skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm under the illusion

I think that's brexit all over, illusion rather than substance.

> it's easier to influence a Swedish politician than it is to influence an order of magnitude more foreign politicians, to get the same proportion of influence.

Yes, and that's bad.

A big benefit of the EU is it's harder to manipulate -- there's a lot more people to control -- at least 16 independent heads of governments and nearly 400 MEPs. Far easier to lean on a single struggling PM and promise your endorsement in return for dinner.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/05/rupert-murdoch...

And the EU's power is limited, by national vetos, and national laws, and the fundamental material scope of eu law. How broad or narrow that scope is of course something to be debated, but the limits are there.

Copyright is clearly is one of those things that needs to be tackled at a level of government higher than the local town council, especially if you have an open market. Imagine a world where a movie made in LA wasn't protected by copyright in New York, let alone Toronto, Paris, or Singapore.

The EU is far more democratic than say the ISDS treaties, WTO and the web of complex interlocking treaties between countries.

> If you go to the extreme you can get too small as well. For example a society with a couple of thousand people is too small to form what's essentially a country. There is no clear cut answer.

Decisions should be taken at as low a level as makes sense. Defense can't be done at a city level, or even a national level for most countries, so these decisions make sense to move to larger areas. How far we're willing to move is an ever changing view, but the principal stands.
Auden Hated His Most Famous Political Poems
To be honest, most people wouldn't even bother to know if it was open source, they would install it anyway. Actually most people probably don't know what "open source" means.

It would work against the HN crowd though.
Maybe. (Actually, no, not, but for the sake of discussion). I have worked with people that would be considered "brilliant jerks" as in, they were amazing but they were so hard for most people to get along with that they actually were fired for being difficult to work with. It's never happened to me, but I've seen it happen maybe a half-dozen times to other people. What I couldn't help noticing about each of them was that: a) I never had any problem getting along with them. They just came down hard enough on the incompetent that they got a reputation for being unreasonable. b) there were people who were much, much more abusive, but not people that anybody would call "brilliant" (the opposite, in fact), who seemed to be applauded for their ability to anger people. The difference was that they people who got away with it always directed their arrogant attitude down, never up. It just seems to me that the more competent you're _perceived_ to be, the lower the threshold for bad behavior gets you labelled as a "jerk".
Micro-Offense: A New Word to Combat Privilege
There's a great, if a bit cheesy video from FortNine [1] on why motorcyclists can be basically invisible to even cautious drivers due to the way our brain processes information, and I think the same thing would apply for bicyclists. When I'm on my bike (of either type) I assume nobody sees me and act accordingly.

For cyclists and pedestrians to really be safe we need to design our road infrastructure to counteract those issues from the start. I visited Copenhagen a few years ago and biked everywhere, and it was a real eye opener how safe and easy it was compared with my home in Chicago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94PGgYKHQ0
ajaygoel you are an inspiration! Thanks for sharing your story!
Back in my childhood, if you told me that one day, there would be more games of any imaginable genre, more than what you would know what to do with, of a higher visual and production quality than I'd ever imagined, I would have thought that to be a kind of utopia. Now in 2019, I find it to be somewhat dystopic. (See also, the "Paradox of Choice.")

A century before cars, if you told people that a commonplace device could quickly and inexpensively take you to the very store or house you wanted to go to at speeds up to a mile a minute, that would sound utopian. Now we know such systems have serious downsides.

Be careful what you ask for. You may get it. Or, as I put it, into any complex system whatsoever, some suckage must come. Solving one problem either exposes or creates another.
Hi Omar! I'm eternally grateful to you, Chris, Aleem, and the entire InboxSDK team.
Better link: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-8912
Can they finish their other wars first?
The fake images would look a more real if they just post-processed them through one of the popular face-enhancing apps.
I'm saying this on a site where I assume people are able to think a little beyond the basics, yes.

Google spying on its customers would result in an amazing lawsuit. People tear apart and reverse-engineer these things for fun and it would have been discovered in due course. Google knows this. So, no, it's not an "obvious" option at all.

You're starting from a position of "of course google is evil". I'm starting from "how much sense does that make?". We've reached different conclusions because of this.

Pedantically listing a bunch of other options is missing the point, and they basically all fall under option 2.

As for your perceived "pro-government" and "pro-google" views on HN: people have different views on many topics. Maybe this is the only place you encounter views that differ from your own?
Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053

Another (short) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19201999

Discussion about an update:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4285333

Other submissions without discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8466459

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730494
Bruce Simpson is awesome. He still has his website. Check out his work on the pulse jet engine at http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/
Unearthed Emails Could Be Smoking Gun in Epic GDPR Battle Against Google, Adtech
>What you call "cheating and dishonesty" most of the world's population thinks of as nothing other than valuing the good of self and family ahead of that of strangers.

And who said that that's noble?

If everybody did the same and had no moral limits of putting "the good of self and family ahead of that of strangers", then society would be a hellhole.

In fact, it would also come to bite them and their family in the ass too, because society would be a hellhole for them as well. Others can play the game of putting "the good of self and family ahead of that of strangers" as well, and to them its yourself and your family who are the strangers.

>Adults who treat strangers as well as family are scarce indeed in this world

You don't have to "treat strangers as well as family" to not cheat in exams.

You can still give your money to family and none to strangers, take care of family members in sickness and not strangers, protect family members when they're under attack but not strangers, give house and shelter to family members and not to strangers, etc.

Cheating exams and stealing someone's place (that they were actually worth it) doesn't imply you have to "treat strangers as well as family".

And how about caring about your family and kids enough to give them principles, and not make them cheaters, liars, cowards, and beggars who only value themselves and/or their family, and are otherwise useless weight to society?
Blockchain Scalability Idea: Private Sparse Merkle Trees
This particular product is pretty easy to think of if you have a little bit of experience with marketing.

What it does is add a common feature found in marketing automation/CRM systems to Gmail, a massively used platform.

It essentially unbundled a feature from a specialized product and made it available as on add-on on a prosumer product.

If you look at large platforms like Gmail, you can probably find isomorphic ideas.
A relevant recent case: the 9th circuit allowed to stand a federal law that limits 2nd amendment rights for certain non citizens unlawfully present in the US:

"... The panel affirmed a conviction for possessing a firearm while being an alien unlawfully in the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5)(A)."

http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/08/15...
> Changing privacy policies doesn't work that way.

Legally speaking, yes it does. It's a free service. The only obligation they have is to make their terms freely accessible, and to publicize any major changes.

You seem to be implying that Google and other free DNS providers have never changed their privacy policies since there's no good way to notify the users. Google's own website (and the Internet Archive) totally contradict this.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

"Last updated October 29, 2018."
> It's less clear to me why a valuation of over $1B matters to a private company though.

> hence public valuation would matter

There is your answer. IPO valuations have to come from somewhere, and the most recent private valuation is usually a good starting point for what investors will pay.
Didn't know about KASAN ( https://github.com/google/kasan/wiki ). "KernelAddressSanitizer (KASAN) is a dynamic memory error detector. It provides a fast and comprehensive solution for finding use-after-free and out-of-bounds bugs in Linux kernel. KASAN is available in the upstream Linux kernel starting from 4.0. Can be enabled with CONFIG_KASAN=y."
Thank you... wanted to say much of the same. I think it is all part of the PC movement to virtually castrate all aggression (mostly in men, in women it's fine). You need a certain amount of ego in order to lead. And yeah, confidence is not the same as ego but they are definitively interconnected. You need to display confidence to convince people to follow you, and you need a bit of ego to secure that confidence.

And some may say, but that's not the point where it is "toxic" but several of the samples in TFA are not counter or even in demonstration of where it might or might not be a toxic level. Even in communist/socialist societies the successful demonstrate an amount of aggression, ego and confidence. It's human nature. When it coincides with competence all the better.
No, it means that states must have a pretty good reason for treating aliens differently, but the fact that an act which would otherwise be within their power is federally prohibited when targeting citizens but not aliens—the outcome of a Privileges and Immunities basis for incorporation rather than the more historically common Due Process one—may itself be sufficient to allow a distinction.

I mean, your basic argument is that Thomas is just pointlessly making semantic disagreements with the majority that would have no effect on this or any other conceivable case because either basis for incorporation produces exactly the same result not only on the present case but all possible cases. While I have a low opinion of Thomas, it's not quite that low.
You can not generalise the whole India by reading one post. There are many Indians CEO's who are running the big companies and are well qualified.

Generalising the whole culture based on post is not right. You should give some one chance and some Indians are very talented and extremely hard working than anyone else you find.

Every business is gaming system even Amazon is gaming the system.
Reliable Microservices Data Exchange with the Outbox Pattern
> First off, every swimmer pees in the pool

Straight up lie. I've swum for two decades and never pissed in a pool. Losing 30-60secs from a set to go take a piss is nothing. In Australia at least, pissing in the pool is considered repulsive. I don't doubt that some people piss in the pool, but I've never been in a squad and felt a "warm patch". If that did happen, others would notice and the person would be socially ostracised.
It's a reinforcing feedback loop: new cities are developed to accommodate cars -> more people own/drive cars because of the city's design -> repeat.

It's a type of trap that leads to these undesired effects. I do not see much changing until self-driving cars change the dynamics of how US society thinks about cars and transportation.
They could easily solve this by blurring the background.
Ok, so here's where they use NN models:

"Although ab initio calculations such as those involving many-body corrections can provide accurate energy-band results, the scope of such calculations is somewhat limited to about 1,000 strain points because of high computational cost. On the other hand, by discretizing ε with a regular grid comprising 20 nodes separated at each 1% strain interval over the strain range of −10 to +10%, the computational model would entail about 108 band structures, up to five orders of magnitude higher computational requirement than what can be reasonably achieved presently. To overcome these difficulties, we present here a general method that combines machine learning (ML) and ab initio calculations to identify pathways to ESE. This method invokes artificial neural networks (NNs) to predict, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, material properties as functions of the various input strain combinations on the basis of only a limited amount of data."

Further down:

"We aim to describe the electronic bandgap and band structure as functions of strain by training ML models on first-principles density-functional theory (DFT) data. This approach leads to reasonably accurate training with much fewer computed data than fine-grid ab initio calculations and a fast evaluation time."

--

If I'm reading this correctly, it sounds like they already have a high-fidelity 1st-principles model that is computationally intractable to solve at scale, so they are using ML techniques to create an surrogate model that is computationally more tractable -- the AI modeling is a model reduction exercise.
What was it W.C. Fields used to say about drinking water?
This is why pass-tomb was invented.
A Genius for Being Human: Isaiah Berlin
Still, given the number of people who seem to be having trouble with it, maybe it'd be worth re-thinking that design?
That's because thinking of it in terms of pain point isn't necessarily helpful, since people have different "pain tolerance" when it comes to technology.

Try to think of it in terms of outcomes.

What are you trying to do with computers/software, and how could the outcome be massively improved/democratized?
That's interesting, I've found it much easier to get in touch with MEP representatives than it is to get in touch with national politicians, and MEPs have been much more responsive as well. Have you tried contacting any MPs, and/or MEPs, and what was your experience?
>So while it takes a long time to get those rights properly enshrined, at least they seem to be safe.

Our rights are so unassailable that I need to repeatedly pay a non-negligible amount of money to the government bear arms and get the approval of my local police chief if I want said arms to be reasonably modern. /s

Some animals are more equal than others. Some rights are more unassailable than others. At least I can bitch about it on the internet and nobody's quartering troops in my home (edit: yet).
Only graphics shaders.

Advanced compute shaders very often need to synchronize local data within warp. When you program such shaders you have to be aware about SIMD width (32 on NVidia and Intel, 64 on AMD), and design both algorithms and data structures accordingly. Failing to do so often have significant performance costs, I saw up to 10x speedup after implementing cooperative algorithm instead of straightforward one.
Adopting Reactive Programming on iOS, Finally
Utopias are not entities that do anything. It's a word, created to describe an imaginary island, by a fiction writer. [0]

Who is optimizing metrics to an extreme, where did you get that definition?

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/utopia
Pedestrians dont weigh 4000 pounds and move at 40 miles/hour, for starters
Sources for what? Parent didn't make some scientific or factual claim, just shared a point of view.
I used to spend a lot of time on chronic illness lists. I left all of them because it was a general truism that you couldn't talk about what worked since the absolute sickest people who had the most and worst horror stories were the same people who would outright mock things like removing carpeting from the house and going to all wood and tile floors or making dietary changes.

They were extremely dismissive of the idea that anything made a real difference and they insisted they couldn't be bothered with stuff like that because they wanted to "have a life" and their illness already took too much of their time as is. They simply didn't have time or energy for such "neurotic" and "obsessive" behavior.

It was absolutely verboten to point out that the people being proactive about diet and the like we're healthier than these people were. God forbid you should imply it was "their fault" that their prognosis was so extremely bad compared to the rest of the community. That would be cruel and would be "blaming the victim."

So I ultimately unsubscribed from whatever lists I hadn't already been thrown off of for the crime of suggesting that maybe us patients could do something effective without drugs, surgeries or a doctor's permission, like eat better and use non toxic cleaners and the like. I got off all the drugs and quit getting the email notices about another death in the chronic illness community.
From the description, it seems it certainly is an (illicit app) store.

Also, ‘illicit’ doesn’t necessarily mean “unlawful”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/illicit#synonyms also mentions “not permitted”, and Apple doesn’t permit you to use an enterprise certificate in this way.
>I like to tell people to treat passwords they have written down like they would a hundred dollar bill. (You keep it on your person, or lock it up when not in use).

Does that system fall apart if you need to securely and remotely share a password with your mom? Because that is the standard of usability I've been considering.
I urge the mods to correct the title.
Maybe: Linux<4.20.10 af_alg_release use-after-free vulnerability[CVE-2019-8912]
> noncitizens necessarily do not enjoy the privileges and immunities of citizens.

Would you have more reading on this? It's something I've wondered about but never really come across a comprehensive answer to. What rights do noncitizens not have that citizens do?
Thank you for an opportunity to revive this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yW5cyXXRc
I've heard the assertion that utopianism is bad, but what about it is bad? Certainly, we should be able to strive for improvement, in ourselves and society?

The problem with utopianism is the desire to create a new society out of whole cloth, with no regard for the lessons of the past, or the structure of existing society. Drastic changes, like those of the communist revolutions, rarely bring about positive change (not never), and frequently bring about huge disaster. Instead, changes on the margins tend to more reliably improve things. There are exceptions of course.
Free Education Platform to Help Increase Test Automation Success Rates
Move Over, Snapchat: Meet Zocal, the App Winning Gen Z with Local Moments
Given the number of people that (reportedly) paying for it, maybe it's good enough.
Do you think all the animals that use these water sources follow the same rules?
I keep getting it right after the first failure. And my brain learned it very quick: (1) The background is distorted. (2) Their eyes are open but their irises are not round enough.
I guess it's likely to be of help to a terrorist the same way https://www.khanacademy.org/math is.
I'm not seeing the patch in 4.20.11's changelog or any of the longterm kernel versions posted today.
At the very least, you shouldn’t stick your head in the water, and swimming in shallower areas exposes you more strongly to contaminants than in deep areas.
looking at the paper in PNAS I think that there is a clever arrangement and application of deep nets in play here. As ever the trick is to couple deep domain understanding to clever application of AI techniques.
Ant Design – Vue Components
Is this a remote exploit? The NIST page seems to say so.
Background, teeth, hair, edges are giveaways. I easily got 10/10 right.
Track-Switching in a Large Elixir Web Application
I could query my system and get numbers. My comments are based on the number of times I've heard a user say "Google shut down my account." It's maybe once a month. And then when I look at what they were sending, it's pretty spammy.

And if you're a G Suite user, and your G Suite domain otherwise has a good reputation, one single user may get "suspended" for 24 hours, but I've never seen a G Suite user permanently banned UNLESS the whole point of creating that G Suite account on a particular domain was to send out mass emails through every single user account.
I hear you, except you don’t address the refunds and cancellations concerns. I now have a habit of only using software that makes refunds and cancellations pain free. I shouldn’t have to email you to cancel, this is just creating a false barrier to make your users life more difficult so maybe they won’t cancel and you can get another charge out of them. The fact that you believe this impacts a small minority of users and your overall response to this is very disconcerting. This impacts all of your users, only some of them are complaining. I also guarantee that you aren’t reaching your full potential because people are reading those comments and not signing up in the first place.
I have to admit, you're doing a pretty good job of playing the devil's advocate. I absolutely agree that any word can be used in creative and novel ways and to express new ideas, I just find this example to be much more confusing than useful. :)

FWIW, I've been trying to find examples of things conventionally called algorithms, but which are not in essence imperative (in the sense that there are multiple operations that must happen in a certain order - "procedural" is perhaps a more precise word than "imperative"), but I can't really find anything, so I would like to insist that it's one of the defining characteristics of an algorithm.
> You clicked the wrong button. Please re-read the instructions.

Probably not the best customer response I've seen from someone doing customer service.

As a learning lesson for others out there with a SaaS service. If you cannot have a phone number for support, absolutely provide a clear and easy to find email address for support. The people who tend to be the most likely to not understand the cancellation process, or have other similar issues, have a large intersection with the people who will have difficulty contacting you via something other than phone or email.
The solution I follow on all my Android devices is the "NoRoot Firewall", free, no ads. I use it either to block IPs/addresses I "don't like" or global block sites/IPs like Google analytics, Facebook etc.
Trying to immanentize the eschaton is risky business. On the other hand, that there's pie in the sky is a vicious lie.
> Beating the Averages

> A classic article on using powerful programming languages as a secret weapon

I'm surprised this is included given that it's been more or less been proven to be false. Almost every valuable company in the past 2 decades was built on a blub language. Facebook even used PHP! Java and C++ are at the core of most Amazon and Google services. There basically haven't been any big companies build on a lisp-like language unless you consider Scala, but even the most companies adopted that later.

edit: blub