skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our immediate goal should be to set our sights lower; forget ML, instead improve and expand technologies like RPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation), which is only "AI" in the narrowest sense.

Example: my wife is an admin in a school office, and a ludicrous amount of her and her colleagues' time is spent on replicating data entry between a multiplicity of different incompatible systems. The Rolls Royce / engineer's solution to this would be to provide APIs for all these disparate systems and have some orchestration propagating the data between them, except of course that's never going to be remotely practical; instead, dumbly spoofing the typing that the workers do into the existing UIs is a far more tractable approach. My (admittedly not 1st person based) experience of these things is that they currently still require significant technical input in the form of programming and "training", but this fruit has got to be hanging a lot lower than any ML-based approach.
Fractals have same patten across different scales. For example, the capillaries that carry blood to the lungs have branching pattern that appears to be conserved when viewing them at low resolution or high resolution
p(woke | rationalist) is like pretty high dude
Upwork joins in to go remote-first after Covid-19
Yes, because then the library developer can define all of the things that COULD be interesting, and leave it to the user of the library to decide WHAT to record (filters), and WHERE to record it (exporters).

And since this is a standard, it means that when a user includes a bunch of disparate libraries/remote calls in his app, he can define his instrumentation wishes once for everything during app initialization. The libraries can even cooperate since they use the same underlying API and concepts for instrumentation.
Turns out you can use any language to write Java code.
Show HN: Tools for practicing a musical instrument as single HTML files
I'm a retired software developer. I hadn't really coded in like four years. But with the lockdown, and my wife in the next room sewing masks, I got the urge to craft something too.
Slightly off topic but:
Why is Microsoft not included in this acronym (FAANG)? Surely they're a more significant company than Netflix?
You keep pushing away namespaces but (as I'm sure you know) you can make a thread join a namespace. I do this with network, mount and user namespaces, to get some separation and be able to put strict firewall, mount rules in place.

Since you can put uid and gid in firewall rules it makes for interesting belts and suspenders component separation.

Combined with ZeroMQ, and SPARK and lots of generated code for the inter-thread comm and you can build modular designs.

Just don't look at you ip link / ifconfig :-)
Monte Carlo Forecasting in Software Delivery
Granderson: Pat Tillman’s sacrifice an important reminder of what Memorial Day
It started off as a federal holiday to honor members of the military who died in battle but has absentmindedly morphed into the world’s largest backyard barbecue. Don’t take my word for it — take yours.
A better title would have been appreciated. Not clear who "his" is initially.
Maybe they have in some areas.

In my case, rural Finland, it's been the same for as long as I remember. Maximum limit is 120 km/h on freeways (and there are practically none of them where I usually drive), elsewhere on bigger inter-city roads it's 100 km/h during summer and 80 km/h during winter. Lesser roads, never more than 80 km/h.

And traffic never flows significantly faster than the limit. A few km/h over the limit at most. There are some weirdos who drive much faster and are constantly overtaking others, but relatively few people drive like that. If anything, it seems to me that speeding has become less common over the years as the police have tightened the limit at which they'll fine you.
Notably this law perpetuates on a daily basis the Nazis' coercive and violent appropriation of a number of traditional religious and cultural symbols, and with it their unnatural exploitation as emblems of the most evil and despicable ideas ever contrived in modern history. All things considered, a very fitting example of parent poster's point.
As long as the DUID does not change, though, is it really important how the DHCP address is mapped? MAC addresses can be spoofed, even randomised at every boot if one is so inclined. They are not any more unique as the DUID in the end of the day.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more development of engines optimized as range extenders. That seemed like an obvious next step from the Prius, for example.

But I think the peak of that opportunity has passed. The market in Europe and China is going to flip to pure electric in 5-8 years, with the US 5 years later. The window for developing new models that fit into that transition is shrinking. There will be long term demand for range extended vehicles, still in 15 or 20 years, but it will be niche.
Reassessing My “Works on My Machine” Certificate
The Bugatti Chiron’s Yearly Tune-Up Costs as Much as a Civic
> Disabling IPv6 because of some -maybe imagined- problem

I've had very real IPv6 problems at home, which has caused me to disable it for long stretches. I turn it back on every now and then to see if life has improved though.

Most of my issues have been down to my ISP only handing out a dynamic /64 prefix. Apparently that's not how you do it and the software side doesn't seem to want to accommodate that, but that's what I got so...
More bandwidth == less switching == lower latency.

Also light can travel from point A to the diametrically opposite point on the surface of earth in 66ms.

Currently it takes 227ms to ping New York from Tokyo[1]. As light travels, those two cities are only 36ms away from each other. Seems like there is plenty of room for improvement, even given the speed of light.

[1] https://wondernetwork.com/pings
You're invited to my funeral.. wait, no you're not, sorry, you can watch it on Zoom.
Jakob Nielsen's Biggest Wins and Fails in 25 Years of UX Columns
Easy to fix with overpaneling unless you’re over 60ish latitude or live in a valley or something.
I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene).

1= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
thispitchdeckdoesnotexist.com
I Broke into Data Science
From RFC8415: DUID used by a client or server SHOULD NOT change over time if at all possible.

Read the fine article. The reasons are mostly the same as DHCP on v4. The ability to assign a specific IP to a specific device for what ever reason: Adding reverse DNS, tracking given IP to specific device etc.

It might not be useful against hostile actors (just like ipv4 DHCP) but its perfectly fine for everyone else.

And the specific argument that "Using it might encourage nat on ipv6" is about as condescending as saying "Using your computer might encourage you to look at naughty pictures".

Android is now the ONLY operating system that doesn't support this and in many ways is harming the uptake of IPV6 because of this. Not being able to use DHCPv6 for Android reduces the chances of an organisation using DHCPv6 for everything else which reduces the pressure on vendors to fix any DUID bugs.
For those not in "the biz", the idea of a WordPress site isn't too far-fetched.

One can mention that there is a LAMP stack behind WordPress without knocking too many unconscious.

Amazon's genius has been to sell the various permutations of the acronym "LAMP" as services.
Depends on your uptime guarantees.

It becomes a non-issue if you're able to go down for a few moments.
Not necessarily viable for some software though, it just depends on what you're running.

(Especially because you can apply the migration on slave and subsequently switch master, making this downtime as quick as the time your system needs to do a database switch.)

This doesn't apply to big services with millions of users, however.
Whoa a fellow Letu grad in the wild! My wife and I graduated back when it was top flight school in the nation 2009. Beat out Embry Riddle and the Air Force Academy that year. She wasn't on the Sting team though, just a regular student. I worked for IT for a year before we moved off into the wild world.

When did you graduate? Are you into programming?
This is the sort of wisdom that leads a company to create macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The recognition that some things are too dissimilar to ship in the same box.
Handling a POST request in a server in Flutter
It's not misquoting. It's poorly chosen words that were misleading. I too thought you meant you either replaced sscanf with a faster equivalent or used sscanf to beat something else.

Instead write "I replaced sscanf with single use code", but then the speed improvement is not that interesting.
Getting Started with Axios in Nuxt
Electrics are great for low-speed stop-and-go. They're not as good on a highway, though. 0% of the energy spent displacing air at 70mph is recovered.
> But admins can still choose to block instances in the future that I might have interest interacting with. It is like a gamble choosing an instance.

Then have multiple accounts and abide by each instances' rules.

> Making an instance is tedious, and once someone in charge finds out who you hangout with, your domain name gets blocked. Such is socializing.

You can still hang out with the folks you were hanging out with. They blocking you has no bearing over who you hang out with, unless you let them get under your skin.

Based on your responses here and elsewhere it sounds like you have a bone to pick with Mastodon because you can't find a solution where you get to be heard by everyone all the time, from the far-left to the far-right. That's not a right and that's not "free speech", that's trampling on others' freedom of association and their right to build communities as they see fit: Not every person is welcome in every community. Who are you and I to dictate what a "correct, healthy community" is?
I'm at a hospital where someone at long last got authorized to try ML on the clinical database.

The ethical committee required that prior to using any data, you have to make a static copy in another database. Their argument is

1. They don't want excel files flying around (which will happen regardless) and

2. To perform any analysis, you "obviously" have to have "structured data", which "obviously" means that you have to extract a csv from the base system (MongoDB) and put that into a RDBMS (redcap).

Go figure...
x86 was always all about backwards compatibility. It's the whole reason why it's such an ugly agglomeration of weird features.

lucky for us the clean sheet ia432...err i960, er itanium will save us all!
Good point. Separation of different config aspects is in the pipe as dedicated article
Sounds reasonable.

It just feel very weird to me that the word "fediverse" is thrown around like a universe, except it is a balance of not getting thrown out by not being the norm. Perhaps it is just me that has this fantasy of everyone being in one place, at least on the Internet, but jerks are jerks.

String phone in one hand, scissors in another.
Inigo Quilez does similar things on his youtube channel [1] and site [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmAhiG8HQDlz8uyekw4ENw

[2] http://iquilezles.org
IBM has laid people off. Some companies like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb laid off a lot of tech people (even if the extent of their status as "tech" companies is questionable).

Some governments are pledging support to startups, which is indicative of some trouble: https://sifted.eu/articles/startups-government-support/

Anecdotally, I'm also hearing that startups are having a hard time finding funding, which isn't surprising in the current cautious financial climate.
Okay this is pretty cool, I can set up so `.js` files are opened automatically with Node.js:

$ alias -s js=node
$ echo "console.log('Hello world')" > demo.js
$ demo.js
Hello world
> The talent quality is the same.

Before I relocated to the Bay Area, I had never gone on call. Never diagnosed a system by only looking at graphs of metrics it emitted. Never ran experiments against tiny percentages of production traffic. Never had to maintain consistency while failing over between regional datacenters. Being here did make me a stronger engineer, because companies here are earlier adopters with tougher problems, and the scale to make solving those problems worthwhile, and people who have been studying them. Maybe someday these experiences will be evenly distributed among remote workers everywhere, but right now they're concentrated in the strongest labor markets.
> Type/Kind hierarchy is unified when you write a dependently typed system

i'm being pedantic, but i don't think that's always the case. afaik

Type : Type

leads to "inconsistency" (sounds like Russell's paradox, but my knowledge of the theory gets flaky here). so e.g. in Coq there's actually a hierarchy of "universes":

> "[The type of Int is Set, ] the type of Set is Type(0), the type of Type(0) is Type(1), the type of Type(1) is Type(2), and so on."

http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/html/Universes.html

(though a dependently-typed system may hide universes from the user by default and offer "universe polymorphism" to allow them to gloss over it)
Is Dropshipping Still a Valid Business Model?
Making a window to redraw gracefully when resizing it by its left or top edge is one true nightmare. Always has been, still very much is.
Echoing this as well, I worked for Influitive and was one of the original authours of apartment (sorry!)

There are a lot of headaches involved with the "tenant per schema" approach. Certainly it was nice to never have to worry about the "customer is seeing data from another customer" bug (a death knell if you're in enterprisish B2B software), but it added so many problems:

- Migrations become a very expensive and time-consuming process, and potentially fraught with errors. Doing continious-deployment style development that involves database schema changes is close to impossible without putting a LOT of effort into having super-safe migrations.

- You'll run into weird edge cases due to the fact that you have an absolutely massive schema (since every table you have is multiplied by your number of tenants). We had to patch Rails to get around some column caching it was doing.

- Cloud DB hosting often doesn't play nice with this solution. We continually saw weird performance issues on Heroku Postgres, particularly with backup / restores (Heroku now has warnings against this approach in their docs)

- It doesn't get you any closer to horizontal scalability, since connecting to a different server is significantly different than connecting to another schema.

- It will probably push the need for a dedicated BI / DW environment earlier than you would otherwise need it, due to the inability to analyze data cross-schema.

I still think there's maybe an interesting approach using partioning rather than schemas that eliminates a lot of these problems, but apartment probably isn't the library to do it (for starters, migrations would be entirely different if partioning is used over schemas)
I’ve been working in the “real world business processes that companies are trying to AI-ify” realm for quite a while now. Pharma, cyber security, oil and gas production, etc.

This article doesn’t mention a really, really straightforward factor for why AI hasn’t invaded these domains despite billions of dollars being dumped into them.

An automated process only has to be wrong once to compel human operators to double or triple check every other result it gives. This immediately destroys the upside as now you’re 1) doing the process manually anyway and 2) fighting the automated system in order to do so.

99% isn’t good enough for truly critical applications, especially when you don’t know for sure that it’s actually 99%; there’s no way to detect which 1% might be wrong; there’s no real path to 100%; and critically: there’s no one to hold responsible for getting it wrong.
Yes, my fantasy is less like "improving Amtrack" and more like "replicate Japan's Shinkansen".
And the useless Windows Experience Index. Like they thought developers would ship software with a single WEI for minimum and recommended requirements.
For those who haven't seen his work already: https://iquilezles.org/index.html
AWS sounds like a good idea until you start calculating the cost of the setup with any kind of clustering and moderate data traffic.
evvvvil_ and Flopine also

https://twitch.tv/evvvvil_

https://twitch.tv/flopine
"AI is a 'brain' that you plop down in the organization and it does 'unsupervised learning' to automate your business and delight your clients with optimized outcomes." - As explained to me

I now see Google sales dragging these people out to 'AI meetings', which are about Dialog Flow. (Meeting pitch email gets around, business manager reply all: 'WTF is this?') Later they summarized the meeting, as they understood it: "You just need to drag and drop the CRM on the 'Brain' and then you can book haircut appointments and open a bank account. We were like um, we develop and support software, they were like - just drag and drop you knowledge management API on it too." Uh... what KM system?

The complicated part is that in small and midmarket business, their knowledge is tribal and processes are folklore. There are processes that are followed though they don't exist, and business rules violated as they aren't aware.

Meanwhile, no one in sales puts useful information in a CRM system if they can avoid it, the least effort principle on administrivia is important if you are ever going to hit your ever growing number.

Finally, the management must still be spooging for SPOGs, I sill see marketing for them as some sort of nirvana. Meanwhile, they have been collecting data randomly about everything, all over the place, excel documents, FTP servers, and of course databases. Here, no one in IS/IT will admit: The servers were here when they started their job and they have no idea what is on them or if they are even needed anymore. They certainly aren't mentioning that to the incoming CIO, who gets focused on improving efficiency as per his executive mandate. So he/she gets to work with cloud migrations (more hilarity ensues)

I need to stop now. It's a rat hole...
I thought review manipulation goes against google policy? Or this only applies for apps with a limited budget?
I've got to ask; given that a core point of contributing to HN is "Assume good faith." How does that marry up with this cathy-newman esque tactic universally seen when any discussions around this sort of topic crops up?
Do your sensors/lamps use Zigbee? I use the excellent Zigbee2MQTT library and a DIY Zigbee sniffer. Now I can use most vendor-locked IOT-devices (Hue, Ikea Tradfri, cheapo Chinese stuff) in my Home Assistant without the need of a separate bridge.

Check if your devices are supported here: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.htm...
This is cool! It's simple and clean. I'm wondering how does the initial key exchange work. That seems to be the biggest problem with PGP.

I would recommend giving it a more different look than WhatsApp.
Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/

Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?
The only paper I see referenced talking about the vitamin D-COVID link is [0]. It doesn't look too polished, and the methodology seems a bit lacking - I'm not a professional though, so if someone is please correct me. Assuming the paper is solid, it is one study on <5000 people, where only 499 even had information about their vitamin D levels.

The article itself only really talks about this connection in a single paragraph, the rest of it dedicated to general issues around vitamin D deficiencies - I don't personally know how big a problem this actually is, but the fact that 1 small paper said it helps with COVID isn't a reason for it to now be "shouted from the rooftops".

In the sentence following this advice, a different (published) paper is referenced [1]: "A new article by a long list of medical experts in the BMJ cautiously agrees", but as they then quote, the only result that paper gives in reference to COVID is that stay-at-home orders may increase vitamin D deficiencies. Though not outright malicious, to me it read like the article was trying to gain credibility by quoting a published paper which talks about vitamin D and COVID together, even if unrelated to a possible vitamin D-COVID connection. Though this might just be me.

Either way, I don't see this "growing evidence" from the article - if it was titled different, and only mentioned [0] in passing (but even better, not at all), I'd have less of a problem with it, but it's implying that a link between vitamin D deficiency and COVID is there and is significant, when both these things are pretty much still unknown.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.08.20095893v...

[1] https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2020/05/13/bm...
It just means "lump of turf" where I live.
> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format?

It can definitely do that, but you might not like the cost/benefit analysis, depending on how many such documents you want to process. The costs are coming down steadily though as the tech improves. If you need to do millions of such documents, yeah a model will probably be worth it. But if you need to do a few hundred you probably should just do them manually.

The thing is, reality has surprisingly high resolution. When you give out a task like this to a person, they will likely come back to you for clarification about how you want to deal with some of the examples. Your initial requirements will be underspecified, or incorrect, in some details. When you are dealing with a person, these minor adjustments are pretty inconsequential, and so you don't really notice it happening. The worker might also have enough context to guess what you want and not ask, and just tell you the summary when they deliver the work.

If you're training a model, you need to work through all these annoying details about what you want, just as you would when you're creating any other sort of program. This adds some overhead, and places a lower bound on how many examples you'll need to have annotated -- you'll always need enough examples of annotation to actually specify your requirements, including various corner-cases. You need enough contact with the data to realise which of your initial expectations about the task were wrong.

So there will always be a lower scaling limit, where the automation isn't worthwhile for some small volume of work. The threshold is getting lower but there will always be a trade-off.
‘Seward’s Folly’ in buying Alaska was a brilliant idea
Many people can’t believe that if we improve IC engines a couple percent a year we’ll be at the Carnot limit in a few decades.