skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, nobody likes being called a charlatan and you have to be careful with that accusation. Case in point: this article. I hate it because the argument he makes is correct and useful until the end, when he tries to claim that giving certain government agencies access to encrypted messengers is impossible without giving it to all of them "because maths". This is a good example of tech charlatanism and it's the sort of thing that will hurt our industry a lot in the long run. It's why lawmakers often end up not listening to us.

There is nothing that stops tech firms doing exactly what they're being asked to do. Every claim otherwise is obfuscation because tech firms don't want to do it, mostly because of their internal internationalist politics where they don't want to be forced to pick sides and tell some governments "sorry, we're Anglos who choose to give the US/UK governments special access that you don't get because we're better than you". It's an example of the first kind of no, not the third kind.

End-to-end encryption is a vipers nest of false claims like this. There's lots of ways to implement such policies, like this: for each message that's being encrypted, you encrypt it under a per-message key which is then itself encrypted under the recipient's key, and also a police (public) key. The servers forward the messages to the police so they can decrypt them. If the decryption fails too often (hacked client) then that user is denied access to the network. Yes yes I know that WhatsApp/Signal and friends use a more complex protocol, that description is a simplified textbook example, but the argument doesn't change.

Cryptography is a very flexible set of tools. They can easily be used to achieve complex security goals, like empowering some parties whilst disempowering others. The resistance to doing this is legitimate and I even agree with it, but it's also political and not technological. When politicians push back and insist that their police should have access to WhatsApp, and get told it's impossible, well they are not all stupid and correctly conclude they're being bullshitted. Indeed some of the MPs in the UK have computer science degrees.

Fact is, buzzword salads can be used to baffle people and get them to agree with you even if you're wrong. Technologists are especially tempted to abuse them when they want to say "no" to make a Type 1 No seem like a Type 3 No. Researchers do the same thing all the time, your complaints about grant funding are as old as the hills. Honest specialists speak clearly even when they might benefit from speaking unclearly.
Would you consider making a pull request?
React Native Development Company
Exactly. If you want to use a store: use a store, don't use Kickstarter.

At the same time I've seen things come by on Kickstarter that I think they should have never accepted in the first place. They were 100% sure to fail.
Huh? What does prevent Joe User from typing in https://www.nytimes.com?
Outside of it being a good idea to manually set `ashift=12` on each vdev creation (because disks lie and zfs’s whitelist isn’t omniscient. I’ve seen too many people burned by this) and `atime=off` for datasets (because burning IO updating the metadata because you’ve accessed something is just fucking stupid), the defaults are sane and you can basically refuse to care about them after that.

Every system I’ve used has `compression=on` set as default, which currently means lz4. People set it manually out of paranoia from earlier days I think.

For linux systems you can set `xattr=sa` and `acltype=posixacl` if you like, which offers a minor optimization that you’ll never notice.

I suppose if you don’t like how much memory zfs uses for ARC, you can reduce it. For desktop use 2-4gb is plenty. For actual active heavier storage use like working with big files or via a slow HDD filled NAS, 8GB+ is a better amount.

Dataset recordsize can be set as well, but that’s really something for nerds like me that have huge static archives (set to 1-4MiB) or virtual machines (match with qcow2’s 64KiB cluster size). The default recordsize works well enough for everything that unless you have a particular concern, you don’t need to care.

I should note, beware of rolling release linux distros and ZFS. The linux kernel breaks compatibility nonstop, and sometimes it can take a while for zfs to catch up. This means your distro can update to a new kernel version, and suddenly you can’t load your filesystem. ZFSbootmenu is probably the best way to navigate that, it makes rolling back easy.

You also want to setup automatic snapshots, snapshot pruning, and sending of snapshots to a backup machine. Highly recommend https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid

If you really find yourself wanting to gracefully deal with rollbacks and differences in a project, HotTubTimeMachine (HTTM) is nice to be aware of: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm
Got any examples of Google sabotaging WASM? First I have heard of this. I thought Apple was kind of since they seem to adopt some things somewhat slow or not at all.
They're not so cheap that you can just buy them when you need them. They're so cheap that you can keep them in stock!

Totally agreed about how annoying it is to lose days to shipping time for trivial purchases though.
agree on all points, but don't grind the paste smooth it should be chunky
I thought b&w only was a gimmick until I saw the results. Removing various colour components from the camera allows for sharper and more light sensitive b&w photos... Also more b&w tones imo.
> you still take up more area than any smartwatch. Just the main processor is typically larger than an Apple watch. On top of that you need 1-2 ADC chips of a similar size, several hundred MB of RAM chips,

I think you’re overestimating the functionality of this smartwatch.

They didn’t really make a full oscilloscope with hundreds of megabytes of RAM and high sample rates and many effective bits of precision.

They just used a microcontroller with a built-in ADC and exposed those ADC inputs with some input protection and filtering. Yes it’s more than a watch, but making a simple oscilloscope out of a micro with an ADC is a relatively simple EE project. It’s often done as a small project for EE students.

The real challenge was making a UI, packaging it, and shipping a hardware project to a small number of people.
https://plantbasednews.org/news/environment/george-monbiot-r...

‘It’s Pseudoscience’: George Monbiot Blasts Regenerative Grazing In Heated Debate

“So any story that says it’s good to be farming these livestock, it’s good to be eating these livestock, is a story which justifies among the most devastating processes on Earth,” he said. “It is climate science denial.”

Monbiot linked this denial to the interests of major corporations like McDonald’s, General Mills, JBS, and the Murdoch Network, who he says have “backed and weaponized” the idea that grazing cattle is environmentally beneficial. “The story is false,” he said. “When you make a grand claim such as this one, that livestock can mitigate climate change, either you produce the evidence for that claim or if you cannot produce the evidence you withdraw the claim. The evidence has not been produced, the claim does not stand.”

"A 2017 University of Oxford study titled Grazed and Confused accepted that managed grazing systems could sequester some carbon back into the soil. It added, however, that this was only around 20-60 percent of the emissions that the cattle produced in the first place. What’s more, after a few years soil reaches carbon equilibrium, meaning it cannot sequester any more."

"A review article published in the International Journal of Biodiversity highlighted that land left free from grazing had more biodiversity. “Published comparisons of grazed and ungrazed lands in the western US have found that rested sites have larger and more dense grasses, fewer weedy forbs and shrubs, higher biodiversity, higher productivity, less bare ground, and better water infiltration than nearby grazed sites,” it said."

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/grazed-and-co...

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-...

"This report concludes that grass-fed livestock are not a climate solution. Grazing livestock are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock. Rising animal production and consumption, whatever the farming system and animal type, is causing damaging greenhouse gas release and contributing to changes in land use.

'Ultimately, if high consuming individuals and countries want to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is.’"
I am with you, measure results and assume the team got it done with minimal effort. If it is for headcount then ask if you can get the same results with less headcount. If you want hourly workers who don't give a shit about results, hire those. If you want result oriented salary workers then hire those. The problem is every manager thinks they will be the one person to figure out a middle ground without consequences.

Micromanage here, red tape there, metrics-squeeze salary people and blame anything but your management tactics when things go south. I have been fortunate enough to have had some managers who knew better than all this nonsense though.

You just can't argue against results.
No. Switzerland isn’t in the EU. Include non EU countries and the population and number of guns is even larger, but gun homicides don’t change much.

Even gun suicides are far higher in the US per capita and per gun than in the EU.

The US has a gun fetish. People sleep with them for crying out loud!
Indeed, but unfortunately the crates.io team is chronically understaffed.
1. Sailboat racing.

2. Absolutely not.
I didn't know matrix had that many users!
Despite of that, I still believe that the ethos is important, I tend to think that people choose the open source model for a variety of reasons, including principles.
I noted that too. :-)

I advised someone designing a logo for a new remix a couple of years ago. (I've left the community due to toxic hostile newbies, but I still use the software.)

They had no idea that the Ubuntu logo was meant to represent something, let alone that it had a name ("the circle of friends").

https://canonical.com/blog/a-new-look-for-the-circle-of-frie...
figuring out exact "nytimes.com" address without using google, unless he has all 100M web sites in his memory somehow.
The focus on the top 10 in vector search is a product of wanting to prove value over keyword search. Keyword search is going to miss some conceptual matches. You can try to work around that with tokenization and complex queries with all variations but it's not easy.

Vector search isn't all that new a concept. For example, the annoy library (https://github.com/spotify/annoy) has been around since 2014. It was one of the first open source approximate nearest neighbor libraries. Recommendations have always been a good use case for vector similarity.

Recommendations are a natural extension of search and transformers models made building the vectors for natural language possible. To prove the worth of vector search over keyword search, the focus was always on showing how the top N matches include results not possible with keyword search.

In 2023, there has been a shift towards acknowledging keyword search also has value and that a combination of vector + keyword search (aka hybrid search) operates in the sweet spot. Once again this is validated through the same benchmarks which focus on the top 10.

On top of all this, there is also the reality that the vector database space is very crowded and some want to use their performance benchmarks for marketing.

Disclaimer: I am the author of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), an open source embeddings database
Nothing wrong with DOS (and I mean that sincerely), just Windows 9x was much more than it.
>If the tests are revealing that the system is "badly designed," the solution is not to throw away the tests in my view - it's to work on gradually refactoring the system to address the difficulties with testing it

I'm mystified that people keep suggesting this given the glaringly obvious chicken-egg problem inherent in doing it.

If you think you can't safely refactor without reliable unit tests and you can't get reliable unit tests without refactoring then you are stuck.

The ironic thing is that on the projects Ive dug out of a "not safe to refactor" quagmire (with high level integration tests), I always used to have an end goal in mind of refactoring to make the code more unit testable in the end. It felt like the "right" thing to do. That was just the industry dogma talking though.

In practice by the time I reached the point where we could do that there was usually no point. Refactoring towards Unit testability had a low/negative ROI at that point, with code that was already safe to change.
I'm not sure I follow why the "official" actions under the actions org are materially different to others? I agree they're likely to have better processes around contributions, but they are fundamentally an open contribution model with human review, and human review is fallible. Unless they had extra sandboxing, pinning requirements, materially better testing, etc, I'm not sure there's a huge difference.
Note that this problem of squatting (like many others security problems) is mostly a consequence of unmanaged repositories where developers publish themselves (like crates.io here, npm, pypi or the various "app stores"). Well-tended community-organized repositories, like most linux distribution have, do separate the role of package maintainer. This makes a much needed buffer between users and the developers, which regularly have contradicting interests, security-, support- and integration-wise.

See ddevault's two very clear explanations of this issue: https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/09/Developers-shouldnt-distr... and https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....
Bit sad how it's going. People go straight to product and venture scaled growth.

Build protocols, not products! I tell people.

It's a terrible advice actually, unless you like eating noodles and scraping by. But it's still the right way.

We're still waiting for the antirez' Redis version of Vector DBs. Maybe he should do one! :)
> There is now a generation of developers equating front-end with web.

I'd go further than that. There is now a generation of developers equating all of Software Development with Web.

The irony? They don't think their web browser, code editors, IDEs, operating systems, etc. are also software that someone developed. For them, it's like firmware that just magically appeared.
In today’s digital age, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have gained popularity as a form of digital asset. But in order to engage in buying, selling, and trading these cryptocurrencies, you’ll need a secure wallet to hold them. So, what exactly are crypto wallets and how do they work? In this guide, we’ll explore the basics of crypto wallets and give you some tips on choosing the right one for your needs.
Yes, you definitely wouldn't plan to have a baby and a pet to arrive at the same time!
Accommodating in the sense that in a language where you control the memory layout of objects, you don’t have to explicitly do an explicit encoding step, you can just specify a memory layout that the GPU can understand. This makes it a lot nicer to work with in my experience.

Here’s an example of a Rust object with a layout that can be sent directly to a GPU buffer:
https://github.com/paulgb/webgl2-glyph/blob/ef5a64a708856d67...
> tmpfs is getting user xattrs in kernel 6.6

I am aware of this, but the so-called user xattrs support most likely remains too bad to be of any use.

The kernel list message:

"Add support for user xattrs. While tmpfs already supports security xattrs (security.*) and POSIX ACLs for a long time it lacked support for user xattrs (user.*). With this pull request tmpfs will be able to support a limited number of user xattrs."

I am waiting to see which is the meaning of "a limited number", but based on the history of tmpfs, I suspect that this does not mean that the number of extended file attributes is limited to some value, but it means that there is a small list of names of user xattrs that will preserved (which are those used by some application that the tmpfs devs love, while they are hating the other applications), while the other xattrs will be lost, like now.

If "a limited number" is really a number, that would be much better, but this might still mean that the number is excessively low, e.g. ten attributes or less, instead of being high enough to not be a serious limitation, e.g. one hundred or one thousand.

> It is still just a oob store, you have to traverse the directory hierarchy old-style; the old BeOS did (and Haiku today does) something more: it indexed the selected xattrs and allowed live queries against those indices.

You are right and it would be nice if the file system itself would allow faster queries by xattrs than what can be achieved by testing the attributes of files selected by their names.

However, it is not difficult to create a database file indexing the files by attributes, but it may need frequent updates, to remain in sync with the indexed file system. I use such databases, but mainly for file system parts where I keep files for long-term storage, like books, research papers, handbooks, product documentation or older software projects.
It's possible, and common, for NPM packages to download additional binaries at install and/or run time. These would not be included in the hashes, and are essentially untrusted, often hosted on random S3 buckets. I'd hope there are checks in the official project to ensure these aren't being used, but there aren't any checks in this project.
BS. “Tech” as described here says no for one reason and one reason only. It will lose them money. Sometimes it will lose money over the short term. Other times over the long run.

That’s the only reason “tech” says no.

Individuals may say no for some of the reasons mentioned. But this article is basically describing companies and yes, they say yes if they think they will make money and no if they will lose money.

And this isn’t even a bad thing. Companies as a legal fiction exist for the purpose of making money.

What is a bad thing is people thinking that companies (especially public for profit ones) act on any basis other than whether they will make money or not.

Which is why this article is an f’ing disaster and naive beyond the extreme.
Security should be easier using WASM.
It's possible that our current perspective on vector storage could be flawed or incomplete, and exploring alternative approaches may yield valuable insights and improvements in data management and computation.
I tried researching this claim and found forums[0] discussing that in some cases Pentax has sold Tamron designed lenses but it sounds like it's far from all Pentax K-Mount lenses.

Also worth reading this article and the comments[1]. Sounds like all * lenses are in-house Ricoh designs, and just a few select lenses have been partnerships with Tamron.

Do you have sources?

[0] https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/10-pentax-slr-lens-discu...

[1] https://fstoppers.com/originals/comments-suggest-newly-annou...
Mohamed Al-Fayed began life as a porter in Alexandria and died as a billionaire
Yep, prelude is great. I finally have a common config across all my machines thanks to prelude, for some reason I never got everything consistent enough before.
The EU has been passing great laws which at worst have meant some annoying banners so no, it’s not just bad laws.
My problem is that that's a pain to type out. I've read that it's necessary (and other's have said it's not), but it'd be more convenient to just do `mirror /dev/sda /dev/sdb` than `mirror /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WDBNCE5000PNC_21365M802768 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_850_EVO_500GB_S2RANX0HA52854X`
I do think work is important part to rehabilitation and also meaningful to pass time. Where I have an issue with is as you point out the for-profit nature of prisons. Even in Europe where one might not immediately consider prisons to be for-profit structures, one has inmates assembling ballpoint-pens or assembling low tech items for EUR 5,30 per day. This will ensure the inmate can purchase coffee and chocolates once a fortnight. But it doesn't change their employability after release. Once they get out it is either back to crime, or straight into another state facility (homeless shelter etc). This could be different if the inmate were actually able to save up some money while there. Sure an addict will likely sound it, or they might have a chance to put it into getting help.

There is another more meta aspect to it when considering a facility location. Many times the facility is a small town and then becomes the biggest local employer. Not just for guards but also lawyers, state attorneys, social-workers, judges etc. If that facility closes down it means these people would have to relocate. This is very hard to decouple and untangle.
Ten years ago, the largest bookstores in Germany formed an alliance together with Deutsche Telekom and created exactly that. The name is Tolino, there are e-ink ebook readers, designed principally to be the anti-kindle, there is a web reader, there are iOS and Android apps and everything is synced by a cloud account you can upload your own books to or download any books you purchase from any of the bookstores.
You can link your bookstore accounts to your tolino account and you get to read anything you buy from them however you want.
Apart from the German ones, Belgian, Italian and Dutch bookstores joined in a few years later.

So what happened afterwards?

Deutsche Telekom sold the infrastructure to Rakuten, the Japanese owners of Kobo , in 2017. Interestingly, 6 years later, Tolino still exists with the same DRM-free architecture and new devices are actually developed by Rakuten.
Study suggests dose of psilocybin safe and effective as treatment
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Thank you for clarifying on my behalf
From what I can tell covid will just become less powerful and more common, and be with us forever - think of influenza. We’ll get a winter shot to protect against it.

There is a pretty high likelihood I think though that we will see a new bug like covid soon. In the past 20 years globally we avoided MERS, SARS, bird flu, swine flu…. Something new is bound to hit at some point.
I agree that computerized voting can make some voting schemes viable and I feel sorry for all the hard work needed to handle a big city worth of those 164x60 cm ballots, if I got the German right.

However about that 1 m² ballot: maybe the problem is in the rules, especially if they end up with 5-10% of the voters making mistakes and voiding their vote. Something different would result in less mistakes and less costs (printing, distribution, labor, storage, etc.)
Amusingly, vector search is conceptually nearly as old as keyword search.

Most older IR textbooks promote the idea of viewing keyword search as a maximization problem of the weighted bit vector product between the query and the document, where the weight matrix is something like BM-25.
Would you consider making a pull request?

Indeed, if it's 50-50 for a name, then there is no solution out of it. If it's close to 90-10, then maybe it is safe to pick the 90%. It depends on the scope of the project, I suppose.

Yes, the street names of US, Australia, Canada and a few other countries contain only the person's last name. Hard to figure out which is which. I agree with you.
How does that compare to similar existing tools like StackStorm?
They could of course ban iPhones in favour of the employees of companies that make worse products. The only people that lose out are the consumers.
>other times developers just don't care

I've seen that far more often than management pressuring people into writing bad code.
Apple spends $25 billion a year on R&D, and has like 10,000 employees and an operational factory in their supposed empty tax haven of Ireland.