skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you might enjoy their new podcast
https://oxide.computer/blog/categories/on-the-metal/

new startup with Brian, jess frazzle and Steve tuck.
They are also seen as the solution in the climate debate. That the tools and technologies that can be deployed by the ingenuity of humanity can change the landscape to suit us.

It's a problem both caused by and solved by humanity. Which is why focusing on this part of the topic is largely irrelevant to the debate.
Me too, this was one if the first things I learned to program. This and MIRC scripting.
> but the real minimum is simply log2(M)

The minimum entropy to code such a thing is log2(MN choose N)/N bits per element.

log2(eM) is just an approximation when N is large.

You cannot code with N uniform choices out of MN options with less than log2(MN choose N) bits on average, by the pigeonhole principle.

> the unary terminator alone

The terminator carries information. If M is chosen well the terminator carries almost one bit of information.
Yeah.still haven't figured out the odd diagonal new ios13 swipes. Esp since second phone is still on ios12.
> for scala that doesn't really exist

https://nrinaudo.github.io/scala-best-practices/
> It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert...

For most people entering a career in tech over the last 20 years those haven't been a consideration, never mind a choice (conservative or otherwise).

Nowadays the conservative choices in the sense that PG is talking about here are Java, .NET, Python, C++, C, and possibly AWS and Amazon. But these are also what the market demands.

You will get paid, and probably quite well, but they are not adventurous choices.
I could not agree more. This is also what really bothers me about Windows 10. Notably in that case, Microsoft makes an enterprise version of Windows 10 called LTSC/LTSB, where you get security updates but never feature updates. Unless you're a huge enterprise, they'll refuse to sell to you.
On Let vs. Const
> unless you want to adopt the hyperlocal production implicit in subsistence farming.

Will it have better crop yields than modern farming techniques? Then maybe? I mean for that efficiency it may be worth it. I still find the claim astounding and I would love to see some citation for it though rather than some anecdotes on waste less.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21857413
Two areas where I have a little experience:

Economics: There are surprisingly little people studying very large, grand, topics such an inequality. You've probably heard of the handful of economists that do. It's unfashionable due to the influence of the Chicago school and it's focus on free market principles, as well as many other factors.

Physics: Good luck getting any interest or funding if you are not studying the currently dominant theory in your
field (even if there has been no progress in decades).
Big Time Public License
PDF seems to fit a world-view where the highest objective of a document is to be printed on paper.

From a machine-parsing perspective PDF files are a nightmare. Chunks of text may be broken anywhere, mid-sentence, mid-word. These chunks may appear in the document in any order.

Spaces may be encoded as spaces, or they may be created a number of other ways, like by positioning chunks, or setting character spacing per character.

The mapping from code point to glyph does not need to be pure Unicode, a PDF document may contain a custom font with additional glyphs.

This is all stuff I learned by trying to parse a limited set of PDFs found in the wild.

All of these gotchas are by the way completely PDF/A compliant.
While it doesn't follow that there should be only two browsers, it also doesn't make sense that Google should expose its end users to other people's lab projects if that increased the security risk of those end-users. Security is a balancing game and always in flux.
Just to reinforce one point: the bank in question could even have MORE of a cushion than other banks, but if the rumor mill hits them instead of other banks, they are the one who goes under. So, it's not even a case of rough justice from the market, it's death by rumor mill. Of all the stupid laws and regulations regarding finance, this is not one of them.
Definitely after a few regenerates. I was looking for degenerate cases. :)
Rich Harris - Rethinking Reactivity

Talk about Svelte v3 and the (possible) future of frontend frameworks

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao

HN discussion regarding Svelte 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719118
Most people in this thread are posting a link and a title of the talk. I think it would be useful to hear why you thought the talk was the best.
Yes, and due to CO2 there is presumably no ideal rate at which to use it other than 0. Great. If the person I replied to meant oil, they should have said oil. Not resources.
Software or otherwise, the best way to find a good contractor is to get referrals from people who had a positive experience for similar work. That can be somewhere between hard and impossible though.

Failing that, and if you need to go out and just evaluate contractors you find through other means, the most qualified person for evaluating a contractor is another experienced contractor who is not competing for the work.

Hire somebody experienced, for a nominal but fair fee, to help you review your project plan and advise you through the sourcing process for its fulfillment. This is a different role than a recruiter, and in fact, be wary of anyone who wants to simply hand you off to someone they know without assessing other options. You want a personal advocate, not some contractor's sales agent.

Then, consider retaining them after the contract begins to double check the work as it proceeds, and to bring issues to your attention if things smell fishy.

Basically, if you are asking this question on HN and don't have access to a good referral, you're about to throw a huge bunch of money at a stranger that you don't know how to evaluate. Written guidelines won't be enough help. Because of your own inexperience, you're almost certain to either trust them too much, or distrust them too much, and either one is going to strain your project and cost you money and time.

Having an experienced advocate on your side, who has a different incentive structure than your contractor, can make all the difference. And unlike the implementing contractor that you'll eventually hire, you can successfully evaluate the advisor yourself. Their role is about communicating things to you, and advocating for you, and these are actions that you are totally qualified to judge. Plus, it's a smaller and more ad hoc role that doesn't have the sunk cost issues that you'll face with your implementation contractor. If you find that they're not doing a good job being your advisor and advocate, you can drop them without sending the project into crisis.

Besides myself, I don't know a lot of people who advertise this role directly, but I think many independent contractors would take it on if you pitched it to them. I think many working developers and development managers would too, as a side gig, although they may not know the norms and pitfalls of contracting quite as well. They'll at least be able to vet your project plan, review candidates for technical merit, and perform code reviews. Even just those tasks can make all the difference for you.

So long story short: before you hire a contractor, go poke around for a paid advisor who you think could help you hire one better. It's really worth it.
I've seen nothing but chaos in every org thats adopted it and they all moved to java/kotlin/go, only place I've seen it successful is around Spark. Usage stats back this up
Sounds like he was referring to a suborbital rocket flight.
You still could set up a study where you have tasks that users must complete and you get countable results. But this would quickly get expensive, so you need a sponsor. This could either be Apple, Google, or some other company in the market interested in making their opponent look bad. And I wouldn't take such a study for granted.
Constructive criticism but the UI on this site is really really confusing. Took me two minutes to figure out that I have to use keyboard nav and that there is one tiny button on the bottom right to go to the next page.

You don't want to invent completely new UI paradigms when the old ones work well and users are accustomed to them.
> Isn't the whole idea behind showing HN something to get criticism?

Let me categorically say: Hell no.

Some may want critique, but unabated criticism? That's not good for anybody (even if it does feel good to write). They're showing off the work of years of their lives; having that work shit upon is not what it's been shared for.

> If someone disagrees, fine, a discussion about it without mean comments like "get a life" or "grow up" would be preferable.

Just remember, the original post was not a useful critique, it was a disbelieving criticism for the author not doing their research. The comment also conveniently ignores that the title of this post explicitly contains "a fast and efficient video game".

Even taken charitably the original post provides little of real benefit to a discussion about the game being presented. Uncharitably, it comes across as a playground attack based around who knows the street slang for PCP.
"Recyclable material" is a type of trash...
How about they’re from a birth of life somewhere nearby but hard for us to detect - like oceans below the surface of Enceladus?
Seems like a lot of weirdly defensive people in this thread.

But the essay doesnt really seem that revolutionary more common sense. If you want to make an impact, dont work in an oversaturated field. The low hanging fruit is probably already picked and other people will probably get there before you do. But you also dont want to work in a field nobody cares about as noone will care. Working on a problem with proven demand, but seems "boring" and hasn't changed much recently is a good bet, as there is probably new insights you can apply and new contexts that have appeared since last time there was a frenzy for that field.
It seems to be pretty pervasive everywhere. I'm a longtime iOS user, but have been helping my mom with some stuff on her Android phone. Most of the things I have been helping her with involve me working in the phone settings or Google apps. I've found them very confusing to navigate, and there's little clue as to what should be clicked on. It took me a while to realize that what I was looking at wasn't a list of feature names with their description under them, but the place I should click to make changes to the features. It was all just black text on a white background. How did someone think that was a good idea?
I’d expect this in my home, constantly monitoring my vitals, without the need to wear a device. Like a smart light bulb or thermostat.
Well, let's see. I am going to exaggerate a touch here but here is what I see at my workplace:

a. They will write an inline script. Solution: Rip it out into a file.

b. Each Job is using a different container. Solution: use Docker with mapped volumes or we all have the same machines (this might not be possible for some workloads) and only use a single container. Why not run the shell directly you may ask?
b.1 Each container has a different environment and my machine has one.
b.2 Some things do not run natively on my machine that do on theirs.

c. Variables are defined in the yaml instead of the scripts. Solution: Make a local .env file see b.

So sure, a local gitlab runner us probably best patch here. But I am imagine if someone made a container runtime specifically for this then wrapped that in a CI config it could be very ergonomic. Which is what I would explore if I where to write a IC today. I am sure some build system today already does this...

Things outside (kindof) of Gitlab's control that I might as well complain about while I am here:

d. And regardless, there are transient dependencies everywhere (which I blame the all language creators for really, mfs :P ). So everything gets fucked eventually anyhow. Wouldn't it be nice if you could whip out a three year old project, run the build, and its exactly as you left it?

e. People thinks all right to allow for mutable versions so I have to asdjnasdaskdjasdlasjdl;askjd;asldkj = asdasdljkdasl;kdjlaskdjaslkjd some non-human readable hash if I am feeling paranoid.

d. and e. are firmly in the language creators hand I believe. But Gitlab does offer artifact repositories (which are non-portable and could also easily could be). Gitlab could also save dependency trees in different languages. But really I would gripe to the tool/language creators.
I really liked this! Looking forward to receiving your emails and giving feedback.
I am planing to keep my SE and buy a small/medium Fujifilm or other camera.

(text selection/navigation in 13 makes me a madman! why the f hey had to fiddle with this, are they f bored to make something f different instead of something better, they are insane! they do this - making differently but not better - repeatedly!)
One of the biggest time wasting annoyances Apple has created is the touch bar virtual escape key. I'm triggering it constantly. How did they not know this was a problem before they brought it to market?

Thankfully, they're going back to a real escape key in the latest MacBook Pro.

And what happened to the backlit Apple on the lid? Another sacrifice to the god of thinness?

Like getting rid of the Kensington security slot. My first MacBook had that and I used it with a cable lock in coffee shops. Also sacrificed to eliminate size and weight, I suppose.
Trying to apply logic to a conspiracy theory is usually a pointless endeavor.
What is so horrible about awkwardness?

I've witnessed people talk about it like it's the plague.

It's just a bit of discomfort, and then you move on.
We did have an API, but it wasn't public - because search traffic is expensive.
Both, as mentioned, in compute resources, but also in pissing off and/or outright crashing vendors.

Logging in - requiring an email validation loop - would be simple for bots, but again, anti-bot tech stops them from doing it en-masse.
Not the person above, but I'd recommend learning APL first. Arthur Whitney (the author of k and q) got started programming by his father and Ken Iverson (the inventor of APL) being friends, and Iverson giving him live demos of APL. Iverson has a lot of amazing resources for learning J (APL's successor) and APL, and learning it will teach you how to be more productive in q, k, J, APL and more!
Hi, do you have a write-up somewhere or a github for this? Very interested.
Hes quite active on his facebook
1, 2, 6, 7: All good points, I've fixed those.

3: 64 bits are close enough to infinity :)

4: Good idea. Maybe something like a logarithmic curve on the number of discovered fields would be good.

5: Also a good point. I'll try to build that
A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover even when you know what are you looking for. I don't have time for making those introductions, and end up getting feedback requests for some features my app already has.
My thought is that Paul should view his essays at least as seriously as someone who is writing an important college application essay given who the audience is (college admissions in that case; HN readers in this case among others). Or maybe someone writing an opinion piece for a newspaper that is widely read and taken as significant.

Imagine as an extreme (and not what PG is doing) if someone writing an 'essay' were to express objectionable stereotypes about people (women, minorities, certain women). [1] The point is if you have a following I think you need to take what you write (essay or not) more seriously. After all PG for whatever reason with his essays typically has several people review before posting which appears to not be consistent in a small way with the fact that an essay (by what you are saying) is about non-expertise. If that is the case why do you need others expertise to vet it before posting?

[1] If it's someone's point of view why does it bother people so much when it's expressed if they are stating it as their impression and not fact?
The problem is that multi-layered problem solving is superhard to execute. It's not that it's hard to find a solution that would be orders better, but it's just that it's risky, as it's an all-or-nothing path. It at least requires a lot of confidence for the existing market.

With waterfall-kind of planning, that would work. Unfortunately it got a bad name in the '90s and early '00s. The wild-west of inexperienced developers, who needed to solve business problems they didn't understand, combined with clients who didn't understand technology.

I believe this is a great period to do bigger things, and you see this happening with for example SpaceX, Tesla and Apple:
space is happening again, companies are creating super specialized and complex ICs, there's actual business value and consumer value being produced, and projects are reasonably on time with these companies. This in constract with companies who, what it seems, do more of an iterative approach: Facebook, Google, Amazon. No huge innovation going there.
Having to have a separately implemented version of this on every website in the world is the dark pattern. Browsers already let you white- or black-list individual domains for cookies; it's crazy that every website design has to accommodate this redundant feature that is never going to be possible to implement perfectly for all use cases.
I was so confused and panicked once I accidentally overwrote some text from an important note on an iPhone.

For a few minutes I desperately searched for any menus, long presses, weird nearly hidden menus, finger gestures etc. but couldn't discover anything. Apparently there was no way to undo!

After some googling I found out you have to shake the phone a few times. Seriously?

I think there must be a lot of people who simply lost their notes due to a small mistake.
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21812772
Some path times are destination-dependent in ways Google doesn't seem to handle well, like certain turns or freeway onramps vs the regular lanes next to them. You would need people "testing" those parts, not just the regular path parts.
It's often a pre-requisite for success. It doesn't matter how good your idea is, if you can't get it implemented and supported by a sales team, support team etc. it isn't going to work.

There are brilliant ideas out there, but very few of them are brilliant and require 0 resources to achieve.
send him e-mail!! worked for me :)
k is incredibly good for distributed computing. It's not as difficult as you're thinking: Arthur started out (as far as languages he published: he implemented a few before) with A and A+ at Morgan Stanley, and Morgan Stanley up until a few years ago actively used both. Distribution was inherent in k from the outset.

Also, your comment on "noDB" is unfounded. k and q are exclusively distributed with kdb+, which is probably the fastest SQL database on the planet.
Hmm, I’m not actually convinced this is secure. Good S-boxes are not trivial to come up with; bad ones are vulnerable to attacks like differential cryptanalysis or linear cryptanalysis (where the S-box is modeled approximately as a linear function of its inputs). While the S-box here is secret, it’s not inconceivable that an attacker could collect enough ciphertexts (or plaintext/ciphertext pairs) to establish statistical correlations.

Second, the whole encryption is modeled on a series of identical encryption rounds (no per-round subkeying). I would not be surprised if this structure makes it vulnerable to a slide attack - which is an attack that specifically attacks weak round functions no matter how many times they are iterated.

Although I haven’t spent enough time to be certain these attacks will work, the design of the cipher does not inspire confidence. The cipher achieves poor diffusion after log2(n) rounds on highly repetitive text (e.g. “a” repeated 16 times yields “rjrjmlmlskskjbjb” after log2(n)-1=3 rounds), meaning that the minimum round count feels entirely too low to be safe.
It wouldn't bother me if it was one or two apps that I use frequently. It does bother me when it's every single one, and as you say, most of which are used rarely. Then it gets annoying on all of them.

It's less annoying with Apple since they only update apps/OS once a year.

But it seems like every software jumps onto the bandwagon and now you see a changelog opening up an app every other day.
Yeah, adjustable viewport size is on my TODO list.

> Do not trust other people's flags though as they can be wrong - possibly intentionally.

Yes, this is intentional. I want to see how people start collaborating across very limited channels. Or how they start playing against each other :)
Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (2017)
I don't think that is honest argument. For one, any giving epoch contains only some of those and not all of them. For the other, accuracy does not mean "show everything". Accurate contemporary movie typically does not show pissing or toilets - there is no reason to. It does not show accurate vacuum cleaning and its frequency.

Moreover, when I was taking ideas about past societies from entertainment, they looked very much alien not-real-people. When I started to read actual history, they became much more human and relatable to me.
I have been very happy with https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq
Presumably there are text formats which are both machine parseable and which are static? Or why not simply use the static subset of HTML?
your excellent summaries here remind me of another era -- substitute the word GUI for "business logic" .. same aphorism ! I recall distinctly meeting with science or business teams while working on GUI desktop app implementation, and inevitably someone would say "just get the model/datastore/file format right and the GUI just sits on top of that" .. not true in practice !! too much effort, too many lost efficiencies, no such thing as fully general. If you want a non-trivial GUI in the end (a few dozen windows with layouts, more than that dialog boxes with control contents and preferences, and big YES for print) .. then (most) everyone has to at least admit there are design choice influences, or actually be touched by the GUI needs -- not intuitive, not perfect, but we always shipped !
New gestures introduced in iOS 13:

Copy: three-finger pinch
Cut: three-finger double pinch
Paste: three-finger pinch out (expand)
Undo: three-finger swipe left (or three-finger double tap)
Redo: three-finger swipe right
Shortcut menu: three-finger single tap
I'm not Christian, so I may have some terms wrong here, but:

Isn't Christmas a religious holiday? Can she not attend a mass or a Christmas service and participate in Church events around the holidays? Isn't this one of the main functions the Church provides? Wouldn't there be many opportunities in nearly any Church for social activities?

My local Jewish minyan is having an event tonight with a public menorah lighting, traditional food, games (including an Oculus VR Hanukkah experience!). There were plenty of opportunities to meet people the past few days and during the week. That's one of the functions of a religious community. We sent out public notices on Nextdoor, etc, and invited everybody in the community.