skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For starters, although Armstrong took testosterone supplements he is mostly accused of using blood doping and EPO.

We don't need to "bring down" those who drink alcohol. Drinking alcohol makes you slower not faster.

The reason that we don't just let cyclists like Armstrong just use any "supplements" they want in a special league is because they then pressurise their domestiques to do the same. This is what Armstrong tried to do with Frankie Andreu.

There are serious long and short term health implications to that, see Tyler Hamilton's description of taking a "bad" blood transfusion in The Secret Race. Many professional cyclists died from "mysterious" night time heart attacks. Some just young neo-pros. Can you really say that they understood the risks of over thickened blood?

I think we'd all be happier if Armstrong and the other cheats found a country where it's legal to dope and set up a dirty league there and left the UCI sanctioned events clean.

Of course the dopers would then have to contend with a new generation of cheats trying to sneak eBikes into the drugs only league.
For This Author, 10,000 Wikipedia Articles Is a Good Day's Work
I bought an $8000 4'x8' router table back in 2003 and built a a bunch of stich-and-glue kayaks with it. I could cut a table of parts while eating lunch from one sheet of marine plywood. With this I may save space, but I have to be present to cut all of those parts without tiring. I doubt hand control of the shaper can beat the accuracy. It's a neat, high-priced toy for makers (I'm one), but if you are going to make more than a few things regularly, go with a router table. I also made 3D carvings or portraits by writing a python script in Blender3D for the geometry, and there's no way you could do that by hand. I really like the Shaper, and I think it will sell, but it is a niche product. It also reminded me of the time I used a projector to, project cut-out templates on ply because I didn't need accuracy, and when I did we would plot out templates to transfer to the plywood, and then cut with a hand router by eye.
DNSSEC for TinyDNS
> If you really have a fleet of web servers burning CPU and you aren't tracking the costs, then I guess "it works" until someone figures out there isn't any money left in the coffer.

What if the costs are fixed? (own servers, unmetered bandwidth) The problem shifts down the line when you want to add a new product and the first product is consuming all your resources. Refactoring then becomes a necessity, but there's no capacity for it because the company is focused on shiny product #2, while also adding shiny features to product #1. Now fire a few people to save money, leaving the remainder short handed, who get stressed and demoralised. But that's ok, because "it works!". Why cant we design first, lay down a good foundation, then add features. The business makes more money, people keep their jobs, instead of spit-balling "user stories" at an application which becomes a giant spit-ball.

> CPU efficiency isn't the be-all to end-all and focusing on it may well prove to be counter productive
> You can spend a near infinite amount of time & resources trying to get optimal performance

I used CPU as a broad example. What happened in my case was there was no performance. At release it was unusable. What stuck in my side was I knew it was going to happen, and had been calling for refactors. But if you cant get them prioritised because you cant justify the customer benefit (it's not released yet, so nothing has fallen over yet) vs features! features! features! it then becomes a bodge job /after/ release. eg. Instead of "refactor this code to make it do fewer queries" it's "lets shove the results of these queries into a memory cache." This satisfies agile, you've iterated and made things "better" - and it fit into a 2 week sprint! - but it feels backwards.

I was going to go on and talk about quantity vs quality, but a quick fact-check google revealed the evangelists with their "Agile parables" (it even sounds cultish), which are in no way perpetuating Agile to sell support tools, say I'm wrong.

I need to thank you for making me realise it's time for a career change. After all this time Agile has failed to convince me, I'm inclined to conclude it never will. But should the next methodology of the moment come along that emphasises quality over quantity, I reserve the right to shout "I told you so!"
Everything seems trivial once you understand it. The author seems to be good at making people understand, so that it seems trivial afterwards.

Knowing nothing about load balancers, had I read your summary before Rachels article, I would probably just glossed over it, but I would not have understood its profound importance for designing load balancers.

Rachel's story kept me engaged and explained the problem in a way that I will surely remember a lot longer.

Teaching is not about reciting facts -- that's what reference manuals are for. Teaching is for engaging students, making them interested, giving background on a topic, telling you why something matters, making it easy to understand, and making sure the student remembers the most important bits.

It's something I have been struggling a lot with junior devs and interns. I show them what they are doing wrong, how to do it correctly, and the next day they make the same mistake again. If people were perfect logical machines, just telling them facts might be sufficient. Unfortunately people are people, and it's really really hard to teach them something effectively.
I generally go with the known ones, the things I search for are generally the privacy statements and the pricing handling clearness.

For example, I needed an object storage publicly accessible over HTTP, so I looked into Amazon S3, which I didn't even bother trying, because apart from the fact that their docs are very poorly written, the pricings pages are a huge mess and I still haven't managed to see what were the real costs, and how they were handled.

While disliking Microsoft, I decided to try Azure, for their blob storage, and not only the privacy statements were way easier to reach, the pricings page was really clear and easy to understand. Furthermore, their administration panel is nicely done, unlike AWS.
So if you are male and sleep with a female you are not homosexual? There have been a lot of gay men married and sleeping with their wives in history.
wow... reading this thread is scary. Google is a joke; my humble advice would be to close your accounts and pay for a better service, life Fastmail or Protonmail.
A major problem with the Stoned Ape Hypothesis for me is that it lacks any physical mechanism. It's fair enough to argue that psychedelics might increase some cognitive or perceptual faculties, but McKenna never explains how this could lead to a selection pressure for intelligence, or any other mechanism for genetic alteration.
Amazing. And now one only needs a random article generator, which describes marriages, breakups, mishaps, accidents, and plain random appearances of these celebrities. Tada, random fake celebrity news, which is probably even better at wasting people's time than the real thing. This is going to happen really soon, because text generation is much easier than what the Nvidia guys did.
Random balancing only works with homogenous servers.
I’m not sure that really improves the situation much. It’d still have effective write permission to itself.

On shared hosting I’d have thought a user-account cronjob calling the app via cli (not via curl) could do the updates - but wordpress has always veered for “offer a shit solution to everyone” over “offer a secure solution to some subset of everyone”.
Coriolis effect demonstration at the equator in Uganda
How come recovering from hibernation is much faster then?

My (perhaps overly simple) conclusion is that the boot process is doing stuff it doesn't need to do.
The experience with a Chromecast is very different to Amazon Fire TV and it does not provide a native set-top experience. If that's what you're after, I'd recommend trying something like the Xiaomi Mi Box which runs stock Android TV and has a cleaner, more intuitive UI than the Amazon devices.
This is very old, for a more recent version
https://github.com/0xAX/linux-insides
Well, technically it would be pretty hot...
It also doesn’t help that on Windows, typically opening a file involves another process opening the files and scanning it first.
I left because it had developed into a bad habit of scrolling through a meaningless feed for me.

The data leak was just the trigger to take the jump.
> I really like the Purism design aesthetic

But Purism doesn't design these, Clevo does. Purism pretty much only chooses the anodization colors and stickers.
The S in CS is science. Load balancers have nothing to do with the science of computation. It’s just like no self-respecting university will teach PowerPoint or “fixing Windows” in their CS curriculum.
That model works if you have a large number of short lived requests.

On the other hand, if you have a small number of long running requests that you want to distribute over a number of servers, then your load balancer needs to track which servers are busy, or you'll spend a lot of time waiting for the randomly assigned server to finish, while others are idle.
Hi,

First of all I appreciate the work all of you put into VLC. This is my media player on desktop. I've tried lots of other players but always ended up going back.

In my respectful opinion as an outsider with no Amazon Fire device or association with Amazon, an update should not lose user bookmarks, playlists, documents, etc.

Users should feel confident clicking "update" on any software, ever.

I am sure you can empathize with your users if you consider what might happen if you updated Chrome or Firefox and lost all of your bookmarks. It is easy to see how users might feel the same way about playlists they put work into.

(Some users might even feel the same way about something much more trivial such as what page number they were on in each book in an ebook reader. If the ebook reader changes some internal structure it's easy to see how the new version might not migrate that stuff. I personally would find this okay, since I could find my old place within a few minutes.)

To try to empathize: how many hours might some of your users have spent making a custom playlist?

There is something big and important here: helping users feel confident always clicking "update" without a second thought.

Although the amount of work seems excessive in this case (and would be even more excessive in an ebook reader that has to export all of page numbers you're on, even if this is difficult technically) I think the secondary effect might be worth it.

I definitely see your point of view too, just thought I would offer this perspective.

Thanks again for all of your work, which I appreciate.
Another case of the old internet trope "I haven't owned a TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV?"

Its not that hard to look up the sales of consoles and imagine that not everyone has a console. Besides, most households have more than one TV. Would you suggest they buy a PS Pro for every tv in their house?
I've often wondered why I can't set my campaigns to, e.g. "Only show this ad to people who have bought something from some vaguely legit website in the last 2 years"
You can assume that any impressions you were going to get from the people this excluded are pretty low quality anyway.

Ad Tech folks: Why doesn't this already exist?
by no means is it a big improvement, but it's forced me, on more than one occasion, to end up needing to enable an FTP server just to accommodate this behaviour. Just... more work (and increased insecurity, even if only for a small window of time).

my default for wp installs is to just take write permission off everything all the time, then re-enable it when I know I will be doing something needing to write (updates, etc). There are likely some actual WP users who are not technical yet actually use the system to do their own content updates, but almost everyone I know who's using wordpress is managing it on behalf of their clients, doing all the content updates for them. These people could/should probably get familiar enough with ssh and stronger security practices, but the 'one click update' for themes/plugins/core seems to give a very strong (but ...problematic) sense of security.
No disrespect intended, but I’d just like to point out-

“I don’t like app stores because they don’t have quality” and yet here they are trying to ensure quality, and you’re upset about it because they’re trying to stop users from having a bad experience by losing content they cared enough to curate? I’m not entirely sure the problem is in the review process here...
My favorite use case for Flickr is the iPhone app Auto Upload feature to backup all my mobile photos. Just an FYI in case you (Smugmug) change or merge features.
Yes and people don't understand this.

If you try to bring it up there's always some inexperienced overseas contractor with 6 months of experience who will say "It' s a few clicks to install and a few plugins to protect the security 100% no problem, what's so difficult? why do you make a big deal out of it?".
Jaywalking in China Can Get You Hit with a Stream of Water
I wish he added Terminator (https://github.com/software-jessies-org/jessies/wiki/Termina...), different from Gnome Terminator, to the panel...
> it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools

It's an even worse craftsman who persists in using the wrong tool. If the tool does a poor job or requires more maintenance than the work it saves - as would be the case if your suggestions were followed - then it should be abandoned in favor of another. Which is what we did. Solutions found, nothing defeatist about it, and I notice you didn't answer the question about whether you've actually tried to do this.
> the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.

There are some other options:

- Phone makers create a "message center", a central place where emails and feeds are shown. Facebook must now adhere to these standards, and they lose their "gatekeeper" position.

- Someone develops an API to interact with facebook on behalf of a user. This API performs a live export of friends, feeds, etc, so that other applications can use them. After a while, people will use those applications instead of facebook itself, and are ready to leave facebook.
If you join a Facebook group about a particular thing, you'll find plenty of discussion about that thing.

And when something is big enough news, it makes it to the top-10 news thing on the right-hand side of Facebook.
I'm sort of on the other side of this problem, but I think an interesting counter-measure came up in a recent Show HN[0].

IP bans alone are probably not enough to stop a motivated scraper, or work longterm, so checking whether or not traffic is coming from a cloud provider and throwing up a captcha would be a significant hurdle, while allowing humans on cloud-hosted VPNs to pass through without much trouble.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16868012
When you remove barriers surprising things happen. Being able to stream practically any genre of music with no added cost (ala spotify), watch all kinds of television through the same immediate interface (ala netflix), get decent guides into all kinds of hobbies (ala reddit) - people suddenly start branching out, because why not.

The risks are removed and the options are clearly laid bare. I feel deeply that we should look to this for how to build societal infrastructure - tax, legal, health, finance - not just entertainment.
Bug appetite: German supermarket sells burgers made from worms
Thank god it renders emojis.
Oh, I completely agree, though I wouldn't call writing code carefully and methodically a "code review" if that makes sense.

I personally find that me a couple months down the track is pretty much another person anyway. In a sense you're not reviewing your own code, you're letting it be reviewed by future you. But if you're in a team with multiple developers, having someone else review your code would be more efficient.
It's too late for many animal species and people living in certain areas. We've already passed that marker. Not too late for humanity as a whole.
The one doing the estimate will do so based off the records generated by the doctor doing the surgery.
Alright, I'll concede that one.

I admit, things become a lot simpler once you limit your scope to issues immediately relevant to you as a patient.

However, I do still believe that when made aware of something new from a patient, a good physician should actively tackle the topic if only to be able to give a realistic assessment of where it falls on the risk/outcome spectrum.

NOTE: This may be assuming an above average level of patient investment. I in no way condone of wasting a physician's time having them wade through quackery. Nobody has time for that.
Because a hibernated machine is still powered on. So you're correct in a way, the "boot process" from hibernation does skip a lot of things.

Problem is, you can't utilize those shortcuts when doing a completely cold boot. Like another commenter said, in that case most of the boot time is preparing hardware.
What's your 1RM and body weight?
The future of crypto-mining is energy efficient and based on algorithms
Billion-Dollar Blessings
I can't see any purpose of a Chromecast over a Roku stick. You still get the ability to cast YouTube videos to it just like the Chromecast (from the iOS or Android app). I think you can mirror an Android phone to it. You can use it as a second monitor from Windows. It also has private listening where you can listen to the audio using your phone while watching on your TV.

It has native apps for almost everything.
You'd be arguing against research in that case. Software estimation is a widely studied subject and no estimation technique we've found has brought projects into the 'predictable' mode.

There are a few different estimation techniques that are better than others but scrum actively avoids those techniques (probably for the best as they are expensive and don't show huge gains over other forms of estimation).

Instead scrum attempts to track a made up velocity number by using any number of known to be inaccurate estimation techniques. It then gets hyper focused on breaking down tasks into small enough tasks that the velocity number stays constant, all while forgetting about the real desire, the quality software the business desires, delivered to paying customers. At that task, scrum has proven to be no more predictable than any other technique.

An enlightening exercise for any project manager is to go to a sales team and explain what you are delivering in a given sprint. Almost always, they won't care at all about that, and will instead ask for when some 'major epic' thing will be done, at which point you won't be able to tell them with any more certainty than if you'd just guessed.

Thats the best case. The worst case is that all that work you put into showing transparency around velocity ends up being used against the teams working on the hardest and most innovative projects in your organization. Their velocity will be all over the map while the maintenance teams will look good. You'll have convinced the leadership of the organization that velocity is a real number to track (cause you spend so much resources tracking it) and the incentive structures will reflect it. You just made it worse for good engineers to join the teams solving your hard problems.
Barclays Equity Gilt Study: How technology has changed the world
Why yes - democracy in the idealistic sense and anarchism in the free sense are not so dissimilar. Such a pity about the small reality of human behavior!
How about introducing VLC 3.0 under a slightly different name? or under a different publisher account?
I had never heard of that paste attack before.

I tried it out and it doesn't work in zsh, because pasted lines of code always get expanded for you to inspect before they're executed.
> This is what happened when one bad web server decided it was going to fail all of its requests, and would do so while incurring the absolute minimum amount of load on itself.

Good ELI5 explanation, but it doesn't really explain why the webserver failed the requests as it did. Or maybe I'm missing something?
What sorts of real-world and legitimate/ethical use cases are there for wholesale repeated scraping?
And Nvidia Shield is about the only device that has the horsepower to run a native Plex server that can transcode. None of the other standalone solutions handle transcoding well.
Find feature importance in Deep Learning
If I train a deep neural network on standard tabular data (csv file etc. with labeled features) is there a good way to gauge how important each feature is in a particular new instance's prediction post training?

What I would like is something similar to a linear regression where you have weights for each feature and a bias perhaps. This would of course have to be local weights etc. in the NN function.

The idea would be to explain the prediction of a specific instance by saying "The network predicted x mostly because of feature y".

Is it possible to do this by taking the partial derivative of the output with respect to each input? If so, then why did these researchers go to the trouble of generating an artificial dataset around a NN prediction to approximate the local NN function with a linear regression? https://github.com/marcotcr/lime

My instinct tells me it's not as simple as just taking the partial derivatives of a certain set of inputs with respect to the output.

What if you were to just nudge each input up and down a little to get its influence on the output and gauge each feature's significance that way?
We have many historical examples of government-based systems working. We have many historical examples of individual-based systems not working.

Everybody just submitting to the hope that billionaires will take pity on them might even work with a sufficiently benevolent overlord, but you get the same problem as so many alternatives to democracy have: If you concentrate all the power in one person, or a small set of people, it's a breeding ground for corruption. Even if your set of people is entirely benevolent, over time as that set of people change it becomes near certain eventually you'll get people who aren't benevolent, and then everyone is fucked.

Democracy, and taxation-based systems of governmental funding, are less efficient than the best possible case elsewhere, but are primarily valuable for massively reducing the risk and dangers of bad actors. Concentrating power among an elite class has historically always been a fantastic way of increasing the risk and dangers of bad actors instead.
Floating Utopias (2007)
Google allows Roku to receive Chromecast streams and they support AirPlay for iOS devices.
Russia began to block Google for serving Telegram App
Reading the source code of a 3D engine can be similar to having a magic trick explained to you. At least, the first time I did, I found it quite disappointing or anti-climatic: oh, so this actually only works if you see it from this specific angle and you cannot move that light in real time, there are just two of them, ...