skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh and by the way, Peter Thiel is an investor in Ycombinator who runs Hacker News so it is pretty much a given that any comment criticizing his brilliance will be downvoted immediately.
I didn't realize neuroscience and pharmacology are low barrier to entry oh boy
There are two bugs discussed in the article. One is the one this thread started with, which was the kernel deref'ing a NULL.

You're right that this is separate from the handling of the oops, which is the main exploitability that TFA is getting at, and certainly fixing one deref leading to an oops (the proc file chasing NULL) doesn't fix the other bug of "any oops can be further exploited".

But the context of this subthread is the implication that you must have some null, and some thing must happen when it is chased. That assumption is wrong, that's what the core of the comment I'm making is getting at: you can't follow a null if you don't have the possibility of them in the first place. (Or where you must have an Option<T>, you can build safe interfaces for handling that fact.)

> unwrap() would trigger the exact same bug described in the blog post with regards to reference count rollover

If we consider this instead as "an unwrap occurring during the oops handling", maybe, but it's not guaranteed that that is the case. Other aspects of Rust could similarly prevent that bug. I haven't fully grokked the latter half of the article, but I didn't think it would be necessary for the comment, as, a. the chain was about "Printing /proc/$pid/smaps is not on any conceivable performance-critical hot path." and b. followed by the question about null.

Ref-counting in Rust is often dealt with via RAII, and is safe through that, both in that RAII means the refcount is managed correctly and without input from the coder, but also Rc (and I presume Arc) will abort on overflow. I don't know if that would fully translate to kernel code, given that we might be taking refs due to the actions of userland, and that might be happening near the userland/kernel boundary and be reasonably subject to unsafe code that could very well fall prey to the same problems.
In theory quantisation should snap everything into perfect time, and quantised swing will still be perfectly mechanical. But there are a number of reasons why the timing might drift.

This is trivially easy to test. Use the pads to record a groove with a standard collection of samples. Replace the samples with clicks. Patch each track to the separate outputs and record into a DAW. Any timing shifts will be very obvious, down to individual samples.

With respect to Mr Linn, he's quite wrong about randomisation being uninteresting. Real drummers play with a Gaussian distribution, even when they're playing to a click. The tiny variations add a surprising amount of interest and liveliness.

But this works best as a dynamic performance effect, and I've never seen it implemented in a drum machine. Baking a randomised uniform distribution into a short repeating pattern is a lot less interesting.
Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible?
My search experience across a lot of products is, to put it bluntly, garbage. Apple Mail, Gmail App on Android, Finder search, Windows Explorer search, MacOs Spotlight... rarely find what I'm looking for.

Why is it so bad? Are indexes / Io ops really that expensive?
This is obviously not true. If there was no new wealth in the world than there was 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be so much more well off despite have billions more people.
I don't see much evidence that the US is the best functioning country around. It has a great geographic position and managed to get a great economy (in no small part due to said geographic advantages in WWI and WWII), but in measures that involve the government providing good services the US isn't doing any better than other developed countries.
I got my start on tracker software in the late 90s. I got meticulous about drum fills, and custom patterns that had little nuances so that it wasn't just the same loop playing for three to five minutes.

In the early 2000s, I joined a punk band at their drummer, and over a couple of years, got to be pretty okay at it.

When, a few years later, I found myself in front of a drum machine again (the Tempest mentioned in this article) I suddenly found the idea of "writing beats" to be absurd. I still recorded patterns, but most of the time, I was tapping them in, in real time. I reflected on how silly it was doing things how I used to, now that I could just... Play the drum beat
If you ever visit Amsterdam for some time, and like to visit musea, check out Micropia [0]. It is a museam where they exhibit microbes, that you can explore using microscopes.

[0] https://www.micropia.nl/en/
> I have a hard time seeing how that could be unconstitutional.

That case is not about whether section 230 is constitutional, it's about how it should be interpreted.
I think I'll disagree that this is off topic. What I quoted is a literal quote from the article. I wouldn't have mentioned it or caught it if it wasn't. From my perspective, the entire point of the article is the beauty and smallness of things that we are otherwise unaware of. The idea that books thousands of years old didn't anticipate, and thus don't accommodate, such is interesting. And I thought the discussion was good.
The Beginning of Edison Motors (3 min video)
Building the next generation of quantum computers
Debian Bookworm Freeze Started
Back in the day there was a project called Tomahawk Player that tied into a service called Echo Nest (which I believe got purchased and shut down by Spotify). For me that was the peak of music discovery. I haven't been able to replicate it yet.
Calling a family business "child labor" or unpaid labor is like saying a founder is doing unpaid labor, or if he is under 16-18, child labor.

Family, ownership, and business are concepts that overlap and mean much different things than a $1 trillion company with countless nameless faceless employees around the globe, that you can buy shares of.
Someone needs to build a browser extension that flags news links for which their main subject comes from an undisclosed source
> There is no US federal budget - not a binding one at any rate.

Yes there is.

> The president recommends and Congress passes budgets for internal purposes

This is simply false.

> but they do not carry the force of law.

Yes, budget bills, like other bills, have the force of law once passed and either signed by the President or vetoed and the President’s veto overridden by both Houses (the President’s budget proposals do not have the force of law, just like other unpassed legislative proposals.)

> The numbers that matter are how much Congress appropriates

“The budget” is just the aggregate of tax and appropriations bills (sometimes, there is an annual package entitled a “comprehensive” or “omnibus” budget bill that covers some tax policy and most or all of the annual appropriations, but that’s rare, and even in that case there are typically continuous and multiyear appropriations and tax policies that are left untouched and outside of it, but which are considered part of the “budget” even though they are aren’t part of the “budget bill”; more commonly, this doesn’t occur.)

> if Congress appropriates $X dollars for something the executive branch is expected to spend it, not second guess Congress and say we really didn’t want to spend that money.

While this is true, and more than just a soft expectation, since Train v. City of New York and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, it is not invariably the practice notwithstanding the expectation and the law (cf., the withholding of funds appropriated for Ukraine aid that was central to Trump’s first impeachment.)
The analogue aperture, so to speak.
If the cost of adjusting to the new thing is greater than the "objective" benefit it provides, then it is better not to change.
If an abort function still triggers cleanup, then yes it is better. C doesn't have such a thing, so your sarcasm about 'telling them' is unwarranted.

If an abort function doesn't trigger cleanup, then you can block it at compile time to prevent this kind of bug. But before you can even think about doing that, you need to split pointers into nullable and non-nullable. And the kernel devs already know about that idea, and how hard it is to implement in C.

Nobody is naively suggesting "hey kernel devs do this thing!" as if there isn't decades of momentum behind the current codebase. It's just a look at how C is bad at this particular kind of bug.
Ah, it does indeed. The dangers of skimming. Thanks for the correction.
This podcast episode is great as a high-level introduction https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/147-quantum-computing-...
Virus exposure and neurodegenerative disease risk across national biobanks
That might be brilliant evil, if they preempted the catchy old sayings about when to get out of the market.
I forgot to include it in the original and the edit window has closed, but I meant to add that one of my favorite things I've made got done because an unfriendly roommate went out for a few hours - finally giving me the time to be in the comfy room and hear what I was doing on speakers instead of headphones. I had a not-terrible hardware sequencing idea, it kinda worked, did 2 or 3 passes until I got something interesting, added a couple of knob-tweaking synth overdubs, some very light effects, and got it onto tape and then back into a computer.
Same, I’m always curious about peoples unknown strategies for sleeping
no, I did not commit that fallacy because I haven't made any claims whatsoever, just asking a few questions. As it happened, I don't even have any strong opinions on this, just curious.

To me, trying to cover up a (beginning) recession seems as stupid and useless as the National Weather Service lying about an incoming hurricane. Why would anyone do that, regardless of their agenda?

P.S. she's not running for office, so she's not under any immediate pressure to bullshit people. She has enough clout and experience to worry about legacy instead of engaging in such blatantly inefficient lying.
Exactly like this. Thanks for the pointers, and the smooth example video!
Ask 5 lawyers and get 5 answers.
Either way it doesn't matter unless that person is your lawyer.

I would have ask if they were a judge. At least they are tasked with weighing the facts and deciding and not fighting for one point of view
NPM Doppelgangers
I've twice done tech work for charities (the second being my current contract) and this is going to affect some charities, particularly the ones that rely on donors, over others that rely on grant money.
My experience is USB digital microscopes are much better because you can look at the picture on a big screen. The eyepieces of most cheap microscopes are terrible in comparison.

With a screen you can show the kids what’s going on. It’s a shared experience.
At this point I’be caved and just coerce through json via python and jam things through jq for most of my data inspection and sleuthing.
I love it, awesome job!
I agree with OP here. Coinbase as a company is almost as shady as the entire crypto industry (not the blockchain technology).
The CEO didn't ever know how to treat employees well and the culture has always been toxic.

The company was always run with the mindset of pumping money into a bag as much as possible and allow investors to check out with profits just the way crypto did to people at one point.
That reminds me of the old sayings "those who do not understand history—screw it, it's time to buy" and "fortune favors the people who buy things from Superbowl ads".
> Affirmations are a powerful and proven tool to calm your inner critic and increase self-compassion.

Instead, I recommend reading (or listening to) Kid Confidence by Eileen Kennedy-Moore. It's applicable to adults and to ones own self.

Here is a paraphrased excerpt:

---

Address your fundamental needs for connection, competence, and choice. When these needs are met, you'll be less preoccupied with evaluating yourself and questioning your worth.

Connection: Build meaningful relationships with family and friends. This is how you'll feel known, accepted, and valued by others. Also, spending time with people you care about will give you more interesting things to think about than your own self-worth.

Competence: Gain real skills so you can do things that matter to you. To feel competent you have to have genuine competence. Learn how to learn, so you can grown your own competence and unblock yourself when you are stuck.

Choice: Figure out what matters to you so you can make decisions that are in line with your values. Embrace opportunities to make your own meaningful choices.

---

Based on personal experience, I believe this is the right framework for real self-improvement. Your inner critic is there for a reason. Respect it and become a person it can be proud of. Affirmations and other popular self-help techniques are mostly bullshit. Also, it's interesting to note that if you inverse the above advice, you basically have the classical framework for running a cult.
Fresh ideas about the causes of depression are bringing new treatments
I used to work with a guy ("R.D.") who was one of the earliest COBOL compiler developers, who said that the primary COBOL compiler running on a massively fast (and expensive) IBM mainframe in the 1960s was horrifically slow -- so he and fellow tiger-team workers implemented their own compiler, generating instructions for an imaginary COBOL-specific CPU running on an emulator.

However, ultimately this was running on one of the I/O co-processors for that same mainframe, which had only about 10 simplistic instructions, so they implemented an emulator of a more usable CPU on that I/O co-processor, and then there was some extra complexity caused by the very limited RAM on the co-processor, so they had some extra layers of emulation that were swapped in and out, so the whole emulation stack was at minimum 3 layers deep and got worse from there.

The punchline is that the resulting COBOL compiler with many layers of emulation ran faster on the pathetically small and slow I/O processor than the primary COBOL did on the mainframe without emulation.

This appeared to be simply because the I/O processor tiger team understood efficiency tradeoffs, while the mainframe COBOL team took the attitude that the mainframe was infinitely fast and had infinite memory.

There are multiple morals to that; one of the more obvious ones is that nothing stays fast if you fritter it away by actively not caring about speed -- something which comes up over and over in today's world.

Another one is that peripheral processors are cool, both on big iron and on tiny iron. :) But see Ivan Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation regarding that. [0] [1] [2]

[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html

[1] http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133389
Kafka for Python Developers
"Once AmazonSmile closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists."

So, Amazon's tired of revenue going out instead of coming in....

Sure, the argument can be made that Amazon does let charities join their affiliate program
<https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GYV3PYE...>

But how many of those smaller charities are going to want to deal with all that fine print just to set a 24 hour browser cookie?
I wonder if kids body temperature being higher than adults is an evolutionary adaption as well?

Off to the sauna!
Detroit scores tops for startups but survey shows it needs to think bigger
Five minutes is ten minutes
Five minutes is actually ten minutes. And often fifteen minutes. Why’s that?
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings to step down from co-CEO
Grooveshark (RIP) had the best music recommendation engine I've ever used.
Glad to hear that, as I'll probably start that process fairly soon. Thanks!
Spoiler: they didn't ID the leaker, and also didn't interview any of the justices.
Your URL (which I've also seen and referenced a lot) sources the OP link at the bottom as "Source 2", so it at least seems the OP link predates this one.
Yeah, they're both languages which are quite unlike C in operation, but both (by design) use C-like syntax to be more familiar to existing developers. I think AWK has survived incredibly well for a language that's 46 years old.
Seems to make articles more readable to me.
TLDR: Lots of musical metadata converted into paragraphs and the SentenceTransformers Retrieve & Re-Rank Pipeline.(https://www.sbert.net/index.html)

The sentence embeddings are calculated using a Bidirectional Encoder Representation Transformer (BERT) model. There's a pre-trained model for this network trained on over 1 billion sentences from the internet that is publicly available, (thanks Microsoft) . The model transforms your description into a 784-long list of numbers (a vector) that represents the contextual meaning of your sentence.

The model runs off a dataset of musical metadata for 35,000 songs. As a "chronically online music nerd", I knew where to find it. The metadata is very rich, it has a lot of useful columns like the genres, subgenres, and descriptions of tracks. The numerical data is binned into categorical values like "obscure" mapping popularity between 0 and 10, "highly danceable" mapping danceability between 80 and 100, etc. The text data is modified into a coherent sentence: "this song's main genres are _____. this song is from the 80s. this name of this song is lovefool by the cardigans. etc"

An arduous part of the project was describing each musical genre in depth, with its own paragraph such that each genre's actual contextual meaning is captured and not just "This song is a Hyperpop song" or "This song is Adult Contemporary". It was a big exercise in music history and tested my knowledge of music. I also learned a lot about musical genres like "Mongolian Throat Singing" and how it compares to "Gamelan Throat Singing".

I also put the song lyrics for each song through GPT-3 and asked it to summarize the lyrical themes. That's also embedded and used in NLPlaylist.

Each feature for each song in our metadata dataset is now a big paragraph that describes the song. The paragraph is split up into sentences, and the embedding of each sentence is found. The final embedding for each song is then calculated by taking a weighted average over all sentence embeddings from the big paragraph and genre and lyrical embeddings.

To make your playlist, all that has to be done is compare the embedding of your query all 35,000 embeddings in the dataset and return the 100 most similar queries, using the cosine similarity distance metric. Thank god we have computers.

Once the 100 most similar candidate tracks are found, they are reranked using a "cross encoder" trained on 215M question-answer pairs from various sources and domains, including StackExchange, Yahoo Answers, Google & Bing search queries to give the best matches.
A copper foil (or tin shield box) would be far better.
All it did was reflect poorly on Australia.
And also had probably best web UI for listening to music. RIP
ChatGPT Used to Develop New Malicious Tools
That's my understanding as well. Lying on a clearance application is far worse than admitting to many criminal acts.

The thought is that someone could blackmail you into revealing secrets by threatening to expose your lie, thus causing you to losing your clearance, job or worse.
Okay, but sometimes the new one is objectively worse; Reddit's new design massively reduced information density and was also the deployment point for a lot of user-hostile behaviors.
It won't. In a couple of months everyone will have forgotten the old design ever existed and the next time they redesign it people will make extensions to bring back the new "old" design.
A blogger spamming their article.

Alternatively Hacker News only lets you post a link once. So if someone posted the FT link at a bad time, you wouldn't be able to post it again and it wouldn't get exposure. This gives the link a second chance
Imagine being one a trillion cells in a human body, born into slavery serving an unknowable entity called the Mind that may as well be called God.
The first one is very clear, I agree. However if I wrote Rust daily, I would probably be familiar with the second one and would prefer it. Here's an article kind of related to that, in this case talking about APL, that I think explains very well the tradeoffs: https://beyondloom.com/blog/denial.html.

To try with my own words: programming is about shared understanding of a problem, but also the tools used to solve the problem. Code is text, text has a target audience. When it is experts you can use more complex words, or more domain-specific words. When it's intended for a wider audience, taking the time to explain and properly define things, sometimes multiple times, can be necessary.

According to Rust's documentation of Some:

> zip returns Some((s, o)) if self is Some(s) and the provided Option value is Some(o); otherwise, returns None

> zip_with calls the provided function f and returns Some(f(s, o)) if self is Some(s) and the provided Option value is Some(o); otherwise, returns None

Using zip_with seems more appropriate (x.zip_with(y, +) or something) but zip_with is nightly. I also don't like how object chaining makes so that x seems more "fundamental", or "in another category" than y and +, while really x and y are the same, and + is something else. The if solution shows clearly that x and y are the same, by treating them exactly the same. The second solution also introduces a and b from nowhere, doubling the number of variables used in the function. All small things, but I think it can help put words on why precisely the second isn't as readable as it may seem.

It's interesting how much can be said about a simple "add" function.
> Lying on a clearance application is far worse than admitting to many criminal acts.

For one thing, admitting to past criminal acts doesn’t add a new criminal act with the statute of limitations clock at 0, whereas lying in any official government process, like a security clearance application, does.
As the saying goes, half of problem solving is about asking the right questions
I also got the sense that when trying a prompt like this that it latched on to one or two parts of it. For my prompt of "upbeat rock with violins and bagpipes" most of the songs fell in to the "upbeat rock" or "rock with violins" (a lot of classic rock power ballads that came up here). Only one or two songs with bagpipes.

I think there may be something about the popularity of songs and artists in the data because most are more popular and that may skew the results a bit because maybe my celtic rock bands don't fall in to the more popular categories.

But still, kudos. The goal of it was to be able to find new music in a different way and it definitely got me there.
Exactly, the XY problem happens because of ignorance. You can't ask X if you don't know X exists.
That's still subjective, even if it's shared by many. I prefer new reddit.
You ever heard of the lottery? Guess what? Every bit of it is money someone lost and half of it funds your government. Wait till you hear about options trading and people committing suicide over bad trades.
> I got the impression their warehouses were pretty damn good compared to other warehouses

This is the correct impression. Amazon warehouses are almost always a step up in both pay and quality of life vs. the other local employment options.

Source: many friends work(ed) the industry. Amazon was seen as trading your autonomy in for a better overall place to work.

The memes about their warehouses being the worst in the world only really exist in white collar circles.

I could never work for them in such a job, because I require too much autonomy to be happy. I don't deal will with strict metric systems that they enforce. However, others really do enjoy that aspect of not having to put an ounce of thought or problem solving into their dayjob.