skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So far we’ve had some individual publishers do that, but no retailer yet.

At this point I think Apple’s really the only candidate for it. Everyone else is either helped by DRM (Amazon, B&N, Kobo), too small, or just don’t seem like a good fit (Google). I was hoping they’d do it after doing so with music, but at this point I’ve given up.
Oh! I had the original version ("Flights of Fantasy") and that's where I learned as a teen about matrix multiplication to represent translation and rotation!
Centralized exchanges are not "blockchain" they're more like Venmo
Comparing payment systems is obviously not easy.

However, I've spent a lot of time studying the payments space (7+ years now!) and I'll quickly give you 3 reasons why UPI is "better" than Interrac for example :

1) Better User Experience

Systems like Interrac enable instant bank to bank transfers. However, they don't allow for third party applications to initiate payment requests / view balances. Customers are restricted to choosing a bank and sticking with the user experience defined by the bankers.

UPI , on the other hand, mandates banks to accept and honor payment requests generated from "Third-party payment application providers (TPAPs)"

This allows for a much larger variety of payment experiences to be designed, which can be "fit on top" of the existing banking layer.

PSD2 regulations, in Europe tried to achieve this effect, however most banks ended up implementing a custom version of the protocol instead of adoption a common standard.

2) Lower costs

Adoption of the UPI payments system has massively reduced the cost of sending money anywhere across India.

For Indian banks, the cost of sending money via UPI is wayy less than the "Gas fees" required to facilitate crypto transactions or the fees charged by VISA/MC networks to facilitate transactions.

Similarly, costs for a merchant to accept UPI payments are much lesser than accepting any other form of digital payment today (in India and maybe the world).

3) Federated Architecture

From Day-1, the UPI ecosystem has been design to support multiple switch providers, payment institutions and local regulations.

If countries like France, adopt UPI, they won't have to depend on centralized servers hosted in India to run their payments technology.

All their data can be hosted in servers within the country and the UPI instance facilitating French transactions can be tailored to honor local regulations and limits.

This flexibility is not as easy to implement with older payment systems (like VISA/MC).

--------------------

Much of this can also be attributed to the fact that the other payment systems were developed 15+ years ago.

The recently launched, FedNow system adopts a similar approach to UPI. Will be interesting to see how it evolves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obbpLGVoVxI
Except the ‘helpful’ steps you mentioned don’t really work. (Another commenter linked to some up and coming apps which are far more promising[1], I’d definitely urge interested folk to look into those.)

> moreover UPI needs no defending, its stats speak for itself.

The law of large numbers applies to UPI like it does to almost everything in India: you’ll get huge numbers which look good on slides.

In reality, UPI is a bit above 10% of India’s cash transaction volume, so yeah, the reality of “UPI is ubiquitous” isn’t quite there yet.

And “UPI needs no defending” is the exact uncritical thinking I expect when there’s any forum discussion of UPI. The thread started with people saying UPI doesn’t work for tourists & short term visitors, which I believe is valid criticism.

There are many other criticisms of UPI, including and especially the governance around it. (On a more optimistic note, all of this is fixable.) But that’s for you to figure out if you’re interested!

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/JDX-cheq-upi-digital-pa...
The article you’ve linked is incorrect. As Dr_Birdbrain said, fitting an SVM is a convex problem with unique global optimum. sklearn.SVC relies on libsvm which initializes the weights to 0 [0]. The random state is only used to shuffle the data to make probability estimates with Platt scaling [1]. Of the random_state parameter, the sklearn documentation for SVC [2] says

Controls the pseudo random number generation for shuffling the data for probability estimates. Ignored when probability is False. Pass an int for reproducible output across multiple function calls. See Glossary.

[0] https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/blob/2a2772a87b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platt_scaling

[2] https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.sv...
I read it. It's a good premise but I didn't enjoy it.

Even so, I still recommend that every LotR fan to read it.
That's a lot of time ago in the before times ;)

I've seen a product like this, yes, but I wasn't the one buying it

(got the schematic for some later products, for a fee)
Medical School 2020, Year 4, Week 12-24 (Interview Trail)
(As a person who went down the rabbit hole of knowledge-based systems and looked at Cyc quite a bit.)

Three forms of intelligence are (i) animal intelligence, (ii) language use, and (iii) abstract thinking.

Animals are intelligent in their own way, particularly socially intelligent. My wife runs a riding barn and it is clear to me that one of the things horses are most interested in is what the people and other horses are up to and that a horse doesn’t just have an opinion about other horses but they have an opinion about what opinion about what the other horses think about a horse. (e.g. Cyc has a system of microtheories and modalized logic that tries to get at this. Of course visual recognition and similar things are a big part of animal intelligence and boy have neural nets made progress there.)

Language is a unique capability of humans. (which Cyc made no real contribution to.)

If you get a PhD what you learn is how to develop systems of abstract thinking or at the very least go to conferences and acquire them or dig through the literature, dust them off and get them working. There is the aspect of individual creativity but also the “standing on the shoulders giants” that Newton talked about.

Before Lenat started on Cyc he was interested in expert systems for building expert systems or at the very least a set of development tools for doing the same and that was a motivation of Cyc even if the point of Cyc was to produce new knowledge bases and reasoning procedures that would live inside Cyc. The trouble is that this was a tortuous procedure and I did go through a phase of thinking about evaluating OpenCyc for a project but it had the problem that it would have taken at least six months just to get started with a project that could be finished in some other way much more quickly.

My own journey led through twists and turns but I came to see it as something like systems software development where you build tools like compilers and debuggers that transform inputs into a knowledge base and put it to work, but I very much gave up on “embedding in itself”

As for problems in general I don’t really know if they can all be solved? Isn’t it possible that there is no finite procedure to prove the Collatz conjecture?
Cubic splines are universal function approximators. As is piecewise linear interpolation. The universal function approximator thing is way overblown.
Functionally it seems a bit like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick

(where space is not really an issue)

Of course the rotation feature is cool.
Why should pedestrians be forced to clamber over bridges for the convenience of drivers?

Drivers are the one with huge mechanical advantage, make them go up and down, don’t force the local pedestrians who live in the to take huge detour, just so drivers from out of town can save 30 seconds.
It was an interesting reading to through your LinkedIn profile. Really liked how you summarized the work and tech used for each entry. When I reached the earliest entry "Night operator" which sounded like the start of a spy novel!
Cupboard DJ would be such a great title in my CV
Same experience here. And IIRC (it was a while ago), after happily hoovering up my CV and personal data, the rejection message was worded as if they were at capacity, not even that they didn't want me specifically. Could have said that up front, but of course they didn't.
Now fix decimate. :)
It's worth reading about the relationship between Wagner's Ring Cycle and Tolkien.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-t...
>I used to think this had to correlate with dominant programming language – c/c++/go vs ruby/java etc. but I don't know if that fully explains it.

There most definitely is a correlation here. Language shapes Thought and the more complex/expressive a language is the more does that Programmer have opportunities to explore new paradigms/ideas that expand his mind. Your knowledge footprint increases and you do get better than somebody else who learns a "simpler" language and/or just stays at the surface level without any exploration (i.e. i will just use this API and not learn about anything else).
gandalf says that even sauron was not evil at first - entities become evil in tolkien's world, they are not created so.
It failed, yes. If you want to go wide you could argue that all open source is "the Stallman movement" but given Stallman's noted hostility to other approaches than his own, that seems too much.

The peak of GPLd software was in the late 90s/early 2000s and since then the base of GPLd code has shrivelled. I can't remember the last time I encountered a library or program in my work that was even LGPL licensed, let alone GPLd, with the exception of some very old programs like the Linux kernel and a few bits of the userspace (plus Java's weird GPL+exceptions thing). These days almost everything new is Apache licensed or similar. Just browse around GitHub for a while and see what I mean.

Also:

1. The Linux kernel, the last bastion of Stallmanist philosophy, in reality has succeeded by not actually enforcing the GPL thus treating it more like LGPL or Apache2 in practice. GPL violations are rampant and rarely does anything happen. They also very publicly refused to switch to GPL3.

2. The most popular Linux based OS is Android where Google rewrote the entire userspace specifically to avoid the GPL, and then also created their own driver layer, again, to avoid the GPL and the Linux approach to technical "enforcement" (constant API churn).

3. The most popular UNIX based desktop OS is built on FreeBSD despite losing technical features, specifically because Apple refused to countenance anything GPL or FSF connected. The few dependencies they started with (like gcc) were rewritten into new BSD-style licensed codebases like LLVM at vast expense.

In other words the people who actually build operating systems for a living avoid like the plague anything connected to Stallman's vision or strategy.

It seems likely that eventually the Linux kernel would also be replaced, certainly Google attempted this with Zircon, but whilst enforcement is so lax and technical workarounds so numerous there isn't much reason for doing so.
:-)

I take my ring off when I play guitar or when my fingers get puffy, or sometimes I want the thinner band :)
This looks really promising, thank you. (And oh, it’s a YC company!)

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7094460...

Is there a page which lists others like this?
> rather than a link that goes down whenever it rains.

Oh, so you are finally conceding that Starlink doesn’t fit every use case? Because Starlink definitely goes down during a storm occasionally but a dedicated microwave link with high gain parabolic dishes won’t in the same conditions.

> I very much doubt there are any cases for remote industrial machine control where microwaves are the better option.

Oil and gas industry would beg to differ.
There should be a law that says that if you buy something and still don't fully own it, then it is a service, not a product.

Owning something should include that you can cut all ties with the original vendor, and still be able to use the device as advertised.
9/11 fifty years ago and its ongoing legacy
You need an helper method for that

public class Main {
private static <T,R> Function<T,R> fun(Function<T,R> function) {
return function;
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
var add = fun(x -> fun(y -> x + y));
var addFive = add.apply(5);
int result = addFive.apply(3); // Output will be 8
}
}

Those helpers should be part of the JDK.
Well, there were lots of other file-sharing systems as well that were older, that it would have been just as effective on. I just misremembered the timeline.
The Perils of Clojure
> Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam.

Why not?
Look at the tea cultures of Japan, China and the UK for just a few.

Half of me thinks it is unimaginable that you’d have milk and/or sugar with green tea but the other half has tried it. There’s a definite “savory” flavor to many green teas particular things like genmaicha that is enjoyable on its own and could be lost. On the other hand, I like sweet too, particularly the oolong you get at a Chinese restaurant.
Ah so you're a troll, because that's NOT what you previously wrote.
An important distinction, I think, is that good and evil are tangible and unambiguous as forces in the world, but there is still plenty of room for complexity in the struggle of good and evil within an individual. Is Smeagol truly evil? Is Denethor? Especially true if you move beyond beyond LotR proper -- Feanor, Turin, etc. Plenty of complex individual struggles even within a relatively simple and immutable binary of good and evil in the world's epistemology.
Ask HN: What does your single file “productivity app” look like?
I would love to see what you managed to do in a single file, how it compares to other people in structure, functionality and technology. It doesn't have to be literally a "productivity app", but could also be how you, planningly or not, take notes, ideas or thoughts in a single file.

I got inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184 (My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file).
Can a DNS server be used to fake Android/iOS internet connection tests?

What I'm after is a simple smartphone connection to a local only, no fuss, wifi network --- without any additional setup required.
You misunderstand.
The point is that online services now come with apps for no reason. Very few things are so local that what you say applies. Though those few definitely should be!

And as you are already on to, not all web apps are cloud. What can be on-device webpages (e.g. routers) should be.
> For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre

I listen to remixes all the time. Not sure what you listen to but they're massive in electronic music.
Bill Gates is a lot of talk but I suspect he's using his funds to push microsoft onto poor countries that would otherwise default to linux.
The article is about hybrid electronic and mechanical timekeeping though, not energy source.

While it has an analog display and a mechanical power source, the Kinetic's timekeeping is purely quartz. The Spring Drive has mechanical timekeeping which is automatically regulated by quartz.
Rarely has anything better? What does that mean?
> [1] I will probably never have anywhere close to a million individual accounts at code-hosting providers, even if it were federated. There will also never be more than a handful of providers where 99.9% of everyone goes.

I think we're talking past each other. I celebrate the move towards federated systems because if done right I won't need accounts on a bunch of individual systems. Unlike today where I do have individual accounts on multiple different code hosting sites.

> Is there any reason you think that this time, with ForgeFed, it will be different?

It's irrelevant to me if 99% of users are on a single ForgeFed instance as long as it's still federated so I don't need to be there if I don't want to but can still interact.

ActivityPub support also means that even if they do nothing to provide easy migration, spidering all the relevant content to move it elsewhere if a dominant ForgeFed instance goes rogue is easy.
Why Henry Ford Imported a Cotswold Cottage to Michigan
Mine drew this:

#___# ##### #______ #______ #####
#___# #____ #______ #______ #___#
##### ####__ #______ #______ #___#
#___# #_____ #______ #______ #___#
#___# ##### ####### ####### #####
Sounds like you're referring to https://www.explainpaper.com/ :)
We also used PCs from RM at our secondary school in the late 2000s. At that time there was still a very similar exploit that allowed me to embed and run unauthorised programs inside of PowerPoint slide shows. Fun times.
The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015)
We are measuring temperatures with satellites too...
Ya, that makes sense. But more work would mean more employees which would also have a (monetary and carbon) cost.
Yes we do. There are pedestrian level crossings in the UK but because there is the very occasional fatality they are increasingly replaced by bridges. This is a huge inconvenience for the vast majority of us who are capable of looking both ways and we do complain about it.
> I’m not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to repossess your PC or parts of it.

I would call iCloud locking an embodiment of this. It's probably an unpopular example because people seem to broadly like it, but it does demonstrate the principal that the seller retains full control of the hardware and can "repossess" the device. The original purchaser does not receive a master unlock code.

Even if locking yourself out of your device is "your fault", it doesn't alter the fact that at that point only Apple retains control of the device.

Same with bios locks and management engines on PCs.

The idea that possession = ownership is gone. And we're almost all ok with that especially since it makes us a little safer and more "secure". At least until we can't trust Apple, Intel, etc. anymore.

One could argue that the black market value for your locked phone compared to unlocked phone is a proxy for how much you actually own the phone.
Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.
I thought the same thing when I read it.

The funny thing in the article is that that tidbit almost reads like a throwaway line.
I think this applies to everything right now. Papers like this are just ridiculous examples. In like, 6th grade I won second place at the LA county science fair for coding a simulation of a coyote's life in hypercard (with tons of graphs). Yay. Y'know what? That shit and those graphs would've been incomprehensible to the judges if it hadn't been written in plain language, in an attempt to make them understand what they were looking at. My entire career since has been an attempt to communicate and alleviate the pain points in communication between parties, by way of writing software that encapsulated their descriptions of what they needed. And likewise I never pretended to be smarter or know more than my clients did: Everything must be explained and comprehensible in normal people language. People need to know how shit works, especially if they're paying for it.

Or they should.

Or if they don't know and don't care, they're fucking negligent.

Especially if they say "wow that sounds smart, let's let these guys run our weapons program".

To your point, the reason this ornate language thrives and people get away with complacency about how their own systems work, boils down to a silent pact between managers and engineers to sweep everything under the rug out of laziness and ill-will. There's something blatantly mendacious and evil (in the banal way) about the agreement that managers approve black boxes which were approved by complex-sounding papers so that upper management can wash their hands of the results.

[edit] maybe I'm just bitter because I spent hours today pondering exactly how many engineers at Monsanto must have known about the dangers of the astroturf, and how many raised their hand, or hid behind a spreadsheet

https://frontofficesports.com/investigation-links-astroturf-...
You don't need to. You get the choice. So if you want separate accounts on multiple sites, nobody stops you. If you want to run your own, nobody stops you. If you want to trust a given instance nobody strops you.

But likewise, if you don't want to trust provider A, but do trust provider B, nobody stops you *even if you want to interact with projects at provider A.
Honestly I think I'll be sticking to the big-boys: Knot DNS, Knot Resolver, Unbound and NSD. Those projects are well established, open-source, well maintained, battle-tested and as secure as a DNS server can be. I'm not sure what MaraDNS brings to the table that makes it exponentially better.

A single-maintainer project DNS server is not something I would be comfortable leaving exposed on the internet. Perhaps especially as there appear to be a few odd coding decisions, such as rolling your own crypto (RNG).
How does it follow though. Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them. They stop you changing the OS stack to an unknown one and then using them for the exact same purposes as before. That's much harder to explain and it boils down to in most cases, people still in love with the idea that one day a hacker/grassroots OS may become popular. Which is fun for developers to imagine but has no relevance to any end users.
Psilocybin's Fight Against Depression
The comments threads for this post are insane.

People, stop posting stuff that make me laugh because I am sitting at the ER with my son and people are looking at me funny.

I could obviously skip the comments and read about the next JS framework but where wild be the pleasure in life then.
Yeah Tolkien always used Germanic words when he could.

Patrick Rothfuss does this too, which is why his works also sound so pleasant and poetic.
Crazy that a country as populous is acting so prudent.
"If you think X, you've got another thing coming."

Another think, not another thing!

And it's harebrained, not hairbrained.
Love this game too :)
Not nearly as convenient. Do you use Interac to pay for a $1.50 coffee regularly straight from your phone? Send money to a friend without needing to exchange emails/phone/passwords? Be completely fee-less no matter what bank you use? Not require "acceptance" on the other end? Be notified and require approval before a merchant can debit your account? From what I understand, UPI has all of these things and Interac does not.
> I dislike how much for Tolkien being good means the same thing as obeying the right authority.

Yes and no. At least in LoTR, Tolkien's various Team Evil groups are pretty authoritarian. Often with the under-baddies ready to disobey or rebel the moment they think that they can get away with it. Under threat of war or violence, the various Team Good groups also tend to military-flavored authoritarianism.

But consider the start-of-story societies of the hobbits and the ents. Both have enjoyed centuries of fairly idyllic peace. The hobbits' authority figures - King, Thain, and Mayor - have faded to mythical and ceremonial offices. And their law enforcement officers seem to have been nothing but the Sherriffs - a dozen hobbits, armed only with walking sticks, with a feather in their caps as their "uniform". When the ent leader (Fangorn) is finally roused to action, he has to think long and hard to recall what other able-bodied ents there even are.

Having two such societies prominent of LoTR suggest to me that Tolkien had some quite un-authoritarian ideals.

(Yes, I'm omitting the Bounders, and Buckland's High Hay hedge, and ...)