skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh boo hoo they enumerated an enormous number of corner cases, handled backwards compatibility, crappy cables, all sorts of things. It also reflects decades of back compatibility and painfully learned mistakes (consider mini-A) not to mention some weird pathologies (weird naming like hi-speed/ full-speed/ super-speed).

It sucks that the standard is so complex that a small number of design houses and consulting shops will end up with a de facto cartel of understanding the Sacred Knowledge, but nobody's stopping you coming up to speed by reading the whole spec and doing a lot of implementing. But it's not like you can build a solid TCP stack these days either simply by reading the original late 70s RFCs.

And you don't have to use this spec -- you can still use RS-449 if you think the USB spec has become overly complex. In fact I used that in a design only a few years ago!
WHY AFRICA FACES THE BIGGEST THREAT OF EBOLA EXPLOSION
Versioning is Hard (aka the “SEF theorem”)
Yes, the elephant in the room is that the trend is inevitable. However the severity of it is the arms race.

For myself, I'm cool with a lot of that. My partner will have to decide for herself. Though it might affect me since we live together and have a child. We're adults though. Our child, however, is our responsibility and if I can protect her privacy in cases which are likely to backfire later on, I should, IMO. Don't get me wrong: I don't have the illusion I'll be able to protect her in every case in this regard but I believe this to be one of those examples. Another one is where your child did something stupid (such as breaking the law) and you documented it. Don't shame your child in public!

What's going to happen is that there will be documented cases of what children did in their youth which were not acceptable. But because roughly all children have that, its kinda OK. "We all were young" will have public sources to back it up, if they're searched for.

However not doing anything is a defeatist approach to the problem IMO. In that light, I find your post defeatist itself; instead of being open minded about this I suggest being pragmatic; a slightly different angle, also less extreme one way or the other. We still have some privacy left. You can, for example, wilfully leave your smartphone home as Bruce Schneier wrote in his latest book Data and Goliath. We have that choice. His essay Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? [1] also covers this very topic. Because that also covers how others should treat your private data, something the EU is far ahead on with privacy laws, right to be forgotten, GDPR, accountability on losing private data, etc compared to the USA.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...
Although it's clear that Facebook's libraries, among which React, favour Flow, there's strong community demand for TypeScript even around React. Thus, the type definitions that are available for React are excellent, Redux even includes its type definitions natively, and most of the large tools in the React ecosystem work pretty well with TypeScript.

The main large project you're likely to use that does not really play well with TypeScript yet is create-react-app. There's a TypeScript fork [1] which works reasonably well, but "reasonable" is not really what you'd hope.

That said, the strong community push means that they're at least considering it. [2]

[1] https://github.com/wmonk/create-react-app-typescript
[2] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/pull/2815
How to help youngsters de-stress?
Show HN: Toy Document Store Layer for FoundationDB
There was a Quanta Magazine article talking about predicting the evolution of a flame-front using ML. The ML algorithm remained accurate for eight Lyapunov intervals; eight times longer than the previous SOTA.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learnings-amazing-abi...
exactly, Judea Pearl's The Book of Why opened my eyes to the fact that most of what happens in machine learning is really just curve fitting

It connected with what i've heard Chomsky say about trying to develop laws of physics by filming what's happening outside the window. We need to do experiments and interventions to learn the dynamics of a system

"What do you think the role is, if any, of other uses of so-called big data? [...]

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s more complicated than that. Let’s go back to the early days of modern physics: Galileo, Newton, and so on. They did not organize data. If they had, they could never have reached the laws of nature. You couldn’t establish the law of falling bodies, what we all learn in high school, by simply accumulating data from videotapes of what’s happening outside the window. What they did was study highly idealized situations, such as balls rolling down frictionless planes. Much of what they did were actually thought experiments.

Now let’s go to linguistics. Among the interesting questions that we ask are, for example, what’s the nature of ECP violations? You can look at 10 billion articles from the Wall Street Journal, and you won’t find any examples of ECP violations. It’s an interesting theory-determined question that tells you something about the nature of language, just as rolling a ball down an inclined plane is something that tells you about the laws of nature. Scientists use data, of course. But theory-driven experimental investigation has been the nature of the sciences for the last 500 years.

In linguistics we all know that the kind of phenomena that we inquire about are often exotic. They are phenomena that almost never occur. In fact, those are the most interesting phenomena, because they lead you directly to fundamental principles. You could look at data forever, and you’d never figure out the laws, the rules, that are structure dependent. Let alone figure out why. And somehow that’s missed by the Silicon Valley approach of just studying masses of data and hoping something will come out. It doesn’t work in the sciences, and it doesn’t work here."

- https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/conversations-on-lingui...

It is actually a really interesting subject, marketing people doing a/b tests for ads/features seem at least a little closer to the experimental ideal, not just fitting curves to data

For further reading, I'd recommend the epilogue of Casuality (Pearl 2000), it's from a 1996 lecture at UCLA:

- http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/causality2-epilogue.pdf
That's because + is a java built-in unavailable to normal types. Usually something like an add method is used instead. It does not detract from the underlying point.
> But it's not like you can build a solid TCP stack these days either simply by reading the original late 70s RFCs.

I literally did this. It's called smoltcp (https://github.com/m-labs/smoltcp) and we use it in production as an lwIP replacement with great results.
Password Generation (in Ruby and Rust)
It may be different but it doesn't mean that it's impossible to achieve. Building the EV infrastruture is relatively cheap (compared to say building a gas-powered or hydrogen infrastructure). Tesla has already built its own (not perfect, but "good enough"), and the other car makers have joined alliances to build their own. Also new companies have appeared whose sole reason to exist is to build such infrastructures. Plus, power companies are getting in on the action, too, finally realizing that this could be big business for them in the future.

The EV infrastructure should be mostly complete by 2025. Most car makers won't start invading the market with EVs until 2023, or so anyway.
AI is good for convenience and expediency, but when it comes to thorough searching of a video for another human being, nothing yet beats humans.
Fun fact: reddit doesn't have batch delete for subreddit moderators. Using the interface reddit provides, you have to individually click "remove" on every single comment.

Reddit also doesn't have a built-in button to ban a user while you're looking at the offending post or comment; you have to go to a separate "ban users" page, and copy/paste the username to ban.

The official mobile app, so far as I can tell, doesn't have ban functionality at all. You can only approve/remove/mark spam and lock threads.

Moderator communities have worked around this, somewhat, with browser extensions that provide mass-remove and inline ban functionality, but they're only a partial solution. The mass-remove in the mod toolbox extension, for example, isn't always able to get everything, because reddit itself only partially loads busy comment threads, and the extension can only remove comments that are actually on the page. So you have to remember to force-load the whole thread and sometimes click through the "we don't care that you wanted all the comments, click to another page to see the rest" links.

The mod toolbox extension (/r/toolbox) also adds some pretty essential things like macros for common messages that need to be sent to users, shared notes all the moderators of a subreddit can see, etc.
I have had nothing but issues with my MBP. Within 2 years

It stopped booting for some hardware issue.

Both the speakers are screwed up

The charger is not working

2 of the 5 little dots where the charger connects are now blackened and expanded.

WORST PURCHASE EVER
I'm not failing to understand it, I live it.

You wind up spending more on food because you're utterly exhausted from working longer hours. It's not that you want to, it's that you get backed into a corner and don't have a choice.
Can you point to some? I am searching and even high end ones came with 2gb. If I search for midrange laptop and 2008 I get your comment of 16 hrs ago. In my (for sure limited) memory, 4gb was rare back then; high end laptops had it but I had to search for them and pay a lot. I definitely paid $3000$ for a Fujitsu with 4gb back then (I still have it, it still works and I have the receipt); best laptop ever but definitely not midrange.
Wil Wheaton supports the anti Alex Jones/Trump lynch mob.

Doesn't like his own.

This is not a tech problem it's a paradox.

How can he not see his right equals Alex Jones or Trumps. It's a basic starting point. Then you can get the tech to solve the problem and kill the trolls, political spammers and unrest. While you're stuck at "I'm right", it's all a mess.

Even the comment because someone is trans they shouldn't be on a block list. This is what is implied, don't be a child and not read into what really is going on here and I'm not saying this is Wil's opinion, but the greater reality which he's mixed up in.
This article brings tears of nostalgia to my eye.
I am wondering what makes a teacher good or a material good quality? Something/one that provides us skill(s) that are applicable in a variety of ways? But the application depends on us, what if we search for a resource that we feel the need to learn, that resource becomes a good one because we can then apply it. And who judges/labels "yeah it's a good resource/teacher"
It's got to the point where, for me, TypeScript support is an important feature of a library that influences my decision whether to pick that library over another. Luckily, most of them these days either ship with their own definitions, or have them available.

Bottom line: I never write my own definitions for other projects.
I love Hacker News. I was just looking for this library to use in my embedded toy.
About 4x cheaper to charge/fill up, and about 3x less maintenance costs.

Plus all the "nice" features of EVs like rapid acceleration, no noise, feeling super-modern/futuristic, etc.
Absolutely not. I have the top of the range 15" MacBook Pro and I despise it, it's without question the worst computer I've ever owned.

1. The Touch Bar is appalling if you're at all a touch typist. It puts destructive actions just an accidental brush of the finger tip away.
2. The keyboard is failing all over the place. My left command key has fallen off, and three keys occasionally stick resulting in double entries.
3. The trackpad is so big that there's nowhere to rest one hand while you scroll with the other, resulting in exposé happening when you're just trying to scroll a web page.
4. It crashes a LOT. I reckon roughly one kernel panic a week since I've owned it.

It's absolutely killed my confidence in Apple hardware and after owning Macs for over 20 years I doubt I'll ever buy a Mac again. It's made me a permanently angry person.
The author says they contemplated an “abandon this ruined planet” option, mentioning Haxe/Clojure/Elm as alternatives. I'd love to read their follow-up post to learn what kept them on planet JavaScript/TypeScript.

The alternatives to TypeScript seem increasingly compelling to me.

It was good to see Haxe mentioned even in passing; I really enjoy using it and — as others have noted[1] — it feels like a “better” TypeScript.

Haxe has great features both at the language-level (pattern matching, algebraic data types, array comprehensions, and more[2]) and tooling-level (cross-compilation to JavaScript, native code and dynamic languages, a fast compilation server[3], good VS Code support in Haxe 4, and a bunch of cross-platform game frameworks[4]). I wish more people would try it! https://haxe.org/

Reason is also compelling; it will be better still once Bucklescript's Belt library is out of beta and some warts in Reason/OCaml are smoothed out — lack of ad-hoc polymorphism[5] and lack of unicode support without BuckleScript string literals being two examples.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009290

[2]: https://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/language-feature...

[3]: https://haxe.org/blog/nicolas-about-haxe-episode-1/

[4]: https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/

[5]: http://ocamllabs.io/doc/implicits.html
Show HN: Very small char-rnn network with tf.data and keras, with a browser demo
Have you looked at Apple's performance during that time period? As I pointed out in my previous post, Apple was sitting on $25B in cash in 2008. Additionally, their annual revenue nearly tripled and their profit quadrupled from 2007-2010. That's not an up hill battle.

All your talk about the economic environment during the recession is irrelevant because Apple had $25B cash in the bank and the iPhone was a hit, even though it was a luxury item being sold during the recession. The massive scale of their business and their overall success insulated them from the larger ramifications of the economic downturn. Tesla is operating in the opposite economic environment today, but they are not as financially surefooted as Apple was during the launch of the iPhone. So, to get back to the point, to claim that the financial challenges Apple faced bringing the iPhone to market were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's, just isn't true.
Can you provide some examples? The only ones I can recall for physical freedom are mostly by private entities, such as metal detectors at movie theaters and banks, though the armed military (?) outside airport entrances are obviously not.

Fraud/corruption/money laundering prevention regulations are definitely an incredible hindrance to opening and keeping a bank account in India, however.
Ask HN: What is the most valuable factor of your laptop?
I value the 15.6" 4K the most.

My ThinkPad gives me enough juice (battery life) to substain with ease (even with 15.6" 4K). Plus, using i3wm gives me best performance, biggest screen-estate to work with.

What is your experience with your favourite laptop?
I found that running Spamassassin is way more reliable than Google's filter, although it missed some spam from time-to-time I don't think I ever had false positives.
Meanwhile I can attest that the few times I tried to use Gmail for receiving something "important" (e.g. an invoice for an online service/shop I just signed up for) it went straight to spam. Maybe because there are so many spam invoices it just can't tell the real ones apart anymore.
I agree. If you want a statically typed language, then there are plenty of excellent languages that compile to JavaScript. But making JavaScript "more like Java" has already failed back in the 2000s when ES4 was spec'd. JavaScript isn't the most advanced, beautiful, whatever language. Its point is that it's ubiquitous even beyond browsers. By using language extensions you're tying your code to a particular tool chain such as TS or babel, and are already developing not-quite-JavaScript; you could just as well use a better language in the first place.

I think the problem is that people are abusing JavaScript for large projects when JavaScript's purpose is small-scale DOM manipulation in response to UI events.
These Think pads were released 10 years ago, it's a really bad idea to invest in used hardware that old. They can fail anytime.
There is no alternative to excel period.

Its like dwarf fortress or bloomberg terminals - when you are digging through what you thought was cruft, you'll suddenly find an entire project/application worth of material to handle a feature you never thought you would use.

Except that feature is used by someone else everyday.
Years ago, Weird Stuff Warehouse (R.I.P.) had a shell of the larger closet-sized Onyx system sitting in the back, and I always thought it would be fun to do something with it, but couldn't think of anything. With a shell of a Cray, you could at least make a couch out of it...
Wikipedia quickly gets political. Even in technical articles, there is an incentive to impose one's own perspective for his field as the "authoritative" version. An important part of contributors, it turns out, are academics working in the field that more often than not are deeply vested in their version.

This is a great system for an encyclopedia that must find the best approximation of the truth, but I wouldn't call it "incentive free". Similar incentives in the social world (pushing out people that don't conform to the moderator's world view) could be disastrous.
Real big fan of TS, like anything though you just have to be disciplined when using it. Type absolutely everything and set the transpiler to the most aggressive checks possible... If you’re being lazy and putting : any everywhere and then complaining about how good it is...you’re doing it wrong

In our project I’ve found we make a lot less mistakes than with pure JS and there’s a lot less pointless type check unit tests due to the guarantee’s it gives us. io-ts (https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts) around rest endpoints checking json input as well has been a godsend.
Kind of test-driver development :)
If u make some notes of ur foray into these two topics (I am a noob in both, and just "interested" in both atm, and in music theory more than composition), it might be helpful for others so if you do plan to make a blog of your journey, pls email the link to me at gawkface@gmail.com, thanks!
I have a kind of followup question (which, if I understand correctly, was touched on a bit in the article). If time is a tangible dimension, is it possible that the "passage of time" is an illusion? I remember the past and because of causality, the events are ordered. Time seems to flow from the past to the future and it never flows from the future to the past. This seems obvious to us, but I've always wondered why time doesn't flow backwards.

Just to take a silly example, what if all the "points in time" just exist (and are ordered -- I don't propose to break causality)? They don't flow at all. From my perspective, at every "point" along the time axis, I can recall the past and it will be ordered as if it "happened", but each point could be independent (though constant). If I could remember "forward" through time, then this would be obvious, but since I can only remember "backward" through time, at every point it appears as if I have progressed through time.

I suppose the interesting thing is that causality is uni-directional. Things can only happen in a certain order in the past. But this is not true of the future. Even if I have perfect knowledge of the present, there are some things I can not predict about the future (quantum mechanics FTW). I wonder why that is (because we are flowing through time? Ha ha!)

Sorry for the diversion, but if someone that is better educated than me could shed some light on the matter, I'd be grateful.
It's wrong to force people from their homes, but over this same period the predominantly Hindu Indian army has killed tens of thousands of Kashmir Muslims. It's hard to see how saying "actually the Hindus are the persecuted" is a fair assessment.
I have two Acer c720 Chromebooks that outlived several laptops and a hilarious amount of tablets.
Hopefully you guys can replace Mapbox. Any plans on trying to implement mapbox GL style and/or native (iOS/Android) map frameworks?

The one thing that Cesium doesn't really provide is really good 2D map support (i.e. ortho). Mapbox really shines here and its mostly due to their Mapbox GL stuff and Vector Tiles. It would be nice to have a leaflet-like GL accelerated mapping framework (the mapbox GL API is vastly different than leaflet and is horrid in comparison). Mapbox GL also doesn't support any other projection besides mercator.

It would be nice to have an alternative to them as they are increasingly more and more corporate and a hot mess internally.
For any two state vectors, |u> and |v>, unitary evolution preserves the amplitude <u|v>:

<u|U^\dag U|v> = <u|v>.
Exactly, the difference in retention that comes from theory vs it's application is too wide
I'm actually subscribed to the AthleanX channel and use a lot of Jeff's training videos, partly because his videos have great click-bait titles but mostly because I find most other youtube trainers annoying while Jeff sure sounds a lot more professional and convincing.

However, since we're in the 'you don't know what you don't know' thread, I really have to ask. Are Jeff's training exercises really that good?
Electric bikes are a huge improvement over standard bikes, and no improvement at all over a car for a significant number of use cases. They’re also no more useful than a bike in places where roads are poorly maintained, rain and snow are frequent, or no bike lanes exist. They’re not useful for taking kids to school, or doing significant errands. They are amazing for a single person to get around cheaply without killing themselves on every hill, and probably a godsend in SV. Most of the world doesn’t have SV’s weather though, and a lot of people have kids.

Electric bikes and scooters are very cool, but they’re no more a solution to the car in most cases than a motorcycle or Segway. They do nothing for people with long commutes, or who live in spread-out suburbs. No one is trading in their minivan for a moped.
Yes and making the iPhone a hit is a lot harder when your customers don't have any money to spend.

Nobody is saying Apple couldn't afford the R&D to build the physical phones.
You could buy an awesome muscle car for a few hundred dollars. I had a lot of fun with mine. Cars today aren't any fun.
Yeah but stock market isn't zero sum... I can't tell if you're actually arguing don't invest in stock market because some HFT might get higher returns or some index fund will get .05% (somehow forgetting your 7% or even higher recently annual gains). Or perhaps you're trying to illustrate someone else's (wrong) mindset.
I don't understand language design or expressiveness but I'm ok with going slow and being restrictive.

I think what we need is a subset of JavaScript, not a superset. There are things we should not be able to do in JavaScript in a web browser because to me that's where JavaScript belongs. I think the whole idea of js on the server or in other kind of projects is very silly. But that's besides the point.

But I agree with your example of symbol in dict. I would be surprised if it isn't already on the roadmap. Have you tried reaching out to the typescript people?