skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand why these articles think that people will just keep buying, like in the past decade the lifespan of devices has become bigger and bigger. I'm typing this post on a 2013 Macbook and I'm sure a lot of other users are using older laptops than that, that run perfectly fine. Like does the media just expect people to be buying new stuff again and again?

I don't know if I'm just missing the point or something...
California Moves to Ban Mini Hotel Toiletry Bottles
CarPlay is amazing and keeps getting better. The new beta 13 is a solid upgrade from 12 -- even as a beta.
This is a very big company with products that have a well understood track record. You could probably be pretty accurate if you just expected it to be the same as this quarter last year.
I thought it was going to take me forever to get used to the swipe up action, but honestly, it took minutes.

I really like(d) the ability to unlock my phone as it laid flat on my desk using touchid, but my FaceID experience has been virtually flawless.

I really couldn't go back to the huge black bar across the bottom.
"Don't worry Charlie, I've got my foot on the rail..."

I have a plan... There's a language, Joy, that combines the best parts of Forth and Lisp. It's also simple enough to be (re)implemented in other languages very quickly, so it can form a cross-runtime glue language and UI macro system.

It's very good for refactoring, partial evaluation, etc. It seems to deliver on the idea of mathematical programming.

I've implemented a simple GUI that takes innovations from the old Oberon OS and Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" to make a very simple but elegant user interface. With Joy and this UI there are no separate "apps" or programs, only one body of commands (words in Forth, functions, etc.) that can be "scripted" by the user. Mouse interaction and CLI are unified. For example, you can click on commands, and then make a "script" (a new command) out of the commands after the fact.

All files are kept in a VCS including the current system state, and autosaved after every change (so you can literally kick out the plug, plug it back in, and keep going from where you left off.) Never lose work.

With Joy you wrap other systems and libraries and expose collections of command words that then let the user use them at the "desktop" level. Eventually I'll write parsers for other languages and translate them into Joy to take advantage of the "convergence" to contract the total amount of code (even as I add more capabilities.)

I was in the middle of implementing type-inference when I was bushwhacked by compilers in Prolog.

The original thing that led me to all this was Dr. Margaret Hamilton's Higher Order Software. (See "System Design from Provably Correct Constructs: the beginnings of true software engineering" James Martin) Long story short, adding type-inference to Joy makes it easy to derive correct software. (This used to be a novel thing to say.)

If you want to check it out my project is here: http://joypy.osdn.io/ Python, Prolog implementations. The GUI is undocumented. There are two: ./gui uses Tkinter text widgets; ./vui uses SDL via PyGame to draw to the screen directly and is meant to guide re-implementation in Joy for a self-hosted IDE thing.

I'm just at the point where I'm going to start targeting "vertical niche" use cases (i.e. interpreting MRI data using ML and finite element methods, etc.) and get some user feedback. I'm not going to try to get developers to use it. I'm going straight to the users. If I don't tell them they are programming they should be able to do it just fine on their own. If this works I'm going to eat software, even as it eats the world.
Is 16 Terabytes Enough for Anyone?
The real difference is that theft is punishable under natural law regardless of what any regulators or legislators might say. There can be no consistent system which would permit theft while prohibiting a proportional punishment for it. If theft is permitted then enforced restitution (recovery of the stolen property) and punishment (fines) must also be permitted, because these are ultimately the same action.

Laws and regulations which are not merely codification of natural law ultimately come down to attempting to create rules which apply to some people and not others. Unfortunately, legislators and regulators get away with this all to often through a combination of good propaganda and willingness to employ unjustified force to achieve their goals.
A Digital Food Supply Chain
Ignoring the Apple Watch, which dominates the category and is a clear success.
1. "_experienced_ coders" are in demand, and bootcamp does not a software engineer make.

2. A lot of companies _think_ / pretend there is a shortage of skilled candidates.

Those who think it generally have an obnoxious battery of technical assessments which they administer with the aspiration that somehow having a difficult tech assessment makes them a Google-caliber company. Often these technical assessments do not actually assess how good someone is at writing code. What they do assess is how well someone handles being nervous and under pressure.

Those who pretend there is a shortage do so because they want to bring in foreigners on H1B visas. This works out quite nicely for companies because the H1B employees are a bit like indentured servants. They will accept a lower salary than an American in order to make it out of India, and once they arrive they can't quit because they would be deported.
Images Missing for Patent Titled “Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device”
go to: https://portal.uspto.gov/ and search for application number 15/141,270, then click on "Image File Wrapper" tab. These pictures were apparently there 3 months ago and are no longer present. This was already weird enough, why did the gov pull the pics?
Cookie Autodelete on FireFox is really great; it automatically clears cookies and local storage as soon as you navigate away.
if one individual can attain access to all of that data that "easily", it makes me flabbergasted at the type of data we and other countries are "acquiring" in our new age cyber warfare...
At these valuations Apple makes sense only when seen as an alternative to other investments. S&P 500 as a whole has P/S ratio that indicates lower return of investment for the next decade. At least Apple will be able to make profits.
Sure, but if I'm reading a paper that starts to show equations, I can start getting lost. There's no "knowning" their garbage because it gets over-math'd. I get that's a sign of a bad paper, but my only argument for "why" is because I can't understand it. Not exactly the strongest defense.

The same for stats - if you are uncomfortable with them, then seeing terms like Wilcoxon and Spearman are just confusing. Should the number be high? Low? Or simply, why do some papers have one and others have the other? If you are shaky on stats, its easier to just accept a particular formula was used even if it is not appropriate.
They increased their spending on R&D by $500 million since last year.

They then spent $17 BILLION on share buybacks in the last quarter.

It's not a tech company anymore it's just a financial engineering scheme for large shareholders. If you're a shareholder, good for you!
>I've come across some cartoon porn sites that are too disturbing to even risk describing here

Those are the best ones :)

Well, you can be disturbed by the work if you want, but please don't discriminate against the people who are into it.

We're just human beings like everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SD9-4pUPH0&t=130
I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm or not...

That story was basically a plant from Amazon and Quillette is absolutely not a high quality news source.
I doubt that even 1% of internet users understand the extent of the PII that is collected. I would guess if the general public understood how all this worked, there would be many more people who objected to the practice.
And where are your fast missile boats and land-based launchers going to get the real-time targeting data they need to hit anything? The ocean is a big place, missile seekers have narrow views, and reconnaissance satellites are increasingly vulnerable.
I think it’s normally wrong to pose these issues as intelligence services trying to come up with new ways to oppress the population. It requires some kind of conspiracy either of the whole organisation or a conspiracy of the highest levels to trick the rest of the organisation into oppressing the population.

In reality these are massive organisations of people who want to do good and protect people from actual dangers and repeats of actual harmful incidents. So I think framing the motives as malevolent isn’t helpful because the motives aren’t malevolent.

I think it’s much more reasonable to ask why these things arise. Eg maybe the government says “how will you stop something like x happening again” and they say “well it would have been really hard to detect but we were slightly suspicious of them. If only we could get a warrant to find out what they were talking about...”. And this probably seems reasonable to the minister who still thinks these intelligence agencies are steaming open letters or tapping into phone lines.

It doesn’t even need to be the case that people know these laws would work/be useful, all they need is to feel that they would. And this can quite easily happen without any malicious intentions.

Other things one could imagine happening are finding warrants annoying because they feel like a formality and feeling that the pause in the process potentially causes harm. Or seeing the whole “I ask my ally to spy on my citizens” process as a silly way to get round an annoying loophole. I can imagine something like this happening in a multinational company and if you see intelligence allies as actually working together in a team it doesn’t seem so crazy to see it as a silly legal formality to allow the actual teamwork. So (to say the same thing again) I don’t think these things arise from bad intentions.

A final thing is that many people in these intelligence organisations seem to care about how this surveillance is done in an ethical way (although some people don’t). Eg note here that they want to get this ability with a warrant (perhaps they really want it warrantless and plan to get it or perhaps they feel like they were burned by the various revelations and don’t think they could get it anyway).

Compare this to the way much of the modern mass surveillance we are exposed to every day is planned where there is virtually no ethical oversight at all.
The thing is, software engineer salaries are going down and data scientist salaries are going up and the data scientist jobs are taken by people from the sciences, who know that kind of math, that CS courses maybe are not that heavy on. So there is a great big incentive to know "maths" (continuous maths). And if one does not know, the incentive is for one to learn.
Same story here. Although 6 years ago I remember catching flak for buying an iPad over an Amazon tablet. Course my iPad is still going strong, but has been relegated to backup after a new iPad purchase. Those 6 year old Amazon tablets are in a dump somewhere.
The difference is that bittorrent is uploading content. People are getting sued left and right for Bittorrent cases in germany but for streaming, that was a new one.
interesting, doesn't Heroku do something similar to this? How has your initial feedback been?
There can be a lot fewer cases if they don't have to go through the process!
Learn Not to Speak Esperanto
https://outline.com/vnwmK4
You can set a branch pattern[1] in your FeaturePeek config so that only certain branch names spin up environments. (And yes – I feel your pain every time I see an empty PR body.)

[1] https://docs.featurepeek.com/pro-tips/#only-spin-up-environm...
those are obviously not meaningfully commensureable numbers.
It's just one random data point but one of my personal friends said: «I still have many friends & family working in Amazon fulfillment centers across the country, and every single one of them says it’s the best job they’ve ever had.» https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1154275824951943168
The Navy has been hemorrhaging actual engineers for decades now. Most of the real engineering work is done by contractors (hired to build something) and contractors (on site technical staff who don't actually answer to the Navy).

The Navy is left with uniformed personnel and manager bureaucrat types, neither of which have the engineering expertise the organization needs.

The results should not surprise us.
That would open the door to thread-starvation, right? Unlikely in practice, but the point being that it does affect the formal correctness of the algorithm.

I imagine it also impacts real-world performance, but lock-free algorithms aren't assured to be faster anyway.

Annoyingly I recall reading a good article on exactly this question - the importance of hardware atomics vs locking - but can't recall what it was. These locks still aren't as bad as ad-hoc locking, in terms of deadlock risk, as you're guaranteed that they are 'leaf locks', with no order-of-acquisition hierarchies/orderings to worry about.
And in restrooms like that, I rarely poop. Only if necessary.

I'm pretty sure the lack of privacy in US public restrooms stems from illicit use and loss prevention. Not a cultural norm of acceptance of pooping.
I have been fascinated by "human language" design for a long time, and reading about Ithkuil brought back a lot of memories. Designing a language is super hard!! I partially designed one to use in a novel I wrote ~16 years ago (the novel is only available in Italian). [0]

The language was called "galatico" (as a tribute to Isaac Asimov), it was comprised of 64 alphabet signs, represented by bit-like letters. In the novel you can get a few glimpses at the language design. It was fun. And hard. And fun.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Nonovvio-Italian-Simone-Brunozzi-eboo...
I have some bad news for you about the Presidential Twitter feed.
I suspect that that fact and our beliefs around it are being reflected in market prices, albeit with some heavy discounting for the uncertainty inherent in there still being so many companies out there.

So many people's first instinct to respond by buying more shares of that company, thereby driving its price and market cap higher. That's a reaction that implies that we think that the general trend is toward Buy-n-Large. If we expected regression to the mean to be the driving phenomenon, then we'd be more likely to respond by selling.

(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting that's actually how things work, just that a lot of us behave as if we think that's how it works, or should work.)
My experience is similar. The newly promoted CTO used a botched merge and delayed release to justify the move to a complex but half-assed monorepo branching strategy with minimal tooling and documentation, trashing any systems teams had in place. We've started botching releases, losing prospective clients, and now are in release limbo.
The point is that this is a pretty small portion of all security updates. Compare to iOS, where updating the browser or iMessage (both with very large vulnerability surfaces) requires a system update.
I'd expect Porsche to put out a minivan first.
Did you miss this?

> Build quality on the Android devices even in the $200 realm are damn near what the iPhone offers.

It's not just the software. I'm guessing you haven't used any of the new + cheap Android phones? They might surprise you.
This is not unlike what we've been doing for years. We generate billions of log lines like this daily as json and inspect them with splunk. By having consistent values across log lines, we can query and do neat things. "What was our system timing in relation to users who have feature x?" "What correlations can we find between users whose requests took too long and were not throttled? -> ah, 99% of those requests show $correlation_in_other_kv_pair!"
The big question is: "How likely are KaiOs users willing to install third party apps".

From the article, it seems like pre-installed apps have ample usage, no mention of installation post hardware purchase.
Menstrual blood-derived stem cells in regenerative medicine
> So, you want to build a CubeSat?

Not particularly, and even less so with this clichéd, condescending headline.

It's a meme that needs to die, why do we have to see these titles popping up in HN every month?
Same. And I like many, I turned that damn cube off after 2-3 months of use.
It's worth noting that problems like this are pretty normal for new weapons systems. Th V-22 Osprey is a good example here: it seemed like a disaster when it came out, but it's now got its kinks worked out and is performing really well.
Brain control as in "the user controls the wearables" or possibly the other way around...

Unexplored ads spots are awaiting for the taking.
A phone with Google Play Services collects less data than an iPhone.

To wit: Apple knows every app you ever downloaded, and there is nothing you can do about it. Every time you click on an address link, it sends the address to Apple, and there is nothing you can do about it. Any time an app looks up your GPS location, that location is sent to Apple, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you want to write apps for your own device, you need to give card details to Apple, and there is nothing you can do about it. A phone with Google Play services doesn't suffer from any of these problems.
Congrats on your cool life, your ivy league education, your CTO role at OpenAI and all the access that provides. You've done it!

Also thanks for telling us how you became a practitioner. It's definitely relatable and not a humble brag at all.
Oh damn! I've been theorizing to my friends about a language like this. Assuming that linguistic relativity[1] holds true, this would be super cool to learn, and potentially highly effective as a form of communication. The author goes into this a bit in the FAQ[2]

Probably super hard to learn (if not effectively impossible)... Is there any "native level" speakers of Ithkuil? Seems unlikely, since even the author hasn't learned it fully.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
[2] http://www.ithkuil.net/faqs.html under "Some people have claimed that using Ithkuil, a person would be able to think five times faster. Do you believe this?"
Why not? They can spend their money however they want, but Wall Street demands endless share buybacks over everything else.

Do you think there is any downside to just transferring wealth to the (already rich) shareholders over and over and over again? Seems to be their top priority nowadays.
PDF warning: https://faculty.utrgv.edu/eleftherios.gkioulekas/OGS/Misc/AR...

Good read.

I searched for "Russian mathematician's experiences coming to the United States and the culture shock with respect to education" ;)
> However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad communication".

This is appropriate, under the assuption of accountability; right now, three letter agencies aren't subject to it.

> "We" also have nothing to hide.

This is disingenous or naive (and it's a worringly widespread idea). Literally (as in literal-literal) anybody can be accused and charged, it's just a matter of legal power¹. Giving up privacy makes it dangerously easier.

¹=There's even a book on this subject (although the angle is not precisely this): https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
Ex-Theranos CEO, Elizabeth Holmes’ Trial Delayed Until August 2020
It's also about DRY and accurately modelling the data for general operations. Imagine the difference between a data environment where a GDPR deletion request comes in, and everything has a relation back to customer identity, and one where the customer identity is denormalised out to many places or only implicitly present.
When Ahrendts was first hired, everyone thought Apple would go into tech jewelry/fashion.

While Apple Watch "edition" was a bust, the concept of designer straps and iPhone accessories is still strong.

Apple is like the IKEA of tech + fashion.
It’s amazing how many replies are poo-pooing your thoughts yet the financial reports demonstrate they are wrong.

I have a good expensive DSLR that I haven’t touched in more than a year. Why? Cause the workflow stinks compared to my phones camera.

- I have to remove the SD card
- I have to bring out my computer and pop in the card
- I have to sync it into Lightroom, which keeps all the photos in a totally different bin than all my smartphone pictures.
- once I’m done dinking with the photos, I have to export the ones I like and import them back into the Photos app, which ensures it shows up on my TV
- I’ve got to post it to FB/instagram.
- I’ve got to nuke the card to free up the space
- put it back into the camera

That is just enough of a hurdle that it keeps me from lugging the damn thing with me on trips.

Seriously. I’d love to use my DSLR more. It takes way better pictures. It just doesn’t integrate worth a damn into my computing infrastructure anymore.

I think there is a untapped market for some higher end camera with interchangeable lenses that can seamlessly integrate with a modern workflow.
> I want to know the genuine person, not fakery

Mot actually possible, since we all wear masks, depending on who we’re around. In the office, I am different from when I’m remote, which is different from when I hang out with my RPG buddies, which is different from my church face, etc.

There’s a different drivingmenuts for many occasions, but they are all me. Just different me’s.

This is normal for everyone.

The one thing I don’t do is mask up to defraud people knowingly.
Written in Rust.

See also:

LSD (LSDeluxe) [1], inspired by colorls, but way faster.

Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils [2]

[1] https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd

[2] https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
> Enhanced Tracking Protection is now on by default even when not in private browsing.

Only for new installs. For existing installs it'll be "in the coming months" (I believe around the Firefox 70 timeline, though that could slip).
I worked at Wealthfront myself and know Andy personally, and really doubt he would ever say that. You could and did talk with anyone at the company.
There's Elm, PureScript and many other functional programming inspired languages. But, TypeScript is a safe bet.
> The machine always jumps from one instruction to the next. It doesn't know how to "fall through" to the "next" address because it has no program counter and no ability to count (compute an increment).

That is very similar to the logic state sequencer designed by Wozniak for the Apple II disk drive controller.
How does preferring sending/having a scheduled daily status update over random interruptions twice a day make one "vigilante"?
So, I remember once as a junior dev, I was asked to write a SQL script to get some data from some tables, etc. I wrote the script and it was taking for ever to run. I scratched my head, had a close look and it was obvious that my script was running in quadratic time (plus, you know- expensive joins and stuff). I rewrote it to run in linear time and, hey, presto- the job was done in a flash.

That is how programmers use maths to do their everyday work.

Note that I don't mean you need to know that what you're doing is asymptotic analysis and so on to optimise your code when it gets bogged down in unnecessarily expensive compuations, but even if you don't call what you do what it is formally known as, you are still doing that thing. And that thing is called "using maths".