skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Libraries and museums burn down all the time, or get destroyed in wars. Consider the recent fire at the Hewlett-Packard museum, where all the paper history was lost. Nobody made a backup, even though paper lasts longer term than data on a hard drive.

Frankly, I think storing data as ASCII in pits on a substrate is a great long term solution, as it can be read with a simple optical microscope, and ASCII is forever.

One of the cool things about digital data is it can be copied forward limitlessly. Make the seed genomes public domain and put them on a server - people will make copies, like they make copies of wikipedia to store in their prepper bunkers.
It seems to be one of several lingua franca in the scientific computing community, and growing in popularity. In that context, its accessibility to people who don't have time to be software experts is another feature.
This comment is late so may not get noticed, but I've been able to trigger lucid dreams using kava. Get the good stuff, and avoid tinctures. Alcohol makes it seem good at first but I've had some bad hangovers from it, which shouldn't happen.
The oracle in this case is a piece of software that compares the neural net's outputs with pre-classified data.

A test oracle "magically" knows the truth, from the perspective of the system, is the idea. Sometimes oracles don't even exist but can be useful as a conceptual tool in deriving some other finding -- such as a proof by contradiction.
Wow, thank you!

We'll see if I still have it takes, or if I'm just a one-hit wonder. I've been out of the game for a long time. About 25~ years ago, when I was in 3rd grade, I was published my first and only time. I landed a poem in a young authors compilation.

Here's the poem, verbatim.

People with big noses are funny,
Because they need lots of money,
To fix their nose,
that looks like a fire-hose,
what they really need is reconstructive surgery.

Since then, I've grown a lot. My art has grown more egalitarian and inclusive. I'm still nervous about re-entering the scene. I'm worried it'll get dredged up, take twitter by storm and cause me to lose my job.
So this was a demo paper, backed by their SIGMOD paper [2]. Interesting work. Their Epoch Protection kind of reminds me of the functionality provided by RCUs [3]. It is unfortunate that they do not provide comparisons with other hash maps in [2], opting for end-to-end comparisons with other systems, but that doesn't take away from their results.

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...
[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/RCU/whatisRCU.txt
I wonder, what kind of tools can be used for profiling CPU performance while playing a game?
Just to throw a few possibilities out there: Correctness? Ease of writing? Portability?
Interestingly, the hash bucket structure presented in their papers does not match the one on their code [0], but that probably means they've made some sort of improvement post-publications.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/FASTER/blob/master/cc/src/core/...
They sit under a service you would actually use. For instance, I think mysql can use rocksdb as a storage backend.
technology owned by a single company you can coerce is the issue.
In apoptosis cell death spreads through perpetuating waves
> Dollar General’s aggressive pricing drives locally owned grocery stores out of business, replacing shelves stocked with fresh fruit, vegetables and meat with the kinds of processed foods underpinning the country’s obesity and diabetes crisis.

I'm sympathetic to this, truly. I believe that our food is killing us. The processing, use of GMOs, pesticides, and insane levels of sugars are making us sick.

That said, I'm torn economically here. If these towns are really doing that bad, is making food cheaper really evil? Isn't processed food better than no food? I used to be that poor, and I would have much preferred food that is bad for me to food I couldn't afford.
(disclaimer I sell a HW random number generator)

I think both the diagrams here are simplistic - in reality pre 4.8 there were 3 pools (an input pool and 2 output pools, one of which blocked) and post 4.8 where there are 2 pools, an input pool and a blocking pool (urandom now pulls from the input pool thru a CSPRNG).

One big downside of the new (post 4.8) architecture is that urandom_min_reseed_secs is ignored - pre-4.8 you could ask the kernel to periodically pull a little bit of real entropy from the input to refresh the urandom output (non-blocking) pool, by default that was once every 60 seconds, but in our case with lots of entropy available we'd set it to happen once a second - now post 4.8 it looks like urandom_min_reseed_secs is ignored and the input pool (where /dev/urandom gets its data from) is not regularly updated unless data is also pulled from /dev/random - which may make sense if entropy is rare, but is not so useful when back pressure from /dev/random is left to control the rate at which external entropy flows into the system - I suspect it's time to present a patch that makes urandom_min_reseed_secs work again

Nevertheless the conclusion "use /dev/urandom" is still valid
It is not the answer.

What are the building blocks for encryption?

1) An cryptographic algorithm

2) Some form of key generation

3) A software implementation of 1) and 2)

4) A binary distribution of 3)

5) A computer that executes 4)

In practice, chances are those 5 are all rigged. They are rigged because you have so far trusted:

- That there are no tricks in the algorithm or its practical implementation

- That there are no tricks in the key generation algorithm or its practical implementation

- Hundreds of contributors to the software implementation of those algorithms

- The guy that compiled the software into binary form and distributed it

- The compiler used to compile the software and all the libraries and dependencies the software has

- Hardware manufacturers

So, common sense tells me that because you have trusted so many people, in practice, it is very unlikely you can have end-to-end encryption or any real ambition to have privacy.

This does not even consider more aspects, like your operating system, your sources of entropy, etc.
Its not laws since the US government and probably others have already shown with the NSA and the like that they have no respect whatsoever for the existing laws and nobody actually seemed to care one bit about that.
Yes. I don't do any scientific computing but I still really like Julia. The speed is there if you need it, but what attracts me more is how "ergonomic" the language is. To put it differently: Julia makes it really easy for me to map my thoughts into code. I have a habit of trying out many different languages across different paradigms and IMHO no one has come close in that regard. There is no one thing I can point to that is responsible for this. I believe it is due to a cohesive set of design decisions by the creators. The only downside is that currently there are not many Julia 1.0 packages available for general purpose programming (understandable given that 1.0 just came out).

Disclaimer: I recently started contributing to Julia (but I wouldn't have bothered in the first place if I didn't think it was so cool ;) )
I fail to see the point, without encryption, there's no modern web, no e-commerce, no smartphones, absolutely everything relies on it like water. Unless you want to go back to pre-2000's technology of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17785616
I agree, this is a core reason we have a government.
First problem with this response: programmers have a terrible understanding of what "crucial importance" is. In fact, most things in cryptography that want random values need unpredictable values. The old Linux man page creates the impression that you want "good" random for keys, and "mediocre" random for everything else, which is false.

Second problem is, there is no such thing as "good" and "poor" random. There are two states: unpredictable (seeded) and predictable (not yet seeded). Once you read seeded state, you're done; blocking serves literally no purpose.
Even if you got to that level of encryption, the devices themselves forming the Ps in P2P will become the tap points.

Nobody has a 100% open smartphone stack from the baseband up to the application.
“This discrimination is okay because it’s for a good cause” is not sound policy (IMHO).

It’s easy to support such efforts until you’re the class discriminated against.
I find Julia to be a wonderfully expressive language to write in, without sacrificing any speed. The abstractions allowed me to write less code (especially boilerplate), and maintain cleaner code structure -- mapping to my understanding of the problem. Feels much friendlier than Python to me, but YMMV. (My experience basically revolves around prototyping various numerical/ML algorithms for exploration and understanding, and not the kind where you just call a library to solve a task. Projects mostly in the range of 20 to 2000 lines of code. Having used both Python and Julia for such tasks, I lean towards Julia when I have the choice)

A couple of my previous HN comments on Julia's indexing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472933 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15473169

Plus, I found it exciting to read community discussions for a language growing towards 1.0, to understand the different approaches that were considered, and why certain choices were made. From what I've seen, the whole development process was quite transparent, and the developers have always indulged sincere questions/suggestions from participants, dealing in concrete examples instead of sweeping generalizations and polemic. I don't know what standard to compare this to, but I've enjoyed the experience.
Blankon 11 Uluwatu – See What's New
You can handle a certain mass of civil servants when you have a strong private sector. The UK, France and Germany can live with it. Most of the other countries, not so much.
Google Execs Misled Staff on China Censorship: 13 Questions They Must Answer
Indeed! And there have been some truly heroic hacks of the little buggers!

https://books.google.com/books?id=lvMxDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT248&lpg=...
I'd be interested in reading this if you ever publish.
Yes, it's very well possible that they have a strong legal case - I haven't looked into the precedent they cited.

The problem I'm alluding to the administrative order's definition of
a 'sale' - whether that definition stems from statute or precedent, or one they constructed just for this case - which doesn't conform to the common definition of the term, leading to a situation where the public is given a naive impression of the scope of the law that is not in accordance with its real scope. This mis-impression is the Orwellian aspect of it.
I'm not convinced that the only economically viable options are "affordable processed foods or expensive good foods." Put on your tinfoil hat, because those being the only options is actually an artifact of a rigged system that is manufactured by massive food industries which exist on selling obsolete products/ingredients.

For example, sugar as a sweetener in soft drinks and juices is now obsolete. It can easily and affordably be replaced with stevia. But massive sugar companies are already making loads of money selling their product, so they have no reason to pivot.
What about running the benchmark multiple times on instances of the same type? I get that it would be noisy but lots of workloads run on shared instances so it’s a useful measuring stick in that way.
this is sick. maybe you could do something with animated/changing emojis and gifs, sort of how gmail has (used to have?) an inbox counter that would change.
Moritz Bunkus / MKVToolNix
* except 8 rules
Oppo’s latest phone has the best notch yet
Anyone know of something like this for .NET objects?

I've never thought of something like this, but this would be very useful for many platforms.
PSA: The goal of the Julia 1.0 release was to stabilize language constructs for library authors to build upon. It will take time for them to update their libraries to be compatible with v1.0 -- so if you want to get a feel for the language, and things are breaking, stick to v0.7 for the near future.
US pressuring Facebook to break Messenger’s encryption over MS-13 investigation
All of American society is going back to feudalism, which is really just capitalism: those who inherit wealth, manage it to extract work free rent.
It's pretty rational, really.
Create a simple cross-platform desktop game with Go
Here's what it covers, straight from the City of Philadelphia's website [1]:

> What is taxed

> The tax is not just on sodas. This tax is on any non-alcoholic beverage, syrup, or other concentrate used to prepare a beverage that lists as an ingredient any form of caloric sugar-based sweetener, including, but not limited to sucrose, glucose, or high fructose corn syrup.

> Drinks considered “diet” or “zero calorie” are also taxed. Specifically, this tax is on any non-alcoholic beverage, syrup or other concentrate used to prepare a beverage that lists any form of artificial sugar substitute, including stevia, aspartame, sucralose, neotame, acesulfame potassium (Ace-K), saccharin, and advantame.

> Examples of sweetened beverages

> Soda (regular and diet); non-100%-fruit drinks; sports drinks; sweetened water; energy drinks; pre-sweetened coffee or tea; and non-alcoholic beverages intended to be mixed into an alcoholic drink.

[1] https://www.phila.gov/services/payments-assistance-taxes/bus...
Variance matters though. Test where you can reasonably be sure about low variance.
Good but me and I'm sure many other people will happily leave flaming of dog poop on your front porch before ringing your doorbell and making a getaway by segway while cackling madly if nobody ever sued me.
When the comic industry was young, they borrowed from each other. How else can you explain Shazam! aka Captain Marvel has some of the same powers as Superman?

They still copy, Deadpool Wade Wilson was a rip-off of Deadshot Slade Wilson. Sometimes they just change names and appearances.

I created original characters for a comic book, but they were too boring to print. So being original does not always work.

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Picasso
I think calling cars that randomly catch fire and drive into walls "best" says more about the critics than the cars.
Just a test: https://write.as/r40qkz6e2bne42vf.md
We don't exactly see them directly growing, but the strong gravitational effects a blackhole exerts on the stars/blackholes around it gives us a pretty good idea of the size of the blackhole, among other things. We can also infer the size of a blackhole through gravitational waves produced due to it/around it, which is the subject of this work.
This seems to just muddy the waters.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-rando... is shorter, more succinct, and to the point.
Sure. But it can be measured and accounted for. The idea that you can't or shouldn't benchmark such environments seems weird, given that they're pretty popular.
China's National Cybersecurity Standards Considered a Risk for Foreign Firms
Props like 13 and 58 were passed in the name of poor grannies; when we look at differential benefits, it is actually rich grannies who end up benefiting 10 folds better than a grannie living in San Bernardino county.

This has parallels in other laws: in the name of terrorism, many laws were passed to spy on everyone—ranging from anti money laundering, know your customer, enhanced due diligence, forcing private companies to be active partners in spying.

One way to kill the beast is by partial repeal of commercial properties. Apple claimed its real estate value’s worth is $200.
>We still can't link to an arbitrary location in a HTML document if the author hasn't put down anchor links.

$ted_nelson_rant_here
BBM was very popular for illicit purposes when it was in its heyday at RIM.

People moved onto other messengers like WhatsApp for those purposes.

Heck people use snapchat expiring messages to relay info on illicit activities.

It is not farfetched at all people are using FB messenger, signal, anything for that purpose.
Can you explain that last part?
Seems like many other dire circumstances would have to befall the earth before any of the global top 3 crops become extinct.
How digital drug users could help to halt the US opioid epidemic
so the thieves just argue with "if.., would" and ignore the facts? lol
`aurman` is a (unofficial?) package manager for Arch Linux. The standard package manager is called `pacman`. Arch User Repository(AUR) is (IIRC) a repository of uncurated packages compatible with Arch.

To put it simply: he is implying that he will check out the book.
> Are you referring to the concessions made by Germany & Italy for military basing, extraterritorial rights, etc?

If he's thinking of stuff like that, I think those had more to do with countries like West Germany not wanting to become countries like East Germany, due to a Soviet invasion.
Those are great points.

Trying to keep RAM usage low doesn't hurt anyone.

It depends on the degree. It's one thing to be cognizant of RAM usage throughout development but it's another to trade time that could otherwise be spent on features, usability, security, or more impactful optimizations, like CPU.

The bulk of a modern app's footprint, RAM included, often comes from outside dependencies. Abstraction overhead. It's the norm to trade app performance for dev performance and I believe it's good for progress.
[1]In 1914–1915 the scroll was dismantled, and remounted on two long stretchers, one containing the nine scenes of the original painting, and one containing all the other sections, except for the Zou Yigui painting, which was mounted separately as an album leaf.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admonitions_Scroll
As somebody who appreciates Julia, my opinion is - probably not. That is, unless you want the opportunity to create a killer library that shows how the language features map well to other domains.

But, I think a lot of people in scientific computing are tired of the typeless mess that Python/Numpy/Scipy code-bases evolve to be. And for those people, I think it has a lot of merit.

At the end of the day, the language was designed to fill one major gap. A lot of time and effort in R&D is spent either; architecting sane C++ memory models, or reverse engineering existing Python code. Alternative well performing and safe languages like Java simply are not fast enough - to get the features of the modern CPU, you need to be native. And a side-note, MATLAB cannot usually be ran in a production environment.
This is worse. This leads to lawyers making the critical decisions instead of regulators and auditors. The latter group at least has some familiarity with the subject area.
3d Wave Sleep Dongle
We have FTC/FCC and EU/GDPR
Great idea. Crowdsourcing is good but averaging out crowdsources of crowdsources is a better way to understand the general sentiment of the population.
Feudalism is more than just concentrated property ownership. It’s primarily about people being bound by law to provide labor and resources to their feudal lord.
I dont understand, this is how TAB icons looked for me for the last 17 years.
That pic made my eyes glaze over. It's a good concept, poor execution.
Name for fast Z: Gonzales
Sadly not even 0.7 is usable right now, see https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1.0.0/
* The only difference between 0.7 and 1.0 is the removal of deprecation warnings. *
I am currently using version 0.6.4. I feel it is still a great piece of software, even if is a few years old.
No, judges and juries decide lawsuits. They have the benefit of being harder to bribe than regulators.
so then argue this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admonitions_Scroll
if the thieves know that, how did they dismantle this Chinese painting and remount it with the Japanese painting mounting method?
>We're not some geoup of mindless automatans max/mining for profit

Haven’t spent much time around investment bankers huh?
The soda tax is a tax on drinks sweetened with sugar. But it is taxed at the distribution level.
Does the tax affect alcoholic drinks? Sure, but it is a tax per ounce. With alcoholic drinks being relatively small, and with a large markup, the tax is virtually invisible.
The biggest problem with the tax is, because it is per ounce, and not a percentage it affects cheaper drinks more. The healthier drinks tend to be cheaper. A $2 bottle of coke is increased 20 cents or so, while a $2 jug of sweetened tea is doubled!
It was called the soda tax because it targeted sodas. Here in Seattle they referred to it as the sugar tax, but they exempted milk based drinks. So drink up that milkshake, which is one of the worst calorie per ounce drink.
You have to be insane to think that a 50% population reduction would have no significant impact on societal arrangements.

Life up until the industrial revolution was dominated by a single factor: the Malthusian limit. The Black Death obliterated that constraint. And, since it reoccurred every 10-15 years, it continued to make the Malthusian limit a non-issue for a long, long time.
OK so now you have one good security certification and a dozen BS phony ones, and plenty of international drop ship / amazon fba sellers happy to counterfeit the legit certification. Now what?
Start a marketplace and only accept listings for products certified to meet certain minimum security standards. Publish extremely clear and accessible guidance on the requirements and how to achieve them for certification. Gradually increase the requirements at a pace that the industry can keep up with. Advertise heavily on news reports of high profile security incidents.
In my experience, saying "I don't know" outside of an academic environment leads to two consequences: 1) People will stop listening to you in preference to loud people who "know"; 2) Loud people who know will use your admission against you.

Sadly, the good habits that you learn in academia will come back to haunt you when you move into industry.
On a VM that someone else runs (i.e. Google or AWS), is either /dev/random or /dev/urandom cryptographically secure?

If no, are there any "safe" choices? (other than an external source like an HSM or hardware random number generator)
seems great for my reinforcement learning models. instead of parsing my hyperparameters through the tensorflow cli API and editing the training file a line at a time to take in an additional hyperparameter, I can just directly set them through the cli with fire.
Julia is increasingly becoming better than R and Stata for data cleaning. Many of its metaprogramming tools beat `dplyr` in syntax and features. So if the data-cleaning to regression stack (which i would guess is different than scientific computing) is your thing, then i would recommend trying Julia out.
A decent analogy might be:

is it possible to recreate a running program from just it's source?

(lacking a compiler, development and production environments, and perhaps user inputs)

so my feeling is, not really, to an approximation
curl -C - -O http://yourdomain.com/yourfile.tar.gz

Why the dash between the -C and -O?
I think a better parallel are tax breaks such as mortgage interest deductions and other tax breaks that the poor generally don't use to get into a house and the wealthy benefit from a great deal. Same goes for the systems for prepaying for college and such.
> So it was basically a slavery contract for n% of your life

This is not an exaggeration, as it would clutter future cap tables and cause your co-founders to reconsider working with you.
How Einstein's equivalence principle extends to the quantum world
I went through this thought process with SIT[1] -- it started out with issue tracking hard-coded into it but it has been later extracted into a separate model and the data & process models are being refined to make them much more generic and support other use cases.

[1] https://sit.fyi
That paper is interesting because it proved that the used car market doesn't exist. A proof of a false result is not a good proof.
Thanks! Short stories are my favorite, so I'll be sure to pick this up.