skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m a rambler too so it’s all fair ;)

See, I’ve been focusing on reading this year, more specifically to find out what my style and interests are, and how I can develop them further. For me it’s unrealistic to “just read away” - there are many different types of books and courtesy to our digital world/ genes/ whatever, my brain is definitely re-wired so that it’s very difficult to maintain focus for long. So naturally I’m interested in reading techniques (and other types of acquisition) and what others’ experiences are like.

But the deeper I go into this project, I am also beginning to wonder that perhaps, even self-proclaimed bookworms may not actually be reading as effectively as they think they are. By “effective”, I mean getting the same-ish level of clarity that the author had when writing it. And so I think you’re right about books having layers of meaning. Which this alone has powerful implications: it means a reading list should not be a ticking box exercise, as so many of us think, but a reference library - you have the freedom to read and revisit however you like, depending on your current intellectual needs. And it also means that books are actually very dynamic and so you shouldn’t really take them too seriously - it’s OK to get an understanding to a limited level only.

It’s interesting, let’s see how this reading project goes.

Anyway back to chomping dense technical books. This is definitely a big weakness of mine - no matter how interesting a book is, I just cannot stay motivated for long. But it may be because I’m approaching it the wrong way. I generally like to dip in and out, and be very selective about what to savour in. So I am probably treating technical books wrongly - taking it too lightly when each should be an individual project, really. I think another factor is confidence - it’s easy to get intimidated but I find that the more I become familiar with the concepts and basics, the tome gets easier. Which means it’s necessary to have a “learning pathway” of books e.g. Sal Khan’s circuit videos and “Electronica for Dummies” before the granddaddy “The Art of Electronics”.
> Laws that put Europe behind the rest of the world in how easy it is to build online services

It is, indeed, inconvenient to consider the rights of the users when building a service, especially when they aren't the ones who pay you for it. Still, I'm not sure it's such a bad idea.
Nuclear Fusion Reactor in France 55 Percent Complete
The solution is to use technology to replace high skilled professions with average Joes. These high skilled professionals can just go do research, and there is always more research to be done. The average Joes will be aided by a combination of technology and human supervision to do a job that is effectively as good as a professional would have done it.

For example, a nurse might be retrained to do diagnosis. Instead of learning the corpus of medical literature they will have Internet access to a database and supervision from an MD. So that way we might be able to replace many MDs who will instead go into research.

I think that is the sane way forward. And it won't be a solution for everyone, of course. But I think it should be doable.
Eyes on Exoplanets
> The result of the second query may be a permanent error indicating that your data has disappeared.

That's actually okay, per SQL. Any SQL transaction may fail, for any reason, at the server's discretion. Because the user's permission to operate on the table was revoked in the middle of their transaction, for example. Or because the server is going down and wants to drop connections.

SQL clients have to be written to assume that any transaction could enter a failed state "before" the execution of a statement, even if the previous statement returned a success.

Helpfully, though, they know that 1. by the SQL standard, that failure means that no part of the transaction applied; and 2. that this failure-state is a failure of the transaction context to be valid, rather than a failure of their statement to be valid. (They don't know that their statement is valid, but they know that they haven't been told that it isn't.)
Not yet, but we're going there.
This article is interesting in terms of producing useful though / mental discussion, yet on completing that thought I disagree with almost all of it.

- Programs are not like cars. Programs are like cars. They are a manufactured construct created for a specific purpose, which does have relative degrees of correctness.

If I have a car with no wheels, it is not a "correct" car, it is at best a chair. No engine or drivetrain, similiar - not "correct" car. Oddly enough, no seat, possibly still "correct". Hiccuping or jumping behavior, it has a bug, or a glitch.

- Software should be pure logic automata. In many respects I would argue this can be a "bad". Such software can be extremely limited - it does X, no more. Or, it can be very brittle. It does does X1, but if I try X2, it breaks. Software like biology is in many ways better.

I feed my software an apple, it eats it, producing work and waste. I feed my software a steak, similiar. I hand my software a baseball, it throws it. I hand it a football, it does similiar. I hand it an apple, it may eat it or throw it depending on the need.

- Faith healing. This has been a meme since nearly the dawn of computers. "Have you tried restarting it?" Maybe kicking it. Wifi won't work? Bad spirits in your house. I worked with fluid mechanics for years, and many (non-trivial) simulations seemed about as likely to complete due to system noise as they did due to program correctness.

Further, there is a serious ivory tower attitude here towards magical thinking and superstition. Technology shamanism is a very real thing. People gravitate towards it often because it works. Its oddly scientific method. If I have my lucky rabbit foot, the program compiles. If I don't, system crash.
Besides the first part which I just don't agree with I agree with the other things and as I said it's not either or but finding a balance.

The kids are looking to you to find out what maximises your attention so that's what you have to manage before anything else. Of course you are not just saying "oh get up, your are fine" to someone who is actually crying because they hurt themselves but there is plenty of room from that and then to someone who cries for every little thing.

So again balance. Read the situation and react to that.
> I don't really see the CIDR analogy

As an analogy, it doesn't directly apply to your particular point, which is why it's an analogy. It would apply to, say, a network engineer.

> an application (correctly) caching DNS records

I'm pretty sure that merely putting the word "correctly" in parentheses doesn't make it so, nor, more to the point, remove the fact of the controversy on that point.

> that different applications cache differently

This is merely an argument in favor of the caching being done by the OS, which would also be aware of a device moving networks. Device mobility (without reboot) is one of those relatively recent uses imposed onto the Internet.

> Another comment said it won't work with DNSSEC, that's another example stemming from going against the design and basic principles of the DNS.

One could lay the blame for incompatibility at the feet of DNSSEC, too, as that technology is also a response to modern needs of the Internet that has little, if anything, to do with any original design or basic principles.

> the common internal/external split-dns setup is fundamentally unsound.

So, again, I still can't tell what it is you're opposed to, on so fundamental a level that you would call it "unsound", with split-dns specifically, separate from the issue of private addressing being used.

Is it any different if two separate nameservers are used instead of split-dns on one?

Perhaps, most importantly, what's the sound, not-misguided, alternative that provides a comparable (maybe even better) experience for the user?
> The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi.

As an American in Australia I found that I could communicate easily enough, but it was often a struggle with cashiers. Katoomba was the smallest town I visited, and that didn't pose much of a challenge (except for the food). Contrast that experience with London's east end where there were a number of accents I simply couldn't understand. The thing I've found with Australia, Canada, and the UK is that in major cities the dialect is similar enough that if you're somewhat familiar with British vocabulary you'll be fine. Contrast that to someplace like Indonesia / Malaysia / Singapore where the accent isn't impenetrable but the slang is mostly Malay derived and it's a whole other world.

Bringing it back to Waffle House though, the only WHs I've visited were in areas where the southern accent wasn't particularly strong. We have local and big chain diners out here on the west coast (e.g. Denny's, IHOP), so a diner isn't a new experience. But visiting Waffle House was a bit of a culture shock to me. While I could understand the words, every single person was discussing football. Except for some expat restaurants, you really wouldn't find that style of situation.
I think the main reason is that it looks good. Nothing better than overlooking a wide open space where the worker bees are moving around. That is, as long as you can then retreat into your quiet corner office.
Yeah I know right?

The reason given was:

> We don't allow products or services that facilitate unauthorized access to
content on websites that circumvents paywalls.

The functionality from the extension was roughly possible with a set of adblock rules anyway, I just packaged it up for the less technically inclined.
It would still take suspiciously long to upload/encode
What about "Spanish language Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law"?
Draw This
Shadowban is mostly a tool to deal with idiots constantly posting attention-seeking comments. If someone isn't smart enough to realize their comments are not being replied to, they aren't the kind of person you really want to contend with. Shadowban deals with people who post comments where the intent is to rouse, not to converse. So much of the time, they don't expect replies, and thus they can continue to post their crap to themselves, and only themselves. I don't think shadowban is polite or nice but it is effective.
Since the url is the same we changed the title to the one the author had for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17449143.
It's implemented as a JS redirect to:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicado_4_julio_2...

If you have JS disabled, everything works as usual.
Is there anything OCaml can do that no other language can do?
The concurrency story is similar to what you get in Python. On one hand, you have event loop implementations with various conveniences for scheduling callbacks (Async, LWT); on the other, you have OS-level threads, but the runtime system has a global lock which makes only one thread execute at a given time. So no parallelism without forking[1] to separate processes. Moreover, the interactions between an event loop and OS-level threads which sometimes arise are non-trivial and in my experience very hard to get right, even with the helpers in Async.

Single-threaded performance is generally good when natively compiled. In a benchmark I did a few years back, which consisted of traversing the filesystem with `opendir`, `readdir` and friends, OCaml was minimally slower than C++ and Nim (when compiled natively) and around Python and Racket when byte-compiled. It probably would be even faster if I used its imperative features. Looking at the code today I also see some unnecessary copying of lists, which could be mitigated. All in all, I think OCaml has a really good performance considering its high-level semantics. You have to be aware of relative costs of operations, but if you do, "as fast as C" is certainly attainable. OCaml code for the benchmark: https://klibert.pl/posts/walkfiles-ocaml.html and the results: https://klibert.pl/statics/images/walkfiled_perf_test1.png

[1] Actually, I just checked and it looks that `fork` is not implemented, so copy-on-write memory sharing is impossible, even on POSIX systems. Docs: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libunix.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Unix.html
Huh. Django cms actually looks pretty nice.
The apples are okay.
There will always be bad actors of various levels of competency. Should the public only be aware of the simplistic ones, or should we make them aware of the worst-case scenario so they can be aware of the risks of poor security?

Serious question.
Surplus value after all tools & supplies to do the job are paid for, is not given back to the workers in most cases. The workers produce the profit in the first place.
SSC Journal Club: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
To be more precise the web is centralising and fracturing in all the wrong places.
Your comment doesn’t explain how you tricked the analyst so I downvoted you.
If you taunt it, even by accident, it has a habit of biting back. And as it has your data, you don't really feel too comfortable just nuking it in that case.
It was already in public use for several weeks before and developers had tweeted publicly about it. At worst the blog post accelerated the nerfing of the API, but it was inevitable once publicly disclosed.
I’m not sure if it makes us less social but I noticed that open plan creates one of the two environments:

1) Super distracting. Everyone is talking the whole time and it’s hard to focus. Your team member bugs you all the time and you realize that your team is part of the noise.

2) Slack driven communication. No one bothers anyone and all the conversation is done on Slack. You slack a person even if they are sitting next to you. Pretty awkward and can be time consuming.
The capitalist is able to procure computers from other workers because they control capital. They then take part of the proceeds of any additional labor attached to it. This is the extraction of surplus value that is being discussed. The workers do not control capital or the means of production and the undemocratic processes of private capitalism means that they will be paid only as much as it takes for them to survive and reproduce their living status without the intervention of the state.

A key socialist idea is to give the workers the control of the means of production and this theft would cease. The idea is that workers as a whole should democratically decide what should be done with the proceeds as they were instrumental in producing them.

Yes, people should be paid to do all kinds of labor. It's not obvious that they should be paid a fraction of all other people's labor in the organization (stocks).

As for bonds, I haven't seen an analysis before, but I'll take a stab. Bonds are the idea that I'll lend you some money and you'll pay me back with interest. The idea inherent in it is that I have no interest in what you're doing other than making some money out of the deal. Person to person, other considerations are pertinent, but at a repeatable institutional level, that's what it comes down to (other than enforceable legality and public pressure). Interest payments in general are also exponential rather than a fixed risk premium, and so represent a particularly extractive way of doing business (though bond payments are closer to fixed payments though they are calculated as interest). Credit cards for instance, exhibit this phenomenon more intensively as there is no ceiling on interest.
I know tons of developers and publishers and I have never ever heard of Valve selling their dataset to publishers. Also based on the TOS that I signed with them as a developer (and presumably is the same for every other developer) it would be a violation of their contract with me to share my stats without my permission.
“working yourself to death by ______"

Analogous to life cough cough
WebPass in SF is $60/month for GigE. It's kind of amazing.

No modem, just an Ethernet drop into your home.
More likely that we are exposed to a lot of aerodynamic animals. And we find them beautiful.
> On the other hand, I would also guess that no serious journalist will contemplate using a free device provided by a rogue nation just in case.

I disagree. While tech-minded journalists may be aware of the risks of untrusted USB devices, the same cannot be expected of everyone; even if they know that USB drives are potentially dangerous (already a crapshoot, even in some tech-related jobs), people unfamiliar with computers may not realize that the same risks apply to all USB-powered devices.
Apple's First MacBook Pro with Retina Display Is Now 'Vintage'
Great to see stuff like this built but having an app this simple require a full RoR backend seems overkill - either I'm stuck running it in Docker (which isn't too bad) or manually getting the right Ruby environment up (horrifying).
Real audiobooks are fine when available but the selection is very limited. Many books worth reading have never been narrated.

There is also the trouble of "A/V sync", wherein you want to mix reading the book with listening to the book. You can do this with some proprietary solutions like Kindle if you purchase both the ebook and get the audio book, but this is again limiting.
Would the magnets in the motor interfere significantly with radio transmissions? Not that it would preclude devices being housed inside either way, just introduce complications.
I find this sort of thing very suggestive of some relationship to clinical/psychotic paranoia, and another recent HN thread made me think there might be fundamental challenges of deep learning systems that lead to similar problems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17438733

When I looked at the example at the top of the paper, where Steve Carell is misidentified as Zooey Deschanel, I thought - I can envision the AI saying (anthropomorphically) yes, I know that looks like Steve overall, but just look at those eyes - that has to mean something. Kind of like a conspiracy theorist/paranoiac.
From what I understand the basic qualm that socialists have, concerns the moral justification for owning income generating assets. Everything else stems from that.

Although I believe some would rather argue from an utilitarian point of view rather than from a moral one.
actually all technology is, in a way, deliberately addictive because it is designed to make people money and not explicitly designed to create greater well being. The story they use to sell it is that it is to improve your life but nowadays its almost impossible to actually reject this concept.
People once lived happily without tech, but now it seems most people 'would die' without it.
I feel like optimizing for manageability is a great way to run a tech company into the ground.

And I notice that Microsoft, which gives its programmers offices, seems like the only tech megacompany that can still produce software.
Yes you do. Because even if they don't register an achievement, they still show up as part of the total population of possible "achievers". I've verified this from my own stats as a developer and that of other developers.

As long as any portion of the userbase registers some achievement data, you can (well, could) get scarily accurate stats.

The only "inaccurate" part is that the stat you're measuring -- "achievers" -- doesn't exactly correlate to any stat we directly care about, like sales. In all the measuring I did against known private sales data, it was always higher than the # of people who had downloaded the game, and the # of people who had played it for at least 1 minute. My best guess is family sharing inflates the "achievers" stat.
Hell, we can barely democratically govern Louisiana. Not for nothing did A.J. Liebling dub it Lebanon.
In Brazil the same. Many are just degree getters but dont really have a good base
Working all your life in physical labour, to provide ungrateful offspring with the chances you never had will do that to you.
Haven't tried it in a while, but there's this: http://www.carsten-mielke.com/redquits.html
I'm not sure I would call it twisted - it's humorous to watch, but not particularly malicious, and if there are truly no devices in any of the fans it could even be construed as a gesture of good faith.

I, for one, appreciate the show.
Apps with access to your Google account
Microsoft Windows is probably the worst software product of all time. All Microsoft has is lawyers and a good marketing department
Yes, if you were planning to upload the whole movie, but if you plan to upload a 2min trailer, you're not expecting it to take very long, likely only a minute or two. Unless Sony has considerably slower internet then I imagine.
Frankly, I find it refreshing.

Here is a man who found Quality in his life. He didn't care about the market. He eschewed the call of mammon. This gentleman dug himself a glorious hole, and worshipped in the one way he knew how.

Building.

You can laugh or call him insane if you like. Here was a man who knew what he wanted and hew it from the earth itself.

Gaze in awe mortals. This man has truly exercised his free agency.
Counterpoint:

Real humans that play starcraft often have bizzarely high Actions Per Minute (APM) scores in the 200-300 range, and often most of that movement is spamming the same commands over and over.
Sure, but a concern about growth and technological revolutions is just as easily found in Keynesian economists works. The conception of socialism here is just regurgitating Hayek's understanding of socialism in "The Road To Serfdom" as fundamentally being about "big government", which is woefully disconnected from the writings of almost every socialist (government centralization is theorized method of implementing the socialist mode of production by some socialists, but it's not fundamentally the point nor is there an understanding of welfare reforms as being "more socialist" by any Marxist I know). Or it's confusing what some socialists agitate for against neoliberal revanchism as their ultimate aims. Either way I wish these people would read a single work by a socialist or have some understanding of the schools of thought within socialism before making these hilariously misinformed pronouncements. It might even challenge their understanding of the "enlightened billionaire class".

Definitely agreed that the eagerness to write off Marx is related to a misunderstanding of what Marx actually said though.
Very similar to the 'infrastructure as code' story, where you're still left with the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure that bootstraps the infrastructure as code systems.

Turtles all the way down, I guess.
Don't worry Microsoft is doing their best to change to open offices.
Why is it called "Jim"?
This and preferring ads to subscriptions are the two topics I feel like I disagree with 99% of HN.

I much prefer open offices and I don't mind my neighbors having conversations. Sometimes it turns out to be pretty useful what you overhear by accident. Otherwise headphones work.
Those are indeed the categories that we shadowban, so if you know of exceptions I'd like to see them.
Seymour Cray (the supercomputer designer) famously dug tunnels underneath his house when he lived in Minnesota. It sounds like fun, really.
A poor comparison. McDonalds is highly variable per location. Just because the one closest to you might be terrible doesn't say anything about the rest of the world.
That's not the point. It's both ASLR and ACLR. ASLR is not enough for certain vulnerabilities when the attackers know which bits/content are present.
Only in HN: socialist entrepreneurs and luddite technologists.