skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The weird design makes me as a layman skeptical of the tech's potential, but I'd love to hear why I'm wrong:

- The randomness and lack of symmetry suggest that we are lacking insight into the problem, like an inelegant physics explanation or an over-fitted model. It's not just that it's complex, but it doesn't even seem to have "parts" that work together. Conceptually fusion seems pretty simple: why in principle does harnessing it require super-human complexity?

- If such extreme contortions and micro-optimizations are required to get this far, how much potential can there still be on this path? In software, if you are replacing divisions with bit shifts, maybe you really need a different algorithm. I understand this is just a research project, but if everything is so finely tuned already, how do you make improvements?

I don't know anything about fusion power, but those are the intuitions I feel when I see the plasma vessel photo and read how it was designed.
This one is funny, and has a couple of obvious solutions that have been prevented due to internal politics. The short answer is that they have a couple of different recommender systems, all competing against each other internally for sales lift.

One is purely based off of pageviews. When you get recommendations for something you already bought, many times it is because you looked at it, but they don't know nor care if you already bought it. In their words, it works really well and accounting for sales brings in a lot of needless complexity.

Another is based off of sales. They also don't care if you already bought it because according to them, it works well. I remember trying to point out to them that for some types of products (specifically consumable products) this would work really well, but durables not so much. They claimed otherwise, that although they couldn't explain it, it was entirely common for people to rebuy things like vacuum cleaners and TVs and kitchen knives. I did a tiny bit of research to show them why they thought that, and proved with a small segment (vacuum cleaners, I believe), that after you filter for returns and replacements, that the probability of sequentially buying two of the same vacuum cleaner was effectively zero. They asked me to do it for the rest of their products, but I didn't have limitless time to spend on helping another team, especially one with a PM who was a complete dick to me for having the audacity to make a suggestion that he hadn't thought of.

In all, I believe there are a dozen or so recommender services, each with their own widget. There are tons of people that think all of the recommenders have merits in some areas and drawbacks in others, and the customer would be better off if they merged concepts into a single recommender system. But they all compete for sales lift, they all think their system is better than the other systems, and they refuse to merge concepts or incorporate outside ideas because they all believe they are fundamentally superior to the other recommenders. Just a small anecdotal glimpse at the hilariously counterproductive internal politics at Amazon.
Questions 4 through 14 are likely not to be answered, or founders will be cagey about it. IMHO, if you get stiff-armed and you're applying to be in the first 10 employees, then run.

My general view is if you're in the first 10 or so employees for a VC-backed startup, you deserve near-founder benefits (including financial transparency).
> They partner and rarely kill.

How the times have changed.
valid: you do not enjoy big company politics. (you’d rather have small company politics)

valid: you want a sense of ownership and responsibility. if you don’t perform, there is a noticeable effect on the company.

valid: you want to be in an environment where others are just as committed as you to the success of the company. you want to treat your work as an endeavor, not as a means to a paycheck.
I guess that’s a personal choice?
Care to elaborate on why removing TouchID killed the iOS platform for you as an option...?
This Slack group sound awesome - my email is in my profile. :)
The fraction of startups that achieve that level of name recognition is even more miniscule than the fraction of startups that achieve successful exits and let you break even financially.
That's fundamentally not how identification on the Internet works. You are whoever you say you are. It's absurd to tie identity to a physical person.
Totally agree. It's not the learning itseft that's hard, it's the unlearning when it's different. In cases where there are beneficial similarities it can also be easier. I've gotten so much from multithreaded OS/2 gui programming that transferred pretty readily to various mvc-ish frameworks and eased into distributed services. The sooner you can recognize the limits of similarities it's usually ok. I did have a hard time getting git the fist time out having used many scs's before, it finally clicked when I related it to a journaling fs rather than a prev scs.
Apple is strictly consumer focused. Microsoft is consumer and enterprise focused. I also believe Microsoft will become a software and services company where consumers are targeted via mobile devices and enterprise for traditional server and workstations (non mobile). Especially as normal users keep dropping laptops for mobile devices like phones and tablets.
I doubt after you pay the transaction fee, and bitpay takes it's cut you'll be paying less than 2%.
Repeatedly hit the Tab key. It's likely you'll see 'o' link getting outlined.
I wish I could buy irradiated salad which would solve this problem. Organic cannot be treated this way and people are convinced organic is better so I can't get what is really safe.
> I also think it's a bizarre exagerration to argue that an attempted prosecution of Assage would result in "broad new powers to put Trump’s media 'enemies' in jail".

I think this depends almost entirely on what Assange is prosecuted for.

It's true that prosecutions of reporters began (after a post-Nixon lull) under Bush, and largely don't rely on anything that an Assange trial would determine. But there are at least two things Assange could be tried for which would seriously erode protections for reporters.

The article points out that the NYT has published classified information - that's basically the problem. Those publications aren't actually guaranteed to be legal. The Pentagon Papers case rejected a prior restraint argument for barring publication, but left open both the possibility of other prior restraint suits and the possibility of simple charges for mishandling classified information. A court case against Assange could be used to set either of those precedents, settling a currently-ambiguous question about press freedoms in the US under a Supreme Court that might well walk back the NYT v US interpretation. (And Assange can be indicted while the NYT isn't because that's discretionary - the DoJ is free to charge whoever they think is most likely to get them a convenient court ruling, however hypocritical that may be.)

Less likely but more even more frightening, some Congressmen have previously talked about charging Assange under the Espionage Act. In fact, a few people have specifically talked about having him subpoenaed without charge so that he could be extradited easily, then invoking Espionage Act once the capital punishment provision wouldn't cause complications. Convicting a non-resident non-citizen of espionage for sharing someone else's leaks would be a fairly shocking decision, but if it happened it would extend legal risk to reporters worldwide.

Edit: I was wrong about the lack of precedent here. A noncitizen has already been successfully charged for acts taken outside the United States which did not involve direct access to US resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Zehe

I haven't seriously followed what charges could be brought over the 2016/Russia question, since it seems relatively unlikely that a Trump DoJ would bring a case there. A subpoena over 2016 could potentially have come out of Congress, but that's not likely to lead to a criminal charge at present.
But you also have to review the diffs of your dependency's dependencies. And their dependencies. And so on and so on.
> i feel like delta transfers would dramatically improve my workflow and upload times

If you think delta transfers would help, you're saying you have a bunch of data that doesn't change between image builds, but you have to re-upload all that data every time.

This actually sounds like a perfect use-case for image layers. If you can rearrange your Dockerfile to put the steps where files change more rarely before steps that change frequently, docker will automatically cache the earlier steps and not reupload if that layer already exists.

Image layers are at their heart already an implementation of a cache + delta transfer system. (Compared to some other delta systems it trades storage efficiency for computational efficiency.) You can get small delta transfers, but you have to work with docker via your Dockerfile to make it happen.

For example, that could mean: moving steps up or down the Dockerfile so more frequently changed layers come later; splitting a step into two steps to exploit the previous; making a step deterministic so you don't have to force rebuild; use multi-stage builds to make all of these easier to implement.
This is a "bare metal" program, not an operating system.
Looking at AA 2017 earnings

Total operating revenues: 42.2B

Net income: 1.90B

For a profit of 4.5%. Where are you getting your numbers from?

https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/static-files/17cae9f4-5...
I wish JS/npm was more centralized... I wish there was some centralized authority who took some responsibility for maintaining the security and stability of core packages.

I think it'd make sense for npm to be this authority. They're a for-profit organization who benefits most from the success of the npm ecosystem. So why don't they try and take over the most popular projects like left-pad and event-stream? Especially the projects that are small and mostly unmaintained.
How so? Look at all the body cam and dash cam legislation.
It's important to note dilution events because startups typically pitch their equity based on hypothetical future exit scenarios, without accounting for dilution.
Books, blog posts, conferences and much more about agile methods
Unfortunately, the reported AI boom, is of the same kind as Japan's "5th generation" computing was.

The when nouveau riches bankrolling the AI party see that no neural algo amount to "money out of thin air" they quickly loose interest, even without finding out what neural algos actually are.

The atmosphere in the industry feels very much like pets.com 2.0.

Here in Shenzhen, I often ask those intrepid samodelkins "how are you supposed to make money with it?" and never hear back a concise answer.

China's real economic strength does not lay with that type of enterprises.
And yet Apple restricts ad blockers... Same as Google.
How TheSkimm Grew to 7M Subscribers in 7 Years
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18535073
With all the new generic top-level domains out there like .biz .blog .pro even .ooo (a personal favorite lol), and a whole bunch more coming out next year, I'm surprised there's still a mad gold rush for .com domains. I was just telling my kids how domain squatting was a thing back in the 90's and early 2000's, but I guess I stand corrected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
Great article! Thanks for the writeup, resources and introducing me to Helena Sarin.

I've been wanting to get into GANs but I've really been turned off by the samey-ness of the work I've been seeing. I'm afraid I'd spend a ton of time getting everything set up only to end up creating more 512x512 jpgs that look like everything else everyone else is making. Helena's work makes me want to give it another shot though.

To me, it really feels like AI-generated artwork is in that hype phase you see with any new tech used in art. Would that work from Obvious sold for nearly half a million dollars if it wasn't a GAN-generated work? Probably not. I'm looking forward to the day an AI work gets that much attention because it's compelling all on its own, not just because of how it was made.
I've always used a lot of MS products, but really thought they'd be close to dying by now. Maybe they can make some money renting Azure Linux boxes, but doesn't seem like a strategic advantage any more like Windows is.
When something cheaper and faster comes along. Until then the GPU isn't seeing much competition. Perhaps the TPU/AI chips might gobble up their market one day.
I was working a 40 hour job and doing the nanodegree in the mornings before work. I worked on assignments during the weekend. I tried to manage my time well to avoid falling behind or having to do a project at the last minutw.

My sister was also battling cancer so this made it even more difficult from a time and emotional standpoint.
> The recent retail discount frenzy in the US (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) has opened my eyes to just how popular [...] Chromebooks are.

Careful judging popularity increases based on advertisements alone, especially in large-scale discount situations, as the sales can sometimes indicate the opposite.
I try, I'm not an engineer, my critical faculties are better than my constructive ones -- I do think I'm pretty good at succinct and accurate writing though. Unfortunately I'm not able to make best use of these skills at present.

What field do you work in?
Regardless of if the author's to blame, the outcome would be no different if the author's Github account were compromised or the author themselves were compromised/decided to act maliciously. In either case, user's of the code also have an effort to act responsibly. Are any downstream package author's that incremented the dependency or failed to lock it to a specific version less culpable? (event-stream is being used by SuperPopularPackageX which allows the compromised version)
This would be nice feature in home weather station.
What if that one program is a Virtual Machine interpreting bytecodes for a language like Lisp or Smalltalk? From one point of view, only one program is running on the hardware, however many Smalltalk 'Processes' (really, cooperative green threads) could be running simultaneously. This was once the case for Smalltalk. It may have been the case for Lisp machines.
The study of karst groundwater should not be as esoteric as it is. About one quarter of the world's population is either completely or partially dependent on drinking water from karst (1). The United States is approximately 20% karst landscapes with about 40% of the population affected.

At the same time, there are perhaps a few dozen authoritative scientists of karst hydrology in the United States and Canada.

(1) Hartmann, Andreas & Goldscheider (2014). Karst water resources in a changing world: Review of hydrological modeling approaches. Reviews of Geophysics. 10.1002/2013rg000443
Microsoft details the causes of its recent multi-factor authentication meltdown
Why would the average joe trust something like this? Your FAQ says each maintainer is vetted and handpicked, but nothing about criteria or how they're picked.

Do you mind explaining this vetting process a little more? How can we be sure that something like this flatmap thing doesn't happen on codeshelter?
That is a paywalled article.
Not to blame them NPM, they're great people, but I often get requests from random people going through NPM support to use an existing name (saying they will bump major).

The centralized naming scheme is to blame here, it normalizes these "cute" names and users have demanded these since day one. They could/should have probably been scoped from the beginning, or people should just stop trying to capture fancy names.

I get tired of receiving emails about those kinds of things personally, you try to just ignore them, sometimes their request sounds reasonable but still, can those people be trusted, who knows.
You seem to be forgetting one of the key advantages of the platform: fully available and controllable source code, including firmware.

For some applications, the compute performance is secondary to that, but price always plays a role. A moderately powerful workstation that runs 100% audited code is very desirable for some uses.
>how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top.

The problem is that long-form works that require substantial analysis by experts (such as scientific papers read by competent scientists) don't work for a voting system like Stackoverflow. Internet voting works on things like comments of HN but not for 20000 word papers.

(I made previous comments about the limitations of voting systems to vet academic papers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269673)

Basically, scientists are humans and human nature says they won't log into a system to upvote/downvote papers. Instead, they want a stronger signal than karma points before they spend (or potentially waste) their precious time on analyzing the merits of a long paper. That stronger signal is another respectable scientists that asks them to look at it.
Interesting. Was it just earth worms? Many breeds rub their bodies into the earth especially when there's a strong (usually bad) odor present.

I've heard the theory that the behavior is intended to mask the dog's own odor which could aid in hunting.
And zergling free.
I know this is a joke, but you're a magnitude more likely to buy something if you've already bought it once. The whole retargeting industry is built on this, but I agree - it doesn't necessarily make it useful.
I don't see how this is a competitive advantage when any company or institution can outsource these kinds of annotation jobs to low-wage countries.
This is despicable. The cost difference is 9 fold between the consumer-end medical expenses vs the producer-end safety testing.

In the US where we have a flimsy excuse for a safety net, and still-too-high uninsured rate, the fact that this regulation has been pulled off of businesses, and instead the burden placed onto the consumer is shameful.

There are certainly families who have been harmed economically and irreparably so because of this.

Now that I'm done ranting, why is so much of the romaine lettuce market concentrated in Yuma, AZ?
I've found anything more complex than an adapter or cable to be of inferior quality with Amazon Basics, and rarely buy those options anymore.
Very elegant! I was once a math tutor and this would have come in handy. Particularly for students who are primarily visual learners to get an intuitive feel for sec, csc, tan, and cot.
That's true. Maybe magazines and newspapers are a better analogy: you can pay for single issues, but plenty of people still choose to subscribe.
I understand the security risks involved. Security is part of my job and I have on more than one occasion been the guy unwinding the entire ecosystem to see what depends on the latest insecure library of the week.

And somehow, despite this experience, I am also blessed with the minimal capablility to understand the swamp-ass social toxicity that's happening here. I am likewise blessed with the modicum of good sense to realize that this is not a problem that goes away by stuffing one person in the wicker man and setting it ablaze. Systemic problems have systemic solutions and a real part of actual security is applying systemic solutions instead of looking for scapegoats that let you think you're a tough guy on the Internet.

Because it is about feelings. It's always about feelings when somebody fumfuhs about how serious and important it is that they, or a likeminded compatriot, get to be an asshole to an individual about a systemic problem. It's just about their feelings and given place of pride because they're theirs. So maybe we shouldn't play that game at all and maybe we should look at the systemic issues that actually matter.

Haveaniceday.
Michigan based startup Rivian unveils electric truck
Spambrand Instagram is taken down - because of spam?
> This is terrible math. Nursing a child severely inhibits getting pregnant; without use of formula (or a substitute like goat's milk or what have you), it is extremely rare for children to be spaced only one year apart. It's rare enough that there's a special term for such children -- "Irish twins".

The timespan for two separate births in 2018 and 2019 isn't 12 months, it is anywhere between 12 and 24 months. While giving birth twice in 12 months is rare, I would assume that giving birth twice in 18 months or 24 months is not nearly as rare.
Markets Can No Longer Rely on the Fed 'Put'
> You're looking at it the wrong way. Untrusted code doesn't have a "I pinky promise that I'm safe" bit they can twiddle in their header. If the code running is untrusted, it doesn't get to make that decision, all code under that context needs to be retpolined. (V8 already does this https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/7d356ac4927e9da3e0.... )

No, you're not understanding.

retpoline doesn't keep you from attacking others, it keeps you from being attacked. But not everything handles sensitive data and thus doesn't care about being attacked, and doesn't want to pay the cost of the retpoline that they didn't need at all.

How can a WASM app signal "I need retpoline because I have secrets to protect" from "I don't give a damn about retpoline because there's no secret data in my process space at all"?

That's not a decision WASM can unanimously make on behalf of others.

> You can implement all of the malloc protection strategies that OpenBSD uses in user space.

No, you literally can't. WASM doesn't have the APIs necessary to do that. It doesn't have mmap & mprotect. Those are in the "proposals we might consider" future section of WASM. But WASM today cannot implement a malloc/free on-par with those in actual libc implementations on major platforms. To say nothing of debug tools like valgrind.

> OpenSSL's sin wasn't re-implementing malloc; it was re-implementing it poorly (and not bounds checking input from attacker controlled packets).

So the solution to people re-implementing malloc badly is to force everyone to re-implement malloc? How does that follow at all?

I get WASM doesn't want to include malloc/free, but the problem is it didn't include paging-based allocation APIs. It used a nonsense linear growth heap design that doesn't match anything about how memory works on any platform and has been obsolete for 20+ years.

This isn't a big deal in the hyper specific context that WASM is actually targeting, but it is a big deal if you're talking about shoving WASM in places it never had any intention of being.
I can't imagine this will work for too long, also will you be able to use external services?

If money is an issue Bitbucket and Gitlab both have free private repos, just use one of them.

Edit: Typo
Robert Bussard shopped his wiffleball fusor design to Google a few years back in a talk that's somewhere on YouTube. Fascinating stuff.
> Define weirdness as the Kolmogorov complexity of the shape, within the precision needed to work properly.

Well, if the shape is the output of an optimization program, as long as the program itself and its inputs can be simply specified, the shape actually has low Kolmogorov complexity.
It seems there are no web-hooks / callbacks, so you don't get notified when a new file is uploaded (or someone downloads a file).

Another issue is that if your have to support a partner with SFTP data transfer requirements you may have to support one with FTP/FTPS requirements as well. At this point you will have to go to a dedicated FTP server (or outsource it to another company) anyway, and AWS SFTP service will be redundant in this scheme.
That's a false dichotomy. There's a number of things they can show you, not just reorder or nothing.

In a perfect world for targeting sales, they will predict and show you exactly what it is you want to buy next. Repurchasing is just a very lazy way of predicting what you'll buy next.