skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

Let's say that inside the lab the dacay happened at t1 and is recorded there. Later at t2 the outside wavefunction collapses. The observation at t2 will be that the decay happened at t1 but was only known at t2.

So does this mean between t1 and t2, the decay had happened and that the outside wavefunction was 'lying' as representing other possible probabilities? Or that at t2 when the outer wavefunction collapses that the decay recorded at t1 isn't necessarily the same t1 and history has somehow re-written itself?
The general theme of this list is that technology gives us more and more hoops to jump through, then provides some trampoline to jump through them. We're supposed to be eternally grateful. I'm not. I want to focus on problem-solving, not masterfully using trampolines.

> SSL certificates, with Let’s Encrypt

Semi-mandatory SSL certificates weren't a thing on the web until fairly recently. Not managing them at all was certainly easier than managing them with Let's Encrypt, which has a lot of gotchas, requires tooling, knowledge and can suddenly break your website if something is off.

> Concurrency, with async/await (in several languages)

async/await usage is literally the main reason why my recent project is written in Go instead of C#. I like C#. I don't like Go. But dealing with all the gotchas of .NET Core async/await APIs drove me away.

Moreover, Erlang had a much more sane and powerful parallelism model way before async/await.

> Centering in CSS, with flexbox/grid

Again, like with SSL, this is technically correct, but generally incorrect. Centering in CSS has gotten much easier with flexbox/grid. However, centering in HTML only became hard because tables were abandoned as the layout mechanism. Sure, they're not "semantic". But we're talking about what became easier, right? Not about what became more ideologically correct, semantic, etc.

> Configuring cloud infrastructure, with Terraform

Again, there used to be no Cloud infrastructure to configure. Personally, I find Terrafrom annoying more than anything else.

> Setting up a dev environment, with Docker

As opposed to doing what? Keeping my dev environment simple is a constant battle and most of the time Docker is the weapon used by the other side. In 00s my dev environment was a text editor and some upload tool.

I haven't used PHP in well over a decade, but for my latest personal project I've decided to brush up on PHP 8.1. Despite awful syntax, I can do stuff by writing a handful of lines of code in a text editor. It's very refreshing. 100% focus on the outcome rather than tooling.
Sure, if we apply the same logic out of the context where it was applied in this case, then you're completely right.

However, context matters. The statistics they quoted showed that the helmet use was at 91% in Seattle.

So if you have a law that is punishing up to 9% of the population and you note some pretty ugly biases in the sample of those who get fined, then it doesn't sound unreasonable to conclude that maybe we don't need to be doing that right now.
You could give it a retrograde kick so it descends into atmospheric drag.

You can instead refuel it or attach a new maneuvering unit to revitalize its mission.
I can't really see this as the negative you imply it to be. This seems like complaining that you might get locked out of your house if you lose your keys. There are certainly better and worse forms of 2FA, but I would like more pervasive (well-implemented) account security, not less.
I really do like the practical challenge that Vapnik poses and based on what you wrote I support the agenda. In the face of the trial&error mentality prevalent in ML, it does strike me as a wise approach towards advancement.

However, the minor technicality remains in my view: there exists a case where a sufficiently complex causal mechanism can be only asympotically identified from a given DGP. In that case, more data is better, and more data is perhaps even required - but also the model will be fully general and will not start to fit on the randomness in sample/DGP for this "mechanism". So indeed, we can theoretically construct situations where Vapnik's intuition does not hold. Then, "more data is better => model is fitting sampling error" is more of a heuristic - even if it is a good one! If the model manages to disentangle error from mechanism, then more data could still improve the model while retaining generality.

Of course, one might propose that any causal mechanism will be identified "sufficiently well" in a finite sample, so there's a point where we have enough data. Perhaps this can even be proven, and my theoretical counterexample simply never exists. In that case, you'd be right: A model that keeps learning ad-infinum can not be causally identified. I am not aware of such a proof, but I'd not be surprised if it were the case. Or more practically speaking, one may be able to show that improvements to the causal estimates are, at some point, always inferior to the overfitting errors no matter the DGP/model.

I would perhaps propose a reverse of the heuristic: We know a model is good, if it can demonstrate that more data does NOT influence its invariant (causally identified) parts. This will be the challenge to solve for DNNs, as the combination of model+ latent DGP necessarily makes this a matter of assumption. In classical models, we can formulate these assumptions mathematically e.g. as exclusion restrictions and the like. For DNNs, I think we do not have such results yet.
My physical book library is not very big. Maybe 30 books and a lot are just textbooks I should probably get rid of with few exceptions. I deliberately got rid of a lot of them. I rarely buy physical books anymore. I think I bought 1 in the past year.

My ebook library is much bigger. Several hundred to low thousands depending on whether stuff like individual comics count. I don't currently have it well organized and in one place. There's also the question of whether PDFs of books I downloaded from the library count as books I own? (Some never expire).

There's a mix of reference material and recreational but it's mostly recreational, at least stuff I purchased. I'm still not satisfied with the state of ePub textbooks so I'll only buy digitally as a last resort option.
A company and managers not respecting refactor is a culture problem, having two backlogs that are weighted differently is just a workaround to the culture problem. That culture usually isn't from managers being ignorant of the value of refactor, it's that incentives for them (bonuses, etc) are aligned against the latter backlog. If you fix the incentive, all the other pieces will fall into place.
“Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
> This raises a point that I don’t think many developers consider. By registering and using a custom domain as their main email address, they implicitly give that domain and their TLD complete control over most of their online accounts.

That’s a feature, not a bug. This is what allows you to take full ownership of your online identity.

If you use @gmail.com or another address where you rent the address-space, someone else can at a random whim completely erase or compromise all your things and accounts everywhere.

Is the author here really pitching that as a good thing(tm)?
Disingenuous take. The threat is the potential dual use of the technology — civilian and military. Are you saying there is no harm use of such technology? You are committing the very misinformation sin you are bashing the media for.
Google got away with distributing 11,000 lines of code from Oracle's proprietary Java implementation. It was considered fair use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

The conditions you put in a software license must work within a legal framework. It appears that your license can't relicense my code, it only applies to your code. However linking or reproducing portions of your code for interoperability don't create a derivative work. This is of course not a legal advice.

FSF licenses are trying to take away rights from you that cannot be taken away.
Easy doesn’t (always) equal good.
> forces you to handle what happens if the user interacts with the UI before your function is done executing

Thank goodness for that. No more of UI suddenly freezing completely and stops accepting input just because internet connection is flaky. Async or other slow operations should not be running on the UI thread.
There are ways to provide backup factors without tying them to more personal information, however.
What if you are authorized to have said copyrighted works?
> There's a lot of FUD about how Linux is being shown recently to be less secure than proprietary systems. That's nonsense. But, now there are hard facts from Google's Project Zero, Google's security research team, showing Linux's developers do a faster job of fixing security bugs than anyone else, including Google.

I don't see how the Linux developers' higher speed of fixing security bugs would in any way substantiate the author's claim that Linux is not "less secure than proprietary systems". He completely leaves aside

- the number of security bugs per unit time,

- the severity of the bugs in question, and

- the overall system architecture and the potential impact of security bugs in general. Needless to say, this is where the situation on Linux looks pretty grim compared to current "proprietary systems" (which has nothing to do with the fact that they're proprietary).
As someone who is deciding whether to splurge on a Quest 2 for exercising, how good is it without a computer system to link with?

Also, is there any step that requires a computer system like the initial setup etc.?

Any recommendations for initial games to try and guides for getting the optimal adjustment are also appreciated.
It aged perfectly IMO. Maybe the timeline was a little bit off, but it did indeed take several years and a huge amount of effort by experts to make object recognition available "off the shelf".

And even then, problems can quickly escalate from "any programmer with a little experience can do it" to "we need a team of data scientists and data engineers".
The Rules Engine Pattern
>...consumer equipment is not ready for IPv6

Is that true? I had assumed that all network equipment could do IPv6, but the functionality was not exposed by default.
Friendly, pedantic, hopefully helpful reminder:

> - ideally, the backup process on the home server side should not be more difficult than a cron job running "rsync -avz --delete /mnt/raid user@server:/mnt/storage"

A mirror is not the same thing as a backup.
Congress has changed the law since MAI v. Peak specifically to allow users to create copies and adaptations of software programs as an essential step in running or utilizing the program in question on a machine, or for limited archival purposes (i.e. backups).

"Adaptation" is another name for "derivative work". So it would appear that it is not a copyright violation for an end user to load or dynamically link modules with incompatible licenses into ram, or statically link them together, or make binary modifications, as long as what they are doing is necessary to use the program.

It might still be a license violation of course, but it is probably a fruitless exercise to go after users who are exercising what are ordinarily considered to be well established rights necessary to use the software, the very thing that made MAI v. Peak an unfortunate ruling that Congress had to fix. Surely that sort of thing - even by third party technical support - should have been considered fair use from the beginning.
It's still a reasonable format for its original use - images with large areas of solid color where only a small percentage of pixels change across a small number of frames.

If your animation has <256 colors then it's even lossless, something not possible with any of the video codecs.
Don’t worry. The Equation Group is on it.
Seeing the system in France, never ending protests, hostage of public services for ever-growing unjustified demands, yellow jackets malaise, general socioeconomic dysfunction, etc I am convinced Trudeau is doing the right thing.

Blocking the streets or vandalizing the public is not the right way to make a point, if you have any.
The pain in the chain is mainly in the main().
I meant, how it is done?
Great job Richard. Do you have or plan to have an API avaialble? We (Kagi Search) would like to use this.
> What I think really stops NixOS from gaining mainstream popularity ... is the inability of just downloading binaries and running them

This is THE reason I switched from NixOS back to a mainstream distro (Fedora). However, I still use Nix for my development environments and builds for a lot of projects. I think adoption of Nix itself is more important than NixOS.
Write ahead log is something with more specific and semantics. You write something in a WAL _ahead_ of some process for durability sake.
Agree with starting focusing on UI first. But haven’t seen a speed advantage at this stage of serverless vs a simple monolithic backend app with a bunch of endpoints. You can get something in front of users within hours. Either way allows you to overengineer and focus on the wrong thing.
Reading the article and I didn't see writing fast Rust programs as easier listed(only Go). The callout was for sharing data between threads which I think is an area where Rust has the edge over other languages.
Accounting-wise, it's very common that R&D and developers are counted as cost centers, not profit centers.

This is not necessarily a problem, unless the management (and shareholders) only understands costs as an impediment to be pressured and reduced (which is sadly also quite common - and not necessarily false either).
I would not call follow the sun ops as harmonious. If anything I'd call it adversarial. Ops is always trying to blame dev for outages and dev is always trying to blame ops. Each accuses the other of not sharing all the necessary information.

Look at all that on-prem software you just mentioned. The developers of every one of those complain that they need better bug reports, and the people who operate them complain they need better documentation. Things would be much better if those devs worked directly for every company that uses them, and in fact in a lot of cases one of the contributors is an operator at a company. Why do you think companies like to hire open source devs? To get better access to someone who knows the codebase!

It's far better if the operator is the developer. Sometimes we live with that not being the case because the software is made by others. But when given the choice, I will always opt for the dev running the software themselves.
Want to change company culture? Start by changing communications
Depending on which way you look at it, Jeff Bezos turned dubious labor practices into a space program.
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20031206211900.GA9034@thunk.org...

Theodore Ts'o (2003)

[Incidentally this issue is at the heart of Oracle v Google. I find it fascinating how the tech community in general seems to not realize these are the same things.]

Quote:

But that aside, does the Open Source community really want to push for
the legal principal that just because you write an independent program
which uses a particular API, the license infects across the interface?
That's essentially interface copyrights, and if say the FSF were to
file an amicus curiae brief support that particular legal principle in
an kernel modules case, it's worthwhile to think about how Microsoft
and Apple could use that case law to f*ck us over very badly.

It would mean that we would not be able to use Microsoft DLL's in
programs like xine. It would mean that programs like Crossover office
wouldn't work. It would mean that Apple could legally prohibit people
from writing enhancements to MacOS (for example, how do all of the
various extensions in Mac OS 9 work? They link into the operating
system and modify its behaviour. If they are therefore a derived work
of MacOS, then Apple could screw over all of the people who write
system extensions of MacOS.)
Either way, it sounds like you're saying sites have all these designers to keep the product from being outdated. If, in practice, they're being made worse, that would strike against claim that all these designers are a benefit and in favor of the claim that they're mostly wasted spending.
I like this terminology a lot because the analog of the integral makes sense too. I wonder if partial derivatives make sense too…
I like the clear and simple design.

Some criticism though: for 50$ you got a budget hotel in Moscow, not a mid-class
GPS satellites broadcast time signals; you don’t need Internet access to receive them.

But if you don’t want to be dependent even on GPS, you can apparently buy a small atomic clock for $1500, well within reach of many tech enthusiasts: https://physicsworld.com/a/atomic-clock-is-smallest-on-the-m...
In descending order (categories overlap, but I don't think there's _very_ much overlap between the ones listed here), roughly 430 mathematics, 260 philosophy, 260 science, 230 computing, 210 history, 110 "reference" (meaning things like dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc.), 100 music, 100 puzzles, 100 language and languages.
You do not need a computer for the setup. You’ll need your mobile phone instead.

You may, if you wish, hook up the Q2 to a a PC to play steamVR and Oculus Games. The oculus quest 2 has a separate store (in VR) in which you purchase new games.
> a smaller device will alway have 'poor' battery life or use a less powerful cpu to keep the battery life on par with bigger phones.

I am not convinced by this -- not least because it will also have a smaller and lower-resolution screen, which brings with it power savings.

Before I switched to iOS, I had a Sony Xperia Mini Pro -- the second version. Slide out keyboard, absolutely tiny. And it was _very_ powerful indeed for its price and size in its day, with surprisingly good battery life (from a really tiny battery) and an incredible display.

A contemporaneous review was here:
https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_mini_pro-revie...

Can't tell you how many admiring looks it got even from iPhone owners. Decent camera for the time (and a hardware shutter button), and a fantastic little thumbs keyboard.

I then had an iPhone 5S and SE. The 5S was an older device by the time I got it, but the SE was/is very capable and it has excellent battery life (especially by Android standards), again because it's driving a smaller, lower-resolution display.

It might be a tough sell in the Android market, but I think it could be done again well technically.

There just isn't enough interest to persuade app developers to support a smaller screen format, and web developers won't do it either.
>Establish what "trust" is. The play-by rule-book.
Interesting you mention this, I have used the word integrity in my own ramblings (can be found via a link on my profile), to essentially imply the same aspect, and probably much more. More being things like predictability, personal motivations that go beyond money making etc.

>These are just ramblings of a semi-serial pseudo-successful entrepreneur. I apologise.

My views come from observations of business. I'm not an entrepreneur either (cannot afford to be one)

>I don't know any answers but I do know that 'trust' is one of the crucial key elements of a successful business. Trust between every party.

True, there are all sort of other elements that people are well aware of ( marketing, development, competition, planning etc.), but this one (trust/integrity) is an underrated one I think.

All that I said hold less true for fly-by-night operators, or enterprises with short term goals.
All: this is a divisive topic. It's also an interesting new phenomenon. That makes it on topic for HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and also makes it vulnerable to the tedious, nasty flamewar that we're trying to avoid on HN. Therefore, if you're going to post in a thread like this, could you please review the site guidelines first and make sure to stick to them?

Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Remember that on this site we want curious conversation. Here's an old sentence of pg's that captures the desired spirit:

Comments should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.
I deeply appreciate the stellar naming of this project!
>why do startups start young, idealistic and innovative only to eventually grow more and more corporate and litigious in nature? It’s because early stage companies tend to hire people who prioritize the company’s well being and mature companies tend to hire people who prioritize their personal gain.

An alternative hypothesis is that, as organizations grow, their focus shifts from innovation to maintenance. It's a counterargument to the obscession with innovation.

"I think in paying more attention to maintenance and maintainers , it’s really signaling a shift in values away from glittery new things, consumer culture and those sorts of things, and toward work, towards labor, towards maybe even sacrifice in the form of taxes or effort to sustain society, and to pay a little bit more respect to the people whose jobs do that. They’re not superstars, they’re just grinding it out from day to day."[1]

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/
Do you have an email signup on your site? When we get an influx of interest, I’ll often ping a few new customers to ask where they heard about us.
I recently used lark and liked it. To my surprise.
Are you located in Germany? If so - welcome to the boat.

From experience I personally would not host on CF pages. But, depending on the content and intended audience CF pages could clearly be argued under legitimate interest. You would/should probably have a TIA in place and state that in the privacy part of the site.

I know people arguing legitimate interest when using Webflow. Also clearly PD being transmitted towards a non EU country there.

As said. Personally I would go with something like uberspace.de as I just like their offering and the fact that I always have a human replying and being helpful when something breaks because I fatfingered it.
I think the thing about the “exact level of richness required” is hugely important. It’s easy to run into the problem of needing to pull in all the data that any consumer would need (set union), but graphql allows each consumer to only grab what it needs. I’m not sure what to call this decoupling but it’s a huge win.
Makes me wonder how many sites are still useable with Lynx
Minix seems to be doing great running on every Intel processor in existence.
"cross platform" isn't well defined these days, since it may or maynot include mobile and/or browser platforms. That said, Qt is much better to use than Swing ever was, and really no more complex until you want to do things you could not do in Swing anyway. Gtkmm too, from my personal (21+ years) experience.
Scholars once feared that the book index would destroy reading
I've been on teams that haven't used docker for dev envs and teams that do in the last 5~ years. The teams that used docker were significantly more productive since each dev env was a replica and forced the team to maintain a common env. The dev env drift without it is huge and causes so many "it works on my machine". I can see a one man show or maybe two not needing a docker dev env but any sizable team IMO it is absolutely required now. You're absolutely right that it is a hoop to jump through, but its a hoop I find very necessary.