skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice post! I work on NLP and I think a lot of ideas in this post resonate with what I find exciting about working on the intersection of language + the real world: large text datasets as sources of abundant prior knowledge about the world, structure of language ~ structure of concepts that matter to humans, etc.

I feel like the bottleneck is getting access to paired (language, other modality) data though (if your other modality isn't images). i.e. "bolt on generalization" is an intuitively appealing concept, but then it reduces to the hard problem of "how do I learn to ground language to e.g. my robot action space?" I haven't seen a robotics + language paper that actually grapples with the grounding problem / tries to think about how to scale the data collection process for language-conditioned robotics beyond annotating your own dataset as a proof-of-concept. Unlike language modeling / CLIP-type pretraining, it seems (fundamentally?) more difficult to find natural sources of supervision of (language, action). I'd be curious about your thoughts on this!

> When it comes to combining natural language with robots, the obvious take is to use it as an input-output modality for human-robot interaction. The robot would understand human language inputs and potentially converse with the human. But if you accept that “generalization is language”, then language models have a far bigger role to play than just being the “UX layer for robots”.

You should check out Jacob Andreas's work, if you haven't seen it already - esp. his stuff on learning from latent language (https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00482).
You appear to be the one uninformed about the definition of human subject research.

>But if they're not obtaining data about a living individual, then it's not human subjects research.

Sure, if you completely ignore the other half of the definition, per the NIH:

https://grants.nih.gov/policy/humansubjects/research.htm

> Obtains information or biospecimens through intervention or interaction with the individual, and uses, studies, or analyzes the information or biospecimens;

They are absolutely collecting information to analyze by interacting with the individual.
I would guess as an attorney you're more used to that style of communication than a random blogger or small entity. Citing law has very different signaling purpose and effect in different contexts.
He seems to have good intentions, but does not seem to have knowledge of IRB which may make this situation worse.

Specifically, he confuses "does not constitute human subjects research" with "exemption" which is a pretty big difference and anyone who works with human subjects should know this.

From his Twitter thread, "Update: They are now saying they have an exemption. They have not made any forms available or explained the lack of informed consent."

Exemptions are protocols that have been reviewed, and deemed exempt based on one of 8 very specific criteria. Studies deemed not constituting human subjects research are returned by the IRB, and not considered reviewed.

Given that the authors actually said "...to the Princeton University Institutional Review Board, which determined that our study does not constitute human subjects research" this is clearly NOT an exemption, and informed consent is not a consideration as far as the IRB is concerned.
Daily database dumps to a folder, followed by a rsync (database and users' files) to a 3rd party backup services (rsync.net). I used backblaze b2 in the past, but found that accessing historical backup data is easier on rsync.net. Just a simple sftp into the snapshot directory.
They could if the government and NIMBY neighbors would get out of the way.

I think you know perfectly well they won't (vote tomorrow to repeal all zoning), so we're already in the territory of wishful thinking. And in any case far outside the realm of "could just do it."

SF's housing problems are entirely self-created

They are not. There are multiple factors involved.

The city has essentially the same housing stock as it did 20 years ago, but it didn't have, at that time, anything like the housing crisis like it has now. I'll leave it to you to guess what some of those intervening factors might be.
Not necessarily. Many languages like Java already have queuing libraries that operate on rdbms through JPA. So not even a single additional line needs to be written for this to work. We got ours working in a day and it works great. I don't know if other languages have these libraries but I'm inclined to believe they do (at least nodejs has).
Scale Rapid IMDB Reviews
> without even a fig leaf requirement of intelligence or academic competence

College entrance exams do not test for intelligence or academic competence. They test for ability to do well on the exam, which is governed primarily by a student's socioeconomic status.
Wait, am I missing something? The child comment didn't refute the OP's point.

OP's point was "This sucks, they're doing away with objective criteria."

Child comment's points was "They are indeed doing away with objective criteria. These criteria are not valuable though "

The only claim made there was the child comment's claim that these (admittedly objective) criteria are not valuable. That claim was not backed up.
I misunderstood and humbly retract my mean criticism. You’re right it does make sense.
>Even then, the guidance notes that people's beliefs change so challenging such a claim is relatively hard.

It is not relatively hard, it is (or should be) impossible.

My religion stating that I believe in whatever I want to believe and is subject to change at any time is as valid as any other religion, from the perspective of the government. Assuming we are striving for separation of church and state.

Religion never needs to come up in legislation, just like one's favorite tv shows or music.
what is "head of line" blocking?
It wasn't clear from the original article whether FDA notified the whistleblower's employer or they found out on their own somehow.
Purdue Pro-CCP Chinese students responding to the statement:

https://www.change.org/p/purdue-university-call-for-mitch-da...
Grades are also biased towards kids whose parents and schools push them to practice. Being good at your job is biased towards being pushed to practice. Achieving the things you want in life is biased towards being pushed to practice.

Maybe instead of lowering standards, we should push kids to practice.
If you must “do something” about it, the only sensible something is having your lawyer handle it.

Otherwise do nothing. For this was already your plan.

You have already met their first demand.

Eventually the domain registration will expire and the second demand for domain transfer will be moot.

Given there are established processes for obtaining infringing domains the letter writing lawyer’s client can pursue those if they are truly serious.

Basically either lawyer up now or ignore it and see if you need lawyer up later.
Fun article. The approach to n^2.

> The result, by Josh Alman, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, and Virginia Vassilevska Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shaves about one-hundred-thousandth off the exponent of the previous best mark. It’s typical of the recent painstaking gains in the field.
Which highly regulated industry do you feel has adequate customer support staff?
I love my Kinesis Advantage and I credit it with saving my elbows 15 years ago.

These look great, but I'd definitely be worried about the little stands standing up to constant use.
https://pkg.go.dev/net/http/pprof

Goland (the IDE) has some nice integration:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2020/03/03/how-to-find-gorouti...
I don't buy that interpretation. That is, I'm willing to believe that's how your university interprets the regulations, but I personally think it's perverse and unethical when applied to this situation.

When you deliberately deceive someone in order to obtain information that you think they would be otherwise unwilling to give you, the response you get back is as much "about" their behavior in response to your deception as it is about the subject of your inquiry. (And if the researchers in this case didn't think the deception would make their targets more willing to cooperate, why the threatening language?)

That doesn't necessarily mean this kind of research should never be allowed, but it should definitely go through an IRB's oversight.
The bit you've quoted is intended to clarify that "about whom" means the subject is the patient, even if the researcher gets the information indirectly through the patient's doctor. Earlier in the document you linked, it states:

> If for the purpose of a research study [...] An investigator [...] interacts with a living individual, [...] Then The research likely involves
human subjects.

What's up for debate here is whether this research qualifies for one of the specific exemptions in the regulation. The general definition in the regulation is broad enough to include all interaction with living humans that produces information used for the study, and is only narrowed by later enumerated exemptions.
Your explanation would lead to the 0.5s answer - that's how long it takes for the first signal to ripple through the wires.

To get the 1m/c s answer, for your example you would have to add a seismograph to the opposite end of the train track - while the cart at that far end will only start moving once the ripple goes around the whole track, the seismograph will pick up the movement almost instantly, since the movement of the initial cart will send waves through the earth directly, not following the tracks.
Information about the people contacted was collected and analyzed, it's a study fundamentally about how they react to this email, it is not (just) about a third party. In the case of websites run by a single individual (such as OP) there is no third party at all, but in all cases information about the first party was being collected and analyzed.

To be a bit more pithy, here is one example of such an analysis (admittedly, I'm not sure comments on twitter count): https://twitter.com/RossTeixeira/status/1471249559879929861
Altinity have a Clickhouse cloud
Already mentioned: https://pkg.go.dev/net/http/pprof

I've just seen that Goland (the IDE) has some nice integration:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2020/03/03/how-to-find-gorouti...
Anybody using graphile-worker[1] in production/heavy load? It looks awesome, and I coded up some simple prototype tasks (email, sms, etc), but question how it truly scales. They claim horizontal scaling is trivial.

> graphile-worker is horizontally scalable. Each instance has a customisable worker pool, this pool defaults to size 1 (only one job at a time on this worker) but depending on the nature of your tasks (i.e. assuming they're not compute-heavy) you will likely want to set this higher to benefit from Node.js' concurrency.

[1] https://github.com/graphile/worker
Since the article seems mostly concerned with book reading, I've added that to the title above.

(All: please respond to the substance of an article and not technicalities or provocative bits.)
Yes but then 'enterprise architects' can't put their shiny cloud certifications to use. They need pubsub regardless of the scale because that's what is recommended by big cloud. And of course the companies also don't mind because there is no immediate devops cost for it. The problems like complexity of debugging, lockin won't hit home at the time of design.
Even on U.S. Campuses, China Cracks Down on Students Who Speak Out
Parler is/was a company with millions of dollars and millions of users.

It's entirely reasonable to handle that differently from someone's personal data storage.
What was your comment on HN when the FSF successfully sued Cisco? Please share link here.
> I don't see how it can be called "cancel culture" if multiple warnings have been given.

The number of warnings has nothing to do with it. It’s cancel culture because it involves censoring opinions and perspectives that disagree with those of the people in power - namely the activist progressives who lead and work at Google.

> I'm sure you can see how a video service that aims to be used by families, children, in schools, etc, doesn't want to provide a platform for cruel and offensive content.

No, I cannot see that, for many reasons. Those who are offended can choose not to click the video. They don’t need to ban it unless they’re afraid of truth and openness, and instead want to substitute authoritarianism in place of it.

> which team a trans child plays on or what medical treatments they might receive; those seem like they would be issues best left up to the child's fellow participants in that sport and the child's doctor, not some youtuber

This is just a long winded way of saying “trust those with power blindly and don’t question them”, especially as vague and unscientific activist medical approaches are corrupting neutral medical science. A man shouldn’t play in women’s sports because they have innate advantages and it makes the notion of women’s sports meaningless. A child shouldn’t be given invasive and irreversible treatments when they are still growing, changing, and very likely to grow out of phases. I find it offensive that challenging these irresponsible and dangerous practices is disallowed in an ostensibly free society.
"What proportion (of x ethnic group) would you like?" is a question that greatly devalues the contributions of the individual student. Would you say, "You're a great interview candidate, but we already have a tall guy,"?
Are comprehension rates that important when your goal isn’t something serious like education or self-help?
Fish ladders are also imperfect. Anglers know this, as we fish the deep pools created at the bottoms of dams -- many fish will stage/rest there, and some will simply get stuck there.

They also don't solve the problem where dams slow and warm the waters running through them. Trout and Salmon need cold water to survive.
San Francisco Mayor Declares State of Emergency to Fight City’s ‘Nasty Streets’
https://archive.md/JCUfj
this is what i was thinking, i think it depends on the demographic but overall i heard that reading rates are way higher now due to the internet’s text content. granted reading books are great but i mostly read those online as well or audiobooks in the car
Meritocracy is unfair because most merit is unearned. For example, I am very smart, I won national math olympiads, but I didn't spend much effort to be good at math. Showering me with advantages feels deeply unfair.

I mean, if some job requires being good at math, I agree math ability should be considered. It's just that I don't think it should be high status or prestigious.
Christ An Sang-Hong isn’t around to benefit from his followers, but somehow he’s still the Korean reincarnation of Jesus to many people.
Also isn't TikTok Chinese

What's your point?
Senior year AP scores aren't available for seniors until way after the application process. I think I ended up having 7/11 of my tests during senior year.

Imo the main advantage APs brings is GPA weighting/more impressive looking transcripts.

I think scores often aren't even considered by admissions -- purely used for college credit.
I actually implemented this after seeing this post back in the days, and it worked great, but writes are somewhat slow after it passes ~1m messages per day in my small VPS, and then I switched to redis.
Internet is the new boogeyman. TV used to be it. Radio was it one time. Hell, _novels_ were treated this way.

The one thing they all have in common is being new behavior patterns that people can worry and kvetch about.
you are talking about the SSPL license, its not "open source license" like people will want you to believe but it sure is free software license giving more rights to users about where they get software/utility out of software
Facebook is not a common carrier, but enjoys liability protections under the CDA Safe Harbor:

47USC230(c)(1)
"(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

And definitions--
47 USC 230(f)(3)
The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

Of course, CDA also excuses Facebook from making tilted or faulty moderation decisions in good faith.
> College entrance exams do not test for intelligence or academic competence. They test for ability to do well on the exam, which is governed primarily by a student's socioeconomic status.

What is the signal Harvard uses to test for intelligence or academic competence? So far I only have learned that SAT and ACT are not it. Whaat is?
Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values.

It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.

If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc.

Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
For me, it was my school's enforced reading and book reports that taught me to skim and just pick up enough info to write a report, and the internet was ultimately what restored my capability to read and attention span, as I could find things that genuinely interested me.

Obviously, the internet has changed a lot since I was a kid, but I'm not entirely sure that there's just nobody being exposed to larger amounts of text and that few people online have interests greater than TikTok.
LOL neither did Cisco, until they got sued by the FSF
Critiques of the bias of testing need to come with a defense of what replaces them. Can extra curriculars be gamed? Of course. What makes a good essay? That would depend on the eye of the evaluator.

The dismay here is not due to a believe that testing correctly plucks the best minuscule number of deserving applicants that get in. It’s that everything else that is used is worse.
If you can spare ~$400, Whole Genome Sequencing can offer some insight into whether your condition has some genetic cause.
> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu.

Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which I understand may in some ways be your larger point) and consumers of journalism today. Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. I don’t believe it is fair to say this doesn’t require expertise.
Nations are made by wars, not "Basic Laws". Read the history. Whether HK is a nation or not depends on how strong their people's will is to not be Chinese and to go to war for it - "Would rather be annihilated than being Chinese." Apparently they don't have it, but the jury of History might still be out.
I think this is pretty natural given we live in an information-abundant world now. Taking the time to read everything you could get your hands on makes a lot of sense when you don't have constant access to everything.

For me, there are some writings that are really great and some that are a drag. I typically skim to figure out if something is really great. If it looks good after a skim, I'll dig deep. I suspect many others are the same, though there probably are some junkies who never dig deep.
Yeah... but if I want to actually read a book, I need to put my phone in another room. It's honestly embarrassing.
> Because, what you're essentially saying is, "yes, this one group had a 400-year head start at the expense of that other group. But, why punish them for that?"

I feel like you said this as an example of an obviously disagreeable point, but I unironically hold this view.

Expanding opportunity for a group is always good; I'm all in favor of funding high-quality schools in historically underfunded districts, or providing free after-school programs to help kids whose parents are working, or to expand tutoring. These are all things that will disproportionately help those groups who have been marginalized throughout history.

I am absolutely against, however, grading an individual differently due to their historic group membership. If an Asian student is applying to college, there is nothing that student could have done differently to avoid the opportunities they were born with, so it seems eminently unfair to punish that specific individual for something they have no control in and had no say in. Charge the student more if they're rich, sure, but don't discount the merit of a student solely because of their group membership.

tl;dr: I'm all for investing in marginalized groups to level the playing field, but scoring individuals differently for things they have no control over feels flat-out wrong.
Sounds like FAANG and the leetcode obsession.
Whatever proportion meets the admissions criteria.
If you click the small down-arrows on the Browser Compatibility chart, you can see the details about each browser that supports it. Most of them require a "user gesture", which is not as good as asking permission IMO but better than nothing. Firefox for Android used to ask permission, but for the last two years it just doesn't support this at all.
https://usehooks.com/
I password protect my key for the sole threat model of me physically losing my device. I am aware that all other threat models that involve someone taking remote control of my device are not fully protected against, but it at least requires significantly more effort on their part versus just doing a scan for private keys on the file system.
Interesting take. I had the experience with Remix and drew the comparison to Tailwind.css [1]. I get the sense that Remix's move away from REST + SPA will be polarizing because of the magnitude of the shift, but tremendously productive for many developers who embrace it.

[1] https://koptional.com/article/remix-fullstack-paradigm-pros-...
It's also in harmony with a shotgun hitting a target. Any prediction will be accurate if you make it vague enough.
look. i get it. the problem is, EVERYONE starts abusing this left and right. remember notifications? i have it set to off by default because every news, every blog every publication wants me to turn on notifications for them only because of "breaking news" and other BS.

go and see how chrome does it. its on by default and imo people are tricked into accepting those willy nilly. the result? i know people whose right side is littered with "offers" and "breaking news" and "see your horoscope".
the worst part, i have had the time to help them get this shit off their computers and it is tiring. you have to disable each and every website one by one in the notifications, its like they don't want you to try. sure there is a general disable button but what if you want to disable all but one? have chromium developers heard about "checkbox and bulk actions"?
https://www.howtogeek.com/725208/how-to-turn-off-pop-up-noti...
Is this a backend framework built on top of NodeJS?
It looks slick, but I can't find the backend docs
I mean, if it's "easily gameable", why doesn't everybody just game it? There exist real score differences in practice.

You can say that it's "gameable" in response to time and resources spent studying, but that's actual learning, so of course that would result in higher scores.

It's one thing to say "Some people don't have enough time/resources", but it's another to pretend that these tests carry no signal.