skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't wave your hands, chant "singularity" or "exponential growth" and actually have made an argument. Someone has to do the research - the singularity is not coming in 2050.

Progress in computer science, and the absurd utility of data handling improvements to other fields, has created an extremely unrealistic expectation in the minds of computer tech adjacent professionals about how quickly technology can actually develop, because the core technology of computing (more transistors) had a long period of exponential improvement due to the nature of how it's produced (lithography on 2D surfaces). Feature size shrinks give you exponential improvements.

But that period is ending for computing - there's no more room left in the silicon chip regime to keep doing it much past 6nm. And progress in other fields enjoys no such advantages: cellular biology for example, can't exponentially increase the time it to takes to grow a culture. They also can't shrink it easily - scaling biological research generally involves just scaling in size - facilities, space, grad students, everything. It is much more linear - there are very few easy wins beyond what improved informatics handling gave us (and where we did get big wins was the same mechanism - the availability of cheap silicon handling led to a rush to look for ways to capitalize on cheap silicon handling).

There's a reason computing is powering better surveillance, but brain-computer interface technology is moving exactly as fast as there are people working in the field, doing experiments, developing technology and doing slow, uncool research like patch-clamping single cells or whatever. Because the fundamentals are diverse, and there is no one single technical improvement which gives you a big scaling improvement (and everyone is hoping they'll find one).
> So I think he is justifiably happy that Apple created a fair competition by clearly spelling out the legal rules for everyone.

Thing is he's only happy because those rules are good for them. The way he talks about renting partial CPUs being somehow 'wrong' and makes them look like a ripoff is misleading. Just because you can get a VPS or hourly billed CPU time does not mean you can not get a full machine as well. But cost matters a lot, especially to smaller developers.
Every time I read news about fusion and all the optimism surrounding it, I always remember this 1983 paper that categorically proves how fusion will never happen on a commercial scale: http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...

Relevant discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782346

So, forgive me for not feeling any excitement anymore in my life about fusion. For me, fusion is just as meaningless as a flying skyscraper. I've yet to see anyone present a good rebuttal of that 1983 paper.
One cannot define the notion of “exist” without explicitly or implicitly referring to time. So the question of existence without time reduces to absurdity like can one exist without existing?
Chat with GitHub CTO on what's next for them and why they built an IDP
Last week I had the chance to catch up with Jason Warner on what an IDP is, why Github had to build one and why this is a new category of tools teams have to look at. To quote him: "If you slow down you die, if you care about not dying, this is one of those investments you make".

My key-takeaways:

IDPs are like Heroku on the tech and tools you use today. Which is an interesting way to put it because Jason was Herokus VP Eng.

There are pivotal moments in a team, such as adopting microservices, going multi-cloud or crossing a certain number of developers. Jason: “like having your first child, nothing will ever be the same again”.

Teams that are building on unstructured scripts get slow because of key-person dependencies and maintenance. Jason: “if you slow down you die.”

Serving internal developers matters as much as serving external companies.

He also talks about what's next for Github. Super interesting!

If you want to learn how to build your own Internal Developer Platform Christoph and myself are holding a webinar on how to do that on Dec 15th (link in the comments). Don't miss that and like, share and please spread the word!
People should wear masks; masks may help.

The real problem with scientists being overly optimistic about masks is that it causes some people to think they don't need to take any other measures - all the need to do is put a mask on. We see people saying that we should reopen pubs or churches (both places with serious risk of spreading covid) because we can get people to wear a mask.
> Someone points out Circle let’s you ssh in, while afaik GHA and Pipelines don’t

That's mostly a convenience feature, you can ssh into GH Actions' macOS instances through something like an ngrok tunnel, or run a terminal sharing tool within to basically do the same. See for instance https://github.com/fastai/fastmac. I doubt that's a key difference.
I can confirm that drinking together in VR pub worlds is a very popular activity in VRChat.
Docker is still super early in development, see the most recent update here: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/142#issuecomment-73...

I wouldn't expect official stable support to be available very soon. Even then, even if most of the official Docker image library will have ARM support, a ton of community images will need to be ported – all of this will take quite some time.
People like you don't actually understand the problem. It's not about technology or freedom of choice. It's a social problem. Good luck interacting in your free and open forum without anyone to interact with.
It's about social manipulation. We are gradually onboarded to these things, and your freedom of choice is suddenly not as easy. If you want to even communicate with your family and friends, you need to join in.
Well, it gets them enough that they bothered implementing all of the circuitry for both memory models and an extra bit of thread state to switch between them. I'm sure they did a bunch of simulation before going with that decision. I'm sure they did some simulations before going down that road and found that it was worth it vs. just going with a more strict x86-like memory model all the time.
Advent of Haskell 2020
I mean, I for one wouldn't be so bold as to claim that people are less sick here. For example the vast majority of my country is a holoendemic area for one of the world's deadliest diseases (malaria).

Although, speaking of which, it seems nearly certain to me that there could be an interaction between malaria [antibodies] and SARS-CoV2, but very few people indeed seem interested in researching that. Oh well
As weird as it is, I think as long as they provide an entire physical Mac you’re free to run as many macOS virtual hosts on it yourself as you want to. At least that’s my understanding of the EULA explained in the MacStadium blog post.
So, my major comparator for ease of installation is a statistical programming language called R.

Both Python and R have equal numbers of C/C++ dependencies, but the only breakage I experience is with Python.

This is for a number of reasons:

1) R has CRAN (like CPAN, but for R). If your package does not build on the latest version of R, it becomes unavailable.

2) if your package has C++ dependencies, the installation will error out and say which headers its missing. This means that I can search for the header and install it.

3) Because of the removal of obsolete packages, dependencies just work and you can be assured that a package will build with a given version of R. Updates can be a problem, but they are opt-in at the package level.

The core issue with Python is the acceptance that different projects can have entirely different dependencies, which means that this breakage is relatively common.

Like, I build C/C++ on a semi-regular basis, and it can be super-painful, but Python is the only higher-level language that gives me this heartache.

Not to mention that if you install pip from the Linux repositories, you're setting yourself up for a world of pain (this actually stopped me from learning Python for a number of years).

To be fair, I mostly use conda for C/C++ dependencies as it works much better, but lots of packages are still only available through pip, which means I can't avoid the problem.

To reiterate, I am super happy with this release of pip, as it will make my life much better. It doesn't go far enough, but it is much, much better than what existed before.

Finally, Python packaging is a horrible wart on an otherwise good language, and I'm probably going to argue against using it in the future because of this.
VPNs are required for corporate use of the machines. That's a fairly big market, I doubt it will go away quickly.
Rules to Improve Code Readability
Oh, so you're right. There it is right at the very top of the error.

So why couldn't the trace include that in that in the body?
The best present is receiving something you never knew you needed until you get it, so I love giving RAM (and SSD) for birthdays! That you can keep the same computer but that it simply becomes faster is a nice surprise for many.
Do correct me if I'm wrong, but Google's Widevine and similar DRM technologies seem to be. I have to manually install a blob in order to stream video from sites like Netflix.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Flash_to_HT...
Nice to see a version of this process for an UEFI kernel. ~2 years ago I was playing around with a similar LFS like, home made DIY distro myself which runs on an i586 router board and a Raspberry Pi.

Sadly this guide skips all the "fun parts" of bootstrapping your own compiler toolchain first, and instead downloads a pre-built one from a third party.

Based on my project, I also decided to write a small guide similar to this one, for the Raspberry Pi 3 as a target[1], but also included the toolchain bootstrapping process[2].

[1] https://github.com/AgentD/diy-linux-guide

[2] https://github.com/AgentD/diy-linux-guide/blob/master/crossc...
Apple will work with you if they think it is beneficial to them.
Who else was offering Mac Mini rentals prior to this change? MacStadium appears to be the only major player in the space prior to Amazon jumping in.
They would have been VMing on top of the machine provided by MacStadium.
I've been too afraid to short this stock - especially since it seems like all the information I know about it (Hindenburg report, few YouTube summaries of the situation) is public knowledge. I naively figured that information was priced in - yet, as recently as Friday this stock was trading at 28 dollars a share.

Following Nikola has really made doubt the capabilities of the stock market. It might be dangerous for me, I might begin to think a bit of reading and casual YouTube watching might make me informed enough to take meaningful positions. On the other hand, maybe it is...
So how do we know it's not an Uber style, use huge amounts of funds to lower prices, undercut the market, and become an unaccountable monopoly?
Yeah I think the issue here is more likely GitHub not following the EULA
Other than MacStadium already having that business model and their competitors that are hurt not having that model. They'd need to put in effort to transition at the very least.
This is all about a nebulous future virtual banking wallet that will be 10+ years away. How about Congress get back to their job and allow, for example, the USPS to offer simple, basic, current banking services to everyone at every location? Tie it into the Fed's upcoming instant transfer/payments service. This would do more for access and giving underserved/overcharged people a way to enter the economy than whatever cyber hype this is about.
Software designer by title, developer by heart.

Work includes full stack development, and some devops + continuous deployment responsibilities.

I feel being called a designer yet actually doing developer stuff sounds a bit deceiving. I'm employed by a small company which lets me do pretty much anything I'm interested in, so what the heck.
> variable adherence

But that's the point.

We know that distancing works. We know that hygiene works. We don't yet know whether masks work or not, but we do struggle to find benefit when research is done (and this includes for source control -- there's plenty of research on that).

When scientists claim "masks work, we know they work, and we know they work well" they risk feeding a narrative that we can go about our normal day to day life so long as we wear a mask. That's untrue. We still need to distance, we still need scrupulous hygiene routines.

They also feed into a narrative that people not wearing masks are causing harm, which leaves those people open to harassment and attack.
I haven't been to a physical bank to do any business in close to a decade. This looks like a USPS bailout package for what's largely another useless service other than doing package delivery. The "unbanked" can sign up for something like Ally.
It’s obvious that those are related, isn’t it? I want to have a powerful laptop which I can carry around all day. Yet latest Intel ultrabooks either throttle or get hot and loud. So much energy just get wasted on generating heat, that’s why passively cooled m1 looks like a wonder.
> Models can be of arbitrarily large sizes to the point where people really can’t understand them. How do you go about dissecting a 2 layer NN with 10^40th nodes?

I'd probably take the output of the first layer, and cluster it.

It would very much depend on what this NN was attempting to do.

Like, all of the work in this field does suggest that people value this feature, and its incredibly useful for debugging which is generally pretty hard in ML/statistics.

> It’s a vastly larger solution space. So it’s really the reverse that would be surprising.

Imagine a world in which linear models returned the entire matrix by observation rather than the coefficients. People would argue that it was uninterpretable, but it's a problem of tools.

I actually think that if you can instrument a model appropriately, then you can definitely build an interpretation layer on top of it. Clearly that doesn't make the model perform worse.

Even if you can't instrument it, you can run thousands of experiments changing one feature at a time and then estimate the impact of this feature on the model. Granted, that's not practical on many problems, but neither were deep NN's a decade ago.
Brian Stucki here. If I had the power over Apple that you think I do, I definitely would have pushed for iPhone Socks first.

Joking aside, the software license agreement was certainly a cause for personal celebration. It might be helpful for you to compare macOS 11 to previous versions. (Linked in my post.) If I/MacStadium did anything, we showed that there was a need for this sort of service and that both Apple and developers would benefit with some official way to do it. Amazon joining is further proof of that.

I’ve always pushed for the safe road at MacStadium (and my company Macminicolo before that) even if it meant losing out on gray area business. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve answered “but what if Apple shuts this service down?” Not anymore.

With the new Eula, the guidelines are now set. Doing everything above board paid off.
You reference a blog post on your Github (regarding the algo description). I believe the author of that blog (someone at Ferrous Systems) has a pretty significant misunderstanding of DMA and serial ports, which raises a whole host of other questions on down the chain <additional unnecessary comment removed>.

edit: I know it's not cool to complain about downvotes, but this is a legitimate concern to raise for this poster. I am not attempting to denigrate anyone here.
Then, make desktops/laptops with 4 or 8 channels. We'd need more dimms, of a smaller size.
>You. can. make. own. browsers

You can't make your own browser anymore. The complexity of HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and soon QUIC (in place of TCP) has grown to the point where only a handful of large, well-capitalized institutions (and really only Google, if you consider WebKit's ubiquity) can develop and maintain a secure, efficient, modern web browser. Most alternative browsers, even forks of Firefox/Mozilla, have either been abandoned, or fallen so far behind that they have no future.

This is almost certainly deliberate on Google's part. They want to control the browser, because outside of apps, it's through the browser that they deliver ads, and over 80% of their revenue comes from ads, and the more they control the browser, the harder they can make it to block ads. They don't even have to prevent it fully; just make it so difficult that only a small minority of technically-inclined, and sufficiently motivated users will do it.
Blaming agents, that are making locally optimal decisions due to the incentives present in the game, for the system being stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium is a very boring critique. Almost, as boring as asking why people get stuck in traffic, when effectively there is only one highway in the region connecting two important points.

In this particular case, the incentives are as follows. Initially, facebook set up the game so that the condition of every agent, as well as the global equilibrium improved if people used facebook. Later on, facebook changed things around, so that the global equilibrium became suboptimal.
> but the word has come to mean something different

No, it hasn't. If you're using "VM" to include bare metal, then you are using the wrong term for something. The definition of the word "virtualization" has not changed.
It did actually. The course has many examples of situations and how would you describe them.
Also I use Grammarly pro in order to improve my writing.
AI Solves 50-Year-Old Biology 'Grand Challenge' Decades Before Experts Predicted
Yeah, next is to try something with a powerful light/laser!!!
We have hundreds if not thousands homeless and heroin consuments in the capital of Switzerland. However not many deaths. There are multiple things including giving them straight up clean heroin for, free that really helped getting this 'under control'.
> Sorry could you explain that? Do Google now run courses and place value on having completed them in interviews?

Yes. They are slowly offering those options along with other tech companies.

I think Shopify has the best model: https://devdegree.ca/
I’ll be interested in how long they keep OS versions. This would be really compelling for me if I could run 10.11+ rather than just 10.14 and 10.15.
More developers should start content businesses
That's a really good idea.

I cannot help to think that this is connected to the horrid economic theory about "cost" and "profit" centers. The sales team create income, and the customer support is just a cost, so why spend any money on them? Why even have them here, can we move them to India?
The reason is they hired the XFS developers from SGI. And they bought Sistina for LVM. As a result, they have been wedded to both XFS and LVM for many years now, because there is likely a combination of wanting to maximise their investment into these technologies and developing the in-house expertise to support them very well, and also in having a number of staff who are deeply committed to them and don't want to change.

At some level, they must understand that both XFS and LVM are over 25 years old, and when compared with e.g. ZFS, are completely outclassed. Their current efforts developing Stratis, which is an attempt to provide more ZFS-like functionality by extending XFS, adding LVM thin pools, and managing it all with an unholy complex combination of daemons, D-BUS and Python looks like a logical progression based upon what they have to hand in house, but a strategic mistake when it can never approach ZFS in functionality or reliability simply because these technologies can only be extended so far because of fundamental design limitations. I'll be morbidly interested to see what they can stretch XFS to do. But I won't be using it myself.

What I find really surprising here is that Linux in general, and RedHat in particular, don't have a competitive filesystem to offer. There is absolutely nothing which matches ZFS.
Who else gets paid in commissions in a SaaS business?

Seems like there really shouldn't be any reason for being paid in commissions.
There's a common category error I find grating in discussions about technology and tech companies, in which both engineers and business people are called "tech people", and the label "tech" is extended to cover business of companies that sell technology products and services.

The consequence of that is a worryingly common rhetoric of pointing out various negative impacts of "technology" on society, which in fact are just age-old problems of businesses abusing people - just in this case, the businesses sell technology products and services. But I guess it's more refreshing to say that "technology is ruining society" and unload it on engineers, instead of talking about the real problem - the same usual failure modes of capitalism that have been identified 100+ years ago.
Super Tiny Icons in SVG
> In 1988 when Dijkstra wrote this piece, cognitive science journals were only about a decade old, and learning sciences wasn’t established until the 1990s.

Cognitive science is a re-branding of earlier work in psychology, and constructivism has been around since the late 50's (see Jerome Bruner's work).

It's potentially a sad commentary on academia that fields appear to ignore other fields more than N hops away, where N>=2.
He's saying that when consumers routinely buy products that need to be serviced by first parties, over devices that can be opened and repaired by the end user, the market is voicing its opinion on whether reparability has value to them.

I personally prefer the latter, but I also don't think that people loving Macbooks or integrated ARM SoCs is going to change whether I can get a Thinkpad where I can upgrade the RAM with a Philips head.

Sure, it might cost a little more further down the line, maybe Intel won't be the behemoth it's been for the last 25 years, but if most people are willing to pay for their black box to get repaired, why does that mean the government needs to step in?

It's been happening in the car market too: even entry-level sedans are becoming black boxes more and more, but people snatch 'em up.

I should also say I'm very much in favor of the "right to repair", but more in the vein of "you can't legally forbid me to repair my John Deere tractor" than in the vein of "Apple shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to any repair shop that demands them".
I think the key factor is not the size, but the type of management: Apollo, SpaceX (and the Manhattan project for that matter) all had technical leadership, and where headed by people who could basically have pulled the whole project off with a sufficient number of clones of themselves.

ITER is under MBA/Political management. Even if the management team had all the time in the world, they could not complete the project on their own.

Especially in ground-breaking projects, this makes a huge difference. With many options open, deciding on how to proceed requires cross-subsystem trade-offs and weighing many different risks and challenges against each other: things that will grind any non-technical leadership to a halt as they request piles upon piles of reports from their underlings.
Macminicolo has been around since at least 2005. They were acquired by MacStadium in 2016 though.
In New Zealand they can have in-person meetings if they want.
You too easily assume people who are unbanked have access to the internet.