skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The end really helped me with understanding their motivations:

> Flashlight’s modular internals make it a powerful research framework for research frameworks.

> We’re already using Flashlight at Facebook in our research focused on developing a fast speech recognition pipeline, a threaded and customizable train-time relabeling pipeline for iterative pseudo-labeling, and a differentiable beam search decoder.

> Our ongoing research is further accelerated by the ability to integrate external platform APIs for new hardware or compiler toolchains and achieve instant interoperability with the rest of Flashlight.

They found it easier and faster to make a framework optimized for their research than to try to iterate on a larger and more complex codebase. I think there is less cognitive overhead and less things to change when experimenting with a new idea, and since they've optimized for fast rebuild times, it is much faster to try out new things. They get native integration with the C++ ecosystem for free and since their team all know C++ well, it makes sense to just do it in plain C++.
School is an "ideal" learning environment - in that to do well all you need to do is digest the information as presented. This requires some baseline cognitive ability and the conciensiousness to actually absorb all the information required of you. In this context you probably don't need a lot of perseverance.

On the other hand most challenging fields are adverse learning environments - where the objective may be open-ended, feedback is few and misleading, and information on the state of the world is mostly inferred. To succeed in this type of environment you probably need a lot more intrinsic drive and tolerance for failure.
Compeletley agree.

Elon was lucky to be born in a rich family. Made his first 100k before 18.

Felix was lucky to be born in time to ride that hippie wave.

Just like some people were lucky to throw money on bitcoin in 2010~2015.

Still more should be a credited to chanse and luck.
In that case, some "people" should be dismembered and/killed.
I think the most useful feature of modern filesystems (e.g. ZFS & Btrfs) relevant to desktop usage is the ability to create snapshot. Software store can automatically take a snapshot before add/remove/upgrade apps; if an upgrade causes issue (e.g. blank screen so there is no way to downgrade), just reboot and choose previous snapshot from boot entry.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/ubuntu-20-04s-zsys-a...
That's quite an insight!

Actually the authors of the seam carving paper went on to do just that [0]. From the abstract: "We present video retargeting using an improved seam carving operator. Instead of removing 1D seams from 2D images we remove 2D seam manifolds from 3D space-time volumes. To achieve this we replace the dynamic programming method of seam carving with graph cuts that are suitable for 3D volumes."

[0] https://faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/index.html
Per the docs(https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/backup/B...):

"The transport is for a device-to-device transfer. There is no third party or intermediate storage. The user's backup data is sent directly to another device over e.g., USB or WiFi."
Some filesystems have features for creating snapshots of the whole of the filesystem or parts of it, and for serializing those snapshot and diffs between them in a form that allows streaming reconstruction of exact logical state elsewhere. My slightly elaborate backup/sync requirements made me a big fan of btrfs.

Some other things one may care about even on desktop are compression, corruption detection, and deduplication.
Goodreads has been around for ~15 years now and it's still lacking the basic search functions. E.g. I'd would like to see a list of books published in 1965 in Science Fiction genre with at least 1000 votes, sorted by the number of votes. Hell, even just seeing a list of books, published in X year would be nice. IMDB can do this, progarchives can do this, a lot of similar sites can do this. But not Goodreads. And without the proper search function the "discoverability" tends to zero, which, in my opinion, should be the main focus of any site, devoted to books and book reviews.

On top of this, the UI is horrendous. Just as one example, compare Goodreads author page, say https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3706.George_Orwell where the only useful things you could see is the short bio and the most voted books of the author with a similar russian site https://fantlab.ru/autor238 Fantlab displays all the works, categorized into novels/novellas/short stories/essays sorted in chronological order (and you can sort by other criteria as well) that gives you a clear overview of the author's works. The book pages are hardly any better.

The only advantage Goodreads have over other sites is it's huge user base, and because of this, I'm afraid, we are stuck with it for a very long time and it's not going anywhere.
From the list in Wikipedia it seems a lot of researchers move institutions after they were awarded, so maybe that is it. But yes, the score might change with time.
If the data changes, it's nearly unconditionally a better idea to use SQLite over those things. CSV and JSON are serialization formats for data exchange between systems, not something suitable as application storage.

SQLite is also much more convenient for anyone who later wants to explore your application's data than JSON structures.
I think the other posters are saying it’s much easier to shred a small file than it is to shred a multiple GB database, although these days it doesn’t matter so much for a database that small. It’s super efficient for file systems though.
Only comparatively short ones, with limited payload. Getting to a ballistic trajectory from one side of the planet to the other takes almost as much dV as going to orbit.
That's not an argument for swappable filesystems as much as for Microsoft to get their shit together :-)

But yeah, competition could do that so point taken.

Ps. An article made the rounds on HN the other day (can't find it back) that was rather confidently suggesting that it's Defender running in every CloseHandle system call. But it's all an obtuse black box so super hard to actually find out what's going on.
Freeman Dyson suggested a focus on colonizing the asteroid belt. The main advantage is 1. Purpose (mining) 2. Low-gravity makes it easy to leave. The main barrier, in his opinion, was the genetic engineering of warm blooded plants.

For what it's worth, I think we will have cities of 10,000 on the moon because it's only 1 day travel and offers great recreational activities (moonball, moonbiking, etc). Televised sports offers a scalable business model.
You can't extrapolate the future from the past. It's definitely possible that there are some very hard technological ceilings that we'll hit at some point of our development. The universe (probably) isn't designed to be easily conquerable by humans or any other species, so it's not given that we'll emigrate from our solar system or even Earth.

Colonization of other planets in our solar system is probably feasible, but I doubt such a colony could be self-sustaining as modern technology requires incredibly complex supply chains to manufacture. And as long as we don't have any replicator-style technology this won't change. Imagine e.g. how difficult it would be to manufacture a microchip on Mars (or a space suit, which requires complex materials and processes). I think a colony on Mars could not survive on its own for more than a few decades. Colonizing other systems seems even more outlandish and outright in the realm of science-fiction to me.

I think we just believe that colonization will be normal in the future because science fiction works regularly tell us this story, so we naturally normalize it.
Crap is not redundant. It's more popular than ever!

/s
One thing's for sure. The Elon Musks of today who say that we'll be there in a decade or so are telling big fat lies. They want to scam your money.
There are a number of Bitcoin variations out there (Bitcoin Cash and BSV) which are tuned in manner that gives faster and cheaper transactions. None of them seem to have caught the eye of investors. My interpretation is that investors like their ponzi and don't really care about whether the technology is useful. I could try and scold them but I don't think it works, therefore I choose just to accept them as they are and see their beauty in their own right.

In the money as credit model, the money supply expands and subtracts with economic activity. And the best suited money have price stability so the market of credit can focus "pricing" risk correctly.

This model of money could be supported by some kind of cryptocurrency, however right now the investors don't seem to have an appetite for sponsoring that sort of thing.
There are dozens of languages that have done exactly the same and eventually faded away.
I agree a lot with this, the European educational system is too much "learn by tough love" sometimes.
All this plans assume a human behaviour model that has been prooven to regularly fail on earth. Yes, there are spartan places on earth(monasteries, poor regions), but even they usually depend via "lifelines" on a continuous surplus on resources from some far away bristling nexus (city) or are permanently stuck in cycles of strife. A colony on mars, would break down with the first generations kids reaching maturity and realizing the remote prison their parents choose is for life.

In my mind, the whole colonize mars plan, is nothing but a elites escapism, who refuses to deal with the problems the species causes on earth and the necessary political change that entails. Its in that, very human, not very different from a neanderthal, who wants to escape his tribe, to find new mammoths beyond the horizon. But easy mammoth is extinct now and all there is to do, is to sit on electrically charged rocks and meditate for enlightenment.
Neptunians already tried and went home. Martians are free to give it a go.
The age of Twitter isn't known for its subtle judgment of human character. This problem is older than Twitter, but the black-and-white worldview has been enormously strenghtened by mobs jumping at people for a single misstep / bad joke.
Right but you can surely follow channels just with RSS? Federation is only required for commenting and voting.
Most variables of life have a peak usefulness in some amount and then it falls off on both sides.

This means applying more "grit" is useful in life, until some point where more grit becomes less useful.

To make things more complicated, the amount of grit also depends on and interacts with all other variables of life.

So not only the optimal amount of grit varies constantly, but you also get a fractal of local maxima and minima along the way. Basically your "how much grit I need for optimal performance" graph looks like the outline of a mountain.

So given that situation, discussing whether "grit predicts success" is kind of silly, isn't it. If life was this simple, we wouldn't evolve these big brains to account for everything at once and constantly balance and rebalance the equation in attempt to find equilibrium.

EDIT: Maybe we need to run a survey and find out the mean grit we have as a society, and then mandate, say 1% more grit and measure global outcomes. So please draw on this line how much grit you have between 0 and 100. The graph is log, because actual grit varies between 0 and +Infinity.
> The Java installation is a 1-time think. It's also a quick google away. I see this complaint a lot, I never understand it. It's plain and simple bikeshedding: someone complaining about a 1-time task that takes 5 minutes in total.

I frequently find that the particular constellation of build tooling and libraries particular projects have requires a particular version of the jvm and all the environment variables set up correctly. In some other languages there is widely used tooling to manage the install and use of the appropriate platform version for the project.

If you're working with a variety of projects, fiddling with the installed jvm and java_home and friends is not a one time thing.
Yes, that's how a non-permanent visa works in just about every country. Some offer grace periods, but your residence there is still seen as extending a privilege.
“China” is a bit of a misnomer for the article. It seems to be mostly “Chinese” politically, but pretty detached from the Han typically thought of when using the word “China” in the general sense. Interesting stuff nonetheless.
There are also companies still using Red-Hat Enterprise 5 in production with Java 4 (1.4), but I tend to avoid dealing with them as much as possible.
I fully agree, but the parent mentions an important word: probability. Combined with your luck, and kept going by grit, you most surely have a recipe for success.

If everyone has 0.01% chance to become a millionaire (chance - that might not happen, or someone does not aspire to be). Then simple probability tells us that a person with grit that does not quit at the first attempt but tries 20 times, has a 0.2% chance.

“I’m a great believer in luck. I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.” is a relevant quote :)
Yes but if it's going to be "non-humans" or "post-humans" as the article calls it, then the article's title is accurate.
Battle of the Python Dashboarding Giants: Streamlit vs. Dash vs. Voilà vs. Panel
I tried YubiKey and SoloKey (OSS).

I've settled on OnlyKey (https://crp.to) because it's OSS and you can back it up and restore. Backup can be GPG encrypted.

24 slots, programmable to store URL, U/N, P/W, 2FA, with the ability to click the address bar in a browser, hit a key on the OnlyKey and watch as it types it all in without any other interaction.

It stores MANY types of auth.

Not affiliated, but a very happy user.

It's a device you'll learn more about as you use it, but YubiKey functionality is achieved in a couple of minutes.
Historically, many things were "never" - until we do otherwise.

The opposite is also true. Many things we thought would be possible are either economically or technologically out of our grasp:

- Nitrogen fixation in wheat.

- A computer simulation of the catalyst that fixes Nitrogen in plants.

- Fusion power stations.

- Room temperature super-conductors

Maybe its possible to point to research that is almost there in most of these areas -- just like the 1950s.
> Elite schools are a foreign concept in many European countries

The most well known universities in England, France, Germany, Switzerland are what you can call Elite Schools. Yes, even in technical fields like ETH, École Polytechnique in Paris, etc
Can't really blame the reporting there imho. At the time that article was written they actively marketed towards the blockchain solution and the government side wasn't really forthcoming with public information. Luckily that changed a few days ago but this article in particular is from March 9th.
Hmm, shying away from hard problems sometimes hurts you, sometimes it saves you. It all depends on context. I have had great success being really lazy and selective where to actually invest my time and had better results than people who would just work their ass off always.
Bitcoin has spectacularly succeeded as a reliable litmus test to identify people and companies who are actually charlatans and get-rich-quick scammers with nothing better to offer than self-serving shilling and crypto-woo-woo, who contribute nothing to the world but hot air, burning coal, and global warming.
...and I'm saying that Rust is the only language where the benefit of using it for its type system has, for me and so far, outweighed the downsides of having to think about memory management.

Java? Pain in the ass with all those non-inferred type signatures and comparatively poor POSIX API integration. Also, I've yet to encounter a Java GUI, AWT, Swing, SWT, or otherwise, that wasn't buggy and sluggish under X11, and the startup time is, in my experience, even worse than the Python-based CLI utilities I'm often migrating to Rust to get improved startup time. (Also, checked exceptions don't compose well with higher-order functions. Monadic error handling does.)

C#? Not as bad as Java, but still doesn't have a value proposition that would make me switch away from Python.

C or C++? No. I use Rust for getting a stronger type system on top of something that's still memory-safe, not its performance. (Aside from the aforementioned "If Rust is offering, sure I'll take faster startup for my CLI tools AND monadic error handling AND explicit nullability".)

Vala? I forgot to mention that I played around with it and it's got all the ills you'd expect of a niche compile-to-C language.

TypeScript on Node.js? Worse than Python+MyPy in pretty much every way that matters to me except for having native sum types.

Haskell? Sorry. You'd have to pay me to code in a pure functional language, even without my dislike for its syntax and the ecosystem's philosophy of not being afraid to break APIs to advance the state of the art.

etc. etc. etc.

Still, as I've said before, I tended to already use Python for stuff that's well-suited to Rust. For example, so far, I've yet to need an Rc or Arc aside from the ones actix-web embeds in its data containers.

...and if I did, I certainly would want something along the lines of the borrow checker double-checking that I'm not introducing data races in threaded code, and a system akin to Rust's for compiler safety checks on non-memory resources managed through RAII.

(See also https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/notes-on-a-smaller-rust/ )

...plus, it's shamefully rare to find things that match Serde for declarative serialization and deserialization, let alone exceed it.

That said, I'm a "right tool for the job" kind of guy and I still use Python for anything that involves SQL for want of a library like Django ORM or SQLAlchemy+Alembic which abstracts over the difference between SQLite and PostgreSQL DDL, doesn't use the database or a raw SQL file as the authoritative source of truth for the schema, and has a migrations system which auto-generates draft migrations by diffing the authoritative schema against the database.
Yes. And I'm talking generally. I don't know what Signal does.
This seems to be a known phenomenon - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/197162/ntfs-performance-...

That's looking at large numbers of files and folders, but we all know that overheads like these tend to come about due to inefficiency at the per-file level scaling up.

Also might be worth checking you've got 8.3 filenames disabled and stripped from existing files (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/josebda/windo...).

Although in general I must admit I find Linux offers better performance due to less "hidden cruft" running - perhaps the issue is background services like Windows defender (and all the other ones that don't immediately leap out) like you suggest.
The many book examples would be exploitable under the traditional attack vectors nowadays in practice, or would generate tons of red lights when put under a static analyser, yet that is how many still program in C.

Bare bones strcpy() and memcpy(), pointer arithmetic all over the place without helper functions to validate application invariants, #ifdef spaghetti code, not using translation units as poor man's modules,...
I would support it too, but I'm not sure they contribute anything back upstream.
Just delete their cookies to work around this. But I agree I don't like medium either the site is very slow and the extra steps necessary to access the content are very annoying.
If we can create Artificial General Intelligence in the next 50 years then...

1) We can build Superintelligence using that.
2) We can build Astronaut assistants.
3) We can analyze satellite data at a faster rate.
4) More focus on Cyborgs and uploads.

We will not get intelligence explosion until the cost of doing human level work drops below human-level hourly wages.

Also, the problem is we are still stuck in a multipolar Nash equilibrium.
> Life in a Martian colony would be miserable, with people forced to live in artificially lit underground bases, or in thickly protected surface stations with severely minimized access to the outdoors. Life in this closed environment, with limited access to the surface, could result in other health issues related to exclusive indoor living, such as depression, boredom from lack of stimulus, an inability to concentrate, poor eyesight, and high blood pressure—not to mention a complete disconnect from nature.

I don't know why there's this assumption that living underground has to be in some dank basement with flickering fluorescent tubes, and that this is an absolute unsolvable barrier to Mars settlement.

I think we should just accept that if humans go to Mars, they're going to live underground and either go outside rarely or not at all, and just get over it. Maybe it won't be all that bad if it's done the right way. Realistically, a lot of space is going to be needed just for growing food, and that means the population per square foot of usable pressurized habitat floor space might not actually be very high. There may be wide open spaces and the opportunity to go on long walks through pleasant farms.

In Oregon near Bend we have a pretty decently large lava tube that's about a mile long, and in some parts it's huge. It's not exactly a pleasant place to imagine living when it's cold inside and lit by flashlight or latern, with walls that look like the inside of a dragon's colon and a floor of featureless sand that plays tricks with depth perception, but if one imagines it well lit with sealed, insulated walls, painted in light colors, or made to mimic the sky, with clusters of apartments and workshops and rows of plants, it actually could be pretty nice. The weirdest thing to get used to would be the one-dimensionality of the cave; it's just one long shaft with no side tunnels. That's what I imagine an early Mars habitat looking like: find a natural lava tube (due to reduced gravity they should in theory be bigger than the ones on Earth), and seal the walls and divide it into large compartments. Install solar panels on the surface, and then move right in.

Eventually one could imagine a habitat expanding by digging side tunnels once the right kind of heavy equipment is available, and maybe establish production for native building materials like sulfur-based concrete.
His reply to his own tweet is hilarious. He's playing chess whilst we're all playing checkers
Is this automatically generated? It looks like GPT-3 output, in that it superficially looks like a real summary, but it doesn't make much sense if you examine it closely. The Annals of Mathematics quote is from an anecdote about Lev Pontryagin, not von Neumann or his assistant.
I sincerely doubt there are many elites seriously considering colonies on Mars. I'm sure they're happy to push their personal brand using the space nostalgic idealism, though.
Lights from regular aircrafts deformed by the lens/aperture.
Only the scenario where development and target machine match 1:1 in hardware and underlying software stack.

Just changing the kernel under which the container runs can break havoc on the "reproducible" build.
Right, I mixed both.
This could be inspected in two directions:

- Does grit predict success? (forwards)

- Do successful people project grit? (backwards)

Although it's always somewhat context-sensitive, with both figures you could learn how much signal to derive from the latter.

If we learned that grit wasn't necessarily an indicator of success, then it'd arguably be a bit callous of successful people to project grit, given that plenty of other people go through hard times without being able to achieve similar outcomes.