skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, though you have to remember that threat is a social construct and isn't necessarily a rational measure. The 2001 anthrax attacks killed 5 people, injuring 17, and shocked the nation. As a direct result Congress put billions into funding for new vaccines and drugs and bio-terrorism preparedness. If 5 people were killed and 17 wounded in a mass shooting by a terrorist, would we really have reacted as strongly?

If you wanted to install fear into a country, I think being attacked by some custom, previously unknown chemical weapon would scarier than sarin.
"and the adoption of risks mitigation measures."

i.e. We really need this yesterday. Stand back, let's see if it works.
> Nothing like spending hours downloading a few early MP3s in 94-95, and having to play them back at 1/2 or 1/4 quality because the 486 couldn't keep up (and even then running out of cache 60-70 seconds in and paused for it catch back up).

LOL. I used to have to decompress them into 40MB WAV files to play them. My whole hard drive was 50MB.
It totally is, but that is was most people know, next to the XLS/XLSX files themselves.
Most food in the US doesn't make you very sick. And food that doesn't make you sick is not very expensive.
Well this is upsetting. I just scrapped and curbed 2x iMacs like 2 months ago because they couldn’t do anything anymore. This would’ve been perfect.
> Differences beyond 2x are still a clear indication that official replacement parts are a scam.

How are you not saying that they're making too much money and it's therefore "a clear indication" that it's a scam?

I'd love to be told why I'm wrong rather than just "hurr durr strawman"
Can be only one and must be at least one would seem to describe the news very well.
Beating Japan at Its Own [video] Game: A Smash Hit from China
OODA Loop – Open-Source Natural Language Processing: EleutherAI's GPT-J
"I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging with your heart and blinding your brain to political/financial realities that are capital H Hard problems?
@osynavets , not clear what you meant by

"Volodymyr Zelensky asking to retreat and surrender their weapons"

did it mean:

Volodymyr Zelensky asking invaders, Russia, to retreat and surrender their weapons

?
I like this idea in theory, but suspect I'd be depressed how often people actually agreed with my attempt to outcrazy them in practice.
For most people, it would surely be BS, but I'd be surprised if PG is making this up.
Charles Murray predicted that this would happen but the opposite is happening: the standard deviation of IQ is decreasing.
A Hard Look at the Risk of a Putin-Ordered Tactical Nuke
Most people here are interpreting "genius" as something like "really smart" or "able to make scientific progress". I don't believe that's the author's meaning: he's talking about individuals whose work single-handedly upends our understanding of the world and causes a revolutionary change in thinking. By that definition, making a faster CPU, or a very successful product is not sufficient. By that definition, who are the Einstein-level geniuses? Someone in the thread said Whitney Houston, but... uhh, anyone else?
> But I'm not glad you characterise me as a troll - its just not true.

My comment and especially that part was over the line -- I apologize.
At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They already have antidotes to some of these poisons.

One could optimize for compounds with hard-to-monitor precursors. Compounds that can be transported with low vapor pressure and volatility, so they cannot be easily sniffed out.

Or imagine a lethal compound with a high delay factor. Or something with specifically panic-inducing effects, perhaps hemorrhagic with a side effect of your skin sliding off in great slick sheets. Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis: have fun tracking where these gibbering maniacs were a week ago.

With a sufficiently dark imagination, "needs" could be identified for all sorts of compounds.

Remember, the goal is to throw a monkey wrench into the gearwork of an opposing civilization, not necessarily to kill. Fear of the unknown is very effective for this.
How will you accept payment? Most processors will freeze your fund if they find out you are taking preorders and not shipping out actually products.
So, I basically agree with you that there's lots of progress to be amazed by. I also think that the "genius" model is fundamentally flawed, at least in today's age -- there's something to be said for the possibility that education and support systems have improved to the point where maybe geniuses are everywhere. If anything I think we have too much of a genius mythology, and maybe this paper is sort of inadvertently pointing out that the Einsteins of the past were more about the social structures they found themselves than their "genius" per se.

There is another argument to be made, though, that goes something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's something that basically just took a ton of engineering refinements to get to.

That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a ton of money thrown into things at the same time, far more than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your smartphone today? It's pretty remarkable, the miniturization involved, but how much money has been thrown at that?

I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at some level.

Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be no progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a strawman. It's not really what these pieces are arguing. What they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just engineering the hell out of those advancements since then.

Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't see it.
Another one [0] (discussed 2 month ago [1])

[0] http://486servu.dy.fi/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29959129
Climate change is not going to wipe out the human species, but it will cause a large amount of economic upheaval, migration, and things like that. Not exactly the sort of circumstances that are conducive to progress.

Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest-beating about Taiwan.

Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot less confident things will work out as easily as you say.
Depends on how old. My sisters old iMac ran perfectly fine but couldn’t load 75% of the internet unfortunately and most of the apps couldn’t be updated past a 5-6 year old build.
Yes exactly. As a data interchange format I think it is much better than CSV (more compact, faster, more efficient, less error-prone, etc.)
No, the article is invalidating people who hold an existing position. "The increase in murders is not a liberal cities problem but a national problem."

It'd be even more convincing if they were able to solve all murder cases and prevent murder from ever happening again, but setting the bar there in order to recognize that a false narrative is not actually supported by the data is an unreasonable standard.
The Tom Cruise ones going around a while ago were indistinguishable from reality for me. Granted I'm not intimately familiar with Tom Cruise, just watched some of his movies, but I could see believing them if I didn't know they're deep fake.
This article from Ars Technica describes the topology and the quantum effect they're going for. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/microsoft-announces-...
libtool is a build tool made primarily to make your life hell if you do anything that the libtool authors did not plan for. Like who thought it would be a good idea to silently drop unknown linker-driver flags.
They already made this movie, except it was about a Russian girl trying to pretend to be a (already rich) billionaire, not meet them
People, Not Science, Decide When a Pandemic Is Over
Thanks for being positive! I don't think I'm in trouble either. I saw some negative comments and was disappointed. I think I am ok with managing my finances, it's just my expenses increased after buying house. I used to pay $1600 for rent now it's $2600.

I'm not trying to bait someone, or trying to get help from someone.

You're right, real estate is one of the best investments I've ever done, with the situation with covid and inflation real estate prices went up a lot since I purchased the house, and I already have about $100K in equity.
I appreciate your feedback and I totally want to market it in the way you propose. But let me be real: I am one person doing everything. I expect to have all that stuff by September when I plan to launch 1.0. If I were "in control" of this situation, I'd prefer the app get more buzz closer to launch rather than 6 months away. But I can't really control when people post to hacker news... And in any case I think all publicity is good. Dying in obscurity is the biggest risk.
> and doing a quick search of the kernel source it's not actually used for anything I can't find it referenced outside of itself.

It's being used here: https://lxr.missinglinkelectronics.com/linux+v5.16/arch/x86/...

Whenever the kernel gets a "device not available" exception, and CONFIG_MATH_EMULATION is set (which is the case when the kernel is compiled for a 486SX), and the CPU does not have a real FPU, and the "emulation" flag on CR0 is set, it calls the FPU emulator.
Because they are.
Why make a chemical weapon when you can just tweak a virus which self-replicates?

BA.2 is even more infectious than BA.1 which is saying something, imagine an engineered BA.3 with even more spread and then make it as even more deadly. You might even be able to target it to one race or region if there is a gene specific to that area.

Always hoped the future would be Star-Trek-like but it seems all it takes is one dictator or terrorist to end the world, slowly at first but then it would double every other day and impossible to stop.
"Murder can absolutely be a crime of opportunity."

Can, but not usually. It's more likely to be a crime of passion.

80% of murder victims knew their attackers.

"I mean, if someone is murdered in New York City, and proximity to other people doesn't matter, it would follow that the murderer is just as likely to be in Cheyenne, WY as NYC. ;-)"

You're conflating necessary means to commit a single occurrence with population level causes. I'm questioning whether population density is a cause of murder. Which I don't see why it would be.
I stumbled on this interesting visualisation while researching about all the wealth in the world [1]

The last blob of Derivatives immediately jumps out. Not sure how useful is for the current discussion; just that it fascinates me; the disparity between the actual wealth and the notional value that's at stake if things go wrong.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...
Trying to make the math easy, if official parts cost $80 to produce due to licensing or whatever, and are sold for $100, is it necessarily a scam if you can produce functionally similar parts without the licensing concerns for, say, $10, but charge $90 for them?

Huge profit margin, but you're able to produce much more cheaply than a competitor. Some would say you earned that margin, and in a fair and open market if someone else can also produce them for $10 you'll see prices start falling quickly. If they can't, I don't see how it's a "scam" for you to make money in that scenario.
People keep saying how fast flight evolved, such that a person was alive both for Wright brothers and landing on the Moon.

We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!
1. Sarus works on data that is organized in records. The intuition is that one record should not transpire in the results (hence protecting their privacy) but studying all records conjointly should be possible. It may be flat files, parquet filets, etc. but we do need this record-level organization. In a given record, there may be columns that are text or images, Sarus will work fine. We never worked on pdf documents. Conceptually it could work but this is quite far down the road.

2. Sarus has connectors to the main DB and we add more when we meet them. The basic assumption is that the experience should be the same as working on the data in its original form. For instance if your data is in a CSV with a weird date format, you will be able to (i) get synthetic data with this same weird date format, (ii) apply python code that transforms this weird date format into something more conventional and use that reformatted version. When running your data job, Sarus will apply your preprocessing code and take it from there.

3. Today we have a python SDK and a SQL connector. Both leverage the same low-level API. We may build other SDKs for other languages but haven't started doing so.

4. Indeed, we don't have any cert yet but we are looking into getting some soon. We are about to start Soc2 for instance. This is somewhat less of a requirement as we never host any of our clients' data. Of course, everything that helps get the green light of the ITSec team is useful.

5. The python SDK is standard python code so you can use in any python env. The notebook is just here to make it more user-friendly in demos. Same for SQL, you can use any SQL querying tool, we did the demo with Metabase.

6. The easiest way is to deploy a docker image with Docker compose. It does not scale on multiple machine yet (stay tuned). In that sense, big data sources are only partially supported: if the source is RedShift and you submit a SQL query to the API, we'll rewrite it and send it to Redshift (which scales), but if you want to do ML on the same data, we won't be able to scale the same.

7. Complex time series is not a problem for the remote execution part provided it is stored in a traditional format. That being said, we don't have a specific synthetic data model for time series yet, so that part of the experience will be a bit different.

8. This is a debate we leave to researchers because there is not a single answer. It depends directly on the number of records in your dataset and the dimensionality of your data. However, you can set up privacy policies so that the weights of ML model without DP are allowed to be shared. This is considered acceptable by 99% of compliance teams in the world today so it's not a huge compromise. If you use Sarus this way, you are guaranteed to have exactly the same performance.

Would love to continue the conversation offline of course!
I think it's simply that they can afford it, and if they don't, their competitors will happily steal the best talent away with higher salaries.

I don't suppose the same situation exists within Google, although I've heard freshly graduated ML hires can get up to $500k, which sounds crazy until you realize China is paying twice as much.
If we are, in aggregate, happier with the things we buy this year than we are with the things we bought last year then there has been economic growth.... since humans can always tell themselves the current thing is better than the previous one there can, in theory, always be economic growth.
What do you watch on YouTube that you want to be able to turn your screen off for? I pay for YouTube red but I literally never use this feature. Likewise I don't expect to be able to turn off my TV screen while listening to Netflix...
> Uses google product x to store payment information

> Surprised when he has an account on google’s payment product y

How is this evil? There is literally zero negative outcomes from this.
Looking forward to switching Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia from BRELL.
not anymore. both links down.
It feels like an awkward middle ground. Like this method has a limited entropy output for the first 2000 coin flips (first 1000 double-heads/double-tails/mixed entries), and then suddenly it adds back a ton of lost entropy.

An other commenter linked to some papers for asymptotically optimal entropy generation, I wonder if there is more of a streaming method there. It feels like there has to be, even maybe after a slow start. My naive intuition is that after 1000000 coin flips you have a good idea what p is, and then you can basically do arithmetic coding from there. Of course a theoretically correct method can't do exactly this, but it might asymptotically approach it.
They are amazingly useful in real warfare. Drop nerve gas on a city, walk in a couple days later. WMDs are the only way to really take a country by force, and of all of them, chemical weapons are the most palatable and also the easiest to produce.

Considering this, defense against them is at least mildly important. A proper defense only exists by considering offense, so they're still developing chemical weapons somewhere. The modern hot topic is viruses and other pathogens.
Maybe I'm lacking some nuance here. Are you saying humans will become less greedy in the next couple hundred years?

Edit:. Appreciate you for putting your opinions out in open air.
> Many years ago a colleague who works in defence told me about a job posting he'd seen but was having a moral struggle with.

This is a good struggle to have. What's ironic in many cases is that we don't experience these quandaries in other jobs, but the ethical and moral ramifications still exist. The early days of search in Google or social in Facebook probably didn't elicit the same kind thought process as a lethality engineering post. (Anecdotally I spoke some years ago with an acquaintance Googler who told me that he enjoyed working there precisely because he was working on privacy issues that worked against some of the advertising side of the business.)

I've worked in telecommunications, industrial systems engineering, and energy. There are ethical and moral issues in the work that I've done/do as a contributor in each of those domains, even though I'm not involved day-to-day in decision making that feels particularly moral.

One of the base assumptions we probably need to make in our work is that whatever we do will always be misused in the worst possible way. If we explore that idea, it might give us some sense for how to structure our output to curtail the worst of the damages.
Yeah. Something like a standard set of protocols on top of an existing peer-to-peer bus, with a good set of supporting libraries, would have been great. I love the idea of service advertising and standard service APIs.
Really cool landing page, looks very modern.
Article from 2021, i have not seen any bikes actually using this. So my bet is that its a fad which didnt work. Prove me wrong.
We developed our own generative model for synthetic data generation. It is an autoregressive model where each variable is derived from previously generated ones using Transformers networks. If you are interested, you have more details in: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.02145.pdf
When we say it works on any types of data, we mean: numerical, categorical, text, images and compositions of those types (see the paper).
Especially since we cannot really help Ukraine with anything but tech and they are outnumbered, so the only advantage we can give is how much better our weapons are than Russian ones.
> We have the technology, it's called "taxes", but nobody seems to want to use it.

We are seeing a little bit of that now with fuel prices. Some countries are compounding the pain by having high taxes on fuel. The way it is working for me personally is that I have decided to drive electric, and I'm glad that I can afford it. But I have a salary in the high percentiles. Most people simply can't go that way.

IMO, in some cases regulation by taxation can create a lot of stress and increase inequality. Furthermore, if cars are affordable to one person out of twenty, and they happen to live in a democracy, there may be an incentive for the nineteen people to vote (directly or indirectly) for banning cars altogether.Fill in "meat", "airplanes", "crypto-currency mining-cards", etc. I think we are between the knife and a hard place, no matter what.
Ask HN: Using Personal GitHub for Work?
I'm worried if I use my personal github for work that it could cause my employer (FAANG) to have access to all of my personal things. This could involve open source work as well as private work repos.

Is it possible to insulate myself from this risk by:

- only using my work laptop for work things

- work-only ssh & gpg keys that are only accessed on my work laptop

Or is the only hope to create a separate Github accounts?
> "My Company would be fine without me" also means you can take vacation, medical appointments, heck even weekend (crazy concept!).

This is so worth it! A decade ago, I was the technical cofounder of a still-small startup. For a while, it was just me and my co-founder. But when we got signs of product-market fit, I hired a team of developers. We set it up so the default was pair programming with frequent pair rotation, with a lot of other tweaks to make it very collaborative.

This paid off in a lot of ways, but for me the biggest came when my mom got sick. I had to fly across the country and stay for weeks at a time to help her and coordinate her care. I was worried things might grind to a halt. But because every commit to the code base involved at least two people, it was fine. There were things I understood better than others, but there was nothing that was a scary mystery that nobody had touched.

When I left the company, it was the same deal. We were on good terms, so they were welcome to call. But they rarely if ever did! It was great to pop in now and again and see them just chugging ahead.
This passage broke my brain.

>When I learned Assembly, I think I broke my brain, permanently. ...when I came back to C#, suddenly, I felt too constrained.

Like, if he'd been talking about a functional programming language or Scheme or something like that I'd be nodding my head along.