skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't your coworkers just do the simple thing, and Comment Out unused imports? Where is your Zen now...

For every Virtue, there are multiple interpretations. What's simple footwear: flip-flops, Birkenstocks, or Redwings? 5 Fingers?
Is this a link to someone’s blog? I’m not sure why this belongs here
That's only because languages up until now had it backwards: warning by default instead of erroring by default.

The proper design would fail with an error, unless you added a switch to warn instead.
I live in Japan and have done this last year to great effect.

My work place is about an hour and a half commute and the trains are incredibly packed starting from around 7am all the way till 9.15am.

What I've done was wake up and started working from home sometime between 7-8am till around 9.15am, then leave for the 9.30am train and I'll be in the office by 11.

Work gets done and I don't get stressed from silly crowds. I also do the reverse and leave work around 4pm to avoid the return rush.

It's a small change but it's an incredible quality of live improvement. This is literal pareto, 20% effort with 80% effect. Do it.
A first look at Machine Learning Classifier evaluation
Carlos Ghosn's new life in exile
https://archive.is/vVmnI
I would not ask for a raise right now. How I would phrase this is is more like : "I do believe I'm worth more, and assuming everything goes well, in the long term, I would like to be payed more/get part of the business".

This way, if/when they succeed, you'll succeed too.
In the "interesting legal case" that the original scenario envisaged.
Future of Esports with AI
If you smash them together faster, you just increase their energy, i.e. the opposite of what you want. If electrons fly off, you are likely to be left with an unstable molecule.
The major distinguishing factors between a scam and an also ran in my opinion are that for something to be a scam the people running it have to be aware that it will not work and that they have not ignored any expert advice telling them that it will not work in sufficiently clear terms that they can't claim that it is just naysaying.

Plenty of people that relieved investors from their funds were unaware that what they were building was a scam.

Plenty of people working for companies that built stuff that didn't work were not aware of the fact that it could not work until they themselves established that.

Plenty of successes where there were people saying 'this can't possibly work' right up until the time that it did, in fact, work.

Theranos, Moller sky car, Ubeam (now renamed to SonicEnergy in an attempt to leave their past behind them) -> clearly scams.

This particular steam powered rocket is not a scam in the sense that it did not attempt to pass the risk or the eventual results onto others. It is merely very stupid, and it should serve as an object lesson in that if you are trying to do something in your backyard that normally has budgets in the 10's to 100's of millions that you are likely not going to succeed. Finally, it should teach people that your tests of vehicles of any kind that go up should be done unmanned as long as possible.
Someone else gave a link to an openai blog post, I personally first heard about it in a post by facebook (on their experiments with small precision).

I believe it is not used because it requires 16bits precision which, nowadays, you only get on GPU.
People usually train on GPU but then evaluate on CPU (in production) where the discontinuity would be much smaller (as you would use 32 bits precision).

Furthermore I don't know if, in practice, that type of discontinuity trains as well as a classical activation function (the gradient propagation might be hindered by the limited precision).
thats like saying everyone in the ford factory is hired to design vehicles. some of the bunch are just workers implementing instructions. i interviewed a few ex google, yahoo and amazon and they were exactly that.
If you're in the EU you might want to self-host the fonts (and other assets!) anyway for GDPR compliance - technically, loading any 3rd party asset exposes the visitor's IP address plus any possible tracking cookie plus the exact URL of the website your visitor is reading to the provider.

Google might say they're not doing any tracking on the fonts, but I don't believe them at all.
Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
I used to work as a programmer. In 2017, I had to stop working because of health issues. I remember Rust was a cool project, JS had plenty of frameworks fighting between themselves, SPA was a thing albeit I was skeptical of it, and I was in love with Go. Big words like Data Science and Machine Learning were thrown everywhere. Whas has changed in this scenario? Are there new stuff I should know about? Thanks.
Chrome Webstore Shortcomings
In theory we might be competitors, but I'd rather the world sucked less than feel smug.

So here's my argument: You don't charge enough money. It's the same mistake literally everyone ahead of you has already made before failing. Charge more money. Charge what seems like an absurd amount of money. Because you need a large pool to get people through the door. It's easier to cut prices than to raise them. Charge more damn money.

More selfishly: I can help you with the paywalls thing without cookies. jacques@robojar.com.
> Claiming that software that never saw any real production traffic is "production-ready" is a bold claim to say the least.

What is production traffic?

> I dug into the code base and there doesn't appear to be _any_ tests. I really hope no one actually uses this application for anything real.

Why? Plenty of great software doesn't include test files, and that's not a bad thing. Writing proper test files means you'll easily end up spending 2/3 of the time writing test code, and even after you've written all these test files, then you still have to do a lot of external tests as well. For instance, setting up external uptime services to ensure things are running as intended, testing everything is loading properly on multiple browsers + devices, stress test, etc. You seem to assume they've done no tests whatsoever just because they don't bother writing test files.

> But validating its functionality is a mammoth task that probably isn't worth doing when existing marketplaces/hosted stores already exist that undoubtedly do it better.

It's worth doing if you're interested in working with a similar stack. I won't comment on the server code since I haven't worked with Node (and hate JS), but the Vuejs client looks good.

> The author also doesn't seem to have any qualms about burning bridges either.

I agree, but the same could be said about you.
Scan-Reading AI Systems Are Helping Doctors Diagnose Covid-19
What does "trust" mean in this context?

I expect Tencents government data sharing to be higher, but I also don't expect Facebook's to be zero - I would also say I trust less Facebook's handling of my data and it's exposure to third parties (see ref: Cambridge Analytica) and let's not forget their experiments in changing people's moods by manipulating what they saw on their timeline.

Not saying Tencent are free from sin, but it seems to be the breaches of trust that Facebook has performed are more wide reaching...
Good questoin, it's hard to give a definite answer, but usually "if it has a harddrive and a network card you're unlikely to have any problem". Rule of thumb: Normal Desktops and Servers are unlikely to be problematic.

Really the only realistic problem is that if you generate a cryptographic key right after booting the device and if the device is something like a router. Look here [1] for some research on that. That scenario can be avoided by newer APIs (newer linux kernels have the getrandom system call for that) that only will spit out random numbers once the RNG has been initialized with enough randomness - but in return you may get services blocking at boot.

[1] https://factorable.net/
All cars in europe have their power defined in kW on the registration certificate, hp is not mentionned.
It will make more sense in the future with electric vehicle.

Hp is used when speaking about cars, but it is a very misleading unit (bhp, metric hp, customary hp etc..) pretty much the same mess with imperial and us gallons.
The Structure and Administration of the GNU Project
Show HN: Search code in GitHub repos using regular expressions
Verified Instruction-Level Energy Consumption Measurement for Nvidia GPUs
Lots of comments about how "no one wants this".
But we already have things like Dropbox, Mega, Drive, iCloud where it makes complete sense for users.
Yup- dont like this open source code? Pull request or GTFO.
It’s interesting that it’s been common to see this exact same opinion (a lack of conscientiousness on the part of students) expressed in Germany about German education over the past 10+ years yet you cite German students as a good example.

In Germany it’s commonly stated that things were better previously and that there’s a ongoing decline.

My understanding in the German case is that it’s not supported in any measures of student attainment - grades, earnings after 10 years etc.
Excerpts from the article.

Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center is using two systems. They are still comparing the two systems to see which works better.

...

While Yitu’s system can achieve 99% accuracy in detecting viral pneumonia, tech and e-commerce giant Alibaba claims that its own scan-reading AI can diagnose COVID-19 specifically with 96% accuracy.

...

But However, experts are skeptical of such a high accuracy rate for COVID-19 pneumonia, as it has yet to be supported with evidence.

...

we have to analyze the case using scans, epidemiological evidence, and nucleic acid tests. This 96% sounds like a PR gimmic
It would be good to see the percentage of upvotes on a product. Something like reddit.
Is this different from running any other piece of software from the internet?
Wait, you need to enter the previous owner's credentials in order to wipe a phone?
They only accept US customers: https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344891-what-if-i-l...
Thanks for sharing! Also `fonts.gstatic.com` is a CNAME alias for `gstaticadssl.l.google.com` which is commonly blocked by ad blockers. uBlock Origin recently added CNAME based blocking, and PiHole is rolling out support for it too. Just another reason to host it yourself.
Productivity gains. But naturally people want more returns, higher stock prices, more profit. So we get both real technological change (innovation) and the dark patterns too.
x11docker takes this and runs with it:)
On they plus side, they won't have nearly as much trouble as they otherwise would have had to make it go down.

On a boat like this 70 tons isn't all that much, but it is outside the margin of error in terms of what you would correct with the ballast tanks. This will be expensive and tricky to fix without impacting other systems.
NYC wants to change to admissions process from being based on a single standardized test to being based on middle school class rank plus a standardized test. Under the current system, some middle schools send a lot of students, some send a few, and many send zero. Including class rank into the admissions criteria would change that. The change would probably increase the representation of black and Latino students at schools like Stuyvesant while maintaining an objective measure of merit: class rank.

This change might help desegregate NYCs public schools by giving white and Asian parents a reason to send their kid to a majority black or Latino school. It could make middle schools more diverse as well.

How would we use this same form of selection to increase Asian representation on high school basketball teams? It's already a de facto class rank system: each high school's basketball team is made of its best players. What's your proposal?
Anyone looking into this stuff needs to read "The impossibility of “fairness”: a generalized impossibility result for decisions"[0]

One type of fairness is always trading off against another, and any presentation suggesting you can just magically increase the fairness of your classifier is straight-up lying.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01195.pdf
Haven: turn old Android phones into security cameras
There’s a huge difference between baking a cake for your kids and running a cake factory.

Enforcing that unused variable rule (and, in some sense the standardized code layout), for me, is sort-of assuming all code that gets compiled will be deployed at scale in a mission-critical context.

A language that also wants to cater to hobbyists should, IMO, be a bit more liberal in what it accepts, and provide flags to enforce additional rules for those who know they need them.

(I also think go could go further in enforcing quality. Code that does in, err := os.Open(path), where in doesn’t escape, should call defer(in.Close). The compiler could enforce that)
The only upside of this is that we finally get to learn about the real infection and death rates.

People believing the data China's been reporting are just very naive.
Ask HN: How to Patent an Algorithm?
So assume I created a magic algorithm which is capable of reducing the computing cost (disc IO and CPU) of any given database-query by 50%.
Is is possible to get a patent for that algorithm?
My research showed that it is generally not possible to do so, but for example I found out that google did this somehow with MapReduce. [1]

The other question is if it even makes sense to get a patent. Are the examples where someone got a patent for an algorithm and got successful out of it? The other option would be to just make it open source (together with the implementation of the algorithm).

PS: I live in europe.

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,650,331.PN.&OS=PN/7,650,331&RS=PN/7,650,331
I don't disagree that it makes economic sense in a lot of cases to go with these kinds of tools. I wonder though if this is really the direction we want to go as an industry. Do we reach some tipping point eventually? when our software is so inefficient that these things do start to matter again? Will we eventually hit hardware limitations that force us to rethink this practice? Maybe eventually there is some holy grail of cross platform productivity and performance to be had.
Making a strong conflicting statement without even attempting to justify it feels very much like cargo culting.

I personally would want a warning but I believe computers should do what we want them to rather than we should do what they want us to.
I really wish they'd get rid of that persistent Scroll banner on every page where the service is active. I'm not going to pay for a service to get rid of ads just to see a different ad.

And no, the ability to share to social media isn't a "useful" service.

I realize they need a way to remind users that Scroll is active, but there needs to be a much less intrusive way to do it, or else they're defeating the purpose of the product.
Tie some balloons to it?
Daredevil “Mad” Mike Hughes was killed in a steam powered rocket launch
A History of the Arabic Language (1998)
> A software should never rely or be dependent to content delivery networks/repositories

Not sure that's viable in today's cloud-y world
Perhaps. One wonders if Italy will be transparent.
The Mechanical Transmission of Power (2013)
You’ve answered my question quite clearly. Thanks.
Because they can't afford to live in SF- which is largely constrained by physical barriers to growth.

I do agree anti building regulations are bad and somewhat at fault but it's not an apples to apples comparison by any means.

Rich people want to live on the west coast because it's beautiful and the weather is pretty nice. In fact I wish I could live on the west coast but could no longer afford to once the baby came along and my wife and I decided to go single income.
On the apparent existence of the moon:

"...think about it – without the help of so-called "experts", how do you really know what you’re looking at? It could be a hologram, projected from various government installations throughout the world. It could be a large, crudely painted balloon, held in place by helium and propelled by tiny sails and rudders (which is why it moves across the sky so slowly). Or, most likely, it could have been different things at different times and different places, depending on the technology available to the conspirators and the culture and beliefs of the population being deceived.

The hoax could easily have been imposed on a gullible world at many points in human history. Perhaps it began as a collective hallucination or a religious myth, or perhaps an especially bright star that came to be exaggerated over time. However the moon story started, early proponents of the hoax were swift to recognize how it could be exploited for their benefit, and shrewdly devised a scheme to use it to their advantage.

They began to spread rumors, falsify scientific observations, and invent new gods to represent this fictional celestial body. They ingeniously concocted the idea of "cycles of the moon", and as their resources increased, were able to create the illusion that this object in the sky actually went through such changes. To make their hoax more plausible to early, superstitious societies, they arranged for these cycles to coincide with the months of the year.

But don’t all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon? Indeed, but shouldn’t one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Even a layperson like myself knows that scientists are not supposed to approach issues with preconceived notions. Yet this principle is cast aside when the moon is at stake. You will never see the revisionist perspective on the moon being taught in institutions of higher learning, even as a controversial opposing view. In fact, in order to even become a recognized scientist in the current atmosphere of academic repression, one must pay lip service to the establishment’s orthodoxy. Could you imagine a student who argued the revisionist viewpoint on the question of the moon being awarded a degree? He would be hounded out of the university in an instant! How can one explain such behavior from institutions that are supposed to serve as forums for the free exchange of ideas, except to conclude that the establishment has something to hide?"

https://phdn.org/archives/revisionism.nl/Moon/The-Mad-Revisi...

https://phdn.org/archives/revisionism.nl/Moon/Feedback4.htm

https://phdn.org/archives/revisionism.nl/Moon/Moon3.htm
I wish processing its own waste was the trend of some communities.

This would maybe help people realize that generating waste has actually a big cost.
And that's part of the reason why some people will bever use go or other languages that add purely stylistical restrictions on you
That said, social media and targeted advertising is used to cause far greater (and more subtle) damage, like polarising opinion and influencing elections. Not to mention common patterns of social media usage (which we have developed and incentivised) are proven to strongly correlate with lower quality of life. (I vaguely remember a causal link too, but I won't say that for sure without a reference.)

A bridge hosts what? 400 people at worst (i.e. when there äre passenger trains on it.) Social media easily hosts 400 thousand or million people.

The single bridge-collapsing event is very dramatic and visceral, but digital platforms allow us to cause damage and death by a thousand cuts.
I wonder how the computation time compares (in the article, he only talks about optimisation time, and that’s not really fair as Excel’s optimiser is more of a toy, while the DAG computation engine is pretty good, I think).

I know an investment bank that had tools to transpile Excel sheets (with specified input/output named ranges) into a nice DAG in C, and expose it as a function, so they could run Excel models on a compute farm and prevent manipulation of the formulae. (Yes, that means they had to reimplement all Excel functions.)

That was more than a decade ago, wonder whether they still use it.
Plenty of old manors will have these. Here is an example from NL (near Velsen-Zuid in Noord Holland):

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4618655,4.6455238,3a,48.9y,1...

The fruit trees are long gone but the wall still stands.
Where can I read what this project seeks out to do?

I didn't understand the GitHub readme file. Other than that it seems they are midway at implementing something.
It's a superset of loopers, timelines and patcher :) but i'm almost alone on it so development is not as fast as it could be
I have seen a similar process on some open-source blockchain projects where they just award people who fix issues within the code.
From what I use, Proxyman is pretty much the same with Fiddler, with nicer and friendly UI.

And Proxyman doesn't come with many advanced features. It's obvious because Fiddler is born 17 years ago.
The Signal client has reproducible builds:

* https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/master/Repr...

... and available source code. The Whatsapp client does not.

Weirdly enough though, Signal does not allow distribution of the client on F-Droid...
He Started His First Business at 13 and Sold His Recent Startup for over $750M
Maybe, but my parents came from the era of slide rules, and when I asked what the answer was to a calculation, I would be told "the answer is ... but I can't tell you where the decimal place goes"
High efficiency houses use this principle (thermal mass) behind glass to soak up the sun during the day and to release the warmth during the evening and night. More complex systems use roof and wall collectors and store the heat underground in large amounts of insulated thermal mass.
It's not the computer wanting you to do this, it's the collective arrogance and pedantry of Google designers wanting you to do this. Therein lies the rub. When the compiler detects the unused variable, it doesn't warn you, nor does it remove the variable as it knows exactly how, but one-ups you to force your hand.

You see, even if this is the right choice, the way it's carried out is douchey, and so I perfectly understand somebody calling it garbage to express a sentiment.
Why would LIGO (https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/) not detect these signals?
"Totally mess up" is exaggerated. I know that 1 hp is "roughly" 1 kw.
Makes you wonder if it's one node with bad content in a set of one thousand servers!

Or bad content cached on one of these/cdn server.
Rocket science is actually rocket science. Making rockets that work, especially with people aboard, is about the most complex thing humans do. Even spending vast amounts of money and hiring the best people can still result in disaster. Doing it by yourself is highly unlikely to work.

I always joke that programming is not rocket science even though some people I know think they are similar.
This explains so much with respect to why politics is so intractable.
https://youshouldgohere.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/wp-conten...
I want my programming language compiler (my computer) to prevent my colleagues from leaving unused variables in their programs.
CEO of Scroll here. yep, it's super annoying and we're changing it to be way less so. Should be rolling out early this coming week, so let me know what you think.

I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff to change as we learn, so please keep the feedback coming.