skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With someone like Peter Thiel I find it very easy to believe that all he got out of the Palantir subplot of LotR was "wow, it would be great if something like that really existed!" and all the cautionary elements of the tale just went in one ear and out the other. Or, he just doesn't mind becoming an actual Sauron figure.
On the flip side of that argument, it shows an extraordinary mount of hubris in their ability to know what the user wants to see.

Allowing customization is considerate to the user, like saying "I made this and I think this default configuration works best, but you can change this if it doesn't work best for you." There is not necessarily a "right solution" for 100% of the users.

The best user experience comes from strong defaults that don't need to be changed, but can be if the user requires it.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
All you need to run a 'personal git server' is sshd and a user. If you plan to have many others to use it, then it's not really personal, is it?

> Even though we've turned off password based authentication in a previous section, we will still receive a significant amount of bots wasting our compute cycles trying to login.

I think that's proven to be false.
Posting from a throwaway:

I’ve been doing work in the realm of Covid for basically the last year. Part of that privilege is access to HHS Protect, as managed by Palantir.

Just to soothe some unknowns, Covid surveillance is nothing like the kind of military surveillance described in this article. There is no personally identifiable data and certainly no effort to trace individuals with Covid.

The actual data inside HHS protect is not much more specific than what is publicly available. Covid tests/cases/deaths by county, locations of long term care facilities, pharmacies, hospitals. Data on supplies, hospitalizations, staffing. Demographic data comes straight from Census data, also still aggregated.

In addressing Covid, I often wish we had better data. Google and Apple’s earlier plan to anonymously contact trace is far more “creepy” than anything the federal government currently has. As you’ll notice, that tech got basically no traction. Contact tracing has largely been a failure in the US, but that’s a whole other story.

Do you really think that Covid would have hit the US as intensely as it did if we had military level surveillance? I don’t. Many points of inaction are due to unclear or insufficient data.

On the other hand, the raw data available to Google, Apple, Facebook and others is insane to me. Your phone is your tracking device. These companies have it as a unique identifier and most definitely track a large number of users in an individually identifiable way. The carriers do this as well.

I absolutely agree that we need refrain allowing this technology to be used in domestic policing, but in terms of war I see it a net positive. Data drives insight which drives action. Palantir just happened to build one of the best platforms to do this. (You may disagree with any of the above, that is fine)
Every single one of them probably "worked" as designed and marketed, or close enough. Safes don't claim to be fireproof and will clearly state something like "Fire protection for 1/2 hour at 1400F." Very few get into "Likely to survive the total burn-down of a home" territory.
I think it’s probably a little of both. On one side, I am reminded of the quote “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. Many of the big discoveries happened by very intelligent people being in the right place, at the right time where a certain idea was ripe, meeting the right people, and having just enough gusto, so to speak, to push in a new direction. I think that is probably applicable to people like Einstein and Shannon. I’m not taking away from them at all because they did it with work and intelligence. It’s just they had the right preparation at the right time and place.

But then there are other people that do seem to be on a totally different plane, usually in some specific field. One that comes to mind is someone like Grigori Perelman. I think that’s where the comment on genetics applies, because someone like that truly has biological horsepower that the rest of us don’t have.

Then there are others who are more generalist thinkers, at a system level, that seem to see things the rest of us don’t and have the capability to sort through it all. I’m reminded of people like Stafford Beer. Someone like Noam Chomsky is probably in this category as well but also in the former, like Perelman. If you’ve ever watched Chomsky debate or speak, he seems to have a basically infinite memory and instant recall of what he has read.
CHAIRMAN: What was your position.?
CICCI: Well at first like everyone else I, I was a soldier.
CHAIRMAN: What is that?
CICCI: A button you know SENATOR, come on.
CHAIRMAN: No I don't know. Tell me.
CICCI: Well -- when the boss says push a button on I guy -- I push a button. See SENATOR.
QUESTADT: You mean you kill people.
CICCI: I what?
QUESTADT: You kill people at the -- uh -- at the behest of your superiors?
[CICCI's lawyer tells him to say yes.]
CICCI: Yea -- that's right Counselor.
I think microk8s uses this to form a cluster, and k3s used to use it but moved back to etc.

Would be good to hear from someone who used it what are the pros and cons of such a setup
To me the biggest takeaway is, as always, you should care about what you're building, or you're unlikely to find success.
https://floatapp.com/ (£39.99/month to start with)
First thing I thought was: wow, that's a quite liberal use of the term "nondestructive".

I dug around the specs, and the neutron flux is 108 n/cm2/sec max.

To approach a 600ppi resolution (and I say approach because I assume the actual vector of each neutron is random and not distributed uniformly), you'd need roungly 60k n/cm2, so the picture will take 10 minutes at max power.

If we assume half get absorbed by the object (will depend on the material and its thickness), 30k atoms are potentially becoming radioactive.

This figure, for some materials it won't matter much, for others materials will become radioactive, and for others it'll release alpha particles straight away to become stable (and for others it may result in nuclear fission, teehee).

Still, 30k atoms/cm2 doesn't sound like a lot of radioactivity added to an object, but its safety will HEAVILY depend on the material it's made of. In general, I'd say objects will remain probably safe enough to handle without protection, but probably not safe to eat; for a few weeks, at least, until the most active isotopes are cleared out.

A banana for scale[0], has 3.4mg of potassium per cm3, 0.012% of them are radioactive, leaving 0.4µg of radioactive potassium, which amounts to 6.161e15 atoms [1], so 3e5 more is nothing to write Marie Curie about.

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=potassium+in+a+cubic+c...

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=atoms+in+0.4%C2%B5g+of...*
It's relatively well documented IMHO.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/style/co...
I use IRC. I use it with multiple devices, including desktop and phone. I have "contact management" and notifications (whatever push is) on both desktop and my phone. I use OTR for private messages. The only thing it may be missing is audio/video, but I think even that may be doable, I have not researched it due to lack of need.
I can understand what you mean, but let's be fair -- preventing things like "all white UI" can easily be coded into the configurability. Yes, the full iteration of possible situations you could get into are quite large, and maybe you miss some -- but there are also options for coding in some kind of "reset" quick-switch that doesn't require the UI.

Also, I'm not sure I buy the claim that "things like that are tolerated a lot less". Are they? Or has it just been so long since we've had anything like that, that we just assume people would hate it even more?
> So I don't know how that's a bad idea, considering sync of a large number of files is the single purpose of file sync.

Yeah it is, but things aren't all rosy and still very flaky here and there (again, I'd wager it's similar for most other cloud sync clients). So we have to still work around these limitations.

I'm not very familiar with git internals, but git writes many files, most of them tiny. When I physically copy a directory with a git repo, the working directory (the currently checked out files) always copies over fast, but the potentially tens of thousands of tiny files take forever (they're not continuous and each one has to be seeked on disk, and each file has some overhead. The overhead isn't noticeable for large files, but adds up for numerous tiny ones).

Next to selfhosting Nextcloud, I also selfhost GitLab for that purpose. That is way overkill though. There's lightweight git servers like Gitea that I've heard people selfhost. If you don't rely on dumb file-based sync but only sync to your remote in git protocol, things won't go wrong anymore.
I want Linux-like anarchy^H^H^Hthemability on Windows and macOS. I'm not keen on tweaking the appearance of every little button, but I want to go 'theme-shopping' from time to time and change the appearance of my desktop. Just to make it look a bit different now and then.

It's interesting that the most slick and stylish desktops are now on Linux (of course there's 99% trash, but the remaining 1% are a lot more aesthetically pleasing than both the current Win10 and macOS themes).
The cost of 4U vs 2U is trivial compared to the cost of this hardware.
thanks yes should be by Intel.
Software costs nothing to duplicate, Amazon isn't taking advantage of ESs resources (as someone losing food might). It's leveraging it's own resources, which it created at substantial cost.

People look at the money Amazon is making with ES, as if it's making money off ES, rather than off ES & AWS. The money Amazon would otherwise leave on the table wouldn't necessarily go to ES, I doubt ES has an claim to being worse off. It's "unlimited" service usage taps markets that might be out of reach for ES otherwise.
I do agree that the modern love for “dark mode” has made developers realise — albeit in a limited way — that there is a pent-up demand for theming.

Products who do theming well tend to be popular among their users — eg IntelliJ and VSCode of course, but tbh Emacs and vim are no slouches in this regard.
You really shouldn't trust articles that use metrics like CO2/tx or that claim to have "proven" Bitcoin's environmental impact. At the same time you shouldn't use such a "proof" as an excuse to dismiss conflicting information.

Bitcoin mining is a very competitive field. Information about the actual energy mix and location of miners are guarded secrets. Researchers are thus using models to estimate these holes.

Estimates on the electricity consumption of Bitcoin in 2018 are ranging from ~20 TWh/yr to >100 TWh/yr. Some papers assume coal fossil power only (0% renewables), global average energy mix (~10% renewables) or a regional energy mixes (~73% renewables [0]).

Based on my experience with papers in that area, is that more recent papers with more complex models tend to produce higher estimates of the shares of renewables. It seems reasonable to me that Bitcoin is greener than many other industries because energy costs are the dominating factor in mining profitability and Bitcoin allows you to convert excess energy into money - at any remote location on this planet as long as you have an internet connection.

[0]: https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-min...
I'll agree, this is one of the things I don't like about macOS. It looks like in the past there were hacks to do this, but Apple broke them.

(Similarly, I'm so glad there's a hint of colour in the sidebar in the Finder again; I hate when Apple says, "We've got two indistinguishable shades of grey; one for available, and one for inactive. You can take it, or you can take it.")

As to the point about setting a desktop background, though, I hardly ever see my desktop background, so changing it doesn't seem very important.
I recommend looking into gitolite, it's very simple and low maintenance and makes managing access a lot easier and with much more granularity than authorized_keys.

It's basically just a simple perl script and a couple configuration files. It just work in my experience.

If you end up scaling to the point where you have dozens of users and need to make regular changes to the config it becomes rather cumbersome, but for small groups of people (with a couple of build bots and the like that need read-only repo access) it's very well suited.
I don't get why they need to exactly reassemble old cars..

A car is ether safe or not. I'm somewhat ok with looser safety requirements as long as customers have to sign a waiver ( and I guess remove the backseats,stop people from putting car seats in the back )
I dug up the first one real quick for you, at the time I was just reviewing issues to see if I could help (codeberg) and browsed the list - you can farm here, and they tend to create an upstream issue in Gitea and link to it for many of the items (provide a good feedback loop to upstream):

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/355

(edit: grammar)
Which implementation are you referring to? The Go package uses crypto.random and generation blocks if the system can’t provide enough randomness. It’s possible to override this with custom implementations, but either ways it’s no less secure than a UUID unless the implementation is horrible.

The spec doesn’t specify a source of randomness - an implementation that uses https://xkcd.com/221/ will or course not be a very good one.
I did that search and I didn't know I could get physical pain from pictures.
Isn't the "homebrew" result at the end exactly the state machine from the DFA?

It has been a while, but I remember KMP calculating a prefix table of some sort beforehand, to skip the repeated checking on yet-unclear partial matches?
Our data SaaS integrates with Git
I thought this was obvious.
> But he thinks the growing movement among law enforcement agencies in the United States to use Palantir’s software programs domestically is cause for alarm

People are usually easily biased by the information they're constantly fed. It becomes easy to concoct a good explanation for why something unacceptable can become acceptable sometimes. "We're fighting for freedom and democracy", "fighting the enemy", "fighting terrorists and pedophiles". All of a sudden a lot of stuff is justified. Then someone else uses it and the argument gets turned on its head. "They're terrorists, enemies, dictators", all others are too "morally corrupt" to wield this power.

Most of those people are able to justify anything as long as they're doing it or at least it's not being done to them... Until eventually it is Because what's ironic is that most don't realize that to maintain power you must keep your enemies in check but eventually also your own citizens.
Given the number of companies already leveraging the marketplace, do you still see opportunities for new companies to come in? And are most opportunities focused on a vertical niche?
The Cost of Pushing Code
> They live in another country so they don't deserve the same rights we superior americans do, right?

It goes beyond that. People don't care Palantir tried to do predictive policing via ML in the US because the suspected criminals were poor POC.
I'm happy to see an ARM-based microcontroller, but I my two questions would be:

1. Why didn't they use the same GPIO header as a full-sized Raspberry Pi? That would allow people to reuse some of the same headers. Seems like a missed opportunity there?

2. Since it has no WiFi and it costs more, this compares unfavorably with the good old ESP8266 in some important respects. Why would you pick the Pico?

EDIT: I'm being downvoted to hell. I'm sure that the new Pico will find buyers, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it sells out based on brand recognition alone. I'm just trying to ask some legitimate questions as to what this has to offer over the competition in the microcontroller space, which is a crowded market, and how it fits into the existing RPi ecosystem.
> Who will be the Snowden of Palintir to give it the public scrutiny required to make sure their powers stay in reasonable bounds?

The problem is, any kind of big data dump inevitably would be met with the same excuse which is made on behalf of all big tech power these days: "it's just a private firm so it doesn't need to abide by the same limitations that would apply to the government."
Hackers publish thousands of files after government agency refuses to pay ransom
Same (except I often use shift+f in Pentadactyl or three fingers on trackpads, and middle click emulation when pressing both buttons is an option on two-button rats).
In my senior year of high school (1968-69) Mike Sivy (Yes that Michael Sivy) and I tried to build some components of a digital computer out of military surplus relays. We took the bus and the subway down to Canal Street in NYC and bought a box of large 24 volt relays.
We designed a counter and we were able to get some parts working. It took 5 relays for each part, which Sivy was able to drop down to 4 by using a diode. I always thought that the diode was cheating and by using it we lost the purity of the concept, but we had a limited number of relays and we wanted to count to 8.
One of our problems was hysteresis and at various times the whole thing would start sparking and chattering like crazy. I remember trying to explain what we did to parents that wandered into the physics lab in the school's open house. They were more impressed with the giant "jabob's ladder" we built that eventually set the lab's window moulding on fire.
"I believe that President Trump's Twitter ban is an unacceptable act of censorship." - Alexey Navalny //twitter.com/navalny/status/1347959515946360833?s=19

I have never been silent about Navalny. He is clearly a political prisoner. However it is important to be consistent, and not only be a critic when it's your adversaries commiting a fault.
Allowing customization also increases the feature area of your product, thus increasing need for support, dev time, qa time, increased chance of regressions, etc.
I run nextcloud internally in a container.

Thing I don't like is that it expects to be hooked to the internet, and it nags you about apps you should install but you have to install them from their cloud/app store.

Now there is a way to install the app store on your server, but it would be nicer to get started without having to buy into all that. So I just run the default apps.
After big hack of U.S. government, Biden enlists world class cybersecurity team
I believe if you religiously optimise for cost per wear you will end up wearing a hiking outfit everyday.
> As I get older, I am returning more to it's more about nature than nurture: genetics matter much more than environment.

It is my understanding that modern science supports this. I’ve seen either a book or article (none of which I can recall at the moment) that echoes this sentiment.
Discussed a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25832047
It’s likely due to the factors both you and the parent are mentioning – and others – not known or in worst case unknowable.
C++ is an anti-pattern
This doesn't directly answer your question, but, there's an important distinction to draw between two use-cases for "ML":

1. ML is used to improve UX / ops
2. Other people's jobs depend on the quality of the ML output

1 can encompass things like offering recommendations or optimizing click-through. 2 is things like analytics-as-a-product in smart manufacturing.

I assume 1 is a lot easier to "succeed" at: if I receive a bad music recommendation, I just move onto the next one.

2 is harder to do well, and the output quickly loses credibility when it's bad.

That said, bad ML in high-stakes contexts (by which I mean, someone else is using the ML to do their job better) should get weeded out pretty quickly...so for the total effort and care taken to address 2, they may be more successful on average.
Raft consensus: https://raft.github.io/

Surprisingly easy to understand, and a cool viaual.
You might be interested to see some more OSS that can be deployed on it:

https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

https://toltec-dev.org/
My dream board would be a full Raspberry with an Arduino-like µC included on the same board, for easy I/O.
What a fantastic machine, amazing work!
Telecoms satellite uses iodine thruster to change its orbit
New website launched to document vulnerabilities in malware strains
In brief: at any point in time, one of the replicas is a "leader" which controls the order in which operations are committed. The changes occur in a defined sequence, and other replicas may lag behind the leader, but cannot be inconsistent with it.

Your example can't happen, because if (for instance) A is the leader, then C will not apply change Y without contacting the leader, which will tell it to apply X first.

If you want more details about how this handles all the edge cases -- for instance, what happens if the leader crashes -- the Raft paper is quite accessible: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf
My TLS conundrum and why I decided to leave Cloudflare (2014)
These type of organisms -- those that seemingly require a rather narrow window of living conditions -- make me wonder how they have survived through ice ages and such.

I assume this has been something extensively studied and is well-understood in biology or climate science.
If you’re referring to the monotonic counter implementation, then yes, that’s a documented choice you can make if you explicitly want strictly increasing ULIDs on the same millisecond, but given that you can’t ensure this across servers anyway, it’s more an edge case.
I really appreciate when people are transparent. There's a lot of good wisdom here.

A decade back I co-founded a startup. My cofounder, a brilliant product manager, had what seemed like a great idea. Great enough that he quickly got a fat check for the whole seed round. We could have just started building, but both of us were big fans of using user testing to guide product development, so we instead did a lot of user tests.

Six or eight weeks later, we were down at Sand Hill Road for our first board meeting. At this point, according to our VCs, normally they'd just hear about plans. But my co-founder got up and explained that of the 6 key assumptions in our product, 2 and maybe 3 were false. The thing they'd given us money to build was a bust. The room was very quiet. Then he went on to explain the next idea we'd come up with and got them excited about that.

Something we learned later is at the same time we'd raised a seed round, two other companies raised large A rounds to go after basically the same idea. They spent the next 18 months (and north of $10m) trying to make it work.

Not only did that make us feel a lot better about having pivoted, but it was an important lesson to me: the best failures are those with the smallest craters. We bought the same knowledge for less than 1% of the money spent.
I more or less agree. I worked on the prior generation of projects like this. The use case at the time was tracking particular vehicles and dismounts in urban environments. We all knew the bad guys and tin pot dictators would love something like what we had. But we also knew that the guys manning the checkpoints really liked being able to know in advance which direction it was prudent to have the business end of the tank pointing in case that car of questionable provenance makes a run for it.

The cat's out of the bag. Now it's up to us what we do with it (and what we tolerate the government doing with it).
I use gist personally from time to time to document things I've had to do, though I wish I did it more often. I keep discovering undocumented ways to resolve software problems.