jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I think that for beginners it's far better to talk about the LZ-style algorithms first, since they are much easier to understand without requiring any discussion of probabilities and the associated maths; the idea of replacing repeated strings with a reference to them is very intuitive, and so is the implementation of an LZ compressor/decompressor. In fact, an in-memory LZ decompressor core can be written in less than two dozen bytes of x86 instructions, and can easily outperform the fastest Huffman decompressor.

When I was interested enough in compression to read about it, the majority of the information I could find seemed highly theoretical and made me think that Huffman was a good first step so I managed to write a simple static/dynamic Huffman compressor/decompressor, but that didn't work so well. It was "fast enough", but the compression ratio was disappointing. When I discovered LZ the difference was amazing: an extremely simple algorithm, requiring about an order of magnitude less code in implementation, that compressed much better than Huffman for data which would intuitively be compressible.

In retrospect, it's quite clear that Huffman and other "variable length code" techniques only work because of nonuniformity in symbol probabilities, so it is ineffective on data containing repeating patterns but uniform probability. E.g. take a string 256 bytes long containing all the byte values 0, 1, 2, ... 253, 254, 255; and repeat that string multiple times in a file. LZ can easily compress that pattern but Huffman can't. (Does LZ rely on probability nonuniformity? It doesn't look like it.) The fact that many common methods like FLATE use Huffman only to compress the output of LZ on their input probably reflects this, but I don't think I've seen such an intuitive explanation for it before.
Well, at least until you realize that your image library has a security hole in it, or that your crypto library is so complex that it's not really possible to audit it in its current form.
Maybe years ago, but I feel like this is the opposite of reality today. I've seen far more hypocritical criticism of Apple on HN than baseless support for a number of years now.
You're only addressing the rapacious pole.

If they are enlightened, they will very much see us as dangerous to the planet that needs to be curtailed.
Installed. Love it. Thank you!
I didn't mean to shame the OP, though I can see how it might have come across that way. What I take issue with is the implication of relativism. That as long as you love your kids, it's fine if you just do whatever is convenient or easy or comes naturally to you, and there are no better or worse ways to parent. I think that's a copout and that our kids deserve better.

I understand why people do sleep training. We were on the verge of it ourselves until we learned more and were confronted by how hideously wrong it felt on an emotional level. Everyone in the US pushes you toward it, particularly pediatricians. But I think that most parents know deep down that it's wrong, and that they are doing it for themselves, not the baby.

I don't think we should pretend it's all the same. These things matter.
Disagree. Seeing the rings of Saturn with your own eyes, literal photons hitting your retina that have come from Saturn, is a stunning view. Ditto for Jupiter's storm. Doesn't matter that it's not Hubble quality.
>clean up the ARM/Microsoft dumpster fire that virtualizes a guest

The VPU does not operate as a hypervisor for the OS running on the ARM cores. Its role is equivalent to a hybrid of platform management (like Intel ME/AMD PSP/POWER SBE) and video processing.

The dumpster fire here is entirely Broadcom's responsibility. Microsoft is only indirectly involved in the VPU firmware by way of acquiring ThreadX many years after the RPi project started. Had Microsoft actually been involved in the project, the RPi would likely meet the ARM SBSA and boot via standard UEFI+ACPI than its Broadcom weirdness.
Seems to be here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.12092.pdf
I grew up in Silicon Valley. That could just as easily describe the 90’s. Has it really changed?
Which is why I said "and other package managers." My point was that a UI like the one to build a custom Bootstrap download doesn't make sense in the Java world because we have package managers, unmanaged dependencies are not the norm in most projects.
Google claims to use differential privacy / federated learning for their GBoard: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/05/federated-analytics-collab...

No idea about others.
I love AnysoftKeyboard but it completely freezes once every few days when pressing the emoji key. Forcing me to reboot my phone. Which is quite annoying to say the least.

https://github.com/AnySoftKeyboard/AnySoftKeyboard/issues/18...
There needs to be some consequences here. Maybe it was just for show, and turned out harmless, whatever. Regardless, the people who participated in this, and those who incited them, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Otherwise this sort of thing will happen again, and next time it may not be so harmless.
I haven't seen Multiling O Keyboard (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh) mentioned yet. It's not nearly as accurate as Gboard out of the box but once you get used to it and train it well it's not bad. It is insanely configurable.
In a world where Tesla is worth over 700B, it makes sense
A simple requisite of mastery in any domain is age. Not to say that young people can't be brilliant and impactfull at their craft. But such qualities fall more rightfully described as having flair. The difference between mastery and flair is that the former is more reliable and stable.

As an art teacher, I have seen many young artists go on to have great careers shortly after leaving school... but most of them burn out or fail in one way or another. Conversely... their aged teachers have acquired character, depth and stability but have in the process lost their wildfire.
>A recount provides absolutely no evidence in either direction on what I'm alleging.

Georgia electronic votes were all backed by voter verifiable auditable paper ballots. That's independent of whether the software is competent at arithmetic. A hand recount does, in fact, protect against fake totals.

Unfortunately, there are a handful of states that don't mandate paper backups. The solution for machines of that sort isn't open source—it's adding auditable paper.
oh.. really? Now I feel silly haha
Rittenhouse was in the open, chased and later surrounded by hostile protesters who variously threw things at him, hit him, and attempted to take his rifle. The NYT reported that there had been gunfire as Rittenhouse retreated, and he may have thought it was aimed at him.

The Policeman was with a number of other cops. They had ample room and time to retreat. There was a closed and barricaded door between him and the woman he shot. He fired the first shot.

They both have a case for self-defense, but the Cop's case is going to be a harder sell.
The author used the "intelligent driver model" (IDM): https://traffic-simulation.de/info/info_IDM.html

It's a system of ODEs that describes the dynamics of each driver. So the inputs are: the parameters of the model and the inflow of cars in the section of road
Mine is Sakurai's "Modern Quantum Mechanics." But it sounds like you're really asking which book would be good for you to learn about quantum mechanics and also the Standard Model of particle physics.
"(or at least I used to)"

Ha! An honest man...
> exchange and outlook (and owa)... the integration between email, calendar, contacts, documents, and access control is still unmatched

So we're just going to pretend that iCloud doesn't exist, then? Is that it?
Fantastic question and something I can relate to entirely.

How many times can you write the same stuff on different PowerPoint slides? How often can you help an organisation to reorganise their marketing campaign structure (that all perform the same anyways)? How often can you reengineer the same problem over and over again and always end up with roughly the same output?

That's just all precious time down the drain. Your time is so much better invested doing things that actually make you happy: Spend time in nature, push yourself in sports activities you enjoy, discover new places around where you live, start gardening, read a bunch of books, learn how to cook, or improve your DIY skills. Whatever helps make you you - that's how we should be spending our time!

I work in IT consulting and here's what I found works for me to some extent:

1. Be knowledgable in your field of work, courteous, and command some amount of respect towards you - be there when people need you (but don't be there for them too much, see my third point),

2. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Never offer straight away to take care of stuff for people just because you know you can solve their issue. Verbally, be knowledgable yet unreachable. Compliment others on their skills and delegate right into their smothered egos, and

3. Information asymmetry. You didn't take their call because you were out for a walk - you were on another call with some client, or colleague. You've only found time to respond to their messages or e-mails late in the evening or early morning (late night or early morning e-mails / messages are a great power play in general) because you were relaxing in your backyard - this other project got super busy today so you just didn't find the time! You don't need to end the call right now because you're bored of the conversation or want to go have lunch - you need to end the call right now because there's another call you gotta jump on.

I believe a lot of people really crave interacting with folks that are both knowledgable (once they get a hold of them) and yet appear perpetually busy or overworked. Noticing this pattern and using it to your advantage is one key towards greater personal freedom.
That's definitely the case with C as well, which is why no one but a complete lunatic would write random business software in C.
> It's not useful to have her ideas proselytized to us.

But you can't properly speak for other users on this site ("us.") You can (and certainly have) spoken for yourself, but a claim to represent more seems pretentious at the least.
Bimodal distribution exist when an external force has been applied to a data set.

Now for a what if. What if the students apply themselves and study, but the class ends up getting around the same distribution of scores?(Where the median is a 90.) The professors theory of cheating is thrown out the window.
Anecdotal evidence from my experience finds this to be true but only when you consider the type of developer and his field.

Opensource web oriented platforms (i.e web developers who commit code to web based projects in accordance to open source code licenses) use OSX in my experience by overwhelming majority.

Lower OS Level developers tend to stick with Linux or BSD

In some instances it didn't make any sense at all, the pains I saw developers trying to install couchDB on their OSX platform (i think it is a easier now), it was far easier to do this on ubuntu.

Developers also have aesthetic impulses, and OSX looks good and feels good, for most people, better then any X based GUI other platforms have. This is also an issue with the relative comfort different developers have with the Terminal.

Much can be said about this practice, no dog fooding might make open source less viable in the long run.
I've done that kind of stuff and, against an advanced opponent, you tend to lose. (Although you can roll the average webmaster)

Remember that IP addresses have a market price of about $3 /month, and that's what an honest proxy cost Honest proxy providers rent machines in data centers and have them bind to a wide range of addresses, all in the same netblock. If you're coming from 20 different addresses in a netblock (paying $60) a month, you still look suspicious. These guys might have machines in several data centers, but they can't put you into hundreds of different netblocks.

The economics might get better if you're sharing the proxies with other people, but those other people are up to the Devil's work, and are busting their asses 24-7 getting the IP addresses in everybody's block lists.

As for Tor, quite a few organizations block or limit Tor traffic... Databases of active Tor gateways are available, and sites like Wikipedia use them... Wikipedia won't let you make anonymous edits from Tor, because they don't like dealing with griefers who use Tor.

Now, some people will use hacked machines as proxy servers. A botnet can create a nearly indetectable cloud of IP addresses, but as far as I'm concerned, use of a botnet is an ethical line I won't cross.
Yeah but if you can afford several hundred dollars for a tv you aren't likely to be in the category of people who care about $20 bucks, whereas if you buy something for $40 you might.

So thats why I wrote that.
FWIW, the GCC, LD and other tools provided with OS X have a lot of deviations in terms of command line arguments and shared library path/bundle concepts.

You can have a simple application with a simple Makefile that works out of the box on any BSD and Linux system, but still have to adjust it to get it run under OS X.

So yes, under that hat OS X is some kind of Unix, but it is a very strange kind of Unix. OS X requires special cases in any build script, even in portable *.pro files of Qt projects.

So to me, as a developer and problem solver, OS X confronts me with a lot more distractions and nasty behavior than any other Unix-like system, including Windows+MinGW.

(This is because the MinGW cross compilers behave like normal GCC/Binutils as far as possible for the Windows platform. However, this solely because MinGW is developed by a group of volunteers, while the GCC functionality for OS X is developed by Apple. MinGW would surely look worse if it had been developed by Microsoft.)
Yes. I've done both (on Ubuntu) without ever having to do anything but parouse the package manager (which is the easist way to install software of any of the 3 major OSes). And they were pretty easy.

Now can you open Solidworks files on OS X? No? Well then obviously Mac OS X is a horrible choice for everyone, because it certainly doesn't work for me.

Pick any random use case and you can single out any one of Windows, Linux, or OS X as being inferior to your choice. I miss Textmate on Linux and I miss the command line on Windows and I miss some of the professional applications I use on Linux and Mac.
Ahh I see according to http://lnkr.mobi/bm/google_bookmarks_api/ that is about all the docs on that API there are, and it doesn't support annotations/notes. Mine doesn't either, but it's a one line change to make it do so.
hyperlinka: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?aq=f&ie=UTF...
Why? SSH is very convenient, easy for anyone to understand (including my 9 year old nephew), and I trust the security. What is better?
How would (will?) China react if Musk gets his low-earth orbit satilites providing Internet globally? I assume China could block the domestic sale of the receivers. But in the long run, a globally accessible Internet would raise interesting issues, and perhaps be seen as an act of aggression by regimes in North Korea, China, etc.
Am I the only one who, looking at the headline, thinks "RSA as in algorithm", not "RSA as in some US company"?
captchas also keep out some legitimate users[1]. I have to screenshare/visit my father fairly often because he runs into trouble deciphering non-recaptcha captchas for the most part (he's low vision with some other vision problems). The only saving grace of recaptcha and a very select few alternatives (google comes to mind) is the audio captcha he can at least listen to.

I would gladly consider working on a browser extension that implements this service for his sake. It's a double edged sword, and really, if your spam prevention relies heavily on captchas, it's not feasible in the long term anyway. This is not the first or last or cheapest service to break them.

I haven't even gotten started on my own personal gripes about captcha abuses. Top on my list right now is one I'm going to encounter again on my flight later today: gogo inflight wifi asking me to fill out a captcha after payment...on wifi on a plane 35000 feet up in the air in the middle of California. Talk about pointless.

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ lists some interesting alternatives to captchas that may work for lower traffic sites.
The difference between a real user and these type of services is mainly the latency, an effective counter would rely on this fact. One idea would be some kind of game that would be easy for users with low latency to play for a few seconds and win but would be impossible for the proxy'd filipinos.
Nice. I used the Fwix API a while back on unscatter.com when I was focusing on news. Since I've gone back to focusing on search and done a rewrite I haven't picked it back up. It's on my list of things to implement again when I want to put local based search back in.

New API looks nice, like the places implementation. I'm looking forward to trying it out when I get to that point again.
Actually, I managed a reasonably large scale free email operation and spammers DO spend money solving captchas.

We had this issue with spammers where after sending 50 emails a day we would ask users to solve a captcha after each email sent. That didn't work.

Upon further investigation and adding some code to track keypresses, we discovered the reason: it had been humans all along, sending spam semi-manually from a cybercafe/sweatshop in Nigeria using an add-on like Roboform as an aid. And yes, these were the usual H3rb4l V14gr4 spammers as well as some Nigerian Princes.

While there is poverty, Captchas are necessarily broken.
If you are doing it right I can see very few scenarios for screwing the system — not more than exist now when it comes to, say, manipulating the odometer.

Such systems must already allow you to keep the battery as long as you want and to use it as often as you want (for as long as you have a contract), they must allow you to charge yourself, otherwise they wouldn't make all that much sense. The idea is that you don't have to change batteries for daily commutes or short trips (you charge at night), only for longer trips. (This is something that works much better in densely populated countries with little sprawl — the US might not be a very good candidate. I think Israel is trying out such a system in some way, its smallness makes it ideal.)

It's like a flat rate, some drive little, some drive more, but just because the battery is rented doesn't mean that driving behavior will change all that much. There is only so much you can drive and charge.

I also think that it would be somewhat involved to sell the battery on the black market. You have to at least get a replacement battery before your contract is up, so where's the advantage in selling your old battery on the black market? You might be able to profit a little, but you would also need scale, you need know how (how to manipulate the data those batteries would no doubt be collecting) and you need to be able to hide from the police. Nothing unheard of, but also no show-stopper. (People already do this with odometers and hardly anyone cares.)
What to work on and who to work with
Depending on how much they cost as well as how much IKEA wants to profit from their sale, it could be well within their reach to charge (for example) Americans what one would expect for an IKEA garden shed, writer's shed, whatever you want to call it. If you search prefab outdoor sheds on Sears, you'll see that prices vary from around $300 to $2000 depending on size and materials and taking sale prices into account. One advantage IKEA has is that they thrive on people buying in to their systems, even when it's not necessarily cheaper than the alternative. That can be attributed to better design, integration/continuity (i.e. "everything just goes well together"), or just shopper's fatigue after a day of wandering through an IKEA store. How much would you be willing to pay for it? That's the only question IKEA needs an answer. If the can sell it for cost x 2 without an average IKEA shopper batting an eye then they're golden. Whether they want to try squeezing a profit in there is up to them but by no means necessary. They get publicity and a new product line.

To address what you've said about OLPC, I don't think it's a good comparison at all. Problems with the OLPC in this case: huge restructuring due to the economy, never intended for consumers, and in an already massive product field (PCs > Laptops > Netbooks). Still, the Give 1 Get 1 campaign netted 83,500 sales. That's pretty good, considering the cost was $400 in the same year that the MacBook Air became available for $1800 (which people thought was pretty high then). How many of those people expected to actually use their OLPC? How many people do you think would buy an IKEA shed just for it to sit around and make them feel charitable or something?
minor nitpick - even if "OCaml has no equivalent of Haskell's Ordering or SML's order types" there is Pervasives.compare. it returns {0,-1,+1} rather than {EQ, LT, GT}, but you can still say

match compare x v with
| 0 -> ...
| 1 -> ...
| _ -> ...

with the minor wart that since compare returns an int, you need to match the last case with a default to prevent the compiler from warning you about possibly not matching other int values.
How does that differ from the telemetry Apple uses?
Snyk isn’t great to be honest and neither is Dependabot though I like the latter better.

GitHub is the only company uniquely positioned to fix/profit from the major problem of insecure FOSS toolchains but for whatever reason they are dragging their feet on it.

Features I’d like to see from GH:

- Private package repository. Each package includes metadata and rank based upon if its actively maintained or includes vulns. Being a GitHub Sponsor would be mandatory for all companies using the service.

- License audit: At the click of a button or api request fetch licenses for each dependency listed in your repo’s requirements.txt, gemfile, package.JSON etc. Extra points if it can flag problematic licenses automagically

- Dynamic scanning: They are already offering static scans against source code might as well go a step further

- Automagic secure code checklists: Scan my PR’s code and dependencies then generate
a checklist for my dev teams use case.

- Signed-off Exceptions: Give me the option to configure better notifications and more accountability for Dependabot. If I haven’t addressed a vulnerability then automatically communicate the risk to a reviewer.

- Centralized dashboard: Let me view all vulnerabilities for all repos for my organization in one place
I was once a snowboard instructor, outdoors, athletic, people. Really fun. Pay was barely over minimum, but I had the time of my life. I spent plenty of time in the woods exploring.
No. Some portfolio managers are just good. This whole no one can beat the market is non sense.
> I don't get lisp's (lisp-2) dynamic scoping

I don't know about elisp, but common lisp uses primarily lexical scoping. If you ignore ‘defparameter’/‘defvar’, then you'll be living exclusively in lexical scoping land.

> I'd like to have macros. I wonder if R7RS has macros

R7RS only specifies hygienic macros, but unhygienic macros are a commonly implemented extension. They aren't present in chibi scheme, but you find chicken scheme[0] or s7 scheme[1] interesting.

0. https://www.call-cc.org/

1. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/s7.html
And here what matters is not your programming skills, it’s your profiling skills. Every dev writes code that’s not the most optimized piece from the start, hell we even say “don’t optimise prematurely”. But good devs know how to profile and flamegraph their app, not leetcode their app.
Suppose I wanted to play around and experiment with token ring networks. Could I cobble it together somehow with common devices? Is it possible to emulate them in any meaningful way in software? Just curious as someone with no networking experience lower than IP.