skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The earth definitely has a carrying capacity. Our ability to push our food production further doesn’t change this fact. I’ve seen around 10 billion people floated as a food production limit in several places.

Crossing this with climate change, particularly our love of beef and pork, is not easy to disentangle.

We may also never hit that carrying capacity if something else other than food supply limits our population growth—war, disease, artificial barriers to food (wealth inequality).
The First Next-Generation, 68K-Based Amiga in Decades Booted Up Yesterday
No one beats Oracle at sales, they are a sales organization; they just happen to be selling software.
Baidu’s AI Can Do Simultaneous Translation Between Any Two Languages
This is one of my favorite Alan Kay talks of all time (I think this is the right version, but at the time it wasn't on YouTube)...

Programming and Scaling - Alan Kay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY

There's also one where he discusses anthropology and the human universals, but the title of that talk has escaped me for years. Anyone remember what that one's called?
Linuxserver.io reaches 1B pulls from Docker Hub
Magento vs. Shopify: The Ultimate Battle of Two E-commerce Platforms
Hello,

You can see the current version of the class at:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/ProgC

I've moved to a style where the lectures are recorded and the lecture hours have been replaced with lab sessions. I've also mostly[1] removed the C++ content and replaced it with more C. Both the videos and the labs should be available for everybody.[2]

This gives more time for tooling (eg, ASan/MSan/UBSan/valgrind), as well as for various low-level topics like memory management (eg, arenas, reference counting and mark-and-sweep) and data-structure layout and cache optimizations (ie, the reasons why people still use C). Also there's a heavy focus on the lack of safety and undefined behaviour -- beyond the lecture devoted to it, this comes up in basically every lecture.

[1] There are still 2 lectures on C++. If you think that it is impossible to learn C++ in 2 one-hour lectures, you are correct. The pedagogical theory at work is basically "Dumbo's magic feather": the goal is to give students enough self-confidence that the year after they won't be afraid to consider doing a final year project using C++ (eg, modifying a web browser), which is the point at which they will _actually_ learn C++.

[2] I'm not totally sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, obviously I'm happy anyone can access these resources.

But on the other, it's really easy to say subtly not-quite-right things when lecturing. If it's ephemeral, then this is harmless since the effect of lectures is just to cue students too remember what to look up when they are programming on their own, but if they can re-watch the video then there's a bigger risk of burning in the wrong idea.

I suppose the long-term thing is to pre-write a script for each lecture, maybe even turn it into a book.
I've problems at recognizing any significant part of Lua that is better designed than Ruby, from the POV of the language itself, pretending implementations do not exist. But this is just a personal POV so we could argue forever. I also bet that a very good subset of Ruby could be implemented with a similar-sized code base than Lua (but not at the same speed probably).
> Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.

Sure, but that's the thing: IBM doesn't have the right leadership team in place, and hasn't since Gerstner left. It shows no sign of having learnt from its mistakes.

Fundamentally, IBM is a sales company, not a technical company. For a long, long time its marketing department was able to sell the fiction that it was a technical company, and use that reputation to sell, but folks realise now that it's just not.
iSH: Linux running on iOS via usermode x86 emulation and syscall translation
Chinese martial art novelist Jinyong has died at the age of 94
Ask HN: What do you do to avoid back pain?
I get upper back pain when I sit for ~1-2h writing some code,

Even when I take breaks and walk or do back exercises, I still get pain when I get back on the chair.

It's taking a toll on my productivity, I waste all day trying to find a comfortable position to sit in.

How do you prevent back pain from stealing away your focus?
This problem has no solution. Now we are in the stage "growth vs. animals and nature". Growth will win. The second stage would be some human populations vs. other human populations.

Also learn about these very efficient viruses which are wiping themselves out by killing all its hosts too quickly. From the point of view of the Rest Of Nature humanity is a virus.
This also happens in the UK, except that many of the stores themselves are owned by the same conglomerate.

Also easy to offer a lowest price guarantee when you know that customers are likely to only shop around at the high street 'competitors' which you also own. Will they bother to shop around? Doesn't really matter - heads you win, tails you win.

Although this probably works less well with much of the demographic of people who buy computers in the online shopping age.
Yeah, but I can pay someone to keep the item and trash it.
It's javascript.options.shared_memory. It's currently set to false in Firefox 63.

As other people already wrote, it was disabled at the beginning of the year because of timing attacks related to
Spectre and Meltdown. Details at https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-lan...

We had this thread on HN about multithreading Rust with WASM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18283110
A lot of electronics are just rebranded Chinese goods. I remember some years back a DLink, Netgear, Netcomm etc. modem routers all came from the same supplier in a different case. I used to work for one of them and we’d purchase competitors product, open it up and it’s look the same inside. We could even install our firmware onto their box.
It doesn’t have “likes” or “retweets” and it’s a paid site.
This principle is well known: 'YAGNI'.
Tesla Has Whole Car OTA. Anyone Else?
Generating Software Tests: Breaking Software for Fun and Profit
RPG.net bans vocal Trump/Trump Administration support
You just need to venture in the realms of Black Metal to find negative songs in a serious way. Try any DSBM song, such as Psychonaut4, Lifelover and others.
Then all the nationalist black metal which preaches ... well very aggressive ideas sometimes. This is of course a fringe but it exists.
Why I love Java
Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines
It can be stored on the server, and encrypted by the users' private key. Like a message to himself.
C's well defended place is unfortunately mostly defended by folklore, nostalgia and a desire for one-upmanship.
There are several good languages available today that can successfully replace C - including at controlling RAM or the size of variables

P.S: there's a book called "The design and evolution of C++" which you should probably read. Where can one learn more about the design of C?
I cant speak for London, but the bin clampdown was definitely post 11/7(there may have been a clamp down with the IRA that I'm too young to remember with a bin liberalisation in the 90s?). I also don't get the unattended luggage announcements. Because suicide bombers leave their bombs unattended? They should be searching everyone with bags /rant
> a) there's something with the way death metal/violent music fans' brain is wired that makes it react positively, whereas with non-fans it makes them react negatively.

Isn't this a tautology, given that there is no way to react to anything except via the wiring of one's brain?
> a lot of the ecological heavy lifting / biogeochemical nutrient cycling is really carried out by microbes

What really worries me is what is going to happen when all those millions of tons of microplastics become nanoplastics and are spread far enough to become part of the foodchain, even down at the microbial level. The dark end of that space is pretty terrifying for life on Earth, IMHO.
I pay for Netflix (no ads) and YouTube premium which also removes ads. I also pay for basic cable (loads of ads).

However, Google still finds a way to show me and my kids ads.

This is the problem. Even when I'm willing to (and do) pay to remove ads, the addiction and greed shown by content creators and delivery services is too powerful. They always find exceptions.
This is silly to start teaching nand gates, you must first learn semiconductor physics ;)

But to understand semiconductors you first need to understand quantum mechanics. And to understand QM you first need to understand classical physics.

Oops, I think we just ran out of time for a masters program. ;)
Show HN: Offline first zip codes validation and parse lib
Moxie was against people publishing the official Signal app (rebuilt) on F-Droid specifically because he was against the idea that ordinary users would be exposed to a minor fork of Signal (which would then require them to co-ordinate changes between the two forks).

I would be very shocked if he would be any nicer about someone writing an entirely new app from scratch that uses their protocol and inter-operates with their servers. Because then Signal on F-Droid wouldn't have been an issue.
> Yes there is, especially if it results in the consumer paying more for a product.

I don't see why ever-decreasing prices seems to be your metric for good here.

I voluntarily pay more for certain things because it is a more ethical choice in those cases.
John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972)
Perhaps you're right. I'd never ventured into black/norwegian metal other than maybe classic Cradle of filth or Dimmu Borgir. But even those felt goody and sort of like an act to me. I'll give those a listen, thanks.
> easy to code for ([...] I'm talking from a "cognitive load" standpoint)

I strongly disagree. The unfortunate design decision of folding arrays into hashtables forces you to be very careful when you conceptually need a sequential list, because if you store a null value in it, you cut your list in half. Ooops.

An array is the most basic, simplest, most useful non-scalar datatype there is, and Lua bungles it.
Check recent submissions about Feldenrakis method.

I’d recommend exercise and take breaks every hour.
API feeds is to pull data from Micro.blog - for example replies. To enable cross posting from your existing blog, a setting can be enabled. From the help page on getting started [1]

> "If you already have a blog, such as one based on WordPress, connect it to Micro.blog by adding the feed URL to your account under Account → “Edit Feeds”."

[1]: https://help.micro.blog/2017/getting-started/
Depends on what you are doing. You often need to pull in the other language's runtime while libc is typically already in use. You also have to be careful about ABI details like string representations, concurrency, and threading features.
> Ecosystems are mostly local

I think this is a misconception. Everything is interconnected. Did you know that some species of bird migrate up to 8700mi every year? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration)
So do many insect species (butterflies!), fish, whales, sharks. And, as apex predators with wide ranges, sharks have a huge impact on ecosystems across the globe (and losing them is very, very bad: https://www.livescience.com/9716-loss-top-predators-causing-...).

We're royally fucking up the entire planet.
I didn't mean it in the sense "C developers can't find a job", but in the sense professional C programing is a niche; low supply, low demand. When you're a freshly graduated student and there are 10 companies at 30 km around that are ready to recruit you for c#/js stuff, and none for C stuff, you tend to think "there is no job in C", even if there are 2 or 3 companies working in the embedded field that were ready to recruit you, with an even better salary, but 60km from here.

Maybe I'm wrong, though.
> HN is the calmest place to have a discussion with someone, because no one's looking for clues about your personal beliefs and what side you're ostensibly warring for.

just scroll to the bottom where everything is downvote-collapsed already, anything that isn't Silicon Valley political echo chamber isn't really discussed holistically and garners the same "you're the enemy" or "you're not in the middle if you don't already agree with me" response as other networks

need a patch for this

My thoughts are that Americans need a credible external threat for unity, and currently we don't have one. The Cold War thing jumped the shark decades ago and just doesn't have unifying consensus as being a problem for America, the religious extremist story has fallen apart with everyone knowing its all part of our cozy relationship with the House of Saud. So here we are
So, what could it be that makes iPhones "react" with helium? Helium is an inert gas and shouldn't really chemically react with anything in there.

Any clues why such an environment doesn't make Android phones behave in such a way?
You can never prove it wrong.

It has to be wrong in perpetuity, because even if it is correct just once, it results in a wasted/depleted planet.

And honestly, considering how much non-renewable resources we are using and the rate of warming, worrying about the population bomb is sort of like trying to get enough cardio exercise while you have acute appendicitis.
Of course it isn't that black and white, and I don't think that was the point. I'd interpret it as: Your company is participating in something that, when looked at as a whole, has become something that you could call a legitimized form of abuse on a societal scale.
Yes, I like it too. I tried to resize the browser window horizontally and the page neatly splits the content in multiple columns. Very nice.
IMO, the claims that population is the problem is far more dangerous. Population growth is mostly a solved problem. All population growth models have the growth being much slower over the next 50 years than it was over the past 50. Most viable models actually show the growth reversing, and some even show it peaking near current levels.

Does that mean we've fixed the problems? Far from it.

The number of people is only a really small factor in the damage that people do. One jet-setting westerner does many orders of magnitude more damage than the typical subsistence farmer; and the damage done by subsistence farmers varies quite widely. (Some are causing desertification and chopping down trees)

And of course there are some people doing more good than harm, reducing the population reduces those people too.

No matter what the population is, we have a lot of work to do. Greenhouse gases are the most visible problem; there are lots of others.
The size of the worlds livestock is around 100 billion. If all humans turned vegetarian, the human population could easily be of the that size.
It's still a dark pattern.
Application of Machine Learning to Computer Graphics [pdf]
Proven wrong? Yes! ehrlich said the human lifespan in 1981 would be 42. He assured us that, if we didn’t do something, there would be mass famine and billions dead and all manner of horror that never came to pass.

It is not all that impressive to note that more consumers than producers creates a scarcity problem. That’s the entire driver behind Malthusian fear-mongering. But over and over and over those that stoke the fears of overpopulation (and it’s been going on for thousands of years) are especially terrible at estimating the capacity for supply. As you call it, “last-minute technological breakthroughs”, dismissing centuries of human progress as some sort of accidental stroke of luck.

You say we “do nothing” but every something I see proposed has to, by necessity, damage the quality of life of lots of people. The majority of people. If we are honest with ourselves, that’s effectively what is being proposed when we pontificate over how the wizards of smart will dole out resources according to their flawed definition of sustainability.

That will, inevitably, result in war.

The fact is, if you want to improve the state of humanity on the Earth, your only effective means of doing so is technology.
Why?

I could guess that these jobs are not as "sexy" as using Java, Python etc?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I'm working adding more resources every day, it just has to be done gradually to make sure the data is of high quality. But I do want to expand the range of services offered, along the lines of what you are suggesting.
As someone who has overcome chronic, debilitating illnesses using unconventional healing techniques myself, I'm sympathetic to your point of view. Indeed dang hinted that he may also be sympathetic to your point of view.

But we're all responsible for phrasing our comments in a way that doesn't trigger flamewars.

The guidelines clearly state: "Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say."

The same thing can be said in multiple different ways. You should make an effort to phrase your comments in the non-flamewar-triggering way.
Yeah, in the beginning of the article they talk about room temperature super conductors, and than this...
Previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743796
I don't think simulated brains can feel pain any more than a float variable "current_pain_level" set to 100 can "feel pain".
Don't read buzzfeed.

I'm serious. They amplify conflict for the sake of click-views, rather than inform.

Moreover, don't take to heart news media of any political stripe that seems to amplify, misinform, re-interpret, or revise. And they all do it, to some degree, even those who are most respected.

We live in a global era of unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy by nearly every measure: crime, poverty, infant mortality, education, equality, war, genocide. No, it is not all sunshine and rainbows by any means, and there are always dark situations that are counter-examples to the general trend, but we are doing okay overall. The news relies on our genetic pessimism to generate revenue. Do not fall for it.

That said, do stay vigilant. Civilization is fragile, and it has enemies, some of whom are well-meaning and good-hearted.
Here's my data point: I used to use Signal but then stopped using a smart-phone for a year, and I very quickly discovered that unlike other chat systems (like Matrix) Signal is so tied to you having a smart-phone that you can't use any desktop communication method. The Chrome App pairs with your phone rather than registering a new device.

(Also, it's kinda funny that Signal has reimplemented the iMessage problem -- you have to unregister your phone number on your website so people can SMS you again rather than continuously sending you Signal messages unintentionally.)

(There are also other problems that have bubbled up in Signal in the past year since I stopped using it -- I've heard there's an auto-backup process that takes more than an hour and makes your phone unusable and you cannot change when it happens.)
Well the Intel OpenCL compiler already does LLVM-> FPGA.
> I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock.

Nah, I doubt it. War is bad for business, and the global economy needs peace in order to extract maximum profit. Best to keep those wars to little backwater countries so we can keep spending trillions on mega-high-tech weapons without really disrupting the flow of money to bigcorp.
he knows what the company needs: a story that last long enough for his equity sales program to complete.

and that is exactly what he is doing.
Walmart's Sam's Club division announced it is opening a cashier-less store
This practice of rebranded stuff is as old as the cheap consumer electronics industry. Back in the 90s myself and a friend had the exact same bedroom TV but they were different brands because they were bought from different high street stores.

What worries me more is fake reviews because that makes it harder to trust anything sold.
I can definitely recommend bands like Lifelover, Psychonaut4, Totalselfhatred, Alcest, Lantlos, Bonjour Tristesse, Drawn into Descent if you want to experience some not-so-happy metal
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#Pharmacology
Also internet anonymity brings extremism out of people.

IRL, when debating another person, most people IMO wouldn't be at least half as extremist as they're on reddit or HN
Which books would you recommend?
Here it is

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316917

Thanks for pointing it out, seems like a good thread
Go Modules by Example
The Masterless People: Pirates, Maroons, and the Struggle to Live Free
Indeed!

I wanted another Science Fiction reference to something I loved.

Vespene gas is very important in build order.

My probable worst name was Cobbler (the PXE server) for those that were into cockney, but it was originally named "Shoe", and the idea was a Cobbler makes boots.

Lo siento!
Yeah, that was a whole lot of lead up for that result.

“It’s so much worse than known high temperature superconductors!”
Free AMP templates and Builder
Adwords scripts tips and tricks
The question is not if they will become a Lehman, it's if they will become a GE
My point was that I don't think Smalltalk was ever more popular in the industry than C regardless of the time frame. By the mid 90's lisp machines were pretty long gone, betting on Lisp instead of C if employability is the metric seems rather bold.

MIPS I concede, it was remained fairly popular for a long time.

I guess my overall point is that the subjective choices made by this university back then don't really mean much by now. The fact that they taught Pascal instead of C alone proves that they weren't particularly prescient.

>Regarding language comparisons, actually C++ is Italian and C Latin.

I thought about that while writing this bad analogy but I couldn't come up with a better one. I wasn't really talking about the historical relationship between C and C++ but rather about their relative complexities. Learning C++ is vastly more complicated than learning C. On top of that the coding style of a modern C++ application (which generally involves a lot of metaprogramming, OOP and even some functional constructs) is fairly different from a standard C codebase. You don't write C like you write C++ and vice-versa.

There's this good talk about how we should "stop teaching C" (if we want to teach C++): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk

I think the opposite holds true as well for very much the same reasons.
> >is that long-term, persistent exposure to violent media may lead to subtle changes in one’s personality, desensitizing fans to violence and reinforcing negative social attitudes.

It's the same old stupid argument that has been becoming popular again about games recently, and frankly, it's such a huge load of bullshit.
Out of the 16700 populations tracked - spanning ~4k species - their average decline since 1970 is ~60%.
When Objective C was originally written, there were no L2 caches etc, Would you say the performance penalty objc_msgSend caused then compared to now was greater? I remember looking into it back then and it was regarded as to slow compared to C or C++, but hardware has changed. Is the hardware now more optimised to handle Objective C, than 20 or 30 years ago would you say? (Looks an interesting book by the way - now on my reading list :-) )
Why do you say "stare blankly"? My young organism stares anything but blankly at the iPad screen when he's allowed to use it.

I think you're painting phone/tablet usage in a very negative light here, as if parents are only using them as a pacifier to occupy their kids so they can have some quiet time of their own. Sure some people do that, but that's the least charitable interpretation I think.