skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anyone want to start a webring?
I usually post to Medium, mostly project write ups and miscellaneous tech thoughts. I've liked it because it has a clean look and can help drive some traffic to your posts.

But Medium seems like it's taken a nosedive. Regardless of what I actually read, my feed is this political doomsday hellscape that predicts America breaking into civil war sometime today. Really not what I'm going for.

So I want to just self-host a blog, but I'll kind of miss the serendipitous reads. I'll likely be writing for no one.

Would there be an interest in a modern webring? Like a JS snippet that forwards you to other self-hosted blogs? I haven't found a modern implementation.

Thinking a maker/project sharing/misc tech theme.
No, why would it be? It wasn’t produced by the partner, and was never authorized to be copied by anyone. It was straight up copied - source code and all - by Hauwei after their partner got access to our SVN repos.
As a counterpoint, I found it to be very helpful in understanding the information presented.

The animals breakdown (Chart B) contains 10 values, ranging from 1 Gt to 0.002 Gt. That's a difference of 500x. That's a bit hard to perceive in a one-dimensional chart.

The two-dimensionality of a Voronoi makes it easier to perceive, particularly in a small image (as is presented on a phone's screen), at least to me. I imagine this is mostly due to a 2D chart consuming far more physical pixels to convey the same information.

A stacked bar chart of the same information: [1]. Admittedly, I didn't take time sprucing up that chart, but I find it extremely hard to intuit from and can't even see the value for "wild birds".

[1] https://www.meta-chart.com/share/untitled-23893
People throwing up emotional drivel while doing nothing to refute a point is one the least appealing aspects of hacker news

Please explain to me how humans are immune to natural selection and then go claim your nobel prize for revolutionizing human understanding of genetics.
From figure 1 of the article:

Humans: 0.06 Gt C

Livestock: 0.1 Gt C

Wild mammals: 0.007 Gt C

So humans and livestock make up (0.06+0.1)/(0.06+0.1+0.007)=96% of MAMMALS.

Relevant xkcd: xkcd.com/1338/
I'm pretty sure Peter Hennessy was one of the first to report on the nature of Letters of Last Resort and I'd be inclined to believe his account.

Having them handwritten seems entirely appropriate to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hennessy

NB Hennessy is obviously well in with the Navy - he has attended during the Perisher course - maybe an advantage to be being a historian who is also a Peer!
This is only vaguely related, but I moved from the UK to the US, and missed the shipping forecast. Listening to it online isn't quite the same thing.

Eventually I stumbled across WWV[1], a shortwave station broadcast by NIST which has satisfied the need in my life.

Ostensibly it is for broadcasting the time, but it also includes storm warmings (especially from WWVH - the Hawaii transmitter), and space weather forecasts. So cool.

You can find it at 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz on your Shortwave radio.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)
You are going to be very very shocked my friend!
Why Paying for Stuff Is So Complicated Now
The post mentions CRISPR in the title and at several points but I can’t actually discern at what step the CRISPR gene editing would have been performed. As described, this mostly resembles a classical transgenic experiment where a plasmid with an antibiotic resistance gene is introduced (transfected) into the bacteria. This has nothing to do with CRISPR, which allows more targeted modifications of a host genome than simple plasmid transfection.

At any rate it’s a fun experiment that is performed, in similar form, in biology in French high schools. Contrary to the tone in some of the comments it’s not particularly dangerous (the bacteria can’t survive outside their agar plates), though local regulations in some countries still might forbid it from being performed at home.

Unfortunately the description is too imprecise to be sure what exactly the author did.
The Road to QUIC
How did you end up in your current line of work? Ever used any of your stats for gambling?
Somebody please build a news distiller that extracts the facts from such articles.
What exactly are the risks with these features that don't already exist with web workers and SharedArrayBuffer? There's the obvious Spectre issue; anything apart from that?
Ask HN: What is the online press service to read N articles from different sites
What is the service that lets subscribers read a given amount of articles in a series of publications, for a given price tag?

It has been mentioned here, in HN comments, a while ago, but I could not find it. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.
As long as it feels like we have agency, then everything’s peachy, right?
How to Memorize a Speech
On a low end box:

* SSH

* OpenVpn

At home, started as needed:

* Samba for backups (dedicated NAS)

* Gitlab (VM on desktop)

I don't need much more.
I'd like to merge all of this into my NAS, but the 14 hdd box draws 70W idle. I'm planning to use a rockpro64 instead to do all that.
Maybe then I'll find other useful things.

Oh, and I have a RPi1 as a 3d printing and mqtt server.
This is covered in the article: these rare chidhood neurologial diseases are considered multi-factorial and antibiotics may or may not work in some cases, at some stage of disease onset.

I would be extremely wary of self-reported miracle cures for chronic diseases as well. 'Liberation treatment' for MS had many fantastic reports of patients throwing away their crutches and the like but of course turned out to be totally ineffective.
And Nvidia isn’t the only company to do so. Intel had a similar monopoly and squeezed it for all it was worth, while providing the best available scientific computing libraries. I can’t blame them, but I would certainly prefer it if there was a way to generically dispatch optimal code for heterogeneous hardware.
Good call. That is a failure mode.

Very glad I agreed "always" needed to be qualified. The crowd here is sharp, and we benefit mutually from it.
> nagging sense of fear and dread, that this version of myself wasn't the "real me"

You've been in an ill state for a long time, and when you come out of it you become more aware of your self and your environment, which makes you feel vulnerable. There are plenty of dangers and worries in the world that you weren't paying attention to that you aren't calibrated for. This is a typical J-curve situation. I suggest you do everything you can to stick through this sense of dread and you may very well see improvement.
Thank you!

I bet you know which language I'm betting on ;)

That said, I don't think a framework is really the thing; I think JavaScript users using wasm in libraries is a much bigger growth area for wasm, at least in the short term.
Nothing in the article indicates any non-contact orders were issued or violated here - I think you’re reading in to this
Whether the matches are plausible is completely besides the point. This isn't an evaluation of Amazon's recognition quality, it's a demonstration that the system is fallible and notes on the consequences.

Same thing re data setup. Not the point again. Even if law enforcement hires the world's best computer vision experts (fat chance, it'll go to cheapest contractor) this is a note that there can be mistakes that get people killed.
Amateur meaning lover. Someone who does something for the love of it and not the money.
I only know of https://blendle.com, pay-per-article.
Avie Tevanian on Venture Capital (& Blockchain and AI)
It's not really such a big deal. Everyone uses dedicated feed readers nowadays. Feedly mainly.
> We're just in a movie and one of the character says "What if we don't have free will? Maybe that'll change the end of the movie." No it won't, it's already set in stone, just fast-forward a bit.

That's mixing in-universe time (and change), and out-of-universe time (and change).

For characters in the movie stuff changes. One of them was alive and then died. It's objectively a change in state of that universe.

For us looking from outside the story is constant, so nothing really changes.

So, returning to the subject - beliefs of people in predetermined universe can have measurable effects in that universe, so they influence stuff. The way they influence stuff is predetermined, but so what?

If the beliefs were different (for example because of different inital conditions), then the universe would be and develop differently. That's enough IMHO to say that beliefs influence stuff in that universe.
Show HN: Druid.js – a lightweight API framework for Node.js and Graphql apps
I'd look to the server side; JavaScript is still quite popular there even though you can use any language.
I use clisp mainly with quicklisp. Lisp isn't rather unique and simple so I have used it for an occasionally algorithm that is annoying any other way. Not for the entire system typically.
I don't see how your infra could cost anywhere near that much. The blogs could be pushed to s3 for pennies, letsencrypt is free, you could probably leverage lambda for the API. Could you shed some more light on your costs?
Thanks for posting, here's a post which describes the actual numbers of wild animals there are (by Brian Tomasik):

http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-ther...
Should also note that the study missed its primary endpoint, but the companies decided to wait for the 18 month analysis anyway, and one dose seemed promising at this 18 month timepiint. Other doses did worse than placebo

Other analysts who have been looking forward to the data and have digested it in detail have similar takes, others more positive:

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/biogen-and-eisai-s-ant...

APOE4 status was an issue. Also the fact that two doses did worse than placebo was odd. And one of the measures of cognitive decline was a metric developed by the company, which could be concerning or could be valid, idk
In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. They should support the standards, but not be everything but the kitchen sink. I don't want Pocket, which is what I think they are trying to drive people towards. I've disabled it under about:config. I want a browser. More and more, I find myself using uzbl-tabbed under Arch Linux because it does one thing well. I use Mozilla now for multimedia and that's about it. My bank also balks at uzbl-tabbed. As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm. It just simply works.
You did see that the recent MBP throttling issue was a software bug and has been fixed, yes?

Admittedly they could be clocked slightly higher if they were larger with better cooling, but they're by no means slow computers.
> If module global variables are considered truly horrible, the same can be said about instance variables inside classes. They are as good (or bad) as module globals in the sense that they represent shared state and can potentially be mutated by any method/member function in the class.

Assuming Python-like modules, module-level globals are worse for encapsulation.

1. A function can access module-level state without having been explicitly passed a reference to it.

2. You can't create additional instances of module-level state. For example, if your app server uses a module-level global for the server listening socket, you can't run two app server instances in the same process.
Now instead, I run git pull; git push in a loop and hope I can get in before a coworker. Progress?
Best part of all is that Web Extensions API is totally based on the Chrome extension API so it should be easy! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!
Loved this show and have listened to this forecast for years.
That's interesting. I've got a kidney infection at the moment, are you suggesting that I have amyloid plaques in my brain?
Yep, clearly.
Tracking the Pace of Consumer and Enterprise Unicorn Formation
Unlike NaCl, Wasm doesn't require building an entire separate (undocumented and unspecified) API to make it work.

Accepting NaCl without accepting PPAPI would not have been very useful. Accepting PPAPI was a non-starter without a lot more work than Google was willing to put into it.
Do you have any recommendations for how a hobbyist can get more into the field? Someone who has a technical background, but works in a different field unrelated to sports at all. Any reading material to get familiar with some of the stats and metrics that are used in the industry?
I've heard a lot of good about QtCreator lately, from multiple people, I'll give it a try soon.

Still, some parsable output would be great for many cases, a CI with diagnostic on a web page for example
What I mean: As a compiler writer you can't just create GIMPLE-IR and then pass it to GCC. You always need to go through GENERIC, which is actually intended to be the AST of your language. Of course you could argue that you treat GENERIC not as an AST but something similar to LLVM-IR and keep your language AST outside of GCC. But does anyone do that? The reason for that is that the IR doesn't contain ALL the information, there is also some global state stored in global variables, etc. Also since the IR is only internal it is not as well-defined as LLVM's IR.

This missing separation is even a problem for writing tests in GCC: Often it would be quite easy to write a small program in GIMPLE-IR (or RTL) and test your optimization pass against it. But you can't write GIMPLE-IR (it needs to go through GENERIC all the time), so you need to write a C file that is then translated into the IR you want to test again. This is sometimes not so easy with all that different optimization passes that run before your pass and hopefully that doesn't change in the future either.... There was some work on this (I don't know about the current status) but almost all of GCC's tests are still integration tests against C files (I think they addressed this by extending the C-front end to be able to parse functions marked with __gimple as Gimple-IR). Also GIMPLE didn't start as a separate IR. It started as a more restricted tree-structure. Even today operands are still tree's and optimization passes are called tree-<something>.c.

With LLVM I can write a toy compiler that outputs LLVM IR with printf and then just pipe it into llc to compile it. That's pretty cool. I didn't want to imply that GCC has NO separation between IRs but the whole story is much messier compared to LLVM. Which is actually fine, LLVM is much younger than GCC and could learn a lot from it. And GCC is still pretty great in the use cases it was intended for.
Ask HN: What's difficult about selling to enterprises?
Also don't forget mobile browsers. I ran into a strange problem where Samsung's "Internet" didn't support something and could not find any online mention of this fact.

(I wish I could remember what it was. Perhaps an array method).
Good thing the Land is a land of dinosaurs.
but arent the biological markers of Alzheimer's still theoretical? i thought that is part of why a cure is so hard to come by -- we don't know if it's the plaques or something else. so if you measure a drug that reduces plaques but you don't measure its affects on cognition how do you know you are making progress?
I think the Swift Playgrounds are an excellent way for an adult to get a feel for coding on iPad.
The number of drugs who are linked to a higher chance of criminal behavior due to being intoxicated are rather limited and when it comes to drug related crimes another topic in itself.

Someone smoking tobacco, weed or heroin wont just suddenly get the idea, that it would be fun to rob someone.

When it comes to heroin, but also other highly addictive substances, the main issue is procurement crime. Which is no wonder if someone is addicted and you look at the street prices. Its not feasible for alot of people to make that kind of money legally. Which is a completely different picture if you look at procurement closer to production cost. Production of something like poppies is as inexpensive as it gets.
I've been meaning to get into more writing. I've always been fascinated with creating tutorials, so maybe I would like to write about the music program, Reason.

Would this make any sense as a part of your network?

..

Something I found on hackernews a while back, https://blot.im

Has the clean minimal look you might be going for.
The tool we develop at work has recently moved from RHEL 5 to 6 as the bottomline supported release. For us that meant a switch from GCC 4.8 to 6.3. So it's not that bad.

And when we switch to Red Hat 7 in the next 3-4 years we might start using GCC 8 with all those cool new features!
Stock analysts should have to share what percentage of their portfolio is in any company they write about.
Two words, nested functions. They should have been in the C standard a long time ago, solving the same problems without them is a major pain. And even though Clang supports most of the rest of the GCC extensions, they stubbornly refuse to touch nested functions. That and the code of conduct social justice warrior bullshit they've been pulling lately keeps me away from Clang these days.
Yes, I, too, saw that demo from the 80's. But the best tech doesn't always win :)
It doesn't really explain what 'Premier League analyst' is. Is this someone who works for a particular club? Or writes for some publication? Or walks the earth like Caine of Kung Fu, offering analysis to those in need?
Interesting that sufficient complexity may also work as a reason. I would have expected some deceease in a genetic context but I suppose sickle cell anemia is another example with simpler structuring given it is partially adaptive and partially maladaptive given one means malaria resistant blood and two means concave red cells bad at their job. Even if malaria vanished a thousand years ago the trait would probably stick around today. Thanks for the link and furthering my understanding.

I wonder how common "summed" traits are where a few to some are good to have while too many or too few is a bad thing. I heard of one computer example which by no means biologically proves anything apparently too high a learning rate caused some neural networks to start making increasingly bizzare associations and caused the convergence rate to plummet instead of improving past a certain point as spurious correlations resulted in incoherence. The schizophrenia thought disorder resemblance was explicitly noted.
It's a big trade-off to be sure. On the one hand, I'm worried about the web becoming more closed-source and less hackable for all the reasons you've mentioned.

But on the other hand, I can't help see the enormous potential of a proper assembly language for web. Web technologies have felt like a massive hack for decades: tools designed for basic text formatting and a bit of interactivity which have been stretched in extreme ways to meet the needs of the modern web. Web applications are the most widely used software on the planet, and if you ask me it's about time developers will have the freedom to develop them in the language which makes the most sense for the task at hand rather than the only one which is available. And I am quite keen to see what kinds of new things will be possible when the ceiling is significantly raised for performance optimization.
Late on the reply, but Iowa.
Near as I can tell the only real reference to CRISPR is that he purchased a plasmid that had been modified with CRISPR. Note: This is not what-so-ever like using the CRISPR method to modify DNA. Modifying bacteria with a plasmid as he is demonstrating here is no where near its equivalent. Every introduction to biology course that I've ever seen performs the identical procedure (and generally with much higher rates of success).
for starters this lake is 2km beneath the surface of the ice cap...
LinkedIn Groups vs. Email Mailing Lists
They just publish whatever companies pay then to publish.
> Cash does not have downtime, and it can be used by anyone.

But not at the store the article is talking about.

Which is the point of the article.
R5, R5d, and Z1d EC2 Instances Now Available
Very valid point
I’m assuming the cost of themselves as a developer which seems perfectly reasonable.

How much would you charge per hour to develop a similar service and how long would it take you?
Oh that's better than what I had aha.
Too many companies want to cure a disease with a drug. It is understandable since a drug can be patented and the company can make a profit.
Unfortunately this means that diseases that do not require a drug never get cured....
Unless you name is Dr Dale Bredesen. Dr Bredesen has a methododoly instead of a drug to reverse Alzheimer. He has published about it and reverses Alzheimer in 9 out 10 patients and is currently doing new studies with a larger number of patients.
TL;DR go to bed at 10 PM, do stress management, exercise a little, eat well and take supplements (blood tests determine which ones), and take a couple of other substances that our body needs, Alzheimer's disappears in less than 4 months.
That would be too bad if she got flak for that remark. It's a great point.
Learn cloud technologies in your browser by doing
> those same government departments are stuck on WinXP SP2 with IE6-8 with Flash enabled

I'm not sure how their sysadmins can sleep at night with this ;-)
I've been thinking of what to do with my next influential post (if I have one). Suicide awareness and help lines around the holidays could happen, or one mega life update with everything from the last however many months.
Well there's this.

https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest

Doesn't work in Safari.
More than anything, I think it was just a nice to have feature. Not many people were really using it as a dedicated RSS reader, but if you ever just wanted to extract an MP3 from a podcast or get an overview of what a blog was writing recently (if there wasn't an easy way of accessing that), it came in handy.
Is there any significant work done on GCC optimizer these days? Most of the changes in recent releases are about nicer error messages (which I love), sanitizers/UB detection (which I also love), new C++ features support (which I think is waste of brain power and time but well, most people like it) but there is little in optimizer department.

From me experience GCC generates by far the fastest code (faster than Intel, Clang and Visual Studio). I realize it's hard to make progress after so many years but I am wondering if there is any promising direction which is researched these days or is it only about small fixes here and there.
Google Assistant's personality team describe development of tricky features