skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unpopular quote from my image and video processing professor - “The only problem with machine learning is that the machine does the learning and you don’t.”

While I understand that is missing a lot of nuance, it has stuck with me over the past few years as I feel like I am missing out on the cool machine learning work going on out there.

There is a ton of learning about calculus, probability, and statistics when doing machine learning, but I can’t shake the fact that at the end of the day, the output is basically a black box. As you start toying with AI you realize that the only way to learn from your architecture and results is by tuning parameters and trial and error.

Of course there are many applications that only AI can solve, which is all good and well, but I’m curious to hear from some heavy machine learning practitioners - what is exciting to you about your work?

This is a serious inquiry because I want to know if it’s worth exploring again. In the past university AI classes I took, I just got bored writing tiny programs that leveraged AI libraries to classify images, do some simple predictions etc.
If it's "overreaching", I'm pretty sure it's not "securing the nation."

Dragnet surveillance just makes me paranoid, and my intuition is that it stifles, rather than accelerates, innovation --- well, except for the cryptography aspect; there is plenty of movement towards resisting the surveillance state(s) on that front.

Your opinion could be summarized as, "it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it" --- when in fact, no one has to do it. Doing so just leads to Cold War-style arms races.

One of my favorite quotes from a simpler time: "Gentlemen do not read each others' mail." -- Henry L. Stimson
All major Windows APIs are based on COM since Vista, as the .NET Longhorn ideas got rebooted as COM libraries.

With Windows 8, it got a new facelift (WinRT, UAP, UWP) and the large majority of Win32 APIs are as they were in Windows 7.

Anyone doing modern Windows development, has to use COM in some form.
This is where decimal floating point really shines. Since the exponential portion is base 10, it's trivially easy to round the mantissa.

The only silly part of ieee754 2008 is the fact that they specified two representations (DPD, championed by IBM, and BID, championed by Intel) with no way to tell them apart.
> just imagine my machine onto and keep working

I assume you installed an image of your 2017 machine onto the 2012 machine... but the idea of imagining onto a machine is a nice one.
So what exactly did this malware do most of the time?

In the original kaspersky report it says "For example, an app with this malicious code may show intrusive ads and sign users up for paid subscriptions.".

So how/did it sign up users for paid subscriptions without user interaction? Does android allow something like that? Aren't all apps sandboxed?

In general how is the android sandboxing and permission system nowadays? I'm considering switching back to it from iOS, but reports like this are kinda discouraging.
My observation is that the CS degree starts making a difference about five years after young programmers start working in industry. Those without the formal background hit a wall in their technical development.
I think that helmet was less than four years old. And it wasn't a cheap one either.
You're probably not the typical user. This comes in handy for someone who always has a bunch of data inflow like a sysadmin, devops, tools person, etc. Or just an overworked programmer.
Thought experiment for funding OSS:

tldr: Your avatar has a glowing halo that shows how much you contribute to the OSS ecosystem. People thus always know how much of an OSS saint you are.

* Instead of gravatar, OSS projects start using fundavatar by default.

* You can contribute $$ to fundavatar to support OSS.

* The more $$ you contribute to fundavatar, the bigger your halo is on your avatar for people to see.

* Fundavatar has a smart voting mechanism to distribute funds among OSS maintainers, that involves your preferences and delegation past the granularity that you don't have preferences. I will describe in more detail if people want to know.

* Crucially, you can get a big halo just through OSS contribution and not lose money by joining fundavatar, because as an OSS maintainer you can pump X% of your revenue back into fundavatar.
Curious, do you look up to Mike Acton?
Children of a Thailand tribe who see with clarity beneath the waves (2016)
It sounds to me like the issue isn't so much with Google then, but that you don't believe the legal system is fair (which I generally agree), but that is a different issue entirely.
Shutup! I heard they pay well. /s

Programmers here at HN could stop this behavior in a minute. They do not care about you.
I would already be happy if they where sorted by early out.
As I understand it the power is relative to the square of the diameter of the blades, so bigger is (nonlinearly) better. http://xn--drmstrre-64ad.dk/wp-content/wind/miller/windpower...
We were suspended once for serving deceptive ads. Yet the only ad network we use is Google Adsense. We had to remove Google Ads to be allowed back in.
PlayProtect is not detecting and warning users about CamScanner even when it has been removed from the Playstore.

I've tested it via manual scan on PlayProtect as well, no dice. Isn't that what it is supposed to do?

Has anyone ever got any app flagged by PlayProtect? If it's useless, then rather I would disable it than to give it access to all my installed apps.

Google Engineers here, please ping your Google Play team reg PlayProtect.

Edit: More detail.
I worked on embedded systems for trains and we used C++. Many people use C just because the chips they target only have a C compiler.
Yeah, happened to me once (steering stem broke) and twice (saddle screw broke). Instantly on the ground. Again, lucky, nothing serious, just bruises. I can imagine during a downhill at 60mph I could be easily killed...
Lululemon has a weak presence in many parts of the EU and we still have people wear gym clothes in their normal lives...
That explains Goog's two word explanation to shutting them down.
I fear the timeline is way too optimistic. It wont take till 2030 to normalize.

>It turns out that, like DNA evidence, there's now an entire innocence project started dedicated to getting people out of incarceration for any crime where the totality of evidence was GPS data and some made up stories.

Is also already the case. Denmark had such a problem recently.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/world/europe/denmark-cell...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/23/20829490/denmark-cellphon...
Good idea! I recently identified this as one of the huge obstacles in my workflow and now I am looking for options to save and manage my sessions in Linux / i3.

So far i3-resurrect looks promising, anybody else have suggestions?
Graphene-Coated Fabric Causes Mosquitoes to Buzz Off
exFAT works on MacOS >= 10.6.5, Windows and with this announcement hopefully shortly on Linux. I'd say it counts as a modern file system too - only released in 2006.
I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it.

I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way with their Adsense program. A long time ago it was. Back then there were actually people who communicated with you about it, at least that was my experience. But it was still stupid.

I was running Adsense on a website and got a message that I was not in compliance with their policies. I emailed and got a reply that it was because I need to make sure the ads are clearly separated from the content. I replied with a link to their own guide on how to "blend" ads, which I thought I had followed pretty closely. A person replied and said "That's not what we meant". WTF.

Another time on a food blog I had an article with a title that included the words "Chocolate Fetish" and a photo of two fully clothed women pouring chocolate on each other. I got an email that I was in violation of their policies with a link to that page. I emailed back and asked why. A person replied and said it was adult content. Double WTF.

So yeah, it's been stupid for a long time. And now days it's just all automated stupidity. It's pretty obvious - don't trust your business or anything else to Google.
Meet India's 'Mount Everest of Trash'
> China’s army bigger, China’s army bigger, China’s army bigger.

Not back in the mid 80s, when the agreements were struck.
Why don't npm/yarn/github/etc have explicit support for premium packages that cost money? It can provide revenue for the registry, too.

Napster and LimeWire were cool because people got something for free and, all else being equal, people prefer free to not free; but all else is not equal because free is not necessarily sustainable. If there were literally no way to monetize music at scale, it would not have worked out well for consumers in the long wrong, because there would be far less to consume.

People pay for software regularly. Package managers are marketplaces for software, so it doesn't seem like a huge leap for them to facilitate the exchange of funds. Then feross can charge money for standard if he wants, and people that don't think it's worth it won't pay him and won't see an ad and won't use the software.
Downvotes incoming!

Other explanations from Google programmers:
"the work is interesting"
The legal system has its own objectives, for instance dissuading people from even coming to the courts, they often enough don't coincide with the objectives of the little man.

Psychopaths and corporations game the system as they have no morality. There isn't all that much the system can do about powerful forces gaming it. For instance car companies calculated that the cost of paying for injury lawsuits was less than recalling defective cars that were killing people. This is gaming the system.

It would be interesting if the courts started finding corporations having psychological disorders and punishing them for it by for instance replacing their upper leadership if found to have certain tendencies which were socially unacceptable.
An update to an ad library is what caused the malicious code in the first place. Presumably either the infected library was updated again or the developers switched libraries.

The developers behind this app did not add any malicious code they wrote themselves. The attack either came from the ad library or the ad library was hacked.
The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world
Wasn't the argument the other way around?

Like everyone thinking your spies are everywhere and know everything?
Something's up with your install. I paste stuff in all the time without issue. I mean I paste a -lot- of memes and text with no issues.
> This is very neat.

Cheers!

> Do you have anything similar for Prolog?

Well, what you think of "Formal Methods: A First Introduction using Prolog to specify Programming Language Semantics"? https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/faculty/hamel/pubs/fcs16.pdf

Abstract

> An important fundamental idea in formal methods is that programs are mathematical objects one can reason about. Here we introduce students and developers to these ideas in the context of formal programming language semantics. We use first-order Horn clause logic as implemented by Prolog both as a specification and a proof scripting language. A module we have written facilitates using Prolog as a proof assistant and insures that Prolog implements a sound logic. In order to illustrate our approach we specify the semantics of a small functional language and demonstrate various proof approaches and styles.

I just found this the other day and it seems promising.

> it's not fair to claim that you can do everything in Prolog that TLA+ does.

A claim I didn't make. "So far", I said, and, "I'm not to far into it yet" (sic). :-)

(Although it's trivially true because of Turing completeness, eh?)

I have great respect for Lamport. I would hate to be unfair to him.
That's a good one, I like it.
No, that doesn’t seem like a useful way to look at it.

The old methane break down into CO2 regardless of our current emissions. Our choices now affect future emissions of methane, the effects of which are essentially independent of the past methane release.

Finding a consistent yardstick (methane = 30x CO2) seems better than pretending it’s not a problem just because there’s some delayed negative feedback loops already in play.
I bet hardly anyone travels without their phone on them. Even in a large city...maybe tens or hundreds of people.
Where is that definition written on?

Are we talking about PICs with 4KB, or ESP32 that would run circles around the Amstrad PC 1512 that I used to play Defender of the Crown on?

A system that already had quite a few high level programming languages available for us to learn programming on.

Ah maybe we are speaking about my Visa card running a set of tiny Java Card applications on 256KB, to handle my authentication processes at POS.
Google auth credentials: not without root (which malware might get if your device isn't up to dage ons security patches)

Read screen: not without permission, even then not on protected screens, unless the malware has gained root access

If the app doesn't get root, the Android sandbox should protect you sufficiently against attacks on the key store of Google Authenticator.

However, if you copy the code to the device clipboard, the malware might read the code from there.
Hiring someone else to do the dirty-work has never been acceptable.

GDPR is a start.
I find their asymmetry to be ugly and visually distracting: there's no excuse for the "chin" on the top of the monitor - I'm surprised Apple OK'd the design at all - and just-as-surprised that they didn't equal-out the bottom bezel of the display in the new 2019 revision just to make it seem balanced.

Also, the fact it's a single-input monitor without HDMI input is a deal-killer for me: multiple-input monitors are fantastic when you have multiple machines on your desk and alternate between them based on the current job (e.g. laptop in docking station, Mac Mini for Safari + iOS testing, main desktop, dangling HDMI cable for connecting to tablets and phones).
As a Hongkonger, can I ask what's the best technology for:

1. Censorship-resistant chat: Something DHT-based preferrably, I am looking at Status.im right now

2. Mesh Internet over the air, something like DN42 but over wireless links
A New Algorithm for Controlled Randomness
In that case, you can scan all license plates in an area, and compare with all mobile users in the same area, and investigate all who don’t match.
What does opt-in mean here? You are still free to insure your Tesla with other insurance providers like Progressive or Geico.

Metromile tracked my vehicle's speed in their app using their ODB dongle. The only way I could opt out of them knowing about my 101 MPH joyrides on the 101 was by choosing a different insurance company.
or any other developed nation's for that matter
My standard counterargument to this is to look at animals. We know that treating animals better lead to happier animals. Poorly treated and well treated animals do not converge to the same happiness level.

I think there are a few key things that drive happiness. Secure food and shelter. Short commute. Nature. Being able to walk away from toxic jobs and relationships.
How is it that this post is ranked 77 with 52 points in 3 hours and only one comment???

Meanwhile "Exploring Weight Agnostic Neural Networks" is at #2 with the same age and only 46 points...

If people are flagging something like this that's so directly in the sweet spot of "interesting to hackers" and non-flamewar inducing as this, then I hope the mods aren't asleep at the wheel!
Just like Oberon has the whole OS written in it.

http://www.projectoberon.com/
I'd count "modern", as something like btrfs, zfs or bcahefs.
> PPC machines are also required if for some reason you're still running AIX, IIRC.

It's probably a way of making more money out of those legacy customers

(yes because if you're still running AIX you're deep down in legacy territory, and you might just want to look at recompiling your stuff for Linux but chose to suffer instead)
I recently upgraded from a 2015 MBP to the latest 2019 MBP, and I actually think it surpasses the older model in almost every way. So far I haven't experienced any of the keyboard issues that people have been reporting, although I'm aware that this model has a membrane that was put in to prevent those issues. My only gripe is the need to have a dongle to connect HDMI and USB 2.0, but I still wouldn't go back to the 2015 over it.

On a side note, I bought a new iPhone SE to see how it compared to the iPhone XS because HN raves about the SE so much. It was pretty underwhelming and there was just absolutely no way I could justify replacing the XS with it.
Best High Gain Antennas for WiFi Router
Sounds like you might enjoy Lisps even more (clojurescript for frontend?). In my experience, that's the pinnacle of dynamically typed.
It's really great how he pushed so hard to open source the previous generation of each game when releasing a new one. It's hard to tell how much that pushed the industry forward, but I'm sure a lot of people became better C programmers as a result.

The "smell in VR" kits in this interview were interesting. I hadn't realized so much progress had been made on that front (or that it would take so much to make it as convincing as visual input).
I love these ones.
> when in fact, no one has to do it. Doing so just leads to Cold War-style arms races.

I largely agree, but when anything provides significant advantages, somebody will do it. You don't have to be the one initiating the arms race but once it's happening, you can't ignore it. I'm don't believe that the stifling side-effects of surveillance (of your own population; obviously, world-wide surveillance provides a large benefit to the US) outweigh the benefits, so it's probably a net loss, but that's close to impossible to quantify.

As for the quote, it may depend on experiences and the personal background how you understand it. To me it reads as "but it's fine to read the peasant's mail", just as two generals would make sure not to harm each other in a battle, but have no issue sending their soldiers to their death.
I applaud your effort. It did raise about quite a bit of unproductive discussion, but there were so many things worth discussing: how funding should happen, the privacy concerns surrounding the proposed format, etc. Though this model didn't quite work, it doesn't mean there aren't undiscovered models waiting out there -- or that there can't be an ongoing discussion about how to improve.

I did want to discuss this sentence from the article. Since it was in bold, it seems worthy of unpacking it a bit.

> Right now, the status quo is that maintainers create massive amounts of value and then for-profit companies and SaaS startups capture almost all of it.

The thing is though, nobody would pay for a service that just left pads. People compose open source projects into novel ways to solve customer problems. A customer problem isn't: "I need to sort this array n log n efficiency". A customer problem might be: "I need to find my most recently updated accounts, and generate a report". To state this in other words: startups create value through their novel use of open source packages, combined in a way to solve a problem painful enough for other people to pay for.

If left pad was that hard to do, people would certainly pay for left pad as a service. But individual open source packages provide minimal economic value. It's how they are combined that creates value. And I think that's what makes it difficult to extract value from individual repositories.

If your primary objective is value extraction --which is totally fine, by the way, many people are coding for paychecks-- why not do it for a company? You clearly have so much skill and would undoubtedly be paid well. There's many remote companies these days, it'd give you the lifestyle you want-- the freedom to travel, etc. It's not as free as being able to say, "I want to work on X and Y and Z open source packages", but it isn't all that terrible. My company gives me bandwidth to contribute to OSS during working hours, too. I think wanting the freedom to 100% control what you work on inevitably comes with the tradeoff of a lower salary. At work, I might occasionally get stuck on a project that I'm not too interested in, but that's why I get paid a premium to do it. I think wanting a FANG salary, but also total control of your workstreams, is honestly asking for a lot. It's wanting the best of both worlds, with none of the drawbacks. If everyone could make six-figures a year working on dozens of open source projects, they'd probably switch to doing that, since it would be (hopefully) more rewarding.
Do you use an external monitor? That's the most important part of the setup, IMO.

I said two monitors but what I mean is one for each location - many people I know seem to prefer two but I think it's an antipattern (move your head, instead of alt+tab or similar)
Also worth looking at if you're into this sort of thing:

https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/replica-1-plus-from-br...
Capitalistic? They profit from this kind of behavior because they are shielded from capitalistic-geared reality.

They have built an ivory tower that has nothing to do with capitalism.
There is a counter point from a brain surgeon:

https://www.cnet.com/news/brain-surgeon-theres-no-point-wear...

There were reports of increased rates of basal skull injury, i.e. the same injury many race car drivers suffered (Dale Earnhard) and for which HANS device was invented. So on one hand you would be protected in simple accidents but on the other hand exposed to more serious ones.
Why would their head of WW Marketing go down for this? This would be the fault of whoever was in charge of the keyboard design and its multiple failing iterations. So presumably the head of Mac HW.
Engineers develop bone-like metal foam that can be 'healed' at room temperature
Me too. The laptop is an inch thick, and _I love it_.

We need a revival of bauhaus design - no distinction between form and function. If it falls short at its function, it fails as a form, and should not be accepted.
What's Julia's story on the NLP area? Would it be a good choice for "production-R&D" in this area?

...asking as someone who tool an interest in Julia a few years ago but jumped away from it bc it seemed not mature enough, but re-looking at it as way to solve the "tower of babel" + "inflexible languages" problems.
Squirrel migrations recorded in North America (2006)
Heat is becoming a real problem, note that most of it is from the brakes which is why the station is commonly higher than the main track to try and take advantage of GPE.
Zuckerbergs infamous "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumbfucks" springs to mind. While I'm sure there is some amount of long term damage, you'd be hardpressed to say it has crippled Facebook.
Pretty charitable to call them educational videos.
Where do people find the time to fit all this sexual harassment on their schedules?? I feel like I'm always sprinting towards completing 3 different projects at any given time.
How exactly could programmers stop this?
I'm a maintainer of a 10K+ starred project with 1M+ monthly downloads and I know Feross personally.

I do not agree or support this movement.

Don't do Open Source if you can't afford it.

It is as simple as that.

Framing it as exploitation is misses the point of collaboration.

It has never been about us, it's been about giving value to the world.

We can't play the victim card. Nobody wants a whining Batman or Spiderman.

So what is Open Source about?

Here's an excellent talk on the psychology behind it:

https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc
Work elsewhere.
I feel you. I have the 15" mb pro at work and the only place I can use it is at my desk (with external trackpad+keyboard). The massive touchpad is driving me crazy to a point I don't want to even carry the damn thing around.
Shanghai sets up $70m fund to attract drone makers (Asia AI News)