skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Buggering op[] would be the slowest possible way to get the NUL there.

> Evidently that is a minority preference.

What evidence? Pointing out a fact isn't an endorsement.

> If you think anybody is complaining about the extra space for the NUL

Then what exactly are you complaining about? Setting the byte to 0? If not, why are you being so obtuse?

> what you are barking up is not even a tree.

In this thread your tone is repeatedly that of a condescending jerk.
You can be skeptical of almost anything you want. One thing that surprised me was how tolerant scientists are of dissent. Your views can run from the unorthodox to the downright eccentric and, so long as you pay attention to data and argue politely (and maybe even not so politely), people will listen to you. You can't be a scientist without being humble, and humble people listen even to the weird arguments.

But if you believe GM foods have adverse health effects, and you design a study to look for them, and try to get it funded you'll be turned down. Literally thousands of scientists have had the same idea and done the same thing, and they all found nothing. Scientists listen to data, so if you wanted to go on looking for health effects, you would probably start with very subtle ones that haven't been looked for yet. If it were me, I would start by trying to find ways genetically modified protein gets past the digestive system, which destroys genetic information by breaking all protein down down into its constituent amino acids. Not an easy problem, but better than some of the others.

If you don't want to work on the problem scientifically, you also have the option of thinking about it non-scientifically. A non-scientific opinion can be whatever you want, but holding one means lumping yourself in with a lot of people who object to genetic engineering without knowing the central dogma or even what a gene is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-sa...
How TCP works, using people as packets
I don't know who downvoted this but come on. jariel has a point and it's not going away because we bury our heads in the sand.

At a basic level I think it falls down to fundamentally different conceptions of what is a "business" versus individuals, families, organizations of many types. What we call "lie" and "theft" in the West might be innocuous or praised in the East (think "great poker player", "bold move"), and no regulation will make each side suddenly re-order their hierarchy of values, and the centennial legal system that surely goes with it.

I don't know where the solution lies, if any, but that's one hell of a cultural clash.

That is not the same as more coincidental, opportunistic bribery the likes of dictatorships or local lords, the chaos tax. That's more of a temporary friction that can (and should) be dealt with more swiftly — had we the global political will to do so. It's nowhere near as hard a problem as the above cultural matter.

Edit: self-censored a bad initial
Huh, it absolutely does. Alan Macdonald wrote a book about geometric calculus and made a companion video series for it. Here’s the section defining manifolds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfwdlW7Yr_I

That said, tensors are in fact more general than geometric algebra’s multivectors (in that the latter form a quotient algebra of the former). But not all tensors correspond to manifolds as we know them in physics and I argue that GA keeps track of the geometric properties we want better.
Is Portion Control the answer to a healthier lifestyle?
Tens of millions of people were killed in Cold War violence. It was a huge disaster caused intentionally by “fellow humans.”
They've been a huge success for the wrong reasons. Its very much a rent-seeking driven business: vendor lock-in, big contracts with government money, etc. What they do would be considered anti-trust if it weren't that government paid them to do it.

You can build an ehr with google docs if it were legal. But it isn't.
Are there even laws anymore? It seems like the law only applies to non-corporate entities and citizens. If you're in politics, law enforcement, or the Fortune 500, expect zero consequences for breaking the law. Exceptions exist but aren't the rule.
This 'app' charges in the range of 6 digits yearly per provider.
EU lawmakers overwhelmingly vote to push for charging cable standard
AT&T maintain a comprehensive database of call level history dating to the 1980s.

Certainly to resolve customer billing disputes, I'm sure.

https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record

http://epic.org/privacy/nsa/Section-215-Order-to-Verizon.pdf
Hemisphere: Law Enforcement's Call Records Deal with AT&T
If the phone manufacturers care enough, they can always pay the fine per device
So I love TripMode but it's a very different beast.

LittleSnitch = I want to monitor every connection every application makes.

TripMode = I want to disable Dropbox, Apple Software Update & Steam while on MyPhoneHotspot.

That being said, I wish there was an OpenTripMode, or... something on Linux.
I think a different problem that some people may be thinking of when they post this question is: how do I find new music which is like this given song?

It's a narrower question but all the more interesting for it. Most algorithmic recommendations rely on "other people who played a cumulative ten tracks from this artist played ten tracks from this other artist" or pretty vague slices of tag-clouds intersecting along n dimensions, or worse yet influencers who are perpetually hyped up about a n new thing, and that can generate some new-to-you recommendations, yet I long to find ways of answering the former question.
While greatly overshadowed by the nuclear arms race, the US and Soviet biowarfare programs during the Cold War were absolutely terrifying. Many Soviet bioweapons scientists defected to the US toward the end of the Cold War. One of those scientists — Ken Alibekov — shared his experiences in a thrilling autobiography called Biohazard [0]. According to Ken’s claim in the book, he actually uncovered the Sverdlovsk anthrax incident through an epidemiological research project while in medical school. While it’s likely many of the stories in Biohazard were embellished or altogether fabricated (vested interests in promoting biowarfare threats), anecdotes from US scientists working at USAMRIID at the time support many of the Soviet claims. It’s interesting to ponder how differently the world might have turned if both sides had access to our modern understanding of genetics, precise editing tools, and inexpensive sequencing. Biowarfare is insidious for other reasons as well: lack of damage on physical infrastructure, relatively low development costs, ability to mimic a natural pandemic, and potential for mass transmission to name a few. And perhaps that latter one is a saving grace — the possibility of losing control over a biological weapon makes it a very risky asset indeed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohazard_(book)
Because it’s not. You know that lobbyists can’t pay politicians, right? The meme that “lobbying == bribery” needs to die.
This, so much.

Bounce over to this comment on another front page post for another great example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208260
Can you link to the video?
How Do People React in a Pandemic?
Because in this case the consumer is choosing to waste their own time and their own money. If the charging situation is so terrible people are free to buy other phones.
Bribery or MCAS? Your choice.
I wish Keybase had a couple of extra features:

Ability to use it as an SSO authority. You could grant certain access to new employees, who have already proven their identity in Keybase. Imagine having your own identity that can be given roles by multiple organizations.

Ability for Bitwarden to use Keybase as its store.

A way to store your homedir in Keybase's filesystem.

A way to use Keybase as a development space. Imagine Alice gets a job at Corporation X. She's given the "programmer" role. That automatically makes Docker images, Jenkins access, Artifactory access, Git repos, other relevant software, all through KBFS. You could even use KBFS as the store for Jenkins and Artifactory. As Keybase already has PGP/GPG support built in, signing commits in Git would also work smoothly.

(I really like Keybase, I just hope it can continue to grow, fix bugs, and add features)
From the letter the AG sent:

> *The Office of the Attorney General has the duty to supervise charitable organizations under [law#]. The [ICANN], as a registered nonprofit in California, is subject to regulation by the California Attorney General.

Sort, IANAL answer: They are incorporated in California, making their corporate conduct subject to California's laws.

Source: This PDF, starting on page 3.

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/jeffrey...
I have issues with that estimate, but even accepting it - it was still a big improvement over WW2, WW1, colonization, Mongol invasions etc. And certainly preferable to a global thermonuclear war which was a real possibility.

Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
What makes you think the people reading are reading in good faith?
It doesn't work in the sense of predicting the conversation, but do it long enough, or, do it with iterative deepening, and even though you probably won't nail the specifics of how the conversation goes, it WILL frequently prepare you in broad strokes such that the actual conversation's twists and turns won't throw you, even if they do surprise you.
ICANN is incorporated in California.
No fan problem here. Works silently while browsing or doing other simple tasks like iTerm and vscode.

The author of the blog should seek technical assistance for his hardware.
So true. One of my most active channels of communication is actually Instagram's chat despite it lacking many features I prefer in a messaging service like a desktop/browser interface and search functionality. But it's what my friends use, more actively than Facebook even, and so it's what I use. If you have Instagram then you already have this messenger, so it becomes a no-brainer.
I've long believed that when companies do illegal things that would normally be punished by prison, the company should go to prison.

The company office would have to operate according to the same rules as a prison. Employees on arrival are security-checked the same way prisoners would be when they arrive for the first time. Rules about talking between cells, and device use, are the same as a prison. Once you get to your prison office, and you have your prison clothes on, you can work on paper.

I think this should be an existing prison. If a company wants to instead hire prison guards and do renovations to make their existing office work like a prison, I could be flexible to that.

Presumably all the employees would rather quit than work in prison. Sounds okay to me.

Presumably all investors would pressure the CEO to avoid getting the company put in prison because it would be a real productivity problem. Sounds okay to me.
Text Augmentation Using GPT2
This is design by committee. What’s the worst possible decision you could imagine?
imho MIDI 2.0 hits the low hanging fruit but doesn't go far enough at fixing the biggest problem in professional audio. Deterministic rendering. Basically same input makes the same output, which doesn't happen even in totally digital systems - doubly so with live (or recreated) midi events.

I'll give an example - you have your PC with $DAW_OF_CHOICE running and plug in $MIDI_2_CONTROLLER to USB and enable a track and hit record, play your stuff, and stop. When you play it back, unless the cosmic forces are exceptionally on your side, it will not sound the same as when you played it. It's subtle and sometimes ignored or even desirable, but it's there.

There are a lot of reasons why this problem hasn't been solved, some technical and others artistic. But imho, a certain grade of equipment (namely, recording/reproduction, of which the MIDI protocol is a key component) should behave identically under the same conditions and be able to reproduce a performance exactly. It's a goal that borders on absurd, but I think we could do it!

Namely - enough of this "transport agnostic" horseshit. Give me a professional event protocol that is sent synchronously with the audio, on the wire and on the board. I want my codec chips interleaving midi messages (don't care if they're 16/24/32 bit) as a separate audio channel, even if it is undersampled (eg send LRLRLRMLRLRLRM over I2C at the appropriate clock to have audio in time and MIDI undersampled by 3x per word), I want MIDI events in my interrupt and in the callback, synchronized exactly to whatever audio is coming in at the same time.

And give me unadulterated total, absolute dictatorial control over the audio drivers using a ping/pong buffer that gets mapped to memory in the audio callback for my professional application and mine alone. Minimize the kernel time spent mapping physical memory to virtual memory, like ASIO drivers but without the bullshit. I want as little overhead between the frame buffer coming in off DMA to the chip as I want without the possibility of pwning the system. Hell, give me a dedicated core!
Option 3: start jailing these fraudsters for criminal fraud. Jail corporate profits for 6 months. Claw back any and all executive pay since the fraud began and distribute it to low level employees or other victims of the fraud.

If you can't survive as an honest company you don't deserve to survive.

And there are very few people that give the government as many screws as executives to modify their behavior.
I think they can just tell the zip code where you use the card.
They actually tried this, during the French Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

It didn't catch on then either.
please. you are way overstating the situation. if anything its boomers who massively increased the scope and reach of govt social programs and spending.
I don't understand this statement: "You don't necessarily gain any new awareness by paying attention to something or someone, you gain information."

How does anyone gain awareness of anything, then? Surely not by ignoring it?

I'd urge you to sit in the forest for a day (or the prairie or the desert -- anyhow, in nature, away from buildings and cars and phones) and pay attention. What do you gain from doing so?

You will find you simply notice different and new things if you spend the time (again, pay/spend... interesting). Perhaps you'll be able to codify this into "information". I'd be interested to see your notes.
Thank god.

A particularly nasty aspect of this story, alluded to at the bottom but not made explicit, is that Airbus was taking massive export credits (in the UK, they got the lion's share of the budget).

It was only in the UK that Airbus was required to actually required to produce documentation about the customer, and the scheme was only uncovered when someone at UKEF realised that Airbus wasn't doing this and the govt had been giving out hundreds of millions to corrupt politicians.

Also, the timeline here is incredible. As soon as the UK announced their investigation, and Airbus was banned from receiving credits...they were in negotiations to resume funding, and (somehow) Enders only lost his job 3 years later (and even the UK has turned back on the money spigot...although this time with sheepish promises about trying to fund a company other than Airbus through UKEF).

Airbus is everything that is wrong with the corporate world. Run by politicians, hopelessly corrupt, always spinning, and receiving massive subsidies by dint of their impact on local job markets.
Does anyone knowledgeable know if a magnetic coupling is coming for USB?

I have used volta cables for a while (I preferred the 1.0 to the 2.0) and I'm surprised that this design idea isn't more widely popular, given how user friendly it is.
This is civil law, not criminal. Maybe criminal liability s needed, but it’s just not reality.

Also: beware what you wish for. Criminal law may allow your bloodlust to be satisfied. But it’s just as likely that the higher burden of proof it requires, and various other differences such as the 5th amendment, make prosecution difficult or impossible.
Isn’t https://solidproject.org going in that direction?
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
That’s what the US Department of Justice claims, at least.
It is absolutely not,in any way or form.Charger is only second to a power plug.My TV, router, washing machine and hair dryer use the same type of plug to get electricity from a socket. It's 2020 and yet we argue how it's beneficial to have x types of phones with z types of connections...Come on!
>As you yourself point out, the US starts militarizing space and other nations follow suit.

Yes, but you can substitute "US" for almost any other country. Russia starts militarizing space: US and Britain follow suit. Someone is inevitably going to be the first one to do it.

The land mines, I agree with. The nuclear situation is a little more complicated, since some believe nuclear MAD has actually (so far...) saved far more lives in total than if it weren't there, but I agree cutting back is probably a good idea.

I think these things are different from having a military presence in space. I think it's like creating an air or cyber force. It's a vacuum that's inevitably going to be filled with a host of entities, so you might as well be first.
If Apple introduced a phone that didn’t comply with the 5G standard it wouldn’t be able to interoperate and would be less useful.

But the government didn’t mandate that iMessage had to be compatible with SMS (even though it is somewhat) nor did they mandate that AirDrop had to interoperate with a standard.

Should the government also mandate a standard messaging protocol must be used or that it has to work with SMS?

Should FaceTime be forced to be interoperable?
I mean, pro- or anti-Trump, you have to admit that he's at least symptomatic of divisive politics, right? It's probably fair to go one step further and say that he also embraces that divisiveness.

That's without expressing an opinion on the underlying politics.
we also have a web app
Conflict of interest may not generally be illegal, but it can be illegal under specific circumstances, especially if undisclosed. Especially things that get filed with the SEC. I would assume a lot of decisions made at the board and C-suite level have stricter requirements for this.
Because the people of California and the people of Oklahoma both agreed to become part of the "United States", and in turn, the existing United States at the time also agreed to let them join. And the US Constitution and rules say that the residents of the states can move between them. So "self-determination" does seem like an important part of the reason.

There is no reason in theory why, say, Mexico couldn't apply to become part of the United States and the US accept them, but I suspect the reason this kind of thing doesn't happen any more is 1) being a leader of a nation state is much more fun / fulfilling than being governor of a state in the US, so why would the leaders of a country ever agree to it? and 2) the level of welfare spending under existing rules in the US would require a massive wealth transfer to any new state that isn't as developed an economy.

Personally, I still think it would be worth it for both the US and any state that wanted to join, but I don't think it will ever happen again.
As far as I know they do
Seeing that Apple is always bragging about their 90%+ retention rate, not many people are switching from iOS devices and throwing away cables.

But is “think about the environment” the new “think about the children” and “terrorism” war cry for more regulation and big government?
I’ve got one, and the only time this happened was a rouge process that I installed using 100% CPU. I usually just open Activity Monitor and either sort the CPU tab by usage or the Energy tab by Average Impact. If it’s a software problem it’s going to be there.
When you know enough about something, there's horrible misinformation on it everywhere, even on HN.

But one of my favourite things about HN is the rebuttals, deep-dives, and 'well, actually's of informed commenters discussing niches I know little about.
seems sort of pointless when players like Cloudflare have already twice voluntarily censored content on their networks they personally deemed too provocative. Not to mention this does nothing in the event a service provider with end-to-end crypto is implicated in some dastardly deed. The mathematics of crypto still win.

the Signal protocol used on platforms like Whatsapp provides confidentiality, integrity, authentication, participant consistency, destination validation, forward secrecy, post-compromise security (aka future secrecy), causality preservation, message unlinkability, message repudiation, participation repudiation, and asynchronicity. Using the protocol on something like TAILS OS basically turns the conversations participants into living ghosts.

Prosecutors would have one hell of a time proving a provider did anything, and if it started to seem like this could bite "providers" in court or jeopardize their 230 status, they could just release the entire thing under the GPL and patch it to use blockchain or TOR mesh networking after the fact. The name of the program is still tangentially associated with the brand and people on your social network will still talk about it and advocate its use.
SSB is interesting and the clients (e.g. Patchwork) show a good amount of the promise. I'm watching it and poking occasionally and it has been fun.

And the protocol spec page is fantastic: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/

... that said, it has some enormous problems around multi-device, rather costly replication (start at the beginning, catch up to now, otherwise you can't verify anything), and it's fairly normal to miss part of a conversation and not have any real way to get it filled in. There are a number of branching concepts with semi-compatible protocols that strike me as a lot more promising, but odds seem pretty good that the community will shift if necessary (which is a good thing).

Worth a shot for anyone to explore if they're curious though, there's even a largely-functional mobile app: https://www.manyver.se/
Yeah, you should maybe work on whatever causes these revenge phantasies. It doesn’t seem healthy.

On a factual level, I’d just like to point out that "illegal" isn’t (always) equal to "criminal“.
Installing Elixir Using Asdf
Agree that "pay" has non-monetary meanings, which are whispered in "pay a visit" or "pay court to". But I just noticed that we say in English both "pay attention" and "spend time". Hm... paying and spending....

In Finnish, one could say "Keskity!" and since "keski" is
"center" it has some idea of centering oneself? But this is more like, "Focus!" Or you could say, "kiinnittää huomiota" -- to fasten your attention?
They can set up the politicians' children and relatives with lucrative government contracts and positions on the boards of investment funds and foreign oil and gas companies, though. The meme that this is somehow OK needs to die.
> Apple has set a standard to use their cable format, which works.

And precisely which other manufacturers have Apple licensed this standard (Lightning) to?

And by that I mean not "we will deign to allow you to make cables for our products", but "here's a new standard connector everyone can use".

It's absolutely laughable to claim Lightning as any kind of standard.
I recognise that, but I once again point to our experience with non-standardised cables in the past. In theory, those cables could have introduced new capabilities. In practice, they really didn't. Cables got much better after standardisation, and the USB Group have proven to be substantially more motivated to advance standards than any of the manufacturers ever were.
For an alternative view: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2014/06/23/victus/