skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coupon codes have existed before the Internet as a privacy-preserving way for businesses to track conversions for advertising. If a buyer quotes "MAGAZINE5" when purchasing to obtain a 5% discount, the seller knows the magazine advert is working. In modern times, there is nothing technologically preventing a business placing online ads with frequently changing coupon codes "HAPPY15" vs "HAPPY22" to gauge effectiveness of particular ad formats in more granular ways.

Television and radio advertising exists and has existed long before the Internet without any need for detailed conversion tracking. Brief "To help us improve our business, could you please tell us how you heard about our brand?" questions in order forms has sufficed. A/B testing of billboard placements have sufficed.

Put simply, "Privacy Sandbox" is presented as a solution to a "problem" that doesn't exist.
The glutamate they're referring to is naturally a part of parmesan cheese. It doesn't need to be added.
I can't edit now but a point to add: they're adversarial in their persistence, this response isn't from nothing
You're correct that the immediate host animal hasn't been found. But that problem also applies to the lab leak hypothesis, since there's no evidence in the genome of SARS-CoV2 that it is an artificial virus. It is in fact over 95% similar to similar viruses isolated in the wild.

The first patients were all associated with the market, and genetic evidence shows that the virus was circulating there for weeks (at least) before the first recognized case of covid. That is consistent with what we now know, i.e. that most SARS-CoV2 infections do not lead to severe disease.
Absolutely, that would most likely happen, they'd compete like any other market. However, a more appropriate financial compensation would still come with all the other benefits that I mentioned. Reporting to the affected company tends to come with positive public exposure, potential long-term job offers from that company or others, and receiving taxable income with few complications. Even selling exploits to intelligence agencies or nation-states likely involves more hurdles compared to dealing with companies like Alphabet or Microsoft.

Receiving 75k from Google versus a few hundred thousand from a less reputable source is a different scenario compared to getting a few hundred thousand from Google versus slightly more from those same sources. In the former, I'd have a hard time not going for the large yet morally dubious payday. With the latter, I feel like most, myself included, would stick with Google
It may be a requirement or law depending on where the company does business.

For example, the financial companies I used to work for had a “standard practice” of archiving all e-mails and internal chats for 7-8 years. Not sure if phone calls on company equipment were recorded or retained though (may be a YMMV case).

This is why I separate work and personal assets. I never do work on personal devices nor do I use work devices for personal activities (ie, social media, e-commerce, shit posting). Also if I’m shit talking the boss’s boss. It’s never using work devices.

Have been asked a few times to use personal devices for work but absolutely refused. I would be asked to install their invasive spyware and root kits so they can abide by their draconian corporate policies. So far, they haven’t forced me otherwise I would have quit those companies long ago.
Based Blobs: Introduction to polynomial commitments in Python with the ckzg libs
They should learn opsec from the Disney Vault.
The bigger the storages get the bigger the discrepancy.
1 pebibyte isn't 10^15 byte but more than 10% more.
> To me an algorithm is closed

i dunno what "closed" means here? converges? lots of things with heuristics converge...

most things people think of as algorithms are just heuristics codified. take for example unit propagation in DPLL (fairly modern SAT approach); quoting wiki[1]

> In practice, this often leads to deterministic cascades of units, thus avoiding a large part of the naive search space.

that *in practice* there means there's no guarantee because ofc not - otherwise they would've proven something about NP. but they didn't, they just came up with a way to search that's sometimes/often not bad. a lot of people call this an algorithm ("... is a refinement of the earlier Davis–Putnam algorithm") because it fits the dictionary definiton (a repeatable process) but i do not because it's a repeatable process that isn't proven to produce anything (ie faster than brute force). and the intuition i'm proposing for why it doesn't is because it doesn't actually shrink the search space fast enough.

note, my definitions/intuitions don't translate/have the same force elsewhere (especially in continuous/differentiable spaces) but they're a pretty standard/obvious perspective in combinatorial optimization (np-hard/np-complete problems).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPLL_algorithm#The_algorithm
Oh, it's a very understandable request. And you are welcome!
On the other hand, a publicly funded equivalent of Firefox 3.5 or maybe SeaMonkey with incremental improvements over time (e.g. adding things like form validation and pie charts and bar charts and line charts to html, and not adding USB or GPU or ad tracking or attestation support) would be amazing for the web.
No it all really changed when storage service manufacturers realized that they could market 1,000,000,000 bytes as "1 gigabyte", to people who then saw their computer tell them that there was about 7% less than a gigabyte in there.
> This is the key point - capturing, organizing and retrieving notes has a cost.

Exactly my thoughts too.

There is a cost. The thing is to keep that cost down to the level where it is in fact a good investment.

I don't think there is an ideal solution. It is just hard work to create information-artifacts, just like there is no silver-bullet for writing perfect code.
You just gave an example. There are loads of classified information out there. Though Disney will probably not be able to sue you for just reading the data necessarily, doing so is a big liability if you're a competitor or work for a competitor.
Not to mention that domain names and twitter handles are worth much less money these days. gTLDs something something...
Do you worship at the altar* of Climate Change Safety for believing the scientists vs. the energy corporations?
Really? How old are you, then? How long have you run your own business? This year is my 41st as a professional in this field, and my 25th running my own business. I've written two books.

I'm not a lawyer, but I have been involved in 10 court cases as an expert witness, so I am aware of what it means to launch and win a lawsuit.

How many times have you been sued for defamation? Are you speaking from experience?
Yes, maybe if one is clever and lucky this could cost only a popcnt and a branch? not sure.
Obsidian in a nutshell.

Too many bells a whistles to tweak, and isn’t conducive to consistency.
Only works on a desktop browser. You can't use the phone
Yes, but you only have to succeed once. They have to succeed every time, which is a much much harder proposition.
Confirmed We Live in a Simulation (2021)
Stegosaurus fossils may fetch $6M at Sotheby's. Should they be auctioned?
Quick, how many gibibyte are 1234567890 byte?
I consider this a glimpse into how neural networks and "AI"-like techs would be implemented in the future. Lots of engineering, lots of clever manipulations of known techniques woven together with a powerful, well trained, model, at the center.

Right now I think stuff like chatgpt is only at the first step of making that foundational model that can generalize and process data. There isn't a lot of work going into processing the inputs into something the model can best understand (not at the tokenizer level, even before that). We have a basic field about this i.e. prompt engineers but nothing as sophisticated as Alphafold exists for natural language or images yet.

People are stacking LLMs together and putting system prompts in to assist this input processing. Maybe when we have some more complex systems in place, we can see something resembling a real AGI.
This has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
I did not expect Dr. Ruth to have been trained as a sniper; incredible.
By clearly visualizing your mental model, you can more easily identify and address any gaps or missing elements, leading to a more complete understanding.
Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly
Its more probable that you are trying to install the deps in the system python. And using pip instal xxxxx -u will install them in your user directory rather than the system. I'm pretty sure modern Ubuntu warns you against doing that now anyway.

If you're installing for a small script then doing python -m venv little_project in you home dir is straightforward, just active it after [1]

I'm using rye[2] now and its very similar to Rust's Cargo, it wraps a bunch of the standard toolchain and manages standalone python versions in the background, so doesn't fall into the trap of linux system python issues.

[1]https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html
[2]https://rye.astral.sh/
What Happens If the President Issues Potentially Illegal Order to the Military?
Very cool, thanks for digging into this!
Also, just to be clear - the US gov buys tons of zerodays.
To save bees, scientists say focus on habitat first, then pesticides
A few things:

First, the technology choices are secondary to the organization that is charged with maintaining it. If the organization goes out of business and the software doesn't get picked up then it's lost. The exception to this would be widely used open source software.

Second, use boring technology that's easily extensible. If it's easier to build a new thing to replace the old rather than extending it, then it probably won't last.

Finally, the purpose of the software must stand the test of time. Think about the patterns/things in life that will still be here decades from now. For example, death and taxes :)
Berlin also has the advantage, being generous on “advantage”, of being completely rebuilt about 70 years ago.
An effective strategy for managing complex tasks
If you open it up, the strip is actually a thin PCB glued to the underside of the top of the case. Mine was a little loose, pressing it down made things work a bit better. It does still get worse at tracking when the batteries start running down (a sign that they need replaced/charged!).

Even when it’s working well, its resolution is disappointingly low though. More like a mouse with a scroll wheel with fairly large detents than the trackpad-like scrolling I was expecting.
No, but I also don’t think a government agency gets created in the first place for a small mission
The civilized world is also using kilometers for example. Kilo has its roots
in Greek and literally means thousand.
That's my friend Tom Nelson! He wrote that on an old IBM PC back in the day, then ported it to a windows executable with some graphics.

Pretty clever! Michael Chastain once beat 9 Dreadnought class starships with one Interceptor for an outrageous score. Took all night, and one misstep would have doomed the effort. Not everybody can have that kind of single-minded concentration over so long a period.
Books of the 21st Century
The genesis of the Post's gigantic comics section (three full pages on weekdays, if I remember correctly) was that they picked up all of the comics that had been run by the Washington Star when the Star (along with all the other evening papers) finally ran out of steam and closed up shop.
sudo apt install pipx

pipx install package_name

Takes care of the venv and the script/app path is added to system path.
I don’t know why it would be illegal, but it feels skeevy. Besides, Disney has a a good legal team — I wouldn’t be surprised if they could find a reason.
The notion that using a journal is a common misconception
There's not that much wealth in the world
For me, it‘s usually not about somehow „breaking“ my repository so that it‘s in a „weird“ state, but about messed up rebases, filter-branches (or modern equivalents), and other branch manipulations that leave my branches in a now unwanted state.

When working on big projects with many people, multiple release branches, and constant updates to those release branches, there‘s bound to be situations where you try to juggle multiple local branches for the same change(-set) to massage conflicting changes into place, only to after a while go „no, that went bad, let‘s start over“.

Having the commit ID displayed by the prompt is a good idea, and it solves the problem in a similar way. However, I prefer my prompt to be on one line, and it‘s already pretty long. Plus, I often do lots of stuff between git commands, so I‘d have to „hunt“ for the prompts. I need git reflog on average probably about once a month, and just typing „git reflog“ and seeing what git operations I‘ve performed is perfect for me.
Heh, just got burned by this in the Czech Republic. Far on the east side, hotel advertising A/C but it’s only in a common area - not in the room itself.

Just about drove me insane.
That’s not actually fair.

Defense is very hard. Offense, by comparison, is much easier. An attacker has to win once, and then they’re in.

A defender has to win every time, which is much much harder, if not impossible.
Thanks for sharing. I agree with everything in the essay.

When it talked about the person effectively working 2 days, once on the managers schedule, and once at night to code on the makers scheduled, I thought back and that resonated with me. I spent a decade or so doing something like that. I’d typically work 12-14 hour days. The normal work day was full of distractions and interruption, and once everyone started to leave and the meetings stopped, I started making stuff and got a lot done. At the time I thought I was just avoiding rush hour traffic, but there was a much bigger side effect in terms of productivity.

With the situation I had in 2017, this essay may have gone a long way. With my current situation I worry sharing it would have a negative impact on my job. It’s not one person I’d have to convince and coordinate with, it’s at least 4, probably more. I have 3 “stand ups” most days, which are all 30 minutes and often run long. If I were to split my day into 2 maker blocks, my mornings are shot every single day with 2-4 hours of meetings. This is usually enough to kill my whole day. 3-4 days per week usually have a meeting (or 3) in the afternoon, which kills that block as well. Some teams have office hours posted to everyone. While I rarely go, simply having them on my calendar has an impact to my ability to see that my day is clear. And of course there are all the chats I need to monitor and respond to, which never stop and might as well be meetings.

A massive culture shift is needed and I don’t feel like I’m in a position to make it. We are getting a new CIO soon, so I can hope for some positive impact there. Right now all bets are off. In the current culture, if something isn’t getting done fast enough, the go-to solution is a daily meeting to talk about it. It makes the project managers feel good and gives the appearance we’re doing all we can, but in reality it slows everything way down.

I will keep the essay in my back pocket to share if the opportunity presents itself.
SimCity and Elon Musk to the rescue! See, we put satellites in space with giant solar panels on then and then just beam the energy down from space, directly to a receiver dish mounted on your rooftop, next to the starlink dish.
Having looked at some of the links in the article, I just realized that one extra feature of roundabouts is that they allow U-turns (which is not always the case at an intersection).
I didn‘t know about that. Good idea, thanks.
She was funny, am sad to hear. I think her accent may have helped Americans get over taboos about awkward terms because they were laughing.
Old news, and didn’t require AGI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Cyber_Grand_Challenge
There's required disclosure using an administrative subpoena for records over 180 days old if they have them

CALEA requires phone (and later broadband) equipment to conform to wiretapping standards, and if a carrier gets a court order to wiretap it has to provide that data from warrant receipt til warrant expiration.

Landlines have some data retention requirements.

But there's no law on broadband or wireless data retention.

There may well and likely is a secret FISA court order under section 702 that's been served to telecoms, but an astonishingly small number of people in govt and industry know whether that actually says that they just have to hand over records in real time or whether they need to keep records for some period of time.
It's a bit surreal seeing it tbh, but knowing that Google keeps them afloat makes it make sense. A sad day to see Mozilla go down like this.
Alex has us covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCTWyNstpD0&t=55s
So morality aside, I imagine dealing with large amounts of money that you can't explain the origin of isn't simple.

You can't just do a bank transfer, so you're probably getting paid on crypto. Converting the crypto to fiat will probably be a pain. All the reputable exchanges have KYC requirements. You'd have to explain how you came to acquire so much crypto.

I guess you could get paid in a suitcase of cash, that has it's own headaches.

Personally, I'm just picturing so many headaches that even if I wasn't morally against selling it to the highest bidder, it doesn't feel worth it. Selling to some other "proper" corporate entity or a government agency seems reasonable, but are they offering more than Google?
Focus on meaningful, contextual comments that explain the "why" behind your code.
To quantify the winds we're talking about, the record-setting winds in the Bay Area this February peaked at 100mph gusts, with 18 stations recording values between 80mph and 100mph [0] (Pablo Point, out in the middle of the Pacific, recorded gusts of 102mph, but I'd consider that an outlier). Notably, all stations recording values higher than 80mph are on mountain peaks, not anywhere near population centers. In most of the Bay Area the gusts didn't exceed 60mph [1].

During Hurricane Beryl, 17 weather stations in the (very flat) Houston area recorded wind gusts in excess of 100mph. 30 stations recorded gusts in excess of 90mph [2]. Beryl's sustained winds were about 65mph, in excess of the gusts that most of the Bay Area experienced in that February storm.

All of which is to say: other commenters are right, it's useless to look at what you experienced in the Bay Area and compare it to even a small hurricane.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/05/map-where-wind-reache...

[1] https://underscoresf.com/the-belated-weekend-catch-up-record...

[2] https://houstonlanding.org/these-houston-areas-received-the-...
Even if we can't can we think of better names?

"kibibyte" sounds like a dog treat not a unit of measurement.
Oh, I actually make heavy uses of detached heads. The projects I work on frequently require you to look at a „snapshot“ of how the code was at a certain time when diagnosing issues, and it‘s good to be able to „look without touch“, i.e. being able to check out a specific state without it cluttering up my branches (though honestly, they‘re pretty cluttered already).
I mean, five years ago people were saying "Bots can tell a joke, but..." Why persist in this "I know better than the researchers mentality"? Just because you don't have personal cognizance of a topic doesn't delegitimize the entire topic.

In any event to answer your question, the ability to hack, in whatever sense you think is acceptable, is being heavily iterated on.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/06/project-napti...
Absolutely! What often appears to be effortless intelligence or innate talent is usually the result of extensive experience and hard work.
Fair enough, but a decent heads up would've been nice. Scumbags.
OK i see, re-reading this with your top level post is "not all vulnerabilities are the type that could be bought by (insert state actor)", which makes sense (for some reason I thought you meant that they were buying the type of bugs that would end up getting reported to a BBP, but I just misread the original comment).

And yes the Saudis definitely bought software from NSO Group but it's also been used by plenty of other governments, including half the EU...
I wrote a blog post about how numbers like "30ms latency" are thrown around called "How to lie about latency": https://www.obe.tv/how-to-lie-about-latency/

It's left as an exercise to the reader which methods of lying are being used in this case.
The standard source comes with malware, and the one big alternative comes with malware. Such is the state of the tech industry (even nonprofits) in 2024. Random individuals like Raymond Hill are far more trustworthy than large organizations.
Tiktok isn't generative AI, I don't think you understand this topic. The topic is generative AI, not recommendation AI, recommendation AI doesn't require much investments, the generative AI that companies has poured many billions into the past few years is the topic.
Have you ever been to India? I have, and have also visited the bad part of downtown San Francisco many times. Homelessness in major Indian cities is on a whole different scale - I remember taking a taxi ride through New Delhi at night, on some streets the sidewalks had people lying side by side (packed so tight they were touching other people on both side) for what seemed like miles.

On the other hand they don't seem nearly as mentally unwell as the SF homeless.
Why do you think the two are wholly separate? If software is just a job and not an art for you then I get wanting to keep “clean”. The software you build is 100% an expression of your beliefs.

I would never build software for a defense contractor, or any other myriad of nasty things engineers are hired to do.

In a similar vane, if my work has given me a platform (ex: a popular open source project) then it would be a waste if I didn’t use that platform like Notepad++ is doing. (Though I’d probably restrict messages to the download page)
For the first point:

All of them, I think? Better question is: which labs check the DNA sequences are safe before sending them to the printer. I know some claim to check, I hope but doubt that it's all worldwide.

For the second:

At first this looks like a good thing, you asked for growth and it gave you growth — "Who cares about the poor complaining that energy prices have gone up, they can turn use less heating/AC, right?", Martin Antoinette, probably — and like the fossil fuel and cigarette industries, you are motivated to FUD anyone who tries to warn anyone of the dangers.

Sometimes, as seems to be the case with fossil fuels, change happens soon enough. But this isn't a universal, the British ignored the USA because they assumed democracy was stupid and the rebels would see sense and go back to the superior British aristocracy… and then it was too late: https://youtu.be/Zbku2ILzGlo?si=yihnBlifkaLLseyy
Most programmers these days don’t use Windows. They use the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which means they are using a VM with Ubuntu.
Trying to explain how roundabouts work to someone who doesn't get them is extremely frustrating. The rules are simple, but for some reason a lot of folks are vastly overthinking it.

The thing is, I like roundabouts, but I'm somehow not surprised that the metrics focus on accidents involving death or injury. I think that because people have to slow down, it must improve those metrics. But there's a particular glut of bone-headed people who power right into the roundabout without anything resembling yielding, to the point where I would legitimately not be surprised if there were actually more accidents overall. That may still be better, but it's incredibly frustrating how badly people handle roundabouts given their simplicity.