skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What if you used one of the managed RDBMS services offered by the big cloud providers?

We could (and likely would, despite the costs) but that doesn't address our testing requirements.

The control plane is on AWS.

We use 4 or 5 different cloud providers (Tailscale makes that much easier) but the most important bit is on AWS.
Thanks for re-highlighting this point, and for doing it with a pun!

While not directly related to the differentiability question, the idea that you can resolve spatial movement to well below the spatial resolution of pixels in an imager is relevant.

It is possible to resolve displacements that are e.g. 0.02 pixels wide [1] by relying on the "natural" anti-aliasing effect of the point-spread function [2] that arises from 1. the optics (where even if lenses were free of any aberration, the aperture cannot be infinitely small nor can the lens diameter be infinitely large), 2. the pixels don't sample light at a point.

This enables video motion amplification/magnification, which has been on the front page of HN before [3].

There, the rasterizer is a physical process that needs to be modeled. Here, the rasterizer is constructed to have the necessary property.

Note that if you had a perfect model of the physical process, and if it had no noise (e.g. no photon noise and no Johnson noise---impossible), and if the pixel intensities were given to infinite precision (as opposed to being discretized by the imager bit depth), then you could resolve arbitrarily small displacements of point light sources. I wonder if that points more to a continuity question than a differentiability question... but I felt compelled to make the connection in any case.

Returning back to your comment:
> case where discontinuous computations (polygon coverage at edges) are in fact meaningfully differentiable

It seems like the rasterizer ends up being a continuous computation, unless we disagree on what counts as the "rasterizer" (I'm including any anti-aliasing strategy, including one that underlyingly makes multiple calls to a discontinuous rasterizer.)

[1] Sound-Induced Motions of Individual Cochlear Hair Bundles
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1304819/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_spread_function

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
If you are a business, wth a few defined exceptions ("reader", multiplatform, _physical merchandise from outside of the platform_ etc.), you accept payments through Apple Pay, don't direct people to your website to to send you money regardless how you decide to call it and pay Apple the cut they desire. FOSS developers are still businesses, not charities, much as we like to pretend otherwise - and "tips", "donations", "patronage" and similar verbiage does not change that.

If you are an actual nonprofit, you get to ask for donations both via app and your website and have Apple not take the cut.

Don't like it - don't deploy on the platfrom, but if you persist you will soon run out of platforms. Note that particular point has also caused WireGuard to be delisted from Google's Play Store before so it should not come as a suprise to anyone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268389).

Note that some of those distinctions are legal - where I am, I need to know if I am gifting you money or donating to a nonprofit to report it on the tax record (and I certainly need to know if I were to get my own limited company to "donate"), as going above certain limits makes _me_ liable for tax on gifts as well, including reporting who the recipient is. "I sent that money to a random functional email PayPal@zx2c4.com I can't say much about" does not cut it. Yes, Jason might be at the other end of it - but as is, it fails the smell test compared to other FOSS projects. Simple as that.

Can we go back to discussing why Apple is bad due to their ever changing APIs, general disregard for backwards compatibility and for that matter general compatibility with anything else and not one of the few things in the whole process that make sense? Or, for that matter, why Google effectively making GMS and locked bootloader a requirement for corporate and/or finance apps is ensuring that in many areas the existence of unlocked devices/alternative AOSP distributions is and will remain a fig leaf purely there to avoid being considered the one true dominant player?
I upvote literally everything I see from Tailscale, because I am hugely impressed with Avery Pennarun and David Crawshaw. Seeing Fitz is there too takes it to an even higher level. I want them to succeed, and I think they create good HN content. Major kudos.
I've found that in general the longer someone has been on a project, the worse their documentation is.

People who have both deep practical knowledge of a domain and can explain it clearly are so rare that we tend to remember them by name. Experts can bitch all they want about how Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't a 'real astrophysicist', but lets see you try to talk to the general public, or for that matter, college students starting their senior year as undergrads in your field. Then lets have them frankly rate you on your lack of accessibility, tendency to circular reasoning, overuse of jargon, and complete lack of patience... We'll call it the head-up-own-ass quotient.

Erlang is a very, very old project, with a historically high degree of echo chamber going on. Without active pushback from a dedicated member of the core team, such things usually end in utter chaos. It is less likely that you will achieve understanding by reading documentation of that sort, than that you will accidentally summon an eldritch horror by reading it aloud and not being very precise with your pronunciation.
A vast majority? How do you arrive at that conclusion?
Well, if a government goes authorian, than it does not matter much, what service you use, if you have to assume your phone has spyware on it.

If the main danger is, police scanning the phone for compromised material (without a police spyware on it), then there are some ways to deal with it technically, by using services that don't leave a trace. Telegram for example has a "secret chat" function, which won't save the messages, meaning someone scanning your phone later, won't find them.

(which I head is also a main reason for many people to join telegram, because so they can chat with their affairs and not have their wifes read it)

Then there are simply private tabs of chrome or ff, from where you can use chat-services without trace. (if the chat services are not cooperating with the police, or are decentralised by default, I think in that scenario I would use matrix)

Anyway, you live in kashmir?

I know mainly of the conflict by reading Shalimar the Clown, from Rushdie. Just curious about your opinion, if you know the book. I heard it was not well received in Kashmir itself?
I think it was very well written, but I don't know how accurate it is.
That's what a lot of people are saying up and down this thread.

Limited devices (ugh) and high cost to unlimit (ugh).

That didn't have to happen.
Why some bike shares work and others don't
NordVPN may have good intentions but they were hacked.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/nordvpn-confirms-it-was-ha...
I agree but the article was written in a knee-jerk fashion and once I'd written the title I felt the need to repeat it a few times to help push the point :-)
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series is also rich with detail about sailing in the Age of Sail more generally (with some in-depth details about whaling in many of the books). I've been slowly working my way through them for the past year, and I feel like I've learned so much about what it took to sail a ship in those days.
So, I worked for Broadcom for some years after this went down. This post is purely descriptive to give people some insight into the history from inside the company; I'm not commenting on who should have done what (although I was not directly involved, so if someone who was comments, take their word over mine).

Broadcom made an error of judgement here, but this incident fostered a deep distrust of open source, at senior levels, that persisted for more than a decade after; perhaps to this day.

Firstly at this point Cisco was, at the time, Broadcom's largest customer by a large margin. This caused huge tension in that relationship that was totally unforseen, and was very painful for a while.

Secondly, a at a certain point it dawned on Cisco and Broadcom that the GPL lawsuit was not like a normal business dispute , because businessmen after a certain point will settle for money even if they didn't get everything they want. Sure a few people will keep going to the detriment of their own business, but most aim to make profit, not expound a principle. Many companies in the position of the FSF would have settled for a cut of the revenue. But the FSF wanted the source code released, and they were prepared to kill the business to get it. So Cisco and Broadcom had to concede. The source code was released, and OpenWRT was born.

The fallout, though was that subsequently Broadcom router ICs were designed with hardware accelerators which were separate from the main CPU. They were driven by separate CPUs on the same SoC that did not run linux and whose drivers could not be demanded under the GPL. none of the open source firmwares can run these devices efficiently unless someone spends weeks reverse engineering them.
You'd think, but we subvert and bomb Iran every time they get close to enriching uranium, so there are precedents, if perhaps not on the same relative scale.

The other question is why not just domesticate us and what kind of evolutionary impact does domestication have on a species? As someone who "educates," horses and dogs to live in an inescapable human dominion, in doing so, I shape them into something other than what they are. They have good lives and find joy, but there is a responsibility I have they will almost never see. The best I can personally do is evolve my own understanding and various virtues and to relieve their suffering where I comprehend it. I would hope an alien species would be a little further along than most of us on that front, but I'd say the analogies are useful.
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.

Not necessarily. I think some people have said that democracy is designed to imitate revolutions without actually being violent: that if much of the populace is armed and not that many people have enough gear and training to make them enormously more effective than a random person with a gun, then "one person, one vote; majority wins" approximately reflects what would happen if there was a violent revolution, so people don't have much to gain by adding violence. If that's true, then appeasing the mob by letting them more or less get their policies implemented may be best even if those policies are not the best—because the alternative is risking a bloody revolution followed by the mob implementing their policies anyway.

That's one perspective, anyway.
Yeah I used this a week ago and was surprised by how much I liked it. It was a very pleasant onboarding, and the one click chrome extension to send to podcast was pretty magical.

I'm not a frequent web article reader, so I'm not a perfect user, but I can see how this can fill in for those moments where I do come across a dense text and think "goddamn I don't want to sit here and read all this right in the middle of my workday".

Have you considered a youtube audio extraction extension? I personally prefer videos over articles when it comes to learning about things, and most of the time I'll tuck my phone in my pocket and just listen to the audio. Seems kinda similar.

Either way, good luck, I see something like this working. Passive audio is just more convenient than dedicated article/video consumption time.
The topic of discussion is datacenter vs. an extremely small cryocooler. What is the other polynomial scaling paradigm that would cancel out the datacenter's advantage?
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.

What you are describing is leaning towards "direct democracy", which nobody tries to implement, vs "representative democracy" which is what we all experience. In the latter it absolutely is a feature that representatives will go against the preference of the majority at least some of the time.
How is PostgreSQL (or MySQL) "considerably less scalable" exactly? etcd isn't particularly known for being scalable or performant. I'm sure it's fast enough for your use-case (since you've benchmarked it), but people have been scaling both PostgreSQL and MySQL far beyond what etcd can achieve (usually at the cost of availability of course).
On the upside, in the USA, if you can find that 'sweet spot' company that is paying well, good healthcare, and good time off, you can make bank without overworking. I'm sure these exist all around the world, but perhaps they could be more common in the USA when compared to the EU, given the generally lower EU net wages we're talking about.
> I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies that could pay far above median

It's not really related to compensation even if those companies pay well. The short history is that FANG was coined by Jim Cramer (he has a TV show where he talks about stocks) around 7 or 8 years ago to mean Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google. He just thought those were good stocks to invest in at the time but the term caught on and started being used in different contexts, Apple was added as the second A to make FAANG and now it's roughly just a synonym for a big tech company depending on the context.

This also explains why Netflix is represented in the acronym but much bigger companies like Microsoft aren't.
Stretching kids' minds with remote digital "paper" games
They were bought by an adware tech company last year AFTER the events of the article you linked. I would suggest mullvad as a good alternative. I've had better speed and as good ease of use.
It's not about what happens when Hitler 2 is in power, but to prevent that from happening.
Brain-machine interface and robotics could benefit stroke survivors
Endoscopy without anything but the throat spray was fine, the dry heaving isn’t awesome but unlike the endoscopy not eating the day before is no real challenge.
Apple’s 100M dollar plan for fighting racial inequality
> If free speech is essential to a liberal democracy, we're moving to a place where the majority of speech takes place in non-free-speech areas, and that does not bode well for the health of our democracy.

The majority of conversation in democracies has always taken place in private venues that were free to control who had access and did absolutely do so based on political viewpoint.

That these private spaces are now virtual rather than physical doesn't change the essence of that fact.
... I am guilty of downvoting and moving on a couple of times.

Guilty, guilty, guilty! :-)

Seriously, I think all of us have done it. But for most it's an occasional thing and we wouldn't miss it if downvoting went away, since most of the time we either write an opposing view or upvote an existing one.
This was beautifully written
Is the exact demographic I was aiming for when I wrote the post, with the aim of making them stop for a moment to gather themselves, before being part of the problem.
Let's hope Red Hat doesn't pull the rug from under Keycloak, like they did not so long ago with CentOS.
I gotta put a big, giant X next to "Readable."

I have HN at 170% zoom right now. I keep most of my font sizes around 14pt minimum. I have one useless eye and another that isn't so great even corrected with contact lenses.

Give me more web design trends that emphasize fonts at a readable size AND color contrast with the background color. Dark gray Calibri Thin on a light gray background might impress some design nerds but I'll take large, margined, justified text well set from its background any day of the week.
I think if you put the modern norm of affirmative consent on things, this is probably a “true” statement, although much less interesting. Otherwise it seems p hard to substantiate
Whenever I see an ad flaunting privacy guarantees, I ask myself "How would a honey pot for gathering user's information be advertised?" Exactly the same way.

That said, at the end of the day you have to trust SOMEONE if you want to use digital communications. And there's certainly a difference between facebook and GPG email encryption.

It's just a matter of balancing convenience and privacy for your personal use case.
They work like machines! It is hard to compete with them
I should also add two more important pieces to this:

1. In-person meetings and real-time calls have been a major part of the work. There is an agenda and very good notes are taken during these sessions (https://github.com/ethereum/pm). The calls have been essential for coordinating in a more formal setting and to get a feel for when consensus is achieved on a particular topic or proposal.

What threaded forums later added was the ability for others to get involved in the discussion, particularly those who are not core developers or not able to attend.

2. Another important medium has been GitHub issues (e.g. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315). Proposals are submitted as a PR and, earlier in the evolution of the governance process, many people would comment on them. These were not ideal due the flat nature of the format.

What generally changed on GitHub issues in recent years was the encouraging of commenters to go to an external forum thread (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315#issuecomment-63...), leaving editors and authors to work out structural and other basic issues about a proposal in GitHub PR comments.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-leak-...
I have a sketch of a HP fanfic short story I should really flesh out one day. It involves muggles launching an operation to retrieve a key person from Hogwarts just as the final battle with Voldemort is about to erupt there. The story would follow a bunch of SAS soldiers who fly in on helicopters, while covered by a wing of fighter jets that intercept a dragon, and then provide distraction / air support for the good guys. The overall tone was meant to be similar to the start of Gulag mission from Modern Warfare 2[0].

I'm not a good writer, so this will likely end up a military porn story to the tune of Salvation War[1] - so perhaps it's best if it remains unwritten. But really, if you think about it, the Wizarding World wouldn't stand a chance against even single organized operation by a modern muggle state military.

--

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDX5uToKuPY

[1] - https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheSalvati...
You need to increase demand:

* Offer tax breaks for tech startups. The UK has a whole suite of these and London is number one in EU (out of now) for tech startups

* Similarly non-tax pro-entrepreneur reforms and help: bankruptcy protections (the US does this very well, the UK very badly); access to mortgages / leases and credit for the self employed; better management of taxes and benefits; reform of regulation for smaller businesses; and media campaigns to make starting (and failing at) a new company more acceptable socially. The UK does great at some of these (starting a business is easy), badly at others (bankruptcy is a nightmare here).

* Legal reforms around freedom: so you can break non-competes (the UK does ok at this and the EU too I think); so it's harder to enforce IP that isn't being actively used; to prevent large established companies from bullying smaller ones (less of a problem already because the rest of the world doesn't follow the "American Rule" for court cost...)

* there are a bunch of smaller initiatives that can assist too: government buy-local and buy-small policies; entrepreneur training and projects in schools and universities, requiring graduate programs to accept delayed/older entries (so you can take a year off between uni and SafeCorp without worrying you'll never get back on the ladder), encouraging contracting over employment.

All of that should drive entrepreneurship. That will hopefully build an eco system (suppliers, capital providers etc.) and it can grow organically from there.

I'm not sure it will ever be Silicon Valley in London or Amsterdam or Berlin. Partly there are established industries that soak up talent tech workers (finance in the UK) but also because software is a "winner take all" market most of the time. Even hardware can be that way too. And that's just not the European culture.
I own an MSP and we have wide latitude to set rates with our customers. The numbers that were in the example ($.50 plus on a $2 transaction) are on the high side of ridiculous, especially for card present. And yes, the base costs vary by industry so your milage may vary.
Early days in a creative experiment with tech - we have had great success getting young children to connect with their grandparents. This feels so much better than "here's YouTube, be quiet for an hour". What have others tried? Does this trigger any other good HN ideas?
No. If anything this makes it harder for anyone to block segments of the internet, by ensuring the integrity of routing to any given netblock.
the entire ecto api is built upon chaining statements together. I have a few queries that are 8-10 statements long.
I think bringing back that absolute bafflement intentionally once in a while is good habit, especially for people working in technology.

I am constantly amazed that computers work at all. The more I learn about it the more amazed I am that anything works. Especially software wise I see soo much duct tape on so many layers, like looking at a house of cards that could (or rather should!) crumble down any minute, because it seems to defy reality.
> what exactly did marriage advocates "give up" in the bargain?

This is poorly framed. This is not about "bargaining".

This is a case of people demanding and advocating for their rights. There is no principled reason to ask while doing so they should "bargain away" those rights.

Sure, opponents of same-sex marriage may disagree.

There are some schools of thought that try to separate, shame, or exclude others based on some criteria, whether it be sexual orientation, educational background, or socioeconomic status.

I see a pattern around intolerance. People that have exclusionary beliefs don't have a good track record -- here's what I mean -- these belief systems do not survive contact with reality, unless the person with that belief system digs in their feet and refuses to engage with real people. For example, it may be "easy" for someone to be homophobic if that is how they were raised, but this belief system is unlikely to survive if the person has a gay son and they are open to talking with their son and learning about the issue.