skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read that as: less syntax, less leaky abstractions and less macros; and I mostly agree.

I would add better integration with the C tool chain, more separation of concerns and less academic ego bullshit.

I've been working on something like that [0] lately.

https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl
Call this 'the language they speak'.

Let me explain why I believe (in part) they are doing this (and Jeff Barr can chime in).

AWS does this so that people learning from the start in cloud computing 'children' get used to the Amazon term (trademarked) and then it's harder for them to leave.

Because all of the other things they would need to do elsewhere have unfamiliar terms. And now the Amazon term is what resonates in their head 'the language they speak'.

So the brand name is the moat.

Meanwhile if you are Linode or Rackspace and you call it a VPS then it's easy to find an alternate provider of a VPS somewhere else.

Business wise it's on purpose and honestly it (in this case wouldn't work for everyone I might add) it's really smart.
Are we teaching economics wrong? (Krugman and Cowen)
The Spectre/Meltdown Performance Impact on Linux 4.20
Because when you imagine learning something, you probably imagine setting up a conv net on a camera to recognize your guests and say their names.

But when you start, you realize the camera was delivered to the wrong address and you spend 2 hours on the phone getting it to arrive.

When it does you realize that you can’t just use the python code but have to download some C++ patch and that the version is incompatible with your new Ubuntu LTS.

Fine, you use virtual box to use an older Ubuntu but now you have to roll back to Python 2.6 which breaks your conv net.

Or maybe you want to write a novel hoping to win major awards and be chatted up by journalists.

But after 2 pages of a pretty exciting coder’s life you aren’t even sure how to describe his mom and you’re wondering if you should start the scene at night and you’re unhappy with the corny language.

It’s the gap between the ideal done form you see and the boring work to get there.
I met her briefly while working for SurveyMonkey.

She seemed cold, calculating and impeccably manicured.

Think Claire Underwood on House of Cards.
NVLink between CPU and GPU is the key, and only IBM has implemented that with Power8 and Power9.

Everything NVSwitch does is between GPUs, and doesn't really help with getting data up to the GPUs.
That's the conventional wisdom, but it really depends on what the alternative is. Many things done by an IT-dept provided environment often have negative value for many/most users and most of them can be dropped, or replaced with something less centrally managed.
Ask HN: How do you “try before you buy” jobs when internships aren't possible?
Internships may not be an option if you are not going to school, but you may want to think about choosing between several places to work in a way where you want more time to judge each company, and also without the stigma of switching jobs a few months at a time.

This is just an outsiders perspective looking in, but internships look like a very long, drawn-out job interview, in a good way. They are testing you to see if you are a fit for a real job while you are present at the company, except that it lasts for months rather than days or hours. With that period of time you have a much better way of soaking in the work environment of that particular company, instead of just having a few hours to make a judgment of the company, team, and potential peers.

What options are there to "try before you buy" in that regard? Internships seem like a unique proposition that unfortunately are being limited to college students. If I want to try out working for Tech Company X can I propose a 3 month contract job for X as a possible similar experience?
When Families Un-Adopt a Child
Right, hence why nobody uses bitlocker without a TPM ;)
Biology as a field ranges from majority female to 1:1 parity in the modern postgraduate cohorts I have seen; the physical and logical sciences at the postgraduate maintain large male imbalances and notably seem to do so across all western countries regardless of social ideology from the figures I have seen across various sources. It is true in my observation that gender-specific encouragements are consistently emphasized at the university level even oddly in scenarios where parity has been reached or exceeded.
But we don't. The number system used in the western world is base 10. So why add base 12 on top of that?
Nvidia Grapples with Cryptocurrency Miners’ Exit
Create mobile apps in few hours
Every feature of the new Linode cloud manager https://cloud.linode.com is backed by the new Linode API (v4) https://developers.linode.com/

The previous version of the API (v3) was definitely missing parity with the old manager interface.
Really, this is worse?

FILE * test_file = fopen(“/tmp/test.txt”, “w+”);

than

create file /tmp/test.txt for input and output as test_file

Yeah, remove the ; and duplication of type:

let test_file = fopen(“/tmp/test.txt”, “w+”)
>> Privacy First Products - A curated list where you can discuss privacy first products

Cool! will I be expected to sign-up with my FB/Google/Whatever social media account to join?
A popular unit for a large beer is the "40" which is what a 40 ounce bottle of beer is called. About 1.2 liters, but not a size found in "respectable" households.
How to give feedback to designers?
There's an interesting summary that MIT news did of a study done in 2005[1] that explains habits which might be helpful.

The part I found most interesting was:

> "It is as though somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back," Graybiel said. "This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit. Just the sight of a piece of chocolate cake can reset all those good intentions."

> Graybiel speculates the beginning and ending spike patterns reflect the nature of a routine behavior: Once we start, we run on autopilot -- until we stop."

So this could explain a few things. One is that when you're in the mode of getting things done at work, it's easy to ride this wave into inspiration for learning. But when you're at home after work it's easy to ride that wave into distraction.

So a potential fix might be to trigger your brain with a stimulus to get back into inspiration mode. For instance, make a simple note of cool things you learned this week, month, or year, and reflect on it for a few minutes. This might kickstart you into action for learning.

1. http://news.mit.edu/2005/habit
Show HN: The new All-in-One Database in the making
lol, the way this ends.
What is?

- Data Bricks?

- HD Insights

- Data Factory

- Cycle Cloud

- Signal R (does that have anything to do with the R programming language)? I know what Signal R is but if I weren’t a C# developer I wouldn’t.

I’ll give you that most of the names make sense, but it will still take me the same year to be confident that I was architecting the correct solution on Azure that it took me on AWS.
The difference between Walmart and Amazon is that Walmart is a major employer in small towns across America whereas Amazon is present only in a few large metro areas. When Walmart gets pressured because of some real or perceived issue, each congress person representing those districts goes to bat for Walmart. Maybe not publicly, but real politics is done informally and out of the public eye. Defense contractors learned this lesson long ago as well.
This seems to be missing an important piece: who is the target audience and what problem domains is it targeted at. "For the 21st Century" doesn't answer either of those questions.
No one gets to that level in the corporate world by being nice...is this really that surprising?
I find the rank graphs in this post a bit unsatisfying - I keep wanting to see what the relative magnitudes are. I've been experimenting with a visualisation that combines rank and magnitude. It needs another few iterations but I think the direction is promising:

https://netograph.io/data/stats/connections?q=all
About 8 years ago, I moved on from Apache Groovy to Clojure which is far less verbose. Well placed macros in a testing script reduces a lot of clutter. Clojure has a longer ramp-up time than Groovy though, but once mastered is far more effective. I stayed with Clojure until I moved off the JVM about 5 years ago.
Toys of Christmas past
I don't agree with 'less syntax'.
More syntax (when designed well) results is significantly more readable code.
Give them a month, then maybe you could call it a 'start-up' or something substantial. It would also help build some level of anticipation.
I wonder if hybrid should become the new bottom. No ICE unless it has some small electric power and regenerative braking.
Don't fiddel with text selection, at all.

The use case here might be exceptional, in contrast to contextual ad overlays.
No, you will need a email address to log in.
How do I get started in Python (ideas)?
The headline and tone of the article implies that they have evidence of some underhand or nasty behaviour by Sandberg. But there is none - having the political intelligence to make the most of a photocall does not make you a bad person.
This is kind of a common issue with genetic disorders. When I was active on cystic fibrosis lists, sometimes articles were posted that said stuff like "It costs an average of $100k annually to treat CF" and parents would discuss it and go "That sounds low to me" and some older patient would chime in and say "Last year, my drug prescriptions alone were $100k. That's not counting the cost of doctor's visits and hospitalizations."

(Estimates in articles vary wildly. I searched briefly and just trying to find something that makes sense for like two minutes just makes me tired. So if you want to jump up and dispute that with some googled up article, I don't feel like arguing with you about it. I've already told you actual people living with the condition read those articles and go "Where on earth are they getting these ridiculous low ball figures???")

So then they come out with some very expensive drug that costs like a quarter million or more annually and it only treats around five percent or so of patients with CF. The price on Wikipedia [1] is currently listed at over $300k annually.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivacaftor

And then who can afford that? If you have been sick your whole life, you probably don't have a lot of savings or a lot of ability to come up with big bucks, etc. You are probably deeply in debt and not making much money.

I don't know the answer. Conventional medicine doesn't really work for people with genetic disorders. It tends to be crazy expensive and also merely mitigates things somewhat. The standard expectation is that you will suffer a bit less and maybe live a bit longer, but you won't ever really be well.

So such people understandably want a cure. That's the holy grail for folks coping with genetic disorders.

I think there are potentially other avenues for some portion of people with genetic disorders. But I don't currently have the words for that and I get tired of being ganged up on by boatloads of internet strangers who want to inform me that I'm imagining things and my entire life experience is a hallucination and I don't actually know nothing about genetic anything. So let's just leave it at "I have this opinion and maybe it provides a way out of this trap and maybe it doesn't."

Because the current approach of inventing incredibly expensive drugs that might provide a cure is essentially failing as a method. And all other approaches are so awful it's why such things get labeled "dread diseases" -- because what it does to your life is so terrible that if a doctor were not prescribing it, it would be in violation of the Geneva Convention. It's just not humane.
Why California’s Wildfires Are So Destructive, in 5 Charts
> These little 2L...

I regularly forget that most people here are in the US. The vast vast vast majority of cars in Europe are smaller than 2 litres, even diesels. Most petrol (gas) cars here are 1.2-1.4L engines, while most diesels are 1.6-1.8. A 2l VW golf is pretty much the top of the line in terms of "standard" cars, before you get to "performance" style cars.
Not that uncommon. Seeing how many gadgets get sold e.g. iphones where the money could go to charity to save kids.
Why not just use a complete checksum of the file?

The average project is what, a few MB? Less? Most of which is going to be cached after the first compile anyway.

Even on an enormous codebase, as long as you have an SSD or a nontrivial amount of RAM I can't see this being an issue.

You don't care if a file is newer - you care if it's different!
Also the 100 million is used to distinguish between real medicine and snake oil.

Also, is this treatment better than the current treatment? How can you be sure without a clinical trial?
Credit repair companies are a total rip off and I can tell from my experience for several years. All they did was take my money and never removed or updated the items I wanted off. I used lexington Law and I was really frustrated because I could not get approved for anything then my closest pal introduce me to the God Eye. I must say I was further convinced when I read some articles about him online and guess what? He live beyond my expectation. He successfully fixed my credit score to 820 excellent standard, delete all the negative collections on my report within 72 hours only and now I know why he is recommended by everyone as the first and only hackr to successfully fix credit scores. Don’t get ripped off lexington law. Get this done easily with the help of the God's eye. (Godeyeviewhacker /AT/ hotmail /DOT/ com)
exactly, still push notification is not there for mobile iOS. I dont really know if its a bad thing as a user
US tech companies aid Chinese surveillance state
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/tesla-mazda/

Apparently it may not perform noticeably better (other than in speed of filtration) than a 2010 Mazda 3 or, even more surprisingly, random Uber cars in Shanghai and Delhi. I'm unclear how accurate or widely applicable the results of this test are, however.
And then now the effort is to switch from diesel to petrol (or other things). [1]

What's old is new again.

[1] https://qz.com/1183779/europes-intoxicating-love-affair-with...
A lot of people on HN would probably go with the Paul Graham definition: "A startup is a company designed to grow fast"

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Anyone with enough money can invent whatever public persona they want about themselves. You hire a ghost writer to pen a book for you, then you hire PR agents to get you written up in the NYT and on various news and talk programs to shill your book. This was Sandberg, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, and countless other people. The key thing is to have a lot of money and some reason to do this. Even if you never did anything important, maybe you just start giving money away and write a manifesto. I’ve watched this happen with people I’ve known professionally on a more regional scale.

Also, you don’t need to write a book to do this, but it’s a sophisticated and high-brow way. For example, business people and even actors usually get long form interviews on NPR only when they write a book, and with that as the catalyst the conversation covers the other aspects of their lives.
> Viewing this after-the-fact leads one astray, into thinking there is some problem with the system

> The answer is probably that this drug doesn't make economic sense

You don't see it? The problem with the system is that we let economics drive these decisions.
> The problem I have with pen tests is that they're not systematic and rely on the cleverness and knowledged of the tester.

It really does take skill to accomplish some things and breaching defenses (and protecting from breaches) is one of those. Be it a pen tester vs the blue team or a foreign spy and the intelligence agencies thwarting them, when there’s one and one against another it really does come down to the skills, persistency, and resources of the people on both ends, and a bit of luck. There’s just so many variables and as long as there’s people involved there’s a vulnerability somewhere that can be exploited that needs someone to wake up that day and use his mind and body to defend it.
Occasionally useful on mobile for giant pages. Useless on devices with keyboards.
Microsoft to Shut Down HockeyApp
My personal desktop uses bitlocker without a TPM.
Sometimes you might only learn reading/writing and have no need to speak that language, so, I think it can be OK to only learn written language.

(And some kinds of languages are not speech anyways)
Native Apps are Doomed, Part 2 (updated 2018)
Exactly, that was my point with the tree of NVswitches. That's the obvious next progression. But to have an interconnect that fast, as I wrote, is also a change in mindset in how you can treat that system. A unified address space is no fun if only a small fraction of the memory is available with high throughput on a specific card, so you are essentially back to a version of cache locality optimizations that are really painful to program for in anything that's not a simple parallel data layout. Having that bandwidth to the whole DGX allows entirely new use usecases.
Two layers of brick separated by an air cavity in the old days (c. 1970) and more recently with foam, glass fibre, or rock wool.
I really disagree with the author's points about macros.

If your language doesn't support macros you'll end up with programs that parse some arbitrary code and generate code in the language you're working with. That's far worse than a macro system that at least works in the confines of a language's syntax.
You're essentially claiming that you only like something because it's not something else, and that it's only worth liking because you think it has some innate magic that separates it from something "mundane". It's basically a religious argument, and when it's revealed that it really is "mundane" after all, suddenly you don't like it. Calling this a type of supernatural elitism is generous I think.
That just sounds like misplaced priorities than the obfuscation layer getting in the way.
Some French education researchers / teachers had a saying:

"if riding a bike was taught at school, no one would know how to do"

People naturally learn things at the right dose and context. Music is a huge pleasure and desire. And music school doesn't really teach you music, it barely put you on rails and keep you digging in music for 5+ years (which makes one learn anything). They don't teach you what groove/swing/funk means (it's not even described except with informal tags).

I had the same sense about maths. You go through the motion, but the actual thinking process, the reasoning behind even ~obvious notions like variable, equality, finite domains .. You have to read books about history to know that.
Using Wine on ARM computer to run Windows program, it even requires you to to custom build kernel, compile Windows program to ARM target, all for.. for a Text Editor? Really?

Come to think of it, When I converted myself to Windows user to GNU/Linux user, I studied a lot about Wine. All knowledge was unnecessary for I find GNU/Linux and its ecosystem is much better than Windows.
People, don't comment before you read the whole article (and click on the survey on the bottom)...
Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy
Does your team know why they are developing something?
Skepticism is all well and good, but it can go too far if it's just a blanket denial. Dr Greer himself states that he's skeptical of 95% of what he's seen, but still states:

"we have 3500 cases where ET vehicles have landed and have left physical traces. We have 4000 cases where they have been tracked on radar and seen by pilots" ~ Unacknowledged doco.

> A more plausible explanation is that they simply misinterpreted what they experienced

If you watch 'Unacknowledged' you will see:

- multiple US Presidents hint at, or directly acknowledge their existence.

- Men who've walked on the moon, testifying.

- Top US government officials, air force pilots, etc, etc who've actually interacted with them, and and seen them stored in bases in the US.

- There was even a British Lord in there.

- Various government records (also available online).

> the notion of some grand government conspiracy is just ludicrous on the face of it

Yes it is, but doesn't mean it isn't happening. Apparently $100M dollars a day is spent on US military. $25B is unaccounted for each year. (The actual numbers may be out of date, but the scale of them is correct, from memory).

> No secret could be kept that long by so many people without some more reliable evidence leaking out.

This statement is directly addressed in 'Unacknowledged'
ME is (among other things) supposed to be the secure enclave for SGX keys, which Intel is hoping will allow encrypted computation on cloud computing clusters that are protected from inspection by the system admins.

So, without even getting into the whole DRM argument, yes?
Yes, on some processors basically it's as if all userspace was recompiled to use retpolines. Enabling STIBP promises that one thread cannot influence the indirect branch predictor's operation when the sibling runs; on those processors the indirect branch predictor is completely disabled, which is an inefficient but valid way to implement STIBP semantics.
This is discussed near the end of the article. It works best when the file system itself stores a checksum in its metadata so it does not have to be calculated for each file for each build. It's not appropriate when your build may include dependencies based on other side effects besides file content. For example, sometimes you depend on the timestamp of an empty file, or the success or failure of another step based on e.g. a log message, to trigger other actions
I'm wondering exactly how far this promise of support will go.

It's no secret (although it still surprises some) that only software in the "main" suite is supported by LTS, so all the useful stuff in "universe" for example, may see no updates.

But there are a lot of large pieces of software in main that are already problematic for support across 5 years, let alone 10.

For example what about Django, which is at version 1.11 in Ubuntu 18.04 and uses Python 2. The Django project doesn't intend to release another version that uses Python 2, and Python 2 goes EOL in 2020. So how is Canonical planning to support a complex web framework out to 2028 when the framework is EOL and the scripting language it is based on is also EOL in 2020?

Realistically I think the answer is going to be, "it can't; install it yourself from upstream, or rely on a snap provided by upstream." But that's what the answer always was, and a few answers like that make the promise of 10 year support for main rather hollow.

Is the promise of support just for the kernel and base OS?
For myself, I make creative plans when busy -- I write out my ideas, draw some sketches of what I have in mind, and then leave it all in a Trello board. Later, when I have free time, I peruse my own ideas, see which ones still look good, and do it.
"an embedded Forth with a Lisp in C" :)

Sounds like the opposite of what the post is advocating.
Try adding quotes, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q="aws+connect"+best+practises... brings back results only to do with Amazon Connect.
Prisoners of War and the power of pessimism
Though the amount of tracing/logging to equate to debugging is so much that you will want to turn it on selectively.

And you will want a mechanism to iterate quickly to see effects of tweaks.

Eventually you have built an interactive debugger.
Engine "Stalling" is not a big issue at all. As a part of training we purposefully stall engines and recover from it. And as angle of attack increases due to increase/decrease in wind speed, engine stalls can be more frequent that usual.