skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Less gaslighting.

There's a lot of ground between "error messages precise enough to effectively give botters a to-do list" and "faking failures 100 times in a row." What was the marginal utility of the 99th fakeout? Are there really enough otherwise effective bots that get persistently tripped up by this particular fakeout to justify sending the poor kid crying to his room?

Almost certainly not. What really happened is that someone removed (or never added) user communication in order to maximize their score against botters and gave little thought to mitigating their false positives. Minimizing them, yes, mitigating them, no. "Humans are smart, they'll figure it out," they rationalized to themselves, and called it a day. They never bothered to calculate (or even guess) when the marginal utility of the fakeout dropped far enough to allow them to have mercy on the poor humans still caught in their web.
Surely "a few extra cows" requires more than slapping down $5 at your local Walmart.
Hum... I'm not from the US and do not live there if that's what you are asking.

People usually have enough trouble separating the first name from whatever you call the rest of it and deciding on what part goes where, and you expect them to be able to tell what are the cultural roots of the name?

Keep in mind that not all names on databases are filled by their owners. Besides, I really doubt I would be able to enter my name into whatever you are designing without some amount of lying.
I think there are some features of DynamoDB that are miles ahead of other databases:

- Billing model. Pay for reads and writes directly rather than trying to guess how your queries turn into CPU & RAM. Also able to scale reads and writes up and down independently, or use pay-per-use pricing to avoid capacity planning.

- Permissions model: Integrates tightly with AWS IAM so works well with AWS compute (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda) with IAM roles. Don't need to think about credential management and rotation.

- Queries will perform the same as you scale. It's going to work the exact same in testing and staging as it is in prod. You don't need to rewrite when you get four times as many users.

A lot of folks are worried about migrations, but they're not as bad as you think. I've got a whole chapter on how to handle migrations. Plus, one of the examples imagines that we're re-visiting a previous example a year later and want to add new objects and change some access patterns. I show how it all works, and they're really not that scary.
Why not write code locally and push to build/test remote?

I feel like this is the best of both worlds- but it does require some up front effort to build the pipeline
You can run a k steps of adam-sgd and differentiate through the learning rate and scalarising parameters of a composite loss function in order to meta-learn them.

Support for general n-th total derivatives is rather good :)
The same article was submitted yesterday. I think it is very one sided. Even the facts it includes (Boris was warned of 100k deaths, in writing), it somehow glosses over to blame political appointees who become scientists despitw not being scientists...

The UKs current government actually make Trump etc look good on this subject. It's official policy that scientists cannot question government decisions. The party in power has "had enough of experts". Everyone without sufficient ideological purity had been sacked (the chancellor of the exchequer, traditionally the second most powerful person in the country is was given the job because he is loyal, he has no previous ministerial experience).

Don't let the ignorance and incompetence (or total disregard for the nation) be blamed on anything but the people in charge.
One of the things that really struck me reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was the observation in it that you could almost always distinguish scientific fields from other by whether they taught students using the original works of those who made important discoveries or if they re-wrote them into easier to understand textbooks. If you can't separate the truth of what someone said from the way they said it you might be doing something useful but you don't have the tools to be making actual progress.
Airbnb’s Coronavirus Crisis: Burning Cash, Angry Hosts and an Uncertain Future
I assume you mean you are running the whole site through the cloudflare proxy, not just DNS. You cannot get that advanced of DNS metrics by just using them for DNS.
It is a UI Widget Library for the Web. It helps with RAD style development.
i'm sure there are people at google who want to honor those opt-outs in good faith, and there are those who don't.

the massive organizational system itself, nevermind the massive computational systems, acts against doing this thoroughly and auditably.

it's also hard to believe that they'd get the data out of every last nook and cranny when they don't even swap out dead hard drives in their datacenters because of time and cost to find them (as related to me by a googler a number of years ago).

and they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists for anything that falls all the way through the cracks to the public in a way that allows lawsuits (gdpr and the like).
I think I'd be the first to admit that NATO has probably outlived it's useful life as a Cold War construction, but there's still a lot of history there. None of that exists with China, and China seems to be using the crisis in Europe as a means to exert its influence abroad (hello 5G rollout). Does Europe really want to trade that history for a new relationship with a country like China where the structure of that relationship is yet unknown?

Perhaps it's better to actually ask some hard hitting questions about fairness between US-EU trade relations (and admittedly since I am an American, it seems a bit unfair that the EU gets to essentially freeload on US defense in the western hemisphere and we get some stiff tariffs in return). So it seems perfectly reasonable, and probably a good thing, that France and Germany are creating an independent defense pact.

>If there's one thing I'm sure of is that China won't share their spying data with my own government ;P

And? Consider for a moment that sharing of this data between defense partners actually provides a useful signal of mutual capabilities and for what's being collected.
It’s more like asking a public-facing representative of the company whose job partially consists of answering questions about the company a hard question. Not as pithy as your cashier analogy, but closer to the truth. Your cashier is more analogous to an Amazon warehouse worker, or a literal Whole Foods cashier.
Yeah, they have to fire him and then hire someone else. That costs time and money. Then he can make some noise about it and get media attention on his firing.

If this happens enough times, perhaps corporations may be incentivized to change how they do things.
Steps to Starting Your Own Business Quickly
That's an excellent business model.
Enforcing US IP protections isn't a partisan issue. I think it's crazy that people are trusting zoom for their critical communications (like design review meetings and screen sharing schematics/process diagrams!) when there's a non-zero chance that the CCP/PLA has the infrastructure to:

cat '$COMPANY/zoom-chat.log' | grep '$TRADE_SECRET' | local_industry_boost.bash

inb4 the whataboutism: yes, the US Government has (and might continue to) participated in state sponsored industrial espionage. But if I'm an American company, I'm not going to care about that.

I've worked for at least one company that outright refused to do business in China or with certain companies that had oversized presence in mainland China because of experiences with this kind of problem. I know of some engineers that were arrested upon entry to the USA because they stole company IP and founded a company in China that used it. I know of another company that had network hardware compromised by an employee over there and was used to attempt to penetrate US networks (and if you wanna get spooked, they weren't alerted by their stateside infosec team, but federal authorities). I don't know why people treat me like a conspiracy theorist for bringing this up about Zoom routing data through China and using less-than-best-practice security.
Towards the end of the article, they talk about high performance modes added by manufacturers and say "The phone essentially goes into a high-power mode throwing away any attempt to be efficient; it’s a nonsensical mode that is unusable in every-day use-cases beyond getting high benchmark scores"

What makes it "nonsensical" ? Are they exceeding the TDP of the phone? If so, then couldn't benchmarks just be made much longer, so that the phones would throttle or fail if they were cheating?

Or is it just about battery life? If so, why is it unreasonable to have a phone plugged in to get great gaming performance?
Written today it feels like some of these technologies mentioned in the article should actually have demonstrated some real purpose.
The odd thing is, we physicists actually have a pretty solid understanding of why magnets repel each other. It's a fun story, one that I try to include every time I teach the subject, and I'm pretty sure that Feynman knew it! So it's curious to me to see Feynman basically dodging this question. (His point that "I can't explain it in terms of anything else you're already familiar with" is entirely valid! But I kinda feel like that's what questions are for: learning new things, that we may not already be familiar with.)

With that in mind, I probably would have answered in a different way, though the questioner might get bored and regret asking if I didn't find a way to be unusually efficient about it: this answer relies on a lot of knowledge that seems at best tangentially related. :) I'd try to give some rough description of the way that moving currents generate magnetic fields (especially the field generated by a current loop), and the way that moving currents feel a force due to magnetic fields (especially the force on a current loop). That's enough to argue that current loops will interact with each other in just the same ways that magnets do. And then I could tell at least a sketch of the story of how regions of aligned spins in magnetic materials act on average like current loops. (But that's quite a long story to answer a simple question, so again, I can sympathize with Feynman for saying, "There isn't a straightforward answer that a non-expert would understand.")
whiteboards date back to at least the 1980's
Great point! It was originally about both of these things, but the storage aspect isn't discussed much anymore because it's really not a concern.

The data integrity issue is still a concern, and I talk about that in the book. You need to manage data integrity in your application and think about how to handle updates properly. But it's completely doable and many people have.
On the other hand, there are a lot less Julia developers than Python developers so focusing on Zygote instead of splitting the effort over several AD packages makes some sense, doesn't it? There were already a few AD packages that were fairly mature: https://www.juliadiff.org/

Also, I think performance is very important because Zygote is used in Flux (Julia's main deep learning framework at this point.) and if it's keeping Flux's performance from matching, say, PyTorch's then that's going to limit adoption of Flux and Julia. One of Julia's main claims to fame is performance so people coming to kick the tires are going to be disappointed if it's actually slower for this domain.
This has to be irony right? Not more than 10 seconds in I had the pleasure to hear loud, wet, chewing.
I would say that anyone who ever tries to encrypt some data and does the bare minimum google/stackoverflow search for how to do it would see extremely vigorous warnings not to touch ECB with a 10 foot pole.

Unfortunately, crypto libraries have a history of having a terrible UI and defaulting to ECB. Years ago I ran into this with pycrypto. I worked on a team that joked about how important it was not to do ECB and it turns out they had done ECB. https://www.dlitz.net/software/pycrypto/api/current/Crypto.C...
> Private enterprise as whole is every bit as f'd up as the government.

This is wrong. What's the basis for this comment/idea?

I have founded and run multiple companies. I have worked for small, medium and large (8,000 employee) companies in various capacities. In a 30+ year career I could not name even one company that I would say fits your assertion at all. I am sure they exist. Yet, I am also sure they are an insignificant percentage of the total.

There's a key difference between private enterprise and government: Failure kills.

Again, except for corner cases or companies that exist due to government money (I don't include these in "private enterprise") entrepreneurship, private industry, capitalism if you will, is a survival of the fittest contest. Like it or not, this is reality.

Government operates with completely different metrics. Failure, for the most part, has no real consequences. A simple example of this is the "high speed" train project here in CA. I've lost track at this point. I think the last time I looked they were at $100BN and the whole thing is a massive smelly pile of manure. Nobody, except for taxpayers, will pay for the consequences of that failure...sadly, one of many at the hands of government.

This crisis is highlighting just how messed up things are under government control. Last night my son, who is in university pursuing a degree in CS, said "Dad, do you know COBOL?". When I asked why, he said New Jersey is trying to hire a bunch of COBOL programmers because their payment systems are badly broken, the code is done in COBOL and it is in need of fixing so they can pay people the aid funds the federal government is providing. I mean, this is typical, sad and ridiculous.

No, private enterprise is a universe away from almost anything government touches. The only service I can identify in government that lives (or dies) by similar metrics is the military. They have real and non-trivial consequences for incompetence. Death. And that means they can't run like a state payment system that's 40 years old and grossly outdated. I am sure the military have issues as well, yet, for the most part, given their mission, could not survive in the long run if they did not operate at a certain level of competency.
> game-optimized drivers

These generally actually make the games you're playing have somewhat better performance (via game-specific hacks). Applying tweaks to a mobile phone benchmark, but then not applying those same tweaks to other apps is just misrepresentation of actual performance.
I've noticed that it does this in meetings, but not in a direct chat with another person (I don't think group chats either). What I usually do in that case is create a meeting so that I can do that.
This is why I hate shortened variable names.
Setting a sufficiently low DNS TTL will take most caching servers out of the question.
BLM land is held in trust for the people to use. It's a commons. In Nevada, for example, the federal government owns 81% of the land. Similar in Utah and elsewhere. You can't just say "buy your own enormous tracts of land" when it's mostly held by the federal government.

You're inverting the relationship of the government and the people when you approach land management with a mindset of "the government is being generous by granting access to the land". The BLM and federal land management have existed to prevent over-grazing and other tragedy of the commons scenarios. In a very meaningful sense, these ranchers DO own the land, and have chosen to work cooperatively in the past rather than try to parcel the lands out. If you really, really want to privatize these lands, you can, but I don't think that's a better outcome in the end than responsible land management.

The point of holding resources in trust by the government is to help the people, not make a profit. Do you really want the federal government to try to make a profit by charging the highest highway tolls they can get away with? What about charging for beach access? The point of federal resource management is to preserve the resources for the people. Not extract maximum revenue from the people.
Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) on the Far-Side of the Moon
From experience, the clients who can't get some things right struggle to get many things right.

Seriously.

Someone has a great idea and is able to attract good people to work with them? Then even though item X is the focus, you see quality in items Y -> Z. It naturally seems to happen.

I'd love to know WHY this is the case.
Asking a question and expecting a satisfactory answer is not berating someone.
More people know what Google is than TCP/IP.
Stop using Google Analytics and pay for your project? Sorry. I'm not convinced by the logic.
Is that Tailwind UI that you're using? First time I've seen that in the wild in that case!
And it's really interesting: see the HN effect!
Can't you get there by assuming electrical effects propagate at the speed of light as well? And magnetism falls out as a result?
Sketchy package installer to boot https://macpkghallofshame.tumblr.com/post/138612887932/indis...
>But what’s the alternative? Local development with syncing back to a server?

I'd say this is a perfectly fine solution for a lot of cases. Not all, of course, like your iPad one sounds a great fit for mosh (and I'm gonna try it out!) But even a RaspberryPi can power a really powerful terminal.

You can use sshfs[0] to mount a remote drive over ssh. Obviously there will still be some lag - `ls` will require a round trip - but your local terminal will be much snappier.

[0] https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
Neat, where did you order yours from? I've actually been looking for a sensor without a Bayer filter on it to use with a spectrometer, and this looks like the sort of thing that might be able to be used for that.
Making Face Shields for Healthcare Workers
You don't have to be a great company to win in the market. I'd bet that zoom still maintains dominance and manages to con people into believing that they're super secure now guys.
For the average modern website, how much load time does shaving off 44kb save?
I agree. I've been just waiting for a use case for jitsi (the woes of social tools, is there is no use if there is no remote party willing) for years. I love when open source options are valid options.

After all the zoom privacy/security nightmare stuff, we've started looking at alternatives, but we have a set of features we need that either aren't in Jitsi or we couldn't figure them out. So in the mean time we've been stuck with zoom.

* breakout rooms
* annotations on screenshare (being able to draw on the presenter's screen)
* something other than dropbox for exporting recordings

There may be other shortcomings, but we'd be willing to "downgrade" except for these that leave management going "well, i guess we'll just deal with the security issues of zoom rather than lose features"
FAQ Off: Platform for Interactive Q&As [Open Source]
According to the article, the (not mutually incompatible) reasons are:

1. Sanders didn’t run a smart enough campaign

2. Democrats were wary of a very liberal nominee

3. Trump aside, Sanders was always a weird fit as the Democratic nominee

There's another possibility. Democratic primary voters are actually participating in a Keynesian Beauty Contest:

> ... entrants are asked to choose the six most attractive faces from a hundred photographs. Those who picked the most popular faces are then eligible for a prize.

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

The president has broadly and deeply invaded the psyche of democrats. Instead of choosing the candidate they want, party members are choosing the candidate they think everyone else, even those outside the party, wants.

It's similar to the calculation made during 2016. But this time around, there have been 3+ years of unrelenting psyche assault.

Speaking at the level of gut voter reaction and leaving policies aside, the two probable candidates in the probable 2020 presidential election are by a long shot more similar than any other possible matchup.
Covid-19 impact on venture-backed startups
Does anyone know how their releases correspond to version numbers? It looks like they are possibly releasing multiple times a day, or maybe using releases and tags in a non-standard way. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/releases
My 3D printing company is making thousands of Covid-19 test swabs a day
Sounds like a cat and mouse game.

Mouse: They could then try to analyze human delay randomness -- it's probably not uniform.

Cat: And then someone will come up with a replacement to randomDelay that mimics the above pattern.

Mouse: And then they will look for changes in the distribution itself from person to person

etc.
> Google would be in a lot of trouble if they didn't honour that.

There are plenty of examples where Google have not honoured such expectations of trust. They have not, to date, gotten into "a lot of trouble".

The GDPR is probably the piece of regulation most likely to possess teeth big enough to get Google into a little bit of trouble, and the task of enforcing that is down to 1 person in a deliberately underfunded department in the country where Google has chosen to locate it's EU HQ[0]

There is no will to prosecute Google for misbehaviour in this area.

- [0] https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/over-6700...
You might want to try and filter for pages that offer an RSS feed.
Yep, I should have clarified that. There is a weird disconnect between 1-to-1 calls and meetings with 2 people in them.

So far I haven't been able to see any advantage at all to 1-to-1 calls except it takes fewer clicks to start them.
> We should organize our code into deeply nested tree (with exception of cyclical references for recursions), but at top level we use linear and procedural model

A filesystem with nested directories and files is a tree. The contents of a file are read in linear fashion, for the same reason you'd read an s-expression character by character--because it's simple and consistent.

> In each s-expression there is typically 3 to 5 elements, but at top level there's usually more than dozen definitions. It seems jarring especially when contrasted to elegance of s-expressions

There is no law for the "branching factor" of code. It depends on your style, the problem, etc. It seems like a somewhat superficial elegance you're chasing.

> What if I want to write new function? I still have to redirect it to specific location in specific file.

I'm trying to picture what your ideal alternative is, and it doesn't seem much different. Codebase backed by a graph representation that explicitly encodes dependencies in code loading order? When you add a new sexp you add a new edge and node? That is essentially what we have now, `require`s `refer`s and `declare`s as needed, and the convention that you may depend on everything introduced above your current location in the file.
Uh? Many govt agencies care that they can monitor what you do if they want and that you CANNOT connect securely to the web without going through a MITM SSL proxy in some cases.

They are sold this as a virus filtering requirement or something like that.

But some agencies literally decrypt everything going out (and then re-encrypt) - talk about a security and privacy risk!

Staff can use personal phones to check bank balances, do messaging etc if they have any sense at these places.

Thankfully this all died WAY WAY down with certificate pinning - thank you google! Seriously, when the execs got the warnings from google chrome the decrypt everything situation died at a lot of places.

Google's history on securing users using chrome is not bad (if you are dealing with old IE etc chrome is basically heaven by comparison in terms of security and patch velocity)
pretty bold claim... when you say "showed" do you mean personally or that you reached out to him somehow with no evidence that he received information about this?