skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it worth replacing zoom due to privacy concerns?
After a few countries showed concerns about Zoom being vulnerable to Chinese surveillance, I've been considering moving away from Zoom in my company. My concern is that since Zoom is a tool that right now we have the entire world watching, and looking for flaws. Moving to another tool could mean facing the same issue, but not being aware of it since there aren't as many people using it. My ultimate question is, how to evaluate moving to another tool when there is no way to be secure about the data usage?
>anything

So if a human ever stated such nonsense, that would disprove the idea that they could truly reason about "anything" as well? Or does it just prove that they are capable of spouting nonsense?
Anyone who is taught to look for racism everywhere - no matter how minor - will find it everywhere. The false-positive rate must be astronomical.
>lawsuits

on what grounds?

>And the unpredictability of juries.

AFAIK if you're the defendant you can opt for trial by judge rather than trial by jury.
Show HN: Usage AI: We reduce your AWS bill by 45%
Hello Hacker News Community,

My name's Kaveh, the founder of Usage AI. I've been spending my lockdown time working on Usage AI - a platform that analyses and automatically finds savings. We recently helped an Amazon-backed company find a 47% reduction on their AWS bill (email me for the case study).

We're in beta and are selecting a few good customers to launch pilots with. If you're looking to test our platform and find savings, you can email me at kaveh@usage.ai or by visiting our website.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

https://www.usage.ai/
It’s also critical in Python to make heavy use of metaprogramming with decorators, so the bundling / unbundling operators combined with named parameters aren’t just for ease of reading or annotating call sites, but rather they open up a huge range of behavior that can only work if decorators can easily manipulate parameters of the functions they are decorating.

For example, suppose you have a function foo and within foo you call another function baz, where baz has a very large range of customization parameters. If you want to memoize calls to foo with a decorator, you can just pass kwargs for any “pass through” customizations of baz. The memoizing decorator can flatten kwargs out into a tuple along with any positional args, so you get call signature memoization without needing to restrict or list out all possible args of baz. In fact you can make this perfectly generic over the function being memoized so it doesn’t matter if you change baz to bar one day, with a whole new signature.

You can combine this with the inspect module and with functools.wraps to ensure full and complete docstrings and introspected signatures as well, so that putting kwargs all over doesn’t hurt readability, remove info from docstrings or help messages, or make it hard to read.
I've just heard today that - supposedly - Maslow spent a period at Esalem (Big Sur, California), and there found the inspiration for his work on the hierachy of needs.

Not sure how true it is, as I couldn't find any source.
glad i dont work at netflix
Looking for android beta testers.
Thanks. Mind sharing where you are browsing from and what you get when you try to hit the link (DNS failure, site not responding, etc)? I can forward an issue report on to the maintainers
Stellarium is great for this too.
I don't know Rails. I know Python and Golang. Worked in a data-intensive, data heavy startup, throwing microservices, nanoservices in a haphazard fashion with K8S backing the "throw and see something sticks" approach.

Elixir, and Phoenix makes me think. About three years ago, when we started the company, if we had these two tech... we could've been saved so much dev time focusing on the core tech, instead of making scaffolding work.
Lukashenka and his clique have been consistently eliminating all public figures for 26 years straight. The fact the public is able to organize without real leaders is a true success and the only viable way for them to succeed.

Yesterday, bandits from local militia arrested all the members of the water rescue crew that helped protesters out of the water where they jumped to escape.

The same day the head of the criminal police was photographed shattering the windows of a café where some of the protesters receded.

Yesterday again, a second heavily beaten dead body was found in the woods in what looks like a militia victim.

Merciless criminals took over all police and security forces and they act with total impunity.

How can there be "real opposition leaders" in in a scenario where they are beaten, imprisoned or exiled soon after becoming public figures?
That’s largely why I’m careful not to use the term ‘photo-journalist.’
> Netflix's chairman has said working from home has no positive effects

No positive effects for him. Maybe. And even that is pretty dubious considering we're in a pandemic and nobody is at their best.
I've posted this before, but first bell was at 7:18, bus was at 6:30. I had it luckier in that I lived ~1 mile from school, but lived in an area where you couldn't safely walk. There were students that lived ~15 miles from school whose buses arrived ~5:45 to be able to make the 7:18 bell.
Around here peeling potatoes b before boiling was illegal during rationing in WWII.
I mean its sort of a blanket statement. Do I believe remote work is harder for c suite and writers? Absolutely. Is it harder for engineers? Probably less so.
What’s best for the company doesn’t mean it’s best for the individual employees. People need to focus on what’s best for them because we’ve probably all learned at this point that the company puts their needs above your own.
also Netflix boss: we are fine with advancing the pedophile agenda of normalizing sexualization of minors [1].

[1] - https://www.ccn.com/netflix-cuties-scandal/
At the end of the day, students vote with their wallet.

The decision of the dean chooses to protect an environment of low-risk social-compliant low-EQ classroom, which will act as a deterrent on the university's prestige moving forward (e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard).

At the end of the day the dean might get fired for his actions. To use an analogy, "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, but if for years you're left beyond Amazon"... one might need to eventually take a hard look at the university leadership and make the needed changes.
Frankly, the point of the university today is to provide a service for paying customers. When you see a job posting that says that a bachelor's degree in such-and-such field is required, the employer is hardly asking to get candidates who have spent four years freely discussing ideas like they're one of the figures in The School of Athens; they're asking to get candidates who know certain things and have experience doing a bit more self-directed work than they would in high school. (That's also why the university degree can be reduced to a GPA instead of a dissertation or set of publications.)

Now, it's definitely a problem for society that people who want to spend their lives engaging in academic debate, which is a thing we should encourage, can rarely find a job that supports them in doing so, and the closest they can find is providing vocational training to 20-year-olds who are ready to leave the academy once they've received the service they've paid for. But it doesn't really help either the professor or the student to pretend that the modern undergraduate classroom is anything else.
This action is so obviously wrong I can't but wonder if its not some prank. It would be an ideal prank for the Chinese in particular, to audit the course (at first as an attempt to see how Chinese language and culture is taught here), and then stumble upon this coincidental pronunciation, in the context of a tinder-dry atmosphere of political correctness, and send in (multiple) complaints and watch America burn just a little bit more.

Truth is, if this was the case, then we deserved it. It seems sometimes like America has split into the two races in "The Dark Crystal", and we very badly need a reunification. We need the reason and open-mindedness of the left, and the practicality (and romanticism) of the right. We need to accept the truth that there are real differences between people (even groups of people) and celebrate those differences and not pretend they don't exist. We need to accept the truth that racial/ethnic/religious bigotry is essentially a human universal, which doesn't justify it but it also means you can't stop it with law or strongly worded emails to university authorities.

So yeah, if the CCP is behind this one, I say: thanks. Hope we can learn from it.

P.S. The culprit is the dean of the USC Marshall School of Business, Geoff Garrett, not UPenn. Also, according to the LA Times it was a group of black students, not the CCP. Feel free to call or write (213) 740-6422 ggarrett@marshall.usc.edu or tweet https://twitter.com/USCMarshall/ https://twitter.com/garrett_geoff
I have been remotely working for years, and had thought about applying to Netflix, but if they don't have plans for remote work to continue, then I'll consider other jobs.
Seems like you would be okay as long as you emphasized the strong K sound at the front.
Epidemic Models
You won't really get the appeal until you try it yourself. It's $20, easy target for a lazy Saturday afternoon.
Yeah, the idea was to just display a nice SVG + CSS + HTML clock with Chromium running in full-screen mode (screensaver off etc.). I know it is not the most efficient option but I was surprised that RPi struggled with opening a HTML page on localhost.
So glad remote work is simply a bigger undeniable phenomenon that the suits can’t wish away.

Even a four day work week with one day remote for most white collar jobs was a foreign concept until this year. The quality of life improvement for everyone is insane. People have more time to spend with family, cut entire commutes a few times a week, getting that extra hour of sleep, or have that extra hour or two after work, it’s about as close to the mythical European quality of life Americans hear rumors about.
> Not sure if any of the test-driven development people have thought about this, but the same principle also applies there: if you debug and fix the code until it passes the tests, you can overfit the tests. It's no longer a good measure for code quality, once it has been explicitly optimized. You'd need new, previously unseen test cases. It would be an obvious mistake in machine learning to simply add failed test examples into the training set and rejoyce that the new model can now deal with those previously difficult cases.

This is a great point, and it articulates some challenges that I’ve seen with test-driven development.

I would say that if you can write tests that fully specify the desired functionality, rather than merely check a few possible inputs, it’s less of an issue. This is a reason to try to build things with less knobs to twiddle, so the space of inputs has lower dimensionality.
The need for a new more modern Reliability Stack
https://archive.is/6iK6Z
It makes me wonder if children (during their imagination/imaginary friends years) naturally produce DMT like brain chemical?
Ask HN: Self-taught software engineer returning for a CS degree
HN,

I have a heavily time-constrained opportunity to study Computer Science, Bachelor's at ETH Zürich. To generalise by qualification, the school is one of the top ten schools in global university rankings.

Meanwhile, I have 4 years of experience as a SoftEng at a Swiss branch of a US-based industrial company, earning ~$120K. This I manage with a Mechatronics undergrad, whose curriculum was entirely removed from the world of CS. My work has seen me develop internal systems, frontend & backend, with emphasis on REST interfaces. Work is well-paid but not quite fulfilling. the rare bit of SE research is interesting, so is designing architecture; on the other hand, it's just gluing things together, no matter how well the glue is structured. (yes, that's SE in a nutshell)

I can't assess the worth of the degree. I will own the decision but I fear I am underqualified to weigh the advantages and disadvantages.

Conflicting opinions I have been given:

* experienced SoftEng, ex-SpaceX, EE degree: you're in the industry, stay in the game and just self-study to get a better job. (industry-driven)

* professor fluid mechs, doctorate at ETH: ETH is world-class. Dropping the uni name astonished new business associates and imprinted me in their minds favourably. (academia-driven)

My primary concerns are:

* does the degree devalue my prior four years of experience for a future employeer? As a competent SoftEng, I would hate to be disparaged just because university came after work.

* what career paths open that are difficult for a self-taught software engineer?

* expounding the above: at the end I will have a solid mathematical and CS foundation. What can I do with it?

* is it worth the >$200K investment (in opportunity cost, given foregiven earnings: assume that I can't work)

* bonus question: if looking for a career linked with China, how does that help?

I'm 26.

I would be grateful if you found the time to share your background and your thoughts.
I do this currently. I was working at Google and left. I wanted more time off since I have enough money to not grind, but still need to pay rent. Basically personal project time.

I ended up at a small company that had additional hours but not enough for a full time employee. I'm now part time across three DARPA contracts. It was really just luck, a friend reached out and asked if I was interested.

Everywhere else I was talking to was just pushing unlimited PTO policies. I wanted explicit acknowledgement about how much vacation I'd take and that was hard to get.

I know people at Google went to part time. You probably just need to ask. My route was definitely finding a place that needed a worker but didn't have enough work for full time.
And the layers and layers and layers between Netflix' CEO and non executives probably mean he has almost no idea what he's talking about wrt general employees.
> I think the point is that journalists use twitter

Which is not a problem in itself. If Twitter has done anything it is lower the distance between journalists and the general population, especially minorities, and it allowed "grassroots journalism" to exist in the first place.

Yes, ordinary blogging existed before Twitter, but only Twitter has the advantage of "going viral".
Interesting question. I'll try some rough calculations.

A C60 audio cassette holds 30 minutes per side, and the tape is ~85 meters long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_tape_specifications#Comp...).

The diameter of the actual disc in a 3.5-inch floppy is 85mm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk#.E2...), so the circumference of the outer track should be about pi * 0.085m or 0.25m.

There are normally 80 tracks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats#Ph...), so if all tracks were as big as the outer one, that would give you about 20 meters.

In reality, inner tracks are shorter. I can't easily find the inner diameter, but from pictures it looks like it's about 1/3 the outer diameter. So the track lengths (circumference) should grow linearly from 1/3 to 100% of the outer diameter, which means the total track length should be 2/3 of 20 meters or ~13 meters.

To sum all that up, with 80 tracks, there seems to be about 13 meters of linear space the head can travel across, or about 15% of the length an audio cassette uses for 30 minutes. If you recorded at the same linear speed as a cassette, you'd get 15% of 30 minutes.

But running a cassette at half speed is definitely practical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_tape_specifications#Tape...), and machines were even sold with a setting for that. So double that to 30%.

And there are a handful of floppy formats that use more than 80 tracks (one even uses 240), so let's assume 160 tracks is possible. So double again to 60% of 30 minutes.

And that's just one side of the floppy, so using both sides means you can double again to get 120% of 30 minutes. So yeah, it seems possible! (Which incidentally is NOT the answer I was expecting.)

If the 160 tracks thing doesn't work out, you could probably compensate slowing the rotation more.

On a side note, the two-sided thing creates the potential problem of a gap at the 15-minute mark. Apparently there are read/write heads on both sides (https://computer.howstuffworks.com/floppy-disk-drive2.htm), so I guess you could do the transition by recording a few seconds of audio on both sides, then cross-fading between them. In other words, start at the inner edge of the disk, reading from one side for 15 minutes as you slowly move the head to the outer edge of the disk, then cross-fade to the other head and continue back for another 15 minutes back toward the inner edge of the disk. You would need to have a good method for being sure you make this transition at the right time, though.

Or you can always just record 15 minutes of stereo sound, reading each channel from one side of the floppy.
Show HN: Voicerum – Call Tracking Software
I sorta had the impression that they were going to be WFH for the duration of the pandemic, so unless the boss is trying to prepare the ground for a change, I guess he's just complaining?
Yes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/27/i-was-kidnappe...
Word Costs City Official His Job (1999)
To play sort-of devil's advocate, while the concrete situation is completely over-the-top, it's easy to imagine that "nà ge" could become an actual racist dog whistle if widely enough known.

E.g., I personally believe there is ample room for criticism on the way the Israeli government treats Palestinians (to put it mildly). There are some attempts to define any and all criticism on the Israeli government by non-jews as anti-semitism, which frankly seems ridiculous to me.

Nevertheless, it's also true that "solidarity for Palestine" and "criticism on the Israeli government" are frequently used as covers and dog-whistles by actual antisemites. Marches in solidarity of Palestine can be easily be co-opted by Nazis if the organizers don't work too actively prevent it, even if the original intention was genuine.

In a similar way, white supremacists, racists, etc, might start to use "nà ge" as a substitute for the slur and attempt to back down with some bullshit excuse like "I was just speaking Chinese" when called out.

This is not advocating banning words preemptively because they could be used as slurs (nor banning pro-palestine demonstrations) but to stay vigilant. Context matters, but this goes both ways.
Gary Marcus's Kafkaesque critique of GPT-3
>A neural net can approximate any continuous function (from one euclidean space to another)

Which doesn't answer the question by the way because Neural Nets suffer the same limitations of Turing Machines, that is to say even a neural net can't solve the halting problem.

The fact that something is a universal function approximator should not be mistaken as equivalent to "isn't limited in functionality".
this is pretty abrasive, but it's also 100% correct. before you downvote this you should take the time to investigate the claims it makes and think about whether what you think you know is actually true

i learned a ton about distributed systems in my time writing erlang and elixir, but it was almost always because i was forced into it by misapplying some erlang/elixir feature and backing myself into a corner. the idea that erlang/elixir make concurrency easy is extremely dangerous. what they do is make it accessible. you still need to understand what you are doing
https://archive.is/SJ6uk
It's apparently a common word, a demonstrative pronoun, similar to "that". Pretty hard to avoid without language acrobatics.
You could specify the type first (instead of doing it inline) and then unpack (if you want)
Wasn’t there a story awhile back about how Netflix does like ritualized firings, guided by all kinds of weird dark, internal politics? Probably harder to do over Zoom.
Not a minor nit: in Objective-C, keyword arguments are ordered. Every function call reads like a sentence and the keyword argument itself can be something phrase like:

-onStream:writeObject:withKey:;
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/voiceofbelarus.com?proto... says that is it up.
i’ve read articles that suggest the line between work and life is actually more blurred due to WFH and people just end up working longer. logically it makes sense when it’s all happening in your home.
I’ve given up on buying anything like that from Amazon for exactly this reason. I’d rather go through e.g. MSC and know I’m getting what I want the first time.

Specialty suppliers sell to a relatively small market of pros and can’t afford to burn them. You often pay more, but you get a better experience.

It’s like buying from Digikey vs Radio Shack.

That said, you can usually do a lot better on price than Grainger, who seem to mostly want larger accounts and don’t give good prices to the accountless.

Other good online suppliers I’ve used:

Uline

McMaster-Carr

Router bit world

Highland woodworking

Infinity cutting tools

Rexel

Locally, you probably have suppliers for some of these industries that do principally brick and mortar sales and have a limited online presence.
Sorry I have not been precise. Ukraine was not part of Russia, but under Russian influence. And Ukraine in very important for Russia (ans Belarus share this same characteristics) as this gives access to Russia's core, without natural barriers...
Is there anything you're an expert at? Postgres, Django, React, etc.?

Companies hiring contractors want to pay somebody to "show up" (perhaps virtually) and do the one thing they're an expert at, not waste time getting up to speed or learning on the job.

Figure out what you're an expert in, and contact some recruiting firms that hire for contracting gigs in that area. Explain that your schedule is "half full already" but you'd like to fit something else in, if it's the right opportunity.
I use LLCs and similar concepts to hold title, sometimes to a single asset.

Its nice to be in an audience where others do it as well. But I think that's the point, you shouldn't know who does it if its designed well. Your name wouldn't be on any public records. And you can always just ambiguously say "my CPA/lawyer said to set it up that way I don't know anything" as opposed to coming across as a meticulous chess player in life.
Clojure has an implementation of these in java.
I work 24h/w (TWT) for my employer. I did this by... saying that's what I could do when they offered me the job. (There are some specific personal circumstances that prevent me from taking full time work.) And sure, it does limit you; a lot of places demur, but not everyone. For sure my small company are happy to have me. Of course they are: they get a massive bargain. I am prorata so they get a developer for janitor wages and still everything gets done. Who wouldn't be happy with that deal?
But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?
I didn’t have many friends who played this game. Sometimes, my brother would play with me, but he wasn’t into it like me.

Yeah the physics were pretty interesting, although a tiny speck of concrete was super annoying :)

Have a look at the indie game King Arthur’s Gold. Played this a few years ago for 500 hours or so. Online, faster, more interesting gameplay. But might be addictive for a former Clonk player.
Yes, the same guy thinks sleep is a competitor of Netflix. So no, I do not think he has the best interest of other humans.

[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-hastin...

edit for possible misunderstanding that I'm critisizing the OP