skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is saying you should build this in your back office. My comment was limited (by the first bit) to people utilizing public clouds and those who run public clouds. If you are, you are affected by these issues; if you are not, then there's an opportunity cost there, whether or not you believe the early optimization is greater or lesser.
Cheers! I'm actually using R as part of a SaaS app I'm building at the moment. I'm gonna use this for an easter egg. :)
As if it wasn't already difficult enough explaining to people why I use Firefox...
> XML is unnecessarily complex for this kind of usecase, and too hard and time-consuming to work with (and I agree)

What is 'difficult' in XML?
It's also on seclists.org -

http://seclists.org/isn/2015/Aug/4
Will this still be based as a US registered company then?
Because the post very clearly makes reverse engineering out to be an inherently terrible thing, when the alternative is basically see-no-evil.

And so are you. Not paying is inherently wrong. This is an arbitrary rule more akin to "no looking out the east window".

Trying to sell something to be used but not understood is a fool's errand.
> It's pretty common practice for a .com to run its backend stuff on the .net version of their .com domain.

Meaning the .com is basically just the UI that sends all its information to the .net to be processed, then back to the .com to be rendered? What's the benefit of that to the company, instead of having it all on the .com site?
Sure. It will be a fork that falls behind master without funding or support. Get enough momentum and push it far enough and Chromium and Firefox will stop being OSS altogether.
Why Google changes name to Alphabet – Larry Page gives full details
> Ad-blockers have finally reached a point that the financiers of the major browsers are setting the groundwork for tightening the screws on them.

You speak with such confidence about things you obviously have no idea about. This change is driven by the massive amount of malware that threatens users of all browser with a sufficiently strong add-on API.

Can you please point me to any evidence that would suggest that this change was made even just in parts at the request of Yahoo?

Also, Firefox is free software, the only thing that belongs to Mozilla is the name. If it ever became difficult to block ads with Firefox, that brand would lose its value pretty quickly and somebody else would offer Firefox+adblocking under a different name.
Authentic shit is still shit?
On mobile you want messages to come through without each app maintaining a connection.
Ironically, if you look at the data center as a computer, this looks very much like scaling up, not scaling out.

I wonder if one day we will find that sending all data to a data center for processing doesn't scale. I think that's already a given for some realtime'ish types of applications and it could become more important.

Obviously, the success of decentralised computing depends a lot on the kinds of connected devices and whether or not data makes sense without combining it with data from other devices and users.

With small mobile devices you always have battery issues. With cars, factory equipment or buildings, not so much. But management issues could still make everyone prefer centralisation.
Users still have control. You can remove plugins you don't like, and if you really want to, use a version of a plugin which allows unsigned extensions.

Arguably this change might give users more control: Trojan horses can no longer secretly side load malware.
When Phone Encryption Blocks Justice
> Even worse is the Wifi sharing with social networks

Which is turned off by default....
China's actually working on a reactor like that: http://www.scmp.com/tech/science-research/article/1840219/ch...

Advantages: the fusion side doesn't have to quite hit breakeven, and on the fission side you can handily break apart any transuranic atom, even more effectively than fast reactors. It'll destroy any transuranic waste (which is most of our nuclear waste, and almost all the long-term waste), or directly fission thorium or unenriched uranium.

On the other hand, fission people don't like the complexity and fusion people don't like introducing all that hassle with fission products and decay heat. But it may well find a niche for nuclear waste elimination at least, and produce a lot of energy along the way.
It may or may not have had something to do with the sale of the Danish West Indies to USA in 1917.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_West_Indies
Keep in mind that economist tend to have a long view goes between 1970 and the present (Piketty goes so far back as 1700, which is why he is famous).
Firefox users see through this feel-good marketing nonsense from Mozilla.

They've seen Firefox's UI change for the worse in so many ways, even in the face of wide opposition.

They've seen unwanted bloat, like Hello and Pocket, forced upon them, again in the face of wide opposition.

They've seen their requests for bug fixes and performance improvements go unheeded, sometimes for years.

The easy use of extensions has been the only thing keeping many of these people using Firefox. They've been using many extensions to undo, as much as is possible, the unwanted changes that Mozilla has made.

I use Firefox Nightly, and was recently surprised when, after an update, some custom extensions I had written myself were not loading, and could not be easily enabled. When I found out it was due to this, and I had to start adjusting about:config settings, it was nearly the last straw for me.

I don't want to use another browser, but it's like Mozilla is doing everything in its power to make using Firefox a bad experience for me. I know I'm not alone. We've already seen Firefox' share of the browser market drop from well over 30% to a level of around 10% today, if it isn't actually lower than that.

It's truly sad to see what's happening to what was once such a great browser.
Mozilla hasn't fired anyone for their views.

And caring about users' security is to be commended.
Confessions of a back-end developer
You cannot swear you will never be an Oracle customer. You buy a service from a third party, the company get bought by Oracle, you are a customer now. In many instances in B2B systems, it is a lot more pain to migrate away than sending a check...
They took it down. Mirror?
How to create a genius mouse
I dunno. I spent some time learning Clojure but came to the conclusion that it's really only a good tool if you are also heavily committed to Java -- too many Java stack traces, too many functions where the answer is "use Java", too much time looking at Java source code. I don't hate Java, but that wasn't what I was hoping for. (Haskell is a different story, very different pros and cons.)
Oh, I get it. Alphabet.

Alpha Bet.

They're making a Bet on the Alpha versions of these products.
> I mean that there needs to be a fundamental difference between the
> difficulty of finding a solution and validating one. There's none in
> case of edit distance.

If you consider the decision problem "Is the edit distance <= d?", there is (according to this result) a fundamental difference - though only a polynomial one.

To see this, consider the following argument:

Clearly the edit distance between strings of length m, n is bounded by m+n (>= d). So if we found a way to transform the string s1 into s2 using d steps, we can construct a certificate of length O(m+n) (worst case) steps, which can be verified in linear time.

On the other hand (according to this result) you need Omega(m*n) (worst case) steps to find such a certificate.
> I know Burcu Dogan was against automatic sync because it isn't 100% reliable in every case, but frankly she's wrong. That isn't a sufficiently bad con not to use it compared to the pro - it's automatic.

With a bit of bad luck, automatic sync easily turns into a mess (see the trainwreck that is Apple Music; even the most devoted fanboys loathe it).
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt/FAQ#I_want_to_try_the_b...

Could be explained a bit better...
The business of starting businesses, interesting..
> might install malware

Might? This happens very frequently.

> might grant it root/admin privileges

They don't need to, if you have the browser you have all the good stuff.
Will this also affect Firefox for Android?

Mozilla currently don't provide a dev build for Android, just regular and beta versions https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Mozilla

The security problem that this "fixes" is not really an issue on Android due to Android's own app sandboxing, so maybe the Android build will allow unsigned extensions? It's not mentioned in the FAQ.
> Meaning the .com is basically just...

Sort of, yeah.

I can't tell you why you'd want to have a front office/back office split like that, but I could speculate: Domains are cheap, and it might reduce cognitive overhead to have a .com/.net operational split.
Ah, but what if they hold a referendum and 60% want to change sovereign and 40% don't. Is it not an abrogation of that 40%'s right to self-determination? Maybe we should recognize that everybody has different desires and voting exists merely to pacifistically answer the question of if we fought a civil war over this decision, who would be more likely to win.
Well this is an interesting rip-off way of driving a lot of traffic quickly to a somewhat odd joke..
Yeah, and you did that because you had to back then. :)

Thinking more about my post, I left out the option of just staying with Linux Mint after a noob gains experience.

Not that I'm anything like a role model, but it's my default personal distro, because it doesn't try to be the main focus of my computer experience, it just gets out of the way lets me focus on the work.
> The old free software movement has died. We need a new free software movement.

There is nothing wrong with the free software movement just because someone does something disagreeable---that's like saying there's something wrong with your operating system because you have malware on it.
My phone turned out to be vulnerable!
Take a look at the platform statistics there. Nearly half of the feedback (46%) comes from Android users. Reading the comments, they seem like the (very uninsightful) reviews you typically see in the Google Play Store where the "unhappy people will complain" seems to be quite true.

Firefox for Android is a fundamentally different beast from the browser on Windows/Linux/MacOS. I am quite happy with the desktop version, yet I find the mobile experience quite underwhelming.

If you limit the selection by platform, on Android it will even show "100% sad, 0% happy" -- Mozilla has some work to do there. On Windows 7 you get "81% sad, 19% happy". Still bad, I agree, but don't just dismiss the inherent bias of a feedback system. And compare them to the stats for competitors, too.
They did: "XEP-0295: JSON Encodings for XMPP" https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0295.html

:-)
Force Touch on iPhone 6S revealed: expect shortcuts, faster actions across iOS
My comment was satirical too actually. The whole idea of thinking computers have created something "new and original" just by shoving together bits and pieces of human-produced works of art seems somewhat ridiculous. It's not entirely ridiculous, as the computer did do some manual labor of piecing together the words, but ultimately, you are relying on a corpus of pre-existing work and then reassembling it together. Any emotion (or indeed, most of anything good) comes from the corpus, not from the bot analyzing and imitating the corpus.
Does that mean you're blocking CDNs? What's the effect on performance?
Berlin is importing a bunch of highly-educated unemployed Spaniards. It's not really the same thing.
Some people hate the UI changes. A lot of people are just fine with them.

Hello and Pocket are just two buttons in a toolbar which you can remove.
The notion that XML is difficult comes from the most profoundly lazy evaluations possible, where the most minimal of up front understanding are effort are eschewed if you can just launch mongodb and insert some giant mystery meat bags of json. We've seen this same mistake play out over, and over, and over again, and it is incredible that in a field where projects often end up taking thousands or more of man hours, people sweat and complain about 15 minutes up front gaining a basic understanding of a structure or API, and instead pursue solutions that, for instance, doesn't even have a date type or even consistent hack standard of how to handle it.

This is how we have the rapid trends in this field, where the new panacea is tomorrow's nightmare.
While I've learned a lot from Norvig's posts, he tends to write Python code that many wouldn't consider "Pythonic" :)
Mtime Helps Hollywood Clear China’s Marketing Hurdles and Reach Fans
A non-technical person's computer is often a source of agitation for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes those reasons are reasonable. Sometimes they are not.

I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by speculating what Aunt Tilly might think of a long list of human-unfriendly domain names.
While I agree that XMPP is not the future for app-to-app communication, I do so for a slightly different reasons.

> XML is unnecessarily complex for this kind of usecase

XMPP is too complex, but the XML stuff is really the smallest issue, compared with other complexities in the protocol. For example, every client that successfully connected to an XMPP server must first send a "<presence>" message. Otherwise, it won't receive any messages despite their successful connection. And there are more such surprises in XMPP. Good luck in understanding which "devices" (#xxxx) of the same Jabber ID will receive a message targeted at that ID.

It's really annoying and discouraging to debug that kind of issues - especially since these aren't bugs. These work as specified, but the specifications were obviously designed with direct human chatting or direct human collaboration in mind, programs being an afterthought.

> The correct technology is JSON-over-WebSockets

Not really. Whenever I saw someone trying this "in the wild", I see them quickly switching to HTTP long-polling. (Not to be confused with polling! We are still talking about instant push notifications with very low network overhead.)

For example, there are some libraries that used to provide wrappers around WebSockets, which switched to HTTP long-polling as fallback for old browsers. Nowadays, it seems they use long-polling by default, even though browser support becomes better and better.

Don't underestimate the role of firewalls and HTTP proxies! Many firewalls are aggressive configured, and many companies have forced HTTP proxies in place.
This is now a prime example in what happens when politics gets involved with justice. The police interviewed everyone involved, including Assange. The district chief prosecutor looked at it and concluded to drop it. Almost a month later, even through there had been no new information available, the political assigned director of Public Prosecution decided to reopen the case and immediately issues a international arrest warrant for Assange who by then had left the country. Assange then later goes into political refugee, while prosecutor refuses to continue with the case for political reasons, which then created a deadlock. A Swedish judge then order the prosecutor to continue with the case, but by then its too late to start diplomatic negotiations to get into the embassy and the case falls through to the statue of limitations.

If the choice had been between the possibility of incompetent police and prosecutor that might cause a criminal go free, or the political mess above, I rather go with the first option. The accused, the potential victims, and the tax payers has all been suffering from this case and the only beneficiary aspect has been the diplomatic relation between Sweden and US. That outcome should be a clear sign that justice and politics do not belong together.
Users still have control. You can remove plugins you don't like, and if you really want to, use a version of a plugin which allows unsigned extensions.

You could argue that as long as users can still download a disk editor and change any byte of the disk on their machine they still have control (in fact patching out this signature check could probably be done with a single-byte change to the binary...); the problem is when this control is made more and more difficult.
This is different to the sort of thing Google is doing in the data centre. Most of the PBs/sec don't really see the light of day since you may have a multi-megabyte "image" being captured at something like 40MHz, but practically much of the image is zeros for any given capture. So zero-suppression in the first instance already brings the data down to much more manageable numbers, before they hit off-the-shelf computing hardware.

(At least, that was the case a few years ago. I don't know how much it has changed but I would be surprised if they had totally overhauled things).
> I also don't really understand the comparison with "JSON over HTTP"

One of the complainers is matrix (https://matrix.org/), which does JSON over HTTP.
Dealing with it. Namespaces, attribute access, type-casting, the entire shebang.

JSON can be very easily natively represented in just about any language: you have objects/hashmaps/dicts, arrays, booleans, strings, numbers, and null. This means that accessing something in a JSON object is simple - you just use standard member access in your language of choice.

XML is considerably harder to use - you have children, and attributes. You have namespaces, and so on. These make it impossible to use a basic 'data model' like for JSON - instead you need interactive objects, that let you traverse the tree.

You can no longer simply map/filter/reduce over data. You can't easily access deeply nested structures without lots of syntax clutter. You can't easily serialize back and forth. Instead of using what your language already provides for data structures, you now need to learn an entirely new one, specifically for XML.

That is what is 'difficult' in XML - it considerably increases the cognitive load for working with it. You can't keep the structure in your head easily, but need to look at documentation instead, and need to learn a specific (often bulky!) API just to interact with the data.

Realistically, XML is useful for storage of complex data, but you really shouldn't be using it for wire serialization like XMPP does. XML is useful in a small subset of usecases, and trying to apply it to everything else is a mistake.
Of late I've been taken by the concept that someone who grew up on the far side of the Moon, and never travelled very far, would - due to the Moon's rotation period equalling its revolution period - be completely unaware of the existence of the Earth. They'd see the Sun rise and set in a 175 hour cycle, along with the rest of the Universe. The notion that a brightly reflective body, significantly larger than their own spheroid and covered with billions of intelligent (?) beings, existed a mere 238,900 miles away would be absolutely preposterous ... at least until said resident travelled far enough to peek around the horizon and see a most mind-blowing sight.

I mention that to set premise that one can be remarkably unaware of a plain truth just around the corner. The strong argument for Earth being flat is little different from the strong argument for Earth perceived as flat. The flaw obviously is the objective difference between fact & perception.

I go thru trouble of writing this to note that while you're pointing fingers at the difference between being and perceiving, you are yourself holding the mistaken notion that Earth is a lumpy sphere, when Earth is, in objective reality, a very long and slightly bent 4-dimensional _spring_ shape, which we see just a 3-d cross-section of which looks spherical to us lower-dimensional beings.

While making a strong argument, be humble - your perception may be objectively wrong, misguided, or incomplete as well.
You can't quote a word and ask them to explain it if they didn't even use that word.
Israeli company to Google: Find another name, Alphabet is taken
Three India-born CEOs now lead global technology
Well at least it's not a funny joke.
Those approval ratings you speak of are usually reported as a part of representative studies. What do you think is the approval rating of Obama, if you only ask people who support Jeb Bush's campaign?

Input is anything but representative, it's not meant to be. It's there to catch things as early as possible.
That is a browser issue, and does not exist in native clients. If we're talking about XML-stream-over-sockets, then comparing it to browsers makes no sense (because they can't do that!), and thus long-polling and JSON-over-HTTP become irrelevant.

EDIT: Hmm, did you edit your post? I don't recall the first part being there... anyhow:

> XMPP is too complex, but the XML stuff is really the smallest issue, compared with other complexities in the protocol.

That is one factor, but the protocol complexities often seem to derive from the question 'how do we represent this in XML?', and that's an issue.

Another problem is the jargon - the MUC specification is utterly incomprehensible, because the terms it uses for things are so wildly different from how they are used everywhere else, that building a mental model is really hard. I've seen this issue in other XEPs as well.
The author must have been undergoing some bad moments so far. The post seems just the outcome of a more complex series of inputs. Most points are not valid from my own personal point of view but still may have been good points if written in a more objective way.

BTW, the post is gone.
Hopefully one thing this work will lead to is more physically accurate iridescence shaders for 3D render engines. The ones I've seen so far only attempt to fake iridescence at an approximate level, and the results are not very convincing.
What is next ? C is for Cats. How is this article relevant to HN community?
As always, when making these kind of statements, the question is: relative to what, and for what purpose? Without knowing that, it’s quite hard to know what the author of this page is getting at. Who is he arguing against, and what’s the context for these “myths”?

XMPP is sort of similar to all the browser technologies (HTML/DOM/CSS/etc.): it’s a large and complex spec which takes a large amount of work to implement even a basic version of, with lots of possible things to screw up.

It mixes various concerns together into a big jumble without the cleanest layering, which makes certain types of systems a pain to build on top of it. It’s based on a technology (XML) which is inherently heavyweight and not all that well suited to streaming applications. Tooling which exists around XML is mostly fairly irrelevant to an XMPP-like use case. If someone wanted to make an open IM protocol from scratch, they could make something much simpler, cleaner, and better organized.

On the other hand, all the other popular person-to-person IM protocols are proprietary, and XMPP is at least open, reasonably well documented, and with a relatively large community built up around it. Which counts for a lot.

If someone wants to build a new protocol, for example Google Wave, I would very strongly recommend against trying to shoehorn it into XMPP. On the other hand, if someone wants to make their chat client or server interoperate with existing chat networks, then XMPP is great.
Because TCP connections are expensive on your battery life. Especially if your network is flaky, and all those connections need to constantly repeat their handshakes.
Your boss is unlikely to pay you for it. The companies using Oracle software are usually not in software (database) development themselves, so there's no business incentive to pay you for having "fun" with expensive software.
Caribbeans are awesome (hot girl speaks)