skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine is scanned, front and back, OCR'd, and stored - as far as we know, indefinitely. That's how they deliver the "what's coming in your mailbox" images you can sign up to receive via email.

Those images very often show the contents of the envelope clearly enough to recognize and even read the contents, which I'm quite positive isn't an accident.

The USPS is literally reading and storing at least part of nearly every letter mailed in the United States.

The USPS inspectors have a long history of being used as a morality enforcement agency, so yes, this should be of concern.
Amazingly enough, you can! Robert Tinney was the illustrator for many Byte covers from the 70s and 80s (though not sure if he did this one, based on the style). He used to have a website up, but if you check archive.org you can still find his email address. If you send him an email, he’ll let you know what cover prints are available and you can order them directly from him. I recently ordered 5.
In 2022 scaling mostly works.
Twitter confirms January breach, urges anon accounts to not add email/phone
Menace: Massive methane leaks speed up climate change
Are you sure? The man page for Vixie cron at least doesn't imply that and it's not what I remember, and the web page this links to also doesn't think that's true. So "First Friday of the month at midnight" gives "0 0 1-7 * 5".
There are plenty of leaked classified documents from NSA (and others) that have been verified as legitimate. Many people working in public know stuff that hasn’t been published in full.

Here is one example with documents:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powe...

Here is another:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-...

Please read each and every classified document published alongside those two stories. I think you may revise your comments afterwards.
I'm trying not to comment on this article's title :-)
Some more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...
Reposting from another comment: I think https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-y... is a good summary. One quote:

> The guy who invented effect size suggested that 0.2 be called “small”, 0.5 be called “medium”, and 0.8 be called “large”. NICE, a UK health research group, somewhat randomly declared that effect sizes greater than 0.5 be called “clinically significant” and effect sizes less than 0.5 be called “not clinically significant”, but their reasoning was basically that 0.5 was a nice round number, and a few years later they changed their mind and admitted they had no reason behind their decision.

> Despite these somewhat haphazard standards, some people have decided that antidepressants’ effect size of 0.3 means they are “clinically insignificant”.

> (please note that “clinically insignificant” is very different from “statistically insignificant” aka “has a p-value less than 0.05.” Nearly everyone agrees antidepressants have a statistically significant effect – they do something. The dispute is over whether they have a clinically significant effect – the something they do is enough to make a real difference to real people)
My experience from when I was in the industry was the opposite. Studios would generally maintain a solid baseline renderfarm and then send overflow to the major cloud providers.

They also weren't really set up for the kind of strict isolation and security that offering resources to external parties would require.
One cannot prove a negative, but given how much public recording of everything there is these days (and in the last decade+), I'd say it's safe to err on the side of them not having prevented much of consequence. ("Absence of evidence..." doesn't really apply when evidence should be ample for the phenomenon to be explained.)
Appreciated, thanks.
Extrapolate/compare generationally
For me it's the random up/down volume for voices. I can usually tolerate a small amount of dropouts but for whatever reason, someone using airpods tends to vary so much in volume I just can't parse what they are saying.
Because it isn't "64-bits on x64". It's 32-bit minimum on all platforms. Assuming larger sizes than the minimum is how brittle code gets written. A compiler vendor can set the sizes to whatever they want regardless of the target architecture and claim conformance if they meet the minimum.
I mean, the point of Twitter's statement is to try to bound the risk. They could fix their methodology, or their advertisers could sue them for charging them for bot views, and the magnitude of the risk is ~5% of their mDAU, according to Twitter.

A company with 95% of its revenue coming from bot-clicks and a company with 5% of its revenue coming from bot-clicks might make the exact same amount of money, but one is substantially more screwed in the future.
And considerably worse in every way, especially compared to modern OLEDs and high refresh rate LCDs.
> and giving it a permissive license is stupid

We haven't seen the license yet so might be prudent to hold off on the panic until then.
If they were idempotent, yes. But they're not. Analog processing can't be perfect, and amplification is an inherently noisy process. The RIAA curve first cuts the signal on the bass end of the spectrum, throwing away information in the process (because vinyl doesn't have infinite resolution). Then it amplifies that degraded signal.

You can simulate this pretty well with computer speakers. Turn down your audio outputs so that it's barely audible, then turn up the speakers as load as they'll go. Noisy, isn't it? In theory that should be the same as turning the outputs to their maximum clean level and turning your speakers way down, but in practice it's absolutely not. Well, every vinyl record made does exactly that to the bass.
I just did a quick test of demucs vs spleeter:4stems. demucs is significantly slower but the output is better.

in a semi blind comparison, I prefer demucs for all 4 tracks (drum, bass, vocals, and other). bass and other stand out the most so let me say a couple words about them.

bass - the demucs bass has less bleed from other instruments and the volume is consistent throughout. with spleeter, the volume varies a lot and there are multiple sections of 1-2 bars where it just drops out completely. In Capo, the demucs spectrogram is nice and clear whereas spleeter tends to look like pencil smudges for the most part.

other - with spleeter, whenever there are vocals, the other instruments turn to mush. demucs is much better. Oh, you can tell people are singing -- the instruments get muffled -- but you can still hear them.
You forgot the introduction.

"Hi, I'm Greg and I've been a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. I'm happy to help you out."

<insert robotic answer that totally does not answer the question at all>
Many mp3 encoders cut off really high frequency stuff - somewhere between 16khz and 20khz depending on the encoder. Often this isn't changed by any of the quality settings, e.g. on lame it's still enabled on the "insane" preset without manually disabling it.

While that's on the very top-end of human hearing - most by middle age can't detect anything above 14-16khz, but it's certainly possible (especially for those younger) to have frequencies all the way up to 20khz as audible.

So it is possible for some people to hear a difference with some mp3 encoders, no matter the bitrate or quality settings.

And the psychoacoustic model is going to focus on the "average" listener, so it's perfectly possible that an lower bitrate encoding is transparent (IE: Completely indistinguishable) to one person, while another may be able to notice higher frequencies that have been cut off to provide more quality in the more noticeable parts of the spectrum. Or even the same person at different ages. This is completely physical difference, and no amount of training or harder listening would be able to bridge the gap.

And I find many of the higher frequencies that are hit by such things are often not particularly noticeable unless you're actively looking for them, being able to tell there's a difference and knowing what to specifically look far isn't the same as saying the recording is somehow less enjoyable due to quality differences.
There definitely was a short period in college where I needed to spend money I barely had to upgrade my system. This was when CDs first came out. I could tell, when listening through my stereo (as compared to plugging my headphones into the CD player) that there was a ton of extra noise/distortion and most importantly, a very high noise level (audible hiss). Ended up having to go to Salvation Army to buy a $25 used receiver and the speaker store to buy a pair of $200 speakers before I got decent results. Even after that, I had no end of problems with the analog cable. it took a long time to switch to digital.

Nowadays I can get excellent audio quality watching good Youtube videos or streaming from my preferred music site (I only listen through headphones now).

I'm super glad I was able to get to the quality level I liked for fairly cheap.
My LG OLED TV is connected via an AUX cable to a speaker, but still mutes its audio output after long-ish periods of silence. Cabled audio doesn’t help if the software sucks.
This.

One wonders if NIST can be fixed or if it should simply be abolished with all archives opened in the interest of restoring faith in the government. The damage done by NSA and NIST is much larger than either of those organizations.
There's no a priori reason why any recording medium needs to have a flat response curve, so long as the curve is known so it can be reversed. The reason for the RIAA curve is that most sound has an inverse relationship between amplitude and frequency. The RIAA recording curve limits the overall amplitude of the groove, allowing for better management of dynamic range and distortion in the cutting and playback processes. The slight lumps in the curve are a concession to practical filter technology of the 1950s.

Other analog broadcast and recording media have similar curves, called pre- and de-emphasis.

Digital doesn't need it because it has effectively zero distortion, and dynamic range to spare.

An advantage of vinyl is that there's a physical deliverable, making it possible to monetize it. I think that's why a lot of indie bands use vinyl.
He certainly can be too. There’s no rules about there having to be a single grandfather.

What’s important to me about Carmack is that he was unwavering about the need for high fps and low latency through the entire pixel pipeline (as well as a lot of other things), and that he brought the skills to make it possible.

A VR industry based on a common denominator of 60fps with 10ms panel response times was very close to being the reality (and IMO that industry would have killed VR’s adoption for at least another decade)
A few gripes about the post:

1. It appears the author hasn’t been doing this long, judging by their Twitter feed. I’m more interested when somebody’s been at something for a year or two. The whole “I’ve switched to $thing and it’s changed everything!” is always fun when it was written soon after the switch. Even funnier when you visit it a few months after and they’re back on the old thing. See also operating system switch posts.

2. “Most” notes systems aren’t using Zettelkasten. Most note takers don’t even know what it is.

3. I take handwritten notes and drawings all the time. Then I scan and OCR them into a PDF with my iPhone that goes into Obsidian via Shortcuts automations. This way it’s searchable and I always have them. I don’t have to remember to carry a handcrafted Midori/Moleskine around everywhere.
It's from the Serbian word "čuda", which is pronounced "chuda". It means "miracles", and also occurs in many other Slavic languages (Russian "чуда", etc)
You should compare them to the ultra premium category. These devices aren't competing with the massive majority of cheap androids.

Given that Samsung sold around 20-25 million S21s, it is absolutely a massive hit.
Reminds me of the tube vs transistor amplifiers discussions where tube amplifiers are supposed to have a warmer sound.
Then I'll give you one: autocrlf.

In fact, if you paste text into GitLab's "Web IDE" in a windows browser, the results are (or at least used to be? We stopped using it because of that) horrible to the max. Of course with the added nuance that copy-pasting a word vs. a paragraph vs. an entire file produced vastly different results, too. That one was fun to figure out.
The scarcity wasn't artificial. People genuinely didn't have ice and you were compensated for making it available. I don't see a problem with this.
> One thing I have to constantly wrap my head around is that being broke doesn't correlate to income. I have a family and a mortgage and savings and nothing left over for luxuries at the end of the month. But someone working as a bartender can afford a new Jeep and go to Vegas 4x a year because they have a good roommate situation and they are due to inherit their parent's second house one day.

I feel like we don't count our own responsible expenses but double count other people's luxury expenses.

A new jeep is maybe 6k/yr. A trip to Vegas is maybe 1k. That's maybe a total 12k/yr

If you're mortgage is 3k a month and he's paying 500 a month in rent, you throw in two kids @ $1,000 a month and maybe 500/month in savings and you're looking at 66k in expenses which dwarfs the 12k.
Any recommendations for an affordable city/town with moderate weather ( high 90f and 2-3 weeks of snow per year), walkable neighborhoods and good schools in North America (US/CA)? Seattle area is decent but too pricey for our family.
The institution credited, Jönköping University, is notable in Sweden for /not/ being a university and skirting the name issue by being named “Jönköping University” in Swedish as well. Make of that what you will but to me it seems like a con.

diva-portal.org is not a journal, it is simply a repository of all academic texts from Swedish institutions.
The "old" machine I played around with in high school (an H11) had an LSI-11 processor and 8" floppy drives. I think my dad still has it in his attic.

He also reacquired my first computer, which was an obscure 8080A machine ("Interact") with a tape drive.
> The Fed won't stop until they break the back of the labor market and unionization movements

That's not the Fed’s goal. Yes, tight monetary policy generally weakens labor leverage, but the target is inflation. If inflation comes down and unionization continues (which is not implausible, if non-labor price drivers like oil keep dropping), the Fed will almost certainly back of the brake lever notwithstanding the continued labor organizing drives.
From man 5 crontab

Note: The day of a command's execution can be specified by two fields — day of month, and day of week. If both fields are restricted (i.e., aren't ), the command will be run when either field matches the current time. For example, ``30 4 1,15 5'' would cause a command to be run at 4:30 am on the 1st and 15th of each month, plus every Friday.
Off by Doomsday – Demozoo
> It's absolutely, 100% fine for someone to say that they subjectively prefer the sound quality of a record player to a CD.

There's a lot of weirdos out there, but these ones aren't hurting anybody.
Love the concept but honestly - why the rear wheel cover? Complete turn-off from me (yes, shallow).
I have the exact opposite experience. Living in France for 8 years means basically assuming the usual french mass media rhetoric or the English one.
The ends don't justify the scamming.
The "AI"s i saw are oneway streets and don't change unless they are training. If we assume the brain is empty at birth, it is constantly training and working.
additionally the brain is from my perspective more complex because it is more meshed and has more input parameters. Some things are even processed before the brain even got them.
California DMV accuses Tesla of falsely advertising Autopilot and FSD features
Well they should clarify because they cite the example of the 2/3 breakage which is a major version break, and they're not complaining about packages just violating SemVer so I don't think your interpretation makes sense.

It also certainly wasn't what I was responding to, and responding with "hurr durr major versions" like I've never heard of them before is just mildly insulting (and kind of insulting to the parent comment by proxy)
I'm going to navigate to those pages, scroll back and forth, click to expand reviews -- they would know anyway.

If that's your issue, you practically can't buy things from Amazon.
Ironically, when I visit the site Chrome says my connection is not secured by TLS.
This is silly. AI is a tool analogous to a camera. Both existing only after billions of dollars of human effort in the global supply chain.

A person who points the tech at the right problem and configures it to get an outcome is the rights holder.
That is a beautiful poetic extra dimension of the book that only could could receive.
Selenium is the most popular tool in the industry but mostly for legacy reasons, its real competitor is Cypress. If you've just started a project I'd recommend checking it out, a huge time saver is that you install it as an npm package with a headless browser out the box without any webdriver/infra stuff slowing you down.
It's even easier than that. There's a few npm libs around that are dedicated to shipping a copy of ffmpeg with electron.
Here's the counter-argument that I've seen in cryptography circles:

Dual EC, a PRNG built on an asymmetric crypto template, was kind of a ham fisted and obvious NOBUS back door. The math behind it made such a backdoor entirely plausible.

That's less obvious in other cases.

Take the NIST ECC curves. If they're backdoored it means the NSA knows something about ECC we don't know and haven't discovered in the 20+ years since those curves were developed. It also means the NSA was able to search all ECC curves to find vulnerable curves using 1990s technology. Multiple cryptographers have argued that if this is true we should really consider leaving ECC altogether. It means a significant proportion of ECC curves may be problematic. It means for all we know Curve25519 is a vulnerable curve given the fact that this hypothetical vulnerability is based on math we don't understand.

The same argument could apply to Speck:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speck_(cipher)

Speck is incredibly simple with very few places a "mystery constant" or other back door could be hidden. If Speck is backdoored it means the NSA knows something about ARX constructions that we don't know, and we have no idea whether this mystery math also applies to ChaCha or Blake or any of the other popular ARX construction gaining so much usage right now. That means if we (hypothetically) knew for a fact that Speck was backdoored but not how it's backdoored it might make sense to move away from ARX ciphers entirely. It might mean many or all of them are not as secure as we think.
It could be, "With all the excitement going on, finding a nice programming project to distract me seemed like a good idea."
There's plenty of capital to grow small but profitable businesses. But it generally comes from in the form of a small business loan from a regional bank. Venture capital is explicitly a model seeking homeruns not singles.

Being mad at a16z for not investing in your online t-shirt business makes about as much sense as being mad at Warren Buffet for not investing in complex interest rate derivatives.
side question :

I've only recently started to digg a bit deeper into crypto algorithms ( looking into various types of curves etc), and it gave me the uneasing feeling that the whole industry is relying on the expertise of only a handful of guys to actually ensure that crypto schemes used today are really working.

Am i wrong ? are there actually thousands and thousands of people with the expertise to actually proove that the algorithms used today are really safe ?
Would you really want every random corporation having some random person pick from the list of open source cipher packages? Which last I checked , still included things like 3DES, MD5, etc.

You might as well hand a drunk monkey a loaded sub machine gun.
They could and should leak more documents if they have evidence of malfeasance.

There are both legal safe avenues via the IG process and legally risky many journalists who are willing to work for major change. Sadly legal doesn’t mean safe in modern America and some whistleblower have suffered massive retribution even when they play by “the rules” laid out in public law.

As Ellsberg said: Courage is contagious!
Learning from the Feynman Technique (2017)
This is BSTR for the Windows/COM folks.
For Judith Durham, I don't know if the problem is the physical writing of the songs, or the ability to compose a song. Sources aren't clear on that.
Doesnt a Roomba eat lego bricks and other small toys?
> It comes to about 16 million invocations per day. I'd guess obly a handful of their customers have this load on Lambda.

I'm not so sure about that. Without going into details, I have a project which calls a single lambda around 500 invocations/minute, give or take. That's already close to 1 million invocations per day.

We're talking about 30€/month worth of lambdas.
> North Korea

That is inhabited by the same Koreans that live in the south and only exists for geopolitcal reasons.

Just like east and west Germany.

Ukraine exists because Ukranian people exist.

Belgium is more of a buffer state than Ukraine

(no, I'm not Ukranian, far from it)
We wouldn’t even notice we’ve become pets of any kind of superintelligence; one can’t notice intelligence vastly superior to their own, same way your cat can’t even remotely grasp what the code on your screen is for.
> Individuals can prefer different sonic characteristics encoded in an output but that's an aesthetic choice.

I find that listening to one of three different sources (earbuds, gaming headset which is EQ'd via open source software, and inexpensive-but-fancy headphones) causes me to adjust to that particular set of headphones' sound. It seems to be like the equivalent of our brain continuously auto-white-balancing our vision.
Analogies are like cars, they're never perfect but that's OK.
The license is Apache 2.0 [1]

[1] https://openmoonray.org/license
Yes. And he promised those shareholders $54.20 per share, signed the contract, and now the same shareholders are suing to get the money. They don’t care what happens to Twitter if Musk takes over since they’ll have cash instead of shares at that point and can reinvest in something more promising.
This was a bit unexpected. What did actually happen during the summer to cause this?
In Debian cron, you can do:

0 0 */50,1-7 * FRI

It works, but it's a bit of a hack (to put it mildly ;-) )

Consider this expression:

0 0 1-7 * FRI

This one will run on dates 1-7, and additionally on every Friday. This is almost what we want, except we want an "AND" relationship between the day-of-month and the day-of-week fields, instead of the "OR" relationship.

The weird extra */50 bit exploits a quirk in Debian cron's expression parsing logic. It fools cron into thinking the day-of-month field is a wildcard field, and into applying the "AND" logic.
There's a huge difference, to most people, between natural sounds and the noise of other people being other people. It's just not the same and we need to stop pretending it isn't an issue.

I lived in an amazingly solid, all-concrete, incredibly sound-isolated complex for awhile. In the bay area, so it's nice to have fresh air and not live like you're in a bunker. And then the neighbor with the parrot moved in next door, and the neighbor with the kids who loved playing CoD late at night with a subwoofer moved in above.

In short, I will _never_ share walls again. Never. Enjoy the density.