skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Forth is not the language. Forth the language captures nothing, it's a moving target... Forth is the approach to engineering aiming to produce as small, simple and optimal system as possible, by shaving off as many requirements of every imaginable kind as you can.

This has been something on my mind recently: I feel like as a software engineer I spend a lot of time working with abstractions designed to contain complexity, and I really appreciate it when I find the rare few that do so successfully (or get the buzz from having done so myself!).

But there's something even more appealing and satisfying about simplifying the model of the problem so that it's more elegant where that's possible.
Stratum – Enabling the era of next-generation SDN
Thank you! That's an interesting read.

Directly from the article:

> And when Mao founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he and Zhou Enlai decided not to seize Hong Kong—which the British at the time expected

The other side of the story is that China could've easily seized HK from the beginning, and the people of HK would've been under the direct rule of China, and never gotten any of the freedom and autonomy they enjoy today.
I feel I have to link to a song I grew up listening to that tells the story of this "war"
https://youtu.be/4_Ap1rGgVLg
Out of 5 paragraphs of text, the only "apology" was "We’re sorry for the confusion and uneasiness that caused." which is the equivalent of spitting on someone's face and apologizing with "I'm sorry you felt spit on."

I feel like we're watching one of the pillars of modern software development crumble.
You, the driver, have much much more control over pedestrian safety than any tool. Tech is not silver bullet, it fails (rta). If you believe the tech will "protect you", do you job for you, that is dangerous. Get skilled first, augment those skills with tech second.
I empathize with where you're coming from, but I honestly think this line of thinking has led us to where we are now.

The city is legitimately scary for many (maybe most) of its inhabitants, especially after sunset. I know plenty of women who absolutely will not walk nearly any distance alone at night. On the Muni the other day, I saw a man outside get stalked by a homeless guy who was physically threatening him. You regularly see people who you realize you need to watch out for. It starts to become a nervous tick.

We need to deal with this in a real way that is not just empathizing with their situation. We can't just say "Well, they're ill, so we have to let them be horrible and scare 99% of the population". That is essentially letting the inmates run the asylum.

I know that full, actual treatment is complex. A lot of them honestly don't want what's available to them and I don't blame them. But in the meantime, we have to do something to enforce the law.

It's so, so deeply crazy right now.
Preempting your next reply with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

If you do nothing else, please watch.
You sound like an outlier, I routinely interview senior engineers applying to Google and a massive majority do not pass the coding test. I would say half are not even in the ballpark of passing.
> But is that dramatically worse than blowing up a train moving 50 mph

Yes, it is extremely bad when 60-100 ton railcars are being thrown around like toys, at nearly the speed (about 30m/s slower than most .45 ACP) some handguns fire bullets.
When I said local I meant city-scale as opposed to internet-scale. If it's broken, then that's an invitation for you to get involved. Which supervisor represents you?
Brain implants that don't require brain surgery
That depends on what kind documents of course. It isn't usually true for text-centric content.

Here's Dazai Osamu's Hashire Melos: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000035/files/1567_14913.html. Despite having an unusually large amount of markup (most Japanese text wouldn't add the ruby characters), it's smaller as UTF-16 than UTF-8.
Best line from the song: "They called it a war, but it wasn't very big. The only one got killed was a little British pig."
I did not read the paper fully, just some general commentary, hopefully useful.

First, fantastic that you're doing academic work so early. I believe most students wait far too long to be exposed to this aspect of academia (and their lives), which is far more about asking good questions, achieving deep understanding, and getting good results, than memorizing some procedure that isn't necessarily useful (but happens often in school). Keep creative and keep working on creating a good toolset (find math tools you find interesting/useful and own them!).

Now on to the paper. I'd reiterate the importance of asking good questions almost above results. For example, the result of adversarial sticks and sinks looks good -- but is it asking the right question? If you think realistically, adversarial attacks can occur in a number of ways.

One of them is that a human classifies a dataset one way while a machine another. In this case you would also want the human not to be able to tell you data is weird or there's something funky going on -- that is clearly the case with sticks (and sinks to a lesser extent). A human could be easily trained to spot them, and generally tell something weird is going on.

Another attack scenario is where you can modify some object, like a picture, but have some restriction on how much you can modify it. For example, you can manipulate only some bits of an image, or only perturb a small part of a real-world object that is under classification (say by putting a sticker on a car and fooling a system into thinking it is a dog, or something). If there is no restriction on your perturbation, this problem would be trivial (just replace the data with intended object data). The justification behind sticks and sinks does not look very well fundamented.

So sticks/sinks do not fare too well in either case, despite looking very good in terms of success vs defenses (although there's a chance they could inspire more practical attacks).

The commentary on Haussdorf distance is relevant here, but only on the first case (fooling human judgement), and it is of course an imperfect proxy (the true metric is human perception) -- another hint that fundamentals (and applications) are important to keep in mind.

Overall the paper seems well written and I specially like the numerous illustrations.

Keep the good work and don't forget to always look for the inspiring, beautiful and impactful, and seeking understanding. With a little of this in mind I have no doubt you can achieve very much. Good luck!
I’n extremely surprised that warrants haven’t been brought up yet here. A device cannot be unencrypted when a warrant is issued, so that evidence is lost, assuming the device itself is lost. Is this an ok course of action?
Pay is not based on the cost of living but on the area job market. These can have a relationship but are not the same. London is an example of an expensive city where software engineering wages are relatively low. If there's robust competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be high.
There are objective truths. It doesn't matter if you think the earth is flat. It's not. And I really wish this was a contrived example
> CLOS started as a portable library for Common Lisp. It was implemented as an embedded language extension and provides on the user level a set of macros: DEFCLASS, DEFGENERIC, DEFMETHOD, etc...

Right, that shows that if a highly skilled group of people with community support put in a lot of effort, they can do something that is extremely difficult to do.

The Scheme community has not had such success. All three of the Scheme object systems I've experimented with suffer from all four of the problems I mentioned. And at least one of them was recent enough that they had the advantage of having CLOS to guide the way on how to do it right.

I'm not saying that DSLs are impossible to create successfully. I'm saying that many Lispers drastically underestimate the difficulty of doing so in proportion to the value.

Keep in mind that you have people in this thread claiming that "DSLs are trivial to implement in Lisp." And I'm saying, DSLs are trivial to implement counterproductively in Lisp, but implementing a high quality DSL is still very hard.
http://archive.is/xVI0g
Construction costs are very high in the Bay Area, and it is one component that holds back the construction of ADUs (in-law units) wchi hostage requires cities to support.

Of course, then you’d ask, well why are construction costs so high in the Bay Area? And you might hear something about earthquakes, insulation, whatever. But the real reason is that contractors and construction workers need to live here too, and living here is damn expensive!
Just because it hasn't happened to you, personally, doesn't mean it hasn't happened to other people.
I don't see the point in this request. We're going to have to figure out how to live with encrypted messaging regardless of whether Facebook implements it.
At 4:45p PDT, this post was #14 on the HN front page with 77 points and then it suddenly disappeared.

I can't find it on any of the first several pages of HN. Where'd it go? Was it flagged?
Steampunk helps me come to grips with the industrial revolution, 150 years on. In an age of gigahertz radio waves and nanosecond computer speeds, I like thinking about 1 Hertz, 1 Volt, 1 Ohm, and 1 Farad (!) alt-histories.

As the story said,

> It’s about using design to make the working of technology scrutable through an object’s aesthetic.
Working for whom?
>San Fran doesn't care how terrible their city looks to tourists nor care for its people like NYC does?

The way I see it, fundamentally, San Francisco views the homeless as part of it's people, many other places do not.
Here they're all terrified that apartments will be occupied by Section 8 occupants. Oddly enough they are predominantly far left people here.
For me it was the part about typing JSON. I work at a company with a Common Lisp back-end and Let Me Tell You. Trying to enforce the JSON structure it generates using any kind of front-end JS types, so that nil-punning doesn't crash the UI every other day, is an exercise in attrition. Unfortunately JS is not Clojure and so can't as elegantly digest inconsistent data, but I certainly have learned to appreciate the appeal of that philosophy.
SF improves permitting process with online portal to help combat housing crisis
Moderating a forum of a few hundred recurring posters, who nominally all want to participate in discussions of
a few specified topics is usually feasible.

Moderating open venues with no sense of commonality or community where anyone can just show up and say anything
is ... much less feasible.
I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are rewrites on that grammar. My current target grammars are for simple LISPy languages because of the simplicity, but my original (and eventual) goal was/is as a tool for exploratory mathematics. I've always felt mathematical manipulation as more of tactile, synesthetic phenomena than a verbal/linguistic one; I feel like the current state of haptic input is not quite up to reifying this yet, though it is improving very rapidly these days! So I'm trying to tackle some of the software side, and seeing what can be done towards this goal with extant input devices.

What I've done is pretty rudimentary so far, but I have a talk about it here if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA
> Those reactors were vanity projects, not big contributors to economy.

Your argument is anecdotal.
No worries mate.

I mentioned the dragon book by obligation, not in comparison to the works you referenced.
picolibc$ find . \( -name test -o -name testsuite \) -prune -o -name \*.c -exec cat -- {} + | wc -l
259227
picolibc$ find . \( -name test -o -name testsuite \) -prune -o -name \*.h -exec cat -- {} + | wc -l
60588

musl$ find . -name \*.c -exec cat -- {} + | wc -l
60697
musl$ find . -name \*.h -exec cat -- {} + | wc -l
37889

Those figures are sufficiently far apart that I don't think we need to quibble about comments. Whatever is causing those huge numbers for picolibc (architecture optimized function variations? per file license preambles?), suffice it to say that it's debatable the extent to which newlib or picolibc is smaller or simpler than musl, if at all.

musl is maybe more ambitious in terms of full and correct POSIX compliance, but the code base is very clean and concise. For example, for locale support they keep things very simple by only supporting UTF-8. Unlike picolibc, musl includes a full ELF runtime dynamic linker, full pthreads library (with correct cancellation semantics!), and up-to-date wrappers for all the esoteric Linux syscalls, yet still clocks in at ~60k lines of C source files at most. It would be fairly trivial to remove those things, precisely because of how well structured and straightforward the code is.

musl also builds using a single, simple Makefile

musl$ wc -l Makefile
235 Makefile

compared to the supposedly simpler and cleaner meson build:

picolibc$ wc -l meson.build meson_options.txt
282 meson.build
132 meson_options.txt
414 total

If I was working on an embedded project, I know which build I'd prefer to hack on.
Can you list some examples of actual companies? Because, I haven't seen any here in SV. Everyone and their mom asks leetcode AFAICT.
It's a bit unfortunate that this article is one of the most circulated accounts of a "failure" of applying Forth to a real-world problem. The author learned a little about Forth and was fascinated. He then wrote his own implementation and struggled mightily with it. Ultimately he was disenchanted.

I think the heart of the problem is that the rudimentary ideas of forth- a stack, some stack-shuffling words, some arithmetic, control flow, and that's about it- are appealingly simple, but not enough of the language:

>"I figured I didn't need the more interesting metaprogramming stuff for my first prototype programs, and I could add it later if it turned out that I was wrong. It was wierd to throw away everything I originally liked the most, but I was all set to start writing real programs. Solving real problems in the real world. It was among the most painful programming experiences in my life."

Imagine reading the first chapter of SICP without prior exposure to Lisp, excitedly writing an interpreter for the parts of the language you'd seen so far, and then feeling your enthusiasm slowly slip away into dismay as you attempted to use that stunted fragment of a language to get work done.

Forth can be small, and simple, but the real gems of the language are a bit subtle. The many implications of CREATE>/DOES. Abuses of manipulating the rstack. Striking a balance between parsing words, named locals, global variables, vocabularies, and other tools to minimize twisty stack shuffling. Bending the rules at the right times.
It's like the difference between porn and art. You know it when you see it, but writing a rule for it is impossible.
A cheaper home next to a freeway is probably healthier than living on the street.
I suspect Americans think trains are an awful experience not because of the trains, but because there will be other people on the trains. It's one part "don't make me interact with a human," and one part "white people don't ride busses."

It might also be one more part actually creepy people, but I bet most folks don't get that far into their evaluation.
I hear you. I lived in SoCal for many years and fought the traffic on all those routes you mentioned. When I came back from trips to countries with working mass transit the awareness was even greater.

But I think it's a hard problem in the U.S. Autocratic governments just decide to do something and plow over anyone who gets in their way. The country I live in now is actually starting to lay track for a high speed rail system to connect the centrally located capital and major outlying cities, and all the way to the northern and southern borders. It did take a while to get started, because everyone had to decide how the contracts would be divided up among their cronies and how the kickbacks would be paid. But it is getting done, because if anyone stands in the way the government declares a threat to the security of the country and sends in the soldiers.
Thanks for that . A couple of things: 1. I don’t think an E-mail address is really necessary in order to ship a package or charge a credit card. 2. Friction and convenience used to be acceptable reasons to collect personal info without consent but maybe that’s starting to change. I highly doubt the 99.99% figure but having no data of my own I won’t dispute it. I trust that you have seen such an opt-in rate for sharing E-mail addresses in your past user research.
Yes, there are similar ideas to removing points, like masks and other transformations. Removing points is merely a 3D equivalent of the idea of destroying potentially adversarial information. I guess you can "remove" a pixel by setting it to a certain color, so my statement is not entirely accurate. However, point-removal methods are able to take into consideration the distribution of points, which is unique to 3D point sets. Furthermore, there are a lot of redundant points on the surface of an object, which means that removing a few points will not destroy the shape information.

This paper does suggest that we can circumvent certain domain-specific knowledge when attacking. This does not mean that we won't discover methods to utilize domain-specific knowledge in the future. I would imagine extending current provably robust methods to 3D would require domain-specific knowledge to deal with the distribution of points.
Any proposed methods of attack mitigation comes to mind after this research? I would suspect, and take this with a grain of salt, I haven't been working with machine learning for quite some time, that smaller subsets of the same data each representing a different kind of attack mapped to another dimension in the network output (that would be then recurrently fed to the same network) could prevent the issue. Kind of teaching the network to defend itself, recognising patterns of attacks and discarding or compensating them as it would noise or other kind of interventions.

Are the attacks statistically identifiable? Can they be translated to a training subset? What would you propose?
Well it's an interesting question and the answer is not ambiguous as far as I can tell. The US share of global R&D spending on pharmaceuticals is approaching 60%: https://www.abpi.org.uk/facts-and-figures/science-and-innova...

To answer your question I think there's little doubt that dramatically cutting health (and pharmaceutical) costs per person in the US (i.e. with a single payer model) would dramatically impact global R&D spending on pharmaceuticals.

But are you saying that the average American citizen is ok paying ridiculous health care costs (with only a limited number of citizens having coverage) because their payments are subsidising global health R&D? I really, really doubt that. Also this idea is clearly socialist which is one of the main arguments against universal health coverage in the US.
Eye contact is only meaningful between drivers. When you are asymmetrically squishy (as a pedestrian or cyclist), some drivers will take eye contact as "good, they have seen me, they will know to stay out of my way".
The problem is pervasive, and speaking in noncommittal terms perpetuates passive acceptance. We can take action through our democratically elected representatives by re-opening mental health institutions and drug rehab centers. And we can enable law enforcement to lock up violent offenders with the assurance that the defendants will be given due process instead of being released without charges.
There are traffic fatality statistics by nearly all countries. Parts of Western Europe and Japan are much safer (like half the fatality rate) per capita but in my experience a lot of that is due to their infrastructure not allowing high speeds, though some of it is probably stricter licensing.
That seems impossible. Where do you live in SF? Do you ever take public transit?
> Nuclear reactors contribute very little to the job market.

that is not the point. Point is, it was contributing for years with good paying jobs, well-educated folks etc. Since 1990 - nothing.

> few people were allowed to pursue the more prestigious careers

Like gasp nuclear engineer? Yeah...

> On top of that you couldn't pack your bag and move to a bigger city without a permission of the authorities.

Really? It was that bad in Bulgaria? Definitely not like that in Soviet Russia

> As a result of all that and the appropriate weather conditions, agriculture was a safe bet for just about everyone.

Yeah, except those nuclear engineers

I bet they were dreaming at the reactor controls about moving to be a swine herders
"...except for phone calls with the President of Ukraine. Those can stay secret."
Ummm but isn't San Fran the most extreme left-ist city in the country? Why is this not happening on the same scale as say in Nashville?
The person who believes (or says they do) that the earth is flat, has every right to do so. I agree with you, they're objectively wrong. I find it arrogant to say they have no right to speak because of that, and will not.
A few years ago I learned an interesting bit of my own family history, which is that my grandfather was the head of mental health in California when Reagan was governor. And so it's his signature that was on the decision to dismantle state mental health hospitals. The hospitals were awful in their own way and there was a loose theory that the counties could step in with a replacement (which never happened). But it's basically that decision that put a lot of mentally ill people on the street.

When I was a kid in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s, it was pretty much accepted wisdom that all homeless were mentally ill and were choosing to live on the streets. I don't think that's true anymore, although I don't have statistics. My experience though was that living there as an adult in 2010-2016, I saw a lot more families, a mom in the Powell Street station begging while helping her daughter with homework, or two moms digging through my trash on Precita Ave with their kids in tow. That sort of stuff.

I'm not saying at all that homeless should be allowed to terrorize the city. But I do think empathy is one of the steps (and maybe the only step that readers here are in complete control of executing themselves). Are you ready to pay to provide shelter and services for each of these homeless people? Are you ready to have a shelter in your own neighborhood? Does your local supervisor know that? I doubt I'm alone in that my own feelings of generosity are improved when know and care about someone.

Although, more in line with what you are saying about SF being deeply crazy, I agree and I moved away and I can't imagine moving back. But wherever you live, I'm encouraging people to do more to make that place as great as it can be. I live in NYC now, but basically follow the above advice, only more focused on over incarceration.
> And since I both care about minorities

To imply that those who don't wish to act the way you wish them to don't care about minorities is invidious and not supported by any evidence I've seen.

> I'm ok with calling people whatever the heck they want to be called.

As are most people until they are compelled.

> It'd be pretty silly if we thought the arguably more objective sex characteristics of a person were not binary but thought that their gender had to be binary, wouldn't it?

Would it? If, as some do, we posit that there can be an infinite number of genders or even a large number like… 42, are there 42 different categories of sex? If not, and I don't believe there are, then it's possible for multiple sexes to fit into a gender category and multiple genders into a sex category. You could probably fit all 42 into male and female and cut out a lot absurdities.

I'd go for 3, male, female and 3rd sex. Come up with a better name if you like.