skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use Google Chrome very casually, mostly for development exactly for the very same privacy concerns as people have so I stopped using the Google Account integration for a long time explicitly because of these worries. I was extremely surprised to randomly see the browser logged into the account I use for YouTube.

As a user this is greatly worrying to me. I want my browser to not do anything like this without my explicit consent -- especially since I knowingly avoided doing it... I moved out as much of my digital identity from the Google Cloud as I could. I obviously can't escape needing to use YouTube, but everything can't be perfect.

I gotta be honest, I have some worries regarding Firefox, too. Too often they have pulled shady things and got into bad with terrible people. (the unwanted advertising stuff being auto-downloaded for Mr. Robot, the "fake news detector" thing, etc. etc.)

I find it extremely important to have good, independent open source alternatives to commercial web browsers and each step like this is a step towards one interest trying to take over the core of our internet experience. Pretty scary.
For consumers, navigation makes a lot of sense, especially when on foot, or on a bike. It's unsafe in many instances to use your phone, or even to wear headphones for turn-by-turn instructions.

AR translation of text is already awesome but cumbersome using a smartphone. This would improve it a lot.

Speech-to-text for hearing impaired folks would be really nice, as well as visual indicators of loud or dangerous sounds, with directional indicators. You could imprint someone's vocal signatures or a keyword so your friends could get your attention at distance.

In professional or enthusiast settings it's also quite useful to have a heads-up display for many "live" tasks. Cooking, construction, surgery, driving, sports, policing, you can even tether to a battery pack in some instances.

In short, any setting when your hands are occupied but you can benefit from some sort of data feed.
Firefox here I come. Google’s update, to automatically take an action on my computer that I specifically don’t want, is an egregious misuse of technology. This is what Microsoft might have done in the early 2000’s for which they were rightfully vilified.

What happened to “do no evil”?
This is true. Complete understanding rarely occurs until one can understand how to wield this knowledge.
It could as easily be said: before they hit the street and became politicized, many drugs like Cocaine and Heroin were used in over the counter medicine and even consumer products like Coca Cola to treat a variety of ailments.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be researching these chemical's potential benefits to humanity now, but it's not like these drugs were clamped down on for no good reason. We saw what many of these drugs were doing to society, completely banned them to try and counter that, including Universities in the process, and over time we've begun to develop an understanding and different perspective on these drugs, and now the pendulum starts to swing in the opposite direction.
I came away from this article feeling cautiously optimistic. As the article noted, they had 800 applicants, accepted 50, and graduated 35. It's great that those 35 got jobs, but what do you do with those 750 people who couldn't get in? Do you train them in something else that requires a little bit of tech skills, such as CNC machining?
I'm with you on that. I once left the gas fireplace on for 6 weeks. Fortunately, nothing bad happened but a large gas bill.
Quick side note: the main graphic on your website displays "Upload template", "Set up fields", etc.. in the default serif font on my computer probably because I don't have the Avenir Pro font installed. You can probably fix this by converting the text to outlines in Sketch.
This also applies to complicated parametric CAD models, assemblies in particular.

Three schools of thought on CAD:

Unconstrained, design in place at assembly, and or part level.

Partially Constrained. Given that which is known, define, test, and process according to numerical input.

Fully constrained. At part level, this can make a lot of sense, but not always. At the large assembly level, resolving all those degrees of freedom get human and very compute intensive. Today, pretty much all very large models, rockets, planes, most of cars, is either partial, or design in place.
> When you're looking for escape hatches, you know the software is working against you.

I would say that when you're looking for escape hatches, you know the defaults don't match your personal preferences. I understand why some people don't like combined login. However, I personally prefer it, and I guess that the decision to add it was made on the basis of believing that most people would feel like I do, or at worst feel neutral.
I'd believe it, cats have the urge to hunt whether there are mice to be hunted or not. We had one particularly ferocious hunter who would go after chipmunks, birds, and snakes after the barn was clear of mice.
But taking your logic for whether or not that's ok, then the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook should also be considered "cut-and-dry," since the terms and conditions users were accepting meant that the user gives explicit permission to read metadata (read: demographic data) of the user.

TBH I'm not sure I agree with you either way, but if that's what you're arguing, then let's give equal treatment where it's due.
If you are remote, you don't need to be in the bay area. While a harsh reality, the bay area is a crazy expensive place to live, and I would say do so if you have to, not because you want to. And if you do want to, work where it makes sense.
I think a big problem with "apologies" nowadays is that they are often not apologies at all, but exercises in ritual humiliation.

True apologies (e.g. what passes between people who care about each other when one of them transgresses in some way) are conversations in which someone expresses concern for the injured party and makes it clear that they're unhappy about what they've done. They aren't structured or formulaic and might not even contain the word "sorry".

The kind of "apology" that parents force uncomprehending children into ("Say you're sorry!") is a totally different thing. We all remember going through it. It has nothing to do with genuinely understanding your duty and responsibility towards others, it's just a Pavlovian training device. Child misbehaves, parent humiliates child, child learns not to misbehave.

The social media public "apology" is even further removed from the real thing because it usually relates not to personal relationships and authentic emotional responses, but to making insincere sacrifices to the political correctness gods in order to limit damage to career/reputation/revenue/share price. There's no point critiquing them, except perhaps to evaluate them as some kind of dubious art form.
Hmm. At least with revolut, app only means they can do infrequent SMS auth (for setting up a new phone) and otherwise use the stable phone for auth. I suppose the key point here is that requiring their users to have a smartphone allows them to really simplify auth, but that doesn’t preclude also offering a website. Maybe they just don’t think most users would want it? (My personal usage of revolut is quite limited and the app works fine for me.)

Maybe the bigger question I have here is what the core innovation is. I use revolut for the cheap currency exchanges, but there’s no reason any other bank couldn’t offer that. Maybe the market for such services is just very small, or most traditional banks make more money by selling add on services (mortgages, say) based on a very tight relationship (vs revolut’s more temporary/limited usage model).
Question: How do I sign extensions I wrote for myself so I can actually use them, without uploading a copy of the extension somewhere? That's my roadblocker right now. I don't know how to migrate make my own extensions work on my own system without uploading them to other people's servers. (Yes, I want Firefox stable. I don't want to run a buggy browser.)
That’s actually the concept of ensemble learning! [1] The question is, how would that lead to predicting a randomly placed elephant as an elephant with high confidence?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_averaging_(machine_...
I have a self-hosted domain too, with docker-mailserver, but only for less important email. For important communications I really worry about ending up on a spam list somewhere and landing directly in people's spam box, plus there are potential downtime concerns, so I stick to GSuite for that.
I’ve never seen this happen on any website, ever, and I’ve used the dev console on some pretty insane websites. Come up with minimal steps to reproduce and file a bug like a normal person, like the other comment suggests.

People like me use Firefox for their paying job daily and somehow we still don’t find it beneath ourselves to file bugs.
I'm curious if any of you full-time tech worker folks have ever read a significant portion of a math textbook and done the exercises just for fun/fulfillment. I've tried starting Concrete Mathematics myself a few times during multi-day breaks from work, and it's tough to keep it up when work starts back up again.

It's frustrating to me that it seems like this window during which you can get to some of this knowledge (college) closes and the to lack of a teacher, the structure provided by a course, and sufficient time seem to be unavailable.
The bank can disable your account by mistake or have any number of other bugs affecting only small number of customers. With physical bank it is so much easier to make enough noise so at least they spend some time on you. With phone support they can just promise to call you later.
Can you tell the difference between American and British English speakers?
I feel so stupid for not knowing this existed; thanks a lot.
> I just don't think most people care.

Every single person I've explained how much data Google et al's regularly collect has cared a lot. My mother's first comment after hearing what Android and Chrome collect was, "Why aren't the in jail?"

Unfortunately, most of these people continue to use Google's services because they often don't have a choice or are not aware of alternatives. Please, actually talk to people outside your bubble and get their actual opinion (which might require educating them about the specifics of what the tech is doing).
pardon the delay here!
We do the matching - based on historical data on what makes a match "work." Groups formally connect monthly, but folks meet in between meetings at their leisure.

And thank you on the hamburger comment!
Yeah I realize that it's a convenience, but I don't see how this (the "hub" if you want) is the area these giants focus on (Facebook is launching one, amazon obviously had one for a long time).

They seem to think that "we'll let others sort out the actual smart home, and we'll provide the controller for the smart home, because that's how we corner the market for ads/purchases/subscriptions whatever". I can see the angle they are approaching it from, and it might make sense short term business wise, but unless peoples homes actually get smart soon, their Alexa will be collecting dust after a while.

> being able to turn on the lights by voice is handy even though it's far from "needed".

The Alexa doesn't do that though, it only does if your home already has a ton of smart home stuff! So it's an interface to control a smart home (or if you prefer the common terminology - make an automated home a smart home).

If I buy smart speaker thing and say "switch the lights on", it will find a lonely Hue smart bulb somewhere and switch it on. But the chance it will actually switch the bulb on is only 50% because if the last person to switch it off used the wall switch, the light won't come on! So a smart bulb is fundamentally incompatible with a normal dumb wall switch! Add a smart wall switch, and you no longer need a smart bulb! So the smart bulb concept is useless for any lighting fixture that has light switches.

And most lighting in newish homes these days isn't in bulbs at all, it's in spotlights built into ceilings etc, or it's a light in a window, connected to a power socket. This is the problem. "smart home" tech is in its infancy and there is a myriad of different standards that don't solve the problem of being 1) cheap, 2) able to replace dumb tech in existing installations 3) complete (in the sense that the lighting gear can actually fit ALL lighting in a house, for example) 4) not make existing tech worse, such as in the hue+switch example. The quality of a new smart switch can't be flimsier than the 90's switch it replaces. It can't fail even one time in a million to switch the light off. When smart tech fails, it must become working dumb tech. If these giants really wanted to make my home smarter- they could push to standardize or even subsidize better smart tech. That's how they will get into peoples home long term.

> My wife cares more about her $5 shopping rebate than she does her information being passed around to marketing companies

When people tell me that they feel that way, I like to tell them a scary privacy story. Doesn't need to be true, just a plausible dystopian near-future. It could be about how the "quick quote" on the medical insurance site shows a vastly different amount than her friend of the same age and medical history - and she can't help think it's because she recently visited an online pharmacy with a referrer being a google search for a scary symptom. Something like that.
So you're choosing a less-secure version of Chrome over just switching to Firefox? What makes you so loyal to Chrome?
WebKit isn't slow though.

Also the parent comment is about Google Voice, which is not a browser and therefore is not constrained by Apple's restrictions on 3rd-party browser engines.
the truly matters part i think needs at least 1 level of “but why”... okay they pay for it, but why do they pay for it? that’s the important thing... okay, it pays your salary and gives freedom, but why do you care about the product? what if it paid you nothing (but that didn’t matter); would you still work on it? why?

i’m sure you know these answers; you wouldn’t have gotten to “paying customer 1” otherwise
The US's election system has many issues, but Russia's system (at the present moment) is a complete charade.

At least with the US system, the rules and loopholes (as stupid as they are) are transparent, known, and understood ahead of time. There's no funny business behind the curtain.

In Russia, elections are secretly manipulated by the state. The US is a sometimes-dysfunctional democracy, but Russia doesn't have a democracy at all.
Several interesting points but maybe they show something different from what you intend.

Network stacks, databases etc. that correctly handle trillions of interactions, some of them adversarial, have indeed been "refined around [their failures] repeatedly" and have gotten pretty robust along the way.

On the other hand useful formal accounts of their behavior (distributed, highly parallel, loosely coupled, asynchronous) seem far, far way.

It would be helpful to have an account of approximation to formal properties, especially if that can help us understand how repair and refactoring can lead to progressively better approximations.

Perhaps the house of cards that is revealed is formal methods not software.
It doesn't need to be an emulator. It would more likely be a compatibility layer, like Alien Dalvik or Wine.
There is mainline kernel support. I don't know about how much is published as data sheets but it's basically an ARMv8 processor with GICv3 which boots using completely standard SBSA/SBBR. It currently boots using a standard Linus kernel.

They gave out a bunch of servers to many companies including Red Hat (where I work), but I don't think they ever made it to retail. That's a shame because they are/were spectacular CPUs.
Good proof methods are symbolic computations. Hoare logic and the predicate calculus are the two major examples I know of. In fact in my personal favorite formalism, a proof is actually rather a lot like an equation[1].

It's an observable reality that most "pure" mathematical proofs are rather less rigorous than the best CS work, simply because peer reviewers are rather more lenient than computing machines.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/E...
Is compensation really strictly less with a 20% pay cut? I'm from the midwest and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the compensation differences. Google-able "cost of living" calculators give me an 80k range for my midwest city salary, that works out to 35-62% cut.
> You can't simply propose an unfalsifiable idea and declare that the fact that the idea is unfalsifiable means it is rational to believe in it.

The fact that teleology is unfalsifiable is not the reason it is (potentially) rational to believe it. Russell's teapot is unfalsifiable, but it is not rational to believe in it. However, consciousness (for example) is also unfalsifiable. A conscious being cannot be experimentally distinguished from a philosophical zombie. It is nonetheless not irrational to believe in consciousness.
Many of those are reviled as well.

"just 31 percent look favorably on corporate executives and Wall Street"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/wall-stre...
Care to explain why Firefox is the most unsafe? I've been using it for a while now and the built-in privacy protections are great (would be better if they were on by default, but hey, we have this at least).
Really? Do you have a source for this?
> there would be a seperate log-in process for Chrome versus every other google service (which normally all share your current login status).

Sorry, not much of a Chrome user here. Why would I want to “sign in” to a web browser? I’ve been browsing the web successfully for decades without doing so. I don’t sign in to my text editor either.
What were the consequences (both formal and informal) if a student slept in?

People can do things that are both unpleasant and harmful to them for extended periods of time if subjected to sufficient coercion, social pressure, or reward.
Citation, please?
Adversarially generated inputs have been known for some time [1], so I wouldn’t call it a new class of attacks unless 1. there are other and older ways of attacking neural networks 2. new as in the last couple of years.

[1] https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example-research/
In my experience I never learned a single thing except from the exercises.
> purpose is not an intrinsic property of objects

Can you prove that? Can you falsify it?

> it is unfalsifiable, and for some reason you think that makes it rational to believe in

No, it is (at least potentially) rational to believe in it despite the fact that it is unfalsifiable, not because it is unfalsifiable.

We should merge this thread with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053609
I'm fascinated by it too. Though it does seem to conveniently ignore that this is probably made possible by stealing IP to get started.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to consider other mechanisms for technological evolution.
DRAM Boom and Bust Is Business as Usual
What kind of app is it? Is it an SPA or a mostly-HTML website with some bells and whistles?

I've been through the whole gamut -- pure JS, jQuery, Backbone, Angular1, and React. I love React because it's by far the most pleasant experience for my work. You would not get me to go back to pure JS over pain of death, it's just a non-starter for the types of apps we're building.
That is how I feel about my use of youtube-dl.

But youtube is so damn entrenched nowadays...
unums are at best very controversial. In actuality, I don't think I've heard a numerical analyst (save for Gustafson) come out in favor of them.

The original proposal that Gustafson had involved a variable-width format, which is going to absolutely kill performance in practice (particularly on the GPU-based supercomputers that are all the rage nowadays). The posit format was essentially a recognition that variable-width doesn't work.

The more serious error is that, well, interval arithmetic turns out not to be useful in practice. Essentially, the potential accumulation of error is exponential in the number of steps in the worst case, so interval arithmetic in practice too often gives you the answer "the result is 1, but it could have been anywhere between -inf and +inf", which is completely useless. He may complain that he doesn't want to use a numerical analyst to get work done, but the rebuttal is that numerical analysis is still necessary anyways, so promising that one isn't necessary is a false promise.
Teaching Machines 'Fairness'
This is why you almost always see "experience required" in job postings. It makes getting that first job difficult (you basically have to BS some), but you explain exactly why employers do it that way.
Apart from the fact that you get to choose which company you're forced to generate profit for, not really.
> The complaint is centered around Wendy's practice of using biometric clocks that scan employees' fingerprints when they arrive at work, when they leave, and when they use the Point-Of-Sale and cash register systems.

Why move from the mag-stripe card like they use at Denny's and other restaurants to track activity and spend the money on that kind of tech? When you're around greasy food all day your fingers can't possibly respond that well to the contact for reading their prints.
If the power users can't figure it out, is it less confusing for non-technical users?
What are you talking about? On x86 page tables were cached in TLB since their introduction. No mmu at all (80286) means that you're subject to fragmentation, and swapping segments is as expensive as a syscall since you have to lookup the descriptor through GDTR. x86 segments are scarce, expensive and cumbersome resources invented to cover bus width mismatch. Today it is not ever an issue. Even TSS is shared one per cpu, so much useless and slow its hardware part is.

We could imagine more segment registers and bigger descriptor tables, but that would be just poor man's manual TLB (manual always failed in cpus). If you concerned with constant checks, you may order yourself a cpu with BOUND instruction support and put it everywhere with the same result. Oh, it is already in x86-64, nevermind.

>actually a tree

It is 2 level "tree", afair. Directory and table. Please make your homework and research why segmented model was kicked off software arena by virtually everyone involved.
What exactly do you mean? (Honest question) Firefox works great on my tablet.
I used Monzo as my day-to-day bank for two months and have only stopped using it because I'm not in the UK and need to keep my money in local currency. It was a terrific experience. Having an instant push notification when money enters or leaves my account, treating card purchase reservations instantly as unconfirmed transactions and not as nebulous inaccessible money, having transaction information presented in a human-friendly format, showing foreign currency transactions in the foreign currency, not charging currency exchange fees, being able to add notes to transactions… it's such a stark contrast to the mobile banking efforts of mainstream banks.

By the way, if you're in the EU, bunq is a similar mobile challenger bank but based in the Netherlands and serving all of SEPA (if you're in the Eurozone you can use them as your main bank; I live in a non-Euro EU country so hold an account just for the hell of it).

Disclaimer: I have multiple friends who work at Monzo.
Ampere Ships Arm-Based Server SoC to Lenovo
Why are you telling _me_? You need to go to the person I responded to...
I switched back to Chrome recently because the ublock origin port on Safari has been pretty broken recently. Setting third party domain blocking options in advanced mode doesn't seem to work any more (can't save the settings) and the extension doesn't seem to be maintained any more, judging by the github repo.