skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The EFF summarizes it this way:

"If you are a website owner, your site will automatically be included in FLoC calculations if it accesses the FLoC API or if Chrome detects that it serves ads."

Personally, I don't trust Google that much. Chrome knows which websites I've been to, so it could easily (accidentally, or on purpose) just include any site. Google also has a history of starting conservatively, then rolling out stuff a little at a time. "Boiling Frogs".

Rolling out the header everywhere seems like a good way to keep Google honest about it. Chrome can obviously still do whatever it wants, but it would be harder to explain for them if they shared info on an explicitly opted-out site visit.

It's also just a sort of ceremonial way of expressing dissent with the idea in general. In a way that people could collect statistics on and track.
Not telemetry, but usually C&C, GPS, etc.
Top trending posts of 2020-21
This is good advice for founders and people intent on, and capable of, advancement, but it's generally bad advice for everyone else because it makes them easily disposable.
Oh your talking about wireless fusion power. Yeah, that's cool stuff.

I actually made the same joke about 10 years ago while working for a CPV (concentrated photovoltaic) startup collaborating with Sandia National laboratory.

I was talking to a Sandia researcher who was working on their huge fusion-inducing laser and he was all pumped up about it, then, I mentioned that I really don't know what the big deal was, we already had working fusion power. The joke did not go over too well.
Whereas I have Chrome set to default to 90%, and have some individual sites set as small as 60%, specifically because too many site designers seem to have drunk the 16pt cool-aid and not tried using their own site in a half-screen-width browser window on a 13 laptop screen.
Use `i to get it. If you hover over the character in the language bar at the top, the text shown has some indications of how to type it. Here, "Prefix: <prefix> i", with the prefix being a backtick. The version with a tab afterwards is longer but could be easier to remember for some characters.
>>> or think they do not have the time

fwiw - As a lead engineer I tried to influence meeting formats as being "review only". The idea is to distribute ideas as wiki or markdown prior and review/comment prior to meeting. It failed spectacularly. I believe the demands of multi-tasking (meeetings, chat, meetings+chat+work at the same time) have caused a lot of people to not have the will power to sit and read. Reading is considered "not-productive" when you can just go to a call and ask the person to explain.

In short, its really hard to change bad habits.
That your brain continually learns and evolves is not surprising at all.

What is surprising is that the location of the subset of neurons that reacts to a specific thing (say the smell of wine) changes over time. So neurons that were used to identify the smell of wine at time T, might be doing something completly unrelated 6 months later, and the task of identifying wine smell is now handled by another subset of neurons in the brain.

It is surprising and on the surface seems ineficient since your brain has to continually transfer knowledge from one region to another rather that just ajusting the existing region to new learnings.
Yes.

There are always requests and negotiations in play. But those three channels sufficed almost all the time. At times we'd combine channels if there was an urgent need and agreement from customers.

The slowest customers were the most enterprise-y. Things almost couldn't go slow enough for them. When there were complications to the release process, they could be a release version or two behind and there'd be a catch-up release.

We also had customers outside all of this, and had custom releases, and we charged very high fees for this. Ultimately, we were able to bring them back into the slow release because the extra work wasn't really worth it. Part of the requirement for these kind of customers is to have additional engagement efforts to make sure their internal teams were really aware of the details and contingencies of releases. Big companies move slow and need over-communication, and you can't trust them to do it themselves. It was more effective to take that responsibility on ourselves.

I preferred to take the things that were difficult and do them more often. Keeping a cadence to things kept everyone together. The minute you break cadence -- and entertain special circumstances -- it's really hard to get back on cadence, and that cadence includes testing, notifications, documentation, feedback, approvals, releases.
Why Mass Effect Should Be the Next Game of Thrones
Flange
> The former approach was release + upgrade all projects. Now if one of those fails post-update you have to build a new release and upgrade all projects _again_. Multiply that by hundreds of services and it can become pretty annoying.

I think there are actually at least 3 possibilities when you find a new version of a component breaks something that depends on it?

1) Continue using the old version for however long it still meets it's requirements and then do (2).

2) Make the local changes required to be compatible with the new version.

3) There is actually a bug in the new version and you need to fix the dependency.

If (3) is happening a lot it suggests that your test suite isn't good enough or you have some design problems that are making it impossible to provide a stable API.
The original: https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag
Could all your digital photos be stored as DNA?
That... Isn't accurate either. :(. He did actually pay some taxes, so income wouldn't be zero.

This whole "loan against debt" story feels off.
Make prols vanish underground and enjoy empty beaches, clean air and unspoiled nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Truth
It's not that it's small. It's that the suspect is likely not in the jurisdiction and the money is likely out of the country.
Actually, it implies that managers are multiplicative. You -hope- that it's a value > 1.0. I quite like the term individual contributor - it implies you're actually doing work (and that it falls on the rest of the business to make sure you know what work will be valuable).

But, yes. Bullshit managers invariably choose to take empowerment onto themselves, despite a lack of knowledge, and oftentimes without any real responsibility, either (i.e., they don't bear the consequences of their decisions).
I agree that only selling self-driving as a subscription is exploitative, but I generally disagree with your analysis of which model is better for consumers.

First, the subscription model means that VW has an incentive to maintain the feature. Ofc, Tesla has been very generous with updates so far (even to older models!) but the key word is 'generous.' Once you've paid 10k (or more in the future) they have your money and you are at their mercy.

You're correct that, if you wanna self-drive everywhere, the subscription will eventually be a bad deal. But I think Tesla's approach actually keeps a lot more people from taking advantage than VW - because $10k is a lot of money! $8.50/hr is pretty reasonable for, say, a couple that wants to make out on their way to dinner or a parent who needs to keep their kids from fighting. These people don't self drive everywhere, but the option to pay for a bit of self driving is nice.

Or, to put it another way, whether or not Tesla's 10k charge is taking advantage of consumers "less" is based on usage and follow-through. You need a little over 1,000 hours of self-driving to get that 10k charge down to below VW's price of $8.50/hr and Tesla has said the $10k is gonna go up. So if you buy it and you ever stop using it within the first ~4.5 years, you are spending more compared to VW.
It's also only part of the story. If the median or average income has grown at a larger rate than the decline in value of the dollar, you still come out ahead from the perspective of human living conditions. I'm fairly confident that the median American is living a better life than someone in 1630, or 1730, or 1830, or 1930.

In short, from an economic growth perspective -- things have generally worked out. Not that things are perfect, or that I love that anything sitting in my bank is slowly losing value. Just that things have been generally going in a positive direction and I'm personally cool with a slowly devaluing dollar if that means that same general trend continues.
Things I learned from MIT’s ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach' lectures
The pseudo-code you listed does not contain a data race by the author's definition since there is no simultaneous read/write assuming words have their usual meanings. As a result I believe it would not be UB in C++ today.

The protest that languages like C or C++ should just leave Undefined Behaviour alone so it will Do What You Mean is probably almost as old as I am and even more futile. You don't actually want that, the languages go as fast as they do because optimising compilers assume undefined behaviour can't happen.

The Java model tries to deliver what you wanted here and it fails. You still get surprising behaviour sometimes (defeating the objective of ensuring that the behaviour with data races is something you can reason about) but now you can't do certain optimisations that seem otherwise reasonable because they defy the promises the model made.

There are people in this space, who believe if they tighten the model even further they can get rid of the surprising behaviour while retaining most performance. That's where OCaml seems to be going. Maybe it will work.

The Rust model is the opposite, Rust evades the problem with its rule about modification XOR multi-reference. Either one thread can write this data, or one or more threads might read the data, but never both and thus no data races. Instead of ensuring you're able to understand the residual data races (and maybe conclude they're "benign") Rust ensures your program doesn't have any.
A bad ruling. To let it stand, the more reasonable interpretation is that the purchaser has to remit sales tax to their own state. But it may not stand on further challenge. For example, why should the state the items are leaving not be entitled to sales tax?
I couldn't find a book named The Timeless Way of Seeing. Is there another name? Who is the author? It sounds interesting.
When I was a kid, we were pretty poor. So a lot of our food was purchased in bulk, and whatever that thing was would be the only thing we had to eat for a week, maybe even two. It didn't happen often, but there are specific things that I just can't even get near anymore without getting physically ill from just the smell.

Lebanon Bologna is one.

(something called "Hot Dog Stew" is another)
If a customer requests a changelog in advance that’s one thing (should be as simply as fine-copy-paste-email), but setting up a preview sandbox is work that should be negotiated by a contract if it wasn’t already signed or in the terms of service.
Ask HN: Are you backing up your repositories in your company?
We currently use Github for the company, but I couldn't find out if it's good practice to back up repos.
Bad apps do this. Some even create a new channel for each individual notification so you can't possibly block it. Except for a blanket ban which you can always do. So it does depend on the developers goodwill.
Are there some specific terms in their legal bits that you're concerned about?

Personally, they've mostly been very good. The product works, it was very easy to set up and it does everything out of the box, and it's made sales tax & accountancy almost completely disappear.

I have occasionally run into issues or bugs, and their API is a bit of a mess, but nothing show stopping and their team has been reasonably responsive and sorted everything out very reliably. That's noticeably got better & faster recently, I think they're beefed out their support team a lot in the last year or so.

If you're selling a new product as a substantial business, I think they're good but there are other options to look at too and there are tradeoffs (5% is high, you could probably do your own customer accountancy etc in house).

If you're a solo dev/small indie, or just getting started though I think it's a no-brainer. It's just so much quicker & easier than doing everything yourself.
Another MMT idiot detected.
Theses on Techno-Optimism
For those fortunate to be able to work from home during this pandemic, as I'll guess most on HN can & do, I'm very curious how they're getting it assuming they:

a) Just go to the store and back wearing a mask while indoors
b) Spend most of their leisure time outdoors - because what else can you do?

I haven't been holed up this whole time. I'm outside multiple times every day (dog walks, kids playground etc.) and I don't know anyone who works in a factory, meat processing plant, hospital etc. hence my curiosity how people think they're getting it.
Email inbox providers would have to incur 100% of the cost in a very coordinated way, and then hope that doing so bullies the senders into turning off their open tracking. It’s not going to happen.

Major inbox providers like open tracking because it is a tool for senders to improve their products and clean their lists, which ultimately reduces email volume and makes email recipients happier.

The people at big senders and big recipients talk to each other. If there is going to be a change around open tracking, it will probably be along the lines of a negotiated feedback loop like they have set up for spam complaints. Possibly with the inboxes charging the senders for the privilege of getting that feedback.
Yeah, I think the point of China's term "Informationized Warfare" is to manipulate information flow and content to serve your interests more than your enemy's. If you can distort the perspective of an opponent country's decision makers or twist popular opinion there to foment internal dissent (as Russia famously has done in the US in the past decade w/o using any AI, so far), then you win.

I also believe this strategy is not only about conducting occasional violent hot wars but very much about conducting a non-violent day-to-day cold war which is largely invisible to the public (both China's and the US's). China has been waging such a "cold war" in the US for over a decade in their many break-ins onto US computers to steal IP, especially from high-tech and military/intelligence sources. In the last 5 years, they more active in international PR initiatives to promote their economic and political interests. China's AI and data-driven social engineering techniques will surely play an increasing role in daily practices like these.

Info-based warfare isn't about killing the enemy as much as weakening them, as Sun Tzu famously wrote, and I believe that's a view that China embraces. If you're patient, you don't need physical war. You can win simply by helping your enemy become more of a dysfunctional loser.
Privilege escalation with polkit: How to get root on Linux with a seven-year-ol
not a [neuro]scientist, but is there such a thing as “the smell of an apple”? one would think that sensory input != actual representation and also that representation is context specific.

On top of that layer the fact that the brain constantly tries to predict what is going to happen (based on a model of the world). So the experience of smelling an apple the first time is different from smelling it subsequently. Also smelling an apple is heavily influenced by visual input.

So, I don’t find their “findings” odd at all. I also think the whole we have neurons for X is an old theory that maybe we should move away from.
Related Github ticket: https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite/issues/94 (labeled as 'help wanted')
Show HN: Auto summarize your content text/PDF/DOCX
Right and floc was made for advertisers. They’re the customers here.
Try https://shop.app it’s absolutely great for the use case you described! You can even login to Amazon directly from the iOS shop app.
Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders
Related: Pound sterling from 1209-2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1031884/value-pound-ster...
Good point! And with Stripe Tax we'll monitor how close you are to those thresholds too, so you'll know when and where you need to register as your business grows or sells into new markets.
never used stripe, but I do like their design choices.

Also given how extensive their APIs are and even offer in-person payments via a physical terminal, why would one choose Stripe over Square? I am guessing these products mean the % transaction cost is slightly more than what is offered by other payment companies (chase, square, boa)?

Almost seems like a no brainer to choose stripe if you want to scale your small business.
Thanks! I haven't really tried that way of working - mainly because it feels less clean (more complicated history), especially if you want to keep your feature split into a nice sequence of small diffs to make review easier (I think some people call that a "stack of patches").

I guess there's no reason why you couldn't have an equivalent that automatically merges `master` into all of your branches though!
Github can probably count as one backup, but you probably should keep another backup offline
Link shorteners: the long and short of why you shouldn’t use them
you can't open this unless you're logged in to PA. I don't understand the point of posting this here or why this is on the front page!
Software is eating the car
> There’s no way the hardware on my car is the limiting factor, but I will never get any of these improvements. Tesla is still the only car maker to decide that car software can be treated like almost any other software people use, and actually updated independently of the hardware.

You also won't have any features removed, like Tesla has also pioneered.
As a solution, I propose a popup on each website that forces the user to accept FLoCs.
What I mean is that, though you can garbage collect a whole array, if you have an index array X such that Y[X[i]] contains the Y of entity i, the runtime can't automatically compact Y to remove the indices to which X does not point, because you could generate indices into Y in some other way, for example by counting up from 0. Automatically compacting Y in such a way would be the parallel-arrays equivalent of garbage collection in the Lisp memory model.
Why subsidize? Let the producer pay the freight. We want to eliminate this oil source anyway, so if there is anything we should be doing right now it is to more heavily tax oil sources like these which have such significant negative externalities.
In my experience people that call themselves “expert” think they know everything.

So no hot take there.
Microsoft announces Xbox TV app and its own xCloud streaming stick
It looks like about $250-$400 for a policy I would want. That’s not unaffordable but it’s not trivial either. Anyway, thanks for the nudge.
Maybe if I keep trying I'll get good at teaching some day! So far my results have not been inspiring.
They will get sued for this one day.
It's a damn good thing people on fixed incomes don't live to be 400 and don't have to hold all their savings in cash. Aside from the basic nonsense of projecting purchasing power over periods in which what you can now purchase didn't exist.

This is of course also nonsense, but the one good that has existed that entire time is land. Manhattan was purchased for 60 guilders in 1623, projected to $24. According to Bloomberg, the estimate of Manhattan land value in 2018 was $1.74 trillion. Amusingly, thanks to the magic of compounding, that actually only implies a 6.5% average annual inflation rate.

Of course, land is a capital asset and expected to appreciate, but this is granting the Hacker News inflation hawks worst case that inflation rates should include nominal price increases in capital assets.

I'm having trouble finding decent data on this, but it looks like a guilder averaged about 10g of silver at the time? So saying Manhattan was worth 600g of silver, that's about 21.16 oz. The present value of Manhattan in ounces of silver is 62,142,857,142. That is 5.674% annual inflation denominated in silver.

Not bad for the dollar, I guess? Less than 1% per year worse decrease in purchasing power compared to silver?

I have no idea how the website I was looking at computed a dollar to guilder conversion rate a century and a half before the United States existed, though.
Show HN: Generate configuration files for your Hyper Ledger Fabric deployment
Honestly it is so frustrating for me when I have a new project that is written by someone on my team and I need to do something to it and so I go to view the repo in Github and everytime without fail there's never a stinking README.md and so I have to go message my coworker on teams and harass them to help me figure out things about the project that 10 minutes of writing some basic documentation could help.
> biological evolution is sufficient to (eventually) achieve biological general intelligence

Says nothing about this:

> biological general intelligence is the end goal of evolution
Yeah, that's why ideally the engine itself would be open-source (which it is, though largely controlled by Google). I wish it were further controlled by a third party, kinda like ICANN or Mozilla, but that also subjects it to political capture.

The thing is, the existence of Gecko never actually meaningfully challenged corporate oligarchies. Mozilla's mission was noble but they were never particularly effective at it... web standards went from IE6 being the defacto standard to the Wild West for a while to Webkit dominance to a Blink/Webkit duopoly. There was never a period where we actually saw a standards-based web ecosystem. It was always renderer-based. In that sense, I'd argue the Gecko contributors (and Mozilla as a whole) would have more influence over the web ecosystem if they abandoned Gecko and focused on the Chromium/Blink project instead, especially if they had override/veto power over questionable commits from any one corporation. As it is, Gecko/Firefox is less than 5% of the web. You can't influence, much less set, any real standards when you're just a rounding error.

Like it or not, Chromium IS the standard. Only when Mozilla realizes that will they actually have a chance to succeed at their mission, instead of being the beloved but always-losing underdog...
Google's tracking consent flow is already in breach of the GDPR, so it's not a problem for them.
Why do you want to disable it? Isn't it nice to see ads that are interesting and useful to you rather than looking at some useless ads you're not interested in?
> I already pay almost $20 per day for public transportation.

You may be an outlier. Usually people buy monthly passes for 150-200 dollars. It gets expensive when you have to commute from another town though, like taking the GO Train in Toronto.

https://www.ttc.ca/Fares_and_passes/PRESTO/Monthly_Pass_FAQ....

https://www.gotransit.com/en/trip-planning/presto/fare-disco...
Of course. Github suspending accounts, someone gaining access and wiping the repos, ... all are risks you wouldn't want to be unprotected against. With git you can at least recover the repo itself from dev-machines, but a formal backup process, ideally covering issues etc, is better.
> He would have created it on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi would be unable without Linux.
But wouldn’t it work better with ECC?
That's one problem with trying to compare CPI over long periods. Consumers are buying totally different types and quantities of things with their dollars.
That's it! Thank you.

(My brain was turning up Chicago, which I knew wasn't right. I note that Chicago and Memphis are both names for fonts... but I bet any large city has a font named for it, so perhaps that's just rubbish.)
Hackers Steal Wealth of Data from Game Giant EA
>The highly symbolic law - which also removed preferential tax rates for foreign companies operating in China - was overwhelmingly passed by the National People's Congress (NPC) on the final day of its annual two-week session in Beijing.

Seriously?