skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, those future ideas are also possible salable products, thought the market is smaller. I had hoped that the surplus from the core bitstring search would provide the seed money for their development.

Chemfp is (or rather was) at least an order of magnitude faster than its competitors. One of my early customers went from taking 5 days to cluster 1M fingerprints using their internal tool to several hours with a re-writes based on a chemfp core.

I figured that was sufficiently impactful. But that was in the early stage when people did fund me to add new features as an open source project. I think that once it got "good enough", people didn't want to fund the incrementally smaller improvements. The commercial version is only about 2x faster than the no-cost version. I would talk with potential customers and they already had the no-cost version installed in-house.

Now, there are a lot of other improvements in the commercial version, but it's a variation on the "offer a compelling product" - I was my own competition. That was the primary failure in the original business model, based on Ghostscript. (I didn't realize that hardware companies paid Aladdin to keep up with Adobe Postscript, which provided the reason to pay for the latest version rather a no-cost older version.)

I tried crowdfunding a project, ie, "pooling together funds", for another project. It worked, in that it made enough money to fund the software development and the marketing, but it also required a lot of time for the marketing (which I'm not good at), and I would have made more money doing straight consulting work instead of product development.

BTW, I focus on "classic" cheminformatics. Similarity search is from the 1980s, with roots in the 1970s. My thesis is that there people haven't looked into these topics in years and there might be orders of magnitude gains by developing better fits to modern architecture, that is, improve existing methods enough that UI/UX changes. Most other people's definition of "killer feature" is "an improveed method predict how a molecule will work in the body."
This is 100% my experience too.
> If it has a keyhole it can be picked

What if you can't get your picks into the keyhole?

I saw a lock that had a tubular key, and an airlock-like mechanism between the place the actual keyhole and the opening for you to insert the key. You would insert the key, and then activate the airlock-like mechanism which would transport the key to the keyhole.

There was then a mechanism to rotate the thing that was holding the key so as to unlock the lock.

The actual keyhole in this lock was never exposed to the outside.
You've won me over. This type of language belongs in accompanying text not directly in a scientific paper.
A long time ago I was observing court cases for a school project.

In one of the cases the prosecution was interviewing one of the arresting officers.

The officer stated "While survailing the subject we noticed he became increasingly paranoid that he was being watched, most likely from his heavy cocain use"

The judge had to correct him that because of the fact he was being watched by the officer, it was not parinoia.

All the points in this article are good, I just wish they didn't get so specific about particular theories and then just dismiss them as debunked over and over. Just because you say they have been debunked in the article doesn't make it so or convince anyone who believes in the theory. I find the media, on both left and right tend to do this far too often, far better to lay out the facts and or logic for the argument you're trying to make.
Indeed. I had any number of friends who bought the biggest house they could afford, because that was what you were 'supposed to do', only to be buried by the cost of filling a 4000+ sq ft monstrosity with enough 'stuff' that it didn't look empty, then heating/cooling, cleaning, etc. all that 'stuff'. I know some of those folks have rooms that a decade or two down the line that they've opened the door to less that a dozen times, much less ever used for anything more than a place to pile stuff out of the way.
Aahh, yes, the German Tank Problem[1]. Also more complex than it would initially seem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Are there any downsides to using a service like this?
If we want to regulate the captcha industry there should be a law passed specifically regulating the industry. Blindsiding the industry with judgments against them when there are no laws about it will decrease confidence in the rule of law, which will hurt the economy as businesses lose confidence in their ability to predict the future.
Brazil set to test Chinese coronavirus vaccine
Here (the US), Nespresso ships their pods with pre-paid plastic bags for recycling. We fill the bags with our used pods, and every once in awhile drop them off at UPS. Problem solved.
The fix:

> Use Probability as an Expression of Confidence

If the probability is just some made up number reflecting a hunch, it's no better at informing us to take an action or drop an opinion. It's just a way of talking about how weakly we are holding the opinion, and not the real deal from statistics.

The concept still provides no concrete framework for assigning the probability, and for taking action. E.g. do you abort the plan when the probability of success feels like it has dropped to 65%, or does it have to feel like 35%?
Building developer enthusiasm and passion? that's great. That's what Stripe is doing, and I'm happy about that.

Please don't call that a cult though.
> Isn't [puncture] a similar process to ballistics?

Maybe in a sense, but I think not really. Bullet-proof vests aren't necessarily (usually?) stab proof. (And vice-versa of course.)
There has been a huge influx of articles from substack lately. I think they are trying to grow their brand.
So glad to see the Law of Leaky Abstractions in there - that's had a very long-running impact on how I think about programming. It's still super-relevant today, nearly 18 years after it was published.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
You could just have a general law banning fraud, rather than regulating every product individually. That's how it was done before the early 20th century.
As a California native who grew up in LA, I'm extremely grateful for California Air Resources Board [1], which set standards for air quality that helped LA reduce some pretty terrible historic pollution issues, despite growing significantly over the same period [2]. CARB has also been important to fighting climate change by creating a model for other states and nations to follow.

LA is definitely not geographically advantaged when it comes to pollution, given it is a big basin. I'm not sure who wins the geographically disadvantaged olympics, but SLC and LA are more alike than not in this department.

Utah could adopt CARB's stricter air quality standards for one. They could also shutdown or limit pollution sources, including those from home heating. And they could reduce the growing sprawl by encouraging density and public transportation. I'm not a regulatory expert so I can't give you more specifics than that, but it's not like these things aren't possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Air_Resources_Board

[2] https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d
Yeah but 99% of thieves can't do that. If they could then they'd likely have a real job. Lots of locks are invulnerable to the picking, especially serious digital ones.
I remembering wondering about the same thing a few years ago, and came across this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30177559/how-does-find-b...
>> Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?

What history are you interested in? I don't think anyone would have written anything about equinet - it was alot of fun to work at - a true technology startup before startups were called startups. Founded by a visionary genius called Peter Dunai. equinet wrote what must have been some of the very first Windows applications. I joined the company in 1987 and they had already written equinet for Windows then so it must have been Windows 1 or Windows 2. Peter Dunai backed Windows when the rest of the industry was still thinking the future was OS/2. Some of the smartest programmers I've ever met worked there.

equinet eventually merged with Bridge Information Systems - an American company. Or maybe it was Knight Ridder. Can't quite remember. The founder of equinet went on to found Iress which became the largest sharemarket information systems company in Australia and spread internationally.

The guy who wrote the software described above was John Cameron - a really nice guy who appears to have gone on to be extremely successful in financial trading software. http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron

>>That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS).

It was just a straight MSDOS application. I can't recall which flavor of Modula2 he wrote it with.

It must have been some pretty tight coding though because it had to run its end user application code and service the serial terminals and not miss inbound characters on a serial port.
Oh my god, yes. You also have to take the input of the group as “evidence,” and acknowledge when you may not know much about something, but someone else does.
Future Apple Pencil Could Have Sensor to Sample Colors from the Real World
Federal officers can make warrantless arrests if they have probable cause to believe the individual has committed a crime, just like normal officers. It's hard to tell if these arrests meet that threshold, but it's at least possible that all laws are technically being following here.

Again, that's not to say this isn't a bad situation. I'm explicitly advocating for changing the laws that allow this to be even possibly legal in the first place.
>I agree, and I like the size of my smaller house. That said, there are some ways that I think the space could be better utilized... for example, we have 4 bedrooms and 1.5 baths, all of which are smaller than you'd see in a modern home. It was definitely designed with a large, baby booming family in mind.

4 bed 1.5 bath does not sound great. I don't think I have ever seen that one but I know it is a staple for comedy where everyone is trying to use the same bathroom at the same time. That might be less bad now than in the baby boom days. I would not want to share a bathroom with a bunch of kids. But, for a DINK family, a master bedroom, his office, her office, and a guest bedroom with 1.5 baths sounds reasonable.
When you move fast you tend to break things. When half the internet relies on you you want to avoid outages.
Every time I buy a new bag of ground coffee, I like it better than the one I just used up. That's almost certainly not because the new one is better than the old one, it's because the coffee in the old bag has gotten stale (as the article mentions). So unless I buy really small quantities of ground coffee, I'm stuck with coffee that gets stale.

That's why I bought a grinder, since the whole beans don't go stale so fast.
I’m going through the conversation with a colleague atm where he believes DRY applies to everything.
Now we're getting somewhere. I agree, China likely isn't doing so because they lack the power. Same way, the USG isn't putting people into re-education camps largely because the people won't let it do so.

If you want to limit the ability of superpowers to kill millions with impunity, then really the best solution is to have a bipolar world.
I’d say throw it up to the appropriate height. You don’t need exactly 10m and it’ll replicate the drop event perfectly.
"grounds can be rebrewed twice at least (like good tea)"

Confession: I was once a missionary. We had a saying about used tea bags: good enough for a missionary.
I tried talking with funding agencies. As a self-employed/sole-proprietership, it proved to be difficult.

I conducted the "mmpdb crowdfunding project" at http://mmpdb.dalkescientific.com/ . Unfortunately, it's been on delay because of major changes to my work schedule once the coronovirus came. My conclusion from that was it's still easier for me to make money as a consultant than from selling a product.

One thing I didn't mention in the paper was that being a consultant on different projects makes it easy to present new talks at conferences, which leads to new work. Continued development of a single project with one focus leads to variations on a theme, feeling sometimes like "have you ever looked at your hand. I mean, really looked at your hand" introspection.

You can always email me as follow up. dalke at dalkescientific.
Possibly the roommate is the problem? Shared kitchen/bathroom etc.
"If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens."
I think the author is stuck in 2010.
I have a 5-6m high grapefruit tree, and they... do not survive the fall. This material sounds cool but I hope it's better than my grapefruit.
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prior.pdf
We recycle a bit differently, possibly because we're in the US: Nespresso sends us pre-paid UPS bags. We fill the bags with used pods, and take them by the UPS store every once in a while.
For light reading on 20th century style I like this site:

https://retrorenovation.com/2017/06/23/59-midcentury-modern-...

Only book I've found for Streamline Moderne:

https://www.amazon.com/Streamline-Moderne-Style-Primer-Book-...
List of Alternative “Reddit Like” Social Networking Sites for the Minimalists
They just use a Ramset gun. Thieves are generally quite smart. The dumb ones tend to end up in prison, or worse.
Love the list, but I definitely think Programming Sucks [1] should be on any list of programming essays. :)

1: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Substack is just a publishing platform, it's not editorial.
What about cicular saw with diamond blade? You can cut cement, ceramics and granite with it... What about demolition hammer or hammer drill?
The Library of Scott Alexander
Except you'd have no way of knowing whether they knew they were violent rioters.
Sadly it's a video/presentation, not an essay, but Simple Made Easy[1] is the single software argument that has made the most impact on me.

___

1. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
I might not been too clear. Courses were great, but certificates/diplomas are worthless.
Any platform and product. How will platform and or product affect general time management strategies?

Say, I am developing for iOS, Android and Web platform. And the product is in B2C space. Then how do I distribute my time developing on each of these platform? The backend will be shared as much as possible. The mobile code will be shared as much as possible by using Flutter.
>Many prove to be true.

Which ones? Most conspiracy theories are over-thought, under-researched, pure horseshit. Out of the most well-known, "the moon landing was faked" - false, based on no real evidence and a whole lot of denying reality. "The earth is flat" - absolutely false. "5G towers cause COVID" - it's really not difficult to understand how ridiculous this one is. And the conspiracies just keep getting crazier from there...

Sorry, no, "many prove true" is just not workable.
Centrism is inherently conservative, and will lean towards whatever the current system is. A “centrist” party in the Soviet Union would be just another communist party, and a centrist party in Australia is likewise just another capitalist party. Likewise a centrist party in the USA would be another run of the mill capitalist, pro-military, pro-police. pro-surveillance. It would basically just be the current Democratic party except it wouldn’t fight for immigration rights, abortion rights, nor gay rights. A lack of centrist parties is not what is wrong with American politics currently.
The Saturn System Through the Eyes of Cassini
I have this "theory" that one trait of successful people is forgetfulness. In my experience they tend to forget their mistakes and also forget the source of their successful ideas.
rigid hierarchies can result in friction to getting thoughts in. but having no hierarchy can be problematic in getting notes back out. dendron tries to walk the line by letting you create links between any two arbitrary notes but also layering on top a flexible hierarchy that lets you prescribe a canonical organization of your notes
Brian Kernighan: Unix, C, Awk, AMPL, Go (Lex Fridman's AI Podcast)
Cloudflare has done really well in a short amount of time, but I'm sure Akamai is way bigger. Cloudflare is best known because they offer free/cheap tools for individuals and this post is targeted at developers. Most big enterprises I've worked with are on Akamai.
It does both!
Nice tutorial! One small nitpick:

> Calculating a hash value from an input is computationally very easy, but reversing the transformation and recovering the original input from its hash value takes so much time and computing power that it is, practically-speaking, impossible.

The above is true for encryption but not for hash codes. Recovering the original input from a hash code is not just practically impossible; it's provably impossible -- even with an infinite amount of computing power -- because in general a hash code contains less information than the original text.
https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/ambiguity.pdf
An exploration of why Python doesn't require a 'main' function
The essay was written in early 2015, around the same time NodeJS foundation was set up.
Heard that one before https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2p7a6d
I'll just toss in that his latest work, 'The Nature of Order' is really worth reading as well. Oh, and the book 'How Buildings Learn' is almost compulsory in this space as well.
> Can you give me a single example...

This suggests you may not have done the research to support your viewpoint with such self assurance.

The increasing sophistication of Deepfakes as a technology concept applied over time is what people are rightly afraid of today.

But even now :
(based on some search notes I have from 6 months ago)

[1] Video of Gabon’s long-unseen president Ali Bongo, who was believed in poor health or already dead, was decried as a deepfake by his political opponents and cited as the trigger, a week later, for an unsuccessful coup by the Gabonese military.

[2] Malaysia: Is the political aide viral sex video confession real or a Deepfake?

[3] ISIS 'preparing clip of al-Baghdadi ALIVE' using deepfake propaganda.
"An important goal may be to try and rally the ISIS supporters and 'show' that the US is lying"

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/12/top-ai-...
[2] https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2019/06/12/is-the-po...

[3] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/al-baghdadi-stil...
I love stripe and they really do have some excellent designs, but that one screenshot is pretty awful. The contrast between the text and the rainbow image is so poor that it looks like a mistake rather than an intentional design choice.
Turkey is passing a law to restrict Social Media Severely
Sorry I haven't responded. I've been busy. I plan to respond tomorrow
Because additive processes are common. If the variables were multiplied together instead of summed, you'd get a different asymptotic distribution.
> The Constitution was written by people that were willing to do exactly what you discuss.

It is at least as true to say that the Constitution was written by people who didn't view that as something that was or should be a legal right, and who were willing to violently repress others who tried to do it, both before and after their own Revolution.
Quite difficult to use because there are no control buttons there. Specifically for zoom control, two options are required for that. Also there are no instructions on how to make a map for a particular location that we want. And there is no description (tooltip) on every feature, new users get confused.
Agree, I think they accidentally swapped the layers in Sketch or Photoshop or something. Or maybe that’s some cult thing!
Defeated by small hydraulic jack
Nope, the writers are just wrong. It is not a random value, and it is not arbitrary

"DC ZVA" always zeroes exactly one data cache line. That is the size. And you can easily get that size from an appropriate userspace-readable register. See for yourself: https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0595/h/aarch64-system-inst... and https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0595/h/aarch64-system-regi...

You are not expected to use it anyways. Your libc is, in its implementation of memset(), and it will properly query and use it.

Not only that, but since ARMv8.6 this instr, AND the reg you can read to get its size are both trappable by hypervisors (using HFGITR_EL2 and HFGRTR_EL2 fine-grained-trap regs respectively). See https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0595/h/aarch64-system-regi... and https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0595/h/aarch64-system-regi...
When speaking about the state, I (UK) fairly often hear people refer to "Nazi Germany", instead of just Germany (and sometimes used as "Nazi Germany invaded Poland"). With the people though, it's generally just "the Germans".
Instead of a reflector, they could have used 27 contacts, and either had a 27th lightbulb to indicate the output was the same as the input, or made each key a dual-throw dual-post switch so that the 27th output would get wired to light up the switch corresponding to the input key. That would remove the weakness that no letter is ever enciphered as itself.

Edit: never mind: you'd actually need 28 contacts, since the reflector can only reflect an even number of contacts. With an even number of unused contacts on the input side of the rotor stack, you could connect them together in pairs to get extra passes through the rotor stacks. If they added / (for use as a number shift symbol, so 1123 would be /AABC/ ) to their alphabet, then they could use 28 contacts and have something like described above. However, without modifying the alphabet space to have an odd number of symbols, all other workarounds I can think of require an odd number of used inputs at the one end of the rotor stack and and even number of contacts at the reflector end.

The Germans used Q or Z as their number shift symbol when enciphering digits for Enigma traffic, correct?
Aluminum. A highly reactive metal prone to rapid decomposition in household drain cleaner. Yeah, this isn't going to revolutionize bike locks.
It stops you from making a decision too early.
Honestly, as somebody who suffers from "strong opinions, weakly held" I make it a point to include names in my notes on design ideas of who first suggested something so when I pivot to "my old plan is stupid we need to go that way" I can say so-and-so's plan.
It seems KLM has covered their bases — but can they?? This is what I read on the Paypal page when starting the dispute process:

Message from Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V.

Dear Passenger, Please visit our website http://www.klm.com to get the latest flight information about Coronavirus. Hereby the situation is minutely monitored so you can get the latest information. We highly recommend making use of the self-service options on our website to change your flight or request a travel voucher. Claims connected to Coronavirus about” KLM service not rendered” can`t be handled on PayPal site, only on KLM site. Thank you for your cooperation.
Then they should take more notes.
My point is that if you look at that definition of "cut", it's not just rendering one item into two pieces, other wise tearing or cracking something would be cutting it, and those aren't cutting either.

I doubt this material is impervious to shear force, or being lowered in temperature until it's brittle and cracked. But those aren't methods of cutting.
It’s accessing the chat data. If a bad actor could access incoming chats from a major broker’s PT/Swaps desk, a great deal of money could be made.