skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> […] can create identities without a phone number […]

The number one feature I wish WhatsApp (and Signal) would adopt. I don't care for either service, but that would at least allow me or my partner to occasionally participate in group chats without resorting to buying an Android or IOS smartphone.

People just assume everyone under 60 has WhatsApp in some countries (the Netherlands being one of them), and it borders on being a requirement to function socially.

My partner went to a course for pregnant women, and during the first meeting it was agreed that all communication outside of the meetings would go via WhatsApp, but the course leader would send emails to my partner for changes in scheduling. (My partner has no smartphone, and doesn't want one either, but she owns a modern laptop and works in IT.) So basically any knowledge and questions shared in the group are invisible to her.

This situation is likely to come up again and again as we start raising a child, and all we can do to remedy it is buy a smartphone with one of the pre-approved operating systems, and join the social graph of Facebook…
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Guava is a nice utility lib. Why do you consider it infamous?
I'm not even bringing feelings or faith into this discussion though.

This is pure logic my friend. It is not rational to "believe" that an object, a thing, a complex structure, can come into existence without being intelligently designed in some manner. That something as intricate and complex as the universe just came to be randomly, for no reason, and with no architect of some sort.
There is no reason a chat app can't be multiplatform, plus the total cost to transition to iPhones would be in the thousands. Most of them would spring $3-5 a month for a platform secure though.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/851876.The_Sun_Kings
Despite cover and book jacket hype IMO a terrific book on the history of human sun observation and the Carrington event
Product and Customer Success Working Together, a Chat with VPs at Aircall
" they hired a PR firm to tie Facebook critics to Soros and anti Soros stuff...."

Yes, but what if it's true?

Soros funds many, highly targeted political activities.

It wouldn't be right if people were perpetuating falsehoods about him ... but if he's actively campaigning or supporting an initiative with major $$$, then it's fine if people are informed of that.
Not clear to me what you're trying to show by indicating the moon has no life.
But only in the first year after first publication. So if the feature was available elsewhere for long enough, no patent for anybody.
Isn't this is a feature, not a bug? When things are decided by a democratically elected body you don't necessarily want a contractor coming in and tweaking things "because this is a better way."
Interesting. I live in Southern California (LA suburbs) and there are more kids (of all races including white) than what you describe. There are probably regional differences in fertility rate. I know California is probably lower than many other parts of the country.

Ahh... the Internet delivers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

... also:

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vWDFXMF6R7Y/Wp4PBC3EpyI/AAAAAAAAF...
Where did Google use Motorola's patents offensively like a troll might? In the absence of an example, will you admit you are incorrect?
Would you be able to summarize what he says? At work and I can't watch any videos lol
Two approaches here:
1) If I could show you a simple process by which we could take a random mess, and the Sistine Chapel would then form all by itself, without any need for a creator, would you then believe that it could exist without a creator?

If not, why not?

2) If all complex things require a creator, and the creator is presumably complex, why does the creator not also require something to have created them?
You misunderstood.

The need for comments means the code is not clear. That need is a code smell.
What exactly is an "Indiemaker"?
> what's to stop e.g. Oracle doing it and suing them?

Can you imagine every Swift app has to be deleted because of a competing patent claim?

Anyone remember LZW? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel–Ziv–Welch#Patents
HTTP 1 has a fixed feature set and a lot of warts. Nobody is working on HTTP 1.2, etc. so the only way anything is going to get better will be in the HTTP/2 series of development. At some point we need to ask whether skimping on maintenance is actually better than getting those improvements.
Intel 80386, part 5: Logical operations
> Dynamic memory allocation on an embedded system is pretty bad.

That's the one criticism I found valid. I even called it one of the "Four Horsemen of Poor Performance" in a pretty widely read article I wrote on server performance back in 2002. On the other hand, over-reliance on static allocation means allocating many arrays/pools for the worst case, even when they couldn't possibly all hit worst case at the same time, and that can be a pretty bad choice on a highly memory-constrained device. (Doing it for the sake of real-time predictability is actually a different issue.)

OTOH complaining about not using templates because of performance seems exactly backwards, and complaining that it's not likely the the project sponsor will port already-open-source code to a competing architecture themselves seems a bit too entitled. When I see a list of negatives that are mostly bogus, and no mention of positives at all, it's a strong indicator of NIH syndrome.
> if you let someone else broker the key exchange, you trust them implicitly.

Sort of.

Yes, they could serve you a MITM key, but it would be easily discoverable when you compare security codes in the client. And since the client is widely distributed on major app stores, it would be very risky to ship a compromised client.

Ultimately key exchange is a hard problem to solve. Notice that Signal doesn't do anything that much different; Signal does the key exchange and unless you verify each user's key offline, you have to trust it. Both WhatsApp and Signal have an option to display a notice when keys change, but Signal's is on by default.

Overall it's still pretty damn good. WhatsApp is perhaps the only major form of consumer communication where, by default and with no opt-out, every single chat really is fully encrypted using a widely respected protocol (libsignal). That's not nothing.
Eddie Bauer, Patagonia, LL Bean, REI all make down jackets which are arguably just as good and are half to a quarter the price.

I always thought down was groace and sweaty myself. Even in super cold weather. Easier to adjust things using layers.
First, if a complex system like a bee implied the existence of a creator, that begs the question of what created that creator, since it must also be a complex system. It's all turtles down there.

Second, we know that complex systems like bees can and do arise without a creator by means of evolution through natural selection.

Third, even if you somehow still want to believe in a creator, what can we infer about it? There is beauty in this world, but also suffering and misery, and that is not limited to humans -- far from it. Just as you would expect from a system that arise through natural selection alone.
I don't quite understand.

The patent (9,952,841) seems to be about the language swift.

There is mention about language features describing the language, but I don't see a specific claim to any of them.

"optionals chaining" (the feature that everyone is alarmed about) is just one of the features listed. Other features mentioned include an "IDE" and "unicode" as well as support for "functions".

Am I missing something? Where is the claim on an specific language characteristic?
There's an interesting metaphysical discussion here, but in the context of the wider conversation the focus really has to be on spirituality (as opposed to religiousness).

When you're on that level you're no longer restricted to the idea of a creator and their creation.

Tantra, for example, says that god is within us, we are the divine. At deeper levels it goes on to say we are all composed of the same matter that exists in all the universe, so surely we are made of the universe. So, divinity. We are also the creators of our own destiny to some extent, through our beliefs and our actions and our mindset.

Does that mean there's a relationship between creator and created, or might we also be a consequence of an unexpected and serendipitous emergent process, like evolution?

This doesn't answer the question of how or why all of this exists, but once you take religion out of the picture you can start to look at the underlying theories and all of the various concepts we've developed over the millennia.
I love my waterpik but I hear it's still important to floss with string to supplement. I guess you get a slightly different type of clean.
Even without vector intrinsics, you can get a lot of mileage out of spending almost all your time in loop bodies that map primitive operations over large arrays. Interpretive overhead tends to grow a lot slower than the user program's input size.
Re: Hijack 2

This is huge in mobile apps. Loot creates, "packs", etc. which means every end result doesn't have a fixed cost, but an "Expected" cost. I.e. if you want a certain item, you don't know how many times you have to buy a $3 pack to get it. You know you would pay $15 for it, though. So you start pulling that lever, hoping you'll get it. It's gambling, essentially. Literally a slot machines where you put $3 in, pull a lever, and maybe you get nothing good, something okay, or something great.
Speed. It is not everything.
You can't sell the platform if it's heavily integrated. Whoever buys it will just have to rewrite it from scratch then.
Unless they radically change how Facebook messenger works I don't see how it could even be called end-to-end encryption. For it to work how it does now (online and independently through the app) they would have to hold the encryption keys.

They would have to instead tie Facebook messenger to a phone like Whatsapp does and use a web app to send messages directly from the device instead. I don't see how else it could be done and still be called end-to-end encryption.
>Yes, but what if it's true?

Well then maybe they should prove it?

I don't get the question, do you think the critics of Facebook critics are all tied to Soros or something?

You could say "What if it's true" about anything... that doesn't mean anything.
> especially if the suspension extends to the actual filing of patents,

This was addressed somewhat deeper into the article:

"The agency said it would keep a “small staff” to receive new applications and filings, to receive payments and maintain the information technology infrastructure."
Maybe it means that if you are _always_ exposed to high CO2 your body adjusts, but if you are sporadically exposed it does not? Kind of like living in the mountains vs going there occasionally
https://github.com/ARMmbed/littlefs/blob/master/DESIGN.md answers those questions in admirable detail.
There's no single "right distance from the sun" - areas of Mars have temperature ranges acceptable for some Earth bacteria, Europa likely has liquid seas, etc., and Earth-style life isn't the only option - and the Moon is inhospitable in a variety of other ways.

We also can't completely discount life on the Moon having briefly explored a couple acres of it, largely on foot.
The biggest selling electric car is from Japan. The Nissan leaf.

Yes, you used the weasel word "reputable" - but what better reputation is there than having the most sales? Nissan from Japan sells the most electric cars.

Apart from sales, the Nissan Leaf scores 7-8/10 and 4/5 from the critics. Which is around the same as the Tesla model 3.

If the critics think they are ok, and they sell the most of all electric cars... then they can be considered reputable.
I think there's a lot more to limit than average APMs and reaction time, in order to have human-like capabilities. For instance:

- the context switching cost of multitasking

- the precision/speed tradeoff : pro players adjust the mouse speed according to what they want. Selecting exactly the units wanted is very difficult, AlphaStar seemed to do it perfectly.

- the timing precision of an action

With restrictions such as these, I'm honestly confident that AlphaStar won't beat human players anytime soon (once the human players adopt the interesting findings of the AI).

I'm mostly interested in how it will change the meta. Players are often biased by their experience, and regularly the meta shifts entirely without any significant balance update, simply by players finding original strategies
If the universe was created, it wasn't created to be friendly to life. I'd guess that more than 99.99999 % of it is hostile to human existence.

On the subject of over reporting of church attendence, the discrimination against atheists in the USA may have a good part to play:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_atheist...
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>A pen, a banana, a baby, a piece of code, all of these things came from something. And all of these things compared to the universe are incredibly simple. But how come you believe the universe came into existence from nothing and without design?

The modern banana, a pen, a baby, a piece of code - these all were invented by us, and made out of something that already existed. Just because so many things that WE observe have a beginning and end, doesn't mean EVERYTHING has a beginning and end.

Our entire world/universal view is skewed by the fact we are mortal. Even if we go by the logic of someone had to make this, it couldn't have come from nowhere - then who made the inventor? Where did that come from? At some point your logic will REQUIRE you to believe that "things appear for no reason and with no creator".
Why not Telegram instead of Signal? Telegram has the best UI by far of the independent messaging apps.
Open offices are bad for us (2017)
That's also why large software projects for government usually fail.

Create a system that handles all the rules of a single municipality or so -- doable. But too expensive for a single municipality.

So we create one system that will work for all municipalities! That way they can afford it, right?

Yes, but none of them is going to change their process. All the different ways of doing more or less the same thing have to be supported, in one system.

End result: nothing working, way over budget. Every single time.
As a counterpoint, I really do not care about this at all. I routinely use Linux, Mac and Windows systems and I would much prefer software that looked/behaved consistently across them rather than trying to make sure the buttons look the same as the OS-provided apps.
>I think the Windows NT kernel is a very underrated piece of technology - the reason it was unstable in the beginning is due to a corporate top-down decision: the hardware of the time was limited so they included GDI stuff in the kernel (crappy code not written by Cutler's team).

Err, no. The reason it was unstable in the beginning were choices like having a "MUST SUCCEED" kernel memory pool which caused a bugcheck if the system could not allocate from that pool. Random kernel components allocated from this pool and if you opened too many handles (sockets for example), you'd get a bluescreen because an unrelated driver was trying to allocate memory for some other activity.

There were probably other similar choices that I don't remember now. It has been 25+ years.

And let's talk about the NT Driver I/O model. The most highly complex, over-designed POS I have ever seen. And this design was "polluted" for performance out of the gate (Fast I/O path, for example).
It took Microsoft years to reliably and safely cancel pending I/O in the kernel. Remember the days when a random peripheral driver could hold on to an IRP and cause bluescreens all over the place because the process it was doing I/O for exited ? It was hard for internal Microsoft people to write good drivers, let alone OEMs in the wild with a fraction of the learning resources at their disposal.

NT was based on the microkernels that were fashionable in those days (e.g, Mach from Rick Rashid et. al). As with most academic ideas, when microkernels met the real world they had to be adapted.

Win32K came about because GDI performance in NT was crap. There were other things that were similarly pushed into the kernel already. I believe a classic microkernel would also have networking modules in user mode, for example. DirectX in the kernel (hated by the purists back in the day) is inarguably responsible for NT being able to supplant Win9x in the consumer PC market.

The NT kernel evolved over the years to be something that actually met the needs of Microsoft's customers. I would argue that's the real achievement, and not all of that can be laid at the feet of "Cutler's team".

I second the recommendation for "Show Stopper" :-)
Interesting read. I wonder though, doesnt this also apply to ML data scientists? After all we are talking about basing a career on AI.

Perhaps developing software which does good ML/DL data science (or greatly helps with it) is the way to go?
> Things just don't appear for no reason and with no creator.

This logic must logically apply to said creator.
This is a sour point for me. It bugs me that other people can reveal information about me and there is little I can do. I actually stopped entering contacts into my phone because of this. Or I put false names for ones I man need to label. I recognise my contacts by their phone number. I doubt my part is overly effective because others likely don't do this but it is my way of saying screw off. I hope one day legislation will regulate these companies and what they share about us. I thought Facebook promised it would not suck up the whatsapp data how can they integrate without all that data? Reminds me of a child. Was told no so going to just do it anyways and see if there is a punishment after. I hope some regulatory body sinks Facebook over this idea.
"Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis."

- Alan Perlis
Equinox – .NET Event-sourcing platform
if you have 14 minutes this US MSM 60 minutes spot from 1996 is a good representation of the mistrust a lot of the centre and particularly the right have about Soros
https://youtu.be/QSyczwuTQfo
Since then he is synonymous amongst nationalists with open borders and supposedly funding them
You might be happy but I'd be furious. If I wanted content on Instagram then I'd have created an Instagram account and put it there.
When was the Internet invented?
You can find a transcript here:
https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/quotations/quotes/stephen_fr...
“my wage” poem by J.B. Rittenhouse
> Most of my tests on CDNs show they are faster unless the server is hosted in Chicago for me.

For you, with warmed caches. The problem is that most users aren't you and so when they follow a link to example.com their client makes that first DNS request for example.com, starts the connection and TLS handshake, etc. and then sees a request for e.g. cdnjs.com and does that same work again for a different hostname. If (in that example) you were hosting your site on CloudFlare you'd have the same work for the first connection but not the second because it'd already have an open connection by the time your HTML told the client it needed your CSS, JS, etc.

Here's an example: check out https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190125_F0_a1a180631ecebd8... and notice how often you see “DNS Lookup” and ”Initial Connection” times which are a significant chunk of the total request time — and ask yourself whether it would be better for the render-blocking resources to have those times be zero. Especially measure how that works on a cellular or flaky WiFi connection, which is closer to what most people experience in the real world.

As to the gigantic bundle of JavaScript, do some real browser testing and ask whether it's better to wait for the entire resource to be loaded before any code runs — and to repeat that entire transfer every time one byte changes — or only block on the portions needed to render the page. Yes, having 8MB of JavaScript is too much in aggregate but the solution is to use less and use it more intelligently, not slap it all into a big ball of mud.
It makes sense though: The bigger the brand, the more they want to control their brand experience instead of being tied to /associated with another brand, i.e. the native platform.

Businesses don't innately care about doing what's right, so optimizing for brand differentiation over a unified platform experience is what one would expect to happen in most cases.
WhatsApp Web already provides this, by connecting to the phone and proxying messages through it. Of course, that also requires implicit trust in WhatsApp Web, but it is possible. And using WhatsApp requires implicit trust in Facebook anyway, so...
Ok? That doesn't make my answer to the question wrong.

FTR: I would love!!! an open source / open protocol messaging platform that wasn't owned by anyone. But, that doesn't seem to be in the cards for us all.
(Another) Londoner here, regarding risking the ire of drivers - I used to feel like that and now no longer care - I press, wait and cross safely. Having seen enough close calls in London traffic or with bikes suddenly coming up and zooming past I value my safety more than inconveniencing cars.
FWIW, this article is from 2010.
you could type the key into each client each time, no?

isnt that how things like dashlane work? it sends the encrypted historical blob to your device, your device decodes it.
What’s the Fastest Translation API?
A lot of people can think of both perspectives because so many westerners come from Christian households or settings.
FB messenger never really took off outside the US because Whatsapp was dominant.

Clearly FB wanted to not just have access to those users, but also integrate them into the wider FB ecosystem.
> No more patent trolls or bullying by large corps lawyers.

The existing trolls, with existing patents, will be able to continue as long as the courts are funded and operating.

All a USPTO shutdown would mean is no new patents being issued for some period of time. So a troll would not be able to add a newly issued patent to their warchest for a while, but everything they already have in there remains just as useful as always (as long as the courts are operating).
Well, some folks are. I find Windows abhorrent at every level; there's just something missing about the way it's put together, and its evolution has been slapdash in the extreme. Apple avoided this fate by effectively starting over with OS X, but Win 10 is still beholden to design choices made decades ago, and it shows.

The technical Mac folks I know aren't switching. They're just yelling a lot, and if they're on pre-butterfly keyboard Macs, they're putting off upgrades.

Of course, the VERY nerdy/technical folks can and do sometimes switch to full time Linux, but if you're used to the level of out-of-the-box just-works functionality you get out of OS X that's a hard sell.
iMessage, though operating at a smaller scale than WhatsApp
When I worked at a place with taller cubes it was always nice to be able to sit down and clear my mind a bit. It didn't take a full on office with a door or anything, just enough space to be hidden a bit.

After they lowered the walls it was just not possible and going to some random breakout room just wasn't the same.
I had exactly the same issue. But in my case I setup a device password that probably was in one of the PW leaks. I was listening to spotify on my phone and suddenly it switched to a different device unknown to me and played mostly latin songs. When I changed the device pw it stopped
Just clarifying something you alluded to: Signal claims that Whatsapp actually uses the same protocol, so naturally the key exchange is very similar.
UNDP head: 'The entire economy thrives on the destruction of nature'
A 4-day workweek for programmers, the easy way
What is CR?