skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea that people who report being intensely allied to particular political parties would automatically be the people who we should be most concerned about being in filter bubbles is bizarre, and is part of a broader media narrative that all opinions right or left of the NYT and WaPo editorial pages are the result of manipulation. This seems like one of a cluster of centrist articles attempting to debunk this idea, specifically targeted at Republican bleating about tech-media companies hiding left-wing bias behind claims that they have objective algorithms that have no particular political content.

They're twisting the finding, culled from mashing together a number of studies (not any particular study) and summarized in a whitepaper, that find when you monitor the people who self-report the most partisan consumption of news, it turns out that they actually read a lot of different sources. In other words, they've discovered that the most angry readers of news spend as much time hate-reading as reading outlets that they agree with.

Interesting finding by itself. Instead of reporting that, though, they transform the group that most self-reports being in what the authors would call a filter bubble (i.e. they report only watching Maddow or only watching Fox) into the group most likely in a filter bubble, they find that group to not be in a filter bubble, then they declare the non-existence of filter bubbles. It's really garbled logic.

I'd submit that the people most likely to be affected by a filter bubble would be the people who read political news the least, and where the few examples of what they look up would create a skewed algorithmic perception of their interests. I'd further submit that those people would far outnumber the extreme party partisans, but their votes would count equally, so the fact that extreme partisans who are already absolutely sure how they will vote are not trapped in filter bubbles is of far less importance than the people who are not sure about how they will vote, and are affected by new information.
To me that problem had a simple answer: active harm is worse than negligence. To kill someone is a worse action that to let someone die, regardless of the numbers of people involved.
I think paying to opt-out of ads and tracking is a reasonable solution.

There will always be people who can't afford or don't want to pay for content.
What about QT?
that is a very interesting take on the subject.
It's a closer analogy to the "beat frequencies" you get with constructive and destructive interference of waves of similar frequency. The envelope of the total amplitude of the pendulums oscillates with lower frequency than the amplitude of any individual pendulum.

I used Audacity to mix sine waves of the frequencies of the pendulums (51/60Hz, 52/60Hz, ..., 65/60Hz), multiplied by 440 to get them to audio frequency, and it sounds a lot like the UFO sound effect from the 1970s TV series "UFO".
You’re on HN right? As they say in the startup world, it’s all about execution. Sorry Facebook stole your idea, I’m sure they’ll make you ceo when you sue them in the courts
Yellow rain: either biological warfare conducted by USSR or bee pollen
things like enter filenames

Entering filenames is exactly what the interface is trying to avoid, doubly so for entering paths. And it worked - you could be a sophisticated classic Mac OS power user and not know what the HFS path separator was.
> over $500-100 a month

Businesses come in different sizes, and it's tempting to project startup-level finances onto your customers. But $100/mo is not an expenditure of note at most businesses. (Neither is $1k/mo, but that starts to be a different market.)

Some back-of-the-envelope math on costs for building a billing portal:

- First pass of Stripe integration including displaying receipts, upcoming bills, edit of payment info, etc. : at least two solid weeks to more like a month of dev time. Yes, most devs can get something shipped much faster. But to achieve a battle-tested, secure, reasonably complete implementation will take a few revisions. A month of dev time in the US will vary, but $10k fully loaded isn't out of the question. If you're using an agency, this could be much higher.

Other features your business may want will drive this cost higher: Salesforce integration, QuickBooks integration, operator-facing tools so customer service reps can see what the customer sees, etc.

But let's just say $10k+ of dev time for the implementation. Then don't forget you just added a bunch of code to your codebase that will need to be upgraded, tested etc. when you rev platform versions. If you added any dependencies specifically for the billing portal, congratulations on having your billing portal now drive your release schedule. The billing portal adds permanent technical debt to your project without helping you meaningfully differentiate.

For a small app, the billing portal code could reasonably be bigger than the rest of the app. I have seen this too.

Crucially, while you're building this code, you're not building code your customers care about. Zero of your customers would upvote "build billing portal" over anything relevant to why they are your customer.
> But if only a single browser will be able to display it

Chromium has no intrinsic power. If Chromium and Google disagree, the latter can easily break off. The browser political landscape is fragmented as ever.
I think you mean Crush the Castle :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_the_Castle
I recreated this in CSS/JS a few years ago, inspired by this video.

https://codepen.io/madelinw/details/ocnCl
I live in SF now (moved from EU 3 years ago) and while I like it here, this city have so many flaws that I cant imagine settle here pernamently. My wife wants to return home to be closer to parents, so we will probably move some time next year back to our home country. That idea still excites and scares me at same time.
> respect for user privacy

No US based entity can offer user privacy, as the government can force any of them to cooperate while requiring non-disclosure. The fact they don't use anonymous user data to offer internet services doesn't negate the fact that where most of us actually care about privacy, they don't have the power to actually offer it.
I personally agree with you, however is is extremely important to realize that most of our society does not agree at all, and that that data is hugely relevant.
It knows about the driveable areas even outside the lane lines where it can go in the case of an emergency.

See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il6LV4064bI
Bullish on telehealth $TDOC - higher deductibles every years means more will take advantage of free or subsidized telehealth calls through insurance

PayPal and Adyen - payment cos very consolidized now and only get bigger every year with more commerce moving online
I hope this goes up through the court system. I hope the owner wins. There is often too much conservatism when it comes to preserving the old. Some really significant, old things, ok. But not at the pace of SF. I mean this does not happen in Japan, or Korea or China. People move on. Time goes on.
People are buying the land and pay taxes. They should be able to do reasonable things with their property. I don't think Korea, Japan, etc., are unreasonable with regard to property development.
Got tired of all the phalic-volcanoes so I made something nice for you https://sandspiel.club/#2scDpZpyMACGp65FrkPT
Thousands of particles and the worst frame rate I saw on my iPhone 6 was 25fps. Impressive.
> Hiw is this any different from Lamba?

You had to write all that orchestration code yourself.

That said, I completely agree with you, and utilize the same arch at dayjob.

There are “app tier” cattle, and there are a few special pets (databases) that are backed up, loved, hand-held, etc. because database failover is still painful for users for seconds-to-minutes. When you’re serving thousands of requests per second, that’s a lot of angry users.

RDS, Azure SQL, Cassandra, Aurora, whatever still cause measurable pain for the end user during node failure.
I'd never heard of the audio cassette, but our 1990 Mac came with an interactive tutorial (built with an early version of Macromind Director).
I remember having a lot of fun overfeeding the fish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgdFZD-N8k
Very well written, honest, and instructive post!
Have the classifier incorporate the identifying characteristics of the minority so that it can push past beyond the 99% limit it's at currently.

This is why people are pissed off about the trolly problem. It's all zero-sum hypotheticals when reality is primarily not zero-sum.
Why is this such big news? No-one I know uses Edge as their daily browser. Based on the Google Analytics data of the various apps I work on, the usage for Edge is so small that it is basically irrelevant. If we are concerned about a lack of browser diversity, why weren't more people using Edge to being with? Or is it all the people who are now chanting "Use Firefox" are the ones who used Edge and feel cheated somehow?
> quit this job and open a shop which does the same thing as the existing company but doesn't artificially reduce speed

That would require rewriting the whole application (without the artificial speed reduction part), which may be a lot of work.
Interesting how Apple's SecureTransport seems to be the most permissive of them all, rejecting 0 certificates that all the others complained about syntactic errors with in the dataset.
It’s State Capitalism. We know it works when the state knows what to do and picks correctly, but when you reach the forefront, it becomes harder to know the path forward and individual businesses incentivized by profit can do a massively parallel search. So goes my thinking.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
Hyundai Kona Electric Is Next Best Thing to Expensive Teslas
Lab-Grown Meat Prompts Rabbis to Consider the Impossible: Kosher Bacon [video]
How so? I don't believe the layperson really cares all too much about the underlying engine, it's more a marketing thing. And the IE brand is forever tainted.
Good post.

But the used definition of "rewrite" is a bit broad, calling a piecewise refactor and rewrite of some components a general rewrite explains the more positive stance towards the issue.

Doing a start-from-scratch rewrite is a risky proposition for a profit-generating, working piece of software. The more reasoned approach of refactoring and possibly piecewise rewriting, is much more advisable, though possibly more painful.
It will have incremental return on investment and keeps risk smaller, while also re-generating some knowledge about use-cases and decisions of the past codebase.
And compare that to the corresponding IBM PCjr "Guide to Operations",

ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/Hardware/IBM/IBM%20PCjr%20Guide%20To%20Operations.pdf

which combines the conventional IBM-style step-by-step troubleshooting guide with an extensive keyboard tutorial featuring full-color, cartoon-style artwork on nearly every page, illustrating...the fact that someone at IBM thought a bland and largely uninteresting tutorial could be made more approachable by adding full-color, cartoon-style artwork to nearly every page.

That, or else there's some connection I'm missing between the Ctrl key, say, and towing childhood pets around in an improbably stable two-wheeled trailer behind one's tricycle...
Remote Work Digest: December 17, 2018
There can be a challenge even without an explicit win condition or chance of losing. It is the challenge of discovery.
It is not. It uses its own, which is what makes it unique.
I'm very curious how that sounds, would you mind posting it somwhere?
Any source code for this? I'm learning rust right now and it would be really cool to see how this was made
Can I question the orthodoxy on this one?

Suppose WebKit or Blink are the one engine that everyone uses. Do you know how much uncertainty and effort that will save around the world that goes into browser compatibility and quirks? Look at the x86 architecture or POSIX as well.

Here is my serious practical question: this is open source, so if you want to make some extension, you should be able to distribute it. And if it becomes so popular as to be merged into the core, or included with the main distribution, then it will be.

It seems on balance, this would be a good thing.
Word of mouth. Ads. The media. Plenty of avenues will quickly frame why Installing Chrome is so yesterday.
Alejandro Agag Is the Elon Musk of Motorsports
> What remarkable faith? It's a program to start/stop AC/heat units based on temperatyre readings, not to send people to Mars.

> A talented high school student can write one today, and do it with a Rasberry Pi and for much less than $1 million (more like 5-10K).

Yes, writing a bang-bang controller would be trivial. Even some kind of PID controller wouldn't be too hard for an enterprising high schooler to try.

What makes the professional systems valuable is that they can build much more accurate models of how the building heats and cools. These models depend on the building's geometry, usage patterns, outside climate, etc., and are notoriously hard to produce. However, they can produce meaningful savings over long time periods since they ultimately use less energy due to the quality model.
The dangers of operating a pogo stick on vehicle congested roadways are significant, but remain consistant across differing pogo technologies. This post makes no mention of making a pogo stick safer to operate on public roadways.
Lock-and-leave culture: rise of self-storage and clinging to stuff we hardly use
One of the linked posts spent a great deal of time differentiating between the browser interface and the engine itself. The average user doesn’t understand the difference, so being told “Edge is more like Chrome now” doesn’t actually make it Chrome for them. Other than tricking user agent checkers from putting up the inferior browser warning (is that still a thing?) this won’t stop people from using Edge to install Chrome.
Thanks for the detailed remarks, and for pointing out that my statement above about the novelty of our implementation was wrong - CasADi uses the same algorithm as was released in 2013. My apologies. Joel Andersson pointed this out to us and we added a cite to his thesis several months ago.

As for Sundials and FatODE, my understanding was that they used finite differences, forward mode, or differentiating the solver operations for at least some aspect of their sensitivity analysis.

On another topic, I think you might be misunderstanding how we're running our adjoint sensitivity analysis. You say

> In the Neural ODE paper, to do a reverse solve of the adjoint ODE it solve the forward ODE from the beginning time point until the point. Clearly, this is really slow because it requires a lot of forward solves over long intervals.

This isn't true - when we do the reverse solve, we get all gradients using a _single_ solve going backwards in time. I'm now realizing that the misunderstanding might be caused by our Fig. 2, which shows that multiple backward solves are necessary when the loss depends on the state at multiple time points.

I agree that our statement about the stability of implicit over explicit was overly broad, thanks for pointing that out. Can you suggest a more accurate statement about the advantages of implicit over explicit methods?

I also agree there is a lot of numerical work to be done in this area, and I'm glad that people more knowledgable than us (such as yourself) are looking at it too!
Thanks for sharing! What kind of outdoor activities do you have in Rochester? Any mountain skiing? How far from the city is that? Thanks!
> It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out.

I think it should be that one competing _standard_ will win out. Ideally we can have infinite number of browser engines, as long as each one implements all widely used standards correctly. We already see this with most websites working fine whether in chromium or firefox. The only incompatibilities (in theory) should come from bugs or new standards/experiments which haven't been widely adopted or implemented yet.

The same for javascript - multiple implementations of a js engine is fine, as long as they all implement the ES* standard.

Also if everyone moves to a Chromium engine monoculture, what will happen to innovation? eg. Mozilla has made some major progress with it's work with Servo.
I think most consumer robots will be driven by centralized computing power. There's probably no need for the brain to be on the robot, just a good wifi connection.

EDIT: That is of course for robots that won't need to leave the house. Then again, I can't imagine the future won't have global high bandwidth cellular coverage with at least 5 9's availability.
It’s not just the busses and taxis but lots of bikes are electric too. Most of Southeast Asia is full of loud mopeds but Shenzhen now has these small electric bikes which people make deliveries on (similar to other parts of Asia), except quieter.

Another fun fact is that the local government restricts electric bike ownership over a certain capacity to citizens. It’ll be hard to get one as a visitor. I’m not quite sure why.
Adding fairness to your models usually incurs a cost which can be measured. You have to choose between max profit or equal opportunity, you can't have both (do you run over the investors or over the minorities?).

See here a visualization of trade-off's between global accuracy and fairness:

http://research.google.com/bigpicture/attacking-discriminati...
Maybe it's possible to apply a regenerative brake like mechanism?
i just retired a 10 year old desktop, and not because it would have stopped working, but because i couldn't get a RAM upgrade for it. i gave it to a schools hackerspace where it will hopefully do a few more years of service.
Sucks that you're being downvoted since at the time you posted "X.509" wasn't in the title and it was reasonable context on why "20% of HTTPS server cert are incorrect, half considered valid by libs"
So long as there’s enough low latency bandwidth.
It would be awesome if you put this somewhere like archive.org!
Interesting to see this come up again. Here’s a small model for this system written in Haskell from a few years back:

http://syntacticsalt.com/blog/2011-08-27-harmonic-motion.htm...
it's more complicated than that though.

Nobody is lamenting the loss of the edge engine. Things like choice of video codec, drm module, etc have shown is it's a good thing to have a few different vendors with a seat at the table for standards.

Most important of those is Firefox.
Will activating WebRender improve framerates?

Not that it needs improving anyway... just curious.
The solutions in the test segment are all "note the error and have your system unit serviced", so there's no difference there.
Update Smart Art Text and Render Active Worksheet in Workbook to SVG Using Java
Those particular pictures don’t look like that to me, but some prototype Macintosh machines had a Twiggy drive. There’s a great story about how the mac designers had to hide their negotiations with Sony from Steve Jobs so he wouldn’t get mad on folklore.org.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_FileWare

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
WebRender is used for rendering DOM. However, as games use WebGL primarily it's unlikely WebRender will help in this case.
saved on what? heating?

in austria, decades ago they invented winter holidays to save on heating for a week. then they found out that it cost them more to reheat the building after that week, so now they just keep the empty buildings heated.
Serverless Sentiment Websites
I think this divide is a great thing. You don't want the state having access to and controlling your social networking -- as is the case with Tencent WeChat / China.
Ha, fair enough. I would like to argue but the relevant comment has been flagged, so I don't have the material to make a case, and I gracefully concede this point.

However while we're being HN etiquette pedants, the original comment clearly breaches this guideline:

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

The original comment virtually embeds a confession that it is flame war material:

> Cue the argument that these "don't count" because they use CUDA.

I introduce this just to point out that a strict interpretation of the HN rules can stifle reasonable discussion.
Except alcohol is directly harmful, nicotine is barely harmful.

And nobody has ever died from nicotine withdrawal. Or smashed their car after inhaling nicotine.
The argument was that preservation is "stealing from the future." Ergo, the commenter apparently believes in earnestness that a personified "future" has an unqualified right to destruction. The argument as presented is sheer nihilism, and pointing that out was the goal of my comment.
I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made by the OS manufacturer). Chromium is open source - the only lock in is the decision to use it. Sure, Google may be at the reigns of where the project goes, but then differentiate on features, or fork it and make it different. Differentiate on the user interface, or integrations with other services, or go hard on privacy. Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows? One operating system would be bad, but one kernel has spawned many, many Linuxes. I guess I’m doing my part by using Firefox, but that’s more because I am worried about just how much Google knows about me, and not because I think Gecko is remarkably better than Chromium.
It's so frustrating. No "gopher" either.
A EULA in FOSS clothing?
People don't download Chrome because EdgeHTML-Edge sucks; they download Chrome because it's familiar, and ironically doesn't nag the person to enable half a dozen Microsoft's services one by one. There's two greater truths here: that some people are more comfortable using Google's services over those of Microsoft, and that the power of defaults matter, even when they feel skeevy to a part of the population. Google proved that defaulting to all the services enabled by default is reasonable not just with a discretionary application (like Chrome) but also when the user barely has any other choice on the device (like Android), and years of these defaults have resulted in a userbase that relies on them and seeks out the product for this reason.

It also shows that past precedent can lead you down a gauntlet of bad PR: Microsoft has tried to be pushy with many features of Windows 10 (telemetry, inking, online login, Cortana, always-online search) in the same vein that we've long seen from Google, but their strategy contrasts unfavorably against long legacy of a less invasive Windows. Google has pursued a policy of opt-out from the beginning, and by doing so they escape a fair bit a bad press.

Firefox has the worst of it: their users are the most discriminating, the hardest to please -- even if some of Mozilla's controversies were poor choices, the level of uproar was immense. Posts like this just encourage the migration of users driven by causes. This would be less of an issue if it were entirely community-supported, but Mozilla has paid developers and evangelists, and deriving revenues from a discriminating userbase is a challenge.