skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit tired of the "critical infrastructure" argument. People are very quick to put all sorts of things into the category. He mentions network effects as the only real moat in the article.

If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away.
The growth in tech stocks has been pretty insane imo. It's so easy to be afraid though and call this another 2000, but we really don't know what the future holds.

I wish Europe had it's own set of exciting tech companies. That would be amazing. As a human living on this planet, the more things available to me, the better. Unfortunately, Europe doesn't seem to do much anymore. Google "European growth stocks". I want them back in the game.
Awesome! Played it on my desktop and didn't have any issues with it being too dark as others have suggested. Keep up the good work.
Likewise. I often use several different conference platforms a day.

This fixation on Zoom really mystifies me. A couple months ago trolls were wandering around in Zoom conferences, recording things and interfering, making headlines. I would have thought users would abandon this open wound immediately for any of a plethora of alternatives, but for some reason they're dogmatically faithful.

Somehow Zoom appears exempt from confidentiality or privacy concerns, even among corporate and government users. Have all the lawyers vanished with the appearance of COVID-19?
you don't need to. just adhere to a simple rule: distance indoors, and when you can't, wear a mask.

that takes care of the overwhelming majority of transmission risk. minutiae and the marginal are just not worth worrying about.
The tech industry is culpable for Trump
Things have gotten riskier, but you have increased your exposure. There are certainly other factors involved: we know more about those risks and how to mitigate them, for instance. But, things have gotten riskier, not safer.

From the discussions I have had with people around me , justifying the same 'calculated risks', it's clear that they aren't actually making rational decisions as much as rationalizing their decisions; bargaining with their emotions and then sliding into complacency.
To answer this, think of why does Facebook allow users to purchase ads from within the app? Does it make for a better experience to be able to buy an add from your couch, or while traveling? Isn't the Facebook experienced for these users improved by offering for sale goods within the app itself?

I think there is a very good case to be made that the in-app experience is improved by allowing these purchases in-app, and the in-app experience and value would be significantly reduced if Facebook did not allow marketers to buy ads using their iPhone or iPad.
Can even just fork it and run everything in bitcoin and gold ^.^
> A small team can make something similar in a few weeks?

You can say that about a lot of products on the market, and yet this magical team never rears its head.
Twitter Suspended Unity2020's Account
Magic Email – Say goodbye to painful email reading and writing
I am still working in big law and I disagree that the benefits of adopting more advanced version control would be small. However, I work in a field that is a mix of regulatory law and litigation, where almost no work is based on templates and most things are drafted from scratch.

One very large problem that typically comes up in large teams: Only 1 team member can edit the the "live version" of a document (it's locked for editing by the version control system), the other team members need to work "offline" and then reintegrate their changes/drafts into the main document. Everybody has lived through the horror story of a team member in the different time zone still having checked out the live version and going to sleep :)

Sometimes you have to circulate a draft document in parallel to multiple parties (e.g. colleagues with special subject expertise + client's inhouse lawyers + client's technical experts + other party's law firm + other party's inhouse lawyers + other party's technical experts). It can happen that you need to reintegrate comments from different parties to different versions of the drafts, e.g., if your client gives feedback quickly and you re-circulate updated version internally, then you receive other party's comments to the older draft version...

Besides the mechanical aspects of reintegrating comments, it is also difficult to track if everybody who needs to sign off has actually signed off on the parts of the documents they had to review. Often it gets lost who made which comment/change. It can be quite awkward if a regulator asks you "Isn't the technical statement on page 12 contradicted by fact XYZ" - please explain until tomorrow - and you have to quickly figure out who actually put that in...
Various non-web companies are involved with QUIC work at IETF too, so it has to have some points in the "generic" column, especially since IETF-QUIC separates out the HTTP-replacement layer.
I recall Terence Tao made some recent progress on Collatz, I figured it might be of interest to the HN crowd:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/almost-all-collatz...
I wanted this essay to offer some hope and I was greatly disappointed. I've been a ham for over fifty years and an ARRL member for even longer.

This guy compares learning Morse code to learning a foreign language! How does learning the alphabet, numbers and a little punctuation compare to learning a language?

When I started over half of us built our own rigs, now it's probably 5%. When you were a kid few adults took you seriously or cared about your opinions. I joined a club, met all sorts of people. I became an expert on certain arcane parts of the hobby because they interested me. Suddenly when questions on this area of expertise came up I was the expert people four times my age consulted and this helped me gain self confidence. I also saw examples where not only age but race or sex just did not matter because we were all part of the ham radio fraternity.

I think we need to pitch ham radio as a worthwhile pursuit to those budding nerds. Pick up technical knowledge that could lead to a career in engineering. A social club where the work done to pursue membership had its rewards. A chance to compare yourself to others in competition. Not everyone is a natural born athlete but we all have a desire to compete in something and ham radio contests are a way to do it.
Image Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel CNN
All of these are doing that because of either ethical (first 2) or political (the rest) reasons. They were not moved by people "voting with their wallet", nor could they be, as their products are not usable for the general public.

(I say this with nothing but respect for Librem and the Pi foundation. I'd get a Librem 5 if it didn't cost 5x as much as my car )
Join the beta now - http://bit.ly/magic-email
Even the normal flus are somewhat dangerous for infants and young children, while COVID-19 is not.
Using machine learning to detect deficient coverage in colonoscopy screenings
I've lost track of how many times cyberpunk has died and been resurrected with new cybernetic parts grafted onto its corpse.
Yup. For blitz, there is a default session management solution that's essentially based on a long lived, opaque access token. There is also going to be one which is what SuperTokens is. Either using SuperTokens directly, or an implementation of that in Blitz itself.
I don't know, but it is somewhere between covid and the flu.

Even with all the precautions, we've surpassed 175k deaths in the US. Imagine if we had been treating covid like the flu from the beginning?
And I can use that price to turn my stocks into real, hard cash. It's not like it's funny money.
They don't get together on weekends, they chat on hacker news. we call it "adding value to the world"
Its not possible to do that. Nodes cant know whats in a chunk of data that comes by and from whom it comes. But freenet is to host website like sites called freesites. You cant really spam anyone with sites you can create as many as you want but if no one visits them they will eventually just "fall out" of the de central storage.

Technically you could probably bring it down if you simulate a massive amount of users who only access spam sites but that would probably become rather expensive because you would attack your own nodes and your own nodes would try to help the network. It would also need to persist forever else everything would simply go back to normal shortly after the attack is stooped.
A sweet spot I found is a generic laptop (a good Dell or Thinkpad, with the least imaginative hardware possible so Linux runs happy) and a Mac desktop (can be an iMac or a Mini) for the Mac-ish stuff.

You need to pay attention to what can and can't be upgraded, however. The newest Mini can't have the storage upgraded (you should probably buy it maxed out), but can upgrade the memory to 64GB, so it's cheaper to get the 8GB and then upgrade it yourself. The 21 inch iMac can't be upgraded, so YMMV depending on what you get.
I don't know how I feel about cutting off the water service, but "cruel and unusual" seems like a reach.

It would be cruel and unusual to deprive a prisoner of water because they have no other means of attaining it when you withhold it. Turning off city water service to a property is different. The property owner has other options they can take to get the water they need to stay alive.
The x86 memory model already allow (and all current implementations alrwady do) forwarding from the store buffer (which is core private). As far as I can tell, this won't break any code which isn't already broken.
Mid 20's Extra here... Experimentation is totally allowed. Either the FCC will ignore the complaint, or you are actually outside the (very lenient) experimentation rules.
https://vo.codes has you covered. You can also use David Attenborough's voice to narrate Gilbert Gottfried standup.
> Modern CPUs don’t have RISC cores, complex instructions are all the way down.

Proof: Intel's LEA instruction is executed as one uop. That's a super complicated instruction that you'd expect to be split into other uops, but... lo and behold, complex all the way down to the end silicon.

Even a "risc" machine: ARM has macro-op fusion, with AESE / AESMC instructions. (Macro-op fuse AESE / AESMC into a singular AES macro-op. A full AES cycle includes both steps, so its very rare to ever need to only do one of the steps).

As such, I've considered "RISC" to be a misnomer. Even RISC-V and ARM are now doing macro-op fusion (and micro-ops). So what exactly is RISC mean anyway?
If you are grounding your thoughts in the expectation that "people are not that stupid" you are setting yourself up for failure.
That is a lot of money to raise for an established technology. Sounds like they might be standing up their own cloud?
It goes in many combinations. Where I work now, it's Teams internally and Webex externally, with Zoom being explicitly banned, with at least two strongly worded e-mails reminding us to make it double plus sure we don't have the Zoom client installed.

At the same time, outside of work, I was videocalling people on Skype, and my wife had classes delivered via Zoom.
> It always starts like that.

That's the "slippery slope" fallacy. There's a knee-jerk reaction in America that any censorship is bad and will somehow always lead to more censorship. But there area places where censorship has been implemented in small ways and it hasn't led to some sort of free speech apocalypse. In Germany or Israel, for instance, it's illegal to deny the holocaust. That's a pretty sensible limit considering their history. All these years later, they're still free an functioning democracies.
Beta access to GPT-36
I started in 2013. I have not noticed a significantly greater number of things just working on it then I have on Windows or Ubuntu over that time period. Maybe it just works for non-programmers.
A problem for every solution.
I work in the family business, and my mom is older and absolutely crucial to the business (and therefore to the financial health of both her and our households), so most of our decisions are based around preventing her from getting sick, though my wife and I are personally not particularly worried about us or our kids catching it.

My wife has had multiple friends with similarly aged children try to convince her that it's not dangerous for her or the kids when she refuses play-dates, and no matter how many times we tell them that it's not us we're worried about, they still frame it in those terms.
I think it shows that nothing about Photoshop or deepfakes matters in the slighest since the kinds of content that people are falling for now is a stock photo with some text under it.
> There's direct social risk: What are the chances that others involved in the encounter will suffer direct personal harm?

Why do people always assume that if someone is anti-mask or anti-lockdown that they didn't think about others before they made their decision? That they are selfish and dumb?

Stop making that assumption.

People do think it over. They do consider all points. And just because they come to a different conclusion than you doesn't make their conclusion invalid.

> What are the chances that because of this encounter, the pandemic grows more severe or goes on longer than it otherwise would have, extending the length of time before we can truly return to normal life?

ICUs are still fine. It is killing the elderly and those with co-morbidities. Any "spike" is barely a blip. The economy continues to crumble as days of social restrictions and lockdowns build up.

You think we don't consider the lives of others with our decision. We do.

You simply put too much weight on the perceived danger of this almost-at-this-point-not-a-pandemic-anymore. We simply don't agree on how dangerous it is.

PS: If you want to talk direct social risk and safety then it's time to ban alcohol for the greater safety of society.
iPad has a remarkable number of Pro apps for note taking, drawing, architecture, design, and so on. There are screen protectors that try to create the paper feeling for the screen. I love my Apple for drawing and note taking
There are currently several mastodon clients available on the App Store, like Tootle and Amaroq. Hopeful that they stay up, we'll see.
Survey Analysis on hate speech online in the context of video games
#StoreLoad still requires a barrier even on x86.
Tarpn: Terrestrial Amateur Radio Packet Network
So Google somehow knows which apps block certain instances, which generally get reputation among other instances & are quickly blocked? That's not believable.
I think Zoom has become critical infrastructure, but not from a technological perspective. As @nicoburns points out in another comment, there are many companies that can do the job (MSFT, Google, Cisco, etc. have perfectly comparable alternatives here), and if you're willing to look outside of the biggest companies explicitly targeting business meetings, you have other companies with working technical infrastructure targeted at a different market (i.e. FB, Appl) and a batch-ful of YC startups trying to provide the same functionality to the same market.

What I think the article is pointing out is that when Zoom goes down, schools can't teach. And that's true. I think this is indicative of a usability / coordination / culture problem of missing fallbacks. For example, when Zoom goes down a teacher (at least to my knowledge) can't/won't quickly email out a "Hey class, Zoom is down so here is the Google meet link for today".

However, this is true of many technologies (if gmail is down I'm not getting email, if slack is down I'm not reading messages, and if Github is down I'm not pushing code). I think the larger problem is HOW MANY institutions it's a critical point of failure for. If Zoom goes down, our courts largely pause, our education largely pauses, our economy largely pauses, etc. The same is not true of Github or Gmail. In this regard it's closer to a powergrid failure.

This should go away as verticalized solutions and fallbacks appear (leading to broader diversity, where not all courts use the same platform), but I think the key things to think about until then are:

1. Is there anything Zoom could do to create stronger network effects (https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/) preventing new entrants from entering the market?
2. If they did those things, how could we respond to ensure Zoom's incumbent position didn't allow them to prevent new entrants? An old-internet answer would be to centralize the key nodes, effectively utilitize them, and then allow anyone to make a platform that connects to them (i.e. AT&T doesn't own telephony, DNS' don't own the internet, Gmail doesn't own email).

I'm not sure how likely this is given (1) we're moving towards centralization generally (2) the importance of performance in video streaming. Any abstraction creates overhead, and that might be a critical failure to open standards in the video streaming space.
I did not know about this. Nice. Thanks!
Probably best you didn't. Unauthorized use of a computer system, even if you have the credentials, is considered hacking, at least in the US.
It's an interesting question but the precise straighteness of roads would more likely be derived from local ground surveying (e.g., optical) which places the markers from which construction commences.

The maps then eventually record what was actually built (measured by satellite nowadays).
The typing speed is driving me nuts.

I'd enjoy it a whole lot more if the descriptive text simply appeared and didn't halt the gameplay.
Yes, there seems to be a cache somewhere. They have a nice trick: when you flip pages, a lower-resolution cached image renders and you can immediately start reading/writing, before being (almost immediately) replaced by the actual-resolution one. (See about 15:15 to 20:00 in this video: https://youtu.be/YWLJPyTrHnM?t=915)
For some reason (bad software support? tradition?) the PC laptop market seems to simply not care that much about extremely high resolution displays. There are some, but none in systems with the overall build quality of a MBP.
> Forum software is notoriously annoying to configure securely and to maintain.

I'm not familiar with setting up forum servers specifically, are they difficult to setup for just one user? I can totally see how having proper authentication, emails, caching, etc getting complicated, I'm just curious if it's any user for personal use? Obviously you lose the ability to receive comments though.
The "growth" in tech has been entirely driven by monetary policy. Google or Facebook or Apple or Netflix or Amazon have done nothing special than what they've been doing for the last 5 years. I wish we were getting insane tech out of this bull run but the truth is there's no "innovation" behind it and their paper is just being used as a shield by investors which is why their stocks keep going up.
Does Safe Browsing block sites that the user wants to visit?
Everyone clamoring "ads don't improve the in-app experience" are looking at the wrong user. Obviously Apple has no grounds to charge Facebook when a user sees an ad and/or clicks on it. Instead you need to look at the person spending the money, which is the marketer.

Facebook clearly saw an opportunity to improve marketers' experiences in the app by allowing them to make ad buys from within the app. A marketer could certainly log on to their desktop and create an ad buy there, but their experience on the Facebook app is improved by being able to buy ads while on the couch or travelling. Facebook is improving their in-app experience by offering something for sale in the app.

How does that not warrant a 30% cut to Apple?
> Why are results displayed above the code cell instead of below it (as in Jupyter/IPython)? Was a bit confusing at first.

I also strongly agreed with this at first, but after working with it some more I've found it compelling. The key mental model is to think of the code as something akin to a "figure caption."
I'm a PM at Chainalysis, and the work has genuinely been has been the most interesting and impactful work of my life.

If you're a mission driven engineer, or interested in supporting our amazing customers, we're hiring a number of positions.
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Feel free to contact me if you want to know more.

matt @ chainalysis/com
> merely the next iteration of Photoshop

I think you're significantly understating the impact here.

You're talking mostly about content-creation, and in this context there are a lot of positives; I certainly agree with your statement:

> They're going to breathe new life into media and make it significantly easier to make films, music, and all kinds of art.

BUT. I don't think you can, with a straight face, say that there are going to be no negative impacts of this technology. You make a claim that this is just like Photoshopping in the 90s, but I think the key difference here is that in the '90s, there was a fallback medium; when photos became unreliable, you still had video, which couldn't easily be faked.

Looking forward to the next 5-10 years, how does anyone figure out what's true when photos, video, and voice can all be trivially faked by anyone? What reliably medium can we fall back to? This could lead to a real epistemological crisis!

> The public will come to understand AI-generated media as a part of daily life. People are not that stupid.

My problem with this position is that it hand-waves away some pretty fundamental changes to the fabric of our reality. How exactly do you propose that people are going to understand the world, post-'fakes? If any video you see in your twitter feed could be fake, how can anyone make any inferences about the world outside of their own immediate direct experience?
You’re in for a treat if you haven’t heard of the oculus quest :)
Never, because morality is not the same as religion. Morality is well established as a basis for law.
I lived within walking distance of Powell's for over a decade and it was my favorite place to spend free time (shot out to Annie Bloom's Books in Multnomah Village, as well). I make a concerted effort to live near bookstores because I think they are some of the most wholesome and comforting places on the planet. That and libraries.
> If you happen to be the target of this hatred and violence, and feel it is an existential threat to your livelihood, you might believe that it is a good thing to make it more difficult for those who are engaging in this behavior to enlarge their communities.

I’m indeed being threatened by various hate groups (one of them actually tried, and almost succeeded, to kill an acquaintance), but strangely enough they are never removed by Google or any other big corporations. Worst, each time I voice any slight complain about them, I am the one being censored. Some of those groups are even sometimes getting official support by the GAFAM. This is a really odd and unfair world.
If the memory renaming cache isn't cleared, I can foresee Spectre-like attacks against that micro-architectural buffer. However, for a new feature like this hopefully they've figured out how to not leave that open…
Richard Stallman was right. The computer (smartphone) for millions of people has become a prison. The smartphone has been a tragedy for the human species.

"Oh it doesn't matter they went after people I disagree with"

Okay wise guy, what happens if the other side takes power? Think that's never happened historically? Then they'll come after you and I. How about we just not give this kind of power to anyone and let people make their own choices.
Which is obvious when you consider that C didn't get any sort of thread-awareness until C11.
want an idea for a tv show? and if in the future, where souls live forever in matrix, in peaceful matrix where everybody is a king or a queen with unlimited slave npcs; and only mech bodies exists outside matrix, those machines do find a way to communicate with an alien high-tech civilization, but the latch is around 1 year. will do the kings and queens get to work on the problem and start to vanish heaven?