skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article describes an attempt to create a "one true colorspace" by using fMRI to look at people's brain activity as they view colors, which is an interesting idea.

One of the questions asked at the beginning of the article is “Why are there so many different color spaces?” he asks. “If this is really reflective of something fundamental about how we see and perceive, then shouldn’t there be one color space?”

There are multiple color spaces mostly because we generate, measure and communicate color spaces in different ways. Active displays (monitors) tend to use some kind of additive color space (e.g. RGB) where the default is "black" and we add various amounts of selective wavelengths to generate colors. Passive displays (printing) tend to use a subtractive space (e.g. CYMK) with a full spectrum (white) reflective surface (or backlight) and then selectively block certain frequencies. Paint colors have their own (proprietary) color spaces based what set of colorants and paint bases are available for mixing.

For transmission of images as data, we tend to use other color spaces (e.g. YCrCb) that actually do map to something like the average of human color sensitivity, as that provides less visual color distortion when quantized to fewer bits.

All these color spaces exist in parallel because they are optimized for different purposes.

And of course color perception varies from person to person. In addition to the various types and degrees of color blindness, a very small % of people appear to have super color sensitivity [1]. I also expect that an fMRI of someone looking at colors would give very different results depending on whether their languages support the blue-green distinction [2].

So I wish them luck, but I doubt there will ever be a "one true color space".

[1] http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Machine Learning / NLP Video Playlist
Sure, but that's not an argument to give up.
You’ve used enterprise products before right? Making it painful to use is basically priority number one.
> There are a lot of great things about it, but it has never held much sway in my mind

On the contrary, it feels like veganism holds quite a lot of sway in your mind.

Based on my understanding, you have created an imaginary idealised version of veganism, so that you can mentally reject its imperfections, while recognising that this version would still hold some value. All the best.
Guess what - most cloud providers are like that. My personal experience is with GCP where stuff can be majorly on fire and no status update for hours. Cloud SLOs are lies like a lot of other things there
Another under utilized feature is using JSON schema for enforcing the shape of all documents. In my opinion the lack of a strict shape (which developers choose to do for short term speed gains) is one of the biggest pitfalls that could easily be solved.
Nope. See the version with the lines. https://twitter.com/Jakesaurius/status/1331543133910396929

The illusion has nothing to do with the arrows, but the circles still don't move.
UBC students accused of cheating on a math midterm
Ah it's not even free? That's misleading. Theres the option to download etc on their page but no results for "pricing". I hate that they try to make you invest in them first then you get shown the fee. I cant say I'm the biggest fan of false advertising or dark patterns against me.
Ask HN: Recommendation on Apple Hardware for iOS Development
I did a small amount of iOS development a few years back on borrowed hardware, notably a 2014 MacBook Pro and a 2011 (maybe newer) MacBook Air. Don’t remember much about the machines outside that.

Now I’m looking at MacBooks. I’m not overly familiar with their lines but I’m a bit concerned. The newer Pro with the M1 is capped at 16GB (my main machine has 64GB these days) and I’m a bit weary of an Arm processor in a product labeled “pro”. Most of the laptops I’ve seen with Arm processors are rather low end, maybe good lightweight, everyday use, but I would be weary to use them for development. The larger MacBook Pro seems not to have the memory limit and does not advertise the M1 (which for all I know could be fine), however the base price is much higher. From my understanding the Air is cheaper and smaller, but I don’t recall the specs or know if they would perform well for development.
This is by far my biggest gripe with Apple. Almost everything else they do can be justified by some mental gymnastics, but their suppression of the web on iOS is something I can't forgive.

The size of their user base demands that we don't ignore Safari when developing sites, but they simultaneously refuse to support modern standards. They are literally holding back the web.
You mind telling us how to get started?
My uncle's shop was exactly like that, and that Xenix box, and then osr5, was where I cut my teeth.

He is on a linux box now of course, but that last osr5 install was actually migrated to new hardware twice before finally getting the app onto linux.

There was much to like and dislike about SCO.

Even back before the later lawsuit people took over, it was a bit ridiculous to ship a system where you had to pay extra (after already paying $1200 or so, in '92 dollars) just to get a compiler, and extra again for tcp. They tried to justify it that most installs didn't need that stuff so by splitting them off you could pay less for just that parts you need. But that kind of doesn't wash when the most basic subset was already ridiculous.

But I liked it in most other ways. It was limited and annoying by todays standards, and definitely osr5 failed to advance and became terrible to use in comparison with everything else after a while, while still somehow demanding a big price tag.

But earlier, it was as good or better than anything else at that same time. People did a lot with it. I did a lot with it.

One thing that was wonderful from a small custom back end software seller point of view, practically zero support overhead. You install the box and your software, and forget about it. The customer calls when they want something new or when some hardware breaks. Proper administration was what they would call neglect today. One guy could have 150 customers out there and spend 1% of his time supporting past installs.

And 10 years after doing your first install, your latest install used practically identical steps and knowledge. All those 150 systems that were installed spread over a 10 or 15 year period, they all worked the same way. They were all practically identical to each other even though version numbers and hardware drivers changed.

That is a level of efficiency and low overhead that we'll never see again.

Today you might be able to magic up 150 servers in a few seconds and a few lines of cloud orchestration config code, but tomorrow everything you learned to do that today will be different, and you better stay actively on top of monitoring them, none of this fire & forget like ye olden dayes.
Ask HN: Any consumer software distributed as a VM?
Was just reading the "pimutils" article, and realizing that it's python dependent gave me a sudden pang of doubt, because I've always had an uneasy relationship with my python installations. Then I realized that you could solve this by shipping a Dockerfile that installs pimutils and its deps, and then someone else might build an image, and someone else might embed the image in Virtual Box and white label it as an ordinary .EXE.

Stranger things have happened, right?
The other main issue is bandwidth. For a CRL, Apple has to serve the full list of revoked serial numbers (or some shard of it), even if 90% of users don’t have 90% of the revoked apps installed. I can’t remember where I read this, but I recall that after the Heartbleed disclosure one CA saw their CRL traffic grow by some number in the gigabits per second. Bandwidth is relatively cheap, but still not free (without even considering the argument of “do I need to know that the cert for an app that I will never use is revoked?”).
Danish Nuclear Startup Taps Billionaire for Asian Reactor
Honestly, a lot of it is the community. The strongest advocates for crypto tend to have a lot of wince factor.

* The most prominent actual merchants taking crypto first or only (as opposed to a novelty 13th choice between PayPal and money-order-in-an-envelope) are in it because no conventional financial platforms will touch them (Silk Road style stuff, ransomware, etc.).

* The "irreversibility" crowd. The people who are convinced that all their profits are going out the window because of the cost of honouring refunds and chargebacks, and if only we used a payment method that didn't support them... normal people tend to classify "the system will make you whole if stolen from" as a feature, not a bug.

* The "it's independent and self-governing" crowd. These are the same people who blame their gout on the Federal Reserve and 20 years ago were buying Liberty Dollars. Money is a tool, and it makes sense to have the tool be bendable to public needs, not dogmatically hard-coded into economic rictus.

* The FOMO/HODL crowd inherently keeps cryptocurrency from developing legitimacy. What is a dollar, rouble, or yuan worth? It's how much goods and services you can get for it, and that being relatively stable and predictable allows people to build an economy around it. Until we get a critical mass of actual commerce occurring in cryptocurrency, we can't say "what is a Bitcoin worth" in the same way, and instead we have speculators tossing the value wildly up and down from day to day.
It's not the court that does the justification, it's the administration that has to. It has to be litigated in the court because, well, no other branch of the government has the power to decide that someone is violating the law.
Agree, I believe it's because of the comments... also, tried resubmitting the correct link and it broke too, had to use a shortener: https://bloom.bg/3q5IJXE
https://bloom.bg/3q5IJXE
> It's a subscription because the value you get depends on how long you use it

Isn’t that true of all things you purchase?
If quantum-computing sees broad application, middle-schoolers will be speaking the language of bras and kets within a decade.
So, kind of the reverse of the Stonehenge gag from This Is Spinal Tap.
This is actually a really good explanation.
Apple hobbles PWAs on iOS, so unless app creators want to ignore the most profitable segment of the mobile marketplace PWAs aren’t a solution
probably, but you'd probably get better mileage (and modern support out of a pretty active academic community) out of doing that with xv6: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2020/xv6.html
Great job. I largely agree with the concepts in this well thought out paper. I have built several commercial grade products and the front-end is always where the most pain and cost exist. By a long shot. If someone doesn't agree this layer needs a serious overhaul, they are not the ones paying the bill or have not build a large scale commercial product.

HTML and CSS are not clean, intuitive, or efficient beyond simple examples. Masters of these tools sadly have their heads full of legacy hacks and trickery needed to get content to display properly. Thank goodness there has been some consolidation on the V8 engine because without it, the hacks between browsers had already become exponential.

Contrast this with algorithms, the middle-tier, and databases. These tools, while not perfect, are far better able to express developer intentions and therefore be maintained.

Sadly, the Web stack has largely become popular due to OS politics. JS/HTML/CSS is the only real loophole devs currently have to build cross-platform products, which everyone wants because the expectations from users today are so high (expected to run everywhere on any device). It is good that we at least have this direction to build upon, but it doesn't mean that this is the ideal tech stack. There is alot of improvement to be had here.

For example, consider how much good VS Code and Typescript have brought to this space in recent years. The concepts of types, intellisense, async/await, and other efficiencies are great examples of historically native benefits brought to the Web.

Good work here. Keep pressing on - I salute you. Please consider making any progress you have made here open for review and validation. Cheers!
What would happen if you replace "performance" in this article with "not contrast enough UI" or "bad autocorrect" or "annoying background music"? Should this article have been "Good autocorrect matters"?

The problem here isn't performance. The problem here is that the company which is building this software are so remote from end-user that they don't hear feedback.

If they knew that performance is the problem and multidollar contract with some huge network of hospitals were at risk, I can bet you, this performance issues would have been fixed really fast.
Yeah, as far as I know they run 5 machines with these specs for the actual conferences now - still encountering these issues and no end of covid in sight for the near future, so I hope that they can figure it out.
But if the product is ok and useful at a cost which users to not want to pay, it’s just a matter of time before equivalent features get integrated into video calling platforms directly.
I agree. I mean I get it that it's for open source, and so therefore can be straight to the point. But it's missing a lot that would be easily recommendable, like clear calls to action; there isn't a clear option to Contribute or Support, or one pathway to Learn More.
> If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper, I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy.

I'm curious about this, and there are some ways we could test it if we had access to sales data.

Amazon sells a Kindle that displays ads on the screen while the device is asleep, and a more expensive model without ads. How many people buy the one without ads? (I'm assuming the device sends back a record as to what ads were seen or interacted with, which has privacy implications.)

Hulu has a plan that shows adverts when you watch a show, and a more expensive plan that doesn't. How many people pay for the more expensive plan?

More generally, what's the price spread that would cause most people to flip from buying one version or the other? To use your example, I'm sure most people would pay for a "mac with privacy" if the difference (on a multi-hundred-dollar or $1k+ product) was only $10. But what if the difference was $50? $100?

And that's not even the exact same example, since a "mac with privacy" might look, to the average user, to be identical in operation to the "mac without privacy". Paying more to avoid advertisements has a clear impact on the experience of using a device/service. But knowing that your $X-more-expensive mac isn't sending application launch data to Apple doesn't change your day-to-day experience much.
Because then you don't have to download and install an app
You can purchase it in pretty much any amount, down to amounts that are pennies each. But that's not the point. The point is how it behaves, and the market forces that drive its price movement.
Check out how much a computer cost the year you were born (2018)
I did a lot of data processing, and about 1/4 of the year was grant proposals.
You could, at rush hour, drive to microcenter, buy all the components, drive to home depot and buy a generator and gas can, go back to the office and assemble everything, fill and turn on the generator...in less time than this outage has lasted. I think generally more people are concerned about the scope and length of the outage, rather than that outages occur. And in this instance the fact that they aren't admitting to their downtime at all...
It's exactly how email spam filters evolved.

They used to be completely local and even some DIY solutions, evolved to signature updates, but eventually the attacks grew so advanced that only online services could be updated and aggressive enough, which is of course how gmail took over the internet with near perfect spam filter (when was the last time you checked a gmail spam folder).

The last generation of local spam filters were pretty good though. Anyone remember Eudora and Spamnix?
But it will boot and run. It has other display outputs you may use.
You are gate keeping by saying that you have to have some intangible special quality to be a "software developer". This is a toxic view that spreads doubt and division inside people.

Programming isn’t special. If someone wants to do it for a job, so be it. Shame on you for trying to gatekeeper what they learn or do.
When Will the 200Bth Person Be Born?
Right, and given that those certificates expire after some finite amount of time, this wouldn't be a forever-growing CRL, as expired certs could be dropped from the file periodically.
I worked with SF extensively. I agree the APIs are complex. Mule though is the worst. Mule is like Talend. It compiles everything in to Java. Mule’s Anypont studio is an Eclipse shell. Mule fools decision-makers with their Informatica wizard GUI. But you are forced into using Anypoint Studio if you want to do anything beyond beside a copy.
Forks?
I've fixed things all my life. I just fixed a wireless mouse by harvesting a switch from a wired mouse in my junk bin. It took not much more time than ordering a new mouse.

I get that things have gotten smaller. I can't do transistor level repairs when the transistors are 7 nanometers across.

I've fixed nearly every appliance in my house, some twice or more.

What I've learned is that a remarkable number of repairs involve something that is basically mechanical, and big enough to work on, if you can get at it. I resoldered the headphone jack on my son's cell phone.

But design measures that frustrate repair and don't really add much value, such as tamper proof screws, prevent what might otherwise be a perfectly legitimate and easy repair. That bothers me. Design features that seem to gratuitously frustrate repairs. IP built into components to prevent aftermarket replacement parts from working.
While being satire, this page makes some good arguments - http://n-gate.com/software/2017/07/12/. You will need to copy the link and paste it into a new tab, as it blocks HN refers.
> I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy.

What "privacy" means here is a huge issue.
I would not agree that this would be the case.
I think you'll find the majority looking to save 10$, which is almost nothing for many people but a non-trivial amount for most in the US.
I have known scientists to hold a view to the effect of Math > Science > Tech > ...

So, yea, you are the "tech" guy, but this is not necessarily an exultation
Very much agree, this is a fishing expedition where you can come to pretty much any conclusion.

1. the regions of sky that the signal might have come from are huge, and contain tons of stars.
2. he's basically just sifting through all the stars in a huge area of space and looking for ones with Sol like parameters.

That's not science, but that said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't have a look and listen at the star if it really is a great candidate.

When Kepler started returning data, so much of it was unexpected that at the very least now we have a star name that if future scientists are looking to compare their data set with other findings, they may see "oh this 2mass star was hypothesized to be the wow signal by a crank, but we just found X there!"

It's tricky of course, because it's hard for a normal person (I am assuming) to tell the difference between some dude who uploads a neat thing to arXiv and someone who stakes their career and livelihood on the science they produce.
I'm about as anti-Google as it comes, but I didn't even mind the first incarnation of reCaptcha as a concept. You prove that you're human, and you also help transcribe books so that they're more accessible/searchable! Sure, it's in Google's interest in that it improves Google Books, but it at least seems like a symbiotic exchange (to, e.g. humanity in general.)

Contrast that with today's form of reCaptcha where you identify stop signs/crosswalks/et c. for Google's benefit, but at the same time you're also improving...oh, wait, Google again. It almost seems like forced labor, in a sense.
By the way, there is also a LibGen plugin[1] for Calibre book manager and reader.

[1] https://github.com/MCOfficer/LibGen-calibre
A fantastically bad take. "You're more secure because Apple has been careless with your privacy for a long time and you didn't complain before -- be grateful."
A related technique is generating an index using a machine learned model (well explained here: https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/08/the-case-for-learned-ind...). In interpolation search, we just use a simple linear model. Kraska and co. use much more complex models to beat BTree indexes. However, the Recursive Model Indexes (RMIs) that they published (https://github.com/learnedsystems/RMI) use Rust to a C++ model that is exported as a library, so it definitely doesn't seem ready for production yet!
I didn't mention this, but the provide I mentioned, LunaNode, is only available in (eastern) Canada and France. I don't know a lot about the labor markets of Canada or France, but I have very much wondered whether that plays a part in what offers LunaNode can make. Also not sure what energy costs are in eastern Canada!

On a technical note, seems like ping times from LunaNode to LA are expected to be a bit over 70 ms.
Utilimarc – The leading business intelligence platform for fleets
> Any software vendor CAN be nefarious.

I'm glad you finally realized this! And thats why people should use FOSS.
> It sounds like that's how it used to work, and then it changed for some reason, maybe to do with the size of the list and a need for faster updates.

If that's true, that's a lazy excuse on Apple's part. Differential updates has been a solved problem for many, many years. Hourly or even daily diffs would be tiny (likely much less traffic than the OCSP checks that occur now), and expired certs could be dropped from the local store, so it wouldn't grow without bound. (Sure, ok, people could turn their clocks back and defeat that last bit, but doing that would break other things, too, like TLS to any website with a reasonably recent cert.)
From the labs I've worked in, I think the Russians would already know you weren't given the security of a lot of researchers' systems, maybe not national labs/NASA, but I even did some work at Goddard Space Flight Center and it was an ancient lab that definitely had live internet Ethernet wires here and there that systems were plugged into doing... stuff.
"It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1982 my family and the entire country was at war with an Argentinean dictator, when suddenly Margaret Tatcher, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the Argentine dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, Argentine people felt betrayed by England."

It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1939 my family and the entire country was at war with an GERMAN dictator, when suddenly WINSTON CHURCHILL, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the GERMAN dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, GERMAN people felt betrayed by England.
Commodity 5G can solve last mile to fiber stations. It doesn't have to be telcos.

Starlink will eat into exurbs, outer suburbs, and disgruntled customers.

Both will be viable competition at the 200 mbit level, and will drive down Comcast costs.
possibly a candidate for an Ask HN post - I don't use one so can't recommend but "self hosted kanban" does produce some pretty clear top results.