skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw a guest lecture in my HCI class at CMU this semester from Dan Bricklin [1], who demoed VisiCalc for us on an emulator [2]. One thing that really struck me was how similar the interface was to today's Excel or Google Sheets. He even demonstrated how a lot of the original shortcuts still worked in Excel.

Another fun bit of his talk, about the max digits in VisiCalc:

The number of digits that we stored for precision, it was stored as binary-coded decimal, just like a calculator, it was not stored as a binary number. It was stored as the digits, so that it would be exactly the same that you would see on your calculator, without funny round-off errors and stuff like that.

But we had to figure out what the maximum number of digits would be. And we decided, let’s - ha-ha. We thought, here us, two little programmers trying to figure out if anyone would use it. Let’s take the budget of the United States of America, in dollars. That’s the maximum, at the time. So that’s the maximum number of digits we had. Sure enough, within a few years, people were using it, according to the Wall Street Journal, for calculating the budget of the United States of America, but only in dollars, not in pennies, because that’s all it could do without going to scientific notation.

[1] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

[2] https://www.pcjs.org/apps/pcx86/1981/visicalc/

[3] http://www.notetakerhd.com/about.html
(a) Not THAT difficult; there were always alternatives and (b) what exactly do you think "Mr. Tambourine Man" on the Dylan CD was about?
Unfortunately it would be hard to ask him directly as to why but a good proxy is to listen to one of his colleagues, Richard Hamming explain. https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw. He mentions Claude around the 4:30 mark.
In[1]: %load_ext autoreload
In[2]: %autoreload 2

?
"[C]ompanies should be held to extremely high standards when it comes to how they source their components and the environmental impact of the lifecycle of their device, because [it] ultimately [ends up as] junk that’s hurting the environment."

FTFY

All products should be held to that standard, not just "semi-disposable toy electronics", which it's not even clear applies to this.
Yeah, sites like that are pretty much in the sweet spot of uselessness - lasers too powerful to use as laser pointers, too low quality optics to use for engraving or other laser CNC projects, too cheap to actually deliver the rated power, and too outside the law to give a fuck about false advertising.

There are less-sketchy looking offerings in the 7W range for a similar form factor, though - see [0]. Of course, I'm still not sure if there's such a thing as a 'reputable' site in that segment...

0: https://www.sanwulasers.com/
I wish they would just set the H-1B minimum pay to $120k a year or something.
Thousands of practitioners and millions of users also believe in the efficacy of Homeopathy. They are convinced that diluting a substance actually increases its potency! It's not very difficult to find examples of millions of people believing in nonsense. The Placebo effect is very real.

Science hasn't disproven the existence of Invisible Pink Unicorns either. But I definitely would hold off on building unicorn crossings untill we actually have evidence.
Nice! Great example. I remember seeing this a while ago and being impressed. Even more impressive is that there are no .c or .s files in that repo at all that I can see.

Although it's not clear that it has a GUI toolkit up to the level of complexity that SerenityOS is showing though. If it does it's not being shown off, and I'd love to see the performance.

I'd love to see more examples if anyone can find them.
What we’re missing in product analytics
Sure, anything can be used for good or evil, uranium, an ICBM, whatever.
While I agree with the aspiration, I don’t see how it’s possible to use facial recognition to flag “america’s Most wanted” or to look for missing children without mass surveillance though?

It only works if it scans _everyone_ .

Additionally what happens when the technology isn’t perfect and innocent people get mistakenly flagged as persons of interest?

The other thing is once it’s installed and in operation, what’s to stop it being used for other purposes? - being used to target people peacefully protesting against the government or whatever.

It’s a slippery path from there into a surveillance state - China is already pretty much there with their social credit system - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

I for one don’t want to wake up someday soon and discover it’s 1984...
We know! You made it very clear you're "not a homosexual." And we believe you.
I generally don’t look at post/comment history except out of general curiosity myself. It’s not like the stuff posted here is private, and it’s probably more permanent than most sites.

I also post under effectively my real life identity. Could eventually regret that, but there’s definitely downsides to the alternative approaches to online identity too.
Hello Black Mirror.
Some of the developers may be naive, as people often willfully are for the preservation of their paychecks. The governments and corporations funding the development know exactly what they're doing.
Panic’s Playdate is a pint-sized gaming machine with a ‘season’ of 12 titles
Agree. And to take it even further, consider Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" where technology could arise that makes it trivial for individual actors to cause mass destruction. From the abstract:

"A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance."

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
While those journalists surely would be delighted to hear their profession depicted on the Dylan CD:

You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you’ll say
When you get home

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ballad-thin-man/
Fishing games, although judging by the appearance it probably isn't capable of offering any real variable resistance UX unless they have some clever patents attached.
London is so much more well kept than Paris for some reason. I went to Paris last year and the city was terrifyingly dirty, with layers of dirt struck on the walls of beautiful buildings, darkened by it. Stuff under construction was also mismanaged and often just poorly done. Scaffolding was very poorly done all around the city. After midnight I felt quite unsafe even in good neighbourhoods. I feel like London as a city is way better kept than Paris
This is seriously awesome work. Productive is an understatement, damn.
Basic Machine Learning Interview Questions and Answers
Well, a CPU microcode framework. Or perhaps an electron mustering framework.
Where do you store your state files? The only project I've worked on that used Terraform stored state in a git repo, which seemed like a nightmare with multiple people doing deploys to the same environment. Others have suggested it would be better stored on a network accessible share.
This same argument could be made about any decision to abstain from anything. If a country banned facial recognition the work could happen in another country. You can make it even more farcical by changing the act you abstain from: Why not kill someone? They will die eventually.

For any actor, their choice to do or not do something matters. It might not matter much, but it has some impact. I would not describe Amazon as a small player or having a small impact. Dismissing the importance of what they choose seems myopic. To return to your frame, I'd say that if Amazon stuck to its decision not to work on the technology it would be more meaningful than any national ban outside of, probably, the US or China.

In general - it seems like, if we don't like something, we should celebrate it not being done. Even if it's not done in some limited context. In fact, outside of a world government with effective law enforcement - all choices not to do things are limited. So it's really all we have!
It is not "virtue signaling" to choose to stop doing evil.
Panic published Firewatch, partnering with Campo Santo, the developer quoted in the article.

https://kotaku.com/the-people-who-published-firewatch-are-no...

I'm not arguing that the person you're replying to is right in their assessment of Panic, just that they're not _totally_ out of left field.
The last time I saw an article of this nature, a commenter pointed out that conscripts may be incentived to score lower on these tests. Isn't it true that many people simply don't care to score highly on them?

This hypothesis seems reasonable to me, and yet I don't see any mention of it in the 2018 study [0] although they do address concerns about the conscript data in other respects.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf
The title's use of quotes made me think it was going to be an article on the Therac-25 incident, whose software was arguably the true first "killer" app and is used as a cautionary tale in every intro level human computer interaction course

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Maybe no help from Exxon, but US per capita CO2 has been decreasing since 1978. But China and India have increased per capita, which is scary given their huge populations.
Apologies. Missed that one
Different ethnicities have different physical characteristics because they are adapted to different environments. Being able to efficiently use sunlight is useful in high altitudes, being able to tolerate heat and intensive sunlight is useful near the equator. Intelligence is useful everywhere.
Man they worked with Teenage Engineering for this? That's a pretty incredible team. I am amazed.
But $20-40 for each game.
An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth
The idea is not to assume that everyone will be superrational or trustworthy at the beginning of the game.

I believe it’s possible for the superrational players in a game to become the majority by expressing the superrational strategy in terms that will appeal to rationally self-interested players and demonstrating a superrational strategy working at some non-trivial scale.
One way I can think of that will solve this problem is to do something like:

resource "aws_instance" "nomadclients" {
ami = "${count.index > 2 ? data.aws_ami.nomadclient_tick.image_id : data.aws_ami.nomadclient_tock.image_id}"
instance_type = "t2.micro"

count = 6

iam_instance_profile = "${aws_iam_instance_profile.consul-join.name}"
subnet_id = "${element(aws_subnet.consul.*.id, count.index)}"

vpc_security_group_ids = [
"${aws_security_group.rule01.id}",
"${aws_security_group.rule02.id}",
"${aws_security_group.rule03.id}",
"${aws_security_group.rule04.id}",
]
}

The downside to this approach (in TF < 0.12), however, will become apparent when you want to modify the number of instances in one or both pools. This arrises from the way hcl v1 manages the counter index with each resource in the state; That is each resource is linked to a specific index and when that index is altered in someway, terraform will attempt to adjust the resources at each respective index accordingly.

Because of these headaches, we decided to abandon hcl for these use cases and ended up writing our own preprocessor that takes a JSON configuration and generates individual JSON-based HCL (ie. .json.tf) that terraform can then use. We can leverage proper templating to generate many variants of a single resource in a higher level language, while still using terraform to manage the infrastructure and it only adds one additional step to the plan + apply process.
IIRC it includes a macroassembler as a DSL in lisp; booting bare-metal with zero assembly is just not possible.
Super ambitious, but I love/respect the fact that there's still people out there driven by sheer passion and originality, rather than money.

I've ranted many a times about the hypercapitalistic race-to-the-bottom approach that Valve/Epic/etc are taking. This is a breath of fresh air and they have my full support.
Lost in the Jihad
Honest question: aside from "they provide Enterprise support", does anyone have a reason they would actually use redhat or centos for new servers? Why not use a Debian-derived one, which seems to both be more common, and have less constant creepy corporate influences?
Not only banned flourocarbons, China and Asia are the main source of plastics entering the oceans through their rivers.

Some are calling for environmental mercenaries, like Earth First! or GreenPeace, who will reek havoc on those who pollute or endanger the planet, ourselves included.
Yes, auctions will be similarly gamed.

I think one easy thing to do to ensure that small cos and rural areas still have access is to require all h1b hires to be level 4, the highest level. As it stands now more than 70% are hired at levels 1 and 2 (2018 data), which are essentially "below average" which is weird for a program aimed at bringing in those with hard to find skills.
Yeah I thought of the same comment. That is unfortunate.

Maybe Debian is more respectful since it's open source not backed by a company with enterprise customers?
I've done it as an exercise a while ago:
https://github.com/michaelklachko/NN/blob/master/Python/conv...
Where is option 3, come clean, change their ways and work to correct the damage? Why are 'lie' and 'kill themselves' more obvious?
I understand where you’re coming from. But you need to understand HE attacked MY grandmother and every other person suffering from dementia. Why the hell does HN allow his comments but not mine? He gets a pass because he owns a startup? I’m absolutely livid that you allow this double standard.
yeah, I'm working on one now (picking up where Indian devs left off) ...
Code is laravel 5.2, every controller injects session, requests, etc into the constructor, then injects a 'manager' which is basically a loose repository structure, laravel 5.3 > somewhere makes it so using requests/sessions in constructor you generally want to wrap that in middlware...

So upgrading is a huge nightmare. This is one reason I'm not a fan of repository pattern, more classes to inject everywhere even when they're not fully needed. When just making a fatter model would suffice.

Also lots of bad php practices...everywhere else. Bad devs can work on any code base, but laravel core code is pretty beautiful, and laravel's community encourages better code, if some bad actors write shitty code the rest of us have to clean up that's on them, but woocommerce is owned by Automattic and has bad code, you'd think they'd fix it or something being a large company.

There's also tons of great packages out there that are written way more OO and with testing and best practices than there are for wordpress. Laravel is also easier to optimize, and the data structure for wordpress can get out of hand as well.

ltdr; Yes, lots of bad laravel code -- but that's on the individual dev, core laravel and lots of laravel packages use php best practices and encourage good coding. Easier to write better code in laravel than it is a wordpress plugin.
Weren't documentaries predicting a global climate cooling in 1978 ? In that context, did Exxon think they were saving the climate ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-_SXLMMfo
Even a Surface Go beats a iPad Pro. I had one and changed it out, couldn't be happier. For more juice I'll get a Surface Pro. WSL beats anything but native linux.
When WiFi is enabled, iOS devices broadcast a list of known SSIDs and possibly the MAC addresses of some known routers. Has that changed?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/03/anatomy-of-an-iphone...

https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2012-March...
I'm always astounded by the depth to which Mark has explored this space. On more than a few occasions, I've come up with an interesting idea for a new protocol or programming language feature or piece of distributed systems infrastructure and told Mark about it, only to find he had already thought of that problem and discovered and solved several issues I hadn't even thought about yet.

Cap'n Proto RPC (https://capnproto.org/rpc.html) is based on E's network protocol, CapTP, e.g. utilizing The Four Tables:

http://erights.org/elib/distrib/captp/4tables.html

https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/c++/src/c...

(You can think of this design as an extension of the file descriptor table concept in Unix, except that both sides may export descriptors to the other side (so that calls can flow either way), and either side can be responsible for assigning the numeric descriptor value for any particular description (which makes it easier to compensate for a high-latency transport).)

When I first told Mark I was working on an object-oriented RPC protocol, he insisted I visit him and listen while he explained all this to me, and boy am I glad he did... would have taken a lot longer for me to figure it out myself.

It's crazy that most of the content of erights.org was written over 10 years ago -- I think some of it goes back to the 90's, even.
Speaking of buying and selling domain names I heard something interesting on a podcast a few days ago about buying a parked domain from someone else.

What they said was, if you are starting a business and the domain name that you want is already taken, you could approach the domain owner with the following suggestion:

You will rent the domain from them for a period of time, say two years, with a contract that gives you the option to buy the domain from them after that time has passed, at some price you both agree upon now.

This agreement could be beneficial to both parties.

- You avoid shelling out a lot of money for a domain name now for a business you don’t know whether will work out or not. The money you don’t spend on that domain name now you can use on engineering, marketing etc.

- They get money from renting the domain name to you, instead of just having it parked and earning them some meager amount of money from the ads they might have on the parked domain. On top of that, if your business works out then they get a good deal of money selling the domain to you in the future.

Of course you will have to be certain that the people you make this agreement with are trustworthy and that they will uphold their end of the contract.
Initially Skype was an Estonian company, with founders from Denmark and Sweden. A reporter asked the CEO whether they would modify it to allow compliance with a U.S telecom law mandating provision for wiretapping of voice services, and the CEO said "We're not American. Why would we?"

It was a sad day when that changed.
If Siri used a female voice in some countries/kingdoms, it would possibly be a punishable offense. I'm unaware of cultures where the reverse may be true. It's quite a quirk.

Why doesn't Siri et al have a circular slider like some of the digital music synths have, where the sound coordinates are wood, string, glass and metalic, along with other timbre controls on the side to allow emulation of just about every instrument you can imagine.

One axis for voice pitch, and the other for softness. Done. Everyone's happy then.
Not too sold on the price but it will download 12 games every month for you, if I read that correctly. That is pretty cool. The crank mechanism seems silly but with some creativity perhaps you can do interesting things with it, like fishing.
Definitely not subpar. Cloudformation is an incredible service. I’ve used it to deploy thousands of stacks. It just works.
I wish more airports embraced planespotting! I enjoy planespotting at SFO regularly- I go to Bayfront park and get decent views of traffic departing/arriving the 28s (longest runways).
I see China moving to appease the Americans in the short term and then working to secure their economic independence in the long term. The truth is that the Chinese know that they have overplayed their hand here; that Trump can raise tariffs all day long and it is foolish to race to the bottom with him. By making the requisite concessions in the trade war, which, as Ben noted, has historically been tilted to their favor, they will be able to steady their economy as they continue to build up their advanced technology infrastructure.
I dont think this will pass and my best guess is this is the administration getting FAANG to play ball.

But... if it does, how will it work? I did read the article but it wasnt clear if current h4 employees would be grandfathered? I work at a place with a few hundred h1b engineers and it seems their spouses fill the product/project management roles. If they arent grandfathered it'd be catastrophic for the company I work for, never mind places the size of FAANG companies.
Using `The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow`, Concurrent Programming is very easy and natural.

[The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow)
Keep in mind that Mark was talking about Smart Contracts 20 years (or more?) before anyone else was...
I just cannot imagine why someone would do this unless they want to crash a plane... you can’t even see the pilots reaction!
Of course Airbus misbehaved and is probably still misbehaving in some manner. The question is whether they are misbehaving when it comes to safety.
The comment assigns all the resentment to one side and all the difficulty to the other. When you describe a conflict that way, you're subtly perpetuating it.

When someone with the opposing identification runs into such a comment, inevitably they feel that their side has been excluded or treated unfairly. Then they feel compelled to respond in kind, leading to flamewar which we're trying to avoid here.
Hipster couples everywhere will have the crank to thank for bolstering their courage up to a level where it was possible for them to talk to one another. Eventually it will come to be viewed as an integral part of the tragic grand hipster narrative. That's the idea anyway.
I can't speak to that with accuracy (other than the fact that information is from 2012)

But it doesn't make sense to me it would be probing for known networks in it's disconnected state.
why is every comment saying how cool this thing is?
I thought they weren't allowed to work for a while now. How is this new?
And yet you can't buy hand grenades at 7-11 even though that would be insanely useful.
> booting bare-metal with zero assembly is just not possible

Well that makes sense on Intel anyway, the first stage bootloader has to fit into a single 512-byte sector (the MBR) doesn't it? Not sure if this still true in these modern days of EFI.
It only works for this crowd if it's either impossibly rare and hard to come by or expensive enough to keep it out of the hands of most non-hipsters.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. The site is awful on desktop - definitely designed for mobile alone. Which seems strange - considering the target market for this.
Your experience is that volunteering doesn’t help with loneliness? That’s all the article says, ultimately.
>Note that iOS "grey" color for WiFi does NOT mean disabled - you can still be tracked. A diagonal line across the WiFi symbol = off. Use "Settings" to turn WiFi completely off, or disable WiFi via Control Center before turning off Airplane Mode.

Are you sure about that? It's my understanding turning it off in airplane mode turns it off completely.

I just tested - connected to wifi + cell, went into airplane mode, then disabled wifi, and I see a diagonal line through the wifi symbol.
Oh yeah? How many votes did fake Jeff Bezos have along with his fake-ass divorced wife who specifically left him voting rights.

This shits called a long con, folks.
Well, if they gave a double ROT-13 quiz then it'd be a great answer.