I think if we're going to be fair, it's more accurate to say it's totally, unequivocally overdue. Large chucks are flat out late. But! That is fine. We can forgive a late game if it's good, and it looks to be awesome. Optimism invariably takes over at the start of project, and we all knew it was going to be a long haul.

And I say that as a person with a few ships awaiting release, too. While I really want my Carrack, it's far more important that they make it good. The estimated release times have moved back a few time, but that's the expense of great work in the rest of the game. Backers seem to largely accept this as the cost of buying into an in-progress development: priorities must be fluid, and we have to make do.

The trick to Kickstarter is to only invest what you can lose (like anything!) and then be patient. Starcitizen is stupendously ambitious, and is going to cost a fortune to develop. They successfully made the transistion to being nearly self-sustained, basically using Kickstarter to kickstart their development process.
Actually interesting:

Around here we have a number of forward/reverse lookup services (I use 1881.no) but I have a hard time finding anything similar for other countries. Right now I am trying to look up what I believe is a Californian number but where do I find a usable phone registry for US?
I think the point made in this sketch is pretty relevant: https://youtu.be/owI7DOeO_yg
even worse i have seen web devs using png tables instead of html tables or svg. have publishing web content become too hard ?
My bad, I should have been more specific. The Deep PCA paper shows superior performance not on baseline MNIST, but on the MNIST variations.

I also agree that vanilla MNIST is pretty useless for Computer Vision researches and was trying (awkwardly) to support that idea by showing how these other non Deep Learning techniques performed equally well.
Reassuring our users about government-backed attack warnings
What are you even talking about, leaking a little oil? This is exactly what they're supposed to be doing. I'm interested in what about Star Citizen development you think qualifies as "leaking a little oil".
We don't have race and gender equality anywhere, and the one place that has it less is probably the US (see incarceration rates for blacks for instance).

Same for respect for life; we seem to be quite indifferent to the victims of our bombs, while we mourn the loss of one soldier (this has been going on forever, but hasn't changed in recent times).

Also, our "way of life" is built on the massacre of trillions of animals, many of which mammals who have feelings very similar to ours; being indifferent to their suffering and death is not an absolute value, nor is it "better" than the opposite.
The charging light also tells me whether or not my laptop is done charging by means of an orange or green light.
One thing I just thought about, Musk said miles trains a better AI. Supposing this yields true valuable results. All SDV may become near perfect drivers. Humans will keep being spread along the spectrum of dangerous to safe driver.

ps: thanks for reminding me that statistics are hard to get right.
Exactly. You aren't getting "nothing" for your money. You're contributing to the continued existence of something you want to continue existing.
There's kind of a bias here. Does the author mean "computer scientists in America"?

In France, I definitely learned mathematical notation. Actually, I learned ∈, ∀ and ∃ in high school. And I had set theory courses in the first year of my master's degree (I mean first year after high school), among other mathematical courses.
I've bought a new MacBook pro. It works reasonably well, but :

it is seriously bug-ridden. For instance, at times the Finder won't allow any drag and drop operation (you need to kill it). Access to network shares is hit and miss. Globally the OS X Finder has been a pretty poor piece of essential software since... Developer Preview? :/

The absence of at least one standard USB port is really annoying, you need an adapter to plug in just about anything, a thumb drive, a phone, a mouse... any of the bazillions of USB gizmos and cables everyone has lying around in his house or at work. Wherever you are, you need to have this stupid adapter at hand. It's incredibly annoying; in practice you have to carry your nice, sleek laptop with a constantly dangling white protrusion on a side.
It reinforces the notion that women are objects to be paid for?

Sexist or not, this seems highly inappropriate for a work outing, and definitely adds more evidence to how Uber does not strive to have an inclusive culture.
PSI looks like a fabulous alias for inheritance.
Let me add Norwegian to the list as well, only with a double t in visitt (double because the vowel in front should have shorter pronunciation I think).
Are you also against case sensitive file systems? Otherwise you can end up with two files that have the "same" name - eg. anne.jpg and Anne.jpg). Does normalization cover such a case?
> Consider a site with high distribution and crap content

So, BuzzFeed?
From a strategy point Uber is in a desperate position. After the Google lawsuit their self-driving story is not working. Their existing business is loosing money in most places with no end in sight. Top level executives are leaving which is a sign that they can't imagine a positive course in the medium term.

The company is under extreme pressure and has proven over and over again to be willing to cut corners when it comes to legal compliance. It should be frightening to anyone on the streets that Uber managers are making decisions to put self driving cars on the road. They neither have the culture, patience nor the expertise to make decisions affecting life and death.
"Many people", maybe ("some people" would probably be more accurate). But does that make any difference, at the level of society?

My point is, the article in reference, seems to be amazed that people could own slaves and live with themselves; but we do much worse than own slaves, and live with ourselves pretty well, so maybe we should start wondering about ourselves first.
you could easy have a web server with thousands of visitors running on a rasbery pi. i would say a week end project to set it up or one hour if you already are familiar with web servers.
This used to be a pain point with git, when some developers were using MacOS and the repository had file names with accents; to git, it looked like the files had been renamed. Some time later, git added the "core.precomposeunicode" option to work around this problem.
I think it was clear that I was paraphrasing to show a fallacy, not attempting to suggest the parent actually believed this.

Out of curiosity, if paraphrasing someone else's argument is so untactful, how come the paraphrased comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954036 is not the one downmodded?

People expressing mainstream views don't seem to be held to the same requirements of tactfullness.

Here's another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12695708

Here's one that was flagkilled and resurrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12498776
6 Reasons Why You Should Use AngularJS
Dumb question: How popular is C++ as a systems programming language in 2017? Does anyone have data on the popularity of various languages (C, Rust, Go, etc.) when web and application development are excluded?
> If Medium made is super easy (and cheap) to find and buy images for an article, I'd use it.

Like https://500px.com/ ?
I'm not saying you have to build a server to host your blog. You can host it on AWS or elsewhere if you get a lot of traffic. It's not that hard to get a domain name, host it somewhere, and write some HTML code.

Yes, it could be difficult and a lot of work if you think you need embedded videos that autoplay and follow readers as they scroll down trying to escape that and the pop up pestering them to subscribe.
The original goal didn't include any of the massive stretch goals that were added in as funding ballooned. CR has been completely forthright about the schedule as the stretch goals have been designed and built. It's not overdue because nobody is expecting it to be finished right now except Derek Smart, arguably the world's shittiest game designer. Saying it's "totally, unequivocally overdue" because we've passed the original planned release date in November of 2012 on the Kickstarter page is totally, unequivocally disingenuous.