skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a very interesting question, of how can we measure when a neural network is being creative? In fact, creativity is not obvious at all. It's sort of an ill-posed question if you think about it. How can you verify that a network is generating things that are not like what it was trained on, yet are... like what it was trained on?

Are neural networks* forever relegated to the role of copying and interpolation? Do the neural network weights form a kind of database?

* (I don't think this only applies to neural networks, but models in general)

There was one recent work trying to address this [1] but I'm not 100% convinced and I think a lot more work is warranted in this area. A difficulty is that it's not a purely technical problem, but also one of semantics and interpretation. It's one that the "automatic musical accompaniment" community and other digital arts communities have struggled with for decades, and it's not resolved.

How do you know when a machine is being creative? It's not far from the moving goalposts problem of general artificial intelligence. How do you know when a machine is being intelligent, if you can always explain it away by examining the black box?

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068
I've a 2600K with 32GB DDR3 ram, and its the cost of DDR4 ram that is that stopping me from upgrading. Well that and the fact that that i've no compelling reason to upgrade beyond keeping up with the joneses.
TLDR: Fluff, more fluff, some basic stuff we all know about the business-IT relationship, fluff again, buzzword, ADVERTISEMENT for KeepCoding (a coding bootcamp thing)...

https://keepcoding.io/en/
The 6 Biggest Messaging Apps in the World by Monthly Active Users
If you want a Meritocracy, then Best does need an objective definition. Otherwise it's just a popularity contest.
What is the educational path to becoming a CISO? Would you go into IT or CS?
Well, in the Mythical Man-month, Brooks describes the difference between accidental (later clarified as incidental) and essential complexity.

In other words, computers getting easier to use doesn't affect the complexity of the aforementioned "business requirements" or the kinds of research problems we attempt to tackle, which are only getting harder.

But yeah, ten minutes to load one program from tape... that was a productivity killer.
SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
I offer the same service...

versus adding some value.

- challenges they ran into
- it's working for them or not.

it's just a blatant ad.
I'm assuming the solution isn't unique because I found some positions that are under-constrained.
Happens surprisingly (or rather unsurprisingly) often. This article http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2002-01-06/entertainment/02... has a few more examples, including Joseph Beuys, who's work had been destroyed countless times. Many cases ended up in court. A baby bathtub of him filled with what looked like trash was scrubbed by politicians who partied in the museum and then used it to cool their beer and clean their glasses. The artist was not amused.
https://www.wired.com/2011/09/ff_kilogram/
to add a little bit of extra inside baseball (my experience only, YMMV) -

bands (short for pay bands) in FEDERAL (not contractor) competitive service vs. excepted service are slightly different.

Competitive service works as Band 1-4, followed by SES (senior executive service). With excepted service (which I expect most hacker type folks to be hired under) you don't have SES. You have Band 1-5, with Band 5 roughly = to an SES pay grade. Excepted services essentially means you are hired in for a special skill set, and you don't compete on the normal gov HR point system (which includes vet preference, disability, etc.). Excepted service tends to be used for hiring a specific person. Downside is that without competitive status, excepted service personnel can not move laterally in government.

in both cases, band 1-4 cover the same ground as GS 1-15, but with less stratification.

GS Grades go from 1-15, but each grade has 10 steps. GS 9 (average masters degree education starting point) will run 42K-56K base + whatever COLA (cost of living adjustment) you get for location. For Wash DC area COLA is +24.78%, bumping GS 9 to 53k (step 1)-69K (step 10). Each department/team is a little different, but most places I'm familiar with have a clear career path from GS7-GS13. GS14 and GS15 are more slot based, and generally are management positions.

Bands are tougher to move around in after your initial hire. It works out better for you if you just scrap into the next highest band, it works out worse if you land in the middle or the top of your band. Instead of step or grade based pay bumps, the band system is an "experiment" to incorporate pay for performance. Everyone gets their base pay (determined by band, and then further separated into high, medium, and low), and then there is an extra pool of money at the office level that is distributed by performance reviews. High performers get 1.5%-3% * (base pay + COLA), with low performers getting nothing. Without getting deeper into the weeds, most people can expect to get a ~1%-1.5% "bonus" annually. Theoretically, the bonus system is supposed to make up for the additional stratification of the Grade/Step system, but because of office politics the curve is pretty flat, and the high performers don't really see that much of a pay bump.

edited to add this is for FEDERAL employees. Contracting has a whole different set of issues and rules. In general, I'd recommend going Federal to get experience and a clearance, then transition to contractor status later in your career. Whereas most Fed salaries will top out at 160K-ish, contractor salaries w/ bonus can be much higher (2x-4x). Downside is stability and employment risk, and working for a client rather then being the client.
Isn't Sony going to start making vinyl again?
Yikes, hope those bennies are pretty sweet.
I would argue that they're useful but not mandatory.

Is having separate certs really that big of a deal? Operational overhead with LE is next to none and if you're scared of hitting limits you can contact LE to have the limits increased.
I would feel even more comfortable if I would be able to pay a nominal sum. Even $1 per cert would go a long way in securing their infrastructure. Maybe Letsencrypt does not want to handle the hassle of managing payments.
> having a significant portion of the world's TLS be under one umbrella isn't a good thing.

Why is that? The damage from a CA being hacked is not proportional to the size of the CA - they are all equally (small number of exceptions notwithstanding) capable of issuing certificates for any domain which will be trusted by all major browsers.

Is there another aspect I'm not considering? While I see how it feels like a troubling thing, I'm struggling to actually come up with any real consequences of it.
FUNNY VIDEO: SH*T PEOPLE SAY IN SILICON VALLEY
About a month ago one of my websites was being scraped. They were grabbing JSON data from a mapping system.

I replaced it with a GZIP bomb. It was very satisfying to watch the requests start slowing down, and eventually stop.
Isn't that exactly what I said in my original post? A majority of people in the network wanted to (effectively) take the bad actors coins, so they did.
I would argue that they're useful but not mandatory.
Is having separate certs really that big of a deal? Operational overhead with LE is next to none and if you're scared of hitting limits you can contact LE to have the limits increased.
This is definitely true, and single-domain or SAN certificates should continue to be the first option administrators consider when deploying TLS. Wildcards make sense for things where the number of subdomains is unmanageable and where each of those subdomains share the same attack vector (i.e. are handled by the same load balancer, etc.)

The fact that validation for wildcard certificates is limited to the DNS challenge will hopefully ensure that most users will continue to use non-wildcards, as the other challenges are significantly easier to automate.
I love using the rest API like this. The main downside is you lose the inability to use many Wordpress plugins.

I.e., if your users want to insert a poll into a page, before you could probably install a plugin that integrates with the editor and admin panel. With this approach, you'll (probably) need to build that functionality yourself. So, your content and users need to be just right to do this.
http://www.teemingbrain.com/2013/05/09/orson-welles-on-chart...

If you don't have time to watch a two hour documentary, at least watch this part, which is beautiful.
Very sorry to hear! Apparently additionally also the engineers in New York:
https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947
Yeah, I've tried to keep a team together an leave a toxic employer. People just aren't interested. It's very rare that the need (or expectations) line up exactly.

Seems like this is better for freelancing when you can sell a solution and maintain autonomy in how you produce that solution.
What is LGBT sex education? The Church provided the best sex education my wife and I got. During marriage prep, we actually learned how our reproductive systems worked, and how to monitor my wife's cycles, which led to the diagnosis of several health problems that should have been obvious in retrospect. If only we had actually been taught about our bodies in high school, it would have saved us a lot of heartache. Thank God for the Church.
MMORPGs had knowledge base websites dedicated to them almost the instant they came out. The reason they don't foster community anymore is more by design than anything else. That said, old MMORPGs fostered community via some pretty unfun methods. I'm not sure if there's a good middle ground.
Meow-generator when the last slider is set to Meow-y ;-)
You can setup a reoccurring donation to letsencrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/

The reason these are free has nothing to do with payments but instead allows removing an additional barrier to entry from getting SSL working.
Indeed I am.

In the case of a consumer spending money, a method of electronic spending that's not unilaterally reversible is most definitely a bug. For a lot of honest vendors that's also true - they want a situation in which people don't feel constrained from spending because of the high level of risk involved.

Reconciliation between finance houses? Not so much, sure.
I believe column E is under-constrained; a solution with column E = "YYYY " or "OOOO " passes the tests, but is clearly not what's intended.
> Wouldn't all but the most naive scanners use time-out settings, maximum lengths on bytes read etc?

It wouldn't save a scanner from crashing to use a time-out or max read bytes. The defense can send the 100kb zipped data in a matter of seconds. The client then decompresses the zipped data which expands to gigabytes, causing crashes by out-of-memory.
You can: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/
When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a functional third arm, this seems like the first step in that direction.
How to Create a MOOC in 28 Days
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-repository-...

I think this Chrome extension called "GitHub Repository Size" might be exactly what you are looking for
Show HN: Harvest, the easiest way to grow your mind (spaced repetition learning)
Like I said. There are uses for wildcard certs I'm just arguing against the fact they're used en masse. People should be perfectly aware of the ramifications and sandbox appropriately. (*.tennant.sandstorm.io or whatever.)

Everyone keeps saying SaaS is the reason for the use of wildcard certs and I would absolutely argue the point that multi-tennancies weakest tenet is the fact that if you get compromised the scale can be broad. Why intentionally weaken that system? LE can handle thousands of domain creations a minute, they've been very forthcoming with lifting limits for people on domain creation.

The downside is your server sites which need a little overhead for vhost creation but that could be automated with less than a day of ops work.
Deliver Go binaries fast and easily
I always find useful tidbits or inspiring quotes as I browse the internet. Harvest lets me write or copy & paste the text so I can be reminded of them later with an automated email scheduled with a spaced repetition algorithm for optimal memory and learning. Try it out and let me know what you think!
Refactoring is like the Fight Club. Never talk about Refactoring. Instead do it all the time while implementing new features instead of saving it up until the building falls apart.
The large majority of the software isn't deployed by developers, but it is written by them, and it's rather difficult to deploy unwritten software. And if the people who deploy them have to write it in the first place, they by definition become the developers.

The issue can only be solved by catering to the needs of both parties. For example, the currently available distro packaging formats tend to require privileges to deploy, which complicates the development cycle. (Exceptions do exist, of course; for example, Nix doesn't have this particular issue)
The article says that can make about 10x as many pizzas as a similarly staffed pizzaria. Along with their delivery innovations, it seems like they could serve a wider area and deliver pizzas much faster, especially at peak hours. The last bit strikes me as important: I really haven't ordered much pizza since the early 00's because at peak hours it could take 20 minutes or an hour - if it was a reliable 20 minute delivery, it might be more tempting (especially if automation grants some quality improvements).
Hybrids, in my opinion, are the next logical step for the masses. A pure electric vehicle has range and charge time issues that keep many of us from considering them. Plug in hybrids make the transition even easier.
Yes. During our beta, we will focus on organizing teams. Our platform will have emphasis on matchmaking, with enhanced personal profiles to make it easier to find/join teams. We will be introducing client leads when we officially launch, it will become a marketplace to showcase teams with projects.

The bigger picture is to allow teams to "grow together" which is to showcase the work they've done together as a team. We want to have team-based portfolios to make hiring choices easier for companies.

We feel synergy is an essential part of effective teams, and we are putting a lot of emphasis on showing that.
Four of the seven physical constants used to define the seven base SI units will change, so a bunch of physical constants that currently have exactly defined values will start being subject to measurement uncertainty. So μ_0 will no longer be exactly 4π × 10^-7 H/m, k_C = 1/4πε_0 will no longer be exactly 8,987,551,787.3681764 N m^2/C^2, and 1 mol of carbon-12 will no longer have a mass of exactly 12 g.
Requesting a new certificate per user is another step that can go wrong, and contacting LE for limit increases is a barrier.
Defining your fundamental unit of mass in terms of a single arbitrary physical object costs a lot of theoretical purity, though it might not cause a lot of problems in practice. You mention a potential loss of precision. But we should gain accuracy by defining it in terms of fundamental constants. When the object itself changes, do we simply have a standard that drifts more than the physical constants of the universe? Do textbook publishers need to update all examples and problems using micrograms because the unit drift at that scale became significant? Should anyone without access to a reference object not get a real, accurate value for the kilogram? Do we keep using the mass value we know the reference object had, or does our kilogram really change with the object? Do we need to update any equations with a constant in them involving mass in any unit or derived unit in the equation once a year for high precision applications?
This announcement goal is to change the mentalities and set a direction, people in this thread are taking it way too literally. The public (even the younger generation) currently thinks electric cars are a kind of joke, putting 2040 makes it far away enough that people will think it's possible to go into another direction. It does not matter if it can be done by 2030, the public would just dismiss the announcement as unrealistic.
First time I've ever seen that stack. +1
Show HN: Gigalixir: A PaaS for Elixir Apps
Dell do Linux edition that ships with Ubuntu.

So full compatibility.
reinstall.
Hey Hacker News,

I've been working on this for the last 6 months or so to try and help spread Elixir. Deployment is probably the top complaint when it comes to choosing Elixir so I'm trying to make that easier. Please let me know what you think!
A larger CA is a more valuable hacking target.
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Bringing Machine Learning to iOS Apps
Looks and feels great!
I just made it up since you mentioned "little caesars", famous for their $5 pizza.
I would be more impressed if they replaced diesel trucks since they are likely a larger contributor to air pollution in major Indian cities.
Unless there will be a breakthrough in batteries with 10x capacity and 0.1 price, I won't change my car to electric, neither will many of people I know. May be as a second car for short city trips. Or oil price will skyrocket, but that's unlikely too.
Fortunately (and unfortunately) all the way up to the assistant vice president came from software engineers and systems engineers. So when Comodo did their little scam, the AVP called bullshit on them and told them off. (The unfortunately is that some of the higher ups are technically exceptional, they have low regard of people skills).

We're on LE for 90%. There's a client (there always is...) that demands Network Solutions certs. Yet they cannot put to words why that's their need, other than stupid bullyish business practices.

We're still trying to wrap our heads how LE plans to offer wildcards.. But I digress.
LSP is sensible for the same reason that the middle end in a compiler is sensible - it turns an MxN problem into an M+N problem.

For compilers, M is source languages and N is target platforms. For LSP, M is source languages and N is editors.

They both have the same downside. The more esoteric the language feature, the lower the fidelity of support in the common middle.
Was thinking more about a maximum length for the decompression stage.
Couldn't you have a cert per sub domain? If you're using Let's encrypt, you almost certainly have automated renewal in place, so you could allocate a cert when you give them a subdomain
I dislike how their website makes you pay the Microsoft tax (no way to choose "no operating system"). Is there a way to customize it to not have to pay for Windows?
Layoffs at SoundCloud
How to Uproot Systemic Racism and Sexism in Venture Capital
There's still text chat in SC which is very popular for that exact reason.
Ha, the irony! The USA's NIST defines a SI unit to the rest of the world; meanwhile, most of citizens don't know what it is.
I would settle for a car that drives exactly as well as I do, and non of that stuff is required to meet that goal.
Also this: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882979330086895619
In the expression in the second row, the 5th character must match the 12th character, which must be R.
Free risk assessment software
or health care (at least in the US)
Functors in C++ – II
23 years later the KLF is going back on tour
Wait, it's actually generating new cat faces as in cats that don't exist? Some of those images looked like they had backgrounds in the corners was that also generated???
I find #3 (minus the music part) to be so important and yet so challenging, having grown up in a house where the TV was ALWAYS on in the background. I spent my teen years falling asleep with the TV on. It feels very uncomfortable at first to forego TV/Movies, FOMO hits hard.

A couple of ideas for taming it.

0) Media detox. It's can be so uncomfortable at first, feel what its like to go without for a week. A similar thing worked for me when I was trying to lose weight, getting used to fasting and what true hunger felt like allowed me to restrict my calories effectively without falling off the wagon.

1) Don't pick up new shows, finish out current seasons and leave it at that.

2) Make a rule that you won't watch TV/movies unless you are watching with someone else, so it's a social activity.

3) Only watch shows when you are working out, cleaning, other mundane task like that. Although you could go the other direction and say those are great activities to practice mindfulness with.

4) Pick one day/week to allow for watching things, ie Part of Sunday is just a lazy day in bed. Kind of like a cheat day.
Interesting! I wonder how many teams they have hired this way. Any followups on this?
it is. perhaps you missed the word "commode" in "re-commode-ification".
This is a helpful use case. Could you message me so I can learn more? press@letsencrypt.org
Serious question. What does LetsEncrypt buy me that I could not get from having a knob in applications and browsers that lets me accept self signed certs?

To be clear, the reason I am asking is that historically a CA was intended to be a way to validate "who" you are talking to. LetsEncrypt is providing a signed cert that does not validate an entity. It just solves the self signed cert, which could also be solved in applications by having a setting to "Accept Self Signed Certs". Some apps and appliances already have this.
The parent makes the point that it's not necessarily the case since hacking any trusted CA (no matter the size) lets you generate certificates for anything. If letsencrypt was hacked today it could be used to generate a valid google.com certificate for instance, even though Google's certificate is normally issued by their own authority.

It's a weakness of the current authority architecture really, trusting a CA is an all or nothing decision. If any of the authorities is compromised you're vulnerable until you remove the CA from your browser, regardless of the number of legit certificates it issued.
At worst enabling 2FA would make no difference but it will not make it less secure if you still need the password (might not always be the case but then it's not true 2FA).

I would argue that even if it can be beaten it will add security since that extra hurdle can stop a lot of low effort attacks.
For the NSA, they list salary ranges on the job postings.

Examples:

Cryptographic Vuln. Analyst - Entry: $68,586 - $85,464
Cryptographic Vuln. Analyst - Mid-Level: $79,334 - $105,663
Computer Network Analyst - Entry/Mid: Same
Systems Vulnerability Analyst - Entry/Mid: Same
Capabilities Development Specialist - Entry/Mid: Same

The range for Senior positions is $94,796 - $145,629

There's also signing bonuses available, and language bonuses if you know foreign languages that are in demand. They also adjust the pay for living in Hawaii, since it's more expensive.

The CIA pays a little better, but it's more expensive to live near there.
Hachim Mastour – From Teen Sensation to Flop