skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That weaponizes–as if it hasn't been already–personal data collection.

Collect data on a foreign nation's citizens, preferably the only global hegemon, which also happens to have internal constraints on what it can collect on its own citizens.

Then play Let's Make a Deal. Trade personal data for foreign aid, arms deals, oppression of rivals, etc.

Anyone on the planet should be concerned about personal data collection by anyone else on the planet, whether that be North Korea, Google, or anyone else.
This whole question of what to do with one's mind. Introspection sounds nice but it's not always useful.

What I'm kind of trying to do with technology is study or learn for many hours every day, it's just that I'm not doing a great job, because the stressful approach makes it hard to find and approach real valuable material.

I'm also trying to keep up with some kind of professional community as well as some cultural forms of community. I appreciate the professional or hobbyist communities because basically they don't revolve around Donald Trump and I can pretend the world is basically sane.

I've reflected a lot but not really gotten anywhere. I really value two different three month periods in the past few years when I haven't had internet access at home at all, though. Having hours every day when my mind wasn't hooked up to high frequency information systems was pretty wonderful.

There's something in Bob Dylan's memoirs, the first book which is the only one I read (I don't finish books anymore), about how his "news" for a while was the history of the Byzantine empire (or something) because that's what he was studying at the time.

I'm more and more interested in the visceral feeling of "offline" and I think it's a source of refreshment that is becoming scarce (this ought to be a considerable driver of interest in meditation retreats).
Kitchen Appliances: Bedlam in da Vinci's kitchen (1490)
Neat facts:

-3DFX Voodoo (all models in 16bit color depth) let you enable hardware dithering block (2x2/4x4 ordered dither, zero performance penalty). They did it to save framebuffer space (24bit textures, 16bit framebuffer). It made 3dfx graphics look significantly better than nvidia/ati in 16bit depth. Earlier cards used 4x1 filter on the output, Banshee and later models gained 2x2 filter providing "22 bit like quality" as 3dfx called it.

-Back in ~1994 some HP unix workstations used dithering to produce 'near 23bit color' out of 8bit framebuffer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Color_recovery

-All crappy (TN) LCD panels (staple of garbage bin supermarket 1366x768 laptop, and older 'gaming' fullhd ones) use FRC which is a form of temporal dithering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate_control

One legitimate use of dithering was in the days of CGA/EGA/other fixed palette hardware. You can relive it here 'Joel Yliluoma's arbitrary-palette positional dithering algorithm': http://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/dither/jy/
Not really, it is still being "developed."[O] But some HN clones or forums built like HN use it.

[O] http://arclanguage.org
-> https://openaddresses.io/
Ask a legitimate question, get downvoted.
The problem with these articles is they mix delusional paranoia, which is a real thing, with investigation into government corruption, which is also a real thing. The article muddies the waters between the two in a politicized way and thus helps to legitimize ad hominem attacks.
>A far more feasible approach (though still very expensive) -- and probably a more "correct" one, even theoretically -- is to verify existing C code using some of the many excellent verification tools (from static analysis to white-box fuzzing and concolic testing) that exist for C

When I tried to verify C code (with hoare calculus, by hand) I found that rewriting that code in haskell and proving that to be correct was much easier. As a result i hardly know anything about the complexity of that code, but for me knowing it produces correct results was enough.
Orlando shooting discussion censored on Reddit
what is the connection it is being served on?
Intellectual Gluttony
Ask HN: How to volunteer for social causes as a software engineer?
Hi Everyone - I'm interested in spending some time (~20h a month) volunteering to help social causes. However, my latest attempts were pretty disheartening. One charity had me answering phones, another doing basic IT work. I didn't feel remotely utilized, and felt I would have a much larger impact donating a few hours salary than a few hours of my time.

Other professions (lawyers, doctors) seem to have great frameworks for pro-bono work utilizing their skills to make a significant impact. Does anything like this exist for tech? What's step 1 of getting involved, but in a way that utilizes my skills? I'm interested in both tech-focused organizations/charities, and general approaches for working with existing non-tech charities.

Note: I try to support open source on the side as well, but that's not what I'm looking for here.

Thanks in advance.
I don't think any fees are charged any more for using direct debit.
I'm curious to see how HIPAA regulations interact with this type of research. I would imagine it would be seriously limiting (though my actual knowledge of the laws is severely limited, so maybe not?)
Let's say you want to copy and paste something from an earlier command line entry and put it in a new command line entry:

% set -o vi
% # hit ESC to go into vi cmd mode, hit k a few times until
% # you get to this old command in your command history:
% longasscommand -with -params -i super.dont -w ant2 -type in -again
% # you want just the stuff from -params to ant2, so you
% # type "f-n" to get the cursor to -params, then "yf2"
% # to copy everything from there to -w ant2
% # now you type j a couple times to go back down to
% # the line you were working on:
% longasscommand -with -oh jesus -not this.shit -again
% # now you hit "f-nn" to put the cursor on the -not
% # type "dW." to get it just so:
% longasscommand -with -oh jesus -again
% # now you're ready to paste in your copy after jesus
% # so you type p, and it's inserted where you left the cursor:
% longasscommand -with -oh jesus -params -i super.dont -w ant2 -again

You can use screen or tmux to copy and paste from anything on the screen, including using the mouse. It's really out of the purview of bash, tho.

Really handy tools on the Mac are pbpaste which sends any text in the system clipboard to stdout and pbcopy, which you can prolly guess at.
Discussed (and flagged into oblivion) on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11888870
When I want to reflect, I go for a drive. It takes me through places I don't see every day, and ensures I keep my hands off my phone. When I get home, I will have cleared my head, and I often feel I just had an adventure.
The uncensored version can be seen at https://r.go1dfish.me/r/news/comments/4nql8f/_
Uncyclopedia: The content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
I'm curious about the total byte size of all HN content.
Oh interesting. Any idea why it was flagged?
>Don't want to derail with Windows 10 arguments, but for me, that's a total deal breaker at this time.

I'll bite. What's holding you back? Ever since 7 / 8.1 got telemetry backported in, they're on equal footing with 10 from a privacy standpoint. I guess you could cherry-pick out which windows updates you want to install, but that's frankly unsustainable.

You may as well get the new WDDM, the new DirectX 12, the new virtual desktop support, the new command prompt, and all of that.

>if I find out Windows 10 can handle LF-formatted text in Notepad, I'll have to check and see if Hell froze over :P

It doesn't, and it hasn't :P

Love your work by the way. bsnes/higan is a significant contribution to the human race.
That comparison is misleading for exactly the reasons others have said: the algorithms differ, as can be easily seen in their very different data structures.

A naive, line-by-line port of your fast variant to safe Rust (which I unfortunately am not allowed to share, but didn't require much thinking nor much time), without bothering with prefetching, gives me numbers more like:

Rust-fast: 533
C-fast: 685

I'm using --release for Rust (so no CPU-specific optimisation), and the same invocation as you for C. Everything except my editor is closed when benchmarking, and I'm on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4870HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz.
Multiculturalism and the political scene is what keeps your employees happy to live in the city.

regarding access to capital, two things;
1) We have access to NYC and Chicago VC's, easily. If you slightly push your startup in the media (blogs, newspapers) it almost guarantees a call from interested US VC's within a 1hr flight.

2) Where we lack the competitive VC environment, we make up for it with Federal and Municipal programs. Incentives to hire top talent, compensation for hiring new graduates, grans for office space or R & D.

Canada rocks. more people are starting to realize this.

The other reality is, older generations, our parents or their age group, were never as globally competitive as we have the potential to be. They were happy with just having a customer base thats local, if lucky, nation wide.

But no, this new generation is fierce and competitive. We don't want to just dominate in Canada where we have home advantage, we want to compete globally. The rise of the tech startups out of the Toronto region is just a great example of that upward trend. it's just going to get better and better where as SF seems to have peaked.
The new companies are following the regulations (though many of the rules don't actually go into effect until August; Uber/Lyft left because they threw a tantrum, not because anything actually immediately changed when their proposition failed).

There are hundreds of cab, electric cab, and pedicab, drivers who all follow the rules. The rules may not be perfect, but they aren't particularly onerous, either. It's about $40 to get your fingerprint background check done. The rules have been in place for years for those other kinds of drivers. Uber/Lyft wanted special treatment...they wanted their competitors to keep playing by those rules, while they continued to be exempt from them.
Related; Type 1 diabetes being also auto-immune disease.
There have been now atleast 2 groups that have succesfully done "cure" using same kind of immune system reboot strategy.

few interesting links;

[1] http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2008/12/burts-...

and

[2] http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2010/11/snarsk...
Switzerland is pretty clean, and it's largely due to the Swiss culture, and the fact that there's plenty of bins which are regularly cleaned and emptied.

However

There's one class of people who believe that it's their God given right to litter wherever and whenever they want, and that's smokers.

You can especially see it around Tram stops where people are waiting around and will quite happily throw their cigarette butts on the ground or pavement when the tram approaches.
I have an idea of a time-line when considering the long term (years to thousands of years) because there are events and periods in the past that I have a reason to locate and recall.

On a sub-year basis there's so little structure in modern life (other than, in some climates, pronounced seasons) the year doesn't seem like a concrete idea but a bookkeeping abstraction. Actually the idea of significant cyclical structure in life evokes a kind of new-agey mysticism.
That makes sense. Square's niche is businesses that are too small to bother getting real merchant accounts. The convenience of not having to go through that process is what you're paying for. After a certain level of sales, it's certainly logical to "go direct" with a merchant account and eliminate Square's cut.
What have you seen go wrong with Java packaging? I've had very, very few issues with it. The fact that you can package compiled blobs in JARs means you don't need to rely on the OS package manager. You can get into some hairy class loader situations with dependencies on conflicting versions, but most other environments don't even let you try and resolve those issues.
> Since the Rust standard library depends on libc, I'm not sure how one would properly allow the Rust symbols to replace the linked-in libc symbols while still depending on the rest of libc. Maybe it's not an issue? Maybe there's some magic which could be done?

Static libraries can have circular dependencies like that. For example, in ring[1] I have C code in one static library, which calls some Rust functions in my Rust code. And, that Rust code calls functions in the C static library. The linker...links them together.

[1] https://github.com/briansmith/ring
- I'm really good at it, promise
- Did I mention I'm good at it?
- [random name drop]
- It was *lucrative*
- Have I established that I was good at it and that I made money off it?
- [random quote]
- Rules are made to be broken
- Catchphrase
- Platitude
- [random Feynman reference]
- The new people don't like me or vice versa

Gee Tim, I wonder why.
TL;DR

> The more young people’s attention is fragmented, the more expensive it is to create an audience for each film, the more desperate studios are to find franchises that birth many fruitful sequels, the more it makes sense to create fewer films and conserve production and advertising budgets for a handful of them.

Very sad...
I don't follow the logic of avoiding error types.

If I'm calling `foo.Bar()` directly, I already have a direct dependency on package `foo`, so what difference does it make to have another one to get `foo.BarError`?

If I'm calling `foo.Bar()` indirectly, then it's true that checking `foo.ErrorType` introduces a novel dependency upon `foo`, but it's equally true that:

a) my direct dependency is frequently going to check and wrap that error in some other type anyway, and

b) I can still use the interface trick that Dave describes to avoid a dependency on `foo`.

I don't see why forcing callers to declare helper interfaces every single time they want to inspect an error is preferable to them only having to do that as a rare workaround.
The ending is a little eyebrow-raising. Both founders are ousted, refuse to talk about it, and we get some pablum about how they are now a 'team' (rather implying that they epically weren't before). What was going on there in the 2000s?
The only problem I have with my feature phone is the fact that it has opera mini which is capable enough to write this comment. On the first week I broke the email when trying to update it. Facebook on the other hand is kind of interesting. it takes 2min to send a message.
Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
> even if it means avoiding -40 degree winters.

Oh come on, winter in Ottawa isn't that bad. I can't recall many days that were below -30 when I was living there.

Although I hear Toronto barely has snow in the winter time, must be heaven not to have to shovel your driveway.
"I have to dump batch files into a folder in PATH because there's no alias support nor .profile startup script."

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...:

"Console aliases are used to map source strings to target strings. For example, you can define a console alias that maps "test" to "cd \a_very_long_path\test". When you type "test" at the command line, the console subsystem expands the alias and executes the specified cd command.
To define a console alias, use Doskey.exe to create a macro, or use the AddConsoleAlias function."

https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp...:

"Executing registry subkeys

If you do not specify /d in string, Cmd.exe looks for the following registry subkeys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun\REG_SZ
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun REG_EXPAND_SZ
If either one or both registry subkeys are present, they are executed before all other variables."

"There's no shell escaping backticks."

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490909.aspx:

"Iterating and file parsing
Use file parsing to process command output, strings and file content.
[…]
for /F ["ParsingKeywords"] {%% | %}variable in ('command') do command [CommandLineOptions]"

Good UI? I've seen better. It also doesn't affect the conclusion that the cmd shell is bad, but the functionality does exist in some, often weirdly limited, form.
Is there a commitment by the Go team to adopt Dave Cheney's approach for the standard library?
And soon you won't have big daddy coal to kick around anymore.

I think I saw a heat map that showed the CO2 footprint of electric cars based on location. Here is one, there is a huge variation between states.

http://blog.wegowise.com/2012-06-26-your-cars-carbon-footpri...

The CO2 contribution from electricity is going to get better not worse, especially in states like California. California is hell bent to get off fossil fuels.
No reason to apologize. The content was definitely still viewable.
Get quality consistent sleep.
Like the NYPD.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
> particularly when compared to the company’s competitors whose reliance on an increasingly fragmented Android macrocosm isn’t likely to lead to a polished, reliable experience.

I would know why he says that Android fragmentation is increasing and what he means with fragmentatoin
I guess the output would be very ugly as the C semantics are probably ugly to reproduce in rust. For instance arithmetic with unsigned types in C is defined to be wrapping, so you would need e.g. calls to wrapping_add() instead of + all the time.
Uber/Lyft were not banned. They were asked to follow the same rules as every other driver in the city; they paid an exorbitant amount of money (the most expensive local election in history, where the opposing side had a budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars vs. the $9+ million Uber/Lyft spent trying to buy it) to overrule city council, which failed. When it failed, they threw a tantrum and left.

The process they were fighting to avoid is a fingerprint and background check that costs about $40 per driver. Their millions could have paid for a couple hundred thousand drivers to get checked.
http://tabletopaudio.com/ 's soundpad feature does a similar thing.
Fluent Page Object Pattern in Automated Testing
There is a lot wrong with movies today. I'll go with my 2 biggest gripes:

First and foremost, i want to go to the movies for entertainment. I find myself bashed over the head with liberal views. so yeah, alienating 50% of the US population, there's that.

2ndly, movies want to squeeze out money from the under age crowd. that I dont get, they dont buy a whole lot of tickets anyways, so you make a zombie movie PG 13? really?
I think so too - are you thinking of building such a thing? I noticed you had some open data science ipython notebooks on GitHub.
Sunspring, a Film Written Entirely by AI
Nick Denton’s incendiary publishing empire, Gawker Media, collapsed under the weight of his excessively cruel and cutting philosophy today, an outcome many predicted, but that Denton miraculously dodged for a decade, as subjects chose to thicken their skin rather than get into protracted and destructive litigation, until Peter Thiel anonymously bankrolled them.

an outcome many predicted

If it wasn't an outcome that many stakeholders expected, it wasn't expected. Were there any people trying to cash out while the trial was happening?
You're rather mistaken my friend.
Hacker News existed a long time before AWS.
It has 2 servers - 1 production, 1 standby, running FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is the OS of choice for them.
John Donne’s Biathanatos
I think people flagged it as outside of "what is interesting to HN".

My belief is that the shooting event itself should be flagged, but the knock-on impact of the event in the tech world (how do Reddit executives and mods behave?) is absolutely an important point of conversation here.

It is just as important as the ongoing drumbeat of accusations of Facebook manipulation of the newsfeed against conservative topics.
As a selfish consumer, I really couldn't care less who gets what share. I only care about the price. How walmart arrives at that price is their problem. Should it be higher than elsewhere, I'll go elsewhere.

What we are seeing is a p_ssing contest between two big hitters that has spilled out of the boardrooms. These negotiations happen every day without us hearing a peep. Perhaps I'd be mildly interested if this was a spat between walmart and farmers or some a sympathy-worthy small business, but this is Visa.
Who cares about ssl when your country's spooks are running their own modified Bind servers (dns) having hacked your ISP switches routing you net traffic to their own look-a-likey servers where you think you are buying an ssl cert from a CA, or you are downloading a distro like tails or ubuntu from their own servers.

Hashes are useless if you have downloaded compromised software/distro/what have you from spook servers. Just hash the compromised software, the unthinking will see the hashes match but not realise what has been downloaded is already compromised.

It pays to plan decades ahead.
Toronto is indeed up and coming like every major city, as tech continues to become more essential and dominant. My company, Fiix (www.fiix.io), is an example of a company based out of Toronto, that actually just got backed by YC. Ideally we'd love to stay in Toronto, but the valley continually entices us and a lot of startups to eventually transition there because of their abundance of top talent. The main reason we are in Toronto is because our current market consists of only Torontonians. As we look to expand our services, staying in Toronto might become very difficult. I think once Toronto has a huge surplus of tech talent, then it will be very interesting... Maybe a first mover advantage works in the valley's favor here ;)
General rules aren't good for very much other than arguing with people on hacker news.
Have a look at the design of a DRAM cell (search for it in google images). Basically you can just pull all the address lines high, and set the bit lines to ground. SDRAM works similarly.
Opsworks used to be called Scalarium.
It seemed even-handed to me.
I get constantly distracted at work by people asking me questions, needing something etc. My solution has been to leave the office and go for a walk. No one knows where I am and I get to think quietly to myself while walking.

I have my phone with me and I just leave it in my pocket.
Most of the commentary on this case has revolved around whether it is just for Peter Thiel to fund the litigation, but can we just pause and say that $140 million for invasion of privacy is kind of out of control?
A SoundCloud client in React and Redux
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these.

In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
Help me. I'm being oppressed.
What does Jason Calacanis or the site this article was written for[0] gain from this?

[0] https://www.inside.com/
Whack realization of the day for me at least.

Epicycles --> Taylor series.
In my experience, Bluetooth is just the worst. It's consistently unreliable for me. Every Bluetooth device I've ever had has been a constant headache of pairing issues and random disconnects and reconnects, sometimes getting into a loop of that every few minutes.

I don't know if that's a universal problem for everyone, but my negative experiences with it have been enough to turn me off wanting to buy anything Bluetooth and favor other solutions instead. I use a Logitech mouse with a little USB antenna instead of Bluetooth, which is consistently reliable and never has an issue, and normal headphones with a 3.5mm plug or non-Bluetooth wireless headphones which have no connectivity issues.
reliability, yes, extrapolation beyond the original 8 test subjects, no.