skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting point from the article is about language models and how they're related to searching documents. She types in a set of sentences into Google and the top ranked documents that Google returns for each sentence align with what the language model predicts. This means that neural networks can be used to rank documents by associating a query with a set of documents and then fine tuning it over time.

Here's the relevant section

> I’ll make a competing hypothesis: Given Aristo’s language model, no such knowledge or reasoning is needed to answer this specific question; instead, the language model will have captured statistical associations between words that allow it to answer the question without any real understanding whatsoever. To illustrate, consider the following four sentences.

> 1. Magnet will best separate a mixture of iron filings and black pepper.

> 2. Filter paper will best separate a mixture of iron filings and black pepper.

> 3. Triple-beam balance will best separate a mixture of iron filings and black pepper.

> 4. Voltmeter will best separate a mixture of iron filings and black pepper.

> A language model can input each of these sentences and output the sentence’s “probability”—how well the sentence fits the word associations the model has learned—and choose the option with the highest probability. As a very rough simulation, I typed a version of each of these sentences into Google (making sure it found no exact matches) and looked at how many “hits” each received. Indeed, the sentence beginning with “magnet” got the most hits. My crude language model answered the question correctly without any intelligence other than word associations on the web.

> I tried this same experiment with other randomly chosen questions from the Regents exam and found that the correct answer received the most hits in six out of 10 cases. My Googling experiment is just an illustration, not meant to be scientific, but it does agree pretty well with the score the Aristo team itself reported for “baseline retrieval methods.” It’s far less than 90 percent, but it highlights that there are “giveaways” that can boost a learning system’s performance without requiring any knowledge or reasoning at all. Moreover, this may be only the tip of the iceberg of the subtle giveaways that a machine-learning system could use to choose an answer.

Does anyone know of research along these lines? Or if you know of the right keywords to google then that will also be helpful.
> Yeah there's no precedent for the argument that "use of police force against vandalism is objectively unreasonable".

Yes, pretty much every lawsuit that has been won (as many have been) with police use of force in protests has involved (1) the argument by police that the use of force was justified by the need to prevent an imminent threat of injuries to persons and property by arson, vandalism, etc., and (2) the determination by the court involved that the use of force involved was objectively unreasonable in the concrete circumstances that actually existed because it was disproportionate to the thrat that existed.

I mean, since Graham v. Connor that's literally the standard that has to be met, and it has a number of times, so there is certainly precedent.

> My point is that policing vandalism is not unreasonable

“policing vandalism” may be reasonable, that doesn't make the particular use of force in any particular incident automatically reasonable just because vandalism is threatened or occurring. Disproportionate use of force is specifically what is generally the source of a finding that force is objectively unreasonable.
You give me a law, I'll give you a way to legally avoid it. It's difficult to legislate this stuff. Indeed, I would contend it is impossible. Unless -- like we did with income -- we implement incredibly invasive procedures (such as withholding, W2s, 1099s, etc.) for ALL transactions.

It's not as simple as you think. For instance, Chelsea Clinton received a &600k salary from NBC along the following compensation from Barry Diller’s IAC/InteractiveCorp. Salary for Chelsea: $300,000. The board position also pays an annual retainer of $50,000 and a $250,000 grant of restricted stock.

This is how wealth is funneled from one generation to the next. Meanwhile, the Clinton foundation pays exorbitant fees or rents to the Dillers step-kids' charities and foundations. (As an example of how such arrangements work... I don't have any details.)

There is simply no way to keep track of who is paying whom. (Especially when you toss in the 'art' auction business... the greatest money-laundering scheme ever invented.... Rich Kid A gets $45mill for some crap painting from Rich Dad B, while Rich Kid B gets $45mill from Rich Dad A. Etc, etc. )
Thank you! Chesterton's fence strikes again. There had to be a reason for this misfeature.

Then the question is why would schools use Google classroom at all then if they have their own MIS/SIS.

As I was teaching to adults I was puzzled on how to effectively use Google Classroom.
> worst case, if something happened to the project - users could still have full access to it

Can you put in a formal license statement saying that each change will become mit-licensed 18 months after it's committed? That way, there's no ambiguity if development stops and releases stop getting put in the oni2-mit repository.
There are many Twilio competitors and there have been for a while now. However, Twilio has been really resilient in terms of keeping their high growth year over year. What is the reason for that?
One of the reasons this is so important is that it makes it far harder to phish people. The webauthn APIs include the web origin in the authentication process, so it’s not possible to use something like modlishka to phish people. If we use magic links or something similar like a QR code for adding new devices, or more users also have roaming authenticators with PINs, webauthn will massively massively reduce phishing success where it’s implemented, as it’s pretty easy to make website that doesn’t have phishable credentials at all.
Central Bank of Brazil has suspended WhatsApp's payments feature
While the general response to COVID-19 is already infuriating for so many reasons, it’s especially frustrating to see people think it’s “OK” to get it since they’ll probably “recover”.

It needs to be drilled into people of all ages that “recovery” is terrible terminology. Congratulations, maybe you didn’t die but you still may very well develop lifelong conditions that really screw up your body and your lifestyle (and, if that’s not enough, consider the healthcare costs).

Furthermore, if a person’s only complaint about pandemic rules is their “inconvenience”, it’s time to grow up. No one owes you convenience, and this is definitely the point in your life to figure out how to do what’s better for society. Put on a mask. Follow the rules. And learn more about this, from actual health professionals, not politicians with mile-long track records of lying.
This essay is in a totally different genre than an HN blog post, so all of the comments here are totally wide of the mark. It's like asking why Thoreau didn't just get a telegraph line back to Boston. We don't use this genre in the US, which reinforces the point he's making. The Analects quote at the beginning is also crucial. All educated Chinese know that quote and ~0% of Americans do: we have radically different cultures, not just superficially different pop cultures. The whole argument is a sly wink in favor of nationalism, but it's not supposed to be read on the square as simple propaganda either.
> maintainability and extensibility (I think these are part of what it means for a system to be reliable).

Frequently forgotten is the duality of extensibility: subsettability, or contraction. Being able to remove or disable code without rewriting large parts of the application is just as important as being able to extend it!
Companies like Benchling and TeselaGen hire software engineers.

Disclaimer: I'm an investor in TeselaGen.
I was actually thinking if an open source project to do this 'if then' predictive analytics that works across the world is available. It would be a great contribution to humanity if someone can work it , but like every complex problem i do not think it is that easy to distill all the information especially without sufficient profits.
Compiling and running C code in a single command (without using a Makefile/build system, etc. but by pulling a binary from Homebrew or whatever) feels like a 10x engineering goal, so I therefore put forward: 10cc

As a bonus, it can output "I don't like C code, I love it" in its help/version docs.
Soap Bubble Pollination
There are some bad fallacies on their part too.

Large amounts of child porn detected equals platform being used on similar scale for producing it / distributing new content / grooming. By playing with equivalence, you can push for tougher policy.

It is under-prosecuted for frankly embarrassing reasons. Tech companies can't submit it on the spot. They have to wait for them to come to them, and have to delete it if they take too long.
Decrypted iCloud backup? Inspecting the WhatsApp sql database file is straightforward if you have the lockscreen pin.

How did they get past the lockscreen? Corp phone has some MDM policy that let's them bypass/reset the lock screen?
That's basically a robot, eh? A farm mecha.
Similar to how you would sign in on devices/browsers without WebAuthn support or don't have physical token (Yubikey/etc.) with you: use a fallback method provided by a website. This is usually TOTP or a scratch code. The website need to implement it though.

One thing to keep in mind is this is not supposed to be the only factor required to sign in. It should be used as a 2nd factor in the similar way to TOTP (but with much better usability).
No, but Rails definitely did feel like snapping pieces together. RailsCasts was a blessing.
I've had 10 or so manager changes in my 8 years. They are all a little different. Most are not a big change if your company has policies about performance management and they follow them (this could be biased since the time per manager for 10 manager in 8 years is small). Most big companies have a lot of policies, which can make the transition smooth by maintaining consistently.

Another point is to rely on your department head. Usually they hire people similar to themselves or to the people they have previously hired. So the incoming manager should be somewhat similar to the outgoing one unless the department head is looking to make a big change. If you like your department head and old manager then the new one shouldn't be terrible.

Your progression will probably slower if there are a lot of manager transitions in your career. The manager doesn't get to mold you to their image of what defines the talent level for the next role. If they don't have a big hand in your professional development they might be less inclined to feel like you deserve the promotion. (After 8 years I'm only a midlevel dev. Maybe I just suck though)

All that said, my experience has been that changes are usually negative. There are a lot of managers out there and very few of them truly have your best interest in mind and have the pull to influence the situation for your benefit. The chances of you getting one of these good ones might be 1 in 5.
A _substantial_ portion of the desktop PC market was running on 512MB of RAM in 2006[0]. Even today a significant portion of budget computers people buy have 4GB which is just barely on the edge of enough to run Windows 10 and a couple modern websites.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/YiMobdC.png
It’s great to see that that’s already supported! I wasn’t aware of that, and it’ll allow Google to pivot this feature towards a similar use-case.

Right now however it seems to primarily be marketed to mobile game developers.
I wanted to make a similar point with piping UNIX commands. I can think of two reasons why the degradation happened:

1. Expansion of the software universe. Back in VB6 times, there were fewer programmers but many languages. Reusing components made with different languages was a big deal (VB used COM/ActiveX machinery to make this possible), but today there are so many more developers, that each language/ecosystem is big enough to exist on an island and happily not interact with anything unless it's a grpc/rest endpoint.

2. Transition to SaaS. We no longer use the same platform for building and running. Your VB app used to run on more or less the same computer it was built on. SaaS applications run in weird, custom-made, hard to reproduce and fragile computers called "environments". They are composed from all kinds of complex bits and this makes SaaS applications less portable. Frankly, they feel more like "environment configuration" than "code" sometimes.
The Mac’s future is on a collision course with the iPad
Yup. A site can even say "I want a platform authenticator" or "I specifically don't want a platform authenticator" during registration using the Javascript API.

Most sites should just not care, but it's an option if you've determined there's a specific reason it matters in your application.
It mystifies me how often Amyris is omitted from posts about synbio. Sure it's not a hot startup, but it has commercialized more molecules than anybody in the industry (and possibly as many as everybody else combined).
I'll launch it in a few weeks, so right now I don't know.

I believe that in the future the most of software will be open-source and If people don't have a problem sharing blocks/widgets/assets, they will not have a problem to share information about connections.

Side note: Every program has 2 parts - instructions and data. When people share assets and connections, both are instructions, so their data stay private.
This is why Raku doesn't have contexts in that sense. All a subroutine or method can ever return, is a single object. Such an object can be a List or an Array, but it is still a single value.
You can’t just add anti-fraud sprinkles on top. The rampant fraud is built into Amazon.com’s business model. Monitoring product quality is hard. All the little shopkeepers and buying managers were actually doing work, work that isn’t easily automated. Amazon’s recreating the problems of central planning that the USSR had in product quality.
It's not a good comparison.

StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.

Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.

Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.

A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.

---

More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.

Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.
Apple is considering this to be multi-factor authentication all in one click, the something you have (the phone) and the something you are (FaceID or TouchID). For the site perspective, if you ask for attestation then you will have cryptographic evidence of this. No more SMS 2FA!

Apple is promising to do something extra with their attestation process which they call "Apple Anonymous Attestation" to mitigate the issue where attestation allows tracking the same device across different websites even if they are using different usernames. Not included in the current release, but "coming soon".

The process of enrolling an authenticator is presented as a "one and done" event, but of course the devil is in the details. Shared accounts would need multiple authenticators, and what happens when you upgrade your phone or lose your phone? I guess this gets handled like a password reset. You probably will want users to be able to add/remove authenticators, which means also having to name them.

The enrollment process in this video highlights the upgrade path from a password login to a FaceID/TouchID login, but doesn't give us the UI flow of a new login. It seems like sites would need to implement a standard registration page and then perhaps swap out the password field with a Next button which would prompt for the FaceID/TouchID enrollment. Makes me wonder how does this compete with or tie into the 'Signin with Apple' if a site wants to offer one-click registration?

Will my Mac and iOS devices automatically and securely sync the private keys between their respective Secure Enclaves so that I can signin from any of my devices after enrolling on just one?

Lastly, how about the case when returning to a site where the user is on their enrolled device, but there isn't a cookie present. It looks like the site can detect that the device supports Webauthn, but I'm not sure if it can automatically detect that the device already has an account enrolled with the site?

The call to 'credentials.get' includes the 'credentialIdBuffer' which is a value provided by the platform authenticator and saved during registration. But in the video they make it sound like 'credentialIdBuffer' is actually optional? It's not even clear to me in the official WebAuthn spec [1] if this value is required, or if the authenticator will just use the RP domain to present the user a list of available credentials? Ultimately I'm wondering if a user without a cookie will still have to type in their username before the site can prompt them for FaceID/TouchID authentication.

[1] - https://w3c.github.io/webauthn/#dom-publickeycredentialreque...
I agree and I don't want these incorrect answers to be made more plausible
Just try something without paying for it, set some reminders to make sure you use it, don't be too prescriptive, don't do so much that it frustrates you, and only change one thing at a time about your process so you're doing most of your notetaking process on autopilot.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter that notetaking helps me. You need to see if it helps you, and you have to try it to do that. But it's one of those things where it isn't all or nothing. Start small and if it helps do more.
Not familiar with the reference, can you please elaborate this is fascinating to say the least.
It's a free product. They can spend more money and more engineering resources on a project to improve it, but with little financial results to show. Google has only been very slowly figuring out how to make money from anything other than ads.
You are going to end up perpetually unhappy if you always assume that people designed things the way they did just because of stupidity / incompetence. Perhaps instead you should take a while to think about the reasons why they might have chosen their design. Even if you can't immediately think of a good reason, doesn't mean there wasn't one.

For this particular case, I'm not sure what drove the selection, but I would guess (since the decision would have been made many decades ago!) it was probably based around perl trying to operate similarly to other command line tools of that era, like awk, sed, (or even ed?), so that people could switch to perl and have a familiar environment? But I don't know, nor have I researched it. In any case, perhaps give the designers the benefit of the doubt before assuming their incompetence?
Command-line tools?
Neat. But this is hardly a settled issue. Each time it comes up, it seems the court flips a coin to decide the answer.
You can disable thumbnail images by selecting, IIRC, "compress link display" in your account preferences. No custom css needed.
If only there was a great alternative to Excel in Linux, I would have moved. Not just good enough but as good as or better than Excel.
If you need power features, you should be using the desktop version...

The web version is intended for basic/common use cases, not power user functions.
Ask HN: What Is the Value of CockroachDB?
I dont mean this sarcastically, I just keep hearing how this technology is great and distributed but I cant really see the current use case in current enterprises.

Is there something I am missing? Why would someone simply switch their backed databases for something that does not even offer Data Warehousing or other data management tools?
> When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it,

So does my gmail. It only shows things marked important.

> Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming

That happens to me occasionally, but I just click on "filter messages like this" and then set it to never mark as important (or straight to spam).
> Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much.

I thought the common idea (and implementation) of indoor vertical farming used artificial lighting at each level. Possibly only using light in the wavelengths actually used by the plant, not "wasting" power at other wavelengths like the sun does.
Yeah well, this was super pro-communist.

But I agree with those ideas and I like the post.

"There cannot be both billionaires and the means of billionaires fixing the world out of the goodness of their hearts, because the only way to maintain billionaires is to maintain a system of dragging money toward billionaires."

This
> Can you imagine a budding musician complaining that musical notation should be made "easier for beginners"?

You mean like string instrument tab coloured by finger instead of sheet music? Yes, exactly like that.
Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
Ah, those details were not clear from the original story.

They could have assumed (at the start of the process) that it could have been a pre-dissolution built slide.

But if they admit that, during the dissolution process their machinery wasn't sold that definitely goes against my theory.
Gmail does not have this. Hey inverts the default behavior to one that is consent-based, and things can only reach your inbox if you thumbs up the first time they send something to you. This is not some minor technical point, it is at the core of Hey's value proposition. In Gmail, the default is that everything gets to you and it's up to you to play whackamole with filters and unsubscribes, requiring several clicks each time.

In addition to the simple whitelist behavior, on the initial Hey screening you can (with a single click) route second-tier messages into Feed and Paper Trail, which is a much better UX than what you can build in gmail by creating a filter for every sender that labels + autoarchives.
With the Neo2 you can plug in a USB printer as well and it just works. The Neo2 has been the best cheap Christmas present my youngest kid ever got.
Dremio 4.5
It's reclaiming the Perl name since Perl 6 has abandoned its connection to Perl and is claiming to be a completely separate unconnected language.

This is the logical conclusion to this divergence and will mean that going forward people wont think Perl 6 is the newest version of Perl. That problem would still exist if you leave Perl at 5.35 since search engines are still happily returning pages for Perl 6 even though it's no longer a thing.
Until some joker writes an unless/else block. Gah. I hope someone implements an elsunless keyword /s