skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a minor point and somewhat off topic, but:

> The status quo which Plaid aims to disrupt (ugh)

Agreed. The fetishization of disruption never sat right with me. Why not express the point in terms of solving problems for customers, rather than in terms of ruining existing businesses?
Why not both? Give people fish and teach them to fish. Why does it have to be one or the other?
Pick one:

a) force companies to service a minimum liveable wage and maybe pay some higher prices (or see a corporate profit margin decrease)
b) pay more taxes to cover the long term social cost of a citizenry who can't afford food/healthcare/education/etc
Ask HN: Best website for finding dedicated servers?
I'm currently on the lookout for a dedicated server located in Europe with unmetered connection (at least 1 Gbps), and previously I've used websites like oneprovider.com and dedimax.com to finding servers (all around the world, not just Europe), but maybe there are better ones out there?

Hetzner is an obvious one which I've used in the past and liked, but the amount of locations they offer is lacking to say the least.

All aggregators/websites are of interest, not just ones focused on Europe and unmetered connections, but the website needs to at least have filters for location and connection type so it gets easy to find the right server for the right job.
This works well for the audit part - have done this myself more than once - but makes it hard to impossible to get good query performance for some kinds of queries.

You need to have a trigger that keeps an "up-to-date" view of only the latest version -- or alternatively, have a trigger that keeps the "insert only" table based on one you treat as usual (delete/insert/update)
Any feature that's a serious benefit for raw performance takes up serious area. At Intel's volumes, it's better to produce a different (and smaller) die for performance-based market segmentations.

Expect this to be used for features that are comparatively cheap in terms of area but valuable for enterprise. Virtualization features, ECC, that sort of thing.

This will slow the adoption of those features in software ecosystems since many developers still quite reasonably focus on stuff that works on their local machine.
> Was there a zero day in the font renderer?

As far as I'm concerned, freetype is another spelling for CVE. There have been multiple high impact vulns. Though it usually seems to require crafted fonts, so I wouldn't be too concerned about window titles using system fonts. Web fonts on the other hand.. disable 'em.
> Fixing it would require banks to develop, deploy, and standardize on better technology, and, well, good luck with that.

There's OFX. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange) and "OFX Direct Connect". It's literally made for the same reason Plaid exists. Most banks even allow you to export a (likely broken) version of those files manually. Plaid may be terrible, but banks basically invited this situation and help it exist.

So I disagree with the required level of effort. They had decades to do this. They care so little that one of my banks provides exported files with repeated "unique" IDs and another with the minutes instead of the day of the month (mm/MM mistake). They need to do the very minimum of actually implementing an existing standard and doing basic testing on it.
If a browser syncs a private file system access across devices, I could see this being quite useful; e.g. you could have a Google Docs -like browser based document application that doesn't depend on a Google hosting and snooping on it. I don't know about whether it adds anything above indexedDB.
Not sure who is "we" here, but yes I agree, a general purpose customer phone can't be considered secure against state-level hackers, there MUST be tradeoffs.

As an example, I consider that a secure phone MUST have boot-time full disk encryption passphrase, which needs to be different from lockscreen. For obvious reasons (which is that the user will tend forget their password), you can't have this even as an option on general purpose phones.

That being said. GrapheneOS is IMO a pretty good option wrt security (like they chose to disable JIT, which impacts performance, but supposedly improve security), even though lately their focus is no longer security for business reasons.

Architecture-wise, the best smartphone are pinephones/Librem, because of separation of modem (which is in the case of state-actors, an actual danger), and you can force encryption of all communications (it's even possible to do VoLTE encryption CPU-side rather than modem-side), but I think at the moment their OS really lags behind Android when it comes to security.
If you pick on every little detail that differs from an existing tool, call it a serious usability issue, and accuse others of “actively being hostile,” “screwing users,” and “being obnoxious” for the sake of it, that’s the end of any reasonable discussion.

Different tools have different use cases, design goals, and priorities in mind. That is in no way a justification for name calling and mockery.
NYC is such a hostile place to young families and those with mobile disabilities. It might benefit everyone if it was 20% smaller and they used the space savings to make the city more human friendly.
> Facebook had a big screen where you could enter your credentials for a variety of email providers

Are people just making up wild conspiracy theories about Facebook now? They read your contacts but I’m virtually certain they never released any kind of email scanner like you described. I searched for this and came up with nothing.

EDIT: if I’m wrong please show me a source and I’ll happily retract this statement.

EDIT 2: I was wrong. See e1g’s comment below that displays this functionality.
A sibling has already linked it, but extra context: Robert Tappen Morris (aka ‘rtm’) is a legend, his dad is a Bell Labs legend, and along with Trevor he’s kind of the “silent partner” in the Viaweb -> YC -> $$$$$ miracle.

Guy’s a boss.
My wife tells me that she really appreciates my deep voice at parties because she can always find me in a crowded room when I'm talking. Probably too situational to make a good evolutionary 'just so' story, but it's a nice minor advantage.
Wild speculation but maybe the communities in which it happens see a lot of short-term members, for whom it is novel and interesting?
Don't think this solves a real problem but could be interesting if you open sourced it
Let's be grateful there aren't any cynics in this forum.

We should seek to make sense of microeconomics no differently to how Attenborough seeks to understand the natural world. To observe, analyse, explain, and ultimately try to understand what's going on. We can't infer he has a "hatred" of dung beetles because he explains their activities!

Price floors introduce distortions which reduce efficiency. It's easy to look at one tiny labour market, like NSW Amazon delivery drivers, and think it's great drivers will make more. Now consider when they go to spend that money. They will have slightly reduced range (some sellers will no longer be profitable and will cease selling), and their pay won't go as far, since they themselves will, like everyone else, be paying more for delivery.

Now for the mind blowing part: consider what happens when everyone attempts the same trick of legislating a price floor in the market for their own labour.

Now everyone's pay goes up 20% but when they go to spend it, it only goes 60% or 50% as far as it once did when markets were efficient.

This doesn't even touch on 2 other major considerations of price floors:

1. If wages are low in one profession, you must ask "compared to what?", and if the answer is another higher-paying profession, then you should consider switching. That is allocative efficiency. It's easy to overlook the gains when thinking of a few hundred workers, but across an entire populace, the gains are enormous.

2. A price floor on labour will put some people entirely out of work, since some people's marginal value will be less than the floor. As a rule of thumb, any NSW driver who doesn't produce A$37.80 of value per hour for Amazon won't have a job after the measure is fully phased in.
It's worth bearing in mind, because it pops up again and again and is popular in certain circles, that the racist message of "The Bell Curve" was modelled on earlier research that tried to explain why poor (white, though no-one would think of them as that in context) people in the UK, didn't succeed as much as those with money and connections.

Clearly there must be some physical difference between the classes to explain this discrepency and re-inforce that the rich are simply better than the poor and so deserve to be rich, despite the obvious objections raised by reality.

And just to ram this point home in a way that you would think would be unmistakable one of the authors of the Bell Curve, followed up with a book explaining why poor white people are also deserving of their fate.

"Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
Temporal tables where possible or insert only structures with a deleted “state” representation
C is the only sane language left. It never changes and it lets us write code that just works. We can focus on getting things done and shipping rather than learning new features and Googling compiler errors. Learn once, ship forever.
> Haskell Lego Edition

Gatekeeping much?
Great flashback. I used Betsie on several projects in the early 2000s.

It was quite useful when you were stuck with baroque HTML generation code you were unable to modify.

The BBC produce a bunch of interesting tools for web development, another being the layout comparison tool, Wraith:

https://bbc.github.io/wraith/
It sounds like you are not reading what I wrote. Humanity does not spread by going from A to B, killing things in B and then returning to A. That is tourism and not spreading.

Also where does it say that humanity have to spread? I’m sympathetic with people whose current location become undesirable and they have to move to a new place. But “spreading” is not the goal.
It's a bit unclear on why you're using JSON to pass things between main code and the task itself. I can imagine serializing/deserializing that takes quite a bit of CPU time compared to if you just passed native data structures, or at least something binary instead of a format meant for human introspection.
"Screen" as in "a page you could pull up in Facebook's UI", not some secret war room in Facebook's HQ. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I remember this. LinkedIn did the same (though I don’t recall if it was generic IMAP or specifically gmail and hotmail)
exactly, normally you would like to make sure it works before a change goes to production?
The article describes how Plaid is designed to replace the micro deposit / verify flow used by many sites to validate that you own a checking account before they deposit/withdrawal to/from that account.

I’m sure this is a reasonably common flow, but it’s only a slice of what Plaid does. They additionally do transaction parsing/normalization across a wide variety of accounts. I’ve been using Plaid for years as part of my ledger-cli workflow, to automate importing of account transactions.

The security flow is horrible, but the security flow for banks was already horrible: the reason I trust banks with my money is because of strong ability to reverse malicious activity, and regulatory oversight, not because I trust their infosec practices.

Pre-Plaid, I had some local scraping tools to pull transactions, and ran into several instances where the “MFA” step for banks allowed my “browser” to pick its own unique identifier. If I set it to “hahalol”, that was fine, and as long as I kept sending that ID, I never had to MFA again.

If we somehow had a world where there was an actual standard way to fetch data from my banks, I’d love that. I’d switch immediately. But in the current world, Plaid is pretty far down my list of financial-service-related risks.
It is typically assumed that by the time you are making a Dyson swarm, that most life exists digitally. And spread out through the solar system.

So in the best case scenario, you are powering computronium, upon which trillions of sophonts live out their digital lives. Hopefully doing some science, or at least playing some interesting games. A vast distributed network.

In the worst case scenario, Blockchain and spam emails.

Either way, people will put that energy to use.

With a Dyson swarm, energy is received on the inside, towards the star, and heat is radiated outward. Lower power systems can run off the heat radiation of the inner swarm similarly. It is all eventually released as very low level heat, but diffused across the entire outer surface of the swarm. No hotspots... because someone would come along and use it.

The Earth would also likely be deconstructed by this time, so don't worry about the biosphere, there won't be any.
Yes, what I’m saying is that it wouldn’t say that until it’s true. There’s no disagreement here.
Depending on transpiler (compilers that will compile to C), you can get near representation in C (rarely) or something completely different (frequently). In Scheme/LISP world (where transpilers were popular for a while), even a simple expression like "(+ 1 1)" will rarely give you something like: "int a = 1 + 1;". I've seen these things would produce dozen of lines of various boxing/unboxing calls, type checks and GC protection marks. If the compiler is really aggressive, it will just put "2" as a constant.

I think that the only benefit of "compiling to C" was reusing existing compilers, not tooling around it. Also, debugging that code is a nightmare unless you are intimate with transpiler internals.
can we change this click bait title?

both statements are not true. a) zero click hacks have always been popular b) of course there are ways to stop them.
There has not been a misunderstanding. Show me a source for this “friends collector” that reads email via IMAP.
Hmm, suspect the julia code in that post is not optimized
Perhaps try asking on https://discourse.julialang.org/
information asymmetry and lack of competition pretty much absolutely guarantees there will be no significantly lower involved
This is an impressive example, but is it really a common example? I think typical examples are much more mundane and possible only due to poorly written code and memory overflow exploits, etc, no?
Can you say more? What specifically is exhausting?

Exhaustion/burnout isn't uncommon but without more context it's hard to say if it's a product of the type of work or your specific work environment.
Origin Private File Systems should be in exactly the same boat as IndexedDB, Local Storage and cookies here.
AFAIK compilers don't reorder if it would change the result.
Is that a bad thing? You have to learn to deal with conflict at some point.
I took the time to learn Rust well in spite of how annoying the Jehovas Witness routine has been for like, what, 5-10 years now? I worked with Carl and Yehuda both on the project right before Cargo (which is pretty solid, those guys don’t fuck around).

I think I’ve paid my cover-fee on an opinion.
Text email. HTML email provides access to a vast attack surface on the user's device. Normally webmail clients will cheerfully send along all the HTML. Filtering is a futile game of whack a mole.

If you are only doing text email (or some very restricted HTML interpretation) then there is no extra risk in using a local email client. The lack of a HTML interpreter probably means you would be safer than with a webmail client.

If you are doing some form of email as a precaution, you still need a secure place to do it. That might not be a typical smart phone.
ThreadPool and Queues are my personal preference here
>> SOTA accuracy on a similar but more challenging problem (5-shot 20-way rather
than 60-shot 10-way) appears to be around 99.6%:
https://paperswithcode.com/sota/few-shot-image-classificatio...

I'm aware of results like that but they're just kicking the can down the road
with the other foot: they push the problem of training with big data to the
pre-training stage and then claim to do "few-" or "one-shot" learning at the
end, or even "zero-shot" which is egregious abuse of terminology (and it's very
sad that it's accepted terminology). It's like the Aesop's fable where the
sparrow hid in the eagle's feathers and jumped up at the last moment to claim
"I'm the bird that flies the highest!".

Vapnik's point in the interview I linked above is that you should not need a lot
of data for anything, including pre-training. His challenge is for the community
to find what he calls good "predicates" which are primitive functions (I think
of them as feature detectors) that can be composed into a good statistical
invariant, a function representing a high-level concept while having good
out-of-dataset generalisation ability. His claim is that if you have a bunch of
good predicates and good invariants, then you don't need a lot of data, because
the generalisation ability of the good predicates makes up for it. Or, seen
another way, lots of data is needed _in the case when_ a good predicate is not
known. In a certain way, transfer learning, or meta-learning in the case of the
paper you link, is a step towards the right direction, but the reliance on big
data for pre-training suggests that the models are still not learning good
representations that generalise well - so they still need big data to make up
for it.
The word "portable" means a subset of everything possible. Do you think every CPU architecture supports SIMD?
Yep, Intel clearly hasn't learned a single thing from the disaster that has been price segmentation on features like AVX-512, the result is the vast majority of software never bothering to use it, because it can't be guaranteed to actually be present.
I don't disagree, but I will also take debates about licensing over 30 separate "Looks cool! I've built something similar here: PLUGS PROJECT" comments.
Right. Showing an “image preview” for myriad file types means executing them, essentially, and perhaps on buggy code.
I believe this line of thought has not been given enough attention recently.
I’m not sure what distinction you want. The status quo is that for site operators and end users, there is no sane way to standardize API access across US financial institutions. The thing Plaid is “disrupting” (notably, the article says disrupt, Plaid themselves don’t mention disrupting anything on their site) is this current gap. The problem they’re solving is “people want to interact with financial institutions in a standard, programmatic way, and Plaid enables that”
I look forward to config files in right to left Hebrew

Or maybe Arabic so the characters flow into each other
Researchers levitated a small tray using light
The thing is, it might be contrary to the underlying model of the OS, but it's how a lot of people want to do it.

To give a similar example: in the Rust programming language, dependencies are declared in a TOML file. While the dependencies are declarative, there's also a popular tool (that's being added to the main project) that lets you do

cargo add awesome-thing-rs

and add the dependency to your project, and edits the config file for you. That's it: no combinations to remember, no weird use cases, no unintuitive error messages, you just say "I want to add X" and then X is added.

I don't see why Nix couldn't do the same.
> I'm not even sure it's working in the EU yet?

It's called PSD2 and it applies EU-wide since September 2019. Banks have to make _some_ form of API available to third parties. However, these third parties must meet certain criteria and get a license in one of the member states. This makes sense since they can access financial data, and they only have to do it once. So a fintech licensed in e.g. Belgium can access the APIs of a bank in France and vice versa. Since banks already have most of the necessary rules and paperwork in place, I've seen many banks themselves become PSD2 clients as well, offering customers the ability to manage "foreign" bank accounts through their app as well.
First thing I notice: the license is horrible.

Even GNU recommends liberal licenses for snippets with less than 300 lines (and allows for commercial use anyway!):
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
"
What if the work is not very long? (#WhatIfWorkIsShort)

If a whole software package contains very little code—less than 300 lines is the benchmark we use—you may as well use a lax permissive license for it, rather than a copyleft license like the GNU GPL. (Unless, that is, the code is specially important.) We recommend the Apache License 2.0 for such cases.

"

While LOCs poorly reflect the effort made, in this case a less anal-retentive approach would have opened up a long-term contribution to societies at large. Considering that the BBC was mainly finances by quasi-public money it's a shame that it was opted for a license with an unnecessary special case (NC).
Given that topic under discussion is US campus and behavior of Americans, the way attitudes are spread in US is relevant. In fact, "Americans" is only relevant demographics.

Also, coincidentaly, similar division occurred across Europe. The people more likely to be influenced by American conservative thinkers were more likely to be hostile to masks and lockdowns.

Honestly, how is any of that controversial?
Doesn't this article mean the opposite though when you have so many leaders over 60?

Why would we not want more people in their 50s making decisions vs 70s if we know the brain is slowing down in 60s?
This “howto” from 2011 seems relevant https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1821514&seq...
Absolutely! There is not enough data here to signify the actual performance of the algorithm.

Without more data it's not clear if the algorithm is actually effective - e.g. if the approval rate of these loans is 80% for instance, a formula of "always return true" could be said to be '80% accurate compared to human decisions'.

And if the AI makes the same decisions as a human 95% of the time, but then makes horrific errors the other 5% of the time, it wouldn't be an appropriate replacement for the human. This is the same issue with self driving - it doesn't matter if you make great decisions 99% of the time if 1% of the time you decide to drive into a wall (until you have got your error down to a place where it's safer on aggregate than a human).
Jens Stoltenberg: “These are dangerous days for European security.”
Are you saying that a Firefox user with an account which is synced across multiple devices does not sync the IndexedDB, Local Storage etc. That's news to me (though I have not looked into it particularly).
Full quote:

> These are dangerous days for European security. #Russia has relentlessly massed troops in & around #Ukraine in the biggest military build-up since the Cold War. #NATO Allies continue their strong diplomatic efforts to find a political solution. #MSC2022[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/jensstoltenberg/status/14950074251953520...
Hospital Prices data could be worth a lot
Ah, also previous threads on the subject would be of interest, I could only find one so far:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14724566 (2017) - "Ask HN: Which dedicated unmanaged and affordable hosting you suggest or use?"