skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“There is a big difference between Observation (which is what Snowden is doing) and Analysis (followed by Solutions). It's not healthy to confuse the two.”

Very true. For example I think Marx did a great analysis but his solutions lacked. Same happens often in medicine. People who observe something are asked to also explain it. But if they can’t explain the observation it doesn’t mean the observation is wrong.
There are provable quadratic speedups over all possible classical algorithms.
G Suite, or what was originally "Google Apps for Your Domain" is a white-labeled Gmail.

Commercial social media companies can theoretically make some serious money by whitelabeling their services and selling those to whoever has an audience. Stop thinking about things in terms of followers - it's the publishers that need to be captured for revenue.

What I'd really like to see from U.S. Senators is legislation to require all *.GOV agencies spin up their own ActivityPub-compliant implementations and publish through that means, rather than via accounts on commercial social media services.

Eventually, media and other institutions will follow.

if anyone is interested in learning more, just look up Mastodon Project, the Fediverse, and ActivityPub in Wikipedia.

edit: By "whitelabeling" I mean "Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Youtube for Your Domain", federated and ActivityPub-compliant. Enterprises will eat this shit up.
Big mouth grazes tough subjects, and came off way too preachy in this latest season. It's more like drawn together: vulgar over comedy.
>In urban areas, cycling is faster, and electric biking is expanding your reach a few times over.

In Cambridge, UK, where I used to live it once took me quicker to ride to the same destination than a taxi. In fact it’s well known that cycling in Cambridge’s city centre is much faster than taking a car.
Yeah the idea that the intelligence community pushed these stories doesn't hold up.

If you look into the folks who were in the spotlight pushing "we need this to prevent another 9/11" they were mostly former military and some with intelligence connections... but the real connection was their political connections.

Many outright stated the information they were provided to go on TV with came from politically associated groups not some secretive internal policy. In fact intelligence groups internally pushed back on some of the claims and political appointees ignored them.
I learn by:

Reading books and taking notes.

Watching videos and taking notes.

Attending meetups and taking notes.

Doing. Specifically, by applying what I learned to small projects.

I collect all the notes and projects in GitHub. It's simple (markdown), searchable, versioned and all in one place.

Oh, and free, portable and highly available while hosted by someone else.
This guy did this to the US gov but would never do it to China or Russia. They are not on the safe safe playing field.
They were very slow. The important thing is they didn't feel sluggish, at all.

It took Android phones many many years to even approach feeling as responsive and smooth and indicative of whether input has actually registered as the original iPhone, just scrolling through stuff and navigating around the OS.
Tech at the time didn't even try on that front.

Featureless yes, but it could do enough to almost right away replace my iPod, Palm, and Nokia. One device instead of three was just too good to pass up.
Firstly, I am not making sweeping claims. I am making a very narrow, specific common sense claim. I have not seen a single paper that refutes the safety benefits of a rider wearing a helmet. Helmets reduce brain injuries. Does this need a citation?

Secondly, there are a lot more than two factors at play to make the "cyclists killed per billion of km of bicycle travel" number. Culturally bikes need to be accepted. I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
I want to drive. Just not to work (or the shops, or anywhere else on a daily basis).
> I think this kind of title is trying to do exactly that, or at least, that's how I took it

I took the exact opposite: This article is describing an alternative to RiiR, so that RiiR is avoided when not needed.
Which book? I'm just starting the O'Reilly book, coming from Python
I don't see what I did, mind explaining the joke?
In garbage collected languages, are there any objects on the stack? I’m not familiar with GC implementations, but at least theoretically everything is allocated on the heap. Maybe some implementations keep things on the stack as an optimization?
Six and a half years ago I launched https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/, a book to teach people how to integrate Stripe with their Rails app. It generated almost $80k of revenue, mostly front loaded but with a really long tail.

Recently I turned off sales because I was feeling more and more guilty about not having time to update it, and now that I work for Stripe updating it involves a layer of approval.

Of course, now I work for Stripe so I'd say it was a success :)
”There has never been this level of government overreach -- if only because of the technology involved. Never has it been like this. Or at least, never has a government survived this”

They always has been overreach. This is not new.
"leaders arise naturally, and they don't always match the org chart. Wise managers let those people shine"

Two points I see here.

1. managers are placed above the real leaders artificially
2. leaders arise without any formal process

The first point is what systems like Holocracy want to eliminate. The second point is what Holocracy leads to, some people following leaders and nobody really knows who that leader is.

My idea was to decouple the orga/bureaucracy stuff from management and create a new team assistant role, so things can go on orderly and there is someone to talk to.

The second part was creating some kind of process that helps to make decisions, so no "hidden leader" can wreak havok in the background.
You could say I run an import business. I import mainly Chinese cellphones and gagdets that are not officially distributed in my country and even after taxes I can sell them at an attractive price via Facebook marketplace and a local equivalent to Craigslist. I make twice what I make in my day job as an engineer. I'm aware that one day I might not be able to continue (regulations, taxing, etc) so I'm not going too crazy about it.
There is a big difference between 1) admitting difficulty in discerning a more-or-less truthful version of events, and 2) simply throwing up your hands at the idea of objective truth.

And why, if all "news" is simply fact-free narrative, have you chosen to believe the the Trumpian narrative? Do you believe that all news that casts a negative light on POTUS is simply fabricated?
I would like to add my 2 cents,

TBH I don't see a future where RIIR every piece of software would make sense, and I think you sort of put it in there somewhere in your comments.

But yes I do see that for many it would and for those, RIIR would IMHO be an incremental process of oxidizing your project to the point that there's nothing left but Rust.

Writing something from scratch and waiting for it to finish is the biggest problem we face, cause eventually the will to continue with the effort just dies.
But creating a meaningful ground not just some "safer" bindings does help in inviting others to help share the effort as well.

So hopefully people will be smart and identify what they should do for their projects, should it be a rewrite or should it be a new feature that you write in Rust. :)

And no I don't think bindings are the solution to anything, they serve no purpose in Rust community as a long term measure, you shouldn't have to sacrifice safety and/or performance incase of high level language.
The Immutable Bank
Wouldn't wanna jump to conclusions from a single tweet, without hearing the other side of the story. Like i have no idea how NYT internal security organization is structured and what the bigger picture is.

Employees that send out critical tweets on the day they are let go are typical in an emotionally driven mode. So, I'm sure we will hear more soon.
Ask HN: As serious readers, how important are discussions for you?
Hi everyone!

As a serious reader, how important are discussions for you? I love reading and I often find myself in the following situation:

1) Read a really great book i.e., Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (amazing read btw, 10/10 would recommend)

2) Find someone to have meaningful, deep discussions with (someone who has also read the book)

3) Profit.

Unfortunately, #3 comes rarely. `:(`

I'm in the midst of developing an idea (http://qitab.club -- just landing page with additional details) which is trying to solve the following problems:

1) Difficulty finding people who are reading the same book to discuss with

2) Book clubs, which are great but have their own pace and their own roadmap

I've tried finding book clubs but they always have their own roadmap and there are usually 100s if not 1000s in a single group. So, I'm trying to develop
something where you can answer discussion questions for yourself and later, form small groups (the app helps with this) to discuss the book with.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and learn about the problems you face for your discussions.

Thanks for your time!
If I'm interpreting "Tricks in beam search to force rhyme schemes" correctly, the idea is to filter the beams and only keep those which correspond to the chosen scheme. You don't have to use beam search to be able to do that; you could also rollback the generation process whenever it doesn't rhyme and try again with a different alternative.
Is it illegal on a national level? I see people do it here in Amsterdam still on a daily basis.
Another distraction from politicians!

The issue for me and many other folks is not taking the data - but its the ability to remove specific users data COMPLETELY and FOREVER from all of the companies servers!

So far this capability and access are reserved to special branches within the government (3/4 letter agencies etc).

Every human should be able to wipe off their own digital footprint forever!
But that kind of makes no sense. It'll be completely out of context and it's not going to provide much value. Wet can't you just link to your Twitter on mastodon?
Quantum leap in computing as scientists claim 'supremacy'
> Which is arguably, at least in part, actually in opposition to this

Disagree. Today, questions about persistence and portability are made by companies. Users have virtually no say.

Giving users say in the matter may mean some make bad portability decisions. But there is nothing fundamental to user-initiated portability that interferes with user-initiated deletion. Today, I can do neither with Facebook.
> there is no "news" anymore

Yes there is, and there are facts and truth.
Logically-speaking, why would you create people who will be a burden to a society in need for a longer period than people you could bring in from outside? It's a very similar issue to the adoption vs birth debate, which is exceedingly simple before emotional matters come into play: it's much better for society for childless couples to adopt parentless children.

Likewise, the answer to this immigration debate is exceedingly clear, until you throw overly emotional notions about culture and ethnicity and nationality into the mix.
Ross MacDonald is worth a look, too.
Because the removed moderator moderated a site on religious practice (among other sites moderated), it is possible the proposed gender pronoun standard might conflict with the moderator's profound beliefs and non-negotiable practices.

My impression from reading the resignations of other moderators is the proposed gender pronoun standard may affront a moderator's beliefs regarding free speech. In other cases, the resignations seem to reflect a long growing general unhappiness with StackExchange and a need to move on. The code of conduct proposal creates an opportunity to do so with dignity.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 – The Dark Eye – Official Game Master Mode Campaign
I believe the contacts list you’re referring to is generated by AirDrop based on nearby contacts

The 12 year old girl across the street who helps me walk our dogs on a regular basis (hence why she's in that bar), whose father works for Google, and has an Android phone is most certainly not showing up due to AirDrop when I'm in my living room.

And I'm with parent comment: I DO NOT WANT 12 year old girls to be one accidental button push away from inappropriate content. Hell, I don't want to explain to my bluegrass pickin' buddies why I sent them an Ikea link, either.
Exploring Chaos Engineering with Gremlin Co-Founder and CTO Matthew Fornaciari
A Guide to the Must-Know DevOps Tools and Applications
Yeah we're updating that at the moment, the site isn't a big priority so we don't have anybody full time on it.

Will be fixed in a week or so.
IBM's head of research had a pretty confident statement the other day:
"I’m convinced there are more quantum computers working here than the rest of the world combined, in this building," Dr. Gil said.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/science/quantum-computer-...
Energy doesn't scale with distance in that way, with quantum mechanics. A "mismatch in size" (roughly speaking) will result in a different quantum efficiency, not a lowered energy, and also keep in mind that DNA is a highly coiled molecule so the resonance frequency could be deceptive. The straightened length of DNA in a cell is on the length order of meters. (Though that doesn't mean that it will resonate with meter long waves, it will have a higher efficiency with wavelengths much longer than a micron)
and be able to delete it COMPLETELY and FOREVER!
Then you should make an effort to change the law and not just complain and try to get away with breaking the law. Until the law has been changed the president should stay firmly within it.
Yes, that’s what it’s supposed to mean on both platforms. It does sometimes show up when you had already downloaded something and then flash the OPEN button.
There are many flavors of beam search - I have found that for adding explicit checks and constraints (for example rhyme constraints or certain pivot words) the resulting proposals are generally a lot better. Even with simple markov chains I see pretty diverse behavior depending on beam search style.

Some of the better ones I used were variants of diverse beam search, and stochastic beam searches usually combined together. The "classic" / pure variant has generally not been as useful in generative modeling for me, it tends to collapse to basically one or two effective candidates (with maybe some filler words changed) fairly quickly.

Also it seems to generally work better for me in conditional generation than in unconditional generation (e.g. charRNN / some uses of GPT-2). However, things like the "repetition problem" can be removed by construction if you are willing to hack in the beam search just a little bit. See https://badsamples.tumblr.com/post/160777871547/stochastic-s... (stochastic, diverse beam search w Markov iirc) vs https://badsamples.tumblr.com/post/160767248407/a-markov-arg... (fixed beam search, where I didn't try to remove repetition or anything special, same Markov setup)

Sometimes I also manipulate probabilities with masks and things directly, and that also combines fine with beam search in the experiments I have done.

Nucleus sampling works well, and if you don't want to control or constrain the output in unconditional generation I don't know that beam search really does much. But for conditional generation, or post-hoc hacks to get more control over a generator I find beam search variants really useful. Especially combined with a specifically conditional architecture.

For example, conditioning the language model on a particular bag-of-rhyme-words + (stochastic, probably) beam search to force rhyme pairs at the start and end of lines, probably further modified by input and output masks to "blank out" invalid tokens and tell the model which tokens will be blanked out. I've used some blend of these tricks in speech, music, and text experiments and it can be helpful if you have structure that is important to replicate and a simple model, with simple sampling just isn't replicating the necessary structure.

EDIT: One practical reason to do this would be plagiarism detection, especially if fine-tuning a small corpus. There are ways with guarantees by construction (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pierre_Roy2/publication...) but simple setups using beam searches and tries can also do constraint checks for n-grams of certain lengths. Concretely, set up tries for 1-2-3-4-...-nminus1-grams, which are considered "valid" transitions, then set a "bad" trie for n-grams. Check these tries during generation, and throw out any candidates which violate the "bad" trie, but still match in the good one.

See the line of Max Order work from the Sony CSL lab (formerly run by Francois Pachet) for some examples of this.
All those things require certain skills and whatnot though. If someone has a good thing going and doesn't want to plunge into the abyss, I'd say good on them. The abyss is full of pitfalls and ways to lose life savings and go into major debt when the lucrative side gig can no longer pay for the vision. Employment is at least guaranteed no debt, especially while the lucrative side gig is going. Correspondingly, when they have this good thing going, they're not being a drag on society. Their employer is still finding value in them too. To those who want to take the plunge and risk it all, that's cool too. On HN, even honourable. But it doesn't have to be the only way.
Ah, I see! So yeah, this isn't something the book covers, so that would not be helpful.

In this case, the hash ends up being raw bytes. So the question is, what are you trying to do with this hash? Being a bunch of bytes, this may not be valid UTF-8 (and in this case, is not ASCII, let alone UTF-8). One option is to encode to base64:

use sha2::{Sha256, Digest};
use base64;

fn main() {
let mut hasher = Sha256::new();
hasher.input(b"hello world");
let result = hasher.result();
let encoded = base64::encode(&result);

assert_eq!("uU0nuZNNPgilLlLX2n2r+sSE7+N6U4DukIj3rOLvzek=", encoded);
}

But yeah, you can't exactly "get a string" out of a random bag of bytes unless you know how you want that bag of bytes to be represented, encoding wise. That's not exactly a satisfying answer, but such are strings!
One of the complaints, in the article, is not like the others. The people that have been buying Pixel phones, expecting to have unlimited storage, to find out with the latest device Google forces your content to be compressed, do seem to have been tricked. If there's an expectation there, they have the duty to disclose it.
Oh no, it's not available, maybe you could rewrite your website in rust to handle the load? ;)

...this is tongue-in-cheek comment. I do agree with the author, "rust rewrite" alternative of wrapping c library is way better in many cases for well established or legacy libs. However it depends on the momentum you can bring - as pure rust implementation for widely used areas can benefit from compiler grinding through it. I can see rust written low level libraries used across all high-level languages in the near future.
I'm pretty skeptical of personal projects for things like this but this looks very compelling. Thanks for sharing.
I agree completely. If we can make energy ~10x cheaper, I think we can eliminate poverty globally up to a pop of around 50 billion or more.
13.1 is out now, and it's pretty slick.
Sure, but I think you should compare the incentives between the two situations.

A teacher doesn't have a real incentive to hand off your child to a stranger.

A company holding a large amount of user data has the opportunity to make millions or billions of dollars if they are allowed to sell it as they please. And they would likely do everything in their power to do so if they thought they could get away with it. That is why I think it's such a slippery slope that we should avoid all together.
Can you share numbers airing how much you Male yearly from this?
If you're going to allow cheating on calibration then it's trivial to achieve "quantum supremacy": simply precompute the answer and call that "calibration"!
I don't think this passes even the sniff test. The shifting policies of the US seem to be driven by politicians, not some "intelligence agencies" boogeymen.
You do own it. You can copy paste your posts around as much as you want. Does Twitter have to put in work to make it easier for you for no benefit of their own though?
Bioethics is in this case exceedingly silly. There is a necessity to cross the line here as you may not go forward with understanding without growing that spontaneous complex system. This is not to disregard concerns but you really have to play with these systems to understand consciousness even. The future bulk of sentiences of all kinds may benefit from the new experimental paradigm here. Reactionary bioethics is as detrimental to progress as its antithesis in bad ethics.
Not if they use up all the energy in the visible universe or they need so much power they collapse and form a black hole.

Real quantum computers should be able to do calculations that are that powerful, assuming we can prove the best classical algorithms are really exponential.
At issue, as I understand it, is whether the results from the 53-bit simulation (which would take 10,000 years, or 2.5 days, depending on who you believe) are valid or whether they are just so much junk because they haven't been calibrated and rely on calibrations that may or may not generalize. Kalai responds to Peter Shor making similar critiques in the comment threads in the blog, but it seems it comes down to clarifications on methodology, so may not be a fatal defect.
I don't disagree with you is that the thesis of the article is "don't re-write something in Rust."

What I was trying to say is that I think the title is making a joke; it's saying "how to re-write something in Rust badly", because well, it's not re-writing it in Rust at all.
Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have data-driven prices; understanding your audience
As mentioned by others, you need to convert the bytes to a String. `Sha2` provides a helper function for that: `hasher.result_str()`.

EDIT: sorry I don't know which docs I was looking at, I can't find it in the current version.
>One of our customers thinks they're paying for a team of 6, but it's actually just me.

Isn't that fraud?