skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Big move. I see this potentially as groundwork for the eventual integration of Mac and iOS App Stores, which you have to imagine is something Apple wants in the years ahead as platforms converge on common software stack and UX. It's also a signal that the App Store team may now be willing to do the deals necessary to attract MacOS apps back toward this larger strategic initiative (vs just trying to maximize revenue).

From Microsoft's perspective, now that Windows is sidelined, Office is their primary consumer platform and that means UX outweighs any strategic tax of trying to make the Windows version better.

Have you tried to download Office from their website? It's a horrible, braindead experience. You have to log in to your Live account, then go to a particular page to manage your existing Office installs that is super confusing. Coupled with the poor autoupdate UX on Mac [1], and it's almost like Microsoft doesn't want you to have Office on Mac.

I think the issue finally reached a breaking point there and they shifted to UX > control. This is a positive shift for them, since being on the App Store means features ship faster and users see value in their Office subscription. Aside from update UX this is obviously a way to bump their Mac Office numbers. Seems like a good play from both Apple & Microsoft's perspective.

[1] Right now Microsoft's autoupdate UX is pretty terrible at keeping things up to date. When I visit my parents, they're almost always several versions behind, and as another commenter pointed out, a decent part of that is the autoupdate needing to update itself. They have automated updates but its hard to trust that process won't result in issues when documents are open, and it presents a lot of cognitive load to users on top of the OS & App Store updates.
It will probably do both. "There are people who will take risks that they otherwise wouldn't be able to with a basic income" and "there are people who will do nothing of value to anyone besides themselves if they have a choice in the matter" are not mutually exclusive.
What's the threat vector if it's not a cloud environment? Also if you have access to either the LB or host wouldn't you get access to the certificate there anyway to decrypt the traffic?
> If we support open competition and we believe in Darwin's theory of evolution then Google is the inferior

Evolution theory has no bearing whatsoever on critical moral and philosophical concepts like whether you should be allowed to prevent others from conforming to an API.
I had no idea about the stream-ability of Fox News, but that makes sense. I, too, make sure I watch both sides (CNN and Fox as well) but CNN has a 10-minute cap unless you sign in through your cable provider, which has consistently not worked for me. Sure would be nice if somehow print and TV news didn't have to be so much behind paywalls and commercials.
Is MS Access still missing?
What makes this interesting is if they can make a computer program better at Starcraft strategy then a human. How they did that is irrelevant. If having developers code rules makes a better AI then deep learning, then the former is the most impressive solution. What they did is a great accomplishment and the AI they created was amazing, but I feel like the faster-then-humanly-possible micro makes any accomplishment hollow, because that is really nothing new.
Ask HN: How do you use Confluence?
Maybe the question here has multiple parts:

- What do you use to organise and curate your team's and/or company's knowledge
- What would be the best practices followed to ensure that things do not get messy, out of hand quickly

Confluence can be the choice of a Wiki/Documentation hub for many, how can you apply the best practices
from point 2 in Confluence
Microsoft works with Zero Latency on free roaming VR platform
I wasn't interpreting your comment as a criticism. I was introducing background information, which also shouldn't be interpreted as a criticism.
Friktal: Exploring Infinity. A Virtual Soundscape Experience
I'm fascinated by the concept of a verbless language, but don't want to go to the effort of learning a conlang to experience it. But taking English and removing the verbs, substituting similar structures as in Kelen, wouldn't be all that instructive; I'd spend more time aghast at how seemingly incomprehensible the English is rather than the effect of the change to the language. Difficult one.

(That said, if someone did decide to make some sort of Kelenglish, I'd love to see it thrown into this framework!)
Given the weakened state of unions in the U.S., perhaps it wouldn't be too hard to start over from a clean slate with new systems and practices.
You have to purchase a subscription, but you can cancel at any time.

If you purchase an in-app subscription through the App Store with your Apple ID, the only option is a yearly subscription.

If you purchase a subscription directly from Microsoft's website, you can purchase either a yearly or monthly subscription.

The yearly subscription costs the same in both cases, and is cheaper unless you only want to use the app for a few months.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...
Arbitration agreements are a massive, massive scam and the fact that they can be forced as part of your employment contract needs to go. It allows companies to sweep away shitty corporate behavior and avoid addressing the actual issues with their workplace in addition to overwhelmingly tilting the system against employees.
A reminder that what the law says, and what is a good idea, is not necessarily the same thing. The courts rule on the first point. Given that Oracle has prevailed in court on this before, one has to at least entertain the possibility that our law really allows for API to be copyrighted.

But if so, that law desperately needs to be amended - the nature of APIs, at least public ones, is such that interoperability concerns override everything else, IMO. If companies can copyright an API and block competitors from implementing it, that would be very detrimental to the industry as a whole, for the sake of a few rent seekers profiting.
You really should read the whole article. I definitely recognize what he talks about.

"It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating." (...)

"You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." "

And the article then ends with:

"At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?"
> ...you make it seem that I don't value this country and its citizens. What I don't value are the stupid wars those citizens are tricked into feeding with their sons and their taxes.

This could have been an exact quote from a publication of the America First Committee in 1940.

> Also, Noam Chomsky is twice the man and twice the American that anyone in this thread can claim to be. You don't know that, not because it isn't true, but because you are ignorant.

Noam Chomsky is a genocide denier. That's a hard moral line to me. Sorry it isn't the same for you.
How many social points do they strike when they find you use a VPN?
This is also a relevant idea: https://www.coolutils.com/TotalMailConverter
https://duck.com
> not least because if humans realise they're at a disadvantage it would be essentially impossible to prevent them from colluding with other humans to get an advantage, even to some extent unconsciously

Indeed versus a single opponent, you can play an "optimal" (e.g. Nash equilibrium strategy) and basically win/solve the game. But in a multiplayer setting (in poker and similar games), you rely on your ability to predict opponents. In the former you could essentially assume your opponent is as smart as possible ('rational' in game theory language), and if it is not rational it will necessarily do worse. In the latter however, by assuming every player is rational (e.g. playing N.E. strategies) you lack the ability to exploit weak players which are decidedly suboptimal, predict their moves, and capitalize. Thus winning is conditioned as much as the knowledge of your opponents, their skill and style, as in your own power to play probabilistic 'optimal' moves.

A good simple example is also Rock-Paper-Scissors: a N.E. strategy just plays randomly -- it clearly cannot lose even against the most skilled players every -- but it also cannot win versus weak, predictable opponents. So e.g. in a tournament setting it would always lose, depending on the tournament structure (in particular if tournament stages are not all pairwise elimination).

I find it a fascinating contrast to traditional game theory, and sort of conventional view of games, that there are "good players" and "bad players" in the sense of their execution being superior in an absolute sense, independent of opponent. In reality success in a variety of games (and real world scenarios) is won by tailoring your strategy to a particular opponent, using information from outside the game, and specifically predicting his plays vs. utilizing universal strategies (again this is particularly relevant in non-pairwise tournaments, non-zero sum games, etc).

In real life, almost always the "game" is non-zero sum, multiplayer, with non-rational players, etc., even in a sports setting. Roger Federer might play slack and save his body in the early stages of a tournament vs a known weaker player, and give it all vs his most fearsome opponents.

And also finally to quote "The Art of Strategy" (introductory game theory classic), 'There's always a bigger game.' (in real life it's the ultimately the entire Universe, and no one is quite sure of the Rules :p )
Works on my local :)
Most kids love simple noodle and rice dishes.
That's not true. If you independently come up with that then there is no copyright violation. Especially if it's a single method out of a large API.
And if he thinks others are adding 20x the value he is adding and are not getting paid as well. Working on it is not such a bad idea.

But I doubt non technical founders are adding 20x value at this stage!
Start helping others specially senior citizens and you will learn self control while doing so. https://www.coolutils.com/TotalPDFConverter
Arbitration contracts need to be illegal, period.
I think we need to clarify some terms here. Advertising by its very nature is disruptive. It's goal is to interrupt you or grab your attention so that you look at SOMETHING and become aware of it, start to form associations, etc. There really isn't such thing is "relevant" advertising in the sense that ads pertain to my current activity, which, by the way, Zuck insists is "connecting to people."

The real question you're asking is: Would you rather trade some of your data so we can show you ads that you are more likely to click because we have ascertained that these value propositions are likely to drive some kind of an action? (And by the way action is all we really ever know, and is a so-so proxy for "relevance" or value to the user, c.f., clickbait.)

When you ask this question I'm inclined to say some users wouldn't consider this an awesome trade. That's being modest.

Disclosure: I make digital ads for a living.
Have a flexible heirarchy and build lots and lots of pages. When I learn something new I document with a background explaining things and dilimenate into clear sections with explantations and code snippets, documents, and links where necessary. If I find an old page that is now irrelevant, I delete it. When the heirarchy needs to be reorganized we add/delete sections and move pages around no problem. 99% of my team's doc is written by me and one teammate (hundreds of docs).

I know people that are nitpicky want to spend hours arguing over the perfect way to organize things, but it ain't worth the time. What is important is that you document lots and lots of stuff and can find specific things via search + keyword.
It's really sad corporate America owns workers, forced arbitration is such a handout. Now UBS gets to ax anybody they want a day before their bonuses are due and even if they go through with arbitration they've done the math and saved 50%.
> We should go back to doing things my way. R2P is horse shit.

If the mass murder of almost a million people doesn't bother your conscience nearly as much as, for example, the use of NATO airstrikes against the Milosevic regime in Serbia, then we have a fundamental impasse in basic values. And I think you'd find a similar fundamental disagreement with at least a plurality of Americans, bolstering my contention that your opinion is merely unpopular, as opposed to under active suppression from powerful institutions.
Anyone remember peak oil? What happened?
Access behind VPN connection. Or deal with the logs in a better way. If SSH noise bothers you, you can either direct it to a different file, or setup a log aggregator where it's trivial to see what you want (or filter out what you don't by default)
Side note: it's really sad that more languages aren't allowing trailing commas in sequence literals and other places, like Python does. In Python, these are legal:

[1, 2, 3,]
foo(1, 2, 3,)

And thus, when writing multiline literals and calls, it's pretty common to use the comma as a line terminator, precisely so that new lines can be added at the end without touching the previous line.
Sorry if this dumb, but what does a fossil like Oracle have to do with the future of software development?
Yes. Irrelevant ads are less likely to influence me to buy something.
> If I tell you how I ran a marathon, you could shout "survivorship bias!" But that fact still stands that I hadn't successfully run a marathon before I did those things.

Well, yeah, the whole point is that we don't know how many people did those same things and then failed to complete a marathon.
Two big developments in recent years are:

1. SIMD "threads" being programmed with traditional programming languages (ie: CUDA C++). These are "false threads", they run in groups of 32 (NVidia) or 64 (AMD) and have unique characteristics compared to traditional threads.

2. The push for "Task-based" parallelism. Instead of writing threads, you should write tasks. Tasks are then run on a thread-pool. The difference being: Tasks don't always spin up a new thread. You track "dependencies" between tasks to minimize communication and synchronization instead. Tasks are both more efficient than threads AND easier to reason about. The crazy example is Intel's "Inefficient Fibonacci": https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/506102 . The task-based Fibonacci is both efficient and simple. Threads simply cannot compete.

-------------------

It turns out that threads themselves are both inefficient and complex. Pure performance pushes us towards SIMD / GPGPU compute. Even on CPUs, the fastest computational model is AVX or AVX512.

Simplicity pushes us towards the Tasking model, which happens to be more efficient in practice anyway. Its far cheaper for thread-pools to swap tasks, rather than spinning up threads for the scheduler to pass around and manage.

Classical thread based programming seems like a dead end to me. Its too complex and doesn't give enough returns on modern architectures. The Task model is built on top of threads, but I expect most programmers to switch to the Tasking model, and only to leave "Threads" to the OS-devs or System-level devs far below.

The SIMD model gets everything done efficiently with barriers in most cases (no need for semaphores or mutexes... indeed... mutexes don't work on traditional SIMD GPUs like Pascal or AMD Vega... due to how SIMD Wavefronts execute). Other issues are handled with "CUDA Shared Memory" or "OpenCL Local Memory" and atomics. Its weird to lose the Mutex or Semaphore as a tool, but you learn that you really didn't need it once you learn to use Barriers and Atomics effectively.

SIMD Model gets a LOT done with atomics, popcount, ballot, and various primitives that are alien to CPU Programmers. Watch a "Merge Path based Parallel Merge Sort" on a GPU if you wanna see what I mean. Its very alien, but it works extremely efficiently.

Tasks similarly have a different model compared to Threads. They're the natural successor. Almost everything I can think of can be more elegantly expressed as a Task instead of as a Thread. That'd be OpenMP 4.0, Intel TBB, or Microsoft PPL.
Absolutely. I have never, to my mind, benefitted from a “relevant” ad.

I work in advertising. I have heard it all, and all of it essentializes an unrealistically infantile and helpless audience. If the audience is so helpless, how could we even reason they have the means to purchase the product being advertised? It really makes no sense.

The answer is extremely easy for me: Give me the irrelevant ads and stop collecting my data.
Perhaps it's an acquisition play - as the other comments on the thread point out: if it helps offload work from attorneys (who could be making money from clients with resources) and/or can somehow serve as a philanthropic endeavor for a profitable company (or organization) in desperate need of some good PR (big law firms doing work for questionable foreign nationals, pay day lenders, etc.), there is some intangible value to be had. A nice diversion from people calling on lawmakers to regulate a company out of business can be motivation enough to look in to opening up a more charitable, less profitable, line of business.
I don't see why they shouldn't. They're definitely creative works that take skill to produce.

I think using an API for the purposes of interoperability should be allowed under fair use.

However! My controversial opinion is that Google's use of the Java API wasn't for interoperability. They didn't use the Java API so that Java programs could run on Android, they used it so that Java developers could transfer their skills to a new platform which is precisely the value of a cleanly designed API -- value that Oracle doesn't want to provide for free.
Wow, if you told me just 10 years ago the US would become a net exporter of petroleum, I'd have laughed at you. The long-term prospects of oil in the US are poor, however. In the next 2-3 decades, renewables and electric cars will start exerting significant downward pressure on prices. US producers, especially frackers, are high-cost. Fracked oil usually costs $50/barrel or more. For this reason, fracking has only become widespread in the last decade, despite the fact that fracking has was invented in 1947.

Saudi makes oil for less than $10 a barrel. They and other low-cost producers are the only ones that will be able to compete after significant demand destruction occurs.
The only things to ever sell me anything were news articles about cool new innovative products and YouTube videos showing products like that off, from people I subscribe to or other creators in their community.

I've learned to mentally block out any ad-space-based advertising a long time ago, in the Warez-site era of the late 90s, early 2000s. I mostly just get annoyed by the disruption of useful space but I don't even really process ads, I couldn't tell you what the last ad I've seen was, even tho I'm watching a YouTube video with mid-roll ads right now.

I don't trust ads. Especially since I've grown up in Eastern Europe, ad-spaces were always littered with dodgy things here. It's still not a common thing to see ads for products from big brands, etc. Last year I've seen Jesus-cult (not kidding, it was some weird religious sect advertising), Russian singles banner ads on YouTube itself. Oh, and I forgot about the one for "winning the luxury cruise of your dreams".

The only exception to pointless, dodgy and creepy ads I see daily are the e-commerce site product carousel ads. Those more than often advertise products or alternatives to products I just bought. Very useful!

I would very much like to be left out of "personalised" advertising. If this is what my data gets me and gets you as an advertiser then we're both better off with me keeping it to myself anyway.

If I want to hear from your products, I'll subscribe to your newsletter or visit your site.
Do you rely more on heirarchy or labels/tags and rely on the powerful search of confluence? Also have you tried Confluence for personal use or only professionally (I am thinking of moving away from Evernote but am afraid Confluence is an overkill)
Personally, yes. It's easier for me to feel less psychologically manipulated if I'm seeing ads for tampons, in addition to not feeling like someone knows more about me than I'm comfortable with.
Even the latest version of npm 6 can get dependency resolution wrong. Like, the basic core feature.
My rule of thumb is if I can't opt out of arbitration then I can't work for you. Most established orgs give you a grace period after start date to request opt-out to legal and I've run into no flack for doing just that. However I've learned from experience that it is critical to not be bound by it - especially if your pay is tied to a metric or a quota and/or a portion of your package is options/RSUs.
Ask HN: Career advice needed
Dear HN,

I am PhD student graduating soon and I am looking for career opportunities. I am having trouble with the job hunt though.

A little bit about me... I am not software engineer, but I do lots of programming in C/C++/OOP. I have done some advanced things, wrote many lines of code, and completed many projects. The catch is that I do all of my programming with the help of the interwebs.

I also work with the TCP/IP abstraction. My research is in the networking field where I try to improve communication streams. I test protocols, modify them, design them, implement them, whatever I need to do. I usually do this using C/C++.

I have an interest in security and cryptography. I took a few courses at school and I follow some online courses and forums. I implemented some crypto things for fun, such as AES-128 ECB, from scratch. I also worked on blockchain projects that required crypto knowledge and implementation of related methods. I implement my security/crypto projects in C/C++ as well.

The problem is that I am doing these job interviews where they ask me about implementing something for a BST or something similar. I am not successful at answering interview questions of this type. I understand the logic behind them but I do feel that these types of interviews are inadequate at measuring a candidates potential. Am I applying to the wrong jobs? Any suggestion are appreciated!

Thank You!
Yes, “algorithms” can be biased. Here’s why
VictoriaMetrics creates instant snapshots for huge time series data volumes