skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Surely kids still try to make gunpowder, what are you talking about?

The late Jerry Pournelle told a story (at least) once on a twit.tv podcast about how when he was a child the encyclopedias effectively told you how to make explosives, and he did, and damn near blew himself up dropping them into a pond while he was in a boat.

More recently, as part of the firecrafter ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firecrafter )line of patches here in Indiana in scouts in the mid-late 90s we were taught out to mix various automotive, and household, chemicals to create fires.

One involved dipping cloth into an open-cell car battery, using some water purification tabs and some sugar (I think we used pixie sticks) IIRC.
Its heartbreaking when these things happen.

All I can say, is for anyone reading this, if you do not have a will, medical power of attorney, and medical advance directive set up - do it now. Spare your loved ones this kind of confusion and hurt.

After you create these, make sure to tell your loved ones what your expectations are. You need to pick someone to have medical power of attorney who will defend your wishes. You also need to file your directive with your local hospitals and care providers.

This may be a difficult conversation, but not having it can cause many more problems.
You can get a buzz off canned air. There's a famous episode of the A&E show 'Intervention' with that topic (walking on sunshine)
As with anything, it depends on the project. I’m working on an internal service that uses Mongo as a single merged cache for a lot of mostly unchanging data from various data stores with different credentials for each, which are distributed around the world, that we otherwise have to fetch through multiple comparatively slow API calls. For this, Mongo is perfect: no messing with schemas as they change, unannounced, from upstream; I can index just the fields I want to search on; Mongo will expire things for me on a TTL; the query API is simpler than the API we’re caching from; and we get results 20-50x faster. We looked into FoundationDB and Postgres, but they require a lot more initial setup. ElasticSearch is the closest solution, but it needs a lot more info about the schema up front and its query language is a nightmare compared to Mongo’s, for no real gain in functionality that I can see.

Is Mongo the right tool to build your entire business on top of? Probably not, but it can be the best tool for the right job.
I find it hard to comprehend how anyone would actually support this other than a stupid government bureaucrat, anyone with any real world experience of privacy and practicality would laugh at this idea.

Yet it gets voted in. Well done UK government.
Not a fan either. It commits the same sin as the typical Computer Modern typically used in TeX but to a worse degree: far too light for easy reading. IIRC it's name is either Iwona or Kurier. For free fonts for typesetting in TeX, I would recommend one of the Times-based fonts.

I personally typesetting typically in EB Garamond with a very new free Unicode math font called Garamond Math, but the setup is quite elaborate.
It's hard to argue against this point without looking like an asshole.

But no, I have little faith that many people (including at least one family member) can handle the firehose of bullshit from facebook. I have one family member that was always anti-vaccine, but it was not really an issue until she got on facebook. The degree of radicalization she has now reached is intense, and I pretty directly blame facebook for this. Her sub-network of friends that post about this regularly did not exist before facebook.

There are many firehoses of bullshit, but facebook is a singular example that has connected enough people to it via people they already trust that it seems to be having a real impact on the world's decision making abilities.
And what about life-work balance?

Because not everything is about work.
The wording of their comment suggests heavily to me that they are from Australia. I participated in scouts in Australia about the same amount of time ago as we did somewhat similar things, going on camps where there was a reasonable amount of independence and I would have described it as arts and craftsy.

You mention concern about liability these days, but it's important to remember not everywhere is America. I can't speak to the rest of the world, but Australia is definitely nowhere near as litigious as the US. I could definitely see something like what they described still happening in Australia today.
Why would it cost $1M for everyone? Not everyone has a disease or an accident. And if we were all greatly diseased at the same time, the price tag would be the least of our worry.
only if a person has a high copay?
eLisp (and others!) do this. It's very slow because memory and disk sizes got larger, but disk transfer bandwidth didn't keep up.
Indeed. Young devs probably can't even fathom that back in the late 80s and 90s, not only everyone used proprietary languages and tools such as DBase, TurboC++, Delphi and Visual Basic, we used proprietary libraries for things such as displaying images or opening network connections, and paid good money for them.

And boy, were they awfully buggy. And you didn't have access to the source to understand why it didn't work, and good luck getting any meaningful support.

Proprietary software really is hell. How that taught us to love the GPL.
> Take a long, hard look at your relationship with e-mail and social media. Although they are vital to everyday communication, they can claim much more attention than they deserve. Consider shutting them off completely as you work on a task that requires your full attention.

For me this strikes at the heart of a fundamental problem: on one hand we all want to maximize our attention span. On the other hand, the task of regulating and disciplining our use of social media is placed squarely on our own shoulders, which can be difficult because these platforms are intentionally addicting.

I developed Pony—email that sends and receives once a day—to give people a non-distracting place to communicate. The critical thing is that you don't have to regulate or discipline yourself. There's nothing to "turn off."

I've been using it for several months, and it's pretty funny: I still find myself checking my Inbox for something new even though I know that nothing new will come until tomorrow. The addictive power of social media is that strong and it keeps us from doing what’s important.

[0]: https://www.pony.gg
Simple, ignore constraint (B).
> And then what happens when they add a field to the form and the table already had a million rows?

Maybe I don’t follow. You would insert a row into the fields table. Millions of rows should be fine.

> I asked “what would have bought us”.

I don’t know. None of this matters really, as long as the service works.
How is this going to even work? It sounds like it’s certifying particular devices, but there’s no way to certify the age of the actual user.
I've been pulled over in the last couple years with a handful of rifles in the back seat of my truck.

On the way to/from the shooting range. Let the officer know what I had and why, they don't even bother to look back there.
I think Schmidhuber should be up there. LSTMs are everywhere, not just NLP. The latest Starcraft 2 bot from Deepmind uses LSTMs extensively in its architecture.
Who's the lobby behind it? Or is pure conservative Weltanschauung?

Edit: Fixed punctuation.
£4.99 per device?

Whatever this is about, it's blatantly nothing to do with age checks.

(Obviously, for that you'd certify the person, not the device. People do share computers!)
Google Reveals AI and Emerging Technology Ethics Panel
When I still pursued my PhD in physics, I worked on all-optical amplifiers with phase noise reduction for fiber communication.

Now I develop software for a medium-sized ISP and IT outsourcing company.
You need avx
Cool! The flag images don't seem to work.
Sure, it's somehow better to think of it this way, but the FACT remains that - however much you might enjoy spending time with a game like this, say: in-game ;) --- there's no denying that it REALLY IS a waste of time, since everything about it is totally virtual. I mean, if you look at it closely, doesn't it sound somehow strange that people are actually upset about having to “euthanize“ their beloved virtual pets?? ;P

I think it offers a glimpse at the critical direction in which our society is heading... and that's what is truly miserable and sad.

Nowadays people tend more and more to give up thinking/using their brain, instead they choose to follow brainless “influencers“ (what an expression!?) and anything their phone spits out. :(

NB. Your comparison with the passing away of a loved one does not fit really, since with loved ones our memories are real. ;)
An English translation is now available on https://996.icu/#/en_US as well as GitHub.
Although 3b1b's videos are awesome, his NN videos are heavily inspired by this: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/. Even the code on his github page is taken from there.
Understanding Wealth Inequality and the Role of Interest Rates
I did this for a desktop app I wrote. The liver kept an in memory ring buffer and when there was an unexpected error, it would dump all the previous debug level logs to give context to the error.
Why, that would be great news! Or do you think anyone enjoys doing this type of work?

Now it's time for the governments of the world to catch up and introduce a basic income.
A Milestone in the History of Particle Physics: Why Does Matter Exist?
No, I didn’t refer to your citing of my previous submissions as a personal attack. I referred to a different part of your comment, since deleted. Anyway, this exchange doesn’t add any value to the discussion. Have a nice and peaceful day.
I was a Boy Scout in America; we did the same thing. It was a great experience.
I don't think even AGPL software is safe from the SaaS menace; the tooling around AGPL software can simply refrain from actually linking to it, ie, generate configs and manage the software service doesn't trigger the AGPL, so you never see the code.

I think MongoDB has had trouble with that despite AGPL license, which is why they did the entire SSPL thing.

If all that developers see happening to their free software project is that SaaS corps take it and squeeze it for money without giving back a single cent, people won't license as free software anymore.

Atleast with open source licenses the expectation of that abuse is always somewhat present but people will similarly stop using it if the abuse is too great.
I think you are trying to say it is more than an insurance, because it also pays out for routine expenses?
Conceptually, if you separate out the application generating the log from the one constructing the structure, so that the former is still streaming individual messages with added context information and the latter (probably a log viewing application, so it is completely out of the critical path of recording information) uses context information to provide a structured view, then that's not a problem.
I have no idea about what happens in the moment but it is best determined long before a situation like this arises. My mom is an RN and has seen first hand the need to have this set up prior to a serious situation happening. I have health care power of attorney for her instead of my dad or sister because she believes I'm more likely to follow her wishes around extreme measures being taken or being put on life support. I hope I'm never put in that situation but if it happens the whole family has already talked about what she wants and I'm the person with HCPOA.

It's a hard conversation that most people desperately try to avoid but if you haven't already set it up (especially if you're married or have kids) you should set a goal to do that this year. There are lots of simple guides online to help you put something in place or you can hire a professional to guide you if you have a more complicated personal situation.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity passes a supermassive test
Automating Android Build-Test-Release Cycle
> All I heard is more people are going to be using high-speed VPN services.

By pushing people into clandestinity, surveillance against serious stuff will become even more complicated.
I'm not a physicist but studied physics before jumping to programming.

A surprising amount of people whom I studied with ended up as programmers themselves, after finishing the physics degree.
*for commercial use. The article says quotes "Technically taking the picture is also illegal" but every other source in the article says it is not against the copyright law to simply take a picture for personal use.
It's about 15 years with SPCs isn't it?
The Prefect core automation engine
TLDR; the French government are greedy penny pinchers...
> ^^ This makes me feel better, believe it or not.

Frankly, why trust me? Why not try this yourself? I wish no one would trust random commenters on any social media, whether it be facebook or hackernews.

I'd rather you not trust me, I only spent 5 minutes on it. For someone such as yourself with such a strong opinion on the topic, I think it is worth spending a bit more time on it. This is one of those rare issues where if you think there's a problem, it's not hard to check for yourself.
> They have some amount of Rails, and JavaScript has to be there, but if you want to experiment with, say, Go, Kotlin, or anything else, you are going to get nothing but push back.

I missed this - starting 2018 we were writing all our backend logic in Kotlin and we got no push back from anyone.
What are the right reasons? I'm genuinely curious. I can't really think of any reasons why censoring porn is a good idea.
Mindgeek lobbied hard for this. They (owners of Pornhub etc) are the government's approved age verifiers, so are in theory now in charge of access to all the other porn sites.
Who else do we, the people, have to enforce our rights on our behalf if not the state? It's not as if we can count on Facebook (or any other major corporation) to stand up for our rights in the face of extracting even more money out of our personal data. We need the might of the state to fight back against these entities.
I honestly don't even look at names on HN or Reddit.
This is the entire premise of the anti-vaxxer movement, in case you’re not familiar. The argument is completely bogus: vaccines are orders-of-magnitude safer than the diseases they prevent.
The answer is (C) leave it on the statute book to create the impression that they care about limiting access to porn and then ignore the fact that the majority of people, including the kids the law is supposed preventing from accessing it, can find a workaround if sufficiently motivated to do so.

(there's an argument that "ensure sufficient motivation is required to do so" is the actual rationale for this and many other behavioural regulations anyway)
May Facebook have as much luck challenging this as EA had challenging Belgum's ban on in-game gambling.
The example I keep coming back to is how are they going to enforce this on, say, Google? If you do a Google search for any sort of physical characteristic followed by nude/naked/porn and hit the Images tab, you get thousands of pornographic images back. I can't see Google enforcing such a block and ID scheme merely for its image search engine, tbh.
wow... just wow...
I, too, hate scrolling in code (and almost never used Visual Studio's "jump to X" navigation helpers) but the reality is that each and every non-trivial program we write (which is practically ALL of them) will never come close to fitting on our screens. The real problem is always the limit of our ability to hold the mental model of the code within our mindscape as we operate on the patient. For me, having another abstraction to wade through on the screen is just another murky impediment to my reshaping the model.

As an inveterate simplifier of code and its formatting for clarity, I have gone to only doing a single thing on a single line, even variable declarations [Note I only have personal projects now]. The primary purpose behind this is that such extreme simplification will make it easier to process algorithmically, for both meta-code (i.e. IDEish) work and to narrow the horizontal extent of its format on both paper and screen.

Now that I think about it, it seems that Whitney's perspective might flow from his not using a code-folding editor, where each chunk of code can be collapsed to its header comment that states what it does. Aren't we usually dealing with the higher-level flow of logical chunks instead of the itty-gritty details of each?
Ask HN: Are you also witnessing regressions in Gmail's spam filters?
A casual observation over the last 12 months or so is that Gmail's spam filter has regressed heavily. This is both for false positives and false negatives, even when all SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks have passed. Worst of all, this seems to happen when for gmail-to-gmail messages.

I'm obviously unaware how the filter makes its decisions to flag or not a message, but in my naive view of the world, I should have amassed quite a bit of positive signals, marking me as a legitimate user:

- I've had an active account for 8+ years;
- I'm a paying user (Google Play/YouTube);
- I've linked my Android phone (with all the data that I gladly let them collect from me);
- I've not used any add-ons to send mass emails (e.g. Gmass);
- I've had 2FA turned on for years;
- etc, etc.

What's your experience with Gmail? I'm also considering a solution. For inbound filtering, a better client (e.g. ThunderBird) might help; however, the problem is that other Gmail recipients end up having some of my emails sent to their spam folder.

If anyone from the Gmail team reads this and wants more input, I'm glad to help out. I love Gmail but it's slowly becoming less attractive (first the huge bloat - i.e. what inspired Superhuman, now the spam issue).
> Whose side is Facebook on? The side of advertisers? It cannot be the side of users, at least not ones in Belgium. They cannot claim they are "neutral".

Facebook is on not on the side of the "users" (or what you would describe as it's users). If you look at Facebooks business model the ones actually paying them for a product are the advertisers, which is why FB is on their side.

'if you're not paying for the product, you are the product' - which means we are the product that Facebook is selling, or more precisely, our data.

Of course, I'm sure if Facebook is asked directly, they wouldn't admit and find a way to say they care about the people, and all that. But from the business side (and probably the investors side), Facebook shoudn't and doesn't care about privacy or other concerns of it's users (the citizen).
XcodeKit and Xcode Source Editor Extensions
My first degree was in physics as well, and I also ended up in IT. At SAP, to be exact. Urban legend among German SAP employees has it that SAP expands to "Sammelplatz arbeitsloser Physiker" (gathering place for unemployed physicists).
I fully agree with the premise and details of your post; to the last point of "can you name a proprietary...", HN tends to forget about / disregard the wonderful world of "enterprise" / "big corporate" software. Most large companies I dealt with are very "modern"/open-source on the client-visible apps; but very proprietary / legacy on the back-office stuff, from ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning - HR/Financials/CRM/EPM and such) onwards.
I mean, corporate world back-office still largely runs on DB2 and Oracle databases, the likes of Windows & AIX (HP-UX/Solaris back in the day as well), even z/OS, and it goes up & down the stack like that.

(as a somewhat related stunning bottoms-up anecdote, a young-ish AIX sysadmin at my recent engagement absolutely positively refused to install AIX tools [1] on the servers, as he didn't want to pollute them with that "unsupported open source stuff")

[1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/aix-toolbox/i...
relevant Tom Scott:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYH87V6EHrk
The article says copyright expires 70 years from the death of the artist, not from the date the work was created. I don't know who is considered the creator of the lights though. Is it different if 'the creator' is an organisation?
My Volvo has sign recognition, and although it is quite good, it frequently gets it wrong. It will pick up signs on the back of lorries/buses, as well as signs for i.e. a neighborhood (5kmh) without subsequently picking up the fact that I have moved out of that area, and am now allowed 50kmh. If this erroneous behavior would translate to limited speed, I'd be extremely unhappy.
Semantics. They gave no qualification on their definition of 'almost certainly'. 5% is almost certainly enough for me.
This kind of reminds me of what Jeff Hawkins once claimed was the issue with making sense of how the brain works:

> So why don't we have a good theory of brains? People have been working on it for 100 years. Let's first take a look at what normal science looks like. This is normal science. Normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists. The theorist guy says, "I think this is what's going on," the experimentalist says, "You're wrong." It goes back and forth, this works in physics, this in geology.

> But if this is normal science, what does neuroscience look like? This is what neuroscience looks like. We have this mountain of data, which is anatomy, physiology and behavior. You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data, but no theory. There's a little wimpy box on top there.

Not that physics has no theories, but I dropped out of studying physics myself over a decade ago, and at that time it felt a lot like the balance in physics has shifted towards having to measure and process disproportionate amounts of data with so much precision that it has to be automated, or like you said do a ton of really complicated modelling. It feels a bit "stuck" that way.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_...
Exactly. Plus, it would be unnecessary. Vaccination quotas are still high and got as high as 98% in the past. Without mandated vaccinations in many cases. So it is possible to get there without decreasing liberties any further.

We are on this course of decreasing liberties for decades now and it ruined trust in government and societies. Guess what? If that happens, we see more esoteric fringe groups. Geniuses...
Its going socialist. The entire European Union is. Whether you include the UK or not. Less Privacy, more public knowledge. Next thing you know they will start studies based on these people that watch porn.
Protecting children.

But while I agree that the average porn is not how children should get sexual education ... I doubt this is the way to change that.
If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too
In a sufficiently high dimensional space, like used in word2vec, concepts can have lots of neighbors along wildly different dimensions.
Poles already carry the cables of both duopolies in areas that have them and fiber ducts have always carried multiple fiber providers - they are public rightaways. The cell tower infrastructure is also increasingly shared the last 10 years days as AMT and Crown and Castle own the towers and lease space on them to multiple providers. So monopolies are not really a feature in those things you mentioned.
Who cares if you can enforce it; it provides probable cause (or whatever they call it) to search any device that doesn't have such a license. And if they happen to find (or plant) something on that device when it's searched: mission accomplished.
That's how it used to be actually.
Well... Brexit is also happening. I wonder if the U.K. is going through a "forest fire" stage where in order for new culture/government/society to flourish, the old has to first go into decline. Both Brexit and these Porn laws are things that seem incompatible with reality and seem to force the U.K. onto a collision course.