skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rust drops to 16KB (on a Mac, I suspect nearer 8KB on Linux) if you set panic=abort, turn on LTO, and drop the std library:

#![feature(start, lang_items)]
#![no_std]
#![no_main]

#[link(name = "c")]
extern "C" {
pub fn puts(s: *const u8);
}

#[no_mangle]
pub extern "C" fn main(_argc: i32, _argv: *const *const u8) -> i32 {
unsafe {
puts(b"hello world\n" as *const u8);
};
0
}

#[panic_handler]
fn panic(_info: &core::panic::PanicInfo) -> ! {
loop {}
}

#[lang = "eh_personality"]
extern "C" fn eh_personality() {}

2x assembly isn't bad, but I'm willing to bet we can go smaller.
Well-meaning parents saying "eat what's on your plate, kids are starving in Japan" really reinforce valuing sunk costs. They also ignore that there's a global obesity epidemic.
> it seems a bit improbable that a bolide would just so happen to hit the armory. Given that bolide events are rare to begin with, the low chance of hitting a military building is enough to make me skeptical.

Well, isn't the probability of hitting the armory identical to that of hitting anywhere else on the planet?
I'd assume plenty of people will completely miss any news of it.

A lot of sites have no developer actively working on them. Even if the developer exists, a lot of them will happily ignore warnings. I've certainly been guilty of that.
An airborne explosion of the bolide (which is the most popular hypothesis) could easily cause a secondary explosion in armory.
Your idea of complexity is totally backwards. Swift has some types that do different things. Maybe you could add features, thought out to a vague level, that infect every part of the type system, and require redesigning major parts of how the language works, so you can define a few less types! C/C++ have const [which doesn't work well], so surely you can just throw such a notion into Swift's type system! Well that's not gonna make the language simpler.

Go make a statically typed language with Mutable<>, in some form. Then talk.
Most of them are probably from glibc.
That one is the most idiotic advice I have seen. He said “seats” so he was clearly taking someone there - a friend or girl friend? I can only imagine driving back after selling the ticket would probably meant the dinner was alone.
"shattered pixel dungeon" is probably the best phone game I've played.
Capitalism is (i think) about efficient allocation of resources (ie free price movement in markets are better than governments). But BigCos are so Big they are just as bad as governments - take the trophy property bid below - I mean you could parcel out that 10 billion to every HN member and I guarantee higher returns than a Seoul Real Estate bid.

So while I am sure Hyundai will spend this 87bn on car related stuff and multiplier effects etc, I just happen to think that since the money exists anyway as they are borrowing it, perhaps it should all be turned into VC funds

I mean look at SoftBank. if you took 100bn and handed it out to a million start ups globally what could you expect. Another WeWork? or better?

So - the million start up fund? Whose in?
Pursuing the Perfect Project Manager (1991)
Plenty of people were working on the issues that relativity sought to resolve but I've never heard of any simultaneous discovery of relativity. Many of the other stuff Einstein worked on had multiple "discoveries", I remember reading some about Brownian motion before.
If the meteor passed overhead and then exploded some distance away you'd get the sound before the shockwave.

Perhaps the passby tore the roof off the armory and sucked black powder into the air, and then the impact shockwave caused a fuel/air-like explosion?

Also note that the description is by survivors, so the sequence of sounds maybe different away from the impact.
Humans have no free will, but the universe has
> I think it's important to note that human pattern recognition is basically black-box as well.

Agreed. But as you note, even though humans are basically black boxes we can ask them questions in order to find out how they came to a particular conclusion. (How reliable the answers to these questions are is of course a different matter.)

So maybe we don't necessarily need fully interpretable models but simply a way to ask black-box models specific questions about their state, e.g., "To what degree does a person's age influence the output?".
What's the connection between your first and second sentences? You imply that a continent can't have a culture. What's the biggest unit of division of people that can have a culture, in your opinion?

In reality, culture isn't defined in the clear-cut way you're using. There are subcultures as well as minority cultures. That's how Australian culture exists despite there being some foreigners living there doing things their own way.
When I want to predict something, I need the highest accuracy, and I am not interested in interpretability of an individual parameter.

and interpretability is only a half measure. If i really want to understand the model, I will conduct causal analysis with randomized controlled trial and will find the root cause and impact of the factor of my interest.
Advertising is not free speech. If someone is paid to say or do anything publicly for a company then said people are not exercising free speech. They are providing a service with the intent to coerce people into using a companies services, in many cases, without an actual need for them. Advertising should be regulated more harshly than drug testing on unborn children. Every advertisement should come with warning labels at least as significant as cigarette warning labels.
Just saw your question just after writing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21958927

Warning: No doubt what I wrote there is not good enough for NSF or DARPA funding!
Pull-Based CD Pipelines for Security
Thread scheduling (or waking up cores) is slow.
Because of this, mutexes will look better on dumb benchmarks, as the contending threads keep going to sleep, while the single succesful owner has practically uncontended access
I was glad I found Provider after almost diving into BLoC. The less boilerplate and context switching the better.
> The fallacy would be giving the first option some sort of financial value because you spend time and money on it in the past.

But when we have sunk costs, we really have a past investment that we have an unknown return upon-- and we're deciding whether to abandon that investment.

If we've made a substantial investment, it can make sense to have a bias towards avoiding actions that definitely invalidate that investment-- a bias towards inaction.

It's rare that a position presents itself where it is completely clear what the future value of different tracks is worth so clearly.
Zstd has an enormous advantage in compression and, especially, decompression speed. It often doesn't compress quite as much, but we don't care as much as we once did. We rebuild packages more than we once did.

This looks like a very good move. Debian should follow suit.
Federal Depository Library Program Website Hacked by 'Iran Cyber Security Group'
Here's what I predict for 2030:

1. Trump will either be world dictator, or hardly anyone will talk about him.

2. Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, and C++ will still be incredibly popular programming languages. Kotlin & Swift may join that list.

3. Self-driving cars will begin to see wide adoption. Governments will update infrastructure to better support fully-automated self driving.

4. Facebook will be a hollow shell of its former self unless the company makes a considerable innovation.

5. The climate change debate will hardly change.

6. There will be either a major war or a major recession.

7. Automation will replace hardly any jobs, but the jobs it does replace will lead to creative endeavors being more highly desired skills in the workplace.

8. Trump will win a second term.

9. Space exploration becomes a high priority around the world.

10. A major disease will be cured / a medical breakthrough of some kind will occur.

11. People will still be obsessed with the 90s.
What is the standard deviation of a bimodal distribution with modes at 0 and inf? Is that a meaningful stat?
Rather than say one way to bill is better than the other, I view this as situational. I've worked a fixed price project on occasion, but most of my work is hourly. The approach is a result of the negotiation process.

I also believe ethics is subjective. A consultant is running a business and has a fiduciary duty and a right to make money. If I can make money and keep the customer happy then all is good.
For the original, maybe. This second edition was supposed to hit a sweet spot of no distractions, but enough features to live a normal modern life (ex: maps), and have a shot at being your main phone.
The biography that this is based on, "American Prometheus", is fantastic. A fast, smart read.

Oppenheimer obviously also appears in Richard Rhodes' utterly superb "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", though he only becomes a main character in the sequel, "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", which is also great.

Oppenheimer was a highly skilled physicist, but Rhodes attributes his ability to lead the Manhattan Project to his gifts as a "synthesizer" of ideas and knowledge from many people and disparate branches of science. In my opinion he really came into his own, though, after the bomb, when he started formulating the US' atomic energy strategy, essentially inserting himself -- a scientist, not a statesman -- into the political elite by sheer force of will and charisma. Rhodes tells of Oppenheimer completely dominating meetings in early efforts that resulted in the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission (which became the US Department of Energy), essentially writing national policy recommendations on his own.

Oppenheimer realized the dangers of nuclear proliferation and detente early on, and wanted the world to own atomic energy as a force for good. He wanted an international organization (what became the IAEA) to control atomic energy and not let the US and UK have a monopoly on it. Oppenheimer also recommended against developing the hydrogen bomb, which he thought would dangerously escalate the destructive power of nuclear arms. This opposition ultimately led to Oppeheimer's trial that cost him his security clearance.

But it was his extensive writings on what the future of atomic energy could be that I think set him apart in this years. He was prescient about nuclear arms race and tried to steer the US and the world towards peaceful use of atomic energy. If his policies had been implemented we may have been in a different place today.
One issue that networked filesystems have is with mutations, especially with multiple writers. WebDAV, NFS, etc. try to address this with locking, but that doesn't allow simultaneous writes, which means it's dangerous to work offline. It's possible to solve this by using an OT or CRDT algorithm behind the scene. This is what we are building into an extension of HTTP called braid (https://braid.news). It could be useful for a web-backed filesystem. It automates synchronization.
Because he didn't have it in B. The K&R C "Hello World" uses printf(), which itself does a whole bunch of crap other than printing out "hello world".
Real! Check out number 1 here: https://www.visualcompliance.com/blog/?p=185
Sounds like a high turnover job, probably not paying a living wage ... A priceless cultural object mismanaged by stripping down costs as though they were under Walmart Inc management practices
Coal is a deprecated technology and needs to be phased out. It doesn't make economic (or any other) sense.

Economic progress cannot ignore the current disaster. Renewable energy creates jobs. We can print money out of thin air but we cannot print The Great Barrier Reef which creates thousands of jobs. Today we are destroying it.

Digging coal to put more money in the pockets of the elites is causing this (from the article):

>>Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.

>>thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness
Fascia encases tissues and organs and may have widespread effects (2019)
I'm not following. If the author is gone, then who decided to use the model? Who decided which safeguards were put in place in case the model failed? Liability is a chain.

AI systems aren't activating themselves, they're being used because a chain of people are authorizing them based on promises made by other people. So if an AI system in a courtroom wrongly jails people, you can still hold judges accountable for using the system. You can still hold manufacturers and businesses accountable for promising a degree of accuracy that their system couldn't meet.

In the same way, if my dog bites someone, and I get sued and argue, "animal motivation is really hard, we don't know why the dog chose to do that", I'm not going to win the case. The reason it happened is because I didn't leash my dog.

The reason the black box hurt someone is because an accountable human improperly used it or inaccurately advertised it.
Again, how is that the same as saying that blame should be tied to compensation?

Separate out management for a moment. So an engineer who gets paid 50% more than another deserves 50% more blame for a failure?

I thought HN was a place where people attempted to form good arguments based on fact, not one where people let emotion rule the day.
Look I'm not shitting on high culture.

And yes, there's a lot of snake oil out there. (Personally I hate the medallions that are supposed to protect against stray EM! And don't get me started on audiophiles.)

> The rest (99% of the self help shelves) is snake oil sold by marketeers to the gullible...

You haven't read "99% of the self help shelves" have you?
He's using sarcasm to dismiss off the bat anyone who may seriously claim that Murdoch et al are responsible (yes, there are people who honestly believe this).

This is a very common literary structure in internet comments.

To claim we can't satirize or mock racists and bigots because the satirical content itself is racist seems misguided. Intent matters.
Yes. WebFS doesn't actually use any of the file/directory functionality provided by IPFS, or any encryption features. We only use the get/put block functionality. Everything is encrypted in WebFS before being posted to a Store.

The data encryption keys are generated using a secret and the hash of the data being encrypted. That key is stored in the reference to that data. This continues recursively to the superblock which is not encrypted.
The graduates of state colleges end up being the ones who get out of the dying towns in the areas being left behind. They move to a thriving city often out of state and in doing so become the "elites" that are so hated by those left behind.
If you only have 4 threads it is likely that all your CPUs are sharing caches and you won't see the real downside of the spinlock. They don't really fall apart until you have several sockets.
Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
For those who want a TLDR :
The trade off is 0.8% increase of package size for 1300% increase in decompression speed.
Those numbers come from a sample of 542 packages.
Credit Cards for Giving
> But as you note, even though humans are basically black boxes we can ask them questions in order to find out how they came to a particular conclusion.

No, you can't. If somebody treats you with suspicion, it's because of a combination of their news intake, their culture, local events, what their friends and family would think, the way you present yourself, and many other factors. You can always ask somebody to state their reason as a simple "if-then" statement, and they can make one up on the spot, but it'll be so oversimplified that it's basically a lie.

> So maybe we don't necessarily need fully interpretable models but simply a way to ask black-box models specific questions about their state, e.g., "To what degree does a person's age influence the output?".

You can already do that. Just change that number in the input and see how the output changes. To that extent, even the most black box AI model is more transparent than human decision making.
I found that movie pretty disappointing. So much great historical material, a great screenwriter (Bruce Robinson), and yet such a lackluster movie. Both Shultz and Paul Newman are completely miscast.

The only good part of the film is the subplot about the John Cusack character (loosely based on Harry Daghlian), which is a pretty good re-enactment of the actual incident. That scene (which is on YouTube) is worth watching on its own.

For a much more accurate portrayal of Oppenheimer, check out the BBC miniseries "Oppenheimer" from 1980. In terms of TV, it's positively premodern -- more like a filmed play than a real production. But Sam Waterston is much more true to Oppenheimer's character.
If you are going to continuously edit a soothsaying prediction about Google's doomsday date since 2017 and place a bet on Brave succeeding while they keep using Google's technology (Chromium now maintained by Googlers), it very well appears that the authors crystal ball is a faulty one.
> A high-level language performs the same amount of work as the lower-level one

No, uh, the high level language performs way more work. It just happens that most of that work is useless. You seem to be unclear on the definition of efficiency, so let me spell it out: it's not about getting the work done, it's about getting the work done in the minimal amount of steps. That's why this is a good test: there's a clear boundary of "minimal amount of work".

> It's the lower-level languages that, for the sake of efficiency and minimalism, cannot handle systems larger than a hello-world and actual programs written in them without long development times and a mass of bugs that come straight from their inability to abstract when necessary and from their memory management systems that lack sanity and safety.

Yes, nobody has ever written a complex program in C. Excluding every OS and every important desktop application, I guess. Yeah, it's more work. Sometimes doing something hard takes more work.

> Or, paraphrasing your quote, if your language prevents you from creating most basic abstractions, how can you trust it's doing well on actual programs?

You're right. Let's rewrite the Linux kernel in Ruby. C just isn't up to the task. As an added bonus, all our computers will now have the benefit of working as excellent space heaters!
I used to think mutex is a special case of the semaphore, like square and rectangle, now I learned their difference.
Ask HN: Idea for a minimal desktop email client – would you use this?
Hey everyone, I'm trying to validate an idea and would love your feedback.

I'm big into email but not big into clutter; and the more windows I have open on my desktop the more cluttered my mind is. To this point, I've built a very minimal email desktop client that helps me stay on top of my inbox without having to keep a dedicated window open.

Would you use this? If there is enough feedback, I'd be interested in finishing the code and releasing an MVP. It's customizable so you can choose fonts/bgs/sizes to your liking.

Overview:

https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%205.png

Compact:

https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%206%20(2).png

Compose view:

https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%202.png

Read view:

https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%203.png

Minimize view:

https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%204.png

Thank you so much for reading.
> Calling all this mere "privilege" is a defeatist and devaluing attitude, that betrays a facile lack of empathy for the plight of those involved.

I would advise you to not resort to name calling if you want to have a honest discourse.

Now to the substance of your argument: yes families have been the bedrock in the past, but the assumption that everyone may have stable, reliable families to depend on does not hold in the modern world. As fertility rates plummet, families are smaller in size. Many children born in the past couple of generations in the US lived in divorced households or were raised by single parents, and this is only going to increase in the future. To ignore that reality and insist on people forming families is going to be as effective as insisting on abstinence as a form of birth control.

So yes, having a stable family is most certainly a privilege today, regardless of whether it’s defeatist or not. It’s a fact. Recognizing that reality will allow us to dedicate resources to help the present and coming generations of kids, instead of abandoning or incarcerating them.
Nice! Looks like a good idea to implement something from scratch to improve the understanding of a language and also a tool. Any other ideas about stuff to implement? Thanks.
"Day After Trinity" is also a fantastic documentary in this area! It spends a lot of time on Oppenheimer's character and has interviews with a bunch of his former colleagues.
Jungian, by chance?

Much of psychology (at least in the non-behaviorist arena) and self-help deal with ideas that are really grounded in philosophy proper. Philosophy is the original psychology and the original self-help.

Philosophy is no luxury. It saves lives. It's a deep failure of culture that it isn't a core area of primary and secondary curriculum.
I’m not trying to be divisive, but allow me to counter that all markets need consumer advocacy. High fructose corn syrup has been substituted in certain soft drinks now because of the diligence of consumer activism. I take it as a mathematical certainty that bureaucrats take longer to respond than the fluidity of market economics. I just find it appalling I can’t order my methotrexate medication without having to physically see a rheumatologist, with the man-hours to get that script embarrassing for a digital society.
Isn't webtorrent just bittorrent implemented in JS so it can run on browsers?
That's more-or-less what my sister said.

Whatever works.

I mentioned this thread to her and she wanted me to add that there was no withdrawal and her behavior didn't change. When she has tried to quit previously it had significant effects on her mood. This time we (her friends and family) didn't notice she had quit until she told us! It was the best Christmas present.
How do I read this? It looks like it has been pulled down for further review/work.
Hi HN, I made a diagramming tool specifically for explaining systems. It's something that I felt like I could've needed at my previous engineering jobs when I was explaining some software architecture or concept that were complex and I had trouble expressing on a single image diagram. Would love to hear HN's thoughts and feedback!
The rfc is super dumb though. For instance, when handling a PROPFIND request (more or less listing files / folders), it’s not mandatory for the server to honor the Depth header (how many levels are returned). There is also no mechanism for the server to advertise whether or not it’s honoring the Depth header. That means the Depth header is useless because the client has no way to know whether there was only one hierarchy depth or if the server did not honor the Depth header. Therefore, your only option is to always scan the full hierarchy using PROPFIND at each level.

The RFC is full of that kind of crazy gotchas, not to mention the overuse of “MAY” or “SHOULD” which will drive you crazy if you try to implement a client / server.

If you want to go further in insanity, just look at how crazily over engineered the locking mechanism is. I have no words for it.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918#section-6

Unfortunately, even if you think you implemented the whole rfc correctly, your implementation will work with almost nothing as not that much implementations are any good in the wild. A useful WebDAV implementation must be full of vendor-specific workarounds.