skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my opinion the only value in this idea is that it highlights the absurdity of trying to apply an empirical model on an un-empirical concept. Since "consciousness" can not be measured, and indeed is difficult to even define in words, it is excluded by any model which insists upon an objective reality.

To your point: how do we know that all people posses consciousness? We don't. We make that assumption because other people are like us. The less like us something is, the less likely we are to assume it has consciousness. For most of human history animals were not afforded this assumption and that is only now starting to change because, as it turns out, animals are a lot more like us than we like to admit.

In other words, it's speciesism. The whole discussion about what does and doesn't have conscious is a desperate attempt to justify human exceptionalism.
> Bikes are severely underrepresented in the list of things that car automation companies care about at the moment

How can you possibly know that?
So true. It is infuriating to know how much faster have become the last 20 years and to see how software manages to feel as slow as 20 years ago.
It would be within my rights to repeatedly batter my own head with a hammer. It would not seem reasonable, however. Most of the thinking behind this license is of the cargo-cult variety, and these valiant defenses of developers' rights are just silly.

If I cared about a git client for these platforms, I would file a bug about the license. Fortunately that is not the case.
Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption
> And even then, it's not clear that these software update systems are even capable of targeting patches down to the level of the phone of an individual person. There's no reason for it now.

There is reason against it now, because it makes it impossible to do things like reproducible builds or other security checks like comparing the software being offered to other devices to verify that none of them is being offered compromised updates before installing any of them.

It would also require prohibiting the transparency necessary to implement any of those checks independently, or anyone could do so and then use that to detect the attack regardless of whether or not the attackers are domestic state sponsored.
I thought they already did, but in the layers they control, like Chinese apps and telecoms.
Modern encryption is really just math. Cryptography in consumer and off-the-shelf products (which Barr is targeting with his discussion) theoretically _could_ be modified in such a way that the government could decrypt it. The two ways of which I can think are (1) Encryption "backdoors" -- fancy math known only to the government; this would require new encryption ciphers or (b) key escrow. Both approaches have their shortcomings and I'm against both, but it's plausible that the government might try it anyway. All that said, because encryption is just math, any individual or group could employ their own encryption by implementing one of any known existing ciphers -- one without a known "fancy math back door" and refuse to follow the "key escrow" guidelines. In these discussions about the government being able to decrypt stuff, are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal? If that's really what's being proposed, I'd urge people to consider "Illegal Numbers" and how effective that's been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
In communication, context is everything. People are also lazy and switching contexts is mentally exhausting. Both channels and email threads have context isolation issues.
Safely Rewriting Mixpanel’s Highest Throughput Service in Golang
Not entirely...mostly the HN topic effect.

Someone posts something on x obscure subject and people find it interesting and then research x on their own and post about x a lot.
if it's fun, why do you need major changes?

I'm certainly not upset that Mario Kart 8 plays basically the same as the old SNES Mario Kart.
They can't force me to tell them where I've physically hid things.
I'd like to see more tooling applied to small-scale postgres operation as well. There are a lot of novice postgres users who find themselves managing postgres in production who could use this kind of helping hand. I also believe a lot of start-ups shy away from relational databases because they do a prototype with inefficient queries and poor indexing and the "slowness" pushes them to mongodb or the like for no good reason.
Agreed. That being said, everyone knows that waiters/waitresses make their pay from tips. I think that most people had the expectation that delivery drivers were making base pay, and any tips were on top of that - the equivalent of handing the pizza delivery driver a couple of bucks when they get to the door. This was not the case, and certainly not communicated clearly to customers.
Aside from localization issues this was how it worked at a very large tech (not software) US company I worked at
> only people who are 'informed voters' should vote

That is not a valid position to have and thus doesn't need to be considered.

Voting is the best way to figure out how everyone feels on things. As annoying as it is party lines giving free passes to incumbents that is a problem better solved via other methods such as term limits.

Even if someone is going to vote opposite of me I would rather they express that opinion than have the vote not hear their voice.

The solution to uniformed voters is for people to become informed not avoid people going to the polls.
Ask HN: Good ntro to programming book for adult with no experience?
An adult friend on mine asked me about getting into programming. I let him know first thing that it's super hard to break into, and to just be prepared to do way more work than he expects. He still seems interested in learning more, and so I offered to help him find a good into to programming book, as he'd be starting out with limited access to computers and internet. What book, or other resource, would you recommend as a good starting place?

My primary motivation is to help him explore coding as a career possibility. I want to optimize sparking an interest in him wanting to know more if he's serious enough about digging into it. I'm prepared to help him along, but I am not going to do the work for him.
Mate has good i3 integration. I'm running i3, but have the mate panel and menus and stuff.
You act as if the court has no option if someone won't decrypt something they hold the keys too. This is why contempt charges are a thing.

The government has done an astounding job of showing they are untrustworthy with access to our personal information, or frankly even their own information as the OPM breach makes painfully apparent.
Moral of the story is to never use DoorDash at least not until they pay back all those drivers the tips they stole.
This is just naive thinking, that there is some grand purpose behind the laws of the USA. Step back, we all know it's because money is power in this country. Restaurant industries will kill any change that forces them to pay their employees a living wage.

You think this is based on logic and sensibility? That's not how government works in the USA. The null hypothesis is that capitalism rules; all else, democracy and logic and truth, come a distant second.
You make that at home, sounds great. (and of course your friends and family trust you and know you wouldn't slip garbage onto their plate)

So you know all this work we do to remove processed foods by making it at home right?

Do you think this is what is in these industrial pastes at the store? In a box on the freezer isle?

Taco Bell is allowed to call their product meat and thats NOT ok with me.

Vegetarians jumping on the corporate lying train with Taco Bell is a terrible terrible idea.
In the FBI's defense, they did return all the equipment after they were done with it (if I remember correctly within like a day too). Funny enough though, one guy thought it was strange that after they gave his phone back, all of his text messages from then on were suddenly emailed to his work email also. Wouldn't happen to be that all email in the company was saved indefinitely due to the archiving server?
What about people that have a distaste for authority? Would this distrust dissolve how power informs our perceptions?
Is there something in the transition period in the teenage years that also sets the foundation of perceptions? I ask because that is a time it seems where we take the most risks and question everything.
Exporting all your documents out of Slack also becomes challenging. How do Slack shared documents get versioned? Just by manual file names?
We did this at one point, but at the scale we work at (our GitLab has 671 projects, about 150 of which have been worked on in the last 4 months), that kind of lock down creates a major bottleneck for updating projects unfortunately. We had to disable it shortly after starting it because it was simply too much to manage with our current workforce. It's too much extra work for us compared to just saying "use a GUI", which has had a great success rate so far.
Not just governments, but various mafias, several corporates, random masonic offshoots, and the occaisional creative individual presumably have backdoors into all sorts of stuff. This isn't about creating backdoors, this is about being allowed to use them within the public legal framework.
China already does require backdoors of both local Chinese firms and foreign firms with HQs in China, although the requirement may not be "technically official" (it can certainly be interpreted that way from their 2017 law, though).

I think it's disgusting how supposed "democracies" have been trying to emulate China, both in terms of surveillance and censorship. UK is one of the worst offenders here -- sometimes they didn't even hide the fact they were using China as a role model.

There used to be a time when the U.S. government and other countries would condemn China for this sort of stuff.
It's still systemic and correctable. The fact that the ML is somewhat opaque doesn't really matter here. You correct it by generating test cases and adding more training data related to those cases. The issues are still systemic and correctable.
I think Boeing stock has held up because Airbus has limited production capacity for the A320. The 737 and A320 split the market almost 50-50% and it isn't like Airbus can double their production capacity overnight to replace the 737.

Marginally the 737 MAX problems will push some business to the A320 and will also help the rise of the A220/E190 class aircraft. It will take a long time though.

In my mind it is a clear case of secular stagnation, under-competition and under-investment. One of the reasons why flying has gotten worse over the last 20 years is that the 737-A320 class has entirely pushed out widebodies in the U.S. domestic market.

People make all kinds of excuses for the 737 but you shouldn't buy them.

For instance, the 737 is a horribly loud aircraft. People will say "buy some noise canceling headphones" but what about the poor people on the ground?

People will point to seat pitch as a factor and blame airlines, but seat pitch is one of three dimensions. The 737 feels cramped because of the low ceiling and it is stuck in a local minimum of comfort with 3-3 seating in coach.

The A220/E190 class ditches the circular cross-section for something more appropriate for the human body. The planes are smaller but have a little more width with 3-2 seating. With geared turbofans, the noise level in both the cabin and on the ground are greatly reduced. These smaller planes feel like riding in a 767 or other widebody compared to the 737 -- it sounds like a boast, but flying is believing. It's like the Japanese cars in the 1970s that were big on the inside and small on the outside when American cars were the opposite.
Check out Witcher 3 if you haven't. Thought it would be hard to top Skyrim...but actually...
"Can they be trusted? Can they be compromised?"

No, and yes.

This is not cynicism speaking, this is realism. Basic principle of security is to make the cost of breaking the security greater than the value of what is being protected. In this case, the "backdoor" keys will be protecting many, many billions and probably trillions of dollars of worth of information. At that scale, a foreign (or domestic...) intelligence agency finding the n of m people necessary to get the key and making it clear that if they love their family, their personal well-being, or indeed, anything in the world at all, they will hand over the key information is completely on the table. It isn't even just that there isn't anyone who can't be trusted with the keys, there isn't anyone who can stand up to the pressure that can be brought to bear on them. Put the keys in the hands of the most honest person on Earth who literally can not be coerced into giving it up, and it just means their family is the walking dead until the agency finally gives up and murders our magically honest person, and the key falls to the next in line and they try again.

(Or, in other words, if this backdoor is created, and the people in charge of the backdoor and all their families are still alive in a year, yes, I would consider that proof positive it's already been compromised. The stakes are that high.)

These backdoors would literally be massively more valuable than the nuclear codes, which still require various physical access and other things to be penetrated to use them, whereas these will be immediately valuable simply upon possession. Even if we entirely ignore the question of internal trustworthiness of the holding organization, which we shouldn't, but even if we do, no conceivable organization consisting of conceivable human beings can possibly secure this information. It's just impossible.

(Also: Note the complete lack of reference to any technical considerations. It doesn't matter what the encryption algorithm is, or whether it's secure on its own terms, or whether the tech companies are being unpatriotic, or anything else. There is simply no way to secure any information this valuable.)
This- encryption + deletion of the key is basically destroying evidence. Which is already illegal and our justice system already has to deal with. No special casing necessary.
Do you realize how PRISM is the very reason that the government cannot be trusted?

>What percentage of communication in this country flows through either Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon?

You make it sound like data collection and snooping on innocent people is the whole point of it. If backdoors are required on communication that goes through Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon then nobody's going to use the communication on those services for illicit activity that the government would care about. They would use something else.

>But I recognize that there is a problem and that we should be open to talk about ways to fix that problem.

There is no talk to be had, because the entire idea is silly. If the US government can mandate backdoors then so will every other government. This would make everyone vulnerable.
What's the /dev/null of phone numbers?
"Maybe not." These journalists...
> don't call your market manipulation tool TurboMarketManipulator, call it EnhancedOrderManager

Good advice. I am somewhat surprised at times on what the media doesn't uncover and try to spin as a conspiracy theory. For example, we had this open source project publically available https://gfiber.googlesource.com/kernel/prism/ around at the same time as the Snowden leaks about "prism" and nobody wrote any articles about it. Of course, it's completely unrelated... but I feel that that normally doesn't stop people.

I found the whole thing very interesting.
Those are still good tips, irrespective of language and even the document's age.
Nothing assumes 100% perfection as a requirement. We might not like it but if, say, popular services had a way to satisfy warrant requests that would mean that most cases would be satisfied with a warrant even if a small percentage required something else, just as the existence of very hard to open safes doesn’t mean most criminals use them.

To be clear, I’m opposed to widespread access and would want a warrant at a minimum but honesty compels me to note that there are crimes which would be solved if someone used, say, SMS but not Signal and we should consciously accept that as the cost of not living in a surveillance state rather than pretending it’s not true.
:-). India has the lowest cost per GB of mobile data [1]. I guess it's primarily due to being subsidized by deep-pocketed businesses' in their quest to acquire customers. One of the early such initiatives didn't end well[2], I wonder how sustainable current rates are.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47416250
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliance_Communications
Ask HN: Can an early-stage startup hire really good engineers?
Do you think it is possible to attract outstanding engineers to work with you at an early stage? (Meaning you can't pay them Silicon Valley salary).
If the FBI comes in your office with a warrant and you refuse to speak I'm guessing they'll be taking your phone anyway and/or arresting you. Making things harder for investigators often means making things harder for yourself too. Winning an argument about your personal device's admissibility in court six months later isn't really winning is it?
This is all true, but I think encryption backdoors are more possible than people think.

The target here is not nerds able to pull code from GitHub or run open source or enterprise software. The target here is consumer stuff by companies like Apple and Google. The government doesn't want it to be easy to do end-to-end encryption.

For the average user, easy equals possible. The average user has neither the time nor the expertise to roll their own solution or run nerd tools. Look at how PGP/GPG's complexity and absolutely horrible UX (even for technical users!) has prevented e-mail encryption from ever taking off.

This reminds me of what a government guy told me about crypto export controls. Yes, they know that crypto export controls won't stop nerds using GitHub. What they want to do is to stop IBM, Google, Apple, Cisco, Juniper, etc. from selling ready-made polished crypto products to blacklisted countries.

In both cases I think the target is large corporations not individuals and the goal is to make crypto hard and keep it out of the hands of the average user or less-technical foreign organization.

That being said I still don't think it'll work. Just pointing out the thinking that's going on here.
But what about myself wanting to validate the payload on a system I don't necessarily trust? In the symmetric case I would grant that system the ability to sign.
Indeed, medium size is the death size. Too big to survive on ramen, big enough to sell for an acquihire or small bounty for IP.
I'm in Chrome on Mac and it says "(1) New Message" every half second.
Depends on whether the delivery person has access to the information about the tips and whether they can opt out.

If they don't see the different payouts that come with different customer tips and they can't opt out, it's not very equivalent.
Exactly. Strong encryption is not rocket-science anymore. Criminals can even simply code their own encrpyted tools and in that case, law enforcement is completely out of the game (and actually, professional crime does no rely on Signal and sorts anyways).

It would be so much wiser to just keep quiet about that topic and rely on the neglicence of the common criminal - below the line there is a plethora of information in metadata and connection data, still incredibly better than anything law enforcement had 15 years ago.

The effect of any public advance into "responsible encryption" is only causing criminals to harden their tools.
My biggest gripe with tipping culture right now is the number of services and establishments that think it's okay to tip ahead of time.

If I sit down at a restaurant, and get served well, I'll leave a tip at the end when I pay. Hell, even if the service isn't great I'll still leave a bit of a tip.

But now there's this idea that you should tip for service... before you get served. The tip jars at Starbucks, apps that ask you to input your tip before you get your delivery, POS systems that ask for a tip, etc. There's no way I'll ever tip before service, and probably won't after either if the business is audacious enough to ask for a tip when they're using a pay-before business model.

I'm looking forward to seeing how long it takes for self-service gas pumps to start asking for tips. After all, there's an attendant inside keeping an eye on you, so that's a service right?
And using that the companies should possibly also be able to charge costumers that leave the scooter in bad places an extra fee. Or maybe do that after a complaint is made to the scooter company.
Apidiff: Checking Go Package API Compatibility
Makes sense.

People in those circles are usually pretty sharp & aware but can't hurt if it saves someone's ass
I was refering specifically to IMAP and the Android default mail client.
> What would you consider vastly unethical that coinbase has done?

I was responding to harryh's thread about the cryptocurrency ecosystem in general rather than Coinbase specifically, which I perceive to be about as trustworthy as cryptocurrency exchanges get.

That may not be a super high bar :^) so I appreciate you sharing your experience.
Format is a kind of moderation and guidance. With email, anything goes, but it's usually direct communication, where the rules are organically decided between the participants. With a zillion participants, that can't happen, so limiting the options is useful.
>These are not just ‘increasing numbers’. These are fucking witchcraft, and if we didn't live in a world with 5 inch blocks of magical silicon that talk to us and giant tubes of aluminium that fly in the sky the average person would still have the sense to recognize it.

What about generative models is really AI, other than the fact that they rely on some similar ideas from machine learning that are found in actual AI applications? Yes, maybe to an average person these are witchcraft, but any advanced technology can appear that way---Deep Blue beating Kasparov probably was witchcraft to the uninitiated. This is curve fitting, and the same approaches in 1999 were also trying to fit curves, it's just that we can fit them way better than before right now. Even the exact methods that are used to produce your examples are not fundamentally new, they are just the same old ideas with the same old weaknesses. What we have right now is a huge hammer, and a hammer is surely useful, but not the only thing needed to build AI. Calling these witchcraft is a marketing move that we definitely don't need, creates unnecessary hype, and hides the simplicity and the naivete of the methods used in producing them. If anybody else reads this, these are just increasing numbers, not witchcraft. But as the numbers increase it requires a little more effort and knowledge to debunk them.

I'm not dismissing things for the fun of it, but it pains me to see this community waste so many resources in pursuit of a local minimum due to lack of a better sense of direction. I feel like not much more is to be gained from this conversation, although it was fun, and thank you for responding.