skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I enjoyed reading both posts very much! Thank you for writing them.

The line about "survivorship bias" also jumped out at me as out of place. It's probably a phrasing thing, but I think granting that survivorship bias could be a factor, even as you assert that it is not a dominant factor, would have made the piece stronger. The way it was phrased seemed to deny the possibility, causing me to raise an eyebrow in skepticism, but that doesn't seem to be what you believe.

I absolutely agree with your central thesis that open source can provide a ladder for the underprivileged. At the same time, it's also undeniable that some people are constrained from contributing to open source due to economic and social circumstances, and I don't think those two ideas conflict. Does that make sense?
Rampant Kodi Malware? It's Time to Either Put Up or Shut Up – TorrentFreak
gRPC isn't really designed with web programming in mind at all; it's primarily used for server-side languages. (For example, it supports 64 bit ints.)
> Please dude, actually read up on the involvement of the US in the secret wars in Cambodia by Kissinger, the School of the Americas, instrumental in teaching South American militaries repressive strategies that killed tens of thousands of innocents with the full support of the American government, the Iran-Contra affair, the ridiculous involvement in Vietnam.

Kissinger was just pure evil. Apart from his involvement in the things above, he also actively supported dictators in Pakistan, and indirectly did nothing to stop the slaughter of civilians in (then) East Pakistan.

But, I still stand by my point: Americans have strived to right the wrongs (and there have been many and monumental ones). Eventually all these 'secret' activities have come out and the public has ensured that the people responsible were shamed or held accountable, to some extent (it never is a full reckoning, unfortunately). I can't think of that happening in China, for instance. Name any other great power that hasn't had stuff like this?
I'm not saying the system is perfect, but there is a reason we switched to the current system.

If I've invented widgets (or think that I've invented widgets), I should be able to know if I can patent and sell them, without years later getting sued because someone once did it in their basement and left it at that.
It depends on the kind of notes:

For information you want to retrieve easily later on: markdown files (avoid any wiki-like format that isn't widely used) + some way to sync those files (e.g. unison, synching, Dropbox etc.). The app doesn't really matter but I use vim on my workstation, notebook, phone, tablet etc.

For overviews, outlines, mind maps, notes in a meeting: a white sheet of paper. You can scan it, put keywords in the filename etc. I avoid tech in meetings.

For sketches: a small notebook (A6 format) I always carry with me. At my age, it's more natural for me to think with a pen in my hand than with a keyboard below my fingers.
They could send another drone ;)
Flip side: first to file arose because first to invent is inherently ambiguous. The fixed cost of a filing was deemed better than the large and unknowable cost of determining who invented what when through the courts.
This is actually completely backwards in an ironic way. I have found in the past that when I made a program closed source, for sale, all further incentive to do anything to the program became connected to its revenue. Like, "it hasn't generated any meaningful revenue, so I cannot justify spending another N hours on it unless those hours lead to sales."

Most software that you can buy has little or no revenue, which means you will be one of a scarce set of suckers paying for it. That meagre revenue doesn't pay for the developer resources to improve the program.

Paying for software is like an insurance premium against bugs and issues in that program.

Paying for some unpopular software with few users is like buying insurance from an insurance company that insures only a handful of other policy holders.
Careful leaning on criminality; it isn't a thing. Remember that sitting in certain areas of a bus, voting as a woman or a person of colour, etc. was encoded into law and legislation. Violating those laws becomes criminality.
Newark police opens surveillance cameras to the public
Scientific Debt (and Technical Debt in Software Engineering)
I’d love some feedback from a longtime Workflowy user on my open source alternative if you would be so inclined https://BulletNotes.io/
I don't understand why existing protections must be brought into the 21st century.

Was it not already illegal to harass minors, regardless of how you do it? Were people able to say 'Oh, I only wrote words about it, and didn't verbalize it so it doesn't count'?
A better solution would have been to drive more users to paid accounts.

Microsoft buying them doesn't even solve the problem that they're not financially viable right now. Unless cutting HR and other support roles is enough to bump them to profitability, but I doubt it.

At this point it's too late, though, because this sale is a direct consequence of them taking VC funding a few years back. How was a website for hosting source code ever going to satisfy venture capitalists looking for a big pay out?
It won't be a messed up situation if the politicians said what you just pointed. The employers are taking away jobs of americans, not the immigrants.

It will be a totally different debate altogether.
They probably do but I guess many people have their profiles set to "Friends only". And on Twitter people don't usually use their real name.
Have you had your resume reviewed by other developers?
Unbundling the Corporation
Since you mention it, people who have degrees and people who don't have degrees usually work in different companies. Any programmer is unlikely to experience both sides of the coin.
GitHub, Inc. is a for-profit organization too, as are its biggest competitors. If you're concerned about the interaction between profit and code hosting, that doesn't have much to do with this acquisition.
While I agree he made the right decision, and I also agree that Taleb has interesting things to say that bear on career choices, I don't think he needed Taleb's ideas on risk to make this choice. In programming, becoming obsolete is not a risk, it is guaranteed. This is just short term pain vs. long term pain. Which is also a difficult decision, but not one you need to have read "Fooled By Randomness" or "Black Swan" to understand.

Losing your job (eventually) if you become obsolete isn't tail risk, it's the most likely scenario. And losing your job right when everybody else is losing their job is also not tail risk, it's the most likely scenario. So, if you're not learning anything new, you aren't at risk from a black swan, you're doomed.

If anything, it relates more to the idea of "Antifragility"; many small shocks strengthen you. The small shock of learning a new technology (and feeling underproductive while you're on the steep side of the learning curve) is the small shock that makes you stronger. Don't let yourself avoid those small shocks for too long.
I have received numerous donations in the past. They were never accompanied by any specific request to fix something or make a feature. So even if I wanted to do something in the software out of a sense of obligation to those users, I would not have known what that is.

Realistically, a $100 donation doesn't get much of my time anyway.

It's more of a pat on the back; people like what you're doing, and the way you're doing it; so keep going. (Don't do anything differently, just more of it.)
The neurology of flow states
I think you missed the other seven pages. Page 2 paragraph 6:

> The present application does not meet the criteria of Article 33(1) PCT, because the subject-matter of claim 1 does not involve an inventive step in the sense of Article 33(3) PCT.
I like versioning schemes that imply something about the amount of change in that specific version, not just its position on a timeline.
The one time I was flown in to interview at a Silicon Valley shop was the only time that I was asked about education directly. I never attended high school.

Added: It was something like "education means a lot in this town, as much as people don't say it.".
>Likewise, I think Tramiel could have done something similar instead of diving down the 68000 path with the Atari ST.

The Atari ST was built from scratch in less than 8 months after the deal to license the Amiga chipset fell trouhg. The ST is an amazing engineering feat considering the insane schedule.

I agree on you that the 68k is a terrible CPU for gaming, but it got better when there was some cache added to it, starting with the 68030.

I had an Acorn Archimedes with an ARM 2 clocked 8 Mhz (the same speed as the Atari ST, and 1 Mhz faster than the Amiga 1000/500), it was so much faster than my ST.
It takes a long time to wake from sleep, sometimes over 30 seconds with monitors flickering on and off. Which monitor displays which desktop will change after unplugging and plugging back in, or even after sleeping and waking back up.
This is opinion masquerading as fact.

Take for instance Ubuntu - should those releases be considered unofficial? [no]

How about the python-attrs library - should those be considered interim? [no]

All versioning schemes fail somewhere and CalVer and SemVer (and certainly others) are not exceptions to this rule. The problem is you’re reducing a ton of metadata into a human-readable, compact label - and that’s inherently lossy.
This Knife-Wielding Mini-Monster Wants You to Back Off
Literally, win a Nobel prize, or you have to "tick" several boxes for "extraordinary ability." I don't think a good professor in an American university will even qualify. It's pretty legit.

Note that that "extraordinary ability" green card is not employer-sponsored. You don't have to have anyone sponsoring you to get it - that means you can be unemployed and Uncle Sam will be happy to pick you up as a permanent resident.
The only reason the US is interested in the women's game is because it is the only one in which they compete, the men's team is a joke. The reason the US women are competetive is really pretty simple: title IX. Funding equality means that collegiate women have a lot of scholarship slots and team funding available for women's teams so they have a good pre-professional program. A woman who wants to play football looks to get a place on a US collegiate team in the same way a man hopes to get picked up by a U-21 junior squad -- you get better by playing against the best and in a competitive environment.
It sounds like a great approach to enable both speed in searching and customizability in indexing -- no way you get to bit level box ticking with conventional means. Thanks for explaining. Bag of Words, last I recall reading, is a statistical method for predicting the next word, so I'm curious how that played out for you.
A somewhat overlooked factor: Luck. International tournaments are won by single elimination games - in the case of the World Cup, four. Four wins in a row in a relatively low-scoring sport against the best the rest of the world has to offer. You have to be good but you also have to be a bit lucky. Unfortunately for England, they've rarely been particularly good and they've often been particularly unlucky.

Another common factor among many World Cup winners is a top flight national club league that produces the core of the national team and drives significant tactical or other innovation. That would give you (in their respective heydays) Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Germany, Spain. The Netherlands is missing - bad luck.

The Premiere league is commercially successful but isn't quite that sort of league. English clubs are regularly embarrassed by their top European competitors. There's not much incentive to fix this, though, since the league prints money as it is.
Rpcs3 is making good money
I was interested to see a more formal definition of calendar versioning than I've come across before, until I saw that it refers to `DD` for short day while `0D` is zero padded - which goes against all date formatting specifications ever... `DD` should be zero-padded and a single `D` unpadded...
I'm surprised to see some of the most popular software of all time not be mentioned: Windows and Microsoft Office.

Also, for a more technical audience, the C, C++, and EcmaScript specifications.
Is it just heating of brain required or blood flow? One crazy way to test would be to artificially heat the brain!
I am in complete agreement, but that’s not the way companies interview. It’s a CS world. Strange because many used to regard a CS degree like a consolation prize if you couldn’t RTFM.
> In your custom kernel project, your custom allocator() can return a buffer from a memory pool you handle yourself.

We're done. "It's OK, you can just write your own heap-like API!" is just not remotely responsive to the kind of problems I'm talking about, and that you think it is is sorely tempting me to put more words in your mouth.

If you don't think these libraries are useful, that's fine. Don't use them. Don't presume to understand the application realm before you've worked in it.
I'm not sure why you got downvoted, normally obligatory XKCD posts go over quite well. I enjoyed it.
My not-to-be-taken-seriously theory is that Italian influence helps. If you look at the national teams of Uruguay, Argentina (should really be called South Italy), Brazil, and (obviously) Italy itself, you'll find a large number of Italian surnames. That's 13 titles between these 4 countries.
Or it is possible that humans are maladapted to living in the artic circle.
Not the parent comment's author, but personally I'm quite content with PlainNotes (https://github.com/aziz/PlainNotes). I also rely a lot on ST temporary buffers, and only use said plugin for mid-to-long-term stuff.
Yes. I've got some questions about your incredibly trivial scheme:

* Do users declare a dependency on "= 37", or ">= 37"? (Or do they have the option of either?)

* How do you push backwards-compatible changes like bugfixes? Is the rule that every new release is a new version number?

* If you do the >= thing, do you automatically take the newest compatible dependency or the oldest possible one (vgo-style)? Do you run tests on reverse dependencies when dependencies are updated?

* Are you allowed to have diamond dependencies, e.g., A depends on B and C, B depends on AdminTools 37, and C depends on AdminTools 38? Do you resolve that with a single copy of AdminTools, or two?
Cool enough to dupe.
So...dont brake suddenly. Decelerate, buy some time to collect and analyze more data and if the end result still appears to be a collision, then brake hard.

If a human driver started hallucinating behind the wheel, we would expect them to do the same, not maintain speed (or accelerate!) through the supposed object in their path.

This tech was supposed to be safer and more convenient than human driving, not a simulation of the decision-making abilities of a 12-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto.
So we need a volunteer to put the electrodes on the hippopotamus?
SpaceX has saved the government boatloads of money by breaking the monopoly ULA had on government launches. It's one of the wiser investments the government has made recently as not only has it saved the government money but made a US company dominant in the commercial market to the point the market is expanding because costs are so low.
What's the best introduction to Forth or Occam for complete beginners to programming.

(I didn't downvote you, and I have upvoted your post.)
Of course critics of GitHub's acquisition have indeed offered a better solution in the form of Microsoft not buying GitHub.

Beyond that though, the article encourages and exemplifies the most blatant form of armchair CEO-ing.

The tech press has gleaned clicks from their fawning yet resigned corporate strategy fantasies for so long that now their headlines straight up demand that mentality from their readers.
> In your custom kernel project, your custom allocator() can return a buffer from a memory pool you handle yourself. Your custom deallocator() will reclaim that memory back into your custom memory pool.

I don't have either. I have a statically allocated buffer big enough for one frame of data, and I need to guarantee that it never gets used twice. My code does not have a custom allocator. It does not allocate.
The developers of FORTRAN 77 and IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 would probably disagree.
> I am interested in the notion or aspect of consciousness that relates to why people behave the way they do, think the way they think, and are not only largely oblivious to it (the idea of examining behavior and the ~motivations behind it) but commonly hostile to it, sometimes extremely so. Or even more interestingly, the ability to easily notice the behavior in others, but utterly incapable of seeing the same thing in oneself.

The book The Elephant In The Brain touches on this. Short version: effective self-deception is the only way to effectively deceive others, as we as a species have developed very finely tuned bullshit detectors. To recognize and acknowledge your own hidden motives is to ensure that you won't accomplish your evolutionary goals (survival/reproduction), so evolution has generally limited people's ability to gain insight into themselves.
Faulty society constructs break down one way or another. This is very clear sign of rotten stuff underneath. I.e.: The system sucks, man.
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/file/65e65d5905bc/src/hot...

The VM interpreter is generated from assembly code snippets that calls this class when something complex need to be done.

Hotspot is written in C++ and objects shared by Java and the VM can be seen either in Java or in C++ because they have a Java header and a C++ header.

Classloading is done lazily in Java so you can not preload classes until the first time you see it. If you see a non loaded class in the JITed code, you have to jump back into the interpreter and re-generate the assembly code later.

OSR stands for on stack replacement which means that while you are interpreting a loop, you decide to JIT its body.

Biased locking is a way to implement monitor/lock if those locks are used only by one thread, you biased the lock to that thread, which is slightly more efficient.

The stack contains stack frames of different kinds Java, C, adapters (assembly stubs between the 2 JITs and the interpreter which obviously doesn't use the same calling convention) but you have a common way to iterate on them.

All Hotspot GCs are generational so you have to hold every pointers (Java reference) into Handles (box known by the GC) because the GC may decide to move the objects while the C++ code hold them.

Obviously, all this mechanisms make sense but managing the complexity of all of them working together is insane.
This is a repost of something I commented a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943853):

I always carry a pocket sized notebook and a pen with me wherever I go. It's still the fastest method to write something down, it always works and it's socially acceptable to use in all situations. Most people whom I meet, even in private, will see me take out my notebook at the beging of the meeting, taking notes occasionally while we interact. I don't think you could do that with a computer or phone and it allows me to remember important details and action points that I (and the person I'm talking to) would forget otherwise. At work I have larger, A4-sized notebooks that I use similarly.

One of the features that I appreciate most is that everything I write down is in chronological order and can be accessed very quickly. In seconds, I can go through last weeks notes and check if I forgot to do something, or even go back a year or more to revisit my thoughts on something that happened back then. Using a pen is also much more expressive, allowing me to highlight/format certain points as a discussion/meeting is ongoing and add illustrations, arrows etc. on the fly.

I've seen and tried some of the new epaper notepads and they're definitely getting closer, but for now they're still to slow, clumsy & fragile to replace paper for me.
Maybe by extension it’s not really worth living there ;)
Sure but this sounds like an opportunity for something like “Uber for FLOSS support.” Or perhaps it would be more like OkCupid.

But you could pay money and your FLOSS problems get researched and solved for you by a developer who is experienced in this area.

In practice I can see this as a forum where people make minimal effort posts and skilled people give them quality support. Just as I was forming the previous sentence I realize Stack Overflow and Reddit kind of do this. Maybe it would just be nice if people found a good way to add payment to the process.

Anyway, it’s not as nice as not having the bugs in the first place, but FLOSS has other advantages. There will continue to be people who choose commercially supported software, but the more we can close the gap on quality with FLOSS the better.
GitHub provides a central, well-known "hub" for code collaboration. Due to its success and popularity, it has achieved a network effect that is really difficult to replicate. (Google wasn't able to do it.) If GitHub were to go away or deterioriate in some way, something else would inevitably take its place.

Putting your project on github is the best way to ensure that you have the largest possible number of eyes on it. And if something better comes along, you can always copy your repo there. I don't see what you lose by hosting on github.
Because they're tired of sitting
Why is it that the US women are consistently the best in the world, and US men are consistently middling? Do women in other countries just not play as much soccer as US women?
The C256 Phoenix Project aka What Commodore 256 could have been like
I have been really surprised with how often she posts Patreon updates! It makes sense now as I didn’t realize she was full time.
> The end of all the 8-bit systems was pretty obvious by '89

While it might not have been as easy to see /in/ '89 in hindsight the seeds for the rise (and crowding out of other architectures) of the Intel x86 chips were already well sown and growing rapidly by then:

i386: released Oct 1985 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386)

i486: released April 1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486)
With laptop or at home: Notepad++ with Auto Save plugin. Whenever you change windows, it saves all open tabs. Also makes it a good IDE - when you click on the terminal, it saves your code, so you can just reload the module.

Mobile: Dropbox text files. Also they interoperate well with the above.
I've already explained why that argument makes no sense

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17276845
I've been searching for a note-taking solution for years, and I was really going to start using Notion, especially after they lowered the price for personal use, but what still stops me is the inability to control where the notes are stored.

That's why I'm using nVALT, I just wish it had some better formatting options.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16571595
This is why. And also you are ready to move when people start to move out. If you don't stand up before, you will block everybody when you stand up while they are trying to move out.

Sitting is the last thing you want when you have been sitting for many hours.
When a velodrome was built in my hometown, people were outraged. The cost was around $600k of 80's money. And there was absolutely no tradition in the area for this sport.

Less than ten years later, olympic gold:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Moreno_(cycli...