skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Copy and pasting my earlier comment about TM - TLDR for it is that the org is terrible but the technique is not bad (it's pretty generic: sit comfortably, repeat your given mantra, allow other outside thoughts to rise up and pass through you. Don't fight them, just think them and then go back to your mantra. Repeat for 15-20 minutes twice a day).

TM is a pretty terrible organization.

They used to officially believe all sorts of crazy things, like that their meditation could make you fly, or make you invisible, or that if the square root of 1% of a city meditated, then it would dramatically lower violent crime.

They charge huge amounts of money for very little value - a course to learn TM is something like $500, even though the whole technique could be described in 30 seconds.

They claim that you get a unique mantra based on your personality, and that the mantra is a powerful magical vibration energy word (or some such junk). In actuality, the mantra is chosen based on only your age (and sometimes gender).

The TM centers also sell snake oil - they have tons of teas, powders, supplements, etc, for cleansing your toxic energy.

Of course they have studies done by practitioners of TM that claim it is amazing, but there aren't really any unbiased studies about it.

The current leader of the movement, a former physicist, received the Ignobel Prize (like the Nobel prize but for stupidity) for his beliefs in the crazy parts of TM.

All of that being said, as a technique, it's not bad for meditation. It's just run by a shady organization that believes in magic and will charge you tons of money.
Startup company says it is one step closer to creating nuclear fusion
interfering with powerlines and fiber optic cables -- the things an ai would depend on for life -- may be seen as the equivalent of a terrorist attack by the AI.

Edit: further... using silicon or other resources that the AI needs to reproduce or grow would put us in direct conflict with the AI.
>once you want to use a microphone you're dealing with different pinouts

This is true, but ultimately they are all variations on the 1/4" phone plug, which has been a standard across multiple industries since the advent of the telephone. Adding another ring to a TRS, or changing the pinout, is a minor variation compared to Apple's alternative. The phone plug is so ubiquitous that I think the comparison is valid.
Thanks, I've brought this up elsewhere and never gotten a reply more substantial than mentioning the licence. Do you have any reason to think that is all they used?
Sure, but the 2nd ensures the 1st. Government needs to be afraid of its citizens. Only armed citizens ensure that.
See my above comment - please don't pay them $1000 to learn this technique.
For comparison, they estimate the observable universe contains 10^78 to 10^82 atoms. Though comparison is a bad term. The human brain can't meaningfully picture numbers that large.
This is a perfect example of how demands for socialist implementation are a zero sum game. Facebook's contractors make the $15 an hour that minimum wage workers are clamoring for.

Now that they have that - and without offering any new value to Facebook - they want all the perks that high demand, highly skilled workers get. It's a never ending cycle.

Not that I don't feel for their disposition, but it shows how these types of requests come with no understanding of basic supply and demand.
I have a house with a standard lock. A couple years ago someone decided to kick the front door in while I was at work. We have shitty house locks because the entire system is terribly insecure and strengthening one link in the chain is pointless.
Originally typo'd pretty hard and had numbers much too high! It's still a larger amount of energy than I can even imagine.

That's what I get for trying to do math in a <textarea> instead of on paper.
High-Resolution Satellite Image Samples
It's not a one size fits all thing. The majority of startups won't need these methods, think software for examples in the article: control systems, critical infrastructure, etc. It's fine to have different approaches for different classes of software. Raising awareness of these tools is critical because most software engineers haven't put much thought into them.
> It's never pleasant.

Can you expand on that if you don't mind?
As an armchair scientist, I mostly wonder about mass estimations.

If there's a whole class of objects (black holes around 20 to 50 solar masses) that were previously thought to be virtually non-existent, and now turn out to pretty common, does that mean we can explain away at least some of the proposed dark matter?

What if we keep finding more non-radiant objects that still (presumably) made of ordinary matter?

Can these classes of objects account for the "missing" matter in galaxy rotation curves? Or would their distribution be simply wrong?

Exciting times to live in, for sure!
If I owned Cloudflare this is the direction I'd go. Ads without the MBs of bloat that existing ad networks add.

As a cloudflare customer and an everyday internet I am thankful cloudflare hasn't gone in this direction.
For their Point #3 I'm guessing they are saying if they are sleeping or a mugger points their phone at their face. Fortunately, Face ID has focus detection, so if you aren't looking at it then it won't unlock. Which makes point #3 moot as well.
Maintaining a skill set isn't a guarantee if you're in something mainstream like web dev, where lumber-sexuals have taken over. You'll be expected to be a manager instead, and if you don't have management experience virtually unemployable at those places.
Echo + Hue totally does this. Though, you have to say "Turn off the bedroom lights." if you just want the bedroom. "Turn off the lights" will turn off all the lights.

BTW- it's magic, amazing and too expensive. But if you're dumb and like geeky tech things, it's pretty rad.
I am really surprised devices like this don't support naming. Both individual and general. Like starting a conversation with one "Home" indicating you are talking to all, Master for master bedroom, and such. Heck you should be able to name them like pets. Spot, roll over. Sit. Lights on.. lights off. its cold...
> They also list some papers that purport to go over the math, biology, and performance. However, the source code access terms are pretty restrictive.

Holy shit, you weren't kidding about restrictive terms. Actual terms in the agreement (Discloser = ESR who make the STRmix software, Recipient = Defense expert witness):

1. Discloser will only provide source code to an expert witness who is retained by the defense.

2. Recipient must sign confidentiality agreement.

3. Costs of the disclosure will be recoverable from the Recipient by the Discloser.

4. When source code is disclosed, a representative of the Discloser must be in the room at all times.

5. A stand-alone computer will be provided by the Discloser, and it will not accept USB drives or CD-ROMs.

6. No photographic devices are allowed in the room, including tablets and phones.

7. The only permitted notes are hand-written.

Good luck finding any bugs using a company-provided computer, under the watch of a company representative without the ability to take anything except for handwritten notes while you are being billed for the time that you spend.
The "distortion" you're hearing is actually just the leftover noise. When there's noise and speech at the same time and frequency, then you can year some of both and it sounds a bit harsh -- like distortion.

In general, this problem is tough because when there's a change in the signal, you have just 10 ms to decide whether it's the noise or the signal changing.
The costs of living in their area may not be affordable at $15/hr.
It is eminently suitable as a signal for remote shutter release, which was the context of my comment.
Project management: A surefire way to kill your software product – TechBeacon
If I had to bet, I suspect F# will fill in a niche. Just like SQL, javascript, etc.

Functional-style languages seem to have difficulty becoming mainstream.
That sounds like a configuration issue. "The Lights" is likely setup as the default group including all your lights. You should be able to group them separately into something like "bedroom lights" and "living room lights".
Won't that require huge amounts of energy and a lot of whatever fluid you're using?

Also that still leaves dealing with the tailings.
Oh god, don't get me started on this. Why can't we have modern day USB ports?
I think they are comparing staff engineers with contract janitors. I think most of the pay differences are between engineer / janitor, not between staff / contract.

I heard that engineers on contract at Facebook are in general paid very well and I suspect many could easily move to a full time position at a less-hot company, but choose not to.
One of the largest cryptobank (exchange) is ran by someone who openly praised one of the major ponzi scams, even after it shut down and was known to be a scam. [1]

Said cryptobank is now allegedly using fake orders to buy up significant amounts of BTC (recently a 50,000 BTC order [2]) during market crashes.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6xpddt/as_20m_more_tet...

[2] https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/908718464671641602
I'm worried that 'Dolby Atmos' is a catch-all for a bunch of unrelated audio tech, but the positional audio in Overwatch (game) is noticeably better than most games have.
But will it have YouTube?

Actually, that's a serious question. I'm looking for a box to recommend to a friend who's going to cut the cord. I think the Nvidia Shield will be better for them due to being real android tv, and because I have one and know the Android TV ecosystem better...

It looks like FireTV still doesn't have an easy way to install Kodi from the appstore, but requires that it be side-loaded.

And it looks like the Youtube app in the amazon app store is written by Amazon. The icon makes it look not not legit..
Pymetrics raises $8M for job-matching with AI and neuroscience games
Thank you so much for this wonderful piece of work.

Please keep improving it.
Yeah, it's pretty great. We evaluated spinning up RDS MSsql instances for our testing, and found the time that it took to spin up one of those to be extremely prohibitive for use with CI pipelines, I mean something to the tune of 20 minutes for the instance to come up.
Whereas with docker and mssql-linux, we only have to (at most) have a 10-15 second delay before the container is fully online.
Definitely great for devs to run their local tests against, and great for me to be able to do some minor admining via the CLI tools provided in the container.
> These assumptions are key to economic analysis and commercial success.

Well, I mean, they are key to the well-established-as-false rational actor model that for a long-time ruled the social sciences (well, with the notable exception of psychology, which had it's own different challenges) as the one overarching model of human behavior.

It does provide a convenient framework for useful first-order approximations in some (especially mass aggregate) situations, with some supporting assumptions, still.
New Unix implementation (1983)
I must be dumb but in today's world of the big 4 spying on you all day long, I'm trying to kick out voice assistants, not bring more in. After Google Now, my voice control needs are done and someone said enough is as good as a feast.

Now when you get Mrs. Roddenberry's TTS voice powering a smart home, we may have to revisit.
Well, i guess you do have a point there - one iteration was worse in terms of privacy than the other, yet the adoption of alternative OSs was very weak.

But they've gone a little too far with Windows 10 - for me at least, of course everyone will have their own "measure" where too much will be too much.
Birds of same feathers. The same thought and same reaction moocha.io. Next up aaya.ai.
For me that writing process was the most fun. Trying to get an idea to fit in 140 characters and still be grammatically correct is a pleasant challenge. Expanding the character limit may make that easier and therefore less fun - or maybe it'll just give more characters to edit and rearrange.

They gave the statistic that 9% of tweets were at the character limit. That's the wrong statistic though. What they need to check is something like "met or exceeded the limit during composition" because I'd suppose that more tweets are affected by the limit than only 9%. Most of those affected tweets are simply pared down to less than 140 characters.
Yeah, I agree about the article. I wouldn't offer this criticism to the main essay - fundamental bugs in critical systems are absolutely an engineering failure, at least in the sense that we should look for engineering practices to solve them.

But with the post I responded to? I see this idea of "it's because engineers don't care, so give them liability" a lot, and frankly it's stupid. It neglects both cost-benefit differences and any interest in the question of hacking, and then goes on to pretend that you can fix bad systemic pressures by beating up the guys at the bottom. The difficulty of writing good code is not a function of how heavily you punish bad code.

I flatly don't believe that the Therac bug would have been caught by personal liability for the bug; either the code would have been cancelled altogether to avoid liability or the bug would have gone on unabated. Realistically, criminal liability for lethal bugs mostly sounds like a way to drive talented devs away from high-stakes applications and leave those apps to be handled by people desperate enough to run the risk, or by international shops operating outside the reach of prosecution. I don't love the thought of a shop unwilling to use git because it creates personal responsibility. "Oh, we just pass code around on thumbdrives, I can't remember who wrote that critical line."

I'd shrug and let the whole thing go, but the rumblings of "regulate software" keep getting stronger from a lot of directions. I don't really want to wake up in a decade and find out that degree requirements and expensive-but-useless licensing have become mandatory, and it feels like pretending bugs come from lazy devs is another snowflake in that avalanche.
It's an interesting idea but the tech is probably not really there yet. It's one thing to have one person say something simple in a "command voice." It's another to transcribe, in real-time, overlapping conversations in a space. I wonder if people wore mics though.
Tata GenX Nano XE is Rs 215,255 ($3,284), Bajaj Qute is $3000 in India.

But what is coming is a wave of EV in China, that might be around $1000.
One of the most disturbing things to me about a potential AI future is that anything beyond a very basic education will not be necessary. No point other than personal enjoyment to learn about physics, computer science, engineering, electronics, AI, etc. Not only that, but at some point technology would be so advanced, it may not be possible for a human to understand how things actually work. Everything we know about how our society works will be limited to "lies to children".
Price's square root law: Empirical validity and relation to Lotka's law
Great resource! Thanks for sharing
They just announced this feature. The new echo knows where it is and saying something like "turn off the lights" to the echo in your living room vs your bedroom will now work as you would want it to.
Differentiating let and function would be a very bad decision. The whole point is to indicate to you that functions can be passed around and worked with just like values. There is a verbose mode that is a lot less whitespace sensitive but I personally didn't mind whitespace sensitivity in python or F#, I just turn on show whitespace.
You think there was a time in US politics that an AI would choose to keep us around?
The Navy's Decaying Shipyards Make Its 355 Ship Goal Seem Laughable
Agree on battery drain, I can leave my D300s on for days and it still has battery left.

If it had WiFi it would be a matter of hours.
perhaps amusingly and somewhat blasphemously, the Bible guides us here: God created mankind in his own image.
Why does skill come into consideration at all? Does a software engineer with 15 years of experience at Facebook get laundry service or health insurance that a fresh out of college QA engineer does not?
Financially, yes... But... the second part is mostly just the dread of it. I've moved (with family) 6 times in the last 7 years... most of which do to bad luck of contracts falling through in the companies i worked for and them just not having enough work to support the staff... lay offs... and while its disruptive, there is actually a ton of growth out of it that, honestly, has been worth it... Just because something is hard up front doesn't at all make it a bad choice...
I think the inverse proportionality is probably wrong since entry-level cameras generally never get mounted on anything. Arca Swiss mounting on my mom's camera wouldn't be particularly useful.

I don't think a multiple-thousand dollar camera body is a good target for invasive modifications unless it's already out of warranty, regardless of whether the change is being made by someone with the appropriate skills. I also doubt that the result of such a modification would be very good anyway. Without being part of the initial design (e.g. a captive nut embedded in the base), the best aftermarket modification would likely be based on either threads tapped directly into the body or a nut essentially glued in place.
>The dangerous unreliability of software is an accountability problem, not a technology problem. Engineering disciplines are regulated so that engineers are held personally and even criminally responsible if they endanger property or lives. Software, being the newcomer, has no such regulation.

Regulation like that tends to follow after a series of disasters causing massive loss of life. Software hasn't yet managed to achieve that.
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/why-biometric-data-breaches-...

I submitted this earlier today but it didn’t get traction.

Basically it could be done.
You raise an interesting question here. Civil engineering these days is done on computers, mostly with incredibly convoluted FEM software and other simulation tools. All software vendors refuse to take any responsibility for bugs in their software and even block you from using the software if you don't agree on the terms.
GDPR is a good thing
Every other electronic in the world has GPS, but not DSLR's. What is up with that?
Sometimes, when Slack e-mails me that someone has mentioned me in a channel, and in the e-mail there is content of the message, I have a brief thought of "how do they know-... oh". I'm slowly getting used to e2e provided by various IMs, as well as encrypted at rest e-mail providers (personally I user Protonmail) - it's not something extraordinary anymore.
This is about janitors and engineers.
It's great feedback, definitely more food for thought. Thank you! It's a fine line between cutting features vs. trying to solve too many things at once.

Our current approach to the collaboration part can be seen when you link a Google Drive account. When you want to edit a Google Doc it takes you right there, no need for the GDrive UI. You can actually create a Google Doc from within Shelf.

Also, "good" to hear what you wanted to know but didn't learn immediately from the website. We'll surely be working on making the use cases and functionalities more clear.
And how many photographs/screengrabs of pieces of text are now posted as plain text.
Nor will Facebook when they realize that they just "can't afford" to provide all these freebies to staff because at a certain point it becomes too expensive to contractors to be able to live within an affordable radius of their employment.

That leads to Eloi and Morlocks, an underclass schlepping 50+ miles, doubling their day, to do janitorial work for companies.

Are they (technically) skilled employees with valuable knowledge, to Facebook? No. Is the value they present to Facebook worth more? Arguably so.

Or they'll start deserting SF/SJ and who will valet park your car at Facebook after that?
Is that Facebook's problem to solve? Part of the Bay Area's trouble with affordable housing has to do with their heavy handed rent control policy (another side of price-fixing), which squashes supply.
Assuming the hardware isn't being pushed to the accuracy limit for the sake of processing time, perhaps there could be an "enhanced security" mode that requires a more thorough check? I suspect their 1:1,000,000 false-positive number is an extrapolation of the maximum allowable difference in measurement. They probably could have set that "fudge factor" to a value that corresponds to something like 1:1,000,000,000 and increased false negatives to 50%.

Maybe it needs to see more "liveliness" and a few degrees head rotation?

Overall I think with the alertness test, the 48-hour passcode lockout, the "press the lock button 5 times" panic mode, and a limit on all attempts is enough to discourage most three letter agencies. It seems to have been enough with TouchID.
No offense, but that's rich. I've emailed abuse, sent public notifications through Twitter, and more. Received silence.

I've had spam campaigns -- open spam campaigns, complete with scraped emails, dubious subjects, and more -- last for 3+ weeks before finally getting shut down. I wouldn't call that "taking the fight seriously".
Perhaps part of the difference is those $15/hour contractors working three jobs to support their families are also
working for a company that is making $9 billion a quarter.
> But let's not pretend that software has the same difficulties as every other type of engineering. Most engineering doesn't face an epidemic of people actively trying to disable safety precautions to hurt people, and a lot of it reliably fails as soon as it does face enemy action. Punishing every engineer who ever gets outwitted (say, by a leaked NSA-developed vulnerability) is absurd.

The issue isn't exactly how software fails, but that software today doesn't properly protect confidentiality and integrity of data, ensure services and data are available without providing oracles, authenticate and authorize correctly, log properly, etc. This is a well known methodology that is consistently ignored in preference to shipping products immediately. That's the issue.

Unexpected things happen, accidentally or maliciously, but care should be taken - the proper kind of non-negligent care called due care. In general, software is not fit for the purpose it was created, appearing to work even though it really doesn't.
The Roodman Replication
I had 2 shots done last week in the UK, only £20, I think it’s partly subsidised by NHS.
DevOps takes this as a primary input.
At the end of the article: The Atari we’re left with owns the rights to more than 200 games. The bet it's making is simple: people will be willing to fork out money to play them again on a suitably Atari-looking console.

This is the value proposition in my opinion, that makes it newsworthy.
And they could also install a hardware keyboard. Neither of which is going to happen. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Yes, and there are plenty of examples of spreadsheet-bugs having significant real-world impact. E.g.,

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...

2. https://www.cio.com/article/2438188/enterprise-software/eigh...
As a person from a third world country living in the US, the subtle difference between "absolutely" and "pretty much" is exactly why I (and I'm sure, many other immigrants) like my life in the US much better. I enjoy ${k}x the pay, yet not everything costs ${k}x more. I'd have way more breathing room with that extra money here and there every day, every minute, every hour. Pretty much everything I buy, every service I use, every problem I touch costs "a little bit" less than ${k}x.

That is, other than the medical bill and the education bill, if I have my own family later on.
In the past there was this post about exactly this topic - http://martin.majlis.cz/what-happened-when-my-project-got-on... - with some analysis.