skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AresDB: Uber's GPU-Powered Open Source, Real-Time Analytics Engine
Unless there's something I'm completely unaware off, there's still no way to make that work without root (Android) or jailbreak (iOS).
Is there an issue with the New Yorker’s mobile site? This article shows up as only a paragraph long for me and doesn’t even mention data collecting.
To be fair it’s also made from “fairtrade gold and conflict-free minerals”, which is arguably more important than the plastic bottle that’s saved.
An alternative is requiring developers to engage with the community and convince them there’s no ill intent.

And where is the option for those of us who don’t mind less battery in exchange for actually getting prompt notifications for services we use?
> Instead, they have this warped reasoning where they don't allow any program to run in background, except theirs, "to save the battery".

Looking at the landscape of shit software out there, I find this justification entirely plausible. If iOS & Android didn't lock this down, phones would be running 4-5 different poorly implemented push platforms (or more). Battery performance on mobile would be utter crap.

There is a big balancing act going on here. People want phones that do the thing they are supposed to do. They also want battery life to be excellent and the device to be secure by default. It's impossible to give 3rd party devs 100% access and meet those 2 demands.
Worth nothing that Theranos wasn't public, there was no opportunity to short-sell. If there had been they might have been exposed much earlier and done a lot less harm.

I knew several people who said what they were claiming was impossible but they didn't really have any interest in being the whistleblower.
It's been a little while since I've heard this one, but if there's one thing that I remember hitting me is that the same language used by the interviewer is used today about privacy, end user programming and any other more powerful technology, programming language or paradigm. It seems that as an culture we're always able to go so far, but not all the way. We see the path between start and end, there's no genius needed for the last push, but after so much progress we reduce ambition towards the end goal and instead develop arguments against continuing.

At some point we just don't think people need help with paper based tasks, "look around you, it's how everything is done" yet here we are with the PC 40 years later. And people look around and think that there is no chance everyone could be a programmer "look around you, they're all consumers, they couldn't understand how to make the computer do what they like". In 40 years there's no doubt this viewpoint will be wrong, but the popular opinion on the matter can't see that future.

See Bret Victors history of computing. The biggest adversary we have to overcome towards progress is the mainstream experts of our own field.

We have apps which seem to be like starting from scratch every time, which can't have abilities known by all because they aren't prepackaged by the devs ahead of time. Every app reinvents a minimal subset of sorting and search. If you have a better idea or a different connection you want to make its just not possible in the app.

Stop pretending that debilitating users is actually good for them in the silly word games we play. Give users power.
> “ For example, lets say you are developing infrastructure at Google, how often do you think you talk to non-engineers?”

I can speak from experience since I help run the site reliability incident response team in my (large ecommerce) company.

How often do rank and file SRE ICs need to speak with non-technical staff about projects? All the time.

They give tech talks and council presentations, they contribute work to quarterly roadmap project pitches, and they give business scorecard presentations to walk higher level managers through the breakdown of costs and benefits, why we should pay money for a new cloud tool, what time & effort some org-wide planned migration or upgrade is going to require.

Let alone basic stuff like writing effective tickets / issues / RFCs / PR descriptions, postmortems, etc., and walking teammates through work artifacts daily.

For every two hours of software work, I’d expect 1 hour of “wider audience communication” work - and that is for deeply technical ICs in roles like SRE. The closer you get to product engineering, the more the ratio shifts towards communication.

I can tell you this translates specifically to Google & Facebook - because most of the SRE colleagues in my company came from Google & Facebook, and attest to that being the case there too.
there are a total of 4 now, I believe.
isn't this literally a plot point from House of Cards
They are unsupported by the PSF, but still supported by Linux distributions. For example Ubuntu 16.04 uses Python 3.5 and is still supported until April 2021 (security updates until April 2024).
From time to time I'm a hiring manager. I absolutely watch for these kinds of things, be it codegolf type challenges or large banks of interview questions. Depending on the role this can be helpful or hurtful to the expectations I would have on a candidate.

If the goals is to have a skill hire, typically someone who can maintain an existing, well-documented system, then having them know trivial details and banked information can be quite helpful. On the other hand, talent hires I would take in a different direction. If the candidate's only stand out quality is a clear memorization of banked answers I would wonder whether they could work from fundamentals.
> The sticking point is the law of conservation of momentum, which says that inside a closed system momentum remains constant.

...wait...

> The current design is calculated to provide a thrust of about .012 Newtons (equal to the weight of a paperclip, or a raisin) for one kilowatt of power, similar to the drives used to maneuver satellites.

It requires power input. Doesn't that mean this isn't a closed system?
This strikes me as semantics. I've never heard that anybody says "users are stupid" in a truly derogatory way. It's a shortcut for a long-winded explanation that you'll deal with a lot of different people, some of whom will barely understand what's happening.

An example I like is Amazon's question feature. If you buy a product and somebody else has a question about it, Amazon will mail you and ask whether you can answer the question. When you browse Amazon, you'll notice that quite a few people don't understand what's happening at all. They believe that some person has directed a question at them personally, and feel compelled to answer, even if they have no idea. Amazon being Amazon lets those answers go live, and so you'll see answers like "Dear Mr. Doe, unfortunately this was a gift for my nephew, so I cannot tell you how large the item is compared to a banana". Others are using it for support, I've seen things like "Hi Amazon, I don't know. Can you please tell me how to find more from manufacturer X?"

"Users are stupid" is short and catchy, and it beats holding an hour long explanation session each time you want to remind somebody that they're not designing something to be used by people like them, but by society at large. And many users are, in regard to this technology, stupid.

Is anyone actually judging them, saying they're horrible people or something similar?
The solution on more open OSes is to require apps to publish their source code and engage with the developer community before making them easily installable. (Ex: most Linux distributions)
> by "mathematical truths" I meant axioms and statements that are reducible to axioms

That distinction is important, and it seemed to me you'd skimmed over it.

Axioms are directly defined to be true for the purposes of mathematical inquiry, and as such can't really be wrong. At worst, a set of axioms can be inconsistent.

Emergent properties are different; they're not directly defined to be true. This is of practical consequence, as mathematicians sometimes get them wrong.
I'm not sure that's correct, one of the main reasons why NVIDIA succeeded is that they actually pushed technology and they always seem to have a much longer term vision than for the next 1-2 iterations.

I'm also not sure if you are suggesting NVIDIA made the same mistake as Microsoft regarding mobile, but them buying ARM is anything but that.

Them buying ARM is a way for them to offer a fully vertically integrated solution for the enterprise, pushing their existing initiatives such as NVDLA (https://github.com/nvdla/) being able to exert more control over the future of ARM architectures and designs for specific fields especially automotive as well as potentially getting their graphics and compute IP into billions of devices.

Anyone who thinks NVIDIA is buying ARM to simply trash it or to mess up with their competition is wrong, I'm not saying NVIDIA would necessarily be successful but most of the so called competitors that people are point at aren't their competitors at all.

NVIDIA is also buying a lot of talent with this acquisition, specifically the likes of ARM Austin which were responsible for the A76-78 cores.

NVIDIA + ARM + Mellanox has the potential to be a player on an unprecedented level for the hyperscaler and HPC markets, especially if the likes of Apple and Amazon (and to lesser extend Cloudflare etc.) do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. Apple going with ARM is probably the best thing NVIDIA could've asked for.
Wouldn’t Apple or Google review apps before they get published? Dont they have some responsibility?
The office I currently work in does have one shower. It wouldn't be feasible if everyone had to use it. The early gym birds use it, the bike riders don't. And this is an office of 60 people.
> that very scale and effort seems to be problematic when it comes to reproducing the results of experiments

First of all, LIGO is 2 observatories so every result out of LIGO was observed by at least two locations.

There is also an independent project called Virgo which is making gravitational wave observations, and the results are being correlated with LIGO. They have made a number of overlapping observations, which further moves us towards reproducibility.

Future observatories are also planned (like LISA), which will be another opportunity to further validate events.
For the seller it's different, to market it's just a sell.
Personally I don’t like the UX of other platforms at all so I don’t see why that’s a requirement.

It hasn’t taken off yet because it’s only barely started shipping.
YC W21 will be remote. Applications are due in 10 days on the 23rd. I put together this Google Doc to make it easy to draft and share with proofreaders. To make your own copy go to File > Make a Copy.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P0IzDEwKQ7C8kXKdSm1WQmQ_...

I'm applying with NanaGram (https://nanagram.co). NanaGram is a service that helps you send regular printed photos to your grandparents in the mail. All you have to do is text your photos. What makes it different is you can add siblings and cousins to curate photos as a group. It's bootstrapped, solo, and profitable. I've been on-and-off full time. There's so much room to grow. I'm doing the Startup School build sprint (https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-yc-build-sprint-and-...). It's been so helpful to have somewhere to report to each week. I'm planning to focus on NanaGram exclusively the next 6 months with continued weekly reporting cadence.
Microlens arrays have been standard for years and increase the fill factor to ~100 %, so the argument is kinda bogus. In any case, the gaps between adjacent sensors in a "raft" are much bigger than the pixel pitch, and the gaps between rafts again larger, so the argument is kinda moot either way.
Apple released a version of the iTunes installer that erased users files if the hard drive had a space in the name. Of course I don’t believe either Apple or Google were being intentionally malicious.

As far as the hobbyists, I had another proposal in another thread. Free “self signed certs” that are tied to your device. You can compile from source an app and keep it on your phone. You are free to share source code. This would also be keeping within GPL2, GPL3.

Apple making money on in app purchases is just as unethical. I think that’s the purpose of Apple Arcade.
Diabetic. My checkups include doctor gently poking my feet with a thin probe to see if I can feel it, visually inspecting my feet, and reminding me to visually inspecting my feet for damage that I might not have felt.
I have had this enabled for KDEConnect in past but it still used to fail.
On the one hand you dislike semantics, on the other hand you want me to understand your meaning. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am arguing that the social aspect of morality isn't about measurement, but about whose yardstick we should be using.

Said differently: How do we calibrate our measurement instruments?

Man is the measure of all things. --Protagoras.
I think the objection is that those are large error bars compared to the force measured. And that even a modest source of experimental error could put this at zero real output.

ETA: and since “non-zero real output” implies that virtually all of our physics is incorrect, and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, the bar for measurement error needs to be exceptionally small.
You would hope that Boeing has went into excruciating detail about explaining how it happened before and exactly how they have fixed and verified that it cannot happen again and that they have not broken anything that was working in the previous version.

You would hope!
> little enough documentation about the "proper" way to handle Unicode that I doubt that it will actually reduce Unicode-related bugs

I won't claim here that the compatibility break was actually worth it, but I am sure that it reduces Unicode-related bugs.

It's easy to write Python 2 code that seems to work fine but immediately crashes when it has to process Unicode. But if your Python 3 code works at all it'll probably handle Unicode fine, or at least handle it better than naive Python 2 code would.

Whenever I have to write Python 2 code that has to handle Unicode, I mainly just try to write it so that it would be able to run in Python 3.
Show HN: Showing a single AWS architecture from 9 different perspectives
The purpose of UX in my mind is to be able to constantly create beginners that can become engaged and advanced users.

Knowing your audience, and how to create beginners is critical. Helping them get up to speed as quickly as possible is the goal, not assuming they are stupid or lazy.

This article was plausible for me, up until it might not account for users who do not have digital literacy or capabilities like the writer's own. There might be a bit of a blind spot there, ironically.

Many of our major services started the same way.. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all started as very simple services for people to learn new digital experiences and interactions.

With these social media digital interactions as a foundation, maybe it's possible to place more complex initial interactions in front of some users.. but I feel that the digital alienation of people is real and one of the things that may be fueling the divide in society when it comes to access to opportunity.

This post by Google's CEO articulates the alienation that not helping create beginners can fuel: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/digital-technology-mus...
You pulled those numbers out of your ass...

The truth is that 99% of the population believes that homosexual couples will have less children then heterosexual...

The surprising result for the uneducated? That homosexual couples have any children...
I chose to diagram this solution because I thought the architecture diagram that comes with the source (https://github.com/awslabs/distributed-load-testing-on-aws) was pretty underwhelming and needed to be broken up and expanded on. Would love to know your thoughts!
A Pandemic Is a Terrible Time to Buy Real Estate
The best description I heard from an old boss was "Users may be inexperienced or stuck in their methods, but they are capable."
I think maybe the "system" is only with respect to momentum in this context.
>>All legal concepts are government created fictions.

This is often the diverging point between a libertarian outlook on the world, and an authoritarian one.

To the Authoritarian all laws are just social constructs created by governments, thus it is all subjective and there is no objective truth or unethical laws

To libertarians like myself we believe in the Lockean concept of natural rights, where by laws and governments are erected by man to protect those natural rights and any government that goes beyond that goal is Authoritarian and unethical.

To summarize Frédéric Bastiat "The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties;"

Ethical Governments are formed to enforce this law, these natural rights, to provide a common defense force of a persons natural rights.

Ethical Governments are not formed to control and regulate all aspects of society at all levels and on all subjects
It doesn't have to be, but it is.
Were the team and functionality of Firefox Developer Tools affected by the recent downsize at Mozilla?
Orcas are known to be highly intelligent and are also known to be able to operate on a pretty decent level of thinking. Seeing boats take your food while you starve is not a difficult conclusion to draw that the boats are total assholes who need to be taught a lesson.
You should never break backwards compatibility in a language. It's its undoing.
Internal PDF Links Zooming in or Out? Set the Zoom Level
Have you read the law? It’s about 100 words of code and thousands about exemptions to the code, and the exemptions all have their own specific boundaries, like a writer can freelance 35 articles per outlet. But not a cartoonist. That’s not a good law. If it were a computer program, we’d call it spaghetti code, kludge, dirty hack job (and be fired for writing it). And it creates unequal protection under the law based on choice of profession. I get that profession isn’t a protected class. But gender is, and as I’ve learned recently, wow a lot of moms take contractor gigs so they can have flexibility dividing their time between work and children.
I agree. Orcas are known to have multi-generational culture to at least a limited extent; perhaps orcas remember commercial whaling and know humans are skilled at killing whales when we choose to. Or maybe they could work that out just by observing what we can do today.

I doubt attacking humans would be good for orcas in the long run, and perhaps their intellect allows them to generally understand this while sharks don't. (Orcas don't even nibble on humans out of curiosity, so how would they know we don't taste delicious? In this regard sharks seem more curious than orcas, which is seems strange since they're otherwise very curious animals.)
I'll second the computers for cynics. I don't think one of that series is about blockchain but he does have other videos about blockchain.

For those who don't know computers for cynics is his series about questioning the origins of the status quo and considering alternative futures with different foundations.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzk...
This is why police sketches don't work well on people with close relationship to the subject of the sketch but work rather well for law enforcement and the general public.

When you rely on a sketch you don't rely on it being a photocopy of the subject but on specific features matching the actual appearance of the subject.

For example eye distance, brow height, nose shape, chin shape matching up 2-3 sketch features with a suspected target tend to lead to fairly high likelihood of a correct match.
It's currently on the main page of Hacker News with 61 points and lots of attention turned to it. Sadly, as long as people find this needlessly aggressive tone appropriate, we'll keep seeing this kind of stuff everywhere. It's like clickbait, fewer people would click on this if this was titled 'I have some issues with cloud messaging', I know I wouldn't.
Grounding a discussion of universal morality in Greek philosophy as a basis for condemning Jeffrey Epstein is a remarkable excercise at ignoring the elephant in the room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece

(This is not a defence of Epstein but a criticism of the article's argument and coherence.)
> You can leave a socket open in the background (although you do need a periodic keep alive but the period can be pretty long.) to receive push messages without draining the battery (as long as the server doesn’t spam it.).

This only works on a platform where apps can run in the background indefinitely. Small memory, limited CPU, and battery life means apps have short life-spans on phones.

This is why there is a push notification service for mobile platforms.
ahahahahahahaha.

You mean you can't define free will in those terms!?!?!? Who would have guessed....
Solzhenitsyn -- yes!

"A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" is profound, concise, and memorable.
Why do you think that? What part of the paragraph?

What aspect is over-humanized?
How to set up your own email server integrated with Nextcloud
The Coming Tech Cold War with China
Linear regression does not require errors to be iid, normal, and homoscedastic for it to "work". One of the ways to separate candidates is to push on what (and how) assumptions can be weakened, what the consequences are for estimation and inference, and what sort of corrections can be incorporated for maintaining consistency, improving efficiency, correcting biases, etc. An entry level candidate may not have (nor need to have) a complete understanding of asymptotic theory, but they should know what the purpose of robust standard errors are and how to use them.
Yeah except for your OS depending on python 2 and most python code you write being in python 3.
>several Palahniuk books

Could you recommend a couple for me to start with, please? Thank you.
Yeah it's really the Apple attitude. "We'll lock everything down so you can't screw it up".

First with iOS and now they're bringing this model with the Mac (on Big Sur you can't even edit config files in /etc anymore, I've been told).

I really hate that attitude, I feel the user should always have the final say in everything that happens on their device. Defaults are fine, locking stuff down is not. There should always be an override for the power user.
I'm talking about Google sequestering tensor cores and writing the distributed training code for g-cloud pods. Even your nice embedded inference device was designed with the hopes you'd grab some high performance compute to train something high quality. (These embedded devices are useless for training)
What about the person who drives for both Uber and Lyft?

My brother does that, and tells me most drivers he knows do the same.

Should they be employees?

And if so, can I work for Google and Apple at the same time as an employee?
Which may be appropriate for an exceptional piece of infrastructure capable of hosting heavy vehicles as well as cars.

If you are going to compare "infrastructure" then you have to compare everything, including how many people benefit - everyone who shops at a supermarket benefits from the road system even if they own no vehicle.
In addition to how good Mitch is, he's also one of the nicest people around. I recommend his twitch if you wanna watch him speedrun, these days he's grinding SMB 3 10% with a crazy hammer bros. manipulation.
"Silicon Valley North" checking in.
No but if that also narrows down the pool of people further with sufficient degree of accuracy it can arguably be a useful tool.

The only question here is does this actually work in reality and does it provide sufficient benefits without tramping on civil liberties and rights.