skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For anyone else who always wondered what this circuit thing is and what happened to versions one through four: appeal courts in the USA seem to be numbered one through eleven, each having a few states they serve, and the group of states is called a "circuit". The word apparently has a meaning of a geographic region, so that's where that comes from (I only heard the word used for electric circuits, besides seeing this Nth court name a few times now). The judges in higher courts (like these, it seems) are chosen by the currently elected president whenever seats in the court become vacant, if I remember correctly.

What's still unclear to me is why the article consistently calls it "the conservative fifth circuit court" as though that is part of its name (or as though there is another nonconservative one), whereas Wikipedia uses no such phrasing that I can find. Is that an artifact of the news medium being of "the other side" and wanting to emphasise that most of the judges were chosen by a party they don't like? Or are most judges party members, or how is this label decided? And isn't the whole point of being a judge that you're impartial, are they subtly alleging the court is partial to whatever laws are made by one of the two major parties or something?

Edit: I'm not sure what this reads like to y'all but it was meant as a genuine question with what I've already figured out for anyone else who doesn't know this (probably most international visitors, I figured)
honestly, I still feel like that is a win for users. pop-ups that are modals on a site is not anywhere close to open application windows, especially the pop-unders. to me, opening another application window on my system is much more abhorrent than a site deciding it wants my attention somewhere else on its site.
that's just the plus, no?

I'm asking about the star
You can beat it by rapidly clicking left to right and back. Maybe add a rate of fire and change the vertical position of the enemies.
Colocation gives you a) passive source of information (e. g. just by observing people, see them being frustrated or cursing) and b) lower barrier to get talked to. Both can be disruptive for your own work, but facilitate more communication. You yourself can be more proactive, but that doesn't solve the problem on the whole team / organization level.
India's growth story is precarious: both the optimists and the pessimists are disappointed
I used to work at National Grid, and we had a non-parametric mixture model developed by some very smart quants. It was used to predict gas escapes, and would take into account the current SLA performance (aka the cost function) to predict how many engineers we would need to reserve to respond. The main variables were weather related (temperature, wind) as well as some obvious modifiers like public holidays.
Ask HN: Probability Distribution of Stock Returns
Is there a modern theory for the probability distribution of stock returns?

It is relatively easy to deduce that under idealized conditions stock returns follow a log normal distribution. One arrives at this by considering the product of ratios of prices ("stock returns"), applying a natural logarithm to convert the product into a sum and then applying the Central Limit Theorem under the condition that the ratios are iid (independent and identically distributed) and have finite mean and variance.

The problem is of course that we cannot just assume that returns are iid or that they have finite variance. So I am seeking alternative theories that try to address these shortcomings.

I am aware of Mandelbrot's Multifractal Model of Asset Returns. Is this considered SOA in the field? Is there something else that is considered a better model or easier to work with?
It's so frustrating how code hosting is like 10 years behind the big tech companies' internal tooling. Like GitHub is still terrible for stacked PRs, monorepos, code search, refactoring, etc. We're just starting to catch up with tools like Graphite, but in all honesty, Graphite should be a feature that GitHub made 10 years ago. I appreciate it being built now, but I question why it took this long.
While the way secrets work in Swarm seems weird when compared to Kubernetes, this is usually pretty easily solved by a quick overriding entrypoint in the docker stack file that does essentially this:

export SOME_VAR=$(cat /run/secrets/some_secret)
exec /original/entrypoint.sh

Can you explain the second one? I don't get the usecase.
You may be interested in the "binary step" activation function. This does what you're suggesting. In general, complex behaviour really takes a hit though using this for the activation function of a neuron (though I'm also not sure which papers show metrics on this being used for transformer models).
Helix: Release 24.03 Highlights
This is an interesting article. Zalewski is almost unique in the ability and credibility to write this. He used to work for Google in infosec, he's got a lot of experience writing code, and he no longer works for a big corporation, so he's free to say what he thinks.
Sharding is the easy part. Eventually you need to implement distributed transactions, taking a consistent backup across shards, PITR, resharding, load balancing, and the list goes on... That takes exponentially more number of people and time and mainly risk.

It works for Figma(for now), but for it to work as a solution for other companies with different hardware, data schema and access patterns will add even more complexity to the mix.

It's a excellent solution but I don't think it be good enough in the long run.
Brazilian plastic artist Ila Fox created one alternative image: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ILena.jpg CC-SA Licensed, original from https://blog.ricbit.com/2009/11/lena-e-ilena.html?m=1
+1 Autogen
No, not every conversation is a "collaboration". Do you dial into Zoom during lunch and coffee too? When you grab a coworker passing by do you start a Zoom call to make sure the whole team can spectate your random conversation?
> it's not like you're going to realize equivalent margins by running your own little server

I get even better than their margins. In the neighborhood of 100x cheaper. It's not rocket science.

> equivalent availability

AWS availability isn't all that super great. Most of their services are rated for only 99.95 before they offer pittance credits. That's not difficult to meet with a single computer...

> scalability

A service only needs good enough scalability. Auto scaling is also a bug, not just a feature. Remember that it is also tied to auto billing. I can't afford to have my wallet DDOSed.

> security

Security is always a problem that needs to be solved. You don't get an auto pass on security needs because you signed up for AWS.

> support

You have to pay for that.... You can get it from other vendors too if you have budget for it.

> ecosystem

This is flat out wrong. Compare AWS offerings to the breadth and depth of open source offerings and the latter comes out far ahead.
Check out klogg for log viewing on Windows, I recently switched to it.
That's how I bought my house. No money down, 2.65% mortgage
> 2) Is there no legal recourse to this? We're talking about someone who managed to root any linux server that stays up-to-date.

Any government which uses GNU/Linux in their infrastructure can pitch this as an attempt to backdoor their servers.

The real question is: will we ever even know who was behind this? If it was some mercenary hacker intending to resell the backdoor, maybe. But if it was someone working with an intelligence agency in US/China/Israel/Russia/etc, I doubt they'll ever be exposed.
>I'd much rather see passwords entirely replaced by key-based authentication

I've never understood how key-based systems are considered better. I understand the encryption angle, nobody is compromising that. But now I have a key I need to personally shepherd? where do I keep it, and my backups, and what is the protection on those places? how many local copies, how many offsite? And I still need a password to access/use it, but with no recourse should I lose or forget. how am I supposed to remember that? It's all just kicking the same cans down the same roads.
> If your entire database can be lifted into the application's heap, it's probably small enough that I wonder why you've got it stored in an RDBMS

I think he meant lifting the database schema, not the whole database. This would help with auto completion and other static checks before trying to run queries.
All acquisitions. Golang is not a product.
I would push back on the "collaboration" thing a bit because it's an often-used reason for forcing everyone into one place. Yes, tech jobs (we're mostly talking about Software Engineering, so let's just stick with that) are not 100% lone-wolf coding projects where each engineer goes into their vacuum and pumps out software. On the other hand, it doesn't require constant human interaction like a Wall Street trading floor. It's somewhere in the middle, and that's where company culture and deliberate choices come into play.

We don't collaborate constantly like on the trading floor, nor do we have to be available at all times to collaborate. Nothing worse than being in the zone and then having Lumburgh walk up and say, "Heeyyyy, mind if we chat about something right this minute??" I could see a workable scenario where you set aside 1 hour per day as "human interaction time" when you do face-to-face collaboration. And, if that's feasible, then maybe instead you could do 1 day every two weeks or even 1 week every quarter.

I also like full remote, but when I took the job, I made sure that I was within striking distance of the office in case there was something I absolutely couldn't do without this in-person collaboration.
Mathematica's SolarEclipse[] function, introduced in v10 and seriously updated in v14, is a gem.

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/SolarEclipse
Or it's just some weird property of the specific training and inference setting the author was working with.

The epistemic claims the author is making aren't supported by the work. The work is interesting for other reasons of course.
I really enjoy this as a feature. There are many times that I don't need a video full frame, but don't want to see the rest of the website page either (I'm looking at you YouTube). I can just pop the video out, and even shrink its size, and then go back to whatever else I need to be looking at.

Sadly, there are so many videos out there that do not need to be videos, yet that's how they are presented for sometimes rational reasons on the "creator's" part.
>Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends.

Thats where you do need to explicitly make effort outside of work to fill that gap. You could also make the argument that commuting 90 minutes a day is a regular time suck for you that could be spent doing other productive things.

>Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens.

oh, so smoker breaks lol. as long as they're getting the work done, why do you give a shit?

>As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions.

There's nothing stopping you from doing that outside of work, but you need to be more mindful about doing it
Can somebody explain for the uninitiated? What does Google need saving from?
I find it easier than terraform since when using bicep you don't need to track state.
Show HN: K4nundrum – An open-source tool to investigate Kryptos K4
Hi HN.

As a hobby, I have been studying Kryptos K4, a classic unsolved code. Kryptos is a puzzle sculpture dedicated by its creator in 1990. It contains four encrypted messages. Three have been decoded (K1 to K3), and the last one, K4, remains undeciphered.

Like many others, my attempts to solve it using classic cryptanalysis attacks have failed. However, I have recently discovered a pattern that may indicate a distinctive encryption technique. To test this idea, I created “K4nundrum”, an open-source tool written in Go: https://github.com/glethuillier/K4nundrum

So far, this tool has revealed that K4 may result from combining ciphertext segments with the letters “W.” It will be continuously updated to provide additional insights on the encryption technique(s) employed for K4.

You can read this approach in more detail here: https://guyomel.hashnode.dev/a-fresh-perspective-on-kryptos-...

If you are interested in classic ciphers, I hope you will enjoy using this tool and even contribute to it.

I appreciate any feedback.

Thank you.
Yes, and the point is there's nothing here that will be good for everyone. If you let people ditch the office then those who would benefit from being in person fail to do so. If you force everyone to be in then those who want to be alone will be unhappy. Your preference might be the latter, and that's totally understandable, but that's a very distinct argument from "the latter is inherently better" or "I don't understand the benefits of the former".
Firefox has all of this except the date. `about:config` lists all config values, values in bold do not match their default or do not exist by default, values can be reverted with one click, and there's a checkbox to filter out unmodified items.
The other thing this is missing is that SourceForge reviewed your project before giving you a place to host it. You also didn’t get a nice URL back when everyone was really focused on having nice URLs (right before GitHub). Those two factors are shallow, but they made a lot of friction that GitHub eliminated.
Stop looking at a computer screen?
If you're on a Mac, https://setapp.com/apps is a bundle of nice indie apps under one subscription. And even if you don't want a subscription, most of those apps are available for purchase from the devs directly, but this site is still a useful curated list of relatively high-quality small desktop apps.
The star means no 0. It might be redundant, yes.
> No, if A always scratches the left, and B alternates between left and right, your classical trick of having some tickets with two winners and some with two losers won’t produce the correct win distributions for B’s choices.

My proposal was intended to be independent of A and B’s strategy. As a fully worked-out example, suppose the tickets are printed like this:

With probability 42.5%: all positions win

With probability 42.5%: all positions lose

With probability 7.5%: Both of A’s options win and both of B’s options lose

With probability 7.5%: Both of A’s options lose and both of B’s options win.

This follows the rules of the game, and it has the following properties. A wins with probability 50% regardless of their strategy, as does B. And A and B get the same outcome 85% of the time.

For the CHSH inequality (following the pretty-bad Wikipedia article), each E term is the probability that A and B both win when they use the indicated strategies, which is 0.425. So S=0.85, which is well within the limit, as it should be since these are extremely boring classical tickets.
I agree that some of the reasons behind RTO boil down to control.

But I don't agree that this is the only reason, and I think we need to be discussing the reasons RTO can be beneficial, so that we can have a more productive conversation about how to replicate the benefits without blindly applied RTO mandates.

> they can't seem to grasp is that people are already not working much of the time even in an office due to a variety of reasons - smalltalk, watercooler chats, distractions from the all too common open office environment, coffee breaks, useless events/activities

I don’t think that framing this as “not working” gets at what’s happening. Humans are a social species. Working effectively as a group is directly benefited by this kind of “non work”. If you restrict the definition of “working” to just the moments in a day where someone is creating some kind of measurable “productive” output, I think something important is missed. The company is still made of humans. These humans are working on highly complex and interrelated tasks, and fostering an environment of social connection is arguably as important as doing the “strictly work” parts of the job.

Prior to COVID, I was remote but I still went to the office periodically. Those office visits were like filling my gas tank. More communication and collaboration happened during those hallway and water cooler conversations than hours/days of emails and meetings could accomplish. There was a fluidity to it. Start a conversation with Person A about <Project>, arrive at a realization that we need to take to Person B, walk to their desk and bring them up to speed, they know another key stakeholder and pull them in, and 20 minutes later we have consensus on something that would have taken hours or days to align on everyone’s schedules. Multiply this times dozens of complex issues, and the easy access to direct conversations was invaluable.

Getting back home was also important because I could then go deep on tasks that required long periods of focus.

I’m not saying I think RTO is the only answer. But I have yet to see anything close to the kind of collaboration and connection that is possible in a collocated environment. Companies have proven that it’s possible if it’s baked into the core of their culture, e.g. GitLab, but the reality is that most companies aren’t built this way, and many people aren’t built this way.

So yes, I agree that RTO for the purpose of control is a problem. It’s also not the only reason for RTO, and we need to broaden the conversation to find solutions to the human social collaboration that has been lost.
No, but you also make sure to bring it up in slack or whatever to fill in your other teammates when the material is relevant and useful. Or just because?
Nuts that any significant open source project would choose to not use any kind of version control, especially nowadays.
Unfortunately, those GitHub links are no longer valid, so we randos can't use them to learn what went wrong here. Hopefully GH will reverse this decision once the dust settles.
The big companies fighting to win gen AI have forgotten how to build good products. There seems to be enormous confusion about AI applications — few seem to be willing to commit to a singular focus or application, instead trying to be everything to everyone. The tried and true way to build something big is to bootstrap a killer app that solves a real problem and then expand horizontally to other problem spaces. These companies are trying to do too much too soon (probably because they have too few financial constraints). A lack of focus.
Firefox's default "allow autoplay after interaction" policy doesn't help much in the case of SPAs. Go to a site like ESPN and autoplay will be blocked on the first "page" you visit, but navigating to any subsequent "pages" ends up enabling autoplay since link clicks are intercepted and Javascripted away.

What I really want browsers to adopt is an SPA breaking policy, where click handlers for <a> elements are ignored for non-whitelisted sites.
It is a great piece of software but annoying that you can't edit text.
HiperLAN
>PFOA being used

I think you're misunderstanding something.

Inhance used (and uses) their fluorination process "for decades", but the fact it generated PFOA only became known in 2020 (edit: article is wrong; was cited by EPA in 2022).

Because the law states "new" use, the court threw out the EPA's "we found PFOA coming out of this in 2020 (edit: 2022, see above edit), this is new use" argument as hogwash. I agree with this ruling, because I presume this is all English.
Sourceforge still looks like a scam website. I can't really put my finger on it, but even if a project is "officially" hosted on sourceforge to me it looks like a random guy's Mediafire download link
You're likely being downvoted because the Github profile looking like east Asian isn't evidence of where the attacker/attackers are from.

Nation states will go to long lengths to disguise their identity. Using broken Russian English when they are not Russian, putting comments in the code of another language, and all sorts of other things to create misdirection.
Given the alternative, I find it reassuring when people give some evidence of shame.

(I have not checked yet myself, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech#Quotes claims one can hear Goebbels catching and correcting a potential Freudian Slip, and in principle the audio of the original broadcast, these days, ought to be available in-browser)
The funny thing is that in less open societies, connections are almost everything in entrepreneurship, off course it also means you need to know how to leverage it.

Not necessarily a positive thing, because it is the same group of politico-business class that capture the same ideas and innovations for themselves. If you have ever seen Shark tank India you will understand what I am saying.

In that respect US Silicon Valley culture seemed like a breath of fresh air, however I feel there are only certain specific combinations of history, economics and culture that enabled this. I doubt it is really possible to bootstrap new crazy ideas easily, one because incumbents are not as laggards as before.
I thought OpenAI is a huge stickler for in-office work?!
Do you have to be a veteran to get a loan from the VA? If so, what about people like me who weren't in the military? Especially people like me who were never eligible to even join the military because of a childhood illness?
> Are we really supposed to expend as much energy as we expended in the entire industrial age just to remove the excess CO2 in the atmosphere?

I'm not sure that's the correct argument.

We only really need to expend as much energy to convert stuff into coal as was needed to turn it into coal in the first place. If we can do it more efficiently than Nature™ then we are energy positive since all the effort to extract it is already expended and (reading the terms & conditions) nonrefundable.

It seems to me... could be wrong.
this backdoor had nothing at all to do with memory safety.
It's hard to do design right the same way it's hard to do kanban right or Jira right. Less skilled people chase the trends without understanding the fundamentals.
No known consequence, assuming...

(1) changing the RSA decrypt function in OpenSSH is all the code hidden in crc64 does: that's the only known behavior, but we don't know what the changed function does besides letting some authentication through, nor do we know if there are other things it does

(2) there's no malicious machine in your LAN exploiting the RSA decrypt to log onto your sshd: nobody has seen one yet, but it doesn't mean there's no such thing.

If you are not using a distro that does dpkg or rpm, or if your machine is not x86-64, you're free from the "code hidden in crc64", the one that targets sshd, CVE-2024-3094. Are there unknown backdoors? Who knows. Do we count the landlock sabotage as a backdoor?

It's hard to deal with unknowns. Assume the worst, maybe, but what even is the worst?
Show HN: How we’re using Docker Overlay Networks to boost MinIO’s cloud storage capabilities – a deep dive into scalable architecture.
This is very much true, but also has nothing to do with diversity or "Wokeness" the parent is referring to.
When I realized that the gervais principle was not a joke _at all_ I became a contractor, and I moved to 100% remote. This way I produce the output they expect while working on my own products. Best of both worlds and everyone is happy.
Firefox has fine-grained site permissions, which probably cover this. The UI is pretty obscure, though, and not discoverable, which may be why this option isn't considered in the article.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/site-permissions-panel