skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Controls engineer here.

I've often wondered what a theory of computation based in differential equations would look like. We desperately need one. Control theory gives us some tools, but not nearly powerful enough ones.

It's fairly clear by now that AI, at least as applied to domains immersed in the natural world, such as robotics and machine vision, is better thought of as analog in nature. Ten years ago I'd go to robotics conferences and it would not be unusual for me to be the only person in the room who knew that control theory was a thing. Now it's nearly taken over the field. But the kinds of developments we see in the field, both in terms of controls and in terms of machine learning, are essentially experimental in nature. We try some stuff, and see what works. Mathematical proofs, or even a mathematical understanding, of these algorithms comes later, if at all.

To this day we have intuition about why deep networks work, but backing that intuition up with rigorous mathematical analysis has been very challenging and is quite incomplete. But when it works, it works far better than ideas rooted in automata. It would be a tremendous benefit to the field if we could somehow merge the practical power of differential equations and function approximators with the theoretical power of the theory of computation.
Vignette: add photos to your contacts by searching public social media profiles
PCI-Express Riser/Extender Test (2017)
Back then the expectations were different. So if you didn’t want to be reachable at all times, there was less relationship management involved.
Presumably they meant made redundant - I suspect you could be fired for cause.
That's certainly what "nation" meant a hundred years ago, and what it means in context of nationalist ideology.

I think that in modern English, "nation" and "nation state" mostly mean "sovereign country or polity". I think this usage is partly because obviously most uses of "state" are references to obviously-non-sovereign internal divisions of territory, whether in the US or Austria or Australia or Brazil or India, and including extremal cases like the states of Palau (most of which comprise less than a thousand people).

Probably another cause is that so few people take 19th-C / 20th-C nationalism seriously that there's no real need for the word "nation" in this context.

But if you're keen on the political-science definitions, note that states don't have to be sovereign. The word "country" won't do because they don't have to be sovereign either (e.g. England or Greenland). I think if you want to formally say "sovereign state", you have to say "sovereign state".
I've had a 30-year career as a sysadmin and developer, and I don't have a CS degree (or even a highschool diploma). Most of the people I've worked with at Fortune 500 companies don't have CS degrees. If you think you know enough to do a job, apply for it and be honest. Don't lie about your credentials. If you have no related job experience, you can build an online portfolio by contributing to open source projects, or highlighting your own solo endeavors. Get a GitHub presence, start a tech blog, make a portfolio site to showcase what you can do.

The quick and easy way to get a job is to go to an immersive code school crash-course. I have a lot of misgivings about the quality of candidates they tend to produce, but I've seen enough good people come out of them that I don't dismiss them. I've hired plenty of people with no other CS background and no related job experience. They're expensive, but the payoff is huge if it gets you a job. Some of them are free until you start working. App Academy specifically operates this way, and produces strong candidates (they have a competitive application/vetting process).
And still, a politician who says that airplane ticket and meat prices should rise to levels unaffordable by the bottom 95% won't get elected. It's too unpopular. Despite quite many people in non-western countries not flying in airplanes and only eating meat on rare occasions.
It was funny how the numerology is bunk but then we use 440 rather than 439 because it's prime. It all makes sense of course unless you're in the believer camp then it could seem arbitrary.
Lots of people enjoy Iridium flares or ISS passes. Have satellites bothered you in the past? You’ve got to really be awed by NIMBYism extending all the way into space.
> You're still just arguing that Intel knew this would create huge vulns and they went ahead regardless, which is baseless.

The first scientific paper about such vulnerabilities namely in Intel processors is from 1995 [1]. They went ahead regardless. Processor technology has developed a lot. Many things that were not practically feasible in 1995 are possible today. That holds for the good and the bad. There must be some people inside Intel who must have understood that. Otherwise all that progress would not have possible. Some experts might have blind spots, but I doubt Intel microarchitecture is developed by just a handful of people.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabi...
Part of the problem is the participation trophy and helicopter parent mentality.

Who are you to tell me my beliefs are wrong? I can be anything I want, I am qualified to be an expert on something because I want to be. The Earth is flat, who are you to tell me otherwise?

The lack of humility is the real doomsday machine.
>If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such "intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not go online without FB or other easy ways.

That's hardly an argument in favour of social media. The US is a democracy where people used to have civic debates around a shared reality.

That social media isn't going to ruin the debate climate in corporate-governmental societies where civilians don't have any input anyway doesn't really calm my nerves. In fact it frightens me. If the future of the internet is a cluster of entertainment bubbles with business and government bending reality to their will, and China is an example of the future, I'm not really keen on duplicating it. It's actually a very prescient observation: There seems to be a strong correlation between societies with high technological development but no democratic tradition, and the demise of traditional channels of media in favour of social media.
“Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable,” he said.

“We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.”

Obviously this guy is speaking off the cuff. And the article is light on detail and doesn't reference any studies.

Study from 2017 that makes the opposite claim:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we control individual pre-marital well-being levels and find that the married are still more satisfied, suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage, from pre-nuptual bliss to marriages of long-duration.

A brief APA article describes possible marital bliss confounders:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/marriage

In short: marriage qua marriage won't make anyone happy; children reduce reduce happiness; economic insecurity causes unhappiness.
I hear that advice a lot. Seems to be consistent with what I see happening around me.

What kind of skills in particular would you recommend to work on and how does one go about improving said skills ?
Yes, that's exactly how I meant it, thanks. It's a pretty well-known shorthand for people talking about self-employment taxes (I know how payroll taxes work, thanks tptacek).

tptacek there's no need to try to save face by attacking me with your pedantry just because you got caught giving out ignorant advice.
It’s always interesting to see contempt for people like me to come out into the open.
That line of thinking implicitly assumes no upside to being capable of connecting at will, 24/7.

I live in a small town with a surprising amount of 24 hour service. I'm not obligated to run off to the store every night at 2am just because I can, but I sure as hell appreciate being able to do so when I need to or want to.

There are upsides to our current ability to connect. Acting like "simply not having that problem is better" amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I have made the opposite conclusion - large parts of critical infrastructure are vulnerable today and we shouldn't underestimate just how disruptive and destructive one could be without great expertise. It's a ticking bomb. Trivial example, but try browsing Shodan for a wakeup call. And that's just already publicly indexed opportunities.

We haven't seen anything yet.
>How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

Accountability. Someone is ultimately responsible for every newspaper article and every TV program. If a national newspaper decided to publish a piece of paid foreign propaganda, someone would have a lot of explaining to do, possibly in a court of law.

There's no such accountability for algorithmically-driven systems. It's not our fault that our platform keeps promoting propaganda, it's just a quirk of the algorithm; we don't really know why our algorithm is doing this and we're not going to let you review the source code.

I don't know what the possible solutions might be, but there's clearly a problem. Social media companies have largely abnegated responsibility for what goes on their platform and their platforms can't function without that abnegation of responsibility.
Course we did, but a CD in the car? I think that had to wait until about the millennium. Tapes were still hugely popular through the 90s, even pre-recorded. Never did understand that as pre-recorded tapes had abysmal quality compared to home taping. :)
> Further, sometimes the work is unbalanced

My team has just grown my two backend developers to three. We also have six frontenders. Yes, the work is unbalanced, hire for it.
Has Seattle Found the Solution to Driving Alone to Work?
Thank you for bringing that to my attention... small oversight on my part. Just recently switched providers.

It should work now.
But his books are quite mediocre too (besides those wikipedia articles he adds to them) so what does it make his speeches?
I'm confused by this comment - are you trying to say IQ isn't heritable? Or just that both nature and nurture play a role? And why rely on anecdotal evidence - just read the second paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ. It even agrees with your experience: "IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics, for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. [..] Recent studies suggest that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores; however, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease can have deleterious effects."
I have the (admittedly subjective) sensation that I read a similar blog article just about every week.
As the author aknowledges the various opposing points, we could, perhaps, sensibly surmise that it's contextually dependent.
It's an open secret that many of the "anonymized" datasets that the large tech giants pass around are very easy to de-anonymize. I don't know much about how Apple works, but people who work with Google Ad products and analytics regularly violate the anonymity agreement because it's so financially lucrative to do so and just never tell anyone.

We need to stop mining people for profit while putting minimal or zero privacy protections in place.
Architectural coherence is such an important part of software design. I agree with your point completely—you need specialists for deep, specific problems, but you also need people with a view of the entire system.
“Does your history degree help you during recruitment?”
I wouldn't be so sure. Grindr tracks users locations pretty precisely, and although many users hide their faces in profile pictures, many more demand a face be sent through direct messages, etc. If you have location and a face, and your target is even remotely popular, some internet sleuthing can put the rest together pretty easily.

How much of this can be validated and proven to not be a masquerade (fake pictures / profiles are ridiculously common, as are bot accounts on the platform) is anyone's guess, but for blackmail purposes, that doesn't really matter.

Given how the app is marketed, and how pervasive it is throughout gay culture in the US (pretty much everyone in that community at least knows about it, whether they use it or not) just being shown to have an account on the service carries a pretty strong implication that the user is seeking a hookup of some kind. Now imagine if the target is married, or they're a closeted politician... it's pretty easy to see how dangerous the dataset can be from there.
Is Linux About Choice?
Isn't the problem that we're already scheduled to be killing a lot of people due to inaction? We need to find a path that maximises the chances for the remaining survivors.
I was an adult in the nineties. I was subject to vastly more expectation to keep in touch and be available and call people than I am currently.
No.

And I was a teenager in the 90s, peak nostalgia, but the answer is still no.

The 90s weren't that simpler, we just had different problems. In fact, I have a bit of trouble finding things that really were simpler from a personal perspective.

The one thing I can think of is security. We didn't have security checks everywhere, kids could do plenty of "dangerous" things, we didn't see pedophiles everywhere etc... And I kind of miss it. But it may just be the result of living in a safer society: human lives are becoming incredibly valuable, resulting in over-protection.

Other than that, think about how simpler internet made things. Want to buy something unusual: buy it online with a few clicks. Access to knowledge is almost limitless. I don't miss going to the bookstore at the other side of the town, noticing that the book I wanted isn't available, take an order, and come back 2 weeks later to pick it up. All these forgotten details were really annoying thinking back.

Another example: cars. Cars used to be mechanically simpler, which was great for the DIY types. But modern cars are so much more reliable. Smoking cars on the curb were a much more common sight back them. So maybe cars were simpler to repair, but not having to repair make life much simpler.

Now about computers. Sure computers were simpler under the hood. Understanding a CPU and assembly was comparatively easy back then. But nowadays, we have abstraction layers that make computers more accessible at every level. We just shifted a few layers up. Truth is, even oldschool computers hid a lot of complexity regarding the electronics inside it that we, as kids, didn't realize and older people did.
The engine is quite powerful and allows most of the math and knowledge features from Mathematica, true. But playing with it via Jupyter I see how they've purposely crippled some of the more useful features. For example, Manipulate (the interactive feature where parameters can be adjusted via sliders) doesn't work, but Jupyter itself supports such interactions in Python, so it's not Jupyter's fault. Also, in Mathematica entities can be clicked on and explored, but in the Jupyter interface an entity is displayed as a static image (that deceptively looks like a button but can't be interacted with).
> I can't take any other measurement they published seriously.

Here's another problem with the article:

> Microsoft is pushing out OS-level updates [...] However, this doesn’t mitigate the problem entirely, for that we need motherboard BIOS updates and reportedly Intel has released the new microcode to motherboard partners. However as of writing no new BIOS revisions have been released to the public.

That's wrong - microcode updates can be successfully applied by either the OS or by the early-boot firmware, you do not need a BIOS update (just apt update intel-microcode).
Linux ignored those concerns as well. Torvalds didn't think hyperthreading was at fault, and Kleen stated that it was a "user space problem." In other words, there wasn't exactly consensus that there was something to fix.

Anyway, that's not the same vulnerability as any of those that have become public in the last 18 months.
I think TeMPOraL's point is that if you take away luxuries like airplane flights, cars, meat rich diets from the masses, you will cause massive riots involving human casualties.

Not sure I fully agree with the premise that such measures are needed though. You can also increase efficiencies by e.g. requiring the industry to build more durable products or e.g. increasing spending in artificial meat research as well as high speed trains or hyperloops. People would still eat meat, would still travel the world, but now without causing as much of a carbon footprint.
Drawbridge: cross device matching (ie fingerprinting) service

unroll.me: selling your inbox contents, but "anonymized"

FamilyTreeDNA: proudly letting law enforcement and probably tons of others search your (and your relatives!) DNA, without -- for your convenience -- asking your, or your relatives', consent

Klout: kinda scummy, and also not phased out because of GDPR

>Lithium CEO Pete Hess reported that Klout is a “a standalone consumer-facing service” that no longer fits the focus of delivering customer service solutions. In addition, “recent discussions on data privacy and GDPR are further expediting our plans to phase out the Klout service, giving us a chance to lead on some of the issues that are of critical importance to our customers: data privacy, consumer choice and compliance.” [1]

We're supposed to mourn these companies? We shouldn't trust an author or site whose best choices of companies to mourn are (1) at least in some cases, not gone because of GDPR, and (2) mostly companies we're better off without.

[1] https://www.relevance.com/lithium-ends-klout-gdpr/
Why would they? They keep selling all the chips they can make at their current prices.
Yes, I built an open source tool called Dnote [0]. Basically, I can write down my microlessons as I learn them without leaving the terminal or browser. And it sends me a weekly digest to automate spaced repetition.

I used to use Evernote to write down my knowledge but I quickly found that I never look back at my notes, and quickly lost grasp of my knowledge. That's why I built the automated email digest.

My workflow is simple: when I learn something, I execute a command line program to write it down without leaving the terminal when I am coding. Every weekend, I receive a digest of what I learned in the past. This way, I can successfully maintain all the new knowledge I acquire.

Similarly to your requirements, I often search through my knowledge base in the terminal before doing a web search. Doing so saves me time because my knowledge base is already written in my own words that I understand well.

- [0] https://github.com/dnote/dnote
> The thing is, it kind of depends on how you define replication, also some of these studies were done decades ago, society has changed since then, possibly affecting the results.

If a study doesn't replicate because society has changed, and so the results, then that study cannot be used to infer things about current society. It belongs to historical studies at best, at worst it was garbage from the get-go (I suspect the latter is usually the case; human psychology seems mostly fixed).

Yes, hard sciences are easier; the physical reality keeps you honest. But that only means soft sciences need even stricter standards than hard ones, whereas today the opposite is the case. There's little point in spending all this effort if almost all of it is wasted - we need to accept that psychology is hard, and meaningful results will be rare.
One other thing to keep in mind about social psychology:

http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res...

> Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.

That is, stereotypes are frequently better predictors of human behavior than bona-fide research in social psychology.
CD players in cars were extremely common by the mid 90s.
> EternalBlue was so valuable, former N.S.A. employees said, that the agency never seriously considered alerting Microsoft about the vulnerabilities, and held on to it for more than five years before the breach forced its hand.

This has been common "conspiracy theory" for at least a decade. And not just about Microsoft.
In retrospect things seem simpler because you know how they turn out.
$250 a year is a pretty small amount, probably about what it costs to keep a registry of SysEx IDs so that manufacturers don't create conflicts.

What's the alternative? This is a bit like MAC addresses - if network gear manufacturers didn't have some type of system for de-conflicting addresses it would be chaos when you bought 2 pieces of gear that conflicted with each other.
Oh god no. Tell me this idea is a joke.
>A good IQ test should have high test/retest reliability (ie you don't get better after taking it again)

This isn't actually true. Most people improve if they take the same style again which is why Mensa, for example, asks that you wait a year before re-taking their proctored tests.

One source of many: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1932-00905-001

"When a Stanford-Binet test is repeated within a period of three or four months the experience gained while taking the first test appears to result in a median gain of four or five points in the second IQ."
> It would be a tremendous benefit to the field if we could somehow merge the practical power of differential equations and function approximators with the theoretical power of the theory of computation.

If you consider Leslie Lamport's TLA+ [0] bringing logic specifications tied to software, it comes close to what you are looking for IMHO. Code the differential equations in your code but use TLA+ for the mathematics and theory of computation.

[0] http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/high-level-view.html
> each MD post is generated on request so I can update easily

> if needed.

You mean each client socket? If so that would be awfully slow for high volume traffic.

> Only requirement is I have to restart the server to

> rebuild the list of available posts in memory.

This seems quite undesirable too, where does this requirement come from?

> pull changes in on the serving machine

Is this manually pulling or do you fetch in a loop?

> will gladly do the work to share in a gist if anyone’s

> curious.

I'm certainly curious now to see exactly how this Go program works.
So not as safe as travelling by train in Japan or Europe then?
That’s profoundly horrifying.

In America, unauthorized dissemination of nude photos is both criminalized and widely reviled. What I don’t know is if it’s that difference or end to end encryption platforms that makes the difference.
I was just discussing this with a friend. Obviously there's a certain degree of multi-tenancy sharing that's most cost effective. For electrical power use and removing heat there's a floor where, if not being used, the best you could do would be to turn a system off, which has its own issues. Go too far and you won't be able to also run a spot market in CPU instances like AWS does.
I miss not worrying about the earth dying.