skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A more recent change (April 2020) is that Amazon lets you buy/rent movies in their apps, and if you have billing info set up through Amazon it goes through that instead of Apple, presumably bypassing Apple's cut. If you don't, payment goes through Apple's system, probably at the reduced 15% cut.

Apple commented to 9to5mac that this is part of a "program for premium subscription video entertainment providers," and it has some strings attached - integration with the TV app, AirPlay 2, universal search and single sign-on integration.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/01/purchases-amazon-prime-video/

From a business perspective I can see why they'd offer this, integration with the TV app and universal search means that users access content through that, so you're putting in extra work in order to mix your content in with everyone else's and give up the chance to upsell whatever else is on offer through your own app. When they first launched the new Apple TV system with its TV app, streaming providers didn't seem very keen on the idea of integrating. Cutting to 15% in exchange lets the providers keep more of their revenue, and lets Apple create the integrated experience that they want to offer.
Any problem that works.

IIRC: SAT Solvers regularly solve 30,000+ nodes of traveling salesman problem in just seconds (Or something along that magnitude. I forget exactly...). Yeah, its NP complete, but that doesn't mean its worthless.

It will take some experimentation to figure out if your problem is within the "feasible" category of SAT solving. I don't think there's any method aside from "try it, and if it works, be happy. If not, be sad".

If we knew which problems were easily solved with SAT-solvers, we probably would be well on our way to proving N == NP ?? So just guess and check.

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

Honestly, people may forget that brute-force solvers can be incredibly useful. When I was playing with a hash-algorithm I was inventing (just for fun on the side...) I searched the entire 32-bit space for the best integer that best mixed-up the bits from input to output. The brute-force solver took only seconds to try every 32-bit number.

We can brute-force a surprising number of "intractable" problems from our college years. Yeah, its inefficient, but who cares if its solved in seconds or minutes?

There's also that a^3 + b^3 == c^3 problem that was solved in a few weeks by brute forcing every number (or something like that).
>Maybe if the flu hadn't hit him, Germany would have gotten a fairer deal and not felt unfairly treated which was a cause of WW2.

That's on interesting take. The feeling in France is that Germany got off far too easy because of US intervention.
Not the GP, but here is a scenario that I am interested in understanding from the perspective of types.

A calculation that involves 21 parameters (in a particular insurance industry underwriting) yields a number. A threshold is read from the database. This threshold could change every month.

Suppose that the current value of the threshold is 0.78. The calculation above can yield an `x` with the following cases:
(i) x <= 0.78,
(ii) x > 0.78.

We have hundreds of test cases for the combinations of the 21 parameters, leading to hundreds of values for `x`. It is a bug for `x` to be > 0.78 when it should be the other way.

Is there a way this can be encoded in types? That would be very interesting.

Thanks.
Get Paid $10k to Leave Your State – Cost of Living Adjustment
i am often shocked at the lack of photos and diagrams, particularly in technical blog posts -- if you'll indulge me in a related tangent. the word-only approach likely points to the wide spectrum human cognition, and maybe some entrenchment around the arbitrary masculinization of backend vs "pretty frontend/design", and "technical" vs communication/marketing.

EDIT: I recognize this article is from NYTimes -- that need not be our gold standard for inspiring awesome communication!
Evolution works on far, far longer timescales than you're suggesting.
Chinese boats fish near Galapagos; Ecuador on alert
I never used async/await as I'm more comfortable with promises so yeah, I thought the first code was correct.

async/await is clearer to me after reading this article though.
And you can eat their nests!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_bird%27s_nest
Would like to see if we can bring the live streaming and code sharing to our platform! Wow, you just opened up some hidden potential to IndieLog. Thanks!
The big weak point in the authors argument is credential stuffing. They argue fairly convincingly that 2FA is vulnerable to phishing, but concede it prevents credential stuffing. Then they try to argue that credential stuffing doesn’t matter because it can be prevented by using unique passwords, which is the one thing users have been shown to rarely do. 2FA stops credential stuffing cold, that’s important.

Also 2FA can stop phishing attacks cold as well, simply by using links instead of codes. So really the author should be using their time to advocate for that.
Although the issue is complex, a very dominant part of the "some reason" was that the German army never really experienced an unequivocal final military defeat (although it was clear to the high command that the war could no longer be won, this was far from obvious to the population) and remained in effective control of Germany, allowing them to consciously disseminate propaganda for their own ends as well as taking full advantage of the ensuing popular unrest after the end of the war.
I was a purescript developer and Haskell dabbler way before I was an investor, for what it’s worth, and happy to engage on the substance of my points if you would care to have a collegial discourse befitting of academics!
Using cryptographic primitives to implement a non-productive asset is one thing; using cryptographic primitives as some kind of ledger goes back to the 70s, heck even Git uses Merkle trees.
Clever of the Economist to drop this on the day of Google's earnings.
Bernie Gordon – Lessons I've Learned as a Lifetime Engineering Leader
Have they publicly announced the availability of the special deal Amazon got, and the criteria for qualifying for it? Are they proactively notifying everyone who might qualify for it? Are the rules written broadly enough that a wide variety of smaller developers might easily qualify, rather than just the behemoths? If not, then these secret negotiations are not treating all developers equally.
'Ghostwriter' Influence Campaign
Build a Full-Text Search Engine
"On April 21, 2017 Bernard M. Gordon addressed the MIT Community on some of the valuable and enduring lessons he’s learned in his lifetime as an engineering leader. A 35-minute lecture Is followed a 15-minute audience Q&A.

Deemed the “father of high-speed, analogic to digital conversion,” Mr. Gordon is most notably the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Analogic Corporation. He was also awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Regan in 1986 and has represented the key creative and essential role of the engineer in the development of new technology."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Marshall_Gordon)
> internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet

I've worked at companies with pgAdmin or something similar that allowed people to edit prod. It was a catastrophe.

As others have said, non-tech people shouldn't have access to prod data, where they may not understand the schema well enough to edit it. Tech people already have GUIs.

Using something like Airtable and syncing it with prod using a thin layer of code is much more viable.
Social skills, family background, and physical looks correlate far more with success than raw IQ. Raw IQ is overrated. See e.g.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20628656?seq=1

~125 eases entry into well-paid middle class jobs. Over 140 people start to seem weird by median standards. Over 160 they can seem very weird indeed, and are likely to become isolated without a compatible environment. So they're just as likely to fail spectacularly as to become innovative successes.
I appreciate the zen-like nature of this advice, but I think you also know how unreasonable it is most of the time, unless by 'concrete' you allow something as vague as, "troubleshoot production issues".
They aren't really targeting similar markets (at least from my perspective): pretty much any multinational firm can benefit from better corporate treasury management; cryptocurrencies are just one application of this technology, and Stephen is calling out specifically those which are attempting to defraud (or at least benefit from the the gross ignorance of) retail investors.

Those seem like entirely different markets to me.
"Uncontrolled digital lending" seems a very strange term for

* lending in specified forms, which require illegal activity to make further copies, and

* lending for a specified time, which requires illegal activity to extend.

Welcome to NewSpeak, where "uncontrolled" means fairly tightly controlled.
The eligibility criteria is available here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/future-fund#eligibility
That's really not my experience. The places I've worked that have assignments like have managed to hire some pretty good senior engineering talent, and these people also often have pretty involved lives outside of work (families, communities, etc.).
Fortran is used all over for high performance computing, not just in government contracting. Scheme is not only used for language research. A large part of Julia, a pragmatic language for technical computing, is written in Scheme.
I think in practice the web provides the biggest competition to any native app development, but of course that’s not really a commercial entity trying to “woo” developers.
I'm sure there are better options. OTOH... I was at SO for about 9 years, and the system described existed for all of it - predating GraphQL, predating even ElasticSearch. There's stuff built on top of it that was never envisioned when it was created, and stuff that wouldn't have been possible without it.

At this point, moving to something else would likely be a far more costly investment just in terms of requirements analysis than the migration described in the blog post. Would it pay off? Maybe! But for a critical bit of infrastructure, that's something you put an awful lot of careful thought and research into before you venture to do anything... And meanwhile, that infrastructure has to be kept running.
Backlogs is a cool idea! But I feel like it really wants to be a Trello Powerup. Show a popup asking for CC info after install, using Stripe Checkout. Then give people a CNAME record that displays a public board in an iFrame, available at backlog.yourservice.com. This would be like a 3-5 day project, instead of weeks, to duplicate most of Trello's functionality. And you'd benefit from the visibility in Trello's marketplace. You could really simplify your implementation and still validate the idea. Just a thought!
"Identified with the company" may be a poor choice of words, but I'd rather spend my time working for a company whose culture and goals align with my own, rather than feel like I'm doing tasks mechanical-turk style.
> Nobody is getting paid $500k+ to directly build things that are net negatives to the world.

Yes, they are.

Anyone involved in adtech, tracking, their garbage news feed algorithm is actively and directly harming humanity.

Sure, they're involved in a good project or two as well, like https://www.opencompute.org/. But that represents a tiny minority of Facebook employees. The vast majority are getting paid directly to build things that are net negatives to the world.

> but at the same time, the work they're doing directly from an engineering perspective is probably technically on the cutting edge

I don't even know how to begin to unpack this. "Hey, I've built this new rocket I call the V2. Don't blame me if my employer uses them to bomb civilians in London, even if I knew that was exactly what they were going to do before I started the project. Just celebrate my technical excellence!"

> Contributing to technical excellence and growing younger engineers is a positive

No. Training young engineers to abuse their users for profit is not a positive.

As for technical excellence, that is quite a stretch for a website that can't even support the browser's "Back" button. But that's another discussion altogether.
You say that but people were pretty upset that Google couldn't confirm if anybody exploited the G+ security bug past the last two weeks that it was discovered.
Yeah, I'd figure if you plotted a distribution of photo printing frequency you'd see a pretty sharp peak centered on zero and a very long, very skinny tail. The cutoff for "makes more sense to order prints at need" vs. "makes more sense to own and maintain printing equipment" would probably happen right about where that tail started.
Steve Jobs rose from the grave to attend a Congressional committee hearing?
Not just a string password, but also a unique password.

I once ran IT for a small startup (As part of a large portfolio as Ops director), none of the employees put any thought into password security, or cared, no matter whether I set them up with 1password, gave them training sessions, etc.
That makes sense, thanks. I was definitely thinking in a nearer-term context.

Even in that distant future though, wireheading would be a practice that fundamentally damages the emotional feedback loops that led to that type of society being formed in the first place. (i.e. the feedback loops that cause people in a society to reject agents that want to change or destroy it.)

Without those feedback loops, a perfect utopia would become an unstable equilibrium, because nobody has any reason to prefer that society over any other society. Thus, you could argue that wireheading is long-term incompatible with a perfect utopia.

There is an "out", which is to just have some of the population wirehead, and then have the society be steered by the individuals that don't wirehead, and therefore can make ethical decisions. Alternatively, you could emulate Ian Bank's Culture, and remove decisionmaking power from human hands entirely via automation. But really, even in that world, I'd rather be one of the un-wireheaders who retained their ethical agency, even if it came with suffering. At least, I think I would... although I'm not sure exactly why.
So you won’t know until the MPAA is suing you for a trillion dollars because you wanted to watch your DVD on your phone.
> Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.

I agree with this 100%. I'm old enough to remember when the internet worked fine without having advertising everywhere. Now we're supposed to be convinced that the whole thing would cease to exist if there weren't popover ads and auto playing videos. :/
Show HN: Interactive fiction about AI
I will give two quotes from Baudrillard -- UBI is great, but it won't solve the spiritual problems of the west, nor it's obsession with eliminating death -- a compulsion borne of a constant internal struggle with nihilism.

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

― Jean Baudrillard

“You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of 'missing' something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some 'sensation'. It is no longer desire, or even 'taste', or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease - it is the 'fun morality' or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one's potential for thrills pleasure or gratification.”

― Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
That's of course correct. Perhaps GPT-3 can do that too? I don't have access to it, but I wonder if it can be taught new words using few-shot learning.

In fact, even GPT-2 gets close to that. Here's what I just got on Huggingface's Write With Transformer: Prompt: "Word dfjgasdjf means happiness. What is dfjgasdjf?" GPT-2: "dfjgasdjf is a very special word that you can use to express happiness, love or joy."

What takes time is all the learning a child needs to go through before they can be taught new words on the spot.
As to the question, I would guess the answer is "Not easily." Otherwise, we would not be having these problems with overgrown websites acting as middlemen for large swaths of the web. The rest of your statements are all true, but that does not change the truth of "They simply lack the web traffic". Amazon has an amount of traffic that gives them leverage as a middleman.
Look around. It’s too late for that.
"The first fully functioning electronic digital computer to be built in the U.S. was ENIAC, constructed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, for the Army Ordnance Department, by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Completed in 1945, ENIAC was somewhat similar to the earlier Colossus, but considerably larger and more flexible (although far from general-purpose). The primary function for which ENIAC was designed was the calculation of tables used in aiming artillery. ENIAC was not a stored-program computer, and setting it up for a new job involved reconfiguring the machine by means of plugs and switches. For many years, ENIAC was believed to have been the first functioning electronic digital computer, Colossus being unknown to all but a few."[1]

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computing-history/
26 hours nonstop? You didn't take any sleep?
Switching Gearz
> My point is exactly that: a technology itself can't be tainted by crooks using it.

Reportedly Lisp was hit pretty hard by its association with AI hype collapse ("The AI Winter"). Of course this doesn't change the merits of a language per se, but it can be a blow to the community and investments around it.
I would say this is actually the norm... In most orgs the leadership is not highly technical and this is always a hard sell.

The best you can hope for after a "hold the eff up" rewrite is for everything to keep working the same "but it's more hardened/scalable/modular/blah blah", and the worst you can hope for is to screw up some critical business process while the kinks are worked out.

Also, there is rarely any incentive for anyone from Joe Developer all the way up to C level to even call for this in the first place.
The plague and it’s after effects is what basically of what some people call the Dark Ages and is a pretty clear line to demarcate late ancient to the Middle Ages.
Sure, but presumably they’re both more expensive than fresh produce, which has a fraction of the carbon emissions.

Furthermore I really doubt that the carbon emissions of transportation dominate the carbon output of beef production, so the local vs imported beef cost seems irrelevant to the overall correlation of price and carbon output.
Hm, what's the issue with state and branching?
Yes, I agree with you. What I was referring to was the parent comment's seeming insinuation that "bad cultural fit" is usually a blanket excuse made by bigots, and I don't think that's fair.
They supposedly had mental health problems and had trouble with law enforcements.
A dystopia where everyone is happy is a bit of an oxymoron. I can imagine this "dystopia" being unsustainable though. Like everyone is happy but forgets to eat or has no motivation to reproduce or everyone is happy but they are quickly killing the planet (still better than our current state, lol).
But I think the article deals with the unsustainability.
Lots of places have restrictions on how you can say something, but still give wide berth to what ideas you can say. Just because I'm not free to express my distaste for The Last Airbender by punching M. Night Shyamalan does not mean I am not free to voice that opinion. Science journals can require your speech to be in a certain form, namely it must be science, but you are not barred from publishing anything because of what you are saying. While some institutions, like the US Federal Government, might be held to higher standards, this is what most people are referring to when talking about freedom of speech on a platform.
> For small, and really small companies they already have the talent to deal with the database directly because that's how they handle most of their problems because they don't have a "console" interface.

I feel like small and really small comparies are the primary market for this tool. A sort of stepping stone until they can build out a large enough engineering team to support more specialized internal tooling. A lot of small companies store most / all of their business data in spread sheets anyway, BaseDash just gives them a more robust backend (SQL) that allows them to transition more seamlessly into custom back office software.

> So this would be just another product for them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful because they already know how to interact with the database.

The technical staff would find it tremendously useful because they can focus on building a solid data model on top of a SQL database without having to spend time building out clunky admin interfaces. And from the other direction they don't need to build out migrations from legacy spreadsheet data into a SQL database.

> For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is counter productive.

Maybe, but if BaseDash offers robust enough validations and permissioning, this shouldn't be as much of a concern. The flip side is that without BaseDash, if some data needs to be tweaked that isn't possible to do using the clunky ad hoc admin interfaces that were built, someone on the engineering team would need to make those changes in the database manually, or ops would need to wait for engineering to build out a feature to allow them to make those changes.
You're working more and getting paid less than people did, 10, 20, 30 years ago... meanwhile the wealth gap has increased dramatically. Where do you think it's going? It's not hyperbole whatsoever.
You're talking about the supply of dollars, I'm talking about the supply of university admissions slots.
Sure but then you have to deal with a real estate market resulting in irrational collective decision making.

Also, by all observation, the market is restricting the freedom of people to live under a roof in their own city.
Stumbled across my first one of these the other day.

It's not obvious at all that you should leave it in - particularly when accustomed to the ubiquitous slide-in-and-out-fast kind.

This one tried to lock my card in, but when I reflexively yanked on it to pull it out, somehow it lost contact with the chip or something. What followed was a stuck card in this machine, and the machine stuck on "verifying"... no cancel buttons worked either. Eventually, after a long and disconcerting minute had passed, it finally released my card and told me to go inside for payment.

Definitely not user friendly in the slightest... and just an awful way to start your morning on your way to work.
Two months since the riots, and still no “National Conversation”
> He's working on the same ledger tech but centralised

Cryptographic ledger technology has been around since forever (the 70s to be precise): just look at Git, SUNDR, etc.

I believe he's specifically calling out firms working on cryptocurrencies; cryptocurrencies are just one application of cryptographic distributed ledgers.