skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They probably got informed that since phones are personal devices and not company provided, this level of restriction might land them in the parts of BYOD laws that require employers to compensate for personal device use for work.

Amazon probably decided most employees don't have anything too sensitive and it's not worth buying everyone a phone.
Practical Profunctor Optics in PureScript
Back in the day, that's roughly how web developers would frame it when they tried to rationalize making websites that would deliberately refuse to load if the user-agent said something other than "MSIE".

Removing support is a passive action; you accomplish it by just doing nothing. Calling exit() is rather more on the aggressive side.

All that said, good on 'em. I got a decent chuckle.
The American political left/right scale is very silly on the international level. Republicans attack standard Party-Line Democrats as Socialists when in reality the vast majority of Democrats would be considered right wing in the EU and the Republican Party are more like Far Right extremists a la AfD, UKIP, etc.. Sanders himself would hardly be center-left in most EU parliaments.
Except that people will forget to use them
Analog can be represented in digital: we can mathematically prove this. It's not at all reasonable to say that AGI cannot be achieved because it doesn't use a certain type of material.
ck12.com has a full range of textbooks available at no cost
You gave me a press release from an organizaion that has a history of being deceptive. Why would I, or anybody, take it as a "concrete list?"

The thread of discussion here is that the FBI needs to have broad survaillance capabilities to catch crime before it occurs. The list you gave has verly little support for that in that almost all of the acts in the list were not stopped due to any survaillance, but rather invesigations after the fact. You could assert that they might have been stopped, but that is conjecture.
The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.
PWA’s on iOS, Windows and Google
I think newer ones even route it through the T1 chip. Need to look again.

There was an exploit, over 10 years ago like you said, that allow to disable it. But that was corrected.

Edit

- iıSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED - This was 2008 - https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...

Looking for t1 links.

Edit 2

Can't find anything confirming the t1 right now..
Wild Rumor Details Intel Rocket Lake-S VPro CPU with 8 Cores and 12 Threads
Interesting; thank you! Related to videos: recently Open AI released GPT-3, a transformer models trained this time on images ...
>applies only to older Mac notebooks from like 2008

Point being that the indicator light can be hacked and isn't too be blindly trusted.
Wikiversity
You don't "have to" do anything.

The point is that the hardware has been designed properly. Combined with the OS-level permissions, it should be assurance enough for the majority of use cases.

If you need further assurances, then by all means, use a physical cover.
> On the other hand, deplatforming people and removing their resources does work in some cases.

In what sense do you mean they "work"?

> Civility fetishism is an entirely different conversation. Suffice it to say that I think it's distinctly less valuable than commonly portrayed.

One could say the same about the fetishism of "safety".
Elon Musk Rockets Past Warren Buffett on Billionaires Ranking
If you read to the bottom of the directions it says you can use a sticker. So this looks like its targeted to the plastic camera covers that can be turned on and off.
I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because most (if not all) startups require a huge level of commitment and focus from the founding team. If you aren't able (for whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign that you might struggle to be successful.

I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much effort, it's likely that if you're not able to quit to work on it, you'll lose out to a team that can.

PS: I'm saying this as a founder who quit his job (as did my co-founder) when it looked liked we had something, and I doubt Overleaf would be where it is today if we'd not. So I may be biased in that direction!
Think how funny this would be if we are, in fact, part of a massive computer simulation.
> humans are such machines.

Humans are animals. Part of the paper defends the notion that a lot of human intelligence is tacit based on being embodied in the world as a living organism. The idea that humans are biological robots is only one that came about as metaphor when we created machines and some similarities were noted.
Show HN: Hacker Empowerment Pod (Podaero)
> To train the grounding model, we synthetically generate 295K single-step commands to UI actions, covering 178K different UI objects across 25K mobile UI screens from a public android UI corpus.

Sounds like a decent size training set.

> A Transformer with area attention obtains 85.56% accuracy for predicting span sequences that completely match the ground truth. The phrase extractor and grounding model together obtain 89.21% partial and 70.59% complete accuracy for matching ground-truth action sequences on the more challenging task of mapping language instructions to executable actions end-to-end.

85.56%, 89.21%, and 70.59% don't seem impressive to me. I may be oversimplifying, but why can't you just fine-tuned a Transformer model to map sentences ("Now tap the right-top side of the screen") to a fixed set of commands ("Tap(MAX_WIDTH, 0)")?

I used transformers before for classification, and for other cases, and they are quite powerful when you have "enough" data; 295K / 178K / 25K seems ok to me, but even if it's not, why not synthesize more.
I have to thank Gaston Planté for giving me a way to power my blog when the sun goes down.

Don't let the sun, go down on me...
Often that switch is just a peripheral that gets interpreted by software
I'm not sure real "jerking face" blackmail is that frequent. If caught the author would face heavy charges. It's probably way easier and less risky to massively scam by pretending you had access to the webcam than to actually bother to hack.

Beside I'm not sure a "jerking face" would be more than awkward if published. A reverse angle in which you could identify what was the video used for the jerking session would be way more compromising.

And in this regard poorly protected IOT surveillance cameras have way more evil potential that webcam in my opinion.
We can do better than that:

- Someone figured out a way to grow comfrey (and other nitrogen fixers) in a separate field with low maintenance to supply mulch material for the main crop, without having to rely on animal manure.

- There are people who built their animal barn at the top of a hill and dug swales to transport runoff from manure downward. They plant edibles all along the swale. Once established, low maintenance.

- I saw another practice that involved growing grasses, and using grazers and micrograzers to increase fertility in depleted soil. It’s part of an overal system where fences and chicken trailers are used to move grazing around.

Some of these practices may not be practical at scale, but that is not the point — these practices work well for decentralized food system
For one thing, it's incredibly chauvinistic to dismiss pre-colombian society as "some nomads," and their mobility patterns as having "wandered". Nomadic life-ways aren't the thoughtless ramblings of a child at play, or a sub-sentient beast in simple reactionary pursuit of greener pastures. They summer here, winter there, raise children in these parts, and visit those for sport, trade, or agriculture. Their relationship with the land is purposeful, and maintained by cultural artifacts we'd recognize as Almanacs.

One isn't "wandering" just because they haven't poured concrete.

For another thing, the pre-colombian americas weren't the Gardens of Eden, magically and effortlessly producing sustenance, and materials for us to enjoy. They were cultivated, sculpted, and gamed into those forms which facilitated our survival. There's evidence enough of that in the ways that restrictive intra- and under-growth have returned to the forests indigenous populations kept pruned for their traversal.

Lastly, biomes are big systems, and interconnected. I may have only a small garden, but it's fed from massive watersheds. If I am to survive, the mountains which constitute that watershed must be recognized as "mine" in some regard. So it goes with all the lands which feed into, and out of, those through which "some nomads once wandered."

I hope you can see, now, how myopically your "reality check" frames the situation.

Edit: I took out a specious allusion to the BLM.
Imperative doesn’t hurt my brain, but because many operations in FP are generally much more succinct and expressive than in an imperative style - writing in imperative instead just makes me groan about all the manual keyboard-typing I’ll have to do (e.g. Linq vs foreach).

I really wish I could do more FP, but the languages and libraries I use for my day-job aren’t as-accommodating (mostly C#) - while C# has some FP features, it’s really held-back by the CLR’s type-system - so until that fundamental plumbing gets done we’ll never see features like type-classes, true immutable types, algebraic-types, and so on. Without those features we’ll have to keep on writing more code than is necessary.

<digress>Heck, it’s bad enough that IDictionary doesn’t implement IReadOnlyDictionary - or that none of the IReadOnly* types make any guarantees about immutability, which means having to review documentation or disassembly in ILSpy. And the famed non-nullable-reference-types in C# 8.0 is actually all just syntactic sugar for yet more attributes rather than true code-contracts, a built-in Option type, or extending the CLR’s type-system to understand nullability. Grumble.</digress>
ISTM that AGI would swiftly result in vastly extended lifespans, at least for those fortunate enough to be at the control knobs. In that sense, they are at the same difficulty level.
This isn’t speculation. Opening up hardware to modify the internals is something that covert agencies do, and it’s naive to think that the purpose is equivalent to a simple bug.

As someone who posts to Hacker News you are by almost any definition a potential information source or APT vector.
There's still one problem. To exemplify it, if you call with `-av`, it'll process the `v` as the option `-v` instead of the option value to `-a`. If you only have one possible option that takes a value, this can be fixed by putting its case clause before all others. If you have more, then that'll require things to get a little more complicated:

-d*|-[!-]*d*|--debug)
if [[ ! "$finished_case" && ("$1" = --debug || "$1" =~ '^[^ad]*d') ]]; then
debug=true
fi
;;&

-a*|-[!-]*a*|--arg)
if [[ ! "$finished_case" && ("$1" = --arg || "$1" =~ '^[^a]*a') ]]; then
if [[ "$1" != --arg ]]; then
value="${1#*a}"
fi
if [[ ! "$value" ]]; then
value="$2"
shift
fi
finished_case=true
fi
;;&
...
esac

shift
finished_case=
done

All case-clauses would need to use `;;&` by the way, including `-v` and `-h`. The regex is generally:

"^[^${all_options_with_values}${current_option}]*${current_option}"

Another problem is that option and argument non-recognition would not work as previously layed out. You can include short options that aren't recognized, and they'll be ignored instead of raising errors. For positional arguments, one would need a condition to check for options, since using `;;&` for everything means that everything would land to

*)

Maybe those are the last issues, but this is already out of hand for otherwise small and simple shell scripts. All these complications arise from trying to support the sticking together of short options and their possible values. Processing arguments in a case loop is much, much simpler if we avoid supporting those 2 features.
I've had my barn door over my camera for years. It prevents a perfect seal but my screen works great. I'm sure this is valid in one way or another, but I don't buy this for a second. Adjusts tinfoil hat
The Document Foundation should - IMHO - employ a more nuanced, and "deeper", community funding effort. Even though, when downloading it, we see a payment link - there is almost no motivation to press it:

1. We are in a hurry to go on with the download.

2. It's called a "donation" - which it isn't. It's support for the project, financing further development and bug removal, and should be presented that way.

3. We have zero information about the situation The Document Foundation is in, what it needs money for, what its income stream look like and why, etc. I think Thunderbird (https://www.thunderbird.net/) has been doing a better job in that respect.

4. There doesn't seem to be an effort to encourage or even make-it-easy-for users (corporate or individual) to engage in community activity, of the kind that increases commitment to the project and also awareness to the importance of supporting the project financially.

------------------------

Also - please consider actually supporting both projects I mentioned, financially:

* LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

* Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/

and consider doing some volunteer QA work on LibreOffice by reporting bugs or even getting into the code. I, particularly, am very involved with Right-to-Left, Hebrew and some Arabic language issues.
Historical injustice is not something that people living today are responsible for. Therefore the "problem" of historical injustice is best solved by people today forgiving the people from the past and moving on with their lives.
And the hackers still win, cause no one remembers to slide it shut after a call, and they can hack the led so there is no physical indicator when they are watching.
The Damage We’re Not Attending To
Doesn't inspire any confidence that the indicator is subject to bugs. It can happen again.
#2 is fascinating! I'll have to look for the thesis to read.
How about this one. I think you meant to say "I couldn't imagine a more off-topic and unwelcome [...]"
That really depends on your threat model, are Apple and google going to use marketing data against you? Probably.

Are they going to plant malware which steals your banking details? Probably less likely than a random binary package you found on some forum.
A Land of Monopolists: From Portable Toilets to Mixed Martial Arts
I appreciate this point. In a similar vein, DNA services like 23andMe should also come with dates on them. In fact, frankly, any mention of ethnicity should come with a date. No cultural group–bound by genes of memes–is truly the same river twice.
I don't think you meant to respond to me. I was talking about being critical of your state and others. I think you meant to respond to the more generalized discussion of cheating. This discussion diverted a little from that.
I think this still has a grace period for trusted devices? Some of the FAQs at the bottom make it sound like you don't need to use the physical key every time you log in.

Which, again, is probably reasonable for 99% of cases, but might be undesirable if you're doing investigative journalism on powerful state actors or some such.
Not to be trite, but this was the whole biz plan of Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, et al. The algos will generate the hits. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. Algos will identify the hits earlier, but they won't "make" them for you.
I am very excited about the idea of both of these monsters actually getting behind PWA. One can only wonder about their motivations (i.e. anti-trust heating up), but I will take whatever I can get at this point.

To me, full support for PWA across all vendors' app stores would represent a revolution in the ability for hobbyists and small development shops to publish incredible applications.

Has HN not been published as a PWA to the various app stores yet? This seems like an obvious use case and could serve as a great example for other applications.
It's not just slow, but just the subtle things in how it behaves. For instance, try navigating a spreadsheet in LO with only the keyboard. It's super annoying. Then try the same thing in, say, Google Sheets, and it does exactly what you think it should do. And that is a huge difference in terms of UX and productivity.
We've kinda been doing that for a while, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopesticide

More mechanical contraptions also have a long history, and do actually include lasers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Lasers

But most pests are rather microscopic. I doubt we will ever construct silicon/metal hardware better able to operate at the level of, say, spores than the biological systems that are natural to that environment.
I think my head is going to explode. We..the farmers buy everything from input to tech at retail. Retail to companies who give us a ‘wholesale rate’ but fun fact: they don’t have retail or market consumers. We are their ‘retail’. And we sell wholesale. What kind of ass backwards business model is this?
Why not just use a desktop program with online features, then?
Well, "who got here with the biggest stick."
But the problem is not indication that attack happened (light turned on). It is too late if the camera was used even if I was notified!

The camera cover is not an indicator of use, it prevents use. Indicator of use is not sufficient.
"might also interfere with the ambient light sensor and prevent features like automatic brightness"

Oh, if I could only get automatic brightness to actually turn off!!!! I keep the sensor covered with electrical tape because that's the closest I've been able to get.
The surface level of intelligence, not the biological implementation. Chess and Go programs have a surface level understanding of board games.
Speeds are good enough for streaming (especially because videos can buffer), but not good enough for WFH setups, especially because of the data-caps.

A little while back, there was some research that pointed out that mobile data prices in India were regulated by a cartel, because of how accurately data prices and plans were matched across all telecom operators. Jio's entry shattered a lot of it, but even today - data prices are irrational. Buying lots of data is costlier than buying a little.

I put prices for my operator (State-owned BSNL) here: https://gist.github.com/captn3m0/ab25123638b877cd8e3d9868f33... and some interesting insights:

* the cheapest option for me is to spend 4 cents per day to get 2GB data per day. However, it stops working the moment I cross 2GB, and I have to remember to pay every 54 days.

* there are no plans where you can pay for an entire year. Paying for longer durations is _always costlier_.

* All plans have caps around 1-3GB/day and short-durations.
The reservations themselves are responsible for the deplorable state of the people living on them.

If the Natives had integrated a few generations ago they would be far better off today.
If they sold a model without a camera for the same price, I would have bought that. The camera on MacBooks is terrible anyway, and you can buy a USB camera that's significantly better for less than $100.

Since that isn't an option, I keep a square torn from a post-it note over the camera.
Exactly. That said, a one-on-one type thing with someone you trust can be great.
Linux Might Pursue x86_64 Micro-Architecture Feature Levels
> It is true that there are tasks where threading matters, but still require a CPU rather than a GPU. I wonder however if these tasks do need full SSE/AVX etc. Couldn't these extensions be removed of the CPU cores and instead have the necessary work performed by the GPU?

SSE/AVX shares an L1 cache that's damn near instantaneous to access for the CPU core. Total L1 bandwidth is on the scale of TB/s.

PCIe -> GPU takes 1-microsecond to 10-microseconds per access, and operates only at 50GB/s (or 1/20th the speed of L1 bandwidths).

------------

Case in point: Memset is very commonly AVX'd to clear out L1 cache and initialize ~1kb to 32kb of data to 0 as quickly as possible.

There's no way for "memset" to move from CPU to GPU unless you feel like obliterating the entire point of L1, L2, and L3 cache. If you moved a "memset" to GPU, it'd operate only at 15GB/s (the speed of PCIe 3.0 x16 lanes), far, far slower than L1 cache AVX-loads/stores.

SIMD units, like SSE and AVX, are highly "local" and have huge advantages.
No longer. The power lead for the camera requires electricity to pass through (and, thus illuminate) the indicator LED.

Can't hack that without extensive physical access to the machine.
Looks like the methods are already there but they’re not streamlined yet, as well as the research. You’d most likely go for an existing virus that targets cell mitochondria specifically, maybe you’d want mitochondria of a specific cell. The viral DNA can be altered in the ways you want and the virus can deliver the DNA to your cells. I’m not sure how specifically this would be done, usually they use viruses to deliver a small portion of a DNA that encodes a specific protein, so the main objective there is to make the cell produce that protein. Not sure how that would work with simply mortifying existing DNA.
Ordoro https://www.ordoro.com/ could be a good alternative (Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Ordoro). Ordoro works well with Shopify and has an open API. We've successfully migrated users from Stitch Labs to Ordoro in the past.
You do a proper study. It sounds like the resistance is coming because they're trying to push it through and skip a step.
Wouldn't call it 1000 monkeys, it is not different to books or startups or even restaurants, some fail and some succeed. Isn't start up success rate is also 1 to 20 or more? There are so many books and songs that nobody watch or read, it is just normal.
How would you handle the microphone? I don't know any hardware way to make sure my microphone's not hearing me if I can't trust the software.
All that may be true, yet it still does not mean rationality should be thrown out the window when evaluating claims about TikTok.

If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.
> In what sense do you mean they "work"?

They reduce the ability of extremists to radicalize young people, for example. On a platform level, banning certain actors makes my life better because less fake news will show up in my feed.

ETA: It also denies people some amount of income in many cases, now that platforms are often monetized.

> One could say the same about the fetishism of "safety".

Yes, you could. But I believe that acting to protect one's safety is more justifiable than acting to protect "civility". Both are subjective, but the former is more personal.
Why many buzzwords? In simpler language: trees surrounding farm land keep strong winds from blowing nutrients away and have other benefits. For that and other benefits Before 1989, a lot of farm land in Bulgaria was surrounded by tree belts as they also provided shade for farm workers. In the US much bigger efficiency has been achieved by farming large fields with giant automated machinery. Effect on nutrients is unclear. However what this company is suggesting is to pair farmers of different types and plant productive trees between flat crop lands to enable multiple types of production happening at the same time. An underlying premise is a carbon offset system may pay for such investment. The part that’s missing is how much harvesting efficiency will be lost when you lose the ability to use big machines to harvest single crops. That said, there may be lands suitable for mixed farming that were underused before. Hopefully those farmers don’t get into too much debt trying to pursue potential carbon credits.
On new Macs the light is a minimum 3 seconds even for a single frame photo. Anyone monitoring you has to turn the light in just to see if you are there, and what you are doing, and will likely have to watch for hours to catch any incriminating footage.

You will have plenty of notice.