skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the similar reasons I don't really use markdown notes apps. Instead I write all important notes to Evernote despite it being rather heavy weight.

When I do use markdown note apps is if I want to quickly jot down an idea or what I just learned. Four months ago I shared this technique with HN [0].

If I were to adopt a markdown app to use regularly, an important factor would be that it is open source. The reason is that, like you, I'd be worried about losing data due to a developer be mistake. Granted, something like Evernote is not open source, but I'm less worried about losing data.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16357917
Amusingly, it mostly died off because of a film called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. In that film, a man called Alan Smithee couldn't get his named removed from the film because the only available pseudonym matched his own name, with said film being so terrible that it's own director wanted his named removed from it.

So a film about the use of Alan Smithee as a pseudonym was credited to Alan Smithee, which in turn made it incredibly hard to take the name seriously any more.
FreeBSD Desktop – Part 14 – Configuration – Tint2
This gives me hope. We really do have both the technology, and the money, to cut our fossil fuel usage to almost zero, right now- and morally, there is no other choice.
I'm curious how many "suspicious" accounts will be real people simply expressing their views. Twitter does openly admit to censorship [0], so it's not exactly a wild thought.

[0] https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...
Athens, Rising
The frighteningly popular extremely careless trend
Partial functions are undefined outside of the part that is given, therefore the result of an input that falls in that zone is undefined. This is not good, how do you deal with it, exceptions? Termination? You must make the function total by extending it to a version that gives some result to manipulate whatever the input (or restrict the domain to make it again total.)
Nvidia Jetson Xavier Dev Kit: Under 30 Watts, 8-Core ARMv8.2, 512 Core Volta
The criticisms I found strongest from the talk:

- Tooling needs improvements. He mentioned how the Scala plugin for IntelliJ IDEA will flag working code as incorrect. It will also fail to flag code that won't compile as written. He didn't mention sbt as a pain point, perhaps because it goes without saying.

- Scala 3 (Dotty) has the potential to split the community and libraries for years, much like the Python 2/3 transition. That said, I'm still kind of excited about Dotty because I only have 10s of thousands of lines of code that potentially need porting work, not 10s of millions, and that seems worth it in exchange for stable macros, faster compilation, etc.

- The Scala community is losing people who just want "better Java" to Kotlin, and losing people who want pure FP to Haskell. I came to Scala because of Spark and I keep using it because I have grown to really like it, despite the pain points. I'm not eager to jump ship toward Kotlin, plain old Java, or Haskell. But if the community keeps shrinking, and the ecosystem shrinks with it, I will eventually be forced to jump toward something else.
Leveraging Node.js and AWS Lambda to Scan S3 Files
It may be that they’re surprised the system isn’t easy to bypass and this is actually useful instead of pointless.
Gotcha

I guess in the case of faking political speeches and the like, it becomes some trust model regarding who owns the camera.
Twitter blocking bot
Time is money. It takes time to set it up.
In general, your data does not have value to me to steal it. Not so with power.
Yes, because ignoring comments from internet forums is the right approach.
Another benefit is that if you can reliably get off grid, it reduces infrastructure costs at the community level. Say, for rural properties.
What do you see as a problem?
When you smash one you are saying “i vote car.” I vote to continue to make the status quo system of cars how we move from point a to b. And there are a lot of problems with cars. Are you sure you want to be on team car?
A Tale of Two IoT Pioneers – EE Times
Recovery of Degraded-Beyond-Recognition 19th Century Daguerreotypes
> This is only true if the load on the grid is growing. In North America, it is not.

The article I saw the other day showed growth of 4.5% (comparing Q1 2017 with Q1 2018)

Surely that growth in production is matched by a growth in load?

https://renewablesnow.com/news/wind-solar-farms-produce-10-o...
He got to play with the touchscreen virtual keyboard for 2 weeks and told Andy Hertzfeld that he thought it was a good design choice.
This bot uses the threat of blocking shared users to impact an offending user's following. Ideally making them think twice before being terrible.
I am not a corporate person and I am in the “public citizenry” and I oppose so-called net neutrality. If the public citizenry is unhappy, they are invited to vote. As Obama famously said, elections have consequences.

We should be demanding policies that encourage ISP competition instead of demanding policies that would ultimately suppress it.
Would it be possible to put the gigabytes back in the title? In general, ETL of gigabytes of data can involve complicated operations, e.g., use of statistical models. And, the utility of data is not determined by the size of data. One has to be a pretty petty person to make fun of this article for data sizes.
Reading material:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attack (especially the cache side channel)

TL;DR: CPUs are designed to "safely" execute next instructions before having received the results of conditional checks that might have take the code path in another branch (of the "if" statement).

The safety here is achieved by not "committing" any effect of that code to "real" state (aka architectural state).

The reason I put safety in scary quotes is that it turns out that while the CPU does manage to fully undo any writes to memory and other data buffers, the actions it has taken so leave a measurable trace.

It's called a "side channel", because it's not the primary I/O channel, but a different, unintended way for data to be conveyed from the CPU to ether another device or to another program running later on the same CPU.

Cache side channel work by leveraging the measurably quicker time it takes to read memory regions related to regions recently read.

Thus when a program reads something in memory, you can later take a good guess which locations of memory it read (not every single byte, but with the granularity of a "cache line" which is e.g. 64 bytes)

The next trick is to find a spot in a program that contains code that reads some data and uses it to compute an index in another table.
If you're lucky and you find some code that for some input value computes a location in a table, you will be able to guess that value by looking at which cache line is hot.

There is a lot more to say about this, in particular about the ways you can find code that does what you want in the victim program (especially about ways you can basically reorganize code in ways never intended by the authors; read more about Return Oriented Programming)
It's surprising that the BBC think it's surprising.
A minor note concerning the usual characterization of the Scala language itself as a fusion of OO and functional, it's definitely not an equal fusion. Not that you proposed that the fusion is equal, but I see it come up elsewhere.

The core language is very much OO. The functional aspects of Scala are either syntax sugar that desugars to OO stuff (e.g. automatic eta expansion, special syntax for defining FunctionN vs new classes, case syntax for partial functions, context bounds) or decisions made by the standard library (e.g. the prevalence of immutable data structures).

Understanding this has been the key for me to understanding where most of the warts of Scala come from. For example some of the weirdness of functions vs methods, weird performance issues, the existence of some of the encoding tricks that libraries like cats and scalaz use, and strange decisions made in the collection libraries all can be fundamentally traced back to this layering.

That being said you can do a lot of FP in Scala because of the combination of ecosystem and syntax sugar, but you have to always keep in mind that you're encoding FP concepts with OO tools (not as equals) otherwise Scala's limitations will come back to bite you.
It is sadly necessary; 30%+ performance regressions from, say, gcc 4 to gcc 6 are not uncommon w/ vector intrinsics.
I dunno, I think the DeGoes has a point. Like he says near the end, there's this fiction that an OOP+FP hybrid will be loved by both OOP and FP programmers, when many times it actually means both will dislike it and the language will be mediocre at both goals.

My opinion -- and I mostly write Scala in my day job! -- is that Scala is in a truly difficult position. Its OOP (and Java) DNA hurts its FP aspects. If it goes full hardcore FP, it will probably lose relevance (because most programmers can't be bothered with it, and those who can will probably hope for Haskell on the JVM). If it stays like it is and tries to be a "better Java", it will keep losing ground to more practical and "easier" languages on the JVM, possibly including losing to Java itself!

PS: DeGoes didn't sound disrespectful to me, and bear in mind I don't know who he is. He seemed to be arguing out of practicality, not shouting people down. I don't if he is angrier in other forums, but his tone in this presentation sounded closer to a wake up call to me.
Do many local stories appear on the news wires?
Text only no tracking version https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954
I'm OK with this being OPT IN, hidden behind three layers of warnings. I just want it to be an option.
If I manage to find somewhere in our open office to get work done in solitude, every individual who walks by feels the need to comment "oh, colanderman, you must be trying to get work done! Well I guess I'll leave you alone". It is so. Goddamn. Annoying. Like seriously, the fuck people, you don't need to vocalize every thought that pops into your head.

The only two solutions I've found are to (a) legitimately book a conference room, or (b) work from home. Except the latter reminds me how futile it is to spend such a short life working for someone else during all the beautiful hours of the day.
The cost of the system includes buying a new one in 30yr. I didn’t include deprecation of the panel, but modern panels such as Sunpower or Panasonic degrade at around 8% over 25 years, so maybe add a multiplier if 1/.92 to the cost to fudge that in.

As for the 4% interest rate, which in this case is really a time value of money discount rate, I’m comparing it to mortgage loan amounts (which is pretty much the average consumer's risk free rate of return). I’m assuming the buyer can afford a cash system.
Actually it worked very well for many companies. The Amazon Kindle came out of Lab 126, Amazon's innovation program.

The idea isn't just to remain dynamic, but to allow for new products and services to be developed despite posing a threat to the company's main cash cow.

So Lab126 was completely independent from most of Amazon, including being based in the Bay Area vs. Seattle. This allowed the to develop a product that went directly against the main cash cow at the time (selling physical books) and make it to market.

Microsoft had one as well, but would always fail because the existing businesses heads held too much power, and would always kill the products. Just take a look at the history of the Surface.
I think when the electrical service wires have insulation it isn't as much of an issue as opposed to the electricity driven trollies needing bare conductors.
Civic engagement dropped by ~5%, with p<.05, per the study linked the article. The way it was written I expected a drastic drop.

I didn't see any other years compared to see if that kind of variance is typical.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/10584609.2012...
No, it's just capitalism in action.
Broadcom Nears Deal to Buy CA Technologies for About $18B
After the fake comments Ajit Pai wanted to be submited, now they want to fix it?
...by a little bit (mostly due to Boeing's greater familiarity with NASA paperwork requirements.)

"Based on NASA's "schedule risk analysis" from April, the agency estimates that Boeing will reach this milestone sometime between May 1, 2019, and August 30, 2020. For SpaceX, the estimated range is August 1, 2019, and November 30, 2020. The analysis' average certification date was December, 2019, for Boeing and January, 2020, for SpaceX."
Right, this is a poor attempt to save face. Pai was going to repeal net neutrality no matter what, his corporate sponsors/donors/masters demanded that. Now that he's achieved his single goal, now he can pretend to care about everyone else in an attempt to influence the midterm elections.
It's a bit ridiculous that the only process for this sort of thing is a recipe for bias and lack of justice. If an agency that is known for incompetence and overreach is simply allowed to investigate itself, without any independent oversight, I don't have much faith that complaints are given a fair hearing.
> literal fascism - and I'm not just being hyperbolic.

High government fees aren't really fascism. They're bureaucracy.

Industry-wise, fascism is authoritarian governmental control. [1] By that measure (and it's 100% stupid hyperbole) Net Neutrality is more "fascist" than non-NN.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
I'm surprised, given that it is the NYT that the headline isn't:

For Limiting Teenagers' Screentime, Apple Provides New Controls
The NYT also reviews TV shows, movies, and Broadway productions. Are those any more/less newsworthy than a change to a system that millions of its readers are holding?
This is exactly what drove me out of the lisp community. There are just too many people that insist on seeing engineering decisions between different sets of trade offs as stark choices between good and evil. Go read some of Eric Naggum’s rants for a really extreme example of this syndrome.
The formal complaint you are referring to is essentially a court proceeding, where both sides present cases to the FCC.
So what does your organisation use for intrusion detection? Humans eyeballing logs doesn't scale. Rule-based approaches?
I did something like this a few years ago! I needed to do a bunch of transformations and measurements of data that came in on a regular basis. Make was a perfect fit - I could test the whole process with a single command, cleaning either just the result data, or nuking everything to make sure it pulled stuff in properly.

I spent some time trying to write my own processing system in Python before realizing this was a familiar task...
"Female education"?
Isn't the problem concerning everyone?

In the west we can try and stop producing plastic uselessly.
Make people pay for disposable glasses everywhere, they will start bringing their own as they do for bags when shopping in sensible places.
Stop producing useless packaging, make it forbidden for most things, make loose products the default and privileged way to buy and sell anything.
Provide reusable stainless steel containers, glass bottles, solid fabric bags that last.

Only produce things in plastic when it is absolutely necessary, things that are not thrown away after first and unique use. Use plastic to build solid items when the only alternative is to kill or make an animal suffer. When fabric, glass or metal cannot reasonably be used.

Make buying used things convenient and the privileged way to acquire stuff.

Recycling is costly and inefficient. The best waste is the one that is not produced. (I did not make this sentence myself.)

And the most ecological phone is the one you already have (to cite fairphone) so phones should be designed to last very long and people should stop buy phones every two years. This is true for many things, not just phones. Also some items might not be worth to have that much. Do you really need a (smart)watch especially when you already have a phone, considering all the resources and pollution it takes to make one, and considering the watch itself becomes a waste within a few years?

25% of ocean pollution may come from a handful developing countries, but that may just mean they don't handle waste. That does not mean they produce much more of it.

Developed country burn much of their waste. This is better but still absolutely terrible.
May I ask why should the FCC restrict comments? Isn't an argument valid or invalid no matter who or what posted it?
The Microsoft compiler can do some level of automated mitigation. But fundamentally it is a static analysis that cannot cover all cases. You do need help from the compiler to de-speculate loads appropriately (GCC and Clang will feature these intrinsics). But only the programmer knows the true security model the program exists under.

Spectre V1, quite fundamentally, means that branch conditions are not necessarily a legitimate security boundary anymore. That's really all there is to it. Either you have to accept this and fix your code, or not fix it and say the threat exists outside your model. Even leveraging newer hardware features (e.g. perhaps segregating cache regions like Intel CAT) will likely require software integration if they wish to retain speculative capabilities, and this seems likely.

We also cannot test for all possible side channel attacks in highly error-prone and detailed cryptographic algorithms, and new ones are found. But we manage through many mechanisms to try and mitigate the things we know about (through various static and dynamic methods, and enhancing our security and programming models). These all require coordination on the programmers behalf, still.

It's not necessarily our fault this is all happening. It's unfortunately our responsibility to fix and mitigate it. And, unfortunately -- it's also another thing on top of the 200 other things a C/C++ programmer/systems programmer writing security-relevant code will have to understand.
I launched, finally.  what I learned in 24 hours
I am not surprised that an PR article would try to spin the positive side.

There are rare exceptions in anything - but the existance of lottery winners does not mean the expected payout of a lottery ticket is positive.

Bell Labs used its monopoly profits to fund research - which was good for research, but no so much for Bell.

If we consider AT&T as Bells successor, it only allowed Bell to stay relevant. Still, AT&T now is nowhere close to Bell it is heyday. Same for Xerow now. Research doesn't pay as much as companies seems to think.

While google position in online advertising is as close to a monopoly as legally possible, it will not change the structure of the incentives. The odds are against them.

But maybe they do not aim for the kind of success they claim they will have, and only want to stay relevant, like Microsoft is now. That is more possible, even if it will be hard to pull.

Personally, I think most R&D money that companies like Microsoft (or Google) have sunk into internal R&D could have had much better uses. But it's not my money! And eventually white elephants get butchered for the meat, so no big loss there.
TBH I am from the Bay Area, work in SF, and I have never seen ire like that directed at SFFD before. I wouldn't take this example as representative or common.
However, based on what you just said, the pro-NN people might ought to consider other views as well. The pro-NN crowd is guilty of one-sided thinking and has had no interest in actually considering other viewpoints. So the FCC should consider everyone’s comments, but then regardless of those comments, uphold NN anyway? Is that what I’m reading?

Regarding the ignoring NN supporters — at least a few of those supporters engaged in credible death threats against Pai and his children. At that point, I’d be done. I would give no credence to the pro-NN side if they are going to threaten my children. As soon as some NN supporters started acting like racist jackasses, that point of view ceased to matter to me.
I'd really like to see distributed comments across self-hosted sites and blogs, but I haven't come across a decent way to prevent spam.

I used to embed Disqus in my site, but wasn't really happy with its centralised nature (plus it was far slower and bloated than anything else I had; generally a few KB of static HTML with "motherfucking-website" aesthetics).
> The data they process and what they do with it is worth more to society than any number of petabytes crunched to target ads.

No it isn't. You are getting defensive for no reason. If propublica ceases to exist or never existed, it wouldn't matter a single bit to the world. You could even argue the world would be better off.

> Processing petty petabytes is not praiseworthy.

From a technical point and many other ways, it is.

I don't get why you are getting offended by people making a jab at the scant amount of data. Last I checked, hacker news is a technology oriented site. And from a technology point of view, what pro publica is doing is a joke. It's a toy amount of data.

Why not just say pro publica is not a technology company and hence people shouldn't expect technological feats of wonder?

> The point is they used open source technology to process public data for reporting once the government stopped updating its own tools.

Which is something I could have done on a lazy afternoon all by myself. It isn't anything to be impressed about. But good for them anyways.
> The invariant for `K+D` is the identity function. So if we had a `D` with holes, we could use a prover to verify the identity invariant and “solve for D” simultaneously.

This was pretty mind-blowing for me. (I haven't really looked into program synthesis so I may be slightly more susceptible ;) There was one part of it that seemed problematic from my (perhaps flawed) understanding, though.

So I guess the idea is we have K+D = I (and this is roughly equivalent to 'D(K(s)) = I(s)' where 's' is a string to compress), so if we come up with a proof of 'I'—which would be a path through theorem space starting from I'm not sure what axioms—and we know 'I' is equivalent to 'K+D', and we already know the value of 'K,' then the value of 'D' is implied.

My question is what is the equivalent here to the subtraction operation that would allow us to say D = I - K? It seems very surprising to me that K and D would be structured in such a way that their own proofs would necessarily have any relationship to the proof we derived for I, so that such a subtraction would work so cleanly...
It's really the difference between negligence and justifiable harm.

If the officer is negligent, they're not immune. That seems to make sense to me.

If they intentionally harm you, and that harm is justified in the course of their duty (say, they hit you with a nightstick and break your arm in order to stop you from attacking someone else), then they're immune. That seems to make sense to me as well.

The problem is when they claim that the harm was necessary and justified, but that they could have -- just as safely -- de-escalated the situation another way. Then it becomes a judgment call: was this harm justified-intentional or negligent? Unfortunately the review boards and courts err on the side of the LEOs nearly universally on this one.
I am not sure what you are referring to. I was involved in a motorcycle accident in October of 2017 and I was treated by SFFD paramedics in an ambulance.
> I see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it

This is the original, only purpose of retweets, going back to before it was officially supported and was done manually.

Showing tweets which have been liked by accounts you follow is a much worse behavior of the app. I like indiscriminately but tweet and retweet very seldomly. There's no feature to save and show appreciation for a tweet without boosting it to my followers.
You totally sound like a corporate shill.
Intel pays out $100K for Spectre 1.1