skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crash course in entanglement:

The state of each qbit is represented by a state vector of two complex numbers [a, b] where |a|^2 + |b|^2 = 1. There are two special qbit values called the classical basis: [1, 0] which is the classical bit 0, and [0, 1] which is the classical bit 1. If a qbit is not in one of the two classical states, we say it is in superposition. When a qbit is in superposition, we can measure it[0] and it will collapse probabilistically to 0 or 1; for a qbit [a, b], the probability that it collapses to 0 is |a|^2 and the probability that it collapses to 1 is |b|^2.

Things get more interesting when we have multiple qbits. If we have two qbits [a, b] and [c, d], we define their product state as their tensor product [ac, ad, bc, bd]. For example, if we have two qbits both in state [1/sqrt(2), 1/sqrt(2)], their product state would be [1/2, 1/2, 1/2, 1/2]. We use the product state to calculate the action of a quantum logic gate that operates on multiple qbits - for a gate which operates on two qbits, we can always represent its action as a 4x4 matrix.

Usually we can move back and forth between the product state representation and writing out the individual qbits states. However, in certain scenarios something very special happens: we cannot factor the product state back into the individual state representation! Consider the product state [1/sqrt(2), 0, 0, 1/sqrt(2)]. If you try to write this as a tensor product of two states [a, b] and [c, d], you cannot! It cannot be factored; the qbits have no individual value, and we say they are entangled.

Well, what does this mean? It means when you measure one qbit, even if the qbits are very far apart, you instantly know the value of the other qbit. So if I entangled two qbits in the state [1/sqrt(2), 0, 0, 1/sqrt(2)], give you one, then we go to opposite ends of the universe, if I measure my qbit and see a 0 I'll know your qbit instantly also collapsed to 0 (or collapsed to 1 if I measured 1). This phenomenon has been experimentally-verified to occur faster than light. It is instantaneous, as far as we can tell. So, local realism is wrong! Spooky action at a distance is real!

There is an important caveat: while the qbits seem to coordinate in some faster-than-light way, you cannot use this to communicate in a faster-than-light way. All we have is a shared random number generator. I can't send some chosen bit from my reference frame to yours. This is called the no-communication theorem.

If you found this interesting, I have a full video on quantum computing for computer scientists here: https://youtu.be/F_Riqjdh2oM

[0] IDGAF about your chosen quantum mechanics interpretation, don't @ me
All election software should be open source and publicly inspectable, like the code in the Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1! ;)

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/dumbold-voting-machine-for-th...

Somebody actually reprogrammed the Dumbold Voting Machine to run their intelligent university campus simulation!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4370926_Towards_a_m...
I agree with the caveat I didn't read anything similar to go's work stealing thread scheduling, useful for tasks with synchonized IO for example.

What appeals to me is the Lua integration. I'd love for a Lua application server to become widely available. The http servers out there now don't really fit the bill for (Xavante, Luvit for example).
I KNOW what it helps you with. No programming language has a keyword that decompiles expressions to their base components. Also profiling is only done when optimization is needed.

SQL on the otherhand... EXPLAIN is used on a regular basis, it's built in to the programming language and rather then just mark lines of code with execution time deltas it literally functions as a decompiler to deconstruct the query into another imperative language. This is the problem with SQL.
> Please no, I don't trust the government at all to handle healthcare efficiently.

If only we had literally the entire rest of the developed world to demonstrate that it's doable, with dramatically lower costs (and yes, that includes the tax portion) and similar health outcomes.
"The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online."

The only way they can do this and link it to you as an individual is if we have all been lied to about how everything is "anonymized" data being sent between the data brokers and sold to corporations. I've always assumed that the whole narrative about all this data being anonymized was complete and utter bullshit.

Now we know with certainty.
Goldman Sachs' next CEO is a part-time electronic dance DJ
Surveillance is not advertising.
Tons of malvertising comes through Google. When one company owns the whole space, finding just one vulnerability is enormously economically attractive.
It's not CNN. It's ads.

Advertising has ruined every medium it has ever touched. It will ruin the web. It is only a matter of time. It did not destroy ancient network television overnight. It did not destroy cable tv overnight.

The last time I saw cable tv a few years back, it had become so bad that after a long run of ads, they would then put bugs and walk on people right over the content of the show you were watching. Sometimes obscuring important content within that show.
Which other ad server and ad intermediation service would you recommend?
Can you provide more references on XAI and converting current black-box models into more open ones?
> What indicates that Interstellar travel requires a technological level that includes arbitrary transmutation?

It seems likely to me that mastering fusion will be a pre-requisite for interstellar travel. But you're right, that's probably the weakest part of my argument. So maybe there will be a market for rare shipping rare elements across interstellar distances.
Yes, Lwan's thread scheduler is pretty simple, and can be borderline useless if a thread blocks. This 2014 blog post has more details; not much in that regard has changed since then: https://tia.mat.br/posts/2014/10/06/life_of_a_http_request.h...
Great suggestions (and book suggestions)!
I think it's that attitude that people are downvoting. There is more than one way to be a developer; there are many different workflows that are possible. The fraction of a second that I might lose by using a pointing device is made up for by not having to set up and memorize arcane and sometimes rarely documented key combinations that might not be the same from program to program and system to system.
I used to be a web developer (still am, sort of) and, while I thought it was stupid and did it grudgingly, I have to admit that this sort of thing beguiled a lot of clients, generated a lot of work and paid a lot of bills.
Almost any state-of-the-art computer science paper can be incorporated into a commercialized product. Entire companies are often built around a single fancy new index method or the like.

The trick is in the execution and application. What problem are you going to solve? Are you able to build up the surrounding "boring" bits necessary to productize something?
First fake news, now fake ads...
That is only true because we don't yet have the technology for making atomically perfect copies of physical objects. No one pays a premium for "the original" of a digital image.
TGV trains in France have a very strict structure. For the TGV atlantique lines, for example, "short" trains contain exactly 10 cars (and "long" trains are composed of two "short" trains), with the following distribution:

- Car 1 and 10 are engines, and include some second class seats.
- Cars 2 and 3 are first class.
- Car 4 is the bar-restaurant.
- Car 5 is first class.
- Cars 6, 7, 8 and 9 are second class.

All the infrastructure is designed to treat the train as a single unit, during all operations at the shunting yard, in repair workshops, and son on.

And the position of toilets (including special toilets for nappy changes) is fixed.
I think it depends on what the CEO is really hiring you to do. Is it to turn this team around, so that it can take on projects in the future without stalling out? Is it to finish the project in as quickly as possible? I would recommend talking to the CEO first to figure out exactly what he's expecting from you, especially given that it's a hierarchy-oriented team/culture.

In my (and others', from reading other comments) experience, it is pretty unrealistic to swoop in and fix everything at once. You need to establish what you are being asked to do, and then make a reasonable step by step plan. Changing attitudes about software development is very difficult and you need to have a plan.
Suspend for the X1 Carbon 2018 on Linux
If you haven't seen, openbsd added a new api to simplify tls programming, "as a response to the unnecessary challenges other APIs present in order to use them safely."

I don't know how portable it is yet though

https://man.openbsd.org/tls_init.3
This is true, but the reality is I doubted my insurance would pay from the start. I was expecting to pay for everything myself. It was only once I got the quotes in Singapore that I realised I might not actually be able to afford it that I resorted to the insurance. And their response was even worse than I expected it to be. I appreciate there are countless fraud attempts and they need to protect themselves, but I was lucky, it could have been a lot worse, I'm sure for other people it is. And I guarantee you when you're facing emergency surgery the LAST thing on your mind is "I best call my insurer and start the form filling process". It's fuck, FUCK. This fucking sucks.
Thanks for the response. Do you have any recommendations for tax software, or do you have your accountant handle tax payments? I'm a sole proprietor now but am going to upgrade to an LLC soon.
To be fair, you trick an optical sensor with a gust of wind and a plastic bag.

Ideally all sensors would be redundant, with poorer and poorer (but still safe) performance as each is removed.
> I accepted this contract because I like the country, the CEO and want to push myself to a first experience software lead.

I suspect that you are young. Only a young/naive person would take a job on these points. From my perspective from a 40+yo (with 20+ years exp), this is very foolish.

> They are struggling with a project and the deadline is close.

You should really tell us the backstory. Unwittingly, you have made yourself the fall-guy. Now your "boss" can surely put the blame on YOU when this goes south.

> They are seriously lacking on this aspect: no test, a single staging dev server (no local dev env), no doc, inconsistent function and variable naming, the list goes on.

I hate to use the word incompetent. But lets call a spade a spade shall we? In the little to no time you have, you cannot expect to work miracles overnight. Especially when you are so new to being a software lead.

Talk to the wrong person, in the wrong way and it's all over. Depending on where you are going. Losing face is quite serious in some places of the world.

What happens if you get into a situation where they cannot say no. So instead they say, not now or maybe it isn't the right time to implement X. Now you've stalled and the project fails.

Honestly, my advice would be to walk back this situation as best as you can. You want your first project lead to be a simple project that can be controlled and taken from conception to shipping with the least amount of issues.

Not this baptism of fire, which you WILL get burned. There are so many variables in play that you won't be able to control ANY of them!

> How would you handle this situation ?

Very simple. Talk to whomever gave you this assignment and tell them you have thought about it/taken outside council and it was foolish of you to accept.

Let the project fail. Let it fail very hard. Let the project owner bask in it's failure.

Only when you are asked to rescue the project, then you can submit a document detailing how it could be rescued. How long it may take to do so, the budget, the team members you need, etc, etc. You make it clear that it's only an estimate since you have not seen the codebase.

Then and only when you get the codebase and do a thorough examination of it, then you submit a revised proposal.

If you are successful in a bid to rescue it. Once you have control of the project you can implement your dream wish list, etc.

If you are unsuccessful in getting the project. Well, let it burn. It's not your head on the chopping block. Move on, that project lead will come some day.
I think in other contexts, you might say that these signals are "below the noise floor."
Define "better". On what metrics are you evaluating Wikipedia? Factuality, writing quality, etc? Wikipedia's process has driven away some of the most knowledgeable subject-matter experts into creating rival publications like Scholarpedia, and pre-Wikipedia incumbents like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remain stronger imho, despite having fewer (but more qualified) editors.
Electronic voting seems like one of those ideas that seem great when you start programming in your teens, but you eventually grow out of it when you start to see all the security considerations, costs and possible problems. With some experience in the field, it just starts to seem cheaper and easier to stick to the paper.

I'm always stunned when I'm reminded that there are places in the world that not only went electronic, but absolutely fail at its basic security as opposed to getting burned with some elaborate and/or clever attack.
Better be careful. I was just warned about making obvious and non-threatening jokes on this site by the main headquarters themselves. In fact, this is my last comment ever. I'm done with this site and the group of babies that run it. Take care.
This was an interesting read from a technical point of view, but also well written and refreshingly transparent.

I found the discussion about why it doesn't matter when you start talking about 11 nines of reliability to be hilariously true.

At the end of the day we're still flawed humans living in a hostile universe, and no matter how foolproof we make the technology, there are some weaknesses that just can't be eliminated.
Exactly it is incorrect to jump to the conlusion that they are using a keylogger. I mean, they're loading a JS library that allows to handle keypress events; but if you talk about a keylogger everyone assumes that they're stealing your keystrokes.

What needs to be done is to navigate the site and typing a given char sequence on every page while logging the HTTP traffic, then do a search for that sequence to see if it appears in any request. That's the basic thing you could do to actually verify if there is a keylogger.
I need tracking of some sort, and my workflows tend to be mouse-heavy. I don't personally have a hard requirement for the Macbook touchpad, but the pad is a huge part of my interaction with a laptop and I hate using the clitmouse. I will never ever voluntarily run windows so my options are Linux, BSD, or Mac.

BSD is horribly performant on any laptop hardware I've tried, so that's a no-go.

Linux touchpad support is a dumpster fire of bad drivers and missing config options.

Mac is therefore the only real choice.

At some point you just get sick of dist-upgrade breaking palm rejection and no fix being available for months.
Maybe the closed source nature of the Xbox OS makes reverse engineering more difficult? While some of Sony's PS4 OS is proprietary, the majority of the source is open. Same goes for Nintendo I guess, both are using forks of FreeBSD. If a bug is in FreeBSD it's likely in the OS for both consoles.
Leaving the "Obamacare-market" doesn't imply a health "insurance" company is then operating as some bastion of the free market. The entire sector is rotten, easily demonstrated by providers not publishing a uniform list of prices for every single customer.

In general, a lack of legibility to consumers means they are unable to choose efficiently, which implies that the other party is likely taking an outsized amount of profit. Much of that profit goes to paying the paper pushers who keep the system opaque, but from the consumer's perspective that's little consolation.
Hypersonic and supersonic civilian transport. SpaceX published a first render of what parabolic arcs through low-earth orbit would look like. With estimated one-way arrival time under an hour. YC's own Boom Aerospace is set to announce first flight of its experimental XB-1 aircraft sometime next year. But it is just the beginning. Latent consumer demand could equal 100M+ passengers per annum. The technology is here today. It's simply not evenly distributed yet ;)
I'm not an expert, and in my opinion, I'm hoping the industry focuses more on the software tooling to utilize hardware accelerated compute power better. In my limited experience, the "tool chain" is overly complicated.
This is a beautiful project! Well done :)

I wanted to paste an emoji but HN rejects those in comments :(
Quantum computers are extremely useful for simulating chemistry. They can do it exponentially faster than classical computers. Cheap useful quantum computers can revolutionize biology and materials science.
Assembly language is mostly mnemonics for the individual instructions available in the hardware of a microprocessor. So you need to pick a microprocessor family, study the hardware (registers, different memories), and what each instruction does. The popular microprocessor architectures are: ARM, X86 (Intel, AMD), and the new open source RISC-V.
Start with "Computer Architecture" by Hennessy and Patterson.
Modern architectures overlap many instructions, this is part of the cause for Specter and Meltdown. Add a number to a register, the result won't be there immediately. A branch tests true, the branch will not complete for a couple of cycles.
> I personally don’t think it’s an interesting question yet.

You're probably right. I think it will become interesting once a FAANG starts losing enough stock value and cash that compensation is no longer competitive and cannot be adjusted.

My sense is that retention relying on constant and substantial stock appreciation is inherently dangerous for the employer, because it means that if their stock value plunges, their woes will be compounded by almost immediate talent exodus.

This is not yet the case for Netflix, which can still pay well.
Crispr Can Speed Up Nature–and Change How We Grow Food
>I felt I shouldn't claim the first bills because I hadn't informed them before the procedure. And yes, because it turned out to be a fairly manageable bill.

What you did after the accident was reasonable. Claim the bills that you were covered for.

> And yes, because it turned out to be a fairly manageable bill. But the 2nd procedure was going to be considerably more, so I notified them. To clarify, I didn't want any long term care at all, I was only asking them to cover the 2nd operation that I was already scheduled in for.

Which they specifically told you you weren't covered for.

Your article says

>At this point, it’s 4 days until my scheduled surgery to have a plate fitted in my hand, and each reply from Insure and Go takes 3–4 days

The e-mails you include from Insure and Go have time stamps of June 6 and June 7. Perhaps they took more time before or after that, but during the time sensitive part of your narrative they were responsive. It was you that didn't respond to their June 7 e-mail requesting the not fit to fly until at least June 12.
So basically, it's just an event-capturing interface to what you can do natively in the browser already. It doesn't necessarily mean anything is being logged. The code using the library would need to be inspected—whatever callbacks are being fired, etc.
> when 'all you have to do is to try to define what "the same thing" actually means', you, other people, and aliens' efforts might lead to different definitions.

Well, yeah, they might. But I'm assuming the aliens understand physics, in which case only one definition makes sense. You can snooker the irrational and the ignorant into paying for anything regardless of what species they are.

On which note, I have this nifty bridge you might be interested in? It's available at a great price. And it is the original!
It's very dependent on the car though.

I just bought a new Subaru for about $24,000. A 3 year used in an identical package ran about $19,800. For that level of a price difference I couldn't justify going used, with some likely impending mechanical issues and effectively no warranty.

If I had financed, the used car payment payment is actually far higher - about $577 vs $432 because of the shorter loan duration (yes, total cost is still lower).

It's one of those "/r/askreddit-style" pieces of gospel that people endlessly parrot without ever testing if it's still true, or at least realizing the truth is a lot more complicated.
His doctor said that he was not fit to fly back to the UK!
Agreed and the more informed speculation about the RQ-170 that I have read is very skeptical of the Iranian GPS-spoofing story. The RQ-170 supposedly has at least doubly-redundant, possibly triply-redundant, position-fixing systems, and it seems nearly impossible that GPS failure or spoofing wouldn't have been anticipated in the design.

Some have suggested that the aircraft might have crashed for other reasons and been recovered by Iran, and the GPS spoofing story is propaganda on their part in order to explain how they came into possession of it.

I suspect we will not know the real story until all the documents are declassified at some point in the future.

http://aviationintel.com/iran-says-it-spoofed-the-rq-170-sen...
Bringing the Windows Console into the 21st Century!
> You can give up entirely on government intervention in health insurance and social "goods" being pursued - everyone is on their own and "healthcare" is a private, personal matter.

Except Kenneth Arrow showed market based health care doesn't work. That was in 1963. Since then the US has pursued market based heath insurance for ideological reasons and... that doesn't work without vast government subsidies. The government pays enough subsidies to cover a socialized system.

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf
Roger that. Thanks for the info!
What Are Hot Wallets, Cold Wallets and Hardware Wallets? (Explain Like I’m 5)
I can learn to understand basics of many advanced concepts outside engineering math to the level where I can read/skimp some research papers and understand the thinking behind it. But it's very hard to recognize the concept on my own and the utility 'on the wild' unless someone else is pointing it out and explains it.

Take for example Sheaf[1]. The basics are not that hard if you spend some time. But once you have learned it in abstract. Can you see use for it [2] in data analytic, signal processing, or machine learning? How long you have to work for it to really click to the point where you can see and utilize the concept?

I think this is the reason why mathematicians are needed more in every area. They should walk around pointing things out.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheaf_(mathematics)

[2]: http://www.drmichaelrobinson.net/20131024_overview.pdf
As an audio engineer (as well as a dev), I definitely agree with this use of that phrase.
Also shockingly, if you already know you need a heart transplant, you're well beyond the point where any market-based risk pool is going to offer to pay for your transplant in exchange for a premium that's below the cost of your transplant.

You need charity, not a market.