skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gruber didn't call it a fraud. He said the demo was not "distinguishable from a fraud," which is true. His actual recommendation is the title of the post, which is that we should have "a little Duplex skepticism."

And yes, Google certainly wouldn't demo a completely non-existent technology, and I'm sure Gruber knows that. But they might very well demo a technology that only works 60% of the time at present. Let's be honest, this wouldn't be the first time we've seen a large tech company demo incredible-seeming too-good-to-be-true tech that turned out to actually be too good to be true and never made it into real world use for one reason or another.

It is kind of weird that the broad tech punditry has just accepted Google's demo at face value with respect to what the tech is actually capable of at present.

For example, Google demoed object removal in Google Photos (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-ob...) last year at IO, and as far as I can tell it never shipped.

If a company in any other industry announced an insane-seeming new technology with a completely non-verifiable demo like this, no credible journalist who covers that beat would report it as credulously as tech journalists have covered the Duplex demo. Gruber is absolutely right that the lack of skepticism around Duplex is baffling and journalistically suspect.
Totally agree on it. Autocrypt (https://autocrypt.org/index.html) is looking good as an incremental approach towards an automatic, widespread use of encryption in emails
There are some wrapper "sanitizers" around to make it work despite of bugs, like https://pastebin.com/hLcMBVDQ :D
How the Wait Time for Unlimited NYC MetroCards Became 18 Minutes
Fair enough, I can't argue with that.

But outside of something like serializing events in an application, I don't think I can reify time. If you've got an idea for it, please clue me in because the possibilities are endless.
My personal conspiracy theory is this is Google’s way to get its notorious horde of SJWs to resign en masse. I left years ago, and even back then the internal Google+ was a festering, aggressively intolerant SJW cesspool. There are dozens of people who seem to spend all day there posting the most ludicrous SJW bullshit and virtue signaling, and seemingly do nothing else (according to eg Critique, the internal code review tool). The management is unwilling/unable to do anything about the problem. From what I heard things have gotten much worse since I left.
Paul Erdös – one of the most passionate mathematicians of all time
Thank you for the tip! I am going to do research into my Taurus to see if it is affected.
Why would you not want to take about that? Did the insurance company have a very bad reputation? Because I certainly would not be embarrassed to work for some insurance companies because they can be fair and quite reasonable (while others are not).
I think the parts are probably at least 20K, and the software is the proprietary effort of many, over a decade or more, so the homebrew version will be incomparably inferior, to the point where it's not really "the same thing", like how a Power Wheels car isn't a Tesla.
"decreased the execution time by a factor of 3"

So article is about a flew in previous versions of Rust not supporting 128-bit numbers on x86_64. But title makes it sound like "switching to Rust was the breakthrough". Or am i paranoid about it..
I'd guess in the vast majority of cases, that kind of person wouldn't even start working for Palantir.
This feels like a plea for Fortran that has hindered some of the other communities of scientific software like High Energy Physics where they are struggling to get key software ported to C++. If the SciPy community glues itself to Python 2 it's just going to be that much worse when Python 4 exists years from now. I agree with a lot of the other people commenting here that you should be able to reproduce the results with the code at the time it was written, if that is not being preserved as either an artifact or a versioning piece that is a process problem when releasing work.

Losing the work generated before or making it not clearly reproducible is bad, but trying to be a stick in the mud will prevent advancement for the generations hereafter as well as for the High Energy Physics example: when was the last time you see undergraduates taking fortran en masse? Keeping an esoteric version of software only helps you unless you make sure it helps those who come after.
Why is it embarrassing to work for an insurance? Most insurances exist for a reason and are vital for most people/businesses. It's often said that insurances can be boring to work for but never heard that the sector has a terrible reputation.
> To what end? Should we waterboard them every day? Should we implant them with pain devices that make their life hell?

Nothing like the good, old reductio ad absurdum. Two can play that game, but it prevents any meaningful discussion.
I felt like Batman vs Superman had at least a little bit of that.
Ask HN: How do you communicate important changes across your dev/ops teams?
I work in a larger development team with developers, sys admins, database admins, other ops. We have trouble communicating important production changes (code base changes, config file changes, active server changes, etc) between all of us. In other words, when things break, we have to ask around if changes were made, rather than just knowing. Are there any tools that you use to help you notify others of important production changes across all types of changes?
I forgot about LIDAR, in that case, my estimate was too low. LIDAR stuff is expensive, even the lowest end stuff is thousands.
Did anyone think they would not hate it?
If someone wanders into a group of nerds to take an "I'm right" stance on a nerdy topic, what do you expect? No matter how delicately the responses are phrased, the underlying "well akshully" is going to show through.
I built a quick project to address this from the other direction: https://github.com/aderusha/MQTTCarPresence

If the car is turned on and in range of your home WiFi, it makes sure the door is open. This is mostly a convenience thing (when I leave home in the morning, it opens the door when I start the car and closes it after I leave, same process returning home) but it also address the concerns floated in the article.
> _the fact that I perceive the world from "my" perspective remains constant_

That's only your perception because you have memory. If we copied your memories right now and put them in a robot body 3000 years from now, it would also have the illusion of a single continuous perspective.
At least in the United States, it's a trope that insurance salespeople and civil litigation lawyers are scumbags.

I think it's completely bullshit, we need these industries.
Microsoft starts vesting immediately at 20% every 6 months. Amazon, take note.
Google is a US company thus eligible to bid on US government contracts, if other countries were to open their defence logistics to outside bidders they should consider bidding for those.
Without insurance, much of all business and life cannot be risk managed and is not viable in any way. Pretty silly POV
You should watch The Wire, which is exactly what you describe. In fact, everyone should watch it, as it is one of the best shows ever made (despite the wonky final season).
Isn't one of the major benefits of computer automation that such adjustments (e.g. adding a safety feature that uses existing hardware) can be made with little cost/effort? If a few lines of code will save 2 lives a year, is it worth it?

I get where you're coming from and you ask a very interesting question: where do we draw the line? I think a good place to draw it is after we've eliminated accidental fatalities.
I'll start by saying that I don't have a good answer to this problem. But, I do have some thoughts. I recently reviewed a paper and was extremely happy to see that they included a Jupyter notebook and their Keras model along with some testing data. For those of you not in science, this was rather amazing And when the paper is published, it will be part of the supplemental materials, so at least for awhile, readers will be able to play with it (and the authors plan to release their training data once they find a good way to share such a large set of data--again, a limit for academic researchers). So, this is going above and beyond what I've seen in normal practice (I'm in condensed matter physics).

But...there is the problem of context. In their case, they had relatively few dependencies and I was able to get everything to run, but there are more complex environments and ecosystems. Even if I create a docker container, at some point it will no longer run. I think what we can do is try to make it possible for referees and early authors to run our code for a time. We can't hope that 5 or 10 years from now that this will be possible--but hopefully if we document our reduction steps, then if someone really wants to reproduce the work, they can see the flow.

Now, why might this become important? One example is a case of outright fraud. I went to a talk by someone from MD Anderson who gave a talk about a case of fraud at Duke in an oncology study. They saw an amazing result and their colleagues wanted to be able to use the same statistical methodology. They initially tried to work with the original authors, but once they discovered problems with the work, the original author stopped being responsive. They spend an amazing number of man-years trying to reproduce the result and figuring out what went wrong (intentionally and not). This was important because human trials were beginning. If the original source code (and infrastructure) was publicly available, this could have been avoided.

For those that say a mathematical description should be sufficient--I would say, not always. In some cases, the math could be fine, but the implementation could be flawed. Often if you find an error in a previous result, you need to at least make a guess as to what could have gone wrong before. The early days of Monte Carlo simulations sometimes suffered from flaws in the implementations of random number generators even if the over algorithm was fine...

Containerization might solve the problem over the short term (which I would argue is the most relevant time period). But, it won't solve the author's second problem which is maintaining software. Here, I think the problem is a lack of resources--there's not much credit or funding for maintaining scientific software...
How this isn't exclusively military tech is beyond me. If this sort of thing is available to anyone with a chequebook then what does the military have?

It is begging for a weapon to be mounted to it and sent to patrol the streets of dystopia.

The Police will for sure be buying stuff like this with the argument that it will save cop's lives in hostile situations. From there we'll have to get used to seeing automated enforcement. Oh poop, I am getting into the obvious slippery slope arguments, it's just so hard to not be cynical about tech like this. The world is rapidly changing again </luddite>.
What would really help with XMPP is some idea of profiles - like a Jabber2018 profile that requires all of the XEPs used by Conversations[0]. That way, client and server implementers would know exactly what they need to be compliant with other implementations using the same profile.

[0]: https://conversations.im/
Lol no idea - it was just a reaction to the title. When I clicked on the link, I lost hope. If they're selling what's in the image, the parts alone cost more than I want to pay :P
Welcome to the internet, where opinions and guess-timates are spewed as fact behind a veil of anonymity.
On IBM and Unisys mainframes the common denominator is the "language environment", the intermediate format that has allowed them to evolve all these years since the 60's.

On Windows the common denominator are COM and .NET, with COM upgraded to UWP on recent versions.

On Android the common denominator is Dalvik bytecode.

On macOS/iOS the common denominator could be indeed LLVM bitcode, depending on how much Apple would like to deviate from upstream to make their own toolchain actually hardware independent.

Natural Linux's popularity has sky rocketed, UNIX's path to success and its clones, has always been free beer, which tastes even better when it comes with source code.

I am optimistic, but I am also aware it won't happen on my lifetime, changing mentalities requires changing generations, one person at a time.
Comparing observational vs. rct designs in large experiments at Facebook [pdf]
Yeah you can, but while the door is open, the car will (in my experience with 4 different brands of keyless cars in Europe) sound an alarm to remind you it is still running.

I think this is a good thing.
How do you know it was the same consciousness doing the perceiving, though? You think because you can remember things that you were also the one that perceived them, but you can take a hard drive and move it from one computer to another and the data is still accessible. It is likely there is no part of you that is fixed, even your consciousness.

On the plus side, much like matter and energy, it is unlikely that consciousness is created or destroyed in the operations of the universe. Instead, it just gets reconfigured.
Espressif Gets Investment from Intel and Beijing Singularity Power Investment
"Star Butterfly vs. The Forces of Evil" has several episodes like this: the first half will be from one character's point of view and the second half from the opposing side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_vs._the_Forces_of_Evil
Well the insurance industry doesn't have the best record in some areas. eg screwing over long term customers relaying on inertia to massively hijack up cover costs.

Let alone the whole with profits funds sector of the industry.
Show HN: A raytracer to shade topographic maps in R
Who's Saruman's equivalent in the Bible?

Yes, there are some similarities but the entire story is markedly different. Jesus didn't die to come back as a more powerful Jesus 2.0 in order to defeat his former boss.

Gandalf's death had nothing to do with absolving the sins or saving the souls of humans. That's a fundamental aspect of Jesus' death and ressurection.

There are many more fundamental differences than there are similarities.
They're quite a nice feature for areas which contain "seasons".
Yeah, it was a nice break from the really terrifying episodes. Just a bit of casual murder.
The original title is the more precise "How a Rust upgrade more than tripled the speed of my code". Also I think mentioning the version made it clear that it's about a specific version, not about rust in general.
If the Middle East is a threat the easiest solution is switching to renewable energies. Many of the wars in the Middle East can only be fought because of money coming from oil. Any increase in renewable energy lessens that.

That is, to a certain degree, also true for Russia. Revenues for NAtural Gas and Oil are crucial for the state, they'd have to cut expenses significantly if oil prices were back at $30/bbl for more than just a few years.
And then one day SpotMini gets a firmware update to attack me in my sleep..
Virtual reality just got upgraded to 1,001 ppi
If they really had ethical concerns they’d have quit long ago given all the data collected from their users

Because everyone who doesn't share your ethics must have none?

I like and support the GDPR, but that's the most intolerant statement I've read in a while on HN.
> They are, in the end, selling the labor of clever and well-credentialed but woefully inexperienced people at really eye-popping rates. You'd think any well-run company could get the same sort of insight from its own people.

You'd be thinking wrong. Companies hire consulting firms _because_ they can't get the same types of insights from their own people... mainly due to the fact that their people have jobs doing other things and can't stop to spend a few months doing nothing but research.

Also sensing some bias here: consulting firms work in teams with a mixture of new graduates and people with "deep industry experience and consequent insight" in order to provide a mix of expertise and exposure to new technologies/techniques coming from academia. If your experience with consultants was as a line employee or middle manager, you likely interacted only with the new grads from the team because they do most basic research and interviewing, so be aware that there may have been more experienced people on the engagement.
Making a Datomic system GDPR-compliant
By selling them to institutions, with support, rather than people, but also because it's decent. Cheaper robots are all jerky and jittery and slow and have no other sensors/cameras and no decent software interface (that I have seen, but I'm not even an amateur roboticist, I just read about it sometimes).
>"One huge secret about Juniper devices is that the hardware is remarkably unreliable."

This is patently untrue. The MTTF is the same as Cisco gear. The only reason this would be a "huge secret" is because it is not widely held opinion.

There are bad revision of chipsets on certain boards from time to time yes. And if you place a large order you will likely feel that pain if you're shipped boards with those revs. I know this first hand and with SRXs. Firewalls are but one segment of their product line and the one that was never their core strength(in fact this was the Netscreen acquisition.)

The T4000 and MX 960s are both "big iron" and in both the core and edge of Tier 1 ISPs. The reputation of these are exceptional and for good reason. Their EX/QFX ToR switches also have a well-deserved reputation.

To use your anecdotal experience with on particular segment of their product line and make a sweeping generalization of the quality of their entire offering is absurd.

I say this as someone who doesn't have a horse in the race and has very little love for network hardware vendors in general.
I think he's referring to the resource problem. Let's suppose that you write a library in your copious free time (like he apparently did). Once you reach around 100,000 lines of code, it may be nontrivial to update it (for example, if it has say bindings to C)--given that he probably doesn't have a team, but maybe just himself and a graduate student.
>They could use the old skye just fine

The old Skype was great. But it's gone now; that's how the world works: things change, and not always for the better. You have to adapt.

>Completely impplaussible that maybe those stupid people do not use the alternatives, because they suck even more?

Given all the complaints I've seen about new-Skype? No. It's because people are just too stupid to look for alternatives when the thing they've been using turns to crap.

>As in, they are non standardized, not easy to setup et etc.

The newer alternatives are web-based and easy (or, at least, no more difficult than new-Skype). And WTF does "standardized" mean? There's no standardization for video chat programs; that makes as much sense as asking about standardization for social media websites like Facebook.
Why do people not always begin by telling the visitor what the site is about?
How is it the opposite of npm?
They probably wouldn't have mentioned the specific version if they were talking about switching languages instead of switching compiler versions.
And? I'm responding to:

> Looks like an complete failure of imagination

Your response doesn't demonstrate a use for the technology, only that people are throwing money at it hoping to get rich. Communities built around useful technology don't spend so much time trying to convince everyone that the technology is useful.
I agree that they look terrifying. I still would buy one. Maybe that is their angle to look terrifying?

Or do you mean the uncanny valley?
You are basing your analysis purely on your own personal experience and attitude towards the world which is definitionally anecdotal and extremely anti scientific.

If people are not influenced by advertising and marketing why then do governments put fourth propaganda, why is advertising a multi billion dollar industry, why is it an extremely sought after undergraduate degree, why are there advertisements literally everywhere you look? The answer is because it works, and it makes people a lot of money and gives them a lot of power.

We are highly influenced by the mainstream and by culture, I mean culture is what is allowing us to communicate with each other by providing us with a set of symbols (alphabet and English language). In fact we don’t know what we don’t know and therefore can never truly be objective in our view of the world, it’s always built and based off of cultural artifacts and norms.

So it’s not a problem per say that people do the wrong thing at large, it’s simply a fact of life, people tend go with the flow. That means people who don’t go with the flow need to make the flow flow better. Or else you are suggesting we leave normal people behind because they suck. Where I personally think we are as individuals defined by how we help people that are weaker than ourselves.
I don't think I have much to agree with here. I do agree that one should be aware of the trade-offs of any given solution. And I agree that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I do disagree that "devops" is a job role and the sole responsibility of particular engineers on your team.

So what does Docker bring to my team? Well it means repository maintainers have control over how their software is packaged and our deployment systems don't have to worry about configuration management on the host systems we deploy too. That saves our business time and money. It has instead allowed us to focus on high-level A/B canary deployments.

Though Docker today is much better than Docker just a few years ago.

I've used those third-generation configuration management systems to deploy services across hundreds of machines across two data centers. Usually without a hitch. It works great. But we were deploying a homogeneous suite of services that were all written in the same language ecosystem. Never had a problem.

This is why I think it's important to think of devops as an approach to structuring teams. When the people who run and operate the software are on the same team as the people who write it then the trade offs that make sense become much clearer.
It sure beats losing your home, your job, and your relationship.
I still hang around one channel for an Unreal Tournament (then Half-Life 2) mod. 15 years at this point and some great people are still in there (and been interesting to see how everyones lives have changed after meeting )
We can value whatever, but eventually there won't be anyone left to do the valuing. Impermanence doesn't stop us from valuing, but impermanence does guarantee that value won't last. Which may or may not bother us now, depending on how existentially grumpy we feel in the moment. But luckily, those feelings are impermanent as well.
You could have a global cache folder instead of a global vendor folder.
Honestly, I can see AnkleHub being popular.
Those things remind me of the Rat Things from Snow Crash.
Angular Viking Soccer Game Developed in 48 Hours
I'm still confused.

Isn't it simply a matter of asking, "Is there a generic for this, doc?"

Both $10 and $100 are greater than $0, the patient almost certainly always wants $0, and a doctor can do that math without referring to your plan.

Or is this a case of this particular method being combined with N other methods such that the doctor has trouble getting the correct information to the patient?

Edit: By $0 I mean "$0 more than the cheapest generic." :)
Great introduction! It should probably also include integration with Route53 and Amazon's SSL cert manager.
Do insurance companies have a bad reputation in other regions? I personally love my insurance company and wouldn't be embarrassed to work there at all
yet another coin tracker...