skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That the behavior that FiveThirtyEight themselves said to expect actually happened? The Republican state legislatures engineered it to happen this way and then acted with mock surprise when their system functioned as expected.

The Republican base was taken for a ride and they didn't even realize it.
Even though people may not be engaged in politics mandatory voting is important. It reduces extremist politics and the constant need to be increasingly divisive. It forces regression to the mean.

In non mandatory voting systems the politicians need to motivate people to the polls. The default of the population is apathy so to generate action you appeal to the extremes who are the most likely to act. The more people you can make act the more you can get to vote for you.

But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
> if it's a choice and not a necessity

You described the problem yourself: given enough people making a particular choice, it becomes necessity for others. See two-income trap, for example.

So basically, it's okay for you as long as you're not a minority. Of course, it's better to be healthy and wealthy than to be sick and poor.
This seems much more developed than whatever is being done here:

https://huggingface.co/transformers/index.html

I recommend it since they already are democratizing AI.
EleutherAI won this fight already. The technology is freely available for anyone to use however they like, and they're responsible for whatever it is they do with it.

The 6 billion parameter model was released just last week with the huggingface api hooks. It's just a few percentage points less performant than Gpt-3 DaVinci in most metrics. You can run it on a laptop with 40gb ram, albeit slowly.

All that to say, the horse has left the barn. What openai is doing is just marketing and protecting an investment. They don't have an ethical or moral high ground.
> ... we're okay with this level of uncertainty about the systems we rely on every day.

I'm not included in this "we". And I definitely pay a price for that by sacrificing some convenience. I'm sure the price would be lower if more people were willing to make the same sacrifices.

I can understand most end users being okay with that. Most are not educated to know the problems or alternatives. But developers should consider how contributions in code or money could improve competition and encourage development of better software for everyone.
Regarding your second point, I would strongly caution against considering even the most egrigious offenders for forced organ harvesting. There are currently serious allegations regarding China's black market organ trade (briefly, that political prisoners, dissidents, and minority populations are quietly executed and harvested to supply China's thriving organ market). As medical advances in transplanting improve and expand the ways we can repair the human body, this will only become more of a problem in the parts of the world where government designated "undesirables" can be quietly disappeared.

It is simpler, cleaner, and less prone to malfeasance and corruption to limit organ harvesting to registered consenting individuals and lab grown tissue, where a chain of custody for the tissue can be established.
In this case, it appears to be…another website analytics tool.

Not sure how that is “enormous”.
I'm reluctant to even mention it, but I'll bite. :-)

I found the first half of "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson to be incredibly useful for understanding human dynamics -- I use the framework presented there every day. The core of this is in my opinion just a very straightforward computer-focused analogy that gives me insight into the behaviour of other people and myself that I haven't found elsewhere.

Of course, outside the core is a LOT of wild new age, Crowley-Leary-Regardie syncretism that provokes strong negative throw-the-book-across-the-room reactions in most people. A lot of very reasonable people would look at the wikipedia page or the cover of this book and not only think that the book is crap, but also that I'm a crazy hippie for even considering reading it.
Unfortunately I'll probably be dead by the time the Joe Frank catalog drops out of copyright: https://www.joefrank.com/

The most interesting radio from around the '90s from KCRW (NPR).
"Bobby" Jindal, "Ted" Cruz, etc.
> A self-respecting company

Citizen's United notwithstanding, companies are not people and don't have (or lack) self-respect. People who control policy for a company have all kinds of reasons why they do things, and while they might see and value one benefit of a particular action (lower support costs), they might not realize that there are negatives to that action (worse reputation leading to lower sales and poor customer retention). "Self-respect" has nothing to do with it. Companies make these sorts of errors all the time.
Regarding Jan 6, I think you have it exactly backwards.
From a command prompt (you shouldn't need admin rights), run "REG ADD HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer /v DisableSearchBoxSuggestions /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f", which disables the web search suggestions in the registry. After restarting Windows Explorer (or logging off and back on), you should have search work how you'd expect.
> The cost figure I recall is $500,000; maybe it's different now.

That's the standard tactical defence fee? I would guess that kind of money is very far above the means of most open-source developer defendants.

And wouldn't a larger, closed-source business rationally choose to pay Unity (say) $400,000 extortion fee instead of taking it to court with the associated uncertainty?
Except this implies that disagreement on any policies agreed upon by the two major parties is extremist. What is the solution to issues where both parties perpetuate the status quo?

I would suggest reversing the Senate ballot 6 votes rule. We can have status quo in the lower house, and negotiation with minor parties representing the population on issues they deem most important - and handled incorrectly by the major parties - in the Senate.

It is important to note that you are making an argument for outcomes where the design of the system should be philosophical. What system best represents the will of the people? (Or whatever question best frames this problem. This is troublesome and often prejudicial.) It's the subsequent application of this system that is the people's voice. We should not be designing a system to get the political outcome you prefer.
The assumption that because it worked for the author means it will work for everyone else is flawed. It doesn't work for everyone. Hard work is not the only criteria needed for success. That is exactly why it can be toxic.

Glad it worked for the author, but if the story had gone the other way, and they ended up broke and burned out yet needing to go get a job right away.... they would be telling quite a different tale.
Why is it a trap? If someone wants to work twice as much for twice the pay, more power to them. And I am very sure there are people at my work who make more than me, regardless of how many hours I put in.
Don't like their rebadged Clevo hardware (I know they put a lot more effort than that, and I appreciate it, but the look is not for me). Other than that, IIRC they just came out with a Ryzen laptop and it's too big for my taste.
1) Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

2) Principles of Product Development Flow, Donald G. Reinertsen

3) Step Away from the Computer or Hammock Driven Development, Rich Hi ckey

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
Triton virtual networking design and architecture
The reason it worked out was that each virtual machine was given a set of capabilities, and the hypervisor restricted access for that machine to only those resources.

Eventually, this lesson will spread. I think about 5 more years of chaos until people finally catch on.
Except after the second failure you have a REALLY hard time to get funding out of politicians...
Meanwhile company rakes it in.
Thanks! I'm a total amateur (coder && astronomer) but I'm having a lot of fun with it. I started it because I wanted to see what the galaxy looked like from outside perspectives. Unfortunately the uncertainty (noise) in the Gaia parallax data makes things look weird as soon as you move the camera a short distance from the sun.
Very few things impress me, but dedication impresses me. Whenever someone is willing to sacrifice to chase something, I find it to be fascinating. Even if the something isn't particularly noble or even "good."

A singular focus on a goal at the expense of much over a long period of time - especially if that goal is achieved - is aspiring.

For me, that focus is my work, but for someone else, it might be their kids, their God, their country, their cause - whatever.

But find a focus and dedicate yourself to it.
I need a windows version please.
You do realize that this isn’t about this one ad bringing down Windows 11 but rather the very architecture that allowed for an ad to integrate itself into the system to such an extent? That is not something you can fix before RTM release, only patch around.
That's the thing. I attempted to get into the org productivity zone a while ago but it fell apart the moment I needed mobile support and syncing. Unfortunately, the mobile org clients of the time didn't support syncing well enough to be viable for my use case - not to mention that all the customization I had painstakingly set up within emacs didn't transfer to the mobile clients either.

I suspect it's impractical to adapt the Emacs workflow to the task of syncing data across devices that is now the expected norm, and other services will have to rise up in its place. If all you have is a filesystem, up-to-date syncing across multiple devices is just a really hard problem (coming from someone who could never get Syncthing to work reliably).

However, I have heard of the remoteStorage protocol, which is supposed to be an open-source syncing protocol that replaces Dropbox and the like, but it's still in its infancy. Maybe adding support for it as a plugin to sync directly from Emacs, instead of using a "dumb" polling filesystem monitor, could become an option.

https://remotestorage.io
I need a windows version
Your comment betrays a lack of imagination when considering what a coffee robot entails.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2iAGuRvN1w

As far as humanity is concerned, perhaps it is uniquely human to bitch about low paid service jobs (even when they aren't all that low pay) while also bitching about those jobs no longer being necessary. If the labor I interacted with regularly took their jobs seriously and had good customer service skills, I wouldn't be so quick to cut them out of the picture. Unfortunately my experience is that at least in the US, the culture of work varies wildly by region, and most of them aren't all that good for the consumer.
If the 50 cent bullet was the tool of coercion for the future the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. The Soviets lost not because they could not produce enough bullets, but because they could not keep up with the rapid advance of information technology, computer chips, processors, and supercomputers.

China leverages its vast market power to coerce American high tech companies to provide it with the latest technology if they want to conduct business in the People's Republic. China's power is market power, it is the power to request that Google censor news that is harmful to the Communist Party. It is the power to ask Hollywood studios not put the small flag of Taiwan on Tom Cruise's bomber jacket in the new Top Gun movie. The Chinese now have more supercomputers than the United States (188 to 122), and for a few years, they had the fastest supercomputer in the world. These computers allow nations to simulate everything from the weather to nuclear detonations.

At the end of the day, China understands better than anyone that control in the future is control over information, not tanks, aircraft carriers, or nuclear tipped ICBMs.
>Defunding the police was never a sincerely held belief

It certainly was in some circles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Either way, excuses.
It's ironic that a country founded by England with prison convicts who pushed out the indigenous people would eventually choose to create a police state.

Edit: Fixed for people who knew what I meant but want to bust my...
If you're trying to argue that the ACLU is espousing authoritarian causes, I'll have to ask for a citation.
I mean the article explicitly lays out that their position is based on prior polio, smallpox and Spanish flu epidemics, so they aren’t dealing with the abstract. At all.
Andy Hertzfeld it's probably for UI /UX what Dennis Ritchie was to programming, he is a genius mad respect for him... but, even for that time, that hustle culture sounds too similar to a compulsive gambler justifying himself because of a winning streak.
Actually pretty easy to do with latex and hyperref. Has been fairly standard for scientific preprints on arxiv for a decade or more.
Yeah that's the real disconnect with this mindset. Like, are you even doing something important, something worth the effort? In most cases, probably not.
Ignoring the specific claims in the patent (automatic memory optimization or whatever), if we're just going by entity component system articles, we can do a lot better. Here's one from 2007:

http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are...

IIRC this one was the one to really popularise the idea of not storing any component data in the entities. If you loosen that requirement, there were earlier ones still (eg the one from the Dungeon Siege team).

But as others have mentioned, ECS is really a special case of a relational model, so its entirely possible that Unitity's techniques have been done there already.

Also, I found it pretty difficult to understand the claims, they didn't exactly make it easy to read, so I can't quite figure out exactly what is patented. It also doesn't help that they don't clearly define their terms, eg what exactly do they mean by archetype? Maybe they describe it in the description before the claims, but I didn't find it at a cursory glance and it was too painful to try read it all. I wonder what their definition exactly entails, versus what I imagine they mean from what I know of archetype-based ECS's. For example, if they mean "a conceptual grouping of entities that have the same components" then non-archetype ECS could fit that, but if they mean their specific implementation then I don't know. EnTT, a popular non-archetype-based ECS, has had "views", which are ways to efficiently access components, since its first public commit in 2017: https://github.com/skypjack/entt/commit/b0b8ee7aea3d9f5cfe6f...).

Whether any of that is relevant to the patents validity, I have no idea. Probably not.
Not just writing them. Apparently only a lawyer should read the claims too:

> Lawyers are not very expensive compared to the consequences of trying to read it yourself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451317)
> Crypto actually seems like a good use of carbon-based electricity

That's another one of their gems.
I've lived in Australia for 10 years and really considering my familys future in this country. We are sleep-walking towards a very average future.

An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".

It really feels sometimes that the only thing the average Australian cares about is the price of their property portfolio.

Or maybe 3 months into the Sydney lockdown is finally getting to me.
Is it possible to get any decent data without looking like The Thinker fro The Suicide Squad?
Issues around civil liberties don’t rank with Australians.

They are captive to their housing investment debts, so political campaigns are decided on policies around that.
+1 for templates. The big hurdle I hit with every productivity app is getting it set up.

I'd love to have some templates to play with, to find bits that work for me that I can copy from and stick together to end up with what I want.

I'm certain that almost everything I want an app like this to do can be done; the problem is I have no idea how to do it because I'm not familiar with how the app structures things. It's frustrating to start setting things up one way, only to discover there was a better way to do it and have to re-do everything.
I enjoy the quote from a political scientist, while ignoring the reality.

In Australia we have an example of what happens when you force everyone to vote. It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.

> I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.

I think you assume what you see on TV is legit news. I agree, you see the same “fake news” everywhere. The problem, is those who believe fake news are often not those voting because they don’t do their own research, they aren’t engaged. You want the engaged going to vote, because they’re engaging with society. Forcing everyone to vote is basically a recipe for getting the candidate that “gifts” the most to the people. It’ll be the downfall of nations.
You may need to reread my comment.

There are no fundamental rights being violated here.
This is such an incredibly pedantic HN answer.

Let's just say they're both insanely important to our continued functioning digital existence. Without working Linux or Windows we are quite fucked.
I know two people who bought similar new but low specced laptops that came from factory with windows 10 about 10 months ago.

Their laptops got visibly progressively slower. Considering what I read here, I asked them if they installed many software. They said they use the laptops for work only and haven't installed anything beyond office and antivirus. I asked them to take a look. After minutes after turning on, windows said it was installing updates... we waited... the battery went kapuft... we plugged the powerbrick, turned it on again and waited... windows said it was installing updates... after a new reboot and 40 minutes total of waiting I just gave up.

Now, this is not how an EXPENSIVE OS should behave. An expensive OS that behaves like this and still has ads is definitely something I'd only use if there was no other choice.
How to set up GrapheneOS (August 2020)
Good point, there are quite a few "mini" models out there that are low-ish power and would work well for this sort of application, and would likely have the horsepower left over to do other things that someone might find useful.

I haven't been watching the Linux+wifi space all that much lately, but what you outline still does sound much better than the situation even a decade ago. I get that it's slow, and I totally sympathize with and share your frustration there. I'm running 11ac gear at home, but I'll be due for a new laptop before too long, and would like to start the 11ax upgrade process. Seeing that I might have to forego OpenWRT (or just wait an uncertain amount of extra time) isn't really fun.
I don't know about the last couple of years, but listen to some startup pitches for hiring events (like on YC used to host) and phrases like "work hard, play hard", "we are a family", etc. creep in and basically push the same thing.

I often refer to one startup I was at as the worst experience (the manager was horrible - including griping at me for being off grid for my then wife's bday weekend), but most interesting (the technology was all over the map and there was a feeling of "how the hell is this actually working").

Never again.
In your first response, you defend the idea that tech companies have more power than the US government. In your second response, you decry the power the US government has.

Pick one.
Then a smug physicist will walk by with either the the equations of quantum electrodynamics or Maxwell's equations in terms of differential forms on their t-shirt

Besides, EEs usually cheat by assuming a sinusoidal solution anyway.
It's death by a thousand paper cuts. Lots of things that aren't really that slow in isolation, but in aggregate (or under pressure) they slow down the system and become impossible to measure.

Let's do web development. Since you mentioned payloads: today they're bigger, and often come with redundant fields, or sometimes they're not even paginated! This slows down the database I/O, requires more cache space, slows down the serialisation, slows down compression, requires more memory and bandwidth...

And then you also have the number of requests per page. Ten years ago you'd make one request that would serve you all the data in one go, but today each page calls a bunch of endpoints. Each endpoint has to potentially authenticate/authorise, go to the cache, go to the database, and each payload is probably wasteful too, as in the previous paragraph.

About authentication and authorisation: One specific product I worked on had to perform about 20 database queries for each request just for checking the permissions of the user. We changed the authentication to use a JWT-like token and moved the authorisation part to inside each query (adding "where creator_id = ?" to objects). We no longer needed 20 database queries before the real work.

About 15 years ago I would have done "the optimised way" simply because it was much easier. I would have used SQL Views for complex queries. With ORMs it gets a bit harder, and it takes time to convince the team that SQL views are not just a stupid relic of the past.

Libraries are often an issue that goes unnoticed too. I mentioned serialisation above: this was a bottleneck in a Rails app I worked. Some responses were taking 600ms or more to serialise. We changed to fast_jsonapi and it went to sub-20ms times for the same payload that was 600ms. This app already had responses tailored to each request, but imagine if we were dumping the entire records in the payload...

Another common one is also related to SQL: when I was a beginner dev, our on-premises product was very slow in one customer: some things on the interface were taking upwards of 30 seconds. That wasn't happening in tests or in smaller customers. A veteran sat down by my side and explained query plans, and we brought that number down to milliseconds after improving indexing and removing useless joins.

A few weeks ago an intern tried to put a javascript .sort() inside a .filter() and I caught it. Accidentally quadratic (actually it was more like O(n^4)). He tried to defend himself with a "benchmark" and show it wasn't a problem. A co-worker then ran anonymised production data into it and it choked immediately. Now imagine this happening on hundreds of libraries maintained by voluntaries on Github: https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com

All those things are very simple, and you certainly know all of them. They're the bread and butter of our profession, but honestly somewhere along the way it became difficult to measure and change those things. Why that happened is left as an exercise.
> the darkest skin guy get the crap kicked out of him

On his way to a job interview? And also for many of your other darker skinned friends on their way to job interviews? And your female friends on their way to theirs? I'm not denying it happened in some isolated cases, but that it causes normal people to not get to "the door". It didn't even happen to normal people among your "dark-skinned" friends.
Minor parties and protest candidates already offer the mechanism for that in Australia, and preferential voting means those protest votes often make a meaningful difference