skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WebRTC is somewhat new and complex, and browser support varies greatly. I don't know what kind of unlimited resources behemoth you imagine Slack to be, but I can definitely see how doing consistently working cross-browser WebRTC would be too much effort to be able to pull off at a given time.
Nice examples. But the problem with "swallow" and similar lies somewhere else. It's that translating a single word into a single word is a ridiculously stupid idea. As a person whose mother tongue is not English, I occasionally stumble on a word that I need to translate. GT is utterly useless for me. A random free online dictionary gives me 20 different translations for "swallow".

I am honestly surprised that a company with such talent creates a tool that is this useless; it's literally about doing something like this:

1) Check if the word or phrase is in a dictionary. If it is, return all results from the dictionary.
2) If it's not, try something smarter.

But no, this is not Artificial Intelligence enough! /s
I'd be surprised if any place here in the Netherlands would take a credit card. We are fully used to debit cards. Essentially, credit cards are only needed here for travel and international purchases. Everyday stuff is all with debit cards, cash is unusual.
Diversity in technical backgrounds is an important value-add. There's something truly special about a team of people with backgrounds in embedded, web, traditional desktop, devops, and so on working on the same project; even if they're not currently applying their specialty directly on the work they do.

The knowledge acquired through their backgrounds will have taught them different approaches to problems, often allowing them to pick a better solution to a problem in (as an example) the development of a web application than an equally experienced web-only team would've come up with.

Diversity of skill absolutely DOES NOT MATTER in a startup. You really want to get your money's worth on a team that will not stumble and leave a project in limbo due to technical issues (which can easily kill any small company); and for that you always want to get the best possible talent.
Handling Overload (2016)
The British empire invaded 9 out of 10 countries.
Kudos to the blog for not having silly facebook sharing button. Thanks for protecting my privacy / reading log
Out of interest how long ago was this? Asking because: "Mobile advertising revenue is reported and according to Facebook, it represented approximately 88 percent of advertising revenue for Q3 2017 up from 84 percent in Q3 2016." https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/

Facebook seem to have done an incredibly good job of reducing their exposure to the browser. That comes at the cost of exposure to Android, but it feels like Google are going to find blocking Facebook ads in the Facebook app way harder than in their website.

That's all a little bit irrelevant though because Facebook are members of the 'coalition for better ads' anyway.
We’re 7 years on from stage 1b, similarly drastic surgery (“the works”), eternally grateful that we had kids before. No recurrence but we’ll be watching and waiting forever. My wife is still the youngest person at her doctor’s office by ~20 years so it’s a long goddamn road ahead.

I knew cancer was bad and had a lot of research surrounding it, but I was blown away by the uncertainty for patients and the incredible amount of resources put into solving/treating the disease and supporting the people going through it. After immunization, chemotherapy is probably the most important medical discovery in human history. If immunotherapy can carry us past that, how amazing!

The immunosuppressive therapies are new since we went through treatment and I’m hopeful. If or when we have to fight again, we’ll have new weapons, I’m optimistic.

I hope you find strength, comfort, and support enough to be a support for your wife. Others have gone through it, empathize, and are rooting for you. Fuck cancer.
Intuition is an ill-defined term that often distances us from the actual processes at hand.
I'm still trying to understand the cryptocurrency space and its implications, but isn't digital identity a perfect use case for the blockchain? Decentralized trust that doesn't rely on some government or corporation?

For example: https://www.civic.com/ (disclaimer: I own CVC tokens)
Even before ad-blockers, I have never intentionally clicked on an internet ad, whether in search results or on a website. These days, I block ads with extreme prejudice so I never even see most ads.

But I don't hate the concept of advertising. I don't deny being influenced by ads, or even sometimes finding them informative. I just reject being tracked and targeted.
> We didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the cards, just that it's not on the cards right now

If something is not on the cards RIGHT NOW then it doesn't mean "we released this feature on Chrome first and the rest is following", it means "we don't believe in cross browser support (=diversity) unless enough people scream loud enough". A very web damaging attitude in my opinion.
Why should they support browsers that make dramatic, arbitrary changes on a whim? Chrome is the only browser that remains stable. Who knows what Firefox or Edge will look like next year?
Folks often ask "what's the problem, why not just have Blink be the only browser engine?"

One important reason is that there's a lot of innovation that happens outside of Blink that will not happen inside Blink. Blink shows no sign of permitting Rust components such as the parallel restyling engine that Gecko uses.

Another issue is that Blink is not designed to be embeddable in other browsers like Safari. The friction of having to maintain multiple "ports" in one codebase was much of the reason for the WebKit/Blink fork to begin with.
$250M sounds pretty behemotish?
The market consensus is wrong in this case - this is the obvious inference.
The EU tried the soft touch approach and we just got generic cookie warnings on everything, so now we have the stricter regulation. The ultimate purpose is to put a stop to pervasive tracking and user-targeted advertising. Advertisers will just have to go back to targeting based on the content the ad is displayed with instead.
Considering that many countries have announced plans to fully eliminate gas and diesel engine production in less than 25 years (e.g. 2030 for China), I think it's quite unlikely that internal combustion engines will continue to dominate the industry for the next 25 years. Also, there is pretty big irony in the analogy that you make. Obviously, Microsoft moved too slowly to focus on mobile computing and they missed the boat. I'm hopeful that car companies which aren't focusing on EVs today will similarly be left behind in a few years.
Yeah, I've looked at AOPA and others but I'm a bit too low-time to get favorable rates, and now I'm a lapsed pilot who hasn't flown in a few years, so it's on the backburner for now. Thanks though!
Citrine version 0.7.7 released Linux/OpenBSD
Hiring Doctors: look for the ability to abstract and not for experience.

Hiring Lawyers: look for the ability to abstract and not for experience.

Hiring Mechanics: look for the ability to abstract and not for experience.

What is with this industry and its strange disdain for experience?
Postgres isn't always perfect and for a few things lagged behind for a few years (namely upsert and better replication support). Fortunately we got both of these in recent releases, but this post is a great collection of areas where it already shined with some powerful features.

In particular really love the details on check constraints and null in Postgres.
What does "stable" mean here? Chrome, Firefox, and Edge all take Web compatibility extremely seriously. They would not break Slack.
No. I'm thinking about how he was sued for giving his girlfriend an STD and then giving her the drugs she killed herself with.
Not everyone is a he or a she. I'm not, for example.
This is a bogus headline. They can't justify the cost of developing video chat for other browsers. The truth is much less interesting than the misleading implications.

NOTE: I posted this comment before the title was corrected by the mods for editorializing.
libffi author here...

Did you consider writing a purpose-built JIT compiler? I believe the FFI use-case is narrow enough that a tiny hand-written JIT compiler would be pretty easy... like the old QEMU template based JIT.
Combine pgreplay with pgBadger
Look like? In what way does the interface of a browser changing make it more challenging to support as a website? Firefox looks a bit different now to a year ago with Quantum etc, and add-ons are very different, but I can't think of a single website that would be affected by those changes. Can you elaborate on what you're getting at here?
You seem to be chasing the idea that somehow your idea was formative, even though pretty much nobody will have seen it, even though you yourself don't know whether or not there were earlier instances.

Railroad diagrams are also called syntax diagrams [1] and were used in print as early as 1973 [2]. They are an obvious kind of diagram to use for regular expressions, which express a grammar/syntax.

Basically, many people will have had the idea, independently, because representing a regex as a railroad diagram is an obvious invention, as is converting them between variants. Doing these on demand is also obvious.

Trying to take some sort of credit (even as inspiration) for other people's work is not likely to make you many friends. The world is a vast place with many things going on independently. Keep on inventing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax_diagram
[2] Niklaus Wirth: The Programming Language Pascal. (July 1973)
Have you heard of Microsoft's distributed FPGA fabric project? They are using acceleration for a lot of Bing's algorithms with excellent result all around. They are now working on bringing it to Azure.
Chrome is being updated outside of the operating system updates not because of some great pure architectural motivation - but out of necessity. Apple can push an entire OS upgrade to its entire customer base without worrying about carriers or third party OEMs. Google not so much so.

Why would Apple go through the trouble of implementing a feature and then breaking it?

The promise of not needing native apps for mobile started with Apple in 2007, then Palm, RIM, and Microsoft. It's always been a poor user experience. It still is today on mobile - with apps that are just glorified web view wrappers and on the desktop with memory hogging, battery draining, slow Electron apps.
This is apparently largely because Chrome's implementation of WebRTC has been less standards compliant than that of Firefox. See https://twitter.com/adambroach/status/959298097674305537 (by one of the WebRTC developers).
I find it strange you mention transfer learning, since one of the reasons neural networks are so popular are because they tend to excel at it. Adapting (i.e. fine-tuning) networks trained on a task with a lot of data (e.g. image classification on ImageNet) to different tasks, such as image segmentation, has proven a very successful approach.
Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults.
I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia, the biggest issue is probably the triangle trade in slaves.
This is not something we stand behind as far as I know, though we still harken back to the times of the VOC as good because it was a 'golden age'.
The EU (and certainly mostly Germany) has historically a very strict stance on protecting private data. The so called “informationelle Selbstbestimmung” is regarded a part of the fundamental human rights. See for example the Volkszählungsurteil of the german constitutional court (German, sorry https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksz%C3%A4hlungsurteil)
So the best case scenario is that the goal is to actually protect the EU citizens. (I’ll avoid discussing whether the GDPR is a good tool to achieve this goal)
It might be worthwhile to add cloud data warehouses with SQL interfaces (e.g. Redshift/BigQuery) to the slides, as I believe they have a similar feature set to PostgreSQL.
Should a browser also not be in the business of alerting a user that they're about to visit a site serving malware and using zero day exploits or is that also the job for 3rd party tools and extensions?
”It requires significant effort for us to build out support and triage issues on each browser, so we're focused on providing a great experience in Chrome and our desktop apps. ”

They are not saying they can’t afford it. Money they have, engineering talent tends to be always on short supply. You need to think where you put the effort.
Making web-based chat apps isn't an end to itself. If the company can't profit from a FF chat app then they won't make one.
Lots of jobs can be considered a social activity, including programming, but at the end of the day empathy and psychology aren’t going to write your code.
Do you have proof that Chrome is the only "stable" browser? Is your standard for stability Chrome, meaning that by definition Chrome is stable and other browsers aren't if they aren't exactly like Chrome?
Another reason to dump this fad. I've been using slack for my jobs for years, and it wastes more time than saves. No real work gets done in a chat room, which is what slack is. It's a shame a private, bad experience is so popular now.

Try search for a conversation with someone in a channel about topic X. You can't do it, because there is no context. Search for the keyword or person? Good luck with that. Even then, if you find it, it just scrolls you to that spot, which is terrible UI.

Ugh.
Nice reflection on the monitors edges.
Well, 'is' is singular so it can’t be the correct verb associated to 'sailing ships' if the latter means multiple sailing ships rather than the activity of sailing ships.
Is it though? We might not understand it fully, but we understand it's role in allowing us to make quick decisions and not overload our cognition with the mundane.
I wonder when they'll write this about Michael Jordan. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes"

Probably they'll never mention Friedman and Breiman, which seems pretty unfair considering their gizmos have arguably had a bigger impact in "actual machine learning gizmos deployed..."
But they dont measure profits in bitcoins. They use dollars or similar because they too see such value swings as dangerous.

Id still say that most drug deals are done for actual cash. Darkweb sales are the public endpoints of long private chains.
Pokéservices
The opposite viewpoint is that intuition is an ill-defined term for a phenomenon that, if better investigated and nailed down, could lead to better processes.
I've heard technique 2 described as a "Wizard of Oz" experience.
Most other scientists dismissed neural networks?
Is there some history I am unaware of as that doesn't seem true. Did the article want to push the idea of the lone rogue thinker a bit too much?
Control the sled to steer it along a "racing line" that will net you the best time.

More difficult than it looks, especially when you're hurtling down the track, one slight miss of the line and you'll see hundredths of a second shaved off your run, which will cost you

See the top 10 womens singles results from Sochi in 2014, the top 10 spots are within 2.9s.

[1] https://www.olympic.org/sochi-2014/luge/singles-women
Reminder: IRC works on literally everything, uses kilobytes rather than gigabytes of RAM, and is a widly supported open protocol with many competing implementations.
Not according to the United Nations Charter. In international law, people have a right to self determination.
Even what doesn’t happen is epic
You call it domination, I call it slow decline.

Many governments have announced that by 2040 it'll be illegal to sell cars with such engines.

They certainly won't be dominating in 22 years.

The question is not "is this business going to be dead" but "when this business will be dead".

So it's more like telling MicroPro to to stop investing in their cash cow DOS-based WordStar and port that app to Windows, because the writing is on the wall.

MicrPro and many other companies were a bit asleep at the wheel during DOS -> Windows transition and that's why there's no MicroPro anymore and there's no WordStar anymore.

Transition to electric motors will take a bit longer but the window to become a significant player in new technology is not infinite.
Japan’s SS-520 CubeSat Launch Vehicle Achieves Success on Second Try
users who value stability and reliability over small efficiency gains

The efficiency gains are often theoretical, not real. This is the essence of why the qwerty keyboard remains the standard, though it was designed to be intentionally inefficient to slow people down. There is a very real cost involved in retraining yourself to do things differently.

It only makes sense to do so when any gains in efficiency will be quite substantial, obvious and will meaningfully pay off in a relatively short time frame. Most new tech fails to meet that standard for most people.
In "advanced user" mode it can do this. You can even say things like "yes allow from foo.com but only when I'm visiting bar.com"

I did this for a while but it all got to be too much trouble honestly. Now I just run uBlock in default configuration and also have an /etc/hosts file, and browser set to clear all history and cookies when closed.
I don't think this is an issue specific to Slack. It seems like the trend with nearly all real-time video/voice software. You either use chrome or get the desktop app.
I am Canadian here.
The Speaking Clock [YouTube]
How easy is it to disable the whitelist and notifications in chromium? It seems like an obvious, user friendly, change.
I was just about to mention that.

At least it still lives on in the metadata used for Google smart snippets, and it's used a lot in the life sciences, and on wikidata. I really wish it went further, but at least it's still useful for most intents and proposes despite the small ecosystem.
I have a Kaveri era HP laptop (read: old). No issues with wifi. Fairly sure it had an Atheros chip which has amazing Linux support.
goreuse takes Go, modifies the AST by replacing those parts that are needed to be customized and generates a Go source that is specialized for concrete types. It is "go generate" compatible.
Reinvesting into ecosystem startups is one.

Salesofrce does this too fwiw.
You can use ML to summarize the video and you can store the most interesting bits in low quality - instead of actual video you can just store something like "red car crossed intersection going northbound, male with blue cap stopped at light, ..."
>To have an ad network control so much of web traffic and then decide which ads to block is just absurd.

Google doesn't determine what ads are blocked. That's done by the coalition that's composed of the following members and affiliate:

https://www.betterads.org/members/
The key difference between "classic" RDS and Aurora is that classic RDS really only automated the control plane. That is, RDS spins up an EC2 instance (or two, for multi-AZ) on your behalf, attaches an EBS volume of the appropriate specs, installs Postgres, sets up security and backups and replication etc.

Under classic RDS, when your application makes a SQL connection (the data plane) it's talking to a more or less stock Postgres instance, the same as you would have if you ran it locally.

Aurora, on the other hand, is involved in both the control plane and data plane. Your SQL connection is to a Postgres instance that's been forked/modified to work within Aurora.
You raise a good point. This conversation would benefit from someone articulating what particular issues are making it hard to support certain features in other browsers.
Our company recently started using Chime [1] it supports Chrome, Firefox and afair Edge, it's quite pleasant to use for video-audio chats in a browser. It uses WSS and WebRTC so it works behind NAT where SIP can't, also it looks like it's a P2P technology so your voice and video traffic doesn't go to central server (I might be wrong about it).

[1] https://www.justchimein.com/en/
Here’s the Solution to the 3 Year Old, $50,000 Bitcoin Puzzle – Motherboard
asserts are for diagnostic-enabled code, don't use them for security checks.
I thought this too. Neural networks definitely seemed like a credible research topic in the 90s at the very least (which is when I first became aware of them).
I don't understand the outcry. Cookies are not required to show users ads or track clickthrough rates. Why will there be a loss of ad revenue? We had ads before privacy invasive techniques like retargeting.
The reason for this regulation is the privacy of EU citizens. Businesses (both in EU and outside) don't "behave well" by themselves, since there's an inherent profit motive in violating users' privacy and interests, so this regulation is forcing them to do this.

The best case is just that - businesses serving EU citizens (this includes most large multinational businesses as well, companies hosted outside do have to abide with these stricter regulation at least for EU users, since almost always they also have EU customers or EU presence) have to obey these rules. They don't get to (ab)use user's data that much and are unhappy about this, but figure out on how to live on without that data.
I think they ditched it in XP SP2.
The main article mentions some defenses. Never immediately determine whether or not the user wins; the basic idea of a transaction that immediately within the block results in win or lose has to be thrown out the door. Instead, roulette-type contracts always must have the user pay in as one transaction, let the user at a later block check if they won, and then let the user withdraw any winnings in a separate transaction.

An easy and pretty good way to do this is to record the block number they make their deposit, and then have the question of whether they win or lose be calculated from the hash of the block some fixed N blocks after their deposit. There are certain attacks by miners that are possible to try to force a win, but the attacks require the miners to forfeit mining rewards for blocks they calculate where they lose, and unless N is small enough for an attacker to try to generate the whole chain of deposit-wait-then-withdraw blocks, or the entire network is working together, it's likely that a different miner will create a block first and interrupt any miner trying to bruteforce a winning block. So if the winnings are under the size of the block reward amount, there's basically zero danger, and the danger is tiny unless the winnings are ridiculous. ... I hadn't thought about how possible future proof-of-stake schemes affect this though. Those might be fatal to this strategy on second thought, since it might be easy for a staker to try out many block variations. I'm not too familiar with this detail of PoS schemes though.

Another common solution involves active oracles and commit-then-reveal schemes, but they generally require the oracle to be honest, or else the oracle could participate in the lottery and force its own win. There are common ways that oracles try to show their own good behavior, so people can notice if they cheat and stop depending on them. As long as it's more profitable for the oracle to continue operating than to cheat a roulette and then be shunned, things work out.
Distributing Postgres with a Distributed Team at Citus Data
Insect: High precision scientific calculator with support for physical units
DriveSpace. And yes, something similar to Windows 3.1 standard mode was used for both, often called mini-Windows.
I'm curious why more money equals faster or better software engineering. Didn't we collectively learn from the Mythical Man Month and others that throwing people at a software problem doesn't scale? More engineers on a project increases communication and administrative overhead; the additional overhead and context costs quickly exceeds any productivity gained.

Given this: Why would more money scale, when people - presumably the thing the money would pay for - has already been shown not to scale?