skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting thought for sure, I hadn't made the direct connection that essentially the simulation creator would be "God".

I think at least for me personally, I think the reason for "less trouble having faith" in this premise is the implications of believing it. Religion asks things of you to subscribe such as Sundays, cognitive dissonance with scientific findings (not all religions, I recognize generalizations are dangerous), tithing (again, some not all), and any number of social "requirements" of belonging to the community.

Playing around with this idea asks nothing but idle brain cycles and maybe some funny looks for saying crazy sounding things. Every time this debate comes up for me I think "Oh fun, I'll go play around with this some more and see if I find anything new" and then I forget about it until next time. I don't shape my life around it, I don't make any decisions based upon it, I don't get upset if other people dismiss it or don't "believe" it, and I don't even necessarily engage with the topic every time I see it.

Based on all of the last paragraph I'd say it's even a fair question how much I do "believe" this premise at all. My answer to that is that I don't believe in it in any sort of meaningful way, it's fun though.
A Lover and a Fighter
Why forbid commercial use? Wouldn't the GPL be enough and keep the software free?
hmm the apps infrastructure diagram for the crypto age showed what a weak offering there actually is imho.
"But Go isn't targeting C++ or Rust.. Go is trying to replace Ruby"...

If you listen to Ken Thompson and Rob Pike talk about the first days of Go, it was directly targeting C++. They mention the absurdly slow compilation times of C++ code at Google, and the high complexity of code that folks were writing. I believe Steve Francia's "Standing on the shoulder" talk goes into this, but I don't have time right now to re-watch and make sure I'm citing the right talk.
Node.JS is a fast and simple server framework. Perfect for userspace level applications, everything from simple chat apps to distributed services. It has a lot of potentials. Not just as glue for front end frameworks.
They're not useless, but yes, they are a form of trickery. It's a psychological technique that tries to make people who are lying or hiding things more likely to be nervous and more likely to confess (or be led down a line of questioning which eventually reveals new information).

The actual results from the machine are pretty much just a red herring, but that doesn't necessarily mean the machines have no valid uses. If use of a polygraph has helped tricked even one criminal into (truthfully) confessing or scared away even one person with malicious intent, then they're useful.

I wouldn't want a polygraph to be used for evidence in court, but I would want them to be used if I were interviewing for FBI/CIA/NSA. (But I definitely wouldn't want them to be used for firefighter and parademic positions.) I know it's a bit paradoxical that they can be both useful and a sham, but I think that's how law enforcement views them, too. This article presents a lot of issues with how they're used, but I wouldn't expect them to be phased out for a very long time (unless someone makes a version that actually has more scientific validity).
Didn't icculus distribute this years ago?
It's a great way to discredit someone if you get lucky enough that they perform poorly on the metrics that the test measures.
Ha! We do offer powerful "personal information analytics" in terms of GDPR, https://pii-tools.com :)

It's more for auditors and DPOs though.

The challenge with GDPR is more simplicity, taming the mess. Rather than adding more options. What sort of use-case scenarios do you have in mind? What need would SQLite exports solve?
Almost evreything has DNS resolvers setup. How many places verify their DNS queries are not full of evil?
> One layer

Yes, that's why I said "layer beneath" and not "layerS beneath"
Can you provide a citation? To my knowledge, the Archive does not use Amazon's S3 storage system (which they refer to in places as "S3" [1]), only they're on their own internal storage system [2].

[1] https://archive.org/help/abouts3.txt

[2] https://archive.org/web/petabox.php
Those denials have no value.

It seems clear that this is a large scale counter-operation led by the US government and that it has been ongoing for quite some time.
Wall Street Journal article on the same topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pence-calls-on-google-to-drop-m...
Show HN: Custom UI Designs for Your MVP
If you don't mind me asking, did the book do any explaining of why the magic computer words were in a foreign language (English)? Had you been exposed to much English already when you picked up the book?

As a native English speaker I feel fairly ignorant of how programming is taught in other (human) languages. I recall a quote [1] by Eric S. Raymond commenting (or perhaps speculating?) that Linus commented his kernel code in English because it never occurred to him to do otherwise. But I'm curious for your perspective as I imagine the experience of a child learning from a book is quite different from that of an adult who is immersed in the English-dominated "hacker culture" on the internet.

[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4
They still hold up in courts, and it gives an air of authority. A surprising number of people still believe in them as a valid tool.
I've included a one-line docker command example to upload. Working on a place to share that source as a repo, but it is the same JS code as you see in the body of the blog post. Happy to answer any questions, and CC&C welcome!
Love it!

Seems it works for nearly all SM sites.
Don't use JSON, XML has been able to do that since 1996!

I actually agree with the premise – my startup is http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ – but SQL is too complicated and abstraction-resistant in a dozen different ways to be a suitable foundation.
> Finally, in response to questions we have received from other news organizations since Businessweek published its story, we are not under any kind of gag order or other confidentiality obligations.

They're really covering all of their bases here. I guess any human or set of humans can make mistakes. That would include Bloomberg, but I'm utterly perplexed as to which side could be so completely wrong right now.
However Apple or Amazon didn't back up their claims. If Bloomberg published an article of this magnitude which could be demonstrably disproved, it'd kill Newsweek's reputation.

More importantly, think of what would be Bloomberg's reasons to publish a false story versus Amazon and Apple's reason to deny a true story.
IANAL but what's to prevent the litigating party from immediately filing a Daubert motion against an employer who tries to say they used the polygraph to 'scientifically' disqualify a prospective job seeker-since you can't just hand a polygraph machine to any on-staff HR rep and go "No go see if Bob here really graduated from MIT like he says", and the wealth of research telling us how problematic results can be?
I'm interested in checking it out, as long as we're not talking about the usual "reddit banned me for hating muslims" kind of Reddit alternative (which this doesn't seem to be, from what I can gather). Email on my profile.
This Tech Would Have Spotted the Secret Chinese Chip in Seconds
I was born raised, and went to CS undergrad program in China before come to US. Yes. I can testify that the "Xerox Copy Machine" is the first thing they teach you about information security :p
The Death of a Successful Product
>> The whole point here is that you have these "conspicuously ideological" fields
or subfields, which are not doing real scholarship, not interested in truth,
but which rather are pushing a specific position and attempting to label as
evil and shout down anyone who disagrees;

Yeah, look- it's not that simple. In academia, we have to allow discussion and
debate to be carried out freely, but obviously it doesn't make sense to
dictate the subject of a debate and call it "free"! And the only people who
are qualified to choose the subject of the debate are academics themselves-
because nobody else has the expertise to make that decision.

So if academics choose to debate identity politics and "Theory"- well, that's
what they get to debate. If the debate is done in a rotten manner that is not
conducive to good scholarship, now that's another matter, but if the question
is if those fields should exist, the answer is yes, and the reason is that
they do (it's a tautology, OK?).

It's a feature, not a bug. It's a bit like in a democracy you must allow
everyone their political opinion, even those people who are against democracy
itself? In academia, we must allow all academics the ability to investigate
the subjects of their interest, else we don't have academia, we just have a
closed club of people who agree with each other- so, just like the fields
targeted by the hoax.
Any as in just any.
Unofficially, the policy is called "Too Big to Fail".
No, largely because it can make query performance harder to evaluate: https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js/issues/855
I'd like to see self-driving first appear for limited-access highways: the driving environment there is far simpler than other places and requires far lower computation. Just get on the on-ramp, hit "self-drive", and lie back and relax or sleep while your car drives to your exit.
Ask HN: Did you start and give up on learning Haskell or Purescript?
Did you try to learn Haskell or a similar language, but decided to give up? If so, any particular reason?
the pattern where people at the extreme margins of a trait proudly declare that the trait doesn't really matter for success

I just noticed yesterday for the nth time a girl on facebook posting her pic with a caption saying how true beauty is on the inside. Can't help noticing it's only the most beautiful girls who do that, which I've always found puzzling. You've shed some light on why for me, thanks. I'll think twice before again writing on here how unimportant talent is in music! (I'm a musician.) I just don't know about that. My favourite story about talent, from Kevin Spraggett:

"I remember fondly one conversation I had a few years back with Boris Spassky. We were discussing 'THE' Victor Korchnoi...Boris and Victor had been bitter adversaries for more than 40 years at the time of this conversation, and they had played more than 60 times in official competitions..(including 2 candidates finals)... Boris [said] that Korchnoi had every quality necessary to become world champion but lacked one very essential quality...and it was precisely this quality that prevented him from attaining chess' highest title. I coaxed Boris on...He began to list Korchnoi's many qualities: ...Killer Instinct (nobody can even compare with Victor's 'gift')...Phenomenal capacity to work (both on the board and off the board)...Iron nerves (even with seconds left on the clock)...Ability to Calculate (maybe only Fischer was better in this department)...Tenacity and perseverance in Defense (unmatched by anyone)...The ability to counterattack (unrivaled in chess history)...Impeccable Technique (Flawless, even better than Capablanca's)...Capacity to concentrate (unreal)..Impervious to distractions during the game...Brilliant understanding of strategy...Superb tactician (only a few in history can compare with Victor)
...Possessing the most profound opening preparation of any GM of his generation...Subtle Psychologist...Super-human will to win (matched only by Fischer)...Deep knowledge of all of his adversaries...Enormous energy and self-discipline...

'But, Boris, what does Victor lack to become world champion?' Boris' answer floored me: "He has no chess talent !" And then he roared with laughter..."
I remember (quite clearly) the day I was introduced to the Apple II+ and shown Logo. It was way over my (middle school) head- functions? recursion? so I went with BASIC and later Machine Language, but the ideas stuck and percolated and later helped me understand Emacs LISP and functional programming. I thought the integration with the turtle so that you could make graphics really was slick (compared to direct explicit mode in BASIC).

I'd love to get my hands on an actual physical Logo turtle.
This is very clear and doesn’t include any of the usual wiggle words corporate entities use to create uncertainty about facts. I’m personally assessing it as an accurate representation of Apple’s piece of this story.
I was looking for a statement by the "other side", someone in government who could give a justification as to why they're being used.

Is it simply because its the "standard" now, and bureaucrats don't want to stick their neck out by getting rid of it? Is the fact that it is a machine that has been around for awhile, regardless of efficacy, give people that much comfort? Or are enough people really that misinformed?

Its a bit like marijuana legalization coverage - its rare to find arguments for maintaining the status quo as opposed to getting rid of it.
The Feynman Lectures on computation[1] are a physically grounded treatment of the subject and include a section on heat and energy usage.

[1]https://www.scribd.com/doc/52657907/Feynman-Lectures-on-Comp...
Entanglement Renormalization (2007) [pdf]
Is there a preferred contact?
If they are so confident on the efficacy of their font, why don't they use the font for all the text on their website?
Erlang 19 is only 10% faster than CRuby 2.3 on a simple factorial bench. Web throughput is even closer as lots of it is C extensions.

I haven't made the comparison myself for a while but I suspect it's still very close.
iMac Pro and 2018 MacBook Pro Must Pass Diagnostic to Function After Some Repair
Open-source crypto wins because it's never just crypto. It's a whole system with crypto as one element.

The crypto may be the only hard part, but it's still just one part. Like in a password manager: Even if the crypto is somehow known-good, if the whole thing's closed-source, I don't know if the non-crypto parts aren't exfiltrating my plaintext passwords so my accounts can be sold to botters. In an open-source project, there's a good chance something like that will be caught without some bored person deciding to run Wireshark at the same time they're running a password manager.
Here's my take:
Apple is serious about security. They recognize beyond utility, it has huge brand value. In the fake news era, it seems Apple decided it was important enough to merit a response to set the record straight, no doubt a tremendous amount of thought went into this response and the decision to publish it.
I always wondered how non-english speaking developers from other countries who were first adopters of HTTP (or any new tech) reacted to words like "GET" and "Content-Type" and other things that were clearly invented by westerners. What would we think if we had to implement something new and use words we didn't understand?
I assume what people want to say is that Go requires nothing which other languages install via the system package manager. While "runtime" is not the correct term, the desire is real.

With Java you first install a JVM. With Python you install the interpreter and batteries. This always leads to version conflicts at some point.

In contrast, with Go your CI builds an executable, you transfer that to your server and it runs. You don't have to care about the version of some "runtime" already on your server.
All of those interfaces are trivial to implement in Go precisely because Go implements a much stronger abstraction. By contrast, if you only have those other abstractions you're quite limited in how you can structure your code. (You might not realize how limited you are, however, if those are your only options.)

As the article says, most languages settle for those interfaces because they can mostly be implemented as libraries with minimal refactoring of the existing implementations and their execution model.

They have their uses but they're not universal enough. If you think actors, futures, and async/await are so great, imagine having to write every single function invocation in that manner. It would be unimaginable outside of some special-purpose declarative DSL. By contrast, the concept of a thread--linear flow of logical execution of statements and expressions--is fundamental to programming. Even in functional languages with lazy evaluation or automagic parallelism. It's a basic building block similar to functions. And much like functions, it's incredibly useful to be able to easily compose those blocks, which is where channels and message passing come into the equation. One way to compose them is with actor and future interfaces, but that's not the only way and not always the most appropriate way.

Threads ended up with a bad name because of (1) performance and (2) races, but that conflates the abstract concept of a thread--a construct that encapsulates the state of recursive function calls--with particular implementations. Goroutines are threads, pure and simple, but [mostly] without all the baggage of traditional implementations. (That they can be scheduled to execute in parallel complicates the construct but also makes them useful for the same reasons traditional OS threading constructs were predominately used, except with much less of the baggage.)
You would think, though, that killing your own citizens is even worse. And yet they're getting away with it. I'm absolutely baffled that this is allowed to go on in the US. Any other country would revolt over this.
TBH that HIRES mode still bothers me.
SPARQL, part of the Linked Data / Semantic Web toolset, does support aggregate functions.
I don't think you are responding to what I wrote. I never suggested a one-size-fits-all approach.

I don't think the 85th percentile rule is entirely bad, just not a "best practice", which sounds to me like "one-size-fits-all". The Strong Towns post I linked to said it makes sense for highways as I recall, which seems perfectly consistent with what you wrote.

Anyway, to reiterate, I am still interested in knowing how frequently speed cameras and the like are used poorly. The only uses of speed cameras that come to mind in my experience were not on "controlled-access" roads and seem justified to me. In fact, I rode my bike several times on one road with a speed camera that many drivers whined about back when I lived on the east coast. It was not uncommon for people to drive 15 mph or more over the speed limit there, despite the pedestrians. If I recall correctly the speed camera was added before a pedestrian crossing.

Edit: What I am recalling was actually multiple cameras on multiple roads. http://www.gazette.net/stories/12092010/laurnew185647_32536....
Wouldn't it be possible for a company to take the GPL'd software, change the name, and sell it along with a non-GPL asset pack? In that case, the game being open source is immaterial
> All of these things are extremely cost sensitive.

Say their profit margin is 1%. If you offer to pay them a 1% higher price, you're offering to nearly double their profits on whatever they sell to you.

Admittedly, that only works if you are a sufficiently large portion of their business. If you're a tiny percentage, then it may take a lot more to motivate them if their other customers aren't willing to pay more.
ha ha, nice. We need more people like Elon, hopefully he will never shutup
Amazing! That README is great. Here’s a snippet

Mike: Well, not really, unless they learn that they have to focus on designing a brilliant game, rather than writing brilliant code.

Matt: Ah, that's a good thing.

Mike: Yeah, I don't think I understood that until we started working on Descent. At first all I cared about was writing technically good code.

Matt: Then we ran out of money and all we cared about was finishing our game.

Mike: Right. Our code got ugly, but our game got done.

Matt: Writing code is easy. Finishing is hard.
You're right. I oversimplified a bit too much.

I should have write: Go produces native binaries, while Erlang runs on a VM.
I ask for both reasons. If there is a chance that this pattern could break RSA, I wouldn't be in a hurry to release it.
How many hours per work do they work? How do they find clients?
> Open-source crypto is no better than closed-source crypto

If the weakest link is the hardware (e.g. Intel ME, or Chinese Trojan chip), then this proposition doesn't even matter much.
I'd rather see "SPARQL[1][2] as an API language" myself. SPARQL is criminally under-appreciated.

BTW, if anybody wants to play around with SPARQL and see some of what it can do, the Wikidata public SPARQL endpoint[3] is very nice and comes preloaded with some great examples[4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL

[2]: https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-overview/

[3]: https://query.wikidata.org/

[4]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/...
IQ tests have been plagued with controversy including cultural markers and yet many continue to be obsessed with attaching more meaning to them that they can deliver.

How can we design tests and make definitive judgements about the best way to test intelligence when we do not fully understand it or even define it? What about things like curiosity, passion, emotional intelligence and team work?

Are we testing abstract thinking, visual thinking, language skills? What do they measure and how exactly do the scores translate into the real world? Without any comprehensive studies, data or evidence this quickly becomes a pseudo science.

Is there any guarantee and precision that a person with IQ of 140 is more 'intelligent' than a person with an IQ of 120? In what? In the IQ tests yes, but beyond that in what? The real world is much more than a single test in a controlled environment.

This is like claiming a student scoring higher than classmates in an english test will write a better novel or compose better prose. Does not follow, in the same way ascribing value in the real world to an IQ test does not follow.
Try www.supermicro.com. With the www it didn't work for me.
Panama Papers film examines how journalists speak truth to power
The type of illegibility matters, apparently. Decontrasting and visual noise stress a different part of the visual pathway to hard-to-read letter shapes. I'm trying to find the paper which describes this, but it's been at least a year since I saw it.

http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf reproduces the original effect. What's interesting here is that the effect is measured as significantly more pronounced in dyslexic students.
> U.S. Vice President Mike Pence sharply criticized what he said was China’s theft of U.S. technology

What? By Google wanting to enter this market? That's not theft it is called capitalism. Ever heard of that Mr. Pence?

> Pence said in a speech that business leaders are now thinking twice before entering the Chinese market “if it means turning over their intellectual property or abetting Beijing’s oppression.”

It is not like China needs any of this from Google. China is #2 in AI patents, what is remarkable given that their country consisted of a bunch of farmers and no economy at all just a few decades back. It is not like China is asking Google for help it is just the case that China suddenly is an extremely attractive market in regards of advertising cash.

> “For example, Google should immediately end development of the ‘Dragonfly’ app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.”

What do you care for Chinese citizens privacy? If I recall correctly you guys built an entire intelligence agency to collect everything possible on anyone in the world.

Awesome times we live in. Stick to writing children's books, Pence, as shitty as that was, it was better than this attempt at a public statement.
Ask HN: Off-Grid Small/Personal Solar Solutions
I need an off-grid solar kit that can generate enough energy on average each day to power: a Macbook for at least 5 hours, a router for at least 8 hours, and a single desk lamp overnight.

Any recommendations?