skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do you have a resource showing TLA+ does same thing as Alloy or as easily?

See, Why Amazon Chose TLA+[1]. They found Alloy pleasant enough but a bit weirder than TLA+, and TLA+ is richer in terms of expressivity and features. I learned Alloy and played with it after knowing TLA+ well, and while I think it is an extremely nice and useful tool (although its syntax is indeed weird), it is absolutely trivial to express anything you can in Alloy in TLA+, and that's without even TLA (i.e., just the +). Their tooling is a bit different, so I guess there may be cases where Alloy would be more convenient even if you already know TLA+.

> Im saying they were used similarly. ...

Yeah. Deep formal methods are, in general, much more similar to one another than they are different.

[1]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-43652-3_...
Specifically is a blockDAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), but the term Blockchain is often used to describe the entire set of protocols.
Sure there is, it's just effectively a zero interest debt instrument. Imagine that everyone is exchanging IOUs, instead of physical dollars.
> How does MaidSafe work, by the way?

It consumes your $$$, and emissions promises that one day it'll become "a new shiny replacement of the Internet".
Why might it bear closer examination? If a person is comfortable with what they are (and are not) sexually, why delve into it?
Workbox: JavaScript Libraries for Progressive Web Apps
I see that libexpat adopted SipHash just last month, per issue #35 / pull request #39.
Why should I choose your project instead of Neomutt?
For one, it's deprecated. I've also found (at least during development) that it seems to cache too aggressively. Plus it lets you do weird things, like cache your appcache file. Combine that with caching the HTML, and you won't even be able to update your site until you clear the browser cache.
I do appreciate the surface simplicity, but the complexity under the surface makes it painful to use.
Sweet, thanks. Haven't been on the Adobe devnet in a while
Catastrophe Theory [pdf]
Noisy Networks for Exploration
Reddit/HN like forum as an API. I want a forum for my site, using my own templates and integrated into my app, but without having to code the forum myself. What buttercms does for blogs, but for forums.
Please get rid of the video titled "What the ?" on your home page. It is very unprofessional. If I was in HR, or even if I wasn't, I wouldn't touch your company after seeing that video on your home page.
IMO, this reveals more about human intuition regarding randomness than whatever financial point it purports to make. It's still a useful point though.

Reminds me of the load balancing literature. There, the explicit goal is to evenly divide the burden across your fleet of servers, and having wide distributions is a problem on both ends: you're paying for servers to sit idle, and some are over burdened and giving customers a bad experience (high pageload times).

By way of illustration, I took the code and made a simple modification to it, implementing power of 2 random choice (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/tpds2001.p...).

Here's the video result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Vc7gf3ONY Much tighter distribution, though you need to be able to identify the size of people's bank accounts. In this model, it's very rare for anyone to give the richest anything, unless you magically choose two people randomly tied for richest.
Different people may experience it differently, but for me SSRIs improve my ability to "keep it together" under stress, particularly in terms of irritability. If not getting angry because somebody cuts in front of me while driving means my emotions are blunted, I am happy to have my emotions blunted. I certainly do feel pleasure, joys and pain, but I find negative emotions have less command over me.

What is a consistent observation is that SSRI drugs retard (delay) the sexual response so that in general you are less interested and take more time and more stimulation for the experience to progress.

This can vary from "I took a Lexapro and did not think about sex for a whole week but I've been so busy thinking about other things I just noticed now" to "My partner likes it that I last longer in bed" to "My partner is furious that I'm not as interested as they are" to "I feel like I am not myself".
Q&A:Travels to Cuba and Visual Storytelling
Congress Wants a New U.S. Military Branch, a ‘Space Corps’
So many of these startups seem to have fragile, non-strategic products to get these valuations. I don't understand how they get funded in the first place. Hopefully my first jaded thought is further from the truth than I suspect it is, which is some college grad whose dad is plugged in gets his weak idea funded. Or maybe the far uglier truth is that venture actually has that much money to flat out waste.
While true, the most compelling use-case for serviceworkers is still on mobile. Serviceworkers solve the problem of intermittent connectivity. They can patch the gap when a user drops a connection for less than a few minutes (e.g. when a user is mobile).

Laptops and desktops still benefit, but less so because generally if you sit down to use one of those devices in an area of poor connectivity, you're going to run out of things you can do with your serviceworker's cached content pretty quickly. If you're developing a serviceworker, the improved experience will be most felt by mobile users.
Show HN: Using functions to construct Regex in Python
Have pity on those with small screens.

How small are your screen(s)? What resolution do you run them at? What size font? Do you have eyesight issues?

I have decent vision at monitor distance. On a 13-inch Macbook Pro, using a font of reasonable size, I can easily diff two files with a line length of 108 - side-by-side.

I'm curious, then, why others can't do that. (Eyesight issues aside, of course.)

(Whether code lines should be 108 characters long is a separate issue.)
>Because billions of people still live in poverty worldwide.

That depends on available resources and distribution -- not economic growth.

Besides, what's really bad about poverty is not access to lack of access to West-level consumption but lack of basics -- from health care to housing.
> But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.

But does it? I thought one of the bigger arguments studios use is that art is not a commodity, hence licensing (enforced by DRM) and copyrights and please pay us.

> This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.

> And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.

I'm less and less convinced of that. "Breakthrough discoveries" in sciences seem to be very incremental steps. That's, I think, the reason so many of those achievements were made simultaneously by different people in different parts of the world. When scientific knowledge reaches a given level, some discoveries become ripe for the taking, and they get plucked by whichever smart guy manages to figure it out first. I suspect the similar may be true of politics - even though history lessons tend to focus on individuals, it seems to me that big events were always much more about the environment than any individual decision.

That is to say, if anything, science is much bigger a commodity than creative arts - by very virtue of being constrained by reality. All practically useful maps of the same territory will look alike, after all.

> DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.

I'm having trouble seeing what is the main problem you think about. If I try to do a root cause analysis of DRM, I always end up concluding the main problem is that content creators have to create content for a living - i.e. if creative work were to be entirely decoupled from monetary interests, more people would have access to more and better cultural works.
But he's describing it in visual terms: "the Helsinki bus station makes a cool backdrop for Magnum wannabes". Here, "cool backdrop" implies that a lot of photographers shoot it because it looks cool. But I get the sense from the article overall that he's thinking of the bus stop in purely metaphorical terms, so the language is confusing.
Try ChargeBee? Solves a lot of subscription-related problems. It's a product and not API.
I wish AWS autoscaling groups had a "recycle every machine" operation.
Unfortunately, while the Chinese people are fantastic, the most recent round of government repression has made it extremely difficult to live and do business there as a foreigner- and of course, the very air is frequently poisonous.
Event-driven process chain[1]. In fact, any executable process modelling language would do.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_process_chain
Can you expand on this? Where do those two moves go?
>Appeal to popularity. Come off as an asshole, not just a jerk (and definitely not just snarky).
The Guardian has an experimental iOS app that polyfills the Service Worker API. The way you'd use it is, roughly, change the INITIAL_URL variable to your home page, change the name / icon / etc. of the app, then release it on the App Store as an actual app.

https://github.com/gdnmobilelab/hybrid

If you have an actual iOS app already, then this is of course worse, but if you have something that works nicely as a webpage on Android with ServiceWorkers and you want iOS users to have some option at all, this is probably worth playing with.
Let me programmatically schedule a task to run at a specific time, just once. E.g. if my user tells me to remind them about something in a day, I want to schedule a task to do that exactly 24 hours from now.

I'm sure this exists already but it's hard to find because searching usually points me to a cronjob service. But what I'm looking for is distinct from a that. I don't want to run something every minute or hour or checking if there's any work to do. I just want a given task to run as a pre-determined time, scaled to any arbitrary number of tasks.
I find none of this unethical and actually pretty typical web marketing stuff - tame even. Not exactly sure who was harmed and in the end the consumer really wanted what was offered.
Considering your views, how would you describe the great rises of (European) culture e.g. in 15-17th centuries? What kind of system collected and rewarded talents like Michelangelo or Mozart? (Both made numerous gigs.)
I'm from the other Newcastle - the city in Australia, named after the original. You certainly hear the term Novocastrian very often down here, although I would not expect anyone outside of the area itself to know what it refers to.
I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government).

For example, my local library buys a set number of digital licenses for ebooks, so there's a waitlist system for ebooks and each digital copy is time gated to a certain number of days before becoming unusable. In that time, though, you can read the ebook offline once downloaded through the library's app. Annoying sometimes, but overall seems reasonable.

How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?
I suppose people in general are not yet used to have everything in their life be some kind of service. With DRM, the part of the issue is how quickly we went from ownership (buying paper books, or even music/video on physical media) to renting.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, one could argue that everything becoming a service is a sign of a maturing society. On the other hand, it makes individuals less autonomous, and society more fragile. Currently I lean more towards thinking that service-oriented economy is a problem, and in particular that SaaS and DRM are cancer.
Conceivably, but 'what would be enforceable legally' is often a function of practicality and transaction costs - that is, there are many infringements that publishers would ideally like to prevent, but don't bother because of the impracticality of doing so. Nobody tries to collect royalties from a street musician banging out Beatles tunes on a guitar, for example.

I've gotta say that 10 years on HN has taught me not to trust the general opinions of hackers on legal matters and copyright especially, because few of them are interested in familiarizing themselves with the history and economic developments of the subject, which makes discussion about it almost impossible.

In other words, you might be surprised at what would be enforceable legally if all cases could be fully worked out; it would likely be better than you expected in some regards and worse in others. DRM enforcement isn't isomorphic to legal enforceability, but it's a reasonably good approximation.

I am not arguing in defense of the copyright system we have, which I would like to drastically change. I'm just saying that I think you're underestimating the legal complexities. This isn't your fault; I feel our legal institutions are failing partly because they have become so ridiculously complex and impenetrable to most people.
Optimizing Function Placement with Call-Chain Clustering (2017)
Organised crime is bad for public health
The cron alternative that does something only once is 'at'.
Opening articles in new tabs. Hard to upvote/downvote submissions later.
On hacker news, and some other sites, I right click and "open link in new tab" on every article that I think might be interesting. I don't want to up-vote or down-vote the article until after I've actually read it, yet, I'm unlikely to come back to the source of the headline minutes/hours/days later, search for the thing that I clicked on, so that I can up-vote or down-vote the submission. How could/should Hacker News or other sites deal with this behavior? (and please don't tell me to stop doing it, because I'm not going to stop doing this.)
>Consider this thought experiment: we invented Star Trek replicators and made them as expensive as computers or microwave ovens. Retail business would, and IMO rightfully should, literally stop existing that very moment. Trying to restrict replicating everyday object would be wrong, and would go against the very nature of replicator-enabled reality.

I don't see why it would be inherently "wrong". Wrong is for humans to decide.

Consider this alternate though experiment: we invented a device giving people the ability to murder anyone in the world without anybody having proof of who did it. Would it be wrong trying to restrict that machine's sales and use, and would it go against the very nature of killing-without-evidence-machine-enabled reality?
He is still doing https://andofood.com/ so I wouldn't worry too much...
Sorry, that statement wasn't directed at you specifically but the recurring arguments that crop up around this topic on HN.
Have your ever been selling music via a label, or via a service like iTunes or Bandcamp? How much, as a percent of sales, did you receive?

(Not rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely interested.)
> cheat (fake Reddit users)

There's nothing about fake users in the Reddit start-up story that equates to cheating (cheating what or whom exactly?).

Cheating requires that there's a framework of defined fairness in place such that you're violating it.

No such framework exists in the context in question (eg: other human users were not promised there were no fake users). Your premise is wrong accordingly.

You might as well claim that when someone at an old-school software conference showed off their product in person, it was cheating (after all, they hadn't even purchased the product and they weren't an organic user). Or that to demonstrate a product on QVC is cheating, because the people doing the demonstrating aren't likely real customers and didn't come to discover the product in a strictly organic manner.

If you have to create fake users to demonstrate how an entire system works to the first real users, the last thing that qualifies as is cheating. As in the QVC example, showing off how a product works through simulation, is among the most important things you can do with a new product or service.
Pterodactyl – An Open-Source Game Server Management Panel
> I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government).

Simple. Play it on any device I own, now and in the future.

None of the drm formats sold 20 years ago live on today. Had my collection been based on those, and not open formats, it would be dead now.

What makes you think today's DRM will have a different fate?
also available in funnier form in the Tom Hanks movie: the man with one red shoe
No, what gave you that idea? Do you believe that companies should be able to give you arbitrary restrictions on any thing you bought?
The "exact" clone that you propose is fundamentally impossible. What you're looking for is the no-cloning theorem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
I don't find this situation comparable to those programs.

Boomers never paid any taxes on the extreme capital gains on their primary residences and I'm not holding my breath that prices will quintuple again in my lifetime. They got a huge something for nothing and the least they could do now is sell their houses at a huge profit and leave so workers with families can live closer to work.
The innovation of blockchains is not on the how-to-store-things side, but how to keep a state of things every nodes agree with.

Stellar can store data on Postgres because it is just a small database of how much money each account has at each ledger. Past ledgers can be erased from the database (which makes it not a blockchain in any sense anymore).

Bitcoin has a history of all transactions organized in blocks not because it's a fancy new database technology, but because that way is the way it worked out better to keep a synced state between nodes, kind of an append-only log.

You could, if you wanted that, read the Bitcoin database and translate it into a set of rows of a who-has-how-much Postgres table.

Or, better, you could implement a Bitcoin client that stored its blocks as rows in a Postgres table, but I think it would be much more resource-intensive than the databases the Bitcoin clients are using today.
LinkedIn: fake that a user that you can connect with is already on the platform.
On balance it's still a win. Alcoholism kills a lot of people.
Text This Number, and SFMOMA Will Send You Images from Its Collection by Keyword
Apparently. There are people that say the same things in earnest!
I love everything Lua. Going to have to try this out tonight.
I agree with this sentiment. I have found that with a little big of economics I've been able to pick out successes much easier than large VC firms.

It almost seems as if many of these firms are throwing money away without even thinking over the 101 level business requirements: expenses, revenues, growth rate, 2nd derivative growth rate, market size, profit per employee etc.
This is definitely one of those problems that while I was implementing it every day I would think "Why the hell do I have to do this myself"
Depends on what you're measuring. If it's pure death rates sure but throw in quality of life and it's not as clear cut.

I personally wouldn't want to live in a world where I can't enjoy a glass of whiskey.
Hey! I just made https://reversepaste.com/ for you :)
Can someone explain the statement about the length of the cables (in the section starting about 2:48) that they'd stretch from Beijing to New York if laid end to end? It seems so obviously false (there's, what, a few dozen of them, maybe a hundred?) that I assume I'm missing something.
Obviously, it does not follow, but it seems likely that there is a correlation. I think it bears examination because knowing yourself is generally a good thing.

I say this because I too enjoy some porn that I thing I wouldn't want to participate in. I found it rather productive to consider what this means about me.
In c# , an obsolete attribute on the binaryserialiser, in the same namespace as the text serializer. With the reason why you switched and why it's obsolete now

Perhaps should have added a 'mostly' in my original reply though. But I want to keep comments always to a minimum
I agree with this. Currently it is super annoying to upgrade a group to a new launch config
Just right-click on "Discuss" first. Then, click through to the submission.

Back-arrow takes you back to the discussion page for that article.
Let's Encrypt switch to IPv6 – one more reason to monitor
How are scripts used in this thing? I'm just curious. Do you use scripts to set auto-responders? Manual spam filtering? What?
Probably did do that at first (10ish years ago makes it a bit of a haze), but it was being served up by a PHP script that was creating the card name dynamically.

I wanted to move it off being tied to a server anyway and since anyone playing this would probably see a lot of cards, it made since to just download it all as one file rather than 52. At the time, it was all the rage to do such things.
That makes sense. It also highlights why Linux/Unix will likely never have the kind of seamless system wide integration I’m talking about - different design choices for the structure of the OS & GUI.

Nothing wrong with those choices (they give the end user more flexibility & control for example) but it is a trade off
Just found this: https://github.com/colinbjohnson/aws-missing-tools
I right click first on "Discuss" and then on the article itself. Then I can refresh the discussion later and flip between them.

Alternatively, as masonic says, open the discussion in the new tab and click through from there.
Does that mean the floorboards or joists are also over 400 years old? Being from the West coast of the US I find that equally amazing for some reason.
The issue is with your word "simply". On one level, it's true, but on another level it's not.

The Eiffel Tower is "simply" a bunch of puddled iron. On an even more reductionist level, it's simply a bunch of quarks, as are you.

While "Both you and the Eiffel Tower are simply bunches of quarks." is a true description (according to modern physics), it's not a very useful one. It says nothing about why the Eiffel Tower is different from other bunches of quarks, and definitely says nothing about (e.g.) what kind of reaction you might have to visiting Paris and climbing the Eiffel Tower. Would you be scared (acrophobic)? Exhilarated? Bored? The "bunch of quarks" description is of absolutely no help there.

Reductionist models have their uses, but attempting to use them to explain everything is a grievous mistake.
Made me want to try my dillo+lua idea again ..
Indeed, it is possible to enjoy gay porn without wanting to have gay sex. There is weird stigma around this though, which is why I suggested introspection. The stigma might distort some self-perception.

It is hard to talk about this because sadly 'you might be gay' is often read as an accusation.
> Really? Where do you think it's confined to?

What a weird request. For someone to be confident that a practice is not widespread, he does not need to know where it is confined to. We don't expect him to have visited all localities.

I am confident that there is a goat behind one of the doors because the host has told me as much. That doesn't mean I can tell you with confidence which door it is behind.
I would second the idea to show a sample trading algorithm based on some trading system, it would show passion and self start...