skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those examples are cheap because you can arbitrarily produce more than you need. As counterexample, consider things which you cannot arbitrarily produce more of — licensed drugs, lottery ticket combinations, shares of a company you’re not already running. In all cases, it is possible to buy enough that you’re excluding other people from buying any. In the case of licensed drugs and similar, this is why monopolies are regulated. In the case of lottery tickets, it’s one of the few “winning” strategies and (Some? All?) places forbid it. In this narrative, energy production is limited at some imprecisely defined level, so more cannot be produced.
A B is like 80% or so, judging from A being the best iirc? I'm not familiar with alphanumeric grading systems.
AFAIK zita-njbridge is quite similar to Roc, but it's JACK-specific and has no loss recovery.
Like that text says, as long as a single person can be - even indirectly - identified from the data, it's only pseudonymized, and the GDPR protections apply. Even an IP address can be personal data.
Augmented Reality for Productivity
I get a lot of spam, mostly correctly categorised for me, but some leaks through.

I do find it a solved problem in the sense that it's easy to deal with though - as long as we're considering phishing a separate issue - it's easy to identify spam (I get several identical messages, possibly just from a different name, at the same time apart from anything else!) and click a button to get rid of it.

It's much harder to identify 'fake news', and even if you do once you've forgotten about it it may be in the back of your mind as a thing you heard, and forgot you proved false.
The law I was referring to in this case was Stefan–Boltzmann law (heavily reliant upon assumptions on a given black body that break down under certain circumstances, that people like to hand wave away because they haven't had to deal with the complexities of said circumstances before), which may as well as be a model as far as I'm concerned.
Just build progressive web apps already, break app store duopoly
This. It's like those counterfeit memory cards you could get on eBay, that had a 128 Mb chip but reported themselves as 8 Gigs or so. "Works perfectly if you stay below 128 Mb!"
It's not an area with the potential for scams. It's just scam.

When someone tries to sell you a product that goes against the accepted laws of physics, because some flawed experiment decades ago indicated that they might be wrong, you can be certain that it's a scam.
They've been used and will be again ... there's a reason we have so much media exploring that fear in fiction, a reason so many fallout shelters were built, a reason we derailed Iran's nuclear program. It's a big risk, and it's going to go really badly for us all one day, or at least that is as likely as peace is. So, what's your point?
Not OP, but Google can enforce whatever policies they like in their own marketplace. Considering their main business is selling ads and click fraud is against their TOS, I'm not surprised they'd ban this extension.

Personally I think that if people hate ads so much they should just block them (I do). This attitude of "sticking it to the man" by "screwing with their data" seems petty and potentially counterproductive.
From my personal experience I think Rust's string system is hard to beat at the moment. It's pretty darn good from a usability point of view and it also found a nice solution to work with UCS2 windows APIs by providing a OsStr type.
The Rise of DataOps (From the Ashes of Data Governance)
I think I'm gonna switch now, too.
Why You Should Start Writing
Proper WebGL 2.0 support in Safari seems MIA despite occasional tweets and mailing list posts implying otherwise. Seems it's going to hang out half-baked in the "Develop > Experimental Features" menu indefinitely.
Yes, it is true that providing a service or an information consumes less energy than materials.

The real issue though is not about absolute amount of energy. The author is talking about exponential growth - the one where every year economy must grow as a percentage of existing base. At any base, even with a majority service based economy, exponential growth will hit a bottle neck.

For example, take this (from https://www.energuide.be/en/questions-answers/do-i-emit-co2-...)

>In 2018, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) account for 6 to 10% of global electricity consumption, or 4% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And this figure increases by 5 to 7% each year!

This year-on-year growth is unsustainable, no matter how small the base. At 7% growth, the greenhouse emissions will double every 10 years. We're really bad at wrapping our heads around exponential growth.

The argument that we will find more energy efficient ways to do a certain activity misses the point because for a growing economy, even that efficiency gains will get outstripped by scale. And there's Jevon's paradox too whereby efficiency actually increases resource consumption. So as Internet bandwidth expands, it's not like per-capita Internet usage remained the same. We simply increased our hunger to consume the available bandwidth.
The basic fallacy here is the proposition that all economic activity involves physical work, and hence energy == economic activity. However this is not the case. My economic activity consists of staring at a screen and pressing buttons. It is therefore perfectly possible that energy consumption can level off while economic growth continues.

One can imagine a similar conversation between a geographer and an economist (if one existed) in 1700 in which the geographer made the same argument about land use; at the time economic growth was very much about bringing land under cultivation or other use, and hence (the geographer would argue) economic growth would be limited by the finite amount of land. Same fallacy.
Legacy data governance is broken in the machine learning era. Let’s rebuild it as an engineering discipline.
I'm starting to question whether it was such a good idea to make web browsers virtual machines (for Javascript or WebAssembly apps).

It makes web browsers big and complex. I know both Chrome and Firefox are open source, but does that really matter so much when the codebase is so big and complex that only large and well-funded organizations are able to develop it? I'm not sure if it's realistic anymore for a few guys to get together and create a web browser (including rendering engine) in their spare time.

This centralization can lead to censorship, as we're starting to see here.

We also end up with a mono-culture (well, not quite there yet, since there are still at least 2 web rendering engines), which is horrible for security. The Irish potato famine is good example of what can happen when you have a mono culture. These days, you often have to let strangers execute code on your computer, if you just want to read an article or look at some pictures.
Sure, but at some point between 1400 and 2500 years, your (exponential) growth exceeds your (cubic) light cone volume.
TLDR; In 1989 couple of scientist claimed success in cold fusion and tried publishing paper in Nature. No one can reproduce the experiments so Nature didn't published and authors withdrew paper anyway. In coming years, those scientists tried suing and name calling instead of accepting that they were wrong.

There is nothing insightful in this article apart from above tldr.
Creative works are ultimately embedded in physical world. If our exploitable physical world is limited, there is indeed an upper limit to the value of creative works.

Just like we're facing the prospect of peak oil, is it really hard to imagine that we could face the prospect of physical limitations imposing themselves upon creation and distribution of creative works?
Ask HN: Question about Messaging for Erlangers
I should note that I don't have actual experience from Erlang, just docs/talks/etc.

From what I can tell, Erlang treats asynchronous messaging as a language primitive, and to do a synchronous request/response, you send a unique reference, and wait for an ACK back.

I've been fantasizing about what kind of programming language I would write (I don't need to be scolded for hubris, just daydreaming ;) ). It would be statically typed, functional in a pipe-ish way rather than in the pure sense, and have processes/messaging inspired by Erlang.

I'm not sure why I would use asynchronous messages as the foundation rather than synchronous. I'm thinking I would go in a more Promise-y direction, but without Promises explicitly ("message" function calls always return a Union(error,...), and always have either a default or configured timeout).

Are there enough cases for wanting to send a message without knowing at the very least that it was received, in the context of a high-level language?

Thanks in advance for considering this silly question <3
Friedrich Kittler: There is No Software (1995)
It's definitely not. But thanks for playing along.
Yes and I started reading that and went to nvAlt which was also mentioned. But it was frustrating to spend that much effort before even knowing what it was with some detail.

And the gif, which I usually like, suffers the same problem. Hard to follow unless you already know what it is.

In the end I decided it wasn't for me, tons of small files, each per note? Didn't seem that compelling to me, I think I would prefer one or a few larger files maybe something like vim-wiki.

But because I couldn't quickly research it feel I might have misunderstood it.
Here are a few good terms to help your search:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claytronics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_matter
Why would the location service client be a blob? o_0 It's just a web API, there's no reason to not publish the client code, Mozilla's location service client is https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/dom/system/N...
Why iOS Developers Feel Stuck in Their Careers and What to Do
>naturally markets and systems will correct.

Markets and systems obviously correct, but the key question is at what cost and to whom. Imagine for a moment that we find ourselves in a situation where energy is limited. Markets will correct themselves by making it expensive, but who'll suffer the most is the poor (while markets might have been reacting to overconsumption by the rich).

Saying markets will correct themselves is like saying things sort out themselves. They do, but usually who takes a hit isn't fair and ethical (as was evident by 2008 crisis).
Delivery Apps Like Grubhub, Seamless, and UberEats Continue to Hurt Restaurants
When talking about quality, "good enough" is always good enough.

When I build a garden shed, I will not make strength calculations on the whole think, and my foundation will be pretty basic. My "timbered some wood together" shed will stand for 50 years, just as the "made a garden shed like an appartement building". Only the latter will take way more time and effort.

When building an appartement building, good luck doing that with the same effort as building a shed. You will have some nasty surprises once you start adding weight to the different floors. The whole thing will collapse.

So in the end, it makes no sense to build a garden shed as you would an appartement building, and it makes no sense to build an appartement building as a town shed. A lot of people forget this in the software world.

So the quality "support" depends on the project itself. Small projects need less, big projects more. Just like small companies need less process overhead, and big companies more.

Like everything in life, it all comes down to balance, and experience will teach you where the balance lies. Because sometimes you will go too far the the left, and after that you compensate and go too far to the right. But the balance will always be somewhere in the middle.

So no matter what project, "good enough" will always be good enough.
Yep, and facebook too, yet it's very clearly within the ability of both companies to have their algorithms and people categorise non universally mainstream content and only censor what's appropriate to the society that's viewing it.

It's not quite the same thing but a company like netflix offers different shows in different countries, spotify's the same for songs. This is more down to licensing than censorship and the scale is quite different from social media but it's a demonstration on how a company can provide different content per region.

Of course, if you flip the argument on it's head, we're annoyed that a company like Google is censoring things which are allowed or common place in society outside of the US. we wouldn't want google censoring content that we consider "enlightened" into countries which we consider backwards (which they no doubt do) and that's always the hypocrisy of these positions.
Ah, you're parsing the `lineStrings` blob? I'm looking at the lat/long pairs in the `stopPointSequences` structure[1] which gives a different set of coords (in particular, 51.502769, -0.126102 doesn't exist as a stop for the 53.)

[1] `.stopPointSequences | .[0] | .stopPoint | .[] | [.name, .id, (.lat|tostring), (.lon|tostring)]` in jq parlance
Fair enough, I suppose.

Since I can't read the site, I can't draw any conclusions, but:

1. Would it really be that hard to make a profile of the average European, make a selection of advertisements on that profile and the subject, and serve those statically (perhaps mining equipment or Holiday opportunities in Virginia)?

2. The less intrusive your behaviour is, the less you have to worry about the GDPR. Aren't non-EU readers worried about visiting sites that completely block the EU as a preventive measure?

I'm pretty happy to be blocked though. It's a lot more honest and better than the song and dance some outlets put up trying to obfuscate compliance.
Call me cynical but this just sounds like a hook for their new service, Google Séance.
If uBO changes name to for example "Ant Block", somebody will come and create "Ant Block Plus"
The conversation we had yesterday on this topic was not very productive. One thing I'd like to see is a clarification about what surveillance actually means to a user. Does it mean:

- Providing IP address details?

- Providing message contents?

- The police compelling you to provide your password?

- Anything else I'm missing?

It would be nice to avoid equivocating "surveillance" and stick to a common definition so we can argue the merits of each potential practice.
The Worth of an Angry God
Social environment _anywhere_ is far from ideal. I've felt that school gave me great training at recognizing and dealing with assholes. I was more of a sensitive kid and if I was isolated from school (and the playground), I may not be able to join the society later on - the state of it it would've been too much of a shock.
Yeah. To watch a Norwegian educational series for kids to prepare them for puberty, you first have to confirm that you're above 18 on Youtube... They've outright removed episode 6, since it covers female puberty, while the episodes about males is allowed.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJX8EALqb4PzmhYdnK6Ax...

It's the same backwards situation on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BhrSKOiFawg/
Engineers boost potential for creating successor to shrinking transistors
I think you're missing the basic point. Yes, pressing buttons and staring at a screen takes less energy but the value corresponding to that is expected to grow indefinitely, is that even possible?

What humans value is built upon energy and resources (even clicking on buttons), and if that base is limited, where does future value creation come from?
Deft was (around 3 or 4 years) my weapon of choice as well when I was using nvAlt. So, it was nvAlt (for times when I was in a random place on my Mac), Deft (for searching or adding from within emacs and 1Writer [1] from iOS, all were fed from a Dropbox folder.

Now (since January) though I have moved to use Bear [2] (non-free) on all my devices. Its use case is a bit different, but I like it better overall.

Side question: what do you suggest as alternative to fzf? fzf is excellent (a post I wrote on our engineering blog about using it for custom completions in zsh [3]), but I’m always eager to see new tools I can use.

[1] http://1writerapp.com/

[2] https://bear.app/

[3] http://engineering.affectv.com/aws/devops/2018/08/15/fzf-aut...
It will definitely help some US businesses and will definitely hurt others. The same way import tariffs on steel are good for US steel companies, they are hurting the US companies who are using that US steel in their products.
And that's without taking retaliation tariffs into account.
I am not sure the situation is the same. Code used to be somewhat valuable, like in for example a game engine. Today code is to some extent free, and programming is a service. You don't sell software, you sell whatever investors wants to see. If the economy takes a hit programming won't necessarily be very valuable anymore.
A key difference between Android and iOS: on Android, there are alternatives to Google’s app store; on iOS there are not. So it would be entirely possible for someone who lives in a country where marijuana is legal and wishes to facilitate the legal industry there to set up an app store (cloning F-Droid could be a quick start) which offered such apps. He'd be out of luck on iOS.

The federal marijuana laws are — mostly — blatantly unconstitutional, of course, but they are still on the books. I don't blame Google for not wanting to litigate the issue; their lawyers are probably acutely aware of the Backpage case.
When you say 'explode' what do you mean? I can see rendering being a problem, but then if someone decided to use cuneiform in their file names I'd guess many people would have problems rendering that. Surely as long as there's internal consistency???

Now I could see a mechanism where you UTF-8 code could 'explode' latin1 only software.
It depends on the industry and their regulatory obligations as well as their risk tolerance. Defense and Finance should have a 3 strikes rule for specific role within their orgs that produce the greatest risk. Health care would be next up and may or may not benefit from a 3 strike rule.

I think a better question would be is Sr Leadership supporting the security and risk mgmt teams in developing proper training as well as implementing and spending the money on the proper controls to help reduce the risk to the end user of being spear phished?
Security breach: Major social platform hacked
Terry Pratchett predicted fake news in 1996 while interviewing Bill Gates
Ultra-processed food and adverse health outcomes
Ask HN: How can I better transition into hacker culture as a military veteran?
I have found it increasingly difficult to integrate into hacker culture as a military veteran. Politics and the culture war are ever so slowly creeping into our work environments where before such discussions were taboo. I have been out for as long as I was in at this point and every day is a struggle to adopt normal corporate culture. I know that this is my problem and not yours and I should not expect others to conform to my shortcomings but what strategies can I use to develop a more “civilian” mindset again? I am in the process of getting psychological treatment but the wait line is months long. I just can’t turn it off and I feel like I don’t belong. Some days I just want to give up being a software developer.
Quiet handy and amazing thank you very much for sharing this over.
> That’s the allure of the theorem; that a simple unknown proof may exist.

Well, Fermat made lots of similar claims wrt. other propositions, and for most of them the proof was found easily, or perhaps they were refuted altogether and shown to be wrong. FLT gets its name because it was a very rare case of a claim that just couldn't be solved, one way or the other. In fact, it seems that Fermat himself may have realized at some point that what he thought of as a proof he had, was in fact wrong - and dropped his claim altogether as a consequence. Which would then explain why it was only found as a margin note in a textbook. It's fascinating because it's such a simple claim to state, and yet the proof is incredibly complex. To be sure, logicians can predict that such cases will occur, in the abstract; it's a bit like having hard-to-solve instances of the SAT. But it's still nice to have such a natural example!
The only annoyance is the occasional unwrap, when something is provably impossible, but the type system can't detect it.
WWDC is just around the corner
List of Good Site Reliability Engineer/Production Engineer Interview Questions
I'm not an expert but my impression was that a fusor isn't cold fusion at all. The device itself does not heat up too much perhaps, but it literally accelerates ions to fusion temperatures of >45 million Kelvin.
I don't really consider that an anti-pattern. Sure, you can get away with just blitting them to the terminal and hoping that they display properly, but sooner or later you're going to have to decode such byte strings anyway.

The real anti-pattern is conflating byte strings and character strings in the first place. We got away with it for decades, but in a UTF-8 world it just isn't possible.
seems like saying "freedom" to an american is an alternative way to do a mind trick like a jedi waving his hand
I really didn't want to be that guy, and props for the author for such comprehensive reference work, but god, what an appalling typography. Bad tables with too many lines bitmap formulas with misadjusted size, poor spacing, ugly font... Almost everything that could be wrong is wrong.
I think that accessing characters by index is _probably_ a code smell in most places, especially if that string may contain arbitrary UTF-8.
Saying that "people hate change, even when it's good for them" has to be the most arrogant thing I've read today. If someone is most comfortable using their browser with a certain extension for which there is no good WebExtensions-based alternative, how can you say that forcing them to stop using that extension is "good for them"? Even if there is a suitable alternative, which requires re-learning a bunch of things the user is used to, how is that change "good for them"?

The move away from XUL and NPAPI is great for Mozilla, it makes it easier to maintain and develop the browser, it's probably good for extension developers (except for those who now can't port their extension to the new API because it's more limited), but it's not good for users who are forced to take time out of their day to find and alternatives or users who just have to accept that what they were previously using their browser for just isn't possible anymore with Firefox.

Saying that change is "good" for users even if the users don't realize it and resist, prevents us from considering the very real negative effects of introducing breaking changes or removing features of our software.
Phrased in a way that doesn't imply Wiles's extreme longevity: it took 385 years of advances in mathematics to invent the tools and frameworks that allowed Wiles to come up with the proof.
Hg
Bbc urdu
> For any product you can imagine consuming, there are "obesity"-type limits to how much more of that same product you can consume before the marginal utility goes negative. For any service you might use, similar limits apply since there are only 24 hours in a day.

Not if products are finanicalized (like equity, debt or land ownership). There's no obesity-type limit to net worth of an individual and that money allows the person to have unprecedented power to exploit actual physical resources and energy. Some, like Bezos for his Blue Origin project, decide to do so.

> We ended up with a world where widespread obesity is a problem and predicted gigadeaths from starvation did not actually happen.

This is looking at a very specific metric of human well-being. The limits of nature assert themselves in various ways. The loss of biodiversity and climate change is directly attributable to economic growth. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/capita...