skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love that this is the (correct) response here. /r/Apple is full of morons that read the press release and honestly believe making this system scan the whole file system is impossible.
Ask HN: How can I, a programmer, help with the fight against climate change?
Hey HN. I'm a (somewhat) competent programmer looking to put my free time to better use then watching whatever the YouTube algorithm decides to feed me. Specifically, I'd like to do my part in taking active steps to help fight climate change.

I do stuff outside of programming for the environment (not as much as I'd like, but that's a bit of a separate issue), but I'm wondering if anyone here has thoughts on ways I can use my skills to contribute a cause that is matters a bit more.

I've considered contributing to OS projects - but I have no idea what might be impactful and useful to the world generally. Anyone have thoughts on projects / specific ways I can put my free time to use programming in this direction?

Thanks for any thoughts :)
"My medieval knees lack health until they bend,"

W.B. Yeats, "The Municipal Gallery Revisited"
> Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse.

Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced.

I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children.

* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right?
I love how confident you sound about the Bolivian language. I guess you meant spanish, or maybe aymara/quechua.

> This will be familiar to most people who've studied abroad

It wasn't to me until now but this explains a lot!
what's so special about California that it's always on fire? Why don't we have this kind of issue in say Maine, Michigan or North Carolina which all have lots of forest?
Reminds me of a Google translation of "bass" to Chinese as "low frequency fish"
The Federal Government, who has been partially in charge of the Dixie Fire, has a more relaxed approach to wildfires. The recent River fire was fought with California management and resources. It was put down within a day. I really don't think the Federal Government should be able to own so much land in a state. The state of California is closer to the land and could manage it better in my opinion. The forests need to be managed defensively and need to be cleared to recreate what an uncontrolled wildfire would have done in the past. There are parts of California that do manage their forests better than others. From my time in the woods, there has been more defensive forest management around the outskirts of Truckee, CA. They cut down dead trees and pile them in separate areas that could not have a chain burning reaction.
The standard rule is that you need 2n + 1 upstream time sources to protect against n falsetickers, but this falls down for the case of n=1. If you want to protect yourself against just one falseticker, you need at least four upstream time sources, to handle the case of what you do after you kick the one falseticker off the island. We explain this at http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/SelectingOffsiteNTPS....

PTP is great for high resolution time synchronization on the local LAN, but doesn’t leave the local lan segment without special network support in the switches and hubs. It is not designed for good stable time sync over the long term. If you’re running a High Frequency Trading operation and it’s really important to know precisely which nanosecond or which picosecond a particular transaction occurred, then you want PTP. If you’re concerned about keeping all your servers in good enough time sync that you can debug the order of operations as they might show up in the log files on different servers, then you want NTP. And NTP can be configured to use PTP as a good quality Stratum 0 refclock.

If you wish to learn more about PTP, the Network Time Foundation supports the Linux PTP project, see https://www.nwtime.org/projects/linuxptp/

Disclaimer: I have been involved in supporting the Public NTP Project since 2003, and related projects like the NTF, the nwtime.org site, etc….
My wife was a professional translator and I did my master's thesis on the topic. With modern translation engines, there is no way you'll end up with "haze figuring" or "arbitrary timberland" translating one way from any source language into English. I also doubt you could get a very specific word like "timberland" from repeated translation of "forest", intentional synonym replacement is much more likely.

Also, they speak Spanish in Bolivia ;)
If anyone's curious, there's previous discussion about this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891
>> There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children

Can you give a source for this please? Also by "deal in" do you mean create or view?
I'm not sure if what you are describing is correct. If the client sends utc (as in a web browser), the server would transform it to UTC and then work with UTC in any context. So the database will always and only see UTC values coming in and out. Then, the application will transform the time into whatever timezone is needed.
A point could be made in ensuring that postgres timezone should be set to UTC. But if this is the situation, even with the conversion nothing would happen
It's a lossy hash match though. If it wasn't, then subtly re-encoding the image would hide it. So they're definitely going to be mistakingly matching images.
a) Elasticsearch should not be used as a primary data store.

b) PostgreSQL does not compare to Elasticsearch when it comes to full text searching capabilities.

c) PostgreSQL has no vendor-supported, built-in solution for horizontal scalability which is a big reason why you would choose Elasticsearch over a more lightweight search system.
So version it in a repo e.g. on Github, and ensure continuity in the DJIA index from one version to the next on the date the version is committed. We have technology, we should use it.

I could add a clause that says if a share splits its weight gets multiplied accordingly, and that would have the effect of (a) DJIA stays continuous now (b) DJIA stays continuous through next split. It doesn't disrupt anything now, and prevents future inadvertent disruptions.

Anyone that is insisting we shouldn't change it is stuck in a backward age. Honestly I don't understand why there are so many no-sayers on HN. We should be building the future, not making excuses.
There were music videos on US TV before MTV. Night Flight was on Weekends around midnight.
Quasar's “Select” Component Reasons It's the Gift That Just Keeps Giving
With link rot, I think everything is going to be lost eventually.
It's like all those jobs - game developer, film jobs, graphic artist, artist, musician - too many young people want to do it and there's a lot of money if you're successful so it attracts sharks up the top who keep all the money. Just don't is my advice, unless you have a trust fund, which a large number of those successful have, you can weather out the early years then until you make a name for yourself.
I think it's a tortured phrase for Ivy League.
Why would I do that when Elasticsearch is a proven search engine.
> There is a chance of false positives, so the human review step seems necessary...

You misunderstand the purpose of the human review by Apple.

The human review is not due to false positives: The system is designed to have an extremely low rate of hits where the entry isn't in the database and the review invades your privacy regardless of who does it.

The human review exists to legitimize an otherwise unlawful search via a loophole.

The US Government (directly or through effective agencies like NCMEC) is barred from searching or inspecting your private communications without a warrant.

Apple, by virtue of your contractual relationship with them, is free to do so-- so long as they are not coerced to do so by the government. When Apple reviews your communications and finds what they believe to be child porn they're then required to report it and because the government is merely repeating a search that apple already (legally) performed, no warrant is required.

So, Apple "reviews" the hits because, per the courts, if they just sent automated matches without review that wouldn't be sufficient to avoid the need for a warrant.

The extra review step does not exist to protect your privacy: The review itself deprives you of your privacy. The review step exists to suppress your fourth amendment rights.
California is prone to multi-decade droughts (see, East of Eden). I guess maybe that doesn't answer your question at all, but I'm sure lack of rain is mostly it, since bad forest management and global warming is everywhere.
As a native English speaker, but not an academic researcher, I would have naively done the same.

To preface: I am speaking in ignorance of the mechanisms of credit and advancement in your field, so I'm undoubtedly overly harsh. I'm not even trying to be fair, because I admittedly don't have the knowledge to do so.

I know academia is a different world from private sector industry, but I would think if the point of a confidential review is for you to do anonymous work to improve someone else's credited work, and their work was improved by incorporating your feedback, you would be happy with the outcome, or else why are you participating in a confidential review process in the first place? There are different mechanisms for publishing words that you want credit for.

When someone incorporates my feedback on code or documentation word-for-word, I might in the worst case be suspicious that they are trying to get my approval without engaging with my criticism, but in most cases I'm flattered that they respect my idea enough to put their name on it. Although, in my world, putting your name on something is more about responsibility than credit. The command is called "git blame" and not "git credit", after all.

Wanting them to incorporate your feedback, but also wanting them to make some change to the wording to avoid plagiarism, smacks of how freshman essays are graded, not how real work gets done.

Like I said, I'm not trying to be fair and don't have the right background to be fair to you. I only speak up because I grew up in an academic family and know that there is a presumption that academic work is more idealistic, more altruistic, and less mercenary than private sector work, and I think it's worth pointing out when the reverse is true.
I assume you mean Israeli data?
The Plaza accords were basically this. It was conducted much more amicably than the current brow-beating with China though. I'm sure they had their reasons but Japan was probably a little overconfident in agreeing to those terms at the time.
A lot of it yeah but large thick things like bridges will probably survive for quite a while in usable sized chunks. Copper too will be pretty available and protected in wires. It really depends on what timescale we're talking about though in the end. If we talking about humans rebooting there could still be usable bits around depending on how long it takes to begin rebuilding. If we're talking about a whole new intelligent species I agree they'll have vanishingly little to work with.
Good eye! Looks like that corresponds to this report on Google's page:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/request/6590...

90 entries "removed" -- all of them "localhost"
Sorry, but that is simply wrong.

And yes, the inverse square law is strictly speaking only true for point sources. But it is an extremely good approximation once you are much further away than the size of the source (a distance ten times the diameter of the source is usually totally sufficient).
I don't understand this argument. It's weird enough to me when folks say "steal" in the context of copyright, but in the context of FLOSS software, it seems wholly inappropriate. Third-party hosting of open source is the norm, not the exception, in my experience.

The antitrust argument seems orthogonal: lots of small companies make money hosting FLOSS software (Bitnami[0] comes to mind, but so do other hosting companies like Dreamhost). I just searched "elasticsearch hosting" on DDG[1], and Elastic is the 5th result, behind four companies I've never heard of. In many ways, that's exactly what makes FLOSS so attractive to me: if one provider isn't suitable, I can switch. I was very grateful for this in 2013 when I had a huge issue with a change in how LShift was hosting RabbitMQ, and I was able to move my company's cluster over to CloudAMQP instead. I had a similar issue with Elastic in 2016: they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy (geohashing-intensive for the majority of queries). I discussed with the Elastic sales team, and they said they had no timeline for this, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch.

So I guess I'm not sure how things are improved if Amazon is broken up...even if AWS had to stand on its own, this seems like it would remain a proven business strategy that customers value and is used across the industry.

[0]: https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting
The author addresses this point:

> Perhaps Apple is basing their "1 in 1 trillion" estimate on the number of bits in their hash? With cryptographic hashes (MD5, SHA1, etc.), we can use the number of bits to identify the likelihood of a collision. If the odds are "1 in 1 trillion", then it means the algorithm has about 40 bits for the hash. However, counting the bit size for a hash does not work with perceptual hashes.

> With perceptual hashes, the real question is how often do those specific attributes appear in a photo. This isn't the same as looking at the number of bits in the hash. (Two different pictures of cars will have different perceptual hashes. Two different pictures of similar dogs taken at similar angles will have similar hashes. And two different pictures of white walls will be almost identical.)

> With AI-driven perceptual hashes, including algorithms like Apple's NeuralHash, you don't even know the attributes so you cannot directly test the likelihood. The only real solution is to test by passing through a large number of visually different images. But as I mentioned, I don't think Apple has access to 1 trillion pictures.

> What is the real error rate? We don't know. Apple doesn't seem to know. And since they don't know, they appear to have just thrown out a really big number. As far as I can tell, Apple's claim of "1 in 1 trillion" is a baseless estimate. In this regard, Apple has provided misleading support for their algorithm and misleading accuracy rates.
I'd change the closing from "we need to stop breaking software" to "we need to stop breaking processes".

This is a point of stability that Knuth tried highlighting, but gets panned for. Once a piece of foundational software is released, it has to remain stable not just in "doesn't crash" but in "doesn't change."

Common Lisp gets this right to an amusing degree by how much extension can be provided in user space. The lesson being that the less you do in the core offering, the more folks can depend on it? Maybe. Not sure, with how much that offering actually does.

I do think "enable your users" should be more the focus. Not "control your users so that they do what you think they should be doing."
From what I've learned of toki pona so far it seems to be reasonably effective at conveying abstract concepts, poetry, haiku, and the like.

It's the specifics and precision that seem hard to convey. For example, it's hard to talk about physics because the number system is deliberately anemic and power, force, and strength are all the same word. (wawa)

If you wanted to be precise you'd have to build specific concepts using a lot of semantic primes and it ends up being even more wordy than xkcd's Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/
The Fed Govt. is in charge of the overwhelming vast majority of the forest in Cali.

>It doesn't have to be this way

When you have one of two political parties that meaningfully exist in the US parroting the fact they "believe the Fed. Govt should be small enough you can drown it in a bathtub"

It does in fact have to be this way.
Plenty of major databases are able to operate in a self-sustaining manner while remaining completely open. NoSQL is a highly competitive field, it's not enough to go "well we should accept their behavior because they deserve special treatment".
I don’t understand what the problem here is actually. If you plagiarize on an assignment for school, that’s bad, because the goal of assignments is to test your knowledge and plagiarism makes it a less effective test. But here the goal (I think) is to produce an informative and accurate paper. You told them the definition - what would have been gained by rephrasing the definition you told them? Especially if they’re nonnative english speakers, it seems likely that any rephrasing would have made the definition less understandable and possibly less accurate.

I guess the fear is that they don’t actually understand the definition, and anyone reading the paper will incorrectly believe that they do, improving their reputation in a way they don’t deserve?
I'd lament that using 'thinking of the children' as an excuse for genuine overreach, when that's what it is, puts us in a worse situation.

There is incredible second-order harm in overreach, because the reaction to it hurts the original cause, too.

If you try to overcorrect, people will overcorrect in response.

The sort of zeal that leads to thoughts like "screeching minority", I think shows carelessness and shortsightedness in the face of very important decisions.

I have no informed opinion on Apple's CSAM tool, beyond deferring to the FotoForensics expert.
Just wanted to say thanks for the citation here, and FWIW all the literature I'm aware of supports the statements you've made in these comments.
Sometimes the captcha says I'm wrong even though I'm write because it got something very similar to something else. Then you end up having to think like an AI, which is super weird
Compared with doing what else with your 10,000 yen per month?
Like many things, the "blame pie" chart contains multiple reasons and no solutions.
Only governments can stop climate change. Individuals can't and for-profit businesses won't.

The most impactful thing you can do is help political organizers pressure politicians to make better decisions.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to do this part-time as a volunteer. Very few orgs will accept free help from part-timers.

You could try to get a software job with a pro-environment lobby or with a legal group like Environmental Defense Fund.
Upcoming versions of Google Docs will use canvas based rendering [0], and I presume their custom renderer might be compiled to WebAssembly.
WASM and Canvas (potentially using WebGL) are definitely an interesting combination right now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858
Kim Dotcom did this and it lead to Riaa saying it obligated the file sharing service to look for all copyrighted materials. This opens pandoras box for Apple.
Call your legislators and propose it.

I use a virtual mailbox service, physicaladdress.com. They scan my mail and give me an online interface to view it. If I want, I can choose to scan the contents, forward it, or shred. It’s not a PO Box so I can use it as a real address.
Yep, all the fun jobs have horrible work environments because people stick to it even if the job sucks. I'm a big fan of the boring jobs. If its not working out, you just leave and go somewhere else so employers have to compete by making the job more attractive in other ways.

There is even a wiki page for this concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential
Just another point of data to help comments reader avoid selection bias: If I search "Stand up comedy" on prime video I get

- Butch Bradley: From Las Vegas

- Melinda Hill: Inappropriate

- Steve Treviño: My Life In Quarantine

- Jimmy O. Yang: Good Deal

- Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist

- Michael Gelbart: All New Smash Hits

- Sebastian LIVE

- Tom Segura: Completely Normal

and so on.
> Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse.

I think the actual idea, which the nuance is often lost (and let's be honest, some people aren't really aware of and are just jumping on the bandwagon), is that privacy is a right, and erosion of rights is extremely important because it has been shown many times in the past to have far reaching and poorly understood future effects.

It's unfortunate that some would choose to link their opposition to the idea with making the thing it's attempting to combat legal when it's something so abhorrent, but in general I think a push back on any erosion of our rights is a good and useful way for people to dedicate time and effort.

While we shouldn't lose sight that there are real children in danger and that this should help, we also shouldn't lose sight that there is plenty of precedence that this could eventually lead to danger and problems for a great many other people, children included.
I'm curious what data is underlying the claim in the headline. Are these animators leaving the industry entirely, or just quitting one job and taking another?
Completely agree. I use the No Man's Sky fandom site as it is very comprehensive (and the No Man's Sky iOS app "Assistant for No Man's Sky" is just a ported Android app, complete with Android interface, which really grates against iOS IMO) and the Fandom site is terrible with search. So many times I try to tap the top result and I inadvertedly open up eBay instead.

The irony that there is an Aesthetics wiki on the current iteration of Fandom is not lost on me.
Yes, the key quality of irony, as opposed to coincidence, is that in an ironic couplet, the second construct unwittingly reverses the first.
Good? Amazon deserves no support in branding their version 'open'.
>Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced.

You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument?

>I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children.

Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets.

>* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right?

I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children.
> The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it.

Apple killed the paid upgrade model for apps, and helped usher in a race to the bottom when it comes to app distribution. Now everyone expects to pay a dollar or two at most for an app if they pay anything at all.