skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author links to an article about how Excel does all its computations in 64-bit floating point, in a way that seems to bolster their point. The actual title of that article? “Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel” (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/f...).

How coincidental that this should show up on the front page at the same time as the thread on normalization of deviance in software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144330

What is wrong with using a currency library?
I wouldn't call it symbiotic, parasitic might be closer to the truth.
Restack: Full-Stack ReasonML
+1 for having zero issues at all with using DDG as my daily driver, I only use Google for some local searches and currency conversions. DDG results have improved every year even as Google's have gotten much worse.

Edit: just realized that DDG does currency conversion too, there's one less class of searches that goes to Google!
The problem with Google is that everything is attached to your name. I never write any review on Google knowing that anybody can judge me based on that review alone. Reviews are between me and the target of the review. My coworkers don't need to know what I've bought, where I've been and all my opinions about those things.
How Linking Works
Memory Management Reference (2018)
Related, and featuring openstreetmap whose processes should be more open than google maps:

You thought OpenStreetMap data uses the WGS84 datum? No it doesn't! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20460596
Agree with the first comment. Landing pages should be customized to the specific point in the customer journey. If you’re targeting a clueless user you should keep it simple and educate all the way to conversion.
>Only if you have the sense to do that. Have you met many Americans?

I don't know why this kind of 'American stereotyping' is okay.

That aside, myself and my family ('Americans' in 'America') have physicians that we call when we have issues.

That physician is generally the one to tell us what to do.

Our situation isn't abnormal or unusual, either.
The funny thing is that if you're dealing with (US Treasury) bonds, (EDIT: binary) floats are actually kind-of the right thing, since they trade in 32nds of a dollar (and binary fractions thereof)[1][2]

> Unlike U.S. equity markets, which switched to decimal pricing in 2001, U.S. Treasury securities still trade in fractions. In particular, prices are quoted in 32nds of a point, where a point equals one percent of par, with the 32nds themselves split into fractions. On the BrokerTec platform, for example, 3- and 5-year notes trade in quarters of 32nds, whereas 7-, 10-, and 30-year securities trade in halves of 32nds. The quoted price for a 5-year note might be 98-15¼, for example, indicating a price in decimal form of 98.4765625 (that is, 98 + 15⁄32 + ¼⁄32).

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed07.html

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-15/it-s-n...
I am a developer for a Blockchain startup in Europe. The non-compete prevents me to work for any company that has anything to do with Blockchain for 12 months. I don't know if I can call Blockchain an industry but that's my area of expertise and nowadays many tech company are doing Blockchain for the hype.
I've read rush. It was also the designated hospital for Ebola.
Xerox Wants to Replace HP's Board in Hostile Takeover Bid
I've just checked the "there are no ads on DDG" and saw half of the content space taken by Wikipedia-sourced infobox, half by ad, searching for "insurance". Interestingly enough, Google shows me no ads for the same query (whole screen of local maps, then related queries, then organic results). "Car insurance" though ;)

Disclaimer: I do work in Google, but nowhere near anything user visible (I'm developing SRE infrastructure).
Instagram ‘tag cleaners’ are fighting against digital vandalism (2019)
I'm aware the overall discussion was not about my personal preferences, so it should hopefully be clear this is not what I was asking.

The context (set by the OP of this branch) is also that perhaps there is a case of perverse incentives going on, one where we have reached an unhealthy, but relatively stable equilibrium of the majority having the impression of needing Google ads where there would be no such need if they didn't exist.

You responded by saying the majority would indeed confirm that they would not want to be left without ads (an unsubstantiated but plausible claim). But there are clearly people who choose to opt out of ads completely, myself included, and I don't see myself as missing out on anything. So I'm asking whether I am missing out on something.
All Half-Life Games Are Free to Play Until March
A grand, unified theory of flight?
Aside from rounding I have 2 reasons to not use them where (financial) precision is necessary:

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... (it's the same in other languages)

- if results are not exactly reversible then you cannot implement verification and that hinders defensive programming
Fuel price per mile is cheaper in economy than in a Prius. Most poor people don't drive the most efficient cars in market and surely do travel in cars much more than an exec.
Because 12 million illegal aliens are currently paying something like $11B in taxes. That's $916 per person, per year. Now, some of that is because they're here illegally, but I bet a major part of it is that they aren't making much money, and in the US people who don't make much pay little to no taxes at all. Some even get money back from the government.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_imm...
I wish they had a datacenter in Brazil.
What's an "illegal citizen"?
At our job we used to mock both frontend and backend and we needed consistency, so to help us I developed https://mockadillo.com which is imho easier to use than embedding mocks in your code.
> much higher

How much?
Even so, the change in behavior seems genuine, when compared to what it was initially. The experimental fault also seems easy to fix - just compare behavior to other fur-farm foxes, instead of wild ones.
Personally, and I have heard many other people say this as well, I don't think Raft is any simpler than Paxos.

The problem with Paxos is that there is no one way to do things. There are a thousand different variants and techniques that are not all compatible with each other. So to actually implement Paxos essentially requires that you become an expert. The advantage of Paxos is that there are many potential optimizations at your fingertips, depending on your workload.

Unlike Paxos, Raft is much more prescriptive: do x, y, and z, and everything will be fine. And really, to a large extend, Raft can be viewed as a description of what many production Paxos implementations would look like.
I hear that a lot, but search results differ for me between Bing and DDG. Bing is definitely a major component of its results, but I doubt it’s the only part.
Chang’e 4 scientific data is released
Exactly, the results are not reversible if you apply rounding.
Apple pushes back against EU common charger
TikTok hit the global culture and became part of the youngsters minds. People evolved from text to video due to mobile and connectivity. When people identify product/ service name with action is already too late for any other competition. It’s the social media of 2020.. the new like or retweet
Tracing the Linux Kernel with Ftrace
Marburg Virus Found in Sierra Leone Bats
A lot of financial firms use an integer of the smallest indivisible unit of currency wherever possible (stripe is one). This has the handy property that string and numeric representations are identical so no risk of being flipped into scientific notation by some layer. That happens more often than you’d think.

FX is a different world. Spot FX trading systems are fully automated and compute rates to 5 DP. That was 15 years ago, I don’t know if it’s more now. Large Yen amounts can come worryingly close to the limits of precision.

I once watched a colleague trying to persuade a roomful of people to stop using floats. The demo showed what happens to 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1. The answer was not 0.3. I’m not sure they believed him. Some of them are probably still writing software for your bank!
I just switched to Edge and Bing (Will do DDG in the near future) and I'm not looking back. Edge is very snappy and crisp compared to Chrome. Bing doesn't show tons of ads as the top links. I wonder if Google noticed many people like me switching and became concerned.

Edit: Edge operates just like Chrome. Microsoft has made a better Chrome with less memory usage.
> Now we see Linode offering DDOS (maybe saving you money from paying CloudFlare)?

I work for Cloudflare, and we do not charge you money for our DDoS protection. It's free and included on every plan level including our free level, and the protection you get is equal to the protection our enterprise customers get.

In other product features we have we also work hard to make sure we do not charge you for any bad traffic, i.e. our HTTP rate limiting product has the pricing structure designed so that you aren't paying for the traffic stopped by it.

Pricing really isn't the issue here, but where Linode and other hosts adding DDoS protection helps is in the scenarios where your origin / host IP or provider is known. In those scenarios attackers may directly attack the host.

Just as elsewhere in security, you are as strong as your weakest link, and I am really pleased to see hosting companies expand their DDoS protection.

The various disclaimers: I am the engineering manager for DDoS protection at Cloudflare, and I run a little farm of machines at Linode :) I'm happy on both fronts with this announcement from Linode.
Duplicate Charges: What Happened. How We Fixed It. How We’ll Do Better
Just in case, add a question mark at the end of the Quora URL (that prompts you to login) and refresh.

Links from within Quora miss that and then you are prompted to login, but if you add the question mark you can access the target without logging in.
They have legal entities in quite a few countries, but most of them are in countries that have labour-friendly rules. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/finance/payroll/#legal-ent...

Everywhere else it must be similar to freelancing. You give them receipts and they pay. But you still have a contract with the company. But if you both are in different countries I am not sure how much practical value does that contract have.
I am a developer for a startup in the Blockchain space. I definitely could code before that job. The non-compete covers any company that deals with Blockchain.
Ask HN: Which SaaS tools has your startup recently adopted and why?
Prepar3D – QualityWings Boeing 787 – Landing at Portland – 2K
I first really understood the importance of geodetic datums whilst in the Antarctic a few years ago. It’s generally treated as “nobody lives there, who gives a crap”, which means that all datums are significantly wrong there - meters out for both elevation and position, all over the place. Generally folks just pick the least worst - WGS 84.

This also highlighted the inaccuracies of satellite imaging, particularly when it comes to uninhabited islands far from other land - Franklin Island, for instance, is over a mile from where it appears to be on google earth - and on marine charts. The upshot was that we had to stand off a few miles from shore, and had a long journey to shore by dinghy, as at that point the captain was understandably unwilling to trust the charts at all. You’d think we’d have the whole world accurately mapped out by now - but there are still seemingly some significant mistakes in commonly accepted points of truth.
The presumption of innocence is an irrational bias that we introduce in criminal cases in order to favor false negatives over false positives. If you think that we should all be applying the presumption of innocence to each other all the time, then you've fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the principle that you think you're defending.

I think the original post didn't provide citations because Krauss's inappropriate behavior is well known and easy to verify from the sources in the Wikipedia article.

This discussion would be a lot easier if you'd just make your defense of Krauss, instead of accusing everyone else of being part of a mob. Krauss is not the victim. The victims are the women he harassed and the sex slaves of the pimp who bankrolled him, and who he publicly defended. Extraordinarily, you still talk vaguely as if there is some realistic doubt about any of this.
No pedestrians died in traffic accidents in Helsinki in 2019
If you’re not hooking up life saving hospital gear to them, you can safely rely on them until they are completely ruined.
As far as (64-bit binary) floats are concerned, 2.675 and 2.6749999999999998 are in fact the same thing:

$ python3
Python 3.7.3 (default, Jun 16 2019, 16:10:46)
[Clang 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.42.1)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 2.675 == 2.6749999999999998
True

So IF you have enough excess precision at every step, and IF you do the rounding right at each step, then you can get the same results using binary fractions as with decimal.

Of course, correct rounding is still an issue when using a decimal type, since round(sum(n for n in ns)) ≠ sum(round(n) for n in ns).
I'm surprised this is possible. I was expecting as soon as an app is installed on a device (android, iOS, etc.) No-one can tamper with it (except via update). I guess that means Apple could, if they wanted, delete apps from people's devices!
It's not "the same". GCP network quality and performance is much better.
That's my mistake, always ask a lawyer when you see sketchy stuff in a contract. My situation is similar, I'm a dev for a startup and the non-compete covers the domain/focus of the startup (Blockchain), I can still be a dev for other domain stuff.
What's much worse is they removed the precise and custom image size search. It's now impossible to search for a 32x32 icon or a 3200x1800 wallpaper. This dumbing down and feature removal is sad and silly.
> Google Search is leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else.

Nothing is too big to fail. If there's no direct competitor, an indirect one or a group could take over too.

> Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.

This reads to me as if Bing was the only backend they use, which isn't the case. According to Wikipedia they use multiple backends:

"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.", source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview
At some level of evolution of your company you want complicated thing like AWS IAM, because manual management of access becomes much more complicated.
Mocking an S3 object stream using Mockito
So is the neap tide level zero elevation?
Or, add a question mark at the end of the Url and refresh.
Study of a family cluster indicates person-to-person transmission of coronavirus [pdf]
How is that facebook gets away with this?
Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis and databases
All the mentioned things still show up in the latest feed.
"Good state-sponsored malware should never show up in a backup"

Fascinates me that state attacks are being normalised quite rapidly.
> If you want to export/import out of the country then you're going to need to follow all EU guidelines anyway.

Nonsense, the EU is just one of many potential trade partners and it does business with plenty of exporters who aren't forced to operate under EU rules.
> I never need to do anything, but I don't think these attacks are real anyway

What would it take to convince you an attack is real when it has been 100% mitigated and you never saw it in your backend infrastructure?

I ask as the engineering manager for DDoS protection at Cloudflare, and we stop a lot of attacks. But I feel this tension in the communication and product offering... if we do our job well enough that a customer's system does not see the attack, how does a customer see and feel the value?

An example is that as a reverse HTTP proxy we are implicitly also a full TCP proxy for HTTP traffic and so we receive significantly large SYN or ACK floods. We stop these 100% by virtue of being the terminating TCP proxy, but also by using connection tracking, anycast, XDP + eBPF, and so forth... you won't see a single one of these SYN or ACK packets hitting your infrastructure... so what would we have to communicate to convince you that the attack existed?
Comparing prices for bare metal with prices for shared infrastructure is pretty much useless though.
Is it? I'll never know because they also require logging in :)
Comparison with dedicated servers is comparing apples to oranges, but except that line your comment has a pretty strong point.
Ask HN: What is your opinion about employers providing free Virtual Healthcare?
A simple video chat could help employees and their families members to take care of their illnesses & medical conditions.

Yes, there is an cost to employers, it is not exactly free tough. But, bill is payed by employers who can get it done at very affordable rates, just by sheer economic of scale, which is lot less than what they pay for insurance.

What do you reckon?
Marketing goes a long way. It makes me wonder how many products/services are out there which are actually much better than the well-marketed ones, but we just don't hear about them because they don't have the same level of marketing.

I actually don't use DO, but I've used their articles many times after searching for how to setup some things on Linux. Their tutorials are excellent and have saved me a ton of time. I'd imagine those articles alone drive a lot of traffic to them.
VcXsrv works without pain! Thx a bunch!
Thanks for sharing. I am trying to build a in-memory database and need to rapidly pick up some object pool management ideas.
This is not great advice, and he defeats his own argument without realizing it. The main problem with this article is the damn title, which is absolutely awful advice. The body of the article ultimately contradicts the title. Anyone who didn't read the article but read the title might be more likely to use floating point numbers for money now.

> One piece of popular programming wisdom is "never using floating-point numbers for money." This has never made sense to me.

He then goes on to explain why it absolutely does and must make sense. It honestly seems like the author's entire point is about not accepting blanket statements.

> My summary: if you are doing some financial math that does not need to be accurate to the penny, just use floating point numbers.

Arguably all financial math needs to be accurate to the penny. I can't help but think he is maliciously trolling, trying to convince people of something that isn't true.
Eventually he'll die.. You'll die.. Maybe even I. Only ideas are bulletproof
Not in Finance, tech. No garden leaves. I'm a dev, fortunately, the non-compete does not cover programming or tech as a whole. I can't work in Blockchain and Fintech, which is the focus of my startup.
Well done Linode.

I wonder how quickly DigitalOcean will add this to remain competitive.

It's a huge win to have your hosting provider handle this and it's also nice to not be "forced" into using Cloudflare for such an important feature.
TIL: A sentinel value is sometimes known as an "Elephant in Cairo", due to a joke where this is used as a physical sentinel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_Cairo
Why do so many languages not have a decimal type as a primitive value? Is it legacy? Is it because a decimal type must fundamentally be an object that wraps some other primitive values?
I wonder why? this has not been implemented across, why is that only Amazon and Apple are the companies doing it?
This looks really cool and haven't seen this before - thanks for sharing. I've updated the description on Kaggle.
I was on this step. After some time you'll hate fail2ban. Big part of attacks comes from hacked "regular desktops", by blocking their IP permanently you will block access for legitimate (and non-hacked) users - providers often change user's IP.
What's a good alternative to Google?
Google was sued by Getty and had to make the change.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
Classifiers don’t need to be 100% accurate. They might need 100% precision, or 100% recall, and likely just for a controlled set of data thrown at them. The spam filter in your email client doesn’t need high accuracy, just high precision. The “recommendation system” in your favorite product doesn’t need high accuracy, it needs good content to surface to users.

And there’s a spectrum of what constitutes a classifier. It might be a fancy deep model, or more likely just be some threshold functions (perhaps crafted based upon the results from some deep model that’s not too accurate and not yet ready for production).

The hype is that these classifiers are all 90% accurate now and thus all software is going to turn into AI. That’s garbage and can disenfranchise people who don’t understand AI. That storyline only benefits investors.

What’s different today versus 2012 is we have some deep research models with impressive results. But more importantly, software has compounded itself. There are tools to store and mine data. Mobile compute is also now closer to where laptops were years ago. Competition requires taking hold of these developments in order to innovate. Products will inevitably become more intelligent, AI hype or not.
The Silver Stallion -- by James Branch Cabell

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label."
1. Go to Africa.
2. Put an elephant in Cairo.
3. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
4. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west,
5. During each traverse pass:

1. Catch each animal seen.
2. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
3. Stop when a match is detected.

6. If you are in Cairo, then there are no elephants in Africa (other than the one you placed there).
How would you suggest to store and calculate things like taxes? For example in NYC the retail sales tax is 8.735%. Obviously the final amount could be stored as an integer in cents, but I'm talking about the tax rate and the calculations of it. I guess you need to calculate the tax for each item, round it to cents (and I assume the rules on how you round can vary by jurisdiction, so it's not just calling your language's round function), multiply that by the quantity of that item (good luck if the quantity can be a decimal value), then sum each line item to get the total tax.
"Pulling a MySpace" means messing up your product so badly that your users abandon ship.
"Jumping the Shark" means taking your story to such incredible heights that it becomes unbelievable.
Not the same thing.
Unfortunately it's 32nds of a 100th, so they still don't work in floats (because floats are stored normalised, as 1.x in binary).

Eg. 117.125
2020. The world is ending? Here's a great google maps article to take up 10 minutes!
NASA releases video of first space-baked cookies
Highlight-to-copy works inside the Terminal app, it just doesn't use the public pasteboard. You Shift-Command-V to paste. Dunno whether MMB would work too, or could be configured to do it.
People would probably find out what hardware they use for benchmarks and optimize for that, leading to performance decrease for many othes
> I would argue that financial math by definition needs to be accurate to the penny.

Yes, indeed. There is no such thing as "financial math that does not need to be accurate to the penny". I wonder if OP has ever worked with a bookkeeper...