skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want to feel worse, take an interest in something in your neighbourhood that seems wrong. After a bit of research, you will find that it is indeed wrong, so you will get in touch with your local representatives to get this obvious stuff fixed. That's when you will realise that they don't give a damn, that they won't fix it even if it is their responsibility and duty to do it, that they don't give a damn about that either, and that they have done plenty of similar wrongs everywhere around and plenty of other wrongs too, once you start paying attention to it (and the more informed you get about a subject, the more wrongs you find). Then you understand that you can do whatever you want, you're never going to get them to fix them, even though they are obliged by law to do so, and you realise at the same time that you lived happier before you tried making stuff better or just normal.
> That may be easier to read, but which one would you rather scribble on a whiteboard or a napkin?

The one that's easier to read. And easier to remember.
> I'm convinced that a classroom is the worst possible environment for actually learning a 2nd language.

Surely classrooms are the worst environment for learning anything. Of course it's going to be easier to learn any subject if you have a dedicated teacher who makes sure that you understand the material before moving on and keeps you engages. However is it worse than anything? Classrooms usually end up giving you access to a teacher who you can ask questions to and receive a comprehensible response.

Just like in any subject if you actually don't take the effort to study from your own curriculum you're going to be relatively behind. If all someone does is attend their CS lectures and do the bare minimum on their homework assignments then they're effectively wasting their time as they'll be behind their peers who met with professors to collaborate on research projects or with peers to found a startup (in addition to side projects).

Classrooms for any subject are a bad environment because like you stated everyone else has a chance of participating. In addition the material is suited for the majority and isn't personalized. When I was learning about geometric functions in middle school no teacher ever related it to cosine similarity that can be used in NLP.

However 1-on-1 lessons are expensive, so aren't classroms a good enough compromise?
Is blockchain still a thing? Who knew...
I remember the fantasy that more and more people would be able to develop simple basic apps for their own very personal customized needs. It was a vision of a more accessible and democratic compute infrastructure, where we'd all be 'makers' creating the compute environment we lived in. Things like hypercard were part of this vision.

Those days are gone. The article doesn't explicitly mention the fact we all know: Very few people have the capacity to create a 'home-cooked meal' like the OP, for their own use.

In fact much fewer than could create a little hypercard app. It's a world where there are pretty large barriers to most people being software 'makers', and instead we are just consumers who can choose from what is offered to us by various companies trying to figure out how to monetize our needs and desires.

Part of it is the increased complexity of app development. Part of it is the walled gardens of our suppliers.

> I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta.

Indeed. Because the very infrastruture ignores the needs of one-off "home cooked meal" apps, it assumes they don't exist, you have to pretend it is some kind of "beta" of a mass market commodified product instead (and be glad our suppliers still let you do that for 'free'). Our computers (increasingly the phone/device is people's primary computer) are no longer ours to do with as we will.

It is sad. If those who created the computing revolution 30 years ago (including prior versions of us) could see where it wound up.... the level of technological sophisitication of our pocket audio-video-geolocated-self-surveilling-communicating devices is astounding; the lack of 'empowerment' or control we have over them is utterly depressing.
You'd be horrified to learn that every country in the world certifies aircraft based on estimated failure rates per flight hour per component then.
The people behind the website are very smart and motivated, but also acknowledge that this is a big problem to address. I'm sure they'd love your ideas and support!

Have a look at the website's FAQ [0] for their suggestions on How can I help the FDAAA TrialsTracker? and What can I do to help make sure sponsors share their results?

[0] https://fdaaa.trialstracker.net/faq/
Here's some (but not all) of the back-story behind the infamous TCL religious war waged in RMS's name.

TIL Guile was named after "Guy L." (Steele)!

https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft...

>My Scheme library was initially called "Gel" until we discovered trademark issues. Then we renamed the project Guile at the suggestion of one of my co-workers because "guile" and "scheme" are close concepts and because "guile" sounds a bit like "Guy L.").

Also it was Sun, not RMS, who actually started the "TCL Wars" -- RMS was just responding to them:

>Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a vision:

>Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform" and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time. Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that led to the Tcl wars.

Here's a Brief History of Guile:

https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-...

>Around the same time that Guile (then GEL) was readying itself for public release, another extension language was gaining in popularity, Tcl. Many developers found advantages in Tcl because of its shell-like syntax and its well-developed graphical widgets library, Tk. Also, at the time there was a large marketing push promoting Tcl as a "universal extension language".

>Richard Stallman, as the primary author of GNU Emacs, had a particular vision of what extension languages should be, and Tcl did not seem to him to be as capable as Emacs Lisp. He posted a criticism to the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup, sparking one of the internet's legendary flamewars. As part of these discussions, retrospectively dubbed the "Tcl Wars", he announced the Free Software Foundation's intent to promote Guile as the extension language for the GNU project.

>It is a common misconception that Guile was created as a reaction to Tcl. While it is true that the public announcement of Guile happened at the same time as the "Tcl wars", Guile was created out of a condition that existed outside the polemic. Indeed, the need for a powerful language to bridge the gap between extension of existing applications and a more fully dynamic programming environment is still with us today.
Yes, and also read about perfectionism.
Location can be faked as well (besides not necessarily being accurate). You could look into bluetooth beacons that an app can detect. In the end, if there is an incentive for the organizer to fake attendance they can do that in multiple ways. However QR codes which open your app or a webpage where the user is logged in can have additional detections. Always same IP and user-agent would be an obvious indication of fraud etc.
Using a Taylor series, usually.
Its nowhere near the level of everyone hiring plumbers and electricians, but if you’re really interested hunt down some home automation companies (or start your own). If you can find the right clients you can easily make five digits a job setting up Home Assistant to run someone’s new house.
DLSS Revisited: Can Nvidia Finally Provide a Gaming Boost for RTX GPUs?
> If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.

I don't disagree with the point you're making, but that's a bad argument. Good engineers are capable of building a bad product if the conditions are right.
Ask HN: What are reasonable actions to take with COVID-19?
Given the information we have, what are reasonable actions to take either personally or for your business if you're not currently in a high risk region?
I was, and still am, intrigued by the idea of Boltzmann machines, which form a complete graph between a number of "neurons". With the right weights they could be shaped into any architecture. They could be shaped into a fancy recurrent network, or a multi-layer linear network, or anything in between. Indeed, with the right training algorithm the computer could learn how to structure the "neurons" it is given. I don't think we know any such training algorithm though.

They're also not very efficient, because every "feed forward step" you would have to use a matrix that is N*N (where N is the number of neurons), which is a worst case scenario. Maybe with sparse matrices it could be reasonably efficient if most weights were zero. I don't think sparse matrices are used much in machine learning currently.

These are my thoughts as a machine learning novice.
I use Zapier to watch the Twitter feed of a conference I go to (NationJS). They announce stuff there first, and update their website much later. Oh, and it only happens twice a year, so I find out about it when it happens, without having to go to twitter.
Here's a thread where PIA's co-founder actively engaged in discussion to clarify similar concerns raised (at the time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682
I'm calling out Twitter explicitly, not the author, because I don't think he does so enough.
The Accidental Invention of the Super Soaker (2019)
Bugs notwithstanding, this is just FUD. You can go to the Amazon Echo app and listen to all the recordings.

I'd be far more worried about the invasion of privacy caused by it listening to everyone's shopping lists.
Not once in my 25 year career did I work with a manager who gave 1/100th as much shit as this list would require. They may exist, but I've never seen one. I strongly suspect that the author of the list hasn't either, and this is a highly idealized, "spherical cow in a vacuum" type list.
> Also were there any new real SOTA on any NLP tasks since last summer? I feel like accuracy progress has frozen..

Just in the last week there are two papers which claim SOTA on different tasks.

Microsoft released Turing NLG (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/turing-nlg-a-1...) recently which claims SOTA on a couple tasks, it seems like the same transformer architecture, but with more layers and parameters, made feasible by training efficiency improvements. The biggest one seems to be partitioning how the model learns across different processes instead of replicating those states, which significantly improves communication, memory overhead, and training speed.

Deepmind released the Compressive Transformer (https://deepmind.com/blog/article/A_new_model_and_dataset_fo...) which claims SOTA on two other "long-range" benchmarks. My understanding of the improvement here is that instead of discarding older states, in the traditional attention layer, the compressive transformer learns which states to keep, and which states to remove.

I think these are two good examples of paper archetypes -- one where SOTA is achieved through more layers/training data/neurons (and the more interesting contribution is the improvements to model parallelism in training), and one where SOTA is achieved through a new/improved model architecture.

I wonder, for most industrial practitioners, how much either paper is useful though. The Microsoft paper helps for training billion parameter models, but most won't train a model that deep; the Deepmind paper helps for training models over very long sequences, but most people aren't using book-length sequences.*

* I remember reading somewhere that the attention mechanisms tend to only remember around 5 states (would love to see a source or study on this), which is pretty short, so would be interesting to try this model and see if the compressed transformer/attention mechanism can remember longer sequences.
That's why I think Pythagoras refused to write down his doctrines. He knew there was more to be empirically discovered -- and he was wary of how text could become dogma. The divine he uncovered was based on a mathematical, harmonious cosmos; but he recognized it was beyond understanding in a lifetime. That's why Pythagorean mysticism is compatible with modern science -- he didn't write anything down!

2000 years later, Kepler had faith in a harmonious cosmos, and charged his model of harmony so it could fit the evidence. He elipsed the circles, instead of squaring them.

Fun fact #1: it is impossible to square a circle [1]

Fun fact #2: the Pythagoreans conducted the first attested scientific experiment in Western history (according to a recent PhD thesis at UMich [2])

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle

[2] https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/150050
I don't work for Google, but I think you're making bold assumptions about how much a year or two of domain knowledge is worth to Google compared to a couple hundred k of stock.

If these employees are transitioning to wildly different roles within the company maybe the math changes a bit, but I'm not sure how much.

Edit: not to mention the trust erosion aspect. If I see people getting laid off cause their stock has appreciated, am I going to stay? Basically means stock appreciation is capped. People wouldn't take kindly to that.
> If anyone has any suggestions in the context of what I’ve posted, I’m all ears.

I wrote this tool for accessing Standard Notes on the command line:

https://github.com/tannercollin/standardnotes-fs

I imagine it would integrate with bash_log quite well.

Back your data up first, and I'm guessing you could just `cd` into your notes folder then use bash_log straight from there. You could also set LOG_DIRECTORY in your .bashrc to be where ever you mount Standard Notes.
I think game jams probably get closest to this proportion of work:enjoyment in software.
I've used IFTTT to make a backup of my internet activity, especially images shared across social media profiles.
You're right, I mixed it up with the 11 bits of exponent.
> What sort of "relief" are users going to get under an NDA between Facebook and an academic researcher if their data is leaked.

Keep in mind that this dataset being released to academics is literally the relief that Facebook is being forced to provide for the negative externality their users are imposing on non-users.
> “All the applications” don’t matter.

Getting the most popular applications is the easy part, the hard part is the long tail. Only 1% of people may use a particular obscure application, but when there are a thousand such applications, the average person uses ten of them.

You also have to deal with a period of people wanting to run the applications they already own, not the newer version they have to pay to upgrade to or which isn't the same version the rest of their family or company uses on their existing hardware.

There are a lot of people who need nothing more than a web browser, but that's the target market for Chromebooks rather than MacBooks.
The point of the article is that the fine details of the calculation of transcendetal functions often change between javascript versions. The standards committee -- possibly deliberately -- didn't pin them down tightly.
I use Brave, previously was a Chrome and Opera (but never again after I learned what the f is going on there).

I love that it has the chrome ecosystem but with better built in privacy and some other extra features I wanted (right click and block element). Everything works, sometimes sites break due to script blocking but that's a click away to fix.
Your title's 82. ($ pbpaste | wc --> 0 15 82)
Classified Search Engine Seeking Growth and Marketing Cofounder
I'm Lawrence from AutoMudo.io in Victoria, BC. AutoMudo.io is a vehicle classified search engine, that lets users search multiple popular classified sites to find the perfect vehicle.

We're looking for a non-technical growth & marketing cofounder

Website: https://automudo.io

We’re building the most comprehensive automotive classified search engine that lets car shoppers search multiple classified sites. We had this idea when we got frustrated of searching multiple classified websites.

I'm a former senior full stack developer in the fin-tech and ad-tech industries. I was previously at 2 ad-tech companies and before that the largest online payment provider in Canada. I've already built the backend and front end of the website, and generate some organic traffic with little to no marketing.We’re looking for someone with growth and marketing experience who can join as an equal cofounder to drive user acquisitions, ad revenue, and brand. We're very happy to work with someone remotely, but would prefer you be based in North America.

If you're interested email me at lawrence@automudo.io.
It seems to me they could disassemble every Max, re-certify every part as stringently as they would certify a brand new part, throw away any part that was out of spec, then build "new" Maxes from those re-certified parts. (Except doing this would cost huge amounts of money.)
Thanks! It took me a while to digest how that tagging workflow worked with the hotkeys, but now I get it. That does work! I think one of the things that tripped me up was the lack of visual feedback on the second press of a key.

Am I right in thinking that the hotkeys don't work while the video is paused?

I guess the other thing I'd love to see is a more dedicated 'share' mode so that you can create a link with a simplified screen that starts playing the track section of a video when the user presses play.
Configuring SwiftUI Views
It's available on archive.org
At some point you must trust something or someone
I found that interesting as well (it's part of the reason why I shared it ;) ), but I would guess it's not surprising given that it was apparently largely authored by Samuel Groß.
Heh. I've been reading HN for long enough to never be surprised by the capability of incredibly pedantic people to be incredibly pedantic.
I should have said "about 12 years or more."

The tipping point for crime was around 1996-1997. After that, murders (while a bit higher) were much closer to current levels.

After that there was about a 12 year period (until 2010) when rents weren't nearly as high as they are now -- around 40 percent lower across the board; and some neighborhoods have basically "flipped" and seen their median rents double.

The point is, from around 1998-2010 the city was about as "desirable" as it is now -- but significantly more affordable. To get affordability back to those levels -- we'd have to see something like a 30 to 40 percent reduction throughout the system.

It seems unlikely that would happen, even given the most ambitious upzoning, and the most wildly optimistic increases in inventory anyone could reasonably hope for.
FireFox at home, the new Edge for work/development.
I'll repeat once again: do your engineering homework and decide if you can live with a spec that changes the Nth digit of precision, or if you need more precision roll your own. If you're just making an SVG rotate, then why are you arguing?
An Open Letter to America's Billionaires
Seems like this should be a Show Hn?
He got immortalised as a Cassandra in XKCD, that's not nothing :)

https://www.xkcd.com/743/

(at least I assume that's RMS?)
Not that I know of, but I would be really cool. You thinking about building one?
It's not just hollywood, it's all creators. Technical Publishers, software companies, etc.

While I agree that software freedom is important, I would argue that freedom itself is important -- and that means being able to choose the license for a creative work.

That is unless you believe that everything should be locked in walled garden hell....
Thats why I wrote "thread". The HN discussion wasn't at the time I posted this taking into account the government stockpile as a pragmatic solution to the issue, but instead discussing tariffs and other approaches.
Today it's mitigated by the pilot. Runaway Stabilizer is a memory-item. [1]

This is the same memory item Boeing thought would mitigate MCAS, since that is essentially a runaway stabilizer trim, although in retrospect behaving in a very different manner making it much harder to diagnose.

[1]: http://www.b737.org.uk/runawaystab.htm
Bash tetris also comes with Gforth (GNU Forth)!
The thing that's really struck me (which is potentially saying a lot - or nothing - because I'm still young) is how cheap PCB Fabrication (and Assembly!) at a hobbyist level has gotten recently e.g. An 8-layer ENIG, double silkscreen, a few gold fingers for $40 to $50 shipped is pretty damn cheap

Think of all the projects to never get round to making!
I never understood why PHP gets so much hate but Javascript gets a pass. maybe times are a changing. But it might even be too late for PHP.
It will often be about a balance of speed of development vs stability. And it will be impossible to create something bug free.

I focus more on backups and monitoring. So I might not prevent all bugs from happening, but in case they do - a) I find out very early (error monitoring + uptime monitoring) and/or b) I can roll back very quickly to a very recent version.

I'd rather deliver 6 imperfect features quickly and getting feedback from users early (feedback can mean tracking which features are being used most) and iterating early, than investing a lot of time into 3 technically great features, then finding out 2 of them people aren't really using.

I know it's scary, because it's sort of like going out onto the field without enough training. But focus on the added value you can deliver and listen to your customers, and it will be fine.
In my opinion he’d have done even better throwing away anki and watching way more kid shows. Languages aren’t supposed to be memorized. If you’re communicating with it, it just sticks in your brain.

When learning to ride a bike You don’t memorize when to move your legs.
Project “Optima” – Part 1
I'm leery of co-sleeping mostly because it seems to be highly correlated with kids who have bad sleep habits and keep waking up their parents constantly (don't worry how you'll know, they'll tell you) well into their toddler years, and beyond. And I'm pretty sure the co-sleeping is a big part of the cause (can't get used to waking up mom & dad for entertainment every time your natural sleep cycle wakes you up a smidge if they're not there to wake up and start giving you attention instantly).

But like anything else, fuck, if it's working for you and the risk is very low, do what you need to do. I avoided it because I kept seeing hellish outcomes but if that's not what's happening for you, go for it.
The margin is already there today, but it’s “under siege” by Amazon prices. My model would shrink it a bit per item (getting closer to the Amazon one) and then recoup it in aggregate by dramatically reducing local inventory while ensuring the same (or higher) amount of total sales. Basically you shrink costs while making it easier for customers to give you money.

Obviously you cannot stop people from going to Amazon anyway, but if you make it easy enough and convenient enough for customers to buy stuff right away (including ebooks, which currently are not sold in-stores at all), I think you have a good chance to compete.
UC Berkeley CS 198-96: Intro to Neurotechnology Lecture 1
Feynman was undoubtedly a genius, but he also suffered from a need to be admired. The safecracking episodes at Los Alamos are a perfect example - giving the impression he was an expert safe cracker when his real methodology was guesswork and sometimes subterfuge (birthdays, anniversaries, or even subtlety observing someone inputting their combination).