skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's got some good points but it is a garbled argument.

Really I don't know about JS Hell, but C++ compilers aren't slow because nobody has tried to speed them up, rather the nature of C++ is that it is slow to compile. Every so often somebody rage quits C++ and starts a language like Go because of this.

The real data point is that Clojurescript is only slightly slower to execute than real Clojure, but takes two orders of magnitude more time to compile.

He's right though that people have to move on past Electron. Lately I have been building applications in Python/tkinter and I still can't get over how fast it is on both my mac and PC both to start up and when running. There is none of the "spend 30 seconds watching a splash screen" that we're are accustomed to with advanced applications in Java and C++ (eg. PyCharm and Photoshop)

Another thing that impresses me is the size and speed of small GUI applications written in C for Windows such as this little utility:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk...

I think MacOS is also part of the problem. Lately I added a new keyboard to my Mac and I thought I was having Bluetooth problems but the main reason it was unresponsive was that the spellchecking baked into the OS would cause keyboard input to lock up for a few seconds periodically.

Later on I noticed that web browsers on Mac OS (Safari/Firefox/Chrome) seem to "go to lunch" and not respond to mouse clicks for 5 seconds every so often. I imagine this impacts Electron apps.

I think people have been "frog boiled" into expecting computers to be slow.
Serious Fun with Numbers (2010)
One way or another, that landlocked oil in Alberta will make its way to market.

If the US doesn't want it, it will get pipelined to the Pacific coast and tankered to Asia or sent by rail within North America or to the Pacific.

I think Keystone XL's real detractors are US oil producers. It's real proponents are oil consumers that (clearly!) could not care less about where the oil comes from.
Off-topic: I majored in history for my BA. For the first year out of college, I struggled to find work, and was worried that I had made a terrible choice. 8 years on, after supplementing my studies with essentially an Associate’s in CS, my view has changed significantly. Here are the most useful skills that I’ve gained from my study of history:

* There’s a phrase among historians that writing history is like drinking in an oceanful of information and pissing out a cup. As a technical writer, this is obviously highly relevant to my work. But I’d venture that this skill will resonate with any “knowledge worker.”

* Towards the end of the major you start thinking about historiography, which is the study of writing history. You question what kinds of primary sources writers are basing their arguments on, and what kinds of biases (or “perspectives” to use a more neutral term) these writers are bringing to their analyses. A relevant skill in this age of “fake news.”

* History professors place a lot of value on concise writing. It’s obvious to me now why that would be the case, but at the time I didn’t make the connection.

* I went into the major with a vague desire to learn more about how society works. In that regard the field definitely does not disappoint. I enjoyed how open-ended the field of inquiry was. Yet at the same time you have to stay somewhat grounded in reality. I.e. when you write about a topic you have to provide primary sources that validate your argument.

Anyways, I don’t have any major agenda for writing all of this, other than the fact that it’s Saturday morning and I’m hyped on coffee and I figured someone might enjoy considering how studying history is still relevant to the modern workforce.
Windows is different. Linux puts effort into making the Unix style of IO work fast.
It can be the case that the output of your Macbook isn't really flat, or that you have some kind of software processing enabled. You could test a $20 class compliant Behringer UCA202 USB interface against it, which is flat, and try to disable processing or use a software which just passes the signal to the interface.

It can also be your room. If you're not exactly located in the same listening position the listening experience can change a lot, even with the same setup.

Your room is basically an equalizer and should be regarded as a part of your audio system. That's how some Hifi sellers can trick you into more expensive setups, they just change the speaker positions or your location to optimized defaults. It's crazy how they can trick people.

A harder hitting snare can be caused by changes to the upper mids and lower highs, by anything that is located between you and the speakers, and then the later reflections of the room which also add up.
> Eventually, deflation in bitcoin will be very low and will be only down to people losing their private keys.

This is not how deflation works. There's plenty of online material on this subject, you would do well to get familiar with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation
I encountered this. I remember it. It was/is real. But I only happened to encounter it on Ubuntu, fwiw.
The worst aspect of our universe might be that it does not care about our feelings. We have evolved to gain status in terms of competence and knowledge, but most edifices of ideas eventually collapse (beyond ars gratia artis), because there is only one truth and many ways to perceive it. Computationalism renders centuries worth of philosophical, religious and perhaps even mathematical inquiry redundant. People have erected their careers upon claims that can be casually explained away by simple computational mechanisms. It's easy to see how the simplicity could be perceived as insulting. It's a tragedy, really and Bach might be a bit too insensitive about this.
Playable ZX Spectrum Game from Bandersnatch (Black Mirror)
It seems to have a whole lot of data that would probably need to be loaded. Maybe a lot of that time is spent in initialization. Is it faster at parsing a second, third, etc. address once loaded?

By the way, a more convenient way to benchmark Perl:

perl -MBenchmark -e 'timethis(500, sub { ... your code here ... });'
as far as i know the recovery rate for stolen crypoto currencies is zero
Show HN: Immediate ownership of funds whenever a customer pays you
> A Win32 path like C:\dir\file gets translated to an NT path like \??\C:\dir\file, where \??\C: is a symlink in Object Manager to a device object like \Device\HarddiskVolume4

Cool! Can the "NT paths" be used directly on Windows? As far as I know the ordinary Win32/NTFS system doesn't even have symlinks and this feels quite a handicap.
Indeed. I remember getting Akalabeth and it’s floppy disk in a ziplock plastic bag. Rushed home to play it on my apple //c. I was hooked. Played all the ultimas, including other origin games. In those days, I also played the original wolfenstein on the apple. It had synthesized sound for speech. That same sense of wonder and fun I experienced with these games hit me again when I played wolfenstein 3D, doom, and quake. Some of today’s games like assassin’s creed, Witcher, Zelda on switch give that same mix of emotion and fun.
> The main goal seems to be positionning a point on a map.

It says "Actually geocoding addresses to a lat/lon" in the "Non-goals" section of README.md.
A documentation suggestion:

"Why should you even bother?" and "Features in a nutshell" should be near the top, between "Table of contents" and "Getting started", because those are the things people will want to know first.
Technically yes, Descent was very impressive for its time, but 1) Doom accomplished more technical feats first and 2) Doom had much wider appeal because Descent was too difficult to play. Remember this was the early days and the proper way of controlling an FPS hasn't really been figured out yet. Most players didn't even player Doom on the now standard WASD+MouseAim scheme. Descent's starting control scheme was utterly unintuitive, especially given how you had to contort your left hand around pressing A to accelerate and Z to reverse.
No one is trying to make their children slaves.
I guess I've only been exposed to the independent scene (which I would assert accounts probably for the majority of releases, if not the sales volume)

That you're using a handrolled engine is fine, I'm sure your company knows what they're doing. But in the context of this post, and for people who'd like to start game development/design, saying that most devs write their own engine is in my opinion damaging, as I really don't think that most smaller studios do. It increases the barrier to entry, and perpetuates a certain amount of elitism, which really considering the make up of the industry is no help at all.
Oligopoly. Discover card and American Express are both mostly accepted (I say mostly because some companies don't accept American Express due to their charge back policies).

And yes, it makes it so much better. True monopolies can slack so hard and yet still rake in boatloads of cash because their customers have no other option. Google cannot sit around on their search engine or other companies will steal all their customers. Just look at how duck duck go is growing in popularity.
Chaotic pendulum
That's really cool, I didn't know those transmitters existed. Thanks for the tip. :-)
Yes they can, though one problems is that because NT paths are less restrictive than Win32 paths, you can create files / directories that you then have trouble doing things with using standard tools
Working with Java11 now :-)
"Because they can" is the short answer.

As long as there are no direct personal consequences from type of needless waste, a large segment of the population will just keep on doing it. They'll be dead long before the consequences hit, after all.

Edit: However, it should be noted that the confetti is made from waste paper and is biodegradable. I still think it could be put to a better use, but it's not like they're dumping a load of plastic on the streets.

That still leaves 57 tons of trash that isn't recycled, though. What a waste.
It's not inherently the case that the area is worse off than under the status quo. If you have a business that would consume $45M in government services, having them pay $50M rather than the $150M they would pay under the existing laws would still put you up by $5M compared to them going somewhere else.

The issue is that designing tax changes for specific companies is ridiculous. If the local area can net $5M by charging lower taxes in this specific case, why is that not just the general rule so they can net $5M a hundred times from a hundred other companies without having to negotiate separately with each of them? And $50K a hundred thousand times from smaller companies?
> deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code.

Oh, how I wish I could share the joy I experience using Paredit with those parentheses. Paredit turns parentheses from an inconvenience into a turbo button for modifying code at an entirely new level of abstraction.

When you started coding, you probably used an editor that worked on units that were single characters. Think Notepad. Then maybe you learned a programmers editor like Emacs, Vim, or Atom or Sublime. There you learned to cut, copy, fold, spindle, and mutilate code in lines or paragraphs.

But Paredit... oh Paredit... now you have the tools to work with your code not in characters, lines, or paragraphs, but in code forms—the same stuff your code is made from.

And the best part is that Paredit doesn’t have to have a deep knowledge of your code, groping imperfectly like Intellisense. Paredit is deterministic and easy to implement.

If I could have an S-expression based version of every other language simply for paredit, I'd take it.

Now a story for a different day is how much I hate typing commas in non-lisps.
You seem to be confusing me with someone who wants low taxes. I do not. I just disagree that we already have low taxes, as you implied with your comparison.

Norway is an outlier even among rich countries. Having lower taxes than Norway does not mean taxes are low.
I'm not a super expert but I think that is the case and you even need them if you want to use some advanced features like paths that are longer than MAX_PATH or these virtual mount kinds of things.

But IMO it's ugly as hell and just begging for compatibility problems. So don't go there, at least not to get super long paths. 260 bytes should be enough for anybody.
Any chance of a non-paywalled version? Not sure why paywalled links keep popping up on HN.
Ad hominem much. Bla bla you believe what you want in a civilized country the only gun needed by the police may be a taser gun.
Windows does have symlinks and file junctions. Not sure how these compare to other file systems.
More or less, yes. We have our own philosophies about data organization and management and the like, but largely, we are aiming at the same market.
As a dev manager (small team) I am trying to never “assign” work. I just prioritize and describe, and let fellow coders pull the items that are most appealing to them.

Sometimes it means that I wind up doing work I would rather delegate if I were being selfish, but for the most part, everyone benefits.
what gender pronoun controversy? did we read the same article?
Uber in particular has no moat.

So long as Uber is selling half-priced taxi rides that are subsidized by VCs there is not a lot of competition. At real prices, there is nothing to stop the yellow cabs or somebody else in a town from making their own ride hailing app so you not only have competition from big players like Lyft but also many smaller players.

(E.g. I have no smartphone and no Uber app but when I have to leave my hotel/AirBNB at an ungodly hour to go to the airport I have no trouble reserving a ride from somebody the night before.)

It's not credible that Uber will be dominant in self-driving cars since everybody from Google to General Motors will get a piece of that. (e.g. nobody is going to have a complete set of patents, there will be cross licensing...)

This article on Bloomberg seriously misrepresents the situation with Uber:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-27/masayoshi...

That is, he's not competing with Sand Hill Road, he's buying what they sell and making it possible for them to look like they are successful at what they do. If he can find "greater fools" to buy into an Uber IPO he may do OK, but if he can't he might have to commit Seppuku.
> There is none of the "spend 30 seconds watching a splash screen" that we're are accustomed to with advanced applications in Java and C++ (eg. PyCharm and Photoshop)

Are your applications of similar size and complexity as these Java and C++ applications? Photoshop is a huge beast.

I ask because I’ve written C++ GUI applications that start up instantly (sub second). I’ve also written Python GUI applications that did not. It depends on what and how much you’re doing on startup. Most GUI applications aren’t as large as PyCharm or Photoshop and start up significantly faster, regardless of implementation language.

> Later on I noticed that web browsers on Mac OS (Safari/Firefox/Chrome) seem to "go to lunch" and not respond to mouse clicks for 5 seconds every so often.

I’ve not had this problem personally, but I have had Chrome lock up my entire system on Ubuntu (input including mouse clicks simply not doing anything, but if I happen to have another window open I can alt tab to that and then everything is good again, or at least I can kill Chrome).
I develop on Windows 10 because I’m a .NET developer and really like the idea of WSL. But the more I use it the more frustrated I become by its file access performance. I started off using it for Git but now I just use Git bash in Poweshell (which also annoys me with its slowness).

I haven’t developed on an actual *NIX machine in years but recently I deployed something to my DO VPS and it “built” (php composer) in what felt like 1/100 of the time it was taking on my computer, whether running the Windows binaries in Powershell/CMD or the Linux binaries in WSL. Although I will say WSL is slower.

In fact, it was so fast that I’m about to call Microcenter and see about picking up a Thinkpad to install Linux on.
> I could of sworn it's not a huge difference on Linux, at least when using the GUI, maybe when doing straight rm it's quicker.

Using Linux file management GUIs can be a disaster. Some years ago, I was massaging many GiB of text, using a crude hack, with scripts that did grep, sed, awk, etc. And I had many working directories with >10^4 tiny files each (maybe 10^5 even).

In terminal, everything was fine. But opening a GUI would swap out so much that the box would freeze. I don't know why. I just learned to avoid doing it.
The Self-Described Jets Owner-In-Waiting Will Tailgate for Now
No. It's a net waste of resources, and ultimately a pointless exercise in doing work for nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
So you have a centralized database that tracks all purchases country-wide? Maybe Portugal government could compete with Google/FB providing personalized ads...
Oh, absolutely - I was responding to the claim in the OP that 'Contemporary Islam is not known for its engagement in the modern scientific project' (the opening sentence), which of course is completely out of step with the title of the piece, given that the three largest Islamic nations (Indonesia, Pakistan, and Iran) are not Arab states.
Uber is wildly unprofitable, though. There is a lot of (justified) speculation about Uber's ability to exist when it is not able to subsidize its users rides with VC money.
True, but there is also the store-and-forward subscription model where the message is placed on the queue without an intended recipient. Message passing can also be asynchronous but direct, e.g., Mach messages.
This video isn't trying anything new. These are ideas that we've seen already, just presented in a way that is palatable to engineers.

Reason itself can understand its limits. That's a good thing, we are lucky and we got to that poitn.

> It's rather the opposite here; some are trying to forbid reason to stray outside the box they believe it belongs in.

Nobody is forbidding anything, as long as you don't make it dangerous. Excesses of reason led to great crimes in the last centuries but this is not the case.

> The possibility that reason might explain mental processes appears to be so threatening that many people are attacking this video for daring to try.

Reason can explain mental processes for sure: it's called neuroscience and it's a thriving field. But consciousness or intelligence are not only about mental processes. I mean, you can believe so but then we say your opinions are naive, because there's plenty of evidence that mechanicism is not enough to explain human experience. We are not attacking this video, we are criticizing it for making the same mistakes of so many reductionists before him. If the attacks seem vague is because probably you're missing the whole discourse going on in the last 20 years in the Philosophy of Mind and related fields.

Also reason is not sacred, get over it.
It's the reality in most western countries.
I assume that a person's background contributes to their ideas in some way (cf. Whorf/Sapir), hopefully not to their credibility. I'll let someone else come up something here.

I am most interested in the fact that he said that his theory could not be improved by drawing on thinkers from other cultures. Why? Because his theory itself implies that other cultures have things to contribute.

As he said, cultures have more intelligence (i.e. better theory creation powers) than individuals. One would guess, then, that he would say a good theory should maximize the number of cultures it draws from and the degree to which it draws from them.

However his theory is at best the product of one culture or at worst (and I think this is what he implied in his question and answer response) the product of one individual.
The oral history of the Hampsterdance
I've made smaller apps with JavaFX which still take annoyingly long to start up compared w/ similar tkinter apps.
We have a blended approach to chores and allowances. Some chores must be done, for no special compensation - laundry, dishes, and such things that are the basic level of a clean and sanitary home. Likewise, we have a base allowance they get no matter what. If they want more then the minimum money, they have to do more than the minimum chores.

Also, we don't need apps for this - I have a chore list on the wall, and a physical counter they can click for each chore. At the end of the week, I put their 'clicks' in a google spreadsheet, and it tracks what we owe them. Sometimes we'll pay out in cash, but just as often, that sheet acts like a bank account and they can get cash from us on-demand up to what we owe.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/ethereu...

There have been other similar cases.
The same reason banks and countries put sanctions on countries.
We’re probably mostly disputing definitions - I don’t consider those things separate from rationality (well except for spirituality).
- each iteration in the repl is a state that you can preserve ("save")

- playing the vide game is trying out new states

I guess this is what OP was thinking about.
> The reality of the business world today is that employment is at-will. There's nothing stopping employers doing the things described in this article. So I offered up a way that people I know have managed to improve their career outcomes.

Here's a way to improve career outcomes: roll back at-will employment laws and give labor more leverage in negotiations with management.
So if Alpha zero trashes Stockfish 10 will you be saying, Oh Stockfish 11 sees these as only positions.. Please.
> If you asked a random person on the street they probably wouldn't know about Y Combinator, much less Hacker News.

On Castro Street in Mountain View they would.

Besides, we aren’t talking about random people, we are talking about the audience for The Hacker News.
The poster's entire point was that all of them came from a desire to find another option when a reasonable alternative already existed.
Are you sure you know you didn't? I don't remember wanting to help either but with 3 toddlers of my own I realize there is an innate desire to participate in household tasks in every one of then. I should ask my mom.
I find it extremely disturbing that cryptocurrency discussions sound so much like political debate
Exchanges have sometimes protected users from their exchange hacks. With varying success.

And wasn’t there a hard fork rollback for DAO?
If there are compelling arguments from "the whole discourse going on in the last 20 years in the Philosophy of Mind and related fields" then please introduce those arguments.

"You can believe [something] but then we say your opinions are naive" is not actually an argument, nor is it productive discussion.
Awesome article. Does anyone know how to begin applying the AlphaZero techniques to games where information is NOT perfect? I'm trying to apply it to Scrabble. There hasn't been much AI research in this game and right now the best AI just uses brute force Monte Carlo with a flawed evaluation function (which doesn't take into account the state of the board at all, just points and tiles remaining on the opponent's rack). It's still good enough to beat top human experts about half the time, but I want to make something better.

Is it impossible to apply to these types of games? Every time I read about AlphaZero the articles mention that the techniques are meant for games of perfect information.