skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you like short fiction, I really recommend "Little Expressionless Animals". It's not as much of a complete head-scrambler as some of his other short fiction.

If you like journalism, some of his pieces on tennis are astounding, eg "Federer as religious experience" or the one where he follows some guy who's worked his ass off his whole life and is one click below the top tier and will probably never make it (forgotten that one).

If you like criticism, "E unibus pluram" (on TV) and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" (about postmodernism, irony and the whole clique of people around Brett Easton Ellis) are both outstanding.

For novels, he only wrote 3 (as far as I know) and they're really great. I personally read "Broom of the System" first because I like reading things in order (I've done this with a number of other authors I like). It's a really cool book, very funny and not quite as huge a commitment as "Infinite Jest". So don't feel you have to start with Infinite Jest, you really don't. It's great though, as is "Pale King". Had he lived to complete "Pale King" I think it would easily have been his greatest novel, but in the state it was published in, it's still outstanding.
My take on the "robots mean more accurate/less risky warfare" is that that's precisely the problem, actually (at least if we start from the assumption that war is bad). By "industrializing" warfare and reducing the cost in lives, we make it more politically palatable.

Risk assessment is a massive part of waging war. If the risk to one side is reduced by using robots (or other weapons-of-cheap-destruction) instead of humans, then the likelihood that side will favor war as a conflict resolution mechanism is (all other things being equal) increased.

On the other hand, if the risk is too high, then alternative options are more likely to be favored. This seems to be the thinking around things like nuclear disarmament and why proliferation is generally seen as a bad thing despite nukes being hands-down the most cost-effective way to end a war (at least against an enemy not similarly equipped - see the Cold War). The reason given for the US bombing of Japan was to save lives by shortening the war - though I'm not about to get into whether that decision was justified.

And that's before we introduce AI, which has had notorious bugs like failing to identify dark-skinned faces relative to light-skinned faces (https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/02/23/artificial-in...) or driverless car crashes. As uncomfortable as I am with proliferation of killer tech in general, introducing AI actually makes my skin crawl.

Even without the unpredictability of AI, "precision strikes" are not necessarily as precise as their name implies: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...
The Spectre/Meltdown Performance Impact on Linux 4.20 with New STIBP Overhead
Unit testing? Do as I say, don't do as I do
5 Signs That Reveal Your Software Development Process Is Agile Only on Paper
>> and it has proved incredibly powerful and effective for all sorts of practical tasks, from voice recognition and image classification to controlling self-driving cars and automating business decisions.

> and it has proved incredibly powerful and effective for all sorts of practical tasks, from signal processing and signal processing to signal processing and a dubious application of deep learning
I describe how I failed to do what I preach and ended up writing integration tests instead of unit ones.
> referrals, it cuts all the bullshit

Referrals get one out of the internet-resume-void, but you still go through the standard interview process, right? I've always seen referrals as a "guaranteed shot at the interviews coding games". Am I doing it wrong?
I've a different view. Before being married the social life of work was fantastic, that naturally waned once the different social circle post marriage developed.

Regarding remote working, although it's great to have the flexibility of working at home with a family around I much preferred going into the office as I found it was a much better working environment. It's also good be be with other creative people so you can thrive in the mental energy there. My family were good at not interrupting when working at home, but it was always there looming in my head.

I still prefer being in the office but do some days at home as I get less interruptions there now the family have grown up.

I've worked in open plan offices and have always had my own desk so can't compare to hot-desking which must be hell, especially for anything creative.
Oh yeah I forgot. "Supposedly fun thing" is hillarious, as is it's predecessor, "Getting away from already being pretty much away from it all".
Thinking about what one is doing is not the only thing that is possible. It's perfectly possible to think about it in ways that further remove oneself from ones actions (scapegoats, rationalizations, etc.), and it's possible to not think about it at all.

That in turn does away with the implied claim that we can "trust" people to think about what they're doing, because there it's the only thing they can even do.

It's like saying the only thing you can do when you're in a gang is to consider your actions and discuss them with others, so just from first principles (we pulled from thin air) we can make this deduction about gang life.

I mean, the context of this is taking issue with the statement that a person doesn't "completely trust" military organizations, that's bad enough. But the claim that being bored a lot between periods of terror means people genuinely reflect, that's stunning.
https://edgedb.com/
It still has the tightest sandbox. So until Firefox has a new Js engine, it's a security-vs-privacy choice.
Tech Comm Trends: Collaboration with Devs and UX Writing
For many people, Trump is a stop word that makes their brain slip a gear and descend into mindless rage. Trump could say the sky is blue and those people would claim otherwise.
Release of Fast CinemaDNG Processor software on GPU is ready for download
Radeon RX 590 Review: AMD’s First 12nm GPU Hits 225W – Tom's Hardware
I think the only interviewing process that really works is to invite the candidate to work for one day, side by side with their future team.

This also gives the candidate a glimpse into the culture behind the HR marketing bs.
Me myself and I, go team go
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a `DestroyBaghdad' procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a `DestroyCity' procedure, to which `Baghdad' could be given as a parameter."

-- Nathaniel S. Borenstein, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Borenstein
I agree, companies like Facebook open source things that are being helpful for them, and in most cases, due to their huge scale, they didn't find anything similar and had to do themselves. For a company to open source its core product it only make sense when you expect to have revenue from enterprise SLAs and custom services, as it is the case of companies like MongoDB and Redhat.
And it's funny that you say the number is so low; according to the stats of 2016-2017[0] there were 971 offences under s.62 recorded.

[0] https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publica... (page 71, A50)
As someone who has spent a lot of time implementing & arguing for work sample based hiring, the hardest part is getting places to remove the useless interviews from their filter process.

Very few devs given the choice between 8 hours of interviews & 7 hours of work sample/1 hour of interview will choose the former. But companies just add the work sample & leave the interviews defeating the point.
Turkey blocks BunnyCDN (14 000 sites)
XDP: 1.5 years in production [pdf]
New Frontiers in High-Level 6502 Programming
People always say that, but it basically means they refuse to even think about a problem because of a preconception that it is impossible.

I guess that’s basically why I often feel driven to make comments like the one I started with.
You'd think it would be possible to create some sort of certification system so that we could prove we are clever and can code once rather than having to prove it again and again.
Mobile DevOps – Can App Stores Be Integrated with DevOps Process
I guess you are right. A minor issue is that you have to beat the 1.8 value of OP in (or in less than) ten rounds because if you have infinite rounds then median can grow infinitely (am I right?). It is not clearly visible in your solution, that it really happens in less then 11 rounds.

But it is easy to extend the strategy with this: First get half of the people above 1.8 by betting 0.400000000...1. Now half of the people have 1.80...1. They are finished.

Half of the people have .5999. They can do all-in twice, then 25% of them will be above 1.8. That is 3 rounds in total.

edit: the maximum of this exact 3 round strategy is betting 8/11$=0.72 in first round, then in round 3 we will have 62.5% of people at 2.45$
edit 2: got the numbers wrong in previous calculation, fixed

(Now someone should chime in, and present the actual optimal solution. ;)
Show HN: Tcpkit – A tool to analyze TCP/UDP packets with Lua
Exactly especially for those just out of university who probably have not worked on any system of scale.
Unfortunately people tend to forget or were never taught that the people have natural rights they still retain even if they aren't referenced in the bill of rights, and that indeed that was one of the main arguments against the bill of rights in the first place (that the government would see the incomplete list and think those were all we had, which is a repudiation of the foundations of the American system). Only one of such rights is the right of self defense, being independent from the right of a militia to keep and bear arms in defense against tyranny. In other words, you could remove the second amendment and the people would still have the right to bear arms.
The fundamentalist FOSS mentality
TL; DR: proteomics: study and analyse proteins that remain in objects to discover pieces of the past. For example, proteins that remain in books, in pottery, in bones, everywhere.
All good points. It would be nice to see some game theory type assessment of these imbalances.
I think Google actually does open source a significant part of their reusable libraries. I'm thinking about stuff like Leveldb, Tensorflow and Angular off the top of my head, but I'm sure there is a lot more.

Some companies do seem to be ideologically opposed to open source (I'm looking at you Balmer-era Microsoft) but Google has always seemed to have had a certain commitment to it.
I don't think cloudfare really does traffic analysis. At least nowhere near the level that google does. It is not their core business.
TabNine now charges 99$ instead of 30$ for personal licenses
Twitter CEO upsets Hindu nationalists during India visit
Developer-less APIs
Responsible Disclosure: CloudFlare – more interested in tracking than security
Use multiple text analysis APIs for free
I think eventually that's where all of this is going. We're going to have to figure out how to bolt access control onto GraphQL in a better way than we currently do today but that's certainly a solvable problem.
> MPEG itself is a standardisation organisms (technically a joint subgroup of ISO and IEC), defining standards out of technologies both patented and not.

One could argue that the MPEG could take a stronger stance by requiring a RF grant from its participants like some other SDOs do.
> investments that maximize growth don't maximize your utility unless your utility is log(wealth)

This needs a slight adjustment to be exactly true:

> investments that maximize growth don't maximize your utility at a specific time horizon unless your utility is log(wealth)

The reason is that in situations of repeated investment, Kelly's policy actually does maximize many time-indefinite notions consistent with linear utility -- for example, if you have a fixed wealth goal (retirement) that is enough successful wagers away, Kelly will minimize the expected time to get there [1].

For me, the important limitation for Kelly is that it is designed around timescales that involve many many repeated bets. Like most asymptotic results, Kelly can win marathons and lose sprints -- so it's important to consider which situation you're in.

[1] https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/Good_Bad_Ke...
It's as if public education, improved nutrition and healthcare, better means of travel, better communication, etc. result in making the population smarter. Who would have thought that if everyone got some of the advantages only the wealthy had in the past that things would turn out better?
Jesus that is such a god-awful dark pattern. It kinda breaks my heart to read this. I guess I'm locked into the iphone ecosystem for a while, despite their exorbitant prices. Sigh.

Too bad that Ubuntu phone died on the vine.
Elon Musk renames his BFR spacecraft Starship
> It was the only browser with a decent Javascript sandbox

What about Safari? IMHO it has strong sandboxing. Another interesting thing I found, is sharing cookie access between private tabs, Safari does not, Chrome does.
You are mixing the analogies here, thus the confusion.

Unlike in war, the tariff 'war' casualties is either money being transferred between countries in different direction than per the usual, or more money paid as import/export duties to the governments.

No money is magically destroyed; instead it changes hands - between the private sector and the government. Now the supposed "dying soldiers" is just more money to fund infrastructure, or invest in company's growth.

That aside, I believe the most important outcome will be diversification of supply providers, as discussed upthread. Right now China has unhealthy near-monopoly on certain key goods and components, especially the cheaper ones, and thus is able to hold the low-to-mid earning americans hostage via the implicit threat of price hikes.

Once diversification progresses sufficiently - i.e., a significant chunk of the sourcing and manufacturing moves out of China and into other countries, like India, Vietnam etc. - the USA will be able to negotiate trade with China on much more equal and equitable terms.

The diversification of supply and manufacturing will strengthen all the sides.
Battery would greatly limit the amount of assistance which can be provided, and greatly increase the trailer's weight.
Elon Musk Just Renamed SpaceX’s Big F** Rocket
One could definitely argue that, but that's a far cry from "a rent-seeking organization that doesn't actually contribute anything useful to society".
We asked the US military for its 'do not buy' list. Surprise: It doesn't exist
How do you go from "... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" to an assumption that this somehow limits "autonomous non-human entities"?

The default situation with rights for people is essentially "everything is permitted unless it has been explicitly forbidden by the laws", with the added restrictions of what the government shall not ever forbid.

If the government does nothing, autonomous non-human entities have the right to bear arms - it doesn't need to be given, it's sufficient if it hasn't been taken away. Since the second amendment does not apply to such entities, the government can freely restrict these rights if it chooses to, but currently it has not.
Between having to endure a "stupid test" and have to shelve a wad of cash just to get a very expensive piece of paper, give me the stupid test every single time.

At least the people doing the stupid tests are checking for stuff that is relevant to them instead of wasting time with pedantic aspects of a programming language or tech stack.
Unless I have copious free time (and I don't) then I'm not going to browse 130 Github repositories and wouldn't known from Adam if they are forks or not (unless they were all created close together). Thus I cannot trust the metrics from them either

LinkedIn, blogs - not exactly reliable sources of information given they are what you are saying about yourself. We've had candidates list the number of Instagram likes they had as if it proved anything. Sold some t-shirts on Cafepress, wow you must be an incredible developer / entrepreneur then

I have seen some amazing code in a Github repository that the candidate couldn't explain to me. I suspect it was a joint project that someone else was a major contributor to

So yes I will want to verify / test your abilities

But personally I read a CV and then talk to the candidate. Worked well so far
>Some great contributions here ...

Agreed.

>bc -l - the -l option really empowers this awesome little calculator.

Right. Since bc is a Unix filter, you can also pipe expressions into it, to be evaluated, so it can be used in general Unix pipelines. E.g.:

echo *arithmetic_expression* | bc -l

and the output comes on stdout, so it can be further piped.

Edit: You have to quote any shell special characters in arithmetic_expression with single quotes, or better, just enclose the entire arithmetic_expression in single quotes. If asterisk (for multiplication) is not quoted, for example, it will be treated as a filename wildcard instead, and likely lead to an error. A wrong and a right example:

$ echo 2 + 3 * 4 | bc -l
(standard_in) 1: syntax error

$ echo '2 + 3 * 4' | bc -l
14
I heard an interview with the researcher on the radio while I was driving to work a few weeks ago, and it floored me. I then thought about the movie with George C. Scott, 'Day of the Dolphin', which my Dad took me to see when I was nine. I cried at the ending (no spoiler here, see the movie!).
Probably not. As I said I recently read a tweet from a designer so it was fresh in my mind.
Single-Cell ‘Biofactories’ Get Nanotech Enhancement to Make Them More Energetic
This is a brilliant portrait of Karl Friston. Thanks for sharing!
How the Media Gets Tesla Self-Driving AI Wrong: The David Pogue Edition
Which is why I use expanded regex with each section commented.
Easy Ressources Growth Hacking Web Scraping – Pc-Dream.it
I saw a trick where you just do:

const eval2 = eval

eval2(...)

That put’s it back in global scope, even when assigned within a closure with access to a local variable. The local variable will be undefined, rather than it’s actual value, even when called next to the regular eval(). Odd, I know.

Here’s a quote:

"any invocation of eval that is not a direct call uses the global environment as its variable environment rather than the caller’s variable environment." ECMAScript 5 standard,
Why then they offer free fully functional CDN-like service, free SSL ? Data is new oil, and CF has all data in plaintext - your logins/passwords included.
Prisma is used as an ORM for your database, so you would still need to write your own graphql server which sits in front of Prisma.

Hasura is meant to be exposed to the clients directly with declarative access control rules. When you have complex business logic you would write the logic yourselves and expose it alongside Hasura.

Disclosure: I work at Hasura on graphql-engine
I recently evaluated a bunch of different messaging systems, and found NATS to have the widest support for different client languages, plus those clients are also maintained by the same parent company. With other MQs we have used, we have found much variety in the quality of the client libs. YYMV.
Classic and contemporary psychology experiments replicated
The equations are already arranged in a manner that the unknowns can be solved directly by forward substitution (3s=30 => s=something, 2k+s=20 => 2k=something => k=something,...). I am shocked that so many people in that twitter thread are not able to solve them.

Edit. But this may be a trick question, because in the last equation, what you have is not a pair of shoes, but one single shoe. The same for the thingy wrapped in newspaper.
I also use this form but it’s even more complex to some people than the one-liners, which I guess doesn’t help the impediment-factor
how do you claim ownership of data you release publicly at no charge to the users? how do you enforce anyone who copies it by hand or programmatically, does the minimum work to derive some insight and then copyrighting that? You can't. Once it's on the internet, anything you release will simply be relinquishing control.

It's foolish to assume that the lawyers and the justice system will help you out. This is simply not a case of somebody pirating a movie and slapping on their own copyright.

CFAA was how craigslist won but that's been thrown out thanks to the EFF lawyers.

Going forward, there will be little to no recourse for "web scraping public data".
Basics of Coupons and Discounts – Identify the Right Way for Your Business?
I wonder how much it matters who is paying more? A more important factor might be who can last longer. A president with a fickle base used to the many comforts of a highly developed country? Who will vote again in two short years? Or the Chinese people already used to the government deciding what's best for them?
https://wa.me/your-phone-number
The difference between military and civilian decision making is this:

Civilians can be politically active, convince other and refuse to work, or quit on case by case basis without criminal penalties.

In military you can only refuse to follow obviously illegal orders and even then it's a huge personal risk. Refusing to follow morally wrong but technically legal orders will lead to criminal punishment.

For example. Targeting civilians is illegal. If every male above 16 years of age is considered combatant, then it's legal to kill unarmed children from the sky. Refusing on the principle will lead to military court. Military court is extremely unlikely to rule that refusing to follow orders was the right action.
I personally started using it when I saw it on hackernews and thought about buying it. $30 seemed to be a good affordable price for me as an independent developer. But $99 is a big number for me.
So I think, that's it. Bye TabNine
> standardisation organisms (technically a joint subgroup of ISO and IEC

Guessing you wanted "standards organisation" and technically MPEG is a Working Group of a Subcommittee of the Joint Technical Committee between ISO and IEC.

Patents are sad because they create an incentive to argue for a technically inferior choice that you "own" over a superior choice that you don't own.

CA/B Forum (which isn't an SDO but bear with me) ran into trouble when setting up the Ten Blessed Methods (our name, not theirs) for validating control over an FQDN because it turns out some ways to implement these methods were patented by members. Although CA/B isn't an SDO, the effect of it making rules about how things are done is to set a standard, since all significant vendors in this space are members of CA/B, and all major trust stores require you to obey CA/B rules even if you're not a member.

The patents didn't cover any of the good ways to implement the Ten Blessed Methods. Literally in every case the patent described the most unsatisfactory half-arsed way to achieve something you could imagine, the existence of these patents was causing vendors to prefer to do something bad (which they'd patented) rather than something good (which they had not). But there was a reluctance to just say "OK, we patented all this stinking garbage, but forget about that" and get on with it, this stalled things for many months. After all patents aren't free, who wants to admit they bought something worthless? Ugh.