skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In last 10-15 years, I have seen countless such articles about Saudi Arabia's troubled horizon. The Country has very deep connection with rest of Muslim World - they can hold 'brotherly' Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Egypt hooked on to Oil and Petroleum and can rely on these 'brotherly' countries to get access to their agricultural lands and can create massive 'alliances' with rest of Muslim World at their whim (case in point: Saudi-created and Saudi-led grand military alliance with Muslim Countries).

While I support Humanity's move away from fossil fuels, let's not kid ourselves -- Muslim World (which represents 2+ billion people) as well as China and India are in no rush to give up Fossil fuels. What we see now (drop in oil prices, oversupply) may get corrected over time as the poorer Muslim Nations like Pakistan and Central Africa region stabilizes and industrializes thus softening the blow from any dip in business with West.

As for social development across Saudi Arabia -- this is nothing new. Back in 1960s/1970s, Saudi Government had a modernizing phase where they bought Television and media to the masses. Universities were opened and Education was encouraged. Ever since then, Saudi men AND women have been sent to West and other places for their studies. This modernizing phase is just part 2.

You have to understand something about Saudis, Emiratis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, etc. Average citizen in these Countries may have good amounts of wealth and may get exposed to secular culture, however, at heart, their population is very much conservative and strong supports their Royal Family. Case in Point UAE: Flush with Wealth and relatively liberal -- but local population still appears conservative and prefers to live in their own social circles.

This (GCC) region is part of World where up until the Grand/great-Grand parents of current generation lived in desperate poverty since beginning of time and the society still remembers those harsh times very, very clearly -- given those circumstances and where they are now (almost First world type of living standards), any population of Human beings would be, very, very satisfied by their leadership.
What about those of us that refuse to use Facebook because of all the privacy problems? Are we suddenly voiceless in our community because we refuse to sell our identity to Facebook?

"Connecting them to other likeminded individuals"... you mean an even larger echo chamber where people can easily ignore beliefs and ideas that they don't agree with.
Toyota and Panasonic are reportedly teaming up: massive EV battery cell venture
So are there any practical applications, in the sense of projects reprogramming sd cards for other uses, as a cheap micro controller, etc?
Higgs-Anderson "discovery" was done in 1973 with discovery of weak current, and again in 1982. It was a great piece of experimental particle physics, but it was also not necessary for our understanding of how the world works.

The point of all this is pretty simple: people are play acting instead of doing useful work. Higgs-Anderson mechanism is a great example of this. 73 we were done, but had this huge staff of experimental particle physics guys with nothing to do, so we do it again. And again. Until you end up with a "science" paper with hundreds of "coauthors" and a huge racket of people wasting their lives verifying something that was already done in the 70s. Maybe it serves some higher purpose, like international relations, but even if it didn't, I'm pretty sure some bozos will be requesting an even bigger particle accelerator in 20 years to do 1970s physics again.
> Nothing frustrates me more than having my job responsibilities include training someone with no initiative.

Years ago, I worked someplace where a colleague was tasked with working with another developer on project X. After about 15 minutes it was clear the other developer ... wasn't? A web project, and this person had been employed as a "web developer" for at least several months. Questions like "how does this information in this browser get back to the server?" came up.

Colleague goes to manager and says "I can hit the project deadline, or I can make sure other_dev learns the basics enough to be able to contribute and understand projectX, but I can't do both by the deadline. Can we move the deadline back a few weeks?"

No, and no. Train other_dev and hit deadline.

Deadline was hit, other_dev moved to another project afterwards, and was pretty much as ineffective as before, but colleague was then saddled with this reputation of being a 'bad mentor' because the next team learned other_dev didn't know how things worked. Why the hiring manager wasn't tarnished... who knows?
> I wonder why we evolved to feel silly.

I'm going to guess it's because you are doing something unexpected/unusual. Predictability of action is a great thing for social cohesion and safety. Actions that result in one feeling silly might be misinterpreted (are you being aggressive, did you get rabies, or otherwise lost your mind?)
The NYT editorial board seems to have a personal vendetta against FB/Amazon in particular. Twitter and Google get passes in mainstream media, for whatever reason.

I wish they would give the same scrutiny they gave to FB for the past year to Equifax or cellphone carriers that sell our location data.
To aid other researchers interested in replication by sharing the methodology and references to other existing research, since other people might find different results.
Turn off your internet when doing work. Buy a stack of Postgre books. Memorize them. Never, ever, ever use stack overflow. EVER. Don't use google. Memorize everything.

That's what that asshole is looking for. :)

Though to be fair, if you come up with that strategy and can't do -anything- at a sql console, I'm going to ask how you normally interface with the database, because that's like a Linux expert not knowing how to use tar or ls or something.
I believe this is just a transcript of the ongoing experiment, see "status: in progress". Looks like gwern didn't write up the data yet, they have a lot of other experiments going on at the same time most likely..
Ray Kurzweil: AI is still on course to outpace human intelligence
One local burger joint made it a habit to not only call out your order to the crew in the kitchen, but that the kitchen would sing out the order back, with playful names for each type of thing on the menu.

Seemed to keep spirits up and probably had the side-effect of reducing errors.
In a nutshell, simplest form of raytracing: imagine a point where your eye sits behind the screen, throw lines from this point into the screen hitting each pixel dead center into the scene, check which objects you hit, how far away from the origin point that happens and sort by depth. Take the nearest one, render in color based on angle of incidence compared to lightsource.

That's the very simplest form of raytracing that you could do, then you can add reflection and transparency and other niceties that lead to the splitting of the rays and a summation at each hit.

This is actually reverse raytracing, forward raytracing starts from the lightsource, doing it backwards is an optimization because a lot of the light would end up hitting absorbing surfaces long before it would hit the plane of projection.
It would be very instructive to see a studied comparison of what factory work looked like during its peak as a well-compensated profession in the US, and what is happening in software development now. Certainly there are meaningful differences, but I am pretty driven by a concern that we are the factory workers of the future -- people whose profession used to guarantee a comfortable wage, but no longer.
Anyone got a mirror? Looks like it's not loading...

Edit: found one http://archive.is/vI29T
Isn't neutral opinion just a fact.
The nytimes opinion section is a trash fire these days.
I agree that it's not team size alone. Team size is just the variable I'm most interested in.

Thanks for sharing your perspective!

You reference AWS services and Jenkins jobs making things smoother. Is there anything, in particular, you would say should be considered a pre-requisite before adopting microservices, based on what you've learned?
> I think the best way to find talent is to do a trial run for 1 - 2 weeks and see how good they are at taking fuzzy problems and breaking them down into actionable steps

How do you get people to do a trial run for a week or two?

Most people start looking for the next job when they are already doing their current one. So how can we ask them to do a trial run for a week or two?

Also what about the remuneration(what kind should be given if at all for this period) and does this work for freshers and absolute newbies too?
I'd counsel caution in relying on those charts because, inter alia, they're self-reported salaries and the very nature of the report excludes unemployed bar members.
Someone has to make the tools that are used to automate the marketing, analyze the business data, whatever the task at hand is
Im sceptic of this slashdot classic. Was this ever verified independently?
flat side cargo pants, that's pretty neat, I hadn't seen those.
> Let's be generous and say there's about a dozen or so companies that routinely pay engineers that well

You aren't being generous. The amount of companies paying people that well is on the order of dozens, maybe even 100.

Every single FAANG company, every single unicorn, all hedge funds, and a few successful non-unicorn company based out of SF and the Bay Area.
Broadly agreed, except that I find even Ubuntu to be quite slow these days. Sticking to plain vanilla Debian with a lightweight interface solves this quite nicely - XFCE and LXDE are incredibly snappy even on very low end hardware, quite a bit better than XP at least.
It is an admittedly biased self-study that while very detailed in explaining the approach and methodology is very flawed from a credibility standpoint though.
If you are using Linux put the (ttf) fonts in ~/.local/share/fonts/TTF/ instead.
Certainly, taking a nontrivial percentage of global revenue will force Google's attention, but I'm not convinced that's the best way to think about it.

One thought: if Google had just served non-personalized ads (or personalized ads with much greater restrictions) to all of France, how much money would they have lost due to the ads being lower quality? With some very rough estimates, I'd guess $250 million in revenue resulting in $100 million in profit. ($1 billion revenue from France, $500 million from ads, ads are 2x more effective when personalized, 40% of revenue is profit). All very rough estimates/analysis, but it definitely seems like a significant slice (half the profit) of this part of Google's operations, and likely there's at least someone at Google who's thinking about this specific revenue source who just got a wake-up call. Given the roughness of the estimates, seems possibly at a point where it would have been better for Google to just give up on ad personalization (at least in France) altogether.

Another thought experiment: surely at some point (e.g. fining 100% or more of global revenue), Google will just stop operations in France (or Europe), which is probably not what anyone wants. What is that tipping point? If every country (or city) uses the "significant percentage of global revenue" approach, it's more likely to collectively become unreasonable. That's at least the extreme-case downside to giving a fine that's too big (especially proportional to the unfairly-gained profit in the jurisdiction giving out the fine).
> No matter which attacker we want protection against, the points to secure are client and server, not the middle-boxes.

> Here we are talking about implementing security in hardware (bad idea: hard to upgrade as security requirements and practices chage) at a very low level (at data link layer). If this is to skip security at higher levels of the stack, you have to trust all hardware vendors and operators worldwide. If we don't, we can as well communicate on an insecure channel: that's what modern TLS provides.

So you're turning off WPA on your wireless router, I take it?

TLS is not a panacea, and there are many attack vectors for devices and applications throughout the entire network path. Defense in depth suggests security be applied wherever there is a vector.
an airliner is not the same as a taxi. One is mass transport.

The writer didn't suggest racism was involved. They suggested China was upset about it and that would cost UA money.
They're planning on building dome cities.

https://www.popsci.com/united-arab-emirates-mars-city-pictur...
Agreed. The first rule of Hacker News: You don't tell people about Hacker News.

It's becoming very reddity as of late
Indeed, you gotta risk to win. But at which threshold you stop, and reconsider, given the lack of results? 1B? 10B? 1T?

I'm not an expert on the matter, but I understand "cut your losses".
Vacations haven’t been quite the same since I went solo. I have to be connected. That said, virtually all my clients are willing to wait for non-emergency stuff until I get back, so in most cases I don’t have to work a lot while I am away - maybe a couple hours over a week in total. I’ve never taken a 2 week vacation (I’m 44) and wouldn’t know what that even feels like.
This is a common and incorrect misconception.

The network needs security, as does the applications running on it. These are different security layers, and cannot be provided together.

With an insecure network, even if your applications are secure, then bad actors (government, company, whoever) have a much easier time attacking your phone directly. Perfectly secure applications and an insecure network leaves your phone open to attack from nearby radios. If we assume your applications are all perfectly secure, and your phone software and hardware are also all perfectly secure, then that leaves abuse of the network as a tool to affect denial of service, spying on presence meta-data, and not limited to the carrier.

But of course there are no perfectly secure applications, nor any perfectly secure phones. So keep in mind that the weak network greatly expands the attack surface from which bad actors can mess with your phone.

This isn't a problem solved with layer-7 security.
No, because you can't identify the message uniquely. That's why I propose md5 on the client side as extra meta data and only using it as a limit for forwarding.

Not banning when you send to > 5 people, which I do bi-daily
> The carrier should not be able to know much about you, except some vague metadata (an histogram of the amount of data you exchanged with some IPs.)

And your approximate location at all times due to their triangulation capabilities.

Not much you can do about that one though.
>...and put them in a frame of mind to consider that they might be wrong.

You are entirely correct, but I think what GP is saying is that there's a very specific kind of person who goes from being insulted on the Internet to open to reflection and it's not most people.
If people are driving in, is cost what’s stopping them? At least in the US public transport riders have lower incomes than those who do not.
Nice try, Oyster. Back to the NY harbour with you.
If we can reduce global CO2 emissions by 0.7% and methane emissions by 5% at the cost of actually eating the food we buy (and also save money in the process), I'd say that's pretty low hanging fruit in the efforts to reduce global warning.
Thanks for sharing! I like your approach. I've often seen the 'do everything as a microservice' idea get tossed around. I get the feeling that your approach is pragmatic.
You are entirely incorrect in this instance, for all the reasons laid out in this thread.

Looking at stream sizes is not "advanced deep packet inspection", it's in fact the opposite of that.
You could solve those issues by having the actual scientists you mention get involved in the process and ask their perspective on something before you write about them.

The laziness of journalists today, even in long form articles like this, with a full graphics team and everything, never ceases to amaze me.
I routinely get emails from them advertising selections of products which suggest they have almost zero idea of what I might be interested in.
Interesting video, thanks.

The subtitles at around 4:05 are out of sync. The quote reads

> Je moet de wereld niet geven waarom ze vraagt, maar wat ze nodig heeft.

In English:

> You must not give the world what it asks, but what it needs.
Does anyone do that, at least on the software side? Obviously there are consistency issues with e.g. non-instantaneous bank teller actions, but those are human inconsistencies, not software inconsistencies..
Ways to expand your online following
This isn't just about preventing denial of service. It's also about preventing direct attacks to your phone's base-band controllers. It's also about reducing the leverage attackers have to manipulate weak applications.
> doctors, lawyers

Doctors only book so many patients a day. Lawyers are also working for a limited number of clients.

An app I did myself (on top of a FOSS base), released independently, was downloaded millions of times within a year.

Google back in 2011 had one billion MAU. In that context, a $150k+ a year salary (plus equity etc.) for helping provide the content for those one billion MAU is plausible.

Also Google is a web intermediary for web sites with content for consumers. So Google benefits from the work of anyone who puts up a web site, contributes to Wikipedia etc. as well.
Top companies pay similar salaries in Seattle and New York. New York real estate isn't as bubble-like as SV, and Seattle's is possibly bubble-like but still about half the price as SV.
It should be a very simple requirement that whatever the way is to “agree to collection and enter site” must not be simpler or more prominent than the action required to NOT agree to non essential collection and still enter.

That is, no more “agree and continue” that isn’t accompanied by an equally prominent “continue without tracking”.
I really wish I'd read these comments and realised the experiment isn't finished before scrolling up and down the article for five minutes trying to find the conclusion.
This has always been true. New syntax or libraries were added in almost every major Python version.

If python2 was python2.2, it wouldn't support `with`. It's just that python2 has been Python 2.7 for a decade, so it's been relatively stable.
what about journalists, whistleblowers, strictly vocal critics of the centralized surveillance state [0], lawyers, politicians, ... ?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16947652

EDIT: just adding, we also don't know what the cost is of the most efficient privacy presevering distribution method actually is. only when people investigate and try will we find out.
wow this is brutal. thanks for sharing. I had mused on the idea of pitching them an opinion piece about my field, traffic, but not anymore.
>Compromising a CA is not trivial and due to CT it’s almost certain that such an attempt will be uncovered later. The CA ecosystem has improved a lot in recent years, please update your views accordingly.

This is simply not true. Governments can simply compel your CA to do as they want. Not to mention that "uncovered later" is pretty damn worthless.

That said, I do agree that there should be HTTPS mirrors.
Lawyers: ~$33k average, partners get up to $200k.

Doctors: varies wildly, but $20k seems to be the norm with enough hours. The base salary is outrageously low, so many doctors take additional shifts - especially in private clinics where they are compensated much better.

Experienced specialists can count on up to $80k.
State of Social Media 2019 – Buffer
the way you express is very good
A key issue beyond the supply and demand of programmers is the wider technological transformation of the economy. Programmers are highly remunerated because they provide massive market value to the capital owners and they do that essentially by automating, by teaching machines to do things previously done by people. This activity seems to create significant capital accumulation and machines don't usually forget what they learn or need to be reprogrammed from scratch: once a problem is solved, its solution is frequently made available to other programmers who can build on it to solve even more complex problems previously thought intractable for computers.

If this continues unabated for the long run and we don't hit an intrinsic automation plateau, it can logically have two possible outcomes: either programming will become the main employment of humans and source of income, which seems unlikely, or the capital owners with the help of programmers will manage to make large swaths of the population unemployable.

Another feature of technological capitalism is that it highly conducive to monopoly rents, walled gardens and strong barriers of entry. The early mover advantage of Microsoft on the operating system market still earns it billions in pure rents. So competitors who would like to change and equalize the earnings distribution, for example by employing programmers in another country, will be in general unsuccessful.

I know it doesn't seem like that now, on the contrary, the tech industry seems like a wild west of endless possibilities and opportunity for all, but it's worth pondering if the apparent "tech boom" isn't really a massive economic shift for a very different, highly polarized and almost feudal society, with the programmers acting as the samurai, the sell-swords used by capital-owning rulers.
I’m aware. I thought was implied. The primary function of VC of course is to provide the C.
Everything I said is 100% true. Citation: nobody has found an error yet.

I think it would be great if people took this up as a hobby. I don't even mind wasting VC on stuff like this, and said so. I object to researchers selling this to young scientists as a potential career. It's not! It is a glass bead game, and acting like it isn't is the moral equivalent of fraud.
I'm certainly not claiming that the future will necessarily resemble the past. But GP was making an argument from the past, so in that context we should certainly at least try to get the past right as much as possible. (And there was (I am told http://philip.greenspun.com/research/tr1408/lessons-learned.... ) the '80s, where the salary slump was driven by increased supply rather than a collapse in demand.)
> EU per their democratic processes decided

Do you imply that democratic process never make mistakes?

> Relying on people not understanding something is not ethical

CNIL bureaucrats rely on people not understanding, that these GDPR regulations make internet worse (annoying "accept/deny cookies" questions, less relevant ads, less revenue for businesses to create functionality users want).

Would you say that CNIL is unethical?
> Nobody knows whether default configs are disallowed as long as opt-in is positive action.

Isn't it just common sense based on everything in GDPR? I find it hard to believe that someone familiar with GDPR and without incentives to the contrary could legitly come away thinking the legislation intended to allow defaults to be anti-user-privacy.
It's preregistration.

You know gwern isn't hiding unsuccessful self-experiments.
You have a social safety net and actual workers’ rights that make up for at least some of the difference.
> If [...] easy enough to work on it, you don't need to radically change its structure.

This is precisely the point. When you have a large number of developers all working on the same deployment unit, it isn't easy to work on. A mono-repo is orthogonal to microservices.
Jetbrains: Developer Ecosystem Survey 2019
By that logic, we shouldn't bother securing wifi APs because everything's encrypted at the application layer anyways. Also, AFAIK SMS and VoLTE don't have additional encryption, so if the data layer is compromised, so are those services.
>The Saudi's are not poor or uneducated...;

Also, rather indoctrinated... which can be antithesis of education.