skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hi everyone! I created a secure, privacy focused alternative to Google forms using Stacks Blockchain. Would appreciate if is any feedback on the product.
What does this mean? Like you don't think people should have the choice to abort?
I wonder how long it takes to build a model. Is it comparable to typical neural network training times, e.g. hours to days? And how much memory does it typically require?
Out bully the bullies.
In my long history of dental work, I have never once been told the cost of a procedure before agreeing to it.

This might be true. It doesn't have to be. If your dentist won't tell you the price of an exam before she does it, and won't immediately give you an itemized treatment plan after the exam is complete, find another dentist. Dentistry is not like going to the hospital.
For those unfamiliar, John Baez is great. One of the few people who seems to have a good, highly connected understanding across most/all of modern physics. This is very rare even among physicists. He's also credited in a lot of excellent ([hard] science fiction) books by Greg Egan.
The funding works for projects like gcc or Linux, which still retain some of the original OSS principles.

In other projects the presence of paid RedHat developers is a net negative due to their overbearing and controlling behavior.

The latter would be somewhat excusable if their contributions were stellar, but they aren't.
I can't visualise at all and I don't know if that's aphantasia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia) or that I perceive things in the same way as most people but we use different words to describe what is happening.
I am always looking to be more pedantic so I appreciate this
How so? It's literally prohibited in the texts.[1][2]

[1] https://quran.com/2/278-279

[2] https://sunnah.com/muslim/22/132
I feel this, although on a much smaller and less financially beneficial level :)

Every.single.time I write technical documentation, everyone tells me how wonderful it is. But I always feel like it took me forever to write, and the whole thing felt like a horrible, horrible chore; a total bore-fest. Later I read it back and I'm like: "meh, this is so dry and boring!".

But of course, I wasn't writing prose - I was writing a reference document, so I suppose it's not meant to be anything but boring. And OK, while writing it I might of wished I was grating my face instead - but numerous people over a period of decades have told me how good I am at it, so I suppose I must be, even though I hate it.
Government procurement is fundamentally broken, in the software world. The incentives of procurement seems to ensure that the worst software is produced, at a significantly greater cost than free alternatives. I blame this on the rise of administrative costs in the universities (which trickle into enterprise) and the inherent disagreeableness (with outsiders) amongst the price's law coalition.
When Intel released the microcode updates for the MDS family of vulnerabilities, in May 2019, they declined to support my Westmere Xeon, which launched in May 2010.

So, not quite 10 years. Still a hell of a lot better than Qualcomm, though.
(This is not only a response to this particular comment but also a general rant about such comments)

What is the point of this kind of comment? You can summarize an X page book in X/10 words. So what? Would that summary get the book's message out effectively to people?

A 200 page book (about anything, I don't mean about checklists) written entirely in the style of your summary would be unreadable. Or it would be some kind of reference, like man pages, usually not something people read with pleasure, and not something to introduce you to a topic. The less a book invites "This could be X pages"-type criticisms, the more unreadable it is.

Aside from that, I found the memorable thing about the book to be the stories of how surprisingly effective checklists are, what a difference they can make, and how and why things have gone wrong without them. All that stuff you would cut as superfluous.

Non-fiction books, like (e.g. C or Python) functions, don't have to be "great"; it's enough if they do one thing and do it well. The book did that, and very memorably.

And maybe someone will read between the lines and learn or see something else about the world or people or our systems from the book. I find such criticisms mistakenly assume only one thing can be gotten from a book, and their summary presents that. In university courses, a lot of the benefit comes not from the content but seeing an expert in action, how they think, how they talk, what it looks like to be a professional in that subject.

I am often reminded, by the frequent criticisms that speakers should speak faster, books/blog posts should be shorter, people AskingHN how to learn music as fast as possible etc, of this Zen parable:

A young but earnest Zen student approached his teacher, and asked the Zen Master:
“If I work very hard and diligent how long will it take for me to find Zen ?”
The Master thought about this, then replied, “Ten years.”
The student then said, “But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast — How long then ?”
Replied the Master, “Well, twenty years.”
“But, if I really, really work at it. How long then ?” asked the student. “Thirty years,” replied the Master.
“But, I do not understand,” said the disappointed student.
“At each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer.
Why do you say that ?”
Replied the Master, “When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.”

It is also reminiscent of "efficiency" in modern economics, where we are worried about systems being as efficient as possible—to get where we are going sooner—but where we are actually going, is not discussed.

You could summarize this comment in 5 words, but you would lose the unforgettable, epic journey this comment has taken you on.
They provide microcode updates.
> This article attributes the transistor to Shockley, but this is incorrect.

The article does not claim such thing. John writes

" After many further developments, in 1948 the physicist William Schockley patented transistors that use both holes and electrons to form a kind of switch. "

Which it is correct as you can easily check here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2569347

This not the case of a PHB robbing all the limelight from the engineers. Shockley was kinda of an asshole and had a big ego but he was a great scientist. And the junction transistor he individually designed and patented (see above) went on to be more successful than the point-contact transistor developed by Brattain and Bardeen. The Nobel prize was fairly awarded to the three of them.
woke.. i saw that somewhere..

https://www.thefocus.news/tv/woke-police-meaning/

i guess don't do what this guy did. Maybe he woke'd too hard or not hard enough, I don't know anymore.
I disagree that incomplete censorship is noise. Any ban is a ban, even if incomplete. Trivializing and rationalizing CCP censorship acts is why it can keep censoring so many for so long.

(Case in point: H&M is just censored from all major platforms in China, including Apple Maps [0]. This is totally unacceptable in any free society, hence this article. If people think censorship like this is noise, that’s why you will see more censorship acts in the future.)

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/winnie-the-pooh-china-ba... is an honest evaluation of cases where Winnie-the-Pooh is censored, and where it is not. This article still concludes Winnie-the-Pooh is censored (“China’s ban on that lovable fluff ball may indeed tighten”), despite many cases it is allowed.

Censorship is not binary. Saying “Winnie-the-Pooh is not censored” is misleading and dishonest, when it is clearly censored today on major video sites.

In a Time of Universal Deceit — Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/26/22352357/h-m-western-bran...
> even if the times aren't tight

Depending on the definition of "tight" each of us have. I remember having 40mins in Munich, and that is a BIG airport. Especially if you disembark on one side of the terminal and your flight is on the far/opposite end. That's 25-30mins brisk walking. With 5000 people in-between you could as well miss your flight. No discussion about stopping to get a coffee or a snack.. you'll miss your flight.
How do you sell tens of millions of books and become broke not even twenty years later?

Suppose her publisher was absolutely and utterly ripping her off, only paying $1 per book, that's still burning through about a million USD per year.

Somewhere buried there lies the real crime. With which I mean to say either her publisher ripped her off beyond belief, or she's really bad with money.
I always assumed this is because of the extra brain power used for your hands. When you write the tactile sensation, the pressure, the texture all activate different parts of your brain. My assumption was more activation means more opportunity for memorization.
Thanks, I wasn't aware (hence the "I think" in parentheses in my original comment). It's not entirely clear from the very short article, but "outputting a compiled TI-83 assembly program" seems to indicate that that was indeed a similar approach already.
> Regular interviews bias towards people that are charismatic, not effective.

A cooperative multiplayer game is also going to be a similar soft skills check that favors people that can communicate not just well, but also charismatically.

That said, a possible advantage to doing that in a game, as opposed to a regular soft skills interview (or worse trying to force such soft skill checks into the pressure cooker of a whiteboard interview or puzzle questions) is that you maybe provide an environment where the interviewee can be dopamine hacked into believing they can relax and you maybe get a glimpse into how the person's soft skills check out on the other side of that boundary where interviewee knows that they need to be "on" and acting.

I'm not actually sure if that is good or bad, but a lot of my takeaway from this article and other comments in these threads is it sort of feels like there's a lot of excuses for "pick a game that seems technically similar", but most of the "good feedback" that seems to be coming back from these experiences resembles what history tells us about regular interviews versus technical interviews: soft skills matter a lot more than what you can gauge technically in an interview. Most technical interviews are just soft skills interviews under the pressure cooker of taking a non-standardized pop quiz your professor decided you need to take because you showed up to class in only your underwear (and also you are flying for some reason in this nightmare). Cooperative games possibly present the opposite of the pressure cooker: dopamine hacking the interviewee an excuse to let the pressure seem like it is off while you are still doing that same sort of soft skills check.

(Aside: problem solving is classically a "soft skill". "Behavioral interviews" were as much about problem solving decades before the software industry invented the "technical" interview.)

(Further aside: This sort of dopamine hacking is very familiar to anyone that's seen Fraternity/Sorority rushes. Soft skills are hugely important for "group fit"/"team fit" in college social groups as they are in employment groups, and seeing how potential new members interact in "fun"/"game" situations often tells you more about the person than if you sat down and interviewed them one-on-one in a suit and tie or equivalent and they know they have to be "on". Rushes include both of those things for many reasons.)
Look at the requirements for each state. I know Virginia is a three year apprenticeship program. I think California is four years. Finding a mentor is supposedly not all that easy. Good luck.
You either failed to read the article, or worse, read it and wilfully misrepresented it.

Username fits.
Here is a commercial installation of solar + storage at $0.04/kWh[1]. And it’s not unique, that article links to the cheapest solar + storage in the US at $0.025/kWh.

Additionally, these are today’s prices, as per this article the price for renewables is dropping exponentially every year. And if Elon Musk is to be believed (which I do) the price for storage is also dropping exponentially.

[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
I like to believe that millions of years ago the people of Saturn made giant solar collection tree-like space elevator power facilities to catch all those passing rays. That is where Saturn’s rings came from.
This is because the Linux kernel itself is constructed and developed in a way where driver interfaces (API) are ruthlessly refactored and the linker interface for kernel modules (ABI) is intentionally version-incompatible. If the driver's source code is not in the kernel, it doesn't gain the benefit of kernel developers doing this ruthless refactoring and falls behind immediately from a source point of view, and from a binary point of view, modules compiled for one kernel intentionally will not work with another.

This is a conscious and opinionated strategy on the part of Linux, as an effort to make the cost of keeping drivers closed-source high and the cost of kernel refactoring low. It also has... disadvantages, in the form of a massive wasteland of only-supported-once snapshot-in-time devices. I am sure this comment thread will happy expound on this in great and painful detail.

Secondly, there was an entire effort by Google called "Project Treble" to build a stable Android HAL/ABI over the top of these unstable kernel interfaces. Unfortunately it would/will require essentially an Android-specific rewrite from vendors in order to fully implement, so many drivers are not yet operating in this model.
Given how accepting techies (in the US and even Europe) have been of "Chinese folk" and "Indian folk", I don't really see why they would be any less accepting of "Black folk". This stereotype really needs to die.
Raspberry Pi 4, if you live in a country where ISPs actually offer you Internet rather than just download access.
I looked forward to reading those books to my future kids for many years. Then as I read the first one to my son, I saw the gleam in his eye, remembered why I quit riding, and tucked the book away for good.
Is the RMS petition just cyberbullying?
> Using real cheese is surprisingly difficult because it doesn’t melt in the nice creamy way

Eh, is this a US thing? Here in the UK, I just use cheddar - any brand, any maturity you fancy, and it melts just fine.

I spent several months in the US around 2005, and I do recall the cheese was pretty terrible - bland, with an odd, plasticy texture.
The GPL is not “incredibly corporation hostile”, it's a verbose legalese for “tit for tat”. You got that libre software for free? Fair enough, just give back what you added to it.
>$100k range

I would be interested in knowing this zip code.
Can someone explain what NeRF is and what’s going on here?

Do they produce geometry/polygon data as an output of the neural network?
> is objectively a smaller attack surface

No, you have to understand what is really part of the attack surface and what the attacker wants.

For example, on a properly built system with a single application running with its own user the attacker might have no practical benefit at all in doing a privilege escalation to root.

> running on a physical host with thousands of sleeping VMs

This is a strawman. A shared hypervisor opens another attack surface and was not part of the discussion.
I've done a lot of similar work and learned a lot of similar lessons. They were interesting and fun challenges but I've since moved on from Ruby in my professional life.

I'll say this much: When I was working on these applications, one of the minor wins that I had was swapping them over to the jemalloc memory allocator. It has introspection/instrumentation tooling that is really useful for these sorts of situations. You can use `MALLOC_CONF` [0] to trigger some built-in profiling. For instance, `export MALLOC_CONF='prof_leak:true,lg_prof_sample:0,prof_final:true'` will trigger jemalloc to log the heap at exit which is very useful for tracking down leaks.

[0]: https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc/wiki/Use-Case%3A-Leak-C...
San Francisco to give $1k a month to artists in basic income program
This is highly dependent on the climate. As far as I've tested (enclosed in dark bag), they definitively keep longer in the fridge, but the longest in a cold room / cellar. I've also lived in southern climates, and it keeps for much shorter there, even within a cupboard or pantry. And the carrots would last only a few days there outside a fridge.
The article correctly diagnoses what he did wrong: he capitulated to the mob. He should never have apologized.
I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable.

I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, and appropriately provisioned and placed solar and wind, taking the duck curve into consideration.
I'll admit I'm not someone who really follows phone developments closely enough to disagree. What you say is the standard review of FFs, that it costs more and is technically inferior. But then again I believe it costs what a fairly sourced and built phone costs. Other phones are too cheap.

> The screen has color blurring when scrolling especially visible with text

Mine doesnt

> the fingerprint reader often doesn't get a good read

I don't make a habit of volunteering biometric data near Google, so can't comment.

> it's noticeably sluggish in everyday tasks.

Not sure what everyday tasks you mean? Haven't ever really noticed it being sluggish? HN is snappy as hell :)

> The cameras can be upgraded to the 3+ ones

I didn't know, thanks!
I’m surprised they didn’t go with $365 so they could say it is $1/day.
I'm seeing NERFs everywhere at the moment. Improvements seem to be accelerating.
My experience has been that dentists and optometrists are happy to give prices up front if you ask. Doctors, not so much - does this have to do with health insurance and billing being so much more complicated?
Mass shootings and child rape are pointless cruelty.
John is fantastic, not only a nice person with absolutely zero ego, he has brain and heart and he has such a deep love for science, a funny writer too. Anything that he writes (TWIMP,his diary,his blog Azimuth, n-category cafe, his book ) is highly recommended.

This is a must read for the aspiring mathematician or physicist:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html

Bonus points for being the nephew of Joan Baez.
Obscurity???!

FSF is a _fenomenally_ successful organisation in achieving their mission. Free Software is everywhere, it has spawned endless businessess and has completely changed the way people create software.
But then harvesting would be significantly harder, no? At least in the way I imagine this.
As best I can gather, the crawl is an ongoing process, not a series of independent "snapshots". There's almost no overlap in URLs between each crawl archive, although it looks as though there's some repetition on a larger scale (roughly every 2 months):

https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-statistics/plots/craw...
Flipping scaling on its head with Peermaps
I am not sure how you make macaroni and cheese that it only takes 20 minutes. Just getting the water boiling, adding the macaroni, cooking it, and draining it is going to take at least 15.

I am not a mac & cheese fan, much less an instant mac & cheese fan, but it's not at all surprising to me that convenience foods exist. And for what it's worth, it's much more popular in Canada than the US.
> One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security.

... And the fine, levied by bureaucrats paid with taxpayer's money was paid with... Taxpayer's money.

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

― Ronald Reagan
And ironically had Britain joined a currency pulled weaker but the eurozone's expansion, they might have been able to stay an industrial power like Germany!
> Police also found electronic documents with instructions for making explosives and attacking people with knives. Brock also had videos of beheadings and unedited video footage filmed by convicted terrorist Brenton Tarrant as he shot and killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019.

It's very alarming that those things are illegal to own. Were do you draw the line? Am I allowed to own photos of concentration camps in the UK? What about chemistry papers about explosives or chemical weapons?
> I guess the most unpopular ones are his comments regarding relationships with minors...

To which he recently added that he changed his minds after discussing about it with unspecified people.
> don’t want to deal with botnets taking down their work

Botnets and automated crawling are completely different things. This isn't about preventing service degradation (even if it gets presented that way). It's an attempt by content publishers to control who accesses their content and how.

Cloudflare is actively assisting their customers to do things I view as unethical. Worse, only Cloudflare (or someone in a similarly central position) is capable of doing those things in the first place.
Because this is physics I wanted to clarify that the ship is not being accelerated upwards by the surface of the earth at 9.8 m/s^2 it is being effected by a static force that is countering an opposing force that would cause it to accelerate downwards at 9.8 m/s^2 that causes it to remain in a state of rest. To lift the ship off the ground you not only need to out pace the difference between the static force in agreement and the opposing force - but the static force will not contribute to motion so you do correctly need a force that would result in an acceleration of 9.800001 m/s^2 in the absence of gravity.

Since the static force in opposition won't contribute towards upward motion you actually need to supply the full amount of force to lift it - not just enough to barely nudge the need by .00001 m/s^2

In terms of whether that force would cause any effect the answer is yes (because everything is an effect) and effectively no since as ridiculously heavy as this container ship is it is absolute peanuts compared to the mass of the earth nuclear explosions that produce megatons of force are still immensely negligible, ditto for super massive volcanoes. A volcanic explosion large enough to derail the earth's rotation by a day would definitely be an extinction level event for all of the complex life forms on earth. But, that said, every little thing does contribute in its little way.

Lastly - yea, the presence of locks in the panama canal does mean that ships are regularly accelerated upwards and downwards without any noticeable effect - if that change in elevation was executed by explosives or chinooks there would be slight variations in the force but they'd be mostly inconsequential on the scale of things.
Googling Stallman + Epstein will find you the whole debacle.

He was taking a literalist stance, and he did change his mind. Maybe. Not sure.

Hostile stance to women is also wrong, he's not approving of feminist "pink programming" attempts. Totally not the same thing. Can be found as well in the depths of the internet. Mostly mailing lists.

However he had some seriously hot takes on #MeToo. Taken as a whole, this points to reactionary antifeminism.

People are quick to misjudge, misattribute and bandwagon these days. This causes spillover hurting free software movement.
Because every activist must be an angel and every platform squeaky clean.
When you are 104 every way you go is the way to go. Getting to that age is accomplishment in itself. You are beyond awesome.