skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The nuance with software is that we made up the system in which all of these programs are put together.

Just like in math, we made up the constructs and rules that define what an algorithm or a theorem or a function can be. Because there is a human-defined limited scope of what even constitutes a valid construct (i.e. an "upper limit" of novelty - "this is everything mathematics can do"), anything that exists within this sandbox is therefore less novel. We establish the baseline novelty of the entirety of mathematics as "really powerful, and world changing - and too important to the common good to lock behind a patent." So if that is the upper limit, no individual piece of it can be more novel.

The patent office displays stunning clarity in correctly determining that therefore, any particular instance of maths cannot be patented.

Their failure to apply this same reasoning to software (which is, and always will be, reducible to math) baffles me.
Yep, this is called the spacing effect and it’s really powerful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
I picked EFF
Vitel Global Communications – Top Cloud Storage Service in US
Spotlight Effect
The Art of the Metaobject Protocol. Let’s build a system ... in this system we haven’t built yet! We’ll start with some DEFCLASS calls to define some classes for its internal data structures. In a couple hundred pages, we’ll have enough written that we can define DEFCLASS to close the loop.
Vitel Global Communications – VoIP Service in US
Not to burst your bubble but the linked Medium article you’re referring to is satire. Glimmer doesn’t actually pull in Britannica - it never has.
Or just start at 1 and increment every build.
Just because a greater evil exists doesn't mean all other evils are 'silly'.

Is it also silly to worry about hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. because China is committing a greater crime against them?
Lolwhut. “High status” women tend to scare away all the men. Strong, successful (and lonely) is the cliché for a reason because most men are too insecure and don’t want competition in bacon-bringing and rationality. I think it’s cool because in an ideal mate you want someone who can make solid decision under pressure when your life hangs in the balance. That’s the most important factor besides whether you get along and both wants kids or not. PSA: Be smart.. don’t hitch to someone because of short-term lust that fades, hitch because you’re better together than apart for the long-haul, and only with a prenup.
Innovations can't win over evil.
Unless I have misunderstood, I think the ember.js/Brittanica story is an amusing but untrue anecdote from a satire piece ( https://medium.com/s/silicon-satire/i-peeked-into-my-node-mo... ).
Thank you for this. I've been warning people off Event Sourcing for a while now. The architecture is the most convoluted, pretentious, redundant and downright soul-crushing. If you see Event Sourcing anywhere, run away. Run far, far away.
that wouldn't work with most properties in residential zoning in the city I've been in... codes won't allow adding a second kitchen where I'm at even.
Property tax is a round-off error?
WorkFlowy is an awesome app that I would recommend to anyone as an idea/note organizer. DiscoTask is very similar in so far as it is based around nested lists. However, DiscoTask is not a competitor to WorkFlowy; it’s made specifically for bigger teams with many projects and is really meant to (eventually) compete with apps like Trello and Jira.
That's not a bad idea at all to include some sort of semantic tagging to the version, the suffix is a great place for it too like a footnote of sorts.
> "Even worse, try using an OS running in a VM for an extended period of time..."

I actually do this for development and it works really well.

Ubuntu Linux VM in VMware Fusion on a Macbook Pro with MacOS.

Power consumption was found to be better than running Linux natively. (I'm guessing something about switching between the two GPUs, but who knows.)

GPU acceleration works fine; the Linux desktop animations, window fading and movement animations etc are just as I'd expect.

Performance seems to be fine generally, and I do care about performance.

(But I don't measure graphics performance, perhaps that's not as good as native. And when doing I/O intensive work, that's on servers.)

Being able to do a four-finger swipe on the trackpad to switch between MacOS desktops and Linux desktops (full screen) is really nice. It feels as if the two OSes are running side by side, rather than one inside another.

I've been doing Linux-in-a-VM for about 6 years, and wouldn't switch back to native on my laptop if I had a choice. The side-by-side illusion is too good.

Before that I ran various Linux desktops (or Linux consoles :-) for about 20 years natively on all my development machines and all my personal laptops, so it's not like don't know what that's like. In general, I notice more graphics driver bugs in the native version...

(The one thing that stands out as buggy is VMware's host-to-guest file sharing is extremely buggy, to the point of corrupting files, even crashing Git. MacOS's own SMB client is also atrocious in numerous ways, to the point of even deleting random files, but does it less often so you don't notice until later what's gone. I've had to work hard to find good workarounds to have reliable files! I mention this as a warning to anyone thinking of trying the same setup.)
I've been waiting for this feature for years, so glad it's finally available! Just a bummer that you can't collapse tab groups (yet); that would be the obvious next step.

(disclaimer: I work at Google, but no direct relationship with the Chrome team. I found about it searching for an extension to group tabs, only to discover it was available natively!)
Personally, I think the main value of community tech conferences for attendees is exposure to ideas they wouldn't ordinarily be encouraged to sit through.
Not sure if it’s the brand, but I tried frozen patties based on insect protein here (in Germany, IIRC the producer was dutch). I was excited to try it, but besides being more expensive than beef, it tasted bland. Now with beef, it’s neither frozen not pre-assembled into patties, so that might also be a difference, but for now I’m holding out for lab-grown meat.
Lions, sharks and polar bears are also very strong, on a carnivorous diet. What does that says about human nutrition? Absolutely nothing.
Yea, I really think this one will be the opposite. Surveillance will increase and people will not do anything about it. People cannot effectively deal with online surveillance, what happens when that intensifies in the physical space? We are so far behind on this front that I do not believe we can catch up.

I hope so though, it would be beautiful if Open Whisper Systems was the next unicorn.
Repeat after me: “correlation does not equal causation”.
I was actually discouraged from doing 1 on 1s but I'd love to do them with the shy folks that don't speak up and don't join for a quick bteak time chat outside.

especially with the lack of privacy in an open office I learn to late if they start feeling bad for any reason.
Promote your business in China with this new online press release service
Thats great news! I really hope they improve the android auto responsiveness
Ask HN: What book or tech related item did you receive as a holiday gift?
Please list, if possible, the URL of the book or the tech item you received as a gift on ThanksGiving, Xmas or New Year.

Happy New Year to all readers!
Polio can definitely mutate to forms resistant to the vaccine. An outbreak in the Congo in 2010 resulted in 450 infections with a nearly 50% mortality rate. When scientists tested the strain on samples, they estimated that ~20+% of the population would still be susceptible in a fully vaccinated group. Not good..

https://en.ird.fr/the-media-centre/scientific-newssheets/464...
AVC.com was apparently being hammered by an avalanche of traffic. Not long after the articles about the 2010s and 2020s were upvoted to the HN front page, the site was persistently returning database connection errors. So archive links were posted in both threads.
> how much idle power my garage door opener draws

How much does it draw?

Standard Chamberlain or something exotic?
If Anki or other existing flash card programs are attacked because of this I would consider that quite evil
I agree with you on the sentiment of meat of our descendants. I consume meat but have moved towards less sentient animals, but the status quo gives one a deep moral appreciation for the world it seems likely people lived in during slavery, where the moral calamity was appreciated to varying degrees by all, but each person other than those who woke up each day fighting the institution directly were living lives with some level of embedded hypocracy.

It will be quite satisfying to see the folks today who believe they hold the apex of morality and yet still eat meat, or tacitly support through participating in animal-product economic activity, realize ultimately that despite their self-assurance they are truly moral, good people their kids will see them as abject moral failures skin to those who sad idly by and participated in the economy underpinned by slave labor. The great irony is that just as they look down on our ancestors as being morally unenlightened, they will not even slightly avoid the same branding by the next generation — it seems unavoidable as long as our world exists due to the unjust treatment of others, including animals.
Did no-one read the article? [1] It's explicitly not about fictional sci-fi that happens to feature computers/programming, but about real textbooks that hint at what programming could have been had the industry adopted those technologies/principles more fully.

[1] At this time 4 of the 7 top-level comments and all the active discussions are about sci-fi, not what the article describes
More 4 year to make Mickey Mouse public domain or the law extent the period again.
But will likely take at least a generation for consumer behavior to significantly change
The US had thousands of bots defending the Evo Morales Bolivia coup. Barely anyone in Bolivia speaks English.
It's not a different take. They outline the information from the trial as most outlets have.

Here's the NYT/Pro-Publica report on the jailhouse informant: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/magazine/jailhouse-inform...

That alone ought to be enough to give this man another trial.
Consider that "subjects raw plant matter to complicated chemical processes to produce something meat-tasting" is equally true for fake meat factories as it is for cows. Just because the recipe for real meat has come about via evolutionary (and not laboratory) trial-and-error, doesn't necessarily make it healthier.
why use a captcha solving? You have things like proxycrawl where you don't have to solve any captcha and it's completely legal
Pretty fun bit of software!
"Hate speech" has specific functional meanings when it comes to legal jurisdictions in which it applies. The idea that it's a tool for arbitrary suppression of disagreement is approximately correct as the idea that any other limitation on free speech (libel, slander, fire in a crowded theater, verbal assault, time place manner, etc) can be used arbitrarily -- which is to say, generally incorrect, although interpretation and application of the law matters (libel or time place manner judgments have been used to mute speech).

Additionally, I have yet to encounter any example of reasonable discourse that's being legally suppressed by hate speech laws, but, you know, feel free to make a list of the important ideas that you feel are being SILENCED.

Private companies: not that different in the fundamentals, but there are additional issues that lean towards both the right of ownership to speak and restrict speech that comes through them. You likely wouldn't want anyone to force you to repeat ideas you believe are incorrect, or contrary to key personal interests even where narrowly correct, or even lead to effects you find personally undesirable. If freedom of speech means anything, it has to include some measure of judgment about what your personal faculties are used to express, and to some more moderated extent what/how your property is used. There may be balancing concerns in the latter case, but whether we're at that point is another issue. Again, I can think of very little in the realm of valuable discourse that's been walled off here; if there's anything at all, I suspect the relevant mechanism is essentially social values that are held widely enough that contrary expressions bring social consequences, and while you can create some spaces for robust contrary discussion ("safe spaces", if you like), you can't eliminate the kickback from broad social consequences without treading more heavily on other liberties of equal or greater importance to speech.

Honestly, if there's any issue at all here, it's that there has never been an EASIER time to express ideas -- even very unpopular ones -- quite widely, and it's the way that these ideas carry widely that's leading to a level of tension that people are still figuring out how to manage.

And really, this is the weaponization issues: 50 years ago, authoritarian countries didn't have the capabilities of broadcasting ideas or disinformation into your average household, much less an individual handheld device. A world-of-ends internet means that they do.
There is no way to source events in the right order if what you do is keep adding to the queue, I think this should be revised
> I'm in a country that has seen the land mass of Indonesia (population: approx. 240 million), burn off in the last month or so.

Australia?
A single car has about 30,000 parts, counting every part down to the smallest screws (according to Toyota). A lot of people don't understand the difference of complexity between a car and software. The analogy between two is quite unfortunate.

The software in nutshell is programmable transistors. Each CPU instruction is in effect just a convenient way to design a specific electronic circuitry. Even a trivial act of printing Hello World takes an astonishing amount of complexity when you take into account all kind of protoicals, APIs, driver codes, kernal code, fonts, rendering, graphics that gets executed in between. If you showed a computer printing Hello World on screen to someone from 1920s who knows how to build electronic circuits and primitive "display", they can estimate the amount of work that would be required to do that. Nothing has changed from 1920s to 2020s in terms of complexity to enable simple Hello World. A relatively simple program will easily exceed 30,000 low level components working together to achieve a goal in an intricate dance. Now think of large code bases with million lines of code... This is why software is hard, software is complex, software is messy and software is magic.
Everything is better when you add Kaiju.
Definitely agree. I would be more agreeable to the notion of installing tiny senors to retrofit existing toilets for a lot of the analytical functionality.
The grown-up programmer's (meta)manifesto
> there are reports that they are having massive problems with the cars software and are literally building the cars and plan to store them in a lot for a year while they sort out the software issues

The plan to pre-build several parking lots full of cars before starting to sell predates the issues they face with the software. It was probably made with "let's catch any issues before delivery" in mind (which now paid off), but it's also because VW isn't a company that creates hype through limited availability and pre-orders: once the model is brought to market, you're supposed to be able to go the store and get a car in a few days or weeks.

Given that their previous models were quite software-heavy already, it's not as if this is the first time they have to bring software onto devices. I have no idea how often similar issues happened in previous roll-outs, but this is certainly the most closely watched VW model ramp-up in decades because of the novelty of them going all-in on EV.
In my opinion, machine learning is going to replace all of us, now or in the future. We don't know but it will eventually happen, not in this decade...
> For applications though

Often have thought that crypto libraries should be using ChronVer. Unlikely that an implementation will have breaking changes.

Besides that certainly agree with everything else.
Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge I felt were really interesting from a CS perspective, when thousands of years in the future you have billions of lines of code running ships, etc. that no one exactly knows how it works anymore, code archaeologists, etc.
Maybe - for many product inclined engineers, participating in picking and managing deadlines is an extension of authority and autonomy.

Additionally, some people need deadlines imposed to finish work. The alternative would be to fire them.
is it possible to add proxycrawl integration with the tool?
For almost 2 years, my wife doesn't own a smartphone. She personally finds the change very refreshing and puts it in a summary as 'I am no longer distracted!'.

To be honest, I don't know how she makes it work but the only change I see is those who ask her contact number roll their eyes or worse case the eyes popping out when they realise she doesn't own a phone!!!
It takes basically no resources to graze cattle on grasslands. Plus, as a bonus it sequesters carbon and creates topsoil.
I'm surprised to see those scrollbars. Makes me wonder if I should enable them to start seeing them all over the installed apps hahaha
This is what Steve Jobs has to say about project managers:
https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo?t=116
Not sure what your point is, but Evo is the authoritarian that would do what the article is describing. He wanted to be dictator and wanted all kinds of controls on the people there including media. Also if you ever been there you will realize the majority of people understand English, if not actually speak it pretty well.
'What an Insult': CES Names Ivanka Trump as Keynote Speaker
This is at least preferable to the older US practice of assassinating[1] world leaders.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/05/cia-long-his...
Borges’ The Library of Babel works with similar ideas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
Some founders walk away from failed businesses millions of dollars better off. If money is the metric you use, having a successful business isn't strictly necessary.
I quoted Moore's Law and linked you the actual history, you have some reading to do.
The claims in this patent are too broad. It's likely that it will get invalidated with prior arts in the court.
How do you know somebody who calls themselves an expert are 'smart'. Isn't that a religious belief, when you accept what somebody says without question?

I don't accept your experts. I reject them. I will not treat them as though they are priests emitting the gospel. Just as I did with the 'experts' who pushed the lipid hypothesis using precisely the same 'peer review' and 'scientific journals'. Over time that turned out to be a fallacy. Why is this any different?

You have to be very sceptical of anything that is not subject to double blind testing. Belief and bias affects everybody.
> because something like that was not considered to be a plausible scenario.

Except 12 other planes (among hundreds in the past century) have mysteriously disappeared without recovery since 2000 alone, so maybe it should be considered before more lives are lost?
Some friends and I ran a weekly poker game at a local bar for a few years in the mid-00s, before an indoor smoking ban was implemented here. Every night when I came home, my clothes absolutely reeked of smoke, I couldn't even hang them inside my apartment.
> Does this mean that ARIN, lacnic, AFRINIC, RIPE NCC, and APNIC (the members of the NRO per https://www.nro.net/about/rirs/) are behind this?

Yes. They have taken the highly unusual step of expressing an opinion on the DNS system.

> That makes no sense to me, I thought they were highly conservative bureaucracies heavily influenced by national government

They are extremely conservative, which should add to the weight of this action. However they answer to their respective memberships, not governments - despite being "regional" registries they stay out of geopolitics for the most part.
I read the whole readme part and was still not sure exactly what this is.. so I searched for drift and intercom - and still didn't know from the search results..

clicked over to intercom and did not know what they are.. scroll down a few panes and got a clue with the graphics. then a a couple more panes of scrolling down finally graphics are putting it more into perspective..

yet the heading on the section "Move deals through your funnel – fast" - just jargon that doesn't really tell me what the heck this thing is.

then the smaller text has "Our chatbots and live chat capture more of your best leads and convert them while they’re hot." - and I'm like okay - now I see - why didn't they just say that at the top.

and, I've been in and out of business and marketing and internet for years.. so how are any other customers supposed to get a grasp on what this is and the benefits when none of the 4 listed here seem to present it in an easy to understand spiel at the top on the main page.

All the jargon meant nothing - a couple of graphics helped - simple words would help more.
What is the point in an iteration?
We need to have a long exchange over this. My null-hypothesis - supported by the evidence you have provided - is that the large plastic is doing the killing and when it gets small it passes through with little effect - like grains of sand. Because clearly grains of sand are bigger than nanometer and they don't block up digestive tracts. The albatross didn't die from endocrine disruption did it.

That's how science works. From your evidence my null hypothesis is proven.

We should know what it does to individual cells - particularly if we are creating scare stories around it.
> Then its output could be considered a derivative work of every work in that training corpus, and anyone whose creative work went into that training data will have a copyright claim on the results.

Depends how tech savvy the judge is. An ML model is not really like a copy or reproduction, it's much more like a person's brain in that it aims to take general patterns from various sources.
The code blocks do not wrap by default, on a small screen device, the code will not be completely displayed in the horizontal direction, you can swipe left and right to view the hidden part
> a single SD card will now hold so much data that you could store all the music and movies you'd want to consume in a lifetime on one or two of them.

You can store a whopping five 4K equivalent movies on your 512gb SD card. You can shoehorn 10 to 20 movies on there at approximate Blu-ray quality. If you're willing to sink to Netflix equivalent pseudo HD quality you can get 100.

The piracy genie is still being very strongly held back by the massive size of the files involved. The average consumer isn't going to buy and manage ten hard drives to store everything. They're not going to spend the thousand dollars on the drives, and they're also not spending a couple thousand dollars in blown bandwidth caps to download it all. There is no scenario where the average consumer has any interest in that scenario, they'll always choose Netflix + Disney + Prime for sub $30 / month. It's a no-brainer for them.

Also, in the not very distant future those lower quality movies - at eg 5gb file sizes - will noticeably look like trash on modern TVs.

It's only true about music.