skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sway got support for relative-pointer, but it's unrelated to positioning surfaces.
>- There is value in installing a program with a known set of hotkeys and having it work out-of-the-box.

It's a matter of taste, and ours differ. Regardless, there has been some discussion about hotkey protocols. I encourage you to participate.

>What if the user wants to use a different font or color in the GUI? Reasonable software will have reasonable settings configurable; unreasonable software won't. In any case, this is a solved problem in other, even non-Linux desktop environments as well.

Wayland compositors aren't responsible for choosing the color of your buttons. They are responsible for dispatching keyboard events, however.

>How strong are the keylogging concerns? An effective keylogger needs to either listen to keystrokes passively, or capture then retranslate them. Wouldn't allowing programs to assign hotkeys but not allowing them to emit keyboard events solve this issue?

Perhaps! You should bring this up when you start the discussion.

>Correct me if I'm wrong, but the links you provided seem to describe a protocol extension. I believe I was unambiguous in that I specifically mentioned Wayland, not a particular implementation.

Another thing Wayland doesn't define: application windows. The core Wayland protocol is very conservative, and protocol extensions are necessary for doing anything useful.

>Standardization is good, but until this becomes a reality, I believe the criticisms stand, and it would be unfair to dismiss them.

There are effective standards which are implemented by many compositors and clients. In my opinion this is good enough to dispell criticism, but we're trying to improve further still.
Book review – Alibaba: The house that Jack Ma built
Just a thought: The fact that there is physics beyond current knowledge doesn't necessarily mean that it's achievable to find out about it.

Think about it: Finding confirmation for the Higgs Boson required building a particle accelerator of 27 kilometers. For the larger part of humanities existence it was probably unthinkable to design such an experiment.

What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth?
Does anyone know, is https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0066-bett... ever going to be resolved? I really do not like the idea of having to create a new variable for something so simple as this.
>Smashing particles together at high energies is at least a proven strategy that has yielded results in the past and I personally don’t know how we would do high energy physics without them?

Isn't that a little cyclical? Why should we do "high energy physics" as opposed to just physics? Aren't there other ways to come at fundamental particles than smashing things together and seeing what happens?

>Also, not making progress for 40 years is not really long

Compared to the previous 100 years rate of progress, which was the baseline, it is huge.
I'm sure this would be something you could learn for yourself as well. Category theory/logic/universal algebra/etc don't require any magic; they do require you banging your head against them for some time though...
> Maybe that only seems suboptimal though and a true LispOS and Smalltalk OS running on baremetal would never truly work with the general populace?

Been thinking about this a lot lately. What would a regular laptop user, say, or advanced user (office worker etc) need at a minimum to start using such a system? Probably just a functioning web browser and office suite. So long as any given LispOS/SmalltalkOS had those, and a working UI, I think it could actually work.

We have many more common and widely adopted standards now (XML formats, JSON, hell TCP/IP!) than we did back in the 70s and 80s when PCs were much more diverse and exotic -- and hence incompatible. Most things are compatible these days. This in theory gives us tremendous advantage when it comes to experimenting with new viable systems, don't you think?
> As developers we should be striving for a) open sourcing machine learning so that everyone can contribute to the good it can do and b) that we democratise the result of those efforts so that everyone can benefit from it for their own projects.

Why? Oh I know. You are a wild-eyed optimist who would have cheered unfettered globalization in late 90's because "the whole can benefit from it".

You know what - as developers, we should care about maintaining scarcity of developers around the world so that we can continue being in demand and continue having great salaries. I would rather be a part of AMA (cartel which limits supply of Doctors in the USA and erects legal/regulatory barriers for competitors, thereby ensuring high standard of life for Doctors) than being a manufacturing engineer whose job was lost (or threatened) first by globalization and now by automation.

You know who benefits from "democratization of results of our efforts" or when "everyone can contribute to the good machine learning" (or other software engineering in general)? VCs and mega-rich folks, whose capital now doesn't have to share productivity gains with labor because labor is abundantly available.
> Any dev who actually RTFM'd and followed POSIX specs would have been fine.

So I'm trying to do that [1] and it seems to me the documentation directly implies that a second successful call to fsync() necessarily implies that all data was transferred, even if the previous call to fsync() had failed.

I say this because the sentence says "all data for the open file descriptor" is to be transferred, not merely "all data written since the previous fsync to this file descriptor". It follows that any data not transferred in the previous call due to an error ("outstanding I/O operations are not guaranteed to have been completed") must now be transferred if this call is successful.

What am I missing?

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fs...
It’s mostly a distribution problem. Depending on what you write about, your audience may not use rss. How do you get them to come back to something they enjoy reading, amongst a sea of clutter? They no longer get notified through social. As Craig says, email let’s you own your audience. The use of the word “own” is slightly problematic but accurate enough.
No you can only use physical violence in defence of yourself or others against imminent physical harm. I think in the US you can also use it against someone in your home (presumably because by the time in your home you are otherwise defenceless.) Anything else is you just assaulting someone and puts you in the wrong. The law doesn't allow for 'they were winding me up' as a reason to assault someone. I can't believe anyone would think violence was warranted for skipping a queue or speaking to someone in a way you didn't like.
> Asking wayland for hotkey management is like asking the HTTP standards group for a new HTML element

It sounds like there is no equivalent of HTML though, and X used to provide an HTML-level API for which there is now no standard. It's a pretty fair criticism of Wayland if it requires developers to re-invent a common interface to get functionality that was previously available through X.
>If you look at the history of science over the last 2000 years or so, new insights have popped up from time to time in a rather random way.

In the last 2000 years yes. In the last 250 years, no, there was a constant barrage of new insights.

This is what has changed for the last 4 decades.
The Dataist: An Ethical Approach and Best Practice of Data Science
Hi everyone, this is the publication I've just started on making ethics part of the data industry best practice. The link leads to my first article in which I shared the back story of why I started this and why I think it's important for everyone to be aware of the issue and its consequences. As of this writing, I haven't put up the official landing page at thedataist.org. It's gonna be live in 2 days. If you're interested in this discussion, please follow our publication and leave some comments to help us improve. Thanks.
Landley's Computer History Page
What does your magit workflow look like?
Anthem’s emergency room coverage denials draw scrutiny
>property taxes

>transfer taxes

I'd say it already is.
Birth Control for Others (2008)
Came to the comments looking for your response. I've learned a lot about Wayland from your blog, and I really don't understand the hate and resistance that some people have for it.
Show Off Your Data Science Skills with Kaggle Kernels
I say good riddance to multiple clipboards. We had to fight hard to get rid of it. It is really tiring having to fight off nonsense unintuitive behavior in software.
If there is high level of coupling within a system it will be difficult to contain the rewrite to a single subsystem. In this case, it may make sense to rewrite. Alternatively, you can gradually remove unnecessary coupling before applying the strangler pattern, but this can be a longer path.

The related principle here is to ensure you have good boundaries in your application with minimal dependencies between each system so it's easy to rewrite portions of your app. Here is a talk on this: https://vimeo.com/108441214
> That said, I would be very surprised if we discovered anything with as much practical use as say, quantum physics or electricity or thermodynamics.

History keeps proving that we will.
Are you referring specifically to Ctrl + Shift? Because I use Super + Space (think it's default) to switch between languages in Gnome on Fedora with Wayland and it works fine for me, even when an app has focus.
As a start, I recommend reading about Winding Numbers. I've found that to be the most important topology concept for 2d geometry. Computational Geometry is probably deeper than you want to go, but it would answer most of your questions. For curves, I recommend a Numerical Methods reference. Honestly, wander around Wikipedia links starting from topics like winding numbers and spatial partitioning, and you'll probably get a better primer than any book.
Red language
https://www.red-lang.org/

This is for the one who stood their ground.
Like Tommy and Gina, never backed down.

It's your life...... In RED(/System)
Lem's Summa Technologia is a fantastic philosophy book on exactly this subject. He talks about how our racial destiny starts to be controlled by external forces like the chaotic nature of technological progress and how we have less control over our future than you might expect. Dense material but really rich with things to think about.
Well, just proposing things and waiting for the team to implement them is easy.

The core team has also to prioritize, deal with already planned features, and shoot down tons of people with inane ideas as well (not just good ones).
>For example, you want to use Ctrl + Shift keys to switch keyboard layouts on release.

This is possible in Wayland, it's up to the compositor.

>Now guess what happens if VNC client's machine has a keyboard layout with characters not present in layout on VNC server's machine?

This seems pretty normal to me. Remote keyboards are just like physical keyboards. Just configure VNC's keyboard to use the correct layout.

(BTW I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "Everything is broken")

>Because of the same reason on-screen keyboards on Linux cannot produce characters not present in keyboard layout. Emoji, for example.

I don't know about X11's status on this, however in Wayland on-screen keyboards _can_ send unicode to the compositor via the standard text-input protocol [1].

[1]: https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/blob/ma...
Traditionally, policy states that ER utilization is covered by a prudent layman's standard: if a reasonable person would think their condition is an emergency, then the ER visit is covered.

Anthem/BCBS is now changing it to a retroactive review. If one of their medical staff now thinks, retroactively, that a condition didn't merit an ER visit - even if there's no reasonable way a layman would know that - they're denying coverage. They're basically arguing that their post-hoc review is a reasonable interpretation of the prudent layperson standard, where "prudent layperson" means "health insurance company algo."

It's a ridiculous policy stance, and one that is going to cost lives. There's no reasonable way for a layman to know whether their chest pain is musculoskeletal or ischemic in nature. Going to the ER with a suspected heart attack is appropriate. Anthem now says, hey, if that doesn't turn out to have been a heart attack - even if you had no way of knowing that - your ER visit will not be covered. They're actively encouraging people with heart attacks not to present to the emergency room.

This is the most repulsive move I've ever seen in the private insurance industry, and I've seen some stuff in my career.
If I were in a different position in life, which is to say one where I had the wealth and influence to pull it off, I'd have started a non-profit for educational games. I think there is a lot of potential there that was largely untapped because the people who make decisions about what to buy had an inherent bias against anything fun; perhaps reasoning, on some level, that if it was fun it couldn't be educational, that learning had to be boring and awful because that's how they remember it.

But then I see games like KSP, which are engaging and interesting enough (downright fun enough) to drive people to learn about orbital mechanics. Not because it was on a test, but because it was a tool that could get them get to Duna. Or Minecraft, which can teach critical path analysis and Boolean logic. There's a lot of potential in games to present you with a goal you want to attain, and allow you to discover the usefulness of any given subject as a tool to achieve that goal.

Instead we get this "gamification" of education, which essentially means using the nastiest tricks of the F2P market to make kids do their homework. Bonus: we can sell you tablets!
Here are the major categories of stuff we've built in Rust at work:

1. Lots of little CLI tools, statically linked using https://github.com/emk/rust-musl-builder. These are fast, portable, easy to share, and easy to add to Docker containers. For a fun open source example, see https://github.com/faradayio/geochunk, which groups US zip codes into evenly-sized chunks.

2. Code where we need to handle all the corner cases very carefully. Rust's enum and match are wonderful for this. An older open source example would be https://github.com/faradayio/cage, which performed all sorts of fiddly transformations on docker-compose.yml files. (I need to massively overhaul this to work with https://kustomize.io/ someday.)

3. Code which moves around large amounts of data, and maybe processes some of it. This might involve REST APIs, AMQP queues, cloud buckets or databases. Sometimes we wind up writing a little extra glue code, but we're pretty happy overall.

This morning, I'm working on an unreleased open source command-line tool that moves large database tables between different local and cloud databases. This actually uses async Rust (specifically https://tokio.rs/blog/2018-08-async-await/), which is definitely bleeding edge. But this particular code benefits enormously from Tokio, so we're taking the plunge.

Overall, our Rust code is fast and reliable. I enjoy working on it, and my boss likes the fact that our Rust code tends to be very solid.
I think her tone is quite antagonising and I am not sure if it is intentional:

" No one wants to live in a world where the little German lady with her oh-so rational arguments ends up being right. Not even the German lady wants that. Wait, what did I say? I must be crazy."

This is meant to sound self-deprecating (I think) but in the context of the articles comes across as arrogant to me because clearly she thinks she is not the little lady, and others are irrationally ignoring her superior insights. Could be a cultural artefact but it makes her articles uncomfortable to read for me.
She says:

> But the problems that theoretical particle physicists currently try to solve do not require solutions. The lack of unification, the absence of naturalness, the seeming arbitrariness of the constants of nature: these are aesthetic problems.

What are some examples of problems that do "require solutions"?
> as it's also valid.

Possibly so, but it isn't sound.
I work in suicide prevention - I'm well aware of the statistics and I spend most of my time looking at the wider determinants of mental ill-health and suicidality in middle aged men.
An ex-YouTube whistleblower on their recommendation engine
Dumb question (Wikipedia was of no help), if amyloid beta looks and acts like a prion, why isn't it classified as a prion?
I use RSS to keep up with podcasts, with a couple webcomics and [so far] one comedian's tour-dates list. I'm hovering around 50 subscriptions, which I feel is "too much" but I'm not sure which great content I should cut; I have a few ideas, but it's in the small single digits against the 50.

For myself, I'm likely much better to start slashing at my email. What suggestions do you have on how to "hyper optimize" with that?
Or maybe it was a global design language, that the Soviets just kept using longer and/or used more because they were building a _lot_ of things during the period of it's heyday.
My carrier has nothing to do with which phone I chose and use, so I highly doubt it's true at least outside of the big US operators.
pipenv is still a mess.

Definitely give poetry a shot, it's really good. In particular, I enjoy how the maintainer engages with the community and is receptive to feedback. He's pretty good about adding features to satisfy the users, rather than handwaving legitimate concerns in one-line responses.
> virtually everyone here is a man too.

Unsurprisnig when we consider the absolutely toxic arseholes who flood threads like these.
You can go a long long way with what's in this book. Think of factory robots, medical robotics, cruise control, aircraft components, etc. Just because it can't handle a robot octopus doesn't mean it's pointless.
Specific cases where deletion of “consumer Google+ accts” (100m ppl) is stopped?
After a decade of resisting, I finally bought a Kindle (2018)
There's always llvmpipe [1] as a last resort. Do you think that a Wayland compositor plus llvmpipe is inherently more CPU intensive than Xorg without a compositor using fbdev?

[1]: https://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html
A Princess Vanishes. A Video Offers Alarming Clues
This reply from Tom Lane reminded me of the PC losering issue from the “worse is better” essay [1].

> 2. What is the rationale for supposing that a retry a nanosecond later
will help? If it will help, why didn't the kernel just do that?

[1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Does anyone know if FoundationDB is affected?
Very well said. The practical reality is that the “category theory” used in functional programming paradigms (like Haskell’s) has only a passing resemblence to formal category theory in mathematics. It’s a nice idea to formalize some concepts in functional programming algebraically, but learning formal category theory won’t realistically improve your programming ability. There is some conceptual overlap, but they’re just very different things.
> Remote X may work OKish over a wired LAN, but over anything else it sucks.

It depends entirely on the software. E.g., Emacs is great (and even kinda usable across the ocean), while Firefox and most Qt/GTK programs are much less so.
My expectation from this is to see Oregon now turn its attention to other states and convince them to go legal so it can offload its product and, if it moves fast, establish dominance in those other states. Is this happening?
2013 MBP, now I just use a PC that I already had for some gaming reformatted with linux. Takes some getting used to with all the keyboard shortcuts and stuff changing, but it was a massive 'free' upgrade for my work and now I just use my laptop where it is suitable.
I just launched Digital Future Friday [0]. It’s a once a week roundup + analysis about AI, automated propaganda, synthetic influencers, AR/VR and internet culture. My wife forces me to keep it really short, and I just hired an awesome illustrator to add some visual love.

My perspective comes from being the CMO of a unicorn, curious about the underbelly of the internet and human mind.

[0] https://www.nicholasjrobinson.com/blog/newsletter
I wrote The Monad Challenges with roughly this idea in mind.

http://mightybyte.github.io/monad-challenges/

The idea was to guide people through various important particulars of monads. It still needs some work, but I think the basic approach is promising.
Yes!, especially if the available web browser could use Office 365 or G Suite.
The nature of dark matter, for one. Gravity at quantum dimensions...
Ideas to Curb Surprise Medical Bills Percolate with Rare Bipartisan Push
Full circle from one laptop to rule them all to specialized devices
I really like exwm but I currently prefer using StumpWM: https://stumpwm.github.io/. If there was no StumpWM I'd use Exwm.

Both have really similar designs, but for me StumpWM has a decisive advantage: it's implemented in Common Lisp and doesn't run inside of Emacs. Still, it has pretty good Emacs integration and many commands are Emacs-inspired. For example, there's a winner-mode equivalent.

Since Emacs is not multi-threaded, if something inside Emacs freezes your whole X session will become in blocked case you run Exwm. For the same reason, it is a bit more responsive.

After a decade using XMonad, I switched to StumpWM after carefully test-driving exwm and other options. I found I really prefer manual window tiling. StumpWM is really underappreciated. It's the successor of ratpoison, which kind of started the whole tiling window manager saga in Linux.
They haven't said that though. You misread the article.
Show HN : Wisteria GistNoesis Music Tutor Using Tensorflow.js
Some games are clearly inefficient, but others are just making a more extreme optimization that makes one part relatively bloated. From a game development perspective, the ranking of value goes something like:

frame time > startup/load time > download/install time/space > release build time/space

Different teams have different levels of aggressiveness in pushing operations down this slope, and different projects have different demands as well. If you're not trying to render much in the first place, maybe frame time isn't actually scarce and you don't have much to gain by doing a ton of precalculation at load time. Conversely, if you're working on a AAA shooter that's struggling to hit 60 FPS and you figure out that you can shave a couple milliseconds off frame time by reorganizing the asset files in a way that makes updates 1 GB instead of 100 MB, that's an opportunity you can't afford to pass up.
Better Worlds: Skin City
Ask HN: What minimum tooling do you need in an application?
I'm mostly a C developer and when I work on various projects there's specific tools I use or introduce into these applications. When I work on higher level languages the landscape for tooling is pretty fantastic.

What are things you cannot live without and what makes them useful?
Basically what's going on:

with monoids, you can combine things, and then monads result from choosing a clever combining operation in a certain contexts
Fantastic paper! Highly recommended. I had not seen this author before - just started following him on Twitter.
I'm not sure how this is supposed to represent a "better world". Personally this seems like a dystopian nightmare.
From physics, it seems like cosmology has a whole bunch. What the heck is dark matter made out of? Why is the the expansion of the universe accelerating? These seem qualitatively different than the "aesthetic problems" she points to.
Firefox fights for family privacy
Thoughts on Hooks