skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we go back in history far enough: yes, of course we will realize that X% of humanity is a descendant of person Y. But that is just a rather obvious consequence of the fact that genetic signals can travel through a genepool pretty quickly. Nevermind that we are talking about ancestry, not any particular genetic signals. It's just that Genghis Khan, King John and Charlemagne are rather prominent ancestors, and that their geneanalogy is documented well. I'm pretty sure we would find similar results with most people who still had decendants by, let's say, 1750. Since then, humanity went through a phase of tremendous population growth, which by definition expands the set of descendants of any of our ancestors. Most humans that have ever existed are alive today. Their ancestry must come from somewhere.
What nobody seems to be pointing out here: Ben's account contains exactly what you want to hand off to Someone Else's Storage™.

It's just GPG-encrypted backups.

Look. Here's what the innerText says, with the `\n`s interpreted:

Upload
Download
New Folder
Delete
Snapshot

Selected: 0 Files: 0 bytes
Name
Size
Uploaded

dbbackup_06_23_2017.sql.gpg
10.2 GB
06/23/2017 22:24
dbbackup_06_24_2017.sql.gpg
10.2 GB
06/24/2017 22:24
dbbackup_07_02_2017.sql.gpg
10.2 GB
07/02/2017 22:25
dbbackup_07_03_2017.sql.gpg
10.2 GB
07/03/2017 22:26
dbbackup_07_04_2017.sql.gpg
10.2 GB
07/04/2017 22:25
dbbackup_07_05_2017.sql.gpg
10.2 GB
07/05/2017 22:25
key.asc
3.9 KB
02/24/2016 22:01

Once again, noise. Perfect.

(For the curious: I couldn't be bothered to install https://projectnaptha.com/ (probably would've worked), I just resized a terminal to the same column width and blindly retyped the text into a shell printf statement.)
Amateur hour, tracking pixel in admin areas.

Have been a Backblaze customer for many years, mostly because of their state of HD here on HN. Lost all confidence in Backlaze.

Alternatives? Had been using rsyncnet in startups for many years, but was more expensive (now using Backblaze for storing GBs of raw images from DSLRs)
In the past, people went off to war and some of them literally died for their country. Today, people won’t even so much as wear a little piece of cloth on their face while shopping for their khakis. We are doomed if the next COVID is 20x deadlier.
They’re poor because they’re constantly being sued for all the damage they cause. One of the downsides of doing away with masks and secret identities.
Yev from Backblaze here -> we’ve looked into and verified the issue and have pushed out a fix. We will continue to investigate and will provide updates as we have them.
Well, here is where my hot take and general principle needs some nuance :-P

> The proposed solution you mention would include plenty of folks who don’t convert.

The one bit of data I currently have going from the app to corpweb analytics is precisely this - associating a conversion with a website user. That conversion info is sent with hand-coded triggers, the relevant third-party libraries are self-hosted (a good thing generally), and code doesn't call out to it when the user is outside of the billing/subscription flow.

> Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon?

I'm open to A/B-testing stuff - the important part in my mind is less specifically about third-party tracking, and more about ensuring that the product/engineering team makes decisions about the product. Pulling third-party code of any kind, but especially tracking code, is a process full of footguns that should be under the control of people who know what they're doing and are empowered to say "no".

I would still be very cautious about giving analytics code full access to all user activity.
YCombinator also backed a sketchy malware startup, but Google is failing me. Does anyone remember what it was called?
How do I get all this information?

What is the correct method of precisely measuring the bridge size?

What is the correct method of precisely measuring the interpupillary distance?

Or any of the other things?

Do I need a micrometer? Where, exactly, should I place the ends of the micrometer to correctly measure things?
>I mean, what the hell is with all this 60-90 hours per week stuff going on?

What do you mean "all this"? Has there been a trend of posts here with people talking about doing it that I missed?

Specifically with this author, he used to be a Japanese salaryman. Can learn a little more about that here:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...
> Three days later, according to BuzzFeed, New York apparently paid Oren-Pines $69,102,000 for 1,450 ventilators, or $47,656 per ventilator. It was the second-largest purchase made by the state of New York for coronavirus-related medical supplies, according to an analysis by the Albany Times-Union.
> To date, New York has received no ventilators from Oren-Pines.

This is either sheer incompetence or brazen corruption.

In my experience, it's usually the former, but I'm having trouble believing that this one isn't the latter.
Nice visualizations.

I made an online visualization demo showing parsing and compilation of regexes -> NFA -> DFA -> minimal DFA -> LLVM IR:

http://compiler.org/reason-re-nfa/src/index.html

It doesn’t support backrefs, only simple basic regex features.

Try entering (.+)[.](.+)[.](.+)
to see how DFA-minimization of it looks like.

You have to use [.] instead of \. as the parser doesn’t support escaping.
If you're jumping from 12.1 it probably pays to update gptzfsbooot
He was actively avoided by the women of the MIT media Lab. That speaks a lot just by itself.

Flirtation is game around boundaries. When you overstep once, society/the woman will look over it. If you do all the time you will be labeled and avoided. Maybe he applies his stubbornness to everything in life. Which can have outcomes from the awesomeness of a FSF, to isolation or to a lifelong sentence in a prison. Depends a lot on what you are stubborn on.
you'll be glad to know that leaving wood to rot on the ground only releases about 30% of the carbon, and allows for further biodiversity to live that might absorb further carbon. The fact is the natural world has mechanisms for this, we just need to let them work: stop clearing dead wood for example.
>It's their job, they know what's best.

That made me LOL. You'd like to think they know best. Most of the time, they do things because other people do things, but don't truly understand what the true ramifications are of their requests.

Marketing: "What's the big deal? All you have to do is add the 2 or 3 lines of JS to the site."

Devs: "Do you know exactly what that will do?"

Marketing: "It'll give us all sorts of useful metrics for free"

Devs: "Do you know if it is secure or will cause our site to become less secure due to vulns in the included JS? Will it cause the site's performance to become sluggish where we will get blamed? Do you know exactly what data is being collected, and will it affect any of our other obligations of maintaining this site?"

Marketing: "Um..., that's your job. We just want the data"
Do you have any source at all for the idea that they committed a crime?
> What's toxic about this? Two perfectly sensible points of view and you think Mr. X is dangerous to be around?

Not sure where the word "dangerous" comes from.

Just to explain things. If you tell people at work that it's stupid to believe in god, you are probably going to get fired, and rightly so. It's not dangerous, but it is toxic (belittling people for their religious beliefs).
If you are doing business in the EU, then you have to be careful about using 3rd-party stuff (Google fonts, embedded Youtube videos, embedded maps, chat widgets, ads, pixels, analytics etc. etc.) on the public-facing website as well.

> It's their job, they know what's best.

That's like sending an alcoholic down the spirits aisle.
Exactly. When the most important thing for a backup provider is the trust people put in you, don't do anything that risks that trust.
Well I had a “math expert” join my team recently and the problems were: they couldn’t work in a team, verbally expressed their intellectual superiority to everyone else, didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production, could not follow instructions from superiors, thought most of the work they were given was “boring” and invented their own projects to work on, etc. I don’t know if that type of attitude is acceptable in academia, but it won’t work in industry. So now I’m extremely cautious about on boarding anyone without a proven track record at working outside academia. I simply don’t have the time to “manage” someone like that, shit had to get done.
If that was the case, it would be just that much more important than the effects while in the workforce. In actuality, a lot of these things can affect you when you already have a job and are looking for another. It also turns out that you can go to grad school while being in the workforce.
How to Unit Test Network Code by Mocking Foundation URL Loading System
Next, Cleese should sell an NFT for the NFT that he sold for his Brooklyn Bridge scribble.
I know this is a common experience on many sites but I'm a paying customer on flickr.com (have been since ~2004) and other day I visited in a new browser or in private mode and got the "we use cookies..." dialog, it list over 90 advertising companies and probably over 500 tracking options.

Want to see it, go to flickr.com in a private window, it should pop up something about cookies. Pick "Manage Settings". It's insane.
Google Analytics custom events and Datadog are in fact the only third-party analytics code I run in my app. Tools like GA that gather less-identifiable user behavior info are borderline in my book between technical and marketing; and I honestly just trust Google as an organization not to mix my own GA data into their marketing data.
I'm not really sure if it's common knowledge, but I'd say it's less common then it should be. I went ahead and made a top level comment[1] with some info about controlling data disclosure to FB's Pixel in case it's helpful to others.

In the analytics space, you traditionally had to:
– Initialize a tracking object on page load
– Explicitly call methods on that tracking object when you wanted to actually send a hit

This is how it works for Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics historically. Many of the newer analytics providers instantiate auto-listeners, which gave them an edge on the out-of-the-box analytics features. And Google Analytics 4 (the newest release), also does this.

So it's not unheard of for site analytics. And a quick glance at a particular provider's website can usually make it obvious if this is occurring, based on the advertised features.

Ad pixels tend to be different though. You create a conversion event within the ad platform, and you're given a snippet of code to fire when that specific event occurs, which both instantiates the tracking object and calls the tracking method with the conversion event's configuration details.

Facebook's pixel works far more like a modern analytics library than an ad pixel. It vacuums up the hit data from the site and the marketer is able to sort it out after the fact in Facebook's interface and use what they want from it. Marketers working within Facebook can see this is happening because they set up the conversions and audiences against the hit data, but that's "just the way things work" in Facebook so they think nothing of it. Marketers coming from other channels will notice how different it is, but won't realize what's actually happening nor the implications behind it. Devs would realize pretty quickly what's happening after a few minutes exposure to the FB Pixel interface and it'd trigger a red flag for them, but that's marketing's territory and all devs see are the snippets provided for implementation. So the only time most people become aware of it is if marketing has someone technical working directly within FB's interface or if the person tasked with implementation has a reason to dig into Facebook's dev documentation rather than just plop the snippet on the page like they were told.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537140
This means Backblaze has to send out a GDPR data breach notification within 72 hours, right?
Edit: my biases against Facebook keep me from making cogent points.
While the "I'm not hiding a knife" theory turns out to probably be wrong, I think I'm going to Betteridge this headline, and say No. The handshake is going to come back in full force in about a year, and partly due to that apocryphal reason. ("There's no more contagion, here, let's demonstrate...")

People actually like shaking hands. It's a quick ritual that's easily begins many interactions. When the pandemic has ceased, people are going to go full force in all sorts of activities that they were denied, even if they didn't participate all that much prior to 2020.

I saw maybe 2 movies a year prior to last year. I can totally see making it a monthly thing once theaters open back up. Dining out, gym attendance, in-person business meetings. I think these things are going to surge more than people realize (though not always above the pre-2020 levels.)

One thing we all discovered during the pandemic is how many jobs actually can be done from home. Many of us already knew it, but it took the virus to convince a lot of management as well (unless you're Spectrum/Charter). But I think another thing we discovered is that working from home is not all roses and sunshine. A lot of people sorely miss the office environment and interactions that took place there. They're going to jump at the opportunities to return to the office.

So back to the handshake. It's going to come back. People will use it as a reminder that Things Are Normal now. Hand sanitizer use will be more widespread, though. And I think face masks for those with a cold—at least in "blue states".
If this leaks personal information that might have been in the filenames (abc_abc_xyz-street_cancer_report.pdf), this is a GDPR incident for Backlaze.
That is so wrong on multiple levels.
>Imagine if S3 did this.

Walmart CEO already did couple of years ago https://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off-ama...
Tz: A Time Zone Helper
Good point, I haven't kept up with it and was assuming it works to focus on one argument. I'm not a medical researcher and the evidence seems pretty ambiguous at this point. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
The Fastest Bike in the World
I only had a quick mess around but I found the scanners to be close to useless. I ran a docker scanner on the docker hub ruby image and it found over 1000 CVEs just listing out every cve open on Debian and ruby. None of that data was relevant to me or actionable
I would be interested to know the comparison of the magic kernel to cardinal B-Splines [1]. The idea in the paper is that by combining an IIR filter with a traditional FIR/convolutional filter, you can get a much better sinc approximation, and preserve the high frequencies well. For those interested in this, many researches following that have been summed up into a book by Hugues Hoppe [2]. The book also includes some discussion of filters that are commonly used today like Lanczos.

Also, I'm not sure if I agree with this claim regarding partition of unity:

> This remarkable property, that prevents “beat” artifacts across a resized image, is not shared by any other practical kernel that I am aware of ...

Lanczos is surely a weird filter having many less than desirable properties, but IIRC cubic polynomial filters like Mitchell-Netravali and Catmull-Rom satisfies partition of unity, and both of them are popular in today's image processing. Even the bilinear filter, which can be box or triangle filter depending on whether one is minifying or magnifying, satisfies the partition of unity property. Did I get something wrong?

Edit: the bilinear filter actually does not satisfy partition of unity because it's scaled down, but a properly scaled box filter or triangle filter satisfies partition of unity.

[1] http://bigwww.epfl.ch/publications/blu9903.pdf
[2] http://hhoppe.com/proj/filtering/
... fair enough, at one point he wrote most of the user-space utilities in Linux. Although he hasn't gotten around to the kernel, but half is better than nothing, and a free kernel is nothing without _free_ (as in _speech_) user-space utilities to accompany it.
The article touches on DFA based engines and notes that they may not be the fastest in all use cases. To expand on that generally the reason for this would be that the automaton you get from the regular expression has too many states, which can happen for example with very large counters or cases where the state space includes a product of multiple counters due to non-determinism between them (backtracking engines would struggle with the latter case too though).

Something an automata based engine can do (and IIRC re2 does) is that instead of constructing the full DFA, you can construct the much smaller non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) and perform the product construction on-the-fly while caching states you've seen. However, this only helps if your input doesn't actually visit all those states. A malicious input could target your NFA engine to cause states being constantly kicked out of the cache. The slowdown here is linear though, so you're still better off than with a backtracking engine.

A project I'm working on is the Symbolic Regex Engine (SRM) [1], which uses a symbolic variant of regex derivatives. This technique allows an often-minimal DFA to be constructed lazily. This is similar to NFA based engines, but results in much fewer states thus helping with the cache issue. SRM can also handle some classes of counters natively in how the automaton gets constructed, which can turn a blow-up that would be exponential in a DFA based engine into a linear one.

[1]: https://github.com/AutomataDotNet/srm
John_smith_doctored_college_graduation.jpg
More or less what Myanmar so called democratic government was doing to its Muslim Rohingya population was forgotten as the government was democratic. India had cut of internet for months in Kashmir but little news in the western media. Even today Chinese atrocities against Uighur minorities are talked about every week but no one talks about Kashmir or the other minorities in India being marginalized by the current Modi government. With the internet and all the news sources available you realize all the good evil, black and white paraded about in the media or global organizations has little to do with actuall ground realities but mostly propagandas of different countries and interests.
Kitboga: How AI is helping me waste scammers’ time
I implemented this extension just to stop myself from clicking on Medium links https://github.com/fnune/nay
Clear cutting is a bad idea, if you think about circumference = 2piR you can see that the older the tree is the more CO2 it takes up. You need to let trees get as big as possible if you want to be efficient. Additionally big trees support more biodiversity, which afaik is also important in carbon capture.
> Corpweb should be as static as possible, except for whatever third-party JS the marketing professionals think is necessary. It's their job, they know what's best.

I strongly disagree. Marketing professionals often lack technical understanding and are superficial about the consequences. This mentality is how you end up with engineers working for companies doing morally questionable choices because they just want to be a cog in the system instead of being concerned about the direction and how the company do business. Separations between services is a shared illusion, if something is against your values please tell your fellow human beings.
What product from OVH are you using? Can it use rclone?
If you’re honestly asking, it’s a rude question as stated. But if you’re sincerely admitting you don’t understand the difference, the difference is this:

Many people (including myself) have difficulty with certain social cues and expectations. Many of us can be offputting or come off as overly direct or disrespectful. Where we diverge is when and how we address that fact. Do we (only) lash out and expect the world to accommodate our conclusions, or do we (ever or readily) reflect on that conflict and try to live in some kind of shared world?

Obviously what I’m describing is a spectrum, not an absolute. But if you’re trying to understand whether someone on the spectrum is a jerk, your answer is “how much do they use their social faculties to navigate sharing a world?”

Which is pretty much the same measure as anyone not on the spectrum.
These are the sources I've used when I've gone looking, but it doesn't help that we don't actually do industry-by-industry energy consumption comparisons.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici... - US energy consumption by video game consoles in the US alone was 16 TWh in 2010

[2] https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici... - Globally, PC gaming (not console gaming) was estimated at 75 TWh in 2018
Out of curiosity: What happens with messages that are never received? Do they just pile up until the (not-so) receiving process OOMs? How does one debug such a program?
I know someone (no friend of mine) who said some indefensible things on social media. He ended up losing his job not because of what he said, but because people found where he worked and called up threats against his employers. That wasn’t enough. They also found out where he lived, graffitied and egged his house, made personal threats. I don’t know whatever happened to the guy but the last I heard he had his roommates lying, claiming he had moved.

If you get canceled, it doesn’t happen on Twitter.
.. you mean the ARM specifications?
rotting wood does not release much CO2, I think about 30%. Most of it ends up in the soil.
> shared-allocating/ locking/ incrementing/ locking/ decrementing

Minor nit: shared allocation, counter incrementing, and counter decrementing can all be done lock-free. They'd still need memory fence operations (and retries in case of contention), and the associated performance hits, but not actual locking.
Donanemab Confirms: Clearing Plaques Slows Decline – By a Bit
I went to high school in the 90s and I would have killed for Zoom school. It would have vastly improved my mental health. Not having to get up at 7AM for a half hour bus ride full of tormentors, not getting shoved into lockers, not getting my lunch stolen, not getting gum stuck in my hair or having people putting out their cigarettes on my back. It would have been wonderful.
Ack. I read the article before the 2018 suffix was appended to the link so was initially under the impression that it was a recent article. Was trying to be helpful given they concluded the article by saying they were hiring, and that some minor language adjustments might help them towards that objective. My apologies, definitely not trying to incite controversy.
super unlikely that FB is using the filenames in any way

First, we don't know that. Second, it doesn't matter even if they are not using it in any way. Backblaze shouldn't be sending this data to FB. And lastly, even if FB isn't using it in any way today, how do we know they won't use in future?

Nobody should be having access to any data that they don't absolutely need. It doesn't matter how mundane the data is, which company the data is going to, etc etc.
Every non-web platform has an initial gate of "install application X".

The web does not have that gate. The web has "I went to the apps website to see if it did what I wanted. it did/didn't, and then asks to send me update notifications"
The assumption would be the limit you actively test for.
I'm also a long term paying customer and I'm leaving for sure.

If they can have FB pixels in the admin area, they basically have no security processes working. If marketing drives their tech decisions, this is not a company to trust your data to.
15 Project Ideas for Web Developers
Small, cheap spy satellites mean there’s no hiding place
Creating a Culture of Innovative Entrepreneurship (2001) [pdf]