skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Santa Fe Institute! Highly recommend the Complexity podcast. So much good stuff that all dovetails with Gleick's stuff <3

My recent favourite contained an analogy by researcher Sara Imari Walker, who had this great line about how "If you want to understand gravity, you look to black holes, since they're the densest known objects where gravity acts insanely strongly compared to all other forces. In the same way, if you want to study information and how it operates in the world, you need to study life."
I agree specifically with less people/positions "above the law" but it'll be rough. The law in this case is politics - it's whatever the people say it is - and the political system is terribly broken right now. I think it is still proper to move these agencies to have more civilian oversight but in the short term we're going to see a whole lot of abuse of the system until our representation can be fixed.
I've heard good things about Brandon, and since you speak of him so highly, which of his books or series would you recommend I start with?
I'm in Windows / Linux, my wife is on MacOS. She wanted to help with some python programming. Yep - playing super nerd is LAME. I thought getting environment setup to match mine would be pip requirements.txt but no go.

Really facinating. I think things like go / rust etc? may work better - you compile everything and compile to binary on platform, so don't need to build and carry around environments everywhere.

I moved to docker deploys / dockerfiles locally for pretty much everything. Totally overkill, but when I switched to working from home was so glad I could just get up and go without getting my overall system sorted out.

I haven't totally figured out the WSL2 python remote interpreter / debugger code flow yet however, so still using docker. I'm sure WSL2 will or is an option.

I've been tempted to just vnc or similar into a cloud instance, but my local machine is to fast by comparison for the price.
Part of it is probably just the cost of doing one's "duty". Picking up a piece of litter and throwing it in a nearby trash can is a very low cost thing to do, so even if technically the city is supposed to have someone picking up the trash in a public park, an individual who sees some litter can still clean it up with minimal effort.

Filling potholes, OTOH, is a much higher cost thing to do, and so people are more likely to feel that the city should be using the money they have already paid in taxes to do it. (Another aspect is probably also legal risk--if I decide to fill a pothole and do it wrong and someone suffers damage to their car, I might get sued. The city has many ways of mitigating that risk that I, as an individual, do not.)
windows source code has been open to academics for something like two decades
It's in the very next paragraph?

>“In Hong Kong, any new car demands a 100 percent tax. Electric cars had no tax, so I bought the Model S and the Model X. Now we have to pay a 25-percent tax on EVs, which is still lower than with regular combustion-engined vehicles, but what will happen to the company when these incentives are over? Will people still want to buy cars that seem to come from a junkyard?”

He's not complaining about the service, because the car is half the price of any other car. It's like complaining that a Chevrolet Aveo is small and the engine is underpowered.
If you go to Settings > Messages, you can filter out messages from unknown senders. However, this only prevents the notifications from showing up; they'll still be in the app under the "Unknown senders" tab.

FWIW, T-Mobile does allow you to block all SMS and MMS.
Mental Accounting Matters (1999) [pdf]
Reading this, the question that immediately pops in my head is:

Could a hack like this one go undetected for so long in a widely used free/open-source project developed in the open, such as the Linux kernel?

While I have no doubt that something like this could happen to the Linux kernel source code (because security is Capital-H Hard), my perception is that something like this is less likely to happen to the Linux kernel -- and, were it to happen, it would likely be detected sooner, due to the inherent transparency of widely used open-source code.
There is no way the brexit crew will accept that fact. They think the island is moving west as we speak and will soon be over the continental divide...
Your comments on this and other covid stories are a long string of hyperbolic statements followed by walkbacks. Maybe if you offered arguments of narrower scope and supported them with data up front rather than after being challenged you'd find a more receptive audience.

You seem like a smart person and I'm sure you can get the downsides of things like organized disinformation campaigns, the resulting impact on vaccine hesitancy, and the second-order effects like avoidable increases in measles, eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7590343/

If you could make more of an effort to communicate your ideas in a cooperative rather than an adversarial fashion that'd be great.
I read a shit-ton of science fiction books and the main reason is that I find them useful as a prelude in doing further research for various scientific issues that I'm unaware of. That and the fact that they're fun.
As I said, I acknowledge the tongue-in-cheek aspect. My point about keeping nationalism out of software was more general.
You express a number of notions here that are part of the fantasy of managerialism [1]. An especially big one is that if we render all important decisions unto a managerial class, they will make optimal choices.

If that were true, startups would never succeed, because established companies would use their greater resources and market power to gobble up market niches before startups could get momentum. In practice, everybody here knows that's not true.

I think the true way to optimal resource usage is not through ever-increasing process and managerial layering. Instead, it's through tight feedback loops where small cross-functional teams iterate closely with the people they're serving. Which is exactly how most good startups work. If you were really right about pursuing a financial optimum, the first thing (very resource-constrained) startups would do is get a copy of JIRA and hire some middle managers to carefully parcel out the work against precisely designed specs and timelines. That they don't should tell you something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism, and also see https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A76WZ96/
> A lot of times stuff like undocumented APIs and bugs are easier to find taking apart the binary anyway.

Is that why Microsoft, and all you people who poke at its binaries, have fixed all the bugs in MS binaries? /s
And then enjoy the jet engine that your macbook fans turn into, because holy shit Docker is bad at resource management.
While not on the posted list of favorite 2020 books, these are on mine: Martha Well's Hugo and Nebula award winning Murderbot series. The saga begins as the hero, Murderbot, hacks its own governing software to obtain freedom.
There is no such thing as phone number of origin. A business voice circuit doesn’t have an identity like that. Each call it carries is whatever the signaling data says it is. There may be some inbound numbers routed to it, or not.

The problem is not “is this the true phone number of this circuit?” because there is no such thing. It is not even “do I route inbound calls for this number down this circuit?” because there are legitimate topologies where you don’t. It’s the fully general “is this customer authorized to use this number?” which you somehow have to establish with a bunch of mutually distrusting competitors. It’s possible, that’s what STIR/SHAKEN is, but it’s a formidable problem. Telephony is much more complicated than your one-circuit-one-number residential POTS line.
I've worked in big companies like Microsoft, so can only comment from that perspective. Due to their size, they often do not have MFA regardless of location. Many didn't even use MFA. Most have been moving there, but it was long, multi-year projects. So I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft doesn't have MFA for everything.
You can close the site and not consume the content.
"Shame" is the feeling of "but what will other people think about me? Am I being judged", not the fear of someone shaming you verbally. That actually rarely happens, as that risks real physical escalation.

Online, verbally shaming people happens a lot more often as it's safer for the shamer, but you need to have essentially the same amount of shamelessness as in the "real world" to not care.

In fact, shaming online can be more powerful because those people KNOW who you are. Do you think Jeffrey Toobin would feel more shame if he was caught rubbing one out with his windows open as just some guy in his apartment and his neighbors seeing him, or on Zoom with his colleagues?
Didn’t expect to see Cymraeg here on HN!
Neat! I haven't seen this idea out in the world much, but a book called "Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything" kinda runs at this from a neat science-rooted philosophy perspective. It basically says that any philosophical framework needs to have just as much to say about fictional beings as it does physical, since fictional constructs certainly affect us.

I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :)
Got a bunch of random markup mixed into the content for me in chromium
Fully agree. I would even suggest to have separate values for agree/disagree and high/low quality. Flagging might be justified in many cases but unfortunately can be misused (i.e. allows arbitrary suppression of valid opinions).

EDIT: flagging could e.g. increment a visible counter and serve as a trigger to the admin; assuming the admin is a neutral arbiter assessing the compliance of the post with HN and legal requirements he/she could remove the post or comment, and leave a rationale for his/her decision; that could prevent arbitrariness.
> It's a very ancient system, much older than the internet.

That seems an odd characterization.. they both were being developed at nearly the same time. SS7 developed faster and was put into use much more broadly than IP due to corporate need and support, but they're both about the same age.
DOE's AFDC Is Down
Ok, so what policy are you intimating?
Code was added once to Debian (IIRC) and it was detected almost immediately due to code signing.
I dislike Jira, but it's quite untrue that it's absurd that there needs to be context and a record of discussion for tasks. People leave, focus changes, memories fade.

It's not a unique occurrence that I wonder "why the hell is it done like this?!" only to find it was a decision I was part of with developers who had left in a least-worst-change trade-off. Jira or products like it help us avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Put another way, part of the art is not just the code, but the code that's not there. Jira/tickets are one way of managing that data.

And at other times, it's just a tool for bureaucracy, I get that.
I bought soviet-era gem, 'Mathematics: Its content,methods and meaning'. Books is a collorabarative effort of many russian mathematicians to provide holistic picture of maths. Still reading, so far so good.
Do people still trash Microsoft? Maybe it's just because I'm in Seattle, but I feel like their reputation has really turned a corner in the past year or two.

There's still a lot of cruft from who they used to be, but I feel like most people I know echo the sentiment that Satya has been a revolution. Things like them embracing Linux, acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github, contributing to open source projects, and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.
Yeah, right. Everything is so open about all MS binaries that they don't even need to be closed source! It takes a lot of time and effort to find these poking the binaries, and then experimenting them. The source code makes this task obviously easy.
As far as community trust goes, MS has been killing it for the last several years. They've done a 180 in terms of being good software citizens. I'm really hopeful that core pieces (such as the kernel) end up hitting the public eye.
[Current Atlassian employee here] This might be biting off more than I can chew, but if anyone has tangible ways they think Jira can be improved for non-tech team members I'd love to hear them. Happy to chat via email or Zoom about them and try to add some of the fixes into the upcoming roadmap.
Yeast and mushroom go together?
A result of people not understanding how public/private keys work. They just want it to work, and copy everything over to get what they want done.

These same people probably also joke about the marketing folks down the hall leaving post-it notes with their password on their monitor.

Security is the first casualty in the battle for convenience.
This looks like a very useful project! It might also be very interesting for testing input-/output-heay code without needing to get a board, very nice.
> I feel that Jira's configurability makes it like desktop Linux 20 years ago.

Totally. A tool that's optimized for everybody is optimized for nobody. Jira for me is in the class of "false consensus" products. Since everybody has to manage work and get things done, there's an illusion that people mean the same thing by that. But the way people and teams work and the kind of work they do varies so greatly that there will never be one perfect work management tool.
This is a pretty good description of the problems for sure. Thanks for writing it up.
It's obvious these sorts of programs are still ongoing. Probably all that really came out of the Congressional inquiries in the 1970s was the development of better methods to keep them hidden from the public.

We only know about COINTELPRO because some mysterious group of activists stole a bunch of the records from an FBI field office in Pennsylvania!
I'm a recent graduate from undergrad doing work in deep learning. While by no means an expert, I'm inclined to respectfully disagree with the assessment of /u/scythmic_waves. The Reddit roadmap is total overkill as a pre-req for ESL and Bishop (Analysis, Topology, and proof-based Linear Algebra are certainly not needed for them).

I think the only hard pre-req would be a solid understanding of non-axiomatic probability up through the Law of large numbers. For the rest, I'm of the, perhaps naive, school of thought that one ought to jump in the deep end, and consult a variety of sources as need be. iirc, most of Munkres, and Hoffman & Kunze are not needed for these books. Granted, you might find yourself picking these books up as your focus narrows, but for these books, you don't need them.

With that out of the way, I'd highly, highly recommend Bishop as reading, after ISLR.

Edit: In response to your other comment, I also disagree: proofs, especially for regression problems, are important for understanding why we use them.
There's the possibility that COVID-19 directly causes mental illness, maybe even in people who are otherwise not symptomatic. I saw a thread about that recently, that I didn't want to read, but the possibility was already on my mind. Obviously you have to evaluate the number of coincidences you would expect by chance, though.
I look forward to you considering Pulsar. Even though it is the least mature, it is the superset of most of the others listed.
Can you please provide the list of sci-fi books ? I am really missing good books from sci-fi genre, these days.
Absolutely agreed. Downvoting does not add to the discussion, it takes away, and the bar to dead seems ridiculously low.

Instead of a downvote, add more muting functionality, ways to personally shut off speech not welcomed, but not in a way that prevents others from seeing it.

Personally, I believe all opinions should behave the opportunity to be heard, no matter how crazy, and should not be suppressed because a handful of people don’t like it.
As others (and Microsoft) mentioned, it was read only access. The only points of concern here would be if that statement somehow was not true and they were able to add undetected changes, or if their security audit process was severely lacking.

But yeah, to your point - being able to read and analyze the Linux kernel source is considered a feature, not a liability :)
The best people are always where the money is, not the morals.

Wall street, defense, giant megacorps. I will trash them for it. It has nothing to do with being "competent".
just be careful. I don't know if things have improved in conda-land, but when I last used it a few years ago I table flipped and quit conda (and, ultimately, python) when the system-level dependency management got so broken that I was forced to reinstall linux from scratch and start COMPLETELY over (it had broken things outside of its domain). Tensorflow being hard-pinned to CUDA versions probably didn't help.
His point is that users who want to run PyPy can already do so on hardware from vendors that enable people to run whatever software they want on their devices instead of providing black boxes that the community has to reverse engineer.
You can already ‘pip install’ quite a bit (gensim being a prime example), but it takes some knowledge of how/why the general resource was trained to apply it to a business problem.
> I could be wrong, but I’ve had a lot of spam calls in the last few years, and never have I gotten multiple calls from the same number in a month.

But it doesn't say "from the same number." It says the same entity, which should hold regardless of the number.

That said, whoever had my phone number before me (over 3 years ago) owed a lot of people money. I get 3-5 calls per day from debt collectors looking for her. I've never answered any of the calls, and they've rarely left any messages, but the caller ID often says, "such and such credit service", so it's pretty clear what's going on. The same company calls literally every day several times per day. It would be great if they could only call 3x per month. One actually does use the same number every time, so I eventually blocked their number. Another one uses a different number every time, but the callerID is always of the form "V12345678" where the number is just some incrementing integer, so it's obviously the same people.
I'd argue that Markdown is easier to learn than confluence wysiwyg, and also more useful in the long run. Especially as there are many GUI Markdown editors with buttons and preview windows, that give you best of both worlds.
Really like this "meta lifeform" idea. I'd suggest it might go further, even into the realm of language, story, and culture.

Might there be a case for claiming language itself is another level of meta lifeform that has grown and evolved within the habitable neural landscape of our mind. Perhaps this is what separates us from animals.

So obscure theories from computational linguists get pretty deep in this stuff. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this stuff since I read about it last year.

Language as organism: A brief introduction to the Leiden theory of language evolution
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316659539_Language_...
Comment scores should be always available. Some might say HN is copying Reddit but I think it’s just good transparency. I would also love to see more transparency into what dang and other mods are doing; what are they removing, downvoting, upvoting, etc.
What really sucks is the cheeryleading and evangelism for it almost like a cult by the very people who are not responsible for resolving issues. Side channeling by email/phone with expenditure of social capital to devs in the know is quicker with our mutual wink wink agreement to file and close the Jira ticket to appease the higher ups above. Absolutely ludicrous.
Read up on the now closed Confucian Institutes that were operating in the USA and Europe. [1]

"The online and print cultural materials of the Confucius Institute present a vision of

China with a national history of thousands of years but while these materials note that other
ethnicities might rule China the history presented is undoubtedly Han. This can be seen in the
association of historical figures like the Yellow Emperor and Liu Bang with the Han identity,
while the ethnic identity of non-Han historical figures is presented ambiguously, the ethnic
identity of Han historical figures is always clear. Nearly every single historical figure mentioned
in the cultural materials was Han Chinese and that fact was prominent in the biography. It is
often either included at the beginning of the article next to place of birth, or at the end of the
article under a specific section of nationality" [2]

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/why-is-the-us-targeting-chinas-confuci...
[2] http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/27901/1/The_Confucius_Institut...
"The left" is multiply defined. If you mean Democrats generally, the party has become the number one home of middle class people with college degrees. They are naturally going to be more comfortable with the FBI than, say, old school left wing labor activists.

It seems less likely that opinions are changing, and more likely that people with certain opinions are moving.
A company like Microsoft probably gets “hacked” what, a hundred times a day? A thousand?
I highly recommend nix for this type of problem, both on linux and macos. You can make all kinds of dependencies available simultaneously in the same file system. You don't have to run vms, or copy in and out of containers. The build cache works great and is much better than a linear Dockerfile. Tweaking dependencies at any level is pretty easy.
The hydrogen is burned to produce energy (i.e. heat), it doesn't have to be burned in the same furnace as the steel.
I normally read a lot of fiction, but for some reason couldn't get into anything non-technical this year. I have several books that I've started and enjoyed, but couldn't make myself sit down and read. If it's technical, though, I can read it cover-to-cover in a week. Very frustrating, but maybe next year I'll get back into fiction reading.
Humans can panic and decide to swerve, and it only takes them a fraction of a second longer than it takes a self-driving car. Someone willing to argue that the car had a choice and made the wrong one could just as easily argue that the human had a choice and made the wrong one.

You might personally think that oh, the machine is being rational and intentional, that's different from a human. But a lot of people will treat a human the exact same way. That split second panic is judged as if they had all the time in the world to consider the optimal choice.

The legal system already has and handles this type of lawsuit.
The thing that puzzles me is why is the goal to stop the robocaller, and punish them, and not the punish the company that hires them?

I can't say that I know the technical or legal process, but from a layman's view it seems that going after the entity committing the crime is faster and cheaper than going after the company behind the shell company behind the lead generator behind another shell company behind another company behind another shell company, all of which may be in different countries.

In this case, the direct approach seems to be a good place to start.