skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll second this and note that Telegram, an app actually written in native code, is currently using ~500MB on my machine right now. I hate to be the one to say it (mostly because I just don't care about the ensuing argument), but I think most people who decry Electron/et al don't actually have that great of an understanding of how memory works. I say this as a guy currently sitting here writing an iOS/macOS app in Objective C by choice.

Also, to echo your point: yes, the amount of free stuff you get in a web browser would be an absolute nightmare to reproduce in some native code environments (especially cross platform).

The only reason I'm still wary of running any Electron app for long periods of time is because I do end up feeling the same sluggishness that I feel with Chrome open after awhile, and I don't think there's much that can be done about that. With that said... I've been using sluggish apps since the Windows 98 days, this isn't a new concept.
While it’s not the right tool for the job, it is possible to connect two networks together using SSH as the secure transport. Many (most?) good network folks will recoil in horror though about tunneling TCP inside TCP.
Oh, man, that's a good question. I still really really like multimethods, but I ran out of steam on Magpie for a couple reasons:

1. Julia came out. It looks to me like a really nice language that is heavily based on multimethods, and is orders of magnitude more mature than Magpie. In many ways Julia fills the niche I was aiming for with Magpie and probably better than I could have.

2. I hit a dead end in the VM implementation. This is an amateur mistake on my part, and obvious in retrospect, but it turns out writing a VM in C++ with virtual methods and also using a moving GC is a Bad Thing. It means in the middle of a method, "this" could disappear out from under you. Once I realized that, I realized I'd need to significantly rework the entire VM to fix it. Oops.

3. I'm not a sophisticated enough VM hacker to implement multimethods efficiently. I might get there eventually, but getting Magpie to a state where it's fast enough to be usable for real programs is very likely beyond my skills, especially with my limited free time.

Wren was designed deliberately to be a language that I personally have the ability to design, implement, and ship. There's definitely something to be said for being more ambitious and trying to push one's own envelope, but I wanted Wren to be a think that I could make and get to something usable with a realistic amount of effort.
New Attacker Scanning for SSH Private Keys on Websites
Thank you, that was the blog post I was looking for in vain when I found Cybart's tweet.
I don't know why Amazon continues to jeopardize their reputation with being a counterfeit reseller, but they're becoming worse than eBay. I guess the money must be so good that they just don't care.
No, because it probably would have required a complete rewrite of GitLab to make it work.
NVidia doesn't have just 3 or 4 engineers in these tasks. When you consider that NVidia just took Google's TPU concept, and basically cloned it into their upcoming GPU ("Tensor Cores"), you realize that NVidia is really pouring millions, maybe hundreds-of-millions, of dollars into AI.

AMD has a number of initiatives that haven't panned out as well as NVidia's AI investment. AMD's "HSA" technology is actually quite interesting, although unpopular. AMD's push for HSA has made it faster at Video Rendering tasks (see Blender for instance) and random tasks like GPGPU-accelerated WinRAR decompression or LibreOffice Spreadsheets.

IIRC, AMD Vega beats NVidia Titan XP in Creo and Solidworks benchmarks (CAD programs). So its not like AMD is sleeping on its laurels here, they're just focusing on other, still profitable, corners of the market.

Of course, the current is behind AI, Tensors, and NVidia at the moment. AMD can't afford to fall further behind. The current trend is AI and Machine Learning, and it seems reasonable for AMD to at least get PyTorch running on AMD cards (if not "beating" NVidia, but at least they can play along).
It seems like Papadopoulos is small fish here that will be used to get incriminating info on larger targets. He also confirms that this isn't just about taxes and money laundering when it comes to Manafort. And my guess is that Manafort isn't the final target of the investigation either.
Ah I think I read the "higher" as "high" and misunderstood it.
I'd say the advantage of share buttons using the proper canonical tag is it strips away user-customizations, tracking information (utms), and other info.

So for instance if a user clicks the "comments" link on a blog post, it won't then skip the article when people view it.

Though I can also see downsides. For instance you might click on a specific version of a product on an ecommerce site. If you share it and say "I love this version!", that information could be lost in the process.
There are multiple authors there, actually. One of the more libertarian ones split off a while back. Ken is more liberal. They generally stick to the facts and avoid ideology in most articles.

This one is a pretty neutral explanation of the grand jury process that I think is quite informative for most people.
The dangers of garbage-collected languages
This thread has been interesting but I think it's drifted into the realms of utter obscurity so I think we'd better leave it here. Thanks for the discussion!

I'll leave you with my parting thought: I've never used Clojure but I have used Python and Haskell. My experience is that Haskell's ("mandated") type checking allows me and the teams I've worked with to deliver far more business value than Python. If Clojure would allow me to deliver even more then that would be great, but given my experience with Python I can't see how a dynamic language would do that.
> There's not much you can do with VPN that you can't do with SSH

For most end-users, there is nothing they can reasonably do with ssh.
It is irrelevant what software the provider is using as long as they use the openvpn protocol. This will be obvious to anyone who tries to connect using openvpn.
What is a submarine piece?
Do you happen to have a link to the legislation you mention?
It will take you decades of saving to have the kind of capital that can show a return that's even remotely comparable with your salary.
I am not saying the phone is revolutionary, I am saying that Apple and some supporters/reviewers call it revolutionary. See Apple's own page for the X[1]. The use the slogan, "Say hello to the future", and for the FaceID section, literally call it "A revolution in recognition" (emphasis mine). The point that I was drawing out from the review was that all the hoped-for fulfillment of Apple's marketing seems to rely on 3rd-party developers making this new hardware useful, but Apple itself has not really delivered to the hype. It is as if the English colonists in America had written the Declaration and then the Constitution and said, "Hopefully in the future some nations out there will know what to do with democracy and can make it successful, but we'll stick with being slightly more-autonomous subjects of King George for now." Some "revolution" that would have been.

[1] https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/
Yes, but he's saying that Amazon commingles the inventories of different sellers if they recognize it to be the same item.

In other words, if Seller X, Y, and Z all sell Widgets, Amazon puts all their Widgets into the same box. When you buy a Widget from Seller X, you may actually be getting a Widget that originated from Seller Y or Z. From the buyer and seller perspective, it's transparent...unless, of course, one of the sellers is a counterfeiter, in which case the buyer gets agitated that Seller X is selling counterfeit Widgets and yells at Seller X for selling counterfeit Widgets when the item actually originated with Seller Y.
Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up.

What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions.

The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore.

Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business.

But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players.

If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want.

Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat.

https://stratechery.com/2017/why-facebook-shouldnt-be-allowe...
Is there any way in which a VPN is superior to Tor, except possibly speed?
It depends on whether you're signed into multiple workspaces.
This article is also very useful in showing just how far you can push Postgres _without_ reaching for any of these optimizations. I've seen too many projects worry about these things very early on in their lifecycle, when in reality they are no where close to having enough traffic to cause a problem.
It clearly works pretty well that way. Textual (Mac IRC client) is the same setup.

Slack, on the other hand, feels like JavaScript frameworks piled three or four deep, often getting its UI out of sync with the actual state.

Chats/channels will briefly flash (1) unread in the sidebar to tell me about my own message that I just sent, or I’ll continue to have a blue “10 new messages” banner in a conversation that I’m actively participating in.

I use it because it’s convenient, but there’s definitely room for improvement.
It is not too expensive if we were to use nuclear reactors to power it. (Yes, including hiked commissioning and decommissioning costs.)

Combined with solar and wind for peak of course because why not.

There are currently no other options. Renewables alone are not enough to even power civilization at current level. (They get somewhere shy of 60% in an impossible best case.)
> People are canceling $100/month revenue cable plans and getting $10 Netflix. That's a large loss of revenue.

But we can't pretend that that revenue is still up for grabs. The moment people are aware of the true market value of a copy of one episode of Game of Thrones, the price they're willing to pay for the convenience of watching it anywhere is going to be lower than the cost of cable. The upshot could be that what money they do end up paying is allocated almost directly to what they're actually watching, rather than a thousand channels of garbage they would never be caught dead watching.

The people who are cutting the cable can do one of three things: 1) watch it on-demand, 2) don't watch it, or 3) watch it without licensing it. If you don't have a convenient means of watching it at a price which satisfies consumers, consumers can only really justify doing 2 or 3 (which basically means you'll go out of business). That's what I mean by recovering revenues. If you don't do on-demand and paid downloads right, then you will have no revenue once all the cables are cut.

> It's not clear to me that streaming can actually support the television ecosystem we have now.

It's not clear to me either, though we must keep in mind that a) that revenue is going to dry up no matter what, and b) more direct licensing, and viewership-based licensing will make the entertainment industry more lean, and fewer shows will be basically money laundering schemes.
I'm not accusing at all, just describing in a belligerent tone ;)

What I'm accusing (bemoaning?) them of mostly is being big, corporate and basically reserving a big portion of media for that big-corporate voice. This isn't new in media, but it is in online media.

On the point about policing truth (or maybe currating content)..this is just something they now have to deal with. Regimes have fallen on their platform, coups prevented, elections impacted.... They can't hide behind algorithmic moral neutrality as Google 1.0 did, at least least not without taking a bold (costly) stance in a free speech direction.

At the moment Google and Facebook are trying to be neither democratic or undemocratic. Not unbiased, just unopinionated in their role as the media. This is something you could only say in a corporate tone of voice.

These problems are all consequences of being enormous superpowers. I want stuff from GoogleFb, stuff I might feel I have a right to like speech or affiliation. I have to go to them for these. We don't have the "don't like my store, shop elsewhere" relationship anymore because they have all the stores where all the people buying and selling are.
Why is compiling on demand more auditable than just having open source BIOS?
Is it not feasible that a warrant to Google instantly reveals your identity?
Comparing my own situation, I fit in pretty much in the median for my field, age and salary.

It'll be interesting to see what folks dig up over the coming weeks from this dataset.
Why SaaS Companies Can't Win on Features and Must Win on Brand
Agreed, for the longest time, I'd been using Kodi on HTPC to access my lan content with a decent UX but at the same time wanted Amazon video and Netflix support, not to mention Hulu and the like. Now I use an NVidia Shield TV with Kodi as an app, but still wish it was the other way around.

I also hope that Android TV integration for VLC gets better, there are a few things for SMB/CIFS shares that require you hookup a mouse to get through.
Did you never stare straight at the sun as a kid?

Note that sea captains in the age of the sextant were typically blind in one eye by using the sextant on the one star visible during the day (our sun). But this wasn't from a single viewing, it was from many many viewings, presumably the majority of which were while they were midshipman. They were smart enough to sacrifice one eye, covering the other while looking at the sun.

Nevertheless it's a bad idea, especially with both eyes, and eclipses are more dangerous.
Indeed! Tho this is only half the problem, because `T` there includes metavariables, so it's not a type but rather a schema at the meta-level for types. What we'd like is something like `forall a b c. (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> c` so that composition can be used at arbitrary choices of the types. So like, while we can use this composition function at any particular place we need composition, we can't define `compose` to have this type because the first use site will force the metavars to have a particular value and then we get a nasty global monomorphism. We need to explicitly have metavariables in the language itself, rather than at the metalevel of doing the synthesis/checking.
On a related note, for an app I have open all day long but interact with on an event-driven basis - Slack's UI is just too darn big. I miss the days when the only chat UI was a small column (eg. ICQ).
I'd assume that Video RAM is important though. The Titan XP has 12GB of RAM, while the $500 Vega 64 only has 8GB of RAM.

A better comparison is probably Vega Frontier with 16GB of RAM for $1000. If you're doing heavy compute, you're probably gonna need a ton of RAM to go with it.
It's clear to me that the RAM limitations of my 6S are present, I'm more often then not seeing apps starting fresh rather than resuming state.
Yes, this is accurate. Adium’s message views were almost entirely HTML and CSS with very little JavaScript. The bulk of Adium’s “brains” were written in Objective-C (and plain C, via libpurple).
Can't help wondering if FaceID's more of a PITA than a help. Do I always have to stop and stare at my phone? What if I'm walking?
Bitcoin might become an 'internet gold': https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-work-8d8265def194 Moving a kilogram of gold from one part of the world to another would already be more expensive than sending equivalent in bitcoin.

But I am waiting for a new wave of POS systems: https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-stake-can-be-cheaper-than-p...
> Just yesterday an HNer was saying they are in Puerto Rico and the vast majority of pages won't load due to bandwidth restrictions - except for HN and one other site I'm forgetting. I would bet you AMP pages would load fine for them. HN loves to hate on page bloat and AMP, confusingly.

Using hurricane victims to try to trigger an emotional response to aid in the defense of Google's attempts to lock down the web? Bravo.
When one of our kids was around 3, we would write down the stories that he would dictate, which he would then illustrate. It was a lot of fun and I'm glad we still have those.
Killer kids miscast year 2
https://youtu.be/4SQHI8MT3Rc
Does this protect you from a warrant to Amazon revealing your identity?
The trouble is that even bamboo requires marginally arable land which is at premium, fails to grow in cold conditions of most Europe and chunk of US and Russia. The area required to make a dent in CO2 sequestration would be a bunch of countries sized.

Secondary problem would be handling all of that junk. You cannot burn it, have to bury it instead.
Yes, we do! Check out the Uplink: https://anvil.works/blog/uplink

It's a library you `pip install`, which lets you connect Python code running anywhere in the world to your Anvil app. Everything you can do from Anvil server code, you can do from your Python code, wherever it's running. You can define server functions, HTTP endpoints, access data tables, etc.

We have customers controlling IoT devices with it (like that Raspberry Pi video). We also have companies driving big machine learning jobs on EC2 servers with tons of GPUs - but with all the UI and housekeeping in Anvil.
They did. It worked as well as expected.
Most people who use telegram haven't heard of Signal, most people who use Signal won't touch telegram with a ten foot pole.
Well! You learn a new thing every day.
I can't wait to try this out! The introduction video is incredibly compelling and it looks like an amazing product. Nice work!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-op...
Why is this interesting? In short: a great new activation function that may challenge the dominance of ReLU.

Longer story:

Today, ReLU is the most popular activation function for deep networks (along with its variants like leaky ReLU or parametric ReLU).

This paper from the Google Brain team is ~2 weeks old, and shows that SWISH, a new activation function, "improves top-1 classification accuracy on ImageNet by 0.9% for Mobile NASNetA
and 0.6% for Inception-ResNet-v2" by simply replacing ReLU with SWISH.

SWISH is equal to x * sigmoid(x), so not that much harder to compute either.
Vanguard (VTI) or S&P500
SOS functionality is baked in by pressing combinations of the side buttons. Way more realizable than pocket texting.

You’re not fooling anyone in meetings or at restaurants by using your phone under the table. We know you’re doing stuff with your phone. Everyone knows. Still, if you want to pretend to be slick, use the passcode.

You have no idea if faceid will be slower than Touch ID. You have no idea if faceid will limit the phone to just one user.

You’re out on some pretty weak limbs with this list of nothingburgers that goes on.
Simple: it's off-topic here. Generic "world news" stuff is generally considered off-topic. Although they seem to have relaxed that a bit over the years, I still don't see any reason to have the Manafort stuff on here. It's not like there aren't thousands of places on the 'net to read about / discuss that topic.
> TOR or VPN can stop this.

You're saying that the persons of interest in this case were identified and targeted only based on an IP address and not based on some other aspect of their online activity?
That should tell you something about his approach. A staunch libertarian advocates investing half your portfolio in government securities. My conclusion: his investing approach is divorced from his politics (as it should be).
"take" isn't a great word for this context, since it implies something lost by the other party.
> Do you also will do multi-methods?

No, the book will only go into implementing single dispatch. I'd love to talk about implementing multimethods, but I don't know how to implement them very well either. :) I've read a few papers on it, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of literature. Maybe it's mostly locked up in tribal knowledge and you have to be in the right room with the right people to learn it.
Killer kids of miscast
$10-20 at most banks. It’s no ACH but not bad if you’re doing it once a year for safety.
From Bunnie's blog:

Disclosure: I am a technical advisor and shareholder of Bitmark.
Savings rate is the amount remaining after deducting expenses for consumption. It includes long-term investment.
That's why I'm developing eul, a lightweight native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Facebook etc:

https://eul.im

It's only 4 MB and handles tens of thousands of Slack messages in one chat without lag.

1.0 release is going to be out in early November.
> They are libertarian so they generally align with more conservative / right viewpoints.

Please don't spread misinformation about Liberarians. Libertarians align with conservative views on economics / taxes / welfare but for things like immigration and human rights Libertarians on a whole are left of center. To categorize Libertarians as conservative / right is overly simplistic. Notable examples, Libertarians are anti-prohibition and pro gay rights (in general, there are exceptions to every rule).

Edit: bring on the down votes. If one person has their views corrected about what Libertarians stand for It'll be worth it.
No, I was using PIA, I might try them out though, thanks.
Do you mind elaborating? What specifically was so disappointing?

When did you guys visit? Has anything changed since then?
Funny thing is that they publicly own up to their performance problems in an unusual way: in their comparison with GitHub (https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/) they list "Fast page load" as a feature that GitLab lacks and GitHub has.

Nevertheless, the slowness is really annoying, especially because their product is so good on all other accounts. If scaling their database can help speed things up, I bet they will be glad to remove this embarrassing "missing feature".

In marketing terms, having fast page load would be called a "qualifier". For example: you expect a hotel to provide toilet paper. You won't pick any hotel because of it, but you will surely avoid one that doesn't.
From the website, it looks like you can clone the git repo locally, so you would have the code. Now what I want to know through is if that repo contains all the "magic" code that anvil does. You have to upgrade to PRO in order to clone a git repo unfortunately.
But that's not really the threat model described when people are talking about their ISP snooping on what they do. A private VPN solves exactly that problem.

Also you still have the same issue with virtually all of those paid VPN services (that you connect from your IP and that you paid for the service). Oh, and Vultr takes Bitcoin, btw (not that that's privacy but it is potentially a layer of separation from your bank account).
You are making a false assumption that more features is something like geometripential in the amount of memory it should use.

It is a list, with some images. They have Rubegoldberged themselves into some Sisyphusian box of poo while they expect us to row the SS Honeybucket to work and back.

You know what my solution is for when I need to slack? I RDP to a VM running Slack. Mother of Lord! How about Slack sell lil USB ARM computers, like a chromebit that just runs Slack? Maybe I could pair them with my Snapchat glasses! Modular, yes you can!
I wish a trustworthy organization with a history of privacy advocacy, like EFF or Mozilla, would create a subscription VPN service. I'd sign up immediately and their reputation would command a significant price premium.
Putin Targeting People with Cyber Weapons
Some banks out there have been using systems very similar to this (in fact using cloudpickle too iirc), in production, and at scale, for years now.