skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always been intrigued by the way that certain Wikipedia pages can show up on the front page of HN. They always feel so...lacking in motivation. Maybe that's why they languish without discussion :). There's no straightforward explanation of why the random oracle model is a thing in this article, or why cryptographers don't always just use the standard model.

The standard model of cryptography is the basic, default model in which security is a function of the computational time and power required by an adversary to break the cryptosystem. This conception is purely complexity theoretic: we have e.g. a construction based on a hash function, and we want to make sure there is no polynomial time algorithm for breaking it so long as the hash function is preimage and collision resistant. The construction is "provably secure" if we can prove there exists no such algorithm when the hash function has the requisite properties. Then we say the cryptosystem is "secure in the standard model."

Provable security in the standard model is difficult to achieve - we can't always extrapolate the complexity theoretic security of a cryptosystem from the underlying security of its hash function. We could give it our best effort and still use it since it seems hard to break, but that's not a sound basis for cryptanalysis. Instead, the random oracle model is an "idealized model" that offers a compromise between the strict security of the standard model and shrugging our shoulders. This lets us determine that, as long as the model approximates an ideal version of the cryptosystem, we have some measure of assurance that there really is rigorous security involved - some proof is better than no proof.

To use the random oracle model, we replace the hash function in question (ostensibly, pseudorandom) with a truly random function - its "ideal" version. We do this by modeling a black box which every participant in the cryptosystem can query but which no participant can peer inside. A query is an input binary string, and the oracle returns an output binary string when queried. Although the output of each query is truly random, it's consistent: repeating a query results in the same output as the original. Then a proof of security in the random oracle model indicates that any weakness present in the standard model is a weakness lying between the pseudorandomness of the hash function and the ideal randomness of the oracle function.

Much as we don't need the true randomness of a one-time pad for practically secure encryption, and can opt instead for the computational assurances of the standard model, the random oracle model posits that a sufficiently secure hash function is "secure enough" even if it isn't truly random.
The discussion was about "blockchains", not Bitcoin.

I expect that many financial institutions will be using private blockchain in the future.

Although this is much more boring than it sounds. A blockchain is just a kind of database, where entities sign their transactions with their private keys and then share the results.

You don't even need to do any "mining" for private blockchains.
Zerocode for TDD/BDD
Ask HN: Good materials for teaching undergrad Software Engineering?
I'll be teaching an undergraduate software engineering course this Fall and am looking for public/free teaching resources.

It would be great for me to learn from other instructors to know how to organize my course, see how they present info in slides, etc.
I know this is subjective but I just don’t see “disdain and contempt” (which assumes the model is trying to communicate something about the viewer) in the sample you provided. I see possibly “secretiveness” and “a challenging disposition” (I assume the model is trying to convey something about herself).
A 5x to 10x reduction in training time versus other approaches is impressive, regardless of how it's achieved. Hours of waiting become minutes; days become hours; weeks become days.

Among the examples mentioned:

* They fine-tuned a Resnet50 to 90% accuracy on the Cars Stanford Dataset in 60 epochs vs 600 in previous reports.

* They trained an AWD LSTM RNN from scratch to state-of-the-art perplexity on Wikitext-2 in 90 epochs vs 750 epochs in previous reports.

* The trained a QRNN from scratch to state-of-the-art perplexity on Wikitext-2 in 90 epochs vs 500 epochs in previous reports.

There are more examples of improvements in training speed (and accuracy) in the blog post, which provides persuasive evidence that a training regime combining (a) "AdamW" (which fixes a well-known issue with weight-decay in Adam) and (b) "superconvergence" (i.e., raising then decreasing LR, and doing the inverse with momentum) now appears to be the best/fastest way to train deep neural nets.

Interestingly, no one yet really knows why or how AdamW and SuperC together can achieve a 10x improvement in training efficiency.
Remember government is really just a collection of individuals. You can't discount the basic human motivations in things like this. Competing is fun, competing and winning is much more fun. Getting a big company/sport/etc to sign on to your city means you beat everybody else they were negotiating with, and those were all big players. That's a big win.

It also helps build your legacy. The guy who brings "The SportsTeamers" to a city is going to be remembered for exactly that, not the net economic effect. And yeah that does no doubt open the door to 'consulting positions' after leaving office though I do not think that's a primary driver in the deals, just icing.
Those web browsers would probably also not support your new standard, and continue to call themselves web browsers.
They both look neutral to me?
I don’t like the notion that it is morally just to always act in your own self interest and that it is the job of regulations to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do. That framework doesn’t extend to the nuance of life.

I can choose to find fault with tech companies and sports owners while still holding politicians accountable as well.
You can remove the green background with the Basic Formatting chrome extension and make this (and other unstyled sites) easier to read.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/basic-formatting/a...

Shameless self plug here :)
Doing anything of value requires expending of energy, but the way cryptocurrency is right now seems to encourage... inefficiencies.

That farmer driving the tractor down the field using energy in the form of oil is typically massively more productive than the manual pea patch laborer or even the era where "working animals" were helping with a lot of the farm work. Sure, the tractor using energy, but the tractor farmer is overall way more efficient.

It would be interesting to see how crypto's cost per unit compares with a relatively energy inefficient way of monetizing, paper currency and coins. Due to the various costs involved in manufacturing and distributing a coin or bill, I really can't say whether it's more efficient or less (and Google's not helping me here). What I think is fairly obvious is that most electronic cash systems do not have this initial upfront massive energy requirement crypto has, so best guess is from a resource perspective crypto is quite a bit less efficient than most electronic cash systems.
Nasa to test ‘quiet’ supersonic flights over Texas
I think OP is just commenting on how union workers would be a biased source on just how common unsafe designs are.
> Office rents are based on floor space. Open offices require less floor space than closed offices, which means they’re cheaper.

Just note that the kind of "open space" that's designed to both maintain/boost individual "deep concentration"/research work and boost collaboration requires more space pr worker than individual offices.

In the typical "cramped open" setup; either any one on one conversation will disturb everyone, so people are polite and don't collaborate that way as easily as dropping by an office with an open door; Or people gets lots of collaboration done, but no "deep work" done.
What's a Jackson? A twenty dollar bill?
In a world with no tax incentives, the determining factor for a large company is access to potential workforce. Therefore companies will move to places where other large successful companies are already, because ultimately you want to recruit from them. This creates a few really big winners, and a lot of losers. In practice, even metro areas with a couple million people are not desirable enough, and lose population. There are many cities that will be willing to offer more just to avoid depopulation.

Midwestern metro areas are not going to be happy if there was a federal law that, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed that they were going to shrink, shrivel and eventually die. They have the right to fight for their community's existence with economic means: The "best" you could get is, instead of the government doing it, a private consortium of businesspeople doing the same thing with their own pockets, producing the same effect. The one difference only comes when you start from the dubious position that all government actions distort, while a trade association's never do.

Would the economy overall be better if San Francisco had 10 times its current population and we all moved there? In the short term, probably yes, but imagine what even larger differences in state population would do to politics.
You're being no less misleading than he is.

> 258 profitable Fortune 500 companies paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 21.2%

So of the Fortune 500, 242 companies are unprofitable. Seriously? That ignores all the companies using legislation they helped craft to give themselves tax credits and the accounting tricks they use to bring their profits to "zero." Hell, the list itself is pathologically biased towards those businesses.

Seems the rest of the country has figured out Hollywood accounting.
Hey, if you are not using your Librem 13v2 then I'll happily take it off your hands.

Help my third-world a$s that can't afford anything more than my current 2009 Dell with broken hinges.

Thank you!
A democracy is rule by some* people
San Francisco convention canceled over dirty streets, homeless
8 Node.js Web Socket Libraries for 2018
Merkel backs down, agreeing to stem flow of refugees
I wouldn't underestimate the uninterestingness of space either. People could probably place a datacenter at Titan today. But nobody will, and for good reasons.

I don't have any narrative for why people will colonize space, but it will probably be done for sending people there, because exporting stuff for Earth isn't really reasonable.
It depends on how many billions, how many jobs, how much tax revenue, how much projected population growth and average wage growth and how the local economy will respond to that growth, etc.
On nightly, never had ublock or umatrix uninstalled.
Residential real estate has had an almost unbroken streak as a winning asset...not bad considering it also provides you with a necessary utility (a roof over your head), unlike a stock or a bond.

And yes, the tax system will always reward home ownership.
Probably, but they'd need a lot of heating. You lose a lot of insulation with exposed fingertips. Raynaud's starts from my fingertips, so they'd basically need enough heating to keep the fingertips warm via convection. (Plus I'm not sure how you'd do exposed fingertips on a mitt rather than a glove. If you just cut off the end of the mitt you've effectively just got a long sleeve with a thumb pocket.) I do have some wool gloves with exposed fingertips, but if I'm sedentary, they're only good for me down to a minimum of +5C or so.
What is "node => ", is that valid Python? I'm new to the language and have never seen the => syntax before. The docs for 'map' don't show it either.
And St Louis was about to pony up for a second one to keep the team. Fortunately Kronke did the city a favor and left anyway.

The city has rejected another request for a MLS stadium. I guess they are wising up.
I wonder if this isn't a side effect of our moving to be a "less violent" society. Back in the day, that person would at least get punched for doing such a thing, and would not do it again. As it is, there's really no negative reinforcement to such actions, and so they don't see the point of not doing them.
Obviously "Unk" is code for "skyjacking a jet plane", and "please tell the lackey cops" is code for "I am 1st Lt. Robert Rackstraw". What's so hard about that? The guy just has a very idiosyncratic set of code phrases that he was clearly using in Vietnam.

I have to agree that the evidence in the article seems flimsy at best. Maybe the book makes a better case for it, but I'd be concerned that it isn't one of those things where someone who is 100% convinced about something doesn't attribute every tiny little coincidence as concrete proof of their theory.
The title (Dangers of Train Yards) reminds me of a story told by an acquaintance who worked in a yard many years ago. He said they would fuel the engines by inserting a hose and letting it run. It would take a long time to fill the tanks and so they would walk off to complete other tasks. They would return and more often than not, the tank would just be overflowing diesel into the ground. He didn't think they would ever be able to remediate rail yards because of the contamination.
Have you also given yourself a mobile equivalent for those times when you are traveling, or when your primary environment is unsuitable and you must work at a place with public WiFi?
> but the ideology and technology of the Culture -- there's the entire value of the series.

> fascinatingly, banks captures the essence of the Culture in a way that few other writers can do with any concept of such complexity.

Yes, I couldn't have put it better myself :)

The Culture is the main character; the unifying theme. And it is fascinating. More-so than any one person or plot or event. And this surprises me: I generally don't enjoy world-building for the sake of world-building, which many authors have done or attempt to do. But this is something else. It's very special.
That's my point about a static type system. You don't have that problem if types are known at compile time.

I agree that it's a nuisance in Python as-is (but I still like it overall).
Really dumb malware targets cryptocurrency fans using Macs
Very well said.

Edit: feel like I should clarify a bit to avoid the "me too +1" style comment. I've been torn in recent months between fast.ai's great hands on and to the point style of teaching (which I think is great and have strived to use as an example in my own courses) and their somewhat overhyped presentation of the fast.ai library. It's not bad, but ultimately a collection of rather hacky function calls that are build on top of other frameworks.

This being said, from an academicians point of view (to which I so far can still consider myself to belong to, albeit perhaps not for much longer), I do appreciate most things Jeremy and his team has brought into the spotlight, e.g. insights around learning rate and embeddings for sparse categoricals. What amuses me most is that these things are by no means very new, but I enjoy the spirit of fast.ai pointing out that these things are not new and should be considered (again) today in the midst of a research community that is going way too fast.

Then again, I also think this post is a bit too much hype centric and hence falling into the same traps. I am also somewhat disappointed with fast.ai's claims to state of art lying mainly in "known" image detection and text regions, whilst not talking much or at all about e.g. RL, in courses or papers. I think the work being done here by OpenAI for instance during the past few months is far more exciting.
The reclamation water contracts are not an example of a mayor circumventing existing federal or state environmental regulations - they are a completely different thing. I'm not even sure where you'd draw the parallel other than it contains the words 'environment' and 'contract'.
I have an orthogonal perspective - I really think that current Deep Learning works only because somehow those non-linear optimization tricks like Adam fit the model structure - you as a model-preparer restrict the search space with some structural rules (CNN, LSTM, 1x1 conv etc.) and unleashing fairly simple non-linear optimization procedures suddenly works as they don't have to wander unguided around much more complex space (like why these simple optimizers don't work well with large fully-connected networks, which in theory should be better than any specializations).

By combining both structural rules (reducing dimensionality, providing some guidance in form of restricted connectivity) and making optimization procedures that can take advantage of it IMO gives us current great DL performance; if we can squeeze even more from optimizers that could help, and I am glad fast.ai people are doing it. I simply view it in a dual(-metaoptimization) way and both structural and optimization "match" should be researched.
I think they recorded most of the serial numbers of the bills? And it was never spent? If someone was to spend that today, are those still in some tracking system now so they'd be found? How long are things like that followed?
If you're tuned into the right numbers station and know the Illuminati secret handshake it all makes sense.
Warid 3G Internet Packages
Comment Of The Year HN2018
Our company had open space. Manager openly said that it was cheapest and simplest to manage as team sizes changed frequently during that period.

When the company was better off financially and more stable, we moved elsewhere to have office per team. The consensus seems to be that it is more effective this way. Management said it is more expensive (we asked).
So only "shitty business people" fully back up their promises? Then maybe the cities should reneg on their tax deals too?
Is this an overkill setup for Twitch/Youtube streamers?
I wasn't asking about Linux. I was asking for a source that they use SLES / SUSE Linux. Any company not using Linux for their business at this point at the size of Kroger is likely doing something wrong IMO.
Low labor participation in women. The part timers are overwhelmingly women, in a 'typical' household, the man works full time and the woman 2 or 3 days (especially once there are children, but even before that). This effect is even more pronounced in higher educated women, who can afford this arrangement. There are many research papers about this topic but there is no clear reason. The most common conclusion is that it's cultural; Dutch women strongly feel that mothers are best suited to raise children.
Do I know you from my pyspades days? I worked on that(Triplefox) and play Fortnite on the daily now. We did experiment with aimbot detection with pyspades but had false positives. Most of the featureset focused instead on assisting with manual server moderation, which empowered the operators to make "the game they want to play". That ultimately developed into a federated banlist and a coalition government of operators and developers, sufficient to deal with the population at that time. Reports of euphemistic "misbehaving little brothers" were rife. Then the game went commercial, motivations shifted and it all blew up.

The cheating issue in any successful game really is a case of only being able to tame the blatant cheats down to the point of every player you encounter being "plausibly just that good" while monitoring for the cheating software so that a ban sweep can be done later. Pretty much every time Fortnite does a major patch now, a wave of bans goes through and the player population suddenly becomes much weaker.

Likewise I've gone through periods where I'll play Counter-Strike casuals and it's even more dramatic in some respects. Players will show up in the server and the atmosphere changes suddenly - I'll make the same kinds of plays as before, performing apparently similarly, and yet my K/D will bottom out, without even directly interacting with that player at all. It's like they sucked the air out of the room, and they'll get on the voice chat and spew garbage about how high or drunk they are right now. Then they leave and my K/D pops right back up again.

So I've concluded that online gaming always tends towards being an illusion world - a rough approximation of ability at best, but mostly a venue for untrammeled predatory behavior.

I still put up with it because it really engages my masochistic tendencies to try to "beat the cheater", and most games have techniques that let you do this to some degree.
The hardest questions in pop music: Cultural appropriation, lyrics and more
Yes, I was responding specifically to that and specifically about management. Managers do a hell of a lot more than most coders give credit for.
A scripting language isn't necessary if you just want to throw a page together. It's only really necessary for today's web-as-an-application-platform model. If the front-end language were Scheme we would simply see fewer (but in all likelihood, better) web apps.
Lab Notes: How We Made Joins 23 Thousand Times Faster, Part Two
Chinese AI beats 15 doctors in tumor diagnosis competition
Currently, demand for cryptocurrencies seems indistinguishable from zero. At the same time, demand for government issued centralized money is quite large.
Modern servers can be decently quiet as well, assuming you don't run them at 100% load all the time. I've currently got 2xR210 II's, 1xR520, 1xR320, and a Juniper EX2200-48T running in a rack right behind me. It's audible while I'm in my office under normal load, but as soon as I leave the room and close the door you can't hear a thing.

It's not whisper silent, especially during the summer when the fans on the R320 speed up to around 6000RPM (and this is with a E5-2430L) - but that's mostly due to my office remaining closed from the rest of the house leaving the ambient intake temperature around 75-80F (rest of the house stays at 72F). I'm probably going to stick with 2U's (probably R520's) when I start expanding again to lower the noise at higher temps, since the more equipment I add the more heat gets trapped in the room.
Continuously pumping sea water is expensive to maintain, the primary reason being marine biology. I once saw mussels grew inside a boat engine.

Second reason, land on shorelines is expensive. Many people dream about living on a seaside (except for people who did, practically speaking the idea is not that great, humidity, noise). Also many other businesses require shorelines, beaches, marinas, ports.
It's not a problem in C anymore as modern compilers warn about that so you had to put additional parenthesis to make it clearer.

I like C way of assignment being an expression. I think having separate statement and then assignment expresdion is a mess. It's still useful though as Python was missing where keyword like feature from Haskell which is necessary to avoid duplicating computation in list comprehension.
What’s the monthly cost?
reminds me of the book scanner darkly by Philip K. Dick.

The people had these suits to mask their face
sure but if he's going to rehash an old idea, it's reasonable to ask why he expects it to work this time, when it failed last time. If done the research, providing it isn't a large ask; and if he hasn't, then...