skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if all generated images should somehow be watermarked so that they can be determined some day to be false. Otherwise we could have a lot of false images around the web used for confirmation bias.
My thoughts exactly. I'm further convinced that Trump picked him solely because of the "Mad Dog" nickname.
Interesting! Maybe not good advice though. I can see this backfiring and someone who tries it getting busted for something stupid like destruction of property, or even being accused of trying to install a skimmer themselves.
Plenty of unions and associations don't do this. A reasonable method for this would be for a union to negotiate per level salary bands, and yearly merit increases.

Within the band the company pays whatever they think you are worth.
Libraries in London are very much like libraries in the U.S. My local library (in London) has many internet computers, which are always full as the OP described. Library has wifi too but the quality is not so great. It's sort of ironic, because it's the library in Tim Berners Lee's hometown, and even has a big WWW plaque outside it. You'd expect it to have the best internet ever :).
Things have been changing - they put FPGAs in phones now:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S5+Teardown/2...

(search for "FPGA" in the page).

That's a tiny one, granted, but things are certainly getting better in that regard.
For future reference for people suffering from this issue, the most reliable solution I found so far is to add the following lines to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-mouse.conf

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "mouse"
MatchIsPointer "on"
Option "AccelerationProfile" "-1"
Option "AccelerationScheme" "none"
EndSection
Here's the kind of thing it could accomplish:

https://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14490950/travis-kalanick-ube...

If tech workers express collective displeasure about a company, it meaningfully hurts that company's ability to recruit/retain tech workers.
Weird that they mention using MCMC and Metropolis Hastings but don't mention simulated annealing, which would be the logical next step.
There's a difference between what's best for the group and what's best for individual members of the group. This conflict comes up over and over again, as it arises from straightforward principles from game theory.

If everyone bargains collectively, overall compensation goes up as companies have much worse alternatives to negotiated agreement. However, these companies are generally very willing to bribe people into breaking solidarity, and so it's often personally lucrative to be the scab crossing picket lines.
Return to 40 hour work weeks, eliminate unpaid oncall, paid overtime.
6 months is a good amount of time to become a world expert in a topic. If you're looking to make yourself more marketable, this can be an invaluable way to spend your time.

Personally, I've had a few papers that I'd like to spend several months understanding. There was a world changing paper in 2013 titled "Causal Entropic Forces" by Wiesner-Gross and Freer, that I only understand conceptually. I have a strong suspicion, that if I knew how to apply the knowledge it could lead to breakthroughs in many areas of applied computation and data modelling.

I also have a lot of interest in autonomous drone swarms, and could easily spend 6 months working on those.

Similarly, I could lose 6 months playing with the limits of nylon (twisted monofilament fiber) muscles.
That's Pascal's Wager.

What makes you think that OpenAI is doing anything that has any meaningful impact on AGI? We have no idea what AGI looks like.
Are phones sold at such cheap prices carrier-locked?
You don't build tanks and planes without them. Nuclear bombs without them.

Look at south korea. Plenty of military, no brain.
I was a little taken aback by the giant ad for google home at the bottom as well...
You can justify lots of things with Pascal's wager, but most of them are religions.
I'll add to this too. We have had potential employers invited to speak in front of classes for the joint MS/PhD program, often ~6 employers for the hour of class time, and this happened a few times. One guy said '... entry level positions for MS students like you ...', though I was half asleep, I did pick that one out of the talk. When the Q&A part came around, I asked him about it. He said "We will not hire any engineer without a MS. The MS is now entry level", and the other people there agreed with him. This was in bio-medical engineering, fwiw.
One of my favorite tricks, that I sometimes play on myself:

Insist the person documents all the quirks and gotchas in a block of code or library. Sometimes the embarrassment at having to justify it will prompt them to fix the problem, other times they (or I) will realize that it literally takes less time to fix the issue than it does to apologize for it.

Something about the writing process unearths simpler solutions to tricky sounding problems. Possibly the same phenomenon that TDD tries to exploit.
This is flipping the burden of proof. That millions will be made redundant is already a projection about the future, and those are notoriously terrible.

In the past when automation happened and jobs kept rolling it was due to the invention of new industries. So of course no one can say where the jobs of tomorrow will come from. Then again no one can really adequately explain why "this time it's different" with automation. Ever since the luddites, people have been projecting the death of work due to automation. Every time they're positive that this time is different.

History suggests though that new industries will pop up to provide goods and services that no one had the time to make in our pre-automation state of toil. Human beings aren't going to stop being inventive, or stop wanting cool new stuff.
Or, you can just make the data private by default and assume any violations are by default "irregular".

We do this already with health care providers, attorneys, crediting agencies, banks, etc.
>If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive conflict in the Middle East.

The reduction in commitments has to come first, or at least coincidentally. I would like to see a reduction in military spending, but we shouldn't be making overseas commitments without allocating the resources necessary to carry them out.

I would like to see the US out of Europe in the near-to-medium term and a disentanglement from our commitments in the East long term. If we're not willing to do that, if we refuse to step down from the role of the Heavy who keeps the peace, then we need to maintain a military up to the task. And that requires increases in spending.
Why would I live in SF? Culture and Opportunities.

Quite frankly, for software, there's no other place like Silicon Valley in the world. Everywhere else is a pale imitation.

Let's not pussyfoot around this. The reason why cheap places are cheap are because no one wants to live there. It's either crappy weather, or the lack of economic or cultural opportunities. Very few people move because of "burdensome regulation" or marginal tax rates. If they did, it would be California advertising people to move to their state in Indianapolis, instead of Indiana advertising on the 101.

Whenever I go back home to the Midwest I'm always struck by not just how little is there, but how much has left since my last visit. It's pretty much just corn fields and meth labs these days. Checking out some job boards, there's just very little demand for my specialization. Sure you can work remote, and bring in your Silicon Valley money and live like a king, but at the end of the day, you're still surrounded by corn fields and meth labs.

If you like moving to Singapore, that's great, but the idea that Singapore is less regulated and has less smog is laughable. Smog of this level[0] just doesn't happen anywhere in the United States, and I can buy chewing gum.

[0] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2016/08/26/environment/sing...
The concept of mailing pieces of paper as a way to pay bills is so strange to me. Fore reference, I'm in my mid thirties and have never used a check in my life. I remember my mom used them when I was very young, but I don't think I've even seen one in about thirty years.
> Since we don't have our own particle accelerator to bombard the memory modules with in order to cause radiation-based errors

I really want to see someone get some radioisotopes and place them next to both ECC and non-ECC RAM (while forcing reads and writes to the affected memory) to see what sort of soft errors / SEUs happen.
Mapzen: Introducing Tangram Work https://mapzen.com/blog/introducing-tangram-work/
I, unfortunately, didn't get geoblocked. I could tolerate geoblocking if if meant april fools jokes were limited to a single day instead of encroaching onto May 31 as well.
> So you support the idea of Guilty until proven innocent, combined with Guilt by Association.

Do I? I'm not saying they're automatically guilty.
$190,000 for nothing? Plan to publish politicians' internet histories falters
Enigma encrypted message to be sent in 40m, decrypted by Bletchly Park
And people on HN wonder about the disconnect between the pay of the Big 4 and their eternal complaints of 'we can't find any engineers'. Maybe they aren't just greedy, maybe there is a nugget of truth in their statements.
"Butcher says it will refrain from using more than 20% human meat"
SONY had partnered with the US government to create a film that they thought and hoped could galvinize a revolutionary mood in North Korea (by making a comedy about the CIA assassinating the leadership and showing that mock assassination on screen). The DPRK considered this an attack (similar to the US considering the disclosure of hacked DNC emails an attack) and responded with a cyber attack on the contracting firm.
It's interesting how you get downvoted with "I don't" while the comment saying "I do" gets upvoted. It seems this crowd doesn't just see this as a matter of opinion but would rather silence one view - namely the view of men who don't want their wives to be stay-at-home moms. This lends quite a bit of credibility to the hypothesis that millennials strongly prefer traditional gender roles.
They would love to if someone gets them copies of the FSB hacking tools.
Well, I would use it as a criticism. This is a tangled web of like-minded people giving money to each other and calling it charity.

Some people conflate this with Effective Altruism, which I think sucks. Compared to the rigorous work done by GiveWell, there's no way to tell if this is effective, or even altruistic.

It's just people assuming that the world will be a better place if more people who think like them have money, an assumption held by basically everyone everywhere.
This would be a fantastic idea.

SEWTHA made me see the world in a completely new way. When I finished it, I started seeing everything I use, see, or have as an energy process. I felt like I learned a first-principles toolkit I could use to break down anything in terms of energy.

I highly recommend this book to everyone – especially if you're serious about thinking about climate change. No BS, no platitudes – just energy from a practical physics perspective.

Updating it today could make it an even more important educational tool for thinking about climate change.
I would worry that this would encourage more tech debt than I'm comfortable with. I already struggle with people shrugging off obviously predictable consequences of their thoughtlessness. I kind of expect people to at least attempt to think three months out. Who knows what we'll be doing in six but cmon.
Self-modifying the underlying machine code isn't what it used to be. Besides the difficulty in writing it, there's lot's of caveats about how it interacts with the cache and the instruction pipeline. It also requires setup, because with modern memory protection all the machine code is read-only. Changing the memory protection for some machine code to be executable and writable at once will set off some alarms (And isn't even possible on systems with W^X). So you need to change it to just writable, make your modifications, then change it back to just executable, which is less suspicious, it just looks like what JIT compilers do. But all in all self-modifying code doesn't really give you anything.

The exception to that is packers and other obfuscation techniques, which are related to self-modifying code. The general idea with these is that you take your real program and compress/encrypt/mangle/etc it and store that data in an executable. The code in that executable de-compresses/decrypts/demangles that data, sets it as executable, and then runs it. Unlike traditional self-modifying code, packing is orders of magnitude easier to write for the malware developer. The advantage here is that an antivirus tool can't determine what your real program does statically unless it understands how you mangled it, which is hard to do in general. To "unpack" an executable you've got three general techniques:

1. Packers tend to get reused a lot, so just have a person write an unpacker for popular packers by hand, and do some pattern matching to figure out which packer an executable is using. This doesn't work for everything, but it's fairly simple.

2. Dynamic Analysis. Run the executable and watch the contents of memory as the program unpacks itself, the real program should pop right out. Of course you have to run the executable in some sort of sandbox environment, and there's ways for the malware to detect that and alter it's behavior. This also isn't the most efficient process, so you can't really do this to executables during, say, an antivirus scan.

3. Symbolic Analysis. Basically static analysis on steroids to figure out what the executable will do without actually running it. The malware can't stop this with sandbox detection. But it's super slow and is still an active area of research.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Improved remote desktop

- DESCRIPTION: Remote desktop solutions for desktop Linux really haven't changed a whole lot since I first started using them in the late 90s. It would be great to get something out of the box that was as responsive and feature-rich as, say, Windows's remote desktop feature. VNC is functional of course, but lacks a lot of the fluidity of other remote desktop solutions. Bonus features would include remote clipboard, sound, printers, and files.

As it stands, if I think I'm going to need to remote into a Linux desktop, I set up a Windows host and run Ubuntu in a VM. Then I use RDC/RDP to connect to the Windows host and run the VM in full screen. That's surprisingly more responsive than just running VNC in a native Ubuntu installation.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Developer
Could you explain the difference between whataboutism and context, particularly if a comment tries specifically to say that "two wrongs don't make a right"?
I've been on the internet since the 80s even, so your line of thinking resonates with me.

But what's different now is that a troll actually got elected president, this shows how we've come from trolls being toothless. It's probably always been the case that perception makes reality, but never before has a pseudonymous forum such as the internet held so much sway on perception.
Google Cloud Platform Expands to Mars
A better way to think about how Calvin fits into our stack is as a building block similar to two-phase-commit, on which we've built the higher level transaction semantics. And while we do not have any plans on supporting session transactions, this is more of a design constraint to support the best possible OLTP experience rather than a hard technical limitation.

Since our focus has been getting OLTP right, ETLs are currently handled by chunking record imports across multiple transactions. (We have internal tooling for this that we've used to help customers move their data into FaunaDB; we are planning on open-sourcing it soon.)

However, first-class support for OLAP use-cases is on our roadmap and something we are excited about providing, so expect more from us about this in the coming months.
"Google Gnomes are real, but only in our hearts — for now. Happy April Fools’!"
Which leakers would go to wikileaks and not one of the multiple international news papers that are happy to report on "secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations" located in say Syria, Russia or China? Just looking at news paper in my own language, I think I will have a hard time to find one that do not publish articles about things in Syria.

What service do Wikileaks provide to leakers in those cases?
> The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation considers anything but "open shop" to be "forced unionism" and lists 28 states as free from that scourge.[1] No exclusive contracts, no agency fees.

I think you're conflating open shops and right-to-work laws, but besides that, the point is that there is no free rider problem even in states with right-to-work laws, because the union can structure their contracts with the employer so that non-members don't receive any benefits. Sure, they'll represent non-members, but there aren't any reasons the non-members would ever need them to, because the benefits literally would not apply in the first place.

Unions don't really talk about this, because the free-rider problem is a convincing argument to use in favor of mandatory dues withholding, but in reality it's an issue that they already have the tools to avoid.
+1 to explore using Wayland over Mir. I think it's intuitive that everyone (distros, developers, users) would benefit from unifying the Linux graphics stack to the greatest extent possible. The display server decision should not just be based on what is best for Unity, but what is best for the Ubuntu ecosystem as a whole. Having multiple display servers means there will be a duplication of effort for developers of application toolkits, window managers, and, of course, the display servers themselves. The proper question in my mind is whether all the additional downstream and lateral effort from maintaining multiple display servers is a bigger opportunity cost to the overall Ubuntu experience than the additional development necessary to get Unity running on Wayland. It's worth revisiting the display server question because this is something that may have major consequences for quite some time.
You've brought up Pascal's Wager twice in this thread, as if it really can end an argument by itself. Just because you don't like what high impact / low probability EV calculations do in Theology doesn't mean you can wave away high impact / low probability EV calculations in other domains.
I don't know that anyone is asserting lead is the only culprit; socioeconomic trends are complex beasts.

To reject it entirely however flies in the face of a significant body of evidence: http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-g...
BSD kernel
The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
This is incredible. I followed this link down into the Margolus-Levitin theorem, which puts a physical limit to how much computation (entropy?) you can produce with a single joule of energy (6 x 10^33 operations/second).

It seems that at some point the unit for powering computers would then have to be matter, since there's such an incredible amount of energy stored per newton.
Mad Catz shuts down after months of financial woes
Rental investment calculator
It was weasel worded. "Individual data" won't be sold.
Yes, but if the gun maker started advertising on the Underground Assassins Network it might be a different story.
I spent the morning talking with a guy who was telling me about growing up in San Jose during the 60s and how amazing it was playing in all the orchards (hoping the sherif didn't catch them). Anyone who looks around and likes what the valley has turned into is suffering some kind of cognitive issue. This is a disaster of urban planning. A sea of parking lots, 8 lane streets, freeways, and warehouses. There is no shortage of space. We could have had a chain of interconnected walkable towns with high frequency rail connecting them up and down the peninsula catering to three times the capacity it caters to today. The amenities and quality of life would be better for everyone. It's not infeasible to get there now but at this point it requires serious leadership to get us there and Google, Facebook, et al. need to start spending money to make that happen.
So if they want 2fa enabled and users to avoid browser plugins it inadvertantly suggests a vector to start looking at.

At a guess, an API vuln that issues a token of some description?
Charitable interpretation: Comcast thinks that being the one ISP not to sell your browser history will be a market differentiator.

Uncharitable interpretation: Comcast is a content provider in addition to an ISP. Their interest is in using the data themselves rather than selling it.
The congressional hearing last week had them say that "the Obama Administration threw pebbles, and it's about time we started throwing rocks."
This is really neat. You need to take only 1/N of the locks. Maybe the N can be started small and changed gradually as the views increase.
Check a Usenet archive and see what the alt.* groups looked like in 1997. Lunatics and assholes have always been present on the internet; the difference is that in 1997, we saw the necessity of creating private spaces that excluded undesirable people.

Facebook and Twitter are virtually unmoderated. As long as your comment is legal and non-pornographic, it's probably staying up. The "communities" used by the majority of people the majority of the time are less well moderated than a lot of 4chan boards.

Of course the debate on Facebook is uncivil. Expecting otherwise is a peculiar kind of madness.
I think you have to enable js on that static blog post to read, so if anyone cares to summarize...
* Minute or even second-based granularity. Why? We live in a world where a minute can have a hundred events.

* NL History lookups, ie. "Where was I on my fourteenth birthday?" or whatever. It'd be cool to integrate things like calorie tracking, exercise, that kind of stuff. A true personal database.

* Travel days and in general travel time is hard to track, because flights/cabs/busses get delayed, I'm not thinking about my calendar as much, etc. It ends up being a block that says "travel time" or something and that's fine but an interesting exercise is, how can we improve the efficacy of tracking actual time? This is more brainstorming than fully fleshed concept.

* Habit tracking. Time-based reminders with a method to verify "I did this," like BeeMinder + RescueTime combined. This is it's entire subset of problems to ponder but definitely I want to see this in a centralized calendar because visualization is key for me.

* Robust task management. I want to hover over or click on a cal entry and see the Jira/Trello card with any relevant source code links and exactly what I have to accomplish. Ramit Sethi talks about this -- he uses GCal to do this exact thing, and I think it's a brilliant idea. Unfortunately it's lost in two or three clicks down the rabbit hole. If I am using a centralized "dashboard" type calendar like I envision, this is like a concierge for my to-dos.

* To expand on above, I'd love to see a way to set hard goals and have a smart AI to help back-track and build a feasable path to accomplishment. I.e. I'm not a marathon runner in ANY sense of the term, so I set a go to run the Grandma's Marathon in 2019. Based on my current fitness level from RunMapper or w/e app I'm using, compared to my current habits of exercise, and considering maybe my financial and other secondary commitments I may choose to add to this goal, I'd get an autopopulated schedule of "run this many miles at this pace (on this route, if you want) on these days* and eat these macros on these days at least that's just one example but you can imagine more auto-goal-planners.
Ahhhh. This is the kind of silliness that used to be el goog's hallmark a decade ago.