skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked for a CEO who did this once (the frequently-bombarding-the-team-with-new-ideas thing, not the expecting-applause part). He was a good guy, and talented in many areas, but he wasn't a great product leader.

He would let his excitement for some new idea take hold of him, and he would share it with everyone without first taking the time to sit down and reconcile how the feature fit into the rest of the app, what problems it solved, possible alternative solutions to that problem, the cost and complexity of implementing the feature, how the feature should be prioritized, etc.

This stuff and more is what sets good product people apart from mediocre product people. The problem is that it's all invisible and optional, so mediocre product people aren't even aware they're not doing it, and thus it's easy for them to believe they're great product people when they really aren't.

At some point he got the message that he needed to stop disrupting the team with these frequent ideas, so he switched to writing them out in gigantic Google Docs that he'd send to people. At least that was async, so it was less interruptive than him stopping at your desk, but it was still super time-consuming to read his docs. Eventually the entire team started ignoring them.
Uber's Fiber: Distributed Computing for AI Made Simple
You need:

* money to pay for it

* a physical address to ship it to

* not be in a country sanctioned by the US (i'm just assuming)
Quite interesting! It felt good to see a satellite imagery without an overlay of labels, roads, and border lines that we are accustomed to. It's not really real-time if you zoom in, but it's good nevertheless.
Curious about this comment? Why? I've never lived in one, nor even been in one. But they look beautiful. What are the draw backs?
HHS Open Sources Covid-19 Data
Looks like the data available https://healthdata.gov/dataset/covid-19-state-and-county-pol... & https://healthdata.gov/dataset/covid-19-reported-patient-imp...
A part of the HN crowd seems to have a strong opinion about this, it seems. You’d think that educated and technical folk would mostly understand why arbitrary arrests by federal agents is never a good thing...
From what I understand, it gives long lasting benefits.

One of my mentors is a soil scientist that has been doing ecological restoration for over 30 years. He tells this story of where he had to walk across a mountain range pushing a long metal rod into the ground every 3 meters. While most places barely took the probe, the places where there were nurse logs he could sink them deep in all the way.
Id like to see a concerted effort for America to regain number one status and ensure we stay ahead of China. To do that ideally we need more people. Ideally something like 100M of the brightest in the world.

IMO the easiest way to do that is:
-offer a path to citizenship for the world
-they have to pay something like $50k per person for a visa (or maybe $5k per year for 10 years)
-must pay into social security, unemployment, etc. But can't draw any benefits until they are citizens.
-if current on all obligations after 20 years, they are citizens.
-can offer sponsorships for exceptions
-something like 1 week approval (time for background check) $1k non refundable application fee.

Details can be changed, but this solves most concerns on the American right. We can see how far this gets us, but I suspect we would have a lot of global takers. Anyone willing to go for something like this I'm happy to have.
Glamorous Toolkit[0] is pretty neat! More of something designed for making software on top of, but it's a pretty cool example of what's possible.

[0]: https://gtoolkit.com/
Jellyfin Release – v10.6.0
> If Twitter is a national security risk because people can hack it to speak in the official voice of prominent leaders, or discover state secrets through direct messages, that is nobody's fault but the government's, for relying on a platform they have no control over for official business.

I don't see the government relying on it. I see public officials using it as a platform. No coordination is being done (unless it's redundancy), just communication with constituents.

> It was a scandal when Hillary Clinton relied on a private email server.

One problem with using a private email server was because it circumvented FOIA requests. Twitter is open, a private email server is not. We still don't know what 33k of the subpoenaed emails were about that her personal IT guy deleted, other than the ones found on Huma Abedin's laptop.

The other problem of course is having a personal IT staff run your email server with classified secrets (yes there were classified emails). It's not quite the same as having Twitter or the DoD run your security. I mean, the guy (stonetear) was on Reddit asking how to delete emails, I doubt he knew how to protect against state actors.
I always felt like an inferior geek for not liking that book and others.
Good general summary, but it misses some big issues with revocation checking.

OCSP servers are notoriously unreliable - and with the increasing use of tls I don't see that improving - and that required open failure for TLS connections in browsers. That kind of defeats the purpose of revocation checks as someone can kill the OCSP connection and browsers will have to continue. Even when EV certs were a thing OCSP responders had a tendency to go down.

The really big problem though is privacy - revocation checks require transmitting every server name you are accessing, and secure DNS (if it existed) would not be sufficient to hide where you are navigating.

CT "solves" this by at least requiring an SCT so we know that in principle any cert we do encounter has been posted somewhere where effected individuals can see a misissuance. This obviously doesn't stop misissuance, it just makes it visible and allows us to determine whether CAs have verification flaws, etc. It also doesn't do anything about revocation checking as that is still dependent on OCSP, so has the aforementioned problems. Part of the move to short term certificates is to reduce the need for revocation checks as the lifetime of threat is much more restricted, so someone has to repeatedly compromise a CA to maintain an attack.

One other mechanism browsers have is certificate kill lists, which came into existence following the CNNIC and Symantec misissuances - essentially in the event of high profile/major site misissuance vendors can post a more or less immediate "don't trust these certs" list that is fast and robust vs. OCSP.
The creator on that channel simply uses a DAIN application without pre or post processing the images (either the base images or the optical flow maps).

I take a different approach and I can't say I haven't found issues (I have, many, I'm working on them).

My goal is to reach a level where there are almost none artifacts (there are a couple in that video at the start, when the shield is released and when there are many large movements of the camera due to Curiosity dangling off the parachute). As I said, I'm still working on it, and in between my other side projects, work and quarantine I've been on a less-than-ideal situation.

In time, if I pull it off, I'll post it and I guess you'll see it.
Is the US more free than China in every dimension? Perhaps not. But generally, yes. There are societal reasons why the incarceration is higher (per-capita) in the US.

It's also worth noting that if you execute a criminal after a non-fair trial and send his parents the bill for the bullet, it saves some space in the jails, plus has somewhat of a deterrent effect on crime.
I used to have a terminal and still work with some of Bloomberg's data products. A big part of their value proposition isn't so much the functionality of the terminal (though it's really extensive, and they keep adding stuff over time) but the breadth of data you can get through it. Not all of it is easily available and/or indexed elsewhere – I've heard Bloomberg literally has teams of people that hand-enter some of the more esoteric stuff. They also do things like create/maintain their own synthetic bond indexes fed from proprietary valuation models. Would take a ton of time/money to EEE all that.

And yeah, it's actually pretty extensible. There's a mechanism to create apps for the terminal, though I never really used those. Bloomberg will also sell you a programmatically-accessible data feed of pretty much anything they have, although those can cost well into six figures annually.
Thanks for explaining. alicemaz above gave further details.
I'm surprised that you didn't recommend Knuth as the best reference for algorithms.

Technical interviewing for long term employees based on exam essay like questions is rarely productive. My first objective is determining the applicant's honesty on their prior experience. It is amazing that the vast majority of applicants will out right lie on their resumes and to your face when questioned.

Past success in solving/implementing difficult projects is the best indicator of future success.
Congress is the legislative branch
> We can fight it by electing the correct people.

How exactly does that happen when the two key entities have direct ties the the rest of the (surveillance) system? Those two enties control who gets to run, who is on the ballot. For example, look at Biden. He didn't win. The DNC put their thumb on the scale for him.

Any perception of being able to fight is an illusion, it's a ruse. As for the difference between East and West, that's true. That doesn't mean we're not in danger. Just because you can't see doesn't mean it's not there.
Why do none of the tweets or the articles link to the Daily Wire claims made? If you aren't showing the original content, everything you say looks misleading or like you're trying to hide something.

Show us what they said.
Totally agree that "The Martian" would never happen in real life. Still, as other have pointed out, there are dust devils and "strong" winds.
Assistant rules for Angular and CSS development productivity boost
A nicer 4-bit colour than RGBI without fancy logic
Getting [initial][surname] is pretty impressive. My first ID was [initial][surname]7.
I live in Australia where voting is mandatory. My belief is that this tends to mitigate the appeal to extremes because a majority of the voting public tends to be relatively centrist on most issues, meaning that a strategy of appealing to the extremes, will lose you the valuable middle. It tends not be as much of a winning strategy here as it does in the US. Of course, the downside is that change is often very incremental. As I get older though, I'm finding that's not such a bad thing. Democracy can withstand small perturbations and stay relatively stable.
“AI bookkeeper” startup that raised $100M and failed used humans instead of AI
Essays on programming I think about a lot
Absolutely 100% agree.

Why then, the continued obsession with building single-media models?

Is focusing on the Turing test and language proficiency bringing us further away from the goals of legitimate intelligence?

I would argue "yes", which was my original comment. At no point in us trying to replicate what an adult sounds like have we actually demonstrated anything remotely like the IQ of a small child. And there's this big gap where it's implied by some that this process goes 1) sound like an adult -> 2) think like an adult, which seems to be missing the boat imo. (There's logically this intermediate step where we have this adult-sounding monster AI child.)

If we could constrain the vocabulary to that a child might be exposed to, the correlative trickery of these models would be more obvious. The (exceptionally good) quality of these curve fits wouldn't trick us with vocabulary and syntax that looks like something we'd say. The dumb things would sound dumb, and the smart things would sound smart. And maybe, probably even, that would require us fusing in all sorts of other experiential models to make that happen.
How is whataboutism even fallacious. You can be logically consistent and still do whataboutism. It's more like a distraction to an argument being made. There nothing that inherently makes it fallacious.
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll has to be the definitive example I feel. Half of it is in a made up language but every English person instinctively knows what it means.
And yet I feel we are living in the golden age of signals intelligence. The only reason to not say that is because trends point towards an even better golden age. Already the scale of the open source stuff out there has never existed before. And then add speculative stuff like saving encrypted content to decrypt it later decades down the line when methods and hardware have improved. Just a single insider can walk out with an USB stick full of the crown jewels of a place supposed to keep secrets... Pretty sure the US intelligence community didn't have records of basic data of each individual living in europe in WW2 times, but they certainly do now, simply thanks to electronic records systems collecting the data and them just having to harvest the data fruits whether it's by hacking or other means.
I would like to push back against this in favor of the original comment. The context of this remark within the article is:

> I was extremely confused as to why the Normal (Gaussian) Distribution pops up everywhere—in kurtotically-ignorant financial market analysis, in nature, everywhere. Thinking about it, the prevalence of the Gaussian is actually rather abnormal. Can you guess why it’s everywhere?

This is not a "compression of data" question. It's not an "uninformed distributional choice" question.

It's a "why is this distribution prevalent in Nature" question.

In this context, I think the CLT gives a better answer. There are a lot of averaging processes in Nature, and due to the CLT, averaging of independent perturbations must give rise to normal distributions.

It's possible to perhaps go a step deeper than the above. In some physical systems, you can look at the second moment as an energy -- like the voltage-squared in electrical systems.

In this case, due to a-priori finiteness of system energy, the gaussian distribution can make a claim to being "inevitable" by the maxent argument in OP. ("In a system characterized by finite energy E, what is the least informative distributional constraint?")
I never felt that way about the book. He is verbose, but it all contributes in some way.

A lot of writing is setting things up, and he does it so masterfully in Cryptonomicon.
Yes, it's that clear-cut. Which also doesn't imply that the US is somehow perfect.

The US puts people in prison for too long for violent crimes due to minimum sentencing laws. That's the reason the prison population is so high (although it has been rapidly declining for the past decade), not because it's randomly putting a million people into prison. The US gets an immense amount of flak for its mandatory minimum sentencing laws and rightfully so.

As one example, everyone knows the US has a high murder rate compared to other affluent nations for example (typically five or higher per 100k). If you have half a million murders every 30 years, it stands to reason you're going to have a lot of people in prison just from that one category and all of its intertwined consequences and related crime.

China has zero human rights, the government can do anything it wants to, to anyone, at any time, with or without a reason. That's not an exaggeration, it's how their system works de facto. They don't apologize for that and they flex that power routinely. Their government is all-powerful, it assumes all rights by default (anything you're allowed to have is a privilege they're granting to you, and they may revoke it at any time).

Referencing US incarceration numbers isn't enough. You have to demonstrate to a very high degree that the people in prison didn't commit the crimes in question, such as armed robbery, rape, murder, and so on. You need to show that a very large percentage of those people didn't commit the crimes they're in prison for (and no, it's not good enough to reference a few cases, you have to show that it applies to hundreds of thousands of instances). The majority of people in prison in the US are there for violent crimes.
A great architect doesn’t just do the design but specifies the materials list. Contractors then bid and any substitions have to be architect approved.

This doesn’t guarantee good construction practices without supervision, but it does insure you have less crap going into the house.

It can also be a huge savings. A relatives professionally designed house easily made up for the expense of that design - her neighbors pay $500/month in utilities, she paid $75. Neighbors have all sorts of defects, heating/cooling issues.
Standard for investments in tech startups, no? Although I'd assume less standard for biotech startups like Theranos.
Cloudflare is hell when you need to load scripts and css 403'd by them.

Here's my work around:

1) open developer tools
2) refresh page
3) move tab into a new window
4) find a blocked resource in the network tab of developer tools and open it in a new tab
5) verify humanity
6) repeat step 4 and sometimes 5 for each resource the page requires
7) move the problematic site out of the new window and close all of these tabs at once

It is a terrible experience. CF devs and publishers have no idea how inconvenient their service is. I wonder if they have ever lived in a region where every ISP is both incompetent and listed in the CBL?

I frequently skip sites that use CF. The captchas are obnoxious.

The entire concept of a webapp firewall seems a bit backwards to me. Developers should fix their insecure applications.
regarding 3:

Do you think that there is a possibility to transition across to ISIN, SEDOL, VALOR, etc.? Or will we be locked into CUSIPs for the forseeable future?

regarding 5:

Would you be more specific about how Eikon 'isn't working?'

Thank you for the informative post : )
The min-pop is not supposed to return anything, yes. We are only interested in the final contents of the heap. So no sorting required. You can eg give the results of the whole operation as a bitmap over the inserts, so you need to return a linear number of bits.

Min-pops and inserts will in generally be interleaved. The prototypical example has blocks of 2 inserts and 1 pop repeated n times. (All other interleaving patterns can be reduced to this one in linear time.)

QuickSelect doesn't work for this.

QuickSelect or Median-of-Medians approaches work if you only have a small constant number of interleaved blocks (of any arbitrary internal length). Like eg all the inserts first then all the min-pops is equivalent to finding the k smallest elements.
Well said. You really need to be a picky asshole to manage a construction project.

I had to hold a kitchen contractor hostage over re-work and bullshit his guys did to skim a few hours.
“How could they be so stupid?”
On periodisation: or, what’s the best way to chop history into bits? (2016)
> You can't get a mortgage on a self build so you best have a couple of hundred thousand lying around

True, though there _are_ options. A family friend added 2000 sq ft to his family home (which had been 800 - and not excessive, they had three kids in a 2br home). He is a general contractor and works for a home construction company.

Granted that was a "renovation" - well, almost all new construction. He planned on doing almost all of it himself, except for plumbing/electrical, so anticipated very little labor costs. The bank made them take a loan for the market value of the work including labor, on the guise of "if you get injured, you need to be able to pay to complete it", but allowed the setting of milestones where they could repay labor costs out of the loan.
I mean, yes, in an ideal world that's true. Yet, here we are.

It's not possible for a dev to go back in time to before hcaptcha was created or when CF decided to switch to them to create said ramp, so until it's built, workarounds are the only real thing a community member can offer someone in the short term.
I would agree w/ your statement here. The entropy is the on-average (or, expected) amount of information gained from seeing one "x".
Audio captchas are considered broken completely (search for various papers over the past decade, including one from CMU), so it has limited usefulness only in a very narrow context in practice. I suspect this is a harbinger of things to come - as we close the gap on passing the Turing test, captchas are likely to get less effective, and we will need to transition to a very different solution for bot detection.
Sure this capability can be engineered into a system to some degree.

For me the remarkable part is that it’s emergent behavior in large scale language models.
Yup, https://readthistwice.com/lists/most-recommended-books
Prime Editing
George Carlin did a great routine on 'stuff'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

"a house is ... a pile of stuff with a cover on it".
I grew up in a 200 year old school house in northern New Hampshire. Let me tell you from bitter experience that burning wood in a stove for primary heating is a nightmare on multiple levels.

First you have to chop and stack cords of wood in the fall (a thankless, back-breaking task), then go out into the snow to bring in loads of wood every other day all winter to heat the house. You can't store enough wood indoors to last months, so it's always piled up outside. Dealing with the wood is a never ending shitty job that nobody likes or wants to do. It's not a "chore", it's full on work - with cuts, splinters, bruises or worse injuries. Slipping on the ice with an armload of cordwood is a great way to break a bone or get a concussion, let me assure you. I cannot tell you how much I hated it, and how many family arguments were caused as a result.

Since all wood stoves leak, no matter what, you end up smelling like a campfire all winter. And I still wonder if the secondhand smoke effects will rear it's ugly head in the future. I've never smoked, but won't be at all surprised if someday I have lung cancer from years of breathing all that crappy air filled with soot particles.

Oof. So many horrible memories. Thank heaven I live in California now.
Yes, first time I visited somebody who constructed a well-insulated, air-sealed house with high quality windows, I noticed the owner routinely slid the window open partially in the winter to allow excess heat to escape temporarily. I think this is common in well-constructed New England homes.
Investing.com is live. But also most (all?) of retail brokerages are live.
Broadway is a great example of something having very long-lasting effects. It’s much older than a postal road, being originally formed as a footpath used by the local native tribes to travel up and down Manhattan. It roughly followed a ridge line that is not very evident in lower Manhattan today but becomes much more obvious when you get up to northern Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood.
Yes to start with, you differentiate the value by giviing limited features at lower price point so people who need everything clearly not going to be interested.

If there is enough interest on the new product you add features to new version and start hiking the price of both so relative price difference remains similar. There will not be a negative impact on revenue in that approach

You could grow the new product in a different direction completely for whole new user who are ready to pay 10,000 but not 25,000. The 25k terminal is still aspirational and exclusive as it is now, if the premise that people are paying for the exclusive network is true both products can work on their own and 10k community can feed into 25k on, if not well there was never a moat to protect in the first place.