skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I kind of agree with the author's major sentiment: that ML research is stuck in a rut with incremental improvement. However, the longer the article goes on, the less and less I agree with any of their statements. They start of criticizing the incremental improvers. They advocate later that if "stack more layers" beats a method, the method isn't good while completely ignoring anything other than the standard SOTA metrics like data efficiency, computational efficiency, model representation efficiency, etc.

And, while I agree there is a "fake rigor" problem in ML research, the particular examples that they bring up aren't extremely good exemplars in my opinion. Instead, they seem to have a problem with the standard operating procedure of mathematics while missing the point that it is what got the "stack more layers" school here in the first place. Simplifying a problem so you can understand it, and then relaxing the assumptions and seeing if you can figure out what implications that has is how advances are made.

Plus, they have some hot takes and statements that are just plain wrong.

> With Automatic Differentiation, the backward pass is essentially free and is as engaging to compute as 50 digit number long division. Deriving long complicated gradients is fake rigor that was useful before we had computers.

What? First of all, AD is not a solved problem and using it is not "essentially free." There's a huge performance overhead when adding AD to a system. Try using a second order method with AD. I hope your Hessian actually finished computing.

> Julia on the other hand is a language made for scientific computing where everything is automatically differentiable by default.

This is just plain false. I'm a huge proponent of Julia, and there are some great AD packages, but in no way is everything automatically differentiable (even with the nice packages), nor is that a design goal. The work on Flux.jl (a package) is extremely impressive though, and there are particular features of Julia that allow some awesome package interoperability (e.g. the fact that some ODE solvers can be differentiated through with Flux).
I would put data engineering on the supply side of the chef: This would be ingredients, delivery scheduling, and pre-prep functions. That sort of thing.
Twitter, Youtube and Facebook privatized free speech, and they can selectively deplatform that right on a whim.

Now Microsoft will privatize freedom of movement? How long until they are pressured to put former Parler users on a permanent no-movement list, regardless of vaccination status?
I feel crazy in this world, have we all forgotten that one can simply hook up a box to the internet and have it available to millions of people worldwide? Or hook up a couple of boxes together for availability and scaling? What about signed messages?
Well, you can make a deal with each administration. It's probably in the best interest of any DoJ, Democrat or Republican, to be able to access data unencrypted. So these deals probably* carry over each time the administration changes hands.

* With the recent investigation into Apple [0] by the DoJ, I don't see this deal continuing for far longer. Unless the investigation is just for show.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-team-continue-scrutini...
Depends if you have a computer scientist doing a software engineers job
This comment has no basis of truth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo

Jobs @ D8

People are quick to forget because back then everyone (including HN) was praising Google for everything under the sun.
The evolution into DevOps and why it works today
Newsmedia positions themselves as the defenders of democracy but in reality they're just a business. And this idea that you need "the press" to tell you the truth is the result of very successful branding.
Related: Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
People have been taught by big tech companies' PR teams that any regulation will hurt the Internet, but I don't believe it's remotely true. Internet companies currently enjoy near complete immunity to content they distribute, but when such things have gone, the Internet will readjust.
Parler had a moderation process. It verifiably failed to actually prevent violent rhetoric (c.f. Lin Wood calling for Pence's execution days before the crowd took the capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence!").

In this interview (audio, but there's a transcript) Matze details some of it, and basically explains that violent-but-popular content is going to be left up because of "free speech": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
Women's period-tracking app Flo gets FTC slap for selling user data
The two are complimentary. Engineers can't do anything without the fundamental insights scientists provide. But scientists don't have the practical experience of writing end products that real users use.

Obviously this is a huge generalization but I think it's a useful way to think about it. And when I say scientist, I mean "Professor of CS" not "24 year old with a BS in CS".
I think it makes everyone feel like they're not earning enough money.
They moderate things that risk bringing bad PR, including in some cases putting overzealous rules that would cause false positives like you described.

However, it's clear they aren't acting in good faith and aren't actually interested in moderating bad content. Cybercrime-related Facebook groups which don't even attempt to conceal themselves are commonplace on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-... despite detecting them being trivial based on a simple keyword match.
IMO the entire corporate system is working as intended, maximizing profit and growth, by promoting engagement and generating clicks within bounds it’s given in case with social media.

It’s often said that companies aren’t people and not alive or conscious. I agree to the first one, but for the rest, is there a mathematical proof for those?
Show HN: Built a spreadsheet powered shop for my self-help audiobooks
It isn't the dichotomy you set it up to be. macOS solved this without "breaking almost all software by default" using per-app, per-directory permissions for the file system, over and above the decades-old POSIX file modes model.

You're making excuses for the lack of security innovation on Linux workstations. They've fallen behind.
I was thinking something similar, myself.

Increasing the signal-to-noise ratio is the biggest hurdle that I could think of, in passing.
There are sensible reasons why discussion of politics was looked down on in a professional setting. Didn't like that much because it can be interesting. But lately I see the benefit pretty clearly.
Six sources confirmed the FBI contacted Apple, they can't fully prove that that contact caused the decision. I'd bet it at least played a role, but the article is not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
I use spacemacs in Holy mode, you don't actually need to know basic Vim. I use only emacs based key bindings.
I do not see it that way.

But, fair enough. If it has always been that way we should keep it that way.
> I do think there's a distinction between failing to moderate perfectly (or even well) and refusing to even attempt to moderate.

That may be a distinction without a difference. What company failed to even attempt to moderate?
As someone who works on open-source tooling for AI, good.

The more people who can leverage AI, the better the industry will be as a whole. It serve as both a check on AI hype, and also leads innovating in encouraging new applications.

Huggingface Transformers is a good demo of this philosophy in action.
Dolphin (Nintendo Wii/GameCube Emulator) gains native M1 support, 30-50% speedup
Yes. Or hyperscript as my parent posted. I'd love to see an example of preact with it.

But looking at the repo https://github.com/hyperhype/hyperscript I have a hard time imagining how preact can work together. They seem to overlap in functionality.
Parent is actually right, it is unlikely that Trump's speech met the legal standard for inciting violence. However most legal scholars agree that impeachment does not depend on having been convicted of a crime.

Here's a lawyer's video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwqAInN9HWI
Practical Deniability: local message editing (Signal forums)
> What ends up happening is you have a bunch of Data Scientists just handed a pg_dump or flat file from some ops team

Not to disparage the amazing data scientists I've worked with, but I've been on teams where this is very much the approach to operationalizing models. It's basically, "Here's the sklearn model and some fragile featurization scripts we built. Can you take this to prod ASAP?"

The problem I've seen is that DS & DE teams were in different parts of the org and had their own sprints that were in no way connected. So they kept chucking models over the wall and we kept trying to faithfully operationalize. Once we convinced leadership that we had to collaborate from the get-go, things went a whole lot better. It also improved the working relationship of engineers and scientists.

I learned a hell of a lot from the scientists; they learned how to write better code. They also learned what code they didn't need to write because I could do it faster or better than them, leaving them to focus on more important things. It was pretty amazing to find what manual processes they would setup in lieu of proper (or even any) engineering support. Again, these are amazingly smart people, but they were being square-pegged into a lot of round-hole engineering tasks.

Now, the much more frustrating issue I had was being in a very data-heavy organization and being told by a distinguished engineer (my skip-level) plus my direct manager that, "data engineering isn't a real discipline." I left that org very shortly thereafter.
Any online service with considerable content creation and recommendation that you can think of is using ML to improve every aspect of the system (better embeddings, better retrieval, better ranking, better text understanding, better personalization, etc.) And the commercial usefulness is measurable.

Industrial robotics, driver assist, drug discovery, computational photography, speech translation, and so many other examples illustrate a clear commercial applicability of ML methods scaled in the last 10 years specifically.
The problem is BB wasn't around by the time smartphones became more than a niche product.

The list of prior work that influenced Apple, or any tech company, is usually far too long to list.
Thanks :) I actually borrowed the idea from another company who were using that approach for their contact us form and it seemed like a nice change.
Do you have a link to a diff?
100% agree.

Social Media should be treated like anything else in life that is addictive and potentially self-destructive: alcohol, drugs, junk food, video games, porn, gambling, online shopping, whatever. Actively moderate and track your usage, and if you ever feel like it's negatively impacting your life, take a step back and think carefully about if you're really still in control.
If Parler was so intent on staying on the right side of the law, maybe they should have cleared that backlog well before Jan 6th.
Are the ads illegal? Or the products they are advertising? The website for Soldier of Fortune advertises similar products, should they be shut down? How about the print magazine, should that be shut down as well?

There are a lot of sites out there that publish much more objectionable content. Should we shut all of them down as well?
I agree, I don't think it would be productive for the Wine team to support Metal. I do wonder how feasible it would be for MoltenVK [0] to be supported instead.

[0]: https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/
But probably not in the 15-30kya range, right?
Do they have one of those nice announcements where they list all the games that now work with it or does that come later?
I keep thinking that e-Ink is way overrated, and the fact that a large chunk people do not seem to distinguish Pebble (which is an LCD) from actual e-Ink devices only reinforces it.

Not saying that I like "backlight" watches (I don't), but there's a large selection of reflective LCD watches (e.g. most traditional sport/GPS ones, Garmin, Suunto, etc.) which are indistinguishable from the Pebble in terms of display.

e-Ink at this point is just $$ and slow refresh. For most users, at least.
I've talked to colleagues about this before but I find it's mostly a cyclical nature fuelled by tunnel vision.

Every good couple of years researchers come up with a good advancement or fresh concept that reignites the community. However all that happens till the next breakthrough is basic tweaks. The amount of junk papers that slightly adjust the method that gets a few decimal place improvement then call it a snazzy name would fill a mountain. Drawing blood from a stone. People get so obsessed with specific methods thinking its the new great thing they don't stop and think it's probably not the only way.

Marketing and media is the worst though for general public perception. The amount of times they would warp ML into a magical pangea. "ML will make you skinny!"
I mean it's just mathematical approximations, been around a while.

Don't get me wrong, I like this field. I'm fortunate that I get to apply it to a problem that helps people but at times I just want to shout from the rooftops that it's not a God it wont make all your dreams come true. Then they get annoyed it doesn't and we a bunch of stagnation articles like this.
It essentially doesn't matter /why/ guns, tobacco, liquor, etc. are regulated by the government. That reasoning has no bearing on why Amazon doesn't sell them. Amazon is not a moral agent, it's one of the largest corporations in the world with a profit imperative to expand into as many product categories as possible in its goal to dominate e-commerce. Those government regulations make those product types conflict with Amazon's way of doing business and complying with those regulations reduces profit margins to a level where these products are unattractive to offer.

There's a moral-political argument which can be made, sure, but that argument isn't the basis for why Amazon doesn't offer these products, and /that/ was the assertion underlying the grandparent's analogy. It's simply false.
Criminal liability isn't an impossible thing to do.
I know that Russ Cox & Rob Pike both still use plan9.
Of course. I was just pointing out that it's easy to expand your knowledge beyond first hand experience.
Despite the super snark, I'll reply.

"Value" is quite subjective, no? I don't think it makes sense to completely write off demand for something because you don't understand the appeal. Don't kid yourself, there was (and still is) a considerable user base hungry for the service Parler provided. Something else will inevitably meet that demand.
Parler doesn't moderate their content. Facebook has the worlds most advanced content moderation systems and team. I mean you can dislike Facebook, but they clearly try to moderate their platform.
That would be a stupid waste of money for an advertiser. Maybe ad networks are really the problem.
> Plan 9 is as filled with unpolished brilliance as Mozart’s Requiem. It’s the Sagrada Familia of Operating Systems. It’s creators left long ago but people keep building on the scaffolds. If nothing else, it’s a collection of fantastic ideas never intended for mass consumption. This is The Holy Mountain of Operating Systems.

Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo.

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

The forgotten legacy from Plan 9 authors, and influence on Go original design.
aka how well paid engineers get paid.
The reasons seem neither obvious nor static to me. The founders never intended to leave 700,000 Americans in DC without voting representation.

Are you under the mistaken impression that DC Statehood would give DC undue influence over the Federal government?
Nationalistic drive is more a symptom than anything.

Trade imbalance is responsible for nearly 100% of wars.
It is always about backing a nation into a corner where their status quo is untenable.

And despite nationalism being part of the fuel of WWII, trade imbalance was both the biggest log and the match.
Yeah, I didn't realize that "dog" was equivalent to "canidae".
> Depends on their contracts and that’s all it depends on.

That's not true. Laws supercede contracts. You cannot write a contract that creates new law between parties.
I'm not confused.

It's just curious to tell people to not spread false information and then admit you may be spreading false information.
This is correct. Apple works with FBI while publicly saying they don't.
Sinovac: Brazil results show Chinese vaccine 50.4% effective
> Unless you’re trying to sell animals, because they spot that in seconds.

Facebook is happy to let bad content stay and profit off it unless said content carries a risk of bringing bad PR; I'm assuming this is the case with the "selling animals" thing because some animal rights groups escalated the issue to the media, and it is now the case with anything Trump- or election-related (not that I'm defending said content, but pointing out that its removal is for PR reasons as opposed to Facebook actually caring about democracy or discouraging violence).
Parler did moderate their content though.
How to Optimize Your Pull Requests and Keep Your Code Reviewers Happy
> Elixir code out there is much cleaner than erlang code bases.

You do understand this is just your subjective opinion and not a universal truth, right?

You are basing your argument as if it was a fact that Elixir is “cleaner” (whatever that means) and that there was a thing called “software-testing-revolution” which Erlang was never a part of. Both are subjective and, frankly, plain BS.

> if you are truly dedicated to the craft of software you probably should want them to learn Elixir

Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start... so you’re basically implying that Erlang programmers are not “truly dedicated to the craft of software”? It would be laughable if it wasn’t just sad.

This is the Ruby world mentality that just rubs me the wrong way. Not even worth carrying on with the discussion.
I must say that I really enjoyed the comparison with actual scientific and technological progress to identity politics.

I don't think pronouns are important. There is a big difference of misusing a pronoun and choosing a mean-spirited nickname for you in my opinion.

I read what you wrote, but I just think that if you want to call yourself a yellow penguin that's fine for me but the second you try to force me to buy into the idea that you actually are a yellow penguin that is where I stop being nice and pleasant.

I can call you whatever you want if you really want to, but I am not going to buy into your ideas that everyone must out their pronouns in advance because you think you are so special.
> Put Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai behind bars and the problem will correct after that.

Why not the CEOs of the companies using the targeted keywords/demographic information?

The "it's not the gun that kills, it's the people who kill" argument?
> Plan 9-based technologies are a part of most, if not all, operating systems today (even Windows!).

9p is indeed a great technology—I would have also thrown in utf-8—but most of plan9's ideas remain quite fringe. I would pay a ton of money for an OS with both bind and browser support. Plumber is still leagues better than anything offered by macs/linux/windows.

That said, I don't see "fringe" as being mutually exclusive with "legitimate". TempleOS had some features that other OS's could use, too—its use of hyperlinking is actually really cool.
Make it difficult to find unless the person is actively looking for it.
Facebook does some moderation, but really it's curation that drives engagement.
> It was one of the two most challenging, rewarding courses in my undergrad degree.

which was the other?
I am only commenting on this in the context of community standards and user generated content and should not be extrapolated to all content in all other contexts.
More leasure also brings the opportunity to spend time on fabricating things yourself... that's quite dangerous!
Intel can't make large 10nm dies, or at least isn't, but there's quite a few 10nm mobile parts and they are on their second shipping generation of those parts. Which are shipping in volume, or at least volume-enough for the likes of Dell to put the 10nm CPUs in most of their lineup including the XPS series. Which is about where TSMC's 7nm was 2 years ago, too.

And TSMC's 170MTr/mm^2 is still restricted to a single vendor and hasn't ramped up beyond that yet. You can't simultaneously claim Intel is restricted to what their bulk volume lineup is and then use TSMC's non-volume lineup. The bulk of TSMC is still 7nm which is 100MTr/mm^2.
> Why should this be treated any differently?

Obviously this is a rhetorical question. But the answer is an elephant-in-the room kind of thing so I think it needs to be said:

The reason is that the overlap between "extremism" and our (now) minority political party is so large as to have muddled the distinction. Per one poll, 45% of Trump voters approve of the sacking of the capitol. It's really not possible to distinguish people who merely post angry political speech and the ones who stray into extremist rhetoric about revolution and violence. The same people are doing all of it.

So right now, "moderating communities with extreme content" simply looks a lot like "censoring republicans". But... I don't see how that gets better by outlawing the moderation. Republicans need to fix their rhetoric first.
I'd say this study may be useful for those who have a family history of Parkinsons or find out via genetic testing that have genetic markers that predispose them to it.

I wonder for those suffering from early stages of Parkinsons whether boosting C&E would impact onset.
Show HN: Federated, Encrypted, Anonymous Chat, with Video Support
Astronomy has entered a period of great stagnation. More and more grad students are investing huge amount of time and building larger and larger radio telescopes just to learn more about black hole formation and the properties of pulsars. Little consideration is given to how to more efficiently use inexpensive consumer telescopes purchased at Walmart! Where are the big discoveries? New planets in our solar system? A new structure for the Milky Way? I sincerely hope that the Julia language will allow us to discover ET radio signals, because we all know that Python lacks this capability.
Usually the hardware companies they kill off eventually, Nest being the outlier.

I'm not saying that they'll 100% kill off Fitbit, but it's very likely. Google already does hardware and software that does a lot of the same stuff, no point in having 2 brands.
I suspect the real real answer is that Google would summon an enormous shitstorm of antitrust action down on their heads if they even thought about kicking their biggest domestic competitor in the ad space out of the app store.
My parents were caught up in that and assumed that Satan was coming for my soul through D&D and Judas Priest. I didn’t even know who they were at the time, the tracts I had to read told me all about them. Now I am an adult that enjoys D&D and Judas Priest, so mission accomplished Mom!
The chapter was seized from Rosa Parks' lawyer (follow the link in the article, crazy story), because it should be public domain...so where's the pdf? Am I missing something here? Why can't we read the chapter?