skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t think i’ve ever taken Media Lab “seriously” — or if i did, my age still started with a 1.

To take media lab seriously is to miss the point. They aren’t supposed to be serious! If i may coin a term, they’re not even doing blue sky, they’re doing crack-of-dawn. 99% of what they think about will turn out to be a funny shadow on the wall from the laundry hamper that looked cool for a minute until the room brightened up.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, though we do have a narrative around funding right now that discourages silliness.

Media Lab falls over when they try to sing the serious song instead of their true one, and often falls over quite hard. They should not have to try, but such is the way of the world right now.
There plenty of OS that aren't POSIX clones, Windows is not alone.

Anyone that cares about bash on Windows can install mingw or WSL, preferably WSL2.

Tablets don't have CLIs by default.

Even if UNIX clones ruled the world, chsh is a thing.
It's not only a software thing; Amazon has been accused (or sued?) for anti-competitive behavior by creating "Amazon Essentials" version of lots of very popular items being sold through their site, even advertising the Amazon branded item right on the original product's detail page.
The Deceptively Simple Number Sparking Coronavirus Fears
> They're answering two different questions: what do vocal customers say they want and what does the mean customer actually do?

The only question they're answering is "how do we maximize our profit?". If that happens to mean adding features users want that's just a nice side effect.
That's a really bad sign for mainstream journals.

At the end of the day when considering the behavior of large numbers of heterogeneous users, UX is king for all data consumption. The pricepoint matters, but people would use SciHub even if traditional journals somehow moved to free publication... If the UX is better for SciHub.
Yeah, I already tried this too although not on my own old project, but for a SaaS company I was working for (that would generate a Kubernetes cluster automatically for you with either DNS or HTTP challenge).
Accusations have been going around since the early 2000s but I don't think any governments released the hard evidence to the public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Espionage_...
Our iPad 2 (bought new in 2011) is still being used on a daily basis by our kids. Battery life is still more than sufficient and it's not too slow to run some games, YouTube or Netflix. I think it's the longest we've done with a single electronic device ever!
There's a broader recognition in academia the last few years that most of the academic effort the past century has been to understand people from an urban, centralized core perspective. That's where the funding dollars, the cool architecture, and the big stories are. It's very difficult to discuss non traditional peoples in that sort of worldview though. Things like occupy, Mexican/European border refugees, and Asian (semi-)nomads all fall outside that category, so there have been a number of attempts by academics to construct theories that put these people back at the center of their lives where they can be analyzed/discussed, rather than trying to discuss them as the products of some other events off somewhere else.

A lot of people take issue with this sort of framing though because it smells of postmodernism.
Or, government evaluation of security is half-politics, half-theater, and they just don't give a damn.
Consuming an API with the Go Programming Language
I'm in the middle of rewatching Battlestar Galactica, and this subject is at the core of the series.

Where do other mammals fit in your schema? Do you believe in some sort of biological essentialism? Or are only humans with caring about?
I know two people like that. Both absolute genius level but for some reason the only way they can think about making money is by somehow moving it from someone else's pockets to theirs without creating any value. If they spent 10% of their talent on value creation and the rest on the business end they'd be doing much better than they do now. Really wasteful.
Spy on Your Cheating Spouse
Oh Look, More Giant ISPs Taking Taxpayer Money for Unfinished Networks
Can you point out where I said I want the old king's cross back, please? You seem to continually choose to interpret things in the most polarised terms that fit whatever narrative it is you wish to read.

My stated concern here is in the density and pace of development - the change in what (I feel and believe) should be a more organically-grown locality, rather than some mass vision impressed upon the area.
Keeping stuff working across updates is a niche use case?
Considering how much arable land is used to produce animal feed (about 50%) there is quite a lot of room for improvement, especially considering how inefficient meat production is.
I would try to set up Remote Desktop. It is amazing how nice it is to have high powered computation available on a light weight, long battery life machine. Simply VPN / VNC in, and you are set to go. Also, iOS 13 supports any Bluetooth mouse, so that may help as well.
It’s interesting how success & potential is defined.

iPad generates ~$20B/year in revenue with huge margins. [1]

If iPad was a standalone business, it be the 156th largest company in the world by revenue (Fortune). [2]

How can having a single product where only 155 entire companies are bigger than it, “not live up to its potential”?

[1] https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/10/apple-results-64b-in-reve...

[2] https://fortune.com/fortune500/2019/search/
Yep, seems you are correct, noscript shows it being blocked but I had the 3rd party scripts from https://cdn.jsdelivr.com/ whitelisted. Thought it might have simply been a splash page.
One was usable in production long before the other. Years even.
> I wonder what can you do to stop a big company from devouring your share in the SaaS market

Make a product that seamlessly integrates with the rest of their ecosystem so they're more likely to acquire you than replace you.
When he asks for a central hub to direct drivers, he might be asking for a central hub that optimises according to a system-wide objective. I'm pretty sure that Google Maps just tells each driver what it reckons best for them individually.
How does accuracy compare to what you’re using now?
Yeah Apple is missing a huge market opportunity there.

I've always wanted a tower mac but the new Mac Pro is not the machine for me. I just want the specs of an iMac on a tower.

A couple of years ago I ended up buying an iMac 5K since I needed to upgrade my old MBP and the Apple laptop landscape was so desolate. I'm very happy with it for dev and design work but I tried to use it for music production and it's not the machine for that. Cooling is bad for anything other than short bursts. Even at 30% of sustained CPU work for audio the fans turn on and are quite annoying. I ended up building a Ryzen Windows PC which cost me as much as an i7 Mini but is even more powerful than the base Mac Pro.
Western news media are currently reporting ~100 dead and ~4,500 infected (though that number is surely much higher in reality). This is a ~2% mortality rate.

Can we naïvely extrapolate that we expect ~4,000 casualties from ~190,000 infections?

I'm not good at understanding numbers, but I'm sure someone here can chime in with a better way to read this.
Haha if that existed the AI could just emulate infinite monkeys on typewriters to create papers it could then filter for the plausible, reproducible ones to publish. Hm, maybe it would have to adversarially train the emulated monkeys into monkey researchers to get better throughput.

Seriously though our beloved AI doesn't have reliable object permanence yet. It can't read now and it certainly won't be reading research papers for a while. Be nice, give it some time to grow.
Thanks for creating this post! Fascinating read. You mentioned in the post that a lot of the links in there would probably right t away with time - do you think there's any value in archiving the links and linking to the wayback versions so they're preserved for education for posterity?
Malice is a loaded term.

When Amazon tells you they want to buy you, never sign and come out with a competing product months later we feel malice.

But in this case we don't becauce Microsoft copied an existing product and open source it we say no malice exists.

Big companies are copying smaller successful products on mass. It is not illegal, it's not out of malice. But its getting tiresome. How many products can facebook buy or copy and crush before we change the rules. Avoiding this was one of the pillars of copyright long ago. Now we have copyright for and copying trade secret powered development for big players.
They can't open source all the backdoors and DRM in there.
Does that explain why, though? It explains that it's there, and someone obviously wanted it to be, but it still doesn't get at the why. I've found that most of the logic I'm left scratching my head at is due to some business rules that there's no better way to deal with - even if a test exists for it I still can't figure out what the tests purpose was, other than to just verify that it's working.
Without any form of validation that the shell script I'm running is actually from the software vendor in question. That trust is even further stretched when the request is 301 redirected to another host entirely.

Between custom domain names, TLDs, Let's Encrypt (I love Let's Encrypt, but it provides is encryption, not trust) and cheeky developers using combinations of those, how can I really know that a script coming from (fictional example) https://install.dock.er is actually the Docker company?
The CIA is well known for recruiting journalists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
My big question was "how much", and TFA was really thin on that.

The actual article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...

And the answer, from the abstract:
we estimate an 8.3% increase in external carapace dissolution over the last two decades
Ah, that might be the reason why NVidia is adopting Ada for their firmware, ebay and Netflix decided to use D for some of their projects, the Turkish government decided to invest into Delphi for their education system,...

By the way, it is a list of languages with compilers that currently outperform Swift.
Wrong. You are trusting much more than that, including network components outside of your control and the author's.

Plus you are pushing forward the bad pattern and being part of the problem.

You are encouraging other authors and users to do the same.
I'm a computational biologist and Excel has been the bane of my existence for 20 years. We've "known better" for all of that time, but I still deal with people passing around Excel files of data or having common spreadsheets on shared drives (or now Dropbox shared). We all "know better", but Excel is often the first thing that people try to keep track of data, and once a system works, there is just too much inertia to change.

(For what it's worth, I feel the same way about people who try to send me RDS files with dataframes stored as R objects).

However, I think that whoever decided to name genes "OCT4" and "SEPT7" have to share some of the blame here too...
It's not a server in the true sense of the word. We piggyback on push notifications (proxied through our backend) to respond to requests. So really your phone's polling for requests, but it's a poll that it's already doing for push notifications.
I don't think I've seen an iPad used outside a restaurant payment system since they came out.

And I think whoever owns that restaurant might not be that smart if you consider the competition.

I like the idea of Microsoft's surface. But I haven't used one.
"Liverpool Street, Kings Cross, Holloway - all places once warm and familiar to me are now cold, oppressive masses of dense, synthetic development."

That seems like a broadly negative reaction to the changes. If you think the changes have been for the worse, then it seems fair to presume that you'd rather they hadn't happened.

If you actually like the changes overall, then we are in agreement.

As for organic change - well, Kings Cross had decades of opportunity to deshitify organically, and it didn't. How long do you wanna wait?
Yeah. I think platforms should become neutral after certain adoption. It gives the company lot of unnecessary leverage. Apple can block off APIs to their apps only, google can do it, microsoft can do it, Amazon can (though they don't have as big of a share of online retail market but still enough).
You do need to control both the key and the channel in this case.
How to Overcome Procrastination by Understanding the Fogg Behavior Model
Yeah I think overt exploitation is what happens when you have a situation where there is very thin or no layer of management between the most savvy players of the game ( professors, founders or VCs ) and fresh meat ( engineers or grad students ). They're both situations where the predators walk freely amongst the prey and take as they please. Also SV was an extension of academic-military-industrial complex, and they both engage in high risk projects that don't necessarily pan out.
Then this comment isn't for you, but rather other HN readers.

If you believe in the importance of science, and if you're a software engineer at FAAAANG, then you can afford a 75+45 TB (scihub+libgen) hard drive array. If you are making $300,000/year then a $5-10k hobby project to store distilled human progress is something that you could make financially possible for yourself.

Consider doing this, because this might be the last opportunity to get a relatively complete copy. Just having a copy and letting it sit for 10 or 20 years can be hugely valuable to the world, let alone your community.
GTK environments (IE gnome) owe at least as much to corporations, perhaps more so. In theory GTK is community owned, but in practice it is big companies calling the shots.
That's what distributions are for.

Just write software that is not unnecessarily difficult to package.
Likely true.

They were able to get rid of a lot of Windows 1.0/Dos back-compat junk with the release of x64 (due to loss of native 16 bit support). I'm sure there's still some though.
My favorite graphics in these slides are the revenue/user graphs that show occasional, apparently randomly inserted, MoM downturns. Could be an effort to make them seem more "realistic", even though I would be surprised if it were possible to make predictions with that kind of precision.
have you tried DueFocus?
Victory Gardens worked because they had a patriotic, pro-war, pro-America appeal. Sort of a "Keep America Great" thing.

I suspect there's zero chance that this type of sentiment could be harnessed for "Hey, let's offset carbon emissions [of whom the #1 emitter is our chief political rival, China]"

In fact that's the biggest problem with broadening support for decarbonization in general. The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China, which billionaires exported thousands of American jobs to, profiting from looser environmental regulations in the process. Of course the average American outside of the SF ivory tower is skeptical about changing his or her own habits to clean up that mess!
Yes, and I wanted an answer from the guy who made stuff with masking tape and string (and seemed to get good feedback) and wanted to know how he took negative feedback from his prototypes.
The comparison isn't about hardware speed though, its about software versions. I had an iPad as well. Then successive updates which made it slower and slower, and eventually older software stopped working.

Compare to Android, where I can still run many modern apps on old hardware with Android 2.3, or at least could at the time my iPad was almost completely obsoleted and I sold it off.

Its like if you were forced to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista on your 512MB laptop - which could handle Windows XP just fine but couldn't handle Vista, even though yes Vista came with many new features.
I just realized my older daughter recently received a trusty Nexus S (the one with a curved screen) as a media player. In airplane mode and a number of apps disabled, battery life is decent. After some initial complaining, she adopted it :)
How can you know what you're "curl|sh'ing"? If you're piping it, it's impossible to know what you're getting and executing. That's the problem.
Show HN: Debugger that generates video visualizations for algorithm learning
Ex-Windows boss on what Microsoft thought about the iPad
Yubico Reveals First Biometric YubiKey at Microsoft Ignite (2019-11-04)
For doing this sort of thing, most people can get by with a Kindle Fire, which are constantly on sale for $30-40. They are not anywhere near as good as an iPad, but for pure consumption they are more than adequate.
...not to mention that (some) distributions do extensive security and legal compliance reviews...
U.S. map looks off. The case you have near Washington D.C. should be in Snohomish county, Washington. You should have two cases in CA, one in Orange county and the other in Los Angeles county, not in San Joaquin.
You don't need to write a server to use it. You need to recognize you're using the wrong tool to solve your problem.

I've used SQLite as an embedded database, as a log file, it's even possible to use it as a virtual filesystem in tcl starkits. But a high demand, multiaccess data solution it is not. Yes you can make it work but you need to justify the costs of doing all that server work when you could just use a SQL server that already meets your needs.
A package is signed with a known key, so you can at least trust that the script being executed is from the developer.
The eminent researchers in Distributed Systems are so interesting. I find Edsger Dijkstra and Leslie Lamport to be very colorful and inspiring characters.

Edsger Dijkstra was a pioneer in computing. Yet he lived like a luddite. He did not own a television or go to the movies and did not even own a personal computer until much later in his career! He enjoyed playing the piano and left behind a large amount of papers and documentation - both personal and technical.

Leslie Lamport wrote one seminal paper after another in the field of distributed computing and concurrency. He co-created LaTex and the Paxos algorithm. He then rigorously defined the temporal logic of actions (TLA) which is a mathematically correct basis for a checking a program's behaviour/models at a high level. I took his TLA+ web course recently. The presentation of the course is fantastic. His mirthful yet sincere attitude really shines through in it.

Are there any pioneering researchers who you find fascinating?
what's your opinion on package management communications? couldn't an eavesdropper on the network deduce quite a bit about your system's configuration? distribution of dates and sizes of packages downloaded seems like quite a leak.

perhaps package servers and package management software should round up the package size to hide the identity of the package? use oblivious transfer to hide the identity of the package from the package server itself?
I don't get this kind way of thinking. We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants.

This article even mention it, obviously on the last place in a strange way "and to advanced nuclear plants with zero emissions". As if there were some non-advanced nuclear plants that have non-zero emission.

Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. In addition, in large parts of the World they just does not make sense as there is not enough sunny/windy days.

For nuclear energy we have everything - knowledge, infrastructure, experience.

What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Eco people fought vigorously nuclear energy for years and now we are where we are. Time to say that they've made a costly mistake and move on.
The more times I read this, the deeper it gets, and the more I appreciate modern machine learning.
Good post, nice roundup of some of the ways standups can go wrong and right.

I do think it skipped a common severe corruption of the daily standup, which is a daily application of micromanagement and deadline pressures.

I’ve heard about successful daily scrum meetings but I now believe the inherent chemical instability of this practice makes it too dangerous for all but a few very disciplined teams and only when absolutely necessary.

To me, scrum is the nitroglycerin of management methodologies. People who think they can handle it safely probably can’t. It’s wildly tempting for managers or stakeholders who are concerned with deadlines to hijack the meetings
Splice: The Programming Language for Extraterrestrial Applications
Is anyone familiar with the economics of the 3G,4G,5G ... XG rollout?

Are the margins thin and production slow so that multiple suppliers are needed? If someone does not trust a supplier why it is hard to just keep them out completely? Is it more about politics beyond the network rollout?
What do you feel that means in relation to what the person you're replying said?
I have a commercial qt license (paid for by my job). What is stopping me from downloading the latest QT LTS release and uploading it to my distros package system? I'm not clear if anything actually stops this.
So what is its point?
It's essentially a web app/UI that allows advertisers to actually set up their advertising campaigns that run on devices.

DSPs are integrated with a host of a data providers and exchanges that give advertisers the ability to target people based on location, demographics, what articles they're reading, etc.
It's still extremely raw, but I've done some work on decentralized access to sci-hub. Given an index of scihub ID <> DOI which can be generated from the DB dump made available by libgen https://github.com/frrad/scimag it's possible to selectively download only the parts of the torrent required to get the article you are looking for.

Check it out, contributions welcome. https://github.com/frrad/skyhub
I typically load it up in a web browser, have a peek to make sure it looks sane, and then go for it. If I'm particularly paranoid I can wget it then execute it. But if it's something I'm familiar with, curl|sh is fine.

Like I said, it's subjective. No such statement as "curl|sh is bad" or "curl|sh is fine" can be accurate on its own.
I don't agree with the article at all. The point the author is making has less to do with OSS and more with competition. Business is never 'fair'. The reason people flock to AWS/Azure is because of ease of use, integration with other systems etc.. The burden of maintaining two (or more) ecosystems just because one is 'a little better' isn't worth it. Sure there will always be an alternative that fits the product/team better.

Besides, MS and alike have thousands of products and services. Are they supposed to point to every-other-alternative out there before they enter the market?
>I wonder what can you do to stop a big company from devouring...

Two things:

1) As the other poster said, make your product so compelling that the behemoth company simply acquires you.

2) Try hard to make sure you're not competing against them, nor will they decide to compete against you in the future.

So either do such a great job you get bought out (which will probably be a negative in the long term for your users, but financially it should be a huge win for you), or just don't bother, and find something else to do that doesn't compete with a huge tech company.
Recent headlines, one in 2014, the rest in 2012.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but isn't thinking that executing unsigned script (bash, js, …) on your computer is somehow inherently less secure than running some binary is nothing but a superstition?
FreeBSD and 4.4 BSD are not the same thing. You seem bitter. Why are you bitter about something like that?