skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> no obvious signs of corporate guilt at having driven countless independent bookstores to oblivion

http://bookweb.org/for-the-record

Barnes and Noble got driven out of business because they tried to be Amazon with store space. Right now it's hard to improve on Amazon's supply chain.

Independent bookstores that add value (carefully curated books, signing events, an educated staff) are doing well. They just have to put effort into it so they can make money.

This is not a case of predatory licensing, it's about adding value. Independent bookstores that are just a crappy offline version of Amazon with no differentiation are getting their lunches eaten, since they just don't add any value.
I read most of Castaneda's books as a teenager (early 90's) and loved them. However this is honestly the first time I've heard of anybody considering them anything other than allegorical fiction, modern mythology and philosophy. The idea that they where supposed to be read as non-fiction had honestly never crossed my mind
I wonder if there will be a time we start seeing this with Javascript transpilers(JS->JS), which are normally used to bring feature parity and compatibility to runtimes but starting to get obsolete as the runtimes catch-up.

For example

let x = (await grabSomeIntegers()).map(double).filter(biggerThan(3)).map(substract(1));

can be optimized automatically to use a single loop but one can rewrite it to be even faster (even though insignificantly, in this trivial example) because you know they will be integers. But then you let go of the DRY.

How do Haskell library authors deal with that?
I wonder if you need the random scattering for this to work, or if it would still work if the fireflies formed a hollow circle.
> Bottom line: your "RemoteDatabase::gotEncrypted" function can simply be eliminated.
(and the rest)

Awesome! Thank you. :)
The security model for nacl is afaik that you run almost arbitrary native code. It was compiled by someone else, your input is basically machine code that you don't know anything about except for some please-dont-break-my-sandbox checks.

With asm.js, your input is javascript code which can't do all the weird things that native code can do, and you're in charge of generating the native code that ultimately gets executed (much like the traditional JIT setup), so assuming you didn't fuck up the translation, you get to assume it can't do anything that javascript code couldn't have done to begin with, relaxing your sandboxing requirements around, like, arbitrary memory accesses or syscalls.
Hi,

I also live in Germany and my experience is a little different. I know several people with 6gb plans for less than 20€, and if you're willing to pay 30€+/mo then 10/15/20gb LTE plans are possible.

Have you tried a comparison site such as Check24? You'll usually find great deals on high data packages. You might have to sacrifice on SMS or Telephone minutes for a high data plan though.
Apocalism.js, or How I Automated My Illustrated Short Story Build Process (2012)
I still think CPAN has more coverage than the equivalent in python
What difference does the motive of individual participants make? There's a system in place which incentivises people to sue to stop this kind of abuse and punish the companies doing it. I'd much rather that's done for money than waiting and hoping for a good Samaritan to come along and save people out of the goodness of his heart.
Dismantled Tesla Model S found in truck
For more info on the legacy and body of Castaneda work see Sustained Action:

http://www.sustainedaction.org/
http://sustainedreaction.yuku.com/

I always wondered if the scifi author Peter Hamilton was inspired by Castaneda's Flyer predator when writing about the Starflyer (as he was inspired by hippy culture in general when describing the Star People and hippy bus in The Night's Dawn)
http://peterfhamilton.wikia.com/wiki/Starflyer

https://www.metahistory.org/gnostique/gnosticastaneda/CCgnos...

This is perhaps getting into twilight zone territory, but in 2001 there were a series of slightly changed intruiging spam messages clearly referring to Castaneda's Flyer (called the Entity) and a prophecy coming true 'later this year' a month before 11 september 2001. I think I tracked it down to some vague viral marketing for a B movie on alternate realities in Australia, but sometimes I still wonder about the coincidence... a real world 'man in the high castle'?
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18796
>no way of truly accounting

No way to predict, sure. But if my memory serves me correctly, the entire theme of Taleb's Black Swan was about accounting for such events. For example, financial hedging; you won't know what event might manifest itself and cause a huge financial disruption (the cause), but you can anticipate "it" happening, in some form, and preparing for it by buying long shot hedges (accounting for the effect).
Don't forget the flip side of that, when there are very few mega-corps who provide everything, then everybody [who works] works for them. I've read science fiction where this was culturally significant, since you are part of a tribe which has a long and perfect memory. If you got a bad report from your manager one time, then it can affect you in subtle ways for the rest of your life. If your [favoured] co-worker behaves like a dick to you and you react badly and you get dismissed[0], then this can essentially destroy your life since you won't work under that mega-corp again and perhaps the others won't be that keen on taking you on either. This is a future scenario which is a bit extreme but we can see the indications of it already.

[0] I have personal experience of this from 20+ years ago, and though I'm long since moved on there are companies I remain unwelcome at though I've never worked there. Years afterwards it could have affected me badly except that the HR at the place which asked for a work-history reference and were told nonsense actually dealt with it in an adult manner and were ok with my explanation.
I'd be interested in seeing the power load of these visualizations - are they a battery drainer?
Perhaps pilots should be required to provide their own airplanes? It's ridiculous that the job wants to force their employees to provide their own $20,000 metal box. Perhaps what they want is a contractor, not an employee.
and I think it has replaces a lot of code that back in the day would have been written in, bash sed and awk
Net neutrality may have lost Netflix as an ally
Is there anywhere a "hello world" or simple DOM modification program which I can implement with WebAssembly?
Now rgb,hex,hsv conversions on the Google Snippets
Milestone: 3,000+ new gTLD readers
Not true. Stock compensation is dilutitive to existing shareholders putting future pressure on earnings per share and generally means you'll see a share buyback further reducing cash on balance sheet or increasing debt. Further, large blocks of lockup expirations cause selling pressure. Once talent sells stock compensation how do you then retain them? Do you grant more shares diluting existing shareholders further?
SROA stands for Scalar Replacement Of Aggregates.
As a slight aside, is NVIDIA's motivation profit from the gaming industry or does this find industrial application outside of the obvious visual presentations?
Does anyone know who is behind the Fidget Spinner phenomenon? A few months ago they didn't exist, and now they're everywhere. Who's getting rich off this?
Exactly, good advice and that's why I'm a proud discordian, next to a faithful roman catholic etc. Or was Illuminatus a subset of discordia? can't remember...
If you like Illuminatus, you also might like this: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/bb/
What exactly are "unsafe" areas of the company

Areas that don't have the general support of the higher ups in the company. Areas that are seen as unimportant or a burden. Areas which have a reputation for not delivering

what will happen to me if I work there?

You'll get passed up for promotions, raises and bonuses. You might also find yourself 'marked' and have a hard time moving to other parts of the company.
I moved from Perl to python around 6 years ago. There are more jobs available for Python, though probably more competition as well.

I regularly see Perl jobs posted in London, but the wages are surprisingly poor, compared to what I could get for my Django knowledge.
Very nice! A heads up. The manual (https://manual.potatso.com/) goes from English to Chinese — that is, clicking English, will take you to pages with headers in English, but real text in Chinese).
That's what I think happened to other countries in the region as well. I'm from Iraq and speak Arabic but I don't think my ancestors are from the "Arabian peninsula", we just adopted the language. It also explains why "dialects" of Arabic can be so different.
5 Surprising Benefits of Milk for Children
Yes we do. Evolution selected for the greedy. An exception might be organisms who're newly introduced into an environment and there are still too many resources for their needs so they can sit around not trying hard to get whatever they can. Once populations stabilize though, they have to fight to survive.
I don't really like the headline. I don't want Mozilla to "win", and I don't think Mozilla wants to either; I want the open web to flourish.

That said, the article is very informative, and well-balanced. It was really good of Google and the other browsers to join the wasm bandwagon. And yes, although as the author himself points out, "proclaiming a "winner" is unimportant or even counterproductive", Mozilla does deserve a lot of credit here.
Startup Incorporation: How to Save $3000 Doing It
No one, because they're not branded or licensed. The people doing well out of them own the factories in China that make them, or buy them from those factories to mark up and sell to the gas stations and convenience stores where they get marked up again and sold to the kids who want them.

Thirty (twenty?) years ago, it was "slap bracelets". Same story; it's just that the Internet makes everything faster.
Probably not essential but it could be quite useful anyhow. I watched the beginning and it was better than I thought. I worried it would be saying disregard abilities to make sure you have a mix of skin types etc but there was some useful things like avoiding the Uber type mess by treating different people well can lead to better companies. (See "Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber" for the Uber mess).
At some point in the future, I could have a quantum random number generator implanted in my skull and defer many of my decisions to its outcomes. I wouldn't be predictable, but would I have free will? Probably not.

How our brains use quantum processes really is the heart of the debate, but we don't even know if they use quantum processes in a way that isn't averaged out at the level of neurons or our entire brain. If our brains do make use of quantum processes in a way that manifests at a macroscopic scale, that alone doesn't guarantee that we have free will, but it does open up that possibility. If our brains are classical, chemical computers, that possibility doesn't even exist.
I have had similar experiences while exploring caverns in the Ardennes in Belgium. This was actually late eighties, so not as prevalent with smartphones.

The tour guide said all the guides had a running bet which group could stand the longest being in total darkness without using watches/torches/lighters to create some resemblance of light. "Never had a single group last over 5 minutes".
That is a good workload for column-stores. Mongodb is row-store (an inefficient one at that).
Amazon has more selection with lower cost of entry for small players. With a near-infinite capacity of inventory, Amazon does not sell only books that people read. Given the low cost of Amazon to host your book for sale, the odds of someone without significant traction getting "squeezed out" is much lower than a physical book store, where real-estate is much more valuable. Self-publishing is much easier and cheaper than the alternative.

Amazon made available practically every book in print to its customers, but some continue to fetishize this non-existent egalitarian book store ideal.
It is joke - we had 'Chrome won' the other day. There is a hidden point being made which you would probably agree with.
def clamp(num, min, max)
[min, num, max].sort[1]
end

being turned into

def clamp(num, min, max)
if (num < min)
{
if (num < max)
return num;
else
return max;
}

if (min < max)
return min;
else return max;
end

Seems to me to be algorithm rewriting.
As is superword optimization and partial evaluation.
All things that Truffle-Ruby + Graal do today.
Appinventiv Receives Top Position in Top Companies Ranking List by AppFutura
Potentially the article title is a reference to a story that was posted a few days ago called, Chrome Won.
Water moonshot: solving utilities biggest problems with tech
You'd need quite a lot of biological weapons. 1000 x 100 terrorism deaths is still on the order of magnitude of the number of road deaths in 10 years. So a 100,000 people killing bomb in the US every few decades isn't really that bad.
I made this factorial compile-and-run example in NodeJS:

https://gist.github.com/Recmo/e0b6911992897c5f51c38fda822537...

To run it you need at least Node 8.0.0 and the `--expose-wasm` flag.

Sorry for using modern JS, you will need to use babel-node to run it. Or you can port it to old fashioned JS.
Ok, then it only works in Firefox without plugin installation. :/
I saw this as a veiled threat from the Clerk that they'd drop the barristers as clients - in other words the clerk wouldn't ask for a penny more compensation because he wouldn't be passing the barristers any more work.
Another thing you could do is keep two different logins in your laptop. One as a work profile in which you only work and another as an entertainment profile. So when you log in to your work profile, that becomes a ritual for you to get into work mode and browser new tabs and the title bar don't give you suggestions that can distract you. (Though hacker news falls into both for me and trips me)
> So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump?

You don't need to be a member of a certain group to be able to report on them. E.g. you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill, or member of the KKK to report on them.
Robert the Robot (1939)
"Someone bet me £5 I could not make a robot in three weeks,"
inventor Charles Lawson, who had a radio shop, told a newspaper at the time.
"I won."
FYI rurban is a well known Perl programmer who hates almost everyone.
AFAIK you cannot access the DOM from WebAssembly right now, although it probably will come in future versions.

But you can use the WebAssemblyExplorer https://mbebenita.github.io/WasmExplorer/: There is also a nice video about using WebAssemblyExplorer and even uses a simple WebAssembly-Module: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XrGjSnPHGY&t=310s
How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality
Aye. While in university, I spent lots of time in the antenna lab (which doubled as an anechoic chamber.).

Even hours and hours of exposure couldn't help me get my bearings; I became dizzy within seconds and, on some occasions, even felt like I was about to barf.

Luckily I didn't fall over - 'our' chamber didn't have a wire floor like the Microsoft one - just a narrow walkway into the center of the room where there was a pod for installing whatever gear you were about to test.

Falling onto those tiles would probably cost someone a fortune. (I've got no idea what anechoic tiles cost, but I know they are rather brittle. Don't ask me how I know.)
The exciting possibility, from my perspective, is that many optimizations may be simpler to implement dynamically (JIT) than statically. So perhaps you can have 10% of the compiler code to get 90% of the benefit. I see this as the basic premise of LuaJIT.

Motivating example: The CPU can predict whether branch instructions will be taken with uncanny accuracy. This is achieved using simple dynamic heuristics. I believe it would be much more challenging for the compiler to predict these branches statically.
2X% actually (I remember watching it in real time), but the point stands as it was way higher than anyone else thought.
I second the request. I had an unit conversion extension once, but it would slow the whole browser down to a crawl when it activated on a large and complex page, like Facebook or GMail. So I'm looking for something smarter / more efficient.
I can say it is common in the finance sector in the UK and US. IT workers get 10+% bonuses as standard. Hedge funds, Market Makers, Asset Managers & Investment Banks will all payout bonuses as standard. The % will depend on the company. I know that hedge funds seem to be more bonus driven and have heard of quarterly bonuses being paid out.
> I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so.

Whenever I think of something that has anything to do with batch data munging, there is usually half a dozen Perl modules that already do it. I have no opinion about Perl as a language but I like how rich the ecosystems is for that sort of project.
In the UK we almost lost our largest remaining bookstore chain, however they've performed a pretty miraculous turnaround. I'm sure I read a better article in the past than this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-..., but I can't remember where it was. Essentially it boiled down to the new CEO ditching a lot of existing agreements and systems like the bestsellers lists, and instead giving most of the control of stock to the local stores, so each store is now more likely to stock books relevant to the local area.

I've been in a number of their stores over the past year and each one has felt rather different, and I discovered quite a few interesting books I otherwise would never have come across. I hope they continue to be a viable business.

On another note, I've experienced progressively worse delivery and customer service from Amazon over the past two years, causing me to cancel my Prime subscription (which I had from launch) and to stop ordering from them altogether. They need to ditch their crap courier service in the UK.
The "compiler" here refers to the WebAssembly -> machine code compiler, not the C -> WebAssembly compiler. NaCl used some clever tricks to guarantee the safety of raw machine code.
Yeah, and I discovered C is horrible because buffer overflows.
Congrats for winning!

This does not change Firefox being on its final death throes though.

Chrome won where it counts.
HN 2017
As an ex-sysadmin I find that a lot of what I used to be responsible for is now outsourced to "the cloud" and most of my old tasks are being handled by other people as a secondary responsibility. Back when I started it wasn't uncommon for a 20-50 man company to have a dedicated sysadmin, whereas now I hardly ever see that.
It was light on information, but just documenting the approach is useful. Letting people know about it and helping people get started has value.
The Origin of Mass (2003) [pdf]
Built the Simplest framework to create and use personal chatbots – for marketers
AI Chatbots are transforming digital experience through conversation. However, building and deploying chatbots can be complex and technical.

Aiming to take chatbots to masses with bottr.me. No coding required. Simple UI.
Python performance is uh ah... difficult. I work on a piece of software that has a lot of hot paths in Python code, and it's not nice. Combined with deployment and tooling issues it made me wonder quite a few times now, whether the a little bit lower contribution barrier is worth all these hassles.
I don't know. Honestly, I feel hit by D-K myself here, because until today I was convinced that launching a rocket from an airplane is a huge expense compared to the very small benefit it can bring. But this thread made me seriously reevaluate this assumption.

The worst thing is, I can't even remember where I have learned that plane-launched rockets make little sense.
The power of scriptable load balancers
I forget which came first, but I was once deeply annoyed to have an expensive mail-order copy of Principia confiscated by a schoolteacher on suspicion of Satanism, until much later I realized how perfectly apropos that was in every possible way.

It wasn't until a couple of years after, or maybe before, that, that I finally laid hands on Illuminatus!. Only book I ever stole from a library, if you want to call it "stealing" - it'd been there over a decade, never once checked out, and wasn't even in the electronic card catalog; I felt sorry for the poor thing, which seemed desperately lonely, and gave it a good home in place of a neglectful one. Still have it, in fact. Probably still have a copy of Principia, too, but if so, I don't know where in my shelves it is, which should tell you all you need to know about which comes first in my estimation.

(On reflection, I suspect I first found an electronic copy of Principia, rather lacking in illustration being the plain text file it was, then discovered the existence of Illuminatus! and found my copy, and finally sent
off for a paper Principia which by that point was amusing but somewhat supernumerary. Do you really call yourself a Discordian in public? Why?)
Exactly. I have dozens of scripts in production and most are 30 lines or less. Most of them read various files and load them into our databases. I do this in perl, because I can cook them up in minutes. Java, which is the official language around here, is just too much of a bother.

This week I realised that a script I wrote about ten years ago has become an indispensable part of my company's infrastructure: it converts Office documents to PDF using OLE. It's about 30 lines long of very clear code.
A single +1 developer is better than -5 developers. cperl got 10x more done in 2 years than p5p in 15 years, and the 10x factor is ongoing. In a few years nobody will use perl5 anymore, everybody will use cperl instead.

I didn't only disagree with some patches, I disagree with most of the feature decisions, management and bugfix handling. And esp. with their negative track record. perl5 deserves a properly managed project and the perl6 features, so I did it. At an important time, with :const, types and signatures upcoming.
And perl5 should not be used in public services due to its lack of security (I am warning against it since 5.16), not talking about the feature mishandling.

See the perl11 blog.

Some numbers: In the last 2 years, p5p produced 12005 commits (2 releases), whilst I produced 6291 commits. That's >30%. The 2nd most prolific author did 3104 (unicode), the third 1689.
And I squash commits into features and bugfixes and don't spread it out over 3-5 postfixes, because cperl works in branches, not posting directly to master.
Of those 6291 commits you have nothing in perl5, but they continue to play stupid and take nothing.
Features wise and security fixes it's more like 1000%, not 30%.
Is WASM platform independent?
I don't think I ever knew where this quote came from, but it stuck.

"Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any invention in the history of mankind, with the possible exception of tequila and hanguns."
It's a tricky title because out of context (i.e. reading the title on HN without clicking through to the content) it sounds a little puerile, but upon reading the article, the title fits very well.

The general message being: "Mozilla are being very diplomatic and restrained, whereas many in their current position would be outright celebratory"
Very similar to Ben Horowitz's "Lead Bullets" story: http://a16z.com/2011/11/13/lead-bullets/
As a value investor or Warren Buffett follower would put it, they are very capital intensive. This can turn into a bad sign if they can't build a moat (monopoly of sorts) or take a hit on their margins.
So? They had a bug, they need time to fix it. No big deal.
Quickly Permanently How to Bypass iCloud Activation Lock iOS 11
Just launched joblist.design