skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Copyright law, Net-Neutrality, it sometimes feels that our current Governments cannot bring forward decent legislation on complex tech issues.

Regardless of whether the cause is ignorance or cynicism; have there been other examples of times in US or EU history that governments passed such clearly 'anti-people' (for lack of a better term) laws?
DOJ says social media giants may be ‘intentionally stifling’ free speech
Didn't a LOL dev give IceFrog's name on the forums or something like that?
That was a nice read.
With SSDs, don't the critical determiners of latency and bandwidth become the data transfer buses, rather than the storage media themselves?

(especially if one uses an external USB SATA controller, in the vain hope of having storage that is all three of durable, fast and easily-replaced)
Quoted from the second paragraph:

The bill—titled the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act—would impose a tax on companies with 500 or more employees “equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low wage workers.” Essentially, this would force large, profitable firms to pay into welfare programs the amount they’re currently getting for free from the federal government.
20 years later, the DMCA in the US actually seems pretty decent. It's not perfect but it strikes a pretty good balance between the interests of copyright holders and allowing for innovation.
Ask HN: What are the practical benefits of Federated Learning?
That's just indicative of the state of the market. Likely it wasn't worth it for Google to also manufacture a separate USB-C version.
The concern is that Google can unilaterally change the spec any way they want, so even if it's fine now it may get worse in the future.
Niv Dror on how to build engaged communities in crypto
The key is to do it when you wake up. Just set your alarm 5 minutes earlier and spend those extra 5 minutes working on your project. It's tough, but try not to dwell on 'only being able to work X time on it' as this doesn't add value. I'd definitely recommend pacing yourself so that you finish your project. Consistency is the key. If you can commit 5 minutes each day to working on it, you will be well on your way.
> But if they all left Cleveland, wasn't isn't that because the places they moved to were more desirable for whatever reason?

Yes, for instance, jobs for urban planners, which are both more plentiful and better paying in growing (both population and economy) areas.

> And if those other places were more desirable, doesn't that imply that they missed something in their planning?

No, in the same way that an investment planner that experiences a known risk that would have been more likely under alternative courses, or who underperforms other portfolios that benefited from access to investments only made selectively available to people who owned particular investments before that advisor came onboard have not necessarily missed anything. Unavoidable risk and opportunities constrained by initial conditions definitely affect urban planning.
There's no reason why large companies versus small companies should matter. If you don't like employment getting subsidized, great -- take away employees' welfare when they get a job. But don't treat Amazon or Walmart differently from smaller businesses.
The Gujaratis are known for being very enterprising folks. It is culturally respected in the community to have your own business, whether it is a small corner shop or the biggest corporation. India’s biggest private corporations (Reliance Industries) was started by a Gujju. Gandhi and the current PM also hail from this state.
> After all, negative results are just as valuable as positive results

This is not true. It's incredibly easy (and you can be infinitely lazy) to come up with any bad hypothesis that has almost no chance of turning out positive results.

Good hypothesis: Existence of Higgs boson at 125 GeV.

Bad hypothesis: Eating chocolate in the morning decreases the risk of developing lung cancer.

We value positive results more because negative results are incredibly easy to make just by coming up with bad hypotheses.
Everyone seems to misunderstand photosynthesis. It can’t occur without water, and in fact, the oxygen plants release is from the water, not the CO2.

The smart money on useful compounds is CO and O2, made possible with high temperatures, CO2, and not much else.
DMD 2.082.0 Released
That's fair it was a smart ass-ed comment, didn't mean to offend, but that one was tee'd up there, couldn't resist :)

I haven't tried Mastadon yet, but the fact I can run my own server for my family or close friends at a very low cost seems very appealing. To me this seems like the most likely use case, I can't imagine just going around joining random nodes, so I'm not too woried about the "virtue" of the whole network.

I'm happy to know that there is a solid, open source option like this out there.
The author has run the numbers (or at least found and cited them) - see e.g. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/5/7/the-more-we-bui... and https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/20/mapping-the-ef...

It's true that the global economy is the biggest factor in a city's prosperity, but a strong economy is only papering over the fiscally unsustainable way most municipalities are run.

Also, generally, urban planners are the technicians that implement decisions made by elected officials. They are NOT the ones setting the vision for a city. [citation: Masters in Urban Planning that I never used]
> "Amazon was for selling books online when relatively few people used the internet. Google was a search engine in a landscape crowded with search engines that weren’t themselves gigantic businesses. Ebay was for selling beanie babies."

I don't find Google, Amazon or Ebay as compelling examples of "toy markets". Google started when search engines such as lycos, ask jeeves and yahoo were already household names. The key issue is that at that point, none of them were giant companies because they hadn't figured out how to monetize their businesses. However, their market was clear and obvious as the internet already had wide adoption.

Ebay was an auction site. People have a lot of crap and want to get rid of it. The site obviously had a large potential target market to begin with.

Amazon started out with books, which is a huge and well understood market. An online bookstore could offer a far better selection than any physical bookstore. Even if Amazon were just selling books, it would be a fairly large company. If Amazon was never founded, there would have been someone else who filled the niche pretty quickly.

(Some of these early companies definitely made big bets on the popularity of the internet. Amazon was founded in 94 and Ebay in 95. Back then, the internet had less than 20 million users, so it was obviously a niche, but it was also growing very quickly (usage just about doubled each year for the next 4 years) [1]. If an investor was already bullish on the rising popularity of the internet, than the fact that companies like this would have large markets was a no brainer. It's kind of like how Coinbase, or someone similar, will obviously be huge if cryptocurrency pans out.)

The article also mentions Facebook, which again, was founded well after the internet became a big thing. MySpace was already getting pretty big traction by the time Facebook came around.

When I think of companies that started out as "toy markets", I think of Apple where their early product (the Apple I) was geared towards early-adopter consumers. But even Apple wasn't really a huge company until Jobs came back in the two thousands (in 2001, after the tech bubble collapsed, their market cap was about 200x less than it is now and far far smaller than Microsoft was at the time).

The fact is that many very successful companies don't start out in "toy markets". They start out in big markets, but they just do things better than the next guy. Amazon and Walmart didn't invent retailing, but they did (and do) run very efficient supply chains. Apple didn't invent the market for cell phones, but they made iterative improvements to what was out there until they came to dominate a huge market.

[1] https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
Sorry, I'll attempt to clarify: most human networks obey power laws in terms of centralization. For instance, the vast majority of the content is produced by a tiny minority.

Sometimes humans make networks in which this is no longer true, that is content is produced basically equally among all, or at least most, members of the network. These are decentralized networks.

These types of networks are not sustainable or large for a broad host of reasons, and so they form only temporarily. But they are desirable, and valuable, which is why they still form at all.

Email exists well within our very centralized federated political and cultural system, and so no, it is not meaningfully decentralized. We do have some small, decentralized networks (artist communes, maybe qualify?) within the US, but they do not scale. Mastodon will also fall prey to the same issues: as soon as it is big enough for anyone to care about, regulation will come, and regulation will require significant centralization.
Feyerabend explores the difficult process of scientific progress in the classic Against Method. He describes how society finds it difficult to develop new scientific theories to better explain new evidence because of our confirmation bias to conventional theory.

For example the earth was once understood to be at the center of the solar system, when telescopes could better observe planetary behavior it first lead simply to more precise epicycles.

In the book he points out that one way we tend to break through this hold on how we frame evidence, is by considering metaphors from the Arts. For example, religious writings helped inform the works of Copernicus and Newton.

So to generally answer your question, I think some insights will come to us from the Arts, like science fiction books/movies/games. For example, the show Black Mirror provides some ideas that we may at some point take for granted.
The Falkon fork was just made a few months ago although the latest release is from May, so that is fairly old in browser update land, but being just a few months old is pretty decent WRT browsers that aren't FF/Chrome. OTOH, QupZilla was one of those just a few releases a year projects anyway. So a few months between releases wasn't unusual.

https://github.com/QupZilla/qupzilla/blob/master/CHANGELOG

Looking at the Falkon repo (https://phabricator.kde.org/source/falkon/) there were commits made just a couple days ago. So, it looks like its being actively developed. There is also a fair amount of mailing list chatter.

Yes, there are a ton of chromium forked browsers:
(random link with a long list of alternative browsers, almost all of them have some tie to ff or chrome)
http://www.canadiancontent.net/tech/downloads/Internet-Brows...

As far as android versions, I don't know what the plans are, you could ask them. AFAIK, Qupzilla didn't support any mobile platforms, although QT does iOS & Android. I'm sure they would take a pull request <wink>
Because there are tickets to close before the whistle.
I also want to start working out, but do I even have time for that if I can’t free time to work on my project?

Start working out. Do that for a few weeks. You may find your energy levels rising and time for stuff suddenly being less of an issue.

Use your workout time to do double duty for thinking about other ways to free up time and energy, stuff related to your project etc. Maybe even use it to do things like listen to podcasts that might be pertinent to freeing up time or developing your project.
Those useless transforms (are you referring to Laplace and friends?) are pretty useful in EE.
This isn't about Netflix. Of the major streaming services, Netflix is the only one that actually meets or exceeds the 30% threshold.

This is about all the other streaming services, like Amazon, Hulu, Disney, etc., which produce almost no shows outside of North America. The EU is trying to force them to play ball.

And they'll succeed...in getting all of those services to add token local crap to the catalog. Expect to see a lot of very low-budget teen dramas and single-set movies if this passes. The EU believes that this will increase funding for EU "cultural" productions, but the more likely result is an entire generation of Uwe Bolls filling up EU's streaming services with utter crap. (Uwe Boll, for those who do not know, was a German filmmaker who took advantage of EU/German film incentives to convince major studios to let him make a number of very bad films, like Postal and the Dungeon Siege movie. Germany eliminated those incentives after a few years almost entirely because of him, and Uwe Boll hasn't managed to make a film since.)
Facebook and Twitter testified before Congress
Negative results on “good” hypotheses (by your implicit standard, which seems to be “prior probability of positive results”), though, are still as valuable as positive results (and negative results on hypotheses that seem obvious intuitively are arguably more valuable than positive results.)
I think they are transitioning from license/support to SaaS. Also looking at their statement SaaS is taking over in revenue. License 25 Million, subscriptions 123 Million in FY 18.
This implication you're making about "intelligent people" not using Facebook does nothing to further your argument, and just makes you look like a dick.

If you just want to refer to smaller, more specialized or niche communities instead of mass appeal, then just say that.
Trash cleaning boat
If you want to write "generic" function in C, use #define to generate static function for your specific type. But it much much better to use C++ or Rust instead.

Example: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/sys/tree.h?revision...
Meet Facebook's top troll hunter
What if I dont watch netflix?
Would be a great candidate for autonomy! Easier than self-driving cars, I'd imagine.
I'm fully convinced that they shouldn't be supervised at all times. I think being alone in a house without adults is a very important experience that shapes children, and without it we end up neutering them in ways that are hard to quantify. Even better if we allow them to roam neighborhoods unsupervised with other children, so they can learn to cooperate and deal with interpersonal conflict without an adult always acting as an authority.
Only issue I have is that there's not enough penalty for false reports or none that I've ever seen applied.
> "We've been Christian for thousands of years."

LOL
I've received those emails as well. The emails came from our domain registrar. We don't buy certificates from our domain registrar. Adding to the confusion the email refers to Symantec certificates of which we don't have any, I even double checked the certificate chain and Symantec wasn't involved.

So, for the longest time I assumed the emails were a phishing scam and disregarded them. Only today when I tried testing with Firefox did I realize that several certificate brands were handled by Symantec and that YES I was affected.

So, yes there has been plenty of forewarning, but yet was surprised today.
Really? Jail time for circumventing DRM?
When it actually /breaks/ something they'll divert resources to fixing it.
> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales

Would you say the same about email? Gmail may be huge, but I still wouldn't call email a centralized system. I imagine Mastodon would have a similar fate, if it gets big.
Well, this is not exactly cleaning up old legacy code. Its more of undoing a patch that should haven not been merged in the first place.
You could ask the same sorts of questions about why fiat money works (if this money has no intrinsic value why will the merchant give over his tangible products for it?). Yet people do terrible things for tyrants. I don't understand exactly why it works but then again I'm not a tyrant of any sort.
Proposal: Go 2: The #id/catch error model, a revision of check/handle
I, personally, hate websites that serve different content based on what device I'm using. It makes it difficult to customize a device to view things the way I want to view them. All of the changes to navigation and features makes it difficult to navigate and use the site.

I do think there could be a case made for Google abusing their power here but frankly I'm on their side for this: one site, one representation.

If you want a lighter load for mobile users, provide a lighter version for every user. If you want to keep features available, allow users to opt-in or out to such features.
Maybe I'll respond in a general way to what's come up here. This code isn't unreadable, or accidentally readable—it was written specifically for readability. Similarly, it isn't unmaintainable or accidentally maintainable—it is written specifically for maintainability. Unlike in most programming debates, we can actually prove this. Here is the proof: I've talked to everyone whose job it has ever been to read this code, and all agree that it is easy to read. I've also talked to everyone whose job it has ever been to maintain this code, and all agree that it is easy to maintain. The point is that readability and maintainability are determined by who is reading or maintaining, and the 'who' that matters for determining that is the team responsible for a system.

If that sounds strange or obviously wrong, it may be that you're taking certain widely-held beliefs about programming as if they were truths about programming. Also, the conventions of the larger codebase which this small program is drawn from carry a lot of information, and free us to work with concision and simplicity that aren't so common in production codebases.

I know this sounds weird, but hope that it will stir curiosity in one or two of you. By far the biggest mistake I made as a young programmer was staying within what one might call the shallowculture for longer than I needed to. The outstanding properties of the shallowculture are that it 'knows' how to program and 'knows' to dismiss uncommon approaches to programming as wrong and inferior. If you notice yourself reacting this way, my grizzled advice is to pause and start questioning. Look into it deeply, and you'll find that this seeming 'knowledge' is spurious. That will open up for you more satisfying ways of making software. For example, you'll find ways of avoiding the complexity bloat that is routinely lamented in Hacker News threads as a plague on our industry.
History is mostly a record of just those kinds of “anti-people” laws. In the UK their history is practically defined by them, with arguably the most famous being Acts of Enclosure dating back to the very early 17th century.

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

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

In fact the history of European and American law tended to emphasize draconian punishments for minor crimes against the landed gentry, nobility, and aristocracy. If you want a present example consider the real impact of the war on drugs, and cui bono.

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. John Erlichhman
Even more of those hundred-thousandaires bought condos that they couldn't afford. We ended up with over-built areas like Chicago's Loop and Miami, because so many of them got exposed when it all nearly imploded. (All of it probably would have imploded without the bailouts.)
In my experience, it's been used to threaten people who reverse engineer software to find bugs and take down content that is not remotely infringing. Not a "pretty good balance" in my book.
The people setting up doomsday bunkers should probably consider your point. I proposed a strategy they may resort to if they don't (or, as you say, even if they try).
Do you have a source on the Netflix claim? I doubt that 30% of the shows available in Malta are made in Malta.
Interesting. I haven't actually seen that one. I was actually thinking about a paper from McGill university which I think it was discussing whether or not having annotations which translate certain words (the name of which escapes me at the moment) when free reading is helpful. If you can think of the name for those annotations (the ones that you can often find in English graded readers), then you can probably find the paper (search for that, "free reading" and "McGill").

However, I have no doubt that the paper I was reading, references this one. Great find. Thanks!
This is true. Since the article talks about Patels. Back in India after holding powerful position in politics, administration etc for long time in Gujarat, Patels are lately agitating violently to be declared "backward caste". So that they can be entitled for more government support in jobs, education etc.
While there may be negative examples as you are asking for. There are also many positive examples, I think GDPR is an excellent one. I would also ask for people to share the positive ones, lest we go to sleep in misery.
The examples built do indeed keep on working with non-prohibitive maintenance - the 2nd #2-design engine (built in the 2000s for Nathan Myhrvold), was on display at the CHM in Mountain View for 8 years with daily or twice-daily demonstration runs. It sadly went off display in 2016 (probably to go to Myhrvold's private collection) but I saw the demonstration a couple of times and can answer some of your questions:

1. The concrete computation performed was to use the Finite Difference Method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method - hence the "Difference Engine" name) to calculate arbitrary polynomials of degree up to IIRC 10. By using Taylor Series, this method could be used to calculate arbitrary functions, like log and sine. This was in fact the same method used to construct logarithmic tables by hand at the time, and had similar nominal precision; the singular goal was to eliminate the bit errors rampant in the old, manual process.

2. The machine removed not just errors in calculation, but also in typesetting; about half the part-count of the original design was in its printer, which could be configured with all kinds of options for typesetting the results. It would output a "print preview" onto paper locally (this was not publicly demonstrated at the CHM because of the enormous mess of ink spills, but the machinery was run dry), and an identical wax mold ready for use in mass printing. This was because many of the bit errors in the existing log/sine/etc. tables were introduced not by the (human) computers, but by the multiple copying steps involved in transforming calculated values into printed pages.

3. Computation was quite reliable - the machine worked in base 10, and mechanisms were carefully designed to freeze up (and be easily resettable to a known-good state, as demonstrations showed) before introducing errors. As far as I know bit errors were unheard of in the demonstration runs. This reliability, like in later electronic computation, was the motivation for using digital rather than analog logic. (Finickiness was mostly limited to those halting conditions - it proved quite sensitive to clock speed (rate of crank turn), but only by the standards of the hand cranking used in demonstrations; connected up to a steam engine with 19th-century rate governors, input power could have been kept clean enough to run with long MTTF.)