skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Information theoretically speaking, how do you generate a "synthetic" dataset (as the article calls it) with the same fidelity as an original dataset without having access to a critical basis set of the original?

Information theoretically speaking, this is impossible. The synthetic dataset will always have exploitable mathematical properties in a way non-synthetic dataset will not. It will open up the trained model to easy adversarial attacks.
Google Loved Me, Until I Pointed Out Everything That Sucked About It
When people choose AWS, they do not need only virtual machines. They need the whole range of products that AWS has to offer, and that range is huge.
>Would you say that a thousand houses "leaked their owner's data" (presence information) if someone went by ten thousand specific homes and rang their doorbells to test if someone is home based on information they got from a third party?

That's not what's the headline says, and that's not what TFA says. Someone "leaked" a list of valid credentials to Ring accounts. A better analogy would be if someone collected ten thousand keys they found around the city, tried them on every lock they came across, and then created a map showing which keys worked on which locks. And provided an infinitely-copyable keyring to go along with the map.

Ring says they're not responsible for the data being out there, and that's probably true. But the data is out there, and that's a problem for the people on the list.
"Faster. Slower. How We Walk Depends on Who We Walk With, and Where We Live — Men tend to walk differently with other men than with women. And Americans walk faster with children, whereas Ugandans move more leisurely."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/well/move/faster-slower-h...

Article is a summary of this paper ("Children are not like other loads: a cross-cultural perspective on the influence of burdens and companionship on human walking"):

https://peerj.com/articles/5547/
I had to dig to get any type of feedback on my interviews, and even then it wasn't clear on what I needed to do to improve.
HMTL was a bad idea that just kept sprouting cancerous growths on top of itself. Just like the author recommends not using non-web fonts, we honestly don't need much markup beyond "monospace", "em", "strong", "title 1-5", and "p". Everything else HTML does is a huge distraction.

In the past thirty years, there have only been a few actual kinds of content:

- Article

- Comment

- Reference manual

Nothing really deviates from this. If it does, then it's probably in the "application" domain and deserves all that javascript stuff.

I imagine a new semantic web inspired content type that bakes in permanent content URLs, author signatures, and supports sharing P2P and rich archival:

<article>
<id>
(Computed immutable content hash and signature. Subsequent revisions
will invalidate this and require new content hashes. Links can be made
to the old version.)
</id>
<authors>
(metadata, homepage, public key)
</authors>
<contents>
<title> Semantic Web was actually brilliant </title>
<body>
<h1>The Web was Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
</body>
</contents>
</article>

It can be a really simple model. No divs or presentational CSS or anything. (Well, maybe some support for LaTeX and I18N.) The client decides how it looks, which is how it always should have been.

If every entity in the universe has an ID, they can link to each other in a distributed fashion. It won't matter if the original source URL goes down as long as someone somewhere has a cache.

It's also probably better to binary encode these (protobuf or something). Images and media could be inlined instead of href'd.

Instead of building on the layer cake, we should take a moment to reflect on what we're trying to do. We have a lot of history and bad evolution that we can garbage collect and streamline.

If our objective is to publish and share content, a lightweight version of the semantic web is the way to go.

Oh, and check out my follow-up to the author:

<article>
<id> (my own post's content hash) </id>
<parent> (the author I'm responding to) </parent>
<author> me </author>
<contents>
Hey you! I disagree!
</contents>
</article>

Again, these can be distributed on a web. It can be p2p, federated, or live atop the classical WWW. It doesn't matter. The clients can richly use the semantic data model.

The anger for disappearing content, walled gardens, and AMP will eventually reach a boil. As technologies go, the pendulum is always swinging. This is the direction we'll eventually head back to.
First discussed in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359542

A large Show HN in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640336
And Zig!
> I don't think that's how probability works.

It actually is. Currently the empirical distribution for the likelihood of ET sightings stands as a big ass step function that reaches 100% at zero sightings. It's exactly equal to the likelihood of seeing santa. There is no way around it.

> Comparing to Santa Claus without taking into account things like laws of physics/magic/supernatural

Your assertion is simply wrong. So far the odds you come across an ET is a big fat zero. That's because in reality zero ETs have been confirmed to exists. There is no way around it. You may argue that there might be theoretical models that suggest X or Y but reality does not lie and ETs are as frequent as flying spaghetti monsters and santa claus, thus it makes as much sense to pin the blame on santa claus and the flying spaghetti monsters as ETs.
Or SingleFileZ files which can be viewed without installing any extension https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ.

Edit: it can also auto-save pages, like SingleFile.
FWIW, Peanut butter and a drizzle of honey on rye is one of my goto sandwiches...
Show HN: A name generator for your next startup, business or side-project
Not everyone is in the “money is no object” startup economy. Outside of tech small businesses are actually small.
Appreciate the silent downvotes.

Luckily it was just a day or two ago that Google documents showed they might shut GCP things down in a few years if they still trail behind AWS and Azure...
E Ink Introduces “Print-Color” Displays
What was it JFK said about the consequences of making nonviolent revolution impossible again? Because it's starting to look like Modi and the BJP want to be dragged out of office and put up against the wall.
Unfortunately, for this use case the attacker that users are worried about are also the ones that will be installing the bootloader on the server in the first place. I don't see, from a computer science point of view, a process for verification that can't be emulated by the system that runs it.
Of our seven episodes only one hasn't been a product of me or Jon: an interview with Armin Ronacher about using Rust in production (https://rustacean-station.org/episode/004-rust-in-production...). Though we're about to publish our second externally-produced episode tonight, an interview with the creator of static site generator named Zola (née Gutenberg).

Plenty of people say tell us they're going to contribute, but you know how life gets in the way. :) We're not bothered by having a low-volume or irregular release schedule, this is just a fun side project for us.
The Decade of Design: Why UX/UI design is having its moment in tech
True this rate will get worse over time.
They may have just wanted a fancy eyehole, but it DOES allow spying on the neighborhood.
I believe the point was collective action of citizens leading to governmental action to enforce corporate action.
>How have you heard [heat] defined [other than "mostly through a solid"]?

Usually something like: Heat moves via matter or energy. For example, air, water, electromagnetism...

It seems to add no value to arbitrarily say "mostly solids" rather than just say it moves via a medium. At worst it's misleading, especially when said directly by scientists, not simply written by pop-sci journalists.

>>...[it's a purely hyperbolic statement]

>Obviously. And I do believe it was meant to be taken as such.

Hyperbole is part of language, but it's used more often by politicians. I consider it counterproductive for researchers to speak this way relating to their results. Others seem to agree:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/30/study-hyperbole-is-in...

>>Is that because quantum mechanics wasn't being taught 25 years ago
>[20 years ago it didn't seem like something new]

Right, that was a rhetorical question. The high level concepts behind it haven't been new to PhD level physicists, even more than 25 years ago (Wheeler).

>They [used] an anecdote...shouting through a vacuum...[you said] it was hyperbolic, [so how does it make sense to question the "depth" of their thinking]

No, I said their present day quote was hyperbole, not the PhD defense. During the latter, I would not consider it professional for the panel to ask hyperbolic questions or for them to be answered that way. Not in the context of academic research, when potentially years of work and someone's future may be on the line.

I get that they want press, attention, maybe investment. Indeed, hard work yielding good results deserve recognition. However in my opinion that kind of self promotion and exaggeration is better served from unattributed copy and PR initiatives, rather than by direct quotes from the lead researchers.
Tech Articles from 2019 to Revisit
1a: Yes. the second we have parity, we'll start turning it on by default for private rooms. We'll probably start with DMs, and we'll probably do a fairly soft roll-out to sneak in some final testing. Current status is that we have E2E Search working (github.com/matrix-org/seshat); we have E2E cross-signing almost done (https://dashboard.lant.uk/#/plan?epic=vector-im/user-stories... we have eyes on the remaining causes of undecryptable messages and are working through them. We're aiming for Jan.

3: Interesting. It could be a very temporary CPU saturation on the Matrix.org CPU master. We're working on sharding the master per-room to mitigate this, but it's going to be a few months to land.

4: Looks like there is a bug for this already - please upvote https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10649.

Testing & reporting bugs is absolutely invaluable - thank you.
In Australia at least, peanut butter and honey sandwiches are a thing. The taste is actually not bad, and it is possibly healthier than peanut butter and jam sandwiches.
Make sure that archive.org - the Internet Archive - catches your website in "The Wayback Machine". Catering to that is a pretty good strategy for archiving for at least the next couple of decades, considering that institute's staying power.

And on that note - consider donating to them.
Arbitrary programs that terminate on every input (no infinite loops), and with a few important caveats:

1. Random access (reading input-dependent memory address) must be simulated with linear scans of the array.

2. Input-dependent branches must be transformed as follows: both branches are evaluated, and the side effects must be combined using the branch condition (e.g. x <- xc + new_x(1-c)).

3. Loops with input-dependent bounds must be unrolled to their maximum number of iterations (this is not always easy to compute).

In general you would probably write your programs in a special-purpose language that is easy to compile for this model of computation. Efficiency can suffer for some algorithms -- sorting winds up being O(n lg^2 n) instead of O(n lg n), for example.

Also the best FHE schemes are still nowhere near practical for the majority of computations people care about.
ContractPatch: Supporting Maintainers in Employment Agreements
> If you are aware of a possibility for efficient video compression that avoids this problem, tell the HN audience etc...

This is a bad comment/reply - upstream wasn't complaining about the codec but about the usability (of the devices).
That new airplane company is spelled Comac.

I expect they will eventually take a large marketshare starting with China, rest of Asia, and Africa.

This will really hurt the economies of scale for both Boeing and Airbus.

They probably have a lot of smart engineers at Comac and very strong government backing. Within 10 years I expect them to produce planes that makes a lot of economical sense for operators and are really liked by passengers for comfort.

Maybe the FAA will find reasons to keep these planes from US skies, but Boeing will suffer as their market share declines.
Our EC2 is cheap. Our RDS however...
It's interesting how a number of Facebook engineers are willing to comment on what they work on, while the company itself refuses to provide any official statements.
I guess we just prioritised working on cross-signing etc rather than adding in UI for this. Sorry; it's an oversight.
Not asymmetrical, in my opinion. Companies are holding all the cards, otherwise I wouldn't be looking for a job in the first place. I believe that someday there will be too few jobs for all the people on this planet.
When was the last browser change that broke things like simple news websites????
And a concern for a long time as well. Witness the Dead Sea scrolls, the many things literally carved into stone, etc.
I think it's less that people assume that it can never be improved and more that they find something else that is "good enough" and they won't leave that ecosystem until it stops being good enough. Generally speaking, I've found others (and myself, at times) don't re-evaluate their options until there's a need for them to upgrade or its brought to their attention by someone else.
Internships are tricky for a few reasons, I think. For one, a lot of college students tend to have very generic/entry level engineering skill sets (not really any fault of their own) so it becomes quite difficult to differentiate oneself from the hundreds or thousands of other people who are applying for that one internship slot.

I think a lot of folks tend to only focus on the large, well known companies when applying to internships, which I think exacerbates the first problem. I've told some friends who are still in college to try and apply for places beyond the major Silicon Valley companies and that pretty much any company that they can think of 1) Leverages software engineering heavily 2) Has an internship program.

I think it'd be interesting to see a "wage-distribution" style chart of who gets internships in Fortune 500 companies. When I say that, I don't mean actual wage, but moreso "what percentage of engineering students are getting what percentage of internships" and similar questions.
Not referenced in this article, but something I've been thinking about while reading about the security kerfuffle, why are people putting cameras in their kids rooms?

I get the exterior, but why are they spying on their kids? I can't think of a security reason for it, it's just super controlling and creepy.
AWS likes to pawn their customers off to Certified Partners for outsourced solutions.

I'm a software engineer who went the specialist route because it does take real skill to do this well. Yes, I am embedded on a team of old school netops people now, but I'm in charge of all of this and I get to drag them kicking and screaming in to the modern world.

Specialists are worth it if you find the right one.
From a UX experience, I think you'd be more successful if you would let the user experience everything your site has to offer and if they decide to continue (or stay with the site, save their prefs and eventually - become paying customers) - give them an option to create an account, because according to the latest research in UX, any login walls (even the FREE account ones) are detrimental. Check the article I linked above.
> and NOWHERE IN THE SOURCE CODE IS THIS FACT DOCUMENTED.

Nowadays that I use VS code with GitLens, each line of code automatically shows me its latest commit message, just hover that info and I have the date, author and a link to the changes which usually give some useful context to understand why and how some particular line was edited. Very useful!

Too many times have I seen well documented code only to later realize that the code was edited with no updates to the comments, now useless and a source of time waste...
Robert Downey Jr Launches YouTube Doc Featuring AI Baby
Looks like this is written in TexInfo. Is there a HTML version or the texi source available?
My list isn't quite that long, but I'm using Franz to put most of them into a single window (albeit, with many tabs).

Sadly, it doesn't work with iMessage, nor Signal.

I just wish it was a native app, although I appreciate that'd make the effort involved 100x more.
With all the means to communicate with one another, are we getting better or worse at it?
>I'm not sure I understand the issues you're talking about but many military aicraft are deliberately built to be dynamically unstable and need constant software control to fly.

Some specific fighter variants are built this way, yes. But the risk tolerance for a single-seat fighter aircraft that has to fly combat sorties is very different than for a civilian airliner with hundreds of people onboard.
Carved stone is a bit more durable that that nice Myspace page was, however. Yes it was not widespread and was difficult to setup but millennia of duration is nice.

I think that the medium, be it a hosting site or you own domain, will fail. What we need is maybe : a naming scheme that can transfer to different people (replicated files on different servers indexed by content hash? Aka anonymous ftp mirrors ... ) and common media ie readable by anyone, gracefully degrading.
It is true. Many stupid programming design, and other stuff, results slowly.

They say, type two words and push F3, well, you can implement a telnet (or SSH) service which provides such a program.

Or, better may be, what I thought of "SQL Remote Virtual Table Protocol". You can access remote data using local SQL, allowing you do make cross-referencing data, both with the same and with different data sources.

Of course, there is still going to be network latency regardless what you do. But many local programs are still slow (as many comments mention), also due to doing too many things, I think. (Maybe network latency may make it a bit slow even if you use telnet to implement the old interface now, but not as slow as with HTML, which is just bad for this kind of things.)

Modern user interfaces I think are also bad, and makes it slow.

I hate touch screens, and slightly less hate mouse. Command buttons and toolbar icons are bad and keyboard is better, I think. There are some uses for mouse, but it is way overused.
My thought is that they don't say "no" because they are waiting for their top pick to confirm or deny.

When I did hiring, I had several top candidates take a different position, so I had to go to a second or even third choice.
UCS Satellite Database Update: More Than 2,200 Active Satellites
New type of explosion spotted on sun's surface
Not only is it sort of sneering (if you're that small)

Lambdas always free tier is 1 million requests per month and 400Gb/seconds per month.

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

It takes a lot to have any meaningful lambda bill. That in no way is meant to be an insult. If you’re spending even $100/month on lambda, you’re running a successful website.

It's hard enough starting a business without learning a whole new tech stack.

If you know how to write a program and create a function that takes two parameters - a payload and context argument - you know lambda. You can write it in the console if you’re using Python or Node and just run it from there.

Even if you don’t want to learn that, you can host your standard C#/WebAPI, Python/Django/Flask, Node/Express API on lambda just by adding code and changing your endpoint.

Several comments focused on it'd just be better to start off with a Rails app, it's quick, it's easy and it's understood.

There is also code to wrap a Rails app and run it on lambda....

And really, is lambda appropriate for anything more than a very focused niche app? I mean, try writing all the usual things you need to slot into a SaaS on it, billing, user management, signup, admin reports, admin functionality, emails, multi-tenancy, custom domains, etc. etc. Even a 20 user, internal, enterprise app needs most of that functionality

Yes. Especially in today’s world of client side frameworks and microservices, you host your static assets like Javascript, css, and HTML in S3 and call server side APIs hosted on lambda.

Put on top of that, you're forced to use a particular, proprietary tech stack and lock yourself into something that might very well die in a couple of years.

Well, two things. What’s more likely to die in two years / your startup or AWS?

Second, you can host your standard API just by adding four lines of code and you don’t have to make any changes to host it in Docker or on a VM.

There is a way to do this in every language that lambda natively supports. For instance for Node:

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express

I have a Node/Express app that gets deployed to both lambda and Fargate (Serverless Docker) when I push it. The only difference is that lambda uses one entry point and Docker uses another.

I’ve done something similar with C#

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/deploy-an-existing-as...

Where it is deployed to both lambda and a Windows server running IIS.

I can be a lot more productive with all the resources that AWS has to offer when all I have to do is provision resources with a CloudFormation template and instead of doing the grunt work of infrastructure administration I can concentrate on writing software.
"I don't even know any web applications that have remained similarly functioning over 10 years"

I have a WordPress instance that has functioned flawlessly since 2007. I would call WordPress a web application (though I realize this is not the bespoke sense of the term that the OP has in mind).
I don't know if this holds up so well for 500 Internal Server Errors, since these are usually indicative of something unexpected and needing to be fixed on the server.

Usually a client retrying a 500 error is the expected behavior, since over time that 500 error will tend to become some other status once the problem is addressed.
This is not more or less absurd as all of the articles I saw after the movie talking about it as if it was a real place and trying to make the claim that it has anything to do with reality.

My guess is a web developer used this for testing. The administration isn't in the business of making individual website updates.

But let's defy all logic once again...because Trump is so hated.
I'd add that development is also pretty foolproof since there are charts with precise times and concentrations for every known film and developer combo. There's also stand development which is actually fool proof.
Hmm, for a small retailer, Shopify offers the same transaction fee as you would get from Square / Stripe which is about 3%.
When you kick out the engineers and call in the Harvard MBA's it's a near certainty you'll start to lose altitude it's just a question of how fast the descent will be. In this case it was very fast indeed.
If it's just a baby then I'd want to keep an eye to not fall of the bed. Door would be closed to reduce the noise. That said, I never did it... just thinking.

When they are older then I don't have a good reason.
That's true. Almost all my recommendations are live music, which is the correct interpretation of what I use youtube for.