skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> extremely permissive licenses of many open source project are nothing but a redistribution of wealth upwards

Although I license all my amateur work GPLv3, I dispute the assertion that more permissive licenses are "nothing but" a redistribution of wealth upwards.

Permissive licenses commoditize their features. This is of benefit to everyone, but organizations with more capital are better positioned to leverage that commodity, and typically when they do, they do so selfishly. This further centralizes value with them, but I believe this is still a better outcome than a closed license because of the educational/cultural/technical benefits to everyone of the open license. The capital leverage problem is orthogonal to that.

Copyleft licenses kind of do the same commoditization thing, but explicitly only for share-alike uses, which is why they're the only way to grow open culture relative to proprietary culture: they're designed to deny "freeloaders" on open culture by requiring all derivative works to also be open.

> without any benefit to original authors

Benefiting the original authors is not (directly) the point of open source.

MIT: "Here's some code, go nuts."

GPL: "Here's some code, go nuts, but share the nuts if you do."

There's zero value capture for the original author built into these licenses. If the original author wants to ensure they capture the value from their work, I recommend using a closed, proprietary license. Just be aware they're applying friction to the overall technological development of humanity by doing so.
> It looks like Russia (and China) are vetoing any UN action. What are the alternatives?

There are no alternatives, that is part of the problem. The UN was primarily created to prevent all-out war between the US and Russia... young people like me expect it to be more than that though.

In the past, as a result the US and various European nations have gone off on their own to engage in various conflicts, both in military actions and in economic sanctions, on sometimes extremely thin or nonexistent legal grounds.

That's unrealistic to expect here:

- there isn't much trade between Myanmar and the EU to sanction (and the bit that is can and will be covered by Russia and China)

- military action is out of the question since the US has more pressing problems to solve than a military junta - Taiwan and interior issues - and the EU is blocked by its 100% consensus requirements on foreign action, incompetent and underfunded armies and general instability

- generally, outside of human rights activists no one cares about human rights abuses, that is the sad and tragic reality.

- as for the UN: there isn't any hope for multilateral action any more there either, it's a dead paperweight. No single nation there acts on good faith and a sense of common humanity, everyone is just looking for their own interests.
One problem there is that you lock up 100% of the money, which is not ideal for a lot of parties.

The other problem is related: you can’t make nearly as much money off your scheme.
surprise pikachu -- technology associated with highly polarizing individual is targeted for any cyber exploits
> nobody can just become richer because they started rich

Right. In PoW, they need access to limited semiconductor supplies and cheap electricity. Which are two things that can be bought with...what was that stuff called...? Ah, yes: money! So PoW does just the same - the rich tend to get richer - but it adds the necessity to cause unnecessary environmental pollution on the scale of an entire country to it. Oh, and all the crypto holders pay collectively for that unnecessary "work". What a stroke of genius!
Not hard to parse, but you are arguing a bit besides the point. It is a solid recommendation given the point of the article. You are of course free to disagree, but then don't argue about the recommendation, but simply give your argument.

Regarding the Hand on stove, it isn't any more "objective" than this a recommendation, there is simply more subjective evidence of it's being bad. Qualitative arguments like that are seldom useful in my experience, focus on the evidence, as I believe you did further down in the thread.
In theory, I agree with your point.

However, I've worked with people who struggle to write in English without introducing random punctuation, and don't "see" (or care about) the text on the screen enough to go back and fix it.

I think Copilot will be a great benefit to the lazy programmer, who understands the semantics, but just can't be bothered to get the indentation or other syntax correct.
Shouldn't there be some CLI tool that would allow verifying the checksum of the file as an intermediate step?

Something along the lines of:

curl https://pyenv.run | pass_on_through_sdtout_if_hash_matches md5 8bffaf30c9ba21393329d531063056fe | bash

That way, someone who validates the file locally, can be sure that what's piped is the same thing.
I'm all for moving forward, but Copilot just seems to be a bad idea, amplified.

What I want is careful, thoughtful, knowledgeable people, who have learned and honed their skills over years in various areas and can come up with creative, maintainable solutions to complex problems. This is not something you autocomplete. If it would be, we could autocomplete 80% of all jobs tomorrow.

I don't want code monkeys on steroids. But maybe I'm to far off Silicon Valley.
What OpenAI and GitHub’s “AI pair programmer” means for the software industry
> You can't watch TV with only a sound bar, but you can do the opposite

You can watch the soundbar with only a TV?
The excerpt from Quake code is literally one of the most famous functions out there. There is no wonder that it was reproduced verbatim. The share of such code, according to Github is really small.

It would be quite straightforward to write an additional filter that would check the generated code against the training corpus to exclude exact copies.
PoW also codifies "rich gets richer" - mining begets return on invested capital in exactly the same way that PoS does.

In fact, arguably PoW is worse, because it has economies of scale that PoS does not have, so the rich truly do have an edge in PoW.
One project uses tf 2.1, one uses 1.15 and the other 2.4 ... for me it is much more convenient to have 3 envs rather than 3 containers or switching the system cuda as needed...
I especially had problems debugging through docker containers back in the days, therefore i never picked it up again.
Tracking Events with Ahoy
They can do it but it requires physical upgrades, swapping out every amplifier in a node, for example. It’s a slow process. Some cable systems have gone to 8 upstream channels. I don’t know of anyone who has a 3.1 OFDM upstream. Does anyone here have that?
Ninja mining is no different than premining
Agreed, Pip isn't to blame, treating `pip install -r requirements.txt` as one's sole dependency management is.

You can choose to build your own dependency management practice around pip, or use one someone else has already created. I think that it is easier to get a team on the same page with something like Poetry, especially if they're used to bundler or npm.

You're right about the docker containers as well, but upstream does what it wants and downstream has a strong tendency to not mess with upstream's choices.
fantastic article. good read.
That’s aligned with what I’ve heard speculated, but what’s the part where they were caught? The reddit post doesn’t point to a Citadel link, unless I’m missing something.
Never noticed that huge cookie popup smack in the middle of every single damn new website you visit huh?! Lucky you...
The author is a bit of a serial provocateur, and is one of the exacerbating forces of the twitter discourse - which you might also be able to distil from the book’s title. He has dined out on making a boogeyman out of student protests, BLM and “antifa” [0] among far-right media outlets and more credulous mainstream ones.

Regardless of your personal political orientation, if you don’t like the way Twitter has changed the way people talk about politics, it’s probably fair to assume you’re not thrilled about reportage that portrays its subjects as radical democracy-destroyers, rather than people with agency and motivations and grievances that may well be legitimate. And whatever your feelings on _that_, the people who are the subjects of that kind of reportage tend to find it a bit of an irritation.

Not wishing to detract from the awfulness of this fellow’s treatment, he’s strayed into the crossfire of culture war BS, that he probably had no idea was there, in a way that appears to stake out a position. But if he’d done the same with some half-baked Pizza- or Russiagate exposé, you might expect something similar, just from different accounts.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-n...
No energy is green. Not a single energy source does not require some mining / oil extracting at some point. We have to choose the solution which impact as little as possible the environment on global scale.

Beware of the Nirvana Fallacy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
> "The problem was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names," Miller said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

Maybe this is a publicity stunt? I would never have heard about this site otherwise.

Trump is (was?) good at this: feeding the media exactly what they want so they write about him.

This is too good a bait to ignore. "lulz trump's social network got pwned on launch day! what a lozer lul"
I do think that some kind of fiduciary duty framework can be applied to directors/deployers/admins so that users/investors/consumers can at least choose between services

we can all jump through an increasing number of hoops and use off shore unregulated financial products who have simply learned not to bother with US citizens, but most of us stick with the ones with fiduciary duties
man you must like pain.

the first half mile of any run always sucks. Why do the worst part over and over without rest days and never enjoy the glory of being warmed up and just humming along for miles?
Apple: Building a Trusted Ecosystem for Millions of Apps [pdf]
What was the exploit?
I was wondering why these apps (inc Parler) seem to be so poorly made. It could just be regular small-team issues, but part of me wonders if it's the lack of diversity in the teams that exacerbates it.

It's fairly well known that more diverse teams (different education, backgrounds, universities, as well as racial/gender diversity) produce better products because they have fewer blind spots on things, and a diversity of approaches tends to weed out issues. An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches.

These apps are essentially built on a premise of lack of diversity, and so I'd imagine that the teams that work on them are much less diverse than they would otherwise be.

The only one that seems to be more immune to this is Gab, which is based on Mastodon I think (funnily enough a project with incredible diversity).
I 100% agree, but that’s exactly what code linters do, which have been around for decades.

That said, a more sophisticated linter might be useful in catching non-idiomatic, but syntactically/stylistically valid code that would thus be flagged as “valid” by current linters’ simple automata.
Do you mean Parler? I think Gab is a Mastodon fork.
> Miller told Fox News earlier this week he hoped Trump would join but that the former president was considering a number of options. He said Trump was not funding the platform.

Is my reading correct here? Trump, after bringing the ban-wave and replace twitter rhetoric to the foreground, isn't even on the platform?
This sort of thing is predictable. Twitter & co are leaving open a huge window for a competitor to come in and take a big chunk of users. The attempts are going to keep coming until one of them has solid technical foundations and sticks.

There were a lot of knee-jerk calls for some sort of government regulation or similar on the right when the censorship started to kick up a gear. Hopefully they'll learn that the first reaction is a mistake and that the market eventually corrects for that sort of power abuse.
It took me one day to realize it was fake. I saw it happen and started reading and listening to the Twitter spaces after a couple beers and I was like "WTF, I don't get anything about it, I must have missed so many things lately".
And yes, having so many of the influencial people talking about it in the same room like they knew what it was really made it confusing.

Thanks Ian for calling it BS the day after
Maybe it's worse, maybe it's not but the claim I was replying to doesn't apply to that.

>Cuban and Musk are not savvy (crypto) investors. Just because they are rich and successful in one domain does not make them experts in others.
Perhaps they are only surrounded by Yes Men who don’t attempt to educate them or advise when they are wrong/under-informed.
I don't think most music degrees are technologically grounded. I have a degree and courses in music from 2 major universities and both of them were reticent to teach about music software. Music is a traditional field, there's a lot of older professors hanging on to tenure who listen, write by hand, and generally rely on their ears and aural sense, rather than tech.

These folks could definitely use software, but why? They largely don't need it, they are performers or educators, not composers. Even composers, some prefer to work at the piano or in their heads, writing down snippets in tech or on paper doesn't matter to them in my experience.
> that generates code in a very context sensitive manner

That's why I compared it to a markov chain aye

In any case I've come to the conclusion my hater attitude is fueled by disappointment, so maybe it was the worst take from this whole thing. I'll avoid future copilot threads
REvil uses supply chain exploit to attack hundreds of businesses
> Cheapest way of charging EVs is from fossil fuels.

Solar is now cheaper to install than it costs to operate existing coal and oil power stations. That's a startling fact that really inverts some traditional intuition on carbon emissions.
Judging by what I've heard of some of their source code that got leaked, I don't feel like it really taxes parsimony to suspect they genuinely did get popped.
yes. and then you become AWS Billing / Pricing consultant .
I think it's like when you're breathing manually. You can but it's just not the same. I always feel out of breath when I do it. Or when you start to pay attention to how you walk and simply can't do it normally, unlike when you don't even think about it. Mindfulness is misunderstood in my opinion. Everything that can be done properly automatically, should be done so.
For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void"

Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The only overarching framework that could situate me confidently in the world would have to explicitly acknowledge that the Universe could in fact be meaningless.

An English course in college helped me out with this. A lot of the course covered Norse religion and philosophy, which was intensely bleak. Ragnarok, in one version, is the End. There is no rebirth or renewal. The world will be consumed by Fenrir and the chaos wolves, and after, for eternity, the world will be Winter. In that philosophy, this is a fact of life: this future is preordained. Your best outcome is to be invited by the Gods to fight - and lose - in the final battle against the Forces of Chaos and Despair. You're going down, but the highest honor you can bring yourself and your kin is to go down fighting.

Humans create meaning in the face of an uncaring, indifferent Void. It's our superpower. Human-created meaning is arbitrary, but no less real for that. The fact that Vikings chose to create meaning by slaughtering their unfortunate neighbors is a bit beside the point. That was their interpretation, but it's not the only, nor best one.

Hwæt! The Universe might be meaningless, these nihilistic Viking ghosts whispered to me, across the centuries. Live bravely, do not allow yourself to wallow in despair while entropy gathers itself. Make meaning, fight, build, love, stay healthy right in the face of the Uncaring Void. It's the only thing you can do. Entropy will win. Until then, make it meaningful.
> There's a slant towards standardised EE-specific solutions for PDEs, but it's still much more abstract and mathematical than any field of CS, apart from maybe cryptography and data science.

Here's the thing, though: PDEs are NP-hard. There isn't a generalizable way to model dynamics. On the other hand, dynamics come up everywhere:

- How is the pandemic going to evolve?

- How will incentive structures skew cultures?

- How do I build a suspension for my car?

- How does heat leak from my house?

- How does my understanding evolve with learning?

... and so on.

What EE does -- and I think uniquely -- is given intuitive, graphical tools to think about differential equations, in tools like Laplace, Body, Nyquist, root-locus, and so on.

They also give a lot of applied experience in applying those, including in contexts with nonlinearities. An op amp will clip on both sides, which you model as a linear differential equation (which is easy enough to reason about) and a memoryless, time-invariant nonlinearity. You squint. You kinda ask yourself how it would work if it /were/ linear, and the nonlinearity just cut gain. And at some point, after doing it enough, you have intuition for what it will do.

With the EE-specific stuff, I can intuitively reason about these things think through to design.

EE is all about modeling -- building simpler equations which approximate more complex ones in ways which give intuition -- so this is also usually correct or almost correct. Indeed, if you go onto grad level courses in control theory, you'll see formalizations of this intuition, where for example, a time-variant system or a nonlinear system is modeled as a linear time-invariant system, together with a bounded error.

A lot of the mathy stuff -- which I've learned a fair bit of as well -- is in abstract more general, but in practice, gives much less intuition.

My experience with the real world is that there are rarely actual differential equations handed to me. I kinda get that we've set up some pricing structure, or some incentive design, or whatnot, but I can't model it formally. I know which way things push, and whether those integrate or not. I can draw a block diagram and reason about how it will behave, in a way the math side doesn't let me do.
Even the most generous interpretation of the lightning network doesn’t actually add enough transactions to get %1.

In theory it could, but Bitcoin simply isn’t used for much beyond speculation right now.
And yet, Satoshi has huge holdings just as if premined.
> Etherium 2.0 has been supposedly just around the corner for years and it never really arrives.

They've been pretty public that it's years away for a while now. Nobody has ever said it's just around the corner until recently when it was given priority over the merge and is now estimated to be completed Q1 2022 (or Q4 2021 in the unlikely best-case scenario).

> Proof of Work on the other hand doesn't have this issue. The creator has the same ability to mine coins as anyone else does

Unless they ninja mine (pre-mine) like Satoshi did....
Should we really be forgiving one of the world's richest corporations for launching a marketing campaign with expansive claims for a half-baked product because, in the fine print, they call it a technical preview?
Kite does only fraction what Copilot is currently doing. It is great at suggesting function names and parameters, but it does not really suggest complete code or generate somewhat new code.
That works fine if you want to be 100% collateralized in cash. Nobody wants to do that because it’s expensive.

edit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PDNZX2nql2Y
The profit margins of a miner is pretty slim. If the price increases, mining becomes profitable, competition increases bringing down the profitability, likewise in reverse.

So yes, you need money to mine, but whatever you mine, you pretty much have to turn around and sell it right away to cover your costs and keep a small profit.
That's kinda fun. The other thing I saw about this platform was that it was effectively being gamed by people flooding things like the Qanon hashtags with pictures of old men in their underpants - https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trump...

It's funny because all of these platforms launch to "combat cancel culture!" and "protect free speech!" then almost immediately start restricting what can and can't be posted.

It's almost as if putting unrestricted spaces up on the internet necessarily causes a race to the bottom ...
Are we going to have Emperor Macropoleon and Prince Putinovich chasing each other's cavalries across Pomerania, like 205 years ago ?

How are the Central kingdoms going to react ? Are they going to try to increase their stranglehold on the Balkan polities, and extend towards the Carpathians, like, well, they have always done ?

Will the new Sultan actually push his troops forward towards the new Rome, or just send his poor unwashed masses to overwhelm christian fortresses ?

Are we going to have the Anglo-Saxons knifing the French in the back, like when they sunk the entire Marine Nationale at the start of World War II ?

Such drama, such passions! What a spectacle ! Bravo !

I'm going to grill some corn on my woodstove now.
I'm sure AT&T was a very diverse place when Bell invented the telephone. Same with early Microsoft or Google.

The likely answer is lack of funding. The median app is very poorly made.
Depends on the provider. My 40 € contract with Vodafone Cable (ex Kabel Deutschland) gets me 250/25 down/up.
Training on code that unintentionally has vulnerabilities is a problem, but I'm even more worried about bad actors intentionally putting code with vulnerabilities on GitHub with the hope that it will become training data. Bad actors might learn how to disguise code to sneak it into Copilot (if disguise is even necessary) and introduce backdoors, etc. It could be especially dangerous because of the "stamp of approval" Copilot has from GitHub/Microsoft. People who would not copy/paste code from the web might feel a false sense of security using Copilot.
I rarely see this mentioned, but you don't have to compress hydrogen that much for transportation/storage. Ongoing research on metal hydrides is promising [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...
The Tech Cold War’s ‘Most Complicated Machine’ Is Out of China’s Reach
> Why not hire a guy for two weeks. See how they do. And of course, be upfront. Tell them this is probationary. You don't sent a guy to relocate, just to be let go in a few weeks.

By doing so, that cuts out anybody who currently has a job. Looking for a new job is much less stressful when your fallback option is "keep working at the current job and continue the search". It also gives you a much stronger negotiating position, since you don't have the deadline of bankruptcy hanging over your head.

If I heard that a company wanted me to work for two weeks on a probationary manner before deciding, that would be a very hard pass. That's long enough that it couldn't really be done without leaving a current job first. Best-case scenario, the transition becomes immensely more stressful for no good reason. More likely scenario, the hiring company decides to play hardball after the two weeks, and I'm over a barrel because I already left the safety net.