skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, I'm torn on this. On the one hand, I don't like the idea of requiring this for all websites. And so pressing it on every startup feels like overreach, since many of them are much closer to "niche site" than "website for the general public."

OTOH ... big sigh here. It's really, really depressing that we've reached the point where websites, and their typical toolchains, are so bloated that it's considered a burden at all to make your site accessible. HTML is basically designed to be blind-friendly! The only reason it's a noticeable burden at all is because everyone's bought into stupid patterns that make their sides so inelegant, non-functional, and meth-addled.

If we use an unusually big stick to slap website conventions back into sanity, I'm probably not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.
>but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.

Yes! I think what has staved it off is the lack of adblocking on mobile devices. I use uBlock on every computer I have, but on my iPhone? Not so much. I think as more traffic moved to mobile it has offset ad blocking to some degree. I can't imagine that 25% of people are blocking ads on mobile?
The fact that it speaks to his motive is exactly what makes it fallacious.

People’s motive’s have nothing to do with whether or not what they are saying is true or false. They are either speaking truth or not. Motives can explain WHY they are saying something untrue. But not IF what they are saying is untrue.

You are saying that Thiel has a reason to lie. But you aren’t addressing whether or not he is actually lying. Instead of attacking what he said, you are attacking him.
> as many of the younger crowd can't or won't learn it.

Or don't need to learn it. Web dev jobs are more plentiful than C++ jobs and need different skills.
I almost did just a few hours ago because of the above and luckily noticed the difference before pulling the trigger.
I'm not a big fan of copyright renewals. There are two arguments I here in favor of them.
1) It allows orphaned works to enter the public domain sooner.
2) For works that are renewed, it provides information on who the copyright holder is and how they can be contacted.

On the first point, I think that renewal is a poor proxy for determining which works are are orphaned or no longer have commercial value, instead just showing which copyright holders have the most diligent book keeping. Large number of published works will loose copyright protection just due to oversight. A simple mistake shouldn't result in disproportionate consequences (loss of decades of revenue). At the same time other works that are no longer available on the market will be prevented from entering public domain by companies that just renew everything.

Furthermore, historically, the USPTO has done a poor job of keeping (and making accessible) records of which works were renewed, and which weren't. Anyone who wants to use an orphaned work has needed to prove a negative, which is difficult to do, so most assume that everything is still copyrighted to avoid liability anyway.

Lastly, just because someone has registered a work (for renewal or otherwise) is not proof that they hold copyright on that work. People have spent decades trying to determine the rightful owner of a work so they can license it, even when it was registered.

Instead, I think what we need is a process for the USPTO to grant third parties permission to use a work when a good faith effort has been made to determine and contact the copyright holder. In my view, this would involve involve paying of statutory license fees to the USPTO who will hold them in escrow. If the owner is eventually determined, they can claim the money, and if no one claims it after some time it goes to fund the endowment for the arts. This would allow the public access to orphaned and disputed works again, and would encourage registration without the strong consequences for forgetting.

I would actually take this a step further and declare that all works are subject to statutory licensing for the second half of their copyright duration, not just orphaned works, and the above process would just be a fallback when the copyright holder can't be contacted. And of course, would shorten the copyright duration as well.
That actually happened? It's not just an internet legend?
Astronauts plan to bake cookies on the ISS
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Making the Moon Camera
The Anadigm FPAA implementation is built on switched-capacitor circuits. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_capacitor. Alternative FPAA implementations exist, but are not yet commercially available. See RASP from Georgia Tech: http://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/FPAA_Papers/.
A List of Alternatives to Google Adsense for Your Blog or Website
Mobile Ambients – process calculus for mobile computation (1998) [pdf]
Ouch. I hope that $1800 grows to enough to be sustainable for Kenton to invest some time or hire someone's time to grow the product, even if slowly.
The TRS-80 Model II used them. Some CP/M microcomputers did too.
> Other free ebooks don’t put much effort into professional-quality typography: they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quotes, they ignore details like em- and en-dashes, and they look more like early-90’s web pages instead of actual books.

True. I hope you guys get proper funding and keep this project on.

Contribute: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/

(I was thinking a Slack or Discord would be better than Google groups mailing list for this?)
So in the UK we have 3 wires, red, blue and green, the green is ground or earth, what purpose does this serve? Is it the same as ground as you call it in the US
I think the best thing is directly do what you did. Then in a completely unrelated context work in the idea "it is your duty to break an unjust law". There are lots of ways to do that, but hard to pull off in context of a summer camp.
The javascript ecosystem however...

The entire stack literally (for the actual meaning of literally) change completely every year. Frameworks, language, package manager, libraries, etc.
When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. Unless you bury the tree in an anaerobic environment or treat it in some other way, the tree is just a time-delayed release mechanism.

New forest can store a buffer in perpetuity, e.g., a new trillion trees can store 133 Gt. But current emissions are > 40 Gt/year, so this is < 4 years worth of emissions.
Some highlights:

- 50% of the 188,640 extensions have less than 16 users/installs

- 13 extensions have over 10m users/installs
I'm sure some of them do it for the sake of curiosity and of working the system in interesting ways. It's much like the folks doing minor phone phreaking back in the day just to see it work for themselves.
sbottom squark and wino aren't good enough for you?
And this is why the kernel community is toxic. Linus was literally advocating violence -- deadly violence at that!
The point I’m trying to get across and explain here is that there are ideas that seem obvious to one set of people, can be incredibly difficult to get across to another set of people due to what they have believed in since childhood. And the fact that I’m getting so many downvoted and people trying to debate and disapprove of my gun law comparison proves that exact point.
Our economic system is literally designed for companies to compete with one another. The less fair the competition, the more collusion and corruption, the less stable the market is.
I tried getting the Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu edition for work but couldn't enable full-disk encryption due to NVME not being supported at the time. The only thing to do was homedir encryption, which I believe are mounted as loop, at least in the standard Ubuntu config. So there are still circumstances today in which it's the only way to get encryption. (Incidentally, I gave up on that laptop because an ecryptfs mounted homedir broke inotify integration with a vagrant guest VM.)
> The demand for programmers is today exceeding the supply.

Tell that to the company having to screen through 100 resumes and interview 10 candidates for every open development position they post. Or to the developer who has to apply to 100 jobs in order to get 10 interviews and maybe one offer.

The "Shortage of Engineers" meme truly won't die.
My pentium with a floppy disk drive has ethernet, so i just copy the files over the network. It's kinda slow, but not as slow as burning a CD (who am I kidding? The box has a CDROM drive, but it's read only). I use this setup to get the photos off my Sony Mavica.
That's a good post, but I think that I went down a different set of windy little paths. My worlds (graphics and video products) had tons of companies disappear, and the ones still standing matured to the point of offshore manufacture, maintenance, decreasing margins. It hasn't all disappeared but I think that a lot of the fun is gone.

I'm older than you, never bothered with internet technologies and languages, and feel a bit of ennui about the whole deal. My guess is that a world that only consisted of workstation software and embedded systems, slightly fleshed out with an internet made up of Amazon, email, USENET (and cars without video games on the dash) is just the fantasy of a Luddite.

My temptation is to take on increasingly archaic skills. Rebuilding a carburetor or playing a musical instrument is already in the pallet, so maybe bookbinding or blacksmithing should be on the horizon.
> Why not buy some companies and get some proper entrepreneurs back into the mix of management? I can't remember any recent major Google acquisitions.

Firebase (acquired in 2014) seems to qualify as semi-recent given it's become a massive product line in a few years.
I don't like these books.
In Chile big forestry companies (?) which dedicate themselves to grow and then sell timber are growing eucalyptus trees for their business, but said eucalyptus trees have great externalities, in that they use colossal amounts of water , given that said trees come from a dry climate, they simply evolved to capture as much water as possible.

I wonder if there's a business here, replacing eucalyptus trees for empress, which might very well grow faster and without as many externalities, such as the water cost, or the bark eucalyptus trees shed which is a fire hazard
Inflammation's hidden role in weight loss
is it hard on your bones and joints ? I wondered if hikes in the hills would be too tough 24/7
Haha, I'll take Management if it comes down to that.
It's definitely not surprising and it does fit both stereotypes I have in my mind, that young people work harder and also that they need to work harder to keep up. Maybe it's that those that can't keep up eventually leave the field, leaving the more productive behind. But obviously, older people do just leave and go home to their kids.

My guess is young people tend to get themselves exhausted doing stuff like checking reddit 50 times a day, too.
No, definetly not true. The backwards-compatability of PHP is insanely good, so upgrading is usually super trivial.
I haven't looked, but I'm guessing ... When you list a second hand car for sale, that's an "advert". Sometimes the adverts are the content you want :-)
Feinstein's new bill seeks to prevent another Cambridge Analytica
Just to derail the conversation further, I've had a thought for that too - one I'm working up the courage to build myself :D

I'm going to presume a few things to keep this short: free and advertising-supported, donation-based, and paid for. I'm focussed on the third option.

Ever notice how many new (typically closed) services are "just the price of a cup of coffee a month"? What happens when I want 20 of these "coffee-priced" services? That's more than I personally spend on actual, gourmet coffee a month (of which I buy copious amounts).

I think there's a decent gap for services that cost $/€/£1/month. The volume of subscriptions at that price point might break even with the profitability of higher subscriptions with a lower volume. It might not of course - but I'm tempted to try it. Mail for $1 a month. Not remotely profitable, but with elastic compute and high volume of customers...maybe. With a self hosted option to boot, to lure in the early adopters and convert them when they want to offload the hassle of running the service...

I don't intend to compete with free, but I definitely think there's room for innovation here. I have a day job, but I'd drop that in a second if there was an opportunity to manage a multi-tenant cloud of Nextcloud instances for customers that a) doesn't cost more than DigitalOcean, and b) had other software bundled at the same price point, e.g. Collabora Online, LDAP auth, Mattermost, Mediawiki, etc. etc. All for $5 instead of $5 x n services....

:shrug: maybe I'm too much of an idealist ;)
I love learning new stuff that builds on what I know and increases my understanding of the world, but this is not what's usually happening in SW, where it's common to have to learn a different version of the old stuff because the market shifted.
The Equifax Settlement Is a Cruel Joke
It’s practically a trope that every time this subject comes up, the top-rated comment is a skeptical response...from a junior developer.

As someone who actually has worked as a programmer on the far side of 40, let me assure you that yes, older programmers have value. Your perceptions are not wrong. But that said, the article is right. The people who do the hiring and firing do not care about what you care about.

As the article noted clearly, the marginal benefit of an older engineer has to exceed the marginal costs. And if we’re being honest, the fact that a graybeard can use tcpdump without reading the docs carries little marginal benefit. Guess what, kid? You’ll figure it out, and you’ll do it quickly enough that the total cost of your learning won’t really compare to the cost of hiring me.

That’s why you see lots of anecdotes about the value of older engineers, but lots of articles from older engineers who know that the discrimination is real. And this is coming from someone who has managed to “stay relevant” a lot longer than most software devs.
Letter from a Region in My Mind (1962)
This is an excellent analogy and I can't understand why it's being downvoted. Software is only as useful as its surroundings find it useful.
Poshmark clothing marketplace says hacker stole customer details
Why do people always talk about arbitrary computation in relation to homomorphic encryption? What I really want is a homomorphic encryption system which allows me to arbitrarily slice and concatenate strings without knowing their contents. This would be immensely useful for implementing end-to-end encrypted collaborative editing of documents. Is homomorphic encryption there yet?
well, if you convert it all to biochar (say with a 50% volume fudge factor to account for non-carbon components and packing density), you just have to stack an area the size of pennsylvania with 1 meter of biochar each year to zero emissions.
Depends, what's his experience with Kubernetes, go, and graphql?
Remember nobody gives a fuck.
After some catastrophy people will discuss it 5 min and then forget untill new catastrophy.

Sad but true.

p.s. europe is the most corrupted bunch of retards. I mean governments.
AWS is all-in on data lock-in.

This may be powerful and useful, but it is proprietary, nontransparent, unstandardized, and nonportable.

I get that every database has some platform lock-in, but its getting ridiculous. At least amazon's relational offerings need to adhere to binary driver protocols.
If I remember correctly, you used to be able to actually take the magnetic material out of the sleeve and it would run in the drive.
Yeah; I get the sense that Java is one of the more reliable (if unsexy) domains to embed yourself in. It's really turning into the new Cobol.
well said :), i vote for you!
I went "full software" back at the age of 36. I did this because I saw the writing on the wall for systems/devops and being a half-developer, essentially from writing scripts to full OOP.

I put a ton of time and thought, and effort into the change. It wasn't easy to complete the transition and get hired, but I settled on C#. Chosen because C# and Java are similar enough (my only formal education in programming was in Java), and I could move between the two, if I had to. I also saw MS driving the future of .Net really hard, even after about 10 years before it looked like there was no future and MS was going back to unmanaged code. I also wanted as stable of a development platform as possible, an attempt at avoiding churn with all the kiddos in the web space. I'm still working fulltime as a C# dev and enjoy it. But if anything ever happens, I'll jump ship to the Java space. Both the city I live in and less-populated state that I'm from have copious amount of C# and Java jobs available, so I'm not on something so cutting edge that I have to live somewhere specific. It's my opinion that the best balance for most software projects was nailed with Java (and then it's descendent, C#). There's a reason it's so popular and they're not bad reasons.

My dream job is to come full circle and be "the IT guy" at a small company, handling software and systems as a one-man operation. That can be done in the MS space, as less expertise is necessary in general on the systems side to manage the entire stack. Even less so with Azure.

Will I be pushed out? I'm sure. I'm expecting less of a shelf life than the old hats because so many more people are raising their children to be ready for this field. Also, outsourcing/visa migration was fully implemented to diminish the industry for workers, since about 2000. The industry that was supposed to be the next buoy of the American middle class has been successfully undermined by American hypercapitalism. Greatly reducing prospects and the future for even my generation, the golden generation of children that grew up on a Commodore. A special time of astute technologists raised when we had personal computers at home, but before iOS collapsed the barrier of entry and nullified the mystery & effort required to get to entertainment.
Breakout Companies Memo: Substack
What are some of the design choices you would make differently than existing browsers?
Technically, would it only shock you if your body provided a path to "ground" or lower potential? For example if you were wearing insulted boots and touched the energized piece of metal you would not feel a shock, correct?
I don’t think it was that bad in 1999, 2002 or 2008. Indoctrination was still a thing, but most Chinese kids didn’t take it seriously. It took some populism combined with nationalism from Xi to really turn things around.
The 'microworkers' making your digital life possible
Peek | Backend Engineer, Principal Platform Engineer, Sr iOS Engineer | Seattle | ONSITE & VISA (transfer+treaty) | Full-time

Peek makes the world's tours & activities easily bookable — anytime, anywhere. Our leading technology empowers operators to manage and grow their businesses.

We're looking for talented engineers to come work on our industry-leading SaaS for tours and activities operators in Seattle. We're well-funded and are growing quickly. We use Ruby, Elixir, Ember, React, Swift, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, GraphQL, Realm, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP. Join us!

See full job descriptions and apply here:

> Backend Engineer: https://grnh.se/b048c8491

> Principal Platform Engineer: https://grnh.se/bc186d791

> Senior iOS Engineer: https://grnh.se/5cb706351

Check out the rest of our stack: https://stackshare.io/peek/peek-stack

If you have any questions, feel free to email megan DOT dose AT peek DOT com.
I have an Apple IIe with a couple extra drives and a large collection of software on ancient disks. It was working last time I fired it up about 10-15 years ago, but I fear disappointment so I haven't messed with it lately. It all just sits in a sealed bin in the downstairs hall closet.

I tell myself I keep old hardware around in case general purpose computing dies or descends too far into user-hostile dystopia, but I'm probably just a hoarder.
Yeah, that kind of "process" probably invites code rot. It's subtle, insidious, and yes, sometimes, shockingly quick to set in.
Could a fully homomorphic cpu architecture with fully encrypted cache be immune to Spectre and similar side channel attacks? Could this be tested on an FPGA?
Early in my career and after a field trip abroad commissioning an aircraft simulator I was stopped at customs with a box of them and was asked what they were worth. Said that we could send the data by modem and so effectively nothing. I was allowed to pass.
We just had something similar earlier this year on one of our systems where it sends alerts to clients, but it failed to send them (in our case though the log showed they sent).

The solution for us took on three unique steps:

1. Make sure unit tests exist for all permutations of failure (network, bad keys etc) and are mandatory to validate that all alerts are operational when new code is being created. Add a commit hook if needed.

2. We created a specific new internal demo account where upon new code being deployed we run a partially automated process (someone needs to push a button right now) where data that triggers specific different types of alerts is inserted into our system to force an alert to be sent out (this is done in production). We did this because we found that unit testing covered one scenario, but a number of other scenarios exist which can be unique to production, e.g. network access, permissions, different keys etc.

3. Add daily checks (or more/less often depending on the need) that all third parties (even internal) your code depends on for alerts are up and operational. We have one where we do hourly checks on the system now to insure it has not failed, another one is only done weekly because the risk of not getting the alert is super low and not client facing. We found in some cases we have one vendor who was sending success even though the alert was never delivered (it basically ate our request), which was found through these automated checks because say 95% went fine but we would miss an hour here or there -- that allowed us to go back through the logs and get with the vendor to see wtf.

All of this seems pretty straight forward and obvious honestly, and we had most of it in place but found it just wasn't robust enough in some cases and we weren't doing #2 & #3 with enough granularity.
I'm not sure how that's fasting.

I don't consider myself as someone who fasts and it is typically 13-14 hours from my supper to my breakfast.

Eat dinner around 6-7PM
Eat breakfast around 7:30-8AM

My schedule I would assume is shifted forward from say my grandparents schedule. They would have eaten dinner & breakfast earlier due to differences in work hours 50+ years ago.

If that's fasting it seems like a strange/new definition. But maybe a lot of people are indeed still eating something substantial closer to midnight as they watch TV or something?

I actually spread out my lunch into several smaller meals during the day.

But I also exercise a lot, and I'm not buying lunch like so many engineers I work with. My lunch is 1/4-1/2 the size of a sit down restaurant meal.

The old norm was so much more physical activity than today too.

One of those articles is totally right about kids though. When I was a kid I took a lunch to school and that was the only time I ate. My son is going into first grade and all the day cares he went to and his current school have dedicated snack times, 2-3 extra times eating that are not lunch. The day care that had 3 snack times porked the kids up pretty good.
i can't figure this out: https://worldtree.info/investment/ this seems far too good to be true. Back of the napkin calculations show they're saying the returns could be 28% a year compounded. That's better than buffet level returns. Surely this is a scam right?