skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The new model of One Version, all updated together is interesting in this context. Examples are iOS, Chrome, Firefox and node_modules. All super complicated with many dependancies. Update everything, fix broken stuff. Only maintain the one blessed dependency graph.

If you report an iOS or Chrome bug where you tried to revert a library upgrade and something broke, they'll just mark it "Won't fix: omg never ever look at this".

The dependency graph when everyone isn't updating all at once is brutal. Half of Unix life is/was "well I need to update X, but can't because Y depends on old X. Now we'll just create this special environment/virtualenv/visor/vm with exactly the brittle dependency graph we need and then update it, um, never."

We complain about One Version/Evergreen, and should, but it's got huge advantages. And might be an indicator that testing surface is the real complexity constraint.

One Version's success a good indication that Plan 9 was at least not totally wrong.
Most coffee shops (caffes)[1] normally serve in disposable cups, unless you ask for different, anyway, and upwards of 90% take the disposable cup, 5% bring their own and the rest ask for a house cup —Im approximating but I don’t think I’m far off.

[1] Peets, Blue Bottle, Andy Town, Ritual, Starbucks and mom and pops.
I mean, it sounds like there's a glut of unused housing kind of in the middle of nowhere, not in desirable cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Building massive amounts of housing in the central valley wouldn't help the housing problem in the bay area.
Yes, that’s what I meant. Thanks for the charitable correction.

Great to see the HN tradition of downvoting for an off by one error continues strong as well...
I'm a dumdum when it comes to understanding stuff about DNS. Why is this bad, and are there any good resources for understanding how these are used by companies to extract more information about our habits?
Realistic fake faces show how algorithms can now mess with us
We learn this in our Theory of Computation classes. Starting with basic deterministic finite automata to nondeterministic to regular languages to context free grammars to pushdown automatas to turing machines and halting problem.
Rent-seeking has a specific meaning, and that's not it. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp

Capital gains represent increase in wealth in the economy, whether taxed preferentially or not.

The example remains the same even with 0 capital gains: After 40 years, at 0 gain, I've saved 20 times my annual income to support my family through retirement. Joe has saved 0.

How much of of my wealth do I need to give him?

Equal opportunity + freedom of choice = unequal outcomes
It’s kinda a jab at the inflationary nature of the programs.

They devalue existing miles but remain competitive going forward by requiring, and giving, more miles for the same trip.
Every Oscar Best Picture Winner, Ranked
First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima plant
This sounds a lot like trickle down economics.....
This looks nice and it supports multiple recipients which was the first question that popped into my head.
> It's worth noting that no existing or announced common hardware is "properly designed" according to this condition. Even the "fixed" Intel hardware that's been announced is still vulnerable to spectre v1 across process boundaries.

AMD Zen is.

Spectre v1 (bounds check bypass) only works inside processes. All it allows you to do is to read any memory location currently mapped into your address space, and so it gives anything that can execute code complete read access to the address space of the process it's running in. On Intel CPUs, this also allows reading the kernel address space, unless kpti is used. Eventually, the ability to read kernel memory will be removed, and so kpti becomes unneccessary.

On all AMD post-BD cpus, spectre v1 cannot be used to read kernel address space.

All the rest of spectre (and meltdown) can eventually be fixed, but it is effectively impossible to make a cpu that is both fast and doesn't exhibit spectre v1.
>> Zip2 allowed for two-way communication between users and advertisers. Users could message advertisers and have that message forwarded to their fax machine. Likewise, advertisers could fax users and users could view that fax using specific URLs

Ha, never heard about that - sounds contorted (nowadays) but somehow funny - so somebody in some company was sitting next to a fax waiting for something to come out of it, then when that happened the employee wrote the reply (scribbled on the same or another piece of paper) and faxed back the reply?

I wonder if I would like or hate doing something like that today - waiting for & finally seeing a piece of paper containing an unknown message coming out of a device sounds somehow fascinating... :)
I have seen some sites that only show a username field but nevertheless are compatible with my password manager (1Password). What I suspect is going on is that the password field is present but visually hidden (not missing and probably not with display: none, but perhaps by being placed in an overflow: hidden box with a height of zero or a similar technique).

I haven't confirmed this hunch as to the technique but it seems like a good compromise if there is a good reason to hide the password field initially. And I think there are some such good reasons. For example, if you are Google: Not everyone logs in to Google with a password. I have to log in to my work account using our company's SSO provider, so that Google account has no password. In this case, I shouldn't see a password field, as its presence will be more confusing than helpful. Still, a hidden-but-present password field would allow my password manager to work in the case that my Google account does in fact take a password. (Presumably care should be taken to avoid adding extra confusion to users of assistive technology.)
In Facebook's settings you can paste a PGP public key. Notification emails sent to you by Facebook will then be encrypted using that key.
OpenID may not be particularly common in consumer-facing services, but it is very much still in use for business applications. Almost every web application I use for work handles authentication through my G Suite account.

This is probably easier for the business case, where you can guarantee that everyone has an account from the same provider. Less so when some of your users want to use a Google account, some want to use Facebook (which isn't actually OIDC and requires its own separate implementation), some want to use Microsoft, etc. Like any complex open standard, the completeness and correctness of implementations vary widely, and supporting many different implementations is a pain even if 90% is the same. I'm reminded of my time working with different IPSec implementations.
Year and years ago, there used to exist a profession where a man behind a bar mixed softdrinks together for customers on demand, often with custom embellishments like cherries, ice cream and the like. This was a very popular, very trendy job. And customers enjoyed the experience. You can still find elderly people today who lament the almost complete demise of the soda jerk.

I'm pretty sure barista will eventually go the way of the soda jerk. It's inconceivable to this generation; people can't imagine giving up the 'human touch' and personalization. But one day, maybe 20 years from now or two or three generations from now, convenience of automatic systems will win and the barista will be relegated to one or two retro novelty shops in large cities. And the people in this thread will be the new elderly curmudgeons, complaining about how young people live life too fast and fucked it all up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_jerk
Are you saying that it was returning pages that didn't contain the phrase "the onion", or just weren't articles from The Onion? What was the exact search term?
I believe the paper they are referring to is here:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/528968v2
Drinking 2 diet beverages daily linked to high risk of stroke, heart attacks
> I disagree that diversity is a priority over long term tax revenue and infrastructure improvements and economic success

'Tech bros' are also diversity, and so are Trump supporters. You can't just pick and choose and create your own special brand of diversity that needs protection from groups and cultures you don't like.
Don't A/B Test in the Beginning
A new algorithm acts like facial recognition software for materials
I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.
I recommend the book Lost New York by Nathan Silver, to anyone interested in these lost architectural icons of New York City.

It was originally written in the midst of the NYC preservation debate of late 1960s, which resulted from the destruction of buildings like the Singer building, the old Met Opera House, and especially Penn Station.
the point is that in FP languages, pattern matching uses closed ADTs, so you always know at compile time if you've covered all the cases.
Bubble that's dangerous for society is when everybody believes the same thing, not when everybody has different set of beliefs.

I know the more popular bubble is information one and you make a fair point, but I believe it's powered more by recommendation systems than the things that you trust.

I got distracted lately and I wanted to clean it up before putting it out there but if somebody is bored: http://comboy.pl/wot.html
I remember briefly flirting with the idea of buying a new WRX back in 2000 or so. Went to a few dealerships and asked to take a test drive, and none of them would even let me. They said "If I let you test drive this car, it would end up with a non-zero mileage, and I have buyers lined up for blocks demanding zero on the odometer."

Well, okay...
By "something like Haskell code executing outside the IO monad", I meant something like Haskell with the obvious backdoors turned off. (Ghc has a "safe haskell" option to disallow things like unsafePerformIO.)

Disallowing direct access to the outside world is a big restriction, but it may be that a lot of the things you'd want to do inside a sandboxed application that aren't safe could be delegated to trusted code through an appropriate interface.

Threading isn't necessarily a problem; the Haskell Par monad for instance should be fine as there is no program-visible way to know which of two sub-tasks executed in parallel finished first.
> It's a ray caster, where the rays are sent out from the camera to intersect the map. With ray tracers, the rays are sent out from the light source, IIRC.

Not correct. I see this pedantry often, but it's factually wrong. If you look at the Wikipedia articles for both ray casting [0] and ray tracing [1], they BOTH describe the methods as sending rays from the camera/eye.

From what I can tell, the difference between ray casting and ray tracing is that in ray casting, only the primary ray is traced. The ray does not get reflected, refracted, or even traced to light sources for checking shadows. At most, surface normals are dealt with for lighting and texture mapping is applied.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)
> I don't think many articles have a lot of repeating sentences.

This misrepresents the comment you're replying to. The case I gave was "linking to a single word." Articles have a lot of repeating words.

I can see users highlighting and linking to a key word or two in the section they want to link to. This is going to result in a broken link if it's not unique. This is not an edge case. It's not even mentioned as a potential issue in the spec.

Should the browser at least warn that this is going to result in a broken link as the doc currently stands? Should it disable the feature until sufficiently unique text has been selected? Should it just silently let you copy a broken link and chalk it up to PEBKAC (which is what the spec seems to imply)?

Needs more thought IMHO.
Sure, and I'm saying that those other factors aren't genetic.
>but IMO that made no difference whatsoever from a consumer's standpoint.

With cheaper techniques, the idea is that the "more capital efficient" way of indexing the ever-expanding web would in turn provide better results for an improved consumer experience. It's the old adage of "do more with less".

For example, see the old Danny Sullivan graphs[0] showing how Google's index was growing faster than AltaVista. Having a bigger index lets one return more relevant search hits.

AltaVista wasn't just falling behind in "staleness" of old indexes; the aggregate size of the index was smaller than Google as well.

[0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2068075/search-engin...
I thought that time was essentially an illusion? Isn't time just things changing from one state into the next. So time travel isn't really logical, it would entail changing the entire state of the universe at once from its current state to one it had in the past
Number theory is always pointless until an application is found and it becomes a separate field of research.
> This was quite a popular media thing among conservatives who were torqued about the evils of the 10% luxury tax in the early nineties. It was always about the yachts and yacht industry, too. It was the opposite of persuasive because in reference to the luxury tax, they were always going on about the freaking yachts.

>> The yacht costs $2,995,000, but, thanks to the current luxury tax that kicks in at $100,000, you have to fork over another $289,500. Rich people aren't happy about paying this extra money. Even if they can afford it, they think it's unfair. And in some cases, they're refusing to pay it -- simply by refusing to buy new boats and planes.

> Funny stuff.

Hilarious, and so transparently selfish and self-serving. Something tells me that if you can afford to spend $3 million on a conspicuous-consumption item like a yacht, you'll still find $3.3 million affordable. They just don't like paying taxes. I'd bet they'd have to raise the luxury tax to a level quite a bit higher than 10% to negatively affect the yacht industry.

Even the tax did hurt the yacht industry, the important question is: what did people spend their money on instead? If a tax kills the yacht industry, but strengthens industries more beneficial to the common good, I think that's a positive result.
NYC is full of rich people. Giving the richest man in the world a tax break and access to a prime location in the largest city in the country to drive out middle class people would be dumb.
"Squawk to Talk" ratio

Squawk = number of words in your hacker news comments

Talk = number of words in children of your hacker news comments
As I vaguely recall, from my own perceptions as web search was arriving:

* There were a bunch of early "full-text"-ish search experiments, but Lycos best proved its immense value and potential first.

* Then, AltaVista arrived with breadth & speed beyond what had previously been possible. Still, it required a bit of expertise to craft your queries.

* Then, Excite burst ahead with a quality breakthrough. Something about their use of HTML-styling & in-link text meant that even with fewer sites, the results were much better.

* Then, Hotbot (powered by Inktomi) had an era of best mix of fresh-content, deep-content, and quality ranking.

* Then, all those pioneers dropped the ball, in one way or another, letting Google out-rank, out-crawl, and out-business-model them. (And much of Google's business-model was pioneered by "Goto", later "Overture".) Sad, really, especially how many coulda-shoulda competitors eventually died inside Yahoo. (Including Overture.)
We had a really slow internet connection at school. So when one of my colleagues introduced us to Google with it's clean interface, we all moved over from a handful of other search engines, and never went back. I can't remember the index being a problem back then.
Show HN: Quickly add “Made with love in” badges to your projects
> I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.

I see; I incorrectly read it as accusatory. Thanks for the very civil reply!
TinySeed seems much better than the "predatory" deal Earnest Capital is offering[1].

But they still seems hamstrung by not understanding that startup investing is inherently a hits-based business. At some point they're going to get a 1000x return, whether they want it or not, and it will make all their previous investments look financially insignificant.

A startup doesn't have to be the "the next Facebook" to return 1000x. It could be an Atlassian or GitHub, two previously-tiny bootstrapped startups.

The big advantage of trying to make your money off your big hits is it allows you to be genuinely founder friendly. The big hits pay back so much that you can be generous and high-minded with the rest, like YC.

1. Giving up 15% for ~$150k would suck as a founder.

But 8% would be a good deal. Forcing smart founders to insist on the minimum end of the range seems like a bad place to start the relationship.

2. Having an investor make monthly payments and control your salary would suck as a founder.

It's going to cause anxiety about the money being cut off and it will make you feel like an employee that has to report to their boss. Investors should be peers and partners.

Seems like they should just make the deal 8% and pay the money at once, and trust that you've chosen good founders. If they blow the money, well, you messed up. And if they spend it differently from how you would, but succeed, who cares?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19160036
True enough, and the two cities actually have similar average salaries. But Amazon wasn't proposing to bring in 10x as many workers to NYC as Seattle; they were proposing a bit over half as many. In both wealth and space, one Amazon office is just a far smaller deal in NYC than Seattle.

The more controversial part is whether that just means "less effect", or can actually change the role played. I'm very much in the second camp. The conflict here is not so much over "good or bad" but timeframe; rising demand helps cities and raises the standard of living for residents, but demand shocks can destabilize people and produce housing shortages even under good policy. Seattle saw 18% population growth by migration in a decade, with Amazon staff becoming 6% of the population, and housing prices rose about 80% in seven years. That sort of disruptive change just isn't on the table in NYC.
IT was responsible for setting thousands of machines default pages to Google through all our system images from an IT Desktop support perspective - this was because Yahoo's frontpage was an utter hideous mess - and it was the minimalistic portal to the internet that worked way better for the users in the companies I worked at then.
EU says „no contingency plans“ for data flows in case of no-deal Brexit
Separated by five natural numbers.
Chinese aren't Christian.
They didn't have the guts to call a prime triplet involving a sexy prime a threeway or ménage à trois? Boo!
Same as every other storage provider's default/basic storage offering. If you want georedundancy, you will need to build it.

EDIT: Apparently GCS has this feature built in. Did not know, very cool!
People are saying this is a "quite dated" method for creating a 3D game. Does anyone have a tutorial on creating a 3D game in one weekend (or even 1 day?) using modern tooling? It'd be cool to make a token 3D game with the kids. I'm curious myself.
Interesting! Thanks for the explanation.
Expensify shows an avatar for the user
Source: https://github.com/plibither8/made-with-love-in
On look here is another shiny tool! ...honestly, our industry needs to change
> With ray tracers, the rays are sent out from the light source, IIRC.

Are there any implementations which send rays from the light source(aka. forward ray tracing)? This is astoundingly inefficient, as most rays will not intersect the camera.

I've never seen one, other than in brief academic discussions. What you can use forward ray tracing for is to compute shadows.
> I don't think you've been to Sweden to make that claim, and perhaps you've been listening to socialist propaganda suggesting that Sweden is socialist.

I have, multiple times actually, and live quite close. They are a high tax, strong central state country with a strong safety net, and more regulations than the US. The same goes for Denmark, btw. You'd expect them dropping far below the US as well with all the ways the government injects itself into the market. Yet, they don't. Granted, they might have fewer TV channels, a lower incarceration and not have a significant part on antidepressants and opiods, so it's open to debate who actually has a higher quality of life ;)

> You would be correct, libertarians do not hold this view.

I suppose that's similar to half of the feminists saying they are actually egalitarians. Virtually all libertarians I've encountered very much do hold that view. "But we might be charitable". Sure. Might. Everything might happen.

> What do some bureaucrats in Washington know of the troubles of people on the street of downtown SF?

What do the super rich in SF do when faced with mass homelessness and people living in open slums otherwise seen in the third world? "Look somewhere else" appears to be the answer. Granted, there are probably a few who don't, but by and large, they don't care.
OMG yes. We went with "choose the login option" and it sucked. Everyone created multiple accounts (we didn't support combined identity at the time) and it just..sucked.
Given the high amount of immigration to the US, both compared to other developed countries, and to its own history in the last century (http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/chapter-5-u-s-foreign-...), shouldn't it have solved worker shortages by now?
This is clearly referring to C# switch statements. Not that they are very different from switch statements in most languages anyway.
>if someone inside the company had used data in this way they would have been fired unconditionally and immediately.

Unless they're an exec, then they might negotiate an exit package or it wouldn't get to that point.

Didn't the Google Exec who was most recently in the news for sexual misconduct misuse data?
Urban unicorn renewal
I too noticed the gender-ness of the description but I don't know if it matters. I bristled at it with the thought of "Why does it have to be a 'he'?" and then thought well if it was another "she" would I be thinking "Oh so only women can be 'assistants'?!". I get that non-gendered is probably the best but I wouldn't read too much into it. The author wrote this, it appears, for themselves and they can call it whatever they want as far as I'm concerned.
Just wanted to mention there's some folks doing realtime source separation (not sure exactly how they've implemented it) with a DNN for reduction of background noise in, eg: Skype conversations.

I'm not involved with them in any way, but I've been amazed with its ability to cancel out coffee-shop style noise.

Check out https://krisp.ai/technology/ - Mac/Windows. I wish they had Linux support!

Edit: Appears they don't have Windows support yet.
Given that so many people do it all for free with very good uptime and connectivity, do you think Filecoin will be something consumers want?
The last line in the comment you responded to is, and I quote:

"Now I wonder whether the companies are different or the times are."

I think that makes it clear that I'm at least asking the question you lead with (but do not appear to have read far enough in what I wrote to see...).

The accusation that I'm affiliated with Google PR is way off base and that should have been superficially obvious from what I wrote above. I suspect and hope, but cannot prove, that your other assertions are similarly wrong.
eke
maybe that's why we're on HN
Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act