skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just run my own VPN from a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet... I feel like all the public VPNs are like big honeypots I'd rather stay away from.

> ProtonVPN has a pretty shady reputation on HN due to their business connections to TesoNet, which is a data mining company

Does that mean ProtonMail also is no longer trustworthy?
This is anecdotal, but when I built a JS image segmentation tool I found that FF was significantly faster than Chrome when working with the lower level stuff like ArrayBuffer, etc. I assume they are using a lot of this here since they are probably dealing with the WebGL API which needs to receive data as a buffer.
No thanks. The gains I could make from VTSAX don't justify the risk of potentially losing half my runway.
If you read the Evan Ratliff's full book, you'll hear how Paul Le Roux was able to avoid having his domains seized by becoming a registrar himself.

I know that it's not really relevant to the narrative, but I'm curious about what level of interaction that law enforcement had with ICANN and Verisign in regard to Le Roux, and what sort of policies they have on law enforcement cooperation.
It's a nice demo, but reusing Julia libraries not intended for TensorFlow seems like a fragile thing? Just because it works today doesn't mean the authors won't inadvertently break it by using something outside the portable subset.

It seems like for non-demo usage, you would want upstream maintainers to agree that their code should be TensorFlow-compatible, and have tests keeping it working.
This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18408063
I suppose once you're in the domain of crystal oscillators, the line between "mechanical" versus "purely electrical" is a bit fuzzy. The mechanical/thermal effects of passing a high-frequency signal through passive components (or a transmission line) might be comparable to the mechanical vibrations of a quartz clock, though somebody better at physics could probably correct me.
Doing exhaustive search of the universe is pretty big task; I don't think we can anytime soon determine that nobody is out there.
Jargon is jargon - to those who know it, it's easy to remember. To those who don't? It might as well be Konami Codes.

Hard for us, who are familiar with this jargon? Not a chance, to your point. To the dad who opens IE, types Google.com into the bing bar, clicks the google.com link, then types his internet search - those words might as well be Elian script.
The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.
Sounds like a lot of scientist have been reading the Three Body Problem.

I think we should worry more about AI taking over rather than aliens. Its actually much closer to home. On the other hand the only alien intelligence which has the luxury of interstellar travel is the one which has no sense of time and that would be alien AI again.
>This might be a better fate than having them end up in a landfill...

If you're not recycling them, why is burning them better than putting them into a landfill? Is it the fact that plastics don't biodegrade and will last in the ground for thousands of years? Isn't that good? Aren't we trying to find carbon sequestration techniques?
I'd put the Jaguar I-Pace as more of a Tesla killer than pretty much anything else that has come out. Even then, you don't see a Jaguar that often.

If BMW comes out with a luxury sedan electric car that would be a tesla killer.
"3. How difficult of a challenge is it to build sorting machines, anyway?"

The answer is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. The problem is that it is a network system. The number of possible connections of different elements with different elements is a mathematical concept called "factorial".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics

Even small factorials become extremely huge fast. Huge like the number of atoms in the entire known Universe huge.

In engineering we have machines that do only one thing well. For example, you can burn wood well. No problems.

If the wood have mercury(button batteries), even small quantities, you have a terrible problem (people dying from cancer near the incinerator), if the wood has pesticides or Teflon or chloric materials you will be creating dioxins which are one of earth biggest poison, making burning extremely expensive.

Just a single button battery can contaminate tons of material or water.

Wet wipes for example have made cost of sewerage to skyrocket.

Humans or living beings have something machines do not have: flexibility.

Something that cost 1 monetary unit to do with a machine, becomes 20, 50, 100 units when you get out of the working conditions of the machine.

The fact is that the cost have been externalized. Make people in Africa or Asia die from our waste pollution. It is a good thing that they start saying no and forcing us to deal with the real cost, so we have to be smart with our waste.

At the end of the day it is not that hard. The US was the absolute champion of waste, invented "the use and trow" concept, because they could do it without dealing with the consequences.
Went to check my city (Atlanta) to see if going there would be convenient. Get greeted by a demand to log in to LinkedIn. Oh well.
The announcement is done to achieve two things:

1. Posture to their own populace that they're not backing down (thus winning political scores)

2. Show to the rest of the world that they are leadership to reckon with, that they don't back down cowardly.

Imagine two high-school teens with some social status fighting on the playground. They will not back off because of social status reasons.

Only here, the teens have nukes.
Miami High-Rise Will Be Ready for High-Flying Cars
Writing an Operating System with a Strictly Typed Assembly Language (2005) [pdf]
What was your math background before you started Khan?
Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script
You can't know or understand possible ET motivations or capabilities.

Humans routinely drive other species on Earth to extinction, our own cousins. We also damage our own planet's environment.

It may be logical for an ET to just destroy us the way you might destroy a harmful bacteria, which might otherwise spread unpredictably. It wouldn't be about wanting slaves or raw resources (although as someone said, Earth itself might be considered somewhat valuable).
I agree. I said it was fair, I didn’t say it was acceptable.
It's impressive that they managed to mess that up. They didn't use LaTex for math?
Has anyone had any significant success finding valuable networks?
Even mere humans, who've only reaped the fruits of serious scientific advancement for a few hundred years have already come up with a way to get to Alpha Centauri within 44 years.[1]

All such spacecraft would have to do to cause massive devastation is aim at Earth and not stop, though it's likely that more advanced civilizations could come up with more effective means of destruction.

Alien civilizations could have advanced scientifically for thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. It is unlikely that we can accurately put limits on their capabilities.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...
Bill Gates’s favorite books about technology
Strategies for Testing Automation
>through something as straightforward as a 51% attack

... which has never been done before on Ethereum (or Bitcoin). Are you talking about Ethereum Classic? It's something entirely different and amateur. Using it as a criticism of Ethereum is like complaining banks are untrustworthy because a kid at school called himself a bank and didn't give the money back you lent him.
I was at my CPA the other day. One of her two monitors went blank due to a h/w issue and so per instructions from her IT guy she had to reboot. Windows decided it had to apply updates as part of the shutdown sequence and she was unable to decline. So we had to sit there and wait 5 minutes for it to apply the updates, then reboot. (Maybe there's a way to override applying the updates and yes, she should get her second monitor fixed. I'm her client, not her IT person, so I wasn't going to intervene. And we had a nice conversation while waiting, so there's that.)

FTR, macOS has also become increasingly annoying with how it applies updates, and my iOS devices never seem to auto update at night like they're supposed to. As in industry, we suck at this. Is Linux the only OS making an effort at patching without rebooting? And does it actually work?

https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-witho...
"Connections" is one of the best TV shows I've ever seen (I have it on DVD) and I'm barely even an adult.
That's cute and wishful but the world is built on legacy crap. And it'll remain that way until economic forces dictate otherwise.
I didn't downvote you, but this seems extraordinarily unlikely to me. Why would our extraterrestrial overlords want to use us as slaves? They travelled a long way to get here, surely they should have robots or a genetically engineered underclass or something. We're in the process of making human labor obsolete ourselves. The only scenario I can imagine where this makes sense is one where the aliens have interstellar travel but lack decent genetic engineering, and they're interested in exploring/building/mining in places that are inhospitable to both their own biology and robotics but not our biology (like a planet whose gravity would crush them that also has an EM field that would fry circuits without exceptional shielding). This seems like a stretch to me. I feel like wiping out a potential future threat is a much more reasonable incentive, with exploitation/study of an already existent biosphere being a runner up. Most of the things they could want humans for would be more efficiently accomplished by phytoplankton and krill. You're right that nigh-perpetual enslavement is the most horrifying possibility, it just seems implausible.
The Three Body Problem and ASI are two songs on the same instrument: value misalignment in cases of massive power differentials.

In an indifferent universe, two optimizers optimizing different things will be in conflict. Can we build machines that optimize what we want to optimize? Can we align our optimization with aliens before it becomes optimal for one of us to annihilate the other?
A lot of startups that grow slowly use a consultancy model, offering consulting services in the area their startup is targeting, or on the Open Source tools their startup is leveraging. As you grow a product and get market fit you can slowly switch from service-oriented to product-oriented, or not, as you see fit. As I understand it, product-oriented tends to be more profitable.
Using Scylla and ElasticSearch Together with GraphQL
Canadian version of Breaking Bad:

"You have cancer. Treatment starts next week."

The end.
Judging from the two ho-hum movies mentioned (Magnolia, Matrix) the answer is no.
Indeed, Sampson's retraction is published here: https://www.grsampson.net/ACsa.html

> DeFrancis’s argument to this effect turns on examination of an example quoted in Sampson (1985: 28‑9) of purported complex semasiography, the ‘Yukaghir love letter’. I had taken this example from a well-known book on writing, Diringer (n.d.: 35), and I retailed Diringer’s explanation of it without trying to check this. DeFrancis has done the discipline a considerable service by investigating the history of the example in detail, and it turns out to be something rather different from what Diringer and I described, and arguably not an example of ‘communication’ at all.

It seems nearly certain that this image is not what it was presented to be.
Or send a chunk of metal at near light speed. Things in space move very predictably for thousands of years, and as the projectile only barely trails the signal of its departure, it would come as a total surprise even for very advanced civilizations.

Let's say an advanced civilization around Sirius wants to take us out. A chunk of metal (or anything really) of about 1000 metric tonnes would be completely invisible until it were very close. Travelling at 99.99% of the speed of light, it would impact with the energy of 13 times the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. The light of the projectile being "fired" would reach us in 10 years, and the projectile itself would arrive just 8 hours later. There is no foreseeable way to defend ourselves against that.

An overly cautious civilization with that kind of technology might just decide to start sterilizing all the planets in its surroundings without having to leave their solar system, just in case.
Good find. I did some more research on John DeFrancis and found his writings on the topic. Pg 32 discusses the "love letter" being part of a semi-ritualized party game. [1]

[1] Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems: https://books.google.com/books?id=hypplIDMd0IC&pg=PA24&dq=is...
Hacker News apps, libraries, resources and shiny things
This sounds cool except eGPU passthrough setups generally cost more then the GPU people want to use no?
More details: https://books.google.com/books?id=fRqKreZFVTYC&pg=PA22&lpg=P...
How would a foldable iPhone look like?
They wouldn't have the lump sum taken from them if they consented to it. And many do, sometimes with more enthusiasm than the person technically giving the money.
Years ago I followed a guide I found online [0] which involves renaming the "Reboot" scheduled task file and creating a folder with the same name in its location, so that the OS fails to re-create the task file. Haven't had an unexpected reboot since.

This technique was familiar to me from the Kindle jailbreaking scene, in which creating a directory with a certain path would cause the Kindle's auto-updater to error out when it tried to `rm` what it saw as a preexisting partially-downloaded update file (the Kindle's OS is Linux-based, so the file-delete operation fails on a directory).

[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-prevent-windows-10-reboot... (including the "Additional Steps")
This is another good (and very long) article from The New Yorker on the topic, from last October: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/the-comforting...
The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine.

The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc.

That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win progs on Wine but original Windows will always be better for them.

So we will have just one browser. That's the reality, want we that or not.

Until either one of these:

1. The spec of Web Client will be reduced to bare minimum. With unified extensions mechanism, think about <applet> but more flexible - based on universal bytecode VM free from licensing issues.

2. Or users will pay for the browser application, instead of having it for free - giving up their private data instead of money. So browser vendors will be able and motivated to provide better, privacy first browsers.
Dumb statement: "Television and radio signals would long ago have signaled our presence to malevolent space ruffians, he said." There are only 11 known habitable exoplanets within 50 light years that we know of. Assume there are 1000 within 100 light years. The odds of a super predator in that small of a sample are virtually 0. Plus, even if they had their armada on standby, it takes at least 100 years to get here. Apparently there is little intelligent life on earth.
I think they just expect I'll get tired of it and pay.
Uranium loses "unexplained" unaccounted for mass other than leaving behind Barium and Krypton. ELI5 continuing.

What is that mass? What are its properties if you capture enough of it?

Does it behave like "a mass of quarks"? Does it behave like an element? What are the constraints on that mass?

It's funny that I have to talk about electroweak interactions to a guy who knows what a quark is. Perhaps they also know what a boson and fermion are.

The entity known as neutron has an interesting property that causes a different set of bosons to be emitted when it's broken out than as if just random quarks were torn out. The color constraint does not explain it.
Does it target pure JVM bytecode and runtime? This talks about GraalVM and how it's "optimized for many different languages", and they make the same claim on their page, specifically citing LLVM.
Incoming tech seems about to change the texts-and-tutoring constraint and opportunity space. I wonder if it's time to start thinking and exploring ahead?

Consider an art project, where you sit in a booth, and watch an interesting video drama. But why is it interesting? The video is a graph of segments, like an old "choose your own adventure" story. And there's an eye tracker watching you. So if you're interested in characters A and B, the story mutates to emphasize them.

Consider a one-on-one tutor on a good day. Noticing a student engaged and enthused, they might reorder content on the fly to leverage that. Might emphasize different aspects, and alter presentation, based on observed interests and weaknesses. Or consider working with a young child, watching them read word by word, noticing their where they hesitate and frown, probing for their thoughts, adjusting difficulty, providing a path of development.

What if that was math content rather than a drama or children's book? What if we could do this at scale? Eye tracking is just one tech coming in on the coattails of VR/AR. A setting for personalization AI is another.

What if saying "the best way to organize and present this topic in a textbook", becomes like saying "the Capital mandates, that every teacher of this grade, will today all teach the following lesson, by saying the following words, regardless of local context"? While not on a national level, that is a real thing.

What might it take to start encoding an adventure graph for linear algebra? The "oh, if you like this perspective on this topic, you might like this similar perspective on this other topic"?

Or if we don't have the tooling for that yet, can we start thinking about the tooling? Or fruitfully do something else now, in preparation for opportunity? Perhaps Kahn academy problems in more flavors, in a richer graph? ML-based textbook aggregation, synthesis and retheming? Perhaps it's all not ripe yet. But something else, maybe?
I guess we'll see. Model 3 seems to be moving towards the Toyota Camry market and away from the BMW market, though. I think there is room for both, and hopefully many more too. EV's are at the early stage where new entrants will be cannibalizing gas car sales more than each others.
Yeah I get people want "exclusivity" but at a certain point it feels comical. How many people are on hackernews on a weekly basis who are specifically "lurking" to try to get into an "exclusive" hacker event.
We have an ergonomics department at work (in a hospital) that helps us set up our desk etc, so I follow their advice. :)

Not saying it is perfect but they probably know more about it than I do xD
Project Orion is a cocktail napkin estimate. The actual problem is much much harder.

But as you point out, anything that can travel between the stars can trivially wipe out all life on Earth without warning. They also know we exist already thanks to the changes in the chemical composition of our atmosphere. If they want to kill us then we're dead.
That's awesome! Would love to use it on popular ruby gems to make sure they are secure (including Rails). Also having a free plan is perfect for experimenting. I predict this company will be a huge success.
Did you have add-ons in Firefox? I almost never have sites break—certainly not anywhere near 15% of the time. And at least 95% of the time I've had issues in the past, it has turned out to be an add-on causing problems, rather than the browser itself. (Ad blockers would be the first thing to check in the case of random breakages.)
Yes but right after that it says to "Filter important updates only", so those are still out of your control.
Home users can still use the registry editor.
OpenSecrets News
eGPUs won't help at all there. If your chipset and CPU support IOMMU virtualization (generally any Skylake+ or Ryzen CPU will, chipsets tend to vary more) then you can already do it with your internal discrete GPU, otherwise those will block it anyway.

However, even then the GPU's PCIe slot will need to be in a separate IOMMU group (generally only the case if it is connected directly to the CPU, bypassing the chipset, usually the case for 1-2 slots per mobo at most), which I strongly doubt Thunderbolt slots would be prioritized for.
Pretty sure the movie was never in any real danger from trolls, but good news nonetheless.
I think some people just don't realize that LinkedIn adoption isn't universal.
I am an Indian and until yesterday, I wholeheartedly supported the strikes by us on Pakistan mainland. Please note that the strikes were to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure with surgical precision.

Pakistan took offense to this and have retaliated. During this retaliation, they caught one of our fighter pilots behind their lines. This happened when 2 MiG 21's from India engaged a dozen F16's coming from Pakistan. (Not sure about all 12 of them being F16's. There were 12 for sure. Some reports say 4 F16's , 4 JF7 Thunder and 4 Chengdu J-7)

Since then, I want the pilot to be brought back home and want retaliation to take a back burner.

Pakistani's too support going on the offensive.
There is a direct line from HyperCard to where I am now.

I started programming as a hobbyist on the Apple //e in BASIC and 65C02 assembly language. But, I released a much better version of Eliza written in HyperCard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) and submitted it on AOL and to the freeware FTP archives around 1993. It also used an XFNC that let me use the original MacinTalk text to speech engine and the newer PlainTalk.

A professor at another college had been looking for an Eliza HyperCard stack to use with his HyperCard based Gopher server. He reached out to me on AOL and that was my first paying side gig.

Having some freelance software under my belt in college at the no name school I was attending helped me stand out and get an internship my junior year in 1995 in the much larger city where I still live.

That led to my first job when I came back a year later at the company where I interned.

Side note: Writing the Eliza clone has been my go to “Hello World” program for years. I’ve written versions in AppleSoft Basic that used SAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth), GW-Basic, DEC VAX DCL, VB6, C# on Windows Mobile, JavaScript, and PHP.
"Its like you are thirsty so you build an intercontinental jet plane from scratch using parts from around your house to fly to Japan to steal a single Coke from a 7-11."

The flaw in this analogy is that the you with these capabilities has different, and possibly incomprehensible desires, compared to the you who wants a Coke.

The natives of Central America and Mexico were not aware of how excited those Spaniards would be about Gold and Silver.
I'm curious about what titles others here might recommend?
Really? How many habitable exoplanets are within 70 light years, and what are the odds of life (let alone super-advanced space pirates) existing on them? Also a little known fact: only energy travels at light speed. So even in the worst case scenario, they won't be here for a few hundred years.
> it got stuck in a cycle of trying to install an update, failing, uninstalling and trying again later

To me, this is one of the biggest issues with Windows Update: it's unreliability. When an update doesn't install, there's no reliable way to get it to work without shutting down services and deleting the updates folder; all technical tasks that most users don't know how to do.

I'm on insider updates and this happens occasionally on builds, but most of the time the updates apply just fine.