skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The thing is, AD predated CT substantially, and was well-understood for a long time. The original theoretical description of AD is something I understood, and the CT description of it was impenetrable, and not useful.

I was the one who linked that. I wasn't familiar with AD before his talk, but I find it perfectly understandable (modulo Haskell's sometimes foreign-to-me syntax). I think the relevant background here is that I was a math major and had a course in abstract linear algebra (i.e. general vector spaces over fields) and two semesters of abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields) plus dipped my toes in some CT on my own.

He basically notes that D had a slightly nicer chain rule if you write D'f(a)= (f(a), Df(a)) and use D' instead. Then his definition of AD is just the chain rule and the product rule, plus the fact that Df = f for all linear f, applied recursively. So forward mode AD is just writing down facts you learned in calc 1 as a recursive definition (with, I guess, some base cases like sin/cos hard coded).

His description of reverse mode AD is more complicated, but IMO still accessible to someone who's seen dual spaces, product/coproduct vector spaces and maybe enough CT to understand that the map from a vector space to its dual (and matrices to their adjoint) is a contravariant functor.

The basic observation is that he can write the chain rule and product rule as a compositions of linear maps with product/coproduct spaces (which are the same thing for vector spaces). Then he says a biproduct category is one that has (equal) product/coproduct, and notes that the dual map preserves that structure. The point is that biproducts are what he needs to write chain/product rules as compositions of linear maps.

Since he wrote D' recursively in terms of linear maps, and dualizing/taking the adjoint still gives him the structure he needs to do that, he's able to write reverse mode AD as the adjoint representation of D'. He just needs to write the adjoints of the pieces he used, and again compute recursively.

I know at least at my school, the engineering program I was in had a first semester graduate class that dealt some with dual representations (using "test functions" etc. when solving differential equations), so I think it could be distilled down to something appropriate for masters level engineering while retaining the character of what he presented. Like I said, the Haskell syntax was probably the most obscure thing for me.

It's all a matter of perspective and background, but IMO it's sort of like how if you're familiar with linear algebra (including function spaces), then the Fourier transform is just writing a function as a sum of projections onto an orthonormal basis. No need to remember the formulas for it; they're obvious and have simple geometric meaning.
>Ah, yes, the Ferrari customer experience.

The difference here is that you can only get a Ferrari from a dealer. Apple products aren't exclusive to Apple stores, so driving away customers eager to shell out money doesn't seem optimal.
To be fair, unless you're building some low level infrastructural systems, coding is the easiest part, and code is cheap.

Drop any senior dev into coding duty, and their skills return after one to two weeks. On the other hand, asking a junior dev to implement a new system that integrates with 3 other departments, and you'll have to wait two quarters for them just to figure out who to talk to and how to get consensus.
> You hire some 'B' players, and they in turn hire 'C' players. An 'A' player will hire other 'A' players.

I have never seen this effect in practice. I believe it is a trope.
Scandinavian here. Had a very brief attempt at Silicon Valley and SFO, 2012. It seemed like a Disneyland of tech. In the end all I got was some very great parties, friendly and inviting people whom I didnt realize were just shmoozing me. Most of that was outright lying. 0% of the connections and the "leads" got anywhere
I threw a bunch of sand in the air and it came crashing down to the ground fast.

I would have loved to stay and lived the millionaire tech dream I thought was achievable.

Loved the scenery, Marina to Sausalito was a great run.
I think the point is that if your home surveillance system encourages you to notify police about about any feels-related issue, then that can add a really nasty edge to your or your neighbors unconscious bias. It’s one thing for me to get freaked out because a black homeless lady comes up on my porch at night, it’s another thing for me to call the police on her. Turns out she’s not actually homeless and is actually very nice and downright hilarious, though she does have drug/alcohol problems.

The author does a good job of explaining that it’s precisely the Neighbors software that is the cause for concern here, which is probably why they are less reticent to suggest other brands of cameras which (presumably) don’t have the one-click police video-feed notification button.

I will say that it’s not an amazing argument, just that you may be misreading why they don’t like Ring.
It seems to me that they are indeed admitting to using the pile/books3 dataset, which seems to contain Silverman’s book, at least.

See post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659041 for a summary.
Sure, fonts local to my machine. Remote fonts can go to hell, and I've likewise got cookies and JavaShit all blocked as emails go because WTF does email need them for?

Seriously, my threat model doesn't include anything that updates claim to guard against. I'm not a fucking enterprise server, nor does any government specifically want my shit. Try arguing for me to update my router before talking about the virtues of Windows updates, at least that might alleviate random port scans and the like which are in my threat model.

I'm far more likely to get pwned by some service getting hacked and leaking my shit rather than /me/ getting hacked. People who scream at me that EOL Windows is dangerous can go pound sand, because they have no clue WTF they're crying about.
It sounds more like fire departments were flooding the waterways with PFAS, not 3M.
Taleb habitually oversimplifies things, creating strawmen to score easy points. He does generate discussion but probably not in the quarters he is targeting.

The deeper philosophical argumemts about the nature of knowledge have been debated endlessly [1]. The naive empiricism he criticises is never too far as a stance (see e.g the discussion about how much an LLM understands the knowledge embedded in the language corpus).

There are pragmatic reasons people use historical data in a direct rather than indirect "internalized" way to assess range of outcomes of a system.

One reason is the lack of understanding of such complex systems. I.e., the absence of usable and validated mathematical / logical constructs that would allow accurate answers to what-if type questions.

Another reason of sticking to historical data is simply the fact they are harder to game.

Ofcourse a practice might get established for more or less valid reasons but degenerate over time into a stylized bureaucratic convention.

The pathologies associated with incomplete understanding (in particular( of the human condition are many and they are quite dangerous if not existential.

"Angry men" railing at the "system" to sell books might not be the optimal path to get on top of them.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
What the heck is an API? [video]
If you overshare with the police and none of it is evidence of an actual crime they are going to stop looking. They simply don't have time to watch thousands of videos sent in by paranoid old folks.
No, the ones using Spark. Do keep up!
I would suggest that perhaps you are not looking for news, rather entertaining, thoughtful writing. Maybe something like Lapham's quarterly, and other literary focused publications would scratch that itch? I have realised how much nonsense masquerades as news since using boring report (https://www.boringreport.org/app) but YMMV.
Just to paraphrase a meme "Not a Cell Phone in Sight, Just people living in the moment" : "Not a single SaaS in sight, Just people producing value"

I was quick to pick SaaS as a target, please suggest any better alternatives. I'm trying to convey the idea that technology is not the objective, it's a tool to achieve the goal. So if cassette tapes are getting you there you don't need a fancy software and newest hardware.
The patterns are read using a Z80 Sharp MZ computer (MZ-80K?) from 1979. Nice

This channel (Byte Attic) have a restoration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiAL5LCQ7Ds
Yeah, this is where the Vision Pro has most of my interest and excitement. The reported[0][1] 3400PPI resolution on the thing is going to be next-level. My main use-case for it will be as a productivity device, and everything else will be a bonus.

[0] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-vision-pro-display-spec...
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/apple-vision-pro
I am not sure I fully understand what you mean, but my question was that if all important data/metadata is encrypted when it leaves the hardware that is trusted then why does it matter if there was a hostile malware on the baseband hardware? A sibling comment mentioned the pinephone has only usb and i2c to the baseband, so barring 0 days over the USB, unless USB also means whatever the equivalent of DMA on mobile is, then it can't impact trusted code.

This is kind if like my home ISP router. I don't care if it is compromised because I don't manage it and I don't trust it with any of my important data or expose it directly to trusted devices.
It has bugs. I need to go back and fix it.

Your actual Easter egg is really solid. You got lots of small details right on about that one.
I think this can to some extent be determined in the discovery phase of the lawsuit. We probably could have some interesting outputs from this process.
I've seen it in real life. Don't ask for a citation, though.
Some "side quests" you might enjoy:

San Francisco Public Library (Main Branch) has a pretty great collection of CS books. Fourth floor (or fifth... can't remember), 000 on Dewey Decimel System. You can place a hold on any book in the SFPL system and have it delivered to whatever branch is most convenient for you.

Definitely make a pilgrimage down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. And walk around the Google campus since you'll be right there anyways.

I also find it inspiring to read up on all the stuff that was created at Stanford and Cal and then walk around those campuses. There are a lot of physical locations around the Bay Area that were the physical birthplaces of important developments in the computer industry.

Last and most importantly... welcome!
Cloudflare Pages is free.
Far more than anyone is willing to pay.
> Just people producing value

You aren't very familiar with Japanese corporate culture.
AFAIK, punch cards were used in the textile industry long before computers came to town. It’s just very convenient to map patterns.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it:)
> [deleted]: If anyone (white hat) can hack this place - upload some really beautiful patterns that certain [cosplay/furry/pokemon/whatever] types would love then have those communities purchase these patterns and keep this going.

I live by a different Japanese small town famous for its textile industry and there's at least one place still similarly using punch cards and tape. They exhibited some of it and a contemporary art piece made using it during the annual Fuji Textile Week last year.

Separately I also met an artist who's doing binary-hacked glitch embroidery and knitting with older machines in the area. I think they have stuff for sale from time to time and would be open for commissions. There's some pokemon/otaku/tech-related stuff if you dig through their insta.

https://nukeme.nu/tagged/Glitch%20Embroidery

https://glitchknit.jp/
Monks and scribes recorded them in illuminated manuscripts on vellum.

I expect many of these will be readable long after HN has vanished into the ether.
How do I learn to analyse and critique my own writing in this way?

It’s broader than just grammar, more like rules for good writing which could almost be automated.

Are there a set of rules or a good book I can refer to?
Why is 3M getting all the blame?

From TFA, a big reason for the high concentrations in waterways is due to firefighter training exercises. Did 3M have any oversight into how much firefighting foam firefighters dump into the waterways with their training exercises? Seems like culpability is more with the user of the product than the producer of the product.
Thanks for your help. I have written to you.
In addition to the meetups and finding some projects/work.

Search linkedin for people doing work you are interested in and say you'd like to learn about what they do. Offer to buy them coffee or a drink. But be very clear you are not recruiting or trying to sell anything. Expect maybe 1 in 10 to actually respond. But you will meet some interesting people and get to know some good coffee places (or bars). People are generally happy to talk about themselves as long as they feel like there isn't a catch.

I am not directly in development but I do work in Biotech software in SF. I am happy to chat, probably not directly relevant to your goals but maybe a starting point.
Code, like say English poetry, can be subtle. Reading the code can easily answer the question "what does this do?", but it usually doesn't answer "why are we doing it?"

Most importantly it doesn't tell us what we're not doing here, and why not.

I find myself adding comments to my own code when 6 months after the fact I'm re-discovering why something that looks casual is really important. Why that one "obvious " improvement or optimization is -not- done.

But that's documentation at the lowest level. Most of my documentation time (and I'll admit to writing a lot of docs) is about a bigger picture; hoe is the code used, what problems does it solve, how it interacts with the world and so on.

Documentation is not about writing the obvious "this increments x", its about making the code reusable, making it useful to yourself and your colleagues, my noting that it exists.

It I'd if you like the "search index" into the code.
Earlier discussion from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657540
Longyou Caves
So they think the crushing bureaucracy will somehow fix itself?
> I was quick to pick SaaS as a target, please suggest any better alternatives.

JavaScript frameworks would be a candidate.
This is actually a big issue with academic research related to bounded rationality. Although you could model it mathematically in another way, by far the most common is to use the rate-distortion approach. Rate distortion theory basically boils down to analyzing optimization problems of the form “minimize cost + (information-theoretic) entropy”. Problems of that form arise and are used for different reasons in fields including, e.g.: statistical mechanics, Bayesian statistics, anything in machine learning using softmax, large deviation theory, differential privacy, and, of course, bounded rationality and information theory.

However, since all these fields refer the same thing by different names, tools for handling problems in one field don’t get picked up by people working in another field. Either someone else rediscovers it later or someone has to have knowledge of multiple fields and see a connection. Sometimes the analysis done by one field isn’t useful in another due to different assumptions and research concerns, but that’s not obvious because you have to peel back a lot of layers of domain-specific jargon when reading the paper. Even though the math is very similar, reading a statistical mechanics paper written by a physicist is a real pain if you’re coming from an applied math / CS background, for example, because fields have their own notational conventions and refer to application scenarios that are meaningless to you and you need to figure out if that thing they reference is important to their development or not in the abstract.

It’s almost like reading House of Leaves. Here’s 30 pages with weird fonts describing the use of light in a non-existent movie and comparing it to both real movies and fake movies real people were supposedly involved in. Will it be relevant to the plot and thus require careful reading or can I skim this section? Maybe, but you won’t know unless you keep reading.
I think another comment mentioning look into meetups is the most solid advice in this thread.

To be honest, your post is a bit of a mess in both what you are doing (and have done) and what you are seeking. You clearly have some skills since you are getting paid to be remote and work on technical projects. I would consider taking a step back and figuring out a way to package that.

Next, what sort of external engagement do you want? I think Meetups are great. I'd also look things like Super Happy Dev House and similar events to meet with other people across a mix of interests / skillsets.

Most importantly - what do you want to do / achieve? You have a job paying you, where you feel like you need to grow, but they are letting you be remote. Keep that until you grow more. Those saying join a startup are bat shit stupid. Startups are a walled cage to deliver on the goal of the company and investors. They are great for learning and opportunities for growth, but you need to first narrow down what you want to work on. And most importantly, do not give up that remote option you currently have.

And, honestly, do not idolize the "brain power of the country". There are many in Silicon Valley that will push others under the bus to maximize total comp/etc. Look for those wanting to build and discuss ideas not just push a particular thing.

Good luck. But also, I don't know your age, it sounds like you are in your early 20s, make sure to allow time for you and your GF in addition to your working hours.

If you see a startup saying "we work hard, we play hard, we are a family" RUN THE FUCK AWAY. They just want cheap labor and all your time. I've been to multiple YC "work for a startup" days where companies say this and ... people there were not happy unless they had no GF/other life.

Edit: Also consider looking up Hacker Dojo in Mountain View and events there.
What if you want to post something when you’re not at your computer? What do you do in those situations?
Isn't distilled water also bad for your teeth?
So how do we fix the actual problem? A functional police service is a useful thing to have and a moral imperative.

American police are sub optimal so we have to stop working with them and get rid of them is a non-sequiter
Google.

Huh? You don't think Google is an AI tool? Why not?
The message is different though. If you downvote it says undown.
UHM - I really need to know more about you/what you know - because this is a passion of mine as seeking the next thing I want to focus on - and the terminology that you have is exactly where I want my knowledge to be.

Please point me at what I should study to be proficient in topological data science (which is what I want to study)
I know true crime youtubers tend to avoid the word like a plague, so take that for what you will.
Lol, realistically it really isn't. The fact that there are plenty of complaints about muh leftist censorship is pretty indicative.
Why would they? The TUI seems to be fine. An modernization would probably be way worse given today's "UX" trends.

Maybe they should replace the computer and cassettes before they run of out them.
From the sounds of it, it was impossible for them to keep data after the 30th of June, so not sure a soft-delete at the deadline would work. Of course the better option probably would've been a soft delete before the deadline, but you know that some customers would've said "why'd you do this before the deadline, you could've waited an extra month!"
"What is a War Crime? and why does America like facilitating them so Bad"
I used Midjourney to generate some icons and then remove.bg to get rid of the background.
> It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good)

The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.
You must have a SIM in the laptop at home (that's a "2FA mule") but you can use the WiFi on the phone. That helps also in other scenarios.

The last time I was in Australia I had a dual SIM phone. I put an Australian SIM in the second slot and used it for calls within the country and for data. SMS from my country didn't reach me or cost an absurd amount, can't remember. The point is that I was out of reach of 2FA SMSes and I couldn't use one of my credit cards online. Of course their customer service told me that I could switch my account to my Australian number but that never worked, it's probably a common move in scams and identity thefts. A 2FA mule would have saved me somewhat, as in some remote areas there was only voice, if lucky, and data was so slow to be useless and WiFi doesn't exist in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, would have I left my primary SIM at home and be unreachable on my way to and from the airport? Probably not.

2FA on SMS should die. Unfortunately it's very convenient for companies. There is little setup and they can send an SMS to any random customer with little friction on customer side. No app to install, nothing.
102 years ago General Motors started poisoning the entire planet with lead [1] (being helped by DuPont, the same DuPont which manufacture PFAS, to manufacture tetraethyllead-TEL, and in collaboration with Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, now known as ExxonMobil, the same ExxonMobil that predicted very accurately climate change 50 years ago, in the 1970s [2]).

Today, in 2023, General Motors has a market cap of $55B with $156B revenue in 2022; DuPont, $32B market cap, $13B revenue 2022; ExxonMobil $417B market cap, $413B revenue 2022.

These planetary-scale terrorists are killing you, your children, and any possible future for a few trillions, and you have been conditioned to sustain, maintain, defend, extend this criminal system.

These world-destroyers thinly masked as "companies" should have been dissolved literally 100 years ago. But in the words of the contemporary ponderer, George W. Bush, after receiving "$1.5 million from the oil industry for his 2000 presidential campaign, at the time, the largest donation from the industry to a single political candidate" [3], and asked by Manmohan Singh, India's Prime Minister, why must ExxonMobil approve India's largest state-owned oil company to buy into the Sakhalin-1 energy project in Russia and "why don't you just tell them [Exxon] what to do?" Bush replied: "Nobody tells those guys what to do."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Leaded_gaso...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64241994

[3] https://www.desmog.com/2015/04/21/george-w-bush-elected-pres...
This seems like a middle-size manufacturing company, not office jobs where the issue you’re referring to is most salient.
Yeah, that’s what I was envisioning. There hadn’t been any mention of raising the laptop, just tilting the screen back, but maybe that part should have been obvious. I very rarely work from the laptop screen, so I wouldn’t think to bother with that.
It would be great to read in which exact ways did money from VCs help your company to reach the current state?
For that timeframe I would actually have picked either Delphi or C++ Builder, not VS.

As for the COM joke, it is still on us, given how widely it is used as main Windows API nowadays.
Waypipe can run Wayland applications remotely in a more modern fashion that doesn't suck ass on all but the fastest network links.

But this will be a useful stopgap for those who stubbornly cling to X11 (or are forced to, e.g. by NVIDIA hardware) as more and more useful software drops X support and goes Wayland-only.
But what is the water filter made from? What if it's also dependent on PFOA?