skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a 3 year old pair of QC 35 (I), and actually prefer the ANC sensation and lack of city noises. I really do prefer this model from the dozens I tried precisely because their ANC seems be the strongest/best currently available. I don't see any advantage in the QC 35 II, only disadvantages with mandatory Google/Alexa. I'm not married to any particular brand.

Also, I've gone through 9-10 pairs of ear cushions. The first 3 I got free (which retail for an insane $35 each), and the rest I bought from AliExpress in bulk for $6 each, which are 80% as good as the originals.

The QC 35 really hates moisture. Ever since one episode where they got a bit too damp, any amount of humidity now causes one ear cup to whine/hum at a low volume before exploding to full, deafening, microphone-speakers PA-system-like feedback right in your ear. I suspect some corrosion/intermittent short on the PCB and I'll go full Louis Rossmann if it gets worse or the battery degrades too much. I'm not handing $400 to Bose, Apple or anybody every 2 years because of their greedy cash-grabbing engineering products to fail/be avoidably fragile. (Tim Cook really ruined basically ALL consumer electronics, small and major appliances because said brands who cargo-culted Apple's approach now treat customers like idiots, hiked prices on their over-designed, over-engineered, under-tested products. I just saw a CBC video on kitchen appliance in Canada and customers keep buying crappy, defect models in droves that fail just outside of the warranty. That looks like a Lemon Law class-action lawsuit waiting to happen IYAM. The original MBPs and the ones from 2012-2013 were fairly well-made and upgradable.)
Yeah I was a bit taken aback when reading that part and became increasingly concerned that the author didn't know what he was talking about.

Imagine your friend asks you to count the windows on a building, so you count the rows and columns and multiply them. When he asks you how you did it so fast, you tell him, and he responds with something like: "Oh, I didn't realize you were a Nihilist." He then explains that mathematics is immaterial, and therefore non-existent. You believing in such a thing apparently makes YOU the Nihilist?

No. Nihilism is not about holding supposedly "empty" beliefs. If anything, it's the opposite; Nihilism would hold that these beliefs in the immaterial are themselves empty. Your friend might be a Nihilist, but you certainly aren't.
>is that you DON'T own the cartridge and you DON'T pay for the cartridge. You pay for printed pages.

>pay the minimal 2USD for it (if I exceed the monthly printable 50 pages, I get another 10p/$1, or upgrade my subscription. Unused quota accumulates up to 100p), and I get a monthly email about the detailed pricing.

This model doesn't make sense to me. Why are you paying by the page and not by the amount of ink actually used?

That's like paying for internet by the number of webpages you visit as opposed to the bandwidth you use.

The ink is the product you are using. Unless they're supplying the paper too? It makes sense to charge by the page in a place like Staples or something, but as a subscription for a home printer it seems ridiculous to pay by the page.
Fair enough.

FWIW what you say matters a lot, pretty sure you have a ton of respect from a lot of engineers across multiple language communities (myself definitely included).

I definitely appreciate how difficult it is to be the "custodian" of a) a language community and b) an open source project within that community.
So here’s one thing about mathematical notation. If it uses similar symbols/scripts/subscripts that means that the objects are related, up to the minor difference expressed. So choosing “f” for everything is often a deliberate and well-motivated decision (Very much like naming variables). Doing that well is an art form.

Unfortunately, yes, it does take some time to get used to it (both reading, and generating such names), but IMHO it’s far better notation than otherwise.
"(Display Power Management Signaling) enables power saving behaviour of monitors when the computer is not in use."

For those not familiar.
Lack of good priors is definitely a weak spot for BNNs. I also like the concept of Generalization-Agnostic Priors. But...

> So viewed through this lens, BNNs with arbitrary priors are nothing more than an architectural decision. A BNN is just a neural network that maps its input to a distribution over outputs; the prior is just a hyperparameter of the model. Just making the network Bayesian bought us nothing. It will only be helpful if we find a good prior, and validate that we are actually doing accurate inference. If you personally believe that exploring this space of priors (similar to exploring the space of architectures or hyperparameters) is particularly promising, then that is a good reason to keep working on BNNs.

Isn't this overstating it a bit... Making the network Bayesian (even if the priors are generalization-agnostic) still bought us something: after training we have a posterior distribution over weights that contains both weights that generalize and weights that don't generalize. That's better than being unlucky and only having weights that don't generalize at the end of training. I'm not saying this advantage is easy to achieve in practice, or benefit from. But it's not nothing.

Also Bayesian inference as a framework has a distinct advantage over the usual aimless architectural twiddling that so much "research" seems to focus on: it's intellectually/mathematically sound.
I suspect in warm climates, the sun will save you the trouble of the defroster, especially if they fit it in the morning when it is cooler and you come back in the late afternoon when the car is at its hottest to reduce the vacuum pressure and the seal rubber at its most pliable due to the heat.
Well they already went after the contractor loophole.

This is virtue signaling and not the most effective, but it does create a real incentive and being forced to hire less and therefore automate more low wage work would be a good thing.

Basically, this policy sets us up nicely for UBI.
A boot, at least, does not obstruct a now-angry driver's view. I have no doubt people will try to drive away with these devices on their windshield despite the loud noise. It's a recipe for accidents.
When I first saw these touted a few years ago I'd imagined they would be fairly trivial to bypass.

- light oil or penetrating oil can be used to bypass the gasket. If it will remove decals or stickers, this thing doesnt stand a chance.

- exploiting the coefficient of expansion for gasses (as these brilliant students did) is absolutely an option.

- keeping your windshield wipers up would prevent use of the device.

- running some 4lb test fishing line taped against your windshield would allow, once placed, the gasket to be defeated by just lifting up on it.

and as always, remember, manufacturers are bound to use a specific set of locks and bolts. Torx security are inexpensive and a barrel lock impression tool is about ten dollars.

disclosure: As an automotive mechanics apprentice, ive had to remove way more tenacious crap from windshields than this thing.
Kashmir internet shutdown and issue of loading web application
I can't even imagine a scenario where I'd want a "smart home".

When I leave a room, I turn the light off. When I enter it, I turn it on.

When I leave the house, I turn the heat off. When I enter it, I turn it on. If I had pets, I'd just dial it down to "pet comfort" level while away.

Am I missing something?

EDIT: I do have a Roomba and think it's great. I hit the button when I'm about to go out for an hour, and there's a clean floor when I get back. I appreciate that. No internet required as well.
I used to be really into philosophy, until the revelation hit me that philosophy is ultimately ontological: it names ways of thinking -- suppose living life is like painting a painting. Philosophy, then, is a theory of aesthetics. Sure it can be handy, but at the end of the day you need to create a painting. How much time you spend reading about aesthetics deducts from your time actually painting and experimenting.

I think the author doesn't look at the drawbacks of nihilism completely -- nihilism is a blank canvas as opposed to something like paint-by-numbers. Ultimately the choice of nihilism is still personal. We are all given a blank canvas to start. What kind of painting do you want to hang up?

Nihilism is basically saying that no theory of aesthetics is better than any other. Is this really true? Would you paint random dots on the canvas? Surely circles are more meaningful than scribbles?
Oof. It wasn't handling binary files. Also fixed directory traversal, and you can optionally specify a content directory on the cmd line.

gawk '@load"filefuncs";@load"readfile";func send(s,e,d,t,b){print"HTTP/1.0 "s" "e|&S;print"Content-Length: "b|&S;print"Content-Type: "t|&S;print d|&S;close(S);}func cf(x){split(x,y,"/");for(z in y){print "FOUND "y[z];if(y[z]==".."){return 0;}}return 1;}func mt(f){c="file -b --mime-type "f;r="";while((c|getline z)>0){r=r z;}close(c);return r;}BEGIN{if(ARGV[1]!=""){if(chdir(ARGV[1])){print "Failed to chdir to "ARGV[1];exit;}ARGC=1;}RS=ORS="\r\n";while(1){S="/inet/tcp/8080/0/0";while((S|&getline l)>0){split(l,f," ");if(f[1]=="GET"){p=substr(f[2],2)}if(p==""){p="index.html"}stat(p,s);if(cf(p)&&s["type"]=="file"){m=mt(p);o=readfile(p);send(200,"OK",o,m,s["size"]);break;}n="<html>Not Found</html>";send(404,"Not Found",n,"text/html"RS,length(n));break;}}}'
Because using scrap cars to exhaust the barnacle supply is a hilarious way to hack the system for the benefit of other students.
So that’s a lie. I drove through Arizona and Colorado on a hiking trip last year, and frequently camped in places with no service. Worked just fine.
FWIW Google Container Registry (GCR) allows arbitrarily nested paths.

Part of the difficulty though is that the Docker Registry V2 API more or less assumes the two-level namespacing. Technically GCR might be considered to be in violation of the spec. I just wish everyone was.
Ackchyually, only few heroes wear capes.
I consult. When its remote, I sometimes recommend we have a person on the ground (at the customer plant) to coordinate and manage data. If they don't agree, I hire a graduate anyway and ask that a place be made in their office for them. Ultimately the client find them useful and they get hired on, because the client actually did need somebody to be expert in the new software.

It's a responsibility to help young graduates find an entry to a company. All it takes is that first entry.
Yeah London and Amsterdam stations have this too. The problem is only the bigger main stations have them. In Amsterdam this is actually a PITA as Centraal is right at the northern edge of the main city, so it's not actually as "central" as the name makes out... :D
What you say is true, for someone over 60. For people without accessibility issues, a walk down the street is not vigorous and neither is cleaning your house.

It certainly is better than NOT walking, but pretending like walking down the street or cleaning your house is exercise is disingenuous.
Surprised there aren't more comments on this here on HN as there's some interesting points raised on Twitter since this news broke. For example, https://twitter.com/zseisen/status/1218358404743299072
& https://twitter.com/chrissyfarr/status/1218263532489207809
It seems to me from the tweet that he was being charged without it being made clear to him that this is what he was being charged for.

If your subscribers don’t understand that to which they are subscribed, that seems like a problem to me.
More background, including access to the public records requests that led to this investigation:

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2020/jan/18/clearview...
The title of the article is at odds with the purely speculative nature of the core part of the argument--the section titled "Are Current BNNs Generalization-Agnostic?". The authors admit themselves that it is pure speculation. They present a speculative class of generalization-agnostic priors, speculate that commonly used priors might belong to this class, and then speculate about why we haven't observed commonly used priors belonging to this class even though they speculatively might belong to this class. This argument is not very convincing, to say the least.

Generalizability is a function of both the network structure and the priors. Non-Bayesian networks without priors can be seen as pseudo-Bayesian networks with (improper) flat priors. The use of independent priors that are unimodal at zero, like the independent normal priors mentioned in the article, will tend to shrink weights toward zero, which makes the function smoother. Smoother functions tend to generalize better (measuring generalizability as the gap between in-sample and out-of-sample error). The classic bias-variance trade-off is that they will generally perform worse in-sample and may also perform worse out-of-sample. Heuristically, if you take any neural network and make it Bayesian by putting priors on the weights, it will (averaging over datasets) generalize not worse than the original network. It may have worse absolute performance.

The authors also argue that we can't be confident in the uncertainties from BNNs until we have a good theoretical understanding of NN generalization in general. They ignore the possibility of building confidence in the uncertainties, both in general and for any particular network, by empirical observation--the same way we've built confidence in generalization of non-Bayesian NNs, since, as the article points out, we don't yet have a good theoretical understanding of NN generalization.
Extreme Helicopters – Sikorsky Skycrane
This is a super interesting documentary well-worth watching. It makes you think about how little most people know about how the world around us is built.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ri0ix2k68

I can't find it right now. There's a documentary about the history of Sikorsky.

One of the most interesting parts of the story is that of Igor Sikorsky and how he launched his company. He was a Russian aircraft engineer of some stature. When he came to the US he had to work as a math tutor to make ends meet.

People in the Russian community in the US knew of him and his reputation. As the story goes, he was asked to meet with someone who wanted to meet him, another Russian. He agreed.

The person he met with gave him $5,000 (which was a ton of cash at the time) and told him to go build his aircraft company. That's how Sikorsky Aircraft came to be. Not a loan, a gift.

And yet that's not the most interesting part of the story.

The person who gave him the money, the fellow Russian, was non other than Sergei Rachmaninoff, the famous pianist and composer.

Mind blowing story. We might very well owe the creation of the modern helicopter to the generosity of a classical composer and pianist.
Svelte Status #23: unit tests for Svelte
Students usually take very poorly to additional fees coming from their university.
> In the "internet of things," we’re promised technology that will allow us to project our will on to our surroundings ... But ...

This is spot on. Technology has always been, and will always be, a means to project our will onto our surroundings, nothing less, nothing more. The only question to be asked is, whose will is being projected onto whose surroundings? Do those surroundings include other people?

To me, all this talk of "smart" household devices is just marketing bullshit designed to mask the fact that the manufacturer is imposing their will onto users. The devices are dumb as fuck. They have no capacity to make any kind of judgment call. The manufacturer does, as they have the source code. Calling the devices "smart" makes it look like they're learning and making decisions for the owner's benefit when they really aren't.

My fridge and air purifier wants internet access for some reason but I'm not giving it to them. I'm not buying a smart TV and probably never will. I prefer my appliances dumb and simple. After all, uneducated and isolated slaves are far less likely to revolt. As soon as they are given a voice of their own, they'll begin to speak for someone else's interests! (Who knew that 19th century slave owners' arguments would turn out to be surprisingly convincing when the slaves aren't humans?)
Depends on the hotel... many bigger hotels have dedicated bag check rooms. Last time I was a conference in New York, I was going to hang out for a while before heading to New York.

The bag check room at the hotel had a line, and there was a set fee per bag to store it there. There were hundreds of bags in the room, so not exactly low cost to accept and track all of them. Makes sense they charged.
News headline seems a little sensationalist to me
Isn’t “first come first serve” fair?
"Parking here [inconveniences|isn't fair to|creates danger for] others, so if you leave your car here, we will make the situation worse by ensuring the alleged harm will continue longer than it otherwise would."

Yes, something something deterrence. Again, in reality, the article explains how that played out.

Proper law enforcement isn't cheap, and if it is a profit center, you don't have peace officers, you have highwaymen.
I think my university made it a condition of graduation that any outstanding fines were paid.

Of course, since it was in London, the only student I ever met with a car had a serious physical disability.
We need more folks like you.
It's worse than legal trouble. They hold your graduation until you return all library books, pay all debts, fines, and interest, etc etc.
I think the argument is that this isn't to the benefit of other students, only to the benefit of other students that park improperly. Improperly parked cars decreases parking supply and puts more stress on students who park properly since they are unlikely to double park or park in a non marked location, whereas bad actors would be willing to deal with the low supply by parking even more improperly.
The Reason Fossil Fuel Companies Are Finally Reckoning with Climate Change
I am not sure where I heard it, but I keep coming back to the quote "There is no algorithm for absolute truth". People who aren't in-the-know about AI tend to lend it much more credit, when it comes to its ability to accurately measure something, than is due.
I found the bit on Wikipedia describing the extinction of the Great auk pretty depressing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_auk#Extinction

> The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot.
There's an entire industry of selling snake-oil Batman shit like this to law enforcement/mall cops. It's a delightful fusion of ill will, they operate with minimal oversight and get to take advantage of government (procurement), law enforcement (mostly ignorant of tech), and the good 'ol citizenry (cast as cattle as usual).

I love how, when one of these places recruits you, it takes forever to learn what they're about, because their website is nothing but euphemisms.
I tried to warn the auto-industry about this windshield vulnerability for decades.

But they all laughed at my dystopian future of crooks running around demanding ransoms to remove their suction hardware.
They wouldn't have to resort to any shenanigans if parking on campus was free for students.
Western "swearing" has a weird past. Look at the word "piss." We are taught to say "pee" as if kids can't figure out that it's the initial letter of the word they are trying (not) to say, putting it in the same category as "the eff word."

Where it gets wild is how often the word appears in the Bible, in the phrase "he who pisseth against the wall," which referred specifically to men, as opposed to women who wouldn't typically urinate in this fashion. As a kid, I used to use the word "pee-eth" as a joke because of it.
Maybe instead of hiring more administrators or building a luxury dorm, the university could build a parking garage.

It's not like the number of students who need to park is unknown.

If you know there's 1000 students who need to park and only 500 parking spots for them, randomly charging half of them exorbitant fines does not seem like a good solution.
the fear mongering in here is interesting. "secret, unproven" algorithms (much less intelligent than anything developed with machine learning) already control an individuals access to all sorts of things, like college, credit, insurance, etc. there is a positive side to approaching this problem and more humans is never going to be it.
Why are these people driving to college in the first place? Take public transport.
Just in case, I've answered similar question "Why are C++ libraries mostly paid such as QT, Poco, and Sciter?" on Quora: https://qr.ae/TS4BUI
Saudi Arabia's oil reserves grow by 2.2B barrels
confirm that at least one UC Berkeley affiliated PR was paid quite a lot of money to do exactly this kind of work for several years, that was five years ago at least.. they did not use bombastic terms to describe the project, evoking the authority aspect, instead they used language that signaled "finding hidden talent"
It doesn’t seem fair to me, it seems like it favors people who have early classes or live on early schedules.
Imagine a doctor working at two hospitals who has to move his car from one location to the other mid-day between surgeries. Is it more fair for him to have a worse parking spot and take longer to get to the operating room because he didn't park there earlier? Or should spots be given based on need?
Increase supply. Most schools use flat parking lots instead of multistory car parks which would be far more efficient.

Alternatively, run public transportation that doesn't suck.
This is really good stuff, thank you for sharing it!
I think in psychology it's called mirroring, if I'm not mistaken. A lot of the times those who lecture others (especially when nobody asked them to) are lecturing themselves without realizing it.
Right, except you can't say that to the face of a Californian or on a forum where Californians are. This will inevitably be taken personally.

If all Californians say that people from Texas need to leave the country that is an insult, it is personal to the state of Texas just like someone saying that he's happy for the idea that California is losing business.
Mass transportation options coupled with high density buildings should be the way to go. Parking just doesn’t scale.

The uni I went to had a decent bus system that had routes along the major apt complexes (private and uni owner). Buses were usually on time, and likely faster than trying to find a parking spot.
I think it's about the demographics. College students are cash-poor but time-rich, so they are more than willing to come in early and circle around to find a spot if it means they don't have to pay. College students are generally more liberal, so the capitalistic way of selling resource to the highest bidder naturally attracts resentment.

If the community collectively believe paying-with-time is the best way to allocate resources, charging parking fee is nothing more than money-grabbing.
No, it leads to people with 10AM classes arriving before 9AM for the free parking, which just worsens the problem.