skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1) learn how the brain works 2) build a simulator

I disagree that step #1 is important.

Consider the "Air-foil", which led to flight. In one sense, its an approximation of the wings of birds and other animals.

But ultimately, the discovery that the "Air-foil" shape turns sideways blowing wind into an upward force now called "lift" is completely different from how most people understand bird wings.

Bird Wings flap, but Airplane Air Foils do not.

--------

Another example: Neural Networks are one of the best mathematical simulations of the human brain (as we understand it, as well as a few simplifications to make Artificial Neural Networks possible to run on modern GPUs / CPUs).

However, the big advances in "Game AI" the past few years are:

1. Monte Carlo Tree Search -- AlphaGo (although some of it is Neural Network training, the MCTS is the core of the algorithm)

2. Counterfactual Regret Minimization -- The Poker AI that out-bluffed humans

There are other methodologies which have proven very successful, despite little to no biological roots. IIRC, Bayesian Inference is a widely deployed machine learning technique (for some definition of Machine Learning at least), but has almost nothing to do with how a human brain works.

An interesting field of AI is "Genetic Algorithms", which have biological roots but not anything based on the biology of brains, to achieve machine learning. Overall, a "Genetic Algorithm" is really just a randomized search in a multidimensional problem, but the idea of it was inspired by Darwinian Evolution.
Openssl was open source and we still got Heartbleed. It's a long strech to think wd can audit correctly imessage by reverse engineering it.
What if those things are all true?
Looks like Poe's law struck again :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
I use the Brave browser to address this. It's based on Chromium with built in features based on Privacy Badger and HTTPS everywhere. It also replaces "Chrome view" so that if you click a link from an app and it opens up with the app, you're still getting the privacy features. And since it's Chromium based I don't see the sluggishness I do in Firefox for Android.
You could mandate Pavloks be worn at work to receive compensation. Then just hook them up to a punishment API!

(groan)

Why give out expensive and forgettable treats, when you could use the much more persistent memory of a painful shock, using the sense of pain that comes built-into the employee?
I've never been able to get the disable annotations option to stick. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it's been that way for years. Very annoying.
I honestly don't understand how can one be at the same time afraid that a vote is won by a majority (possibly involving a quorum as many referendums do) and at the same time point out that it's organized by a minority.

Clearly the definition of who should decide these matters is crucial: at one side some people believe that it's a local matter: Catalans should chose. In the other hand, others think that that since this affects the rest of Spain, all Spaniards should have a say.

Only in this context is clear how a (possible) majority of Catalans can still be considered a minority in a broader scope.

The issue of sovereignty is central but somewhat arbitrary if you think: imagine that before/during the brexit referendum the rest of the European population (or at least Brits living abroad, ehm) were asked if Britain was allowed to leave. After all, it was something that in a way or another could have affected them, right?

But no, it's "obviously" not the same, because "countries" and the illusion of well defined borders between ethnicities and political entities. We grown so used to it, but one should not forget how this bond has been applied through force and coercion.
rribary@synoptek.com is a good contact
A healthy dose of Gibson and Stephenson helps me to stay sane. It feels like we're approaching a singularity.
Not sure I follow, scrolling and dragging are two completely different gestures? Overloading scroll to mean zoom is problematic, but that's not happening here. You need to click "deeper" than usual for seemingly no reason. Fwiw I also thought the page was broken in Safari, never used force touch before on a website except to preview links.
Abortable fetch actually just recently became a thing, as in the Github issue was closed 9 days ago. More info:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/abortable-...

We'll be implementing soon.
I suppose he means the disclosure and not the testing itself.

> The vulnerabilities presented in this research are present in iOS up to (and including) version 10.3.3 (apart from #1, which was fixed in 10.3.3).

This seems like it's old enough that Apple probably doesn't mind anymore.
SensibleVision 3D Facial Recognition System
Need the Firefox World expansion pack for F4
An essential element to resilience is to have a strong support group, ideally friends, or people who are going through a similar thing.

In that vein - shameless plug:

I've been working on a service (www.campfire.care) to build peer support groups for any focus. Groups of 5-10 people with the same issue meet regularly via video and stay connected via chat.

The idea is that we are fundamentally social creatures, and struggling with a challenge alone is unhealthy. It is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. But peer support can be effective + inexpensive.

And being part of a true peer group can provide a kind of value that professional mental health can't. You can't be friends with you therapist, and their job is not to truly empathize with you.

Would love any thoughts / feedback!
Why is it people never offer 1Password as an alternative? Sure, it's paid and slightly more expensive, but they have regular security audits and their apps on each platform are really well made and second to none. Their change logs are also always a pleasure to read, they even mention each bug by issue tracker number! Only problem is no Linux app.
Oh, and about finding good use for their money: they laid off excellent system platform engineers earlier this year, while keeping some failed execs on payroll. That tells a lot about what the priorities of the leadership are.
It's often ambiguous whether you're depressed, burned out, or both.
ZCash is only as secure as you trust 9 people and their ceremony. There's gotta be a way to do consensus about zero-knowledge proofs that's a little more... you know ... decentralized.

https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/6a26rh/peter_todd_h...

Before you guys start saying, banks don't trust Bitcoin either because transactions are controlled by like 5 mining pools and the occasional lucky lottery winner. If they blacklist your address, your "permissionless" currency starts looking a lot more like a frozen bank account.

There are better ways :)
In industry, yes. In academia, there's computational neuroscience:

http://cocosci.mit.edu/people

https://web.stanford.edu/group/mbc/research.html
The 5 biggest announcements from Amazon’s hardware event
Netflix have been heavy users of FreeBSD for a long time.

It also had very good tracing tools before Linux did, so reasoning about performance bottlenecks is much easier.

The networking stack has also handily beat Linux for as long as I can remember.
I am one of the persons who think this is not the way to do the things and there should be an open debate. (and also that both sides are wrong right now). As we lack of this open debate about the independence I am interested to know your opinion about it, as how independent Cataluña wants to be. Does it want to be an associate state, or a completely independent state (that would also need to enter the Europena Union by its own)? This is something it is still not clear for me, and I have the feeling that some politics don't want to discuss it because their goal is to get rid of corruption trials and with any independence they will achieve it.
This works much better in my Android phone (Nexus 5 with chrome dev) than the OP
Very true. I read the Mistborn series and absolutely loved every minute of it, so I picked up The Way of Kings thinking I like Brandon Sanderson and it's a popular book of his. I didn't make it past the second chapter because the story demands I memorize dozens of ridiculous names, made-up words, magical objects, and fictional cities right off the bat.

Suspending disbelief is not the problem. The problem is when the author writes something so unbelievable that there's never a chance to suspend. It's all disbelief, all the time.

Again maybe I'm ruined by years of reading bad sci-fi and fantasy, maybe I would have been better off if I read it 20 years ago. But Snowcrash and The Way of Kings both start their story with all of the hallmarks of every awful book I've ever read.

I'm sure the durian fruit tastes great, but unfortunately I've smelled a dumpster before and now durian is ruined to me forever.
I understand the why, but ICO regulation is shifting the power of crypto from anyone (low-, middle-, upper-class) into upper-class only.

For example, the Filecoin ICO for U.S. participants was restricted to accredited investors, which required a proof of income above $200k/year. Obviously, ICOs are risky, and we can all see why someone with less income probably shouldn't invest as much money as someone making over $200k. However, preventing someone in a lower income bracket from making ANY investment feels like economic stratification.
Thanks for posting this! What a great and fun read!
exactly, too busy pushing resources into stuff that was not their core business while letting the competitors take their market.
From TFA:

> Just about every AI advance you've heard of depends on a breakthrough that's three decades old. Keeping up the pace of progress will require confronting AI's serious limitations.

The expression "one trick pony" means it does one thing, not that its foundational principles are based on one research paper.

If this author's analogy holds, electromagnetism is a "one-trick pony", even though it has millions of applications (which is what common usage of that phrase refers to).
Well I'm running FF 57 right now on my Macs and there is no problem using these gestures.
How does this compare to the current go-to library for this sort of behavior?

https://github.com/RubaXa/Sortable
> More concretely, the Wi-Fi vulnerabilities presented in this research affect many devices in the Android ecosystem. For example, two of the vulnerabilities (#1, #2) affect most of Samsung’s flagship devices, including the Galaxy S8, Galaxy S7 Edge and Galaxy S7. Of the two, one vulnerability is also known to affect Google devices such as the Nexus 6P, and some models of Chromebooks. As for Apple’s ecosystem, while this research deals primarily with iPhones, other devices including Apple TV and iWatch are similarly affected ...

> We’d also like to note that until hardware host isolation mechanisms are implemented across the Android ecosystem, every exploitable Wi-Fi firmware vulnerability directly results in complete host takeover. In our previous research we identified the lack of host isolation mechanisms on two of the most prominent SoC platforms; Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and Samsung’s Exynos 8890. We are not aware of any advances in this regard, as of yet.
Any idea how they will deal with radiation exposure? Outside the earth's magnetic field the astronauts would be exposed to lethal cosmic rays & solar flares for many months.
>high speed pizza delivery by a coder-ninja into a fortified corporate suburb on behalf of a mafioso pizza company

That's really freaking awesome!

>the protagonist is named Hiro Protagonist

Super lame.

That's why it tears me up. I really want to like it.
I don't think it's persistent if you don't log in. There is an account-level setting (not a video-level setting) which I the gp is talking about.
Time for a Career Change? Here’s How to Break into Programming
In an ironic twist, I was playing around with this and switching tabs trying to check out on a Shopify store, and my browser crashed.
A Twist on the Liar's Dilemma (2016)
Kinda reminds me of how the United States is set up. California and Alabama are composed of different populations, differ on key issues, but still share many overarching principles and laws.

Group identities are key to the functioning of society - we cannot destroy them, nor should we endeavor to do so. Instead, the differing identities of a people should serve to unite them, with diversity becoming a strength shared by those who identify with multiple groups.

More concretely, within a workplace, as long as each different group of people is connected somehow by another group, things should work out fine.
That describes me, probably you, and most other people here.
That's certainly one way to do it. However, we didn't succeed at building modern aircraft or earth moving machinery by building simulations of birds or muscles. There's enough that is unknown out there for a variety of approaches.
Project Zero discloses the vulnerabilities to the affected 90 days before releasing to the public. It's probable that Apple was notified and patched this because of Project Zero. Once it's been patched or 90 days are up, then Project Zero discloses to the public.
If you look at great science projects like the LHC, a lot of the funding is "wasted" building the infrastructure needed to actually build the project, while Mozilla missed the target a few times "Firefox OS", I never saw Rust with bad eyes, it was made to enable Firefox to become a top tier browser again.
I'd love an answer to this as well.

Tangentially, this is a rare moment when I want a service to charge me money to assure myself that they are adequately incentivized to take my service/business seriously.
NASA Postpones Launch of James Webb Space Telescope
Well Ukraine never actually was a separate nation except very briefly after the revolution, then after the dissolution of the USSR.

Also, Ukrainians are ethnically almost identical to European Russians, and more than half of them speak Russian. Ukrainian is an archaic dialect and probably would have died out if not for a resurgence in nationalism.

Edit - to add to this, the way Ukrainian identity formed in the first place is that "Ukrainians" were the part of the Russian empire that came under occasional occupation by Western powers (Poland-Lithuania and Austria-Hungary), so they developed their own identity by virtue of essentially being Russians cut off from the empire (they kept Cyrillic writing, attempted to keep the Orthodox religion, etc...). Even in Gogol's writings he refers to the Russian Empire, not Ukraine as a nation (even if the current Ukrainian authorities have censored/modified his writings).

Oh, and I'm an ethnic Ukrainian in Canada whose family originated from the part of Ukraine occupied by the Austro-Hungarian empire...

Edit2 - Sorry, just facts. "Ukraine" never was a country until last century. Maybe one of you down-voters could point out a Ukrainian state pre-1919 that identified as Ukrainian. Because Kievan Rus wasn't Ukrainian, it was Rus-sian....
> I created a chatbot so that people can vote at referendumvirtual.cat and it went viral in the last 48h.

By the way, nice bot! I loved that it lets you pick a language. I'm using all this fuss myself as a chance to learn Catalan.
Yank – Yank terminal output to clipboard
Wells Fargo's $142M settlement: What you need to know
‘The Princess Bride’ Turns 30: The Cast Dishes About Making the Cult Classic
>They don't share their reports since 2015 - basically when the contract with Google ended.

That's not true at all. The 2015 report was published at the end of 2016. Likewise, the 2016 report should be out by the end of the year.
Chockablock is a nautical term (see:double blocked) meaning that two blocks (pulley systems used in ship rigging) are fast against each other and can't get closer. Basically it's a synonym for "full" or "can't move."

Clearly, the term "block" has nothing to do with the word, "blocked."
It's been a long time since I got my BE in Mechanical Engineering, but I still remember being struck by the difference between well-understood engineering and rule-of-thumb engineering.

Bridge building is mostly well-understood engineering. When you study Static Mechanics [0] you learn all sorts of Physics equations, including Newtonian Mechanics, that completely describe the forces and motions of a structure based on measurable physical properties of the materials used and details about the shapes of those materials.

When you get into Fluid Dynamics, things are different. You start to encounter a bunch of things like Reynolds number [1], which is a dimensionless value related to turbulence that you just have to look up for the particular fluids and velocities you're working with. This number is pretty well defined, but there are a lot of others and their definitions and meanings aren't nearly as clear as F=ma. Back when I was in school, particle simulations for turbulent fluids was just beginning to be feasible, so to design something you plugged in dimensionless constants and didn't worry about the unpredictable fine-details. An example of this is the wind blowing through a bridge's structure, and water flowing around its base. The equations don't give you exact forces that the turbulent air and water will exert; they give you more of an average over time. A simulation, if you can do it, can show you things (like resonance) that the equations won't show you.

Then there was Strength of Materials. Here, the big thing was the Factor of Safety [2]. This is solidly in the rule-of-thumb engineering camp. This is where the engineer says "I think two 16" steel beams would be sufficient... so lets use three 20" beams just to be sure." This is still the way a lot of engineering design is done, because the real world is never precisely known, and the factor of safety will save you when something unexpected happens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statics

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety
I'm a little confused on how they tested loading speed. I.e. they use webpagetest suite which is made for testing website speed NOT web browser speed. In other words it's being tested on live websites, subject to network latencies and what not? Doesn't seem like a very robust methodology. Am I just confused here?
At least Apple has a simple way to disable Wifi right from the control center. Oh wait, they removed that in iOS 11. Now clicking the Wifi icon doesn't actually turn off Wifi. I guess no one will ever find similar issues w/that release </sarcasm>
I like the BoroJS family of meetups. Their schtick is "people focused" javascript. Good talks, venues, and interesting company. But sometimes it can feel a bit cliquey because the organizers are obviously good friends.

http://borojs.com/

Oops, I thought you said "meetups" not stuff outside of tech. I personally like to climb, bike, and visit breweries. Biking is fun because you can stop off and explore wherever you feel like.
Why should the homeless in LA be housed in LA? Wouldn't the city be able to house many more homeless people by building the housing in a less expensive place?
Researchers have developed heart scan authentication system
So, what do you do with these "tokens" once you've bought them? Let's say I get 10 tokens. What happens then?
As if the power of crypto doesn't lie in those that can afford server farms.
How Silicon Valley turned off both the left and right
It's not uncommon for someone with BPD. It only gets worse over time unless the person makes a concerted effort to work with a trained specialist to manage the symptoms, and most don't. You are neither the first nor last to have a marriage fall apart as a result of BPD. It's fucked up, it's horrible, but you will survive it. Eventually you'll have days where you don't even think about it.

That said, I highly recommend you speak to a therapist. There are things you are doing to attract these personalities and it's important to recognize it so you don't find yourself in the same situation in the future.

Also, read this book immediately:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1442238321
I'm not even running Nightly, just switched to 57 beta. It's a big improvement on 55 & 56 (which already felt faster than older versions).
If they could only get near-Chrome speeds with significantly better battery impact that would also be a huge win.
Maybe so, but certainly you wouldn't aggress against a parent who refuses to vaccinate?

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2017/09/29/mom-facing-jail-ove...

What if the parent defends against your aggression? What if the parent uses a weapon to defend themselves? Are you really willing to murder a parent to enforce your ideal of universal vaccination? If you are not willing to do the aggression yourself, are you willing to pay a thug to attack the parent to enforce your ideal?

Maybe you think you are saving lives, but what if in the process of trying to save a child you end up killing the parent? Shouldn't your response be proportional?
100% of us speak Spanish and actually it's very common to use both languages in a conversation when more than two persons are involved :) it's just natural for most of us. Actually I learned Catalan when I was 18 so I usually speak in Spanish and it is not a problem at all... And I'm very proud of being bilingual. In any case I would love to be able to express better myself in English :)
I think the issue is whether there is anything else in the pipeline - though it's hard to tell until it comes out of the pipe, so to speak. Back-propagation revived neural networks for a while, but wasn't there a period between then and now when they were thought to have almost exhausted their potential?
Much of the "wealth" was the people they enslaved, so they did not get to keep it. The American Civil War is seen as a huge and enduring economic loss (but moral gain) for the southern states.
Webhooks should not be mentioned without also mentioning SSRF vulns. Because most companies use their firewall as a defense permitter, these attacks can be devastating.
Some of it. Many of those who survived lost a good portion of their capital. But they kept title to their land, and used that leverage, voting power, and racist solidarity over time to claw back much of what they had previously enjoyed from exploitation of the emancipated slaves.

The South was still devastated by the war. But being largely agrarian to begin with, loss of capital wasn't quite as hard a blow as losing a factory.
The new (written from scratch) CSS engine definitely did give a big performance boost, but I'd say it was only about 1/4 of the increase from 56 to 57.

Another big factor is the new UI. It's partially just more efficient, partially uses animations to make it look faster / more responsive, partially enables new performance features, such as "tab warmup", which starts loading in a tab as you hover your mouse over it, so that it's instantly there when you actually click.

Then they're still benefitting from the new multiprocess architecture. A lot of performance problems can be solved by just throwing a lengthy task into a background thread.

Then the deprecation of the old extension API is also significant. The old extension API had essentially no abstraction from Firefox's source code, so Mozilla couldn't even really refactor code without breaking extensions.
Now that that's deprecated, they were able to throw out big chunks of code [1] and refactor what's left.

I presume that made it a lot easier to work with the code and find performance problems, but also just in general, they put a lot of effort into fixing hundreds of smaller performance issues that taken together did make a big difference, too.

Not to mention that lots of those old extensions had performance problems themselves as well.

And lastly, they also just made sure that the right things have the right priorities. Your background tab is not as important as the tab that you're looking at and so on. Again benefitting from the multiprocess architecture.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347507