skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off, thanks for the comment—pretty interesting stuff. One thing continues to bother me though.

> My point is that machine arithmetic preceded machine data storage.

> The concept of algorithms dates back to at least the 9th century, and probably back to Euclid.

I don't think that's the issue at hand. Special-purpose computers implement algorithms and may use arithmetic—those are not the key differentiators from general purpose computation. Perhaps they were important first steps, but clearly what e.g. Turing/Church did was something else entirely. And I'm aware Leibniz was very much concerned with the problem earlier on, but where I get a bit fuzzy is whether general purpose computers really needed the more fleshed out results of e.g. Turing (or perhaps a predecessor) in order to really build a general purpose computer—and whether that was a major limiting factor even after we had access to the necessary memory, or if we knew conceptually that what we were shooting for all along was fully general purpose computation and we were really just waiting for the hardware to be possible.
> My first employer, the online dating site OkCupid, didn’t harp on testing either. In part, this was because our company was so small. Only seven fellow engineers and I maintained all the code running on our servers—and making tests work was time-consuming and error-prone. “We can’t sacrifice forward momentum for technical debt,” then-CEO Mike Maxim told me, referring to the cost of engineers building behind-the-scenes tech instead of user-facing features. “Users don’t care.” He thought of testing frameworks as somewhat academic, more lofty than practical.

I found this paragraph interesting because my experience with my one-man side project is the opposite: I'm so small, and time is so scarce (I have a separate full-time job), that I can't afford to fix bugs on somebody else's schedule when they find them... instead I spend a large amount of time writing tests up front for new features so that I find the bugs on my schedule (i.e. late at night when I don't have other commitments).
Too little, too late, Twitter.
If you’re the Alex who writes Yorkshire Ranter congratulations on an excellent and long maintained blog.

If you want to know more about the policies of the Catholic Church on marriage of relatives the Wikipedia article on cousin marriage is quite good and well referenced if you want to go from there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

On the Church banning marrying relatives

> First and second cousin marriages were then banned at the Council of Agde in AD 506, though dispensations sometimes continued to be granted. By the 11th century, with the adoption of the so-called canon-law method of computing consanguinity, these proscriptions had been extended even to sixth cousins, including by marriage. But due to the many resulting difficulties in reckoning who was related to whom, they were relaxed back to third cousins at the Fourth Lateran Council in AD 1215. Pope Benedict XV reduced this to second cousins in 1917,[22] and finally, the current law was enacted in 1983.

The Church’s justification for banning cousin marriage has no scriptural basis. If St. Augustine's justification for banning relatives from marrying isn’t evidence in favour of what I wrote I don’t know what is.

> Whatever the reasons, written justifications for such bans had been advanced by St. Augustine by the fifth century. "It is very reasonable and just", he wrote, "that one man should not himself sustain many relationships, but that various relationships should be distributed among several, and thus serve to bind together the greatest number in the same social interests".

As to “speculative, just so, white-supremacist” Science is generally built on a base of speculation, which researchers then attempt to disprove. Hypothesis falsification and all that. Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified. Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.
HN loves to hate Microsoft

It'd be nice if you saved this stuff for when you're replying to HN, not to me.

Microsoft in the 80s and 90s were hyper-aggressive towards anyone they considered a key competitor and played dirty. The fact that some of these competitors didn't do themselves any favours doesn't change that (I think, quite uncontroversial) fact.

I don't think VS Code is this huge threat to Jetbrains and as a competitor, Microsoft is not quite the bugbear it once was. If anything, its Jetbrains that's outcompeted their direct competitors (Eclipse, Netbeans) to semi-irrelevance/coma.
Mobile recharge API for developers
>enforcing a domain name (hostname and domain) to be in a single codepage

this is essentially what is already implemented in most browsers. You can't mix characters from different scripts in a domain name, except for special cases (e.g. japanese and latin are frequently used together and have little potential for confusion)
Or we should just be willing to call dog whistles what they are and stop feeling the need to respond when people cry 'but that person used the word rat over there!'.
I'm far from a performance expert, but my impression is:

It shows the call paths to the functions and what part each path took, that's not so obvious from the typical table. On the other hand, finding functions that are called quite a lot all over the place and add up is easier in the table, so it's not become useless.
Actually I don't really understand the problem, what do you mean with "C++ packages"? AFAIK C++ still has no concept of packages (although this has been proposed), so you probably mean how to build C++ based software that is located in different directories or how to do hierarchical builds in general?

That is supported by most build systems, plain old make can do it, CMake can do it, scons can do it, the list goes on and it is actually not something special in software development. It's not like we were unable to build software consisting of multiple "packages" before catkin or bazel.

I'm not saying that these existing solutions are perfect and the problem in general (dependency hell) is pretty hard to tackle. It's just that I don't see how catkin and the workspace concept help here.

Btw. did you know that catkin_make, successor of rosmake, is already old-school?

It's now "catkin build" - oh no wait, that's again uncool if you go with ROS2, there we have our meta-meta-build system "ament".

#edit: I kid you not, it's now apparently "colcon".

See e.g. the discussion https://discourse.ros.org/t/colcon-amend-tools/4685 and rationalization http://design.ros2.org/articles/build_tool.html.
I honestly can't understand this.

They have a queen and a royal family which, AFAIK, literally do nothing meaningful, aren't running the country, don't produce anything of value (from what I can see) and yet are paid billions (land holdings etc) and are forcing populous to pay fealty to them in many respects...

I just don't understand why... The only thing I can see is "Because I said so, that's why", which doesn't seem to be a sound basis for government.
I'm surprised they held out so long considering the seemingly orchestrated removal of him from other platforms.

Bit bizzare thing to remove him for regardless of the person when you consider how much just total grbage exists on twitter in general.
Two prominent examples noted in the bug: https://citibank.com.sg and https://www.citibank.com.sg are different, http://www.pool.ntp.org and http://pool.ntp.org are different.

Like, big companies run separate servers on the two domains.

That's besides the fact where if you have www.example.www.example.com, it rewrites to example.example.com.
Ask HN: What University Sites Do You Turn to Most Often for ML Datasets?
A lot of universities have online repositories for machine learning datasets -- just wondering if you have any particular favorites? Which ones have the best collections, or make the data easiest to find/sort through? Just wondering how many good collections are out there that I don't know about.
I never watched infowars or read anything Jones said or wrote.

But to think there are people who believe his crazy sh*t is really scary. Like the guy shooting up a pizza shop because of Pizzagate.

I compare him to the World Weekly News (next to the People magazines) from way back where they'd show a picture of space aliens shaking hands with the president.

Why does anyone believe this crap?
Most nutrition research is bunk
Really?

I’d say no matter what you think of Jones you should be celebrating this as it means Twitter is holding to their own published policies.

The nonsense of banning people for X, unless they famous, unless they’re the wrong KIND of famous, or are being attacked by someone and asking “Why do they get to say X to me” stuff is a mess.

How can anyone run a platform if the rules are in constant flux on a per day/user/reason/moon phase basis?

Half the problem over the last few years is the quicksand of rules. Punishments applied unevenly start to look an awful lot favoritism even when there isn’t any there.
Luckily we still have Vivaldi, Otter, Falkon etc.
This is just going in a circle. If they don't care about it then it makes no difference. A few characters in an address bar that they pay no attention to is not significant noise. Meanwhile the people that do care have less information.
Running a Rails App with Webpacker and Docker
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929417
> Most sites are on .com domains after all.

Most sites in English, and even that is doubtful.

There's a full world out there of people and businesses using ccTLD like .fr, .nl, .co.uk, .hr, .rs, .es, .jp...
However, these are just "anti-phishing" heuristics. We really should apply a rule on this.
If they're really having 100MM recurring revenue, couldn't they just borrow money from the bank without losing equity?
Yes, this point is important. We need to get the web/internet as simple as changing channels on a television. That is what the masses are capable of.
It seems to me work gave us exactly what we wanted. My parents both swear to work until they die. They seem to have conflated work with a sense of personal value. In doing so, they agreed to give up the kinds of niceties that would allow them to retire early, including pensions, 401k's and livable wages. All to earn just enough to pay the monthly financing bills.

Now it's up to subsequent generations to get the calculus back on track.
This is the third story today about a Google's handling/intentions towards web addresses and general webpages. The theme is Google wants/may want to push a new set of Google orientated web standards. This seems the least likely of the three to be strategically related,however.

The other two: Google may/may not be pushing the open web standard towards their own AMP pages, instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720

Google wants to get rid of URLs but doesn't know what to replace it with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17925761
> It would be more reasonable to assume that they are basically indifferent and would rather not have the distraction/noise.

We are actually agreeing; however I'm saying that this is a preference. Wikipedia refers to anhedonia as an inability to have pleasure about something. However, valence [1] as a measurement identifies affect dimensions as a polar system - (to quote Wikipedia) "Stress is negative valence and opposite of this is pleasure or happiness." My claim is that "pleasure" can be positive or negative - in that music would cause happiness or stress. Adding genre only furthers my statement that you could claim someone is "R&B anhedonia", "death metal anhedonia", or "classical anhedonia" if anhedonia only refers to positive affects. I, however, am saying anhedonia should be for the positive and negative degrees of an affect.

"No sound" is still sound - its the difference between null and zero. My original post says I'd say anhedonia is more linked to "null", while preferring no sound is more linked to "zero". Holding a positive or negative preference is a measurable attribute and therefore not what I would claim anhedonia; however, being purely apathetic (void) of preference would.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(psychology)
Even with Java now it's usually possible to modify a running application while you're debugging. Eclipse handles this pretty well.
Somehow this is just the babiest of baby steps. Infowars has a lot more than one Twitter account, and there's a lot of accounts other than Infowars that need to be thrown off Twitter.
Here's another example. I grew up in Washington state. We have dams on a lot of rivers in the Northwest generating clean renewable energy before anyone had ever heard of climate change (Grand Coulee is the most famous). They literally did change the barren desert of Eastern Washington into a fertile farming breadbasket with the irrigation water and power they provide. Despite that, there are people who hate them because they changed the rivers into a series of lakes and are threatening the wild salmon population.

Pick any part of the Sahara and transform it and some species unique to that area, some native people, some curious weather pattern, some unique geologic formation will be lost and people will be upset.
URLs can be complex and sometimes not intended for human consumption.

So fine, don't display the URL. Define a full-on standard that lets a user agent show a "friendly but not unwieldy" name to the user. You have that funky Graph API or whatever Facebook started to allow URL posts in Facebook to expand to include site info. Why not just use that at the top of browse?
Then design the browser to allow access and editing of the URL somehow if desired (an old browser called 'OB1' didn't display the URL unless you pressed Ctrl-W, for example), but don't display it by default.

The truth is probably not many technical people directly enter URLs in browsers any more.

Honestly maybe it wasn't a good idea to allow query strings in URLs. Perhaps deprecate them and keep URLs looking like hierarchical filenames. Which honestly, is still something difficult to understand for non-technical people.

But this crap of hiding parts of it is dumb.
How is this a usability improvement? What are the positives I'm not seeing?
Very few people live in the Sahara. However, to your larger point, many people live in Europe and the Middle East, and being able to power their cities could in turn obviate the need to emit quite a large amount of CO2, potentially affecting the entire planet in a positive way.

I would give up some portion of the Sahara (up to all of it) if it meant the planet doesn't warm 4 degrees. Of course that's easy for me to say -- I don't live there. :/
Many users never use the url bar. They just 'Google' for websites they want to access and follow the results.
The most popular argument I’ve heard is that the royal family actually makes more money for the UK than they cost, although those arguments seem to assume that abolishing royalty would mean bulldozing the artifacts and architecture which are the real revenue source. I think the real reason why is that the aristocracy does actually run a lot of things, if a bit indirectly. The House of Lords is a powerful, rich group of people, and who hands out the honors thst enobled them? How many in the House of Commoms aim to become lords and retire? Would they really vote to dismantle the institution which might make them lords?
That is a YUGE stretch.
Cryptocurrency Exchange Kraken's Halifax Office Undergoing Sudden Mass Layoff
Skipping tests generally doesn't allow for creating a working MVP any faster. It's just an illusion.
This line of thought interested me so I went and looked for some numbers.

The 10 sqkm 648 MW Kamuthi Power Plant [1] was built in record time in 2016 at a rate of 11 MW/day with a crew of 8500, which comes to about 2 months. This project is many orders of magnitude larger, lets be generous and say there is a 20x economy of scale in this project above Kamuthi: 100 sqkm / mo / 8500 crew. With 100 such crews (a lot) it would still take 3/4 of a century just to install 9M sqkm, and the installation alone would employ ~1M people. Wow.

According to [2], the degradation rate varies between 0.5%-1% per year. Using a generous 0.1% as an estimate for maintenance would put it at 9000 sqkm needing maintenance/replacement every year which according to the estimates above would only require ~10 full-time crews from above. Still ~100k people, a big city for sure, but not millions.

Another thing to consider is that a project of this size would be decades in the future and I imagine it would heavily employ automation, so dropping a couple zeros off the number of people required could be quite feasible.

[1]: https://qz.com/india/854483/worlds-largest-solar-plant-kamut...

[2]: https://medium.com/@solar.dao/everything-you-need-to-know-ab...
> Please ensure to retain 0.5 m or more in two sides and 1.5 m or more in the front of the dock charger.

I'm struggling to think of any open space that large within my apartment. 3 m² is about 6.5% of my apartment's total area.
I'm not some grand arbitrer of the semi colon debate to tell you what is the best possible thing to use (to the best of my knowledge it's a preference thing at this point). Personally I prefer to just use none at all these days in practice, but that's just me.

I just found it weird that they were seemingly arbitrarily used here on occassion.
Your first statement may give you a clue towards your closing question.
Nike wins over moderates with Kaepernick TV ad according to  Swayable (YC W18)
Standard 800 kV DC line from Algeria to Berlin (2400 km) would incur less than 10% transmission loss.
Welcome IPv6 Buzz to the Packet Pushers (IPv6 podcast now launched out of beta)
How does hiding part of the domain make the web any easier to use?
Then there's this $500K just awarded by the NSF to build a "Google for data sets". I wonder if, before making these sorts of grants, the NSF looks at what Google and other and other companies are already (or likely) doing.
https://www.lehigh.edu/engineering/news/faculty/2018/2018082...
The first citibank url doesn’t load for me, so it is site vs not site rather than two different sites, and both those ntp urls are redirecting me to https://www.ntppool.org/en/ - perhaps there’s less substance than meets the eye to those complaints.
Show HN: Hack the Struts 2 Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in a Live Sandbox
Quick Pascal, Quick Basic, MASM, Microsoft C and the 16 bit versions of Visual C++ were hardly hyper-aggressive products, versus the competition.

They were aggressive with MS-DOS and Windows, their developer tools not really, even with VB and VC++ 32, they started to win when Watcom, Borland, CA, Zortech, Symantec Metrowerks stopped being worthwhile to spend money on.
I can't speak for all graph stores, but in addition to ADB being json-native as described below, many graph users describe the types of any value, not just floats or ints, as a relation or property to the value itself.

So you'd never have any value; object, key, value of a string, int, float, or reference, without associated meta-data typing it elsewhere in the graph, and would be unlikely to operate on that data without making reference to those properties.
This undercuts either the APT classification or the identification of the APT with DPRK. It's not as though Sony doesn't have any money; a group that steals money would have stolen some. In that case there would have been some sort of credible trail to follow.

Actually the whole "we don't like movies about Dear Leader" supposed motivation is only superficially reasonable. From the leaked email it's clear that this was a chaotic capricious organization that wouldn't have hesitated to fire embittered IT (or simply IT-aware) staff, who would then have been well-placed to do everything that was done to Sony. (I especially liked the unencrypted Word docs they had of nothing but hundreds of passwords. Passwords don't belong in Word docs!) "Guardians of Peace" had a special hatred for Sony execs, while e.g. Rogen and Franco were afterthoughts.
Twitter permanently bans Alex Jones and Infowars accounts
There are a lot of people who have lost faith in the system of government that has largely forgotten them.

Their kids are drug addicts.

Their towns look like war zones.

They have no ability to earn a living.

They seek to be recognized and valued.

They seek to matter to someone.

In Alex Jones they find a leader who understands their issues and makes it easy to understand who to blame.

If we want to disarm Alex we need to recognize there are real problems in America outside of the coastal areas.
Article says that it's for potential acquisitions. I'm not a banker, but I assume they don't make loans for those kinds of operations. Also, they charge interest. Ultimately, it's a question of what the most effective (cheapest) way to add capital to the balance sheet is. They almost certainly could have raised venture debt (they probably already have an agreement in place), but this was probably deemed a more cost effective way to add capital.
In science and nature, there is only "how".
But this is LESS subjective.

They have rules. Before they were enforced randomly.

Was that fovoritism? Who was at the button for that particular complaint? Who knows!

It doesn’t really matter what their rules or definitions of the terms they use are. Or how subjective people claim they are.

People will choose to use the service or not based on what they see happening.

But for the past few years, it want a question of what the terms meant exactly. People could say things that were blatant violations under the most charitable readings of the rules and nothing would happen.

Or it would.

Or they would show that someone else said thing X the rules forbid and the complainer would get banned and person who actually said it would be fine.

Now we may get some consistency (I’m not holding my breath though). That can only be a good thing.
App Academy's Julianne Costa on her path from Warby Parker retail to drone coder
Many MANY legacy sites serve different information at those two domains.
Lehigh research team to investigate a “Google for research data”
Curious, why did www.foo.com become the standard instead of using the apex/root foo.com domain? Was this because of the DNS limitations of using CNAME records at the apex/root?
I'm a bit late to the party here, and the following doesn't address a lot of the concerns in the article (nor does it actually get rid of URLs), but for anyone interested in alternatives to horribly long URLs or incredibly opaque URL shorteners I made a fun little tool [0].

It's called ShortestSearch and in essence could be looked at as a reverse Google in that you give Google search terms and it gives you a list of websites, but for ShortestSearch you give it a website and it gives you a list of search terms. All with the aim to perfect the art of "It should be the first result if you Google 'x y z' ".

Also found the part of the article where it describes its own URL strangely enjoyable.

[0] https://oisinmoran.com/ShortestSearch/
And yet, you seem to have managed to use the internet for years without ever having to read his stuff. So what exactly is the case for banning him? It seems the standard tools (follow/unfollow/mute/block) are sufficient for people being able to avoid him.

Do we really want social media monopolists and search engines to decide on what is truth and what isn't? What makes them the authority?

Obviously Twitter, as a private company, is allowed to ban whoever they want. I just find it sad that people don't find it grounds enough to switch to a more open network.

Maybe in part because such networks don't really exist atm, perhaps in part because of government regulation?
British Airways Loses Customer Payment Card Data in Breach
But what happens if website admins are hackers?
Success Stories: Three bootcamp prep alums working at big companies