skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What’s New from GitHub Changelog? May 2021 Recap
Avalara is expensive. It works out to being cheaper if you have sufficient scale, but it's generally pricier for small businesses.

However, that is because you're paying for their customer support, and Avalara customer support is very good. Every issue we've had has been dealt with promptly, including issues where Avalara misfiled a return. (Long story short: they owned up to the mistake and corrected it with the state without any additional cost or penalties to us.)
You know what could be actually bad?

The AI think that could do as well as you described...
> Because they are strongly associated with all known examples of generalized intelligence

Correlation != Causation. While they very likely might be relevant, I've not seen anything to conclusively prove that it is. The ability to forget is important to humans because we are emotional beings, but I don't think that necessarily is a requirement for generalized intelligence. "sleep" (as in what happens during sleep, not the act specifically itself) on the other hand is very likely important, but again, not proven.
I thought it was a fun position paper, if not exactly groundbreaking.

They did avoid one common pitfall at least. They are (intentionally?) vague about which number systems the rewards can come from, apparently leaving it open whether the rewards need be real-valued or whether they can be, say, hyperreals, surreals, computable ordinals, etc. This avoids a trap I've written about elsewhere [1]: traditionally, RL rewards are limited to be real-valued (usually rational-valued). I argue that RL with real-valued rewards is NOT enough to reach AGI, because the real numbers have a constrained structure making them not flexible enough to express certain goals which an AGI should nevertheless have no problem comprehending (whether or not the AGI can actually solve them---that's a different question). In other words: if real-valued RL is enough for AGI, but real-valued RL is strictly less expressive than more general RL, then what is more general RL good enough for? "Artificial Better-Than-General Intelligence"?

Note, however, that almost all [2] practical RL agent technology (certainly any based on neural nets or backprop) very fundamentally assumes real-valued rewards. So if it is true that "RL is enough" but also that "real-valued RL is not enough", then the bad news is all that progress on real-valued RL is not guaranteed to help us reach AGI.

[1] "The Archimedean trap: Why traditional reinforcement learning will probably not yield AGI", JAGI 2020, https://philpapers.org/archive/ALETAT-12.pdf

[2] A notable exception is preference-based RL
> Does ICANN actually mandate that a 'click this link' be included in the emai

This is my issue. I've spent years telling clients to not click any links in an email from your bank/insurance etc. but yet Network Solutions and others are still putting a big fat "Click here" button in the email.
You cannot separate the morality of an action from it's usefulness to business, thats putting the horse before the cart.

Modifying your last sentence illustrates this nicely:

You can argue that slavery is a net negative for the world or that it's evil or whatever you want, but if you frame it as "how can we take steps to make things better for slaves without completely destroying the way business on the world make money" then I think the current path is a reasonable one.
Yeah, I don't think it will ever be completely banned. It might be restricted a little bit, though.

But the big benefit that I see of self-driving is that a lot of manual driving becomes safer. Autonomous vehicles won't overlook motorcycles and Miatas.

Autonomous cars will go a long way to making small, fun vehicles safe again.
yeah same, Vyvanse is a wild drug. it has less euphoria which I prefer because I hate the cracked out feeling in combination with the euphoria, but it definitely makes you incredibly amped up. Glad you found a system that works for you (not doing it) haha.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. That's not cool. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points respectfully in the future? That means no name-calling, no personal attacks, and no swipes.
Google already does this. Ask OpenPOWER or *BSD users about the fact their patches must live outside the Chromium tree and be merged in manually, for example. Mozilla has been much more friendly to niche systems as long as they don't impact higher-priority tiers; OS/2 survived in tree for literal years because it was self-contained and non-obtrusive.
I continue to hold a small amount of bitcoin as a speculative investment. I hold much more ethereum as a speculative investment or to get yield from DeFi.

I am happy to pay and be paid in cryptocurrency, but I wouldn't want to allow my rainy day fund or funds set aside for specific purchases (i.e. maintaining continuity of life/business) to have exposure to the extreme volitility that cryptocurrencies have.

Just because one of the many potential use cases of cryptocurrency doesn't seem to be panning out very well doesn't mean that the other use cases are invalid.
I get the impression that they want to ensure people choose meaningful short(ish) URLs, rather than getting random alphanumeric suffixes, because they are invested in the trust placed in the gov.uk domain and it not looking like phishing bullshit. So it makes sense to me that they want to curate the namespace rather than making it either self-service or fully automated.
Grew up in Lebanon, PA and have never been on the Bologna tour. Honestly, I'm surprised this is interesting to HN.

They do a Bologna drop for NYE though, so that's fun, I guess.
It uses the actual transcription from YouTube itself?
Please don't respond to someone breaking the site guidelines by breaking them yourself. I know that's hard when you're feeling provoked, but it only makes this place even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> It was created so that well-behaved adtech companies could target based on FLOC alone, without having to resort to fingerprinting.

I think this is a pretty good take. With floc there is a possible storry to tell companies that want to target/customize, but only in the amount tolerated by the users.

Once thats established, it's much easier to go after shutting down businesses using less ethical means.
Where they do typically have debts, which massively benefit from deflation
One issue with Tesla's approach is that they do not have enough cameras to do this at every angle. Its going to be especially tough in parking lots, as they have very poor coverage of the road directly beneath them.

Mobileye's camera based point cloud approach appears to be much more robust.
Ughh... I was just about to buy an Odroid HC4, but looks like they're out of stock like so many other things right now.
This is more like tripping yourself over by moving your arm through your torso and knocking your leg out of position. A failure in a sense, but you just did something nobody else knew people could do.
I'd love to switch to Jellyfin, but I'm still using Plex as their apps are ubiquitous...It comes pre-installed on most Smart TVs and is available on pretty much every platform.
ZFS backups are easier than anything else I’ve used. I just zap incremental snapshots over to an rsync.net ZFS account.

For drives dying, I just ordered the 3 drives in my zpool from 3 different websites (Newegg, Amazon, and someone I forget) so they’d be different batches.
Sometimes. Border collies will happily herd your children if no sheep are available. You wouldn't want one that had bitten a sheep.
A typical multiplier for house price and before tax income is 6. So you are saying a 1M house, but for 1M yearly income we should be taking about 6M house (assuming the spouse is not working). Now I definitely wouldn't call a 6M house middle class.
Agile is exactly the corporate management hell it claims it was out to solve.
I use them with mass SMS, where we do have a character limit in our messaging tool. We can go above it, but then we get charged for multiple messages.

Custom domain, of course, or the carriers wouldn't like it.
I spent 2 decades working as a scientist publishing and applying for grant money. If publishing or having a paid position matters to you as a scientist, then you have to do something novel. It doesn't preclude doing what you said - but that certainly isn't enough.
You mean dredging through Mexican territory across several roads and a nature preserve? Probably be a lot more doable without a border wall, American xenophobia, and the inherent diplomatic challenges such rhetoric has caused over the years.

And yes, the salt water presents its own challenges on top of that.
> Piles of books on it. Youtube channels and blogs dedicated to advice on how to navigate bad management.

Can you recommend some? I’m at a point in my career and at an organization where this is a matter of survival way more than actual competence.
Why did they decide to name it after a horribly destructive pest that plagues owners of grain silos?

Would the Roomba have been as successful if it was named the iCockroach?
Nothing can

- live forever

- grow exponentially forever

- "eat the universe" (I know, the last point was sci-fi gibberish)

In fact, humans are already pretty good at reproducing themselves and have managed to travel to space, and have exhibited finite periods of exponential knowledge growth combined with periods of collapse, as nothing grows exponentially forever.
Bogleheads has a great thread on what goes in your Death Book.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=119346
If you're california, it's legal as long as they don't drive on a street with a speed limit over 35 mph

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21260.htm...

TTG, 5 seconds ;)
Thanks for the feedback! One of our core values is being engineer first. We've personally struggled with build times at previous roles and other types of slow dev environment tooling. Our goal with Okay is to drive awareness and empathy in the product around all the problems like this engineering teams run into so that management can both connect to the pain and take action to help their teams.
Living his best life man
Is there a tool for anonymously getting https://goo.gl forwarding url? Will be very useful, 'cause this service is popular.

P.S. Service discontinued, but a lot of links are available. Bitly and Ow.ly support will be cool too.
I found it more interesting that while the story focuses on the positives of social media -- even the dog owner says so in the interview. The HN comments are mostly on dog instincts, genetics and breeding.

It looks like the story got upvoted for other interesting reasons and not the original intent as a feel good social media story.
> ourapp.example.com/s/xO8pR

Wow. And makes it easier to brute-force (Which I think you're insinuating). If the links have an auto-expire of 10 minutes, is the risk sufficiently mitigated? Or am I missing something else?
There is a right number of days per month where you have to meet people and socialize. It wasn't 22. It is not 0 either. But I believe it is closer to 0 than 22. Personally I feel about 5 days a month would be the right amount to trigger all the benefits of in person knowing.
How to make envy work for you
This but unironically. Sometimes I find a technology or strategy where I think “people are insane for not using this”. ZFS is definitely one of those. It reduces so many IT costs by orders of magnitude. (Storage requirements for denormalized data, backup time and bandwidth, frequency of backups, procedural cost of restoring from backups, cost of dealing with disk failure, data corruption costs, etc.)
>Are these dogs unsuitable as pets (for non-farming households)?

Does the household have any toddlers to herd?

Working dogs that are not elderly to the point where they prefer to sit on their butts all day generally make terrible pets. Ones that are bred to herd animals and have been kicked out for biting them even more so.
Feels like a bad idea. Shortened links often don't need the level of longevity blockchains provide, nor will they be able to afford the cost if decentralized storage with high availability.
Tesla has gimped range on cars that were already sold with an OTA update. This is far different from a mid-year refresh.
Also, I never click on links in e-mails directly. For something like this I'd cut and paste the address it seems Google puts another layer of redirection in Gmail to spy on you ("data-saferedirecturl", whatever that does in their JS)
I hope you've managed to fix this, because this is an obvious security issue. A long token is used precisely because it is long and unguessable. The shortened URL is subject to enumeration attacks which can be used to hijack accounts.
Do you have more details on that - part number or etc? I have an older beast of a machine that I'm thinking of replacing to get power consumption down, but I'd like to keep ECC for ZFS.
One past thread:

APL Since 1978 [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23510433 - June 2020 (21 comments)
It seems like the author wanted to stick with open source. If that's not a concern, I think Plex wins handily.
I'm assuming you are aware of the difficulties for machines to do even the most basic of things that a living being can do with a brain the size of a pea. A housefly can fly and navigate effortless through most complex scenarios that it evolved to navigate (even though the same fly can get stuck behind a glass window and eventually die).

So yeah, even getting that level of intelligence would be a huge win. However, most people mean close to human level intelligence when they mean AGI even if it's one narrow specialization.
I imagine that the areas of Mexico near the border would support a canal, if it meant the (US) region would continue to be economically productive.

If everyone just left Arizona, it would hurt the Mexican border towns too.
I know that they aren’t, but that doesn’t mean that AI that doesn’t use those tools is impossible.
In 2019, 67 incidents of grain entrapment took place, of which 39 were fatal.

https://dailyyonder.com/grain-bin-accidents-and-deaths-risin...
and our intelligence is quite good at confabulating optimization functions for abstract processes that are inert. pretty amazing, really.
The issue is buried in the premise of the question.

“If you’re going to see an ad regardless, would you rather it be relevant to you or not?”

The answer is and always has been “I don’t want to see an ad in the first place, I don’t want you collecting any information about me under any circumstances, and anything that makes ads spots worth less is a positive.”

You know the cheeky “you won’t see fewer ads, they’ll just be leas relevant” line? The only long term solution to actually see fewer ads is to drive their value down to nothing.

The fact that you can pay to remove ads on a lot of services kinda gives the game away that they’re a net negative. Why would you ever want them gone if they’re so useful and helpful?

AdTech is such a garbage industry — drunk on their own delusions of facilitating commerce and helping businesses reach customers while being so annoying and vile that the only way their products to function is to insert themselves into every facet of life because nobody would ever seek them out on their own. Bleh.
Yes, and the whole solution allows you to plan / decide on (2) and (3) - both need that awareness.

And (1) is common in the open source and cross organization world. But it is less desirable if both the consumers and producers of the library work in the same place. Version spread causes maintenance cost.
And at one point it was a common theme that "an upgrade of JVMKit would have avoided this incident".
Maybe it doesn't have to be perfectly exact, or maybe there's part of the IRS that handles doing it "for" them.

I mean shouldn't matter too much if it's 110 vs 100 billion, it's a lot better than taxing 0.
I'm not sure if this is still the case but there was a period of time when email clients would not transform the entire URL into a clickable link if it was too long. These were generally email clients which supported plain text only.

Anyway, I think that I'd be okay with a shortener like your example as long as it:

1. Required me to enter my user id again
2. Was only valid for 30 minutes
Nice blog post. I made a similar switch, but in the back of my mind I worry that I’ve introduced a new risk factor, since it’s much more likely for my custom domain to get hijacked than gmail.com.

See for example this story of someone’s Twitter account getting stolen via a social engineering attack on their registrar: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...

A Google search suggests that setting up a registry lock could be an additional layer of defense against these types of attacks.

Have you done anything to guard against this type of attack?
I use Handbrake on my mac, and it looks like there's a windows version. For me it's pretty much perfect. I set up my favorite settings as a preset, and now it's basically a one-click ripper.
Reganomics
I remember I looked at Docker hub and found something I used.
It's probably a bad idea, but it might moon anyway and you might get rich creating a coin for it. The reality of money today I suppose
Require the user to enter their user id again.
A massively over-engineered solution for the completely made-up problem of not being able to use the original URL. Yes, that’s perfect for blockchain technology!
Not OP, but yeah, evolution doesn’t have goals in the same sense that people do, just like gravity doesn’t “want” to pull things, it just kind of “is”, and simply acts as reality permits based on prior and current conditions. That’s reasonable to say.

Convergent evolution exists for at least some adaptations though, like the eye. It’s not unreasonable to think that there may be some sort of equivalent convergence which creates a high general intelligence adaptation given enough time, at least for social creatures.

I think it’s pretty much impossible to know whether intelligence is a convergent adaptation without some kind of perfect simulation of evolution over billions of years. You’d have to tweak starting conditions and see if you kept getting smart creatures.
AGI implies it can pass a Turing test, which means it has a better-than-average chance of acting more "human" than a competing human.
My experience is about 1/3 of developers are completely lost without a manager checking up on them periodically, between 1-5 times per week. (Varying depending on seniority, while the frequency changes it seems like the percentage does not; junior developers are more likely to get lost but not always in the ways a manager check-in helps.) By this I don't mean a one hour meeting, but something more like a standup, or just an email "hey, last week you were working on X and I didn't any updates about it, how's that going?"

If you get a team of purely the of developers that don't need this, it's great! But that means somewhere else there's probably a team that's 2/3 or worse that, and that's hell. If there's a manager, it's luckily just hell for the manager.
Trying to move away from Plex since it became more "online" focused and less hosted, but can't find a way to export my podcast subscriptions to OPML, only import

Looks like I fell hook line and sinker for Plex :/
Yeah, we do that. It's simple and easy, allows us to tweak the destination of a published link if the site shuffles, lets us print simple short links that are quick to type but still are obviously our own domain.

You can't do it for everything... for one thing, you don't gain search engine karma from the links. But it's often very useful.
There's an effect where young people watch Seinfeld and find it unfunny and derivative. That's not because it's true, but because they watched stuff that had copied what Seinfeld did first.

People look at Crockford's "JS: The Good Parts" and comment on how it's obvious. It wasn't obvious then and that's why the book was so well received. Languages have radically copied the good parts JS since then while JS has lost most of the worst parts which means that when you move to JS, it's a much less radical shift.

First-class functions and closures with all their implications (IIFE, module pattern, callback/continuation, lambdas, .map() and it's ilk, currying, etc) have all caught on as a result.

Immutable data or more precisely, treating data as immutable and letting the GC sort it out was a huge boon for UI development.

Promises/futures seem ubiquitous these days, but that's strictly because of JS libraries introducing them in 2005 (twisted library introduced them in Python in 2001, but Python wasn't super popular then and twisted has never been popular at all).

I'd also say that the push for pattern matching has also been fueled by ES6.

In truth, StandardML (SML) and Scheme had been doing most of this (and much more) since the 70s, but for whatever reason, they have been rejected by mainstream developers. Hopefully, one day we will recognize this and switch development away from languages with these features tacked on to ones where they are baked in and cohesive.
Yup. I actually was a research assistant for a university professor who specifically studied economic history, price changes, and the econometric models that could be built from them, etc. The problem is that the basket of goods is so different that it's largely irrelevant too compare them. Even a pair of shoes, which certainly existed in the 1600's, can't exactly be compared to the shoes (quality or variety) that we have today.
How does a USB Keyboard work?
I never liked the word. It isn't even clever.
I think he just invented Developer Anarchy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIxHmsWCd7g

Honestly I just call this Software Literacy.
Nobody here wants to say it, so I'll just say it and face the downvotes...

JavaScript as a server-side technology sucks. It was cool back in 2010 when NodeJS first came out and event loops were all the rage. But .NET is now 10x faster than NodeJS, statically typed, has better community support, better tooling, broader official libraries, better package manager, and as a bonus it's not JavaScript. The productivity and performance of .NET with Visual Studio is just unmatched.
This seems... Shortsighted?

You can get any development project done without documentation; I don't think that's up for debate. The question is, can you make changes to this project, improve on it, explain it to another team during an acquisition or due diligence: 5+ years down the line? And if you can, will that new development timeline be accelerated if you had documentation and diagrams to work from?

What happens when a new CEO comes in, hires a new Engineering Manager, and 85% of the devs quit in protest? Will a new team be as effective as possible without that documentation?

In my experience the above scenarios are quite common in start-up and "scale-up" size companies. Where there are a lot of things in flux and nobody has a plan 5 years out. Then, lo and behold, it's 5 years later and everyone is stuck picking up the slack instead of developing new/improved products.

And you're right, it can be a case of misalignment of goals and vision; not everyone cares about the long term. But if your company isn't thinking of problems further out than 6 months then you might have a different problem to address...
That's awesome, thanks for the response. I've been looking for a free and open source solution to media so this adds to my interest in jellyfin
Scientists do not hope to prove theories (except mathematics, where they have axioms, so they can prove things - sometimes).

Scientists may propose a novel model. Then they check whether the model predicts reality better than the old model within some boundaries. Rinse and repeat.

Although a model will probably seem to be "explaining" reality, this is mostly misleading and by all means unnecessary. Pop-sci will explain anything to anyone anyway, they can even explain Hawking radiation without showing even one equation.