skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why exactly is it a problem that powerful models can memorise training data with random labels, if they generalise well on non-memorisation problems?

I also think that a lot of progress is being made seemingly in parallel on this "understanding NN [generalisation]" topic, and the different threads don't necessarily seem to be aware of each other.

This article seems to have failed to mention most of this recent progress. Possibly this is an artifact of the time it takes to produce and publish a completed article, but it presents a picture that we are more clueless than we actually are.

The most promising, IMO, is outlined in these blog posts:

https://towardsdatascience.com/neural-networks-are-fundament... and
https://towardsdatascience.com/deep-neural-networks-are-bias...

which summarise 3 research papers. The basic idea is that because NN outputs are usually thresholded to produce a prediction/classification, there is not always a change in the output if a parameter changes. This gives space for there to be a non-uniform distribution over output functions, if weights are initialised randomly. The authors investigate this empirically (with some theoretical justification) and find that this bias is toward "simple" functions, which often generalise well, due to "simple" properties mostly being what we care about in real data. Then generalisation can be explained by SGD simply being more likely to find parameters which cause the NN to express a function that is simpler, out of all functions that perfectly match the training data.

There is also some interesting investigations into infinite-width limits - the most well known being the result that NNs are equivalent to Gaussian Processes at initialisation, then Neural Tangent Kernels [1] showing a way to view them through the lens of kernel methods throughout training as well.

But then there is Feature Learning in Infinite-Width Neural Networks [2] which seems to be at odds with the kernel approach (due to kernels not learning features) - this paper provides a different method for parametrisation to admit feature learning.

So there is progress both in understanding generalisation and understanding when feature learning does & does not occur. (And this is hardly a comprehensive sampling.)

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.07572
[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.14522
Just what I was thinking. The article doesn't clearly answer the question of what level of browser cooperation is necessary for FLoC. I use Firefox. When I'm not using Firefox, I'm using Safari. Does this mean FloC won't affect me?

> FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves

This seems to hint that avoiding FLoC is just a matter of avoiding Chrome, with no 'arms race' of any sort.
Explorer Yachts for Sale
"Besides being a dream for micromanagers, it seems to be more about signalling progress vs. actually making progress"
Agile is for quick feedback on made progress, to compare it to expected progress and to be able to report your progress and forecast to business people to let them know how far behind the schedule you are as quickly as possible.

Let's say it's January and you need to deliver a product with a 200 use cases on July. After just a few first iterations you will be able to tell if you can deliver all use cases on July or quickly give feedback to business people that you won't be able to. From there you have options: close the project and stop investing time and money in it, add people to the project because you got your info very quickly that you won't be able to make the deadline in 6 months.

Uncle Bob talks about it in depth in one of his lectures here:
https://youtu.be/SVRiktFlWxI
https://youtu.be/qnq9syXUuFE

And in his book Clean Agile: Back to basics.
It was removed from the recommended reading list by Biden's administration for the "Read Across America" Day [1]. That's not directly related to eBay, unless you've seen the pattern before where "woke twitter mobs and politicians signal distate in X, tech megacorps subsequently take supporting action."

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9318259/White-House...
First you bring up something that is neither a cryptocurrency or properly decentralized (XRP and the XRP Ledger [Ripple]) then you simply miss the question as a whole.

The question was: "What exactly is the "threat" of forks?"

Your answer seems to be the answer to the question "How can we prevent forks?"

"Uncertainty" is certainly getting at some sort of answer, but falls short as you're not really explaining what kind of uncertainty and why it's bad in the first place.
On Xavier, the dedicated AI inference block is open source hardware.

Available at http://nvdla.org/
If FLoC is what I have understood it to be then, I support it.

Two things in FLoC's favour:
The algorithm is open-source and it's client-side.

It would be trivial for developers of ad-blockers to provide tools for anyone who cares about privacy to inject poisoned data into their stream. And for those who don't care, well it's a market and they are free to choose to partipate or not.
"Besides being a dream for micromanagers, it seems to be more about signalling progress vs. actually making progress"

Agile is for quick feedback on made progress, to compare it to expected progress and to be able to report your progress and forecast to business people to let them know how far behind the schedule you are as quickly as possible.

Let's say it's January and you need to deliver a product with a 200 use cases on July. After just a few first iterations you will be able to tell if you can deliver all use cases on July or quickly give feedback to business people that you won't be able to. From there you have options: close the project and stop investing time and money in it, add people to the project because you got your info very quickly that you won't be able to make the deadline in 6 months.

Uncle Bob talks about it in depth in one of his lectures here:

https://youtu.be/SVRiktFlWxI?t=1807

https://youtu.be/qnq9syXUuFE?t=3400

And in his book Clean Agile: Back to basics.
Under GPL-like licenses you are obligated to provide source code if you provide a binary. If you don’t distribute anything, e.g. you only use something privately, then there are effectively no obligations. Of course, if you don’t provide source code for your project (whether legitimately or not), then by definition your project is not open source in the first place.

Note that the GPL specifically does not require publishing the source code, or having to distribute it along with the binaries. It allows the alternative of only providing the source code upon request by any third party, to that same third party.
>(just like nobody actually reads the Bible unless they're actual preachers)

I did read a bit from the Koran for a while, just I was interested about what's in it (and why so many people die because of this book) even I don't believe in any god at all.
Human death is not the only dimension that matters. The cleanup could easily cost over $500 billion. That is a massive opportunity cost.
The scrum guide is treated as a holy text by some, but (as the scrum guide even states) agile teams should be self-organising and pick and choose what tools work for them.
Opt-out means you opt-out of default organ donation.
Meanwhile, humans are driving into pedestrians every minute of every day, but yes, get upset about what Tesla called their system...
My plainspoken definition:

An engineering manager manages engineers. They understand the technical work about as well as the people they manage, so that they can give relevant coaching. They also understand management principles that make engineering projects successful (WIP counts, release process pros and cons, etc). In other words they know how to structure work flows.
> Which screwdriver is the right size to stick in this electrical socket?

Note that this is a legitimate technique in UK sockets.

The live and neutral pins have a little gate over them that is retracted when you insert the earth pin, so you need to first stick a screwdriver into the earth pin in order to get your fingers into the live pin.
Your rebuttal is that change is a hard sell? Did I read that right?

In that case why have politicians at all?
Not the case in the UK at least.
This strikes at something that people often WANT when they say "text files are better than the registry/binary formats" - they want to easily bring their own tooling to bear.

Standard APIs let you do this - even if you have a "binary format" like MySQL or PostgreSQL (on disk) - nobody really complains about that because they have a defined API you can interact with.
The distinction is barely relevant. Megacorporations govern us these days.
Holy damn! I built the exact same thing at a hackathon and was working on the exact same things on which you are working.

Great job on your work. If anyone's interested to look at my project, take a look here

https://github.com/prashantsengar/IOwnMyData

It also has video demo in the readme
I've always liked that some houses in the UK have names rather than street numbers. Our Christmas card list includes "Sunnydale", "Lane Ends", and "The Old Rectory". The Royal mail computers must be pretty quirky indeed.
>It's disrespectful and not giving the benefit of the doubt.

So what?

If actually OP knows that this is bad approach, then OP will clarify that he's aware and yada yada.

What's the problem? lack of thick skin?
Google speeds up its release cycle for Chrome
OTOH PyTorch seems to be highly explosive if you try to use it outside the mainstream use (i.e. neural networks). There's sadly no performant autodiff system for general purpose Python. Numba is fine for performance, but does not support autodiff. JAX aims to be sort of general purpose, but in practice it is quite explosive when doing something other than neural networks.

A lot of this is probably due to supporting CPUs and GPUs with the same interface. There are quite profound differences in how CPUs and GPUs are programmed, so the interface tends to restrict especially more "CPU-oriented" approaches.

I have nothing against supporting GPUs (although I think their use is overrated and most people would do fine with CPUs), but Python really needs a general purpose, high performance autodiff.
Java standard library does that, not you directly. The issue here is not performance, but rather ergonomics. For example, in Go, you can forget to assign the result of append to the variable, and it'll even work most of the time (because there was still some unused capacity in the array, so there was no need for reallocation).
I had some good success running similar but not as organized sessions for our open-source project[1] in 2018-2019. There was no specific day of the week and calls were between 30-50 min.

I think this format is much better and more organized, so I highly recommend that open-source maintainers who would like to learn more about how their projects are used to give it a try.

[1]: https://github.com/polyaxon/polyaxon
That's why I hate forums without a proper E-mail gateway -- for me plain text E-Mail is the most essential API between humans.
My mail client is the main reason and I really hate everyone changing something that disables using either my preferred editor.

Everytime some modern hype takes that from me I cannot stop thinking of goose fattening: forcefully stuffing it down the throat and not for good.
Duffel (YC S18) is hiring back end engineers in London
Ask HN: How effective would it be to charge SaaS using only cryptocurrencies?
How many users would not use your product? Do you know an example of a startup that charges its services using only crypto?

Thanks for your time.
I agree with benlumen. I think there is a group which is trying very hard to redefine what racism means, in order to advance a different ideology. It seems to be working, at least in America.

For those people, To Kill a Mockingbird is very dangerous, because it espouses the MLK philosophy (colour blindness) which most people agree with, but which they hate.

For these modern "anti-racists", we must instead see race everywhere, and factor it into every aspect of our lives, making constant calculations and adjustments which we can never hope to do correctly, and which contain internal contradictions we can never resolve. This hands those people tremendous power.

They are like parasites who have taken over a host. It took massive effort to reach the point in society where almost everyone agreed racism was unacceptable, and legitimately feared being called a racist. Like all "isms", we reached the point where almost everyone stopped thinking about what these terms actually mean, and just started substituting the word for a value judgement: racism bad, anti-racism good. This is the perfect setup for someone with different goals to hijack the concept.
What Semantic Search Can Do for You
unfortunately sometimes people who ask questions are really junior, and need to be told they are going to have an unpleasant surprise if they go down the path they are planning on going.

sometimes people who ask questions know the pitfalls but don't clarify that they know adequately because they are pressed for time. in this case those people unfortunately run the risk of being talked down to and they should accept that.

on the other hand if they have clarified adequately that they know what they're doing and they still want to do something that might seem weird then I agree it is disrespectful. Which is a thing you see often enough on StackOverflow to be notable.
The problem is, they can't do this today with the necessary classification quality. Elaine was killed, because someone at Uber wanted these cars to drive so badly. It also is about culture and prediction. If the other participants behave differently to your prediction, it can get hazardous quickly at highway speeds. I can't find a better link [0], but maybe it's good enough to get the point across. The term is "warning dilemma" and means that you only have perfect information at the time of impact. Before, the classification if there will be a problem or not is worse, the earlier you ask. But asking early is necessary for the human to have a chance to react.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326568066_Towards_a...
Qualcomm's 'Snapdragon Sound' aims to boost wireless audio quality
Git does not have colaboration tools. It's very much a "work in a silo for a period of time and then evtually figure out how to mash these things together" approach.
Biden’s New Helicopter Still Risks Scorching White House Lawn
This idea suffers from the same problem federation does. It's harder to move a whole ecosystem. Makes it harder to innovate. Leads to centralized platforms outperforming these BYOC/federated/open options. Basically how Reddit replaced Usenet with upvotes and basic spam filtering.

There's more on this from 'moxie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
It is not just micromanagement, it is also the rest of the business culture. Ego-less development and placing the team over the individual can great for productivity. These productivity gains accrue to the profit of the wider company and _might_ partially flow back to the team, possibly as a bonus or possibly as promotions. However, effacing yourself for the team is unlikely to result in the kind of visibility needed for career progression and with software salaries being what they are that can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands in income over the years.

In a way, scrum and its team-based mechanics form a kind of prisoners dilemma where the first team member to claim credit will gain much more of the value generated than their peers. These incentives need to be taken into account in any framework based on teams cooperating, because they have the potential to rapidly poison any team where people are jockeying for promotion.
The Sonos Roam, coming in April for $169
Perhaps I was offended and was trying to point that out politely.

I wasn’t badly offended. I was offended enough to take the time to write these comments.

Keep in mind that on HN, rude and offensive comments are down-voted all the time. There is a politeness standard on this website, and perhaps that standard should incorporate the use of language like this!
> What would you like to work on?

Nothing set in stone. Hence I mentioned about bouncing ideas in my original post.

> Do you maybe have a Github to get an idea of your past projects?

I do not have a github account.
>And of course all the Tesla haters would go around talking about how their FSD system sucks

Well, nothing of what you wrote looks like an argument for why they would be wrong in saying that.
Yes, everywhere I've worked (UK), the EM manages a group of teams, each with their own team lead.
My dad was in the hospital with Covid for 3 weeks 1 completely unresponsive last March 2020 from the NYC strain.

Everyone in my family (5 people) developed primary symptoms but me (33 years old). I had a very strange course of leg/muscle pain, scratchy throat the first month then chest/arm pain for another month with GI issues the next. My 3 year old niece who had beaten the primary symptoms relapsed with a fever end of September and right around that time I started getting neurological issues where I was dizzy and had a burning cheek and buzzing/tingling fingers/toes with mild muscle twitching in my face.

6 months later I’m much better but still grappling with dizzyness and nerve pain in my cheek which sounds similar to you.

I’m convinced my immune system is going nuts from exposure to Covid and I fear I may have developed a more long term auto immune issue.

Probably time I take these symptoms to a neurologist.

Did the Dr prescribe you anything for your myelin damage?
I think tomaszs was referring to the changes in LastPass free offering where starting March 16th, 2021, LastPass Free will only include access on devices of one type so if you want to use it on desktop and mobile you have to pay for premium access.
If I remember correctly, slices in Go also have ownership semantics, in a sense that so long as any slice exists, the array is kept alive by the garbage collector.

Or do you mean value vs reference semantics? In that case, I think C pointers are simpler as a fundamental concept, and slices are best defined in terms of pointer + size.
Covid-19 pandemic impact on women
The challenge self driving cars face is that being "overall better" is probably not enough. Regressions in certain segments would hardly be acceptable for anyone. You can't tell people "FSD cars lowered overall deaths by 10% but we now kill 30% more toddlers because [technical reason]", or that "highway deaths are going up", or basically any segment that anyone could reasonably care about. Cars have to match and exceed human drivers in every category for them to be acceptable, and even 99% there may not be enough.
You mixed up implicit and explicit models. For anyone interested in the difference - implicit models such as GANs don't allow you to evaluate the probability density over datapoints - you can only sample from some surrogate model of the distribution learned by minimizing some 'distance' between the surrogate and the true empirical distribution.

'Explicit' models (I think this term is nonstandard) parameterize the density directly and modify the parameters via maximum likelihood. This allows one in theory to both directly evaluate the density and sample from the learned distribution. VAEs (only give a lower bound on the density), autoregressive models, and normalizing flows all fall under this category.

Note that while it is theoretically possible for 'explicit' models to go in both directions (sample and evaluate), one direction may be much more efficient than the other for certain models. e.g. for autoregressive models you can read the first two pages of [1] for a good explanation of why.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11495
But wasn't the Capitol riot planned on Facebook? (https://www.mic.com/p/facebook-played-a-major-role-in-capito...)

Nobody is going to pull that particular plug.
Maybe so, but what about the non-junior person who needs to do something weird for an actual valid reason and stumbles on the refusal to answer the question years later? StackOverflow answers aren’t just for the original asker.
I know your comment wasn't meant to spin off another thread, but I do believe you're touching at something quite significant. We as a society have become way too comfortable with using the government to stop behaviour we don't like, to the point that people automatically jump to that conclusion during political arguments.
> "You have no right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater"

This is completely false. It's nothing more than a mis-quoted opinion of a justice in a very old case which was eventually overturned and allowed exactly this kind of speech.

Please inform yourself of the laws you're claiming exist before you try to make arguments about them.
Sinclair ZX81 turns 40 today
My last place had those problems, but scrum was used in the opposite way. If we pushed back on things, we weren't "agile". Burn down was used a a club even though the model they chose would usually result in everything pending until the last two days of the sprint. Our estimations were completely ignored, plus the fact that they were estimations. We would make estimates, and be told they weren't commitments. Later when stuff would be pulled into the sprint, the team lead and manager would lower them, and we'd be castigated for not meeting them.
This legislation is dead if it doesn't prevent local munis from kowtowing to incumbant ISPs and thwarting municipal fiber. That's what we need: a ton more competition from the municipalities in this space given that I think broadband should be a public good like the highway system is.
So we "should" replace "should" with "could"? XD
It’s still racist to use a group’s skin color as a “shorthand” for problems with a country’s institutions.
another angle is the business perspective.

a lot of software is deployed in the service of the goals of business. To serve that purpose it often isn't necessary for the software to be completely correct. If it is probably sort of correct that's often good enough. Better to have something sort of correct deployed and running next week than something that costs more money and time to build, is a lot harder to hire people to maintain, relies on a formal analysis that is highly sensitive to changes in assumptions, and achieves a level of correctness that is unnecessary for the situation.

from this perspective, investing effort into formal methods will often give a poor return on investment compared to alternatives of hacking things together & running a few tests to catch obvious defects.

In some situations it seems to be worth investing in formal methods. Eg relatively well defined systems with very high costs if they fail.
Does anyone remember WordTech's dbXL? It was yet another DBase clone.

When I was a kid, my dad brought a copy home to play with. I fiddled with it but never really found any use for it. Unfortunately somebody (not me) threw out all the 5.25 inch floppies years ago, it was on one of them.

(There's a copy of it on vetusware, but not the English version.)

Edit: I found the English version here: https://www.swcs.com.au/db3.zip
Sq: Swiss-Army Knife for Data
Some scientists question the WHO inquiry into the pandemic’s origins
I doubt the same people would oppose it though. Rights of downtrodden groups are constantly shit on without a peep from the “free speech absolutist” crowd.
I've never met an actual, real developer (not manager or business wonk) who actually liked Agile. At most, people seem to tolerate it.
You have to feed your slaves or they die. No-one suggests that this is somehow paying them.