skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forgive my ignorance. I'm more of a social scientist than a programmer. Questions:

1. Why not go for 16-character strings (instead of 26 or 36), with each character representing 8 bits?

Sure, you'd need 256 possible characters, but it's almost 2019 and Unicode has been with us for decades now. Surely we could be more cosmopolitan than Americentric ASCII and curate 256 characters for an 8-bit encoding?

With a 16-byte string, we could compare and process strings much faster, particularly with SIMD instructions like Intel/AMD's SSE 4.2 string comparison instructions. They're optimized for 16-byte strings and were introduced many years ago in the Nehalem architecture. That's a couple of generations before Sandy Bridge, so any server today is going to support it.

2. What does it mean to be "user-friendly" when it comes to these sorts of IDs? What are some scenarios where users interact with them or communicate or share them with someone or some authority? Crockford wanted his 32 character set to be easy to convey on a telephone, which seems like an expiring use case today. It seems like we should be able to use all sorts of non-ASCII characters now, without resorting to the Unicode Klingon or Tengwar blocks. Do we really need to be able to pronounce them all like Crockford anticipated?

NOTE: Unicode characters beyond the Basic Latin block take two or more bytes each, so we wouldn't be able to use them encoded as Unicode. What I'm advocating is a 256 character set with each character encoded in one byte, strictly for the purposes of generating these sorts of unique IDs represented by compact 16-character strings. Call it Duarte's Base256. All these other BaseN systems seem orthogonal to character encodings, or they just assume ASCII. I guess my idea would require both a character set and an encoding scheme. The latter would be similar to ISO/IEC 8859-15 and Windows 1252, but more complete with 256 printable characters. A lot of them could probably be emoji.

How good or terrible is this idea?
It seems to me that you just made the argument for the opposition. We know that Ellison was successful in a business that involved selling big contracts to a small number of purchasers spending from a budget of company or taxpayer money. But that's not Tesla's business. Does Ellison know how to sell to individuals spending large amounts of their own money on a product with lots of similar competitors? Maybe? But he doesn't have a track record of doing that.

The retort here might be that people who have a track record of being "good at business" are good at all business. I personally don't buy that. I think too much executive decision-making is guesswork based on pattern-matching to prior experience for that to hold; if you have no prior experiences with a matching pattern, you're no more or less qualified than the next smart person making it up as they go.
Greenland ice melting 'even in winter'
Reverse engineering is one of the core skills employed in vulnerability research. If I'd glance behind the shoulder of a security researcher and not see an IDA or OllyDbg window open, I'd be very surprised.
How to Bypass Respondus Lockdown Browser
I think he realized his comfort zone is the middle tier of three-tier web apps and is doing his best to stay there.

On the other hand, this code was in the middle tier of a three-tier Grails web app, so....
I think to some degree he tried, I'm still wondering if "bRspd" is the same guy, anytime it talks about proper hacks / database dumps it blames whoever bRspd is, and keeps him and Judge Judy out of it. It just seems a little too coincidental. He should of published as an anonymous blogger (or more), and then based his wiki work off that. Maybe purposely write in terrible English in anoymous blogs.
Every Building on Every Block: A Time Capsule of 1930s New York
... because the only way to introduce ciphers is, what, chronologically? Why? And why does that make it superficial?
My point about floating point numbers having no advantages other than speed and memory usage was referring to the following: Some people think that you can decide equality of floating point numbers, while you can't decide equality of real numbers, but this advantage is an illusion because rounding errors can make numbers that should equal each other not equal each other. So ultimately it ends up being a pure efficiency vs accuracy trade-off, where efficiency includes things like speed and memory, and of course that could make it impractical in an embedded setting. I can't list out every single disadvantage of something being slower and less space-efficient, including in your pet interest, which is embedded programming. Is that not politically correct?

And ultimately, I'm interested in beautiful things as well as practical things. I fully acknowledged that the idea here is impractical, though theoretically possible, with some very interesting theorems coming out of it. I don't want to always think like a hard-nosed practitioner. That's stupidly dogmatic.

[edit]

Const-me is complaining that I didn't mention his pet interest, which is GPGPU. And then he said some totally irrelevant and obvious stuff (to anyone who knows CS), just like you did. This is why we can't have nice things.
We sort of do have that class of cars: Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. They are restricted to 25mph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle
The assets would definitely survive in some form, but would anyone think that Tesla brand owned by Ford is really Tesla? I don't think so.

Almost certainly a default would result in a purchase from one of the traditional car manufacturers that wants to destroy a potential rival, scoop up battery IP and get a hard start on automation. Ford even have the cash on hand to refinance the debt.
One little-known fact is that (at least for Euro NCAP crash test scores), the scores are only comparable within "vehicle class", and even then by vehicle mass.

> Euro NCAP’s frontal impact test simulates a car crashing into another of similar mass and structure [...] cars which are within 150kg of one another are considered comparable.

This means that at least for Euro NCAP scores, you can only meaningfully compare crash test results within a type class of vehicle, for vehicles of similar weights. Heavier, higher vehicles will usually be better-off, so a compact roadster with a 5* score is not going to come off well from a collision with a 5* SUV.

Ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20090222214930/http://www.euronc...
As warning, there’s still a bunch of work to translate various types from Rust to Postgres Datums.

I’m interested in feedback on the library, so if you use it and experience any issues, please let me know.
Who Are You, Really? A Peek at the Future of Identity
That blog is fantastic, thanks for the link.
Weeding out misleading misnomers
Just an extra nugget of food for thought - I'm all for "seeing [something] through to the end," as it shows a lot of grit and determination. But in your quest for being more decisive and deliberate, you can also give yourself room to fail or to quit or to change your mind. The road to success isn't always built on a single decision that you follow straight through like an arrow to a destination. Your path may meander, and your destination may change. It's all part of the journey. When his kids occasionally seemed "stuck," my father used to tell us "You don't have to take the perfect step, just take a step in the direction you think you want to go. Maybe it'll be right, maybe it won't, but then you look around, make a decision, take the next step and keep moving."
And I wasn’t trying to defend Go :) Just that I hear a lot of comments like these, but they all ignore the possibility that $IMPERATIVE_LANG is the right choice IN SPITE of the inferior type system. In particular I would love an FP lang with Go’s focus on user-friendliness, simplicity, and practicality.
I have a CC with google for their other cloud stuff. Is there a separate one for this?
I think they're talking about data locality. If a single processing step access data that are "neighbours", in some systems that data is likely served from a single server. This means a) better performance and b) higher likelihood of consistency.

Of course the guarantee is still merely eventual consistency, but data locality does reduce the chance this becomes visible.
This makes no sense to me either. A grant for small businesses AND remote workers would seem much more useful.
This is called Cube, by the way. There are a ton of resources out there for building a good cube.
The man literally owns a volcano lair. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/14/see-lanai-the-hawaiian-islan...
Mobile Hackers IO: the hacker news for flutter developers
Tesla issued a bunch of bonds that come due in March. If the stock price is above ~350 then they can pay off the bonds in by converting them to stock. If it's lower than that they pay them off in cash.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-to-pay-march-convertib...
I doubt OSX would run slower if I doubled the RAM in my Macbook Air though, even if the RAM I bought wasn't the best.
"Also, the goal of advertising is often not to convince the user they want something, it's to get them familiar with something through repeated exposure..."

familiarity breeds contempt. And in the end we hate the ads and the products.
Do you mean "Serious Cryptography"? Applied Cryptography isn't a No Starch Press book.
Keep in mind this is with significant subsidies. A 33kWh battery pack alone costs more than that retail. You can make anything cheap to the consumer when you funnel tax money into it.
I think the import/export is no longer lossy since the recent updates, they've been fixing tons of issues.

I've only got it a week, so fingers crossed they fixed that one.
AAMOF, I've never seen a more shallow explanation of AES... and I find it rather superficial for this reason. Man, that's nice you have written a book, now plant a tree, have a baby, and relax... take a constructive review on your work. Use it to improve that version.
“Modern” C++ Lamentations
I doubt most developers really understand how floating points work ( as in how it is represented in memory and why and the mantissa, bias, etc ). Most understand that it is just an approximation and go on about their day.
Reversing is an art more than a science, and the most important things to learn are not tools of the trade but habits of thought and approaches to problem solving.

I appreciate what this guy is doing by documenting his learning process, it will help him without doubt, but... as an audience - perhaps we should not learn a difficult skill from someone who started their own journey into this subject a few days ago?
The Bash manual seems to imply that they use /dev/fd to implement process substitution like regular pipes, but passing the pipe file descriptor as its filename under /dev/fd.

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Process-S...
Counter-theory: a bot builder needs to test out his bot code, and used tweets about Bird Box movie as the test subject to shill for, hoping to drown amongst the other fans, rather than something that might get flagged.

Seems just as plausible, if not more..
Personal customizations for quickly navigating IRC is one example of many why I put in the time investment a few years ago.

Integrating emacs with my CMAKE workflow was another.
Wish we could get cheap cars in the U.S. Our prices are crazy.

I recall hearing the smart car could be sold cheaply in its original country, but after importing it and meeting all U.S. requirements, the price quadrupled.
> You're talking about a guy who has no shame in using a publicly traded company (Oracle) to bail himself out of personal investments gone wrong (See Pillar Data).

Kind of like using SpaceX to fund SolarCity and then using Tesla to bail out SolarCity so that SpaceX bond holdings doesn't go bust?
Yeah see, this is why I would never ever rent a room or property out via Aribnb and similar wildcards are why I would never drive strangers around.

>the glass panel on my staircase

Wait, what?

> two couples with infants had stayed and I spent three hours with a cleaning crew

That seems excessive if not odd.

>Airbnb didn’t get back to me. After three days I decided to call the local press and share the videos we’d found to try to get the company’s attention

So he waited until what, Wednesday January 3rd when presumably employees were likely still off from the holiday and dealing with a backlog to go running to the press? Ugh, I hate that we've created a society that waits hours, or days at best, to go running to press/social media to try and cause a disturbance instead of realizing "oh hey, it's a holiday and they probably have staff off and a backlog" in this instance or when a 'celebrity' has a 'problem' and takes to twitter like with Kevin Smith and 'too fat to fly'.
Nope. Just called my subaru dealer, they don't have any additional manuals for sale that aren't on subaru website. I did find this website though https://techinfo.subaru.com/
I'm sure that electric car manufacturers will have the same things to say when people point to previous claims of extreme longevity.
Unrelated but NIPS changing name to NeurIPS has just drawn more attention to the alleged inappropriateness of its former name.
Show HN: Dashboard I've Built
> Man, that's nice you have written a book, now plant a tree, have a baby, and relax... take a constructive review on your work. Use it to improve that version.

Your feedback isn't really actionable. How is the author supposed to use anything about your feedback to "improve that version"?
I disagree. If people researching how to industrialise antibiotic production had all gone home, there would have been an enormous amount of extra suffering.

If the people who came up with "Monday" as the new name for PricewaterhouseCoopers had all gone home, no extra suffering.
App Icon Design – WWDC 2017 [video]
Not an experienced mouse free|multi terminal workflow user but I find Kitty, as an alternative to terminal + tmux, is quite productive. It just works and has features I-a beginner-need like tab, tiling, layout switcher, and default memorable shortcuts.
Expect software updates for Tesla automobiles to become progressively more expensive and more difficult to install, they will also be packaged with adware.

All patents will be closed and litigation against all other electric car makes will ensue.
But as a buyer to build a reputation I need to buy multiple things , this means I need to buy drugs from X, a gun from Y, some forbidden magazines from Z, my anonymity drops with each purchase. If I would do heavy illegal things I would not reuse same identity. I doubt that the mafia on the dark web have real reviews and fair escrows.
Generalizing and naming is the purpose of functions. An add that only handles 4 and 5 need not exist; add(4,5) gets replaced with 9 and that's that. If I'm looking at a complex expression, it's easier to convince myself that it's right if it contains 9 than if it contains add(4,5). Why would I write an add(4,5) that fails and has to be repaired, if I can write a 9 that doesn't fail? It could only be because I'm anticipating a future generalization.

Oh, and can write a 9 that doesn't fail? That goes against TD; shouldn't I first break the lexical analyzer of my language so that the 9 constant goes red? Then repair things, so the 9 test goes green?

How can you call it TDD if you're relying on non-TDD pieces that work without being covered by tests that previously failed?
I clicked through to these comments because I didn't know who Larry Ellison was and wanted to get an idea of what the HN community thinks of this move. Seeing this as the top comment gives me a pretty good answer about that.
Opera had something called Unite just before it went under; it was a web-server that ran on the browser and allowed you to connect to friends p2p for sharing, etc., it wasn't quite there but it had the concept of the 'net as _the_ social network without intermediates.

I was really excited by the concept and thought we were on track to have "the next Facebook". Primarily it needed caching to handle self-hosted content not being always on.

Still hopeful we can move on that direction so we can self-host and publish to different platforms, etc..
> Many (most?) stream ciphers actually use blocks internally.

I don't think there have been any new designs for a good while that didn't. RC4 is, I think, the last actual stream cipher that saw widespread use (apart from designed-as-broken telco crypto). The same observation can be made for classified crypto, where they used to use bit-stream ciphers like Walburn or Saville (efficient, relatively low gate count hardware implementation) but pivoted to block ciphers since the ~80s.
Which is included? I couldn't find anything like "dirs -v" in the fish manual. Without that, "pushd +N" isn't very useful.
You don't have to be very far from the epicenter to survive a nuclear blast.
Firefox has a reader mode I've gotten accustomed to. I also use 'Dark Reader' which is a plugin for both Firefox and Google Chrome which customizes any website's color scheme to whatever darkness setting you want, or light.
If you Google how to manipulate decimal values, or you type `rate = 1.23`, you're almost always going to get floating point. `1.1 + 2.2 == 3.3` yields false in most commonly used programming languages, with the notable exception of SQL.

That's what it means that we've established floats as the standard. You have to specifically choose not to use floats, look up your language's entirely non-standardized approach for representing exact decimals, and then maintain constant vigilance against entirely intuitive things like decimal literals.
A foreman on a union construction site is generally a union member. The job superintendant (employed by the general contractor) would be a better analog, they're non-union management on a construction site.

edit: I work in commercial construction management.
That must be just a tiny bit of the entire data set they have about you. Tracking from all pages containing like button, all characters entered into chat, including those typed but deleted or not sent otherwise. I wonder how does it match against GDPR request.
Because drug users are much more likely to become returning customers, there is more money to be made on being legit instead of a scam.
ok found it. https://techinfo.subaru.com

I had no idea this existed. thanks.
Just got an alert about 911 being out in MA. A bit belated, if state police twitter is correct that it was fixed 3 hrs ago https://twitter.com/MassStatePolice/status/10786404842292224...
Its speculation, but not terribly wild. This is the world we live in.

The most likely explanation is the holiday effect where people go on vacation and stuff goes wrong.
Transformer "explosions" don't last very long. Transformer fires are a different color. [0] As others have noted, the color suggests arcing. Arcing has a number of different causes, but should be brief -- system protection in the form of circuit breakers should interrupt the flow of power immediately ending the arc.

This article is more factual, characterizing it as a electrical fault creating an arc: https://abc7ny.com/electrical-arc-turns-night-sky-blue-in-ny...

It is curious that 1) it happened at all, and 2) system protection didn't immediately isolate the circuit.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZipeaAkuC0
Delirium 2018 Korku Film izle 1080p
Wow, not surprising to me.

I noticed an explosion of Birdbox memes on social media yesterday. I hadn't heard of the movie and did some research. Mediocre reviews and the plot seemed like ordinary horror/thriller. Still, these memes were popping up everywhere. No way this was organic.
This is very helpful, thank you for taking the time to write a detailed answer.

If I was starting out today knowing what I know I would approach design/marketing agencies

This sounds very logical. I was thinking about this, but for data analysis work. I used to work for a healthcare software firm and I know there is a lot of data analysis work in healthcare - this is probably true in other industries too.

I just need to find the right approach.
I understand and appreciate what you are saying and I agree with many situations this logic applies to.

I do not agree that it applies to this specific example however. As far as I can see, this grand challenge should be classified as low priority and low benefit unless data can be provided to raise the priority and importance to a higher level. There are a myriad of grand challenges here on earth that would be significantly more cost effective and would provide substantial gains with much lower overhead, risk and loss. I am not seeing the value in spending trillions on doing very minimal and limited scientific research on a planet that is not habitable and not applicable to a majority of people here on earth.

What am I getting for the trillions being spent on these efforts?
Glad you liked it.
Keep me posted.
Auditing Solidity Code with Slither from Trail of Bits
Really? I know engineers of all stripes who hold fundamentalist religious views.

I know an engineer doing well at Amazon for 7 years now, who pays a 3rd party streaming service that sensors violence and sexuality from movies for him.

Musings on it here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
Monitoring processes by abusing mutexes
> If your "why" doesn't contains this, I have an hard time understanding why you want it in the first place.

The "why" doesn't need to include every minor style nit (all the way down to variable naming) that came up during the review. It doesn't need to include every "I would have done it this way instead" comment which was in neither the original nor final version. That's noise, not signal.

> Personally every time I only needed a tiny bits more context

Lucky you. For much of the code I have read or written, that was not the case. In general it tends to be less and less the case as code climbs up the complexity/innovation scale.

> I'd rather die than lose time over something I consider won't save time in the long term.

Is that an unavoidable issue with the medium, or more of a reflection of how some people are bad at writing? I've whipped out a spec for a medium-complexity feature or component in under an hour, and been thanked for it five years later. Many times. If you've never had that experience, then I can only say I hope you'll be able to some day.

> when we do, the ticket information is enough and if it's not

Again, lucky you. Others have a different experience.
Perhaps it would help to frame these discussions as not needing to consider whether aspects of our cultures are strengths or weaknesses, and simply talk about the differences frankly.
Wikipedia points out that there was only one manned space flight in the decade following Skylab 4. I’m betting there were many astronauts who never flew again around that time period.
Ok that estimate is better, 500 calories per hour. But how many calories per mile? That's the proper comparison.

And again, 'very cheap' is relative. In a minimum-wage job it can be your entire discretionary income for you shift. And when I commuted by bicycle I got several flats over a year. I've driven a car for decades without a single flat that interrupted my trip (slow leaks).

And actually not many folks can change a bicycle tire, certainly not in 5 minutes, not at the side of a busy street.

All this glib dismissal of the cost of bicycling seems to stem from a fairly comfortable viewpoint.
Language designers, I would guess.
That really depends on what your definition of "flourish" is. The United States is really the only country that has "flourished" under a capitalist system and that's only if you define that through the definition of capitalism which is to say that there is more capital in the US than in other nations. Attributing that to capitalism, though, and not to years and years of industrial progress, human slavery, and, arguably, immoral behavior is somewhat naive, in my opinion.