skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience with those analogies is that they fall at different parts of the programming/software development spectrum.

Writing an algorithm <-> Making a recipe (clear, explicit directions, missing details means that things don't come out as expected except by chance). Any analogy based on writing clear directions can be appropriate here.

My preferred analogy here is more like: The computer is the dumbest employee you will ever have, can you write well enough to communicate to it precisely what you want? Ever worked with a very literal person? That's the computer. It'll do precisely what you tell it to do, even if it makes no sense with a moment's thought.

Larger scale programming (software engineering) has better parallels to the design, and somewhat to the construction of, buildings. There's a reason we call them software achitects. The connection is closer to design work rather than traditional labor (construction). Where there is an analogy with costruction it's in project management generally, which is a discipline that spans all design and development fields.

Really, there are many appropriate model to consider and it depends on what you want to do.

I work in distributed, critical avionics software. I have an agent-based view of software as a consequence of this. I model (even single threaded programs) as a collection of agents communicating with each other (a classical view of OO, also related to the Erlang model, and Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (which I don't apply formally, but I keep the concepts in mind)). I encourage my new people to play with golang and erlang for a reason (though we can't apply either for reasons, they're great at informing the mental model I want them to have). But that's just the software design/writing/modeling aspect. There's the larger environment in which the software gets developed that also has to be considered.

Other people have a database oriented views, data flow oriented views, etc. Sometimes appropriate to their domain and background, sometimes not. You should learn all of them so that you can communicate.

===============================

Mental models are one of the most useful and most dangerous things. They're useful, especially when shared, because they allow you to communicate more effectively with others. They become dangerous when they go unchallenged. My agent-oriented view? Can you imagine someone writing (for a single 4MHz microcontroller with maybe hundreds of kilobytes of memory) in that model? Designing, maybe. But writing the code may require a more explicitly imperative style just for the constraints placed on the program. On the other hand, that explicit imperative style doesn't scale well to dealing with hundreds or thousands of servers (or in my case dozens of nearby radios in a mesh network). It's appropriate within the radio, but not when conceiving of the network itself as a computer itself.
Probably better than a diet that's 40% or greater soda + cookies + cakes + candy, which mine probably used to be before I started keto lol.
Club 33
Morgan Stanley’s Failure to Comprehend New GPU Tech Results in Nvidia Downgrade
https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37 is one possible solution to anonymous IPFS.
Proper public transit, especially subways, are really the answer to everything...

"Can't find jobs!". Well, often it's more "Can't get to the jobs you could do". Public transit!

"Need to do more for disabled people!". Public transit! (assuming its built with accessibility in mind).

"Need more affordable housing!". Public transit! Further apartments are now viable again (need a lot of public transit though, otherwise all you did is massively gentrify an area and kick the poors out).

"Too much traffic!". Ok, you get the drift.

Yeah, it's expensive as hell to build...except for the benefits, its probably cheaper than everything else you can do. And even if its not...the benefits are just that significant.
I love meow wolf. It's one of two or three reasons I'll go to Santa few (from abq), but really only for shows now so I can get in later. Even then, my wife and I have had horrendous experiences there because Santa fe is a total piece of shit city.
I would rather deal with snow problems than with dead people
For all I know the plastic posts are bendable, you can run them over and they spring back up. I know cause I ran one over and both the car and the posts were unscathed.
> If you can build a system that doesn't require time synchronization, yet doesn't have any significant drawbacks relative to what Spanner provides, you'd be better off using this alternative system.

But you describe exactly the drawbacks of giving up time synchronization:

> The main downside of the first category is scalability. A server can process a fixed number of messages per second. If every transaction in the system participates in the same consensus protocol, the same set of servers vote on every transaction. Since voting requires communication, the number of votes per second is limited by the number of messages each server can handle. This limits the total amount of transactions per second that the system can handle.

How is "worse scalability" not a significant drawback?

This just sounds like an engineering tradeoff. I don't think engineering tradeoffs are the same as controversy. I get that your group's DB takes a different approach. But "blaming" Spanner for making a different trade-off doesn't come off well (I approached the article with an open mind).
If you're a US citizen, FAA regs still apply.
Introducing+Petastorm:+Uber+ATG's+Data+Access+Library+for+Deep+Learning
It took like a decade to produce a computer verified proof for the Kepler Conjecture. And that was just for a relatively well-defined exhaustive search. That sounds like a molehill compared to Mochizuki’s Everest of a proof.
Wayra accelerator gets a complete makeover, will focus on ‘more mature’ startups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole

George boole lived in 18th century. He came up with boolean algebra which is used extensively in digital circuits.

Euler, Newton, and Gauss all lived from 16th - 18th century and they are responsible for a large chunk of the math we have today which a reason we have computers.

We stand on the shoulder of giants.
you really eat straight butter? I'm 2 weeks into keto, but that doesn't sound too appetizing lol.
The growing movement of indie internet businesses
I wouldn't call you an old fart... It's just that you understand that massively distributed databases are usually premature optimization.
Yeah except flux code is way simpler than tensorflow code, both for the end user and internally as well. It's not a premature optimization, it comes "for free" in Julia. Besides, you don't know what someone might need. Say someone wants to implement a deep learning model with complex valued activations or quaternion valued activations. What then?

There is no complexity added in flux to support arbitrary datatypes; Character level lstm in about 30 lines of flux. The flux library itself is a very, very small library. Converting character lstm to a custom datatype is about three lines of code (plus about 60, reusable, for the datatype).

This speaks to the good choice of abstractions in Julia. What you may call unnecessary optimization is for me critical research since I'm investigating building hardware and I want to make sure the fp type (and it's not at all a standard IEEE type) I would implement is usable. Most deep learning is memory bandwidth limited so a decrease in bitsize has an O(n^2) effect in computation speed.

In the spirit of rapid iteration it was far preferable to implement 50 lines of code in Julia to get my type able to do machine learning and then know if it failed or succeeded rather than write a tf kernel, which probably would have taken me months.
now that's interesting

"The owner of this website (www.bird.co) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (BR) from accessing this website."

i understand them not shipping stuff to brazil, but full on block? c'mon. what if i wanted to see this and recommend to a friend that lives in the us?
Well, I understand your opinion, though I don't agree with you.

> - The chain of trust becomes completely worthless after I decide to put a new operating system on my device. This limits my choice and freedoms as a user of a device.

Actually, no. If you just want to replace the operating system, you're good to go. Modern android phones display the public key of the kernel when booting a non-OEM ROM and bootloader has been re-locked.
(granted, pretty much noone does that)
Maybe you are just being provocative, but do you really feel this way? I've been in world-class restaurants, and honestly the best meals I've had have been at home, with food made by family, friends, or neighbors. I can still recall a plate of food I had when I was about ten years old - steak, corn, salads, all from local farms or family gardens. One of the reasons I so seldom go to restaurants is that I find what I can make at home is superior to the average in a restaurant. Yes, there are amazing restaurants and there are certain cuisines that I go out to eat because they are laborious or I do not have the skills / equipment to make at home. Do you have something in mind that you have not been able to replicate at home, re: taste?
I don’t think this is an Apple app. The app info says the publisher is DeskConnect, Inc. The subheading says Apple, but when clicked to see all apps by “Apple”, it only shows this one. Looks shady.
Does anyone got any ideas (or know any posts) on how machine learning can be used to detect these types of attacks?
It's from Michelin.

* https://travel.michelin.co.uk/malta-national-map-801/
Seattle ends up spending more than 3x its per mile project cost estimates, estimates that are already much higher than what other US cities actually spent to fully build similar projects. The tunnel, the Pioneer Square streetcar failure, the bike lanes - it’s likely to turn out like Honolulu’s project. It’s a consistent record of mismanagement, and while I would love to build a subway it is not “propaganda” to not trust this council with it.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/930...
Coder's Block?  I prescribe 10 minutes of Eagle multicam downtime
I find it difficult to believe that no one at Google pointed out to management that this behavior was a very serious invasion of privacy. High level Google execs must have known of such objections and either ignored or overruled them, which means Google is deliberately and consciously invading privacy.

I'm also shocked that given the public's and media's increased sensitivity to invasions of privacy by technology companies, as is evidenced by the outrage over Facebook's actions this year, this news wasn't leaked by someone at Google much, much earlier.
Totally doable. Here I built a proof of concept of a DHT over Tor using IPFS's DHT libs: https://github.com/cretz/tor-dht-poc. I even went so far as making it readable (but not participate-able yet) via JS in Tor Browser though it's IPFS doing the heavy lifting.

I would guess you'd just start a different IPFS network, not the main one, and have a set of reliable onions as bootstrap nodes. Then just store the torrent info from its hash like BT mainline and I guess have people pin it. I have not dug too deeply, but in general an entire IPFS network all over Tor is very doable. Now, that's for a tracker, for actually downloading the data that's a different deal.
> We frequently see cheap shots at capitalism, where on the same issues the major alternatives attempted in the 20th century were all actually far, far worse. I

The main alternatives to the system originally described as “capitalism” that was tried in states which already had developed capitalist economies in the 20th century were blends of elements of democratic socialism with capitalism that have since been dubbed the “modern mixed economy”; they were so successful compared to actual capitalism that they have essentially completely replaced it in the West, while there are persistent efforts (which sometimes succeed in driving some policy) from the capitalist class to drag the West back to (or at least toward) 19th Century capitalism.

(The only other alternative tried in any significt way in the developed West in the 20th Century was autocratic fascist corporatism, which, yes, is far, far worse than liberal capitalism.)

And the main alternative to that regressive pro-capitalist drive proposed in the modern West (aside from simply preserving the status quo design of the mixed economy) is simply progressively implementing more elements of democratic socialism, not adopting Leninism or any of the other attempts made in the 20th century outside of the developed West that attempt to bypass rather than advance from capitalism.

Though, I guess, it's worth noting that autocratic fascist corporatism still seems to have some adherents.
This Is Water – Foster Wallace Commencement Speech
Artificial Intelligence for Game Development
That's my impression of everything I've seen from Buckminster Fuller. As someone who loves his work, what would you suggest I read that isn't?
You make the assumption that material existence is somehow less than other (religious/spiritual). It doesn't need to be. For what it's worth, my takeaway was that there is so much mystery, wonder and complexity in the material existence that it's just as deep and exciting as any spiritual worldview.
And those people benefit too by having less cars & busses on the road because of the transit system.
It's not freebooting, it's more akin to hotlinking. Which is arguably worse - they're using the author's IP and hosting infrastructure without offering sufficient credit or so much as a heads-up.

This could quickly make a side project unsustainable, if the owner of a (hypothetical, not this specific) project has limited $ for hosting costs. The author of the project can't make use of the obvious strategy of dropping in an ad or two to defray hosting costs because the images are being hotlinked. This kind of behavior would be a violation of the ToS on almost any site that has one; it would certainly be a violation of Apple's own ToS. But beyond that, it's just thoughtless and rude.
T-Mobile’s fixed 5G to cover 250M+ with 300 Mbps+, competing with home ISPs
Hi there, thanks so much for the bug reports! Would love to see a screenshot of the clipped icon if you could e-mail it to me at rawrmaan@gmail.com.

The flickering when viewing lightbox/modal views is actually due to my navigation library, react-native-navigation, which is otherwise excellent. I believe they're fixing that in their v2 release, at which point those transitions should be indistinguishable from native.

I've also made a ton of progress on Android performance in the past month, including the mindblowing realization that I had set hardwareAccelerated=false in my app's manifest over a year ago. The game should now be very smooth in all views, even on very low-end Android devices :)
Bringing Robots to Homes: Mario Munich’s Story
NYC public transit is not "fully functioning" anymore.
I suspect US regulations make it very hard to block incoming calls. I think it has to do with not blocking calls coming from another phone network.
Britain’s Housing Casino
The Logical Fallacy Collection: 30 Ways to Lose an Argument
I remember I had two tourist books for my HS NYC trip, and one recommended never taking the subway ("because its mostly for locals, and hard and confusing" or something like that), and the other basically didn't mention it at all. Filling a Metro card was like discovering a secret power in how much of the city I was able to see in a short timespan.

One of my favorite stories from that trip was getting a call from my father that he got last minute Broadway tickets for us in a couple hours, while I was on the Ellis Island/Statue of Liberty ferry. When he heard where I was on the map he was concerned I might not make it to dinner/the show on time, and I knew I had the timing on my side with the Subway to get there right on time. (And I did.)
I haven't written much about it except in comments here on HN. I agree there should be more out there, I hope I can find the time to do some writing.
Also a factor is that the game is balanced for human inputs. As many crazy micro trick videoes demonstrate by doing things like optimal gapping zerglings against siege tanks.

If players could do that reliably we would start seeing major unit changes. It already happened to the original void rays who would do things like attack themselves to maintain charge to keep massed annihilation capability.
> That's with 1930's signalling - with modern signalling, they could run trains every 90 seconds, for a capacity of 100k per hour. And that's just on two tracks.

That's an extremely optimistic number - running a train every 90 seconds would leave people basically no time to get on or off the train, and ingress/egress gets harder as platforms get more crowded.
Southern California just saw its longest streak of bad air in decades
I don’t know for sure, but to me the AP vs CP interpretation seems only to be a true limitation for distributed systems of exactly two nodes.

I also like the blogs point that availability is not ever 100%, but I think the added cost of availability levels when going from an eventual consistency system to a linearizable one is underestimated because performance is going to be a significant availability factor, not only failuremodes as discussed.
Patent what? The better world?
Open Bionics – turning disabilities into superpowers
asyncio is more modern, more stylish, and more concrete.

Twisted is more timeless, more patterned, and more self-aware.

I can imagine Twisted's asyncio reactor becoming its default (and the Twisted flow control slowly declining in importance), but Twisted's protocols, control structures, and execution models becoming more popular.

Twisted has undergone a great resurgence in quality engineering since asyncio became more viable - this was surprising to me, but is actually probably reasonably consistent with the way the historical influence of the standard library.

Overall, I think that Twisted is a great project; I almost always reach for it when my python codebase becomes mature enough to need more thoughtful abstractions around network I/O.
Hexavalent chromium (chromium-6) found in 75% of drinking water
From the article:

> Mozilla's ill-judged adoption of the EME standard downgraded Firefox from a long-standing beacon of software freedom to a well-featured browser much like any other.

I think we need to level up our understanding of how power structures are changed. Either you have an intense revolution, or you have incremental change marked by constant compromise and iteration. In the absence of revolution, which would entail somehow revamping the copyright regime in every major political region (US, EU, Asia), Mozilla had no choice but to implement this stuff in order to stay in the game.

It's infuriatingly easy to stay pure on the sidelines, just like it's infuriatingly easy to be a senator in a safe state casting moral aspersions towards senators in swing states. But senators in swing states get things done; they're on the front lines of change. Mozilla's getting things done, working against both entrenched corrupt political and corporate interests, and armchair technological purists. The way to help the situation isn't to criticize organizations like Mozilla for compromising. It's to change the environment so compromise with corrupt institutions isn't necessary.
I admit I don’t have much experience with those, I’m a Keras and CNTK guy but the principles will be the same: marshal your data into a huge matrix of floats/one-hot and hand it off to training where it will spend 99.9% of it’s time.

I am a fan of strong/static typing and was once very active in the OCaml community but that just struck me as a very odd thing for the OP to say... it’s just not something that people doing DL worry about. It could be valuable in the marshalling phase but that all happens before DL begins and (in my experience) in a separate program.
Firefox didn’t take significant market share from Internet Explorer because it was open source, but because it was a better browser. Building good software (that happens to be open source) with mass-market appeal does more to further the open source movement than any amount of shouting from soapboxes.
I sincerely urge you to follow-up with this story. I would love to see what Apple does in good faith on this one - it would have a real impact on how I perceive them as a company.
Corey, We have heard you talk at multiple conferences and appreciate your perspectives. We are in the Bayarea and will definitely take up in your offer on some of the points you describe above. Thanks
Postgresql, llvm, Python, sqlite are pretty up there.
I’m an African, I’ve lived all over the continent (until very recently). What you say is correct. By many metrics life has improved, and that is to be celebrated. But internally, I’m a bit conflicted because for sure this development has also come at a cost: (1) some of us now have electricity, but we’ve poisoned our city air, (ii) some of us have running water, but we’ve destroyed our watersheds and the severity of droughts is increasing, (iii) we have better roads (thanks China!), but we’re extensifying our farm land into forest because we’ve been caning our soils, (iv) we’ve got 4g and mobile money, but man, our leaders still brutalize us if we step out of line.

In conclusion, I don’t dispute what you say, there is a great deal of wonderful progress on the continent, but the narrative should not be either/or, and of course varies by country, but it’s neither dystopian famine, or development utopia.
The author says that "Open source has won, so Mozilla's original mission to promote free software is no longer a priority," and that Mozilla should focus on advocacy.

But how can Mozilla's advocacy have any effect if there is not a competitive Mozilla browser? The vendors of popular browsers are able to ignore Mozilla and do whatever they want, because there is little threat that people are going to switch to Mozilla's browser en masse.
How Jim Chanos Took on Markets (and Elon Musk)
Atomic clocks aren't all that expensive. You can get a decent rubidium one for US $5K.
GitHub Survey for Nat
There is a lot of detail here, but the higher-level takeaway is this: the Python C API is a very "wide" API. It exposes lots of details of CPython: the good, the bad, and the ugly. You get direct access to pointers to the underlying objects. You manually manage reference counts.

For the polar opposite of this, consider the Lua API. You don't get pointers to any VM data structures except a single pointer to the "Lua state". You do not perform any manual memory management.

Lua's approach has yielded amazing results. LuaJIT is not only source-compatible with pre-existing Lua 5.1 extensions, it is binary compatible with them. You can take a .so that you built before LuaJIT ever existed and it will work with LuaJIT without recompiling. This is astounding to me.

Moral of the story: keep your interfaces as narrow and encapsulated as possible!
I think musl libc [1] has good quality code. If anything their build system is great. It makes the code much easier to navigate.

[1] https://www.musl-libc.org
It is a legit Apple app, released alongside iOS 12. Apple bought the app called Workflow which they've made their own, rebranding it to Shortcuts.
Here are some users that have a high chance of noticing visually and in aggregate would probably produce a lot of noise:

* Air and sea port operators and navigators

* Military personal running supply lines

* Military personal on foot in operations and training

* Space-X

* NASA

* River boats

* Fresh water fishermen

* Etc

Out of all the possible users who would notice a 300m deviation just based on visual reconciliation, I personally would not say it would be so rare that the USAF would not find out very quickly. Of course, this is ignoring the equipment that would likely detect the issue way before somebody in the Army started phoning the USAF.