skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, unreadable, non-free JavaScript is not fundamentally different. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Unreadable, non-free JavaScript is used to reach a goal. That goal is to withhold the source from the users to bind them to the service. This leads to centralization, power imbalances, and thus attacks on the freedom and sovereignty of the users.

WebAssembly is a technology to achieve the formerly stated goal easier and more convenient. Of course, some people will be interested in that and work on it.

Mozilla is working on this. So far so good (or bad). The issue arises when you combine this fact with the self-portrait of Mozilla as the one defending the rights and freedom of the users.
My position on this is basically, WebAssembly is no different than JavaScript here. If you think JavaScript ruins this property, well, the web was only in the form you describe for four years, and has existed this way for 23 years now.
I would not be so sure about the declining importance of GCC.

GCC has caught up a lot with clang in the last few years, from the quality of error messages, to standard compliance, compilation times, tooling, sanitizers, etc.

IME GCC tends to produce faster code in practice, even if clang is often able to out-smart GCC in many areas (e.g., IIRC heap elision was first introduced in clang). GCC has a huge amount of inertia behind it, it's still the only compiler officially supported for compiling the Linux kernel, and, as long as the GCC developers don't stop improving it, it will be difficult for clang to take its role as "default" compiler, at least in Linux environments.

I use them both daily and I am really happy that we have the possibility of freely choosing between two such amazing projects. It would be a step backwards if one of them ended up fading away.
Same here, wonder if it is down to a pre-disposition from reading too much tech.
Remember when Adobe AIR was going to come to Android? That would have been an amazing write once run anywhere experience.
Ask HN: Who is using Common Lisp?
What/why?
Prediction Markets: When Do They Work
This Apple Supplier Just Won a Ton of Business
By red filter, do you mean something that keeps red and blocks the rest, or the other way around?
Recently I discovered how weird IP addresses are on local machines:

Ping the following:

1.1.257

3.141592

0x01000001

198.2742178

All the fault of https://linux.die.net/man/3/inet_aton as everyone follows the implementation and there is no RFC on how to shorthand/collapse an IP address.
I agree with your first sentence, but not your second: wasm is meant to access all platform APIs, not just the DOM ones. Canvas is part of the platform as well.
The crows in my neighborhood also have figured out how to deal with cars. They casually step aside when they see a car.
You can use canvas or webgl from JavaScript too, so there's no change here specific to wasm.
It’s that sense of shared experience: “ah, I know what article you were reading...”

I wonder what the longest daisy-chain of connected HN posts you could piece together...
How do you keep your docker images up to date? With virtual machines or even lxd containers, you can enable unattended upgrades but not with docker. There is a project (I forget the name) to destroy and rebuild containers with the newer image version, but it doesn't work with images that are built off of others using a Dockerfile.
Anthony Joshua, a professional boxer got 11.53 in a 100m

He doesn't train to run, but he's still an elite athlete in a sport that require explosiveness.
Jop: process Ruby arrays with J symbols
When the emperor banned opium, the British sold it to smugglers. When the Chinese seized 20,000 chests of trafficked opium to stop it from being sold, the British attacked China and made them sign an agreement to buy tons of stuff from the British, including opium.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36781368
It seems from this discussion that the skills needed to be successful in buisness inovation are in opposition to those I find needed to have a sucessful and happy life. Honesty, compassion, life/work balance. Is there a good exception to that rule?
Sorry, bad example. I have hazy memories of full-screen "creator" type apps in Flash from years ago. You are right that they are all JavaScript or WASM now (owing no doubt to the performance enhancements V8 has brought).
Coinbase and WeGift Partnership Offers Crypto Gift Card Service
Coinbase has rolled out with a new cryptocurrency gift card service allowing the users to cash out their digital coins for cryptocurrency gift cards.

https://coinpedia.org/news/coinbase-partnership-crypto-gift-card-service/
Behind the Iron Curtain: Western Music and the Soviet Collapse
> I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up.

I have memories of being wowed by what creative people could do with flash in the 90s and I would not call that amateur animation. I think the problem (1) is we currently seem to be lacking in tools that let people skilled in the visual arts create things without knowledge of the mechanics, so to speak. It's like if in order to write a great song someone would first have to understand how a musical instrument is built. I would not call Amanda Palmer or Lee Ranaldo amateur yet I bet they probably can't build their own instruments.

(1) I must make the disclaimer that for a couple of decades already I've been working only on the backend, so I may surely be missing part of the picture here.

Edit: Fixed footnote mark.
Training generally falls into one of three bins:

1. Legally required training.
2. Training to prevent problems that have actually occurred at this business.
3. Training as a means of firing with cause.

People learning something new is just a bonus.
How long ago?

Some banks are doing these Pre-paid-ish cards now. I know Chase has Liquid, other banks may call it something else. For the most part, it functions mostly like a debit card backed by an actual checking account. But the requirements are far lower. They don't give a flying fuck who you are. You can even get checks to access the funds on the card.

And for like 90% of the time, you'll never realize you don't actually have a checking account. You won't realize that your money isn't technically backed by the bank. Then that 10% of the time will make your life inconvenient.

So I'd say that access to a card-based payment method doesn't seem insurmountable. But an actual checking account could still be out of the reach of some people.
Why the hell does Twitter even allow Trump at all? He's violated their TOS so many times I can't even. I report him all the time but for some reason his account still exists.
Humans generally have given up on pure natural selection. Otherwise we would have abolished all laws and law enforcement and let the stronger win. You may be surprised by who will thrive in such a world.
That is just for mammals, not all biomass.
A Modern City for People Would Devote Less Space to Cars
> Default allocator settings can call malloc/mmap a lot, and is sensitive to latency on those calls. Under host memory bandwidth pressure, BEAM can grind to a halt. Tuning BEAM's allocator settings is imperative to avoid this. Namely, MHlmbcs, MHsbct, MHsmbcs and MMscs. This was especially noticeable after meltdown was patched.

Excessive allocations and memory bandwidth are two very different things. Often then don't overlap, because to max out memory bandwidth you have to write a fairly optimized program.

Also, are the allocations because of BEAM or is it because what you are running allocates a lot of memory?
> Lost Kingdom is a conversion into Brainfuck of my game 'Lost Kingdom' which won the First Annual Classic 2k Text Adventure Competition in 2004.

Was this written by hand or transpiled from the earlier BBC Basic version? If it's the former then I'm super-impressed: 2MB of hand-written bf code seems like an immense undertaking.
They use GPS and a lot of different technique because the IMU need regular correction. But the main source of trust is the IMU. By jamming the GPS signal you can induce more drifting, but you would have to jam it for a long time to induce a very big drifting (and even them, it might be compensated by the other technique employed).
3 Attempts to Make Medical AI Trustworthy and Transparent
I have been an avid sci-fi reader my entire life and have never come across a book set on a single gender planet. So “fixation” is a bit of clickbait there.
It's not strictly workplace training, but I once worked on a small website for an occupational physiotherapist, and as payment he came to my employers office and helped out with a load of health and safety stuff.

We went over the standard stuff, like foot rests under desks, but he also checked our posture, helped us find more comfortable ways to sit, and recommended different chairs to people that had back issues.

It sounds silly, but I only spent ten minutes with him at max. From that ten minutes:

* I learned how to sit so that my posture is correct. I'm yet to have any back issues after a decade of programming, so it's worked well so far!

* My bosses were told that employees should move around for at least 5 minutes every hour. This in itself was fantastic, as it forced people to get out of their chairs and interact with each other.

* Those that needed foot rests were given them, along with arm rests, suitable mice/keyboards, etc. Since I did some freelance stuff at home at the time, he suggested using a trackball either at work or at home to switch things up. I still have that trackball mouse, and it helps with the stress that constant mouse-use puts on your hands.

* He recommended those with bad backs to a specialist shop that deals with special office equipment. My boss, who had suffered with a bad back for years, switched his chair to what was essentially a spring on wheels, and his back got better every week. A few months later, he was playing football for the first time in years.

It's not strictly training, for a minimal amount of time he offered a service that helped more people than a lot of standard office/workplace training. A few years later, at my old workplace we brought a similar person in at my recommendation, and the benefits were visible all over again. If you're a manager, and you're thinking of getting some new equipment in, or are thinking about health and safety, I definitely recommend this.
>Wasm is the first major thing I can remember all the browsers agreeing on in a very long time, or ever.

Uh, flexbox, grid, fetch, service workers, even shadow DOM...? The cooperation between browser vendors has been exceptional over the last five years.
> Today Singer says that ... Treatments and medications for OCD and ADHD already exist, they say, and should be enough.

Is this true? Treatments and medications, yes, but do any of the mainstream treatments or medications do anything to actually cure these conditions?
We need every Twitter employee to quit 1 at a time and ban Trump on there way out the door.
Firefox's RSS support is about to phase out
The 95% figure was just for mammals I believe.
There's a lot of truth to this statement. The web started out a lot more open. Email addressss were generally public, commands like finger existed, etc etc etc

It's worth noting that the context around privacy of generic life information of the kind you post on social media has radically changed in the last 10-20 years.
They said they wanted someone "new" not someone "younger".

He actually "retired" in 2001, eight years before this incident. He was only doing freelance spots on the BBC until the 2009 slip up, so he didn't actually work for the BBC as an employee at that point.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/sep/15/radio-4-contin...
I love the idea behind the product. My girlfriend often complains when we are packing for trips about how much space her clothes take up vs mine.

The founder story is solid too. A really measured approach to building a fashion business.
Show HN: DIY Lead Lists for Founders and Small Teams
Trump Criticizes Twitter for ‘Shadow Banning’ Some Republicans
Why You Haven’t Made a Sale on Your E-commerce Site
Here is one hand
I do see your point!

I am however scared that HTML will go the way of Gopher. Why would anyone care to maintain boring hypertext documents when we can have app of the day. Marketing departments everywhere tend to turn the web into Blinkenlights.

How many support documents of more than 15-20 years ago are you able to still find using the old links? So many sites are working as dumb front-ends for a database.

The information retrieval and persistence over time is not something many worries about.

The cat is for sure out of the bag. I just hope what was still can survive.
All the Things Satellites Can Now See from Space
what specifically did he do to violate TOS?
Cliche ad nausium. It’s like saying I should never have to write my name more than once, because it is reinventing the wheel.

In this case every call to the DOM goes from a slow baby crawl to rocket speed. In no other aspect of life do people make such empty excuses, using cliches no less, to intentionally remain in the stone age.
Smart Luggage Eases Travel Strict Regulation Could Jeopardize the Market
> Couldn't transition to other apps because most people in my family and friends circle don't really care about privacy or data security. They prefer convenience.

What's wrong with phone calls and SMS? Granted they're not more secure, but at least they're not Facebook. I don't know any WhatsApp users, so I'm unaware of the advantage.
Ask HN: How does one start tech company without CS/programminig background?
As a non-tech guy i never understood how people with seemingly no background in CS/programming start tech companies? Where do they go? Who do they talk to? How?

If I out of blue have an idea, I would not know where to go to make it happen.
GitHub has removed jQuery from its front end
I'd rather have a hardware solution tbh, I don't think software U2F or smartcard is what I want or fits my threatmodel.
For me it's mostly about gow people use metaprogramming.

In Ruby, if I'm trying to find the source of a dynamically generated method in a dynamically generated class, that usually requires me to run add a debug statement, run the program, and see what's being passed. Even if I have a stacktrace, I often find it difficult to understand what the code is doing without running it.

I find Elixir code easier to read, and grepping my way through the code base is often enough. And to be fair, a debugger is often less than useful in macros involving AST & when dealing with a process that got a random message from who knows where.
Surprised they are using flow, the new version of their Git GUI is written in TypeScript
I don't think it's surprising if you consider Elixir's nature.

Languages like Go, Rust, and Haskell have to start from scratch. Getting to the point where they work at all is a huge achievement (though of course they do more than that).

Languages like Clojure run on an existing virtual machine, but want a very different programming model, so they have to invent a lot.

By contrast, Elixir runs on the BEAM and gets 99% of its features from Erlang: you still use processes, supervisors, pattern matching, etc.

So in a sense, the only reason for Elixir to exist is to provide a great developer experience for the BEAM. If it doesn't do that, you might as well use Erlang.
Python 4.0 Confirmed in 3.7 Documentation
No one claimed it's perfect and bug free.
But let's compare it to any js stack with thousands of libraries in the project's `node_modules` directory, written by thousands different contributors.
That's what Elm is replacing.
> In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go to jail etc.

It depends on your viewpoint, but the reason for why they don't go to jail etc. is because it doesn't match the intent with jail. Jail is meant as a deterrence as well as shielding the society. If it doesn't work as a deterrence and we have better ways to shield the society from it happening again (which is "easy" to argue in regards to a mad person) then it doesn't make sense to force it upon people where it will do more harm than good (we still do it do a large extent, but society also benefits from its inhabitants believing that the system is fair and that is a difficult balance).

> Without free will there is no "decides".

This also depends on your viewpoint. A computer takes tons of decisions but they are all based on a given set of inputs, as will society (regardless of whether free will exist or not).
Politicians play by a different set of rules: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/.... From the blog:

> Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.
Not all DevOps teams are perfect
> Since this change breaks compatibility, the new behavior needs to be enabled on a per-module basis in Python 3.7 using a __future__ import:

from __future__ import annotations

> It will become the default in Python 4.0.
```
Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.
```

What kind of idiotic crap is this? Twitter is a private company, they can control what is on their site in any way they see fit. Shadow banning, while potentially destructive to the reputation of the company, is in no way illegal.

We have a moron for President.
Doom 3 BFG comes to my mind.
https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-twitter-account-violat...

"Threatening to nuke someone is a 'violent threat,' no?"
The trouble is that rounding modes need to be dynamically specified in order to enable debugging of suspicious floating-point programs. See William Kahan's rants about debugging tools for floating-point arithmetic for a detailed explanation of it, which I will attempt to summarize.

If you have in hand several algorithms A, B, and C, and one or two of them produce results that differ significantly from the other, how do you tell which one is more likely to be in error? Kahan has a tool that helps: The method which is more sensitive to roundoff error will have its results perturbed worse by directed roundings, and is more likely to be the method in error.

So, you run each of the suspect codes in three modes: Round to nearest even (the default), round to +inf and round to -inf. The code whose results don't change the least under directed roundings is more likely to be correct than the others. In practice, the difference can be pretty dramatic.

This method just helps to point the arrow of suspicion, it isn't foolproof. But it is a useful debugging tool. Static rounding modes don't help for a broad class of problems without recompilation. Good luck running some slice of a Python program rounded three ways, for example. It also requires the ability to control which portion of the program is affected, since decimal -> float parsing code only works correctly in the round to nearest even mode.

That's the crux of my argument: IEEE754 requires dynamic rounding, the numerical analyst needs dynamic rounding, and dynamic rounding subsumes static rounding. Given all that, burning three bits per opcode is pretty damn expensive, especially when you're cramming FMA4 into 32-bit opcodes. Its a mistake at least as bad as branch delay slots. But since its hiding in the floating-point portion of the ISA, it isn't as obviously wrong to the common programmer.
Compilation times? I thought that compliling with GCC has always been faster than with clang, at least in the general case.
I think you are spot on in the first paragraph that trust is critical for existence and advance of civilization.

That trust somehow builds consistently in small groups -- humans seem good at quickly deciding, based on a few personal experiences, whether to deal with / trust another person. The major challenge is that this approach does not scale -- one does not trust strangers in a large city. Using a few trusted agents (newspapers, TV, etc.) for things you cannot personally see and assess kind-of worked 50+ years ago, but that model has now failed.

IMO building a framework of trust in a larger, denser, more interconnected world, is one of the major existential issues for a modern civilization. Allowing folks to organize in smaller groups (and set their own rules) and not forcing mixing based on federal laws might be a start. It might work better that universal doctrines ("trust the state"), universal technology ("trust the app") or behavior changes ("trust a stranger"). My 2c.
Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress with Mugshots
Hey there,

A common usecase on Blockspring for Google Sheets [1] is to pull data from various APIs to build lead lists for sales and recruiting.

However, combining lists is actually time consuming in spreadsheets. Lots of importing CSVs or VLookups.

So since we built a knowledge graph around what types of information APIs return, and are now able to help you collect the data you want (eg company names, locations, etc), as well as suggest enrichments based on what you have (eg go from companies -> profiles -> interests, etc).

This is great if you're a startup founder, freelancer, or starting up a new sales/recruiting process and need to quickly build your own lead lists! Let us know what you think.
Mozilla is also realising that the web needs to compete with native apps as well. Note that it's even easier to hide the source of native apps.

(Furthermore, many apps that would use WASM probably have a significant server-side part as well that is not necessarily open source.)
Shout out to the stunning issue cover photo by John Kraus (/u/johnkphotos), who got his start posting photos of launches on Reddit's /r/spacex.

https://twitter.com/BW/status/1022430733829324800?s=19
I guess both. GCC is very good for compiling C/C++ to machine code. But if you want to write a new language and reuse an existing compiler pipeline (Rust, Swift,..) or write a new tool based on a C++-parser (clang-format, clang-tiny, clangd,...) then LLVM is the way to go.

LLVM-IR has enabled this nice separation between the language front-end and the compilation back-end. GCC could have done that too: they didn't for political reasons. Why? Someone could have used GCC's C++ front-end for its proprietary compilation pipeline. Today this is nearly impossible to change in GCC.

There are also some other advantages for LLVM I like: it supports multiple architectures in a single binary. With GCC I need to compile the compiler either for x64 or arm but not both. GCC is still great but it's not surprising that LLVM is so successful.
Why is Dante much cheaper than Full Genomes?

What's the benefit of "Long Read WGS"?
Oh hell yeah. So glad to see this new competition from AMD. Looking at getting a Ryzen laptop for my next personal workstation. The benchmarks looks fantastic.
Your savings does not care about inflation. When you have a diversified portfolio you gain way more than you would lose to inflation.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the typical ADHD medications amphetamine and methylphenidate?

Shouldn't these two powerful stimulants be medications of last resort?
The focus on driving WASM performance in the browser platforms, combined with the ability to transpile more languages to WASM, pushes the barrier-to-entry lower. Yes, these concerns aren't specific to WASM, but the platform is being made more capable of hosting this kind of troubling code, and more attractive to developers who would develop these things.