skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead.

As "dead" as Android (which is based on Linux, a Unix clone) and OSX (a BSD Unix) and iOS (child of OSX)? Why does Microsoft vibrantly support Linux in Windows 10 (an abomination to Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer) if Unix is "dead"?

I think the very opposite is true. Some developers realized that the KISS principle (including the Unix philosophy where everything is a stream of bytes) is not a bad idea after all.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-architecture-is-...
Exactly my thoughts while reading most of the posts in this thread
Interesting that initial implementation was in Scala but then they switched to Rust because of minimal runtime, language embeddability, functional paradigms, community and high quality packages. The hype bandwagon is so real in here. So basically one could say the same for several other well established languages, e.g. Haskell.
Also what saddens me is that everyone forgets about D which has the same benefits and a syntax that does not make scratch your eyes out, especially when it comes to FP. Also D has not actually "skipped the leg day" ;)
The problem with file systems is that it is extremely difficult to build reliable systems on top of them. It’s shared mutable state with barely any error handling possibilities.
Show HN: Athro – Crowdsourced Learning Maps for the Open Web
No, they're Quixotically trying to balance Amtrak's finances, which always has been bad. If Amtrak was an airline it would have declared bankruptcy over and over and over again through its history.

This sounds like cyclical political pressure brought about when anti-train politicians are elected. It's virtue signaling. As for the underlying problem: imagine if interstate highways and airports were subjected to local property taxes the way rail infrastructure is.... conversely, imagine if the government built out high-speed rail infrastructure as aggressively as it did high-speed auto and air infrastructure....
> I would think a mixture should gain kinetic energy as the heavier one settles more on the bottom,

But this is not what happens, or there would only be CO2 (and a small ammount of the heavier atoms and molecules) in the lower part of our atmosphere.

> I would think a mixture should gain kinetic energy as the heavier one settles more on the bottom,

But this is not what happens, or there would only be CO2 (and a small ammount of the heavier atoms and molecules) in the lower part of our atmosphere.

Edit: Maybe you know this already, but in equilibrium the mixture does indeed have more kinetic energy (per unit of volume) as you go down because even though the temperature remains constant the pressure increases.
Same here. Clever ideas reduced to an expressive and surreal form
https://issdetector.com (ISS is free, not sure about the other objects) does that and you can set up an alarm.

You can point your phone at the sky and see the exact path, visibility conditions etc but wow that Google Street integration by OP makes ISS Detector feel almost outdated.

Especially important in a city where a lot of times buildings will make the sighting impossible.
Basic of military tactics, don't let enemy know what have hit them. Or better to rephrase, don't let your enemy to know what you will hit them with, moreover if the weapon you will hit them is that big.

Imagine US actions if in 2003, mushroom clouds would've actually risen over major US cities, out of a sudden. If you remember, Saddam did a last minute bluff, promising "fiery death" to NYC, and Washington, and this silly bluff did make not so few people in DC to turn pale.

Knowing how US politics goes, I would say US would've seriously considered rising a white flag, invariable how weak enemy's conventional forces are, in fear of additional strike.
How do you think it should have evolved? I personaly think posix way of filesystem needs to be changed into specialized oject filesystems, but I am not sure what object filesystem for a UNIX OS should look like specially since it needs to be generalized into something all the other sub-systems can benefit from.
Ebay would issue the refund even if the fraudster didn't photoshop the tracking label.

Is the granularity of the tracking really the problem? I believe fraud is the problem, and it's an impossible one to solve.
I'm guessing it's the general aesthetic that makes it surrealist

But hey, that's just a guess
It does make sense, but it caught me by surprise.
That's a good point, upvoted, however in my one experience of a government funded R&D project many years ago I was involved in, a bunch of universities was asked to produce a product.

There was no proper oversight. We produced nothing of value (and I'd like a post-mortem of why, but never got one). That was UK £2 million wasted.

I've no reason to suppose that company funded R&D is any better than govt. funded though.
In Europe passenger trains never wait for cargo to pass. Different priorities.
Dentists, lawyers, surgeons and accountants have professional bodies issuing licenses or certifications. Those licenses verify that the candidate in question has at least met some arbitrary skill level in their respective field.

The software industry, for better or worse, have collectively rejected having such a professional body, which means companies looking for software engineers wind up having to evaluate programming skills individually.
So these software engineers would be referred to as Systems and Equipment Engineering leads in this case?
Steps of How to Download iOS 13 to Your iPhone, iPad and iPod
> Amtrak and the American Rail experience is dying because the current CEO of Amtrak is a former airline executive

What would you prefer?

Delta is a well-run airline. Its former CEO knows B2C transport. Flying is, broadly speaking, preferable for business travellers to rail. That is due to service failures by Amtrak. Failures someone who has tackled these problems is uniquely qualified to solve.

The alternative, hiring rail enthusiasts with no understanding of competition, is what got us unto this mess.
Me too, I really dislike the style of journalism. So frustrating, unless you want to sit down and read a short story or something really long form.
financial reward is not a good way to encourage strong performance

And yet managers are highly paid and incentivised with large bonuses. How do you explain that paradox if pay is not an incentive? Managers can reward themselves and their peers with literally anything and they always choose more money. How do you explain it?

Theory and Wikipedia are fine but look at what actually happens in the real world. I read the original research in HBR when it was first published by the way. I didn’t believe it then either.
I was a member of the Institute of Directors and they try to espouse the importance of ethics: https://www.iod.org.nz/Portals/0/Publications/Founding%20Doc...

And, in my country's law at least, some ethics are codified into legal requirements for directors: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0105/latest/D...

s131 to s138a

Of course, in both the ethics are basically "Work in the best interests of the company". Which may not ethically align with the greater good of society. But that's where criminal law comes into it, hopefully.

As for professional engineers, sadly, there's no requirement in my country that an engineer be a member of IPENZ, as notoriously demonstrated by the case of Alan Reay, who was responsible for a substandard building that killed 115 people in the Christchurch 2011 earthquake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTV_Building#Royal_Commission_...

He simply resigned from IPENZ to avoid their ability to censure him, and sadly, our corporate manslaughter laws were found to be woefully lacking around this (and a coal mine explosion): https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/345102/corporate-manslau...

Question remains too, how would you define ethics for a programmer? Some programmers consider it unethical to work in adtech or porn, yet plenty of others don't. What about facial recognition techology?

It's like the old joke - no ethical programmer would write a function called bombBaghdad(), instead they'd write it as bomb() and pass the city as a parameter.
Ask HN: Should I get the iPhone 11 Pro or a pocket camera?
For the last years, I have been using a cheap Android phone for $200 or so and I am completely happy with it.

However, I have the feeling that the iPhone 11 Pro might enable me to make nicer photos. So I am playing with the idea to get one. I would probably not even use it as a phone. Just as a camera.

Does that make sense? Or are there pocket cameras that weight as little as the iPhone 11 Pro and make better photos?
> It is just US railways are broken

No. Geography.

American population centres are disparate. Comparisons to Europe, with its tightly-packed industrial centres among centuries-old farms, are silly.
The £3148 camera lens existed, it wasn't eBay but Amazon, and there was no fraudulent seller, but fraudulent process around handling misplaced (or stolen) delivery. Read with attention.
(Insert any cipher) was too at its time.
No nation's military can afford to use nuclear weapons first because it will absolutely result in country-ending retaliatory strikes. There wouldn't have been an Iraq left for Saddam to rule.

Hoping to keep it secret for some kind of strike like that goes right out the window once you've used it, and you will absolutely never strike hard enough to remove the nuclear capacity of somebody like the USA (that's why nuclear submarines exist).
Realtek RTL836x series of Ethernet switch ICs has a 8051 hidden inside
The Problem With International Development, and a Plan to Fix It (2014)
Legit links need quite a bit of research, like reading a 700 pages book only to realise that it consists on references to older more authoritative and much bigger books written a couple centuries earlier. These "sources" look like a tree with a few "root" ones written or said supposedly by a buddha. The closer the book or it's author to the root, the more legit it is. Technically, you can start from any author in this tree and discover the rest via references. One of the most cited authors is Atisa, who lived about 1000 years ago.
A colleague is a former AWS employee - my understanding is nobody wants to touch the billing code for this reason.
I think that also explains why the billing interface leaves a bit to be desired.
Everyone race to build an ASR toolkit these days, this one is a good candidate actually compared to others. A good modern technology with subword pieces, parallel training, fast decoding. Very competitive decoding accuracy.

Disadvantages are:

1) A bit disorgranized codebase with directly imported fairseq

2) No online decoding in design which is a must for real-world applications.

Other toolkits:

1) ESPnet - crazy dual chainer/pytorch backend, pretty slow from beginning, otherwise good.

2) Mozilla DeepSpeech - very lightweight technology, no real accuracy and speed.

3) nvidia/NEMO - potentially good performance from GPU experts, but not clear how it will develop in the future

4) speechbrain - just announced, no real code

5) facebook/wav2letter - C++ codebase, not within general NN community

6) tensoflow/lingvo - a playground for Google guys, who uses tensorflow these days?

7) kaldi - good old one (if 7 years is old for you), still has very important features others do not have (semi-supervised learning, long alignment). But no Pytorch again, not very attractive for general NN community.

8) didi/delta - did anyone try it at all?

9) PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech - very old technology too, but Baidu releases very good models trained on their proprietary data
Ask HN: How to download comments of my favorite submission on HN
Does anyone have a tool for this?
Yes it's small but it's made up of 26 cantons which are very different from one another in similar ways, including economically and culturally. Half of the country's GDP comes from 4 cantons.

They mitigate the "low response" phenomenon by encouraging political awareness from a young age and trust in public institutions.
It's imperfect and it may be a massive task to make such cultural changes in the US, but I don't think there's anything inherently stopping it from scaling.
> Let’s not pretend that these prestigious universities treat all applicants the same, wealth, celebrity or benevolence is a major factor in admission. For those who cannot go through the formal route of bribery will always find alternative route. As the rich kid knocks with irresistible envelop, the average students form lower class will present an irresistible admission essay.

I'd be hesitant to buy an essay from a service that has copy as shoddy as this.

The linearly scaled pricing model as well as the fact that essays are offered at the "PhD" level lead me to believe this service provides a subpar product.
Do not governments have access to the same data given the right paperwork?
Context - these two twitter threads: https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175692789171884032

>so apparently most unmanaged switches have a 8051 connected to the switch fabric inside.
would it occur to you that pretty much any switch on your network could be monitoring or injecting traffic? sure would not to me

https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175692567150653440

>i wasn't previously aware that it's possible (it does makes sense i guess? doing switching entirely in gateware is more risky), and it's an absolutely incredible placement for a near-undetectable implant
Is there a reason curl and either awk or the combination of htmltidy and xmlstarlet wouldn’t work?
Ask HN: Public companies with exposure to startups' spending?
What are some publicly traded companies with large exposure to startups' spending? As in: if most tech startups were to disappear overnight much of their revenue would be cut off. Like WeWork, or Brex or some popular SaaS, or some random accounting or HR firm, or even a floor cleaning company that's popular mostly in Silicon Valley. I'm looking for good short candidates.
Richard Feynman's Messenger Series
There are already large Sequoia groves under the protection of the parks and other departments.
Looking into it seems like only postpaid need ID, and it is hard to come by statistics on post vs pre paid. However, bank accounts require an ID [1] and only 6.5% of the US population was unbanked in 2017 which demonstrates the same point.

"If you don’t have a U.S. government-issued SSN or ITIN, some banks and credit unions will accept a passport number and country of issuance, an alien identification card number, or other government-issued ID number."

[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/can-i-get-a-checkin...
[2] https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/
> who uses tensorflow these days?

I'm working on a speech model in tensorflow. What should I be using?
Prosecute all the criminals. Whataboutery is not a legal defense.
Yes, I think this is the plan.
The #1 NLP repo on Github and the author of the most popular NLP course is moving from PyTorch to Tensorflow 2.0/Keras

https://twitter.com/GokuMohandas/status/1174497967232782336

>We’ll still use @PyTorch but more for research lessons, I’ll post more on this decision soon! I did deliberate for several weeks on this though but ultimately it sped up development and decreased overhead for the practical lessons by a lot.
It’s fun when you find the firmware on periferals like this.

Did you know the processor in the b43 network cards use this really weird architecture developed by the company that made the backplane? It also doesn’t actually handle the radio baseband, that’s done entirely in hardware (If my reading of the firmware is correct.) Which makes me wonder why having more open source WiFi card firmware is rare, I guess it still handles calibration and some other things that you could use to intentionally make the card misbehave but it’s a lot more limited than I expected.
I agree with the assessment that opening up the remarkable software stack would be a huge selling point.

I bought one for my girlfriend and she's super happy with it, but having a mosh console on there would allow her to ditch her macbook.

Being able to code on it would also cause me to get one and ditch my iPad Pro.
128 Kbps would amount to 30-40 GB monthly

So, digitalocean gives you ~30 users capacity? I think hetzner offers 1Gbit internet without quota which would serve thousands of users.
On the Record: Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth, Facebook's Hardware Boss
Buying an iPhone 11 just for the camera is a rather expensive exercise. Whilst you can buy a rather good DSLR for the price of an iPhone it will be far bulkier and not have the same level of advanced features.

Having said that, some Android phones, especially those at iPhone level prices have very good cameras as well. In my experience an Oppo R2 outperforms a Canon EOS-1000D.

My biggest gripe with smartphone cameras is that they are too wide-angle. Digital zoom simply trades pseudo-telephoto capability for resolution.
You might like his Medium post that preceded his book. The author is the guy that started DuckDuckGo.
https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-use...
In all my days of Amtrak criticism I haven’t heard about property taxes, can you link me a source? (Not doubting you, I would like to read about it)
How did South Africa and Israel end up as bedfellows here? From a common love of apartheid? Apart from that, they seemed to be in quite different geopolitical positions.
Japan is not a direct democracy.
This is why at the end of the day come what may the state must die. Technology won't stop advancing, and if it's possible the state will push it with the exact arguments you just modded correctly.

It's simply too dangerous to allow that level of control to exist in the hands of a proven malevolent actor that will use it to ensure the extension and maintenance of its power. That power must be seen for the intolerable burden it's becoming before that point and destroyed, replaced with other structures which have no right to make any such unreasonable intrusions.
> Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead.

Brings back memories of the old days of the late 1990s trying out so many workstations running obscure Linux distros to actual UNIX OSes like IRIX, Solaris and HP-UX.

They all ran some variant of X11 which was part of the UNIX philosophy which I found interesting (X11 forwarding, startx, etc) but as the requirements of the desktop kept evolving over time, X11 just kept on showing its age.

Nowadays, Wayland is showing promise as a successor but I really don't have time to be messing around with these .xinitrc, .Xresources or dotfiles to get HDPI working on my MacBook these days.
I’ve had a hard time understanding and using lobste.rs

When I visit the site it seems like I need to already know what community to join. Which sticks me with the problem of not knowing which to join. Googling was not helpful.

Is this the sort of thing that I have to know someone to invite me and kick start me into use?

I guess I’ll eventually get around to joining irc chat to get an invite. But I suppose this is useful for filtering out slackers like me who can’t figure out how to join :)
The wayland project exposes what marvelous piece of software X11 really is since Wayland is still not able to compete, otherwise the whole Linux community would use it already.

I respect the intention and efforts of the Wayland community to make things better. However, I wished the community would have focused on making X11 better (easier to maintain with modularity etc.) instead of following the mainstream which is focused on eye candy and other sensual features to attract customers.

The unfortunate developments of KDE3/4, Gnome2/3 and Win7/8 exposed that boring usable functionality is much more important than exciting sensual functionality.
Some details here: https://tanukaskinen.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/pipewire-hackf...

So far video applications on Linux have accessed the
hardware directly, meaning that two applications can’t
access e.g. a webcam simultaneously. Solving that
problem, and screen sharing with Wayland, were to my
understanding the main motivations for creating a video
daemon.

So screen sharing on Wayland (that covers capture use case) was one of the main motivations behind it.

If both Gnome and KDE (the most widely used DEs) are behind it, I'd say it's already a major consensus on where things are going.

Also, it looks like even wlroots has some plans to support it: https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

And if anyone wants to propose a better alternative, like you said, they can do it.
I find it interesting that I know everything about the SpaceX plans for Mars (supplies mission in 2024, people in 2026), but I had no idea NASA has a mission to the moon in 2024.
Easy to fix - don't use it. Linux users today stay away from it for good reasons.
So you prefer to go back to kings and emperors? Without the state we will all be slaves to someone.
Sometimes you get an answer even faster when you ask for help
Hardly ever, but then we've made it an explicit goal that if we're having to fix the system after hours, we need to fix that immediately. It used to be almost daily before we made uninterrupted sleep an explicit priority.
If the Portuguese were fish, football would be the water. The media industry feeds and thrives off the constant hubbub of corruption and intrigue. Of course he’s in big trouble for exposing anything about it.
They keep being forced to prop up Boeing by funding the SLS.
I think this is an indictment of the large nation state idea.
Yeah, it is somewhat strange. But the previous 2 posts (3 days ago and 7 days ago) don't have any comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004053

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20963807
Rendering a Triangle with Apple's Metal API, using Go
I would argue that's exactly the wrong way to think about thermodynamic entropy. Consider this: Energy isn't just in your head (you can use it to do work, and you have to know where it is precisely if you want to do General Relativity). Temperature isn't just in your head (you can measure it with a thermometer, and it tends to manifest as an average energy). The laws of thermodynamics then connect energy and temperature to entropy, which implies that the latter also can't just be in your head unless you add some mubo-jumbo.

Thermodynamics doesn't care about our ignorance of potential system configurations, but that these configurations are available for microscopic system evolution!
> If the seller were to get an empty package they would have some proof to show ebay and so the fraud would be harder to stop.

What? Think about it for a second, what proof would they have?
Are these graphs undirected?

You do not have follow your followers/friends. They will see your updates but you won't see theirs.
Ahem... ahem..., D?
Don’t worry, society has a pretty slick pressure valve called “beheading the rich.” Hopefully the next society we get right!
Nice strawman. Citation needed.
To play devil's advocate, one important difference is that brains are not (yet) networked. We don't have telepathy, you can't communicate with other people using your brain alone, so you cannot use it to coordinate terrorist attack either - whereas with encrypted messengers, you absolutely can.

... not that I'd expect this point to make any difference if the technology to inspect brains were on the horizon.
This is great! Nice one! I'm intrigued by the idea of infinite chess - I'm thinking a chess game that when a piece is taken it reappears on it's starting square (when it's next free).

Edit - something like what I suggested exists - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_chess
Ok, so if someone tries this scam on you, take a picture of an empty box and then you have won. Right?