skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Take a look at iOS satisfaction rate among its users VS the other phone vendors.

Huh? But don’t the other phone vendors also offer worldwide product distribution (I.e. the Google Play Store)? How is the difference between iOS satisfaction vs other vendor satisfaction indicative that this is a cheap solution for world wide product distribution?
Because it completely turns a lot of our societies meta-narratives inside-out. One of them being that humans are born equal, how can we believe that we are created equally by a common creator if now some are being created to be "better" than everyone else?

Is there a point where we end up creating someone that isn't human? If they aren't human, what kind of rights are they to have? So many weird questions that we don't exactly have the answers ready at hand.
there are only about 1.7 billion possible pattern/color combinations which is a tiny search space to brute force.
The lambda calculus approach provides an answer that is a theoretical solution for multiple programming languages. With very minor changes the same answer can apply to C Lang or JavaScript.
The bulk of personal threats and violence takes place between people who know each other and is not so difficult to authenticate; likewise there are many ways and people willing to help identify the authors of internet threats.

The point again is not so much that 'this will solve the problem' as 'threatening people should have a significant cost' and this is one way of significantly increasing that cost without needing to appeal to state actors whose alacrity and integrity may be open to question.

This approach maximizes free speech while providing the targets of objectionable or harassing speech more options for responding to it.
Is this the same project that was called sixl?

If so, I liked it then and I like it now ^_^
It's funny/not funny nobody can give a concrete example of how to apply this. AFAICT the last (only?) example in the paper is about copying memory. I know an easier way to do that.
I like debuggers for things like examining variables from higher stack frames after a highly conditional break (where printf from every higher stack frame would be lost in noise), for stepping through abstractions (especially in C++, where there may be surprisingly amounts of hidden code executed in overloaded bits and pieces), and for hardware breakpoints (an approach for solving reproducible memory corruption: combine a deterministic memory allocator with memory breakpoints + counters).
Why deep neural networks don’t actually think
Almost exactly... like nature does?
Slightly OT: Why are the loading times of Apple's Appstore so slow? Do the run this rhing from ARM servers without any CDN or caching? Guess it's just the lack of competition but wait, Google's Play Store loads fast, Sony's Playstation store too.
That could work. Though i'd argue by now users know what they know what they are getting themselves into when accepting a push notification - and the notifications pane in settings for disabling them has been working just fine.
This is tracked in a frequently updated post at

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/web-hosting-who-support-...

(That post doesn't track support on VPS plans because if you have root, you can run Certbot, Caddy, acme.sh, or other options to get the certificates yourself.)
Granted that it's new years eve and I haven't exactly avoided alcohol but that conversation between the pilot and his wife was hard to listen to.
Tesla and Other Domestic Brands Take Big Steps Backwards in Reliability Rankings
Much of genetic engineering is a blackbox. Many macro physical traits are associated with a gene (or several genes) through a probabilistic quantity indicating that a lot of what we are dealing with is a blackbox where we only establish correlations with inputs and outputs. However, I am addressing the ethics of genetically engineering humans not the ethics of using a technology where we possess limited understanding. The gap of understanding is closing and will no longer be a valid excuse in the near future.

In fact, there are many traits and genetic diseases where we know 100% the mechanism that triggers it all the way down to gene. See here:

https://www.genome.gov/10001204/specific-genetic-disorders/

What is the ethical reasoning stopping people from using CRISPR on these diseases?

I am still against the usage of CRISPR to cure these diseases because it opens a door for the creation of a race of genetically superior humans. I am against this purely for selfish reasons.
FAANGMUA is the latest I've seen...Microsoft Uber AirBnB, I believe.
AgileBits are a very small private company with just one noteworthy product and fewer than 100 employees. Calling them "huge and very well known" is objectively absurd.
Is GMO really any different than selective breeding, which has been going on for 10s of thousands of years, except for the time scale and precision of the changes? Yes, there may be unintended side effects, but that can be true with selective breeding.

Look at what we've done to dogs and how some breeds can hardly breath, others are predisposed to hip dysplasia, others yet prone to hearing issues, and we did all of that without genetic engineering.
I know, but I don't think that is the only factor in play. You could have vertigo without ever having the inclination to step in front of a train.
Well, they can call themselves whatever gender they want. Why not species? If I self-identify as a hobbit, who are you to question it?
They tend to hijack domains when they get popular.
The semantics of that word are endlessly talked about and debated. It’s completey irrelevant to anything and everything besides English literature people. It’s so frustrating to see so many people spinning their wheels on it, wasting energy that could be used for meaningful discussion. What is also frustrating is the use of that word to put people down. Anyone who thinks that automation is bad is a “Luddite.” Those “luddites” actually have an increasingly good point.
Pry is the way to go for debugging in Ruby. Drop into an interactive REPL with local variable context in situ with binding.pry or binding.pry_remote if in a forked server environment.

For subtle edits of a big chunk of code, my preferred approach is to set everything up in a test case, then pop into the implementation that needs to be changed where all the state is available with a binding.pry, and iterate expressions in the REPL until it's good, then copy my history out into an editor.

In Emacs it's nice and easy with rspec-mode and inf-ruby - run the test from within Emacs and get in-editor REPL once you hit the binding.pry.
> You don't need 4096, unless somehow your Raspberry Pi is the target for a powerful adversary and you don't rotate the keys (like a CA).

See https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/2080 for some long debate and my most recent thinking about this. (I predict some discussion about this at Real World Cryptography in January, if only because I'm likely to ask some real cryptographers for their opinions there.)
Great article! A couple of questions:

1.) Could the type of wide-spread glaciation you propose be aided by clustering of continental mass at or near the poles?

2.) Is there any research into what sort of event(s) might trigger world-wide glaciation?

Apologies if it was in the article and I missed it. The notion is definitely cool. :)

Cheers, Robert
The pop effect can be tamed with, for example, font-display: optional;, which allows the first page load to use the fallback fonts.
> Mason Marks ... argues that Facebook’s suicide risk scoring software, along with its calls to the police that may lead to mandatory psychiatric evaluations, constitutes the practice of medicine. He says government agencies should regulate the program, requiring Facebook to produce safety and effectiveness evidence.

Safety/effectiveness studies certainly seem like a good idea, though I'd be really hesitant to prohibit Facebook from doing this, at least not from worry about false positives (the privacy implications are a different issue).

Facebook is just the first in a line of common-sense checks: a Facebook algorithm detects that someone seems to be suicidal, this escalates to a Facebook employee who reviews it and in extreme cases escalates to law enforcement, law enforcement gets the information from Facebook and decides how to respond, and may end up pulling in psychiatric medical help, which of course involves trained people making judgement calls.

Facebook's role is to escalate, not to intervene, and even that escalation process is done by a human. It seems very unlikely that it would ever result in a situation where someone gets involuntarily hospitalized because some machine learning algorithm had a bug.
In principle I think that we should consider doing germline edits in humans. In general, if we have the ability to improve ourselves, we should absolutely do it.

However, in this specific instance, I think being strict on the scientist is okay.

The scientist made a mutation that was supposed to make the babies immune to HIV. But it turns out that the alleged CCR5 mutation that he induced a) didn't make the babies immune to all HIV strains only most of them (there are CXCR4 based HIV strains) [1], and b) made them more susceptible to other diseases like west nile virus infection [2].

He didn't just do that, he also circumented the approval infrastructure of science that is supposed to watch out for unethical experiments. If such behaviour is rewarded, people will start to do ethically questionable experiments. Biology is still in the shadow of past ethical violations like e.g. the HeLa cell samples that were being used throughout science without consent from the donor. Or think of the contergan scandal where the manufacturer company advertised that pregnant women should take contergan. Later it turned out that it had an absolutely harmful effect on fetuses, crippling them for life. The worst thing about this: the company knew about the effects but chose to hide the facts from the public.

I don't say that we shouldn't do germline edits at all. We should just be really careful at what we are doing, especially at the start. After all we are forcing (we don't ask the baby) a human being to live with that genetic change for an entire lifetime and their offspring.

Instead, we could maybe have started with one of those really ugly hereditary diseases that end in certain early death due to an unpopular mutation of a certain gene... Changing that gene to the popular variant would be objectively helpful and meaningful.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07545-0
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2118086/
It's not the distribution so much as the hundreds of millions of paying customers.
What should we call the people who stoke fires on steam locomotives then?
True. Their choices were that, taking a ~loss on these users, or charging more. All put them at a disadvantage compared to Apple.
Fear of change and new things. People were opposed to cars when they were first introduced. Ironically self-driving cars will arguably save countless lives. The resistance and fear will pass. But I do love driving...
Not only is it chaos for battery life, web push notifications are almost entirely spam. The web should have never added them in the first place. I’m glad that Apple stands against that crap.
Sure thing, thanks for the help with IO stream workarounds for mac. It's a complete re-implementation to solve some of the show stoppers that Cixl ran into. Snigl should build mostly anywhere using any C11 compiler for example, so that's an improvement. And it's leaner, faster and just plain better across the spectrum :)

You're welcome!
I really wish this article provided some insight on how much these people are being paid. 95% of the job may be lightweight customer service but providing emotional labor ot people in distress if quite demanding on the provider, regardless of how much training they're given.
Expanding on that, built up areas are where the demand and grid already exists, but not necessarily the clear space. Little added transmission capacity is needed.

In a neighborhood in my city where a few large electric users have expanded, the utility has been subsidizing rooftop panels for residential users to minimize summer peaks and avoid having to upgrade the old undersized grid. So far it has worked pretty well - peaks usually line up with the hottest sunniest days.
I've submitted a multitude of apps to the App Store as well. Of course Apple will reject it if you try to make it simply perform notifications—but exceeding that hilariously low bar is honestly not difficult for anyone with an ounce of creativity.
I very recently learned that BuyPass (a paid CA) now offers a version of their DV product via ACME

https://www.buypass.com/ssl/products/acme

The way that I learned about this is that acme.sh (the awesome ACME client by Neil Pang) announced support for BuyPass alongside Let's Encrypt:

https://github.com/Neilpang/acme.sh/wiki/BuyPass.com-CA

Obviously this is really great in every respect, including a potential opportunity for finding compatibility bugs with ACME implementations.

So perhaps what you were hoping for has already happened!

(Edit: also, thanks for your support for Let's Encrypt!)

(Further edit: apparently the BuyPass ACME certs are valid for 180 days, as against Let's Encrypt's 90 days, but only let you list approximately one domain per cert, as against Let's Encrypt's 100 domains per cert. https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-sh-supports-tls-alp... It's still awesome to see more options for ACME support and definitely makes it more credible that it wouldn't be as serious a problem if Let's Encrypt went away some day for some reason.)
I live in Connecticut (New England) and most of my panels are positioned slightly north.

https://russell.ballestrini.net/fulfilling-childhood-dreams-...
The officer who took the call quickly located the woman, but she denied having suicidal thoughts, the police report said. Even so, the officer believed she might harm herself and told the woman that she must go to a hospital — either voluntarily or in police custody.

It’s an imperfect predictor and Facebook will make a mistake which will eventually be followed by a police shooting. After all, how many stories have been published of police called for mental health issues that resulted in the shooting of the person the caller was worried about.

I hope the programmers are ready to explain how it worked because I get the feeling the family’s attorney is going to have an easy time with black boxes, machine learning, and no true tracing of why.
Absolutely. Not only has it encouraged other capable companies to start their own CAs, switching between CAs will pretty much be a endpoint configuration. Think that’s already the case with the test vs production server, no reason it can’t point anywhere else.
So should we applaud Facebooking for doing this or not?
I also have a question.
the article references the discovery of the new crater created by meteorite hitting Greenland

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/11/impact-cr...

would the erosion caused by glaciers, have enough time to erase the planet-wide evidence of that hit as well?

What conditions need to be there for the erasure to work quickly?
> Your device doesn't care about the CA keys, so those still being 4096 bit RSA makes no major difference to you.

Your device does care about the CA keys, because it has to validate the certificate chain. But the Let's Encrypt CA uses a 2048-bit RSA key, regardless of the size of the key you're using.
> Don't be naive, everyone. This is more than just about the 30% cut. This is also about Netflix having a LOT of extra data on their customers they can't get within the Apple ecosystem.... home addresses, full names, credit card data, and possibly (yes, quiet possibly) cross-referencing that with other data providers to determine credit scores, income brackets, lifestyle choices, etc.

I am no developer of iOS, but I am quite sure that Apple gives this information to developers. I worked in a payment system for years and this kind of information is quite common to share with your API users. I think they're even obligated by law because you can't really have a monetary transfer without sharing more details between both parties involved (yeah, you also have more information about the seller when money is involved).

I mean, I don't see how Apple would share less information with Netflix, them say, Stripe itself. Of course Netflix has some more information about you because you're using their platform to make the payment, however about the payment data itself I would say the information they can get with both Apple or Stripe is similar [1].

[1]: Unless of course Netflix made their own payment system, that also would make sense considering their size. In this case they would have more information about you, like full Credit Card number instead of only the bin number of your Credit Card. However I don't think this would make my point much different.
Not sure what I’m adding here, but I used to feel this way about PayPal and Amazon too. PayPal lost my loyalty years ago, Amazon I now run all products through a review checker and don’t buy clothes from them anymore
Extra points for deviousness, but this won't produce the correct visual result when logged in on a hardcopy terminal (e.g. DECwriter); or even on a glass tty (e.g. DEC VT100) if you set the upper limit to 10001. It will also always fail a correctness test of diffing against the proper output. You should definitely consider entering the Obfuscated C contest, though.
I used to carry 2 smart phones- one for work, one personal. I did it because my work phone was strictly monitored and I didnt want my company (or feds, namely SEC) reading my personal communications without a warrant just because it was on my work phone.

That said, I would not pay for 2 personal smartphones.

Edit: spelling
Let me preface my message by saying that you're absolutely right. If we're having a problems hiring people, the solution is simply to raise salaries. I completely agree with that, period. That's probably the simplest and most obvious solution to our hiring difficulties.

---

Now, the paragraph you quoted from me is a bit weird indeed. I'll try to explain what I wrote:

We can't keep the engineers working with us because they're either getting fired for some reason, or leaving while complaining about different things. All but salary. They had two raises in 2018 and pretty much everyone left got a promotion in 2018.

Hiring is *harder because the economy is strong again, so we have a smaller pool to hire from. But this has never been a problem before. Problem is, people is leaving too fast.
You are confusing yourself. Zoom all the way out. Look at automation in its ultimate, final and inevitable form: machinery that can do anything a human can. If you don’t think AGI is possible then the discussion ends here. The only question that needs to be addressed is whether or not humans can live well in the presence of that technology. Economically, what would the effect be? When the internet came, phone books disappeared. This was predicted. It’s economics, not a question of technology. So what are your predictions for when humans are no longer the exclusive source of intelligent signal processing, which we have been for all of history? If you look at this question honestly and carefully then the answer you find will not make you an advocate for ai and automation. Not unless you hate yourself and mankind.
Lots of nuances. This Twitter thread by a prominent biologist provides a detailed response to your question, worth a read.

https://mobile.twitter.com/thattai/status/106795825891106406...
I've been having too much fun the past week or so with my new computer and gentoo --- ldd as my linker, thin LTO, clang 7.0.1 building everything by default. There's far less breakage than you'd imagine.
lol but not gonna tell ya
It's like editing a piece of code without fully understanding what it does, without unit tests, and your text editor may be buggy.
I basically did what you’re talking about. Masters in physics, then went into semiconductors as engineer and materials scientist, then switched to Data scientist at a bank for 18 months, and now have been a research scientist in AWS for almost two years.

In Amazon, it’s easy to move around, but not between job families. I think it’s a bad idea to join as a SWE and try to transfer because they want people that have done it before, and you’re unlikely to do that sort of work as an SWE. I think it’s better to get experience in the role you want at a less prestigious company. You’ll learn a ton. Pick the best company that will have you.

My personal turning point was when I did free work for a local startup in exchange for them letting me take the Data Scientist title. To a recruiter, it’s totally obvious to hire a data scientist for a data scientist role, and isn’t clear at all what physics has to do with it. Recruiters are the first step when you’re starting fresh, so make it easy for them.

I also somewhat disagree with many of the comments here that textbooks are better than tutorials. If you buy these 1000 page graduate level texts when the idea that you need to read them cover to cover, you’re likely going to give up and fail. Instead, buy the books and put them on the shelf, and then work through tutorials and examples. Then reference particular sections of the book that are relevant to your work to add depth.

Finally, I recommend against starting with deep learning. There’s a whole helluva lot to learn with basic techniques. Very few companies are actually using deep learning in production systems. Start with linear and tree based methods to learn all the stuff about how to frame the problem and build robust systems. Then you’ll have a deeper appreciation for DL.

A reasonable person could disagree and say that there’s so much domain specific stuff around the art of DL that it really behooves you to start there ASAP. I would counter that you’re unlikely to be considered for positions using DL unless you’re pursuing your PhD in it, or have proven yourself in industry. Since that isn’t your situation, I’d wait until you got your foot in the door somewhere and then pursue DL on the side. That’s what I did, and then you look like a hero to your boss. This strategy led to my first publication in the field and I’m now working on DL almost exclusively.

Edit: one more thing. Think carefully about the type of work you want to do. My advice is assuming you’d like to be a person that trains/deploys ML models to solve problems in industry. This is much different than an ML Engineer, who’s implementing algorithms in low level languages and squeezing out efficiency. Obviously that would require a much deeper understanding of SWE. And a totally different person is an academic researcher that’s developing theory or technique. It’ll be hard to do that without a PhD.
Glad to see the Institute for Justice winning one. They're one of the organizations to whom I contribute cash (including just this morning) and find myself very pleased with their impact.
Exactly. And Apple makes it easy when it comes to cancellation too: go to my Subscriptions screen, select the service, and click ‘cancel’. It doesn’t matter who provides the service—it’s always quick and easy.

Granted, Netflix has always made it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up, so I don’t have an issue subscribing through them (and, in fact, I did).

If I thought I’d have to deal with HBO (now owned by AT&T), I’d definitely think twice before subscribing through them. I don’t know what their normal cancellation policy is, but I generally refuse to deal with service providers that force me to call a support line, wait on hold, and then deal with some customer retention rep.

Apart from Netflix, the only app where I’ll bypass Apple for purchases is Prime Video, and I’m put off enough by the process that I’ll only buy content through them that I can’t buy from iTunes.