Hacker News Reader

lsbon SiFive to Introduce New RISC-V Processor Architecture and RISC-V PC

It looks like SiFive is making a vector processor, to potentially compete with GPUs (Nvidia makes chips with dozens of multiprocessors on them, each with arbitrarily many cores)

Super exciting!

lsbon California Bill Would Mandate 'Crime Prediction' Algorithms Instead of Cash Bail

This is a serious problem in many ways.

Ethics can be a distraction from justice.

Ethics sites the problem in the algorithm, whereas justice sites the problem in the power differential.

People generally trust computers more than random human decisions, and computers can automate the repercussions of their decisions quickly. If you work hourly at a government job, and you get your hours yanked when you're judged a risk, without time for an appeal, things spiral out of your control, exacerbating oppression.

lsbon Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

Introduced async Slack stand-ups, introduced containerized artifact-based deploys, massively reduced scope and time of several engineering projects by relaxing constraints (uptime, generality, etc)

lsbon Pinterest cancels office lease in unbuilt project, citing work-from-home shift

For a company to pay almost a hundred million dollars to not rent office space in downtown SF, that's the abnormal part, compared to 2010-2019.

lsbon Pinterest cancels office lease in unbuilt project, citing work-from-home shift

Notably, they paid $90M to cancel the lease.

lsbon Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine Gen2 7nm 2.6T Transistors

Their 2020 announcement is 850K cores, which is even more impressive!

lsbon Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine Gen2 7nm 2.6T Transistors

Part of the genius of the Cerebras on-chip routing is that it can route around malfunctioning dielets.

lsbon Hardware Accelerator for Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning Neural Networks

Yes: you can (for example) confuse a vision algorithm into thinking an image of a turtle is a rifle https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/mit-researchers-fool-google-...

lsbon DuckDuckGo Search Is Down?

I'd seen it failing, and now it seems to be getting back. Sending hugops to everyone fixing it

lsbon Nuclear Energy Is Climate Justice

Nuclear Energy does not exist without severely controlling access to fissile material, which is a strong police state.

Nuclear Energy does not exist without being aware of where the fissile material is, and who is trying to get access to is, which is a strong surveillance state.

The politics of Nuclear Energy are aligned with cops and surveillance.

Wind and solar power are sold at retail, plutonium isn't.

lsbon MSU Vice President of research & innovation Steve Hsu has been forced to resign

> Hsu sparked outrage again when he cited a 2019 study in a blog post concluding, "there is no widespread racial bias in police shootings."

(from link 1)

lsbon Lamphone: Real-Time Passive Sound Recovery from Light Bulb Vibrations

The graphs they present show the largest response with 110db audio, which is about as loud as a car honking right in front of you[1], but even still, to eavesdrop on corner offices from tens of meters away with nothing but a telescope and a video recorder is a huge feat.

[1] https://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/Training/PPETrain/dbl...

lsbon Traffic Cones, Leaf Blowers, & Other Tactics US Protesters Take from Hong Kong

> When have you most successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage?

lsbon SQLite Turns 20

https://sqlite.org/about.html

"Think of SQLite not as a replacement for Oracle but as a replacement for fopen()"

lsbon SQLite Turns 20

Sure it does! You can `POST` the buffer that backs the database to your favorite blob store, and read it back when you're done. You can write to it as much as you like when the page is active.

lsbon Intelligent disobedience

Reminds me of the Milgram experiment https://youtu.be/rdrKCilEhC0 , where people were followed up with, to ask if there was anything the man they were electrocuting could have said to get them to stop electrocuting him, no matter what the investigator told them to do (36:30 is an example of one)

lsbon Show HN: A WebGL Tribute to Tron, the movie that made me fall in love with CGI

On a Pixel 4 it looks great!

lsbon Open-Sourcing Bit: Exploring Large-Scale Pre-Training for Computer Vision

I've been going through the fast.ai course, and pre-training is like witchcraft, it's so spookily effective.

You can take a 15MB mobilenet model, add a layer at the end, fine tune with half a dozen examples of a few different image classes (in a few minutes on a consumer grade laptop), and recognize lots of different examples in real time with a web app reading continuously from a webcam.

The advances made in Computer Vision in the last ten years are mind blowing.

lsbon Show HN: Immersivepoints.com, visualise your data in virtual reality

This looks cool!

Something that I'd be interested in, when trying to determine if this would be useful to me, is seeing how useful it had been to other people: in X industry, doing process to achieve Y, compared to industry standard Z this achieved a W percent speedup in time to insight

That wasn't immediately obvious to me from the front page

lsbon Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Before starting the fast.ai deep learning course, I made a light pollution map as topography. I channelled the panic about contagion into finding somewhere with low human activity: https://leebutterman.com/light-pollution-topography/

The fast.ai course is super cool though

lsbon If someone asks if you have any questions, ask a question

"What did you do yesterday", from the article, is a great open-ended question that tells you a lot about someone.

I've always enjoyed a diff-question, like, what do you wish people knew about xyz, or what surprised you about xyz. Those answers are usually very information dense

lsbon Mapping and Visualization

A lot of the data comes from NYC open data, and the results are gorgeous (especially the hydrology)

See previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837481

lsbon PacketShader – GPU-Accelerated Software Router (2011)

This is 10 years old! The GPU the benchmarks run on has 480 cores, and modern GPUs have >5000, and the available memory has gone from 1.5GB to 32GB.

I'd love to see these numbers run with a modern GPU.

lsbon AOL Moloch: open-source, large scale, packet-capturing, indexing database system

Reminds me of when someone saw that the NSA's public key (http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html) to be included in Lotus Notes had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common name of "Big Brother".

Moloch isn't the good guy in Howl.

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

lsbon The crash of the global flower trade

I'm pretty sure that's a great new botanical OnlyFans

lsbon Using SIMD to aggregate billions of values per second

This looks super interesting!

1) How does this compare to BlazingDB/MapD/etc, especially in queries on <some benchmark> per $ per hour on AWS?

2) I don't see a way to give you money. What ensures that QuestDB will be around in the future if I architect my data pipelines around this product?

lsbon Cloudflare Stops Using ReCAPTCHA

I recently switched my phone to route all internet traffic through Tor and the DDG browser on Android, but the hCaptcha challenges are even more exasperating than the ReCaptchas, and I've found my bounce rate close to 100%.

Is the abundance of hCaptcha challenges for those of us browisng CF-fronted properties in such a manner going to change any time soon?

lsbon An international comparison of the second derivative of Covid-19 deaths [pdf]

Acceleration.

The rate of change of the rate of change of deaths.

The word exponential only occurs once in the paper, and the rate of change of an exponential is an exponential, so take as many derivatives as you want and it's still going up. Why they don't take the log of deaths over time isn't explained.

lsbon Coal mines emit more methane than oil-and-gas sector, study finds

That 0.01 millirem is roughly 1 Banana Equivalent Dose, the radiation you get from eating a banana.

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

lsbon We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

"a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions from human activities that remain in the atmosphere today" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting...