skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If a kilowatt of electricity usage costs enough to offset its environmental impact

The day that markets actually price externalities into the costs of goods and services, whether by benevolent owners or force of regulation, I'll gladly declare Bitcoin useful.
No, I'm sorry, I wasn't precise enough. Yes, it's an amazing feat of engineering, and a truly great peak of text generation. But it's that. Text generation.

Yes, it can serve as great customized propaganda generator, and yes, people can be spin 'round and 'round with it. But they can be already with pretty much anything, from the simplest of phrases from "make X great again" to the elaborate scams of new age bullshit.

I simply disagree on the "virulence" or weaponization factor of this with others. (Especially when it comes to the possible "defenses", none can be "deployed" in 6 months. You can't teach critical thinking to billions of people overnight.)
I was studying some GPU randomization stuff, when I eventually came across this peculiar implementation of the DES Cipher.

The important thing to note, is that the DES-cipher is a 64-bit block cipher. But instead of implementing DES "normally", this implementation in the paper implements DES as if it were on only a 1-bit machine. Each of the 64-bits on your typical 64-bit computer represents a different DES "thread" that is running.

Alas: modern ciphers are better designed and probably don't have any "slack" like DES did in the 90s. Modern ciphers are just so well designed, that you probably can't get a speedup from such an odd technique.

Nonetheless, the 1-bit implementation of DES S-Boxes is truly innovative, and is worth reading the paper alone. If it was useful in DES in the 90s, this optimization technique might be useful in some modern code somewhere...

The paper may be old, but its got some really funny, and cool, ideas.
I'd suggest kattis and CodeForces. I use kattis mostly, but know a number of people who like codeforces better.

Here's a few for you to try. Some of these are pretty hard, but you should be able to find solution sketches online if you google the contests they are from.

https://open.kattis.com/problems/increasingsubsequence

https://open.kattis.com/problems/maximumsubarrays

https://open.kattis.com/problems/tray

https://open.kattis.com/problems/dinnerbet

https://open.kattis.com/problems/hyperpyramids

I've solved all of these as well, so if you get really stuck feel free to reply here and I'll try to guide you through them.
Have you tried connecting with a dial-up modem from 1989?
Note that the listed discussion is specifically about projects generated by the Create-React-App tool, not React itself. React has always been usable by just adding a pair of `<script>` tags to any HTML page.

Dan Abramov pointed out [0] that:

> in terms of feature set (test runner, devserver, compiler with support for bundle splitting and optimizations, error overlay with editor integration, static code checker) it’s comparable to a small Xcode.

> It’s valid criticism that tools like Xcode are installed once whereas react-scripts is per project. But the upside is you never have the “different projects demand different Xcode versions” problem. And everything runs on CI thanks to full encapsulation.

> I’m hoping approaches like Yarn Plug’n’Play will give us best of both worlds. Shared install for the same versions between projects but with isolated and versioned tooling.

[0] https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1097309141075456000
Recently saw a pentester post stating that entry occurred when she asked a person to print something from usb which required showing the employee how to identify the usb once plugged in etc. (Baseline may be terrifying)
I never liked Coq's name because I'm immature, but it really is magic software in my eyes. The level of downright objectivity that you get with it makes it feel so bulletproof.

I know functional languages are slowly starting to adopt dependent types, and you can get reasonable certainty of correctness with property-based testing, but Coq just feels kind of universal. If the proof passes, so will your code.

I really wish I could get my employer to sign off on me using it for a real project.
So far as I am aware the only language where I've read Generics have ever "considered harmful" is C++'s Templates, which are not exactly Generics as most other languages use them. Generics in Java, Typescript, C# are closer in spirit to functional programming's Algebraic Data Types applied to OOP, whereas C++ Templates are much more of a macro language than that. (C++ templates have been provably Turing complete as an embedded language.) Most of the C++ "considered harmful" reasons for eschewing the Template mini-language don't apply to Generics in the other languages.

(It also seems like modern C++ developers have more come to terms with Templates, and a lot of the recent features in that language expect/are built upon Templates.)
Banks do a LOT more damage than computers running.If cryptocurrencies get them out of the picture, it's well worth it.
Top Why SEO Ranking and Traffic Might Drop
I'm very familiar with the staggering difference in image quality between a smartphone and a DSLR - I have a full-frame myself.

In terms of the UI however, it's definitely very out of date.

When I upgraded my camera, one of the advertised features of the new one was that they added an extra digit to the internal intervalometer. Instead of being able to go between 0-999, the new one could go from 0-9999.

The fact that this couldn't be a simple software update still astounds me.
Old quote I've forgotten the source but it's over 40 years old now.

'Business schools turn out well trained, amoral yet obedient clerks.'

Can likely say the same about most CS programs. I know you can say that about engineering.
the reason i put phone in case it's not because it's fragile, but because glass it's slippery, could not even place it on sofa without sliding down
Uber and the Ongoing Erasure of Public Life
... I continue to use smartclient.com for my front end work.

It continues to kick everything from a productivity perspective and the framework is fantastic (for business-y apps).

People used to tell me it was too heavy weight. People used to tell me jQuery or Angular were better.

No external dependencies. NPM not needed. Might be a bit old in some places but so what.
Marvel Trolls Trying to Bomb Captain Marvel’s Rotten Tomatoes Score
Totally true.

In my case it was a natural progression: "videogames are great!" -> "I have an idea for even better videogame!" -> "how do I make one?" -> "can I tweak this one into being a bit more the way I like it?" -> tinkering around data files -> "I really want to make my own game" -> picking up a programming book at 13 -> a programming career.
Humble Book Bundle: Microcontrollers Raspberry Pi and Arduino by Make:
related reading .. The Firecracker Boys, by Alaskan author Dan O'Neil .. recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_(writer)
Honestly, I think that would be an awful downgrade. The software on, say, a Canon camera is fast, reliable and easy to use. Magic Lantern is "just" about adding even more advanced advanced and/or obscure features.
This probably is due to incentives - carrying a knife may bring a long prison sentence, carrying a bottle of acid or lye as weapon did not. UK changed sentencing guidelines last year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43225911
Hm. I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that the hard AND issue is when people search using a natural language type query (I know about stop words, assume these are always filtered out) and include some extraneous term, so 'What is that new crime novel by John Grisham about a Penguin I think?' will return nothing, and no amount of extra terms added at the end will help, until you delete 'Penguin'... Of course it's anecdotal, but I still suspect it's one of the reasons for the hard AND to OR switch...
I imagine technical screening is necessary, but in-person coding assessments are nonsensical. It's not like programming is a spectator sport, so why are we tested on it live? I suppose the process is self-selecting, because I personally have given up responding to SV recruiters or interviewing with those companies.
Sorry if I seemed hostile, but I couldn't find any better word than nonsense to describe what I presume you meant to invoke by "Technological Singularity". It's about as realistic and scientific as religious extremists telling us to repent and prepare for the Rapture.

Ah, but this unwillingness to consider "why couldn't we do this without crypto", leading to rejection of study of centuries of useful economic and monetary theory development, is precisely what predicates the failure of cryptocurrencies to achieve potentially valuable outcomes.

That's precisely why I bring it up. If a thing is a) valuable/useful and b) possible without cryptocurrencies, why has it not been done before? The fact that it has not, suggests that either a) or b) is false.
Yes, it's very worrying. Racists are increasingly being emboldened in the current political climate, and minorities are withdrawing further into their own groups for protection in response.
> just an artifact of infancy of our civilization.

Just an artifact of all of human history.

>those things will become irrelevant to financial system based on bitcoin

I don't think there is any point in further discussion; we are simply living in two different realities. The military and the military industrial complex are not going anywhere, certainly not because of cryptocurrency, the notion is laughably absurd.
Become a volunteer iOS developer for 501(c)(3) organization
Modern day scifi version:

OpenAI stops publishing their models. There are rumors that Geoffrey Hinton wrote a letter to the president. Deep Mind,Google Brain, FAIR go all silent. AI researchers stop updating their twitter and don't respond to email. Zero publications to NeurIPS 2020 from the best groups. Then someone spots few of those guys buying coffee near NSA's Utah Data Center. That center seems to grow and grow.

In the China Baidu Research goes silent as well.

Strange lights are seen on the desert sky....
... Not really.

There are slews of items that have laws governing them. Milk is milk. Butter has to follow a formula. Flour is flour, rice is rice.

Butter might feed their cows differently, though, and flours have different gluten contents. Rice can be different varieties. In all of these, however, there isn't much different.

Other things are preferences. For example, my father preferred any-brand-but-Kellogg's corn flakes, but my spouse is in the only-Kellogg's-will-do camp. There isn't much difference between brands after that: Kelloggs flakes tend to be thicker and it changes the taste.

There are slews of store brands that are much better in taste - and ingredients - than their name-brand counterparts. The store brands aren't spending lots of money advertising, after all, and can invest that money into making products that are yummy. Having good-quality store-brand products gets people into your stores.
(disclaimer: I am not a RL researcher) I think grandparent was using 'model' to refer to model-based or 'value-based' reinforcement learning algorithms (as distinct from 'model-free' methods (ex: 'policy-based' methods)). I don't think they were directly referring to the same 'model' as is meant by MPC.

In RL, the goal is to try to find a function that produces actions that optimize the expected reward of some reward function. Model-based RL methods typically try to extract a function for 'representing' the environment and employ techniques to optimize action selection over that 'representation' (replace the word 'representation' with the word 'model'). Model-free RL methods instead try to directly learn to predict which actions to take without extracting a representation. A good paper describing deep q-learning -- a commonly cited model-free method that was one of the earliest to employ deep-learning for a reinforcement learning task [1].

I think it's worth clarifying -- RL algorithms as a whole are more akin to search than to control algorithms. RL algorithms can be used to solve some control problems -- but that is not all they are used for unless you take an extremely broad view about what constitutes a 'control problem' ... I don't think it would be common to model playing 'go' as a control problem for example -- nor would I consider learning how to play all atari games ever created given only image frames and the current score and no other pre-supplied knowledge to be a control problem ...?

(I'm talking way passed my familiarity now) -- That said, optimal control theory intersects with RL quite a bit in the foundations -- Q-Learning techniques (a foundational family of methods in RL) have proofs that show under what conditions they will converge on the optimal policy -- I believe this mathematics to be quite similar to the mathematics used in optimal control theory...

[1] Deep Q-Networks https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/dqn/DQNNatureP...
@50m in they discuss the problems of using Swift on non-iOS platforms. How far is Swift from being a good cross-platform language?
Most of these tools like Archie and Veronica seemed like magical services when I started cruzing the internet. I recently learned that Archie when it started was nothing more than a collection of `ls -lR`s of various ftp servers that would be searched with grep. Which, in hindsite, was the obvious unixy way of doing it.
I don't know either, but usual shipping is FOB - freight on board, so the seller pays half of it. And so the seller typically doesn't do shit until the money is there.

And when it comes to trade between untrusted parties, it starts slow. To build trust.

Though crypto is great to making faster payments, that's sometimes an issue, and it can save the seller from the buyer's scam, but on the other hand completely exposes the buyer to the seller's scams. (Because cryptocurrency transfers are non-reversible usually [as in ever, except with a hard fork].)
Well, if someone produced such a model then they probably wouldn't be talking about the same soul as, say, the Christian soul.

Also the word "physical" has a different usage amongst philosophers than amongst laymen. In philosophy, a thought or idea might be thought of as physical since it is a property or pattern of neurological activity, but the average person would not say a thought was physical.
Presumably the added greenish-yellowish cast and over-the-top HDR contrast mangling were intentional.

It should be theoretically possible to do anything to each video frame that you can do to a still photo, including moderate/tasteful color & contrast adjustments.
I think it's absurd to think that it should be possible to package 150 years of median US household labor into an easily transportable, easily securable form. That simply will never be possible. It's not a technology problem.

Even if you could somehow do this, you would be incredibly vulnerable to extortion, and I doubt you would actually really want to do this even if you had the capability. There are people that have significant wealth that exists outside of "official" legal capacities (drug lords, dictators of small nations, etc.). They have to spend incredible effort on maintaining security of their assets. Pretty much the only thing that works is giving an army of people a better deal than they can get from someone else to steal your wealth from you.
> On the other hand, I genuinely do feel theory is really important. While not knowing the minutia of a tim-sort doesn't indicate that you'll be a bad engineer, not knowing the runtime efficiency of a sort can lead to some really awful code.

OK but why don’t these interviewers ever ask “internals” questions? How does a CPU works, or what the different levels of memory hierarchy are, what an interrupt request is, what is pipelining, what is SIMD, what is a GPU, etc. Or how about compiler internals, what are the different stages in a compilers, what are the different grammars and parsers, what is an AST, what is interpretation, compilation, bytecode, JIT, and how does it work? How about database internals? How is a database implemented, what is relational algebra, what is normalization, what is a data model, how do indices work? Similar questions can be asked about operating system internals, networking, floating point arithmetic, etc. In my experience, no interviewer has ever asked me these questions. And as an interviewer, I have consistently been disappointed with candidates’ inability to answer basic and relevant “internals” questions. Ironically, the algorithms and data structures questions that are commonly asked in interviews are outdated ways of thinking which do not take the underlying hardware reality into account (memory hierarchy and parallelism). It could be because a lot of these FANG(-like) “engineers” are themselves not knowledgeable to ask such questions. Or they are aware that new comp sci graduates are unlikely to really understand anything at a deep level, but all comp sci students are drilled on algorithms and data structures. If you are targeting a very specific age group (0-5 years experience) and want a standardized test then I guess asking CS201 exam questions in a job interview make sense. Companies prefer the 0-5yrs experience segment because they’re cheap, don’t have children, are easy to exploit, and they are easier to “mold” into your corporate culture.
Not GP, but I'd guess because so much of it is really communism or plain-old anti-human self-loathing dressed up nice for public consumption.
The context of this discussion was making connections in university. I have made way more connections through industry than I did at school, but that's a different situation entirely.
TDD and Unit Testing- Why you should care and how to make it happen
They may very well be, but is the quality of signal truly worse than that which an interviewer can extract from a few hours of your writing code on the board?
A Touch of Topological Quantum Computation 3: Categorical Interlude
EDIT: Should probably add the disclaimer that I'm long Bitcoin.

No need, at this point it’s trivial to determine that from the industrial-strength denial of the downsides and naked proselytizing. Someone brings up a real and long term concern about environmental consequences from a truly wasteful process, and your response is the kind of equivocating about what “harm” means, and fantasies about markets which have become the hallmark of the terminal-stage cryptocurrency investor/ideologue.

Trust me, long before the edit, people understood where you were coming from, and smelled the search for new bagholders.
>a 51% attack is practically impossible today

It appears you think a 51% attack is when an external agent attempts to out hash the network. This is only one type of 51% attack.

A 51% attack means there is a almost equal amount of hash rate being applied to two divergent, consensus equivalent chains. This can happen in above scenario or when existing miners attempt to reorg blocks (See ETC 51% attack) There is nothing stopping this behavior from occurring at any point in time. The only check on this behavior is the cost to rewrite history, decrease this cost, and you increase the profitability of such attacks.
Scrum. No thanks.
Looks cool. I'm, however, very happy no attempt to make me use Windows was made since 2008 or so and, therefore, I didn't have much use for either system.
Yeah, it's bad for everyone involved.
How did these guys reverse engineer Canon's software?
The OP glossed over managing styles and i18n between embedded JS apps and the host app. I'm not sure if there is a way to create strictly isolated CSS in pure server rendered applications without managing naming your own selectors manually. If you build tiny JS apps into your server rendered apps, you'll have to keep the styling for the JS app either in the main app, or bundle it into the embededded JS. If you bundle it into the embedded JS, you'll end up with two styling pipelines, which could make it more difficult to share variables and constants between the two, if you put the CSS rules for the embedded app in the host app, then you have to change the host app CSS for changes in the child app, which means the two might need to be in the same repo. This gets especially more difficult with advances in UI and interaction design which lean more heavily on state based animation. In those cases, we HAVE to have CSS related to animatable elements that are based on application state within the embedded JS application, then you'll really have an issue with having two pipelines. There are similar issues for i18n, asset bundling, accessibility auditing, and testing.

Given all the complexity of managing multiple pipelines for simple and complex pages, it seems to make sense to avoid that complexity by adopting a single pipeline that ensures browser compatibility, testing, i18n, accessibility and performance optimizations are consistently applied and centrally maintained.

Which might imply , if _any_ of your app requires complex presentation/interaction, it might be better to just build the entire app using the same framework.

Unfortunately, even if your app doesn't currently have complex functionality or interactions, doesn't mean you can guarantee it won't ever. Investors are known for pushing products to innovate, pivot, and adapt. Which implies that avoiding SPAs is a privilege for app developers and teams who have absolute control over their product and won't ever be forced to build more complex products.

The Op also doesn't address how having frontend dedicated ecosystems might affect hiring, or influence performance. I remember the days of having 20 instance variables set within a rails action and each of them being deeply coupled into the Erb template. Having a clear client server separation at least forces one to use an API, which can make caching easier by separating the caching of presentational and data elements. Also, the semantics of each server side templating language are quite different. E.g , slim vs liquid vs haml vs ejs. Using server side templates requires frontend developers to be much more versed in both templating languages and understanding the tiny bits of embedded server side code. I don't imagine too many front end folks jumping to learn scala, clojure or Haskell. However, if the client and server are separate than that means a scala shop can focus on the API and hire a frontend dev with no experience in the server side stack.
They don't want to pay you what they think (the you in their heads think you think) you are worth. That sounds convoluted but I've watched it happen repeatedly.

Bill budget IT guy, "What? We need to harden a server? Why do we need to pay this guy over a hundred thousand a year to do that? The internet is full of documentation. Let's hire someone with just enough technical know how to implement it."

The reality on the other side is that hiring an experienced engineer has it's risk. I've worked with 20+ years of experience engineers who did it because it was a job and didn't deserve the salary based on their skill set. Companies let this happen, you need to cap positions and then give inflation based raises.
> > People and companies want to have a central, stable issuing authority they can trust.

> I'd love to see a citation on that.

Didn't you just provide two examples yourself (Zimbabwe and Venezuela) that alternative currencies are being adopted precisely due to the lack of a stable central issuing authority?
I've got plenty of bandwidth on my server - http://files.jjcm.org/mosaic.png if anyone needs a non-ipfs / magnet link :)

Alternatively, if you have a slower connection I made a lossless webp here which should result in the same output at about 1/10th the size: http://files.jjcm.org/mosaic.webp
Good enough, with bugs is what makes the real money unfortunately.
Can you list a few sectors of the economy that are driven entirely by taxpayer money through the government?