skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot look like typical patent spam along the lines of "like X but in the cloud" or "like X but with AI"

"Automatically scaling neural networks based on load" [0] is one such example. Load balancing and scaling is nothing new. Doing it when there's a neural network as the application involved doesn't seem novel. Every flavor of software application shouldn't warrant its own patent for scaling out the computational resources involved, at least not when the supposedly novel method is so basic, but dressed up in neural network jargon. It doesn't even do that in all places. From the patent: "Allocate Processors -> receive load information from the processors -> adjust the number of processors based on the load information."

This is exactly the sort of patent I would expect a patent troll to buy up and then go after anyone (as long as they have money) that does any sort of automatic load balancing or resource scaling. Awful.

Then this one [1] is, quite literally, authenticating a user... but at an ATM machine. Ridiculous.

They aren't all this bad, but a lot of them are. However I'll note one that seems to have a least a little merit: [2] Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. (stealing PINs via thermal imagine is aparantly a real thing)

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614360B2/en?inventor=A...

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200012778A1/en?invento...

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200202015A1/en?invento...
My personal magic trick is learning to speak almost fluently in a second language (Russian) in about a year. However, when people ask me how I do it, they quickly get turned off when they realize it's just a grind. You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent, and there is just no way around brute-force memorization. And if you're serious about learning, you need to keep track of how many words you know, and add new words every day, and have a system for review (Anki). Although memorization alone won't teach you a language, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. In the beginning it is poring through grammar books and practicing basic concepts until they become second-nature. During the intermediate stages it is taking thousands of native-spoken complete long sentences with audio and building Anki card decks and memorizing them. Yup, memorizing complete sentences with audio. For advanced stages it is laboriously poring over classical literature (Dostoevsky) while having a repertoire of academic dictionaries on hand, manually recording every new word and brute-forcing every sentence, until one day the language opens up to you like magic.
Plenty of medicines existed before 1790...

...opium and extracts for pain relief, cinchona bark for malaria, cloves and clove oil for oral pain relief, I could go on, but you could also Google this.

And the fact that a "patent medicine" is a synonym in history for "snake oil" shows how little scientific rigour patents brought to medicinal development, and how the patent system was initially co-opted to lend an air of legitimacy to quackery.
I had a look at the link. I do not really understand what it does (I work in IT, many years as a sysadmin) but it suspiciously looks like my code on a day I thought I had a revolutionary idea.

Then a few weeks later I have to look at it again and try to rediscover that revolutionary idea while the family is waiting for the lights to work again.
"The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application..."

Seems like you need an internet connection to use Jupyter, and you rely on them staying in business. OP's software and data is customer owned, it seems.
I am certain that I've used Teams in Firefox? I regularly use other 365 webapps as well with no problems (apart from troubles that are also present in every other browsers).
High speed railway upgrades are really expensive compared with roads.

Some numbers to put this into perspective:

The interstate highway system is 44k miles of roadway.

The current estimate for upgrading one mainline railway in the UK (HS2) is about 400m dollars a mile.

US defence spending is < 1t dollars.

So it would take a defence scale budget for 20 years to build out a high speed rail network to cover the same routes as the interstate highway network.
What else do you do with a pointer, other than eventually dereference it?

It points to invalid memory as soon as the underlying object is freed. It’s hard to think of a legitimate usage at that point. You’d hope that’s exactly the kind of thing the borrow checker would be able to warn you about.

One situation where you might conceivably want to do something with that dangling pointer is if you were writing an allocator. But in this particular example, we’re not writing an allocator; and if we were, we wouldn’t call .as_ptr() on one of the allocated objects — that would be working at the wrong level of abstraction.

If you really do just need to store the value and not dereference it, shouldn’t it be stored as some integer type? Then to dereference it, you’d first need to cast it to a pointer, and that operation could be marked unsafe.
The issue I have with much of the patent trolling bashing is, that it somehow makes a distinction between practicing companies who make something and non practicing entities. I think this is a huge veil the industry pulled over people's eyes. Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers, but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell their patents to some of these "trolls" who then sue the big companies for violating the patents?

Don't get me wrong, many of the patents are absolutely bogus, but that's not exclusive to patent troll patents. In fact bogus patents help established companies even more, because the trolls at least have to defend those patents in court at times, a small new player who is threatened by a large established one over some bogus patent can't afford to defend themselves.

The whole notion that patents are only legitimate if you build something is completely bogus. Either the patent system is about encouraging and rewarding innovation and then it should apply to anyone equally, or it is not and we should abolish it. I'm firmly in the second camp, but it seems the big players want to have their cake and eat it too.
Carbon fibre for the ancient olympics?
I did that when I first came to Silicon Valley. I went to work for a company which operated a large, for its day, mainframe data center. (Not IBM, UNIVAC). Each time the operating system crashed, which it did several times a day, a "panic dump" was produced, a stack of paper about an inch thick, with a summary and stack backtrace at the top, and a full listing of the contents of memory.

There were two stacks of these, six feet high, waiting for me.

It took me most of a year to work through the pile, finding out why the crash had occurred, by tracking pointers through memory with pencil and colored marker and comparing this with paper listings of the operating system. Then I'd code a fix for that problem, test it (usually around 2 AM when I could take over a mainframe), and nervously put it into production on one mainframe. Slowly, the piles of crash dumps got shorter and the mean time to failure went from hours to weeks.

There were very few meetings, and nobody interfered. They were just happy to see the crash dump pile shrink and the uptime increase.

After a few years of this, by which time the systems would stay up for months, I got a job in R&D at another company and got out of maintenance programming and into theory.
I admire her tenacity.
Zero Downtime, Instant Deployment and Rollback (2013)
Depends who you are.

Drug overdoses usually only make the news if the person is famous.
Examples of common causes left out: nephritis, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer’s, septicemia.

Source:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE...
This hits home for me.

I'm also fairly certain I have ADHD.

And moving jobs terrifies me because I do pretty well in my current job, and my current job is a good long term one due to the freedom (and somewhat paradoxically some restrictions... it works out really well) it gives me.
They will no longer show a price range and will instead show a price.
may he rest in peace
Agree with that, companies should focus more on employee happiness rather than employee engagement. Since happiness will drive engagement.
Nature Can Help Us Prepare for the Next Pandemic
or replacing synonyms with single representation
Netflix has worked fine on Firefox on Mac, Windows and Linux for as long as I can remember.
Probably nobody using this in the community yet, as the project is not yet released (or deliberately announced).

I have some code built against an earlier version of it, but there have been so many changes during development, that the web app that spawned Dream needs to be adapted :)
I have also noticed better performance on Firefox compared to Chrome. Quite surprising but worth a try. Meet only really works well for small meetings though. Any bigger and it slowly starts to fall apart.
Yes, for me too :-(
I was recently looking into using some ESP32s to use on a BLE hardware project I am working on at the moment.

Although I do wonder whether wifi would be a better technology to use sometimes. The only thing I remember seeing is that wifi technology uses much more power.

From TFA it looks like WiFi 6 uses less power, is this true?

Anyone experienced have any suggestions whether BLE or WiFi would be better for streaming serial data from a device onto many platforms? (I currently have a BLE demo working, but working with Bluetooth stacks on mobile and desktop are a royal pain, network requests are very straightforward at this point)
The main guy behind this, Hector Martin, is a good counterexample to the stereotype of lazy dumb spaniards :-)
If this particular thing of clicking everything but the title is really a thing, nothing is blocking you to add some minimal JavaScript which « onclick » on the item div element, triggers a click on the link. Add some « cursor: pointer » in you Stylesheet and you are done.

It’s literally 2 loc, it doesn’t affect accessibility and it’s using JavaScript for what it was meant : adding some optional convenience.

I realize I’ve not done real server rendered sites for years, but adding good old « optional convenience » JS without jQuery and broken browsers, but with ES6, modules, and maybe WebComponents would probably be a really pleasant experience.
But don’t forget Microsoft let IE rot for years and that is what drove the interest - and the protest - for alternatives and helped Flash thrive.

Today Chrome is a fairly good platform, tons of support for all sorts of html extensions, and a very strong commitment to security.

It’s a really nice product, except for the strings attached.

Alphabet should be broken up and Chrome (OS) spun off into its own business; the tracking should be made completely transparent and optional on a subscription base.
Most striking "non-invention" to me seems heliograph. We could have had telegraph communications 2000 years ago.
But the tax year stayed 365 days and so it now starts on April 6th, the 11 days comes from correcting the drift between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Russia switched later and had to add more days.
WiFi 6 supports 5ghz
Yeah, let's just regulate and tax the market for stolen bikes. What do we do with people who don't follow the regulation and don't pay the taxes? Obviously we can't use the police, that'd be like trying to fill buckets under a leaking pipe.
Was “meme” a word in use in English in 1997 already? I first saw the word “meme” in 2006 or 2007 I think, and I never really thought about how long it may have existed in English, I only know that it originates from a similar word in French, and that it means something like the spread of an idea.
Does the packet processing for WiFi and bluetooth take cycles from the CPU, or is the CPU 100% available to the application code? I read the blurb but it didn't address this question.
Steel is too difficult, let's instead use something that was invented in the 1960s?
Having Both Hearing and Vision Loss May Double Risk of Dementia
Or they just mixed the two up.
I am familiar with IBInspectable and IBDesignable, and have, for example, put my own Smalltalk and Postscript implementations in IB that way.

Not the same thing. At all. Not even close.

Palettes were final-packaged components that were at the same level as pre-built ones.

IBDesignable is a way for adding some interactivity to the views you are creating for an app while you're building said app. Like SwiftUI Previews. And it works about as well, that is not really at all.

With IBDesignable, Xcode was continually trying to build the entire dependency tree, meaning for example the entire Postscript interpreter. And failing >50% of the time, which then kills your view. I hear the same happens with SwiftUI previews once your project gets bigger. It certainly happened to me almost immediately when I was trying it out.

Again, they're not even close.
I love these type of prediction articles from the past. I loved the specificity, depth, and unbridled optimism of the article.

Though most of it was wrong in terms of timing, this was bang on: "Around 2010, Intel builds a chip with a billion transistors". Intel released core i7 chip with 1.16 billion transistors in 2010. I guess Moore's law was still in full effect.

Even though timing was wrong, I do feel the authors will be eventually proven right on many. Clearly they were intentionally being overly optimistic, by the way they end the article.
Reversible gene editor created by MIT scientists
It’s an interruption from the task you were working on.
Being planned or on a calendar means it’s not an ‘unplanned interruption’, however, anything that takes you away from what you’re doing is, by definition, an interruption.
Wrong Region. Pumpernickel is typical for Westfalia, so the Ruhr area and the Münsterland.
That's crazy for us. But for them the year was from March to February (ok from March 25th to March 24th :D).
ARNO Token Project
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Yes, exactly. And if I only buy some raw Brezel that has just been heated, I can also buy the frozen thing and define myself when I want to eat it by baking at home just in time.
Section 230 isn’t the problem, Payment Networks are
There's also SRAM that have group sets at every price point, and some smaller manufacturers like Campagnolo or Sunrace.
T-Mobile 5G home Internet: $60 a month, 100Mbps speeds, and no data cap
Actually, there is pretty strong evidence that patents are counterproductive for pharmaceuticals. Before the harmonization of IP laws, pharmaceuticals had different eligibility for patenting in the US, Europe and Switzerland. The US had the strongest, Europe somewhat weaker and in Switzerland it was inelligible. The Swiss companies invested the most money into R&D and were generally the most successful. The US ones were the leas successful and did the least R&D and instead invested much more into lawyers and marketing.
The Datadog setup was working apparently, my conf.yaml file was empty hence no logs but I see localhost stuff under APM.
Hi, I have no way to verify if that is the true reason, but also no reason to doubt it.

I will say DDOS attacks on scientific databases are not that uncommon. This is the same reason that a lot of scientific publication data are now hosted by the publisher and not the scientist.

It's rarely actually a malicious "hacker," though. Usually it's some grad student somewhere pulling a really crappily made wget script out and accidentally using all the bandwidth.

Scientists aren't actually that great of programmers, yours truly included. Have I done this before with an independently hosted database? I can neither confirm not deny. Lol.

But seriously I have no idea. I get why you find this suspicious, but to me it is extremely circumstantial and I can think of a lot of mundane reasons for it.

For one, I don't know that the translation of DDOS and hacker or idiot script kiddie is nuanced enough between Mandarin and English.
System Requirements:

- A time machine so that we can go back to before 1970 and get the program to stop and output a number.

- An insanely fast computer so that by the time you use your time machine enough 9s have been printed.
> There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go?

All of them. And not just via government, or the non-existent mental health authorities, but neighbours, acquaintances, and passers-by. Increase social welfare spending, sure, but also, people should be kinder, more empathetic, and look out for one-another. This could be as simple as striking up conversations with strangers, or people outside our wealth bubble. It could mean volunteering for a charity. We're all complicit in the propagation of bad ideas, and the decline in community, and we can't always lean on systems to fix it for us.
There’s a study out there that Dr. Edell used to talk about.

It compared the mood of treadmill vs. outside walking.

Outside was perfected by a lot.

(I miss Dr. Edell. I thought someone would replace him, but no.)
That whole premise is flawed. First, they often describe themselves as activists. Second, they are clearly not for diversity and inclusion. It's about conformity and exclusion. They are anti-free speech, pro censorship and bully those who don't conform. You can't square that intolerance with any desire to be diverse and inclusive.
1 in ~10 million seems to be the average risk of an american to die from air plane, so, in your lifetime (100 years, if you live to 100 - average lifespan is 80 it looks like), that goes up to 1-(9,999,999/10,000,000)^100 ~ 1 in 100k

Since that number is about the average risk of an american to die (and not the risk per flight), using it to calculate the risk per flight is erroneous

I think?
Here's Google's cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyG...
Yes.

Here I am, looking at a Salesforce integration to Dynamo.

Several attempts at elegance thwarted by the trashyness of the AWS libraries. The Salesforce data-model a pile of hundreds of ad-hoc fields.

I wrote the most Java1.4 code I ever wrote, copy-pasted the hundreds of fields into a spreadsheet and am slogging through the list picking what to keep and what to ignore.

It will get done by pure force of labor, and the customer will be disappointed by “what took you so long”

Sigh
Late Pieter Hintjens of ZeroMQ (and more) openly admitted to using this hack if he needed to have work done. State that something is impossible and watch developers tumble over each other to get it done and prove you wrong.
+1

I paid for full version of AdGuard Pro late last year after my 6 month Android/Oneplus phase ended and I went back to iOS. It has worked REAL well and allows me to just use native Safari. I'm happy with this setup. I used to use free Firefox Focus as the content blocker before, but it would go long time between updates.

The only annoyance with Adguard Pro on iOS (and probably the same for all app based content blockers on iOS) is it is clunky to whitelist a site as they aren't integrated with the browser. You have to open the app itself, dig into the whitelist area and then manually type in/paste the domain name to add it. Brave and FF Focus you can do it right from within the browser, same as it was with FF/ubo on Android.

Also, AdGuard on iOS doesn't acknowledge specific pages only within a domain. For example; mlb.com is loaded with ads, their highlight videos show a 15 sec ad for literally every highlight. I have AdGuard enabled and the experience is so much better. BUT the "Standings" page doesn't load with AdGuard enabled and I can't just disable it only for that page.

Regardless, the small price to pay for AdGuard on iOS is well worth it.
Wow I also describe elsewhere how his understanding of the CGGCGG codon usage is truly flawed. It looks like these codons weren't actually there in the earliest sequences of the pandemic, but evolved over time as the virus adapted to us as a host. Really not the smoking gun he thinks it is. If you wanna see what I mean, just search this page for "CGGCGG"
This is only partially true.

For mid to high end bikes Sram is compelling at most price points. And Campagnolo remain the choice many for high end.

At the low end Microshift and other Chinese brands are seen quite often.

The available choices are broader now than at any time since the 1960s.
It kind of was the restoration of an older tradition: http://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-the-new-year-start-... though it is apparently not very clear who exactly started it and why that person did it.
No they're using the gambler's fallacy, each flight you take is unaffected by any flight you've taken previously. Flying a load of times isn't reducing the denominator.
that's not to mention the first page of results from your query will be from amzon, ebay, & eggsdirect.com trying to sell you the eggs in the first place.
::facepalm::
Tell that to my lambda functions.
You’re absolutely right, my brain wasn’t able to correctly separate English and German in the middle of the night.
No. From what I saw, this person actively blocked attempts by others to make things better. It seemed to be something of a classic personal fiefdom. (Combined with a bit of genuine technical incompetence.)

(And to sibling: I'm not going to name any names, since I prefer not to shame in public. Especially when most all of what I did was read LKML, so who knows what background stuff I'd missed. I'm afraid you'll have to come to your own conclusions.)