skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The “DeepVariant” example exemplifies the problem with deep learning in biology: some exceptions (when actual imaging is involved) notwithstanding, we still haven’t found a good use for it. Most problems that we can formulate in biology are solvable with linear classifiers: the models are purely additive. The nonlinearity of deep learning offers no benefit.

The article says that

> In tests, DeepVariant performed at least as well as conventional tools.

Which is technically correct but highly misleading. But a more honest way of saying this would be that

> DeepVariant performs no better than conventional tools, and given the nature of the problem there is no reason to expect further boosts in the future from this method.

This is pretty much what the rest of the field thinks, anyway (example of this view in [1]).

From a pure science point of view, DeepVariant is interesting: it applies a new technique to an old problem and shows that it works. This alone is exciting (to me personally at least). But in practical terms it’s useless; it does no better than existing methods and is far more complex and orders of magnitude less efficient.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2017/12/11/no-go...
As mentioned above, such therapies cost a few dollars to create and deliver. The price is artificial.
I wonder if it would be possible to peg the kernel to one processor core (or a subset of the cores) and userspace to the remainder of the cores. As I understand it, all of the memory caches that are being exploited to leak information are per-core, so that would give a blanket guard against kernel->userspace leaks via cache timing.
Conversely, the remaining 80 percent are the ancestor of everyone living today.

To nitpick, this is not necessarily true. You can imagine a person who had exactly one descendant, who had exactly one descendant, and so on, to the present day. This person would be the ancestor of only one person living today.
DoubleClick deserved a mention, but wouldn't you say that was more of a financial turning point for SV than a cultural one? DoubleClick is just the money faucet. Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook all existed before DoubleClick's acquisition and were enjoying some level of hegemony, and their overall stated purpose hasn't changed. Apple still sells magical gadgets, Google still indexes everything, Twitter still shuffles sound bites around, Amazon still ships cheap goods, etc. If it wasn't DoubleClick, they probably would have found another money faucet at some point.

Also, the advertising focus has only affected some of the SV giants. Apple has resisted the selling-products-to-selling-users shift by becoming more dedicated to user privacy. They still have "customers" in the traditional sense, unlike Google or Facebook. But people still see all these companies as being united culturally or ideologically, especially outside the US where they are referred to collectively as "GAFA" (including Apple). They are exporting something, but what?

The article does a great job explaining what motivates the people behind these SV megacorps and ties the culture of these companies together into this "just build it" or "change the world with tech" school of thought that he identifies as "New Communalism". These companies and their followers seem intent on creating an alternate government system that solves social issues with technology and engineering instead of laws and courts. The focus is on taking heavily regulated things and "disrupting" them, which really means just getting around those regulations so they are no longer relevant. This works so well because the process of creating and spreading technology is now so much faster than removing or changing regulations, however, they don't take the time to learn why those regulations were created in the first place, so they end up reviving or exacerbating old social problems. This has become a pattern now where everything in American life that is regulated must now be "disrupted" by technology.
This is great. Having versions instead of kitchen sinks, and having those versions get rid of the footguns, is exactly what fixes the cryptographic JWT perils.

Note: you probably still just want a random key in a database. And revocation is still an issue. But if you’re absolutely sure you want to mint tokens...
Great overview. I especially appreciate that they linked straight to the paper instead of a popsci/buzzfeed regurgitation of the results.
This is still in its infancy but you have to start somewhere. I wonder how long it will take to get to a system that can scan a whole series of articles on a related subject and be able to discern information which is more trustworthy from that which is suspect. Maybe it's not possible.
This is why the majority of medical breakthroughs and innovations occur in the US. Sure capitalism has its negatives, but its positive is that it provides vast financial incentives for people to create new solutions while at the same time filling a need for humanity. $850k is a hefty pricetag, but the ability to see your loved ones is priceless. Win/win for everyone involved
The Complete Guide to Mobile App Development Timelines
Cisco Systems is looking for a security-minded mid-to-senior level Ruby developer to join our in-house security test platform development team. The ideal candidate will have 4-7 years Ruby development experience, a deep understanding of common web security vulnerabilities, and experience with common devops tools/technologies for cloud deployment.

Please check out the job posting online: https://jobs.cisco.com/jobs/ProjectDetail/Ruby-Rails-Securit...

Qualified candidates may apply through the Cisco hiring site or send resumes to the hiring manager: samcleod@cisco.com
Our solar system is +-4bn years old, so there have been only cca 3 previous generations of similar stars (and it's kind of nice to have heavier elements from the first generations of stars in abundance - I would expect forming life just from He and H wouldn't work well).

Let's ignore the 'bn' part - this place is 14-old. Our system is 4-old. Life is 3-old. Multi-cellular is 2-old. Sentient is 0.00001 old. With usual star life has +- 10 to escape, or it will be destroyed. It doesn't sound so far-fetched to me.

But maybe it's all different - plenty of life all around the place, even super smart & evolved, but maybe speed of light simply can't be broken no matter what. That would dampen any rise of galactic civilization. Or some other unbreakable constraint.
I am not sure this is the complete explanation.
On Earth we do not see stars because of light scattering (Rayleight and Mie) [0].
In the outer space there is no scattering and the light from each star represents a tiny point in the picture, but this point is bright. After all it comes from a sun. But the original image [1] has a dark background as well.

Maybe it is due to the fact that jpeg compression losses small artifacts or something else.

On some pictures it is possible to see tiny white points such as in [2]

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

[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-14-...

[2] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-15-...

(some non important edits, including changing link 2 which was a thumb view)
For those looking for a well-commented you-don't-need-a-PhD-to-understand implementation of GANs + variants (using Keras), I recommend the examples in this repo: https://github.com/eriklindernoren/Keras-GAN
Looks like they use GUI widgets from Blender, despite Blender GUI is considered non-reusable for other apps. Or maybe they only took look from it.
> The gains are like 1% too

If that. I’m sceptical (and so are others). Given that all methods are imprecise, it’s not terribly hard to find a special case on which method X outperforms all the others. But on average?
This is better than JWT. In particular: the whole protocol is versioned, rather than serving as a metaprotocol that negotiates the underlying cryptography. If you speak "v2" of this protocol, and refuse to accept any other version, then you're getting a token that is basically just Nacl.

My only nit --- apart from the "auth enc seal sign" names, which aren't coherent --- is why do public key at all? Yes, Nacl supports it, but that doesn't mean the token format does. What's the use case for it? Who's asking for it? Specifically who? The overwhelming majority of JWT implementations I see aren't public key (except for the fact that the format is negotiated and might be tricked into being that).

Why not punt "seal" and "sign" into a "v3", when/if it's needed?
> Imagine every virtual function call in a C++ program being mispredicted and taking twice as long.

> (Instead of forcing us to recompile the world, maybe Intel should just disable branch prediction in microcode.)

Wouldn't the performance impact be dramatic ? In this[1] example there's a 6 times slowdown between situation with and without correct branch prediction.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-it-faste...
So if you have this, at a cost of $850k, is it then unethical to have children, knowing that there's a high chance that they'll subsequently have to pay $850k in order to be able to see?

I suppose, more generally, even in the absence of an $850k fix, if you have genetic blindness, is it unethical to have children?
I get the same fancy idea every now and then. If anyone has been in the same place and gone on to really explore making synth music, I would love to hear it!
The paper was published in October and is named: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation
http://research.nvidia.com/publication/2017-10_Progressive-G...
I feel the same way, but I feel like once you start learning Emacs, you reach a point (see 'emacs bankruptcy') where you just want to know what every single line of elisp is doing and start from vanilla.

I've been down the path of package managers, starter kits, etc., which can be good learning tools, but ultimately after a few years of using Emacs, you tend to abandon them for simpler solutions. I used to have thousands on lines in multiple org-files, but now I'm down to a single init.el file and keep it fairly simple.

I code in python mainly so I pull down elpy and tune it to my needs. Check it out: https://github.com/saltycraig/emacs.d
The page says "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China", but other sources suggest that their cores are derived from Centaur microarchitecture. Anyone know what the truth is on this?
Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6
Why would you need to recompile the compiler? Both variants only provide read access.
I agree that they started caring about it more now (cancelled plans for future coal plants, big plans for electric cars).

But overall, my impression is that disregard for the environment is rampant:
- 60% of the country's rivers suffer from pollution to such an extent that they cannot be safely used as drinking water sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_resources_of_China
- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/24/river-rubbish...
- http://www.businessinsider.de/china-factories-shut-down-to-c...

As is it stands now, it is a pretty disgusting place to live in and these habits need a lot of time to be fixed (just because government announced they care environment, it doesn't mean that people/businesses will suddenly start caring as well). However, as you say - they are at least on the right direction for the change.
>> I can pay who is willing to let me learn on the job.

Nope, please do not do that, as other say.

You have 10K and 7 months.

- Find some part time gig (may be teach HTML, CSS) at local community college - 2, 3 hours: pays you something and you are not completely using up your funds. You have some knowledge and we always underestimate our knowledge to be poor and useless to the rest of all. Ironical in that, we go try and find a job with the same knowledge! So be confident that you can make some income with what knowledge you have right know.

- Write 6 apps in 6 months, extremely scoped, solving simple problems, I will offer one example:

-- Write an app, that teaches 2000 most commonly used English words. There is a photo for that word, the spelling and sound. The user is shown the photo, he picks the correct word. If app shows the word, pick the right photo. The user starts a session, selects number of words to learn/review, show the words randomly. Next upgrade: you can talk about expanding this to use Retention algorithms in the interview.
-- Rinse, lather, repeat 5 more apps

- Once your 1st app is ready, go to meet ups, local groups etc where you can do some self marketing with your portfolio, every month 1 more app is getting added to your portfolio. Upload your resume and portfolio on job boards, keep applying.

With some thoughtful planning of a part time gig, 6 portfolio apps, self marketing should keep you busy. Yes, don't forget to sleep, eat correct and exercise.

Hope this helps, this is just what I would probably do. Best.
Damm... ;-D
I'm not sure I'm understanding. It is a well-defined probability question to ask about the "expected number" of planets with life if there are 10^24 of them each with probability 10^-24, and the answer is 1.
To be fair, when you have his kind of money, you have "people" to use computers for you.
Scary to think where this will be in 10 years. Perhaps even video evidence will be hard to believe any more. How do you convict someone if this technology is mature?
but its chips don’t make it out of the country because they’re largely used in products built for the Chinese government.

Very wise of them. Right now the UK needs to make a serious push to make ARM our primary choice, and fabbed here too. This is as strategic as nukes.
Good luck with that.

The issue here is that it reaches right back to the core ideas around epistemology, and those, whether we are culturally mature enough to accept it or not, get murky.

> Maybe it's not possible.

Well said.
To nitpick: there is life on the International Space Station (beyond Earth). I don't mean 'in it'; I mean on it. Bacteria colonize some external surfaces.

So life can apparently adapt to extra-Earth locations. The leap of faith is then, that it hasn't left Earth, or that life on Earth didn't come from somewhere else to begin with? Because either scenario becomes plausible. It'd be strange to believe it didn't happen.
Give me break. If you think perturbed politicians need digital IDs to silence people you don't know how politics works in the developing world.
That was my point, and you worded it in a clear way.

I don’t know what the solution to medical funding should be. It’s clear to me that the current situation (medicine for profit) does not work. It’s also clear that the current economic system is prone to waste and inefficiencies.

For all I know, maybe people should be able to get a grant for certain situations. The normal economic forces would then work to incentivize the grant holders to exchange grant funds for goods/services. The funds would still funnel the way they currently do, but grant holders would have gained some measurable benefit along the way. Presumably the grant holders would have made their choices based on perceived needs. (Ie if they have 2 chronic illnesses but only one is life threatening then the life threatening illness will be allocated most resources.) this is just a thought experiment.

Edit- another idea: change the funding for the DHSS to include funding for basic medical research and treatment with a set % of the GDP. I’m thinking that ratio should be based on disease rates.
Chris Matthieu interviewed about Computes blockless ledger on the IoT Podcast
I would assume they are bright enough to apply some kind of inflation, and maybe weight recent salaries higher.
Ask HN: Is Noah Coins a legitimate cryptocurrency?
It's too late for that ARM is no longer a UK company.
I live in a country where income is public information.

It´s not really a problem as far as I know - and at any rate it definitely benefits employees.
LMMS would probably fit what you're looking for.
Rather less the same system architecture reiterated in different cpu architecture implementations (AMD, Intel), and more special purpose processors for a heterogeneous/hybrid system architecture following certain standards.
> They have no reason to fear punishment from a wrong call.

If they make the wrong call, they face fines. The supreme arbiter of what is lawful and unlawful is not Twitter; it is the German courts, but Twitter is the one responsible for removing unlawful tweets, and Twitter is the one who is fined if they do not remove unlawful tweets promptly. Twitter is not fined if they wrongly remove lawful tweets. Especially (but not only because of) given the volume of tweets and reports, the only rational course of action for Twitter is to delete/block if there's the slightest chance a court somewhere might declare it unlawful.

Here is the full text of the law:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/netzdg/BJNR335210017.html

> For one, the law doesn't require deletion. They just have to make it publically inaccessible pending outcome of inspection.

I think everyone understands that, on the scale of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., that deletion entails precisely that: making content publicly inaccessible, even if the company can hypothetically restore it. Not even on that scale: it's pretty typical to have a "deleted" flag in your database for content for normal web applications.

More to the point, supporters of the law have claimed over and over that it won't affect legitimate content, but here is exactly an example that the opponents of the law were talking about that we're commenting on right now.
It was commonly accepted wisdom that camera lenses could only get so small and light at a certain quality due to the physical limits of glass.

And then... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/a-thinner-fla...

It's a very long way from putting a 1500mm lens in a pocket camera, but it looks promising. Of course, it could end up being the fusion reactor of optics: always a half decade out.
There's always so much guesstimation and wishful thinking going on. It makes sense though because we see this magnificence and want explanations. It's frustrating because we learn so much about what we don't know, and worse, how much we'll probably never be able to know.
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多年来，我在机械非标设计一线跌跌拌拌，主持设计了几十种产品的设计；在这些项目中与帝都知名设计研究院，著名高校及兄弟单位进行过多次合作。深深体会到机械设计人才良莠不齐，浑水摸鱼沽名钓誉之徒太多；大多数设计人员毕业后很少再学习，甚至平均下来每月还不看一本专业书籍，所以其水平也不敢恭维。 国人学习做事喜欢捷径找方法，总结起来有四种
复次，主体的社会地位、创作目的和欣赏对象的不同，必然导致思想观点、感情态度和艺术趣味的不同。文人小说持上层文人圈的价值观、感情和趣味；市人小说作者的意绪、情绪和口味既不同于上层文人，又必须代表市民群众的意识、愿望和趣味，作市民的代言人，才能为市民写心而博得听众（读者）的赏爱；这之间显然要承受市民的进步的或庸俗落后的意识和趣味的影响，使两者的倾向和美学品位异趣。
又，上下层人士的生活接触面不同，所择取表现的题材和角度自然也有差异。再次，主体的素养、创作目的等的歧异，导致两者的表现方法直至驱使语言（不仅指文言和白话）的不同，文人通晓文体章法，有所秉承；丰厚的学养使之熟谙文史典故，运用自如；诗词韵语更得心应手，无所窒碍；市人小说则多用俗谚俚语，以浅俗之言适应听众；叙述的情节必须更为繁富，细节描写力求生动以吸引听众。比如，临场演述时为了等齐后到的听众，正文之前必须先加一个小故事作“入话”，以至市人小说形成一种特定的格式，后来成了案头文学时也承袭不变。唐代传奇作家人人能诗，不以为奇，除了情节必要，极少夹入无谓的诗赋韵语（元明以后的文言小说大量使用诗词韵语，是文言小说的劣化）；而市民小说作家则因没有作诗歌的素养，为了炫示风雅，反而要借用前人的诗词或自诌几句以文饰，往往不是情节发展所必需，反而成为破坏情节连贯流走的障碍。至于文言小说简洁典雅、市人小说通俗亲切，就更无庸解释了。
文人小说自七世纪的初唐出现；至中唐而极盛，作品都密接现实，宣泄时代心声；九世纪后叶起逐渐衰疲，迄宋明而不能复振，虽然余脉不绝如缕，但和全盛时期唐人传奇相比，大抵仅存形骸，神气萧索。直到清初蒲松龄的《聊斋志异》出，才结合市人小说情趣，为文人小说作了一个光辉的总结。市人小说从宋元起取代文人小说而繁荣，实因为小说是群众的艺术，而群众对深奥的文言小说毕竟有语言障碍，对文人的思想感情也较隔膜，文人小说即使不自行衰颓，也难与广大市民更贴近更能接受的市人小说争席。但市人小说经过了晚明的全盛期也渐次衰落了，这因为，大量头脑冬烘的文人（这在中国知识分子中占绝大多数）插手，将小说作为宣扬礼教的工具，这些充塞迂腐的教条的作品当然缺乏艺术，甚至没有可读性。更因为，中国陈腐的封建社会及其文化已经到了末世，已经缺乏新的美学生机，缺乏艺术创新的原动力。白话小说的长篇作品到《儒林外史》和《红楼梦》问世后，立即进入了退潮期；短篇则比长篇更早衰落，明清之际的李渔成了最后一位佼佼者。此后虽仍有文言和白话的短篇小说行世，但在文学价值上已可存而不论了。
Github portfolio might help one get the interview in the first place, but once you get your foot in the door, it is 99% useless. Hiring committee will only look at it if they are unable to give yes/no decision based on the data from the interviews. Preparing for interviews is much better strategy compared to creating stuff to post on Github.
> on defense you should always prefer to make an attack complicated, slow, partially-reliable rather than trivial, fast, highly-reliable.

Always? I would think it would depend on what the trade-offs are, what costs you are paying for doing that (in inconvenience or damage or cost to the non-attacking users and use cases; in opportunity cost to other things you could have been focusing on, etc) compared to how much you lessen threats. Security is always an evaluation.

Timing attacks are the worst though. I think this may only be the beginning of serious damage to the security of our infrastructure via difficult to ameliorate timing attacks.
> My only nit --- apart from the "auth enc seal sign" names, which aren't coherent --- is why do public key at all?

> Why not punt "seal" and "sign" into a "v3", when/if it's needed?

Would you be happier seeing something like this?

- v1: HMAC-SHA2, AES-CTR+HMAC-SHA2
- v2: RSA and all its sins
- v3: Libsodium crypto_aead_*
- v4: Libsodium crypto_{box,sign}_*

> What's the use case for it? Who's asking for it? Specifically who?

The only use-case I'm aware of as of this morning is OAuth2 users who currently use JWT for access tokens. https://bshaffer.github.io/oauth2-server-php-docs/overview/j...
The Software Industry IS the Problem
Yes, me too. I can always learn something new by reading others' configs.
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多年来，我在机械非标设计一线跌跌拌拌，主持设计了几十种产品的设计；在这些项目中与帝都知名设计研究院，著名高校及兄弟单位进行过多次合作。深深体会到机械设计人才良莠不齐，浑水摸鱼沽名钓誉之徒太多；大多数设计人员毕业后很少再学习，甚至平均下来每月还不看一本专业书籍，所以其水平也不敢恭维。 国人学习做事喜欢捷径找方法，总结起来有四种
复次，主体的社会地位、创作目的和欣赏对象的不同，必然导致思想观点、感情态度和艺术趣味的不同。文人小说持上层文人圈的价值观、感情和趣味；市人小说作者的意绪、情绪和口味既不同于上层文人，又必须代表市民群众的意识、愿望和趣味，作市民的代言人，才能为市民写心而博得听众（读者）的赏爱；这之间显然要承受市民的进步的或庸俗落后的意识和趣味的影响，使两者的倾向和美学品位异趣。
又，上下层人士的生活接触面不同，所择取表现的题材和角度自然也有差异。再次，主体的素养、创作目的等的歧异，导致两者的表现方法直至驱使语言（不仅指文言和白话）的不同，文人通晓文体章法，有所秉承；丰厚的学养使之熟谙文史典故，运用自如；诗词韵语更得心应手，无所窒碍；市人小说则多用俗谚俚语，以浅俗之言适应听众；叙述的情节必须更为繁富，细节描写力求生动以吸引听众。比如，临场演述时为了等齐后到的听众，正文之前必须先加一个小故事作“入话”，以至市人小说形成一种特定的格式，后来成了案头文学时也承袭不变。唐代传奇作家人人能诗，不以为奇，除了情节必要，极少夹入无谓的诗赋韵语（元明以后的文言小说大量使用诗词韵语，是文言小说的劣化）；而市民小说作家则因没有作诗歌的素养，为了炫示风雅，反而要借用前人的诗词或自诌几句以文饰，往往不是情节发展所必需，反而成为破坏情节连贯流走的障碍。至于文言小说简洁典雅、市人小说通俗亲切，就更无庸解释了。
文人小说自七世纪的初唐出现；至中唐而极盛，作品都密接现实，宣泄时代心声；九世纪后叶起逐渐衰疲，迄宋明而不能复振，虽然余脉不绝如缕，但和全盛时期唐人传奇相比，大抵仅存形骸，神气萧索。直到清初蒲松龄的《聊斋志异》出，才结合市人小说情趣，为文人小说作了一个光辉的总结。市人小说从宋元起取代文人小说而繁荣，实因为小说是群众的艺术，而群众对深奥的文言小说毕竟有语言障碍，对文人的思想感情也较隔膜，文人小说即使不自行衰颓，也难与广大市民更贴近更能接受的市人小说争席。但市人小说经过了晚明的全盛期也渐次衰落了，这因为，大量头脑冬烘的文人（这在中国知识分子中占绝大多数）插手，将小说作为宣扬礼教的工具，这些充塞迂腐的教条的作品当然缺乏艺术，甚至没有可读性。更因为，中国陈腐的封建社会及其文化已经到了末世，已经缺乏新的美学生机，缺乏艺术创新的原动力。白话小说的长篇作品到《儒林外史》和《红楼梦》问世后，立即进入了退潮期；短篇则比长篇更早衰落，明清之际的李渔成了最后一位佼佼者。此后虽仍有文言和白话的短篇小说行世，但在文学价值上已可存而不论了。
Not in our current human society, where new cures are invented every week. Its no longer a life sentence for your children; its a temporary setback.
Intel itself tried to do a better CPU design. It was called the Itanium.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070020