skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows on IoT, no. Windows as a risk, yes. Apologies if this seems rant-ish, but the idea has touched a nerve.

IoT is generally something you should regard as a entrypoint into a network as much as desktops, servers, NAT broadband routers, APs are.

Flash and forget is a dangerous thing, and especially so if all you wanted was an IP connected thermostat.

If what you wanted was a thermostat with some sort of video output, then why not use an Arduino with a i2c serial ESP8622 or ESP32, or maybe an Orion Omega, note that the thermal output and voltage requirements increase. With smaller micro controllers and a serial connection you have mostly what you need, rather than a full-fat interface. The simplest solution is most likely the right one.

Don't include a GUI and all that other warm and fuzzy stuff of MS unless it is needed on what could be an entry point to a network or if the IoT is infrastructure.

There are things that could make IoT a very dependant piece of infrastructure. Suppose you deliver cargo. Suppose that some of the cargo is temperature dependent and you use a new IoT Rasp Pi 4 with Windows to control the refrigerator as your manager thinks money can be saved compared to old, in-person managed thermostats.

Fluorouracil, a chemotherapy treatment, MUST be kept at 5c +/- 3c, otherwise patient health and treatment can be compromised. It also has a short shelf life, if your goal was to know how long it has been in transit (simple BBE stickers are probably better, but your concern as a consumer could be forgery).

Something like IoT can help, and can hinder here, if you were to do end-to-end tracking of the supply chain, you could know it's whereabouts. If you were a malicious actor, you could do things like stuxnet, report that the thermostat is just fine, when really the shipment is at room temperature. Not that hard to imagine if you know where the shipments are from and your goal is to destabilise.

Is a good old-fashioned thermostat better here? Maybe. If you need to remotely control something, I'd prefer slightly harder to update in the field, Arduinos/ESP than the risk of it being an entry point to a network in the wild.

Many network infiltrations originate at the desktop. I'm classing Windows Server as desktop, because, well, it has a desktop out of the box. It is not a server OS. Real servers are not the entry point, despite their proximity to raw internet.
I disagree.

Corporations, in practice, aren't that. They are not disposable in practice. Large companies dominate their markets, expect to live forever, etc.

Innovations that don't happen within Google, microsoft, etc... those innovations don't happen.

This isn't an absolute statement. Innovations can happen outside and new companies can be founded. We went through a period in internet-based innovations where a lot of innovation happened outside of existing large corporations and became their own giant corporations. That's not a long term norm though. That reality was largely driven by really low capital costs. These days, new internet companies raise a lot more money... mostly to pay for advertising that goes to google and facebook, who control access to users.

More likely than innovation outside of existing companies gets bought into bigger ones.

Consider Tesla. Obviously Musk's abilities played a big part. So did his bank account, his ability to raise capital, etc. It takes that much force to innovate in that market from outside. Very difficult.

I think it's reasonable to ask why existing car companies couldn't pull off anything like it. There are incentive/incumbent reasons, but I don't think these are the whole story.

I agree that innovation should and could come from outside big corporations. But, the reality is that resources, market power and such are highly concentrated within large corporations. There isn't much space to operate outside of it. We can't expect a sub-1% section of an industry to do all the innovation... outside of rare examples like the internet circa 1995-2015.

Also, consider that tech giants are a lot more innovative than incumbents in other industries, largely because of the pressure from small companies and their relative youth. Trains, Planes, Cars, Roads, Banking, smelting, etc... these industries are not like that. Nothing at all happens outside of large corporations, innovative or otherwise.
but also be honest that it's not cool that they won't identify themselves or have badge numbers.
Just F***ing Google It.
This reminds me of Whisper, one of my favorite exotic alien concepts. The alien civilization in question has selected a planet with as stable environment as possible, and planted it full of genetically engineered grass. The sound of wind blowing through the grass creates an acoustic computer which hosts a virtual space its creators have uploaded themselves into.

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/470007b39d192
Long term effects: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53368768
Application - better fitting of clothes brought online? Consumer happy, company returns rate drops. Seems like an obvious one no?
I was always envious of my dad's AF flight suits in the 1960s. Zippered pockets everywhere. There was even a knee clipboard!
>Why do I have an obligation to answer to your justifications for endless, evil war?

Is this how you respond civilly, by saying you have no obligation and rudely making a hyperbole?
Professionals can be surprisingly sloppy.

I mean these guys are pros, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...

And I always return to this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair. If you can't count on the Mossad to have good opsec, who can you count on?

If anything, the impression that professionals do the job spotlessly seems like it goes hand-in-hand with the misattribution of this crime to a "professional."

From what's in the public record, even "professional" hitmen have their moments of conscience, laziness, procedural failures--and, apparently, quite frequently, presumably due to the moral pressure of conducting assassinations.

(Of course it's possible we don't hear about the hitmen who are truly pro-level, but I find that hard to believe.)
Why not add autopilot functionality to the drink cart?
The percentage of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is zero or close to zero in people from African populations, and is about 1 to 2 percent in people of European or Asian background.

From: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/dtcgenetictesting/neanderthal...

Personally I have nearly 4 percent according to 23andme - not sure what benefits this may or may not have given me. I'll be interested to see if my children inherit this.
See also the current top story about low background steel.
Sadly the large phone thing seems here to stay, and it’s driving out small phone options :(
Doesn't really matter when they use booming housing prices from over a decade ago to justify their cooked statistics.
a lot of people use it a lot.
> this is really cool

RPI's that windows, are not cool. They need cooling.
It would certainly be big news.
> nobody has come even anywhere close to the level of evil enacted on the world, as the US and its criminal War Coalition cult

I understand that these actions are incredibly callous, particularly as some of them are ongoing and can be stopped. I'm not trying to make the US look better, but only place it in a global context. All of these atrocities combined still don't seem even even remotely comparable to the atrocities committed by the British, for instance.

> European armies are being forced (by their NATO captors) to participate

This sounds incredibly misinformed and callous. Have people already forgotten about Libya in 2011, urged by the French utilizing NATO for their own interventionist agenda? Or the expectation among powerful European countries such as Germany and certainly most Eastern European NATO members that the US maintain a presence there? No one is being held captive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...

Or for another example before NATO, the British urged the US to intervene in Iran to protect exploitative British oil interests, starting a cascade of further US intervention in the country succeeding the long cycle of British imperialism there.

A very (very) short sampling of the wonders of British colonialism with some sources that provide more context at the end:

A large-scale famine in Ireland that could have been prevented, brutal massacres in Kenya to crush uprisings resulting in the detainment without cause of around 80,000 people and the death of tens of thousands that were later covered up by burning their documents, the deindustrialization of some of the most successful economies in the world that were in what is now India (Bengal, etc.) by razing and/or crippling local industries that had developed globally-recognized innovations and forcing them through enslavement and forced labor into inefficient agriculture that partially resulted in famines that killed more than 10 million.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.s...

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-trut...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...
My six year old will just continue as long as he has people's attention, and if that means he has to make things up, so be it. Freely stealing phrases from other recent conversations.

So this morning he heard about an animal, it was kind of a lion. But with bat's ears, it lives in Africa. It looks like it's a rock, but it's actually not, it's rock shaped but has tiny legs. And it's gray and hard. Its face... It doesn't really have a face. It lives up in trees where it eats bamboo and apples. It has these huge fangs like sabertooth tigers, you know?

It's glorious.
All of those, in my experience.

My smallest kid has a habit of telling stories about himself that actually come from whatever he heard recently, e.g. "once I was Godzilla..", or claims about things in reality that come from stories or misunderstandings all mixed up "did you know, there are three pigs, but they are not pigs, they are wolves and a hunter came and killed them but they weren't wolves they were dragons..."

It's actually very GPT-3-ish now that I think of it.
Sure, what do you want to know?

I currently work on synbio × web archival.

Some of us are cooking up futuretech aimed at storing all of IA (archive.org) in a shoebox. Others are working on putting archival tools in more normal web users' hands, and making those tools do things that people tend to value more in the short-term, like help them understand what they're researching, rather than merely stash pages.

My ambitions for web archives are outsized compared to other archivists, but I'm fine with that. I'm looking beyond web archives as we currently understand them toward web archives as something else that doesn't quite exist yet: everyday artefacts, colocated and integrated with other web technology to an extent that they serve in essential sensemaking, workflow, and maybe security roles.

Right now, some obvious, pressing priorities are (a) preserving vastly more content and (b) doing more with the archives themselves.

A: The overwhelming majority of born-digital content is lost within a far narrower time-slice than would admit preservation at current rates, and data growth is accelerating beyond the reach of conventional storage media. So, for me, the world's current largest x is never the true object of my desire. I'm after a way to hold the world that is and the world to come.

Ideally, that world to come is one where lifelong data stewardship of everything from your own genome to your digital footprint is ubiquitously available and loss of information has been largely rendered optional.

This, of course, requires magic storage density that simply defies fundamental limitations of conventional storage media. I'm strongly confident that we're getting early glimpses of the first real Magic contenders. All lie outside, or on the far periphery of, the evolutionary tree that got us the storage media we have today. For instance, I'm running an art exhibition that involves encoding all the works on DNA.

B: Distributed archival that comes almost as naturally as browsing is well within reach, and with that comes some very new potential for distributed computation on archives. One hand washes the other.

One important thing to realize here is that, in many cases, you can name a very small handful of individuals as the reason why current archival resources exist. GPT-3 is cracking the surface by training on data produced by one guy named Sebastian, for instance.

…i'm sorta tired and have to respond to something about every twitter snapshot since June being broken, though, so I'll pick this back up later.
And if the answer is No ?
Don't give the insurance companies any ideas...
Show HN: React components for faster and easier email templates development
It’s not just that. Cisco shareholders lost as they should have had the value of webex as part of their existing shares. This is being lost as zoom takes over.
This, but removable microSD card instead of EEPROM.
More context to that quote:
>Per Vognsen discusses how to do course-grained error handling in C using setjmp/longjmp. The use case there were for arena allocations and deeply nested recursive parsers. It’s very similar to how C++ does exception handling, but without the downsides of the costly C++ memory deallocation on stack unwinding.

I have never used setjmp/longjmp myself. And I agree with you that my first instinct would be to use it in the similar manner as in many GUI programs: they have have a catch statement in the message loop that shows a dialog box of the thrown exception. You just jump to a point where you print a user friendly error message and exit.

But I still can imagine use cases where you've isolated all other side effects (locks, shared memory, open file handles) and are just dealing with a buffer that you parse. Has anyone used setjmp/longjmp for that around here?

Given your many years in the field and Cygnus background I guess you've used it a few times? Do you happen to have any horror stories related to it? :-)
Unfortunately, that's the situation. Though in the last couple of years, there is a noticeable increase in tooling on all fronts.
But all of those run Darwin, so for something like a graphics API that has nothing to do with GUIs and whatnot, the "platform" for all of those is the same.
You can return tuples from Rust fns just like you would in Go, if that's your thing - no unsafe necessary:

fn foo() -> (usize, Result<(),()>) { (0, Ok(())) }
let (a, err) = foo(); err?; // propigate error
let (b, _) = foo(); // discard error

Or more typically, you might use one of the many fn s such as unwrap_or, unwrap_or_else, unwrap_or_default, etc. - to provide your own appropriate default value. I usually find that useful default values are often caller specific anyways (and doesn't require remembering which fns return which default values on error):

fn foo() -> Result<usize> { Ok(1) }
fn bar() -> Option<usize> { None }
let val = foo().unwrap_or(3); // val == 1
let val = bar().unwrap_or(4); // val == 4

Alternatively you can use out parameters, which occasionally crops up in Rust's own stdlib:

let mut line = String::new();
let _ = buf_read.read_line(&mut line);
// ...use line, even if there was an error...

Also, the "error" type might contain values itself, although you're certainly not ignoring the error if you use it:

// https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ffi/struct.OsString.html#method.into_string
match os_string.into_string() {
Ok(string) => println!("Valid UTF8 string: {}", string),
Err(os_string) => println!("Invalid UTF8: {:?}", os_string),
}
I am really curious how the model would be if you would train it with a decent amount of really good literature. Kazuo Ishiguro et al. instead of Reddit.
So it looks like we're about 2 years away from the 'Her' relationship model.
Ask HN: How do you stay in the loop with HN threads?
Is there some way of being notified of replies to a comment you made, for instance? Or do people hit refresh and visit old threads?
Your non-sequitur America-first questions are really irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not we should be content with the US' death cult recruiting children for its illegal wars.

Where do I think the world would be without the US military today?

There'd be millions of innocent people - mothers, fathers, children - still alive, building their own nations into a better place to live. Mosul wouldn't be a burning pile of rubble, Raqqa too. There wouldn't be millions of innocent victims buried under the rubble that American citizens put them under. Maybe those of us in the West who enjoy these things could even have a vacation in the cradle of civilisation in Iraq and Syria, and actually enjoy the cultures of these peoples instead of reviling them.

If it didn't spend a trillion dollars a year on death and destruction of cultures it fears, America would easily have what it needed to offer its citizens world-class education and health care at similar standards to the rest of the western world. Clean water for its children. Perhaps, if Americans hadn't all signed up to their death cult, they'd have the funds for a better response to the pandemic, and maybe .. here is a cool thought .. average American citizens would have the skills to learn the languages and read the books of the cultures they fear so much today, instead of signing up to callously and evilly drop bombs on 'evil' (innocent) people whose language they can't even speak.
I've found this is to be a common sentiment from people who've lived in 3rd world countries especially during times of conflict. Anyone born in America, or any peaceful first world country would have a hard time understanding how this could be a desirable situation.
One challenge to this that languages which easily allow metaprogramming can encourage codebases where it is hard to write tools to gain insight into the structure of a codebase.

You can say “don’t do that”, but I didn’t. Past coworkers did.
Do you have any links I can read in the latter claim? Using avx512 for ai with comparable power to a GPU?
The 75th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test was just a few days ago, on July 16th. It's been in the news a bit lately, and this topic is related.
Another recourse would be not to build stuff in other people's backyards.

There's plenty of space in the US.
The people I know that are the best at their job? No online presence.

I do know a lot of very well paid engineers who happen to be good at selling their brand on those platforms, however.

They’re just not the folks who blew me away in their actual work.

Blog posts just cannot equate to real gritty problem solving in the world.
The cockpit door is shut and locked not due to safety theatre but actual safety. The ideology he’s talking about is Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, though to be honest, that tends to happen. Exploitable opportunities eventually get shaved away just due to the volume of attacks.

Once upon a time computers were simple, then we needed anti-worm stuff. Such is life.
Every Canadian government but for one has been from one of the two main parties.
that can't be an accident surely; i want it.
The US did that to prevent another war, after 2 world wars who would have though Europe was responsible enough for itself? NATO has been the reason why there has been such lasting peace.

>This is the modus operandi of a bully, an invader, an exploiter - certainly not that of a protector.

So America plundered Japan and Germany? If they actually invaded them and overtook them they'd be part of the US now. The US saved the world from another world war, and they are the bullies? You can make a case out of some but NATO has been good for most of the world.
I agree that the text generation has improved dramatically. But there is a big gap between "generating gramatically correct sentences" and "sentences that express an elaborated idea". For example:

> I was thinking of how cool it would be to build a Twitter-like service where the only posts are GPT-3 outputs.

Why would I need that? There are better ways for entertainment.

> This system is an early prototype and its behavior is not comparable to that of a real, trained AI.

Nonsense. This made it clear for me that the author (= GPT-3) has no real clue what it's talking about.

Even though this looks like we got one step closer to text understanding - we did not. We just got better in obfuscating that those algorithms have no real sense and clue of what they talk about.
If you want to transfer your FB photos and videos to Google photos without the extra work, just use this tool: https://www.facebook.com/dtp
A subject not covered nearly enough!
GitHub is done depositing its open source codes in the Arctic
Learning representations by back-propagating errors (1986) [pdf]
Magic Compiler (2017)
You raise a good point. The Internet has trained us to skim any text that seems pointless or just unsufficiently insightful. So it turns out we have already built up some "mental defences" against GPT-3.
It made me consider:
- The existence of this model I hadn't heard of
- Bitcoin (sigh)
- Testing it out on a forum, trying to become a well known poster
- picking a forum with many different types of posters
- some of which you dislike

And that got me thinking about what I could do with this thing, whether I should, what I wanted to try out...

So the BS random ideas were still inspiring a bit.
What hyperbole? Are you really unaware that Americans murdered 5% of Iraqs population?

Are you really so ignorant of the fact that the US drops bombs on innocent people at the rate of 1 every twenty minutes for the last 20 years?

Come on, you can't be so ignorant of the fact that in the last few years the US literally turned multiple cities with populations greater than 2 million civilians into burning piles of rubble? That it dropped more bombs on Afghanistan LAST YEAR than ever before.

Seriously, there is nothing rude about pointing out America's evils, nor the ignorance of its citizens. Did you think we were all Americans here? Some of us are not that ignorant.
These things can get really tricky.

We once almost bricked our devices (electronic magnifier/OCR for low vision people) with an update that added automatic calibration for the cheap crappy OEM touchscreen we used in some devices. It was so crappy all the screens we had in our company had the same serial numbers and returned different coordinates when you clicked in the same spot :)

Fortunately libev has calibration - you can provide a matrix to transform all touchscreen events with. We added calibration step - the software asked user to touch 4 corners on the screen, calculates inverse matrix and saves it to configuration for better touchscreen accuracy. We tested it extensively, and uploaded the version to our update server.

The next day customers started calling :) turns out libev (which reads the configuration during booting) had a "feature" that parsed the numbers in the configuration using the default system locale.

German locale uses . as thousands separator and , as fraction separator.

So, when you did the calibration and restarted the device with German locale your screen transformed the touschscreen events multiplying them by thousands - so you couldn't click on anything, so you couldn't use the device or click "update software".

It was even worse if you used german locale, saved the calibration configuration and then changed locale to English - then it simply crashed during boot because of wrong number format :)

Fortunately we left one usb port accessible so users could attach usb mouse and click "update" if they had the first situation, or download the whole firmware on an usb pendrive and update from it.

BTW the libev bug is fixed, now it always reads the configuration using C locale. Guess what happened when we updated the linux on our systems half a year later and that change was included :)