skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bootstrapping an AI-powered travel itinerary planning solution
itinease.com
> I live in deep red area, a place where you would stereotype as "places that would enforce such a rule" my interactions in the Men's bath room are silence, awkward, and everyone wants to get out as fast as possible.

Do you often interact with trans people in your area (no blame here, it's unlikely not because of you, but because many people are very private about this).

Now imagine that someone who you assumed was a

> Is there data to back these claims, either that Tran-Women are at great risk in men's rest rooms, or that cis women are in no risk in

I'm not saying great risk in the restroom specifically, but more broadly for being outed. Buck Angel using the woman's restroom would be a spectacle in the way that him using the men's restroom wouldn't be.

Trans people do face discrimination for being trans, so forcing that spectacle to happen puts them in danger in general.

As for the data on cis women: I leave that to you. Can you find a documented example of a trans woman, or a man masquerading as a trans woman, entering a woman's bathroom and doing something nefarious?

> Absent from this conversation it seems in Trans-men, are they not in any danger at all if so why?

Trans men do face violence, but there is less (or at least there is less popular) concern among cis-men about biological females being in men's restrooms.
It's highly relevant to Tech, culture and the current Zeitgeist.

If you follow the current controversy around tech thought leaders like Robert C. Martin aka Uncle Bob, you can't ignore the current debate, no matter which position you take.

Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it never did.
Pulsar offers a standalone mode, which runs everything inside a single JVM and you can just backup the data files. Pulsar also can be made to run with multiple components, but not distributed.
That wasn't to make you memorise a GUI but to make you understand the connections between visual indication and concealed action.

Without "fad chasing" (which is a sunk cost, a week every few years of pro graphics design), without even copying microsoft office's layout, you are losing out on new users. Why would anyone use libre office because it's open source rather than being a better functioning product that is more pleasurable to use (and look at)?
Someone out there can buy a broken MacBook off eBay and score some YouTube notoriety to do this very investigation.

Bonus points for using a Sawzall to get started.
More interesting than the article which says nothing original is the emerging "anti-cancel-culture" - industrial complex which appears to be a flourishing industry of people constantly blogging about how cancelled they are.

There really is something incredibly whiny about people who are prominent writers, have large audiences, but somehow manage to turn themselves into victims.

On the topic itself, I don't even understand the concept of cancel culture. All culture is cancel culture, that simply what culture is. A culture is defined by its delineations, what's inside of it and what's outside of it. All cultures, in all places cancel, all communities decide who is in and who is out, that's what defines a community, if nobody's excluded you don't have one.

What I suspect is not that the glorious past had a wider spectrum of opinion or no cancel culture, it's that people are mad that their opinion happens to be at the unpopular end these days.
Recently saw an appealing -40% discount on amex for dropbox. That could be cool - esp if stacked with a promo. Headed over to their subreddit in search of a special...literally an entire subreddit of complaints.

Don't think they'll be around in 5 years time.
A bit off topic but - how meaningful & do they just contact people on LinkedIn and that's it? I'm connecting good people with good jobs on the side, so fresh market info would be quite useful.
there's currently out on the internet a letter that basically says "cancel culture doesn't exist". it's signed by some ~160 people, mostly from left-wing backgrounds (i don't know all of them to say they are all from left-wing backgrounds).

a lot of those signatures are just "Unsigned, <affiliation>". the reasoning, according to the letter, is:

>Many signatories on our list noted their institutional affiliation but not their name, fearful of professional retaliation. It is a sad fact, and in part why we wrote the letter.

if you can't sign something without putting your name on it, because you fear you're going to get persecuted and fired... isn't that cancel culture?
The email sent to Amazon employees was a mistake.

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/amazon-bans-tiktok-emp...
I learned this the hard way with one of these slide covers from CloudFlare I got at BlackHat Conference. Picked up the Mac with one hand and I heard the crack. Needlees to say I now have a vinyl type sticky cover I just move on and off when I need to use the camera. Apple replaced the screen for me for a small fee of course.
https://www.ipromo.com/promo-products/20101/Custom-Webcam-Co...
That's not what a replacement for Access should be like.
I always wonder why the people who cover webcams don't think about the mic. Isn't that almost worse? It could grab speech even if you aren't right in front of the camera.
To expand slightly, the Elm compiler will help you out here and show you what you need to fix.
Given this function body

randomReturner n =
if n < 0.5 then
123
else
"abc"

The compiler will give you the following info:

The 2nd branch of this `if` does not match all the previous branches:

22| if n < 0.5 then
23| 123
24| else
25| "abc"
^^^^^
The 2nd branch is a string of type:

String

But all the previous branches result in:

number

Hint: All branches in an `if` must produce the same type of values. This way, no
matter which branch we take, the result is always a consistent shape. Read
<https://elm-lang.org/0.19.1/custom-types> to learn how to “mix” types.

Hint: Try using String.toInt to convert it to an integer?

You can try it out on Ellie here: https://ellie-app.com/9nXxfKSStG4a1
> Other than remove the SDK, of course.

Bingo! App developer voluntarily pulled in a dependency which they didn't fully understand. When you bring in a dependency, it's not still someone else's code/problem, it becomes your problem.
Trademark and the Tempest
Taibbi's been on a roll with his writing recently. His breakdown of the current state of the American press is also quite illuminating.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
> Instead of trying to smooth the entire image, it reduces blocking artifacts by finding plausible coefficients that reduce discontinuities at block boundaries

This is essentially the same thing, but using slightly different regularizers. In both cases, an image is found that whose jpeg compression is identical to the given one, by selecting the "most regular" image among the large family of such images. Jpeg2png minimizes the total variation over the whole image, and knusperly only along the boundaries of the blocks. The effect is quite similar at the end.
The telegram group at vectorspace.ai
> certain major crimes committed within the boundaries of reservations must be prosecuted in federal court

(emphasis mine)

> So it's not the territory that determines jurisdiction

Seems like there is some contradiction here.
Even up till 1900 or so, they were very small.

Think of it this way, if you like. Up till around 1900 the world's population was no more than about 1 billion. In that 120 years since then we've grown 8-fold. In other words, where you see 8 people today, in 1900 there was only one. In 1900, every city was only an eighth of its size today (on average).

Many cities had walls. Look at old maps. (Even a map of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.) Those walls were in areas that would now be called inner-city, and most of today's cities are now built outside those walls.
You had this opportunity to add insightfulness and enrich the debate with your comment.
OpenJDK is more complete, but that is also pretty recent work. I think it's an indication of icebergs that Oracle's flagship new compiler is still having random drive-by commits by non-core-team members that add pretty fundamental intrinsics.
You have to dress into the office—albeit many don’t wear suits any longer. Many have to drive. Those who travel a lot need many accessories for the purpose. The ideas that well-paid professionals should have all these things covered by a company seems... unreasonable.

And, seriously, complaining about having to spend a few bucks for something you need at work is equivalent to circumstances around Indian treaties in the US?
This is definitely an area where Pulasr is trying to improve, getting started is not easy. That said, the progress I have seen in the last year since I have been involved with it is really promising.
"Those assets are, in large part, the church buildings themselves. They are not liquid assets. Indeed, they are even more illiquid than most other real estate, because the market for church buildings, all of which are constructed to meet the needs and functions of a particular faith, is quite limited."

I don't think that's true. Years ago in Boston MA during one of the big legal where church leaders were accused of child molestation/rape/sex abuse, the church was ordered to pay $85 million dollars to the victims, some 260 people I think.

They took short term loans to pay that, then sold 15 buildings that netted them over 100 million dollars. One of the biggest properties was the archbishop's residence.

They didn't tap into the normal petitioners funds and similar, just took out some loans, took some insuance payouts to cover the 85 mil, then less then a year later sold those 15 buildings for over 100 mil.

The building packages were thought to be worth at minimum $1 mil per acre.

This was between 03 and 04.

In 2020, they were able to move around $2 billion to shield those assets from being taken into account during more recent sex abuse payouts.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-01-08/the-catho...

They sure as shit can liquidate, or move very large amounts of assets around to protect their own organization.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/10/us/church-in-boston-to-pa...

They're not a small business in any sense of the word, and they took money they don't need, seeing as it can take them less than a year to sell $100 mil+ worth of assets to cover payments to 260 sex abuse victims 15+ years ago, or move around 2 billion worth of assets in a ploy to try and reduce what they'll have to pay to victims of these leaders.
Your phone camera sounds like an engineering oversight.
That's a good point. I'm guessing that people calling for a "hardware switch" implicitly mean one that cannot be overridden by firmware.

I.e., a traditional switch inline on the circuit(s) connecting the camera / microphone to the rest of the system.
Let’s talk. I’d love to be of support and explore ways we can make it less stressful and more fun, even joyful and exciting for you.
It's a teaser to get you to subscribe, to what I don't know. Is this part of Medium so I also get other Medium content for $5 a month? It's unclear.
Try reading company annual and quarterly reports to help decide if you want to invest in their stock or not. These reports contain a wealth of information including candid management discussions, financial sheets, disclosures and much more. These are long documents that do take time to read but my side project (shameless plug) https://www.Last10K.com aims to help investors read these documents more efficiently.

You can also google study materials for the Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam which covers basic securities information that can be applied to investing.

https://www.finra.org/registration-exams-ce/qualification-ex...
When the Spanish arrived to Mexico, they asked one native what was the name of that area. The person replied: "Ma'anaatik ka t'ann" (I don't understand you"), and the Spanish hispanized that phrase to Yucatan.

As a result, a large extent of territory is now known as Yucatan Peninsula. And many names given to territories in the Americas have similar stories.
>If It’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture Is It?

Accountability culture. The argument that "these people came up during the 60's! they're hip!" holds zero sway with me.

I would recommend the author (or folks who agree with him) read responses to the Harper's letter. [1] [2]

[1] https://gen.medium.com/cancel-culture-is-how-the-powerful-pl...

[2] https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1280924457884884994
Bitcoin from Scratch – Part 2 – The Node
after they were exposed, to avoid negative PR
I highly recommend "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by Jack Bogle. It's a super short book full of great advice from the inventor of the Index Fund:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing/dp...
Interesting. Confirms some suspicions I had re: why my recent attempts to use Gnome under Wayland were... more interesting than I'd hoped. That exchange matches what I'd imagined their attitude must be to have produced software behaving that way.

They finally managed to convert me to KDE after 20 years, so that's something.
I think it was pretty successful. I guarantee it got a lot of uk top gear fans subscribed to prime, it did for me.
IXL engineer here. My comments express my opinions, not those of my employer, etc etc.

We don't try to be unfair; we're trying to make math fun. Please send a note to help@ixl.com if you run into questions that silently require a too-specific answer format, and we'll fix it.
That sounds strange, AFAIK most of the base stations around here (Czech Republic) are interconnected via point to point microwave links, as they usually have a line of sight of each other.

This way they are pretty independent of the general infrastructure and often work even if the area around is under water due to flooding (I remember a case where they had to deliver fuel for generators powering a base station that ended up effectively on an island).
I would say you are equally likely to catch someone jacking off through the webcam as to catch valuable information through the microphone. They are therefore equally lucrative
I’ve had the same basic bug crop up 3x in the last two years while using the API - posts to Groups with dollar amounts just… fail. “An unknown error occurred.”

The first two times it took months to fix. It’s happening again currently, too.

Clear there are GAPING holes in their test suites.
IXL engineer here. We're not a Pearson product.
Understanding Parser Combinators
Usually I hear this term in context to attempts to doxx or have someone fired, and while the cancellation of celebrities garners more press, it's due to the notoriety of the victim--probably many more non-celebrities are canceled (and usually with worse consequences unless good and decent people intervene). It's the climate of fear, not the criticism, that people take issue with (we're not talking about "criticism culture" after all).
I certainly felt like I got a couple words of meaning at most out of those paragraphs. Lots of volume and platitude as you say... I wasn't getting much beyond that... but then it asked me for $5.
My startup trail started the day I decided to take the summer off from living in NYC, and go to South America for the summer ( Peru ) to learn to surf while working all day on my MVP.

That was 2006. I never looked back.

Once you get used to doing things your way.. it's very hard to go back.

Let go of the golden handcuffs, put on your adventure hat, and consider finding a low-cost city/country to play in while you figure out product-market-fit[1]. If you are lucky you will also find other potential co-founders also on the same journey, and other talented local folk who are affordable. Who knows you may even learn a new language along the way! Worst case you go back to doing what you've been doing. It's not going anywhere soon in this climate.

[1]https://remoteok.io/
I am convinced they were ordered at some point to include cameras. They definitely drive up the cost of laptops, especially earlier on when webcams were more expensive. There were so few practical uses in the early days and so few people actually use them today that I am surprised few laptop manufacturers don't allow for security.
This listing overlooks one of the biggest imbalances that lots of folks seem to overlook: employer monopsony. There are big chunks of the country where one dominant employer effectively controls employment, either directly or indirectly through the ability to pressure suppliers. Piss off the wrong person and you have a problem.

Of course, people born in those places can theoretically vote with their feet, although most people seem to find that much easier said than done.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/pag...
Being in an employee purchase plan seems to be a requirement. But not everyone on one got that.

Never quite understood why Canadian télécoms give the best prices to people with large organisation jobs.
I should also specify that Beast is not designed specifically for children on the spectrum but parents with kids on the spectrum tend to love it. Also, Beast is a math curriculum, not an all-in-one. That needs to be fixed in the blog!
If that's what you think happened, you need to go look at the facts. No harassment occurred. There was no emotional outburst. Only a solemnly worded paper that was written in response to a request for feedback and wasn't even meant to be spread around as much as it did.
Note that code that relies on inference too much is really hard to read without an IDE. So reading it e.g. in the github web interface is a really bad experience.
I work for a company that buys a lot of enterprise gear. Here is what buying it looks like, if you've never done it before.

Let's say you have your eye on a storage array. You know it's going to cost a bundle but it's exactly what you need and want to know how much to budget for buying one. So you call the company who makes it and ask for a price. They tell you, "Sorry, but we don't sell directly to end users, you have to buy our gear through an authorized vendor." So you ask for a list of their vendors. "Sorry, but we don't give out that information. You could try googling our name for some?"

Once you locate a reseller, you call them up and ask them how much it costs to buy the storage array. "I'm sorry, I don't have the pricing in front of me but do you have time on Wednesday for a 1 hour phone call?" You ask, why can't you just give me a price over the phone? "Well, we want to get to know you and we need to make sure that this solution is the one that fits your needs. Plus we can tell you all about the product and answer any questions you might have." Fine, let's schedule a phone call.

Wednesday rolls around and the phone rings. On the line is your "Account Manager" (salescritter), an Integration Engineer (salescritter who can sometimes answer technical questions), the Account Manager's manager, and possibly a trainee for any of the above. Because whenever there's a scheduled phone meeting, it's never just one person on the other end, it's a whole team. "Why don't you start by telling us about the problem you're trying to solve and by the way, all other parts of your infrastructure that we could possibly sell you solutions for?" So you answer their questions, as diplomatically as you can. Once that's done, if you're _lucky_, you will sit through a 30-minute long sales pitch on the product you already fully intend to buy, if the price is right. If you are unlucky, they will try to schedule a follow-up phone call and webex for it.

As the hour-long phone call is clearly starting to wind down, you grit your teeth and ask, hopefully, how much does this thing actually cost? "I can see your a down-to-brass-tacks kind of guy so I'll tell you what, I'll send you a detailed quote sometime early next week, okay? Great!"

_Two weeks_ later, you get the quote. At this point you are so tired of the resller people and their delays and empty platitudes, you just want to get the damn thing on order before your spending window closes. To your surprise, once they actually have the check in hand, they move a lot quicker and ship the unit more or less immediately.

The thing is, if you offer a product in the enterprise space and _don't_ go through this complicated dog-and-pony show for every customer, they won't buy from you because they won't see you as a serious vendor.

I hate it all.
Ask HN: unstructured data and unsupervised learning
About 80% of data in the world is unstructured: work descriptions, cv, emails, text documents, voice recordings, images and videos, social media posts, website, etc.

As far as I know, as of now, we aren't really able to get insights and profit from all this unstructured data. For instance, in most cases, structured data are needed to train neural networks; i.e all settings are predominantly supervised.

Furthermore, with the discovery of the transformers architectures (BERT, GPT-2, ...) the last couple of years have been incredible for the NLP ecosystem.

My question is, looking ahead two, five, and ten years, how good we will be able to deal with unstructured data? Also, which tools and technologies are we missing now that will be available in a couple of years that will permit to get the most out of all this data? Which role will plays language models and transformers architectures in this field? Semi-supervised learning will be the key there?

These are all quite general and broad questions. The idea is to discuss unstructured data and unsupervised algorithms.
A friendly reminder: the "flag" button is not a super-downvote.
Thanks for your great comment, it's helping further the discussion and my own understanding.

> but it would be a huge shift to grow everything that way, and it's far from clear that it's even workable for the volumes needed for the big staple crops like corn, wheat, and soy.

Agree completely. But I think a huge shift is very much needed, and this shift may decrease our dependencies on staples like corn, much of which goes to cattle feed and fuel uses when we have other, more ecological methods like pastured beef, solar etc. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...

RE 2nd paragraph, also totally agree with, minus the "100x labor inputs". If done properly, bio-mimicry in Ag should decrease labor inputs as you leverage the advantages of natural plant/soil nutrient cycling, reduced watering and tillage from cover cropping and soil development, reduction of pesticide application by attracting animal/insect diversity etc.

From my understanding, "conventional" farming (I say ironically as we've really only been practicing these methods for ~60-70 years vs millennia of small scale farming that is the real "conventional"methods lol) has forced us to increase labor inputs - adding fertilizers, pesticides, annual tillage, managing irrigation systems - these are all things that can be eliminated, if the proper systems are put in place.

Gabe Browns book, Dirt to Soil was an eye opening read. Cheers.
It isn't the led is physically slaved to the power of the camera, the previous version was firmware fixed and was hacked, hence the change.
Dragonfly was canned after Google employees revolted. I'd be surprised if Google could even get a project like that resourced again without more leaks.
Hi!

I was the security architect for this feature on recent Macs. The LED is wired to the camera PMIC and is powered by the voltage rail that powers the camera. The PMIC will always remain on if the system has power. Macs newer than 4 or so years also have a feature that forces the LED to stay lit for at least 3 seconds after it has been turned on to prevent the single-frame-grab attack.
Brave Web Browser Caught in Affiliate Link Controversy Prompting Fork