skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft will give the U.S. military access to 'all the technology we create'
How to Get Binary Search Right
If you’re selling something called wood, and I use a saw to cut it, I expect it to work because I paid for wood. That’s the implied contract. If the person who sells the wood puts some foreign substance in it to circumvent my saw I should not get in trouble for finding another way to cut it.

I pay for my internet connection and I expect others who make use of the same network to follow its protocols. I expect HTTP to work as HTTP. If a bad network node chooses to circumvent how it works and I find a way around their circumvention then I should not be punished. On the other hand, if I republish and break copyright it is an entirely different matter.
I don't think current trends indicate hard paywalls as the future. Instead, it looks like news organizations are going to publish exclusively into walled gardens like FB.
Presenters – Be kind to yourself
I don't know how they do it, honestly. Back in the day, when things were simpler, being a game dev sounded pretty cool. Now? No thank you. Lower wages, longer hours, much more difficult work, and 'fans' who continuously insult you in the worst possible ways no matter what you do... sounds like a nightmare. If I'm going to go the creative route I think I'd be happier on the sidewalk with a guitar.

Career-wise, I would much rather help a middle manager figure out how to best crunch the data on their quarterly reports. It can actually be more interesting than it sounds on the surface, and if you're competent everyone's happy at the end.
Bright spots in the VR market
> Race is a social construct [...] that does not carry any explanatory meaning.

It may be a social construct, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant.

Bias is real. Race-based bias is real. People make decisions based on conscious and unconscious thoughts and beliefs about race. This has been demonstrated through numerous behavioral studies.

What if the real reasons for a police departments behavior involve internally common beliefs about a particular race? What if a majority of police in a particular department just don't like Asians, for example? In that case, race is very relevant to the "real reasons for a problem."

I would love to say racism would go away if we just stopped acknowledging race, but the fact remains that many, many people have closely held beliefs about a particular race, whether it's out-and-out racism, or whether it's the assumption that a black kid in a mostly white neighborhood walking alone must necessarily be an intruder.

In 2018, we can't discuss real reasons for police violence without race. In many cases, it is the reason.
I would argue Communism tried to minimize the income gap, but failed to evolve into something other than a dictatorship. Not to mention "we" tried is subjective, Marx was expecting Communism to be implemented in Germany or England, societies with a developed capitalist classes. I would argue the current western societies are more similar to his predictions than 1918 Czarist Russia, the outcomes could be different.

"Finding the middle ground" is the Third Way popularized by Blair and Macron now, that has also failed, because it maintains the status quo.
Think they will? anyway, what really worries me right now is what's going to happen with all those stored hangout conversations, will those still be accessible? will users be allowed to download them? or everything is getting deleted?
> What I am reading from you is that basically the only useful part of the ML paper is the abstract. If the repo/blog had a good abstract there would be no point to the paper.

The whole point of a blog post is vulgarization (which is definitely needed as well): explaining an idea without assuming that the reader has a lot of prior knowledge in the domain. Which goes in the opposite direction of what researchers look for: the most efficient way to understand what is being proposed.
Most of ML papers abstract would be pretty horrible on a blog post in term of vulgarization.

Plus, papers are all very well centralized in Arxiv. How am I supposed to find blog posts? I should just hope that what I am interested in will blowup on twitter or /r/machinelearning and I will notice it? This sounds extremely sub-optimal.

> This sounds like a strawman, but yea I do think the code is the "actual" method while the math is some idealized cleaned-up translation.

Do you also think that biologist should stop writing papers and just upload video of their actual experiments?

I work in an ML research lab with 30 or so researchers, research never begins with some code snippets. It always begins on the whiteboard.
Even between us, where we have the code and data readily available to share with each others, when someone presents it's work, they will never show code, but always equations or model diagrams. It's just an order of magnitude easier to visualize.

Take this paper for example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.11604v3.pdf how would you even begin to communicate something like that through code?
That's how democracy works. The parliament is chosen by the people as well. Sometimes interpretation is necessary, as the referendums are vague or well written.
Still better to be able to voice one's opinion. What's the alternative?
US Steel has, of all things, a massive steel mill compound in the Utah desert near Provo.

It was built there during WWII to have steel fabrication closer to ship building on the West coast.

The other reason it is there is that the contingency plan for a Nazi landing and invasion of the East Coast was to retreat behind the Rocky Mountains.
If this topic interests you, worth pointing out some similar projects, such as the Citizens Police Data Project of Chicago, which currently has 247K police complaints (and puts the code/data on Github) [0]. Note that it's about complaints -- not about all use of force, as in the NJ database. It also covers a single agency -- the Chicago PD. Ostensibly, the Chicago PD has put in the work to create a centralized database, making it relatively straightforward to get the bulk data once the records request/lawsuit succeeds. It's a much different situation when trying to corral the records from multiple agencies, all of which have their own IT systems and practices.

VICE did a mass records request for shooting incidents (again, a subset of use of force) from the 50 largest police departments. It took them 9 months to collect the data [1]

[0] https://invisible.institute/police-data/

[1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...
How to stop your brain’s addiction to bad news
At least some of these games are only available through non steam launchers. E.g. Overwatch only launches from battle.net.
Well not completely we didn't. Many of us still carry Neanderthal DNA.
> The C standard specifies that values “cannot” be accessed through pointers that do not match the effective type of the value

Yet they can be and often are by using the union trick.

To decide whether to use the union trick requires a discussion of a program's desired portability which-- while usually desirable-- is a separate issue from undefined behavior.
It seems very related to me. This is another thing we're no longer allowed to do on the current internet. Maybe people enough people would rather build a new internet than pay for digital goods.
> Classic ML sucks

Could you elaborate on why that is? The git and linux kernel projects have been using this workflow for decades and it works very well for them.

> The world evolved and offers now better environments than 20 years ago.

I think that's largely subjective. I have experience reviewing code via email and via a Github Enterprise instance.

The Github based review requires far more scrolling and makes it difficult to find comments that were made and how they were resolved. Plus, it makes the implicit assumption that a comment was resolved if the line commented on was changed in any way regardless of whether or not the change is related to the comment made. When that happens, it collapses the comment thread and requires that I expand them to find out what I commented on and determine whether it was addressed by going to another tab to read through the entire diff, find the approximate location of the line I commented on and see if it was changed as I expected.

With the email based workflow, my email client has a built in index of all the comments made on a patch set threaded by commit that I can click on and I can quickly find the comments I made and any responses to them (and whether or not I've already read them). I can easily get different versions of the patch set and run a diff between them to see what changed (either on the entire diff or on each individual commit).

> The world evolved and offers now better environments than 20 years ago. No reason to stay behind.

I believe that if something should be considered an improvement, then it should have all the capabilities of the previous version and introduce new features that were not possible to accomplish in the previous version. It shouldn't make things that were easy to do in the previous version more difficult or impossible to do.
Good point. Is there any legal precedent (in the US) for forcing signature revocation though? It seems to run up against the first amendment since Mozilla would essentially be making a statement that "the addon with hash 1234 does not contain malware", which should be legally protected speech.
this goes into the "obviously" column
Centralization vs. Decentralization
I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the particulars of the law. But I presume "blocking", as in the ads are effectively removed, is key. Instead of blocking them, would hiding them, via a div with a higher z-index? Mind you, that doesn't prevent the tracking. But there are other tools for that.

I agree. Ads suck. Maybe there's a legal loophole to avoid them some other way?
It's about an old dude just realizing that by staying in his job past 65, he's put 9 people out of work.
What New York Times got wrong about kids and phones
In France for a company with a turnover of up to EUR 500,000 it only costs EUR 85/year, for what I think is up to 1 million codes (you get a root number and can generate the codes yourself).

https://www.gs1.fr/Obtenir-un-code-a-barres/Consultez-nos-ta...
For anyone looking for that movie, it is Dune. Worth the watch.
God forbid I care about the privacy of those who're technically incapable of protecting themselves from these evil practices.

Edit: as for local publishers, I personally believe they should be government funded and non-profit, but if I had to choose between any publisher (local or otherwise) thriving while violating people's privacy, or not existing at all, then I would surely wish for the latter, and I would hope everyone felt the same way.
Why would it be wrong for a publisher to only allow subscribers to read articles? If that is the business model that works in the 21st century then publishers should absolutely do it.

The bigger question is whether or not users should only be allowed to run software the neatly aligns with the publishers' business plans (and those of other corporations -- video game companies, business software vendors, etc.). Personally, I think business plans should be based on reality and not based on courts ordering people to pretend that reality is something else. In this case it is not even hard for publishers to enforce their paywalls -- they can simply refuse to serve page content before the payment is made, instead of just asking the browser to not render the content (which is like handing someone a newspaper and then saying, "don't read anything until you pay!").
This would only apply in certain contexts. Height is 80% genetic in the developed world.
For a reasonable code base, say the linux kernel source code, how large is the trigram index? Is it necessary that the index be kept in memory?
No it isnt. The whole point of the internet is that it exists apart from nations law. its in the name - world wide web.
But what makes German a little different is that they translate the loan words using their own roots. No doubt Fernseher is taken from television, but compare it to Spanish "televisión" -- there they literally took the word.
To add some statistics to this, there were 7600 games released on steam in 2017, almost double the 4200 the year before, and 13 times more than the 500 released in 2013. It used to be the case that getting on steam was "guaranteed exposure", but no longer.
There's nothing in the classic mailing list workflow that prevents hosting the code online for others to view. The Linux[1] and git[2] projects mirror their code on Github, for example.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux

[2] https://github.com/git/git
Swimming uses more muscles and requires more concentration. I had a large amount of form degradation when I took a years' break swimming, and it took a few weeks to get back in form. I was noticeably faster after I regained my form -- I'm not sure what the equivalent would be on a bike, since theoretically I would just need to pedal faster (requiring more raw strength, not form.)

I don't think there's much comparison to the bike example in the OP.
So why nature is to blame instead of sources of "bad" news?
Simple, because sources do not care and have the power not care as much as they want.

So, humans are the problem, again.
From the excellent smartereverday youtube channel

https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0

Strongly recommend to watch the above video.He does an experiment on how long it takes to get comfortable by changing the handle bars.
I'm not sure that's relevant, for two reasons. First, the McCarthy and Stirling et al. already have this data, so if it is needed for criminal or civil cases, likely they would make it available and if not it can be subpoenaed. Second, the majority of these officers aren't involved and won't be involved in a fatal shooting or other serious matters.

I think this data is valuable for two things:

1. Discovering systemic problems. Why does department A have so many cases of use of force? It might be racism. It might be bad training. It might be underfunding/understaffing. Or any number of other things.

2. A complex analysis of individual police officers within departments. Is this officer outside a standard deviation in use-of-force with officers within the same department or patrolling the same beat or answering the same type of calls? Is the demographics of his use of force against individuals inconsistent with the demographics of the area? Is he largely using force against suspects who are not charged with a crime or are charged with a non-violent crime?

Publishing these names has questionable value and is unlikely to lead to any type of complex analysis. Already most of the arguments for publishing the names are doing so on the basis of a presumption of guilt.
My wife knew how to ride a bike as a child, and now does not know how, and BOY does it get her angry if someone says you never forget.
OP here, be sure to check out the reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a1we32/i_put_w... some great banter there
If he felt that way, he would probably have a subscription. I will reiterate what several other posters have said: it's up to publications like WSJ to ensure their content isn't available to unauthorized users. If they're sending content out, they should not be upset that it's being consumed.
Launchers are 1 step away from a "store".

I was playing fortnite, and via that launcher they can easily upsell/cross-sell me to their other titles.

I might consider it a "distribution channel" which could serve as a store for sure.
The challenge of realistic music generation: modelling raw audio at scale [pdf]
Most stores keep their numbers private, but I'd wager that Steam has most (if not all of them) beat by a large margin.

Presumably these companies believe that the higher margins and control they get from running their own stores are worth the customers they lose by not being in Steam.

As the Steam Tax lightens however, the results of that equation could change.
Piano one minute samples:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fvS-DU8AcK078-5k6WGu...
yeah, that would be wonderful indeed! The current search functionality of github is nearly useless, which is a shame.
Paywalls exist as a solution to the problem of "how do journalists and other content producers get paid for their work?"

Anti-paywall addons are an attempt to get something that isn't intended to be free for free.

Ignoring the legality of this for a moment, let's consider: is this moral?
Reproducing paintings that make an impression
It depends on what operation could potentially overflow.

Mozilla has a CheckedInt (C++) type that checks all operations for overflow. You can see examples of how this is actually implemented here: <https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/mfbt/CheckedInt.... You can derive similar C implementations if you work through all of the template magic.

Be warned that the definition of what is undefined, implementation-specific, and well-defined varies depending on the exact version of the C or C++ standard you use.
I'm sure Marriot had an IDS that created 10000+ alerts per day.

I'm sure they also had a credential rotation policy, hired 3rd party pentesters, had a vulnerability management program, etc

Securing systems is really hard. A lot of the old school recommendations create more issues than they solve, like rotating every database login password every 90 days or so.
> What would be an alternative or more effective method of defending against the Russian and Chinese troll farms?

What russian or chinese troll farms? The biggest trolling in the US by far is DNC, RNC, israeli, british and canadian trolls.

Or are you someone who believes the propaganda that some russian company spending $100K on facebook ads is why Trump got elected?

> Doing nothing in response seems to lead to even worse outcomes then the admittedly unsavory alternative.

What makes you think russian or chinese trolling isn't a response to our trolling?

It's so funny how the most aggressive and expansionist side always pretends to be the victim.

The easiest way to counter trolling is free speech. It's very easy to spot trolling. Call it out.
> The C standard specifies that values “cannot” be accessed through pointers that do not match the effective type of the value

I think this is used in "type punning" in union structures. This is a related comment by Linus Torvalds on the kernel list:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/6/5/769
I wonder to what extent that helps prevent malware from installing a malicious addon to Firefox, because by using the same mechanism as cheating in video games, you can hot-patch a running browser process to disable the functionality to keep it from installing unsigned addons. Technically, in Windows you would just call WriteProcessMemory to modify memory content of another process.
Tried searching for that post but can't seem to find it. Do you remember what it was called?
Prohibiting paywall bypass software violates the principle that the client dictates how web pages are rendered, or requires carving out a special exception just for the publishing industry.

Viewed under a magnifying glass, it seems like a good thing to ensure the publishing industry can use soft paywalls, but taking a broader view, I think that breaks the web. I don't think soft paywalls are worth breaking the web, and even more broadly, governments should only regulate what users can do with data willingly sent to their computers in very exceptional circumstances.
Pretty strong commentary about an architect who clearly created many beautiful and lasting works - not sure where the vitriol is coming from. His houses are absolutely artworks, and should be treated as such, despite their maintenance woes. Have you ever been to Falling Water? It's had huge problems -- recently mostly remedied -- but is an inspiring and magical creation.
I agree with the idea that fines based on the number of users affected makes a lot of sense. One question I have is how would you propose that number be calculated? In truth, I think the company whose data has been leaked should know exactly how many records have been leaked, but per-individual based fines create an incentive for them to underreport this number. Do you think that’s a problem, and if so, is there a good answer for how society could get an honest answer as to how many individuals are affected in a breach?
It's pretty common for AAA games to not be available on Steam now. Blizzard never used it, and EA, Activision, Microsoft and Epic have pivoted to releasing exclusively on their own platforms.

Ubisoft still releases on Steam but requires Steam buyers to install and log into Uplay regardless, which feels like preparation for abandoning Steam once enough users have Uplay installed.
So with copyright being removed, are you okay with companies using GPL code in their proprietary closed sourced software? The GPL is only protected by copyright laws.
Many larger studios are working on self publishing and have projects in the works. The percent that Valve takes even at 20% is still too high, but the bigger issues is that Valve locks up your users so when you make your next game you have to reacquire them, ownership of ones users is the key due to this issue. We’ll see how they fair over the coming years but this does look like they’re starting to wake up a bit to how unhappy execs have been with Steam stagnating and reaping 30% still.
Is this guys identity protected? Could the government / police demand twitter give the IP address of where he logged into his twitter account from. He probably use a VPN? Seems like a risky thing to post.
I'm not so surprised. Some mid-sized cities in Spain (e.g. Pontevedra, Oviedo) have banned all cars from most major streets since the mid 1990s. They are remarkably focused on pedestrians. You can walk anywhere.

Actually, I'd say the ban on those cities I mention is in some ways more restrictive than what was just implemented in Madrid. It's much simpler to accomplish due to their size, though.
> so if it is needed for criminal or civil cases, likely they would make it available

Who is "they"?
To be fair, they are well compensated for it.
Satellite API available
Show HN: WindowSwitcher
Would it be difficult to set up a list of allowed signatures in Firefox? By making it unintuitive for the average user to modify, you would prevent most bad actors from succeeding but still allow power users to control their own experience.
I still prefer using a real nix instead of the windows subsystem for Linux. Mostly because the file system integration with WSL is still bad and Windows still doesn’t come with a decent terminal emulator.
Does Travis have native Docker support? Last time I checked you had to manually run docker and add "sudo: true" to your .travis.yml.
My grand father who passed away this spring, at the ripe young age of 103, left his finely crafted 1920s era piano to me. We often talked about how both of us wanted to learn but never got around to it, and now to honor his memory I’ve started taking some lessons.

I haven’t played very long, just a couple of weeks, but even I can relate to this feeling. I try practicing a little every day and I mostly fumble around for the first 5-10 minutes before hitting my stride, and the song I just a few minutes earlier brutally murdered now actually sounds.. ok. It’s a wonderful feeling really, makes me feel like I have learned something.
Just Cause 4: How designers blended crazy tornado and grappling hook physics
If not Firefox, try Brave. It can play with a locked screen, though you have to restart it because it automatically pauses (might be a way to turn that off). Also automatically blocks the YT ads without a plugin. Brave in incognito mode has become my default YT listening method on mobile.
I would love if kerbal, simplerockets and the like used this realistic gravity simulation. The piecewise conic approximation is great, but after a few weeks of playing it gets very tiresome and too obviously limited...