skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why are you presuming that there weren’t warning signs of this being an issue, perhaps detected in July and then decided on the course of action by August with the public details of how bad it was starting to slowly trickle out. I recall reading a precursor news article before the details about SolarWinds coming out and that’s an external source from SolarWinds and the government agencies involved starting to get wind of the damage. It’s entirely possible the FBI was sleeping on the job too, so focused on electoral interference that blinded them to a different avenue of attack if it was indeed the Russians behind it. This indicates our government is wholly incompetent at securing our infrastructure. This is a drum beat warning I’ve heard since the 90s when I was a teenager. Our focus on offense rather than on industry wide defense means our IT culture is wide open to attack. That being said it’s also entirely possible this is broadly true but I have seen no evidence of America making attacks of this nature. Our attacks can be more devastating and technically accomplished, but I’ve seen no evidence of us having the ability and using it of making targeted quick strikes at an enemy’s interior weak spots as a constant source of irritation. We do things like Stuxnet or threatening Russia’s power grid for relatively cheaper attacks. Basically we try to fight a gun war with nukes and we don’t have any guns.
Because you eliminate uncertainty by imposing your own standard, the adoption of which financially benefits you.
It could mean that the others are all doing what management wants them to do without wading into contentious but important areas. Simply having a team hired is wonderful propaganda for Google management because people can make exactly this claim without going into specifics.
Ubisoft-Backed Blockchain RPG Lets Players 'Fork' the Game
Sensible and minimal starting Emacs configuration
As a counter-example of this phenomenon I think the character of Joe MacMillan from Halt and Catch Fire moved away from being a sociopathic manipulator with infinite charisma in the first two seasons and ended up as someone with sincere/honest intentions and genuine empathy for others without needing to exploit them for his goals.

I was a little disappointed to see them tone down this aspect of his character, which made for some compelling scenarios in the first two seasons. Nonetheless I’m happy that they gave him a more nuanced arc, even if it did make for less captivating TV.

Granted, the show is not a sitcom, so perhaps it’s not a great example.
And then you see the train scene in Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker which is essentially the same, but so well placed and carried out that it stays with you for life.

When I applied for film school, two different film schools had a no music rule for the application process. This rule was in hindsight mainly meant to weed out very bad applications who would try to drown out other issues with music, but it was also a rule meant to be broken.

I feel very much the same as you do about the musical interlude: it mostly gives me nothing and throws me out, despite (or because?) me being a musical person who likes music.
It's credited in the article, but it's actually from subnormality, which is a great comic, if wordy. I recognized the style immediately.

http://www.viruscomix.com/subnormality.html
Which connection? So far as I understand it there was no definitional collusion between Trump and Russia specifically but I don't know about Assange.
Could bringing suits against both Facebook and Google within weeks of each other be used in court to argue that the case is politically motivated?
Most of these ideas can be done with LimeSDR or USRP B210.
Is there one that doesn't require logging with Facebook?
> The states are whatever.

The state attorneys general extracted hundreds of billions from Big Tobacco as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement.

Sorry, but the states are hardly "whatever."

The EU on the other hand levies pitiful fines repeatedly, and nothing changes. Then, at the same time they pass rules like GDPR, which disproportionately harm small competitors and thus help monopolies like Google and Facebook that an afford to comply.

I'd put my money on the several states' attorneys general.
In what way is it "supposed to be against the GPL"?
Yes, I thought about it and touched on it in the article. I just didn't want to mess with the control unit given how old the building is, I'm renting, and I have no prior experience in wiring electrical stuff. Also by doing like that, I run the risk of ruining something in the control unit and living without temp control until my landlord feels like fixing it.
> When you use Win32 you get the latest fixes and features even in applications that haven't been updated for two decades - for example you get new common dialogs and access to shell extensions (e.g. TortoiseSvn/Git integration) that didn't exist back when those applications were made.

What you're describing is not backward compatibility, it's forward compatibility.

The OS is backward compatible with old applications that continue to run. The old applications are forward compatible with newer versions of the operating system including some of the new features that are added.

Achieving backward and forward compatibility (the combination is often called "full compatibility") is actually quite difficult. The resources Microsoft throws at this problem and the related coordination costs are massive (and conversely, the progress any individual developer sees on their particular tasks is often glacial)[0]. In the open source world, I think only web browsers typically see anything resembling a similar level of effort applied to evolving the platform while maintaining compatibility with extant (and often buggy) code, and that's still a much smaller problem (though it might not be after another decade or two), since for all intents and purposes, the web as a whole is a "rolling release" system with bugs and incompatibilities popping up and being fixed constantly.

[0] http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Nice! I went back and forth on the different Sunny bikes to be honest. My biggest issue so far with Fitness+ is that it doesn't sync up with the cadence sensor as I wrote about. If you have an Apple TV then that is ideal as you can use your phone for the cadence. I really like the Apple Watch integration, i have a video on the blog. I am enjoying the 1 month trial and hope they improve it.
>The average number of internet service providers a household has to choose from drops every year.

In the US, there's always been only 2 companies with wires going to people's houses, the phone company and the cable company. And for 99% of people, the choice is shitty DSL at 3Mbps which doesn't really count as broadband, or okay-ish cable internet with no upload capacity.
Star Trek TOS actually had very little action in it, it was mostly talking. The more recent movies were all explosions and action, not characters.
There are people in prison for drug possession charges, but sure, Dread Pirate Roberts deserves clemency, because he's white and was into bitcoin
Alan Kay's clarification on “arrogance is measured in nano-Dijkstras.”
So what does that say about the relative strengths of the players between chess.com and lichess.com? That chess.com has the more elite players from lichess.com and so the lichess.com players are weaker on average than the chess.com players?
Very informative explanation, thank you very much! I now get the advantages and I might try this out one day (:
There’s a project to help bridge Rust and C++ https://cxx.rs/
Which species is better at communicating inter-species than we are?
Yes, I see how the article literally says this is not a Wankel, but rather an "inverse Wankel". Taking many of the main ideas behind another engine and using those ideas to make your own (with different key features) does not make it the same engine.

My saying you don't have the "right to disagree" was a response to your ludicrous assertion that an engine can be whatever you want it to be, not what it is. Any ludicrousness coming from that is purely a function of how ridiculous your original response was.
The Schwinn bike (same hardware as Bowflex C6) has a power meter built in too, not just cadence, so it can calculate speed and works with apps like Zwift.
Seinfeld, NewsRadio, and Frasier

I'm not familiar with NewsRadio, but both Seinfeld and Frasier are simply named after the main character. This inherently gives the show some latitude.

But, say, Three's Company was based on the premise that this guy was pretending to be gay in order to justify living with two women because they all were pretty poor and he couldn't find another place. That's pretty constraining as to what you can do with the plot line.

It means that any episode that was at the beginning holding out hope that one of the characters would suddenly start making more money and be able to afford to move or something was an episode where the viewer could confidently predict that this would fall through because if it didn't you no longer had a show with the premise that some guy needs to pretend he's gay in order to have an affordable housing situation where he lives platonically with two women.

What's funny there is the tension of, no, they aren't having a threesome. No, he's not sleeping with either of the women. No, he's not really gay, but most people would never believe he's honest to god just living with two women to split the rent if he weren't pretending to be gay.

It's funny because it casts some light on a lot of serious social issues in a way that's socially acceptable to poke fun at, but it's extremely contrived and you can't otherwise try to address those kinds of topics. They are too hot button.

So you can't do it humorously without an extremely contrived situation and you can't do it in earnest without it being terrible drama.

Humor is one of the ways society processes hot button topics and works through them without it turning into terrible real life conflict.
That's new to me. Here's a similar one you might enjoy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
The last part about the thermostat daemon is pretty cool. I set the system to always switch off when it turns on.

How fancy do you plan to go with the control logic?
This $5 campaign surely is a positive way to begin 2021! Let's upgrade.
Read this comment directly after the sibling comment by hombre_fatal. Really made hombre_fatal's comment hit home for me. Haha
There is a level between installing wordpress plugins and creating state of the art massive scale infrastructure. And its likely where most developers sit.

I work on a project management application. Its pretty much entirely custom code with little external libraries but it also requires very little computer science theory. The problems I face are less "Find the fastest way to search this datastructure" and more "This code was designed for a legacy model of the system, how can we replace it with something modern without spending months on it"
Sounds really interesting, could you please elaborate? Is this (or parts of it) available to the public somewhere?
> - Able to easily modify (and recompile) a function while your code is running

I do this all the time with Clojure at work. I will have my application running (web app) with two repls in emacs. One is connected to the ClojureScript repl and one to the Clojure repl. I am able to make changes to both front end code and back end code on the fly by changing a function and then evaluating the function into the repl. I can start the application when I get in to work in the morning and have it going all day a while I'm doing my work.

> Able to sabe the complete running state of the system (the "image" of the system, including state of all variables, data, loaded libraries, compiled functions, etc) into a file so it can be restarted later, just like Smalltalk does.

> - Able to inspect any stack frame at will and to restart execution from any chosen stack frame

Those are really cool features, are they in the base language or are they libraries that you would need to include?

If I may ask, are you using Common Lisp professionally? If so, what kinds of applications do you use it for? I've had this notion, as many others seem to have in this thread, that you don't really do anything professional with CL but I realize it is just ignorance on my part.
I had a VW Vanagon and thought it handled well. Nearly perfect 50:50 weight distribution on front and rear wheels and a super tight turning radius. That thing could do a U-turn on a two-lane road. Power was pretty pathetic though. It would do 70mph, maybe 72 on the highway.
My wife was convinced I had suffered some kind of major head injury after I made her watch/listen to this.

I still think it's incredibly cool and cute though.
Regardless of you feelings on the merits of the case and feelings about Google, understand this: The Texas AG is under indictment for a felony (https://www.texastribune.org/2019/06/19/ken-paxton-criminal-...). His top staff resigned en masse or have been fired after accusing him of crimes (https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/paxton-employees-res...). He is under investigation by the FBI (https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/10/sub...)

He appears to be bringing cases with the goal of securing a pardon for himself.
Significant new inventions in computing since 1980
That and deliberate choice to improve readability, hence the choice of writing in script letters instead of cursive, which is more natural and faster to write when handwriting.
I had never heard of µZero before this, just AlphaGo.
They should publish a magazine.
I disagree that hooks increase the API surface. They decrease the React API.

Before hooks, if you wanted a stateful component you had to use class components with all of their specific methods (didMount, didUpdate, shouldUpdate, render etc).

Hooks allow functional components to have state, and a functional component in and of itself has an even smaller API than the class. The React API vastly decreases. A single hook, useEffect, replaces at least 3 methods (didMount, didUpdate, willUnmount) that previously had to written out separately in class components. Each of those methods had to contain logic for ALL your state and side effects so they could very easily grow in scope and be responsible for handling many things.

Now each individual concern can be packaged up in its own useEffect call. If I have state that is relevant to the useEffect call, than I just build my own custom hook that binds the stateful data with the useEffect.

Because hooks are just functions built up from other hooks, I'm no longer constrained by the React API (its effectively gone) and I can so much more easily the abstractions I need that can be shared across components.
I have contempt for a lot of the things that Google does, but I have a sincere question about all of this. Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? I would say the same about Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum. If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on?
Not hooked cause the valve it's supposed to turn to control the fluid in the pipes is stuck.
How do you define "radio transmitting hardware"? some hardware that can transmit radio signal or some hardware specifically designed for transmitting radio signal?
I'm surprised that this article isn't called Homerization, Homer Simpson seems like the classic example of this. Another comment's description of Kevin from the office applies just as well to Homer.
BTC. It is now being used as a financial instrument by technology companies. And even insurance companies. And of course, paypal enabled crypto payments/trading as well. Becoming mainstream. It’s value will grow exponentially.
Along with the dog featured on that page, there's a YouTube channel full of videos of someone else using the same methods with a cat: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGMTesZlKa0Lokb7ZNqOJXQ/vid...

The cat hasn't developed the same kind of talent for stringing words together, but has managed at least a couple of abstract things like 'mad' as a general unhappy word and 'where (item)' when looking for something.
Any word can be worked into any language if the speakers care.

The truth the inventors and promoters of "Latinx" don't want to face is that Latinos, African-Americans, and almost every other minority is far far more intolerant of everything LGBTQQIA2etc. than liberal elites are.

Pew polls in 2019 showed that 49% of Black Americans did not believe gay people should be allowed to be married. And the more liberal elites try to change people's day-to-day lives in intrusive ways to force them to accept LGBTetc. (like with awkward forced language) the more and more such groups will repel from accepting that.

I've seen it myself in my own community.
> However, if you only reference inputRef inside useEffect then it'll always reference the DOM node so you don't need to worry about it being undefined.

This isn't correct; it's well documented [1], but people seem to often think this is true; if you reference it in multiple places or not is irrelevant.

Passing a ref in to the dependencies of `useEffect` doesn't work either.

Mostly I like hooks, but this one in particular seems to trip people up a lot; I'd go as far as to say that using callback refs should be the only supported way of using them; the normal one is pretty much broken by default for any component that isn't entirely trivial.

[1] - I think https://medium.com/@teh_builder/ref-objects-inside-useeffect... covers this pretty carefully.
I'm honestly curious. You're a bright guy, and you seem pretty confident, so I suspect I'm missing something here.

Which activity among [money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics] requires murder-for-hire? Is there a fifth charge for which he was convicted that I've missed?

Is there some non-intuitive legal definition of conspiracy to traffic narcotics, where conspiracy to traffic requires conspiracy to distribute plus conspiracy to commit murder, or something like that?

Also, is there any legal or strategic reason to drop the charge for the predicate crime? It might make sense as a legal strategy to reduce attention on a shaky part of the case, but it seems that the defense would draw plenty of attention to a shaky key pillar of the case anyway.
Custom Home Mapper is a current Quest project in this vein. It’s VR rather than AR, you map out your whole area (with walls and furniture) and then play some mini-games in it.
> white-wash the story

So to speak
Jake Chevinsky has a great Twitter thread about how Ross Ulbricht's sentencing was deeply unjust. [1]

Basically, the judge sentenced him for a crime that he wasn't convicted of (murder-for-hire): 'When she [the judge] gave him double life plus 40 years, she said the "murders significantly justified the life sentence."'

The most heartbreaking part of the story is the letter Ross read to the judge before sentencing:

"If you find my conviction warrants a sentence that allows for my eventual release, I will not lose my love for humanity during my years of imprisonment, . . .

I will do what I can to make up for not being there for the people I love, and to make the world a better place.

Even now I understand what a terrible mistake I made...
I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age. Please leave a small light at the end of the tunnel ... a chance to redeem myself in the free world before I meet my maker."

https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1025008589080080384
Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign advisor and friend, is a convicted felon due to his communication with Julian Assange and his subsequent cover-up during the FBI investigation. Trump commuted Roger Stone's sentence.
man, this is her own team, this isn't some abstract very removed issue , this people she worked with advocating for her.
I dont know, but gut feeling wise, murder for hire feels very wrong. Operating an exchange where consenting adults bought and sold dangerous substances where they had a reasonable idea what the risks were seems much less so.

I think its fair to spend >7 years on muder for hire (if that was the charge). The other charges not so much, but most drug charges in usa seem excessive to me, so that's probably par for the course.
Was it public before she got fired?
Russians: they run the full range from "pure evil" to "morally complex". Can someone with ties to Russia achieve anything good? Evidently not.
New Messenger UI Removes 'Search in Conversation'
I wonder if they brainstormed something like BunkerDB when deciding on a name with that in mind.
No sympathy here, Facebook can show their ads without tracking their users and non-users.
Important to note that real income per capita isn’t actually flat, only household income but that’s likely because of household size changes.

See here for disposable real income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0
On a similar note, I remember the FCC ordering a Bitcoin miner to turn off mining hardware that was emitting 700MHz and disrupting T-Mobile’s network.[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/bitco...
It’s worth avoiding because it’ll start causing problems for your biggest customers first with no warning, and user-facing timeouts provoke users to heavily retry exactly those shard-crushing queries you most wish they wouldn’t.
One thing I've wondered: what is the purpose of Google's ethical AI group? What utility does it provide to the corporation?

I suspect the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ (or less kindly, corporate propaganda) - to help mitigate damage to Google's brands and reputation by public concern surrounding artificial intelligence.

It is well understood that it can be difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends upon them not understanding it. Conversely, it may be difficult to remain employed and continue drawing that paycheck if you publish research that does not portray your employer in a good light, especially if the underlying reason for your role is public relations.

Here's a fun experiment: open up Alphabet's annual report from last year [goog10-k2019], search for the keyword "ethic", and there are two hits, both under item 1A, risk factors. The latter keyword match for "ethic" in the 10-K is regarding supply chain risks, and the potential for unethical behaviour by alphabet's suppliers. But the former keyword match is far more interesting:

> Our ongoing investment in new businesses, products, services, and technologies is inherently risky, and could disrupt our current operations and harm our financial condition and operating results.

[...]

> In addition, new and evolving products and services, including those that use artificial intelligence and machine learning, raise ethical, technological, legal, regulatory, and other challenges, which may negatively affect our brands and demand for our products and services. Because all of these new ventures are inherently risky, no assurance can be given that such strategies and offerings will be successful and will not harm our reputation, financial condition, and operating results.

[goog10-k2019] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204420...
Technology advances much faster than language and culture can.
I ride on Zwift using an old Schwinn Airdyne bike I got for $25 on Craigslist. It works great!

I connected a bike computer magnetic pickup to the fan wheel, spliced it into a headphone cable, and plugged the headphone into a USB sound card connected to my laptop. On my laptop, I can monitor the microphone input and see each revolution of the fan wheel as a pulse. I wrote a program to convert these pulses to power (using Airdyne conversion formulas I found online) and then broadcast a Bluetooth power meter compatible with Zwift.