skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Read about stoics and negative visualization then give it a shot. Live in that uncomfortable mental space of life without your parents. Not to dull their life and your time left with them, but the opposite! The stoics used negative visualization to appreciate what they had. Many people mistake the stoics for being morbid, but it should work for most people to enhance their time and ability to stay present with people they love. It is a profound and different way to live compared to how most people seem to approach mortality, but it works well for me. When they pass, there will still be grief, but you will take their passing with the sure knowledge you optimized your time with them.
I read the first link, and I don't like the presentation for two reasons - they define secondhand smoke as tobacco smoke, so by definition (e.g.) living in a house with a fireplace that's used all the time doesn't count. And grouping living with a smoker with all other incidental exposure does not seem legitimate to me. It's like saying because workers in a popcorn factory sometimes get a horrible lung disease from artificial butter, you are at significant risk because you eat it a few times a year.

So I'm not saying there's anything out and out false there, but it is what I think of as (more or less) "fake news". My conclusion is that yes, it is bad for parents to be smokers, but if we're not going to take all children away from them for being unfit, then how much less should we go on a holy war against smokers in general for their impact on strangers?

I'm old enough that I remember when nonsmoking sections in restaurants were right next to the smoking sections. It's nice to have it banned indoors, but that's the point at which we've gone far enough, and people who claimed there was a slippery slope turned out to be prophetic.
How is it different from being the angular / vue.js edition of react native? Does it implement its own render & view layer in c++ like flutter does?
I didn't have airplane engines in mind when I wrote that (tanks = vehicles) but given the thread context and your airplanes reference I see how that could happen, same thing with 'block heaters' elsewhere in the thread, I take it that is in the context of other vehicles (heavy equipment, tractor-trailers, buses and so on).

And yes, some airplane engines use gas but the majority of them runs something that in constituency is closer to regular diesel than to gas.

Kersone is #1 diesel!

AV gas is another matter entirely but I'm not aware of any jet that would use it, though that might be a fun thing, and given that turbines can run on almost anything combustible it will probably work to some extent but I don't think it will be a happy ending unless the engine is really designed for it.

Btw, this is an interesting start-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESdHyNtHpqs not cold weather but I'd hate to fly that in any conditions.
As a former bike commuter, the elephant in the room is safety and security. I put up with the abysmal bike lane network in LA, but my bike, along with everyone else's parked in the rack, was stolen from the gated and surveilled garage in my building. LAPD filed a report and that was that.

Even when I had my bike, I would never lock it out of sight. Cable lock or $200 U lock, they all fail.
This is fascinating and indeed quite deep. You've given me a lot of great perspective, thank you, there is clearly much I can learn here.
Two Important things that can make or break a product
Two Important things that can make or break a product?

Any guess?

Ok, let me put it in a more realistic manner, will you be able to store anything in a baseless jar?

No, without a base a jar is useless.

In almost all the blog posts we see people suggesting different channels for customer acquisition, how to optimize the CAC (customer acquisition cost), how to get 10x of ROAS (Return on Ad Spends) and the best marketing strategies to get 200%-500% of ROI.

If there is so much being done to optimize the campaigns cost, Why CAC for almost all the products has geared up to 10x for the last 5-7 years?

Simply because products with no value are placing competitive bids against products with value or no value. This ultimately creates a pricing benchmark for advertising platforms i.e. the lowest estimated bid for the first page, for the top of the page and for particular placement in publisher networks.

So if you got a baseless jar, there is no point putting in so much money but to add a base. Work on your product, iterate till the time you get product-market fit. Once you achieve it, work more closely with the customers who have already joined the journey with you.

I am talking about two critical things i.e. product-market fit and the users’ retention.
India Digital Payments Data – it's 24% of all retail payments now
If you are an iOS or Android developer already, learning dart vs the mess that is javascript seems more appealing. I would imagine something similar for non-JS backend developers.

Web devs are not the only kind of developer out there.
A single chip which supports more LTE bands is more expensive.
The Future of Audiobooks
Totally anecdotal, self report is bad, yada yada, but....

There are rare times when I feel my brain “opening”. Like maybe once or twice a year, I’ll be listening to an album, watching a movie, reading a book or a paper, and... I can’t really explain it except that it feels like my brain is absorbing everything. Not even that I am getting a photographic memory, but it just feels like the event is making an impression on every part of my brain. Like what’s happening in that moment is just becoming a part of me.
Canberra 43.6C and Penrith 48.9C smash temperature records
Also virtually all cheaters will try to claim that they did nothing and the system just failed.
Conservative in this sense means something like 'resistant to deviation from established norms'. I think a lot of the headline-only readers take conservative to mean 'of the character of a specific political movement' which ironically seems more activistic than change resistant.
That's true with any transport that runs on the roads. Your car isn't filtering much.
it would be interesting to see a fork of C++ that only removed features every three years
Because there are many, many angry people with existing codebases that they would break, and you would get something like the python 2 to 3 saga.

iOS already pushes way too many breaking changes with every major swift release. A real break would be too much. They do it incrementally via things like jetpack compose or swift UI.
Did you think this or the other works mentioned are written for the machine learning community? They are written so the rest of society can understand what is happening despite mountains of hype to the contrary and the marketing of ML as magic.
The language is only a very small and trivial part. Most time is spent with learning the API that necessarily is app specific.
Yeah. AI will continue to develop at a predictable pace, but hysteria surrounding AI will increase to hinder it. Emotional arguments like "the founding fathers would never approve of non-human judges" will be co-opted by politicians who need those votes. I can see anti-AI movements becoming very large by 2029.

Maybe in the 30's automation becomes disruptive enough to the existing system that something akin to a revolution occurs on a global scale by the 40's.
Been seeing a guy in the neighborhood with an old schwinn mated to a chainsaw motor. Looks like a death trap putting that rotted frame under so much load.
Flutter is what I call the game engine design, that happens to simulate mobile UI toolkits. It's a native c++ render and view layer, so it has the potential to be as performant as native iOS & Android code.
Vote kicks rarely seen to work because the rest of the players don't know what is going on. A vote starts and you think "wait what, what did they do" even if someone says "they were cheating" most people playing wouldn't have seen it and have no idea if this is true.
https://semantic-ui.com would come to mind. There is also a well maintained react fork available.

Another one is https://bulma.io which is less blown up.
The article is not addressing what machine learning can and cannot do but how individuals and organizations conceptualize what machine learning can and cannot do.

It, as the current top comment mentions, is a philosophical rather than technical argument.

It doesn't matter if all machine learning can do is describe the current state of things of it is presumed by those interpreting the output to provide insight into some great and universal truth.

Most science degree programs have a philosophy of science course as a degree requirement. As an engineering faculty member I have found huge resistance to and equivalent course becoming part of engineering or computer science degrees. Those degrees, instead, take an apparoch to scientific/technical knowledge that is less science and more religion.

The comments here are a reminder why such courses have a place.
I think the main reason is that creating a so called "Black Box" model is faster and easier to some degree.

Its very similar to the argument kids make "Why do I have to learn how to do long division when I have a calculator?" or "Why do I need to show my work on the exam if I got the right answers?"

I tend to agree with the articles premise that any model being used in critical decision making should at the very least have a list of parameters and the weight given to each, no matter how long and complicated such a list might be.

I think eventually this will be the end result of most critical implementations of machine learning applications as they make their way through the courts, as I can't imagine a judge accepting the argument "The machine made a mistake, we are not sure why or the reason why is proprietary, but we are not responsible because the machine made the error".
Another great story of the ingeniousness of Soviet eavesdropping is "The Thing," which operated for 7 years or so and had no power supply.

Also known as "The Great Seal Bug."

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/thing/index.htm
TBH skimming the dart language, the only thing that was holding me back was the lack of optional types, and with dart 2.7 it looks like they've added it:

https://medium.com/dartlang/dart-2-7-a3710ec54e97
What makes you identify more with the kidnappers, rapists, and sex traffickers than the victims?
Being WW2, these were piston engines running avgas.
Wanggongchang Explosion
Yes you can do that, and get banned as soon as Apple finds out.
Yep totally true.

Then again 3cm of expanded polystyrene foam vs a metal box with a engine in it... probably like a surfer forgetting to replace their “anti-shark bite” medallion anyway.
The author writes:

>Machine learning systems are good at identifying cars that are similar to the cars they already know about. They’re also good at identifying faces that are similar to the faces they know about, which is why faces that are white and male are more reliably recognized by these systems — the systems are trained by the people who made them and the people in their circles.

But this seems like an absurd claim. Surely it's more likely that darker skin reflects less light than paler skin and so features are harder to detect on darker skin people. This explains why facial recognition works better on white people than on black people. Likewise women are more likely to wear makeup than men are and therefore are more likely to have a visually different face which could cause problems for facial recognition.

To assume that dark skinned people aren't involved in creating or testing facial recognition, or that women aren't, seems bizarre and vaguely racist/sexist. It's also a strange and I think poor assumption to think that the different accuracy rates for facial recognition on different demographics are due to a bunch of white dudes being too dumb to train their models on the faces of anyone but themselves.

The author also writes about how recommendation systems are "conservative" but to me it actually seems the opposite. Recommendation systems get you to stuff that you haven't tried before. They take what they know about you and progress you to new content or products.

For example, I used to listen to listen to a lot of country music on YouTube. Over time my recommendations evolved to include Irish folk music - which I quite like but would've never discovered without YouTube gradually testing and expanding my musical tastes.
That sort of rule of thumb works fine with an abled bodied sober and alert adult, but throw in someone with a disability, an elderly person, a toddler, and suddenly it makes far more sense to have the bike/moped on the road and just offer the gutter at the very least for a bike lane. A road bike can kill a toddler.
>Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me.

Can those people then get full refunds for any game they purchased? Because they're paying money for the game, which they are banned from playing.
There's a huge area of seemingly obvious user-centric products that don't exist simply because there isn't a working business model to support it.
> One important lesson I've learned in my career is never to run your own observability platform if you can afford for someone else (whose entire product is observability) do it for you.

Why is that?
Think about how many icons it would take to use up say 10GB.

256 x 256 x 3 bytes (24-bit color uncompressed) is ~200K. That's 50,000 icons. So you've only moved the question to why would Windows need 50,000 icons in raw format.
One thing missing from the benchmarks was one on iOS. I'm curious how the cross platform frameworks compare to iOS native, since iOS apps are not garbage collected typically.

Also startup time is another interest to me, I've heard flutter apps tend to have slower startup times.
A footnote: For Java devs out there, the Lucene codebase is a joy to read [0]. Esp, the APIs. Highly recommend it just for the documentation which is top-notch. Michael McCandless, Lucene's committer-in-chief, sometimes blogs about its internals [1].

[0] https://github.com/apache/lucene-solr/tree/master/lucene

[1] http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2019/10/concurrent-query-exec...
Smokers and the overweight vote.

Using my country as an example, any attempt to meddle with the universal healthcare system is treated with immediate and intense hostility by the voting public. The government floated the idea of introducing a $5 copay several years ago and it was met with almost unanimous contempt. The idea was promptly canned.
We generally want ML to imitate us (or human generated data), thus we teach it to do so. But there are also generative ML (like GANs) and simulation based ML (like AlphaGo) which can be more creative. There is nothing stoping us from letting agents evolve in a complex environment and be creative. It's just not commercially useful to do that yet. Doctorow writes like he doesn't understand much math behind ML, yet has strong opinions on it.

Every time a random number is involved in the training process (stochastic selection of mini batches, noise injection, epsilon-greedy action selection), a form of exploration is taking place, finding novel paths of solving the problem at hand. The mixing of noise with data is paradoxically useful, even necessary in learning.
What I did:

- Get a phone in its no Google account state.
- When it demands that you log into Google, choose "Later".
- Delete Google First time app. This prevents the registration thing from coming up again.
- Download F-Droid.
- Use F-Droid to download Fennic, which is a version of Firestorm.
- Deactivae most Google apps, Play Store, etc. Play Store Services may have to stay.
- Use F-Droid to download other stuff as required.

You now have a useful Android phone with no Google account.
The problem is that there's a huge skill difference in games like League of Legends. Matchmaking has made some players improve so much that if you throw them into community servers then other (weaker) players end up not having fun. This is less of a problem in a shooter, because there are no real penalties for dying (other than score), but in a game like LoL it quickly snowballs out of control.
If voting changed anything, we wouldn't be allowed to do it.
China-made UOS gets support from a domestic PC maker
Perhaps you could call it "integral controller" (like the I in "PID controller")? Because systems that have a memory behave like ones, and we are definitely in a feedback loop with those systems.

And, from what I remember from my control theory classes, the integral part of a controller introduces lag, inertia, generally making the output more resistant to input changes.

(Also note that the "non-conservative" Proportional and Derivative components in a PID by definition don't learn - they react to input and its change.)
The classic example of a redesign done right is with eBay.

eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over several months, they lightened the shade of yellow until it became white. [a]

This concept has been applied by many other "big" websites - Amazon, Dell, Google, and Yahoo come up as examples. [b]

[a]: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience

[b]: https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/
It tried:

> root ~# ps aux | grep btrfs ./bash-4.2.5/bash-4.2.5.bash.bash 377 1011 root 2 0 9:32 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/btrfs/initroot.sh : No such file or directory ./bash-4.2.5/bash-4.2.5.bash.bash 377 1006 root 2 0 9:32 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/btrfs/shm_btrfs_show.sh : No such file or directory ./bash-4.2.5/bash-4.2.5.bash.bash 377 1006 root 2 0 9:32 ? 00:00:00 /
Odds are that all these SSNs had been leaked from a bunch of other sources anyways. Why the “fuuuuuuuck”? This doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.
You know? Once upon a time i've done some freelance sysadmin for small businesses. So i installed a new fileserver and a networking gateway with least-cost router functionality for the phones, somewhere. When ready i asked what that big tower did, that stood aside unplugged. 'Nothing, that is just trash we haven't discarded yet.' Since the case had a nice design it seemed wasteful to me, and i took it back home. At home i plugged it into to some spare screen, and since it had a networking card into that also. When ready i rocked the big red switch it had with a satisfying clack into the upwards posistion and wanted to do something else at my other systems while it booted up (i thought). So i rolled, sitting on my chair, maybe 3 feet, and then heard a loud 'Ta-Daa!'. I looked sideways and barely saw how Word 6 and Excel 5 popped up, out of the corner of my eyes. I was dumbstruck!

I shut it down and repeated that, looking at my wristwratch.

FOUR SECONDS!

I couldn't believe that and tested maybe five times again. It took never more than 4 seconds from rocking the switch to WfW 3.11 Desktop with Word 6 and Excel 5 in autostart ready to use! It even got a DHCP address while being at it.

The thing is, at that time i had some Sun SparcStations, some HP PA-Risc Workstations, and assorted X86 PCs, one of them an AMD Athlon XP PR1800 overclcocked to PR2100 with 1.5
GB virtual channel memory SD-Ram, running NetBSD (because it just worked, don't ask). I felt very ahead of 'the curve'.

And then this trash came along and burst my bubble...

I sat there and only thought: 'what for?!'

Now some old Windows running atop of DOS isn't something to really envy, but in this combination of components, BIOS, drivers it got the job done without any hassle, FAST!

That was eye opening for me.
Do you have a harder time recognising black or women faces ? If you as human have no more problem, then your argument fail.

Or explained otherwise: then don't use techniques that depends on lightning reflection. The fact you use techniques that needs high lightning reflection means that you only care about the result with white faces and/or only tested fitness with white faces.... which is the piece main argument.
Cloudwatch. Insights makes it so much easier to query but be sure to log out JSON.
Ofcourse the scary thing is when decisions are being made that will affect a persons life but will never make it to the courts. Like the example of predicting loan defaults or parole releases, those decisions are made with little to no explination. As much as I hate regulations I think this may be a good place to legislate in order to protect those wrongly affected.

It makes me think about the mess the derivatives markets made in 2008
Ask HN: Pilot M90 Fountain Pen
Where can I buy a new unopened Pilot M90 foundation pen?

Any leads to collectors or reputable dealers much appreciated.
1. You have to keep your logging, monitoring, alerting infrastructure up yourself

2. You have to monitor, log, and alert on your that infrastructure yourself with something else

3. You usually have to spend more money, both in hosting and in developer/ops time, on getting something mediocre compared to a provider that exclusively does observability as a product

4. Logging etc are a commodity and you should have a really good reason to build or run something yourself if it is not your core competency

5. Observability is much harder than it sounds and providing a cohesive platform that ties log events to traces to metrics to alerts, and keeping it up and highly available is a hard problem that you shouldn't do if observability isn't your core competency/product
I did a bunch of courses too, mainly so my mum could parade Certs with Stanford stamped all over them in front of our family ;-). Other than that 100.0% grade in online machine learning or cryptography course is pretty useless.
Sure, but no matter what, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is". At the end of the day we merely tell these algorithms what is the case. No matter what goes on inside, they cannot output moral prescriptions.
Just because it's widely used doesn't mean it's good (see PHP). It's slow with single-threaded topics that usually max out around 25k msgs/sec, fragile with dropped connections, stalled queues, corrupted data, terrible clustering that breaks often and doesn't support sharding, has a silly HIPE mode where you can choose to compile the Erlang code for more performance which turns startup time into minutes, etc.

It's poor architecture and implementation. One of the worst products built with Erlang. It's hard to work on (for new contributors) while not really using any of the natural advantages of the language.

Redis supports pub/sub channels. It's very fast and if you already use it then it saves running another system.

Streaming log vs pub/sub is a fuzzy distinction and basically has no difference at this point. Publishers send to a topic and consumers listen. You can do the ephemeral pub/sub in Kafka by reducing retention to seconds, using a single partition per pub/sub topic, and having consumers listen from latest without a consumer group. Or use Pulsar which does both much more naturally.

Also I didn't mention but there are great commercial messaging products like AMPS [1] or Solace [2] if you need much more advanced features and support.

1. https://www.crankuptheamps.com/

2. https://solace.com/
> Not everything in the world has to be prescriptive.

Unfortunately we're still on the rise of the current hype cycle around Machine Learning, and prescriptive solutions are precisely what nearly every company who use the phrase "machine learning" are promising.
Honestly, I don’t think you need to defend your comment any further to appease anyone who would be potentially offended by reading it. “Do not knowingly film your sexual encounter(s)” period. It’s a general cautionary statement and should be treated as such.