skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is 100% how search engine optimization works, the consultants are correct.

As a marketer, when I search for marketing information on Google 70%-90% of the time all of the stuff on the 1st page generally isn't teaching me anything I didn't already know.

But as someone who does this exact thing, I know how expensive good content is - hiring an author to write 3,000 words of valuable information for a reader can cost $500 - $1000 per page. Add another $400 - $1,000 for the consultants time on that page.

Or you can hire writers that produce lower value information for $30 - $120 per 3,000 words that ranks just as well as high quality content.

The first thing I thought when I saw Elon Musk's writing AI was how powerful of a search marketing tool this is.

Reducing your content cost to effectively zero gives you a HUGE competitive advantage.

I know a publisher programmatically generating content and generating millions of organic search visits a month for marginal costs reaching 0 - they pivoted to a tech company after identifying their #1 problem was content costs were too high and ad revenue was too low. Now they're selling this technology to other publishers.
Anybody know why this fell off the front page so quickly?
This relies on - and takes advantage of - a lack of understanding on how these organizations are able to operate

Drop all the currency terms and what you have is a product, a consumer good sold to the public that some employees are given. The employees are free to sell in parallel to the organization selling it.

When that runs out the organization still has 100% share ownership

So THEN it gets put on the same lower level of flexibility as startups and all private tech companies.

So the answer is not that hard: it issues stock options to founders and employees when the product sells dry up. This is not funding just incentivizing, which the article and crypto industry conflates.

The organization and founders have been funding themselves by exchanging the product for cash. LOTS of cash, for years.

The organization has an unknown amount of cash REVENUE from simply selling Zcash from their treasury+mining, this is done on the open market
And the silly hardware bit flip complaint is easily addressed: run the program N times, and reduce the chance of the error by a factor that's exponential in N.

Large randomly generated primes are produced by a random algorithm like this, with a step that (when run on a composite number) shows that it is composite with probability p = a constant < 1. The chance of error there can also be made exponentially small.

As you say, deterministic, or at least highly correlated, errors would dominate the chance that the proof was wrong. But that's true of human proofs too.
This story from the knitting community seems to be politically consistent with this one:

https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/

I wonder if there is much overlap of the people involved. And what is it about knitting attracts people with a particular political valence?
That is true, although that says nothing about the ability of whoever provided the cookie to track you across containers through said cookie. I believe this is the basis for all cookie-based tracking.

What I am gathering from this discussion is that containers are really not targeted at privacy as a use case, unless you have an ad blockers that isn't effectively blocking specific scripts from setting tracking cookies.
Cool concept. Let me know if you find anything!
It would be nice if people were supportive of this effort instead of just pissing on it.

Of course it is incomplete at 0.0.12. Was it over hyped? Sure. Good for him to have time for some marketing of his work next to _actually writing a working compiler with a good start for a standard library_

This thing is real and here to stay.

How about this: instead of writing about frauds and vapourware, contribute to the project. File an issue, fix a bug, work with the author.

We should applaud and encourage these efforts.
What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues
One was given earlier in the thread: `take 10 . sort`

This should be read from right to left: it sorts an (implicit) list, then reads the first 10 elements from the beginning of the now-sorted list, and throws away the rest.

Except under the hood in Haskell, sort is not a function that takes a list and returns a list. It is a function that takes a list, and returns the smallest element of that list and a function to fetch the rest of the sorted list. (A function which actually returns the second-smallest element and a function that if called returns the third smallest element and another function, etc.)

These ephemeral functions / continuations / "thunks" are allowed to have internal state and thereby perform more complex sorting operations such as quicksort, and might actually be represented by an internal tree of branch points and their returned value or unexecuted thunks.

But all of this complexity is hidden by the compiler. It's not some special property of `sort` either, which might look like this:

sort [] = []
sort (x:xs) = sort small ++ (x : sort large)
where small = [y | y <- xs, y <= x]
large = [y | y <- xs, y > x]

"The sort of an empty list is the empty list. The sort of a non-empty list is the elements of the tail less than or equal to the head of the list, sorted, followed by the head of the list, followed by the elements of the tail greater than the head of the lest, sorted."

The Haskell compiler does the magic of turning this into a lazy-optimized implementation which in the case of `take 10 . sort` doesn't bother to calculate any remaining `sort large` partitions once the first 10 smallest elements have been found.
PayPal keeps suspending accounts on a whim, also. Even before the politics vs Internet debate became a part of the zeitgeist, people pretty much daily woke up to find their accounts locked and their account balance lost forever. Stuff like that worries me because the political stu7is a new fad and might eventually pass but most of these companies play really fast and loose with their users lives.
Desalination is expensive so you don’t want to scale it. But as a sanity check.

Assuming you’re talking 70L per day, the worst case using desalination is about 20$ per year. So, at that useage level water is not really a long term issue.

It’s a corruption and distribution issue.
True. Using "Hilink" is easy mode. Using NCM (in this case) is slightly harder but saves you from double NAT.

E3372 can be reflashed to do this.
> Google ignores websites privacy. Even if the website owner doesn't want to expose any content for search engines, Google will come, get it, and show it on its search results and will make money off it.
Absolute, unadulterated nonsense. The Google spider identifies itself via HTTP headers. It's trivial to refuse service to specific clients.

Google spider ignores rules in robots.txt and show results from closed directories. I could write a distinct article about how we fight against it.
Call me a cynical anti-capitalist, but this turns the recent wealth fad of buying up the world's fresh water aquifers into a poor investment, as that resource is not nearly as rare as it was before this discovery.
https://agorafinancial.com/2015/04/24/why-did-george-bush-bu...
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-new-water-barons-wall-stre...
What's the difference? From the sound of it, the VNI would be a USB device identifying itself as an ethernet adapter and usb-modeswitch does... mode switching, like the 'alternative protocol' thingy that USB3 can do?
Use an antenna?
> 2016 US voting age population was approx. 250 million, so it’s actually 25%.

Why do you exclude people who are not of voting age?

> Statistically, unless you have specific data that shows otherwise, we should expect non-voters to have (mostly) voted the same way was actual voters

You can't be serious.

This is flatly false, and has been throughout the entirety of the period of modern polling methodology. Non-voters are dramatically less likely to support the government at all, let alone a particular leader.

Consider also that many of the populations who are unable to vote (felons, incarcerated people, undocumented immigrants) are dramatically underserved by government institutions and are typically not polled in any of the presidential approval polls. Why in the world do you suggest, in the absence of any evidence, that they are likely to have a similar degree of likelihood of supporting Trump?
Suspiciously close timing to the recent wave of Mt. Everest (and other) mountain climbing... and the associated human waste added to the snow. This leads to a change in the albedo, and thus, to greater heat retention. I blame Tenzing Norgay for helping that English dude climb Everest. If it wasn't for those meddling sherpas, the mountains would have gotten away (with keeping the cloaks of snow).
"... I actually tend to use DuckDuckGo anyways."

"... I don't even like AMP."

Any idea how many Google employees use DuckDuckGo?

Is it really common, e.g., maybe due to sheer size of the workforce, for Google staff to dislike what their employer is producing and releasing on the internet?
Here's my source for "safe", I think nobody would disagree that nuclear is the safest in terms of lives lost:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Yes, Chernobyl happened, but even the worst nuclear accident in the history of mankind is 200 people. Fukushima was 2 or 3? The Banqiao dam was over a hundred THOUSAND dead.
>Memoization is a much better name, and really it's nothing but caching re-usable results

memoization does not work for bottom up dp.
Sure, and point it elsewhere too.
In case of E3372 you need to reflash. Not a big problem though.
Can anyone actually confirm this weapon? How many shots does it get? 1? Is there tracking? How wide is the beam? Range?

Honestly I'm pretty skeptical of this. That thing looks heavy, but providing a lot of high energy microwaves requires a lot of power. I mean a lot of microwave ovens are 1kW. I imagine that you'd really need to be a crack shot too, since drones are pretty zippy.
It is indeed sad to see the market share of Firefox declining. At the same time, I understand why; even though I use Firefox, I constantly notice that there are many useful areas in which Chrome works far better than Firefox. Those areas include profiling, debugging service worker, etc. Although I want to support Firefox by switching to it 100%, it is simply impossible when I want to get jobs done.
Everything is obsolete in the face of nuclear weapons.
Vuejs is dead, long live vuejs
Don't forget bringing a golf club
There is no synthesis engine for VHDL in it that I'm aware of. It will never handle encrypted IP, so you can't just buy a core if you don't have a certain expertise in house.

It's... Useless in most commercial settings. The Symbiyosys tools in a commercial setting are only useful for formal verification. And they have some extreme limitations.
Chicken Scheme 5.1
Spammy websites. A flag tool given to long time Google account holders would be helpful.
Brevity is the soul of wit, et cetera.

I mean, the idea is interesting, but I have hard time believing it's good. It sounds insane, but maybe other company de facto rules are more insane? Without trying it out I have a hard time judging the feasibility, even though I believe it is destructive.
Leaving Startup to Create a Competitor
I love the idea of our company, but I hate the idea of building it with my current cofounder - especially if we manage to scale. I am considering leaving to create a direct competitor. What do you think?

I think my cofounder and I have very little in common. Whatever they say or do seems to annoy me at this point. I am the only technical founder. I feel more valuable than the other founder and have not seen them be organised or effective in a while. I feel like I'm working for them.

Leaving seems evil, but I love what we are building despite hating the idea of working with my cofounder. Any thoughts welcome.
Why does the internet care so much? My recollection of the events is that the guy put up a website for an in progress language. Someone else posted it on HN and people started shitting their pants.

The author owes you nothing.
Globalized type inferrence is still a problem when you want to build large programs. You change the implementation of one function and 20 functions further there is a problem and you need to figure out all the interactions on the path between. Rust strikes a great compromise here IMO.
Regular users don’t use any of those features. Chrome is eating everyone’s market share because they are literally spending billions of dollars on it.
> I really think it will change the way people live in the climate change era.

Do you really see the 'climate change era' providing robust enough infrastructure that we'll still be kitted out with smartphones?
This is a different site with a different author, but it's the same article. Blogspam?

Here is the original(?) link: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/08/stalins-rope-roads...
It takes one to know one?
Thanks :)

It's 0.0.12, the first public release. What's with all this "vaporware"?

The compiler can already compile itself in 0.3 seconds and is written 100% in V:

https://github.com/vlang/v#installing-v-from-source

It allows building easy cross platform graphical apps:
https://github.com/vlang/v/tree/master/examples/tetris

It has easy cross compilation and can even compile itself for another platform:
https://twitter.com/v_language/status/1137537130887077890

It allows to build small performant GUI apps like Volt:
https://volt-app.com/ (Volt 1.0 RC 1 for macOS has been used by thousands of happy users for several months.)

It powers a simple forum: https://blog.vlang.io/forum And the entire forum is one 65 KB binary.

It can translate and build DOOM: https://github.com/vlang/doom

It has very extensive and simple to read documentation that covers pretty much the entire language: https://vlang.io/docs

I think it's pretty good for 0.0.12.

Come back when it's v1.0 by the end of this year.
FreeBSD+ZFS Without Drives
> When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds.

I have a cheap laptop (it does have an SSD) that boots from pushing power to a minimal but perfectly usable i3 window manager system in a second.
It's not really about knitting, this crazy politicization has infected everything at least on some parts of the internet. You can think of it as the equivalent of people asking you why you still haven't been "born again" by accepting the Lord God So-And-So as your lord and savior, placing all faith into Him and living your life in accordance with the sacred texts, and telling you how anyone who doesn't do that won't get into their religion's variety of Heaven. The underlying self-assurance and proselytizing mentality is exactly the same.
Doesn’t pretty much every human do this daily to survive?
Medium-well Cyan FTW. And they use a HTML table for that bar. How unsemantic.
As someone who used to run a heavily trafficked and heavily scrapped site, some tips from an operator:

- Make sure your scrapper has both a reasonable delay (one request per second or slower) and a proper backoff. It you start getting errors, back off. We never cared about scrapers, until we noticed them, and we only noticed them if they hit us too hard, we told them to back off, and then they didn't.

- Look deep for an API. A ton of people would scrape reddit without realizing we had (an admittedly poorly marketed) API for doing just that.

- Respect robots.txt. That was another way to get noticed quickly -- hitting forbidden URLs. If you hit a forbidden URL too often, you'd start getting 500 errors, and if you didn't back off, you'd get banned from using the site. It was an easy way to tell if someone was not a well behaved scraper.
Creators of fiat currency call that the "price of money" or "interest rate", which right now is at around 2%, but running "community resources" sounds more like what a government does, with its 30% cut from taxes.
Your recollection is correct.

People don't like that it doesn't yet do everything perfect at 0.0.12.
How to stand out, what is an opportunity? (career advice for starting engineers)
Why people will adopt Libra
It was flamed pretty badly when first introduced to HN, but I still think Steve Howell's Shpaml (http://shpaml.com/) completely removes the pain of writing angle brackets and keeping track of closing tags. Plus, it makes writing arbitrary XML really easy, just the thing for writing DocBook, I'll bet. And no need for a specific editor, just use your favorite.

I'm definitely going to look at Emmet, though. Thanks to all for mentioning it!
Also things like unix pipes or network sockets, where the "close" operation means something different as there are multiple parties involved. Arguably the same is true of files as you could be reading a file being simultaneously written to by others.
https://github.com/laarc/laarc
Currently there's a rewrite in development for Firefox Android:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix

The difference between the nightlies of this and the current Firefox Android is night and day.

Perhaps wait until it's out?
Ask HN: Private and easily searchable tool to export email archives to?
Is there a private, secure and easily searchable tool to export all of my emails from services like Outlook and Gmail into, where they're still really easily searchable?

I'm reminded that gmail isn't end to end encrypted which is kind of lame.
True but all the commercial websites would use it to ban scraping then.
This is really hard to read - dark grey on a black background.
It is fantastic work. Please don’t be discouraged and keep hacking on it.

I bet you could also build an active community of contributors around it.
is it illegal anywhere?
This has nothing to do with race. The reason people view the recent wave of rural drug abuse differently is because it largely originates from trusted professionals. Even old people with no prior history of drug addiction are getting caught up in it now.

In the traditional case of drug addiction, it started because somebody said "hey, let's get fucked up". It was foolish self-destructive thrill seeking.

In the modern case of drug addiction, somebody was prescribed Oxycontin for recovery after surgery or an injury. The addiction became established long before turning to illegal street drugs.

So it isn't "these people are white". It's more like "these are responsible people who were in the care of trusted medical professionals".
I’m not quite sure I understand your discontent.

You assert the author displays a “willful misunderstanding of the differences between FPGAs, GPUs, and ASICs.” What differences did the author misrepresent? And is it fair to call it “willful”?

From what I can tell, the ideas should be taken at a 10,00ft view: Verilog as an interface to (computational) FPGAs is not good enough because it’s inaccessible to domain scientists in other fields (where CUDA and similar are). The way I read the post was the author is framing a research question: “how do we design a new abstraction for FPGAs to do for them what we’ve done for GPUs?”
> Politician's themselves profiting of sand mining from rivers...

who is buying all this sand?
I don't think advertising is bad, provided:

1. It's easy for people to tell the difference between advertising and not-advertising.

2. The collection of private information is strictly opt-in, owned by the collectee, and deletable by the collectee.

3. Advertising is a healthy competitive industry with no one company controlling a majority of the business.

None of those things is true in the Googleverse today.
So, did you know that in the US you can face years in prison for just telling someone, "I can't help you commit check fraud, but Google _____ if you're interested in learning how others do it"?

Do you agree with this practice?
That's what I mean, thank you. Phrasing it like "what we're saying doesn't line up with what we're doing" is a better way to express it.
It astounds me that an article about government officials going on an unwarranted fishing expedition through a journalist's entire digital life would be flagged on HN.

Particularly when previous stories of CBP demanding access to tech workers' devices have been heavily upvoted in the past.

My guess is that the flaggers reacted purely to the headline, and never read the story. The headline pattern matches to "culture war", so they flagged it and moved on.
I hadn’t realized this. So, we can pack .edu full of for-profit degree mills, but myriad respectable research universities the world over are forbidden. Mind boggling.
I think the financial reward comes from, essentially, the number of books sold; while Stephenson writes good books and wins awards, he doesn't actually write many books and averages one giant tome every couple of years or so.
Nice hit piece. All of the criticisms could have been patches. Most of the criticisms are exaggerated. Looks like it took 2s to build on the macbook instead of 1. The 'zero dependency' binary links to libc (as if most programmers wouldn't expect this.)
In my opinion the worst thing about the Ocaml/ReasonML platform is that discovery of language features/syntax/functions is needlessly difficult. There is no Hoogle equivalent for OCaml. Module functors are powerful, but the type system is very strict so it can be frustrating trying to express what you want. There are some techniques that are rarely covered by books and are almost impossible to google for. By contract, I think Haskell's typeclasses gives useful guard-rails to composing "complicated" logic. Overall, as someone who has been programming full-time in ReasonML for 9 months now, there are too many times places where I still feel like a "prisoner" of the type system for me to advocate for it over Clojure. I need to do more projects with Haskell, I am hopeful the built in typeclasses can reduce the time I am "stuck".
Your “expectations” are irrelevant. Either d(bonus)/d(meetings) = 0 or > 0.
> Chrome has better UI

if you are talking about buttons next to the address bar, like the home button, then you can customize that area and let it look nearly identical to Chrome.
A massive pro-Google bias.
You can have all the doubts you want about bias in phone polling, but unless you can explain to me why it should be biased towards Trump supporters in a significant way, I would still go by these numbers as a "best effort" estimate.

I could certainly come up with reasons why those numbers would be biased against Trump: Coming out in favor of him is "undeniable support for white supremacy" or "caging children" or "pussy grabbing" or whatever scandal Trump is currently involved in. That's also the likely reason why the election polls were so utterly wrong.

> people under the age of 18, incarcerated people, undocumented immigrants, and homeless people

Okay, let's say we count all of these as "non-supporters", you'd still have approval by roughly a third of the country. Is "roughly a third" really substantially different from "fourty-ish"?

________________________________________________________

This is an edit as reply, since I'm "posting too fast":

> I'm making the case that these polls are not a good basis for drawing any conclusions

Given the task of estimating the number of Trump supporters, "I can't do it" is not an acceptable answer. Again, best effort matters, even though we know it's not the true number.

> I'm not following the math here. Are you suggesting that, taken together, these groups represent only 7% of the population? Obviously that's not correct.

The math is as follows:

330 million people in the US (ballpark figure)

80 million undocumented and/or underage (ballpark figure)

therefore, (330 - 80 = 250) million polling candidates

42% of 250 million supporting Donald Trump = 107.5 million

107.5 of 330 million supporting Donald Trump = roughly a third