skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “The long-term future probably lies with electronic rather than organic ‘life.’”

I guess this is the standard transhumanist position, but it strikes me as both pessimistic and overconfident. Pessimistic because it doesn’t see the life that arose against all odds on this rock as fit for or worthy of continuation on a solar timescale, and overconfident in its implication that we will inevitably create something in our image that will succeed us.
Ignoring the price volatility of an asset and the shear number of hacked/robbed institutions using it because you want it to be the most stable form of value store is confirmation bias.
Yeah the discoverability is terrible. Even knowing the feature existed, it took me four or five tries to find it again just before I commented.
>Yeah, if they actually wanted to censor something they would do it silently, by not showing it in people's news feeds.

Not really. Reddit does exactly this. Posts to /r/news are only allowed from a whitelist of "real news" sources.
Sure, but you can't transmit gold cheaply and frictionlessly across national boundaries.
What is amazing to me is that twitter still does not have a solution for sharing mobile links to desktop users. It is a really bad user experience.
Interesting story! Care to elaborate on what kind of PCIe devices you were using?

Was it GPGPU compute? Or were you trying to saturate a router / network of some kind? And do you remember what kind of problems you faced? (Latency or bandwidth??)
Exposing China's Digital Dystopian Dictatorship
It's fast for me too, apart from the one to two second load time for opening an email, inbox, filter, spam boxes etc.
I think part of the problem is every industry has a dark side. As with everything eventually it becomes a race to the bottom.
No secure boot doesn't prevent this directly. Secure boot checks for the booting OS. Boot guard is what checks the booting BIOS.
I would say "yes" to that. But fortunately, with the load being so widely distributed, the load on our "local" quantum computers would effectively be zero (ie. x/inf). Unless, of course, our universe is the oddball and most others are running at full capacity. That's a depressing possibility.
You’ve picked a point of the criticism and are trying to defend it. You need to drop your view of your own work when receiving constructive criticism. I agree with other comments. Your website is full of 3d effects and low quality pictures that imply it’s a product for children- and most importantly it doesn’t seem to mention your product besides the blog. A blog is a secondary strand of thought from the main page. You should only have to read the blog if you’re already interested and want to learn details. Also in the blog, you give a long list of features that are very difficult for non technical people to consume. There’s no value statement. It also reads like a side project and not a professional venture. If you spent $700k on this, you should really pay a professional to write some marketing material.
OP’s stance is (I believe) that we shouldn’t align our incentives along money only, but also on the core values of a company. Call it naive or idealistic but I, and obviously many others, believe that we have a responsibility as people and employees to work for companies with the right set of values. Truly lived, not just printed out and put up on the wall. I think this is something that motivates people these days. Do something with a good impact on this planet with the single lifetime we were given and f*ck the money (ideally have both).
Sure, but how is any of that relevant to voter ID? If you really care about integrity of the voting system, then you should also care about prioritizing the problems that are real, easily exploited, and have the greatest potential for harm. Voter ID is largely a solution looking for a problem, with undeniable side effects of voter suppression. It's being made into a partisan issue not by its opponents but by the proponents who are unjustifiably elevating the issue above more important systemic election vulnerabilities.
Despite the complete moral vacuum there seems to be a facebook, I do still believe that this isn't deliberate. But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have done worse. And stupider, since you mention it. It is entirely plausible that they are intentionally suppressing the news.

I find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after all.
Yeah. This argument seems valid for an individual cell. But not for new cells…
Sure it is.

There are plenty of companies which can't easily be categorized as having significant negative effects to the world. You can work for a "bad" company but consciously constrain your work to a business unit which improves customers' lives.

What you're using is false equivalence. You know what the worst thing for the environment is? Being born. Why do people insist on living when everything is bad? Reject the notion that you're powerless to change things.
I wouldn't call this toxic in the least. There is no name calling or childish behavior. I would just call it debating.

I have a coworker that is jealous of me and my boss because we go at it, but we both know it isn't personal. It is about making the right call on a project. We each think we are right and just trying to make our point

So I think this thread is just more intense but there is no ill will
> Proof by insistence?

Proof by statistics and facts. Hardly any women went to college back then. So that's about 50% of the population who were less educated. Thrown in minorities who were discouraged from getting an education, it's statistical fact.

Perhaps if you bothered to read my comment rather than jumping to complain about your students...

"Strange to think that people are nostalgic for an era were women ( half the population ) were discouraged from going to college and minorities were denied equal access to education."

> When you see the written reports the kids produce at my university you can only disagree violently.

Sure, the overall quality of the student body is lower because far more people attend college. But overall, the education level is higher collectively.

Also, instead of blaming technology, have you considered the quality of educators have declined markedly?
The parent comment about private naming convention is a red herring.

99% of the time in places where you might use a multi-line anonymous function you're already inside another function

So when you define your named function in Python, it is only available within the scope of the current method call and there's no danger of it being abused by other developers.

The lack of true private vars in python is a separate issue, and one of the best things about the language (because library authors inevitably get carried away and mark things as private which don't need to be - then you're stuck in copy & paste land... I did loads of ActionScript back in the day and this was super frustrating)
Are other jobs not an option for you? A lot of times, if you already have a job, the other jobs you'll find will be a step up from there. Why wait for 2.5 years to pass?
China is 91.5% Han. That's not what most people think of as "wide diversity".
Integration tests are your friend. ;)
>When you click on that you get redirected to promocode.org where you get re-prompted to click on the promo code and that's where the cookie promo gets tacked on the walgreens website.

Not quite. Notice that when you click "Show Code" (the first click), a new window is opened and the existing window is redirected to Walgreens.com. All the action happens on the first click.
Russia is in the EHCR, so I think it’s very reasonable to say it’s a separate institution.
It's a lot easier when you can just blatantly copy another pre existing game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rune_Factory
How many times do they need to be caught out before the razor gets blunt?
If they are relevant for a quantum computer, then they are not parallel universes. They are part of "our" universe.
Ask HN: Why not integrate the Google search home page into Chrome?
Even though it is already proxified/mirrored through their CDN, wouldn't shipping a cached copy of the Google.com page into Chrome save huge amounts of bandwidth and resources globally?
Wait, there hasn't been an update on Textmate in 4 yrs. And you're working on Jekyll?
At which time they'll randomly change it again.
I've been searching for a self-hosted feed reader for some time. Looks like Nextcloud News is unmaintained. Is it still worth looking into? (Java is a step too far, so I'll pass on Fiets.)
It’s because getting money is not a thing anymore
The big one is memory leaks. People also assume “race conditions” instead of “data races.”
Frankly that's between the board and their investors. I don't see why I personally should mind if investors' money is being wasted (as in Moviepass, or this company as you claim), especially if it's partially going to a big salary. Of course, if it really is such a scam, the gravy train will obviously end at some point.
I loved that you "think", but the reality is that you just don't know at all
A friend from the university used that line on his parents as an excuse for the state of his room. Luckily for him they didn't know enough physics to call him out on it because his room was not really a closed system.
I had a genetically trained neural network driving a car simulation* in qbasick in 1997, and it wasn't "novel" it was quite common back then to combine them.

*a very limited one, imagine 2d, no inertia, 5 sensors at 15° each other each reporting distance from the nearest "grass", with the road 20px wide, drawn by hand gray on green and fitting the screen 13 space. network was 5x5 neuron, with weights all part of the gneetic code. car never made past the fourth corner, let alone did a lap.
What really freaks me out is the day Facebook die, what will happen to all of this data?

If you heard about the NCIX story where they basically abandoned their servers filled with users data (over 13 years of data) and someone scooped them up and tried to resell them on the black market, one could think that a similar fate is possible.

source : https://www.privacyfly.com/articles/ncix_breach/

Obviously if Facebook was going under it would probably trigger a huge legal process on how to handle the data but it clearly doesn't happen for smaller businesses...
step 1: hook it up to a car
Riiiight, and fisherman only fish the species that are most prevalent in the sea.

You don't know how tragedy of the commons works, do you?
You meant Harvest Moon, right?
Mars is a large world. It's not as big as earth, but there's also no oceans, so the exploitable land area is roughly the same. And it is pristine; no one has ever exploited any of it.

With plenty of space and plenty of resources at hand, long term there's no reason a mars colony could not be self sustaining.

Whether that could be true as early as 2050 would depend, of course!
They were Intel X520-SR2 Niantic 10GbE cards (later 82599ES). Bandwidth. It was challenging to find a stable recipe on linux to receive TCP streams at or near the media limit (x four ports, simultaneously).
It's not the indexing that's the trick. That means nothing in this context. The interesting part is how a site with no backlinks etc can outrank a ton of other sites. The running hypothesis is that google treats all aws links as being owned/operated by Amazon.
This was not about gasoline cars, but electricity generation trough using natural gas.

You lost the context of the discussion and became angry and insulted me.
Ologies with Alie Ward is a personal favourite (Alie interviews a different ologist each week).

Philosophers in Space takes a sci-fi tv show or movie and examines the philosophical ideas behind it.

Download This Show by the ABC (Australia) is a great listen about tech news.

Citation Needed is great but only for those who like their comedy loud and offensive.

Rocket Ranch is NASA's podcast and is nicely geeky.

Also Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years is fascinating and funny.

Apart from that, +1 for Reply All, Darknet Diaries, Hardcore History and Syntax
Apple wins appeal of $234M patent dispute with university
> it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users

You nailed it, but large private sector companies like Google (or Apple) have no genuine feedback loops: they do not care, because (1) vocal dissenters will never represent more than a rounding error of the user base, and because (2) there are no obvious exit options.

It's Fordism ("you can have it any colour, as long as it's black"), only with 21st century tech.
Lightning network uses bitcoin to confirm transactions between people. Bitcoin network is limited to 7 tx/s - do the math.
Isn't that similar to golang's (now deprecated) stable HEAD philosophy? On larger projects with tons of human resources that works out OK, but for a smaller team wouldn't living on the bleeding edge & dealing with every issue be a ton of work?
maybe I'm missing something but the only reason they want google in there is to steal as much tech as they can.
It's far simpler than having to teach all the prey animals ( from rodents, to birds, to snakes, to reptiles, etc ) to learn a behavior.

It's not like we don't have experience wiping out animals before. The only reason it isn't done is because the naive minded will cry about the poor cats.
I'm not sure whether or not you misread GP, but just to clarify in case, GP means that the malware used code that was leaked from the NSA, not that the NSA was directly involved in making the botnet. This popped up in google: https://threatpost.com/pyromine-uses-nsa-exploit-for-monero-...
Why use a homebrew Perl script for this when Postfix (and likely most other MTAs) has features available that can do this for you?

Want to block all mail from any domain name that's hosted by Cloudflare? That's simple enough (and doesn't require taking a shower afterwards, unlike when writing Perl).

Just grab the plain-text version of the file that contains the list of Cloudflare's IP address ranges [0], create a CIDR table [1] containing those ranges (followed by a "REJECT"), and add an instance of "check_sender_a_access" to your "smtpd_sender_restrictions" [2].

(Bonus points for taking a couple of minutes to write a shell script that runs once per day from cron, grabs the latest version of this text file, adds " REJECT" to the end of each line for you, and triggers a reload of Postfix if there were any changes to the IP ranges that it needs to know about.)

[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips-v4

[1]: http://www.postfix.org/cidr_table.5.html

[2]: http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtpd_sender_restrict...
because inevitably is an adverb, and ageing is a noun
This is a terrible argument. There are biological organisms that don't age. And we can design mechanical systems that can be made to run (essentially) eternally by swapping out parts. The human body is constantly turning over cells, so there's no intrinsic reason it couldn't have evolved to function this way.
Hey that's pretty funny, but I'm on a 2014 Thinkpad with an i7, and it's slow and stuttery for me as well.
Then you can answer this: How does lightning confirm transactions between 200M?

And what are the limits of that network?
Or you write an iterative version of it that will not only be the simplest solution, it will be fast enough to compute fib(10000). There are constant time ones IIRC, but if someone comes up with such a solution in an interview without knowing it from before, they are probably over qualified for any job that uses the Fibonacci sequence as an interview question.
> But after you've finished getting through the stuff
> that all languages share (hardware sucks, dependencies
> suck, etc), a dependently typed language will be a
> matter of fixing compiler errors, not watching
> percentages of 500s in prod and crossing your fingers.

I am speaking from very direct experience here.

I was involved in a Rails 3.x --> Rails 5.x upgrade of one of the larger Rails monoliths in the world and the trivial sorts of things a compiler can catch were... well, also pretty trivial in our upgrade path. Just not quite as trivial as they'd be with a compiled language (nobody's denying they have the edge here)

> To model the constraints you create in a dependently typed
> language, you have to create a set of tests and checks in
> your dynamically typed language which are basically the
> equivilant of a full dependent-type-system.

No, that's not how you do it.

You don't "model the constraints" explicitly. You write integration tests, same as you'd do in any sort of language. If MethodA from Class1 is passing the wrong stuff to Class 2 from MethodB, your integration tests will fail. At least, assuming you've got proper coverage.

But even in a staticly typed, compiled language you have to write that test anyway, right? Because you need make sure that code path actually works anyway and MethodA is getting the correct response from MethodB there.

There are definitely advantages to strongly typed, compiled languages! To be honest, after a few years in Ruby land, I'm ready to GTFO and go back to something a little more static. But Ruby's not the nightmare you describe it as.
In addition to everything else, they've eliminated the different colored stars & icons. I liked those and used them to highlight mails I wanted to get back to.

Now there's only starred and unstarred. (Be careful how you use 'important', as Google tries to learn from that and gets it wrong.)
The new font weights have such a stark contrast, it's hard to look at. It's enough that I'm finally starting to piece together the parts to leave gsuite for my personal domains.
Do you know Facebook creates shadow profiles of you by tracking your online activities?

How would they do this if you never visit the site or download the app? If you're referring to the use of a pixel, compared to the full-fledge use of cookies used by other ad networks (the Gizmodo article from yesterday itself noticeably had ads all they way down the page based on sites I'd recently visited), surely that alone doesn't make FB evil relative to other advertisers?

what about when all your friends use Facebook? Then you are going to be forced into a situation where you either use Facebook or stay disconnected from you friends.

Why are you forced to use Facebook or be disconnected from your friends? You still have texts, email, Twitter and phones. I know a few people (admittedly not a lot) that refuse to use Facebook. They complain occasionally because they believe they are missing out on seeing photos or something, but nothing to the point where they are in the dark. I think the use of Facebook is a convenience and each person has to weigh their values against what they know Facebook does. But let's not elevate what Facebook does beyond the level of displaying ads for money and crossing ethical boundaries in some instances about what data they use to target those ads. Based on some comments you'd think they were proactively trying to destroy the world.
Are you sure `Matrix[[1,1],[1,0]] * * 46` isn't optimized into a constant value by the bytecode compiler? Idk Ruby much, but it seems like a possiblity.
I like to pin dependencies but upgrade them weekly with CI. All my tests get ran and a PR is created automatically. This gives us both stability and visibility with the trade-off of more upfront work to get the automation going.
Sure, that's a nice approximation, and it will reduce performance somewhat IMO, it'd be nice to quantify how much, no?
Interesting idea that I have never heard of. Thanks for sharing.
Genetic algorithms are (and were already back in 2000) a pretty decent and -more importantly- generic solution to the problem of global optimization (as opposed to local optimization) when the problem to optimize has some sort of (maybe not-so-smooth) structure.

Many of the recent "AI" development very often boil down to finding a local extremum using some sort of ski down the slope optimization program (aka "training"). These techniques very rarely tackles global optimization, or when they do, bundle it up under the moniker "hyper-parameter tuning".

A good example of something that falls under "global optimization" and isn't often tackled in deep learning would be finding the correct deep net architecture for a given problem.

The problem doesn't lend itself very well to local optimization, but might yield to GA-type optimization.
Privacy Heroes
> Those £60 sneakers with 20% off? Yeah, ok then.

How often do you find that those £60 sneakers were "on sale" for 20% off on one site, while being "full price" at £48 on other sites?

It's pretty common for me. There's much less variation in the price something is selling for than in the amount of "discount" you're supposedly getting.
Even after two grilled Senate hearings in this year, Facebook has not taken things seriously
Hrm, your statement seems to suggest upgraded versions are primarily security updates. Good projects backport security updates (for LTS versions anyway), and new versions with new features come with their own new security issues.
First rule of fight club, don't talk about fight club.
Nice! MTA-STS is for the email space what HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is for websites.

This RFC has been around for a bit, and if I understand correctly was recently moved to the status "Proposed Standard" from "Internet-Draft".

I'm glad to see email security continuing to move forward. Thank you to the people who put what was undoubtedly considerable time into making this a reality.

Question to those who are more knowledgeable: Is there a way to determine whether a particular inbound connection is respecting a domain's MTA-STS policy? It'd be nice to be able to monitor what percent of incoming connections are MTA-STS aware, as a way to measure adoption.
Huh? Well I meant if they want to censor something silently they could get away with that.
Per the RFC, MTA-STS policy "presence and current version are indicated by a TXT record at the Policy Domain. [...] To discover if a recipient domain implements MTA-STS, a sender need only resolve a single TXT record."

It doesn't remove the need for DNSSEC. Reading elsewhere in the RFC you find this gem: "the mechanism described here instead relies on certification authorities (CAs) and does not require DNSSEC, at a cost of risking malicious downgrades."

So, basically, you use MTA-STS to prevent malicious SMTP TLS downgrades, but it doesn't actually prevent malicious downgrades unless you use DNSSEC. At least everybody has an excuse, now, to add an HTTP client to their mail transfer agent. Plus, now you get to duplicate MX information in two places, DNS and the WWW, even though it would have been trivial to declare STARTTLS as required in the TXT record.
Are there? I disagree with the article, but have we really conclusively found organisms that do not age?
> It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm.

Who's claiming this is malicious? In the first couple of replies to the tweet, there's talk about how this is probably due to a poorly designed anti-spam algorithm that's badly in need of a whitelist.

That said, Facebook is responsible for the actions of their algorithm. If their algorithm starts blocking critical articles, it's still egg in their face.
This would make sense if we weren't multicellular and didn't have the ability to repair damage and replace cells. Aging is preprogrammed to ensure population variance which is need for survivability in times of sudden environmental changes.
Its a free world and last I checked its not illegal to work for FB. Trust in market forces to take it course.