skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RoboTrump – Trump text generation with the 1.6B parameter CTRL model
About a week ago, the SalesForce CTRL transformer model and code was updated to include the ability to fine-tune the a 1.6 billion-parameter conditional transformer language model with whatever new text you like.

https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl

I was curious about the implications for propaganda and tried fine-tuning on trump speeches. This was the result:

Prompt: I should be elected for a second term as President.

Generated Text:

And you know what? We are going to do great things. We're not even thinking about it. But we have done so much in such little time. We've taken care of our military, we've taken care of the vets -- and by the way, we're doing great. It's been amazing. So many people that were down on their luck, they got health care, they've gotten unemployment benefits, they're getting back into jobs. You look at what's happening with African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans. They're starting to see some progress. The Democrats want to turn America into Venezuela. They don't like that. [Booing] That's why I'm here today is because this election will decide whether or not Republicans continue to cut your taxes, reduce your regulations, protect Medicare and Social Security, defend America's borders, uphold religious liberty, promote American jobs, support our incredible veterans, and more. Or whether Nancy Pelosi becomes speaker and, together with her radical left-wing colleagues, try everything within their power to raise your taxes and destroy what you've worked hard for. This November, every single Republican running for office has an obligation to reject the extreme agenda being pushed by Maxine Waters and Claire McCaskill. If you're undecided, just remember this: In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than any other Administration in the history of our country.
Unless you are purposely trying to pedantic, one should know that FIPS140-3 just came out. You can't even search the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) tool for FIPS140-3 standard level yet. FIPS140-2 for all practical purposes is the current standard to measure against.

And if you really are negating FIPS140-X and what it means to large organizations and government entities... you should do some reading to understand why it exists. It isn't standards hand-waving. It is fairly in-depth and aims to ensure your cryptographic primitives and low level operations are not totally fucked out of the box.

It doesn't solve most security issues by a long shot, but it does try to give you some minimum levels of assurance that it doesn't totally suck crypto operations-wise.

Anyways - I up-voted your reply regardless because I wanted to engage in some meaningful dialogue, and I believe we have. Cheers!
They're using the volume reported by CoinMarketCap which is in turn based on the volume reported by exchanges that fake their volumes. Real volumes are a small fraction of what is reported on CoinMarketCap. This is just bad reporting by a journalist far removed from the industry.
In the US, it's not entirely baseless to speculate that wealthier residents perceive public transit as largely for the benefit of the lower classes, and sometimes block it in neighborhoods to keep out the riff-raff.

In Switzerland, public transit is used by (demographically) everyone. You can meet the Swiss president catching a train to work https://img.blick.ch/incoming/3100960-v4-bildschirmfoto-2014...

or the captain of the local hockey team bringing home the cup after a night's out celebrating the national championship:
https://www.20min.ch/diashow/46825/46825-0dtUaFAvgxvMBKiL0V6...
Your dermis is designed to keep stuff out so though some of the topical will enter your system the amount is likely to be negligible (note: I am not a physician!!). Anyway topicals are used to treat fungi that attack dermal and nail tissue (e.g. tinia mentagrophytes or tinea pedis) so the whole point of using them is that you're applying the drug to the invader. This is why dandruff shampoo supposedly works.

I wouldn't worry about eating garlic although I haven't seen any studies suggesting it might actually be efficacious. But it is delicious!
If that's the case why do such laws exist as foldable knives and switchblades being illegal to carry but sturdy full-length ones are fine, in some countries? Why is banning pistol grips considered having prevented or hindered lethality?
A wonderfully unholy alliance – Linux commands for PowerShell with WSL wrappers
Domain Names Are (Still) a Bargain in 2019
I grew up in Massachusetts and we had a gigantic maple tree in our front lawn, along with abundant other oaks, birches, apples, redwoods, and other trees. When I was a kid I'd go out in the fall and bury myself under the leaves that covered the lawn.

I've lived in the Bay Area for a decade and generally think our weather is much better than New England's, but I do miss the seasons. October is spectacular in New England.
> Commercial enterprise VPN products are an open sewer,

Commercial enterprise VPN products exist for one reason:

To allow the enterprise security office to tick off the checkbox on the quarterly compliance forms that essentially says: "using a VPN to provide secure communications".

Security is only a secondary consideration, if it is even considered at all.
The PD also varies a bit from reading glasses to distance glasses. If you are ordering single vision glasses, you might want to collect both numbers.
> Vue3 will release a monolithic syntax where you can combine script, styles and HTML all into a class.

Nope.

This was already possible in Vue 2, and Vue 3 is not dropping Single File Components at all. In fact most recent demos showed Single File Components [1].

And Evan You announced that the Class API is cancelled btw [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43SqPADf3k
Trams are actually a strange beast that's not as cheap and flexible as a bus, and not as efficient as the underground but still quite expensive to build and maintain, which is the main reason many cities abandoned them. A big advantage is that they are electric but once electric buses really take off they'll be a much better compromise for public transport overall. Much of the surface traffic would have to be reduced anyway.
This article is insane. I wouldn't even know how to begin configuring HDFS/Spark cluster for 10Gb of data.
And I think chances are, these reference librarians will have masters degrees! They’re incredibly knowledgeable, and at least every librarian I’ve ever met has been not only good at what they do, but incredibly passionate too. And if anyone’s looking for ways technology and libraries intersect (besides information storage/retrieval), I recommend the Library Freedom Project [1] (I linked to Wikipedia because their main page seems to be blank.) It’s a program that works with libraries to teach librarians about things like digital privacy rights.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Freedom_Project
Ask HN: Ways to Learn Business Communication
When out in the world, I can pretty easily understand an be understood by others, but in the office it seems every word means something entirely different within the office walls than without. Case in point, I put in my notes to my manager "Implemented Contacts screen for CRM", thinking "implemented" meant "wrote the code for", when in fact it meant "pushed tested and completed product to Production".

There's been a bunch of other times where I've said the wrong thing, usually angering my manager which (I think) has locked me out of getting hired full time instead of being a contractor.

Is there a way to train the way office workers speak, or is that a cultural thing that you either have or don't? I come from a blue collar rural white area with a high school mainly focused on farming, so I didn't get exposure to this mode of communication before starting work here.
wdajdhajdha
Doing RSS Import first might be easier than ActivityPub and help writers get content onto the site faster.
Does that work okay with multiple machines connected at the same time? I've been worried about what happens when there's a write conflict to the DB. I'd really like a way to easily share and manage my eBook library from both my laptop and desktop.
> Also, do not forget that Fukashima is still an ongoing disaster that's only just recently begun to stabilize.

Reactor design has changed significantly since Fukashima was built. Newer reactors are far safer.
>> held to the higher standard

> This I disagree with.

Well the law and society disagree with you. The type of reasoning is very ubiquitous too. The more dangerous thing you are operating the more responsibility you have. We generally have morals that align to it being worse to take someone else's life than your own, though we don't encourage either. A car can do much more damage to others than a motorcycle can. A motorcycle can do more damage than a bicyclist can. A bicyclist can do more damage than a pedestrian. It isn't surprising that the right of way follows the inverse of this; those that are most vulnerable have a higher right of way.

I think you are also conflating two different things. Legally and socially we consider the car to be held to a higher standard because it is more dangerous. Practically when I'm on a bike I have to be more vigilant because I'm more vulnerable and I value my life. But when we say that someone should be held to a higher standard we can take an inverse to check our understanding. Disagreeing that cars should be held to a higher standard is equivalent to saying "cars should be held to less (or equal) standards as bicyclists", which I think sounds kinda absurd.

> The difference is that being careless on a bike of any type is more dangerous to you than being careless in a car

And I think this demonstrates that confusion. The bike is not more dangerous, the car is. There is more danger involved when riding a bike, but the car is definitely more dangerous. There is no way you can argue that a bike can do more damage than a car can. The car is more dangerous, therefore it has more responsibility. But that doesn't mean you should trust them to be responsible. Different things.
Bring in the WhiteNoise, Bring in Da Funk – Building SaaS #34 · Matt Layman
Don't you know? Everyone on Hacker News is a bot. Even me. Even you.

\end{jest}

More seriously...

The thing about propaganda is that once someone starts believing it, that someone can potentially (and often does) spread it organically. Hacker News can inadvertently be a hotbed for propaganda spreading of all sorts without even a single bot or paid poster/commenter. I know I've fallen victim to that before, parroting something that ended up being misleading at best because I had been convinced through disinformation that it was the truth and therefore needed spread. I therefore tend to be cognizant of when others appear to be doing the same, seeing in them the same patterns I expressed.

In other words: just because it ain't violating the HN community guidelines doesn't mean it ain't propaganda.
I could write a long list of small quality of life tweaks to its UI.

But, at the same time, I wonder how many HNers have even built a UI for a product with so many features. It's incredibly hard to find a good place for everything. And experimentation is expensive and time consuming.
> Higher taxes on you are just society shifting their priorities away from your interests

We shouldn't be prioritizing anyone's interests via an institution with the right to licit first use of force. We have the technology now to charge people directly for the government-provided services they use. If you use it, you should pay for it. Until we start doing this, society is never going to price things properly and prices are the fastest mechanism for a society to communicate what is important.

Unilaterally taking away IOUs someone has accumulated without recompense merely deprioritizing someone's interests. It's theft.

> it could just be the rebound from society over-subsidizing your lifestyle.

what aspects of my lifestyle do you believe society over-subsidizing?
It hasn't been upgrading to Python 3 by itself but through the effort of a distro maintainer and other contributors: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author....
The World of Medieval Dogdom
The avocado industry didnt see this one coming or they probably would have paid for that change.
I'm not talking about scratch or UE blueprints. The thing I'm talking about doesn't really exist yet; there is some research into it, but it's nowhere near mature enough to draw conclusions yet.

The AST would be designed for human consumption and it would include information like f-strings. Infix operators would not be lost in the first place.
http://archive.is/ShW5z
Louis opens new Macbook Air, immediately loses mind [video]
The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed. -- Gibson.
At least it's metal. It looked plastic at first.
I think it might actually be useful (for games and whatnot) to have analog input on some keys. i'm surprised such a thing doesn't really exist yet.

or even some sort of way to adjust the elastic constant of the key (i guess in a pneumatic spring you could just change the pressure)
This is a "magical thinking" vs. "thinking" exercise. I absolutely applaud him for doing it.

I can't imagine standing up for rationality being this costly (personally). I think we underestimate how fortunate many of us are.
D has been more accepting of changes to fix bad design decisions than C has. The ; thing was there since day 1, the rejection of (a < b < c) came later - nobody objected to it.
I recently joined a biotech/hw startup after working at much larger companies.

I love the trust that everyone puts in me. I feel like I'm my own director, of a team of 1, and that I can work on whatever I want, but people trust me to be working on important stuff.

There are so few barriers between having an idea and actually shipping it. And everything I ship improves the experience for our customers and our internal team by so much!

As a programmer it's also been a ton of fun working with hardware and in the biology domain... not sure if I can ever go back to pure programming!

Also everyone is so nice and kind and smart and curious. Honestly sometimes I look around and wonder if everyone is just messing with me.

Since joining I've felt excited about going to work, in contrast to the past when I was just excited about what was going to be for lunch at work.
> “This is intriguing and exciting research,” said Dr. Ami Bhatt, who studies microbes at Stanford University. “But it’s probably too soon to add broad spectrum antifungals, many of which have lots of side effects, to cancer treatment regimens, even in experimental settings.”

I wonder if there are natural dietary changes you can make to help reduce the likelihood of these fungi.
To be serious now, the short answer is that NATO would almost certainly not get involved, unless the aggressor was egregiously in the wrong.

The best case scenario is that neither party invokes its rights under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Treaty#Article_...), which is the bit that requires signatories to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. That doesn't happen automatically; NATO would only be obligated to act if one of the fighting parties called on it to do so by invoking their Article 5 rights. If neither of them do that, the rest of NATO can just avoid the awkward question altogether and let them fight it out.

If one of the fighting parties invoke Article 5, then NATO is in a bit of a bind. At that point they can't ignore the issue anymore, they'll be obligated to either line up behind the signatory or be in breach of the treaty, rendering it null and void. My guess is that, unless the aggression is seriously noxious, the most likely result is that NATO would just ignore it anyway and hope nobody cares too much. If the country that invoked Article 5 doesn't have many friends in NATO, it's possible that the other countries could just pull a discreet veil of silence over their failure to live up to their treaty responsibilities. A more likely scenario is that the failure results in one or more signatories pulling out of the treaty, and NATO breaks up.

If both of the fighting parties invoke Article 5, then we're well and truly in uncharted territory. The North Atlantic Treaty doesn't specify that it only applies to attacks on NATO members by non-NATO members. Again, the most likely scenario here is that the other members decide not to uphold their treaty obligations and NATO ceases to exist.

Note that the odds of any of this actually happening are smaller than they might seem. Beyond the obvious (i.e. the members of NATO are all pretty friendly to each other, with few casus belli hanging out there), there's also the fact that Article 6 specifies that the collective action responsibilities only apply to attacks

> on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France 2, on the territory of Turkey or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer;

> on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

So if two NATO members get into a scrap over some old colonial claim in Africa, say, neither one could call the other treaty signatories into it. It's explicitly limited to just attacks that take place within a pretty narrowly defined geographical scope.

(A scope that's sufficiently narrow to raise some interesting questions. For instance, it arguably would not include an attack on the United States if that attack only struck Hawaii: https://www.westernjournal.com/nato-loophole-attack-hawaii/)
Well when you have

- Founders getting to take cash out earlier

- employees with golden handcuffs that could last forever

- Questionable to outright illegal behavior being completely okay in the private market

- Insane levels of founder control

- massive VC firms willing to pump in enough late money to take pressure off earlier VCs

Then why go public? Especially if a lot of companies seemingly can't survive the IPO completely intact. Just look at WeWork
Note that all of this is predicated on High Level Synthesis (HLS) becoming real, after many years of industry over-promises and under-deliveries.

A jaded RTL engineer may fairly ask, "what's different this time?" I'm convinced it's two things:

1. These chips have scaled to the point where the toolflow isn't just annoying, it's crippling. (I say that as an RTL designer who likes Vivado, believe it or not.) Making effective use of the largest FPGAs in traditional FPGA applications is difficult enough. Plus, the marginal cost of baking e.g. ARM cores onto an FPGA is now so low that these parts are quickly becoming heterogeneous SoCs and it requires extensive cross-domain knowledge to get a modern design off the ground. More importantly, though, Xilinx is trying to expand FPGAs beyond traditional FPGA markets, and it can't do so without expanding the pool of available talent to program them. Finally, new FPGA applications (e.g. AI) come with their own technical arcana and finding FPGA designers who are proficient in all of these domains is only growing harder. It is necessary for the tools to help, and Xilinx is amply incentivized to pour money into the R&D programs necessary, even if the new tools are simply bundled alongside the old ones.

2. This may be a surprise, but LLVM. Doing HLS correctly is a forced march through every conceivable corner of compiler, language, and RTL design, and to date, that's been much too difficult for EDA companies. I believe that LLVM as an accessible compiler workshop has been instrumental to Xilinx's success to date.

I hope Xilinx does genuinely open-source some of the pieces. (Not the synthesis flow, in this case, but all the stuff built on top of it.) The open-source EDA community is small but motivated and talented, but it's crippled by balkanization caused by the commercial EDA market. This might be an interesting shot in the arm.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but once you are on $250k+ a year like most of the readers here, it is reasonable of the employer to demand both your butt in a seat and results.

I my personal experience the guy who turned up at 8am and started getting shit done, always was far more productive (and indeed ended up a much better coder very quickly) than the “judge me by results not hours” guy turning up at 9:45. Even despite the latter guy being smart and more experienced.
The money.
Yeah the nice thing about Vue is you can basically add it to existing HTML and import it via CDN, you can skip the build step entirely. This makes it really easy to get started.

If you're not planning on building a large app, I'd say it's a better choice than React for that alone. React excels at scale versus its rivals, but Vue is much easier to jump into and be immediately productive with.
Digital books are fine. It's the terrible way they've been monetized that's the problem. College textbooks simply aren't worth $150 anymore but the publishers are desparately trying to hold onto that valuation.
I like not being broke, sick, hungry, and homeless. I like not being seen as "poor white trash". I like not being hassled by Johnny Law because I look out of place.

Sorry, but there are no positives to being employed. Just an absence of negatives.
This title is clickbait. "World's Most-Used Cryptocurrency is Tether, not Bitcoin" would be more informative.
I think the CCP angle is interesting because they want to project this image of 'perfection' in the rest of the world. The only problem is that almost everybody knows it's BS. So are the powers themselves ignorant of what the "West" thinks of them? What gives?

EDIT: I suppose I should add a little thing here for people who take the more practical angle: The point during these fights is that there's an idea (in how the announcers set it up) of Western vs. Eastern/Chinese. He's just demonstrating that there's 'it works' and 'ineffectual'. Aka: Science!
> Perhaps there is some mercy in the madness. Those who wish to see vermin can, and those who choose to are provided with boundless purpose.
Pre-telephone, almost all real time conversations were not available to law enforcement. That is the historical default. There was a brief time where phone and internet conversations were easily accessible to law enforcement. With the implementation of reasonable privacy provisions that is no longer the case and things have returned to the normal state of affairs.
Worst mistake he made was not just taking the money from google.

It is shocking, and kind of infuriating, that he whines about going public being his biggest mistake when the only reason it was a problem was because of his companies questionable behaviour.
Just to be clear, D doesn't require extra braces. It just doesn't allow an empty statement terminated with a ;.

if (x) foo(); // accepted
if (x) ; // rejected
if (x) { } // accepted