skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't believe you can seriously believe such statements.

While the parent commenter's tone was extremely glorifying, do you _not_ believe that the U.S. leads the world in R&D? Or that China _is_ a surveillance state, and one in which the citizens have much less in terms of rights? Does the U.S. not hold the most patents?

At least half of his statements aren't even subjective ones... Are you berating him for his content, or his tone? This seems like the opposite of the Principle of Charity, which is what HN was built upon.
How does this tie to working with Bootstrap-based custom css frameworks?
Remembering People's Names on a large scale [video]
That's obviously true (most people will not be targeted). But there's plenty more cases than the last few prominent ones. There are also low level cases that are not reported globally, only in local news.

It's ranging from secret services trying to use people to bomb planes and public places, to dissidents active abroad being threatened, beaten up or assassinated by suspected secret services of their origin countries. On source of such activity is Assad's regime in Syria.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190119-is-assad-trying-t...

It's uncommon, unlikely, but not that unique.
Is pBFT the best non-PoW consensus protocol for blockchains?
A Description of One Programmer's Programming Style Revisited [pdf]
Exactly. Those were the terms, basically.
This is true, but it is a statement about causality and the thread was about responsibility. Those are two different things. The fact that your actions lead to a certain outcome does not automatically mean that you're morally responsible for this outcome (that's the fallacy that leads to victim blaming, among other things).

It is always engineer's responsibility to clearly explain the trade-offs to the managers. Only a manager who's making the decision with accurate information can be responsible for it.
Stealing sensitive user data with smartphone light sensor ()
>How would you describe a "reddit-style mugging for karma"?

Normally an extreme appeal to emotion. In this case excessive use of caps-lock and a fictional narrative that doesn't substantiate itself.
The part about renewables suppressing prices is already and has been a thing for awhile. We even see $0 prices in some market intervals because wind is so highly subsidized. This causes some issues as the market prices don't reflect the actual need.
I don't think there are any present, but fault injection mitigations (besides constant time execution, which does help) are something I'd be interested seeing their approach to.

I think it would be very useful if there were a way to formalize and prove that a particular mitigation was effective against a particular model of a fault. So if you assume a fault looks like X (single instruction skip, bit flips, multiple instruction skip, etc.) you could prove that a given SW mitigation was effective at retaining the other properties that are desired for the library.

This would be specific to a particular architecture of course.
Nobody takes BTC in exchange for goods and services, absolutely nobody. In this context it's at best an intermediate representation with huge FOREX risk. That means (a) is a false equivalence as unlike (b) it only represents a small slice of the transaction.
Microsoft kills off the book store you probably didn’t know it had
Hypothermia Cap
>I'm not sure I understand why the government is involved

they probably shouldn't be involved, but my guess would be lobbying from Netflix.
They also remove almost all control from the user, so that's a nice bonus. Unless you're a user of course.
Board games we played at PAX Unplugged (2017)
Silicon Valley and “communication weapons of war”
Hey just a heads up the first link to the previous section of your trip is broken.

Wow what a trip though. How do you think the seals were treated? It looks like a pretty small pool.
Mine too. But every time I start again it's easier and better, and someday I believe my work will "click".

I think the same is true of Chris.
Refactoring Back End Engineering Hiring at Slack
It's still there, but certainly less searchable than before:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.linux
And maybe it's not, and the government is taking advantage of it's position of power?

Competing tethered currencies aren't gone because they're a bad idea, they're gone because they've been made illegal.

Crypto gives the power to operate such a currency back to the people in a way that can't be stopped.
They can get annoying with the junk mail. Still, that's a small price to pay for the work they do.
New Premium Editorials by Vox
Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appeal to everyone to be profitable. The internet, cable news, are helping to unwind that period.

As background, I've spent years writing on social media (and used to work in it):

My Media literacy guide:

http://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.m...

A piece I did for Quartz on Selective Facts:

https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...

And my data analysis of the NY Times (with an example in social media):

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
>before they caved on Real ID.

I blame that on two things (in no particular order).

1) There's been tons of money dangled in front of state legislators incentivizing them to break from what their constituents actually want because both the national parties want to make the state theirs. If you have enough money (from voting how the people with the money want you to vote) to steamroll whoever you're running against you don't actually have to listen to your constituents that much.

2)The MA 5th column.
The author mentions at the end that monetization of your own data is the option offered by data ownership. But I am not sure that there is money to be made by an individual. Facebook makes about $25 / user / year. Say there are 100 companies willing to buy your data -- would you sell all of your data (out of your "digital locker") for $2500 / year?
They are just cheap smartphones these days. Do they really profile people because their smartphones look too cheap?
I feel like your point was missed in the sibling comment. An academic review of editor history would be fascinating, and if it thorough enough might even inspire editor authors to adjust their philosophy.
Employee Monitoring Through Badges
Wiki Storytelling
So you are saying that USA should have started WW3 immediately after WW2?
With electricity going towards renewables, it seems clear that the best strategy will be to get the other major uses of energy on electricity as well.

Vehicles have a clear (if long) path to electrification. But what about heating buildings? My understanding is that electric heating is not cost effective compared to carbon based fuels. Lower costs driven by renewables can help here, but will it be enough? Are there alternatives being developed to tackle this major energy use?
I'm also not a fan of the profit viewpoint, but part of the concept of property is definitively having the right to exclude people from it. In fact, that's already being used for data protection: they must get a warrant to get data from your phone, but not from an FB account, because the servers are not your property.

And this applies to copyright as well - for example, without it, Bill Watterson wouldn't have been able to stop companies from using Calvin & Hobbes on their ads and other marketing crap. The GPL is also an example of it being used to exclude certain uses of it, rather than profiting from it.
The anticipation is nice, I suppose, but... telling us that there's going to be an announcement? Why don't they just, you know, make the announcement? Or, if they're not ready yet, then why don't they just not say anything yet? Announcing an announcement... don't bother. In particular, don't waste my time.
This is often called "sterile transit" (the ability to depart the airport without passing through immigration), and the U.S. and Mexico (and apparently Canada) don't allow this, while generally European and Asian countries do.

https://wikitravel.org/en/Avoiding_a_transit_of_the_United_S...
Porn companies are embracing crowdfunding
> Here's a regulation that I'd like considered:

Well, I would rgeulate facebook and google so that they are required to offer their services to me at production cost + some decent margin, while guaranteeing that if I pay the price, my data is not monetized or shared in any other way to third parties (including using my data to train any kind of machine learning models)

Also, fb, ig and whatsapp should be split into separate companies. Google web search might as well be separated from everything else.
Supercomputing the Complexities of Brain Waves
I'm not sure the crowding-out effect is real? It seems hard to argue that this is a bad time for startups to raise money.

Compare with a boom-bust cyclical model where boom times make raising money easier for everyone. Under this model, overly enthusiastic investors eventually get discouraged after losing a lot of money, so the amount of investment money available changes a lot and thinking of it as zero-sum doesn't really work.
Defence Against the Docker Arts
(2018) article about the same company:

https://digit.hbs.org/submission/humanyze-ing-the-workplace-...
I have zero faith in Facebook as an organization doing the "right" thing. Their machine is fueled by highly targeted advertising. If you erode their targeting capabilities, then marketers will be quick to invest elsewhere. Funny enough, with ITP 2.1 and potentially a less cookie friendly Chrome, they are increasing FB's value prop to marketers.

I am going to butcher this, I can't articulate it how I think it... Why do we need regulation for social network that is only as strong as its network. Is the network effect so strong users can't or will not leave on their own accord? I left FB and instagram a few years ago. It is just so funny to me that this entity (a people aggregator) is powerful but all we need to do is leave it. How many people in your network have to leave before it loses its value? Networks expand exponentially. Is the opposite true?
Checking left and right are two jobs. And how often do you test each of your backups? It might get corrupted at any moment - is perpetual validation the answer?
It often goes negative, which is really backwards. This pulls the rug out from generators that don't like to reduce in power because fuel is a small fraction of their cost. Good old production tax credits.
I get what you're saying. The main reason I hate 'The martian' was that to me the whole book sounded like the above post. Like it was written by someone on Reddit.
The Simplest Motivation Strategy That You're (Probably) Not Using
Spielberg's efforts are ridiculous and transparently self-serving, but how is there an anti-trust case here? Awards like this are given by private organizations who can set their own criteria. Not being eligible for an Oscar doesn't stop films from being made.
Failed sensors can lead to premature failure of various components, especially catalytic converters: http://ricksfreeautorepairadvice.com/causes-catalytic-conver...

Don't put off a $150 job and cost yourself a $2k job. Most sensor replacements don't require removing the cylinder heads.
AI researchers tell Amazon to stop selling flawed facial recognition to police
> It's almost comic villainy

I think that feeling is the group narrative talking. It's a thing we (HN, reddit, etc) choose to do together, rather than a specific fact that's true or false.

Former Facebook employee here: One thing that you don't appreciate from the outside, is that FB employees hear more FB criticism than you do. (This is just true of anyone working for any company.) And one of the side effects of hearing more, is that you hear a lot of very wrong, very poorly thought out stuff. So it does get easier to sit out from a group narrative like this, because the parts that are wrong or misleading jump out at you.
Social media is slightly different in that content is catered to the individual, so I'd guess that it does a slightly better job at siloing people. It also allows others on the platform to provide the catered content as opposed to the media corporation providing you with their political vision (although I'm not sure which is better or worse).
Ask HN: What questions do you ask to improve clarity on vague requirements?
I recently worked on a ticket that was quite ambiguous. It felt like "we saw this thing once that hasn't happened since, and we think there might be a bug in there, so see what you can do to fix it, and we don't understand that code any better than you do". I have to actively fight the tendency to go down ratholes of learning & curiosity, and it was quite difficult to keep the scope of this ticket from exploding, and it's still open. But it does compete for time with newer priorities as they come up.

One question I've learned to ask is:

- Given a lack of more specific requirements, what behavior are we expecting to see vs what we are actually seeing?

- How should I prioritize this ticket relative to the other tickets in my queue?
Atleast they could include the source, with a paid purchase. Many software like vxworks will give you the source, which you can yourself rebuild, if you pay for a license. More commercial software should be bundling source code with paid licenses.
Well, it sounds like they turned off the autopilot but then turned it back on, which is not part of the checklist. It’s not clear from the reporting exactly what happened and I would hesitate to jump to conclusions. Accidents like this are almost always hugely complicated and are the result of many things going wrong in a specific order at a specific time, rather than a single factor.

In fact we don’t even know what the cause of the crash was, and we won’t actually know for several months—there have been a number of crashes where everyone “knew” what the cause was early on, only for it later to come to light that is was something completely unrelated.
An ansible playbook gives you much more flexibility to get to the same place. The one I run takes a mere 3-5 minutes to run (typically) regardless of where I am in the world.
Hmmm, you're right in that humans don't play randomly. But Monte-Carlo in this instance meant "MCTS", and not "random play". I apologize for the imprecision.

MCTS is very methodological despite the name. Especially in the AlphaZero implementation, where there's no random play during inference / during games (!!). So where did the "Monte Carlo" name come from?

The "original" MCTS algorithm used random play to guestimate the strength of a position. But the "real" theory behind MCTS is the math revolving around multi-armed bandit problems. Given a large number of slot machines (in Chess or Go, the positions are conceptually seen as "slot machines" in a casino), the goal of MCTS is to find the slot-machine that gives the highest probability of winning.

In effect: classic MCTS rolls out a position all the way to the final result: win, loss, or draw. Not really in AlphaZero, but this is how MCTS was originally designed. AlphaZero shortcuts this process with a neural-network to guestimate the endgame result.

But still: the MATH, and the precise order which the search tree conducts is very heavily based in multi-armed bandit theory and random samples. Even if the algorithm in practice doesn't use randomization, all the math and understanding of the search tree is derived from randomized ideals.

I think MCTS well-represents the human thinking of the typical expert. Every play is read all the way to the end of the game instinctively. Experts study the pawn-king-rook endgame not necessarily because they expect to see pawn-king-rook endgames... but because the pawn-king-rook endgame is of huge importance to middle-game pawn development.

Learning to see how middle-game (and even early-game) moves develop into endgame is pretty much what being an expert is about. And MCTS best emulates that kind of thinking.

True, chess is very tactical. But humans are generally bad at exhaustive searches and tactics. Humans win with positional play, and with better understanding of endgame positions.

----------

So rest assured, when I say "Monte Carlo", I'm not talking about a typical monte-carlo algorithm. I'm talking about Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is a very, very different theoretical basis than Alpha-Beta pruning.
How about FlowWeb? is that something I could get away with?
You don't need subsidies for the price to hit $0. The power must be removed from the grid.
A lot can be done just by upgrading technology, regardless of the energy source. For example, heat pumps achieve more than 100% (!) efficiency (i.e. by exchanging heat between outdoors and inside of the building, you can heat it up more than you could by just converting the spent energy straight into heat). I imagine similar can be achieved with better insulation.
> I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it.

While you have it - for "us" it is "effectively gone" - unless you uploaded it somewhere.

In the future, after you die, it may become "absolutely gone" - as your relatives or whomever likely won't care, and will discard it.

Unless you make some effort to preserve it. Most people don't - they never did; it was always left up to future people to do so.

For instance, my mom and dad saved a ton of old photos and letters between them, many while he was in the service during the Vietnam War. My mom saved them - but not in a great way. She basically put them all in a box, then that inside a trash bag, and we found it in my old childhood home after both she and my had passed away. So I saved them.

But - unless I scan them - they will be gone forever. In a sense, though, that's ok - because they were never meant to be public anyhow.

But for stuff on the internet - it was public; it was most likely meant to be public. But if you save it personally, then the site or whatever goes away, what the public had is gone. Things like that didn't really happen in the past - I mean, they did - but there was always the possibility of recovery in the future.

More than a few times was something thought "lost forever" - only to be recovered; it found hidden away somewhere, or buried in some dusty archive in a back room of a basement storage area at a university or something. Sometimes found inside a wall.

But the digital? That is rare indeed. Even precious artifacts like tapes and manuals from times past get thrown out all the time, usually by relatives of some passed on engineer, often by their widows, as "so much of this old junk".

Occasionally, though, it gets saved (usually by bitsavers) - and if we are really lucky, it gets scanned or pulled from the tapes - old archives of code, sometimes of other stuff...

But we lose more than we save.

I'm just rambling now - this kind of thing, this loss of our computing history in general (it's more than just "the early internet" - we've lost and thrown away so much of our "early computing" history, it's not funny)...

Think about the inventions that have changed humanity in radical ways, that have altered our society greatly: The steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, etc. How many museums and such are there that celebrate, archive, and curate information about them?

The computer?

How many museums are there for it in comparison?

The difference is stark. A thought I just now had is that I wonder if it is like this, because the computer represents such a different "threat" to humans - that is, it's the closest we've come to a representation of "us" - our minds. And - as it becomes more tightly integrated into our society, if not our body collective (and literal) - if we unconsciously seek to marginalize it due to fear in some manner; fear of the other? fear of the artificial? fear of the usurper? Maybe we seek to forget what we have wrought?
That rule is not in the rules.
I am quite surprised Sheryl Sandberg all but disappeared in the past few months from these discussions.
Is Big Tech’s embrace of AI ethics boards helping anyone?
There is no transit visa to the US. Everyone landing goes through customs and immigration regardless of whether you are connecting to another flight.
Thank you for answering. True, it's definitely not easy but statically possible. This is why I'm asking for advice.
If it's the equivalent of what's already given for free, yes. I'm skeptical that this is remotely plausible, but yes, I would happily accept $2500 for the status quo.
Exactly. If it were so obvious then we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. There are reasons why things got to be this way and we have to understand them to progress.
If I visit a webpage does the fact that I did so belong to me, or the site owner, or both? Clearly, it's a record of my activity, so it should belong to me. But it's also a record of the server's activity, which should belong to the site owner ("Served page X to User at 123.123.123.123 a 4:03 PM EST on April 3, 2019") I don't see an easy way to make a case that they don't have at least partial ownership of it.

Location data is a little more clear that it belongs to the user, since you aren't requesting anything from anyone, they are just collecting it, sometimes without telling you.

Voice assistants are also complicated. Does the information "Analyzed noise XXX at such such time - determined it was not the word 'Alexa' " belong to the company doing the analysis? After all, you bought it and asked it to listen to you and respond when you said a certain thing.
I don't see that too much, to be honest. If there is any sort of corporate love here, it feels more like it's Google that enjoys it, not Facebook.
Caricatures do not rob you of anything. They emphasize grotesques or background features to the point of extracting them from invisibility.
Economist, you wish.
> Only seasonal storage (and perhaps the political challenges of long-range transmission) seem to be truly difficult problems.

Seasonal storage of heat is not that difficult a problem, given that you have large enough need of low enough temperature heat. Which at least district heating offers. And converging electricity to heat is not exactly expensive or difficult...
Better building codes for insulation & air sealing, and air source heat pumps, which can provide 5kW of heat for 1kW of electricity depending on the weather & unit.

As far as I hear the operating performance is mostly there with the heat pumps, now they just need to bring down the unit cost (and do a little more work on performance in very cold weather)
I guess if it was thorough enough and tried to synthesise some kind of framework for analysing these things there might even be a PhD in it for someone?
They are also cancelling ESTA for security professionals without warning and the resulting visa application gets stuck in administrative processing for months due to a security flag.
To be pedantic, unless you flashed coreboot it's not your own firmware and if you aren't using an open hardware laptop then it's not really your hardware either.
Requiring trust is absolutely an argument against the solution. Once you're willing to trust someone, you may as well use a database and a contract.
Even if you leave out email, IRC, etc. I'm sure the volume of discussions that took place on commercial online services like Compuserve and the thousands upon thousands of BBS systems far outweighed Usenet--and almost all of that is long gone (for better or worse). Personally I sort of wish I had more archives from my BBS days but so it goes.