skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the author on every point except:

>That is not engineering. That’s just lazy programming

I don't believe that developers/programmers are all lazy. There are a lot that want to do a good job optimizing their code and making sure it performs well and is future proof as much as possible. I believe that budget limits and pressure from deadlines set by non-technical people forces even the good programmers to cut corners in order to deliver.
> For applications though, I agree that ChronVer seems far more useful, because there's just no real "compatibility" contract with an application.

It's unfortunately becoming less common but there is still a "compatability contract" between developers and users. With 10.13 -> 10.14 upgrade I would expect no major disruptions as a user, I would expect the UI to be nearly identical and no features to be dropped. With a 10.13 -> 11.1 upgrade I would expect "breaking" changes to my interactions and plan to install the update at a convenient time to deal with this. For a 2017.05 -> 2019.08 upgrade I have no indication of what to expect.

For something like continuously delivered web applications I don't think any versioning scheme makes sense to user because they have zero control, it's useless information.
> Why does everyone assume alien races would want to spread out and colonize the universe?

...because organisms (and presumably cultures) without that characteristic wouldn't be as numerous as otherwise identical organisms which do have that drive, in a given environment.
> let's not forget what the NSA from the land of the "free" does

Nobody is forgetting it. But just as discussions about authoritarian nations’ tactics get derailed by these comments, discussions about the NSA get railroaded by “but at least it’s not China” messaging.
Thinking Like a Programmer (2018)
Is Kolmogorov complexity an actual tool, or just a concept with a name which is very difficult to compute/measure/etc and use practically?
UnityJS is open source, and I've been using for various projects and developing it actively, most recently on WebGL.

Here's the original github repo:

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS

I recently refactored that monolithic repo into a bunch of smaller nested repos, to make it much more modular and layered, so that different projects for different platforms can pick and choose which modules to use.

Here is the root repo of the new version:

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_Deployment_WebG...

I'm still in the process of documenting how to install it (now that you have to wrangle git submodules it's tricker), and how to use it (there are a lot of moving parts, and different platform specific pieces). But here is some high level stuff:

Anatomy.txt:
https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_Deployment_WebG...

Architecture.txt:
https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_Deployment_WebG...

InterestingFiles.txt:
https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_Deployment_WebG...

(Some of the paths in the above file have changed in the name of modularity.)

Since Unity insists that you put different kinds of files in certain fixed directories like StreamingAssets (for all the .js files and web content) and WebGLTemplates (for the WebGL wrapper that loads your JavaScript code), you can't make a module with one single github repo that has different sub-directories that would straddle the fixed Unity directories. (And symbolic links don't work on all platforms, so you can't fudge it.) So it is necessary to split some modules up into different repos, so the one with C# code can go into Libraries, and the one with JavaScript code can go into StreamingAssets, and the one with the html wrapper can go into WebGLTemplates.

Here's the repo with all the C# code and resources:

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_Library

For example, here's the C# side of the JavaScript/C# bridge:

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_Library/blob/ma...

Here's the repo with all the latest UnityJS JavaScript code:

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_StreamingAssets

And here's the JavaScript side of the JavaScript/C# bridge:

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS_UnityJS_StreamingAssets...

Send me email if you want to know more! I'm happy to answer questions and help you get it working, and to hear your feedback, which will help me write more and better documentation.
With arbitrary assumptions about statistics, you can "statistically prove" pretty much anything. Until the 2% figure is substantiated, it's all baloney.
Yeah that is fair.
it wouldn't be news if everyone did it no?
Yes, agreed.

But I don't trust Tor either, so I'd first use a nested VPN chain. Just in case the entry guard is malicious. And to complicate the traffic analysis a little.

I could go on about this. But I'll be writing more about all this.
The formalism for this is Kolmogorov Complexity and Occam's Razor.

I also believe that we also value Sophistication, which is at least a partial driver of the interest in string theory, with less free parameters.
All patents are granted to people not companies. The people may then assign to a company the right to enforce the patent.
Downvoted without comment -- honestly curious why it's not promising. Concern about new technology?
>> So if we want theories that are correct, yes, we should value simplicity.

There is no a priori reason why simple theories should be correct. The suggestion that any model can be correct is presumptuous - you might call it an assumption ;-) To borrow from George Box, all models are wrong, but some are useful...
Backpressure is the big thing that Reactive Streams adds to Rx/ReactiveX.

https://www.reactive-streams.org/
Obligatory mention of Parkinson's law (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Parkinson%27s_law#/Generalizatio...), which states

> The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).

Have cheap hardware, software will expand to use more of it.
Agreed that windytan is awesome.

Another highly-technical blogger that I’ve enjoyed has been Ken Shirriff’s: https://www.righto.com/ Mostly focused on microcontrollers and vintage computing, but with other stuff mixed in (he did a great series in understanding the technical side of Bitcoin, although he’s definitely not a “cryptocurrency enthusiast”).

I’ll have to checkout out syonyk.
It's the word "buffer" that threw me. Like, the buffer is a concept on the sending or receiving system and a separate concern from the protocol. That said I am certainly open to learning something new about TCP/IP today.
Note that the system does produce localization. "In addition to producing a classification decision for the entire case, the AI system was designed to highlight specific areas of suspicion for malignancy."
Those estimates have been right on the money for decades:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...

The problem is that since the late 1970s some very wealthy companies realized that this was happening and started spending money to try to muddy the scientific consensus and discourage action. Losing decades means that anything we do now is going to be harder since we’re starting much further behind.
First comment under the article:

> Good Luck!

> Karl Auerbach – Dec 31, 2019 2:07 PM PST

> I hope they have an easier time then I had when I, as a sitting Director on ICANN's board, tried to exercise my legal right to take a look at ICANN's financial records:

> Auerbach v ICANN https://www.eff.org/cases/auerbach-v-icann
I agree with it all.

Here's the thing, you either support freedom of speech and expression, or you don't. Now if you do, then you have to support the nazi's right to speak and express, the abortion doctor's right to speak and express, the senator's right to speak and express, and the beggar's right to speak and express.

Everyone's right must be supported. If someone wants to express themselves to my boss via boycott in an effort to get me fired, so be it. That's their right. Just as it's the nazi's right to express himself on the internet to better inform people about the tenets of his ideology. The government must have no ability to constrict either activity.

It may not seem like it, but it's actually a good thing that the government can't stop any of these people from doing any of these things.

If you want to get the government to disallow any boycotts of companies, then you are not really in favor of freedom of speech and expression.
Baidu Conquers the Next-Gen AI Race by Beating Tech Giants in a Language Test
Two big problems with this:

- Does not support multiple release tracks. What if you have 'version 1' and 'version 2' with both receiving updates?

- Cannot visually guarantee that any version is greater than, less than, or equal to another. If you're using git, mercurial, or any other VCS with hash-based commit IDs, how can a user tell which release for a particular day is the latest?

This is probably fine for SaaS stuff where you only support one version at a time and the version number is more important to you than your users.
Clicked on your link just to get on the list (or move up, I suppose). ;-)
Edit: I rewrote my comment because I misunderstood yours.

You could tie it to an "on-scroll" type of event, like how many text boxes will fire an event X milliseconds after a text edit event, so that they can process the text when the user is not likely to be typing.

A single timer by itself won't busy-wait, but I agree that running a timer all the time is a waste. Just run it when scrolling, when CPU use will already be high.
These joke patents are relatively harmless. The real problem is the "good patents" which can actually be enforced and used to stifle competition.
The only issue is that humans don't seem to do well at jobs in which another agent is at least plausibly reliable. The Tesla autopilot is an example of that, we tend to disconnect pretty quickly.

Another thing I find interesting is that Google was able to train a neural network on retinas and can reliably distinguish sex based on retinal image alone...something opthamologists basically can't do. So not only are these systems approaching human capability in tasks we can do, they can do things we can't. As medical data becomes more freely flowing (presumably) over the next couple of decades, i think we'll find that 'AI' can become even more reliable.
Once a patent is granted, it is very hard to fight the patent using prior art as evidence.
Ah yes, Duktape is around 100KiB.
> military junta kept enjoying dances and other banned fun

Where have I heard that before? Ah,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/07/wikileaks-cabl...
I don't have a strong opinion about the hack.

And their US residential proxies do work very reliably for Disney+. There is the possibility that they're using services that obtain those proxies deceptively. But I tracked down one of them, and the guy confirmed that he's knowingly selling his bandwidth. And yes, it's just anecdotal.
The risks of government abusing Internet is omnipresent, but this risk is out of control in countries where the constitutional courts are weak and lawmakers compliant. It shows that tech disruption is ultimately still less powerful than political disruption -- only that can fundamentally bring this civilization forward.
> Even digging a well (as opposed to surface water) is very possible for not a lot of money.

> And as a result, an entire community can have access to clean water.

Well, no. All communities have water sources. Where digging a well is cheap, the community will have one or more.

The problem digging a well solves is that there wasn't enough water. That's not the problem a community with endemic diarrhea has. Their problem is that they're not keeping their water clean. The new well is unlikely to be different.
True Names doesn't appear on a lot of lists and I'm not sure why.
Yeah agreed. i mean in that example, if tveastman wrote it in a fast language the first time, the rewrite probably wouldn't have been required. (i think that tweet was for a bit of a laugh anyway, because he can now write new code in Rust.)

But as many languages support implicit static typing, the folklore that dynamic languages are "more expressive" is not actually correct.

such as:

let x = "string literal" //compiled as string

let y = 42 //compiled as int

let z : i32 = 100 //compiled with type declared as 32 bit int.
Were they though? In my experience webrings were more like rudimentary, off-white-to-gray-hat link-farms.

Were webrings ever used like a friend-list or is that not what you meant by "primitive social networks"?
My friend was a patent clerk. She is pretty sharp. She explained that rules make it much more time-consuming to deny an application than to grant it or coach the applicant on changes they need to make in order to win a grant. Something about needing to explicitly refute each claim. Further, clerks are given quotas on how many patents they must review a week. It’s a pretty crushing load, so the system favors grants.
Sure there is! The Universal Distribution is the ultimate prior, see for example, Solomonoff induction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_ind...
The real issue is no one knows this and being informed of weird UI quirks by sporadic user messaging seems the wrong approach. Eg if you care so much should you not instead be requesting a software fix?
Indeed, which is why you should spend the money judiciously, instead of on something wildly expensive vulnerable to a relatively inexpensive supersonic cruise missile.
The page says that as of today (2020-01-01) the status is active. The wording is confusing.
The Historian of Moral Revolution
That's what I think.

However, I have used personal VPNs tunneled through Tor. But I was very careful to be anonymous about the VPS I used. And it was just to get around blocking of Tor exits.
I think machine's advantage can be summarized as "good at aggregating weak signals". Humans excel at analyzing complex signals, but basically can't use signals weaker than some point. Machines have no trouble with weak signals.
And here's the researcher discussing the project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqOtLSuPCJY
Actually, features are the #1 feature, and the slow performance of the web proves it.
A better example might be superconductivity.

The math behind the double slit experiment is pretty well understood, seemingly to the point where it can model or predict any desired experimental outcome. We get quantum physics. We don't like it, but we get it.

There is still some debate about how superconductivity really works, though, and how it's connected with other branches of the physical sciences. When/if we come to understand everything there is to understand about superconductivity, I'd venture to say "better gadgets" will be the least of the benefits.
Well, isn’t the UV catastrophe very similar in spirit to the renormalizability of quantum gravity? :-) They both correspond to UV behavior of the only massless degrees of freedom possible. Due to electromagnetism being a free theory, we don’t need to worry about loops, and the particle nature provides the UV cutoff for on-shell/external photons. Gravity, being nonlinear, has loops with off-shell graduations which need to be handled consistently. Also, I would put IR problems on similar footing as UV (soft photon theorems, transformations at infinity, etc.)

If we reason strictly by analogy (with the UV catastrophe being considered relevant to the observable word), quantum gravity has such a gaping loophole that it cannot explain how we can have simple empty space — the kind we see all over the place!

Otherwise largely agree with your previous point about the lack of easily measurable effects pointing to the low likelihood of technological consequences. It’s an under-appreciated intuition!

Oh, btw (as a fellow physicist) what did you work on? Inspire link? :-)
I actually liked .NET async/await because it came with good usable libraries for async RDBMS operations tied into NT IO completion ports, easing a super common bottleneck; compare to other common RDBMS clients that might offer a facade of asynchrony but are really just blocking and queuing behind the curtain.

The task library (TPL) is a smidgen wordy, as was MSFT's way about ten years back, most folks will never get deep into it though.
Can this work with any bank account in any country?
The median desktop site is almost 2MB. https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight
For a second I thought this was a similar book who's name I've been trying to remember. Like Daemon and Ready Player One, but with some magic sword instead. Dang.
1. trends come and go.

2. we all live in our bubbles.

both meat consumption and air travel have increased YoY over the past 25 years in the UK.

and sticking with the UK, current estimates point to an almost 100% increase in air passenger numbers in the 2030s, and Heahtrow still being in the top ten busiest airports in the world.

anecdotally, my flights have increased 2x every year for the past 5 years. this year it's been 50 flights, 40 of which intercontinental (no train availability).
Rewriting quantum mechanics in their spare time
My third-grade son's teacher insists it's spelled and pronounced "communitative" (as in "commutative"), to the point where we had to have a parent-teacher conference about my son correcting her.
It's not wrong but it is confusing – it's showing you what its current status is, which should be shown somewhere else than in the timeline.
Yes, this is true.

So the best bet is staying off the shit lists of the NSA and other global adversaries.
Here's the original on their web site: https://www.nro.net/aso-issues-inspection-request-to-icann/
Another nice to have may be the ability to track the card. When we purchased our order on Postable, the order status displayed as "Sent" which is kind of generic. We don't know which of our recipients actually received the card.
Getting Started in Game Development
I am very sorry, but I am certain the GP was being funny. What he meant was that the person suggesting on Facebook may not have had any sway or may have been pushing you off.
doesn't apply to all European systems.
cool man i need something like this
> And by and far I believe that is the real issue in the industry.

Why? What problem does it solve?
It would help to know what exactly the idea was and how you presented it. One thing to keep in mind is only hacks are worried about people stealing their ideas. This ought to be a safe place.
The first three paragraphs of claim 1 describe every flashcard application ever made. As far as I can tell, the "novel" part of the invention being claimed is the fourth paragraph, namely the concept of displaying multiple cards on the screen at the same time.

IMO, that's still an extremely broad concept to be granted a patent on.
from my experience, you might not need all the data in the first fetch but it is highly likely that it will be needed for subsequent renderings. What worked better for me is to make sure the client doesn't ask for the same data (ID) multiple times, client-side caching works wonders in that case
The Case for Buying a House with Friends
> Crypto increases both.

Not _exactly_. This is kind of the whole point of Stellar, and why IBM invested in creating World Wire. Crypto can make this problem easier, especially if you're looking at it internationally rather than in day-to-day transactions. I also think for auditability there is an advantage here, which can't be brushed away. Tracing down international currencies can be very hard.

That said, what the article is describing is definitely not this, but seems to predict (at least based on the text) something more akin to a stablecoin that corresponds to a given fiat currency. So yeah, in that case, you'd probably be correct, but I don't think we can generalize that to every type of cryptocurrency.
Authoritarian? As if America has NOT been turning the internet into a weapon?
While that's a trope that often gets repeated, the number of successful startups that began life in "stealth mode" seems to disagree...
Larry Niven said the money's in novels. I feel computers are too incidental to 9E9. Manned missiles is a kinda classic though.
Look-and-Say Integer Sequence
> Why do we deserve that much buzz/fame/respect/income if the work we are doing is NOT making the society better?

I understand that you're asking a theoretical question, not a practical one, but in practical terms the answer is fairly simple. Our economy is not built to (indeed, is built not to) reward individuals in line with what they contribute to society. An entirely different set of incentives are what structure our economy, and therefore the jobs and lives of most people.

In some sense, David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs is all about the widespread awareness (and denial) of this phenomenon, and what caused it. I wouldn't say it's a perfect book but it's the best one I've read on the subject.
Computers Don't Argue[1], [2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

2: https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133
What part of that do you think wasn't possible on the web 5-10 years ago? The term "ajax" is 15 years old now.
A blog that I recently discovered is the Sakuga Blog, which analyzes the process of anime production, the works of individual animators, and the state of the anime industry. The blog is very nuanced and has led me to better appreciate the artistic qualities of anime.

The Sakuga Blog is a publication of Sakugabooru, a booru (image board, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageboard#Danbooru-style_boar...) that collects the works of animators.

https://blog.sakugabooru.com/
Same, and I thought that was an odd thing for them to be interested in. They use .gov and .mil.

n.b.: it's "Number Resource Organization".
I have a theory that one should start by tracing all famous video games in history and making them one by one, in chronological term. Maybe skip the text adventures and start from arcade games.
"During a drunken party to celebrate the end of the surveying, the northern observatory was accidentally burned to the ground, taking with it a fiddle belonging to Duncan Robertson, a junior member of the surveying team. In gratitude for the entertainment Robertson's playing had provided Maskelyne during the four months of astronomical observations, he compensated him by replacing the lost violin with a Stradivarius."
This just pushes the validation of a patent into the courts, and at a much higher cost than properly researching its validity from the beginning.
Arctic fox walks 3,500 km from Norway to Canada
I won't claim that it's commonplace, but I have had business people specifically tell me that they wanted a SPA because they saw it as the trendy thing and wanted their web app to feel "modern".
Nobody's claiming TCP/IP to be based on UDP/IP.

I mean to suggest that buffering isn't a proper feature distinction between TCP and unreliable protocols.

Separately, it seems a tad obscure to use IP as the exemplar here--doesn't most everyone want UDP features on top?