skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've written a (mostly) fully-featured x86 assembler.

There are two gotchas that most people starting out probably won't realize until it's too late.

1) Encoding instructions on x86 can be more challenging than they first appear. Understanding how this works and fits together will save you a lot of headaches.

2) Forward jumps are a pain. Any reasonable assembler will provide symbolic labels for jumps and other operations. Because x86 instructions are variable length, you can't simply count up the lines to the label and multiply by some fixed amount. It doesn't work that way. Instructions can range from one byte to 15 bytes. What this means to you is that you'll need to design a multi-pass assembler. You allocate a fixed amount of space for the jump instruction and come back later to "patch" that jump instruction with the correct byte offset. Labels simply become keys in a dictionary that record the byte offset into the assembled binary data.

Other things to make sure you understand: big/little endian, LSB/MSB, how two's-complement works, etc.

One surprising aspect of writing an assembler is that you learn to decode instructions by simply looking at a hex dump of the binary output. You almost feel like Neo in the Matrix, in more nerdy less awesome sort of way. You start thinking of assembler and macros as merely convenience of having to write out hex (or binary) of the instructions you want. And on top of that, you see C as convenience for having to do assembler.
First time around it was a very small one-man operation (just me). I think my main problem at that time was that I lost track of what I wanted to build because I fell in love with the underlying technologies too much. Typical case of when something new came around which seemed a better fit, I switched over. I guess I was still not experienced as I should have been at that time. In the end I was not sure what I was actually creating and lost motivation.

The second time there were different issues (and I was not alone). Product-wise we focused on the wrong thing. We tried to mostly build something which was already provided from our competitors (just improve it) and did not focus on something more original first which could have given us an edge. Financially we invested into the wrong things early on, even we did not need them yet (like marketing tooling). In the end we were simply out of fuel (money).

Third time is a charm and I am currently involved in a few businesses (most of them not even started yet) beside a full-time job. It looks like my current problem is that I want to do many things at the same time, so will have to reduce what to focus on soon.
I’ve noticed this, too. For some reason a junior developer on my team 2 years our of school was made into scrum master, and if we so much as sneeze there’s no JIRA ticket for it he starts whining.
Agreed. For those of us using VMs, the extra cache in each package is enough for the working set of the systemd we are obligd to run in each VM.

Looking back to the 8M total RAM I had on a Mac SE/30, running A/UX Unix and a MacOS GUI comfortably, the sloppiness of modern productions is a disgrace and an embarrassment.

What galls is not the wasteful extravagance. It's the failure of imagination that makes such meager, pitiable use of such extravagance. We make, of titanium airframes and turbojet engines, oxcarts.
A foundation doesn't need to replace all the corporate money. At minimum, it's a guarantee that the language will be maintained if/when the corporate entity loses interest. Maintaining a language is not nearly as cumbersome as improving it.

At best, a foundation is also going to provide more neutral governance, as well as a nexus for multiple corporations to work on the language together. Other companies are more likely to adopt Go if they see it as not just a Google project.

I personally don't care whether my favorite languages have a foundation, as long as they're used for large projects by large companies. That alone is a good guarantee that they'll stick around.
Why wouldn't an intelligence agency just intercept it quietly? If I were sufficiently motivated and had global assets willing to do my bidding I could probably have found a way to intercept it at a sorting facility or en route or by sending in an "inspector" or social engineering or something.

Why on earth would they do something so obvious to leave such a paper trail when you know they could pull this off quietly?
IMO vastly more likely that Huawei wants people to -believe- they were intercepted for US intelligence, as a counter measure for the pressure they are under. In reality, US intelligence would just place someone in a FedEx facility and track down the package and do everything off the record from FedEx's tracking system. The US government is pretty incompetent, but they could easily scan all the documents without a single soul knowing or having the suspicion, even FexEx would likely not know. This is likely just a logistical change, and Huawei is trying to take advantage of it and to raise doubt.
I think this is great and will encourage the industry to do the same to compete. Of course, not aircraft will have this and it doesn't replace maintaining LOS but more situational awareness the better. Eventually UAVs and manned aircraft need to share the same immediate airspace and this is a step in that direction.
> name your terms

I said I’d join you, not that I’d bet against you. My claim is simply that the counterclaim to yours is valid. Just because I won’t bet for something doesn’t mean it isn’t worth discussing.

The vitriol with which this argument has been met shows, at some level, it’s validity as an item of controversy.
> This need not be taken as a counsel of despair. It is perfectly possible for some active managers to beat their passive brethren, even after costs. Such managers must, of course, manage a minority share of the actively managed dollars within the market in question. It is also possible for an investor (such as a pension fund) to choose a set of active managers that, collectively, provides a total return better than that of a passive alternative, even after costs. Not all the managers in the set have to beat their passive counterparts, only those managing a majority of the investor's actively managed funds.

For anyone who misreads the subtleties of your post and thinks they cant make consistent alpha through active management. They can, but (without knowing anything about them) probably won't.
x86 is translated to micro-ops in the processor. Why use x86 if you don't need a half-carry flag?
None of the issues I report ever get fixed, either. I don't bother reporting them anymore. I just complain on HN :-)

I remember on PDF reader on a tablet which would remember your last read position only in the last 3 PDFs you opened. Open another one, and one gets pushed off the bed. I simply cannot understand the train of thought that concluded that 3 was the lucky number here.
How is crypto significant to Amazon? was cloud mining ever a significant part of AWS?
sadly, missing one of my favorites: NCD's mariner (yeah, the x11 terminal company).
For any other reader, the common system API that chr1 speaks of is called WASI. Mozilla's announcement of it is here:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/standardizing-wasi-a-webas...
One thing that's very informative is to look at the HP per ton of various modes of transport.

Emma Mærsk: 156,907 DWT, 150000 HP total, or about 1HP per ton fully loaded.

With the engines running full tilt she'll make 29.3 mph.

Compare with a truck that weighs 20 tons with 400 hp, so 20 hp per ton.

100 miles by truck == 2000 miles by ship.
"Regarding the kitchen comments, are those measures very positive and not to be impeached"

I don't want people to read this and think I am somehow against reducing waste or being overly critical of people striving to do so.

Reducing a single plastic bag or saving .01 kw/hours of electricity are, as I say, very positive and not to be impeached. I am not critisizing reducing waste - I am critisizing a failure to notice that the category of waste that one is reducing is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total that one is responsible for.
Probably happens all of the time. The unlawful spying organizations in the United States have no true bounds, especially not trivial things like borders or corporate integrity.
How is a bandit related to this?

Based on just the article it could be a multi armed chef.
Ouch, that website is annoying and makes my eyes hurt
> I think that's because you're considering people who are already programming in Go

um I talk to a lot of programmers that don't use Go. Most that don't use it decide not to use it because of either the type system ("it's not safe/expressive enough") or the garbage collector. I've never talked to someone that said "Go is technically good and I think it would be a good tool but I won't use it because of Google".
Venice Charter
> What they're doing to Huawei will have nefarious consequences to the US

And what consequences do you imagine there will be?
What are the “indications for use” for a SPA?
I find online shopping far more frustrating than in-person because there's seemingly no minimum standard, or at least if there is, I'm not attuned to it.

There's just too much absolute codswallop out there. Amazon and eBay are the pound shop/dollar store for low value items.

I can go to a supermarket and buy an economy brand tin of beans and it's going to be.. a tin of beans. It might, if I'm not careful and don't check, have added salt or sugar or something.

By contrast if I go and buy a low value item on Amazon like, say, a USB cable, 3.5mm cable, whatever, there's a really good probability of it being utter bollocks. Either broken in some way or just terrible to begin with.

I really, really wish this sort of thing could somehow be eliminated. Reviews don't cut it because even if they're not fake, I don't want to read reviews. I want your store to not sell dogshit items.
Signed distance fields for vector rendering are based on the fact that you can perfectly† reconstruct the distance to any straight line via bilinear interpolation between samples of the Euclidean distance. On GPU, the texture sampling hardware provides that bilinear interpolation.

The trouble with using this property to encode and render polygons is that sometimes to render polygons properly you need to consider the distance to two or more edges simultaneously in the course of processing a pixel. A single-channel signed distance field just accepts the artefacts that result from this. A three-channel signed distance field, on the other hand, allows each texel to record the distance to two edges simultaneously. (The extra channel basically exists just to specify the Boolean operation to be performed on the two edge differences.) This enhances the quality, especially around sharp edges.

Note that rendering of general polygons with any sort of signed distance field remains an approximation, because of the limited number of edges per texel as explained above. SDFs are not general vector renderers and should not be treated as such.

† Modulo quantization error from the fact that you're encoding distance into an 8-bit channel.
>The decision could result in the executives being held in contempt of parliament

So worst case, they can't enter canada anymore? I find it unlikely that they'd get cut out of the canadian market because of it.
It should be noted that we do know for a fact that the NSA has done things like this in the past (the Snowden documents revealed that they would intercept some networking equipment that was being shipped internationally so they could install backdoors[1,2]). And the NSA has hacked into Huawei's systems before to get access to internal emails and the source code of their products[3].

Hanlon's razor isn't as strong of an argument if you already have evidence that something similarly malicious has been done by that actor before. Obviously we still need to be skeptical, but not blindly so.

[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/23/latest-snowden-allegations...
There definitely is for HFAT firms. ;)
I would add ... and other current life, including life on which humans depend, for which humans have already contributed to their extinction independently of climate change (see 75% loss of crop diversity in a century as posited by the FAO).
It'll work on arbitrary geometry the same as any other texture.

The Valve technique starts with "distance to the edge" encoded in each pixel of the texture. Bilinear filtering turns that into a piecewise-linear approximation of the true value for each interpolated point. Thresholding that gives you a black or white depending on if a given point is inside or outside of the threshold distance from the edge. Thus, you get hard, straight edged results at pixel resolution regardless of resolution of the font texture.

This technique extends Valve's by combining multiple piecewise-linear approximations to work around the limitations of approximating corners that are not aligned with the texel grid.
In Canada all phones must be carrier-unlocked, and if they are, they have to be unlocked for free.

https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...
For what it's worth, I've been working for a few years in CS + bio at the NIH, and while demand for CS as IT exists, there's also now a pretty strong and broad demand for computer scientists for scientific research. Between all of our institutes there must be a couple dozen labs with projects in the areas you mention. One of the biggest things holding us back is just finding enough people with a CS background and interest in bio problems! From what I gather at conferences, there's a lot of work being done by many groups in the CS/bio/biostatistics space, and likely more to come.
I've struggled with this a couple of times. In each situation it came down to a single question (or series of questions, actually).

1) Will I be more fulfilled if I try it, even if I fail?
2) Will I learn from it and grow as a person?

If I can answer yes to both of those questions, then I do it. I ask myself these questions to almost everything I do.

And yes, sometimes that means not doing what I _want_ to do, if I don't have the time, energy, or the means to do it. For example, I really want to go to Sweden this year, but I have to save for a few other things that are more important to me and my life (business, learning scuba diving, etc).
There's approximately 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S., so 30 million acres is around 3%[1].

Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
I agree. This has been a problem for decades. The only difference now is that it's much more obvious since we now have a more complete, centralized catalog of all the stuff that exists.

Of course, I could get on my intellectual high horse and talk about things like chaos theory and market complexity and the value of redundancy and competition. But I won't do that because I completely understand where this article is coming from on a human level.
Oh, it's definitely possible to outperform. And for every bit of that performance someone else is taking the losing side of that bet. What most people must realize is that as retail investors with no special insight into the market the chance that someone is giving them a chance to be on the winning side of the bets is not great. If you can't identify who the sucker is, it's probably you, so taking the average at low fees is your best bet.
I'm a noob in investing so I have a few questions:

* Is this a bad news?

* Are there index funds that blindly follow the top 500 but actively remove dumb stocks?

* Should I avoid American-only index fund? Looks like the Chinese market is becoming pretty strong and there doesn't seem to be any insurance that the American market will stay as strong in the next 20+ years. I would comfortable betting on the world market, but not really on one country's market.

* I have some money saved up that I don't know what to do with. I'll probably look into investing for an apartment in the next 2-5 years. Should I let it sit in my bank account or should I put everything in an index fund?
I've been daydreaming about a new sort of consumer's union to address this, among other problems (designed obsolescence, meaningless redesign cycles that make an existing product more cheaply--but not cheaper, astroturfed reviews, etc.)

The part I'm not so sure about is how to prevent infiltration/compromise/hostile takeover. I think I would prefer it to not exist than to make something useful and principled only to see it turned into a trojan horse.
This needs to be top comment here.
Sure. Which makes it mixed, not extremely capitalistic.

If I understand we you are saying, the U.S. needs both more capitalism and less capitalism.
That would be ideal, but we are devs, we don’t get to touch the stories other than to mark them as done...
The whole reason for having this amount of surveillance is to control behavior.

People generally prefer freedom over being controlled and manipulated.
That's a false equivalency. The USB cables I buy in random shops off the street are usually much worse, and more expensive, than any I've gotten from Amazon. And I'd wager that if you got a can of beans on Amazon it would taste perfectly fine. Maybe there is lower quality on Amazon, but comparing such different products is essentially meaningless.
All sounds good until you get a baby...
I love your wording and the focus on the failure scenarios
That's what name brands are for. Buy Anker or Apple or Samsung or Sony or Panasonic or whatever and you won't get crap.

It's not difficult to buy name brands.

"But name brand is charging $20 and generic is $8"

Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.

"But there are counterfeits"

You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback. Yes, some sellers that meet that will sell counterfeits and it's possible that commingling will mean it's a different seller's unit that gets sent but those are rare.
weird to find this here.

Cuir Boulli (literally 'boiled leather') is probably a misnomer. David Friedman's method is probably ahistorical. It works (he fought in leather armor of his own making for years, including the cup!), but you run serious risks of warping and deformation and brittle fracture under load (including the cup!)

I've had much better luck with Gavin Kilkenny's method, which is very reliable. A gentler heat and a hide glue binder produces reliable, field-tested results.

Ctrl-F for this:
Very first piece of advice:

Look up His Grace Cariadoc's article on "The Perfect Armour" and take everything he says as an instruction on how NOT to do it ;) While he was a pioneer in the area and his work was valuable, we have passed to a much better understanding. And before anyone gets all worked up, I was around helping out His Grace back in the day. I'm not disrespectful of his efforts, it's simply that they are outdated. That article is an incredibly persistent internet zombie ;)

here: http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=94793

and god help me for crossing the AA and HN streams.
It's also inconsequential for everyone who has a data cap on their phone plan. Running out of data 20% sooner isn't a win for people who can't afford a luxury plan.
It would be nice if there was a website like Amazon, but that had some sort of editorially vetted product line. I just want a cheese grater that works well and isn't counterfeit. I'm willing to pay a few dollars more for the work that goes into verifying the products. It really seems like there would be a market opportunity here...
That is still true if you are trying to get from New York to Beijing. There is waaaay more chance that something will break in your ability to fly to Beijing than in your ability to walk there.
Option 3: you write a coherent proposal of a quality comparable to those written by the committers and work with them to implement it, possibly becoming a committer yourself and getting hired by google in the process.
Huawei may have broken the law with respect to violating U.S's sanctions on Iran. These are still unproven allegations as of yet.

Meanwhile, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, JP Morgan have provably done exactly that.

Yet there is only one C-suite level executive who is currently being held personally, criminally liable for corporate actions. I guarantee you won't be seeing Jamie Dimon threatened with prison time for JP Morgan's 87 violations of Iranian sanctions and Weapons of Mass Destruction sanctions, anytime soon.

Laws which are enforced selectively lack credibility.
Frida 12.6 is out with major stability improvements on all platforms
"Be smarter" doesn't explain what it is you want them to do.
isn't that a website like williamssonoma.com?
It seems like a problem that's related to wages and consumption.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was just less stuff to be had. My family (8 kids, 2 parents) had one car for a long time. Today, it seems every high school kid has a car.

The same is true of other things. Bicycles, furniture, house size, etc. There is just more stuff today. A lot of it comes from lowest-cost retailers.

A visit to a GoodWill or Salvation Army outlet shows lots of product for very low prices. I don't remember it being this way in past years.

I'm not saying it's bad-- today's poor people seem to have more basic stuff than yesterday's-- but it is different.
A bit of trivia: "the support that holds the receiver above an antenna's reflector" doesn't seem to have a word in the English language. At least one couldn't be found when it was discussed on the Sydney Wireless mailing list 15 years ago. Is anyone aware of such a word?

At the time I proposed "yongcat", but it doesn't see to have caught on as it draws a blank on all search engines!
A random "junk shop" perhaps, but I'm to the point where I'd much rather go down the street to Target and pick up some slightly higher priced piece of electronics because I know it is quality controlled, than wade through Amazon.

If I'm shopping for a particular brand, okay Amazon, if it's just needing something in particular that's guaranteed to have hundreds of Chinese knockoffs with no way of differentiating between reviews (like a bike headlight, or LEDs, or a USB adapter), I go to a B&M that stocks those things.
Insane indeed. As someone who lives in the bush, the craziness of it all smacks me in the face when I make city trips. It's a prime example of the boiling frog syndrome - generations have become insensible to physical reality. As waves of consequent ecological catastrophes wash over our 'civilisation', violence will inevitably ensue: citizens against governments, governments against citizens, communities against communities, all against all.

Some will ask whether it was all worth it for temporary abundances of cheap plastic crap. Most will just be helplessly enveloped.
Amazon used to be my go to place precisely because they provided working tools to help me wade through that mountain of stuff.

Recently not so much. Not a good sign.
Because they want to be able to do it at scale?

The ideal approach would be to have packages of the "interesting" kind automatically diverted to a scanning location, and then continue on their way...

Dont think of it as them being interested in a single package.
They are interested in setting up a mechanism by which ALL packages of interest can be diverted with only very small effort on their part.
Right, exactly.

I don't buy, well, basically anything, from random corner shops because it's likely to be crap.

Does Amazon actually want to be like that? They don't have to be Waitrose, they just have to be even like, Lidl.