jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I would agree all models are bad, some models are useful even though it goes unstated. I feel like the author’s point is that asking for “the right model” is the wrong question. I don’t mind argument-by-analogy too much, but I think it would help if we knew what the aliens were trying to do with their model. People criticizing "inaccuracy" seem to just have high standards for their models (perhaps you want to simulate 100B chess games in 10 seconds.. how's that coin flip idea sound now?). Just imagine you're dreaming about backgammon: do you know all the rules? no, but you can roughly model what's going on. Your model could be said "worse" than standard rules, but it's good enough for a dream sequence.

More than once have I seen a nice chess set in a home, set up completely wrong. They’ll be close! Their model isn’t too far off from standard, but just so (K & Q reversed, B & N reversed, &c). I presume the owners were quite content. Honestly, I don’t even know if most people would notice, so why point it out (is my model even the “preferred” one)?
Correct. If the drivers are treated as independent contractors and account for vehicle costs and paying themselves at least minimum wage for all working time, the profit margin on rides is quite slim, potentially to the point where the additional time to clean the car means a driver makes less than minimum wage. Were it an actual company, that would be illegal. Under Uber's model, it's "they are an independent contractor, we just match them with rides and handle billing."

Uber does provide training that says drivers must accept service dogs. However, if there are issues, they are uncommon enough and the likelihood of a driver getting sued is low enough that a driver may just drive away.

My gut tells me that drivers should be employees, or limits should be placed on using single-person independent contractors to provide a service like this. It's not going to solve every problem and the traditional "taxi" mentality is going to remain, but I remember the early days of Uber when drivers could not reject too many rides and stay on the platform, and it did seem to solve some of the management problems with drivers. Heck, maybe the answer is to contract the work out to car management companies with real HR departments like the airlines do with regional jet flying, so that Uber can insist on their high quality product and performance metrics and drivers can be employees.
I think the author started from an assertion ("This primary difference between a C++ ‘string’ and ‘vector’ is really just a historical oddity that many programs don’t even need anymore") that highlights an error in the C++ model of strings, not in the way we must think about strings.

Contrast NSString in Cocoa (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsstrin...). The Cocoa string is extremely opaque; it's basically an object. And under the hood, that opacity allows for piles of optimization that are unsafe if the developer is allowed to treat the thing as just a vector of bytes or codepoints. Under the hood, Cocoa does all kinds of fanciness to the memory representation of the string (automatically building and cutting cords, "interning" short strings so that multiple copies of the string are just pointers to the same memory, caching of some transforms under the assumption that if it's needed once, it's often needed again).

Taken this way, one can even start to talk about things like "Why does 'indexing' into a string always return a character, instead of, say, a word?" and other questions that are harder to get into if one assumes a string is just 'vector of characters' or 'vector of bytes.'
Okay I understand. In Java, the default String class has the option to "intern" a string which just maintains a list of strings that can be shared.

The change was made because often the devs were unaware of the string manipulation taking place in a third party library (eg XML/JSON/HTML parsing). You'd see the memory balloon, investigate and notice that String/char[] instances were dominating your heap. Instead of changing the entire implementation of the standard String class, they changed the semantics of the "substring()" call from O(1) to O(n) + memory side-effects.
I write a lot of code using the

#[rustc_layout_scalar_valid_range_start(x)]
#[rustc_layout_sclaar_valid_range_end(y)]
struct MyInt(i32);

to create integers with only valid values in range [x, y) that benefit from the niche optimizations.

Like, have literally a project with almost 100k LOC which is all built on top of this.
From the context I think maybe the company was considering the pay cut and sought legal advice from the quoted lawyer. They probably weren’t public about their considerations and this attorney was just offering up an anecdote about an unnamed client as an example of the type of employment law-related questions he’s been asked during the pandemic.
> Surely this isn't good?

Certainly not. We're semi-returning to fiefdom where the wealthy make the decisions for the masses, who they also happen to employ and market their goods to.

Sure, some good things can come of this, look at what Bill Gates has done for vaccines in the past decade or so, which is now making an actual difference when it comes to covid vaccination development and deployment.

You also have questionable things though, look at the Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments. We've seen company towns before, it generlaly didn't work out very well for the masses... I mean, look at the Battle of Blair Mountain where mining interests went as far as to hire private planes and drop bombs on miners in the United States in retalliatin to a labor uprising https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

I love what extreme wealth can do for a given cause, but do I really want a handful of individuals making the decisions? Ehhhh probably not.
I suspect the answer here isn't "replace your dyson with a box fan and bungie cords" but - if you care about air filtration, buy a cheaper more effective one that looks ok.

It's not surprising a 3-in-1 product isn't very good at (at least) 1 of those functions.
People can pay with their phone using a simple QR code. Merchants can check on any computer with a web browser.

How complex does Mastercard make it right now?

Like I said, it's a dinosaur ready to go extinct.
I see a pattern:

- Someone writes an article with a catchy title.

- Someone [semi or quite] influential notices, and says: "Hey, let's write an article from the opposing perspective, to be contrarian, and see if we can also make some good points."

- Me: [Doesn't click and] thinks "Would ya look at that? An article/author which is contrarian probably just to be contratian. I'm gonna find something else to read..."
Great writeup, and also thoroughly answers the first question that popped into my mind: "how on earth could a bug in the Linux network stack that causes the whole data transfer to get stuck stay undiscovered for so long?"
I wish I could make the general internet dark mode (and I've tried extensions, they don't work all that well). Give me a dark mode HN. White backgrounds hurt my eyes. I'm looking at screens upwards of 16 hours a day, let me reduce some of that strain.
What I appreciated was they he calls himself out for not being a true expert, but did his best to understand the situation.
Seems like a loophole where anyone would build a house close to the water to prevent public access.
any great empire expands until it can no longer afford the maintenance of its own infrastructure, at which point it collapses under its own corpulence.
This scenario is not limited to entrepreneurs and founders. The boyfriend described has a passion, is lucky enough to be getting paid to pursue said passion, and seems to keep it his highest priority. I currently 'know a guy' like that. He doesn't date.

I was also once a guy like that. It was only at that "me or your passion" point in the relationship that priorities were re-evaluated, and our relationship drastically improved for the both of us since. The choice doesn't have to be black and white as was presented between the quotes in the previous sentence, but the idea that it might be was enough to make me think more seriously on the matter.

If the author is happy taking a back seat to her partner's life, then so be it and good for her. The tone of the article, in my opinion, indicated otherwise.
I'd hope so! Ideally I'd be able to send the Magic Link from my own domain, but I haven't found a way to do that yet through Supabase.
Pretty much the only kind of firearms Australians have easy access to are high-powered. In most states a bolt-acton rifle is no big deal. But they can shoot very big bullets!

This is the type of individual small arm I'd assume is the most likely threat to someone in a presidential motorcade.

The guns thing is one of the go-to stereotypes about the U.S., but it isn't generally true or helpful.
I wouldn't overinterpret the downvotes - it's impossible to know what people were thinking, and the mind tends to arrive at the most irritating, annoying, or hurtful explanation.

The same principle works the other way too - when a comment doesn't contain much information, readers tend to interpret it according to whatever they personally find the most irritating, annoying, or hurtful, and then react to that. Our minds are not our best friends this way.

The (partial) solution to this is to include enough disambiguating information in your comment. For example if your comment had contained enough information to make clear that your question was genuinely curious rather than snarkily dismissive, I doubt it would have gotten downvoted.

It's hard to do that because generally our intention is so clear and transparent to ourselves that it doesn't occur to us to include it in the message. Unfortunately for all of us on the internet, however, intent doesn't communicate itself.
Thanks.

I would still vote for more squabbling. Because every conflict will end if there are ways to exit and ‘keep face’(a Chinese concept of losing with dignity).

Having no other big social media alternatives, people are unable to find community and think it’s better to kill instead of sparring. As in..better to cancel someone and deplatform an opponent rather than fighting it out.

It’s good to ‘squabble’, I feel..because when you squabble, we recognize who to avoid and who is like minded. In the long run, it results in a truly diverse community that has long term peace.

Almost 8 billion people and only one Twitter. There should be more. Why isn’t SV and the rest of tech community not coming up with more viable competition?

Twitter could invest in non competing spawns for other topics or in other regions witb their systems code and/or open sourcing their code. I mean..with a little bit of creative thinking, so many possibilities exist.

Give people room to wander..the internet is big!
> It is not zero-sum

No, it really isn't. Read my article and the linked economic research.

> if there was 10 fold increase in programmers

There has been a 10 fold increase in programmers since 50 years ago, but more than a 10 fold increase in the amount of programming work, so salaries have done just fine. Also, those programmers are already there, in other countries, so artificial barriers can only create so much salary disparity before companies will pursue other options. At that point, why were you bothering trying to keep them out in the first place?

Read the linked article: it is not a zero-sum game.
Author here. Thanks so much for your kind and encouraging words. Happy New Year!
It could have simply been a question of effort. Maybe Softdisk saw it as a speculative R&D project and didn't want to go pedal-to-the-metal committing lots of resources to it, like Carmack & Romero clearly thought they should.

Also, the PC games market then was very complicated and segmented, making side-bets quite risky. I've personally never met anyone with an EGA card, whereas CGA and VGA were popular. The PC market was also smaller than other games-oriented ecosystems back then.
>> There's so much we skipped: the code in the blog post actually computes pretty terrible results compared to an even moderately tuned pipeline :)

That's fine. I am a day away from starting an image processing app and was thinking of Python and some libraries. This blog confirms that idea and gives the right amount of "starting point" for my effort. My requirements are very different so showing a more specific solution while still interesting is of less universal value. Perhaps a part-II with more application specific methods would be good.
Is it just me, or do a number of these comments seem... manufactured? Almost all of the positive comments come from accounts with < 10 karma.

Just from reading the comments, I was expecting a nice looking app. However, when I actually saw the screenshots I was greatly disappointed. Nonexistent margins, line height issues, and more make for a client that is worse than the original HN.

Then, to learn that it isn't even feature complete (no comment voting) and the author is charging $5?
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/27#issuecomment-673...
At width 1000px to 1200px, "Secure Login via Keychain Access!" overlaps the graphic.
> Why is the basic workflow of the modern-day programmer split over multiple tools and over multiple systems?

I disagree that this is a problem.

Replace "programmer" with any other profession, and you'll see it's universally silly.
Tell me about it! In our village, FTTC has been delayed at least 2 years because one NIMBY bstard didn't want his view of the field in front of his house to be obscured by a larger cabinet. He's already got a cab in front of his house, just didn't want one perhaps 8 inches taller. That's one man holding back progress for thousands.
As German these kind of articles confuse me. Here T-Mobile are the bad guys with expansive plans and crappy contracts.
Yes! I'd pay 10$ a year for it or 8 for 2 month.
How is this a leak when THEY HAVE A WEBSITE with a signup form? http://atom.io

:)
I just got the whole NoSQL marketing talk from a developer I am collaborating with on a project. "Its so quick, just connect Angular to Elasticsearch and blah blah blah". So no thought has been given to security (its going to be a biomedical research application). I can foresee lots problems in the future.
> It is just too much to expect of the human mind that one should not say something one doesn't mean.

Careful, that is quite a slippery slope...
I don't know how long Emacs has had a GUI, but it's at least 20 years.

I don't remember what the graphical capabilities of GNU Emacs are like, as I only use the command line version, but XEmacs at least also has extensive support for bitmaps graphics in buffers that far exceeds most of these "new editors".
I'm amused at how strongly the for/against sides are arguing in this thread. This is a case where the cost benefit analysis is quite simple. I used to start my day at work by doing git status on my project repos to warm up the disk cache, then go get coffee. Now I just dive straight into whatever's on my plate. Then there's the 20 seconds I save whenever I start up Eclipse. The 2 minutes I save on every reboot. It all adds up.

What I'm interested is why people are so adamantly against. People drop huge amounts of money on RAM for their development rigs, but making the slowest I/O device faster and more predictable is a bad idea?

I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but is there a backlash because the people who are happy about their SSDs are so enthusiastic about them? I realize this is the internet and spending energy wondering why people are so angry is pretty futile, but what's the point?
The more important question is: are populist comments getting fewer upvotes? The reason they might is that voting has become for many voters more the individual task of judging the worth of the comment and less the group task of deciding what is popular.

Looking at the distribution of comment karma before and after the change might give some clue as to that. Analysing two popular threads might be better, if we get the methodology right.
PDEs are really useful if you are in the rare domains where they are useful. But most PDEs don't have even have closed form solutions for non-trivial boundary conditions. So unless you are a physicist or something adjacent, no, no you really don't need to know these.

Hard to say what's the intended audience for the page though. Could be a message aimed at physics undergrads or something. If so, then indeed, you should know these.
The HTML/CSS all up is about 34kb, but could be a lot less if minified, and the CSS was made for ease of drawing over optimization :) You could get a PNG down to less than 10kb easily (but of course, that was hardly the point hehe). Cheers for the comments guys!
UK only.
Whether or not the risk is marginal depends on the circumstances of the user. I there's probably a time and an place for this security model, though I don't see myself using it.

I see two key questions:

* Has the security model has been properly implemented?

* Have its properties have been communicated to the users of the system in a clear enough way that people can evaluate how the risks apply to them?

I don't know about the first question, but on the second they could certainly stand some improvement.
Excellent. They did a good job hitting the high points on a $10 million budget. I loved the cast, and I'm glad they didn't use A-listers.
I worked for a company that was building a low-latency real-time platform for applications like financial trading. We shipped on both Linux and Windows. As I recall, our latency on Linux was fairly reliably under 1 ms, while on Windows it was often more like 15ms. In short, the Windows scheduler was nowhere near adequate for real time work.
> Working at home is not as easy as it may seem as you have much more other things in your head that often sounds a lot more interesting than a work.

While working at home or in a secluded office is amazing for getting something done, don't forget all the social interaction, communication and contacts you are missing.

Do you account for that somehow and monitor how that develops over the months? How do you counter it?
Developer homepage, with open APIs: http://developer.jamendo.com/en/
Downloading client-side generated files is possible using data-uri. However these are usually small; it would be very difficult to store a 1GB file in memory (in javascript) while you decrypted it and I doubt data-uris that large work across different browsers.
I love it when startups at least attempt to drag businesses stuck in the old way of doing things kicking and screaming into the new reality.
So your kid's school has the kids segregated by ability... and that contradicts some assumption I've made?
> computer graphics algorithms. The reason is the same . . .

another reason is the test code is/will/might-be as complexly numerical as what it is supposed to test -- how do you feel confident about it? write tests for it? hmmmm . . .
Corollary: Composer John Cage's instructions to "start anywhere."
I can see that virtualization has driven a lot of architectural decisions that have paid off in terms of OS imaging and configuration agents, but at the end of the day I'm stuck with the same question I've had for nigh-on four years: does virtualization really make a difference?

That story is fine for a "hey, the market is growing!" sentiment, but if power isn't being saved or something else tangible, then it's just moving beans (or bottlenecks) around. Imaging advances have obvious benefits outside of virtualization, and as long as five or six years ago you could send an image to Dell and they would slap it on however many computers you wanted to order. Virtualization has always seemed to be tantamount to this, a non sneaker-net way of doing the same thing. Nice, as far as it goes, but you save overhead (less and less every day, to be fair) by declining virtualization, and I think in the long run virtualization will be the province of large budgets and bad or subperformant code (which benefits from from the stop/start speed of images), and in classical terms introduces another single point of failure.
Not really thinking creatively though.

Why replace children in a chinese sweatshopa earning 80c an hour with prisoners being paid $1 hour.
Wouldn't it be more profitable to replace people being paid $1000/hour with prisoners at $1/hour?

Imprison the bankers, have them continue to work from prison for $1 - use profit to pay off national debt.
The point is well-illustrated, but not at all new. Jim Collins's book Good to Great dedicates an entire chapter to what he calls the flywheel effect. Consistent effort applied over a long period of time with a consistent vision can generate massive results. But, I doubt the concept was new with him, either.

By the way, if you haven't read Good to Great, I highly recommend it. Although based on large, slow-moving businesses, the general points Collins and his team extract are easily applicable to just about any significant project.
Even social sites with lock-in can still lose market share because you can socialize on multiple platforms. I still have a yahoo email address cos my grandmother likes to send me email forwards. But when I make new connections, or reconnect with old ones, I don't do it on yahoo.

Grandmothers won't save Facebook. They'll allow Facebook to linger on like a maladapted dinosaur or the old VAX your IT department uses as shelf space. But in a post-Facebook world, just because we all keep Facebook accounts to maintain ossified relationships doesn't mean Zuck still has social relevance.
Sorry, my bad; copy and paste from URL bar
The biggest impediment to a Netflix competitor is getting the licensing from the media companies. After that, Netflix is a very bandwidth-intensive service and it would require a significant upfront investment to establish a competitor, which is probably why not many are trying. Even if you just want to do rental only, that still takes a significant investment to provide processing centers and make the required arrangements with the Postal Service. It's definitely not a low overhead venture.

There are some people that seem to be posturing to compete with Netflix. Amazon has some video on demand services and an unlimited solution on some titles for Prime subscribers. YouTube has made forays into the rental business and if they were interested in providing a service analogous to Netflix they'd be able to do so, and this may be beneficial to Google if they decide they want to ramp up on Google TV.

Furthermore, Microsoft refuses to license its DRM, which is used to encrypt Netflix streams, for use on desktop-grade Linux systems so Netflix can't do anything with the desktop Linux market for the time being. This is a major detraction for custom HTPC builders and some others. YouTube and Amazon both use Flash to deliver their content and both are playable on desktop-grade Linux machines.
My iPhone hasn't touched consolidated.db since I last used Google Maps. It is still at the exact same size as it was before. So clearly you can turn it off somehow.
So meanwhile your sysadmin has gone over to the co-lo to swap parts, and as mentioned elsewhere dealt with CS, shipping, and such. Real-world problems. The cost is not $0.
This one is a hacker?
"Russia is problematic in that its government is notoriously corrupt and controlled by the mob and Russian business interests, "

Don't listen to Western media. I'm sure Russian government would be supportive of anything that provides jobs to the working class.
She do get a lot of press, may be perhaps that is so because she is tune with the political fads of the time, rather than anything else. But shorn of their topicality, does her work has lasting value?

Even considering women writers writing in English only, she'd be considerably behind writers like Marilynne Robinson, Donna Tart, A.S Byatt or Arundhati Roy in the accomplishment of her work.
Was 100x for me. My boss unfortunately did not agree with me.