skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm can't dispute that fast software is a desirable trait for users. I would love to spec low latencies into the requirements documents for my GUI projects. But from a business standpoint, UI latency requirements are a good way to sabotage a project.

Slow solutions have a dramatic business advantage: using libraries, you can shave months off your delivery schedule by adding miliseconds to your UI delays. The months add up; so do the miliseconds. By using someone else's crufty libraries, you can write a calculator app over the weekend. Libraries will handle the double buffering for screen painting, unpacking fonts and rendering them into bitmaps, how to reflow text onto a screen, etc. It might take seconds for the app to load all it's assets and display the first user activity, but it was cheap to create, easy to iterate, and it gets the job done. These are hallmarks of a valuable startup engineering effort.

But the development process for speedy applications is anathema to businesses of any size. You have to throw away Electron and hire systems engineers with knowledge of the entire platform. After some profiling, they may determine that the required speed is only possible once the system event handler has been replaced with a pared down routine, or when the framework's audio interface is bypassed so the sound card can be accessed through low-latency DMA mode. You have to repeat this for every platform you intend to support. You have to throw away the wheel that everyone else is using and pay to reinvent one that spins a little faster.

To paraphrase Joel Spolsky's comment on rewriting software: are you sure you want to give that kind of a gift to your competitor? For most companies it isn't worth it.

Are there exceptions? Yes: a motivated engineer like John Carmack may work months to eliminate another 3ms frame latency out of a VR headset simply because of personal passion. Google can amortize additional billions by wringing 100ms out of page load times by funding a browser project so complex that you also have to design a new build system for it. But if you're not Carmack and you're not Google, you probably can't afford to reinvent the wheel.
Are you paying for 300 Mbps?
I had Encarta '97 as an 11yo, purchased at a Malaysian street vendor market for probably all of 3 bucks. It felt incredible to have that much knowledge available for almost no money. And it wasn't just boring text like the paper versions, there were videos too!

There was point in time where that truly felt like the future. Considering that we're now in the age of autoplaying, monetized "content" video nearly everywhere you go, it was nice to have only "primary source" video, aka stuff like the moon landing, or the MLK speech, instead of some nobody warbling on about its importance while splicing in stills of said video because they don't want to be in violation of the copyright.

The concept of finite, structured and bounded content is also extremely powerful in this era of overwhelming data, much of which rehashed and warmed over by various publications not to mention utterly infested with ads.

The concept of spending hours down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is not new, and it's one of the reasons I donate annually. But it first started with Encarta, and it's offline-only format has grown to be only more valuable as time goes on.
Ask HN: Curated resources for improving system architecture skills?
This tech interview handbook[1] was recently posted on HN. In addition to the handbook itself only discussing "small-scale" (e.g. algorithms and data structures) software engineering, a number of the comments on the discussion thread[2] talked about difficulties that commentators or interviewees had with large-scale system architecture.

Where can I find resources to help me improve my ability to understand and modify large-scale systems and help me deal with black boxes in software development?

[1] https://yangshun.github.io/tech-interview-handbook/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727126
Undoubtedly there is a healthy dose of nostalgia, however there's a lot to learn here.

Wikipedia is unbeatable for breadth and depth, but there's a lot to be said for curation.
I'm genuinely curious - can someone explain how Amazon has avoided litigation on this for so long?
Well, they didn't include any of Tesla's long range models and i-pace owners have been saying (on forums) that their real world range is much less than the official number.
This is insightful and deep, but it begs the question:

Does my text only newspaper article really need all this crap? Like, it's text, with maybe one image or two. Just give me the damn text and cut out the cruft.

Why are browsers now competing with reader modes? We're sending a bunch of data just to have the browser remove it. Just don't send it to begin with!
What's "AI chip"? You can build a full adder, and call it "an AI chip".
No offense, but I don't think you ever used Encarta, at least not much.

Encarta was much more interactive, even including 3D walk arounds of historical sites & quizzes.
Until another replicated study comes along to dispute this, I'll take the word of the author and the editors at JAMA over your 'feel' that this isn't statistically significant.

"There was a significant interaction (P = .02) between child sex and MUFSG (6.89; 95% CI, 0.96-12.82) indicating a differential association between boys and girls. A 1-mg/L increase in MUFSG was associated with a 4.49-point lower IQ score (95% CI, −8.38 to −0.60) in boys, but there was no statistically significant association with IQ scores in girls (B = 2.40; 95% CI, −2.53 to 7.33)."

1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
>You had lots of curiosity but still limited access to information so you deeply explored stuff.

I was about to write this myself. Wikipedia has so much information that it’s easy to surf page to page, link out, etc, and end up having skimmed 50 articles and still not understand the thing you came to look at.
Yeah, "I really miss the era where we were so deprived that now-small things seemed amazing" is a bit of a weird take.

I mean, I have plenty of my own tech nostalgia, like the way at 300 baud you could hear the bits and practically whistle them. Happy memories! But I try never to confuse that with "my childhood was a historical peak". Because it wasn't particularly.

You know plenty of people were just as nostalgic for their encyclopedia volumes and thought kids had it too easy with this CD-ROM nonsense. And I'm sure that people complained that the first encyclopedias made learning too easy, that kids wouldn't value what they didn't work for. And this is a tradition of "the kids are too soft" that goes back at least to Socrates: "[Writing things down] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."
There is Brittanica Online if you want an edited encyclopedia. And Rand McNally has an online atlas--though I don't have any personal familiarity with it. There's also ESRI.
Sadly the US Federal Government is a massive and unwieldy collection of organizations. I work in the Federal government and my part of it doesn't comply with NIST's modern guidelines at all. They probably will at some point, but department/agency level IT changes take years to be approved.
Instead of effortless PR statements like this, let's have a Fortune -5/-10/-50/-100/-500 of the costs companies have incurred from pollution and resource consumption and let everyone claw to the top of the "least bad" pile.

Keep your propaganda, take action and let that speak for you.

(Yes, I'm aware that can be gamed like any other metric. At least it involves concrete changes, not just a fluff piece.)
What I remember most about Encarta is how impossible the "Mind Maze" game was as a kid
So much to read, so little time
Get this into Android at the OS level and I would consider one of those sexy flagship devices

But it would also need to seamlessly mix bluetooth and wifi discovery too.
Using the amount of data you paid for is being a dick? 10 GB per month is paltry amount of data.
I'm no fan of mass medication without a choice (or supplementation, whatever), but what you state is not the full story:

> They don't have it in Europe and have dental health that's just fine.

Much of Europe (not all) doesn't fluoridate their water, but they DO fluoridate salt and milk, or have high levels of natural fluoride in their water.

To quote wikipedia[1] (yes, yes, I know, although they at least have a citation[2] for it):

> the European Commission finds no advantage to water fluoridation compared with topical use

> Community water fluoridation is rare in Continental Europe with 97–98% choosing not to fluoridate drinking water. Fluoridated salt and milk is promoted in some European countries instead. Water fluoridation has been replaced by other modes in many countries where water supplies are too decentralized for it to be a practical choice, or existing natural fluoride levels were already ample, including Germany, Finland, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and at a time Israel.

That doesn't mean they didn't find fluoridation useful, just that topical use is just as good.

Personally, I dislike the idea of forcing everyone to use fluoridated products (by not providing alternatives, or by putting it in all the water) and would prefer if topical use were encouraged instead, but my preferences aside, fluoride has been proven to be beneficial to teeth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoridation_by_country

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoridation_by_country#cite_n...
And about a decade ago there was a brief humor fad that consisted of modifying public domain classic literature to add fantasy or SF features -- "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Android Karenina" and so on -- but obviously the people buying those knew that they weren't buying the original works.
If someone is looking for party dates, this is the go to address: https://www.goabase.net (at least for the EU) :)
Why are you putting logic in the config in the first place? Just let it be data.
Your comments were killed by a software filter which is based on past activity by trolls etc. Users can unkill such comments by vouching for them, and moderators review them and unkill the good ones. I'm afraid, though, that the comments you posted were bad for HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20737083

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736731

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart? You'll find that there are quite a few guidelines there which ask you not to make posts like these. We're trying for thoughtful, high-information comments on HN, and trying to avoid snark and shallow dismissals.
How does `yield` work under the hood? Does it add a reference to some array, with code to loop over all the references with some small timeout until the reference status changes from "pending" to "completed"?
Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day.

I wrote about this topic a few years ago (https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak up (I added some of his comments to the piece). There was a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing around digital encyclopedias during that era, much of it centered around Encarta—Microsoft acquired a lot of publishers during that period and it effectively disrupted most of the rest out of existence.

But even considering that, Encarta was special. I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story.

It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.
Wikipedia could do a better job integrating media.

I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.
Fun and Creative Ways to Celebrate Company Milestones
No I definitely agree with that, I guess the cultural propaganda from non-western countries is usually just more clumsy and ham-handed than something like captain america
Something which I don't understand is why cyber war is both carried out by intelligence services and traditional armies. Sure, war "should" be done by soldiers, but my gut feeling is that intelligence services are the dominating actors.
Such a great idea for a restaurant, would love for it to come to London.

Also, Yahoo Japan does a go fund me style donations platform?! Still amazed Yahoo lives on in Japan.
>any suggestions for further reading?

"Deep Thinkers" is a good recent book, you can check it out (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27...)

>Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this

Our challenge is that we are visual species who are trying to understand “acoustic” species. (see ”What it is like to be a bat? https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum...)
Yes, we can describe their vocalizations in terms of peak frequencies, RMS, center frequencies, duration, intensity, inter-click-intervals for burst pulses or sperm whale codas, but what does it all mean? The biggest struggle is not even that, but how to conceptualize their communication system. Naturally, being humans, we want it to have semantics, grammar, pragmatics and phonetics, and if it does not, they must be dumb (i.e. Chomsky’s argument). So we search for the smallest unit (a phoneme) and naturally we cannot find it.

Additionally, we know that dolphins have at least 2 sound generators (and possibly up to 4) that could work simultaneously and independently, potentially producing very complex utterances. On top of that, we have an animal that “sees” the world through sound, it must have at least some contribution to how the communication system is set up. The conventional belief as of now is that echolocation is separate from communication, although Dr. John Lilly was convinced that dolphins could use echolocation to describe things in their environment (to be clear, we have no scientific support for this hypothesis).

That is why describing dolphin whistles and other sounds terms of duration, peak frequencies, infliction points, etc., does not help at all, as it does not help us to understand how the communication system is set up and what this whistle actually means (and why is it used). The only positive thing in all that is that there must be some sort of communication system. If you ever encounter a pod (especially the offshore species) you would be amazed at their constant chat. So much energy is spent on all these utterances they must be important and must have at least some meaning.
26 here... I think Encarta was one of the first CD-ROMS we owned (Compton was later, er, acquired surreptitiously).

I still remember the joy I had researching the Stegosaurus and the Platypus between my local library and my copy of Encarta for a school project <3.
Great article. I worked at a Forex trading firm and this is a great way to explain China's dilemma.

Really, this is kind of what happened to every other east Asian economy the past 60 years. They grow at a rapid pace for about two decades, then hit a ceiling as their low currency value becomes a hindrance rather than a benefit.

Like the author explains, this is the Japanese model. And every country who has copied it as done so less effectively than the Japanese.

First Japan, then Korea, then Taiwan, now China.

For me, the fundamental advantage in this trade war with the US is that the Chinese are replaceable for the American economy. Sure, there will be some pains as companies move their factories from China to Vietnam (or wherever), but ultimately, there are other places in the world with cheap labor.

There is no other America in the world. China's number one customer is America and China doesn't seem to realize this. If you don't keep your relationship good with your number one customer, then you will lose them eventually.

And that's what's happening.

The Chinese have to get better at international relations or they will be more isolated as time goes on.

No one wants to deal with a partner who bullies them around. Especially when there are better deals on the table.
Proposal Go 2: add a ternary conditional operator
If it’s any interest, I meant this genuinely. In my experience kids with less tend to be more resourceful. I find that a valuable lesson in humility and gratitude. The comforts we seek are often not what we need. Kudos to these kids.
I know it's just a typo in the article but I really love the phrase "malware invested version"

In a way, this phrasing also works.
So did I!

I was half-expecting that HN would have greater appreciation of CS' writings than the general population...
Both the UI and UX of amazon's web store are terrible. The reason people buy from amazon is price, breadth of selection, and speed of delivery, not the wonderful shopping experience.

Trying to differentiate UI and UX in the context of a web app makes no sense. Both are two sides of the same coin. In your own comment, you couldn't even come to a conclusion as to where one ends and the other begins!

This is the hallmark of a buzzword. When a phrase like UX comes to describe everything and nothing at the same time it ceases to have meaning.
Are they actually expired? In both corners of the US government that I've worked most of the certificates are self-signed and work computers have the agency's root certs added to the browser.
> at disrupting this.

Or, you know, democratic policy changes a majority of us all agree are sensible.
Rustradamus.
Which one? He's the CEO of Square too.
Just look for universities where undergraduate lectures are hold in English. I guess there are some where English is dominating starting from the third semester.
> "Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways"

Excluding grammar and style maybe. A lot of Wikipedia, including many articles on important subjects, are painful to read. Either because they were written by committee or simply by somebody with poor language skills (sometimes even worse than my own!)
by that I mean any chip, from a generic (GPU) to something specialized (vision, NLP, etc). Any chip that makes training/or running TF/Caffe models faster.
I knew a guy in Stuttgart who wanted a license plate “S-S” and got rejected.
Kinda looks like p-hacking. They ran calculated the p-value for a bunch of different criteria until they found one that was "statistically significant" (in this case gender, specifically just one gender). The issue is that you'll find 5% outliers 5% of the time, so if you just keep looking you'll eventually find "significance".

This would demand reproduction before action.
almost the opposite. you are trying to avoid writing anything like what would be considered idiomatic c code.
It's not reflected in OP's screenshot, but there was a period where Encarta (and a companion product called Microsoft Bookshelf) used a very flat, Swiss-design aesthetic that was catnip to graphic-designer-wanna-be kid me. You can draw a direct line from that era through Microsoft's Neptune UI experiments down to the Metro design language.
As to the first point, it depends on what you're trying to achieve. That's why I mentioned the lottery option. You can limit the lottery to one entry per person and make the ticket, and the item itself, non-transferrable; anything less can be gamed to favor those with disposable funds, including queues. (After all, that's the subject of this thread.)

However, I think that if someone took the time they'd otherwise have been wasting in lines and used it productively instead then they could probably earn enough to afford the higher market-clearing price, and society would be better for it.
You can download the CIA World Factbook, but it isn't an app, nor does search work offline. It is basically a scrape of the site.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/
Not purely. Things like the timeline shown near the bottom don't really exist as far as I can tell on Wikipedia. Also the many writers few editors leads to articles feeling rather disjointed at times with information being repeated pointlessly in different ways in different sections sometimes, there's something to be said for the edited entries of yore in that regard.

I think it'd be really neat and useful for wikipedia to add things like that. A filterable searchable timeline to say "show me all the wars fought in or involving country X" or a map with layers showing different information or events.
I don't like D's GC. I don't like its multiple modes (-betterC) which only seem to really exist because enough people didn't like the original design of D. The defaults seem off (like shouldn't functions default as @safe?)

I get a general impression of D being in just too weird of a space. It's occupying a zone somewhere between C/C++ & Java/C#, and I'm not sure that's a place I ever want to be. I'd rather just use Java/C# if I need D's feature set, and if I don't I don't want to deal with the headaches that result from trying to avoid them (or use -betterC mode which seems to just be what D should have been from the start)
The way we do things in AI today is multiplication of two large matrices. Just like we did it 30 years ago: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-89e.pdf
The applicants aren't the problem. It's the employers bending and breaking the rules and regulators not enforcing them.
Is there any comparison of training speed of a neural net for one of these chips and a typical one? I'd be interested to see how long it takes to train an imagenet classifier on one of these compared to other hardware.
5.1 Tips for fledgling software engineers that might be useful
introduction to JPEG 101? Really? Who doesn't know these basic facts about the JPEG algorithm?
Seizing the assets of foreign national corporations within the US would be mutual assured financial destruction. Markets would crash and plunge the country into depression/recession as foreign capital flees the US.
Odd anecdote, but my middle school had Encarta 2009 on all the computers and I spent a lot of time going through the historical location free roams finding bad geometry to glitch through walls.

I found out-of-bound clips in like 4 of them, and thought it was all very cool seeing all the level geometry and non-clearing graphics smearing across the screen. Probably contributed to my interest in computers and cybersecurity, ironically, no matter how much my teachers said it was a waste of time...
I remember those too. I still think there's a difference between making kids toys a bit safer and literally taking away their time and space to flourish and replace it with some insane adult-mandated schedule, and then have f-ing Jira boards with your kids as recently discussed here.
Perhaps we should think about establishing a public listing of checksums for important texts?

Not sure exactly how it would work, you'd probably only want to run it against the main text so there would remain some flexibility for chapter headings, forewards, etc.