skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
webpack team, great work on this! The new `sideEffects` option is the big one we've been waiting for – lots of bundles are going to be much smaller.

People like to gripe about webpack and JS bundlers in general. At my last company, before webpack and browserify had really caught on (and before a bunch of other bundlers even existed), I crafted us a custom JS build solution using Make. It had just the right amount of smarts (but was mostly a dumb concatenator and wrapper), and was extremely fast and simple. Basically, it was a cranky old HN poster's wet dream.

And you know what? It still fucking sucked. We had to vendor most of our dependencies and then manually edit their source code to modify references, because Make doesn't understand JS dependencies or module resolution. We couldn't expose or even check for globals like `require` or `define` because we were third-party JS living on other people's sites with their own JS, and any accidental intermingling could break their shit, or our shit.

webpack solves all of that. It is absolutely necessary and anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand the problem space. So cheers on another release!
You can press '?' to see the help. I didn't have any trouble getting started, Most CLI apps have '?' bound to help section.
'Black Panther' is amazing. Why are its CG models so terrible?
It's not just Sierra I miss, it's RPG games that aren't mostly first-person shooters and smashers.

Maybe people of our generation will have their needs met with a new popular genre of games 'discovered' by a later generation? Maybe many of these games exist but I'm naively missing them since I'm not following the releases?
The town that’s found a potent cure for illness – community
> Intel was the one that dropped segment limits, AMD added them in later...

I was there (at VMware). That isn't quite what happened.

We got an early engineering prototype of the AMD64 chip. Ran at like 400Mhz or something, and was in an impressively massive case.

It caused two big problems for us:
1) as you note, it disabled segment offsets on all segment registers except %FS and %GS, which are commonly used for thread local storage. And much worse for us, it disabled segment limit checking entirely, which we used to protect the virtual machine monitor (VMM) in the guest's virtual address space.
2) it disabled LAHF and SAHF instructions, which cause a pretty noticeable performance regression in the binary translator (BT).

AMD was pretty helpful when we notified them, and Rev D and later of their chip had a special "VMware bit" that re-enabled segment limit checking and LAHF/SAHF. Intel was less helpful, and told us to just wait for Vanderpool (later renamed VT-X). Early versions of Vanderpool were actually slower than the traditional BT VMM. And annoyingly, for years VT-X didn't support real-mode or big-real-mode, so we had to keep emulation/BT around for that, which is really only used for the first half-second of bootup. AMD's Pacifica got this right from the start.

Ole and some of the other early monitor hackers wrote a paper that covers some of this history if you want the gory details:
https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece845/docs/vmware-evolution.pdf
Specifically they will value the cash flows that the business produces.

Is there a Godwin's law for crypto in HN discussions?
Nearly half of 2017's cryptocurrencies have already failed
Airliners from 50 years ago couldn't make themselves invisible to radar. Still can't.
Where does the conversion between C's simple "float" and Scheme's notion of numbers take place? Does the call from "#lang racket" check and convert the arguments before passing to a simple f(), or does a complex f() check and convert its parameters?
I just want to take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate that headline.
This sounds like basic opportunism... fits well in line with OPs comment.
As an alternative viewpoint, the RAND institute (a historically very pro-immigration organization) concluded that the American aversion to graduate degrees in STEM fields is rational and market driven[1]. In other words, STEM graduate degrees are not competitive with professional and other degree paths available to academically talented people in the US who have choice.

Americans, by this theory, aren't putting the effort into this difficult field because other grad degrees offer shorter completion times, lower attrition rates, higher pay, and better career stability.

Part of the purpose of the H1b is to create a pool of workers who don't have that freedom of choice, whose right to live and work in the US is controlled by tech corporations.

This is why I, along with a lot of others who would describe themselves as pro-immigration, don't support the H1B program. We're more than ok with talented people coming into the US, but see no reason why we should specifically use our immigration system to increase the number or STEM graduates above. Let people make their decisions according to their interests and market signals. If that means they don't become software developers in Silicon Valley in the numbers tech CEOs think they should, that's the market's answer.

[1]https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
Most people I know stop 15 minutes every two hours and maybe stop for a meal every 4 hours. An hour every two hours is too much. It extends the travel time by 50%.
These videos are excellent, thanks for the link. Just spent the last hour or so having my mind blown over and over :)

I also really need one of these:

https://store.dftba.com/collections/all/products/heat-death-...
admittedly not exactly the same product, but certainly in the same ballpark (server consolidation/management), compare the price to VMware vSphere, a hypervisor for servers. Standard edition starts at 995$/year (83$/mo) per physical CPU.

vSphere is an older, more mature, and more featureful product, but the core value prop is the same: save capital expense by consolidating your services into fewer physical servers, with improved manageability, through virtualization. arguably, docker can enable denser consolidation because virtual machines have typically higher cpu and memory overhead compared to containers. so comparatively maybe docker is underpriced?
> Installing LED lights doesn't lead to people using more electricity.

My quick research suggests otherwise.

The first result when I searched on "people with led lights use more electricity" was The Lighting Paradox: Cheaper, Efficient LEDs Save Energy, and People Use More https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20082015/lighting-paradox....

It linked to research results including:

"A 2010 study looked at lighting use around the world for the past 300 years as lighting technology improved from whale oil lamps to gas and kerosene lamps to electric incandescent bulbs. The study http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/tsao_jy_2010_04_app_for_light_..., conducted by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico found a direct relationship between decreased cost and increased consumption."

and

"A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Industrial Ecology http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.12281/abstra... concluded we will likely see a drop in energy use for residential lighting in the short term, but energy savings will likely be reduced or perhaps eliminated entirely as the amount of lit space increases.

"It's not just a question of turning on a light to read a book or to see something on your kitchen counter, you can do lots of stuff with LEDs that you really couldn't do very well with other kinds of artificial light sources," said Theis, a co-author of the study. "They are being incorporated into wearable lighting now, there is just no end to it.""

I didn't look up electric cars, but I expect to find similar research there. I'm pretty sure I read in HN that ride sharing is leading to more traffic.

I agree Jevon's paradox doesn't happen everywhere, but it looks like it does in your first proposed counterexample. It happens a lot.
What happened after the US moved to chip-embedded payment cards?
Why not just put a camera or other sensing system outside their one plant? (People already do this using satellite photos of walmart parking lots, etc. to get advance information about holiday sales.)
Defining Indonesia's Energy Problem
That attitude is what allowed Internet Explorer to become the dominant browser. What are you going to do when Google gets bored of supporting Chrome and disbands the team, leaving your web pages tied to a stagnating browser?
Listening to these phone calls in the last video, it's really surprising to me how archaic this is. There doesn't seem to be established rules. And everybody is calling everybody to relay messages on phones and missing information because their phones aren't connected.

Only-semi-joking but maybe someone there should set up an IRC channel that the FAA manager's in charge, and the defense operators can join to exchange info.
There is no "order they are received" for H-1B. You have to apply on the first of April and literally win a lottery.

If you remove the national origin quotas (it has little to do with race and everything to do with where you were born), then it would be the exact same process for green cards except you only have a limited number of chances before you cap out the time on your visa and get sent back. How is that a better, less capricious system than the current one for anyone who isn't Indian or Chinese?

The US political system gives disproportionate power to states with smaller population. The US immigration system is disproportionately more difficult for countries with lots of applicants. That's what the US looks at as fair - giving each state or country a fair shot, not each individual.
Homeopathy Explained [video]
I even bought into that meme a bit in the early 2000s. It turns out that most "language" designers (including myself) aren't that good at it, and that designing a language that isn't just yet another leaky abstraction takes a lot of work. Your "interface" is the entire syntax and semantics of your "language."
GOES-East CONUS View – GeoColor 2 hour loop
Lets start with why you think the particular religion you practice is the one?

If you think, all are the same, then you are now moving towards existence of a superior being and possibly creationism.
It’s not killed for sure, but it used to have bigger market share
This is just beautiful.

Makes me want to get a monitor set up to run it all day long.
To play devil's advocate, patient handoffs are incredibly risky and one of the biggest causes of medical error. Retaking patient history is one of the best ways to reduce that risk.

Think of it like talking to a project's stakeholders yourself rather than relying on requirements gathered by somebody else.
I’m sorry, I was editing another reply in a tab on my iPhone and something went wrong.
It's definitely resolution dependent. On my Galaxy S7, the frame rate is 40-45 when the screen is set to 1080p, and drops to 20fps if I increase the resolution to 1440p.
Getting product security engineering right
I was talking more about maximizing tax revenue for the US.
[George] Church Speaks
Nailed it. As you work longer on a project you'll realise patterns emerging. It's the same behavior repeated again and again. Take Rails for example, it is where it is because someone saw the patterns for a webapp and made a framework that conceptualizes it. It's something that's not appreciated very well. The concepts serve a vital purpose in organising your thinking in the problem domain.
> What is his suggestion, though, exactly? For a waiter to not consider 'being a waiter' as part of his identity? If we're talking about reality, that strikes me as a fairly unrealistic ask, especially if it's all the waiter does.

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying.
interesting, thanks for sharing
Fascism, for the people who shape it as such, will be pushed forward by some of the kinds of people the article mentions. However, Germany was and is and always will be peopled by mostly reasonable, kind, stout folks, because most people everywhere are reasonable, kind, and stout.

Even the cream of a country can be goaded and led and pushed into fascism, as the tide sweeps across a frightened or depressed people. The soldiers of Germany had to be shown the horrors and crimes of their superiors in gory detail, and still they had to be marshaled by strict speech laws to prevent the resurrection of a horror that largely benefitted the masses.
I mean, it's been identified as aircraft by pilots nearby. And it has the ability to disguise itself from radar. That's all you really need to conclude spy plane. I know that people had made sightings of previous US planes before they were declassified. A slightly scarier possibility is that its not American.
The underlying Docker fundamentals are open source (lxc containers). Google gives away better orchestration with Kubernetes (and cloud providers are rapidly adopting it). RedHat bought CoreOS. Doesn’t leave much value prop for Docker.
"born Nazi" does not imply that ancestry or ethnicity plays into it. It's merely saying that the personality that one is born with does. i.e. there is some quality of personality that we are born with.
I find the wind turbines to be really cool to look at, at least from my experience with driving through central Oregon. The scale of each one, and the quantity of them are really awe inspiring. Maybe it's just the novelty of it though. But I really enjoy coming across a field of them.
> If you remove the national origin quotas (it has little to do with race and everything to do with where you were born)

Yeah, those things aren't correlated at all. Come on.

> then it would be the exact same process for green cards except you only have a limited number of chances before you cap out the time on your visa and get sent back.

No it wouldn't. There's a different system in place for permanent visas than for temporary ones. Viz. a waiting list. The grandparent post linked the visa bulletin which explains how it works. You have the tools at hand to educate yourself, there's no excuse for ignorance.

> How is that a better, less capricious system than the current one for anyone who isn't Indian or Chinese?

Because human being are human beings, not 1 billionth of India or China. It is a bedrock principle of contemporary liberalism (small l) that people ought be to treated as individuals. The remnant of the pre-1965 racist national origin system is a disgusting anomaly of a worse time.

> The US political system gives disproportionate power to states with smaller population. The US immigration system is disproportionately more difficult for countries with lots of applicants. That's what the US looks at as fair - giving each state or country a fair shot, not each individual.

One terribly unjust system originally put in place to protect slavery doesn't define the United States' entire notion of fairness.

In any event it is nonsensical to talk about giving a country a shot. Countries aren't going to immigrate to the US, people are.
The shadertoy version is missing the mountain terrain scene present in this video.
Story of systemic gender discrimination inside UC Berkeley’s IT Department
Are those aircraft invisible to radar?
Credit blowups can cause capital loss, risk-free bonds can never have capital loss if you hold to maturity.
Did you read the emails? Your conclusion is the opposite of nearly all the comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full...
I’m getting 60 fps on my iPhone X.
Definitely NextCloud.
"Someone has to do it. What makes John Deere's embedded software engineers more qualified..."

Simple, John Deere, probably like us, has spent more testing the software than you could ever do on your own.

You can't judge complex software just by looking at it. It must be tested. People who fail to understand this wind up making these uneducated comments. Go study ISO26262 and the MTB calculations required to pass it and maybe you'll change your tune.

Tested software runs on real vehicles and simulators at large companies, as I stated, running into the multi-million dollar price range. There is zero amount of code inspection the general public can do that would give the same assurances you get through testing.

Bottom line: just looking at code is not enough. You must test it. This is unit tests, simulations, field tests, harsh temperature, vibration, power cycle, high side/low side power distribution, code coverage, etc... None of this is possible by you inspecting code.
Yes, the whole point of this discussion is how the status quo makes zero sense.
Ask HN: Unique wedding gift for an avid HN reader?
Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I'm attending a wedding in the next few months for a very close friend who is also an avid HN reader.

He's an engineer and CTO of a Bay Area startup.

He is ridiculously well traveled. He deliberately avoids all news, but is one of the most well informed people I know.

His bachelor party was the most unconventional I've ever been to, and as a result, the most memorable.

Traditional registry based gifts seem so...unnecessary for him.

I want something elegant, yet simple - and memorable in its uniqueness.

Any ideas from folks who are the best distillation of his personality I've found en masse?
I usually keep a small backlog of tasks that can be fit around the bigger ones and then fit them to suit my mood. This can be learning, doing code reviews for other developers, testing, documentation, etc.
Consider a scheme in which:

Each user generates a symmetric "user key", kU.

The plaintext of each file (or without loss of generality, block of data, etc.), pFile, is encrypted with a randomly generated symmetric key, kFile, producing the ciphertext cFile. pFile is also hashed with a cryptographically strong hash, producing hpFile. kFile is then encrypted with hFile, producing ckFile. The user encrypts pFile with kU, producing chpFile. Finally, the user takes the first N bits of hpFile (for N on the order of, say, 16 or 32), producing hpFileTrunc. The user then submits hpFileTrunc to the server.

The server is, semantically, just a list of 3-tuples: (cFile, ckFile, hpFileTrunc).

The server sees if it knows of the existence of records with the same hpFileTrunc value as the client's submission. If so, it returns them to the client.

The client then tries, for each record returned by the server, decrypting ckFile2 with the client's hFile value, potentially producing kFile. If this is successful, the client then decrypts cFile with kFile, producing pFile. Finally, it compares this pFile to the original. If it matches, a match has been found, and the client exits the loop. If not, (or if either of the two decryption steps failed), it continues to the next record the server returned. If there are no more records, the client instead submits the tuple (cFile, ckFile, hpFileTrunc) to the server, which stores it.

Finally (whether or not a match was found), the client stores chpFile locally, to be used when retrieving the file.

To retrieve the file, the user decrypts chpFile with kU, producing hpFile. They truncate hpFile, producing hpFileTrunc, and submit it to the server. They perform the same process described earlier to retrieve the matching pFile.

(Note: truncation may also be replaced by, or combined with, a second round of hashing.)

With this scheme, assuming secure primitives (authenticated encryption and hashing), I don't believe it's possible to learn any information about a file unless you already have its contents.

So the server can tell if you're accessing (storing or retrieving) a particular file if and only if the server knows what it's looking for.

TL;DR: you can totally construct a scheme that allows meaningful comparison of plaintexts!

But... this is probably a bad thing. Comparison of plaintexts is a vulnerability: the server being able to see who's storing a particular "bad" file has a real impact on privacy. And likely more subtle impacts, too...
Turn off transponder. In the US, outside the ADIZ, we don't have a blanket of active radar.
One odd thing for me was that example problems seem to taken from physics and engineering. Which is natural for the authors and the time -- computer science departments typically started out as part of the Physics or Engineering departments.

One of the first examples is Newton's method for approximation. Which many beginning programmers have never encountered.
Confirmation times = assaying BTC
>you oversimplify things

How can you oversimplify something by asking questions?
I know just from writing graphics hacks that you get significantly better results if you do the correction in the HDR color space before you produce the 24-bit, 8-bits-per-component pixels shipped to the GPU.

If by "video LUT" you mean something at the CRTC or even after it on some external device, if the software producing the visuals has already reduced the pixels down to 8-bits-per-component before they hit the LUT, then you've lost accuracy particularly in the small values.

This is why it's desirable to do one of the following:

1. inform the software of the LUT and let it perform the transform before it packs the pixels for display

2. change the entire system to have more bits per color component all the way down to the framebuffer, then the per-component LUTs at the CRTC can profitably contain > 256 entries.

I'm not an expert in this field at all, just play with graphics hacks. But this is what I've come to understand is the nature of the issue.

edit:

To clarify, the reality implied by the need for correction is that some areas of the 0-256 range of values are more significant than others. When you do a naive linear conversion of whatever precision color the application is operating in down to the 24-bit rgb frame buffer, you've lost the increased accuracy in the regions that happen to actually be more significant on a given display. So you'd much rather do the conversion before throwing away the extra precision, assuming the application was working in greater than 24-bit pixels.
Who does this and do you have a source? It would be interesting to learn more
I don't see any scientific theory here. How exactly would we go about testing the relationship between risks in the ancestral environment and not being "wired properly [to] consider long-term risk"?
Hello LineageOS-15.1
That's fine for secondary, but you'll still show up on primary.
Gracefully dying?
As a 3D artist, I am afraid I am stuck on Windows for life. If I really forced it, the Linux compatibility is always on the up but there are a few big players that just can’t pull it off. They have tried with everything they’ve got. Unreal, for example. V-Ray for Houdini is another. I had to delete the repo links from my bookmark bar. Maybe one day I can get hired at a studio pushing Linux but until then it’s not an option.
If you are interested in what Ken and Roberta have been up to since 2004, check out Ken's blog [1]. In short, they have been travelling the world on their Nordhavn motorboats. Ken does a good job describing their travels and issues along the way, with many technical posts. Plus there are occasional references to Sierra.

[1] https://www.kensblog.com/
Ask HN: Is Java a good choice as a language for developing a startup mvp?
I wanted to use either NodeJs or Elixir, but my friends are more in favor of Java, mainly because Java has more mature libs and frameworks. I agree with the libs being better than NodeJs, but is there any downside of using Java for building an MVP?
Sure, but saying the Holocaust occurred because the Jewish minority was "too pushy" in the views of the majority is not the same as saying they were a wealthy and powerful elite...
Maybe I read the tone wrong but it seemed like more of an antisemitic comment than I'm used to.
That's exactly it. We take it for granted that in simpler human-run ledgers accountability is easier to do. Accounting has all these checks and balances designed to place blame on a single individual. Corporations obscure some of that blame but it still works in theory. A complex distributed system means that it can be almost impossible to determine what went wrong and that has some hugely dystopian outcomes.