skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yup. Think about how you can recognize your friends without even seeing their face, by the way they walk, what they wear, how tall they are, and other contextual clues. Computers will be able to do all of that. Also think about other things that only computers with massive amounts of data will be able to do. Computers will be able to enumerate your wardrobe, your possessions. They'll be able to figure out most of the books you've read or own. They'll know where you work, what your schedule is, where you shop, what you do for fun, when you take vacations and where. They'll be able to learn all of this even if you don't freely give all this information up through social media posts and what-have-you by following you in the background of other stuff or through other "feeds". Imagine how much easier it is to identify someone in a picture or a video if you can pull in "big data" context which narrows down the possible/likely people who could be in that location at that time (wearing those clothes, doing that activity, within a given weight/height range, etc, etc, etc.)

We don't really know what the feasible computational and data limits are here, the potential (and likelihood, I think) is that they are much, much lower than where we would like them to be. In the near future something very close to ubiquitous surveillance is very likely to be the norm. And that has all sorts of chilling implications. If systems can keep track of where you are and what you're doing most hours of most days then that opens up a lot of questions in terms of free expression, political organizing, civil disobedience, etc.
Are you familiar with Total Information Awareness?
Would love to hear your thoughts on the article.
I've always said the key to utopia is shared hardship.
Anecdotally, I feel it's less common than merge commits. There are plenty of places driven by the "Merge Pull Request" button in GitHub and that's the default functionality.

In personal projects or those with fewer developers, I prefer rebase + FF merge for a clean history. I don't really feel the need to see the merge commit in the master branch history.
>blackbox security
Same here. It's a rather extremist view these days, but lately we're seeing just how damaging advertising can be to society. They are terrible because they certainly do work, and they're being vastly improved over time. The past few years have seen enormous developments in adtech.

If we extrapolate this, there will be a point where humans have designed such an effective persuasion engine that certain concepts of society simply don't work the same anymore, such as democracy or the free market. It will be a permanent change. We won't be able to close pandora's box, and we will simply have to adapt as a society without these features. There will be parts of us that we aren't prepared to lose, losses that we never even considered the possibility of.

It will be a loss of innocence that I don't think a lot of people are expecting at all. Most people don't think that something like advertising can significantly change what it is to be human, but technology has fundamentally changed us before. We should be more mindful of it before we allow it to happen.

Bear in mind that it doesn't require perfect persuasion of 100% of people in order to break a system such as democracy. All we would have to do is some slight statistical hacking or nudging, and we could make it so that certain outcomes are functionally impossible. It is probably already happening to some degree.
It’s controversial because China does not have an independent judiciary or any real civil rights protections, so the potential for and likelihood of abuse is much higher. See also the concentration camps containing over 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang province [0].

EDIT: Sourced claim.

[0] https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-e...
The expectation here is not for engineers to see requests that can be handled by the frontline support team. And when you have a sizable number of people asking for features you don't want to build (for a good or bad reason), you can pretty easily turn that into something that the frontline team (or their automation) can come back with:

"Thank you for your suggestion. This is a common request" and then "but we're not planning to build it for [some reason]" or "we're considering it for the future". Depending on if you want articles about how dumb your reasons are, or articles about how you promised you were working on it three years ago, and it never happened.
Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.
Your comment makes me think of one of the saddest tragedies of software development that bit me in the past. Ages ago I used a 'shareware' (thats what it was called back then) FTP client called BulletProof FTP. It was magnificent. It performed its task marvelously well and only had one bug I was aware of that ever caused me any trouble.

Then they kept working on it. With every version, they bolted on some extraneous garbage that made the rest of the application worse and worse. MP3s were popular, so they added searching FTP sites for MP3s... something that I find hard to imagine any human being ever did or wanted to do at any point. I eventually just had to stop using it, they made it far too aggravating. And they never even fixed the bug (after a disconnect, it would use the random port previously used for a data connection to try to establish a command connection and if the reconnect had been quick enough, the server would still be spewing binary data into what the client expected to be a plaintext connection, resulting in random garbage).
Windows 10 19H1 Build 18277 Is Now Available with Action Center Improvements
I am not sure I buy that, as humans are more like biological self programmable machines. Smalltalk or Lisp implementations, not C, if you get my meaning.
Long time mediators are familiar with this. When you drill down attention to smaller and smaller time resolution, eventually you notice that attention flickers.

Buddhist Abhidhamma sutra describes this phenomenon. Smallest flicker of consciousness is called ceta.
I think 250 ms is closer to vithi (kind of small molecule of mind- moments), than ceta.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abhidharma/

> We have seen that the Abhidharma’s analysis of sentient experience reveals that what we perceive as a temporally extended, uninterrupted flow of phenomena is, in fact, a rapidly occurring sequence of causally connected consciousness moments or cittas

...

> The Sarvāstivādins use the term “moment” (kṣaṇa) in a highly technical sense as the smallest, definite unit of time that cannot be subdivided, the length of which came to be equated with the duration of mental events as the briefest conceivable entities. There is no Sarvāstivādin consensus on the length of a moment, but the texts indicate figures between 0.13 and 13 milliseconds in modern terms

(My personal subjective estimate is something like to 40 ms)
I turned it off in the Bixby settings on my S8. I tried repurposing, but nothing worked reliably for too long, so I decided to just nix it.
Show HN: Update (added free data): Directory of 400 startup grants and gov loans
After getting a lot of feedback on my project FinanceLinx.com, which helps startups and growing businesses with finding grants and government backed loans, I've decided to make some of the information public. If you go to the site now, there's an option to request a sample of the financing data.

Please let me know how I can improve this, any constructive feedback is welcome!
I'm a matrix - really via riot client - user, but never used zulip...Can anyone cite 1 or 2 big benefits of using zulip over matrix clients? I'm genuinely curious.
My local phone company continues to serve me no matter how many laws I break using their service. My postal service continues to server me no matter how many laws I break using their service. Internet service providers should just be declared common carriers, and be done with it. When democrats eventually regain control of the congress and executive, I'm guessing this is what will be done.
The day length changes less as you get closer to the equator. It's not nearly a big a deal in Tuscon as it is in San Francisco (or Eureka).
I can tell the difference between different bottled water but not Pepsi and Coke.

But that might be because I rarely drink either.
How to build an on demand delivery app like postmates
rephrasing a popular on HN saying - if you're using somebody else's crypto app, you're doing it wrong.
> Or would it be unavoidable and become public information in criminal complaint filings and such?

I would hope this is the case. While details may be omitted it seems, to know how discovery took place is important in one's ability to challenge it.
The problem with gradual shifts is that physical clocks are pretty dumb and changing the clock once every 6 months is easier than 4+ changes over the course of a month.
> Of course, Snowden was only able to review what he saw 5 years ago or more. Why you have any doubts that the NSA, with ample resources to track and control, would use techniques similar to what the Chinese do? Do we really need another Snowden to realize this obvious fact?

Why do you have so much certainty? What evidence can you provide that they use or currently plan to use these techniques domestically for widespread tracking?
It was made public because the exposed operations of criminals led to threats being made against assumed 'leaky partners'. The police did not want these people to retaliate against other people and possibly endanger bystanders.

While it might not be mentioned in this article, it's mentioned directly in an article of the Dutch DA here: https://www.om.nl/actueel/nieuwsberichten/@104414/doorbraak/
Zulip supports itself by selling hosting (at zulipchat.com) and support contracts for on-prem installations. Everything is a part of the open source project; no proprietary add-ons.
Yes. The default GitHub-recommended workflow of having contributors do `git pull` to integrate their changes an easily result in a confusing spaghetti monster history even if the contributor only has 1-2 commits that don't merge conflict with anything.

For this reason, most major open source projects use that part of the workflow (asking their contributors to rebase their PRs on top of master and never use `git pull --merge`), even if they plan to merge the commits into master via a merge commit.

(The Git documentation is very aggressive in discouraging force-pushing of commits, but that advice is intended for a public repository, like the main zulip.git repository, that others might pull from. Obviously, we don't force-push to zulip.git, but if you're using Git right, you should be force-pushing to your fork when you fix a typo in one of your commits.)
Behavior change of that order is beyond our or the community's capacity. What you're describing is the reflex reaction that happens when pre-existing associations meet well-established brain mechanisms. It happens with this theme and many others.

The most we can hope for is, as tlb said, to downweight such boring reflexive comments and not feed them. If they end up with negative scores, that may be the best training mechanism we have. Telling people to do better doesn't achieve much; most people won't see the message, most of those who do won't hear it, and most of those won't think it applies to them.
>He’s being selective as he searches for new work because he doesn’t want to grind out unhappy hours for unsatisfying compensation.

I think this is a large part of the issue here. I only have my experience employing millenials to go by, but they're a group that seems to be less focused on compensation and career advancement than generations before them.
They're version of the American Dream is also different than generations before them. It's not get job, make money, get a house, have kids, etc. There's nothing wrong with any of that. Society has changed, and the economics have changed.

I graduated college in 1997 with $30k in debt, which was a lot at the time. Now, that'd be below average. I was the only one of my large group of friends that didn't own a house within 5 years of graduation. Contrast that with the cohort of millenials I've managed, and I don't think a single one out of several dozen have owned their own home. It's either not a high priority or seems so out of reach when student loans and the high cost of ownership in this area (Boston) come into play. Sure, they could maybe buy a place in suburbia, but again that's a smaller priority than in was before them.

My tl:dr; for the article is that they're less willing to work "just because" and have different goals than generations before them, and that's hard for people to grok.
As a minimum, most (all western?) countries have harse rules for advertising to children. Can we start by making a blanket ban on advertising childrens stuff, or to children?
I've always found it easy to see the whole system, and how it looks to others. (Ironically,) I can't understand how most engineers don't, and get annoyed instead.

I once spent a couple of weeks working out how to give helpful error messages in the yacc parser of an open source project, for issues that arose repetitively, annoying the maintainers... but it was ignored. They are still getting annoyed by those issues to this day. And I'm still annoyed about it.
It passed 60-40. The legislature would be foolish to ignore the electorate's clear intent.

CA has only a single timezone, the Pacific Timezone.
There are plenty of camera designs that are essentially invisible. There can be plenty of those cameras that are installed in an overlapping fashion. If you want to go vandalizing the visible cameras, you might get entered into the arrest queue somewhere but indeed the police likely have more pressing issues.

Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of random people - just like purges in the many repressive regimes around the world. The main win for repression here is they no longer need a system like, say, East Germany where 25% of population spied on their neighbors.

I suppose you might count it a win that in this coming future, your car isn't going to start when you act staggering drunk rather than when you objectively are staggering drunk. But I can't see the win here.
As an Eagle Scout I'll say that I'm not a huge fan of the BSA organization, but wholeheartedly support local troops. Not every troop is good, to be sure, but I don't think dismissing the whole of Boy Scouts is appropriate.
We are heavy Slack users. We tried Zulip. No one in the team liked the ergonomics of Zulip and how difficult it was to integrate. Just for threaded discussions we felt the switch was not worth it. It didn't stick and we stayed in Slack.
I think it is safe to assume that every country deploying networks of surveillance cameras and infrastructures for tracking communications won't limit its use to counter terrorism or other "good" purposes.
Why? Because they can, and because the first thing any powers that be do once they get the captains chair is to secure their position, and surveillance is an extremely powerful tool to get that goal.
It may seem excessive and paranoid, but again I would be surprised if they didn't.
But isn’t rolling your own crypto even worse?
Always thought it was super interesting/smart that they even implemented functionality just to make this easier, i.e. an extra textbox only they could see that let them set a username for comments they right.
I was hoping for the screen to fold the other way around, i.e it would be outside and it would go from portrait mode to square or landscape (eliminating the need of a 2nd screen)
Oops, sorry, I meant http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/wifiscan.py. We should fix that.
Thanks, your clarification is helpful. I think that it's more accurate to say, rather than "employers are unwilling to pay the market rate for labor," that "at the market rate for labor, employers have other options than employing workers."

Either they decide that the work is not worth doing at the higher cost, or they have some way to get it done other than directly hiring people to do it (automating, outsourcing, assigning more tasks to current employees, etc.)
This is what I'm waiting for. I can't find a reason to upgrade to the current line of MacBook (Pro, Air, etc.) Better performance, better battery life than Intel and I will no longer be funding Intel's lazy way.
You find that model in areas which in peaktime see too much traffic for a roundabout to work well. If traffic along one pair of roads is too heavy anyone on the minor roads can't get in. So the light serves to gate the heaviest traffic. During off-peak hours the light is off.
> Also, as a Canadian and Vancouverite... so what?

Even in the U.S....Washington, Montana, Michigan, Maine...this is fact of life stuff.
I don't see the point of an A-X chip in a laptop. You aren't taking photos on your laptop, why does it need the image signal processor? There's no FaceID (yet, maybe it's coming) on laptops, so we don't need the ML chip.

When you strip away all the stuff a laptop doesn't need, you're left with... an x86 chip!
>They will probably need a Rosetta equivalent to emulate x86 for all the applications that are slow to switch.

Well, and all the applications that won't switch. Also even on the Mac virtualization/containerization is not nothing. The Mac is a different market and use profile then iOS, and while Apple based on past history won't support an old arch indefinitely neither are they likely to completely blow off backwards compatibility. Compared to previous transitions dropping x86 would have extra complexities as well, so previous experience may not be entirely applicable. In particular Apple would be moving away from the full fat computer standard rather then no change or towards one, which may change the payoff for users despite Apple being much bigger. The absolute performance differences (immediate and future) also aren't likely to be as big.

I don't want to underestimate them, and huge disruption is inevitably coming down the pipe anyway and Arm may well emerge a winner there regardless, but it's also just a really big challenge.

>That might be tricky because of the huge surface area of the x86 instruction set.

Transmeta was able to do a decent job, and I think Novafora is still around and licensing their IP? Granted a lot of instructions have been added since then, but Apple certainly has a lot of expertise there as well and a great deal of capital to aim at the issue.
That isn't a constructive reply. OTR is supported by dozens of clients with no connection to that company[0], and the protocol specification itself is available to the public[1].

The person I was responding to claimed that PGP was the superior choice to OTR, and I wanted to understand why.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging#Nativ...

[1] https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/Protocol-v3-4.1.1.html
IMO it would be nice to have scaled-down implementations of caching, queueing, etc. for "small" installations of self-hosted apps to reduce the number and complexity of dependencies. But first there would have to be a market for self-hosting.
Curious if Doctorow got this from Double Star (Heinlein, 1956)
I feel that the HN community should be firmly on the side of Tomatoes are obviously a fruit https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/is-a-tomato-a-frui...
> Maybe the lights reported are because the roundabout has outlived its usefulness? A stopgap before ripping it out.

Yes, the roundabouts here in D.C. long ago outlived their usefulness. Unfortunately, ripping them out probably isn't in the cards.
Well, I think a major hurdle of this tech is that it was unclear whether it is physically possible to create a screen with that extreme of a flexible hinge. Though I would never downplay manufacturing challenges, the existence of this POC is a huge deal in my book.
Thanks! We are in process of re-design/re-brand & new copy. Please excuse our amateur v1 site :)
Do you have more information about this incidient? It sounds interessting
Specifically retina-style display. I have a perfect vision, can't go back to 1080p and use all-retina/HiDPI screens exclusively for 5 years already. Even got the very latest LG 5k2k ultrawide display yesterday.
The article says: "In order for this to actually be put in place, California legislature has to now approve it by a two-thirds vote, and then Congress would have to allow the deviation."
Question: How does one go about building a large-scale graphical app in the browser?

Now, I know a lot about the bits and pieces of web development, but not how to design and organize such an app.
Bloomberg had a report earlier this year saying they'd have ARM Macs in 2020, which makes sense given that lines up with the work they're doing in Marzipan now [1]. They're also making gains in the legal fight to crack the Qualcomm business model, so that means ARM Macs could have cellular at the same time [2][3].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/qualcomm-suffers-setback-in-ant...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-qualcomm/apple-not-...
You wouldn't give this to marketing, but make the decisions data-driven where you try as hard as you can to get a sample of what your average user is doing, and whether they're being hindered by bugs or some features.

This is easiest with hosted SAAS. It's why companies like Google care so little about user feedback. They can e.g. do an A/B test on their UI and find from their data that moving some button makes it easier to find (fewer false clicks), no matter what the minority of users who contact them and swear up & down that the new UI sucks say.

With self-hosted or desktop software this is harder. You might have some phone-home feature that sends aggregate statistics, or simply pro-actively contact a random segment of your userbase. "Hey, you use our product. Does it mostly work for you, or are you being hindered by issues? If so which?".

That's still a huge selection bias (people who care enough to respond to a survey), but still beats the even bigger bias of people filing bug reports.

And I'm saying this as exactly the sort of person who'd be annoyed enough to file a very detailed bug report against some piece of software I use.
Considering the commercial benefits of non-AGI machine learning, the money is not really thrown away. And many of the potential negative effects of AI can occur even without AGI, so those are worth researching too.
I'm guessing since they have a contact us and are probably a design agency, they are giving away free designs to "startups" so that they can build their list of potential clients they can contact later to do branding and design work.
The Rooftop Racetrack of Fiat’s Lingotto Factory
> life is too short for adverts

Agree 100%. In north america you typically pay your cable bill and still get adverts.

Better off just ignoring the whole thing, or stick to public stations.
Simple Create React App localization with ttag library
This is a fine article for what it is, but isn't it really "Apple marketing walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip"? (at least I assume Anand wasn't hired as a SoC architect)

There's little technical detail that wasn't in the ipad review's benchmarks[1] and previous speculation on using apple chips in desktop machines[2].

Everything new they gave no details on, and the only in-depth answers were hard hitting questions like "you could have made a slow chip, why did you decide to make a fast one instead?" and "why is apple so good at teamwork?" (maybe not the questions that were asked, but they were the questions that were answered :)

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/2018-ipad-pro-review...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/apple-is-exploring-m...