skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My biggest technical issue with this "common carrier" movement is spam. The author mentions it, but seems to suggest that users can simply block or ignore spammers. As somebody who witnessed the commercialization of the internet, I find this extremely naive. We generally think of email as a "common carrier," but even there, spam is blocked. Blocking spam is censorship. Failure to automatically detect 1% of spam will still overwhelm non-spam content.

If I lose common carrier status because I'm blocking spam, and thus section 230 protections, am I on the hook if I fail to block a fraudulent spam comment that leads to a user being harmed?
I'm not sure how this relates to anything.. expand?
Amazon’s primary advantage, initially, was that you could save ~7% sales tax in most states by purchasing from them. They also probably had a good deal on shipping at the time since they were the only ones doing it at such a large scale.

If you look at AMZN net income graph, they never really lost a ton of money.
The Raku syntax for list comprehension[0] is very similar as well.

Julia:

[ x^2 for x = 1:5 ]

Raku:

do $_² for 1..5;

[0]: https://docs.raku.org/language/py-nutshell#List_comprehensio...
I prefer this:

<link rel="icon" href="data:image/svg+xml,%3csvg%3e %3c/svg%3e">
Unusual Aircraft Recovery Procedures (2013)
If it weren't for tobacco lawyers we'd have warning labels on cigarette packs, no cigarette vending machines, age limits on smoking, we couldn't smoke in bars and there would be a massive publicly funded campaign against smoking. Yes, tobacco lawyers are the best.
You mean Presto? :)

(Then Safeways, then Morrisons, then something else I think, and now Eroski. I do love that Gibraltar has a Basque supermarket, within spitting distance of the border, haha :)
Are there no other options? Do your friends use them exclusively because they are sticky? Is there actually a feature that makes them unable to use other apps?

I find a lot of times, people just don't want to change, regardless of whether they should. I was the first to delete my Facebook in my group of friends, and now they all have, and my family has mostly jumped ship as well.

I'm sure your friends can use something else, they just choose not to.
Sorry to ask about it, but while deciding the name of your Java graph database, how did you ended up with anus?
We're talking about how banks should be adapting away from this signal, so perhaps they should support WebAuthn and/or TOTP?

It would honestly be revolutionary for a bank to require hardware authentication and send a security key to every client upon registration.
Ask HN: How much Would you pay for a newsletter about startup failure reasons?
I recently tried exploring startup failure reasons as suggested by my mentor and it was truly eye opening ! I think it's a not so bad idea for some side income. I was wondering how much can someone pay for it? Can you please comment?
I am using AWS Lambda functions deployed in all major AWS regions. Deployed with the AWS CDK, it was as easy as creating 1 stack (CloudFormation), then just looping over it for every region I want. Storing the numbers rolled up into DynamoDB.

I can't be an AWS Community Hero and not use AWS in my personal projects/business ;)

Thanks for noticing the typo :) I am a bit sloppy when it comes to language.
For other readers: this seems to be an internal google presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' attention.

I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.
As the article states, this goes beyond the tax system in the US when global companies choose to book their profits elsewhere. If the US is charging x but Ireland offers <x, then a resourceful company will book their profits there. This is a problem because the tax burden is then shifted to the middle class.

And the argument that the tax system in the US is too complex for trillion dollar companies to navigate is laughable. That's arguably very true for individual taxpayers but Apple isn't parking billions in Ireland through a Double Irish Dutch sandwich because the American tax system is too complex.
See: the music streaming industry
Here is a nice table with the history of the budget:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos...
Microsoft Office New Design Update Is Now Available for Office Insiders
Yep. Of course companies do it when they can; it works for them. It's the effect on other companies, on actual market competition, and ultimately the consumer, that is a problem.

Heck, Amazon is a fun example; they've long used their monopoly power to dictate to publishers, and are currently seeking to leverage their monopoly, Kindle Unlimited, etc, to help drive self-publishing on their platform, to cut out Publishers entirely. I'm not saying that removal of publishers is innately a bad thing, I -am- saying that making Amazon the largest publisher and the largest distributor of books in the world probably is. And they've achieved it not by simply being the best, but also via predatory pricing, and using money from AWS to cover costs in their retail arm to help gain market share, at the expense of smaller retailers who don't have a massively profitable cloud service to offset their losses with.
Not having lived in the US for a while, I can't judge the situation there. But -- to keep with your metaphor -- lowering the temperature in patient zero sure seems to have reduced the chance of further outbreaks across the pond. Before the deplatforming, Trump was omnipresent in the media here and as a result on a pretty good trajectory to get a following in the fringes of Europe. The lack of media attention has been cathartic, at least as far as I can tell (small university town, so probably not the best place to judge that but still).
Automation - for the vast majority of people - isn't so much about having something "on the internet" (like a free roaming chicken?) but to be able to control it intelligently. For example when I set the alarm to leave my house I have a routine that kills any lights in rooms that might be left on, adjust the thermostats on my HVAC, kills all the ceiling fans, etc.

Conversely when I'm heading home I can remotely let my automation know so that it sets the recovery temperature on my thermostats and resumes the ceiling fans to help circulate things with the HVAC system. If I had a room without a ceiling fan but could still benefit from circulation this would be a nice solution along the same lines.

Combine systems like the above with occupancy sensors and zoning and energy savings are significant enough you notice them in your power bill.

And all of that runs on a box in my living room - cloud is for remote access only; I loathe cloud only automation systems :p
Fact boy covered it a few weeks ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CowU0QK0Pjs&ab_channel=Megap...

From what i remember this project has been running since around the time of Hubble

Still.... Can't wait for it to get up there, money and time well spent!
What happened to Microsoft? Microsoft still controls 70-90% market share of computer operating system industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple achieved dominant market position through legal and fair market competition.
Another econ issue I'm seeing is that home ownership markets run in a different lane to "place to live" markets. Because homes are closer to investments nowadays than a "place to live", the rental prices don't seem to reflect the appropriate value to the demand of people looking to rent or buy for the sake of living.
> zkSNARKs are not only meant and used for cryptocurrencies. They are decades old technology but ofc they can be used for all sorts of solutions including cryptocurrencies.

Yes, but their current popularity (and the reason why so much effort is put into this subfield of cryptological research these days) is most likely due to their use in the context of cryptocurrencies, as far as I can tell. If I'm wrong, please let me know.

> Maybe there are real people working on crypto problems or maybe there is some sort of Crypto winter akin to AI winter[1].

Most likely, both. Once the low-hanging fruit is picked, things tend to slow down a bit (at least for a while). As you pointed out, this is common in many research fields, and not something specific to "blockchain tech".

> Let's take Satoshi for example a top notch computer scientist and a top notch C++ programmer. Who is even close to him? Vitalik? Kid who dropped out of college and rediscovered Satoshi's smart contract scripting language that Bitcoin had way back in 2008.

Just because Satoshi is a better programmer than Vitalik (I don't know if it's the case, but I'll assume it to be true), and he decided to leave the field (allegedly), it still doesn't mean that there aren't capable people out there working in the field.

> Is Gavin Andresen[2] still involved?

From what I can tell, yes: http://gavinandresen.ninja/

> These are the kind of people I am talking about.

Fair enough. But then the argument should be that "most big-shots are not working in the field" rather than "there aren't any real computer scientists and cryptographers working in the field", as the person I replied to was saying.

I just responded because it sounded a bit like a "no true scotsman" fallacy (i.e. "a real computer scientist or cryptographer would be working on more serious things"). It's almost as if, if you are working in something blockchain-related, you must be a bad professional somehow (or, worse, a scammer).
the interplay between this pricing practice, and the proposed partial or wholesale bans on large tech cos making acquisitions is where it gets interesting. copy acquire kill just becomes...copy, undercut on pricing and kill. this pricing practice will become even more prevalent, and is much harder to regulate.
It'd obviously be a tough rule to craft. In some hypothetical world where I'm the Tzar of writing and enforcing this, I'd tend to allow leeway for companies using data that could be essentially a totally-anonymous incrementing counter (as in this case) to choose how to present their site, based on what's currently being looked at or requested but not on the browsing or purchase history of a particular user. It's using a person's own activity to target, manipulate, or "monetize" them that I find especially objectionable—and the data that's hoarded in the name of those abilities, simply dangerous in ways that the hoarding companies aren't made to account for (a huge negative externality, basically). In general I think if companies want market research they should pay for market research, not just run a dragnet spying operation against their customers. If they want something other than market research out of those data, then they probably ought to just be shut down (or, at least, that part of their business should be)

[EDIT] FWIW I don't think these kinds of rules should only apply to tech companies. Physical stores ("loyalty" cards, tracking shoppers' cell phones, that stuff) and banks and similar also shouldn't be able to spy on people, nor to sell or otherwise use data collected as a necessary part of their business against people. A store may reasonably have surveillance cameras, but ought not be able to sell the footage to another company to train & test its gait-recognition software, nor use facial recognition to track how often I visit the store or what I look at. That kind of thing.
I was surprised to see this is an internal Google presentation.

FYI the way to advance it on mobile is to click the slides. It took me a few seconds to figure that out.
You will be hard pushed to find any maintained XMPP client that doesn't do this out of the box.

So at this point, what does it matter in reality?

XMPP has an annually-updated baseline for compliance: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0443.html
Same feelings here!

Ever since it was announced I have been anxious about it all going to plan.

Sometimes I put myself in the shoes of the engineers and controllers, and I can’t imagine how nerve wracking it must be, waiting and waiting!

The thing could simply blow up on the launch pad, for goodness sake!
stop paying attention to this man
{North,Central,South} America
Yes, the pdp-11/20, released in 1969. Core memory only. In my opinion, it took the pdp-11/45 to firmly establish an impressive new line of machines, separate and more powerful than the pdp-8 line. But, in DEC's way of thinking, it's instructive to note that a pdp-11/40 was used as the console of the DECsystem-20. Separately, it's a shame we no longer have 36-bit machines; 36-bit ints would hold time_t just fine, and 72-bit doubles will work great for science. Oh well. What we're stuck with now bytes.
Apple’s got their own authentication service now. Maybe Etsy will relax their IP restrictions for customers using that.
I used to work at JPL, and I was there when the sky-crane (the system currently used to land rovers on Mars) was first proposed back in the late 90s. I remember thinking to myself, "That is the craziest idea I have ever heard, there is no way that could possibly work." But it did.

Never bet against NASA engineers. Sure, they have the odd high-profile screwup, but on the whole they are shockingly competent.
You are incorrect.

For a given probability distribution parameterized by θ with probability mass/density p(x|θ), the likelihood of θ given a set of data X = {x_1, …, x_n} (assuming X is independently/identically distributed) is simply the product of independent probabilities,

L(θ|X) = Π_i=1^n p(x_i|θ)

Maximizing this product with respect to θ yields the maximum likelihood estimate of θ. Since sums are generally easier to work with than products, and log is a monotonic function, we generally work with the log-likelihood function

log L(θ|X) = Σ_i=1^n log p(x_i|θ)

since the log-likelihood will achieve its maximum for the same value of θ as the likelihood.

The cross entropy of two discrete probability distributions p and q is

Σ_i=1^n p_i log q_i

(For continuous distributions, replace the sum with an integral.)

This is completely unrelated to the generic log-likelihood function defined above. The two are only related if p happens to be the probability distribution of a binary random variable x = {0,1}, with probability π of equalling 1:

p(x|π) = π^x(1-π)^(1-x)

Its log-likelihood is therefore

x log π + (1-x) log(1-π)

which for this particular case, happens to be a cross entropy. Note that this is the log-likelihood of a single observation in a single class; for multiple observations/multiple classes, we sum across them, e.g.

Σ_i=1^n x_i log π_i + (1-x_i)log (1-π_i)

for a single observation across n total classes.

But again, the relationship to cross entropy only holds for this particular choice of p. It is not generally the case that the generic log-likelihood function,

log L(θ|X) = Σ_i=1^n log p(x_i|θ)

is a cross entropy!
Exactly. Which is why threatening a telemarketer is absurd.
I guess part of my question with spam lately is why can't we just go after the spammers? It seems to me that acting as a public nuisance would be enough for the government to take action.
This is what China did to destroy the solar panel manufacturing in the U.S. as well. Some of my colleagues now were kicked out of that industry because US politicians didn’t respond to the tactic.

Also, China is using this tactic now on critical speciality materials related to the global polymer supply chain.
$11k in prizes: NeurIPS 2021: MineRL BASALT Competition
I can't find the bit where he talks explicitly about this as I've lost access to the book I read it in (and don't even remember the name). I'll see if I can dig it out.

In the passage I am unable to find, he gets into the issue of having a worker making widgets, and another worker checking the widgets. In our world this would be a developer and a test author. He states that this reduces quality: the maker knows that he can make poor parts when he is in a hurry, because the tester will catch them; the tester knows the worker personally, and trusts that he will make good parts, so doesn't have to be very thorough. Instead, we need the worker making the widget to be responsible for its quality, and further to be empowered to do so.
> Thomas never claimed to be doing philosophy

?

"The Summa Contra Gentiles is meant as a philosophical work"

Anthony Kenny (Aquinas on Mind, 13)

http://people.exeter.ac.uk/sp344/Aquinas%20on%20Mind.pdf
I was wondering the same - I re-read it a couple of times and he only seems to be concerned with turning it on and off. I can see where speed would also be useful and I'm sure it's just a matter of using more relays. State is another matter - but it looks like it does have a least a few LEDs that are on when it's working - a voltage probe across one of those LEDs or another similar point should be pretty easy without having to get near mains voltage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus
Trump was a symptom of an illness that needed to be dealt with. It's analogous to being sick and having a fever. Taking ibuprofen will go a along way to cope with the illness.
I presumed he was talking about these lawyers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598535/
With bipolar memory option, the pdp-11/45 had a 300 ns memory cycle time.
> The people who live in an area, it seems, should rightfully decide the rules of that area

This sounds nice, until you consider that "people who live in an area" is merely a proxy for community members, and a poor proxy at that. The people who work in an area are part of the community too, and should not be excluded from the decision making process. If towns can tax non-residents who work there, they can give them representation.
I can't imagine the internet without adblockers... I can't watch mobile YouTube because of that... I know there are options but still. There is some bad stuff out there too I recently came across this reversecaptcha thing wow... that sucks. It prompts you like the location/cam permission allow/block stuff (top left of browser).
Interesting how crashes caused by printer drivers in the kernel are an argument against moving them to user space where they can’t cause crashes
No such thing as irony on the internet, you are the persona you choose to display.
You can call your company whatever you want, but my advice is to just not get too preoccupied with it. Just add value for clients, get paid and that's all that matters
Imagine a parallel universe where social network’s interests and the interests of its users were actually aligned—all because paid social was seen as the norm from get go. Fully featured APIs? Multi-platform third-party messaging clients? Ethical privacy policies? Once the end user is able to vote with their money, so many possibilities suddenly open.

The status quo is much more preferable to social networks and their shareholders, of course. Charging advertisers arbitrary amounts based on eyeball count no one can actually verify, while not having to worry about losing paying customers due to ignoring requests of locked-in users, is a nice position to be in.

To the point about market regulation, IMO there may be a place for a limited, surgically precise yet not targeting any specific companies intervention (for example, “you are obligated to provide an API covering the entirety of your GUI features if you serve more than N users”) that would, a few causal links down the line, break such shockingly dysfunctional customer-provider relationships, normalize paid social and let the market do its thing.
I think you vastly overestimate a) how many jobs can feasibly work remotely, 2) how many companies are willing to allow remote work under non-pandemic conditions, and c) how many people want to work remotely.

I would love to work remotely, but I'm not seeing any realistic probability of that for me in the near future.
Facebook allows anyone to sign up and access the site through user.facebook.com. All actual hosting is outsourced to NotFacebook ISP because the cloud. NotFacebook totally at their own discretion null routes baduser.facebook.com.
I believe freedom uses worse frequencies that don't penetrate walls as well. I left freedom when I'd randomly flip between roaming and not inside my house.
I've gotten useful leads on products to research maybe buying from those type of ads before, but I only ever see them on sites I've whitelisted in my adblocker specifically because they're sites I buy things from (and a rare few sites I trust to be respectful about advertising placement). They're useful when they're done right tho.
This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these companies are counter to the goals presented here.

Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement.

I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down social media on the first of every month. (Phone calls and texting are okay, but absolutely nothing else.) Something like that will never happen, but I think the world would collectively realize what this stuff is doing to us if we had to step away.

We're all addicted and distracted.
Of course, every single member of the US government was fully and faithfully implementing the president's policy goals.

The absolute purity of the status of Facebook et al. as private companies, free from any taint of government influence and hence free to suppress speech at corporate will, is looking a mite tattered.
I am so amped for this telescope. I hope it exceeds my expectations.

It also looks like this location will be quite crowded in the future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...
Government red tape and contracting at its finest

Edit: Downvotes with no comments as to why... This thing is 24 years in development and 20x over budget. If thats not a failure of government contracting, budgeting, etc then idk what is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos... - Obviously the platform will be cool once they get it launched, but until then its just a money pit.
back in the early days of internet go, I wrote a client for the ascii protocol that used '*' and 'o' for stones, and used it for a few years on an actual vt100.

not super weird, but it really took a lot less work than any of the alternatives and worked great.
User has control over what is marked as spam, and can see spam messages if needed. If you block some content the way gmail blocks spam, it won't be censorship.
Indexing Arabic Content with Apache Solr
Deck for Reddit [1] is even worse [2].

Thanks, super useful, now I know I gotta work on some assets optimization.

- [1] https://rdddeck.com

- [2] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240...
Those are not super continents.
If memory serves, this presentation was created at Google years ago by Tristan Harris, who also had a huge part to play in The Social Dilemma.
sci-hub FTW

why would you want to feed the parasites?
> anti-trust law used to prevent discounts based upon scale

Do you have a source for this?
Legalizing drugs at best reduces the black market/removes some of the danger. There are still plenty of black market weed dealers in states with legal recreational use. For that matter, there are still people selling cigarettes in a black market, Eric Garner was killed for doing this.
This looks really useful, thank you
Maybe Facebook's ISP of choice requires handing over the TLS private keys?
> The thing could simply blow up on the launch pad, for goodness sake!

exactly, I’ve wondered why they don’t build e.g. 2 or 3 of them in tandem since it’d likely be cheaper/easier to do up front vs after the fact if things went wrong. They would then have the additional telescopes if things went right, offering even greater access.
Audio Navigation Prospects