skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One can be wary of, for example, the increased infrastructural strain of, say, large numbers of uneducated third worlders entering a country suddenly, without being hostile to or fearful of their culture.

As somebody who is passionately pro-immigrant, I haven't been shy of having this conversation with people. The whole issue of "infrastructural strain" is difficult to address in a way that feels non-adversarial, because the facts only live on one side of the issue. Every credible study has shown that immigrants are net contributors to the economy contributing far more to the tax base (and hence to the infrastructure) than they take in terms of services; the only counter to that is vague tabloid anecdotes that are quite transparently racist and xenophobic.

But facts like this do not matter in such a debate; people have an emotional discomfort with immigrants. When pressed, the defense ranges from "Fine, I don't have any facts to support beliefs; that's just what I believe" to -- perhaps more honestly? -- stories of how immigrants "aren't like us," how they "swarm like cockroaches", and "breed like vermin", etc. (Those last two from a couple of prominent Brexiteers whom I'd started the evening legitimately intending to befriend. Things got real honest after the second pint.)

So can one have "legitimate concerns" about "the increased infrastructural strain of, say, large numbers of uneducated third worlders entering a country suddenly" without being a xenophobe? In my experience -- and really, I've wrestled with this -- no. Not any more than one can have "legitimate concerns about conspiracies of international Zionist bankers" without being a raving anti-semite. In both cases, straight-up lies are being used to provide a cover of legitimacy for attitudes that are unquestionably xenophobic, and often virulently so.
This makes sense. I'm all in for having fewer people, but if we could reach the same welfare with 1% of resources we use now, we could easily 100x the human population. Even if the planet is finite, there is loads of room for more people without destroying the rest of the planet. The problem right now is that we don't have the technology and the resources are finite. It also looks like we may be paying for the over consumption soon in the form of climate change... Without a major scientific breakthroughs there is no room for more people really.

What we can do to reduce population? Education. Worrying about poor people in poor countries having more babies? Educate them and help them to get a proper job - problem solved.
Acadia is relatively tiny compared to the western parks. Still possible to get off the beaten path, although it's more like a public summer retreat than wilderness area.
I haven't thought about this in years. Love that sound track. Thanks
FLAG_SECURE:

* overworked, out-of-coffee developer of "secure" messaging app forgets to set FLAG_SECURE. Oops.

vs.

FLAG_CACHE_ARBITRARY_IMAGE_OF_MY_INTERFACE_TO_HELP_ANDROID_APPEAR_MORE_RESPONSIVE:

* overworked developer of "secure" messaging app who is out of coffee forgets to set this flag. App doesn't appear more responsive but also doesn't cache an image of the interface. Yay security!

* But... app devs default to not caching images of interfaces, thus Android appears less responsive overall to the user.

FLAG_SECURE exists.

Therefore Android's appearance of responsiveness trumps secure defaults in this case.

Boo.
> Oracle threw the hot shit

Right, Oracle as an organization did, not necessarily the engineers who will be tasked with fixing this.

> Oracle is going to abuse its staff

Not necessarily abuse, but obviously, having 30 days to fix something is a much more saner experience than when every minute counts.
What are some container technologies that could be used for this right now?
The Death of the Level Designer: Procedural Content Generation in Games (2008)
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/27/apple-product-component...

> [Tim] Cook commented on the inaccuracy of estimated cost breakdowns on Apple products.

> "I haven't seen [them for Apple Watch], but generally there are cost breakdowns around our products that are much different than the reality. I've never seen one that is anywhere close to being accurate," Cook said
> Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, etc [1]. Just look at what companies are pumping 10's of billions of R&D dollars into.

What fundamental research are they pumping money into, regardless of imminent commercial promise? What set Bell Labs apart was the level of fudnamental "Well, we have no idea where this will go, but we can afford to throw some of our monopoly money at it" environment.
It's a profession that's mentally and emotionally draining. My education background is in psychology, worked at a mental institution for a few months as a mental health assistant. Never met a psychologist that was actively encouraging students to go the therapist route, in fact the opposite. It's something to think long and hard about. One memorable encounter was an aunt of my friend literally grabbed me by the arm when she found out I was planning to be a psychologist and advised against it. Thought "who is this crazy lady", she was head psychologist of several institutions for the district...
Hi, I'm the lead developer of another app in the same space, we've also been blocked from updating our app for several months now. Interesting to see that this is happening to the the whole community of apps that compete with apples own screen time.

The worst answer we've had to our use of the APIs has been "the API might change in the future and your app might stop working" - about the location API
The non-traditional databases got better and better while Oracle kept doing a lot of the same stuff

I'm not sure this is true, you can look at the new features in 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g, 12c and see that Oracle is adding a lot of features, and some of them are very impressive. The problem is most people don't need most of them and if you want any of them you have to pay for all of them.

And the "non-traditional" databases had a pretty low bar. MongoDB just had to stay up for more than 5 minutes and not lose your data. Do they even do that yet?
My comment was unclear, and I agree that this is how it's meant to work.
No affiliate links and he says he makes money. How is he making money?
I agree with jakegarelick, a good therapist will not hospitalize you.

What matters is for you to talk.

Why would anybody not deserve to be alive? Life is fundamentally nonsensical, and our struggle / cross ( depending on how you see it ) is to put meaning into it. This is why life is at the same time a tragedy and a liberating experience.

We are ephemeral, and not this important at the individual level. Only thing that matters is not harming others, eventually doing good to others if we are lucky, and finding joy in little things ( intellectual endeavours, earthly pleasures, art, sunsets, you name it ).

If it can help, a reading that helped me when I was deep in depression in my 20's was the The Gay Science, by Nietzsche. Don't read it in one go. Keep it with you, and read a few aphorisms every day. Some three liners aphorisms from Nietzsche made more impact in my life than everything else I read combined. This book literally saved my life.
Fun? It's a job, not a hobby. A job which is underpaid because there's a near-infinite supply of cheap labor.
The Alexa hardware is cheap and doesn't have a lot of computational horsepower, so you can get better accuracy by doing the speech recognition on the server side.
"If you’re the kind of police department that would hire someone who attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, you knew something like this was going to happen..."

Really? Attending one meeting warrants condemnation? Gee, even journalists do that.

The Post "forgets" that Senate Democrats voted many times in the past 20 years to place a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and the top KKK recruiter in his state[0], as the #1 Democrat in the line of succession to the U.S. Presidency.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd#Ku_Klux_Klan
"Simpler and cleaner" Proceeds to show a window inside a window with 7 panels filled with lists and text everywhere.

I was not sure if they were joking or if they were serious.
I guess it’s an analogy that has been in my mind for a while. Rubists are often quite eager to distance themselves from the legacy of Perl. But, the connection is very strong to me. In terms of design goals (programmer happiness), and over all feel (sigils, context variables, infix conditionals) and there’s quite a bit more I could point out.

In fact, many Perl developers where saying things like, “Ruby until Perl 6” not long ago. The difference between two (i.e. Ruby and Perl and similarly Scheme and Common Lisp) IMHO is that Ruby has as an additional goal of wanting to be simple and elegant (which I would say similar to Scheme in contrast to CL).

Whereas, the aesthetic Perl has always been after was programmer productivity and happiness even at the expense of having the capacity to look like line noise. As a result it’s got everything and the kitchen sink sometimes at the expense of apparent elegance (which seems similar to CL in contrast to Scheme).
I once drew the ire of a large private security company and could have sworn they had the ability to listen to my cell phone microphone
I don't think they use haproxy (or at least they don't heavily rely on it). But once you start with properly scalable tools, you "just" need to have a high bandwidth and many machines, and everything becomes easy. Think about it for a second, put a 40 GbE NIC into an single-socket haproxy 1U pizza box, you get this for $800. Take 25 of these in a rack, connect this to an L3 switch doing ECMP and you have 1 Tbps of DDoS absorption capacity. For $16K. I know pretty well I'm oversimplifying the problem, but it always starts this way, and after this you adjust for various aspects (small packets, reflection using tools like PacketShield, TLS handshakes using more CPU cores, large connection counts using more RAM) and that's about all.

The heaviest and hardest to maintain features in these environments are the fat stuff that customers want (WAF, monitoring, UI, config versioning, etc). But basic protection is trivial if you can afford the bandwidth.
I hadn't noticed that. Thanks. That's made my day.
But no matter how severe, or far-reaching an epidemic may be, Olivarius says, "Human beings are very comfortable at saying, 'It's not happening in my backyard, therefore it's not affecting me.'"

I feel like the modern age, with our flood of news access, has basically demonstrated why. It's a coping mechanism. There are simply far too many terrible things going on in the world at any given moment, for any one person be able to concern themselves with every one of them.
This is what the Accessible Scala initiative did

https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2018/06/14/accessible-scala....
Well done! Very creative solution to the problem and using the V8 system as a starting point is brilliant!
This is not good.

Africa is going to explode by a billion this century while Native Europeans worldwide continue to decline, having been since the '80s.
My company responds to subpoenas with a wiki article on how client side encryption works
Hey All, happy to answer any questions.
It is what it is, and what it is in JavaScript is this:

Object.prototype.pipeTo = function (functor) {
return functor (this);
};

function inc (input) { return input + 1; }

// this will write out "2" to the console log
new Number (1).pipeTo (inc).pipeTo (console.log);

HTH
> namely when you need fully up-to-date information on every query, no matter what

So you basically want full consistency (vs eventual consistency) in a distributed environment. You can set up you noSQL that way. I don't see how relational DB's are "better" than noSQL in consistency.
I've thought of that, but the problem is that it needs to linearly interpolate between the more accurate values, and depending upon how finely grained the linear interpolation is, you would need a pretty big fixed point multiplier to do that interpolation accurately.

If you didn't want to interpolate with an accurate slope, and just use a linear interpolation with a slope of 1 (using the approximations 2^x ~= 1+x and log_2(x+1) ~= x for x \in [0, 1)), then there's the issue that I discuss with the LUTs.

In the paper I mention that you need at least one more bit in the linear domain than the log domain (i.e., the `alpha` parameter in the paper is 1 + log significand fractional precision) for the values to be unique (such that log(linear(log_value)) == log_value) because the slope varies significantly from 1, but if you just took the remainder bits and used that as a linear extension with a slope of 1 (i.e., just paste the remainder bits on the end, and `alpha` == log significand fractional precision), then log(linear(log_value)) != log_value everywhere. Whether or not this is a real problem is debatable though, but probably has some effect on numerical stability if you don't preserve the identity.

Based on my tests I'm skeptical about training in 8 bits for general problems even with the exact linear addition; it doesn't work well. If you know what the behavior of the network should be, then you can tweak things enough to make it work (as people can do today with simulated quantization during training, or with int8 quantization for instance), but generally today when someone tries something new and it doesn't work, they tend to blame their architecture rather than the numerical behavior of IEEE 754 binary32 floating point. There are some things even today in ML (e.g., Poincaré embeddings) that can have issues even at 32 bits (in both dynamic range and precision). It would be a lot harder to know what the problem is in 8 bits when everything is under question if you don't know what the outcome should be.

This math type can and should also be used for many more things than neural network inference or training though.
Maybe we should force them to exercise too? Or perhaps we should take a vote on what is definitively healthy and restrict the public's diet to pre-approved items? If China has social credits, maybe the west needs government enforced health credits?

As it is, FDA bureaucrats are appointed, not elected.

What are the costs of deferring individuals' choices to a mob's vote or to the whims of appointed bureaucrats?

Advocates of centrally planned societies will always point to the purported benefits of their authoritarian models.

At what point is the individual responsible for his own health? If we absolve the individual of all personal responsibility and replace it with a set of all encompassing dictates - What does it mean to be a free human being in such a society? How would this differ from being property of the state?
Alan Kay has asserted repeatedly that there's no place like Xerox Parc in the modern world. Not necessarily authoritative, but something to think about.
If all 7.5 billion people want to live in the prosperity of upper-middle class US or North-Western Europe, that may be a problem: either because they get it (and the planet becomes inhospitable for mankind) or because there will be conflicts (see current migration issues) due to the inequality that is now broadcast by a world wide communication network.

So one way to keep or raise the standard of living for everyone is to have fewer people consuming resources for it. The most humane way is voluntarily not creating new kids and hoping that this helps quickly enough.
I considered a more textual representation, but obfuscation of this serves a purpose. I don't mind people cheating if they must, but it doesn't have to be easy. And sometimes people enjoy reading the code but don't want everything spoiled.
It is sickening that there are people from less developed countries that are so desperate that they will work in conditions that our citizens would otherwise find intolerable. You think this is a good thing??

We should be paying our own citizens enough money to pick fruit for us, and pass the cost along to the consumer. So what if an apple costs three times as much? We can afford it. And we wouldn't be selling our souls.

Besides, there will probably be robots doing these kinds of jobs in the next decade anyway. The strife caused by importing a large population of people who have nothing in common with the existing population is NOT worth cheap fruits. Seriously. How did you get conned into thinking this was a good idea?
AT&T Bell Labs made videos like this:
https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?list=FLHa3ljE2SLOERhULuoHNx-Q
The Alexa device itself is rather cheap and the running a relative huge model on 'edge' device is still fairly expensive and remains an open question. Again it falls into economic side of things, it makes sense to adapt a layered model in this case, to delay more expensive processing to the server side.
The web in 1995 seemed magical. A whole new universe to explore.

The web in 2018, in fact for a few years, is actively hostile on every level. You so something as simple as view a document and someone will try to execute code on your computer, present you with a distorted view of reality for psychological manipulation for their own profit, sell you counterfeit goods, make a record of everything you do incase it can be used against you years later... This is not what we meant to build
Less Europeans could be a good thing
Kali linux configure
Not to speak for @rauchg and the team, but I think the answers are 1: no (or not soon) and 2: yes
> MongoDB just had to stay up for more than 5 minutes and not lose your data. Do they even do that yet?

What are you implying? Do you have any source for that? Some of the top tech companies out there use non-traditional databases, including MongoDB. They won't if the nodes crash every 5 minutes and/or there is data loss.
not if you are trying to escape :X
Unblock Blocked Sites in Saudi Arabia with a VPN
It could be possible that Alexa was accidentally triggered and recorded interesting snippets as a side effect.
"Even children can use it without difficulty!"

IMO A child would only find it easy to use if they were already a seasoned coder. The IDE looks overly complicated.
I'd say things like AlphaGo are "fundamental research". Really, any of the top tier AI labs do what's often considered blue skies research, and have a huge concentration of talent.

Microsoft also has a long legacy of funding a large variety of CS research.
Yeah, I find that really obnoxious. I've stopped reading the Quora email and clicking on links because of this. I actually have the Quora app installed, but I think they must have screwed up the app links in the email, so it doesn't open the Quora app anymore (I'm on iOS, and I use the Spark app for emails.) So it's just a bug that opens the browser instead of the app, then they hide the whole page with a popup and there's no way to continue reading the answer. Really frustrating.

Anyway, I guess they've done a lot of testing for the popup and it's better for their business model. Maybe they can show more ads in the app. But not sure why they can't just show the same ads on the website. The weekly digest email is actually great and it would keep me coming back to Quora, but they've ruined the whole experience.
wasm doesn't as of now have any means of code generation independent from the JS api. There is also no way to obfuscate call targets or corrupt heap outside the module's linear memory. Any sandbox breaking bugs that do not involve JS would be codegen errors, AFAICT; in that case what you need to analyze is just the wasm blob and its interaction with the codegen pipeline.
Well now I want to try this with my Echo, but I'm too afraid it'll actually call the police and I won't know how to stop it haha
What Packt pays its course authors revealed
> The parks are heavily curated and managed

The Bill Bryson book on the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods) gives a very different impression. It seemed to him to be underfunded and pretty badly managed with individuals trying very hard despite limited funds and support. Alarmingly there was even logging being done. I have never been to any of them.
Firefox Focus has this enabled, and some banking/payment apps (the developers knew about the flag).
That's because you take my criticism of the overall laziness as the ultimate end of my comment. It's not. It serves as context to answer the question that the article prompts: Why are techies enamored with Pr. Hariri, their "doomsayer"?

And the answer is directly related to the fact that there is a search for contrarian-ness, a quest that is not introspective at all because that would actually require some effort rather than passive content consumption.

You choose to describe my criticism as "putting people down" as if my goal was to be mean, but I suspect you are more annoyed at what you interpret as arrogance rather than anyone's feelings. I don't mind you thinking that but I don't think that's the case.
Experiment that ended in 1767 still linked to higher incomes, education levels
Meet the Plantfluencers
Chicago Gamers Will Have to Pay an Extra Tax on PlayStation Store Purchases Soon
Just because there's "next to nothing" doesn't mean there's actually nothing. The speech recognition sometimes has false positives on the wake word. Also there's the tiny chance that the victim yelled out Alexa in an attempt to get evidence to the police.
> The 9 percent tax will hit PlayStation services on November 14 ... PlayStation isn't the only digital service affected by Chicago's Amusement Tax. Spotify, Netflix, and Xbox are all subjected to the same taxes enacted under mayor Rahm Emanuel and has seen Netflix raise subscription prices in Chicago. ... The tax isn't popular in the city of Chicago, but Emanuel says the taxes are necessary to shore up the city's pensions. Several companies like Apple and Netflix are taking action against the city for the taxes, but until any changes are made PlayStation gamers are now subject to the same tax as other amusement activities.
I was made aware of this posting by Packt on Upwork. It seems that they pay their video course authors $1000 and a 16% royalty for a 3-4 hour video course.

This seems to be comically low. Packt seems to have a reputation on HN for being a "lower end" publisher, but this puts those $10 fire sales they have on content in a new light.
By the way, when you have very few devices to aggregate values from (let's say only 2 haproxy nodes), there's a trick you can use to still aggregate their values over peers, assuming you are willing to maintain different configurations on each node.

The principle is that there will be one table per metric and per node, and each node will track values using its own table. This way each table is written to by only one node, and all nodes get all the table updates. They are then free to watch other nodes' values in their respective tables.

Using the arithmetic converters it's even possible to add or average values between all tables, but then this quickly becomes complicated, as for example you can't easily take into account the number of online nodes in your operations.
This is why this is mostly workable with two nodes and not really much more. In this case of two nodes, you either use your own value or the average operation if you can ping the neighbor.
Plus, if you lose your phone and you don't have your SMS msgs backed up, they are lost forever pretty much. With messenger, because they are not device dependent, they are still there. You can access them from any device (mobile or desktop) which is connected to the net.

I haven't used an SMS in ages...can't even remember the last time I texted or received one.
You need to consider inflation. In 1970, the inflation rate was 7-8%/y on average, so the "growth" these numbers imply did not exist in reality.
The Ethics of Study Design
No, I think the grandparent post was arguing about slowly eroding privacy. If they set a precedent, they could abuse it later.