skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm definitely not concerned of anyone taking any of this too seriously and extrapolating on it dangerously.

Not this particular article, no. But there's a whole genre of excited mathematical modelling literature where the author demonstrates a gee-whizz concept that looks like it could be really useful. The trouble is that once you start digging down into the specific details, they turn out to be really hard to get right, and at best you end up with a model that's brittle, for want of a better word.

An example that I have in mind is the literature on power law distributions. A little bit of theory showed how power law distrbutions could arise via a process known as preferential attachment, and everyone got excited and suddenly people were spotting them everywhere. The literature on this topic is massive.

The thing is, it turns out that it's quite hard to check that a given dataset follows a power law. This paper [0] showed that many of the claims were sloppy, and the researchers hadn't been careful with their statistics.

The crux of what I'm saying is that establishing that a model fits well is hard, whether it's a diffusion model, a power law distribution, or anything else. If someone wants to claim that some mathematical widget can be used to model X, they'd better be able to back that claim up with a real demonstration and carefully laid-out details. Otherwise they're just waving their hands in the air.

[0] http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/CMSC5734/Clauset_Shalizi_N...
I have a bunch of data backed up on the Sia file storage marketplace. Works fine for that purpose for me today.
> Why it is in the past 20 years we have had close to zero in the news ( At least I wasn't aware of any ) and ever since Spectre and Meltdown we have something new like every few months.

It's a new vulnerability class. Prior to Spectre, nobody thought that code which didn't execute (and couldn't execute) could affect architectural state in an observable way. It's hard to overstate how bizarre the vulnerabilities from the Spectre family are from a software point of view: it's leaking data from code that not only didn't execute yet, but also can never execute, and in some cases doesn't even exist! It's like receiving a packet your future self sent to the past, except that your future self had been dead for two years when he sent the packet, and for some reason he's actually a parrot.

Once a new vulnerability class is discovered, researchers will start looking for new bugs in and around that class. Which is why we have seen lately so many issues disclosed around speculative execution and data leaked through shared microarchitectural state.
"You’ve got to understand that our commitment to safety is as great as yours," Mr. Sinnett said in the meeting.

Which is a blatant lie considering they opted to DLC bunch of saftety features.
A pro-active legislation against tech doesn't cost in the current budget, is hard to account for as a cost in a future budget, doesn't call anyone's current actions out as problematic, and doesn't really require a change at the employee level. It's basically free.

By the same token, it doesn't really detract from anything else they should be doing, so using it as a reason to criticize other problems they have doesn't make much sense, unless you assume they can only do one thing at a time, which doesn't seem likely.
> Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies? Or how about free concerts? Or how about meeting up at hackerspaces on open house nights? ... Or what about someone hosting a house party, and staying away from bars and club style events?

#1 goal is to keep people on the platform. Without users, there is nothing. To keep the lights on, only ~10% of what is on the platform needs to be revenue generating. Everything else is about bringing people together.

Open house nights are harder, people tend to feel unsafe when an app leads them into someone else's personal space.

As I mentioned in another reply, v1 is about externally created events, future features are around what you are describing. But an existing user base with enough critical mass has to exist before it becomes possible to have people successfully create their own events.

> What's the chances of this complying with the GDPR?

Very high, I am super paranoid about privacy.

As an example of this paranoia, when user's join a pre-event chat room, they are all given a unique UID for that chat room. A mapping table is created in the DB, tracking their real user id to the chatroom's user ID. The user's actual user ID is never sent to other users.

After 30 days, the entry in the mapping table is deleted.

Everything is like that, end to end, when a user taps "delete profile" every trace of their existence is removed. The only thing kept around are the aggregate review scores they contributed, the "+1" ratings on some particular event is fun, which has no connection to the user.

> It's just another adtech business that attempts to attack and hijack friend relationships by sneaking in the back door.

I'm boot strapping this myself because I believe an alternative to sitting inside on a Saturday night watching streaming pixels fly needs to exist.
Is there a reason you can't build this in FireFox?

How does "someone built a Chrome extension" justify you asking them to explain themselves for why they didn't build it the way you want?
As an American entering the EU, I wasn't asked anything either. Just handed my passport, stamped, on my way.

Similar thing although with a few more questions entering Canada. Usually it's just, do you have anything to declare - which seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to ask.
As a Canadian, I get questioned on entry to Canada every time. I assume it is the same for Americans; the borders are configured very similarly.
Yeah. And because they are sparse the representation is both tiny and stupidly powerful.
I built so many apps using the first apis and then using the streaming apis just so they kill them that I don’t wanna try again
That would actually explain there website. Its awful in only the way a late 90's site can be, but they make great servers so you deal with it. I just wish they made it a bit easier to find everything.
Until it's not and they advertise anyway. Netflix has adopted the pay and advertise anyway model. The advertising in this case is the product you've already paid for, which is still annoying and bothersome. Apparently, they are trying to work off the success of AOL.
Thank you for the unsolicited recommendation! I'm glad you're enjoying our work.
The only reason why Tesla hasn't been hit by a lawsuit over this is because they were replacing these units for free.

Now that they no longer do, what do you expect to happen?
I know that my opinion is going to be unpopular but I strongly disagree with this move. I can understand not allowing facial recognition to be run in real time, or for instance to ban corporates from tracking me and using my face for advertisement data, but to ban the police seems extremely dumb. Facial recognition can be used to significantly cut down investigation times and costs and thus reduce the stress on police.
Papers, please, comrade.

That proclamation was forgotten as soon as the Cold War ended.
SJS – slowest JSON serializer in the galaxy
I can only assume plans exist, otherwise the plants wouldn't be allowed to operate.

Potassium iodide would probably be distributed, which protects against thyroid cancers. Unless there's some gamma/neutron threat from failing plants I'm unaware of, people would probably stay put until they can safely evacuate. Even the inside of a car should be pretty safe.

It would suck, but I can't imagine a million people dying.
I don't think this helps. It's not just having a space to meet. It's having a reason to meet. Without the unifying force of religion or another philosophy, we invariably devolve into family-based group identity, which is another word for ethnonationalism or identity politics.
+1.

I like that mini-summaries on the left-hand side ("subconversations about XX"), but the graph view seems to prioritise responses with the maximum amount of comments.

E.g. if there is a flame-war going on in one of the subthreads, it will be more visible than a highly rated comment with a few interesting subcomments.
My biggest problem with Stellar (and Ripple, which it was forked from) is that it's a centralized blockchain. Transactions are public, but you cannot become a block-producing node (validator). This allows censorship if they do not like the person proposing transactions, or the transaction itself, and could rollback if they wanted.

I'm a much bigger fan of Cosmos and (future) PoS Ethereum, which is permissionless to become a block producer - you just need to acquire enough stake.
Stellar was one of the only cryptos I actually spent some money on, and it seems like one of the few that are still trying to progress
Oh.. I just took that as a joke. And where's the line, if the writers come up with some (non-defamatory) joke (or whatever) about some real product, that relies on real-world context about that product, is there pressure to get a product placement deal, or else drop it from the script?

Seems silly.
CrowdStrike S-1
That makes it an unpaid ad.
I am not from the US, but I imagine Chicago has more than enough opportunities for software devs.
People should realize that ancient Chinese were onto something when they told that all phenomena shall evolve only so much before they tip over the peak of maximum development and inevitably rumble downhill into overdevelopment.

P.S. Wow, hit a soft spot. Flagging this for what? For being unloyal to the ideology of everlasting growth? Try again as much as you can.
It's a label on the map, like a road name. It may be unwelcome, but it's not dangerous.
the point is to prevent the capture of such data to begin with. As a privacy activist, we've seen that simply developing a 'use-policy,' while effective, can only go so far. Once local/state/fed authorities possess this data, it's a matter of when, not if, it will be abused (or sold off to private interests).

Your second question: there's a massive difference between being observed by an individual officer and being perpetually tracked by an apparatus of ubiquitous cameras that cross-reference your face with your background information, possible criminal record, citizenship status, etc. It also opens the flood gates for horrific scenarios like the 'social credit system' that they've implemented in China. Go look that one up and tell me you're still ok with facial recognition.
> religious people tend to not notice that religion isn't the main reason the good parts of church are good.

I strongly disagree with this statement. While I am quite involved in my church now, and think that's great. A belief in God (independent of a congregation, and at times, in spite of the congregation) has kept me sane at the worst points in my life.

I get that you do not see the value in this -- that is your right of course. However, please do not project your feelings on religious people.
Not sure why down voted, this sounds like the most logical reason
Boeing appears to already be lawyering up their execs while throwing engineers under the bus. It’s going to be all about denying everything now.
What does that have to do with finding a replacement for the community aspects of churches?
Didn't know that, thanks.

But there's still the problem of a friction fit connection in an environment with a lot of vibration and contaminants. Seems like these would be good for use cases where the part needs to be removable and also have high write cycles, like a dash cam or data logger that has no other interface to a PC.

Also the eMMC interface exposes quite a bit of the underlying hardware (see mmc-utils on Linux). With SD cards I think you're generally stuck with some kind of SMART interface.
OpenBSD preemptively did the same thing [0] in 6.4, released nearly a year ago.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350278
Lots of people were decrying it as impossible due to pin count on the supposed implant device, which looked like a passive component.
Exactly. When you can't get anything useful done, pass a law that's arbitrarily populist and pat yourself on the back.
I won't repost my entire comment here, but I noted in 2017 on Hacker News some pretty shady stuff going on with Stellar/XLM and their customer support team / developers.

You can read the entire account here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583#15936174

It starts with this:

---

I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was:

"I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information.

You can see the merge operation here: https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ....

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point.

Apologies we cannot be of further help."
Basically, it's Internet money. So like the Internet, it's very difficult for governments to fsck with. They can try, of course, but there will always be levels of overlay networks that they can't touch. This is one aspect of the cypherpunk vision.

Being ~anonymous online, cryptocurrencies are my only option for buying and selling stuff online. Leasing VPN services, servers, VPS, etc. Getting paid for writing and other consulting work.

The speculation aspect is just meme-driven bullshit. What we need is cryptocurrencies with stable values, for online commerce. I'm not sure what you mean by "aspirin" vs "vitamins". But for me, getting out from under the thumb of government is extremely interesting.
In the past few years I’ve gone to 30 hour weeks. It really frustrated my managers at Google, but as an hourly contractor I neither needed the extra money nor wanted to be at work any more than that. Working 40 hours feels like I’m just burning my life away.

Even though the managers didn’t like it, they kept extending my contract until the two year maximum came up. Then I found a new employer who was eager to hire me. I told them if I could work four days a week and about 30 hours a week, I’d take the job.

He agreed and actually it’s working really well for both of us. He doesn’t actually need a huge amount of work done, I’m just working on some side projects he never has time for. The perpetual three day weekends give me a genuine sense of freedom on weekends that I haven’t felt before. Previously the two day weekend was stressful. With the three day weekend I have plenty of time for side projects (which I do constantly), and I’ve recently bought a mountain bike. Ive finally got time to do my weekend chores while still enjoying myself. And I work 10-30 hours a week in a really chill environment. All my bills are paid and I have time to live my life. I’m 34.

It’s hard to find this kind of situation, but let me assure you - it’s well worth pursuing and it’s life changing.

Also my managers at google didn’t like my 30 hour a week schedule and they didn’t want to hire me full time at the end of my contract, but they also didn’t let me go. If you want to explore this, make yourself useful and be a little pushy. It’s well worth it.
I think the 'mostly asleep' might have a good bit to do with it, too - what kind of smuggler isn't at least slightly nervous when crossing customs?
> Every company out there is trying to employ more people.

Every company out there is trying to make more money. If employing people doesn't correlate, and the trends between the two (making money and employing people) are diverging, then companies will make more money and employ less people.

It happens for many reasons - the solvable, as is the case with market capture monopolies, particularly for services (there exist patent troll businesses who employ no one, make no products, but sue with acquired IP rights to make large amounts of profit) and the "unfixable" as is the case with automation and technological efficiency.

The last 30 years have largely been defined by American businesses moving operations towards profit without labor - the per-employee revenues of some of the largest corporations are ludicrous compared to what could be found back then. That trend is unlikely to reverse and very likely to go exponential.
Remember that on mobile by default google pushes the feed on the search page instead of leaving it blank. Desktop is spared the indignity, for now.
The "hidden processor state" is the memory contents belonging to other processes, stored as part of the CPU's memory access machinery. Every single one of these vulnerabilities involves Intel speculatively filling memory read requests from one process with data from another process without doing access checks first, and it turns out they do this all over the place: they do it from L1 cache, they do it if there's an L1 cache miss, they do it when the actual desired memory is uncacheable, they do it with store-to-load forwarding... almost every conceivable method of fulfilling a memory read on modern Intel CPUs is happy to speculatively leak secret data from other processes that shouldn't be accessable. More interestingly, AMD don't seem to do this anywhere that anyone's been able to find. (Well, technically that's not quite true... there's a speculative bypass of x86 segment limits on AMD which no-one cares about because no-one uses those anyway.)
Same, worth the tradeoff when you get to zip right past huge lines, and with the added pre-check, makes going in and out of MCO a hell of a lot easier.
Corporate welfare, by design, is not meant to be accountable.
This is true for Ripple but not for stellar. In stellar you become part of consensus when any node adds you to their quorum slice. For example IBM runs a node, if they do business with your company they want to add you to their quorum and you are part of consensus.
I'm a constituent and I don't want to be tracked as I walk around in public. I'm glad they're listening to people like me.
Downvoted for the frothy edit. Chill out there ya toughy. Someone clearly hit a soft spot on you.
Plenty of normal people incorporate... It isn't about resistance to bankruptcy... It is about avoiding a whole swath of life altering problems that a corporation prevents.
IN their stores, not outside on the streets.
If you have the Cisco 9000 Series, patch them now! This SSH backdoor allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to login as root.
'nopti' only disables the Meltdown mitigation. To disable all the mitigations (including Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, and now MDS) you can use mitigations=off on newer kernels.
Aaron Peskin is the king of pandering in this city. He comes up with bills like this all the time.

I just can't understand why people in District 3 keep re-electing him... even bringing him back after terming out before. I guess his strategy works even while the city has all of these huge problems?
Many things in life "could be" true, but with things such as this (human psychology related), it often takes very long time periods before the truth begins to show itself. This would be my reason for considering these major social changes as potentially bad, and certainly worthy of concern/attention/discussion.
Because Erlang was not written to be a logic programming language? I may misunderstand your question, but it strikes me as akin to asking why Python doesn't support pointers (since it was initially implemented in C).
This may have been a reasonable argument if they considered it to fall under warranty, and replace it for free when it fails.
TBH, that quote is certainly not persuading me. I don't have lots of statistical data to look into, but I will say that myself and my peer group (gen X) at least seem much lonelier, with negative consequences, than my parents and their peer group.

A lot of it is that it's just so much easier to be isolated today than in the past. When my parents moved in the past, they may have hired movers, but they stilled called me, my siblings, and some of their friends to help. I just get on thumbtack to find some help and then hire movers. When my parents were coming back from a flight, one of their kids would pick them up from the airport. I just take an Uber.

Part of forming strong social relationships is a need to rely on other people. It's much easier to get by today without relying on anyone, and that can have significant negative side effects.
> The safest bet now for the best security is probably to stick to in-order CPUs

out-of-order execution != speculative execution.

It is possible to have OoO without speculative execution. On the other hand they do tend to come as a pair since they both utilise multiple execution units, for instance the Intel Pentium in 1993 was the first x86 to have OoO or branch prediction (486 and those before were scalar CPUs).
And yet no efforts at fecal recognition...
Resources are finite, as is time. Those are costs.

I would disagree that "it doesn't detract from anything else they should be doing." Clearly they aren't solving the important problems. What has been done in the last month?

The top thing every week, or perhaps every day, should be how they are solving the important problems. If they are blocked, they should mention how they are blocked and find alternative paths proactively.

Instead they dilute, defer, and distract. These problems have been going on for years, with some of the top-most funding of any city in the country. If nothing is being done, then I think it's safe to assume that they are getting distracted by other things.
Chernobyl was caused by human error and irresponsibility. We have to assume that the design and operation of all reactors, present and future, will involve these factors. Everything humans do does.
There's an ongoing PR push to paint anything from China as unsecure, cheap or untrustworthy. Now I see regular pieces on Bloomberg or popular sites like theVerge, and all those pieces have no substantial facts in them. I know reporters are hungry for stories, and they would eat up a semi-prepared file with all the "facts" easily laid out for them.

This is not new. There was something very similar in the late 80s and 90s, with everyone saying that Japan was going to take over, that they copy everything by sending teams in North America to take pictures of everything.
> The problem you're having

Again, I'm not having a problem.

> is you can't figure out how to use benchmarks to understand how a system works

No, I have no partucular problem evaluating whether a benchmark is useful to a decision and if so, how.

Nor have I said anything indicating any such problem.

> You're throwing up your hands and saying, "TOO DIFFERENT FROM REALITY!"

No, I'm saying he naive statement upthread that benchmark performance correlates with every possible use of a technology is nonsense.

That's it.

> Other folks don't do that

Actually, some do, but that's neither here nor there.

> and while not 1:1, they are able to correlate the performance of a benchmark with the performance of their own use case.

Once again, yes, lots of people have the skill to figure out whether and in what way particular benchmarks have utility for their usecases. I explicitly said that in the post you are responding to.

That's very different than your claim that I reacted against, which is that any benchmark inherently correlates with every use case, which is—again—complete nonsense.
Because they’d eventually have to disclose when the vulnerability was discovered and that’d be extremely obvious what they’re doing?