skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You asked if I learned the syntax from the BNF, not if I learned the semantics from it.

Actually, I didn't ask you anything--it was a rhetorical question, within the context of a post you ignored.

> On any project with more than one person (and arguably even many projects with a single person, for the you of today is not the same you of yesteryear), communication is absolutely essential. And if what you're describing is a language, than the BNF for the syntax and corresponding prose for semantics is the most effective way we know of to document and communicate that language. If instead you try to wing it and rely on examples to communicate the specification, then the resulting mess will take you several times as long to clean up as actually properly designing out the documentation would have taken in the first place--and this I speak from bitter experience.

BNFs might the best way to communicate the syntax of a language to another person who needs to know the syntax to that level of specificity, but the fact that mainstream compilers often don't have widely available BNFs shows that a BNF simply isn't a vital part of compilation. Generating into a real target assembly is a vital part of compilation: if it doesn't generate to a useful target, it literally isn't a compiler.

I'm not against learning BNFs. They're useful. My point, from the beginning, has been that while assembly generation is vastly more complicated and important than parsing, the vast majority of language materials focus on parsing, giving only cursory coverage to generation.

There's literally detailed tutorials on how to use specific tools to do specific steps of parsing. Meanwhile, generation is covered, if at all, by generating partial pseudo-assembly for fictional architectures. Even if you manage to translate the pseudo-assembly into x86, good luck finding any guidance on how to link in a garbage collector, or properly tag the generated code with metadata for debugging or exception reporting, or how C calling conventions work so you can even implement exceptions on the stack... I don't want to hear about your experience with communicating about easy stuff like parsers until you've worked on a difficult problem.

> P.S. I didn't engage with the rest of your post because I wasn't interested in writing an essay to rebut your points.

If you don't feel like participating in the conversation, fine, just go away. Don't take cheap shots at out-of-context sentences where it's convenient, and pretend that you're not responding to the rest because it's beneath you.
Think of all the people who live closer to the urban core in Boston now, due to this decision not making long distance commuting easier.

Portland started ripping out freeways after I-205 destroyed multiple neighborhoods, and Seattlites organized to stop the central district freeway after watching I-5 vivisect the city, paving parks and neighborhoods.
> viscosity of air

Why were people not able to find this error?
If anyone thinks this is hyperbole :

I worked for a tiny startup (>2 devs full time) where Oracle tried to extract money from us because we used MariaDB on AWS.

If you think this sounds ridiculous you probably got it right.

(Why? Because someone inexperienced with Oracle had filled out the form while downloading the mySQL client.)
The problem with bookmarks is you're never going to have time to reread the whole thing. I make a summary and put the source as a hyperlink so that if I summarized wrong I can go read it again. Summaries are better because you can organize summaries and have everything you know about enums together in a few pages, rather than 20 bookmarks.
As someone who spent 8 years heavily biking around LA, I'm glad I got out of there before the bike lanes became overrun with motorized drunks.
I think this is why people want 'less government'. What they really mean is there are too many governments, the basic three levels, plus other institutions like home owners associations. Moving means dealing with a whole different bureaucracy, and falling to the bottom of a new list.
> I have an idea that the "espresso" algorithm could be used to minimize not only electronic circuits but general boolean expressions for any programming language... I think it would do for a useful refactoring tool.

I think the goal for most boolean expressions in code is for the reader to be able to conceptually grasp what's being checked for, not for the expression to be as short as possible. Distributive properties can make an expression shorter while simultaneously making the concepts behind the expression much more obscure.
> It just occurred to me how much easier it is to wipe everything in the cloud age than the on-prem age.

It's easier for physical facility damage to a single facility (whether hostile action or natural disaster) to wipe everything out in an on-prem setup than in the cloud, where multi-DC redundancy is a click away. But, sure, it's easier to wipe out data without physically destroying equipment in the cloud.
Brownian Ratchet
They're invaluable for democracy. Right now, there are a number of anti government, pro democracy protests taking place in my country. All of them are being organized and spread via Instagram and WhatsApp
How you should be using Leetcode
Did you even read the link he posted?
Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality
I actually have a few cows of different colours coming to my patch to do the mower. My review of them is that they do the job and so far no residue. Just wonder in the old days there is a buffalo. May be my opening is too small for him or is it her (got horns though). Just to ensure they do not sit down as settle down in front of my house is not a good development for my places.

It is real. I am not joking.
You don't need much else besides Mithril and maybe a css library.

As for hiring I agree somewhat but anyone with a couple of years of front end experience should be able to pick it up in a matter of hours.
A fitness watch that measures blood pressure
His reasons may not be perfect but he's right.

If you use a filesystem that isn't mainline and it breaks it's all on you to figure it out and fix it. Having used experimental filesystems before and been burned I would rather stick with what I know and won't change overnight.

I'll keep an eye open for new filesystems of course but if it's not mainline unless it's for personal hacking no.

> I own several SBC's (Small Board Computer) that do not run mainline kernels. The company that makes them provides their own patched kernel so if it breaks I'm up creek but I know who to bitch at.
If Mark is ID number 4, are the first three test accounts?
It’s not. They’re even mailing out stickers to warn passengers they’re being recorded in Toronto.

https://help.uber.com/driving-and-delivering/article/can-i-u...
If you gave me a VR headset for free, I wager after a week it would sit unused in a closet. Price isn't the problem.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned SuperMemo and incremental reading as a means of managing a knowledge base.
They mention that by data analysis they can detect higher temperatures later in the day, varying by 0.02 or 0.01 C in two of their three data sets and this was an expected effect. My intuition would be if the data is good enough to detect small patterns you expect, that is an indication it is reliable enough when telling you about unexpected patterns.
Right, except that in Mithril and other libs you don't need to do that to get similar or better performance.
Hashtags Directory
A complex of connected (underground and/or skybridges) skyscrapers that encompass all types of common food/shops and a wide range of residential would be pretty awesome. I’d move into something like that.

Bonus points if they built in a pneumatic delivery tube system for getting food from the restaurants to any of the homes/offices quickly.
They are disastrous for democracy.
Yeah but the point is comparing the frameworks among themselves.
Air pressure changes with weather. It's easily visible in old school barometers like http://www.4physics.com/phy_demo/pressure/baro_exp1.jpg

It varies in a range of about +5% to -5% of average pressure.
Three New Longevity Startups
This sounds nice in practice, but real world says that there is a greater than zero chance that the quickly released patch can have a negative affect on your device up to bricking the device. As a long time Apple user, I never install version X.0. I wait until at least X.0.1.
I don't even think you'd need that for most of the population: it's been quite some time since the median user cared about desktop software[1]. I switched my parents over to a Linux Mint install a decade ago when I went away to college, and it lowered my over-the-phone tech support burden to zero overnight.

I also had (non-CS but very smart) friends who switched to (ie dual-booted) Linux on their own after seeing how much better my system was than a Windows box. A decade later, one of them is getting her PhD in veterinary pathology and still dual boots, firing Windows up only when she feels like gaming.

[1] My impression is that committed PC gamers aren't a large portion of the desktop user population, but I may be wrong.
I'm in the same boat as the sibling poster (albeit with a 15" machine) and I'll add this:

- The TouchBar is terrible

I hope they'll bring back a non-TouchBar configuration when they release the "new" keyboard on a 13" MacBook Pro. I could live with both a 13" or 15" laptop, but right now the list of drawbacks is still 1-2 items too long.
Honestly, until they experience first-hand a totalitarian government weaponizing their information they won't care. Even then, only that generation - well the survivors of that generation - will care. It's not enough to ponder about how much more deadly the Soviets could have been, or reading about what China is doing. For most people, if it's not happening to them immediately and directly, they just don't care.
I like Zim. For my Batcave I switched from Tiddlywiki to Tomboy to Zim to Notecase Pro and finally switched from that over to files and folders using the Geany editor and a sync service. So far this is the combination that seems to survive software, OS, and environment changes best. Even on Android it's not perfect, but it makes me happier than e.g. trying to use Zim on Android :-)
High to extreme higher end would be something like MarkMonitor.

Gandi might be better than some of the other low touch, self service domain providers but its definitely still in the same ballpark. $18/year still means they're losing money if they ever need to pick up the phone for you. It's not a price point that works with "higher end".
I guess what I meant is that we should be doing a better job on bandwidth; a few hundred megabytes of deps isn’t a big deal in the scheme of ram/storage these days.

Hopefully things like Starlink will improve the situation a lot.
> he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy.

Maybe, but the complains seem to be more related to the (problematic) changes not being of technical nature accidentally braking ZFS, but being more of political nature. With speculation that it might have been meant to _intentionally_ brake ZFS and then pretend this was a accident because ZFS isn't (and can never) be maintained in tree. Basically on the line of "we don't like out of tree kernel modules so we make the live hard for them". No idea if this is actually the case or people just spin thinks together. Even if it is the case I'm not sure what I should think about, because it's at least partially somewhat understandably.
Nvidia proprietary drivers work OK for me, mostly (I needed to spoof the video card ID so KVM could lie to the Windows drivers in my home VFIO setup, but it wasn't hard.)

But it means I can't use Wayland. Wayland isn't critical for me, but since NVidia is refusing to implement GBM and using EGLStream instead, there's nothing I can do about it. It simply isn't worth NVidia's time to make Wayland work, so I'm stuck using X. If the driver were open-source someone would have submitted a GBM patch and i wouldn't be stuck in this predicament.

I can't wait for NVidia to have real competition in the ML space so I can ditch them.
How much will it cost to rewrite everything? What were they suppose to choose in the 70s? Do you think that all of the people still using IBM and running legacy code are dumb or just maybe they did a cost benefit analysis and decided they didn’t need to rewrite everything in Node and React?
>Isn't this a problem for any over provisioned storage pool ?

ZFS doesn't over-provision anything by default. The only case I'm aware of where you can over-provision with ZFS is when you explicitly choose to thin provision zvols (virtual block devices with a fixed size). This can't be done with regular file systems which grow as needed, though you can reserve space for them.

File systems do handle running out of space (for a loose definition of handle) but they never expect the underlying block device to run out of space, which is what happens with over-provisioning. That's a problem common to any volume manager that allows you to over provision.
For the life of me I can't see why people wouldn't just steal them. It's literally just standing there, not chained to anything, sometimes for days on end. Sure you probably won't be able to ride it, but even as parts it's likely worth more than a day's worth of heroin, which dooms their business model right from the start.
Electrons are indistinguishable as well.
In the case of Millikan's experiment, we are considering something in the order of a dozen repetitions. With these temperature measurements, there are thousands. This alone makes it rather implausible that we have a false signal that is the consequence of an initial error.

Furthermore, unlike with the charge of the electron, there is no strong reason to believe the value is a constant. In fact, it is known to be variable, and that variability has been recognized as diagnostic (which is why we have a lot of measurements.)

As others have pointed out, the authors have considered, in detail, several conceivable sources of systematic error. We probably should not approach studies with the expectation that the people performing them are naive.
Second time I have seen FusionAuth mentioned, so I figured I'd take a look.

Can you provide a link to the source? I can't seem to find it on their GitHub. They only appear to provide install scripts that grab the compiled java application off Google Storage.

Also, you can self-host, but you must agree to a somewhat restrictive license[1] upon install. As I read it, you can only self-host on equipment you own or operate (I don't own or operate EC2), can't deploy for anyone else (no use in consulting), are agreeing to random audits with 30-day notice, and can only use for "Licensee's internal business purposes" (so only auth for internal applications, not public-facing?). Even if these things aren't true, I don't feel comfortable that I understand what I can actually use this for with their current license.

[1]: https://fusionauth.io/license
I've been thinking the same.
Site supports https.
There’s also things like https://editor.p5js.org
I'm as reflexively inclined as many technical people to be dismissive of marketing, but I dont think you're right here. You can't "just copy" marketing in the way you can't "just copy" anything else that a company is world-class in, and good marketing can indeed build market dominance (do you think coca cola is really a vastly superior technical innovation over Pepsi?)

The fact that it isn't a net good for users in most cases doesn't mean that it's trivial to do.
Critically, Nvidia has a GPL'd shim. In the kernel code, which lets them keep a stable ABI. The kind of shim Linus isn't interested in for ZFS.
in case of worry helium observed in the sun first before we found it on earth.
You've done some exceptional work here cherry picking a world view that matches your own.

> Australia has generally gotten wetter over the past 50 years than the first 50 years of the 20th century

Even if I take Roy Spencer at his word, higher rainfall isn't in opposition with some areas of the continent becoming drier, or hot, dry weather systems getting more intense. As with the link I provided from the Bureau of Meteorology, the rainfall patterns are changing and certain places are actually becoming wetter, but some places much drier - particularly the south east of Australia. You might want to read it.

> Worse still, they actively discouraged and fined people for attempting to remove firewood from national parks:
> That's negligence of the highest order.

That's hyperbole of the highest order. I'm not sure how you back your claim that local residents taking firewood (which is habitat for many endangered native birds) makes a significant impact on fuel load.

And fuel reduction burns are not a perfect strategy. Even when timed as best as possible, they are often not enough to solve the problem, and won't prevent canopy fires when you have catastrophic level weather patterns.

This article was published today and provides a nuanced view on the topic.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-10/hazard-reduction-burn...
Emailed with a tip
China's bid to challenge Boeing and Airbus falters
works for me now, thanks!
Grazing is one of the healthiest things for soil and grassland as long as it's not overgrazed.
To be sure, it's entirely feasible, just not prudent with today's typical disk capacities.
It feels like there should be, but nothing jumped out after searches.

On the face of it, a camera right before the blades works sorta make sense, but then you how do you account for multiple pages being shredded as one, be the lack of light, the extremely wide angle needed, and likely a myriad of things not mentioned.

If you find some, please share :)
Commercial vulnerability brokers don't pay out up front; they pay in monthly tranches, and stop paying when the vulnerability stops working. It's not an apples-apples comparison with bounty payouts.
I note that OpenStreetMap apparently has tags for mapping between OSM nodes and GTFS. I wonder how much GTFS data gets imported into OSM.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/General_Transit_Feed_Spe...
Possible spyware on all Samsung phones
Firuzabad Fire Temple (2015)
Almost always: industries or activities which were once only viable in a single (or small number) of instances, but which, given increases in net total capabilities, but no inherent efficiencies of scale, require replicated instances rather than a centrally-controlled monopoly.

Even here, if there's a space for centralised control, it's possible that either some single entity will gain effective unitary control or impose a control overlay.

High-mass products, which ship poorly, products which are very highly localised (culture, custom), "high-touch" (1:1 or 1:(small-n) activities, on-site services, specifically-tailored activities, rapid spoilage, tend to be amongst these.

Examples which come to mind of each:

- High mass: concrete, dairy, and water. Shipping costs rapidly eat into profits, though water can move efficiently for hundreds, possibly as much as 1,000km, via aqueducts and pipelines.

- Localised: culture, including to an extent the film industry (at least at the national level), which contrasts with video's otherwise extreme ephemerality, and hence centralisation. Teaching is probably the ultimate, with the failures of ed-tech reinforcing this yet again. The gold-standard in teaching remains 1:1 tutoring, for complex reasons. Most personal-care services, ranging from medical to beauty, therapy, and training. Activities proscribed by widely-varying local regulation also tend toward geographical dispersion.

- Most of the trades -- plumbing, electrical, HVAC, landscaping, on-sight equipment maintenance, auto repair, and the like, all spawn from the fact that it's cheaper to provide local expertise and capability than to move the equipment to a centralised facility. The more specialised equipment is, the more likely service is to be centralised, and some transport equipment (aircraft, ships) sees centralised servicing based on both mobility and complexity.

- The degree to which spoilage is no longer a pressing concern is impressive: cold-chains and air freight mean that fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers now move globally, though local produce remains viable. Freshly-cooked meals remain a holdout, with even in-city delivery limited to a few standbyes: pizza, Chinese takeaway, and the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. (https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...).

In most other cases, the supposed freedom from location afforded by technology and ephemeralisation actually strongly favours centralisation. Almost anything related to mass culture (film, music, video games, and some books, as well as clothing and fashion) tends extremely toward centralisation.

Look around you at the "small shops" in your neighbourhood, town, or suburb. Those are the serivces which have resisted centralisation, though almost all have some strongly centralised elements.
Seven predictions for the U.S. health care system in twenties
I think it may have to do with the number of options a person has to earn money. To those with few options a shitty job can feel a lot like slavery.

Taking someone to task over the technically incorrect use of the word slavery seems a bit pedantic at best.
a single file is fairly manageable even when it gets huge. I feel like that's a big advantage of org-mode.

I use a separate file for non-technical stuff.
India's Proposed Intermediary Rules Puts Encryption at Risk: Security Experts
Security, networking, multiuser, i10n, print (don’t even begin to underestimate this and quartz and display postscript) beos was an rtos with a neat UI. it was still fun but there was a gigantic pile of work before it could do what system 7 did, let alone what next did.
Open Source Licensing Fundamentals
I also love that since it's plain text, I can still access it anywhere I want to without having to use Emacs (despite the limited functionality without it).
Anecdotal, but VirtualBox has always been a bit flaky for me.

VMWare Fusion, on the other hand, powers the desktop environment I've used as a daily work machine for the last 6 months, and I've had absolutely zero problems other than trackpad scrolling getting emulated as mouse wheel events (making pixel-perfect scroll impossible).

Despite that one annoyance, it's definitely worth paying for if you're using it for any serious or professional purpose.
There were genuine reasons for the CDDL - it wasn't an anti-gpl thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...
Why Historical Analogy Matters
> If there is no "approved" method for creating Linux drivers under licenses other than the GPL, that seems like a major problem that Linux should be working to address.

It's less a think Linux can work on then a think lawmakers/courts would have to make binding decisions on, which would make it clear if this usage is Ok or not. But in practice this can only be decided on a case-by-case basis.

The only way Linux could work on this is by:

1. Adding a exception to there GPL license to exclude kernel modules from GPL constraints (which obviously won't happen for a bunch of reasons).

2. Turn Linux into a micro kernel with user-land drivers and interfaces for that drivers which are not license encumbered (which again won't happen because this would be a completely different system)

3. Oracle re-licensing ZFS under a permissible Open Source license (e.g. dual license it, doesn't need to be GPL, just GPL compatible e.g. Apache v2). Guess, what that won't happen either, or at last I would be very surprised. I mean Oracle is running out of products people _want_ to buy from them and increasingly run into an area where they (ab-)use the license/copyright/patent system to earn their monny and force people to buy there products (or at last somehow pay license fees to them).
You would download an executable over an unencrypted connection? Whether it's free or not?