skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After 1.5 years of self study in neural networks, my advice would be to internalize the fact that you can train a neural network to do anything that you can encode as a loss function.

Networks try to minimize loss. If you want something to happen less frequently, add it to the loss. Literally addition.

It was a mind-bending “there is no spoon” moment for me.

Also, loss is one of the worst names imaginable. Kerfluffle would’ve been better, because at least it’s mostly meaningless. Whenever you see “loss”, substitute with “penalty” and things will become much clearer.

Secondary advice: if you don’t have patience, you won’t get anywhere. In the same way that the stock market is a lever for transferring money from the impatient to the patient, neural networks are a lever to transfer advantage to the patient.

By that I mean, I can’t count the number of times I almost wrote off some small tweak as “doesn’t work”, only to leave the network training for another week or so and discovering it worked fine. In fact, it was almost always equivalent, or had no advantage, I.e. a placebo. It’s not like code; you can do so much fucked-up shit to a neural network, and it will still work. It’s unlike anything you’re used to.

Beyond that, just remember that this stuff is hard. Coding the network is easy. Getting it right is hard. And getting it perfect, well, took me a year. Google’s official biggan model at google/compare_gan never achieved the same FID as real biggan. Why? I immersed myself in this mystery, eventually reverse engineering the official tensorflow graph. I discovered their implementation was missing a crucial + 1, so their gamma was centered around zero instead of one. And in batchnorm, gamma is a multiplier — so the network was basically multiplied by zero and no one noticed for years. (Remember how I said you can do a lot to a network without causing problems? Sometimes the problems are so subtle they’ll drive you nuts. You know something is wrong, but you don’t know what or why, and it’s almost impossible to debug.)
The actual best estimate of infection fatality rate for people under age 29 is way less than 0.1%.

0-19 years: 0.003%

20-49 years: 0.02%

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
You can predict the driving patterns of drunk human drivers, or humans that have seizures, cardiac, or other critical health events or just fall asleep at the wheel? Quite impressive.
Being able to detect oncoming traffic seems pretty damned important to me! If it’s not detecting vehicles across the line, what assurance do I have that it’ll detect vehicles that cross the line?
> Humans are absolute proof of that

Humans also have a organic supercomputer in their brain. Variety of sensors is probably the best approach. I've grown up and seen technology prices on all sorts of weird technology fall (3d printers, sensors, midi controllers). At some point, we will basically give up on perfection on LIDAR and just do cheap multi-LIDAR arrays where the error rate is overcome by just having multiple units.
This is a great question. Personally, I have very low mental-image ability. I think I realized that this is a thing when a friend was genuinely grieving that he was losing the ability to visualize his mother's face aside from picturing photos he has. My mother is alive and well but I have never been able to literally visualize her face, or anyone's.

Similarly, I've known people who are problematically unaware of smell and particularly their own body odor. I know it's supposed to be a thing that you become to used to your own smell, but I've known more than one person who simply never realized that they, or anyone really, can be smelled by other people.
There are three X-rays in this article, and the covid one is completely bogus. Kind of stains the credibility of the article and the company the produced it.
Probably the regulations of the country the oil rig is registered in.
Who's to say that we will ever reach that point? COVID-19 will be with us forever [1], which means that governments can forever point to it as a reason to push for increasingly oppressive restrictions. The economic meltdown resulting from these restrictions is pushing even the most capitalist countries much further onto the socialism spectrum than anyone could have imagined just a year ago. Some political parties view that as a positive outcome, regardless of how it was achieved.

So as long as COVID can be used as a way to achieve long-standing political goals, there will be absolutely no political will to relax the restrictions, even as infection rates start to fall as a result of vaccinations. It will take serious pushback by the populace - people making it clear that incumbent politicians will lose their next elections unless restrictions are relaxed - to return to any sense of normalcy in a reasonable period of time.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/covid-19-...
Yes: https://delta.chat/en/help#how-can-i-find-people-to-chat-wit...
Fauci was never dishonest. That was Trump trying to shift the blame to him. Watch the original clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI&feature=youtu.be He literally said that the reason he is advising against masks was because he was worried about shortages.
In the nicest way possible, how does that work, this is the code but what is running could be different
Needs more Vaporwave.
Master is used in many contexts in English that have nothing to do with slavery. The first definition given by the OED is “a person or thing having control or authority”.

An arbitrarily chosen quotation: “ M. le Comte Benedetti, French Ambassador at Berlin..sped to Vienna with the latest proposal of his master.”

Certainly, this ambassador Count Benedetti was not a slave.
It is certainly a double standard.
*temporarily
Sure. But that’s a moot point if it turns out you need to basically replicate large parts of the human brain in order to drive with cameras alone.
It took me a while to find the "tips" lessons on duolingo but now I always review them before the translation drills and usually find them to be relevant.
Facebook Private Messages Are Not End-to-End Encrypted
Wow! so much scientific conversation and not one thought about gazillion of animals who live in those trees. Did you guys know earth was doing pretty fine with just trees and animals before all these tech, or even their talk, appeared in the scene.
There is no “slave branch” in git either.
Escaping the Roadmap Trap
Article is from 2012, so nearly 40 years later. Wonder if the author still has it.

As my HN username suggests, I spent a lot of time on the Apple IIGS with nearly the same experience as the author. The article brought back a lot of memories.

I kept my IIGS for 15 years, but need money for school. In 2001 I put it sale on eBay. Someone from Apple bought it off me as gift to a colleague who was retiring. I was happy for it to go to someone who worked on it at Apple. Now I’m wondering if it’s still around too.

They paid me something like $600 for a 15 year old computer plus another $700 for shipping (from Canada to California).
I wish I lived in your reality. Where somebody has a Plan and everything is going as it is supposed to. Unfortunately that is not true. The virus is real.
Sure, I hear what your saying, but her insurance company said oh no worries we will pay for it all. It's not your fault... do you not think they have data about these things and why would they pay for it carte blanche?
> Go spend 10 minutes scrolling the /r/IdiotsInCars subreddit to get a feel for what I’m talking about.

I don't think that is enough to form a conclusion. I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles and have yet to see an /r/IdiotsInCars moment. I think drivers are better than you think they are. If there are even just 10 recorded idiots a day, then that sub can be active and interesting every single day, but that doesn't reflect the fact that there may be 10,000,000 responsible drivers for each of those idiots.

> At worst it’s equivalent to the average human driver.

So I think this needs to be backed up with actual data and not some anecdotes from Reddit.
This is very interesting.

Could you move the next and reset buttons so they're easier to click?
Yes, I’ve seen this over here in The Netherlands as well. Just about every day I log in and can see another non-tech acquaintance having joined signal. It’s been at least 50 over the past few weeks, it’s really weird.
Perhaps if you encourage them to think of it as something other than a creepy, fascist, disgraceful fiasco, they might be more inclined to think rationally about it?
How much more does it cost you than if you picked it up yourself? I'd also be curious to know how a burger in particular holds up through the delivery process.

I understand the time/money tradeoff and would be happy to spend a few dollars to save myself a 20-30 minute roundtrip drive, but it seems like the cost of this convenience is much larger than I prefer, even though we only eat out occasionally.
Open-Source Apache CloudStack 4.15 Gets New Look
> You should be ashamed of yourself.

I appreciate your point, but please let’s keep this place civil. It might be the last one of the kind.
On an undated page on his personal website, Matthias Felleisen writes that a third edition is coming soon: https://felleisen.org/matthias/HtDP3e/index.html
Unfortunately that's how the world currently works.
So pay for it in dollars or in time ;) but goland isn’t free last time I checked
I'm not sure how you could interpret that comment as saying the virus "isn't real". Of course it's real. I also don't think it was "planned," nor did I imply that. But it's certainly being exploited for political ends.
Question:

Is there any mechanism in place (aside from upvotes ranking, and astute HN commenters) to prevent endless duplicate submissions?

What safety guardrail would prevent a malicious/selfish/merely annoying self-promoter from flooding HN with submissions?
With a profit or ideological motive, I can spam you, and shout over all meaningful communication much faster than you can block me.
You are absolutely right. In the dialect of colloquial American English that I grew up speaking, bare “you” can only be singular, and the default plural 2nd person pronoun is “you guys”. Telling us not to use it because of long-forgotten etymology would be as absurd as telling us not to use the word “they” because it’s a product of Norse imperialism.
What is the Y axis, and how was it measured? It's not clear from the legend on the image.
Unless the cars carrying the TikTokers are Volvo or Apple cars monitoring the driver, or driving itself.
> In the HN bubble lots of people have migrated to Signal with all of their contacts but outside of that bubble nothing much seems to be happening.

I’ve had a ton of non-tech people show up on Signal suddenly. I asked one of them why everyone is signing up, and he said because he doesn’t trsut WhatsApp.
Regulations are all we have to keep things from breaking...ignoring them about something like a self driving car should be a criminal offense.
Let’s grant that one thinks that the various COVID restrictions are a danger to free civilization. How exactly does this translate to getting a vaccine being a danger to free civilization?
"Critical feature" but with an "Easy workaround"? Doesn't seem likely.
Elon musk is everything wrong with the tech industry as a whole, overpriced, over engineered, and QA lacking products, hes arrogant when he shouldnt be, and his "disruptions" are mostly stupid, what accomplishments he does have are largely the result of engineers he pays that he takes credit for

the only thing he is good at is marketing himself
He killed two kids, you know.
Frankly, I’ve never seen a good take from Backblaze once I got past their marketing blog posts.

Zero-knowledge encryption? You don’t need that[0][1].

Client writes every backup chunk to disk before uploading instead of holding the data in memory, reducing the lifespan of customer SSDs for no reason? It’s fine, don’t worry about it[2][3].

A pattern of violating of basic and well-known software security principles[4][5][6]? Bodge in fixes. Don’t tell customers about it. Cancel the public bug bounty programme, claim it’ll be back in an indeterminate period of time[7] and replace it with a private one instead[8].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/8oczbl/how_do_i_...

[1] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664798-Secur...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/igaqse/please_al...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/k764xq/backblaze...

[4] https://twitter.com/zetafleet/status/1304664097989054464, more discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24842871

[5] Hard-coded credentials in deployed apps: https://medium.com/@pig.wig45/from-n-a-to-resolved-for-backb...

[6] Relying on client-side validation only: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LC0aEZFVz8

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849334

[8] https://www.backblaze.com/security.html
There are a variety of COVID-19 vaccines either already approved or in the pipeline in various countries. Only some of them are mRNA vaccines, notably the one from Moderna. Others are based on older technology.
Learn about what? Masks are effective against flu? We know that for a century.
Considering the source for that is a single trauma surgeon on Twitter, I'm going to wait until there's something formally published on the matter. We have no information on the condition of the patient with "covid lung", or even a comparison between asymptomatic patients vs patients put on ventilators. Not saying you're wrong, but that article seems sensationalized and quite honestly lacking in relevant information.
I did it mom, I'm on hacker news Joking but this is kind of sureal to see my small handmade project on the front page of hacker news.When I started the project I was kinda at the bottom just dropped of university, and now it's a growing community full of really cool people :)
This. The last decade saw a massive adoption of computers of all shapes and sizes in India. In the decade before that (2000 - 2010) computers were limited within labs, and offices. But smart phone changed all that. From booking train tickets to access medical health check reports to paying push-cart vendors through mobile wallet, consumers are now using computers in all sorts of ways.

As you rightly said, I just can't think of a domain that's untouched by computers.

Even in the fundamental science it's now impossible to do anything without massive data crunching machines. LIGO detection of gravitational waves, the first black hole images, and the plummeting cost reduction of full DNA over last two decades are a great example of how computers have irreversibly changed the way science is done.
There is a NDA. One tester has said that it [at least in part] says "you can't livestream drives"[0], and while otherwise NDA details are sparse, given the many close calls, bad performance situations, and multiple periods of rapid uploads [1,2], chances are they aren't screening videos.

0: https://youtu.be/AkexMo_jdcQ?t=346

1: https://i.judge.sh/enormous/Flim/chrome_RIGtEw3oE3.png (Chuck Cook)

2: https://i.judge.sh/sturdy/Derpy/chrome_NZrYtjHAeP.png (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Thank you for sharing, really, but understand that I could also slip into blind hatred over what I see as the suffering you and your culture have caused (not least being caregivers so scared by the hyped-up risk to younger and healthier people that they abandoned patients?!) but that would not be useful. As the minority opinion I’m also more likely to get flagged or banned, and I do use that handicap as a crutch sometimes (thanks @dang).

Perhaps the best option would be for us to get drunk and rage about this for a few hours or days. I bet I could rant for a lot longer than you, and I bet I understand your position better than you understand mine. Perks of being in the counterculture, I guess.
I'm honestly not sure, I took a test drive at a Tesla showroom and the guy was tweaking the seat for me before I got in.

Tried to convince me to consider the Model S instead. Just, ya know, casually buy a car that costs twice as much. I think I'll get a house before I buy a $90k car...
Yes, JSON was not designed for this sort of thing; it was designed to follow the Javascript object model, which is VERY limited. It was a quick and clever hack to get serialization working between Javascript systems, so it did mostly solve the problem of rehydrating whole objects (in JS). The only tricky problem is if you change the data structure and then try to rehydrate from an old document (the same problem you encounter in databases when you change the schema). And most use cases have done alright despite that.

But of course once you take JSON and try to make it work in other languages, you run into trouble with the lack of types. There have been many attempts at serialization formats that cover the 80% case, each with varying levels of success. The thing is, JSON and XML opened the door to a new requirement: human readability. Nowadays we want to be able to inspect and edit the data without needing some kind of specialized binary editor to do it. We want to be able to load it up into our text editor of choice, make changes, and expect it to work when fed into the machine. That's huge, and marked a paradigm shift in data communications and serialization (despite the terrible inefficiencies this introduces). But it's always been the lack of types that tripped up nontrivial use cases, requiring all sorts of unportable hacks and workarounds to shoehorn it into your particular use case.

I've been developing Concise Encoding [1] over the past 3 years specifically to tackle this problem. For the 80% use case, the format must:

- Be ad-hoc capable (most real-world use cases don't actually need a schema)

- Be human readable/writable as text

- Be efficient (don't waste energy constantly serializing/deserializing text)

- Support all common types (bool, int, float, date, URL, UUIDs, list, map, array, etc)

- Support recursive data

- Support pseudo-objects like comments and metadata

- Be precise (no lossy conversions from things such as floats)

Also another pet peeve of mine is date formats. Pretty much every serialization format either gets it wrong, or doesn't support all of the cases it should (this includes ISO-8601).

[1] https://concise-encoding.org
Probably the thinking is that any online platform likely has some roundabout way to be used to communicate with people on the outside. Internal message boards, group chats, help desk, etc. The software would have to be usable completely offline to be acceptable.
> Now I'm curious. The world you describe seems quite hostile to someone with your beliefs

That's because I don't have beliefs, I have data. I'm not interested in "beliefs". I'm interested in being able to concretely prove something with varying degrees of certainty, and I won't present my findings and conclusions unless I have the strongest available data to back them up.

To autopsy your assertion even further, you could extrapolate to the entire world. Most people in the world don't really want to know why the world is the way it is, or even why they do the things they do. People don't like that they can be quantified, that they can be predicted if someone, somewhere, with enough knowledge and understanding has enough data about them. Yet Facebook and Google and Twitter and YouTube do this every day, fairly easily nowadays I might add. It only upsets people when its in their face and clearly visible. When they can't turn away from it and deny it.

The nearly wholesale rejection of evolutionary biology, psychology, and the Big Five personality traits by a subset of certain people is hilarious because 1) its anti-science, which is made even more ridiculous given the credence these groups place on science and 2) it not only can be, but often is used against them by researchers who have no moral misgivings about the nature of the science and accept it for what it is - its neither inherently good nor bad, its just how we evolved based on the selective pressures nature placed upon our species.

> how and why are you in it?

The why is probably easier to answer than the how. By their own admission, I bring value to their organizations. When someone asks me what I do, instead of going through a bunch of technobabble and mathematics/statistics jargon I just tell them, "I bring order to chaos." It usually sparks more interesting conversations than talking about R, K-means clustering, Bayesian inference, and all the other jargon surrounding data science that frankly almost no one besides mathematicians, statisticians, and other data scientists will understand anyway. The second part of the "why" is "enormous consulting fees". :)

The how is a very long post that I just don't have time to type up right now.
Tell HN: My entire company's Gsuite access has been banned
Google support is refusing to let us know what happened and not even giving access to retrieve emails to other drive data.

We are facing completely hopeless situation where no one is providing us any answers or providing support for PAID service.

Can anyone help or provide any clues on how we can talk to actual support team?
Computers and GUIs have radically reshaped video and music production. I'm sure there are other domains where has had similar impact, where reverting to a dumb terminal would not be possible, such as CAD applications.
D) This is the most interesting time in history so far, and the correlation with population will hold as population grows.

Although echoing the opinions of many other commenters, I believe the early 20th century probably takes that crown.
Reality is not black and white. You need to strike a balance.

The claim of "1000% as dangerous" is sensational, and frankly, should be backed up by facts, or else you are just smearing mud.
I'm with you on that - longer than I care to think ago, I used to order takeaway almost exclusively from Domino's pizza because I could order it online and have it delivered.

I don't even like Domino's Pizza.
The term you’re looking for is “Federated Machine Learning.” The more cars Tesla has, the faster they can train the neural networks edge cases.
Sure, but I think you're missing my point.
> Both manslaughter and murder count as "killing."

Your use of quotations seems to imply that you're saying that GP used the word "killing". That's incorrect; the word used was "murder" and, as GP already said, manslaughter is not murder.

I might have misinterpreted your use of quotations, but in that case then I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
Rivian?
> My only quible would be that only code quality static analysis is useful.

It didn't occur to me he meant anything else. I just read it as not using -Wall -Wextra -Werror makes life more painful.

> just to get everyone to stfu about variations in code style

It makes reading code easier from different programmers easier. But the exact format doesn't matter - just so long it's all similar. Standardising on a formatting tool / linter from the language like pep8 does the stfu job.

The bit I was surprised by is:

> Code coverage has absolutely nothing to do with code quality

It might be true depending now how you measure code quality I guess, but that's a very fuzzy metric. Choose a concrete metric like the ratio of man hours to get code out the door over bugs in that code, and what is absolutely true is automated tests is one of the few dramatic ways we have of forcing the metric up. Either you automate the tests, you spend enormous amounts of time manually doing tests, or you don't test.

I suspect he's arguing the difference between 95% and 100% coverage isn't great. I'd quibble, but that's defensible. But the difference between 50% and 95% on the other hand is dramatic.