skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Software can kill if we put blind trust in it and give it full control over the situation. But we shouldn't do that.

Do you work in a commercial software firm? Have you ever seen your salespeople talk with their customer contacts?

The salespeople and marketing departments at the firms that make this technology and target law enforcement markets are, 100%, full stop, absolutely making claims that you can trust the software to have full control over the situation, and you, the customer, should not worry about whether the software should or should not have that control.

Being able to use something "irresponsibly" and disclaim responsibility because AI made the decision is. a. selling. point. Prospective customers want. to. give. up. that. authority. and. that. responsibility.

Making the sort of decisions we ask this shit to make is hard, if you're a human, because it's emotionally weighty and fraught with doubt, and it should be, because the consequences of making the wrong decision are horrific. But if you're a machine, it's not so hard, because we didn't teach the machines to care about anything other than succeeding at clearly-defined tasks.

It's very easy to make the argument that the machines can't do much more, because that argument is correct given what tech we have currently. But that's not how the tech is sold--it becomes a miracle worker, a magician, because that's what it looks like to laypeople who don't understand that it's just a bunch of linear algebra cobbled together into something that can decide a well-defined question. Nobody's buying a lump of linear algebra, but many people are quite willing to buy a magical, infallible oracle that removes stressful, difficult decisions from their work, especially in the name of doing good.

tl;dr capitalism is a fuck. we can pontificate about the ethical use of the Satan's toys as much as we like; all that banter doesn't matter much when they're successfully sold as God's righteous sword.
> If the notifications are frustrating, users will turn off the permissions or remove the application entirely. Crappy snooping applications are gone. Mission accomplished.

Will they? That didn’t happen with the UAC dialogs in Windows.
Abstract math is a good proxy for how human mind works and deduces and reasons about complex topics. I can understand if you do not see beauty in that, but stretching that to "you liked it because it had no use" is inappropriate.

Edit: I imagine you were just tongue in cheek, though.

While you could construe the negation to be what you propose, it's not uncommon to read it as "not having to have a use in mind".
Hello HN! My name is Ari. I've worked as a data engineer for three French startups. The first, didn't have an engineering blog. The second had one, but i never took the courage to write. The third, didn't consider it a priority.

I believe that all tech teams have tremendous value to share. With Guriosity, I want to encourage and support more teams to write about their work.

So, I gathered 60 software engineering blogs by French companies and classified 600+ manually picked articles in 10 categories: Backend, Data, Frontend, DevOps, Product...

For candidates, it can be a great window to know how is it going to be working for a company before joining.
Looks like other people are onto the same thing - alignment.

Especially if this is threaded code, what's probably happened is something (likely with some sort of locking primitive) that fit on one cache-line, now straddles two. The reverse is also possible where two items were landing on different cache lines and are now creating a false sharing problem.

It's likely a global and likely in the .bss (which comes immediately after .data, which is why it has alignment troubles when static strings change). It's usually pretty easy to binary search your way to the problematic module and variable.
What a ML tool that turns Obama white can (and can’t) tell us about AI bias
Few places in the world get hot enough to kill you outright inside a house. Most of the north (and south in the southern hemisphere) gets cold enough during winter nights to kill without heat. I guess it's puritan now to not want to die?
Every text box should be a Cocoa text box.
I'm a bit skeptical of this

The concept of Octaves (as a lot of concepts in music) comes from physics. Because one of the most basic instruments you can have is a string under tension.

Pluck the string: note

Pluck the same string pinched in the middle: same note one octave higher

Not to mention Note + Note(octave higher) will have the harmonics overlapping, so it will sound better since there won't be any beating.
Because it's simply counterproductive and one can make a good case it's actually racist :|
What are the effects of this, if passed, on the rest of the world using Office 365, Facebook or AWS? It might be impossible to reconcile with some regulation in eg the EU.
> I wrote that commit on my laptop. I was unable to reproduce this on my desktop.

Then please modify the comment in the source to state that.

The described behavior (the speed results unpredictably slightly changing in both directions) of the measurements is actually "normal" on the notebooks with most of the possible thermal configurations and is not something that should be even tried to be "fixed" until the observed effects are actually consistent and big enough to be repeatable without the tight thermal controls.

Edit: of course the pushed commit can't be changed. But the comment (if it is visible in the source -- haven't checked that) can. There should be some kind of a visible "resolution" of the question in the repo.
I would have assumed that anyone would recognise that quote without having to look it up. It's an interesting generational demarkation I think.

"But the way we idealize the communitarian ideals of the past and their impact is mostly nostalgia "

Not true.

Or rather ... of course we always make the past into 'nostalgia' but there's absolutely decrease in civic participation by almost all measures.

- Participation in local community groups is way down.
- Voting participation is way down.
- Direct political participation and Union memberships are way down.
- Millenials are the first generation in modern times to not consider 'hard work' (which is a kind of contribution) as top 5 'important value' (Greatest, Silent, Baby Boomer, Gen X - all had this as a top 5 value).

Now - we can definitely argue the value of 'community groups, classical political causes and definitely 'self described virtues' ... but it's definitely directional.

At very least it's a function of opportunity: people just have so many choices, young people can literally do anything. Three generations ago one's scope of choice was extremely limited.

People can now chose to participate in a 'political meme' on Twitter instead of joining the local cause. There are obviously many advantages to this, but disadvantages as well, as there is generally less materiality to Twitter wars. That said, when 1/2 nation Tweets, things can change.

Here's literally Google's 'ngram' viewer for the word 'duty' [1]

I don't need external evidence for this because in my own family I have very extended generations and I knew my grandparents generation very well: they were very coherent at the local level. My grandmother knew everyone on the street and must have helped or attended with literally over 100 weddings as it was the 'local ladies groups' that usually catered weddings -> for free (!) back in the day. Among other things. And yes, it was 'ladies' who made sanwiches, never the men.

The clubs my parents belong to are having a hard time attracting members's children into memberships which they have done for generations.

I would go so far as to say the level of local, social cohesion and the hyper local social networks were so strong and specific, that we can't read someone like Mill without understanding it.

The comparison between my grandparents youth, and suburbian 'placelessness' today wherein there aren't really any cultural demarcation points or locally established 'social rules' Mill references ... is really shocking, and that's only across several decades.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=duty&year_star...
The solution to policies like this is serverless or point-to-point systems. As an application publisher you cannot be held liable or obligated towards that which you do not possess and are, by design, not capable of possessing. As an example consider copyright law and BitTorrent. BitTorrent provides a software application and protocol but not servers or services, so the BitTorrent software is never liable for the copyright violations of content that makes use of its protocol.
In the legal world it apparently goes by the moniker "Prosecutor's Fallacy":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy
Google will start paying publishers
Why do you need to disagree with BLM? The defunding the police stuff is impossible and stupid (though reform is necessary ASAP) but it’s clear to me, as a white guy, that 1. Black lives are worth protecting and 2. My life as a white guy will be better if black people were treated with dignity and respect at an institutional level. 3. BLM is the movement going forward from here so why not support it?

If you think that your life will be worse if the demands or whatever of BLM are met then you really need to be honest with yourself and others about who you are.
I can’t tell if you’re joking.
> All of the lexer and parser code in perl5 are purely custom and intertwined.

I had given myself a torture by taking a look at perl5/toke.c [1]. Among dozens of lexical analyzers I've ever seen, it is the only tokenizer that uses a probablistic estimator to determine the extent of the current token (grep for the comment "this is terrifying, and it works"). Perl 5 is my go-to language for counterexamples in programming language grammers and syntaxes.

[1] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/toke.c
I'm curious how you're squaring unsuppressed with the "cancel culture" thing whose very purpose appears to be the suppression of those views.

You're also ignoring survivorship bias. It's no surprise that the victims of majoritarian tyranny you hear from are not the weakest in society, because the weakest in society don't have enough power to command the spotlight. That doesn't mean tyranny of the majority doesn't exist or that they are not its victims, only that you won't hear it from them, because you don't hear anything from them, because they don't have enough power to be heard.
Fahrenheit, what is that? A fruit?
I'm not sure why you think the plant will only grow with a concrete lid on the ground. That plant thrives in the marginal spaces in the sidewalk with poor soil quality, and can probably do better if allowed grow in the lawns where we normally cultivate inedible, ornamental grass.

Furthermore, there are several techniques to help trap moisture that does not require a concrete lid. I'm in the Phnoenix desert, and I use the trimmings from my zucchinni plant as green mulch. Along with the palm fronds that my neighbors love to trim, they create very effective moisture traps. I need to trim my zucchinnis anyways for their optimal health.

I could also plant things in a way to take advantage of the vertical spaces as well. Okra, for example, thrives in the low desert, and provides dense shade that already traps moisture. If I add something that likes shade, and stays closer to the ground, that forms a kind of living mulch that does not require a lot of ongoing maintenance. And if I plant pole beans to take advantage of the sturdy okra stalks, they fix nitrogen and help keep the soil fertile.

I didn't come up with these ideas. They may not be widely known, but people have come up with these design patterns and used them well.
The web browsers and operating systems are our trusted computing base. If those have backdoors all else is moot.
‘Tears’ on a Mission
Surely there's a difference between ”Buy this PNG file for €200” and “Buy it for €10,000,000”
> The defunding the police stuff is impossible and stupid

> If you think that your life will be worse if the demands or whatever of BLM are met then you really need to be honest with yourself and others about who you are.

I mean, I'm anxious about all _impossible_ things making incursions on to this reality, but boy, you seem very favorable towards ideas you describe as stupid (I'm less convinced defunding is stupid, but abolishing police, that's not for me).
'Shared heating' needn't mean no control over the heating.

Many buildings in Denmark are supplied with heat (for room heating and hot water) by a municipal system, but each house or apartment can adjust the temperature of the room heating, with radiator valves or electronic thermostats.

We're charged based on how much heat we extract from the system.
From the article:

"Intuition suggests that metals are dense, and while that bears true for some (think gold or lead), it fails to hold up for others. For example, lithium—commonly used in batteries—floats on water. Some metals are hard, such as titanium, yet others yield easily to pressure, including indium and aluminum. How about melting temperature? Platinum melts at more than 1,700 degrees Celsius (3,200 F), but mercury is a liquid well below zero.

Many other definitions of 'metal-hood' suffer similar contradictions, but only metals are able to conduct electricity. Conduction, unlike density or hardness, is an inherent property of all metals."

From the article:

"In these solutions, electrons from the alkali metal initially become trapped in the gaps between ammonia molecules. This creates what scientists call 'solvated electrons,' which are highly reactive but stabilized in the ammonia. These solutions have a characteristic blue color. But given enough solvated electrons, the whole liquid turns bronze and, in essence, becomes a metal while remaining liquid.

Solvated electrons have proven to be important to organic chemists. Through a reaction called the "Birch reduction," named after chemist Arthur Birch, they were key to synthesizing many important compounds and led to the manufacture of oral contraceptives in the 1950s."
Why are you looking to “overcome” an organization you don’t agree with?

I can’t stop the Federalist Society from existing just because I disagree with their views.

From what I can tell, BLM is doing nothing illegal: it’s not encouraging or hate or violence.

Personally, I don’t see anything extreme about the “what we believe” page. I would agree with most if not all of it. If you don’t like that, and if you don’t like that, legitimately, a lot of people actually do agree with those beliefs, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Pieces of advice from me:

1. If you are going to point out that the BLM organization is unfavorable to you, you should clearly separate the organization from the phrase. Black lives do indeed matter and many people who use the phrase aren’t necessarily part of the organization. I hope that idea is rather obvious. You can’t change the fact that this organization’s name and branding is extremely effective like that.

2. Have well-informed reasons on why the organization itself is problematic. This post in particular doesn’t have any information besides a link and a statement that you don’t like it. So what exactly has the organization done wrong in your view? Are they corrupt or shady in some way or do you just disagree with their ideals? If you are well reasoned and empathetic you won’t be accused of being racist. If you’re being contrarian just because something makes you uncomfortable that’s a sign that maybe your own argument is mostly based on bias.

3. Evaluate if it’s even worth your time and energy just to disagree with someone else. What does that get you? Meeting on common ground is how people communicate successfully, nobody got anywhere by telling the other person they’re wrong.

4. I would encourage you to re-evaluate what freedom and liberty mean to you if your aim is to defeat other people’s ideologies for the sake of dislike or disagreement alone. People have the right to believe in the ideology of the BLM organization.
The Liberty Caucus has eight members in the House. Who knows how these people will vote though and which ones can be pressured to vote for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Caucus
Changing the Exchange Business Model with Zero-Fee Spot Trading
The fundamental issue isn't whether or not people "automatically get rich", it's whether we want to incentivize behaviors that harm everyone at all.

The lowest earners are disproportionately harmed by this[1]. People who rent their homes aren't the only ones harmed. People buying a home are also harmed, because they're competing with people who are buying houses to rent out, which drives up the price. And the game is rigged: if you are buying/renting a home to live in, you're operating under the various constraints of your life: you can't wait for more favorable prices without going homeless, you can't buy in arbitrary locations because you need to be where you can work, where kids can go to school, etc.; a buyer buying to be a landlord is not operating under these constraints.

A landlord literally doesn't have to provide any value: they just own the home and get paid to do nothing. When someone pretends they can't work because of disability to leech off society we put them in jail for fraud, but a landlord doesn't even have to pretend they can't work.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asse...
So you just need "Maps" app from F-Droid?
I feel that to some extent this should be similar to estimation questions that consultants face in their interviews. Questions like:

- How many gas stations are there in Paris?

- How much savings does the leading bank of the USA have?

- Estimate the population of Indonesia (to someone who is not that familiar with Asia).

It's probably a great deal more complicated than these type of questions. But if there is a course like this and a student still feels as overwhelmed by these type of questions, then I feel the title should be updated accordingly.

The reason I'm also mentioning this is because I'm curious if anyone did both and can attest to whether one does get better at estimation questions like the one I outlined. If so, I just might want to take this course, as I'd like a deeper exploration on the topic than just consultant interview estimation questions.
> This is going to be a huge problem for a lot of developers.

The way I see it, it's not a problem it's a responsibility. The problem was the lack of responsibility in the first place.
Fascism did control quite a number of countries some 80 years ago. I think it's not unreasonable to say that full fascism was their endgame.
Were you asleep for all coverage of the 737 MAX MCAS, or the technical failures that contributed to multiple warships casually driving into other ships?

https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgeral...

https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

Software allows us to work very efficiently because it can speed work up. It can speed us up when fucking things up just as well.
Timeless Tuesday #5 – AI with Lex
Reverse Engineering Reading List
I love The Visitors - it has a great mix of fun and playfulness combined with a touch of beautiful nostalgia, anyone who has ever traveled to some distant location and had the time of their life there can relate.

Also, when you mentioned Czechoslovak children movies, it reminded me of Karel Zeman. Some of those are poetic but surprisingly dark, like Krabat - The Sorcerer's Apprentice - https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/animation/krabat-the-sorce...
My recomendations from the Polish cinematography:

"The promised Land" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072446): a film set during the rapid development of textile industry in XIX century Łódź, where fortunes could be made relatively quickly.

"Camouflage" (legal link with Eng subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciGr-hi9He4): a story of a PhD student entering the corrupted science world of communist Poland. Relevant to basically anyone who has to function within a corrupted institution (which makes all of us?).

"The structure of crystal" (legal link with Eng subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qozV9J8bVA0): similar to the previous one (same director), but this time the young PhD student explores more philosophical questions.

There's plenty more of great stuff if one wants to explore (Kieślowski, Wajda, Zanussi, the whole movement of "cinema of moral anxiety"), Polish cinema during communism was really prolific for some reason.
The video is more informative of their actual results
> Perl does not have grammars (at least, not built-in).

That's not true since v5.10 (2007). Here's a sample that matches a subset of LaTeX markup:

$matcher = qr{
(?&File)

(?(DEFINE)
(?<File> (?&Element)* )

(?<Element> \s* (?&Command)
| \s* (?&Literal)
)

(?<Command> \\ \s* (?&Literal) \s* (?&Options)? \s* (?&Args)? )

(?<Options> \[ \s* (?:(?&Option) (?:\s*,\s* (?&Option) )*)? \s* \])

(?<Args> \{ \s* (?&Element)* \s* \} )

(?<Option> \s* [^][\$&%#_{}~^\s,]+ )

(?<Literal> \s* [^][\$&%#_{}~^\s]+ )
)
}xms

It's nowhere near as advanced as Raku grammars (not much is), but it's there, and it's built-in.
Every TOS update and every windows update (probably also unasked for) means it's a never ending task to stay on top of things, the only winning move is not to play.
> Germans didn’t like what happened - there were countless assassination attempts against hitler, but it was just eventually too late.

That myth has to die - there was no real opposition against Hitler for as long as he was successful. He was probably the most popular political leader of all the time. German people did not have a problem with his hatred against Jews, on the contrary, that's what gave him his popularity. It never was "Bad Nazis vs Good Germans" - Nazis and Germans were one and the same.

Yes, initially, in 1933 Nazis did slauther some of their political opponents, but for the years after that they really didn't need to terrorize the nation. Gestapo in 1937 was just 7000 people, inlcuding secretaries and other support stuff, and that was enough to keep 60 million nation in check. Compare that to 200k members of STASI in communist East Germany after war.

As for assasination attempts - if you look at Wikipedia list [0] you'll notice two things:

1. Most of them are pathetic, with zero chance of succeeding

2. None of them are attempted by common "good Germans" - some are by members of competing radical groups, some by citizens of countries conquered by Hitler, then, starting in 1940s there are attempts by generals that realize Germany is going to lose the war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassination_attempts...
A new licensing program to support the news industry
Also, you can get compile-time strict typing in Typescript with some minor annotations added to that:

export const Counter: FunctionComponent<{
label: string;
counterType: 'Increment' | 'Decrement';
onClick: () => void
}> = ({ label, counterType, onClick }) => {
const [counter, setCounter] = useState<number>(0);
return (
<button onClick={() => {
counterType == "Increment" && setCounter(counter + 1);
counterType == "Decrement" && setCounter(counter - 1);
onClick && onClick();
}}>
{label}: {counter}
</button>
);
}
> pro information density

I have to use CSS to remove empty gaps on both sides.