skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can get 99% of what configuration management does by just building a configuration package.

1. If you want an application installed, list it as a dependency of your configuration package.

2. If you want a configuration file installed, put it in your configuration package.

3. If you want a user account or group, put a config file for systemd-sysusers in your configuration package.

I built a tool that simplifies package building for this particular purpose, where you're just listing dependencies and file contents: https://github.com/holocm/holo-build - As an example, this is the configuration package for my notebook: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/418282...

The nice thing about this approach, compared to switching to something like NixOS, is that you can continue to use your favorite distribution. However, when you go by this route, you will run into a brick wall very fast because you cannot install a configuration file into a path where an application package already installed an example config. I built http://holocm.org for this purpose. It works well enough, even though it has a few quirks at times. It's fundamentally limited by the system package manager having the final say in everything.

Since January, I've been slowly migrating my servers to NixOS. The desktop and the notebook might follow at some point. NixOS certainly has enough quirks on its own, but at last the configuration management is a first-class citizen on my servers.
It's a lightweight nuclear reactor that heats up air for propulsion.

US project from the fifties:

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

Current russian project:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik
Place your bets now; I predict the day they turn off pip2 will be the real y2k.
I didn't realise the description doesn't format links. Here they are as clickable links:

URL: https://quickfont.xyz/

Github: https://github.com/kiwicopple/quick-font
It was warned by professionals: "When Hoover ran this plan by risk management professionals, the company was warned that it would be an absolute disaster."

I don't know how formal this warning was though. To me this is a key part of the story that should've had more detail.
Don't forget COBOL
If a project you want to depend on isn't using a dependency management framework, how would you then make it work in your project? You will have to do extra work to define the transitive dependencies!

What needs to happen is standardization - this has been done in java because of it's maturity. There's almost no java project that isn't using the standard maven dependency management (even projects that don't use maven, such as gradle projects, would use maven dependency management, and export themselves as an artifact usable via maven).

Javascript has an even worse problem, so python isn't alone me thinks...
Most newer non-apple laptop ships with a precision touchpad that, IMHO, are just as good as the one from Apple, but true, they used to be crap only a few years ago.
Complexity Classes of Problems
Thanks.

That's, as you say, a statically scoped fast exit. One does not need the full power of exceptions for this (exceptions'd dynamic binding comes with a cost). If exceptions are widely used for this purpose, one might consider adding a nicely structured goto to the language. Something like linear delimited continuations?
After seeing the Bartender sample, I'm convinced that this is significant to improving small scale robotic arms. Now the arm does not have to be rock solid, and it's precise enough to do simple tasks. For more sophisticated arms, this can increase their speed/extend their capability. This can even help in exploiting the flexibility of the material, for throwing/catapulting stuff for example. Exciting!
I surely know what a DE is all about.

For example, a desktop environment also offers public APIs for the applications to plug into, which XFCE doesn't seem to offer other than D-BUS.
we have seen similar stuff..a VU professor Valparaiso University in the late 1970s moved some black single moms from Chicago to attend VU tuition free..ten years later 95% of that group had better jobs and stable productive lives
Nonviolence needs an influential audience / gallery to play to. If none such exists then it is not effective.
This is true as far as it goes, and yet, there are people in this world who will not grow up and function except in the face of overwhelming social pressure. They will not be taught, nor learn on their own -they must be broken- and if they are not, well, this kind of thing is what happens. The answer isn't to stop excluding them, but to strip away the new enablers.
Xubuntu has been a daily driver for me for a decade. The donation link is good to know about, thank you!

Also, may be good to check out their list of “officially endorsed” products, which seems to help the project too. Not sure how this stacks up compared to a direct donation of course.

https://xubuntu.org/products/
Hugi demoscene diskmag was absolutely brilliant: http://www.hugi.scene.org/
Perhaps the dark-web should set up shop and bid with foreign/bad actors for these disclosure. Then these companies might care to put in a bid, and long for the days they could have gotten them for free.
I share a NixOS config setup with my brother. It’s been evolving since 2015. He recently got a new laptop after using Mac for a year, cloned our repo, and was up and running. It really makes the computer feel like a commodity and the configuration like a sharable durable trackable artifact.
Protesting is about bring awareness and education to the public over topics the media was not airing. For example, the media was not talking about income inequality before OWS protest started happening. OWS shifted national discourse for a lot of people. That means it was a very successful protest.

So yes, real change has to happen somewhere else. Newly educated people could drive that change, new alliances could be formed, or next steps like boycotts could be organized. Those things could have started at a protest, which is another reason why protesting is valuable.
Seem to always remember this because I feel it opened my eyes to how much speech can influence, but also assist you. I'm talking about Lebron James and when he was going through his decision making in 2010. To stay in Cleveland, with the hometown team who nurtured his career and it is home, or should he sign on with Miami. For him to begin making an unemotional decision, he distanced himself from the situation; at the time he was supposedly pressured from many sides.

“I wanted to do what’s best for LeBron James and to do what makes LeBron James happy.”
New to Hacker News - Is there a reason why this has disappeared from the front page within minutes? It was on the top of the front page as of 9:02pm AEST (4:02AM PDT).
FHA policy had a lot to do with neighborhood segregation but we shouldn't ignore the role of community violence directed against black families trying to move into white neighborhoods either. Black owned houses in certain areas really did tend to burn down and that's a huge indictment of the people who lived there and the local governments who were unwilling or unable to do something about it. So while the federal government deserves blame there's plenty to go around.
Along time ago I used FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) to manage my home machines, but then later switched to Ansible. Just because you use things at work doesn't mean you can't use them at home.
Can I use this to build a package that can be uploaded to a pypi repository for other people to depend on?
Opinion article; is thinly-veiled content-marketing piece for an AI cybersecurity company.
On a related note: I suspect that humans cannot "guesstimate" numbers greater than 20 by sight. I have tried this experiment on myself, friends and relatives and so far no one has succeeded. Take a glance at the next longish queue and try to guess, are there greater than 50 people or fewer than that? The first guess is usually wrong.

This is similar to the picture of the logjam in the article. Somehow, we know abstractly to count, have representations for numbers, and algorithms for arithmetic, but at a gut level, our instinct for numbers is not very spot-on.
> From where I'm sitting (white male, in an office, working a tech job)

That's not a majority of men.
I'd encourage you to try to be less judgmental when it comes to the perceptions and feelings of other people, they may be less valid than your own, but they are just as real and their effects on the psychology of the people experiencing them is.

How about we talk about an example that's easier to empathize with:

Close to where I live (Germany) is a social worker center that offers a very special program for kids with severe behavior problems, kind of as a last resort to save them from a life of crime and unemployment. This program includes going rafting and doing lots of exciting outdoor activities in general, constructing a building together with a tradesmen company and even travelling abroad. This is paid for by the child protective services on a case-by-case basis as it's deemed cheaper than paying for years of possible incarceration, drug abuse treatment etc.

A hot topic among teens that hear about this is that a majority of the kids going to this program are from a migrant/minority backgrounds, as our CPS equivalent already often has their attention on these families and suggests the program when it deems it beneficial. Especially kids from poor families that can't afford holidays or most after school activities ask:"So I don't get to do X because I didn't rob a store and my dad is working as a cashier?" as a way of communicating their feelings of being filtered out.

Their feeling of course isn't valid, the kids being sent to this program aren't to be envied as their lot in life is a tough one, but it's easy to emphasize with the teens p.o.v. that all the helping hands are pointed to other people and theirs isn't arriving.
Erosion of belief in democracy will lead to extremism.
McDonald's Austria had a feedback promotion, where you got a QR code with your bill, that led you to a very short survey about your experience, at the end of which you received a voucher code for a free Coke. When I got my Coke I noticed that the (0€) bill again had a feedback QR code. Of course I had to try and see whether I could get another free Coke that way. Sure enough it worked, but I never abused it, because after two free Cokes I pretty much got everything I wanted out of it, and it had the added inconvenience of the survey. (Plus I think you had to get the coke at the same restaurant and I was afraid someone would notice.)
A subtle constraint to optimize is hardware cost.

I assume Disney chose to separate the constraints by going with simple hardware shapes, yielding a predictable cost and an easy construction. A good hardware optimizer would also need to engineer assembly, which seems nontrivial.

Software costs of optimizing motion for existing hardware are more predictable (~19 minutes of an i7-7700 w/ 32GB, per second of animation).

That being said, they acknowledge in their paper that they could optimize certain properties of the robot, like rod size or joint position.
I was confused about why the article abruptly ended with a blurb on "We need AI", and then noticed the author's company works at an AI cybersec company. In that case, I wish this piece offered more substance about how that AI powered cybersecurity looks instead of just a fluffy little ad...
That's an extreme generalization. In most cases these people work, sometimes hard, yet they feel excluded because either their values don't align with the society they live in, or the society is outight racist. And it's the ones who work (in immigrants receiving welfare, typically the men) who become extremists.
It boggles me that any country in the 21st century would attempt to build such a horrifyingly irresponsible machine, geopolitics be damned.

This thing is basically a dirty bomb on an unstoppable cruise missile. Any reactor powerful enough to drive a thing like that is going to make a big radioactive mess wherever it lands. There's no safe way to test it, either - you can use a dummy warhead, but you can't use a dummy reactor.

Also, clearly such a thing must be air-cooled, which means the moment you have a launch failure, you have a meltdown on your hands (dollars to doughnuts something like that happened here). Just developing such a thing is going to cause a huge raft of nuclear incidents.
I mean, if you want to be super paranoid like that there's no need to use a script to fetch webpages into email format. Use some sort of vnc-over-ssh session to a disposable virtual machine hosted 9500 km away, to browse interactively in a GUI, running firefox+sensible privacy extensions inside xfce4/xorg. With the right automation you could have the vm overwrite itself from an image file every day.

This could be done on the CPU+RAM+disk resources of a $4.50/month vm.

For the purpose of not being tracked by advertising networks (not a nation-state intelligence agency), a stateless vm located on a static ipv4 /32 in bulgaria that saves absolutely no data would be rather hard to track back to its actual user.
New to Hacker News - anyone know why the other thread about the Hong Kong protests (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20673676) disappeared from the front page? It has >100 comments/upvotes and was posted 2 hours ago.
iClaymore - front toward enemy
>If you've been browsing the internet for more than 5 minutes you already have cookies from some of the major ad networks

This does not really work without 3rd party cookies, does it?
Sure. Markets work slowly and capriciously. Part of the deal of taking a salaried job is that you get a paycheck now instead of waiting until you've built something and seeing who's ready to buy it and how much. Even if in the steady state someone will definitely buy it for $5, it's nice to put bread on the table today instead of maybe in a year or two.

As with all financial transactions of the form "I'll trade your risky profit in the future for a low-risk profit now," you lose some money, and that money goes to the entity absorbing the risk for you.
When i worked with python, i remember it having less than 10% of tolling you find even around languages such as php. But you know, religious devs will stick with the only language they know.
Kvyat still waiting for his turn...
There was a US show called Fight Back! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Back!_with_David_Horowit...
I used to really like XFCE and it was my daily driver on my laptop for 6years because it was no compromises on performance type of GUI. Also worked amazing in VMs if you needed to test something and WSL on windows didn't exist.

But then they started working on GTK v3 and things started to fall apart (my experience is only from xubuntu but i think it doesn't matter).
Thunar got really buggy, often crashed in random locations and it was painful to use. This one at least got fixed.

Then mousepad. It used to be really fast editor but after i switched from old xubuntu to 18.04 it feels extremly sluggish when opening lager document with syntax highlight. E.g. download html of youtube and open it in mousepad, it's unusuable.

And then the clipboard issues and large image (screenshot) killed it for me and I had to switch to KDE. It takes ~0.5-1s more to load apps like dolphin compared to thunar but at least once you load them they just work. I still hope I'll be able to come back, the zero animation GUI is appealing to me.
So you used a somewhat obscure window manager, found a missing feature in the folder viewer you were using and jumped to the conclusion that Linux has a broken desktop experience?
Agreed, it sounds very much like "evolution" as goal. It does rule out the option of a "revolution".
Ask HN: Who wants to build a gene editing tool
I was building a tool for front end for 8 months. Took a break and want to build a gene editing tool that will simulate how the edited gene will grow with modified genes.

If anyone has similar interests or looking for a developer and problem solver, let me know.

Thanks!
For those unaware, the Boy Scouts of America changed their policy a couple of years ago to allow girls into more parts of their program, since they realized a lot of boys had their sisters tag along, in part because the Girl Scouts program has little emphasis in hiking and camping.

Even with the new policy, at the troop level (~30 kids), which is where most BSA activity is focused, they will still be gender-segregated: there will be boy troops and girl troops. They will interact at district and council levels, but that's it. Cub Scouts (for younger kids age 7-11) will optionally have mixed units.

There's still plenty of "male space" in the BSA. And learning how to interact respectfully with other genders at that age is a good thing.
> and I feel like if someone were to vandalise the flag of my home country in an act of protest I don't think it would trigger much of an emotional response in me at all.

This very much depends on a country's history and it is impossible to generalise, although I would suspect that burning an American flag in the US (for example) would not go well with many Americans (and probably same for other countries).

China's current regime is partly a reaction to foreign aggression and humiliation.

An enduring symbol of this aggression and humiliation was Hong Kong itself.

This what makes attacking state symbols (or waving the British/American flags as I have seen some protesters do on TV) in Hong Kong so potent.

I think that for many Chinese seeing people protesting against the extradition bill and for more democracy is one thing (which they may be somewhat sympathetic to, actually) but attacking national integrity is quite another, which is guaranteed to produce general anger.
>But... it's the column section? It's not journalism.
It is, however, a piece of work that the paper stands behind. If it were not, it should not be there; newspapers are curated, unlike, say, YouTube or a comments section.
>Are you saying mass media should stop the age-old tradition of the column section
We're saying they should exercise more discretion in what columns they publish. If they don't, they should give up any then-false pretense of being reliable, believable, reputable, etc. The local paper doesn't have to publish the column Crazy Herman sent in about how dragons are cultivating furries' minds for use as concubines, and doing so makes the paper look less respectable.
Plus, in a lot of online media, the Opinion columns are often interwoven among actual reporting, making it less obvious which each is. Especially with this format, which columns they choose to publish become part of the paper's image... and even if unintended, "I drink male tears" columns gives the idea that that publication supports dismissiveness of the emotions of men.
I think it's pretty disappointing that most of the top comments don't talk about the interview with Guido himself over the history of Python. Tangentially related discussion is one of the appeals of HN but I think it's a bit out of control here.
> Probably Go will be the next hotness in 5 years.

I think it will be difficult to grow a large ecosystem for a language with very poor FFI performance [0] in the long run. Golang's poor FFI performance is the number 1 reason I wouldn't use it for my own projects.

[0]: https://github.com/dyu/ffi-overhead
Examples of “power stance” in the UK Tory party. (2018)
old languages decided backward compatibility should be maintained, result is: bloated runtime

and you have python, decided to drop compatibility with previous version and is now still #1

.net / java / c++ they are diying because of their bloated and heavy nature
A lot of people didn't think or that though. So many people would prefer to yell from the sidelines evey now and then about how politicians are all the same and don't reflect the will of the people. How many of them have actually joined a political party p ran for office and even _tried_ to get a seat at the table.
From your link:

"The overall Kolmogorov complexity of a string is thus defined as K(x)=|p| where p is the shortest program string for language L such that L(p)=x and we consider all programming languages."

This is false. No one considers "all programming language", we consider one fixed language (by fixed you can/should mean: independently of the input, or in a different way: you define the language for all possible inputs).

(But it can be ANY universal language chosen from all languages (due to the provably constant overhead) - that's true, but according what follows in your link, your definition not meant it this way.)
It may have been gaining far more comments than upvotes for a time?

This is seen as a red flag by the algorithm, as it suggests that the thread is overly controversial.
> It has a monopoly in the browser

Well, there’s WebAssembly…
> If you look through a neuroscience textbook section on memory systems, it's commonly suggested that the hippocampus does the one shot learning and transfers that over time to the cortex. This is backed up by clinical case studies.

HC's role in episodic memory and consolidation via dreams seems kinda plausible, though I would not put much weight on it. I think dreams are a way of training a GAN-like discrimination between reality and imagination:

http://gershmanlab.webfactional.com/pubs/GenerativeAdversari...

Repetition of any kind likely does improve the model, even if it's merely simulation/dreaming.

> AlphaGo's Monte Carlo search + neural network

I think, in effect, MCTS amounts to something like bagging/boosting/mixture of experts, as it computes a weighted average of the predictions when exploring different branches. But sure, the search mechanism implements a function which a recurrent neural network could probably not discover as it hides behind substantial discontinuities in fitness landscape (it's not a structure which you can uncover step by step, but you immediately need tree structure, a search recursion etc.). The RNN would likely need to conceptualize the search process (subvocally but) linguistically like humans do, which requires structure for the sequential composition of stable prototypes (symbols) which likely requires a one-shot sequential memory. I think even the human mind does not literally do MCTS (would require an overhead that the brain is just not capable of), but some heuristic approximation thereof. The brain can simulate MCTS by linguistic means, though, even if it's just words of wisdom like "take counsel with your pillow", which literally means explore the hypothesis space some more and let the temporal differences backup better value estimates.
I wonder how many of us would do exactly that if we felt it was an option.
Carl-Hauser – Open-Source Image Matching Algorithms Benchmarking Framework
Is "undermine their position in society and the structures they value" some sort of euphemism for allowing women the same rights and opportunities that we have?

Because as a man I genuinely see this as a good thing.
I am trying to find a place in the industry - again, starting from RoR. I absolutely love Ruby. And all this talk of "Ruby dying" makes me feel sad. The rational thing to do is to move on, and learn something popular, like node.js but the more I see Ruby in action, I just can't pull myself away from it.

I had managed to get a job as a Java developer a long time ago, but at that time all I could do was barely write toy apps in Java and I had no exposure to stuff like design patterns. The whole experience left me in a bad place. Now after all these years, Ruby feels like a breath of fresh air, and the texts that I have come across on the subject - Design Patterns in Ruby, Practical OOD in Ruby, Ruby under a Microscope etc. have increased my interest in the language.

But more and more frequent articles on Ruby's decline are pretty disheartening.
Are 5/6 year olds considered “reasonable people”?
I haven't had any of those problems before Mojave. No Facetime bugging me, updates were no problem, and there was an easy terminal command to turn off the disk space notification.