skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By my limiting on QC, it is not approximately on target.

A q-bit really is a store of data that is equivalent to a bit. For example it can be a single trapped particle whose spin is in some superposition of up and down. What makes it different than a regular bit is that you can have 2 q-bits that are correlated, for example they are both in a superposition of up and down, but if one is up then the other is down and vice versa. Which means that an n q-bit system winds up being in some superposition of possible states, each of which is a sequence of n bits.
From Aaronson's (the author's) blog:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5539

> Accompanying the Quanta piece is a 10-minute YouTube explainer [1] on quantum computing, which (besides snazzy graphics) features interviews with me, John Preskill, and Dorit Aharonov.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHoEjvuPoB8&t=6s

I get all my quantum computing info from Aaronson. I'm grateful for his efforts, but I sure hope he knows what he's talking about!
SICP [1] has a good one in a footnote: Numbers that fool the Fermat test are called Carmichael numbers, and little is known about them other than that they are extremely rare. There are 255 Carmichael numbers below 100,000,000. The smallest few are 561, 1105, 1729, 2465, 2821, and 6601. In testing primality of very large numbers chosen at random, the chance of stumbling upon a value that fools the Fermat test is less than the chance that cosmic radiation will cause the computer to make an error in carrying out a ``correct'' algorithm. Considering an algorithm to be inadequate for the first reason but not for the second illustrates the difference between mathematics and engineering.

One that I'm rather fond of is: "An engineer thinks his equations approximate reality. A physicist thinks reality approximates his equations. A mathematician doesn't care."

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
That's public heath in a nutshell.
Finding Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities in Windows Using Process Monitor
> Steve Jobs, he himself up on stage said it would be open source

This seems to be the quote you are referring to:

“FaceTime video calling. Now, FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards — H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet soup acronyms — and, we’re gonna take it all the way. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re gonna make FaceTime an open industry standard.”

Note Jobs promised open industry standard and not open source. They are not the same thing. But you are correct that we are still waiting for Jobs' promised open standard!

This CNET article also misconstrues "open industry standard" as "open source" and also blames VirnetX:

https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-faceti...
> Business people and product managers rarely care (and why would they!) about anything outside delivering features and fixing bugs.

My response to executives and managers with this attitude is that they ought to care about processes beyond delivering product for the same reason that a restaurant owner ought to care about processes beyond cooking meals.

It might sound good to have your chefs do literally nothing but cook all shift, but they also need time to wash dishes, sharpen tools, organize spice racks, track inventory, maintain work stations, mop floors, etc. Neglect these things long enough, and you increase the likelihood of accidents happening and decrease the quality of the meals produced.
we had a principal engineer who thought he was very skilled and held critical knowledge and tried to use it as leverage. turns out, everyone else considered that poisonous behavior.
It sounds like you signed up for something like the fight you’re having.
Not related to the article, but I feel like as active engineers we own it to ourselves to always be preparing for the next play. I recently started doing more interview prep even though I'm not unsatisfied with my position. And I even took a few phone screens just for entertaining the idea and testing the water.

Gotta say it just feels nice to be able to go through a couple of those smoothly. I think that actually relieved some latent stress I've been having all this time and made me more at east even at work. Feels good to know that I'm ready when the time comes, even if not now.
I don’t use sidecar but I'd wager it's not as smooth nor optimized.

I use it with an older iPad so newer version might be better at it, but I see some artifacts on scrolling sometime, and it's clearly using the iPad's resources at full. There are params like resolution and processing that can be adjusted to priotitize what you care about (e.g. I go with retina res and more latency/lower processing).

I think sidecar will be better at the thing it does, I use duet mainly for the fexibility.
My understanding is that the current vaccine helps against all strains, but also makes the infection worse if you do still happen to catch Dengue (similar to a previous infection.) As a result this risk is managed by only giving the current vaccine to people who have already had Dengue atleast once
Remind me of Amazon’s leadership principle. Isn’t that generally considered a bit toxic?
Freenode service outage leaks passwords
An outage of the nickserv IRC service on freenode, combined with the "nickserv" username not being reserved for services, caused widespread leaks of passwords on freenode to unknown parties. Freenode is responding by quieting people who ask uncomfortable questions.
I've learned a lot from asking questions at interviews. My approach is to ask as many questions as them.
The wolbachia can evolve too. Even an arms race between them is probably better than status quo.
Wow! I was involved in creating an app for the mosquito people in the field and the researchers for this project many years ago. So happy it's finally showing awesome results!
Years ago I had an employee who had been with me for over a year and hadn't taken any vacation. I encouraged him to plan a vacation sometime in the coming months, in part, because wend don't really know what things he did at work that weren't fully documented and cross-trained on. Got other people cross trained, things documented, and his vacation went smoothly.

A few months later, he got offered a dream job offer, and the transition went smoothly.
Someone else covered diving deep and fast and WoR scrolls. The other major notion is to learn and remember what monsters can do. What they're weak to, what they can do to you. Part of the thrill (and the agony, honestly) is when you're deeper than you've ever been, and something you've never seen before just one-shots you.

The game has an interesting memory mechanic. When you first start, your character's "monster knowledge" is nil. As you meet and fight monsters, it gradually fills in. When you die and start a new character, you retain this "ancestral knowledge". It's absolutely vital to your survival.

Same goes for items and artifacts.

You can always look stuff up online if you want. It makes the game more predictable, certainly.
A “disgraceful decision:” Researchers blast FDA for approving Alzheimer’s drug
Got any other good ways to tax the working poor? $1/gallon tax is a very regressive tax.
> That would be blatantly obvious and backfire.

Why is that? Such things are done all the time on social media, at massive scales, by so many actors.

It seems like wishful thinking to think 'my favorite forum is immune' or, the worst trap, 'I am immune'. Such thinking makes the thinker an even easier target for the con. But maybe that's not what you mean?
Yes. Probability of reaching a game position is a product of the per-move probabilities, so adding them up tells you how much "luck budget" you need to reach that position, or equivalently, how much information is required to pick that position out of the distribution over positions reached (by a particular player, in this case).
Has anyone worked out what happened to NwAvGuy yet? Afaik he never posted anything about taking a break or going away for a while. Given his pseudonym was totally anonymous I can only speculate - he could be dead or in prison or something...
I feel like the fact that there's a lot of dissent in this thread about whether the advice in the article is good or not means that it may be valuable advice. Like, a lot of advice is great, but also obvious, and, therefore, in a sense, is widely understood and known to be true, hence not quite as valuable as some rare advice out there. The kind of advice out there that people may not quite agree on or even understand. The advice in this article may be the second type, judging by the lack of agreement here within the thread.
What do you mean by that? The false positive rate is extremely low. It's as close to proof as we're going to get.
Personally, I don’t worry about being replaced. It can happen, but I don’t believe it’s helpful to be stressed about it. The way I prepare for it is to try to learn new stuff all the time and keeping in touch with people in the same field.
It’s a fundamental problem of misaligned incentives between the employee and employer.

It is in the interests of the employee to have a more defensible position, even if it increases employer risk.
I can only imagine it's because it might convince people that don't take Covid-19 seriously to not get the vaccine because even if they didn't get it, they'd be immune once infected going forward, missing the point about hospitalization, protecting the vulnerable, etc.
Over half of online recruitment in sex trafficking cases was on Facebook
It does. It even made it into the dictionary as a loan word https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Meth
A friend of mine does something like this to test the waters. This approach seems to help prepare to be prepared. But then he sometimes has to face the dilemma- whether to accept the next opportunity. :-)
Could anyone have guessed what company this was for if the name was anonymized? No? Then it's probably corporate drivel.

What company doesn't like to pretend they only hire top talent?
Being generic comes at a cost of doing everything less well. Sometimes that's the right trade off, but i'm not sure that's the right trade off here, especially when it comes to safety and envornment.
(Related: one of Phil Plait's pet peeves is apparently the large number of people who tell him that you can't see the moon during the day. Again, all it takes to falsify this belief is occasionally looking up.)
It not only hurts an ally, it also indirectly puts money in the pockets of not so friendly/progressive countries. This Keystone XL stuff is peak virtue signaling by Biden et al. It makes no sense.
This comment sounds so confused that I have to break it down into parts. Maybe I have just misunderstood you.

> I wonder how professional gamblers approach bet sizing.

Some variation of the Kelly criterion, whether they admit it or not. Any time you make a decision with the goal of maximising your growth of wealth relative to a level of risk, you're using the Kelly criterion.

> The utility of money is asymmetric; gaining $25000 is worse than not losing $25000.

Right. Not only is it asymmetric -- it is concave. Just like Bernoulli realised when he invented the proto-Kelly criterion. The Kelly criterion can be interpreted as incorporating an asymmetric, concave utility of wealth. (It's not assuming such a utility -- it's just that log utility happens to maximise long-run growth and be asymmetric and concave.)

But critically, it depends on the size of your bankroll. When you are talking about small stakes compared to your wealth, maximising expected value (i.e. running the risk of losing your entire wager) is the growth optimal choice, because in a local enough region, any continuous utility is linear.

> Relatedly, most actual gamblers want to ensure good returns while not going broke, so minimizing risk of ruin is often more important than maximizing return rate.

This is exactly what the Kelly criterion does. It sacrifices expected value in every gamble for larger long-run growth (which requires also that you don't go bust, or lose too much too quickly.)

> Further complicating the matter is that in real life you don't know your actual probability of success, but you may have an estimation.

But decomplicating the matter is that the Kelly criterion is very forgiving of estimation error, as long as you make your errors intelligently. The optimal bet sizing under the Kelly criterion tends to look like a quadratic function. This means that there is almost a plateau around the optimal bet size where small amounts of misestimation does not actually make your growth much different from the optimal growth. (And if you're worried about large amounts of misestimation, the linear combination of keeping money in your wallet and the full Kelly bet form a sort of "efficient frontier" (to borrow MPT terminology) of risk--growth tradeoffs. Meaning you can always bet less than the full Kelly bet, and get an optimal growth for the risk level that corresponds to. Hence the popularity of half-Kelly and similar variants.)

In the end, estimating the joint distribution of outcomes for the Kelly criterion is a far more forgiving requirement than e.g. estimating the parameters needed for modern portfolio theory type analysis.

> And finally, though this is less commonly significant, your rate of return in a given game might depend on your the amount you bet.

A fact also easily plugged into the Kelly criterion. It might make the search for optimality harder than setting a derivative to zero, but we have computers for numerical optimisation!
Schools can go downhill pretty fast, and often do.

Markets also go downhill. If you really went all out with paying for it, you also need to hope that your employment will remain stable. People who are very comfortable with their job and predict no downsides are often the ones getting bitten when the market changes, as it always does.
I think Scott Aaronson is right to rail against the explanation of "trying all possibilities at the same time". The emphasis should be on *choreographing* the right interference, not on the fact that all possibilities get accounted for by a quantum computer (since each outcome has a measurable probability).

In fact, "trying all possibilities at the same time" is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Nature. Light rays find their trajectory by tryin out all possible paths and only the one with the highest constructive interference survives (this is what Feynman discovered in Quantum Electrodynamics, which is referenced in the article).

The real trick in quantum computing is manipulating qubits through quantum gates such that the outcome that gets assigned the highest probability is the correct one. This is indeed hard as the environment usually interferes and spreads out the probabilities across all outcomes, leading to a junky, random outcome.
This looks great! We're extensive users of retool but while it's great for internal tools, the pricing and auth model don't really work for external tools. So this definitely fills that gap.
We literally just started our big partner dashboards project so I'm sending this over to the engineer working on it now.

One feature that's important to us is the ability to download tables as CSV. Sometimes those tables will be really large, so we'd want to paginate them but still allow the customer to download all the data in their csv. Is that something you can/will support?
Looks like taproot should lock in this cycle: https://taproot.watch/
Burning oil for non productive reasons will make it more expensive, but it wont save the planet.
> The only possible long term side effect here is partial or total immunity from COVID.

You don’t need to convince me to get vaccinated, but this is a profoundly unscientific statement. The mRNA vaccines are a brand new technology that would not have been approved without several years of human trials if there was not a pandemic justifying rushing through the normal process.

So far so good, but the immune system is a complex system and we can’t rule out some unexpected side effects for some people some of the time.
Reminds me of a similar story from the guy who wrote Switcher (which basically hacked task-switching into Mac OS):

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
Peak virtue signaling by environmentalists/Biden. It makes no logical sense and net harms the environment.
They could all just revert to a dead language everyone used to use and be done with petty grievances. Go back to Latin.
No, it is not.

There must be a logical flaw somewhere in the middle.

There are always factors out of consideration (they are evolving as you calculate) so probabilities will be always wrong.

This principle cannot be shortcircuited. This is a wall.
The story when IKEA arrived in Haparanda is one of my favourite ones. The "mayor" (komminfullmäktigeordförande) was seen being very nervous before a meeting with Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) carrying with him some calculations about geographical customer data.

After the meeting they are both smiling. Some weeks later Ingvar "Haparanda-messiah" Kamprad delivers the news of a new IKEA in Haparanda.
I dont evne document things when i leave. not my problem.
> Canon Information Technology in Beijing, unveiled a new workspace management system that only allows smiling employees to enter the office and book conference rooms.
I feel like I see nothing but endless moaning about the development of DCSS in places like the subreddit, but I really appreciate that the devs try different things, sometimes radically so. After all, the old versions of the game are all still available to play if you don't like a given change, and the server operators (many of whom are code contributors) go out of their way to make sure that you can play even ancient versions online (it looks like CAO hosts every release since 2012), so nobody is forced to update if they don't want to. And as expected there's a healthy variety of DCSS forks, which IMO is OSS working as intended.
Heavier passengers on planes mean new safety limits for airlines
You could document what common issues you have or any tricky situation you dealt with. You don’t need to say “dns stands for domain na…” but knowing the why behind some of your decisions is super useful.
> It also had monsters that would breed explosively, as in between your moves. In the time it took you to take three steps toward a pile of louses (lice), they would multiply from 5 to 12 total. Fun stuff.

That has always been a feature of mainline Angband. "Breeding explosively" is the exact term used in the monster memory.
What if this the last time I get hiccups..
What does one do when they live by this philosophy of documenting everything and making sure knowledge is captured, but your team mates just refuse to volley the ball back? I find myself documenting how the software works, writing up proposals with beautiful diagrams etc, but my teammates won't take the simple step to even read the dang thing without scheduling a meeting with me to spoon feed / read it aloud to them.
We will be using petroleum products long after everyone on this forum is dead. Might still be 60-70% of current demand as well, maybe higher.
Interesting environment. I like that it's turn based so quick and accurate reflexes aren't an advantage, just pure decision making.

I wonder if something like Civilization would be a little easier, more popular with viewers, and would still push the state-of-the-art forward?
I have heard some of the funny BTS stories around some of the iPhone versions from Apple people, but they are not published anywhere for obvious reasons.

Many of those people still work there, and those product lines are still being sold.
Out of interest, what do you ask?
allowing a pipeline to be built isn't really "going out of our way". if it were being subsidized, that would be a problem.

but in general, i think it's better to allow a local oil industry, and properly tax and regulate it, than it is to allow all those profits to go offshore to less-regulated, less taxed foreign operations. people aren't going to stop using oil just because they can't get the locally-produced stuff.
I have yeah, that was a long time ago when I believed in Bitcoin as a currency and it's use in payments.

I don't particularly believe in bitcoin anymore, but that's only relative to other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.
I think that actually occurred under Obama.
I would not say that I worry about it. It is just that being indispensable in this way can come about by laziness if nothing else.

So I would spend effort to make myself worse off.
Has anybody read this book? I'm curious about the quality. It's one of those things that could either be really great or really misguided.
The article is not a bible and there is something called judgement. If you are getting asked DNS questions all the time, this may be indicator of a wider knowledge issue and may be you can suggest conducting an internal session on DNS. Apply common sense.
Cybercrime: On the Trail of the Internet Extortionists
> Unremarkable performance gets a generous severance package

> We are a winning team, not a family

I find these super unpalatable
PA is Full of Bologna... Lebanon Bologna (2010)
https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/

getting there!
FBI distributed a fake encrypted messaging app resulting in 800+ arrested
No honor among thieves
> Great, so you are wealthy and have wealthy friends and family.

Relative to HN, probably not; globally, definitely, for California...that’s sort of a fuzzy matter of perspective (probably not for a California homeowner), but, eh, whatever. Not the point. My point is that satisfaction is not completely irrelevant for agents.

> That still doesn’t mean agents are not trying to get prices up.

Maybe, though even if they aren't hoping for repeat or referral business the incentives are more for agents to close deals as rapidly as possible; most buyers are going to be looking near the limit of what they can afford anyway, a buyer's agent trying to push them higher is just going to make the process slower. A seller's agent wanting to maximize price would actually be acting in their principal’s interest, but even on the seller side the incentive is to get a deal and close rather than drag things out for a little bump; spending twice the work for a an extra 10% on thr sale price (and thus commission) isn’t a winning move even though it may be what the seller would want.

> Also, given rising housing prices and the state of overall student debt/rising costs of education, I would bet that the average number of houses someone buys/owns in a lifetime is going to drastically go down in the next few decades

The sources I’ve seen have shown it going up recently (increasing economic inequality and buy/rent price ratio should probably have that effect by cutting some of the people that would buy the fewest houses entirely out of homeownership.)
Exactly. If you increase team productivity and your boss fires you for it instead of promoting you, then the company is doomed so why would you want to work for them?
It might be great advice that people don't understand, but it might also be terrible advice that people do understand. The opinions of a bunch of strangers who you have no trust in isn't enough to inform you either way, but you should note that ought to include both HN readers posting here and the author of the article.
Hire Magento
I think you’re interpreting the advice way too literally. The author probably didn’t mean for you to document the answer to every single question you get, but questions you get about the system or domain you’re working, and where the answer isn’t readily available anywhere else.
New telescope detects 'hundreds' more mysterious radio bursts from space
As in traffic. And yes, I'm French.

Damned, I am démasqué.