skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot of those large web properties are going to be using old versions of PHP.

Is that true? PHP 5.6 and 7.0 were EOL'd in 2018, and acording to data at https://blog.packagist.com/php-versions-stats-2019-1-edition... the use of PHP 7 and later is ~90%. Web properties like DreamHost have supported PHP 7+ for years, and have deprecated versions before 7.1.

> Newer versions have breaking changes that make upgrading a large codebase difficult.

The documentation on this is pretty good[1], and there's some nice tooling that can help[2]. I wouldn't say that I've migrated "large" codebases, but FWIW in my limited experience this hasn't been particularly onerous.

[1] See https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.php and related appendices
[2] https://auth0.com/blog/migrating-a-php5-app-to-7-part-three/
Firefox / Safari use reader mode

CMD+SHIFT+R
We're not in disagreement (I never claimed or even implied that USB is bug-free) -- but in order to get an RCE or DMA-like access you first need to exploit the USB stack. PCIe gives you that kind of access for free by design (almost -- there is IOMMU these days but there is little evidence that it is nearly as secure as hardware vendors claim, and you'd need to have phone hardware which supports it).
Nondeterminism is every place where information can enter your program from the outside world.

It's random numbers, the system clock, data off the internet, and input events from the user.

What it sounds like is that Mozilla has come up with a debugging environment that bottles all that nondeterminism up into a neat little package so that it can replay a specific run of your program any time you want.
Thailand: FB, Messenger didn't work till a wee while ago. No WhatsApp service interruption though.
Banning private schools is an extreme position, but I see some sense in it. Here's how I think about it.

It tends to be the wealthier, better connected, more influential people who send their kids to private schools. So, we have a situation where the influential people don't have a lot to lose if public schools happen to be under-funded (their kids get private education). So it is more politically tolerable than it should be to under-fund public schools.
You are the one who made a strong assertion that the potential for extinction caused by rapid global warming is less than what humans have already caused.

I made relatively few assertions and the ones I did make are basic ecological science. I was pointing out that your strong claim was irresponsible given the plausible possibilities and our limited knowledge.
What we're all really looking for in most workplaces is love and attention [edit: acceptance], but we express that by working harder and harder in order to 'earn' it.

In my opinion this is the most beneficial buddhist 'practise' for western society: "You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere."

If that were taken to heart, believed and practised, you would get rid of 80% of most people's suffering.
Undermining their ad campaign claiming that Chromebooks are bad because they don't work offline.
Research suggests Mindfulness increases empathy and reduces anger and fear. Wouldn’t reframing soldiers or CEOs worldview to be more compassionate galvanize more positive change than trying to convince Sundar Pichai or soldiers that they are bad people?
lol, coming from PHP, JSP and co, web APIs were the salvation.

Monoliths are a big problem and merging frontend and backend into each other only made it worse...
Wow...finally. This is happening in public companies too btw. Draper Esprit, Scottish Mortgage Trust, Woodford (he was marking up his "genius" cold fusion play all the way...this is real life, 2019, amazing)...the way positions are marked is very suspect, and the general public just doesn't understand (they see NAV as cash in the bank).
I actually remember when pg made the announcement for YC. I'd been following his essays and was quite impressed with him as I tried to figure out what I'd been doing wrong with my previous startups. I thought then it was a clever idea but never imagined it would blow up like it did.
If the alternative to adding an additional interface is to just give DMA access to the device, I'm not sure I see the downside to using the additional interface. Even if the interface ends up being completely broken, at the very least there was something to break before you get DMA / RCE access. What possible interface breakage could trump free and unrestricted DMA access?
An Uncountable Moore-Schmidt Theorem
> “an adversary is more hurt by desertion than slaughter.”

And disease, starvation, and the general problems of the march. This is one of the things I learned from Clausewitz's discussion of Napoleon's march on Moscow, the one that produces the famous Tufte diagram.

The Grande Armeé numbered 422,000 per Tufte/Minard, 1 million per Wikipedia, the same as several large music festivals; and they almost all had to walk the ~3,000 kilometers to Moscow; and most of the food had to be locally sourced. This necessarily resulted in the force being spread out over a huge area, and every morning when it was formed up there would be slightly fewer men.

Edit: and speaking of burning boats, when they got there, the Russians had burned the food stores of Moscow, starving both the Invaders and the citizens.
It's actually something I adapted to and really came to like about using Firefox Focus (and have missed since switching to Firefox Preview). The main thing about Firefox Focus is it was extremely easy to reopen a page in a different browser or app (Chrome, Firefox, whatever). So some app on your phone would send you somewhere in Focus and you would peek at a website and then decide to transfer to the "real" browser if you actually cared.
I don't think a smaller number of dumb startups will have much negative impact, considering the huge numbers of highly paid employees the giant "fang companies" have.
Here's the RFC for it with the "why" and discussion of the tradeoffs. https://wiki.php.net/rfc/numeric_literal_separator
Tracking the S&P 500 using ETFs holdings
SoftBank: Would you like some money at a $10 billion valuation?

Startup: Sure.

SoftBank: Here you go. Would you like some more at a $20 billion valuation?

Startup: Sure.

SoftBank: Here you go. How about a $40 billion valuation?

Startup: This is dumb but it’s not like we’re going to say no.

SoftBank: Here you go.

Startup: Thanks brb buying a yacht.

SoftBank: Our mark-to-market investment returns are tremendous, we must be good at this.

If SoftBank keeps throwing cash at startups like WeWork, the numbers will start to lose their meaning. [June 14, 2018] - Matt Levine

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-14/softba...
Redux-like TypeScript typed store easy to use with React
To an extent. Certainly not to the extent that it is a worthy comparison. Conformity is not bad in itself. What is bad is the comparison to a mindless drone. I would go more for something like tribe mind instead of hive mind.
Places Your Money Needs to Go – Money Saving Tips
Just tried it out, and performance seems really bad at the moment, to the point where I couldn't tell if it was working properly. Does anyone have any suggestions of sites to try this on?
People imagine the “mixing” of socioeconomic groups at a young age in school to be some kind of great formative event for students that’s more or less required now in the modern narrative around education.

It’s mostly bullshit, IMO. Cultural norms between rich and poor transfer extremely slowly, and without a heavy handed approach it’s anyone’s guess which direction they flow. I grew up upper middle class, and went to a high school that did this and it was terrible. Poorer students brought with them drugs and violence and a “fuck it” approach to academics. The more wealthy students just stayed away. By the time we were juniors everyone had self selected into AP and Honors classes, so there was virtually no interaction.

I didn’t learn a single thing from that experience other than that I actually need to keep my gym locker locked so that may stuff didn’t get stolen.
Not all consumers are equal.

Wikipedia sized organizations would easily absorb the relatively trivial cost, so, they wouldn't switch. Their demand is relatively inelastic to price.

The people switching are going to be the far more numerous smaller operations, who are elastic to price.

And, of course, anyone signing up for a new domain is highly elastic.

Because there are lots of people who are highly elastic, the overall demand is highly elastic.
Very good point. This is similar to the concept of company culture. Every company has one but not all make it explicit.
Python 3 Course – Modules and Packages
yes, specifically the code it generates. I realize theres human intervention, but on average what is the output.
I mean, it's no longer horrible I guess :)

With mainstream languages, there's rarely any single clear and/or insurmountable problem, it's all the little annoyances you run into every day that add up, plus the cognitive load imposed by the language directly as well as indirectly through the code it lets you write.

I'm not 100% up to date on how much PHP has closed the gap in the last few years, but subjectively I never found it anything but tedious due missing features, various unnecessary pitfalls (sometimes with security implications), silly limitations (you can write a static type in this case but not in that, you can catch this error but not that, no inner classes, etc etc.), and numerous other small cases of poor "ergonomics".

The "batteries included" nature of the standard library is nice, and in contrast to the somewhat fragmented world of RubyGems or NPM it can feel downright pleasant, but finding a SQL library or such is a pretty small effort in the scope of a project, and (popular) 3rd party libraries tend in my experience to be better than the equivalent standard library stuff in most of the languages I know. Every time I wrote a non-trivial amount of code with PDO, I had to look up the correct initialization rituals to get sane settings and copy or recreate a bunch of more or less "obvious" helpers. I'm sure there's something better in Composer by now.
I think it's worth noting some of the timeline of this [1]:

> On May 13, 2019, ICANN announced that they would remove the price cap on .org registrations (despite 98% disapproval in public comments [2])

> On May 14, 2019, the private equity firm Ethos Capital was founded by former ICANN chief executive Fadi Chehadé and investor Erik Brooks.

> On November 13, 2019, it was announced that the Public Interest Registry (that manages .org) had agreed to be acquired by Ethos Capital, as its first investment.

> Subsequently, PIR announced it would abandon its non-profit status to become a B Corporation.

Is the author unaware of this, in on the deal, or just remarkably naive?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_s...
> Why doesn't legal have to fight the same fights?

Legal constantly fights the same fights. They get those systems put in place because they acknowledge that fighting these fights is a critical aspect of their job and they make sure those control points are in place. Before I became an InfoSec PM I consulted for legal departments to fight those internal fights for them. They’ve had decades to refine and develop best practices around how to do these things.

Also places where everything is blocked by default by legal are generally badly run legal departments and have plenty of handshake agreements and covert business activity going on the same way places with intransigent and uncooperative InfoSec or enterprise architecture ends up with tons of shadow IT. They’ve been moving towards automated review and self-service tools to speed things up for a while now.
British tech workers facing difficulty working in US under changes to PR laws
About 2 days ago, I noticed that Facebook added multi-level reply threads for a small percent of posters, but as of this morning it seemed totally broken for me on the latest ios build. Seems unlikely to be related, but I wonder if it's possible they broke the site trying to hotfix it.

Regardless of the root cause, I'm feeling for the oncall folks whose Thanksgivings are getting ruined right about now.
> All the ugly CPU vulnerabilities make context switching very, very slow. A microkernel needs to contest switch more than a monolithic kernel, and the overhead keeps increasing.

In the case of the Zircon microkernel in Fuchsia, unlike Linux, almost all system-calls are asynchronous/non-blocking with a small number that are blocking [0], which is interesting since the OS is also fundamentally optimised for multi-core systems. Combined with both features, it makes it very suitable for real-time based applications, something that Linux is not optimised for and requires fundamental tweaking and changes for Linux or even some other traditional microkernels to achieve.

Thus, I doubt that on a system like Fuchsia/Zircon, the context switch would be notably 'very, very slow', even if Fuchsia was running on modern-hardware optimised for microkernels such as Zircon if that were to happen.

[0] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/master...
In response to a question I had in response to your post,

> Is Japanese language always/often a mix of kanji and hanja? Are there significant kinds of text that are kanji-only?

my partner, a native Japanese speaker, explained

> Usually mix of kanji, hiragana, and katakana.

> But some words are written only in kanji like “入室禁止” meaning do not enter (this room)

> For the sentences, almost all sentences require hiragana for verbs.

My buddy, a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, responded

> It’s usually a mix.

From which I gather: kanji-only signage and phrasing (which can be "read" by Mandarin or Cantonese literates) is common, but longer constructions involving sentences typically will have hiragana and/or katakana which are phonetic and have little to no meaning for people not literate in Japanese.
> That doesn't really help, because now you need some other sort of token to authenticate the user for handing out a new short-lived token, and that new token now has the same inability-to-revoke problem. You've just moved the problem.

No you don't, as stated you can refresh your token before it expires.

> You don't need a JWT for this. You can just store that in localStorage directly. JWT is not a storage mechanism, it's more of an encoding format.

I think you can validate the authenticity of your JWT without having to go to a database. This is much more secure than local storage or even a plain old cookie.

JWT provides a useful set of features and just because in your opinion it isn't useful plenty of people disagree with your points.
Is it just a crazy coincidence this happened right after Trump’s signing of the new Hong Kong bill?
If you don’t know your Sharpe, how do you know you are actually making alpha? Without knowing your return and volatility, you can’t really evaluate the performance of your algo or know if changes are helping.
The valuation is just an estimate of how much an average investor would like to pay for a share. It's a guessing game trying to predict irrational decisions made by huge and diverse groups of people. Factor in corporate politics and internal competition and you will see that there is no room for reason left.
That’s not exactly how it works. The primary function of surge isn’t to redistribute a fixed pool of drivers - it’s to incentivize additional drivers to go online in an area with excess demand. For example, it used to be that surge would spike insanely high on big days like Halloween and New Years Eve because demand was drastically higher than supply. Once drivers saw other people making 8-10x surge, more people started signing on at these peak times and average surge went down.
> nested ternary operators without explicit parentheses

This also seems like a first step toward fixing associativity of the ternary operator, one of the most ridiculous deficiencies of the PHP language.
lol @ My People getting removed. It was added not so long ago and it was displayed so prominently (in the taskbar of the default install) and at the same time so seemingly stupid and useless that I was wondering if its inclusion was the result of a manager sucking off the right executive or something.
It's a BCM2711, and the datasheet is NDA only - typical Broadcom!

The VideoCore (Broadcoms GPU) is the main processor on the thing, and the cluster of ARM cores that run Linux are more of a coprocessor which can only see some of RAM.
If the surface of mars is exposed to radiation capable of making particles become radioactive, does that mean the surface is already radioactive? Or would this only happen to airborne dust particles, not to sand particles on the ground?
Very cool site but it's very slow.

I get around 2 fps on that shader. Less on others. I have a GTX 1660. Definitely not top of the line but it's in the latest generation of video cards.
Cursory searching is revealing:

- Softbank "now responsible for more than half of all corporate and financial debt issuance" in Japan [1]

- Softbank's own bond data [2]

- Seeking Alpha's review of SB's bond [3]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/24c4a8a8-7885-11e9-bbad-7c18c0ea0...

[2] https://group.softbank/en/corp/irinfo/stock/bond/

[3] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4308627-forget-uber-wework-...
> Pouring more money into investments to try and boost the valuation. Using previous investments to invest and boost the value of new investments, guaranteeing massive loans in order to get others to invest at huge valuations. It just looks more and more like laundering money through all sorts of different mechanisms to create paper gains that don't reflect reality.

Is this uncommon? E.g. I don't have any inside information as to what went on with the Coinbase acquisition of Earn.com, but from an outsider perspective it certainly looks like:

1) A16Z invests tens of millions of dollars in Earn.com, which fails.

2) A16Z has their other portfolio company Coinbase buy Earn.com to shift some of their profits from Coinbase back into their earlier fund. (Which as far as I can tell is not only completely useless to Coinbase, but is also a huge legal liability.)

3) A16Z uses the "success" of their fund with Earn.com to raise more money.

4) A16Z then compensates Coinbase by investing in them at a higher paper valuation.

I could easily be 100% off base so I don't want to libel anyone, all I'm saying is that that's just what it looks like as someone who wasn't privy to the actual details.
Webasm doesn't enable anything new that couldn't already be done right now.
I have a very personal history with gRPC
Yeah, and the fact that Ethos is run by a former CEO of ICANN is incredibly shady.
The unions aren't going to let Labour do anything serious about climate change.

The idea of green growth is probably false:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...
I'll just point out that a Boring Co machine will fit inside a Starship.

Underground may be the only way to live, given that radiation dosage is cumulative, 24/7, it may not be possible to live on the surface at all in inflated domes. Maybe they're better suited for equipment storage and agriculture.
New Hot Spot 2.0 WiFi Evil Twin Hacker Attack
I'm sorry you received a pay cut, and I'm glad you are happy with more free time.

However, making an extra $100k puts an extra $65k in your bank account. It's basic math. Now, psychologically, I can see it being not so clear cut, especially if one lets their standard of living and spending habits rise up as their paycheck increases.
Or drop the alpha chars altogether and just go numeric. It worked for CompuServe. Everyone's ID was an octal number. 72167,4531 for example.

That way there is no overlap, and nobody is slighted when they find out that their name is taken.
The inability to get TSF vs. TFS straight in that document is...pretty bad.
500 is fixed... you can request additional pages from a footer link in the email, but requesting 5 or 10 would be good.
That's a really messy system when you're a communications platform which revolves around the ability to @ people based on their username.

On Twitter or a forum like this for example, unique usernames are probably essential, because the alternatives are too confusing.
Innovative personal diet suggestions
IIRC, it was day 3 for me as well, and I had the same (minor) let down on day 4 (resign?!?!). That said, I imagined the resignation was a fixable flaw in the AI, and this turned out to be correct.

I can’t actually remember where I first learned about the match. It may have been HN, it may have been in an AGA e-mail, or it may have been some tech-oriented magazine/web site in English or Japanese. I am certain it wasn’t match 1, because I reviewed earlier matches, and I remember the let down of match 4, so must have been match 2 or 3.
Introducing devops-pipeline
I had the same reaction... Is "AI" a selling point to your likely customers? Otherwise it might be worth de-emphasizing it.
You could turn it around... "We have humans generate your front-end code assisted by AI so we can keep prices affordable".
To me, if I read "we use AI to do X" I read it as "we've got some algorithms that do a crappy job of X but we sell it cheap".
Thanks for reinforcing the importance of this feature! :) Just added it to our top priorities.
Abstract:

Constructing agents with planning capabilities has long been one of the main challenges in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Tree-based planning methods have enjoyed huge success in challenging domains, such as chess and Go, where a perfect simulator is available.

However, in real-world problems the dynamics governing the environment are often complex and unknown. In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics.

MuZero learns a model that, when applied iteratively, predicts the quantities most directly relevant to planning: the reward, the action-selection policy, and the value function. When evaluated on 57 different Atari games - the canonical video game environment for testing AI techniques, in which model-based planning approaches have historically struggled - our new algorithm achieved a new state of the art.

When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any knowledge of the game rules, MuZero matched the superhuman performance of the AlphaZero algorithm that was supplied with the game rules.
Its not just VC backed companies with this problem, but with publicly traded "investment grade" ones as well[0]…

[0] https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2019/10/23/anne-wals...
Bubbles!

you get the advantage of just having to ship an inflatable skin and then you just dig out a hole some fraction of sphere, put the bubble in and then fill the dirt back inside the bubble, now it's pressure supported and anchored.
The biggest problem of these artificial environments is the threat of sabotage from either disgruntled, suicidal or criminal minds.

You can vet people as much as you want but with the pop they are talking about someone’s bound to go crazy or be an agent of discontent. And then if they are settlers of course their children can be as varied as they are on Earth, which means the possibility of the same.
I never really got the motivation for this. Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like if I am creating a neural net to recognise if someone is smiling, I should use all the information in the picture, including race and gender.