skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Azure has solid integration with most Microsoft products. The more of a Microsoft tech stack a company already has, the easier a sell it is. If you're using .NET, Azure is easier to set up and easier to maintain. If you're not already on the Microsoft side of the fence, I'm not sure how they compare, but I suspect AWS is better--although we did have that story a while back about how Azure runs more Linux than Windows Server.
I've read the corresponding paper, and while I think it's a fun read, I'm not sure it does particularly much to clear up the underlying confusion here. Reverse mode AD on straight line primitives is describabable in about three lines of exposition. The tricky part is how do you handle control flow (equivalently recursion). The description thereof then depends on what your underlying IR data structure is, but describing this generally isn't horrible either. The real problem in the literature is that there is lots of confusion over what is the AD algorithm and what are the workarounds applied to make it work in the particular system described.

For example, all the ML frameworks generally combine a high level tracer with a straight line AD transform, which then sometimes gets presented as a fundamental aspect of AD (which it isn't, you're just using the tracer to get an IR you can handle). As a result, this field has a lot of confused terminology, but all the results have been known since the 70s.

The name of the game for all the latest generation tools is to cleanly separate out the semantic AD transform from the rest of the system and then just use an unmodified compiler thereafter. We do it by transforming Julia IR, the Swift folks do it on SIL, and the Scala folks have an implementation using shift/reset and LMS. If you do this, a bunch of traditional AD techniques become just special cases of general purpose compiler transforms (DCE, CSE, etc). See this talk I gave recently for some more details: https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2019/02/19/growing-a-compile...

As an aside, a pet peeve of mine is people calling these algorithms "tape free". High storage requirements, due to the need to remember (or alternatively, recompute) intermediate values are a fundamental property of reverse mode AD and you can't get rid of it. The best you can do is hide it (e.g. in compiler managed stack or closure environments), with all the same fundamental challenges. This is probably a terminology clash, with people wanting to use "tape" as a term for a much more narrow kind of data structure generated from a tracing AD system, but the requirement to have some data structure like it, no matter how hidden is fundamental to the algorithm.
I suppose downvotes are from so-called project managers whothinks that valuable things are created by checking boxes in a spreadsheet.
I spend one hour a week optimizing my development environment
Looks like if you go back a few years you can see a bump.
Great idea, thank you!
WeWork’s CEO pocketing $700M is still far from normal
Ask HN: Pinterest for Text?
I keep text snippets saved from webpages (thousands of them) and would like to present this collection online.

I haven't found anything good enough for this. Ideally it should be like Pinterest (or maybe Instagram) for text, an unlimited canvas of text previews (masonry.js style or stacked design). A search function would also be useful.

I was thinking that this description is close to a blog but I'd like it to be optimized for displaying a lot of different snippets (as in Pinterest and giving the choice to the user to "peruse" through the entries quickly) but clicking on an entry should result in expanding into full content (again like Pinterest).

A Hugo blog offers a clean view of the titles (one after the other) but no preview of the actual content. Wordpress is optimized for only a posts per page.
On the other end something like Bret Victor's quote page is too simple and doesn't offer the "read more" feature: http://worrydream.com/quotes/

Anyone has seen anything out there that matches my needs? I don't mind paid services.
This is good, more because it will make searching for information easier than because it will avoid copyright. Searching through journal articles to find information about a given topic is very hard, even at a university with more or less universal library access to the online literature.

Authoring papers of uneven detail and quality and then publishing them in whatever prestigious journal that will have them is a terrible way to document the progress of science.

Instead, new results should be added to an open science information base, fully linked to all previous results that bear upon the new results, either in support or contradiction. This is what some of the bioinformatic data bases attempt to achieve by scanning articles, but it would be better to omit the article step.
The Science of Science Funding – NBER Summer Institute Raw Notes
This definately has a market, but i'm not sure SaaS is it. More typical eCommerce products have a "flavor of the day" like effect, where an article is written in some niche community, and everyone in that community rushes out to buy the thing. Then a few months later, the craze is over. If you're Amazon, you can spot these trends easily (because they have everyone's sales data from the marketplace). If you're a small eCommerce company, unless you just happen to have that product on hand, and someone just happened to have found you, you may never even realize the trend existed. Being alerted that there is a sudden demand for a product, might give you a headstart on marketing and might help you negotiate a deal with a supplier before the supplier realizes what they have.
4 Myths busted about hi-fi prototyping
With clean code it’s probably ok. But with other “clever” code you may see different behavior which is often hard to catch.
How do I know that NSA does not have one root certificate pre-installed in my browser?
Don't numeric solutions in math books also look very different from closed-form solutions?
Maybe Sundar is better at negotiating his salary than Satya? Can't think of any other logical reason
Thanks for that link, I didn't know about that video. I read his "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol", which provided me fundamental insights. Wrote just some weeks ago about that [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20233215
> The average scientific article isn't any good, and the NLP algorithms that do tasks like this are even worse.

In my day job, I'm often tasked with implementing algorithms from recently published physics papers. In order to do so, I normally have to read through at least 10 related papers (both cited papers and cited by papers) in order to have a clear idea in my head about what is going on. Even then, I often have to discuss what I have read with 2 or 3 other people and try out many different approaches before we finally understand what the paper meant.

This is because few papers include enough details to reproduce what they are doing. Many of these papers have mistakes or typos in their equations. Many of the math equations are also under specified. For example, an equation may list a sum over an index, but then in the text there may be a whole paragraph that describes what that index means (there is nothing wrong with this, but it would make it hard for AI to "just use the equations").

At the end of this whole process, which can take a week, about half of the time we choose not to implement the algorithm for one of several reasons:

* The authors misrepresented their work and it does not perform as well as claimed (e.g. the chosen examples are special cases that make their approach look better than the state-of-the-art approach)

* The work is not reproducible from the information in the paper

* The amount of work to implement it is far greater than an initial reading of the paper would suggest, due to additional details that were left out of their discussion

So, all of this is to conclude that understanding scientific papers is at the very limit of human ability for a group of PhDs in the field. I do not think that until we have much more powerful AI that it has any hope of making sense of this mess.

edit:
P.S. I am guilty of these same mistakes when publishing. I understand the deadlines and pressure to publish that leads to these issues. It is a huge amount of work to fully document and publish all the details needed to reproduce some new algorithm .
Should you use machine learning?
He’s clearly trying to quantify it with many different measurements in the video. Shoes his dog reacting to something, vibrations in water, etc.
Game of Tongues: How Duolingo Built a $700M Business with an Addictive App
This feels like the “we’re all dead in the long run” version of right.
Notion Hits $800M Valuation in New Funding
> they've been doing right by the open source community

MS's newer efforts like VS Code are certainly encouraging. This doesn't change the fundamental issue that much of the world relies on desktop software that only runs on Windows and an office suite that's only compatible with MS Office. These may not seem like much to the HN crowd, but we aren't representative of the economy at large.
Pretty precise seismometers back then!

> The first seismometer was placed on the moon’s surface very shortly after the astronauts landed, and seismologists including Toksöz started seeing the data right away — including every footstep the astronauts took on the surface. Even when the astronauts returned to the lander to sleep before the morning takeoff, the team could see that Buzz Aldrin ScD ’63 and Neil Armstrong were having a sleepless night, with every toss and turn dutifully recorded on the seismic traces.
>Which also made me think - does anybody know an example of a widely used programming language that voluntarily discontinued?

Python 2
Is there a plan to sell the data as an API?

I am currently working with a client who is exploring the options for building out a similar system.
There are so many such services that make it look like that there is no auto-renewal but when you check help docs, they have instructions to contact customer service to disable auto-renewal.

Having bitten by this a few times in past, now whenever I sign up for any subscription service, I add a calendar entry to cancel service 1 month before it supposed to expire.

If I like the service, then I just update reminder to cancel it before next renewal period.
I'm a moderator of one of the bigger Facebook advertising groups that exist. This caught my eye instantly as the e-commerce and affiliate crowd are going to be all over it. They love being able to catch trends relatively early. This product is ready made built for flavor of the moment marketers.
> Were our Dutch friends sifting through our messages for four years before Slack notified us of a suspicious login?

The author might know this already but the hackers aren't Dutch. They simply bought a cheap NL server from LeaseWeb to mask their real IP.
Dropbox needs to figure out how to stay in a commoditized market where their special sauce is being integrated into OSes and larger offerings (G-Suite.)

With respect, that is Dropbox's problem. Dropbox needs to do that, But I don't need Dropbox to do that.

The same is true of music-playing apps. Once they cost money and added value. Then platforms all started making "play this music file" free. The purveyors all tried to add more value. And there are a few specialized music players kicking around.

But most went away, the business model was no longer viable, and the move into adding lots of functionality pushed them into a niche.

I agree that Dropbox is facing an existential crisis. If Apple delivers on some of its promised new iCloud folder sharing functionality, I will end my Dropbox subscription, and no amount of "We're a collaboration platform" will change that.

Dropbox knows that, and is going in the direction of getting money from someone else. Will they succeed? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, most of their existing user base is finding their less useful and less valuable as they make this transition.

Shrug.

I have witnessed this so many times over the last thirty-five years. One set of forces acts to take something that was originally just for companies, and "Consumerizes" it. Spreadsheets are common for people to track all kinds of personal things. Kids use them in school.

In the opposite direction, companies chasing the money "Enterprise" their consumer offerings, abandoning the users that built them in the first place.

Same as it ever was.
Hey, great idea guys! I've spent a few summers in the East Bay building these units for folks and know a fair bit about the process.

A few questions:

Are you pouring pads?

How are you tying into the sewer and electrical lines?

Parking issues?

Especailly with South Bay soil/clay, how are you addressing lift and shrink?

There has been a fair few house fires in SF proper in the last few years, many are related to rentals that are over capacity. I've actually lost friends due to these issues. Not fun. Obvi, I really like your idea as it'll help with over crowding. But there is the HUGE issue of fire safety. How are you addressing that?

HOAs?

Extra dirt?

Great idea guys! Hope it all works out for you.
I would have loved to just use OneDrive, but it sucks with a lot of little files. It literally just doesn't work properly.

At a few hundred thousand files I found OneDrive just stalls.. sometimes it might work, other times not. Usually it just sits there and you have no idea what it's doing.
The title seems to suggest worse than the report. Can the information collected in incognito mode be traced back to you (assuming you aren’t logged into Google/Facebook).

It seems the only remediation would be for the browser to leak whether you’re using an incognito window, which would result in sites (e.g. paywalled news sites that give you 3 views per month) disallowing incognito entirely.

The comment that the report stems from Microsoft also makes the report feel dodgy; complain about a competitor in ways that sound bad but may not actually be.
>A simple, effective utility can't support a multi-billion valuation.

This is the real issue: everyone wants to be a unicorn and no one wants to be a utility.
If there's any benchmarks on the DiffEq side, feel free to reach out to us with them and we can take a crack at optimizing it. If it's something that's allowed to be shared, we'd love to add it to our DiffEqBenchmarks.jl repository to track the performance over time and understand the performance characteristics of your domain.
At the same time... why would you want to? It never even occurred to me to try until I read this today.
Here is a less 'conspiracy theory' styled set of articles about "The Windsor Hum".

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/world/canada/windsor-hum....

https://www.theguardian.com/business/shortcuts/2018/feb/21/w...

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

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/a-mysterious-and-mad...

https://www.international.gc.ca/department-ministere/windsor...
You mean something like model-based development? That is a thing, at least I know it is in use for some safety critical development.
The two products I am aware of are:

* SCADE Suite: https://www.ansys.com/products/embedded-software/ansys-scade...

* TargetLink: https://www.dspace.com/en/inc/home/products/sw/pcgs/targetli... (Generates C code from MathWorks SimuLink models)

I suppose the nice thing about these is that you can show some (safety and/or behavourial) properties directly on the model.
> 2.
Vape!
I strongly suggest not transmitting secure information or files via Slack or any other medium that retains or broadcasts (push notifications, email alerts) data.

Given the massive and escalating fines over customer data hacks and leaks I suspect we will see laws requiring data retention going head to head with consumer privacy laws. Given that even Jeff Bezos can’t keep his communications secure, the outlook for infosec consultants is fantastic. If anti-encryption laws start appearing on top of all of this, it’s going to be an absolute bonanza.
Noone relied on billionaires until they went out of the blue and announced huge donations. If they had just shut their mouth, we would be doing just as well with a different financing in mind.

The article is about the less than honorable practice of such publicity stunts, and not about blaming anyone about the fire.
That's a terrible feature in an instant messenger client for work use? I cannot recall the precise details of my conversations with smart people who know things I do not. I can recall that I had the conversation and remind myself what I learned before.
Ignoring the merit of the analysis, this text if very difficult to read. To many parenthesis, onomatopoeias and inside jokes. I know the author is well regarded for many books (I haven’t read any), but I think he has to be more objective in blog posts.
Most things related to Keybase go to the top of Hacker News. The company has many HNers.

I like their products a lot; I wish they were a bit less self-promoting, as it is in fact the case here.
Practice. Practice. Practice.
Moving to another country means life will be both completely different and entirely the same at the same time.
> Microsoft spent $16.87 billion on research and development in 2019

Perhaps it's not even a consideration to them if it's feasible; they're in it to have a leg up in the case that it does pay off massively.
If you value it at or above market rates, then, by definition, whoever bought it from you would pay you enough money to buy another at market rate.
Days After Manhattan Went Dark, Con Edison Faces a Heat Wave
I deleted my account when they purposefully made their Linux version not launch on any other FS than ext4. I use btrfs and that supports all the features they use, still Dropbox refused to work with it. I complained to their support and then deleted my account. Then again I guess having a private server with NextCloud means I'm pretty privileged.
Interesting read, fair point that they are already breaking the possession part of the law but have received a special dispensation, they could apply and receive a dispensation for the sale as well.
Email is really difficult-to-impossible to secure correctly.

Take metadata. Because of how email works, it's effectively impossible to hide the To, From, and Date (or more accurately, the Received) headers. If you're worried about three-letter agencies, that's the only metadata they need, so you're screwed before you started. Theoretically, S/MIME allows you to encrypt additional headers (including the venerable Subject header), and has done so for 15 years, but I'm unaware of any email client that actually supports this feature, and the downgrade mode is pretty UX-hostile.

Another very challenging problem is that the flow of email pretty much destroys any chance of using a good secure cryptosystem. The email sender is not necessarily able to establish a direct, synchronous contact with the email recipient, even on a server basis. That makes protocol negotiation and perfect forward secrecy difficult. Not to mention that users generally expect to be able to open up email clients on unknown machines (especially webmail clients), which means practical key distribution tends to amount to "give your provider your keys," at which point the security advantage over the current state of all-connections-are-wrapped-in-TLS is negligible.

There's also the point that email's main advantage as a messaging system is its universality. But any new protocol is going to suffer from being supported in a small section of clients at first. If you can't get major email clients on board--and that includes webmail clients--then the universality of email is no longer an advantage in your proposed protocol. And if you're going to have to use a different client already, why bother with doing all the crap you have to deal with email syntax, MIME, SMTP, and IMAP?

About the only use case I can reasonably see for encrypting emails is in workflows like Bugzilla's "secure email" feature: the system is already relying on email for communication, there is a clear way to handle the recipient's key and protocol negotiation, and the metadata is irrelevant to secure.
sublime is so much faster than both.
Very nice.

Are these all public sources?

Have you considered backtesting it to see if you can get a trading signal out of it?
>I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside.

I'm sure such places exist, but I've lived in a city (Boston) for many years and this description doesn't apply to the areas I've lived.

Somewhat ironically, the places in Boston that are closest to your description are the ones where they bulldozed large swaths and tried to remake things in a more people friendly way.
> Keybase developer here. Keybase does automatically update on Mac

Interesting, is this relatively recent? It didn't update for me, but I hadn't opened it in at least six months.

Also, that CLI command should probably be wrapped in a "Check for update" menu option.
Very true. The only way to get consistent formatting across tab settings is to use tabs for indentation and spaces for aligning things.
How to install the macOS Catalina beta in its own APFS container
Because OS vendors care more about making money on the Internet than making operating systems with features that people want.
Government isn't society.
Hormonal birth control wasn’t widely available until the 1960’s.

But effective condoms were widely deployed to the non anglophone armies in World War One, and had existed long before then.

It’s true that there was a theocratic campaign against all birth control from the 1920s that finally succumbed in most countries in the 1960s, but that’s not all of history.
Putting aside the question of whether this is a tendentious exaggeration, it is more of a problem in ad-hoc code.
Yes, it's black.

Also, you can't change any of the UI colours. The major feature of the last release was that you could change the UI from grey to black.

So, now 2 colours to choose from. One day we'll get 3 or more!
How an artist is taking trash and turning it into optical-illusion sculptures
What experts are you listening to? Are they telling you to use PGP in 2019?
> Reading this makes we wonder if we are even the same species.

humans vary wildly on almost any metric you choose to examine. I have a hard time just maintaining my weight. I almost never feel actual hunger; I just get something to eat when I notice that I can't focus on work anymore. if I'm not working, I might forget altogether.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ileana_Sonnabend

In this case, the art seems to be nearly the entire estate.
I’ve been running my 100% remote team on it the last few months, it works very well for us. Never been a fan of Slack, and never use any bots, so just comms.
Apple is still the "tall poppy" that people feel the need to cut down.

When Microsoft's money gets posted they get applauded as if they're the underdog, but whenever Apple's profits are posted many people try to point out how it must because they're doing this and that wrong.
`Gmail` appears to be trending down but exhibits local maxima right around Spring and Fall equinox: https://trennd.co/trend/gmail

Now why would that be...
Appreciate your insight - really trying to figure out who I should be building this for, so I know what features and direction to focus on. I was thinking eCommerce entrepreneurs could be it, but then a lot of other people potentially find it valuable too. I want to see who keeps coming back to Trennd in the future, the power users, and ask them why/what they're using it for!