skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But there already is a bright line rule here, it has just not been diligently enforced up to now. The basic argument is that the Amphetamine app has been able to slide for so long that the ToS provision it violates should be treated as a dead letter, or as if some statute of limitations had expired; the Amphetamine brand has existed so long (and under such favorable conditions) in the app store that the developer now has an economic interest in the brand, gained through a reliance on Apple's non-enforcement of this ToS provision.

The developer could try suing Apple on the basis of laches, the legal doctrine whereby if one party has 'slept on their rights' so long that the situation changed, they can't suddenly decide to enforce a term later. But there's no hard and fast rule about this, and since it would tie Apple's hands they'd probably fight it tooth and nail, throwing enough legal resources at it to wear out any opposition.
Ask HN: Should a British developer spell functions with American English?
Should a British software developer write functions with British English spelling or American English spelling?

getColour()
localise()
doTheMaths()
In one of the largest high schools in Texas, we weren't allowed to leave campus, we couldn't even take our lunch out of the double doors and eat our sandwich outside.

It's something I absolutely despise about our contemporary culture.

I live in Latin America now and envy the kids for getting 45 minutes free at lunch time to hang out outside, socialize, buy from the street vendors that will gather at that time, maybe run a quick errand.

My parents point out that they had a high school experience in the US more like the Latin American one. Something is changing about the US, and it's rotten.

There's a book that presents a good overview of some of these changes: "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure" (by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt).
This was the first thing that really shocked me at my first job (startup in SF back over a decade ago). The attitude that what we're doing really matters, and if something was found broken on the weekend we'd get a call and have to come into the office. Fucking absurd hubris all throughout SV.
Related: is it possible for me to download/try out a pretrained GPT-Neo?
I had to look up the word 'sociophysics', which isn't used in my part of the discipline, so probably not! There are a lot of physics-derived tools that are coming into increasing use, though. Half of social network analysis seems to come from sociology, and the other half (the highly computational part, in the main) from physics. I've done bits of network analysis (one of my better-recieved recent papers was applying network partitioning to the problem of identifying the edges of news 'stories' in sets of articles) but I do most of my stuff in the text analysis space where NLP/topic modelling/matrix factorisation stuff is making most of the running, and that's mostly drawing from CS rather than physics.
I’m a contractor and currently “work” for a FAANG on a 3 year contract. I love it. Learning a bunch. Seeing their internal processes will change how I work. But I’m still free (after 3 years)
Stern face is going to make them burst into tears. Great strategy during a business call.
Ask HN: How to stay ahead of zero-day organizations like NSO Group, etc.?
A new Citizen Lab report describes state actors using NSO Group's new zero-click/no interaction exploits on journalists in the Middle East. https://citizenlab.ca/2020/12/the-great-ipwn-journalists-hacked-with-suspected-nso-group-imessage-zero-click-exploit/

I then started reading:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvakb3/inside-nso-group-spyware-demo
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkyzxz/spain-nso-group-pegasus-catalonia

If NSO Group and many other companies and intelligence agencies are actively developing zero-days, how can one protect against it?

Is security through obscurity (e.g. using the PinePhone or an unknown platform) the only option?

I'm only really asking about individual solutions to protect data, rather than systemic ones, like the recommendation by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of surveillance technology. Such systemic solutions seem unlikely as of yet.
The Great Software Stagnation
One of my favorite memories of high school was making guacamole in my physics class. I finished the exam early and had some spare time. Lunch was at 1:30pm and I had breakfast 5:40am most mornings. The teacher walked over, grabbed a chip, scooped up some of the guac, and munched on it. "Luck for you, that's really good. Otherwise I'd kick you out of class"
Read Michael Crichton's 1969 Review of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse-Five'
Pentagon Puts F-35 Full-Rate Production Decision on Hold
“Lineage will fail”... rofl. I’m glad you took the argument down to the level of bizarre pseudo-darwinism.

Textbook example of why civilized society has the keep the animal instincts of portions of the population in check.
It's not just this comment, but his attitude in responses in general. And personally, I find referring to someone as a drug lord counting blood money is pretty abusive.

The comment has been couched in weasel words to pretend like it's just talking about the parent comment, but the content of the message is aimed directly at the person behind the screen.
The point was that good lawyers won't take blatantly unwinnable cases.

At some point or another, a lawyer must start putting their name on the line for the cases they take. If a client arrives without a shred of usable evidence or a blatantly unbelievable story (happens frequently) then a good lawyer is not going to throw their reputation on the line to see if it pans out.

The legal world isn't as big as you might think, and lawyers can expect to run into a lot of the same other lawyers, judges, and so on for decades of their career. Taking obviously unwinnable cases is a quick way to get yourself branded as a toxic lawyer.

This Medium article is a good example of a case that would be challenging from the start. Much of what the author claims comes from unrecorded meetings, in-person interactions, and other situations that lack any usable evidence. However, the author also goes on record admitting that they were struggling to finish their work and other such performance issues (Yes, I know it's from the company's abuse, but think in terms of evidence here). If anything, publishing this Medium article has done the author far more harm than good.
Eliminating Grand Coulee could produce overwhelmingly greater benefit for fisheries.
C.f. "health physicist"
> truly have innate talent/ability in at least one area

How are you assessing that?

In the Picasso example it seems you are confusing "practiced extensively since early childhood with extraordinary external support and training and unusual personal motivation" with "innately talented" (whatever the latter is even supposed to mean). I would imagine that some of the people you know have some similar (probably less extreme) background.
Paychecks are the "almost all else" in my assertion, yes. But I think it's wrong to assume that jobs can't or shouldn't provide value beyond remuneration.
>I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :)

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

This is dancing on the edge of reality and metaphysics, I think the subject is fascinating since so much of our world is dominated by narratives.. real or imagined.
It's more due to ignorance though. All other things being equal, many would prefer to buy directly from the creator if they realize that they can save money, and the creator gets more profit. Apple is right now a corrupt middle-man bureaucrat between them, demanding a bribe from both to make a trade, but the consumers just aren't aware of that.
> Even if she did, would she have been able to even stay while the lawsuit plays out over months to years? Unlikely.

It is not necessary for a plaintiff to be a U.S. resident for a lawsuit to proceed in a U.S court.

I'm not an expert on immigration law, but if a foreign resident needs to appear as a witness at trial in a U.S. court, then they can usually enter on a tourist visa or some other visa.
The first mistake he made was making an app for the apple app store.

We can blame the users all we want but, as devs we also contribute to the problem when we publish (independently of course, not as employees).
I remember sitting in third grade class, red in the face, hand patiently up in the air for minutes straight, simultaneously crying and pissing myself in my chair while Tiffany pointed and laughed at me with her bright red cheeks!

I was a good kid!

If I had of robbed or killed someone and been to Juvenile Hall, my pants would probably have been dry.
The Firefox extension "Auto Tab Discard" is what you're looking for. Not sure about equivalents for other browsers.
Sounds like you don’t have a problem with the legislation that is the topic of the thread.
Am-I the only person that thinks kids derailing a meeting is funny?
He's matured if he'd be the first to acknowledge flaws now.
Indeed the reverse of my point.
Yeah, I know. I still use Dillo because almost everything is usable. at least fora, news sites and such.

Except this site, which I find atrocious having to use JS in order to search. I use DDG/Google on just the domain (site:news.ycombinator.com) and call it done.

But well, no mpg123's unless being played at a reduced band (11MHZ, mono). If converted to mp2, the files would be bigger, but playable at highest quality.
Have to disagree almost entirely.

Any big tech co worth its salt acknowledges the outsized impact a single engineer can make and rewards them appropriately. The important thing here is defining "impact" and "influence". As a standard L4 / SDE-2 engineer, you can have enough impact to make a company like Amazon several 10s of millions of dollars year in and year out. Sure you can't change the strategy of a trillion dollar company, but very few people can claim to have such an outsized impact and still complain about it. It might be adding some prime badges here and some ads there, or improving a recommendations algorithm by 1% but given the scale at which they operate, a 0.25% win in conversion rate because of an idea you've had / executed is enough to drive 10s of millions of dollars in top-line revenue. In terms of technical impact, L4s generally have a fair share of interesting problems to work on - reducing latencies, saving fleet costs, solving recurring bugs are all well rewarded.

- As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).

- As a Principal Engineer - your influence has to stretch across an entire org.

You can vaguely say "oh but I don't care about making my employer gobs of money or solving somewhat interesting problems" but then you'd have to define impact in engineering terms.
So could the former because where I'm from there's a certain amount of times you can not be in a class (without a doctor's note that justifies it) before you face expulsion. IIRC that number is around 20 classes per school year, so that alone brought me to 1/20th of an expulsion.

And being the teen that I was, it's not like I had an otherwise perfect attendance in any of my high school years.
Backdoored by whom is an important real-world distinction.
Microsoft hurts sales of indie developers with “not commonly downloaded” error
Hi,

We've started this as an internal project to solve actual problems we have faced delivering machine learning projects for our clients these past few years.

- No-setup Jupyter environments with the most popular libraries pre-installed

- Real-time collaboration on notebooks

- Multiple versions of your notebooks

- Long-running notebook scheduling with output that survives closed tabs and network disruptions

- Automatic experiment tracking: automatically detects your models, parameters, and metrics and saves them without you remembering to do so or polluting your notebook with tracking code

- Easily deploy your model and get a "REST endpoint" so data scientists don't tap on anyone's shoulder to deploy their model, and developers don't need to worry about ML dependencies to use the models

- Build Docker images for your model and push it to a registry to user it wherever you want

- Monitor your models' performance on a live dashboard

- Publish notebooks as AppBooks: automatically parametrize a notebook to enable clients to interact with it without exporting PDFs or having to build an application or mutate the notebook. This is very useful when you want to expose some parameters that are very domain specific to a domain expert.

Much more on our roadmap. We're only focusing on actual problems we have faced serving our clients, and problems we are facing now. We'd love to hear your thoughts and problems you have faced.
who's reading the code?
I worked at a very mature software company (15k+ strong) for a couple years until recently. I was on a product team. The work was depressingly unfulfilling. I'm pretty sure I wrote less than 1k lines of code while working there. There's so much cruft - tests that break randomly, routine tasks not strictly related to software engineering, meetings, ticket investigations... If you find yourself in this kind of environment and seek excellence, I'd recommend switching.

Since then my preference definitely shifted towards smaller companies so I can get more experience working on greenfield projects.
These are probably just examples but I'm firmly in the no-HOA crowd. If my home owning neighbor with a yard wants to park a truck in their yard I really don't care, and I abhor any organization that punishes someone for that. They could have a perfectly good reason to park it there. I've had former neighbors yell at me for fixing my car in my own driveway which makes no sense whatsoever except perhaps to privileged elitists with no DIY skills.
> Only if you're driving it on a public road.

This actually depends on the jurisdiction. In many of them not having an active registration/inspection is grounds to having your vehicle seized. Even if it's only used on private roads.

> What's not fine is the government saying "you purchased this legally and in good faith, but it's not legal anymore and we're going to need to take that". This feels like a good idea when it's something with obvious negative externalities, but it is a wildly dangerous power to give the government. Especially since this power will almost certainly be delegated to the executive branch by the legislature, giving random un-elected appointees the ability to expropriate property without even a hint of deliberation.

Sure, except if compensation isn't offered.

The government currently does this all the time, it's actually how many "public" offices fund themselves.

Where is the outrage of this happening right now? We've already crossed that line.

> You generally can't punish people for something that was legal at the time that they did it.

We also do this currently. It's called not having clear laws and having to argue in court and creating new precedent.

And "punish" only works if you're not offered compensation. If the government says "hey as your representatives we're going to ban xyz for this health reason, and provide compensation for buying them back from you" then it's fine.

Again I'm not saying the government should waste resources going and finding wood burning systems and seizing them. However the government can ban the operation of it.
Another side of this: consumption is not regulated. So you can consume, but not possess.
>Sorry, but responding to criticism with "you've drunk the kool-aid" is a sure-fire way of never correcting incorrect things you say/believe.

See response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608202

>People leave them all the time after disputes and not one that I know of suffered after they left. You contradict yourself in talking about how hell bent megacorps are in making money, and then talk about them spending 100x your salary on lawyers to go after you.

I know of people who suffered after they left, and a cursory internet search will turn up many more stories. There is no contradiction in what I said, if spending 100 units on a legal battle for a single employee would save them >100 units on the next employee (or as a consequence of an unfavorable legal outcome), then it would be worth the cost.

>This is definitely true, but as the GP said, it's quite simple to leave if you this is the concern. While there, I interviewed for an internal position that involved work for China that sounded to me like part of their mass surveillance program. I don't really know if that was the case, but it was trivial for me to decline their offer.

I spoke to this in the article. You were generating revenues which financed the project even if you didn't directly work on it. They only spent $X on your salary and benefits because they expected it to create a return of >$X, which they can invest into Chinese mass surveillance with impunity. You were complicit.

I'm not saying this to insult you or to raise a character judgement on you, but to illustrate that your "ethical mental arithmetic", for lack of a better term, doesn't work. I don't expect you to change your mind in the face of this argument, either.

>1. Pay less (and I don't get FAANG salaries - perhaps 60% or less)

Yes, they do. But so long as we're talking about ethics, I am disgusted by any argument that it's justified by your payroll.

>2. Work you as much if not more (my life in megacorp had good work/life balance - and when it didn't, I'd simply do an internal transfer).

There's little evidence to support this (that non-megacorps make you work more).

>3. Are less stable
>
>4. Are more at the mercy of market forces, often making it equally unlikely you'll get to do cool work. The need to pay the bills is greater.

I set the standard in this article at billion and trillion dollar companies. You do not need a billion dollars to have a stable, sustainable company.
And PDP-10 had them back in the 70s
Seems to be roughly in line with https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129945/... in some benchmarks as per the article

Some Reddit searching suggests a geekbench score comparable with a FX-8100

It's also worth saying that these comparisons can be overly favourable as (from the architectural design perspective) you can effectively get some performance for free from the roughly 4 process doublings in between this and the Bulldozer.
Every year, some newspapers publish various "most 'popular / sought after / prestigious / etc.' employer" lists, where they've polled various students and fresh grads, typically among STEM/Business/Law students.

The company rankings, seem to correlate by how much they spend on ads and recruiting campaigns.

But what's strange, to me at least, is that FAANG companies also dominate those list - despite the fact that they only have very small satellite offices here in my country (in Scandinavia), where they work on quite niche products / problems.

I always found it a bit curious, when talking to highly motivated and talented young people in tech, that basically dream about joining companies like Microsoft, knowing fully well that they'll be working on some Office 365 feature - probably fixing bugs.

Microsoft, on their side, can pick and choose among talent - because they'll get run down with applicants either way. They could hire good students with Master's Degrees, make them janitors, and still it wouldn't even dent their reputation - because kids will blindly follow lists as mentioned above, and the dream of a prestigious employer on their CV.
In my opinion the field of anti-aging is currently under-appreciated by a factor much greater than that of just about any other area, and this article is a great introduction to help garner interest in the field.

A minor improvement in slowing aging would save more years of life than curing cancer, and it's unfortunate that a lot of the most exciting discoveries and research are under-reported on (meanwhile, some of the least-exciting or relevant findings get significant hype by media outlets on occasion, die to seemingly random clickbait-ification algorithms).
> how size improves usage and efficiency

The power of a wind turbine scales linearly with the swept area. The swept area scales as the square of the height.

Furthermore, wind turbine power also scales with the third power of wind speed, and wind speed goes up with height (though not linearly).

So you can see why the physics of the problem are strongly incentivizing size increases.
check out sir jagdish chandra bose work on plant research and development of crescograph. if is quite cool and very instructive.
I wasn’t a huge net hack fan but I had half a dozen mud accounts on all the local BBSs. I was quite the ladies man. Eagle Scout band dork BBS MUD man.
> She no longer works for Apple, and probably doesn't want to ever work there again, so why the threat, and why the ultimatum?

I'd definitely check with a lawyer on this. I think one could get into serious legal trouble when publishing names
Nightfall AI | Senior/Staff Backend | REMOTE, ONSITE | USA, Canada (HQ: San Francisco, CA) | https://nightfall.ai
Nightfall is a data security startup dedicated to helping enterprises discover, classify, and protect sensitive data across their cloud footprint - their corporate SaaS, data infrastructure, and APIs - via machine learning.

- We’re looking for folks passionate about working at the intersection of deep learning, information security, and distributed systems.

- Tech Stack: Go, Node.js, React, Python, Cassandra, Redis, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes.

- Raised $20M+ from top-tier VC investors who have invested in, operated at, taken public/exited major cybersecurity & SaaS companies.

Apply & view detailed roles here: https://www.nightfall.ai/careers

We would love to hear from you - please reach out to us at careers@nightfall.ai with any questions you may have.
However, it is illegal in California, where the original author was located.
Value is relative. I don't see a comparable platform anywhere or coming any time soon.
I'm a little surprised there's not a complete toolchain for DNA by now, including assemblers, compilers and linkers, given that the human genome project was completed decades ago.

You still need living things for the runtime, but hasn't AlphaFold basically solved that problem too?

Programming in DNA is like programming in assembly language, but a 7.5 KB assembly language program is well within the reach of a lot of people. Has anyone tried to write a 7.5 KB living thing or DNA-based tool from scratch? It doesn't necessarily even need to reproduce to be revolutionary, tiny genetically engineered transistors or structural fibers or chemical reactors might all be super useful and have super simple DNA programs that only have a few dozen lines of code. What makes this so hard?
Absolutely. This happened to a friend from university. He started off with "ogame". A web based space sim. Initially it was ok and we even went to play it with him (entirely free to play) in our clique. Given we were studying comp sci it also wasn't surprising that he programmed himself some helpers for ratios, targeting of other players etc. Shortly after he started Eve Online. Same thing just with an actual nice 3d space sim around it. He'd optimize the hell out of everything including setting his alarm clock for 3am because his character would finish a skill at that time so that he wouldn't waste 3 hours until normal wakeup time. Shortly after he stopped going to uni with us, which worked for a while until he also no longer found time to study on his own and his sleep cycle was completely dominated by the game. I think he never finished uni and I'm not sure what became of him. Other than probably being really well off inside of Eve.

So sad.