skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fun fact: in a single Northwest Territories mine [0] lies an amount of arsenic trioxide dust sufficient to kill every mammal on earth many times over; and in the early '90s an organized labour terrorist planted and detonated a bomb inside the mine, killing nine workers who were there in spite of a strike.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine
I'm not enthusiastic about this possible future, but here's why:

it means they could eventually just adopt Linux as the platform for Microsoft applications. That would do away with a lot of historical reliability issues, and would mean that they would have less to support internally. They're making more and more money on things like Azure and Office365 etc, and none of that really depends on Windows.
If you find a prosecutor in nature, you should contact Sir David Attenborough. That would have the makings of an extraordinary documentary!
Nix Language Primer
I would suggest checking out my employer, Fivetran (fivetran.com). Many tech firms use us to centralize their data for analysis. We have startup pricing for sub-50 employees.
I think it's a bit like having a big smudge of snot on your screen. Sure, you can clean it off. Certainly, it's trivial. Equally, it devalues the product, far more than any value it could bring Microsoft. When I buy a new laptop, I don't want to spend 3 hours reading articles about how to get rid of adverts for mobile phone games, and switching off other blatantly user-hostile features.

It's just vaguely schizophrenic. You have all this genuinely cool, nicely done engineering, then the initial impression is ruined by a load of slapped-on garbage. It's like selling a BMW with a bunch of McDonnalds special-offer vouchers stuck to the steering wheel.
and we all know the next step.
It’s going to create a legal challenge played out in courts, which would answer the question “who does the 14th amendment apply to and under what circumstances?”

I don’t think it would create any executive order jurisprudence.
What should go in the C++ standard library?
If you get windows server 2016 and use that as a workstation no crapware is on there and it runs faster. Unfortunately it costs 5 times the price...
In the book “The Cuckoos Egg”, the author describes how the hacker penetrating his networks was using it to access military networks. That was in the 80’s as well I believe.
The Pentagon has prepared a cyber attack against Russia
It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing.

I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet".

But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High.

IMO solving this problem is by no means "simple". How expensive is it to do "focused care"? Has it been tried, and what's its track record?
> 1) An easy way to join a Windows domain.

Red Hat's sssd already makes this trivial. You can join a Windows domain from the Fedora "first run wizard" or via a simple "realm join xyz.tld" command. It works pretty well mostly. You get AD integrated logins and SSH/sudo access and can use AD groups for access control just like normal groups. Kerberos SSO to Linux boxes works fine etc.
What are the typical radiated power levels from a modern laptop over 20kHz-5.8GHz, excluding Wi-fi and other radios? Does anyone have any references to share, such as E/H spectrums of a typical modern laptop, which has gone through EM compliance testing?
...so I wrote this self-hosting compiler for the 6502 and Z80:

http://cowlark.com/cowgol/

I say self-hosting, but on a 64kB BBC Micro second processor with floppy disk it takes about seven minutes to compile Hello World, so I haven't bothered to actually recompile the whole toolchain. (The overwhelming majority of of that time is spent doing disk I/O, as there's way too much state to keep in RAM. The compiler is an eight-pass behemoth.)

Here's an accelerated screencast of the thing in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epTQPSi3IyQ

The language itself is a simple strongly-typed fully compiled thing with a syntax based on Ada, supporting nice stuff like nested subroutines and so on. It has native 8-bit types (unlike C). Its main claim to being interesting is that it statically allocates all variables, using a simple but effective algorithm to walk the call tree and assign multiple variables to the same address if they're not going to be used at the same time. It's super effective. (This is Wheeler's solution 1.) This feature made the entire project possible, because it allowed me to do without stack frames completely. Trying to access the stack on either the 6502 or Z80 is an utter disaster.

The 6502 is a _bizarre_ thing to generate code for. 8-bit code is fine, but 16-bit and above is painful --- efficient maths is really hard. I kept finding the generated code breaking down into tiny microloops because when doing arithmetic with 16-bit values it can actually be shorter to use a loop than to inline it (in certain circumstances). The instruction set is orthogonal, except when it isn't; there's no LDA zpg,Y for example, but there's a LDX zpg,Y. Things like moving values from one memory location to another are so expensive that the setup cost in using helper functions frequently outweighs the benefit.

But in general, once you get your head around it and accept that it simply cannot do things like 16-bit signed comparisons in a fashion which won't make you cringe, it's not too bad. Index registers are great, as is zero page indirection (at least for 8-bit offsets). It's fast, taking a few cycles per instruction. It's also fairly sensible: there's frequently only one sane way to do things.

The Z80 drove me nuts, though. It's unbelievably unorthogonal. (You can only do 8-bit direct memory accesses via A --- B, C, D, E, H or L cannot be directly read from or written to memory!) It's slow --- the non-8080 instructions are so painfully slow (ld ix, (abs) is 20 cycles!) that they're only barely worth it. The 16-bit stuff doesn't help nearly as much as you'd think, either; you can only do adds and subtractions, with limited registers, and there's no carry so they're no use so 32 bit operations have to be done using the 8 bit instructions anyway. I did find the resulting code density to be better than the 6502, but not that much.

I'm really looking forward to doing a 6809 port one day...
Huh? If I can get the implemented idea for less than $1000, it almost always makes sense to buy it instead of doing it again myself.
> Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.

What a fascinating read.

It really makes you happy that this type of solar/planetary stuff affecting the earth only happens on such a long timescale where it doesn't commonly affect our day-to-day lives as much as earthborn issues such as severe storms or other extreme meteorological events. But it's also a shame in some ways:

> Myself and two mates looking out of the tent saw a great reflection in the southern heavens at about 7 o'clock p.m., and in about half an hour, a scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself, lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens, one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith
If you don't put the information out there, then they won't have it. It's a simple cause and effect relationship. Not giving up this information will likely cause you to not be able to use some services, however you have no inherent right to access services run by private parties. They are offered to you under certain conditions, and if you choose not to comply with those conditions, you are free to not use the service. With regard to "shadow profiles," simply use incognito mode if you are this worried about it.

Let's be clear that this law won't pass, certainly not as it is written. In the US, it's perfectly legal for websites to track your behavior. Should you object to this, you have a simple remedy: use incognito mode.
At least in my Org Reports are pretty much an after thought left to the data engineers (like me) to "take this metric I've developed" and display it on the morning report.

Writing/updating a report is easiest part of my job it's the data that goes into building it that is hard translating the "simple metric I've developed" and getting it to run in a robust automated and sane fashion is the difficult part.

The complexities in my org are two fold.

Firstly the infrastructure people don't get data - at all. They speak PLC's and HMI's to them it's all OPC and magic A2A messaging takes care of everything. All data is time series to them and it all goes into an historian (which is basically a giant ring buffer i.e it gets flushed periodically) anything beyond that is past their level of expertise.

The data needs to be batched together the time series information has to be processed into "event frames" - this data was all part of this sequence of conveyor belt movements for example. Then you need to link it to related events etc and archive it in some kind of sane fashion so that in six months time if there is a product defect or something like that you can trace the entire series of event frames for that particular production batch.

Secondly the people the article calls "data scientists" (in my org these are Engineers - real ones of the Chem and Mech variety) don't know anything about databases or handling data they prototype their metrics in Matlab, Fortran, Excel and the like.

You really need someone to translate their code into something sane that can be automated. Engineers are not taught to code at all. I know I studied engineering at university Fortran is the lingua franca. Code is just a way of representing mathematics. Asking these people to do all the data processing pipeline is just not going to happen. It's not their job. They write the simulations and models they have the domain knowledge thats whats important for them to be worrying about.
None of the links I checked on the site are affiliate links.

The site looks like a fun, and well polished, side project. Someone wanted to see if they could make a useful product aggregator.

They may have plans to monetise it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it remained a hobby.
I'm not sure that's a smart statement to make without having seen what 2038 and 2058 look like. If articles like this one about the sixth extinction aren't enough to sway your thinking, have you seen the pentagon report on the national security implications on the effects of climate change? I think it's a bit naive to think that you and everyone you know will be immune to the effects of heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, famine, etc. throughout the course of your lifetime. I've seen estimates as high as DARA's 2012 report of 100 million deaths by the year 2030 directly attributable to the impacts of climate change. Already Miami Beach spends millions on storm pumps just to stop its roads from being submerged by high tide -- and in addition to Miami, models predict the populations of Shanghai, Osaka, Alexandria and many other cities to be completely displaced by 2070. Perhaps there will be some technological Noah's Ark, but it's far from a sure bet that there will be enough space for you and your progeny if we do not find the political will to begin mitigation at scale as soon as possible.

In ecology, a common metaphor used to illustrate the impacts of the loss of biodiversity is the Rivet Hypothesis. Each species lost to extinction can be modeled as losing a rivet in the wing of a plane. Up to a certain point, a passenger on the plane would notice limited change in effects on their flight. Once the plane loses too many rivets, however, the crashing of the plane is analogous to the collapse of the ecosystem.

To answer your question about "How does that work", the generous answer would be to cite Nassim Taleb's Black Swan and Antifragile where he talks about the tendency of humans to underestimate the effects of long tail exposure to systemic risk. The less generous answer would be a reference to epistemic closure -- some people simply refuse to engage with evidence of a reality that contraindicates their prior beliefs. Or maybe the best model is simply that of addiction -- and who can argue that our society is not addicted to convenience and consumption, even when it threatens the only planet we live on?
> Your example is part of what we are offering. You would be able to validate the accuracy of our predictions.

The problem is that you are entering a field that is full of people selling snake oil, and you need to build a minimal credibility before someone pays to get the data, wait three months, and check if the predictions are accurate.
Some cynic should really do a web site that just follows up on all miracle cures that flash by the feeds.

Let's say take the top viral cure each week, and follow up how it's developing each anniversary. It could actually be really interesting, if done well.

But what to call it?
They have a code after /dp/ - what is that for? Looks like an affiliate code to me.

Edit: doh!
I don’t see Microsoft releasing a desktop Linux but I can see them releasing a Microsoft Azure Linux distro.

Linux is already massive on Azure so it makes a lot of sense from a support POV. Whether they go with their own version or just buy a distributor (Ubuntu for example) is an interesting question though.
I think I appreciate the point you are making, but you have gone a little too far in making that point. I've gone through a physics education, and I can attest that one can learn the material, be good at taking exams, and still do a poor job of applying it to the real world.

The other extreme is as problematic, though. Knowing certain formalism in mathematics can really help in expressing a physics principle - and at times it takes a fair amount of seemingly pointless formalism to get to that point.

>Scholastics claim that without spending two years studying calculus you cannot invert a matrix. (Because they make a living teaching you calculus.)

I have no idea where this is coming from. In my education, we were taught matrix inversion a full year before calculus. I've studied matrix inversion multiple times in my academic career, and I don't remember calculus being invoked once.

And to be frank, I'd be extremely wary of anyone claiming strong physics knowledge without learning calculus. Physics gained by leaps and bounds after calculus was introduced. It is the subject one can apply calculus most easily to, and is perhaps the reason we know more physics than any other discipline out there.
Yeah, seems like an aging configuration among quants and various teams in IT at many finance companies.

Finance may have been ahead with adopting data science but it seems that many others reached parity or even surpassed in capabilities.
I recommend a book or at least watching a video on YouTube - Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
Can you post to this from Tor?

edit: oops, just found this https://meta.getaether.net/t/how-to-use-aether-behind-tor/53
That's exactly what I found, but I think I'm more forgiving then your are. I agree, Watts is a smartass for certain* concepts, however I thought it worked in Blindsight because the story and concept is so original, and though-provoking that I didn't mind. It may because I didn't catch the technical contradictions like you did :)

Because of it's technical density, and thought-provoking concepts, I think it's a book that rewards rereading (my favorite types of books). I've read Blindsight twice so far, and the second time I was able to appreciate, and understand better the massive amounts of technical detail he was pumping into the book.

I may need a second reread of Echopraxia to get to a similar appreciation. In my first read (only a couple of months ago) I felt as if Watt's desire to be seen as smart starts coming off as a smartass. He buries every action in about 10 levels of subterfuge, and ambiguity, such that by the time I got to the end of the book, I knew I was missing about 50% of what was actually happening. What saved me was a Reddit thread Watts had done where he explained to his confused fans all the intricacies of the plot that he had hidden. Once I read through his explanation, I appreciated the book a lot more, and have to say if it was rewritten to be more understandable it would be at an equal or higher level of originality then Blindsight.

What do you mean the Noon series is a counterexample to what Watts had in mind?

* I say "certain" because he has a PhD in marine biology, so I assume his biological concepts are very rigorous.
What about all of the other companies who have built useful Linux tools over the years? Probably quite a few more useful than this.

I'm sorry but I just don't believe that Microsoft is good for Linux. Although Linux has only a tiny fraction of the market, it's still one of the few competitors to Windows. They are competitors. MS does not try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart. They do it despite themselves or for PR or in an effort to try to mitigate Linux in some way. If possible they would like to eat Linux up, incorporate a version into Windows. This is not because they want to help Linux adoption. It's to try to keep developers, who would otherwise run Linux, inside of Windows.
It’s not any way. You are very restricted to either a helix or a disk.
I'm wondering if anybody lives in the hypothetical perfect world scenario the author writes about. I'm at one of the larger tech companies and it's inconceivable that something like this could exist (though the churn here is extremely high - a mature shop with longstanding membership could implement the hypothetical in some form). Everything sounds nice when dreaming it up in one's head, but discounts the reality of things. You can only lead a horse to water so many times before recognizing that they just will not drink the water themselves - some people actively refuse to implement solutions, no matter how convenient the building process might be. And then the more you burden them with things like SLAs, performance, etc., the more of shit show things become.

There are some forward-moving, solid "soft skill" analysts/data scientists that can make this happen. But by and large they shouldn't all be held to this standard. Maybe my standards/expectations have been soured too much and I'm too pessimistic, but as a whole they're just not cut out for this kind of stuff. Which is fine - being a "doer" is easy to begin with, and over time the more that you're able to automate as a data engineer, the more trivially easy ETL/everything else becomes.
> Being a farmer is not made easier by moving a couple hundred more miles west.

Cheaper land makes being a farmer vastly easier. The same capital allows for more either more farm land or better farm land. Remember, farms are just like any business you can extract more money when the output stays the same but your costs drop.
Might be nice to splice this kind of functionality into tmux, probably right about here: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/blob/486ce9b09855ae30a2bf5e576c...

Wouldn't need any LD_PRELOAD tricks...
"Why are ICO contracts not useful?"

Burden is on your side: "Why are they useful?"
Sounds like a classic flaw with innovator's dilemma. Established players try not to cannibalize themselves and the world passes them by. Kodak is one infamous example.
I love checking out daylight charts for weird places like Iceland or Svalbard. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen

I didn't know the original proposal was to do it in multiple small shifts, nor that it included an energy savings argument.

Most of my life I thought I didn't like daylight saving time. Then recently I looked at the daylight chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...) and really imagined what it would be like without daylight saving time, and I changed my mind.

If I stayed on summer time all year, then in the winter sunrise would be around 9am, and I'd have to commute in the dark. If I stayed on winter time, then in the summer the sun would be up at 5am and down at 8pm. On a normal work schedule, I'd miss the morning time and wish for more sun in the evening.
Applications advertising use of AES is generally a good red flag that they're rolling some sort of custom, broken crypto. Fortunately, neither seems to be the case with joplin.
Completely agree with your take, and as an engineer in a similar role, the post rubbed me the wrong way. I don't find ETL work soul-sucking, and I certainly don't think that my colleagues or I are mediocre.
I'm cynical, if bankers can get away with the mortgage securities fraud and not go to jail, then how can a data breach in a tech company cause people to go to jail?

Faulty thinking on my part, probably.
What do Chernobyl robots and well logging have to do with Blindsight or Echopraxia?
The way GDPR hurt smaller companies wasn't so much that the regulation directly applied to smaller companies but that larger companies, due to the liability the regulation presented, no longer felt comfortable working with smaller vendors who they felt couldn't provide the assurance of GDPR compliance. External vendors became riskier that everyone reduced the number of vendors and partners they wanted to work with (either directly or indirectly), which had the cascading impact of smaller companies being cut out of the ad ecosystem and Google becoming much more dominant.

Now I'm not yet familiar with this draft nor with how it's likely to evolve from this point on but you have to do one or the other. You make the regulation overarching enough that partners' lack of compliance affects your own compliance efforts, in which case smaller players are going to have a hard time competing and will be cut out of the ecosystem by legit big companies who have more to lose than you do. If you don't do that and it becomes relatively easy to outsource data-related liability to your partners, there will be a loophole where shady data collection and processing activities will tend to aggregate and move towards entities that are either exempt from regulations or at least willing to take on liability for their customers for short-term gains. The latter is distinctly worse than the status quo because you're making the problem worse. The former is arguably bad for the startup ecosystem.

My understanding is that smaller players are, in the aggregate, much worse about pretty much everything and the effectiveness of GDPR-style regulations depends on the impact they have on smaller players who are much further away from compliance than the big tech companies who were for the most part never too far away from compliance and whose bottom line never depended on any of the alleged shady practices. Most people aren't aware of smaller ad-tech players or data vendors so often their (and their customers' or partners') wrong-doings are blamed on the big tech companies that are much more visible.

To a large extent, what happened in the ad ecosystem is that smaller shadier ad tech companies forced everyone else to become shadier - if they are out there promising marketers more data, better tracking and more accurate measurements and they are accomplishing that through questionable practices, that still raises the bar for what marketers expect and they are able to force their way into integration with other platforms or at least force everyone to do similar things. Ultimately, there's a trade-off between transparency and measurements for marketers and privacy and a world dominated by lots of small players who don't trust one another is one where marketers are forced to require proof that their money is being well-spent, which means more privacy-defeating tracking and measurements.