skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All technology goes through two somewhat independent cycles, continuously:

1) The bloat cycle

2) The disruption cycle

The bloat cycle is where you have a “platform” that does more and more until it has a lot of features that most users don’t need. Eventually the cost of supporting those random features gets too high and there is pressure on people to hack together an alternative micro-platform that does some arbitrary subset of things. If that subset is actually a superset of “must-have features” for a large number of users the micro-platform becomes a new platform and the cycle repeats.

The disruption cycle is when there is a singular feature that is prohibitive to add to the framework, because of past decisions. Businesses working on the platform will just work around the hole, or fill the hole in a hacky way. This creates pressure for someone to create a new platform that solves that one unsolved problem. It can leave many solved problems unsolved and still ascend to dominance under conditions famously described in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.

This would be something like “multiple users work on the same surface” or “works the same-ish on literally all the OS’es” features of the web.

These cycles might seem pointless, but they’re not because you end up in a different place than where you started. You get some fundamental simplifications and new features each time you go around.

Ideally as a user you want to time your entry into the cycle so you don’t have to deal with the regression phase.
Qt would be an example of a desktop UI framework that was around 20 years ago, and is still popular today. It's also far more mature and stable than Electron etc, and better documented.

I don't know whether there are more Electron apps these days around than Qt apps, but it's certainly neither outdated nor obscure.
Mosquito net. Modern cities may not find use for them but there is a pretty big chunk of world's population for whom this simple item is indispensable. Its cheap. Protects against diseases like malaria, dengue etc. And definitely helps with getting a good sleep.
Many villagers in India build it themselves for the community and i hope it stays that way. I know its is popular in the subcontinent (India,pakistan, bangladesh, sri lanka.) Would love to know if other countries also use them
> the UI output is entirely based on your state

How could anything else be true?
My roommate and I went to that COMDEX in 1992 specifically to see this device. When we got to the booth they wouldn’t let us in, so my roommate, thinking much more quickly than me, told the dude at the booth entrance that we were developers (in fact we were juniors in the BYU CS department). Our status immediately switched to “VIP” and we were escorted inside, handed a device, and left on our own to play with it for half an hour.

I thought I was seeing the future of computing.

Unfortunately, Microsoft was also at COMDEX, in force, with its “Pen Windows” product. Which was clunky and stupid and very clearly only meant to crush GO. And it was clear even then to me as a 20 year old that that strategy was going to work.
React, Vue and Angular can all step through debuggers.
So here's a dumb example I just came up with.

Let's say we know that x = 3^a 5^b. It's a trivial fact at this point that x isn't divisible by 2 (by the fact that prime factorization is unique).

Disclaimer: I'm not actually good enough with lean to prove this sort of statement quickly... I could be under or even over selling lean here, hence why I phrased my original comment as a question about whether I was missing something.

If I was trying to prove this formally, I'd have to say something like (in computer speak): Suppose x is divisible by 2, x = 2 * y, y has a prime factorization p by <theorem in library>, and 2 * p is therefore a prime factorization of x (ouch, already not sure how to specify that statement). 2 * p = x = 3^a 5^b, so 2 * p = 3^a 5^b. Both are prime factorizations, prime factorizations are unique by <theorem>, therefore both expressions should have the same number of 2 terms, but the one on the left has at least one, and the one on the right has 0, so they don't. This is a contradiction, so x is not divisible by two.

You see why I'd like a computer to fill in the long formal proof instead of doing it myself? It's not because the statement might be false, it's because it's a pain to phrase everything in terms of the re-usable result about unique prime factorization.

While I'm disclaiming things, disclaimer 2: I'm a hobbyist, not a real mathematician.
World’s most valued edtech startup Byju’s raises USD$200m from General Atlantic
You can actually check on the webpage when the simulation is running: on my machine it shows around 17 Hz, so it's about 60000x slower than a 1 MHz 6502.

For comparison, the C reimplementation of the transistor level simulation, running unthrottled and without visualization (I think that's the main performance killer) is about 150x slower on a modern CPU (according to the readme here: https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502)
Similarly, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE are all alive and well and haven't changed much in the last decade, either.
Mitigating Content Marketing on Lobste.rs
Detergent is more harsh on your skin than (real) soap.
Mate desktop has been fairly stable (the default green tinted icon set is gross but fixable). I switched to it after Ubuntu long term support, and Debian on my other computer dropped gnome 2. Just didn't like gnome 3 or unity. Cinnamon was okay but at the time was still coupled to the brain dead ideas the gnome team had been perusing at the time. I haven't checked it out recently enough to know if it had improved.
The idea is nice, but basically zero of these laptop ideas have turned into a worthwhile execution.

Intel sockets offer at most one upgrade cycle, and of late require a firmware update for that, so really the upgrade potential is from a low end chip to a high end chip in the same architecture, but the socketed systems often cost a lot more than a soldered system.

The GPU modules are also subject to the continued viability of the form factor. Recent trends for reduced GPU power consumption make this more likely to hold up, but still kind of iffy.

Something with real potential for upgrades would be a standardized motherboard size, including z-height, and cooler positioning; then you could swap in a new board and reuse the chasis/display. Of course, you would need to standardize the type and position of display connections and connectors for keyboard and pointing device and battery and what not. I don't think the manufacturers would gain much though --- if it was useful to them for this to be standard across models and model years, we would see some of them with an internal standard instead of every model being similar but not the same on the inside.
There's no universally accepted definition but most biologists would say that viruses are not alive because they lack metabolism.
The wheels under the suitcase. Somebody came up with that idea after we got a man on the moon.
I would guess that it's a bit easier. With what I was proposing, you just need to be able to infer the semantics of certain words. With the Winograd problem, you need to grasp the semantics of all the words, and then use that knowledge to infer a pronoun's antecedent based on what yields a more sensical overall interpretation of the sentence.
I would like to see a chat application implemented with just forms that submits stuff. How are you going to get new messages?
Pre Randal Stephenson AT&T when they were still a tech company that, you know, actually liked tech.
I'm not sure I see these training issues as a problem with the methods and processes we use to train pilots. Rather, this seems like information which was kept from pilots in order to avoid costly training altogether. The methods we use to train pilots have resulted in consistent safety gains even as the cost to fly for passengers has gone down.

My personal take is that the industry and regulatory incentives which led to the lack of information to pilots is the problem, not the methods by which we do train pilots to handle automation.
The Fabulist of Auschwitz
Not true at all. My previous startup was written about and we did not pay a dime.
I Had a Gloriously Wild Childhood. That's Why I Wrote 'How to Train Your Dragon'
The BA callsign isn't "Speedbird" for nothing. :)
The benefits of washing your hands depends on a fairly large set of other improvements and inventions.

For most of history the water available was frequently contaminated with human and animal waste, along with whatever your local tanner was dumping in. Fixing that was a prerequisite to making hand washing useful.

And then there is the soap issue. While soap certainly has a long history, it was often unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Cloths were traditionally washed with urine.
According to the DMCA, even if it’s up for public viewing, the mere act of making a copy is theft. For example, if the MPAA posted a full length movie on YouTube for free viewing, and you made a copy, you’ve committed a crime. That’s ignoring the fact that you already do make a copy: your browser cache. It’s perverted, but it’s what the law is.
One of the things I really liked about working for AWS was the accessibility of the S-team. Even as a fairly junior engineer I was in meetings where you could get their opinions, see where they were going, and understand their goals.

AWS has a lot of things I don't love (not least of all, their policy towards developing games in your spare time), but they had a ton of rigor around setting goals while still giving dev teams the opportunity to (mostly?) drive the details of what those goals were. (I've heard this is maybe not the case in all AWS teams, but I had some great local leadership as well.)

If they could fix a couple of deeply set cultural issues (open source and side projects were definitely hard or impossible), not lean quite so heavily on their employees (I was oncall 24/7 for months in the worst times and received no extra comp), and disconnect themselves from whatever is going on with the retail side's treatment of labor.... Well, I'm not sure I'd come back, actually. They'd have to change quite a bit more -- the promo process, the stack ranking/"top grading" twice yearly, better benefits and comp...

But I do genuinely miss working in the AWS org. There's a lot of incredible things to learn there. While I don't see myself coming back, the lessons I learned there have been absolutely invaluable.
>and more expensive than a bit of bent wire if you FDM it

Yeah, but the whole point of 3D printing is that you can make small-scale custom runs that would be exorbitantly expensive with traditional manufacturing.

You can have paperclips that double as markers/tags/have your name on them/send a message, e.g.[1].

Same goes for other things. 3D printing is a way to make custom things at small scale on demand, but automating away most of the steps after the design stage.

[1]http://www.mkrclub.com/2016/02/make-football-paper-clip-fast...
By the time the user presses the save button more than 100ms have passed and the user probably has filled in 10 other fields. You can avoid this frustration with a little bit of Javascript.
Maybe it's all just a scheme to funnel Saudi oil money into the US economy.
Android and IPhone both stole from various less popular phones/tablets that had better screens, icon based launchers, and app stores. Motorola had a few (not popular in the USA) and Nokia has the n770 (800 x 480). I went to OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) in summer and 2006 and begged the substantial number of Nokia folks to add a WAN chip to their Nokia 770.

The n770 had a better screen than the first iphone (800x480), actually ran apps (the first iphone was web only), and had an app store. In particular Maemo mapper was crazy better than anything apple offered for many years.
Which is pretty ironic, really. Whoever did the hacking for the US could be charged by China for basically the same thing the DOJ just charged the Chinese hackers for.
You generated this with GPT, right?
> Most of the anti-religious sentiment is expressed by invisible downvotes and flags, so people don't generally see how great it is here.

Downvotes and flags aren't invisible, they're shown by comments becoming grey and [dead], respectively (the latter can only be seen by people who have that option enabled, which I do). The points also influence the ordering in a thread, and I often see posts respectful of religion at the top.

What I also see are people seeing their own posts downvoted and deciding it must be due to a particular reason, which I often disagree with.

> I'm not convinced. People will be even less educated on what our religion teaches, so there'll just be more general confusion. As Fulton Sheen once put it, there aren't 100 people in the whole USA who hate the Catholic Church, but a great many who hate what they believe the Catholic Church to be. Misconception and misrepresentation will only increase over time.

People don't hate what they don't know; how many people today hate the Manicheans? People hate what they feel as threatening. The Catholic Church increasingly doesn't, in my opinion.

> The mysteries of _why were not actual mysteries, they're illusional, for lack of a better word.

Not everyone shares the fetish of the authentic. Of course they're an illusion.
The code is really just a pythonized version of the dot format. The real innovation is the fancy-looking icons. When using graphviz directly we have to futz around with images in the filesystem alongside the dot file, in order to avoid simple boxes.
With herbstluftwm I address that issue by just doing a split; you don't necessarily need to put anything in a given pane, so it's possible to just resize the pane for the window about which you actually care, and ignore the unused space entirely.

Of course, I typically end up sticking a terminal or editor or chat window or music player or something in there anyway, because why not?
It isn't exactly advertised as an incomplete alpha product. Everything in Windows 10 funnels you into the new interface. The fact that the first-class option for system configuration is woefully incomplete is pretty hard to forgive. This is the only supported version of the flagship product of a fortune 500 company, not an early-access Steam game.
> Regarding politics, I wonder if another way to interpret this is people who find San Francisco too liberal (or unsupportive of Trump) and want to move somewhere more representative of how a majority of the country (however you define that) thinks.

I'll provide a personal anecdote...

I lean on the conservative side, and lived in San Francisco for a few years. I never had any particular desire to live somewhere else just to be around others who believe that the nation can be more effectively governed with lower taxes and a leaner bureaucracy; or those who believe that abortion is murder. However, in the last five years, there's been a large uptick in representation of a very opinionated, very loud, and increasingly violent minority of those associated with the left. The kind of people who will call you a Nazi for not agreeing with them, or for suggesting in any context that a person ought to be responsible for their own well-being.

I think I'm not alone in stating that was a factor in my moving away from the area. I did not even vote for Trump in 2016 by the way, and I left in 2017.
Delphi is "textual" as well - the designer works with text files (*.dfm) that describe the component tree. Very similar to JSON, but with more Pascal-like syntax. People mostly used the designer because it was easier - but then again, in that era, it was also common for people to use e.g. Dreamweaver to write HTML.
Twin Breaker, the Official Game of PlayStation Podcast Sacred Symbols, Grabs Rel
Hell, O'World
Another idea was to use beams of Neutrinos and go point-to-point. It's been demonstrated[1] already.

[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/neutrino-based-communication-is-a...
I wrote 2 of them.
MagneticReadHead.jl
and MixedModeDebugger.jl

MagneticReadhead is interesting as it is a purely compiled debugger via extensive source code transfroms.
Same magic that powers Zygote.jl for AutoDiff.
Also same general concept as is behind Jax.

It has huge compile time overhead, so is not practically usable.
In that way it is the opposite of Debugger.jl, rather than being slow at runtime it is very slow at JIT compiling.

MixedModeDebugger.jl is a proof of concept.
A small Source Code Transform to allow the debugger to run entirely compiled until it is going to do something, then it swaps to interpreted just like Debugger.jl
Early benchmarks are extremely promising.
But it's not really hardened enough for use.
You're right. Compare that to the random classics in which you have no interest on which you have to write a report.
Is that still the case for ripping? I was under the impression that all you need now is a copy of https://www.makemkv.com/

edit: skimming their forum I see mentions of firmware flashing/patching so I believe that's answered my question.
Long-Term Learning Requires New Nerve Insulation
Coronavirus Genome Posted on the UCSC Genome Browser
Thank you for saying this. I think a lot of people probably haven't felt the pain of actually acquiring a trademark and branded domain these days. My personal opinion is that .com domains should be a minimum $100 per year. At this price point the number of available domains would skyrocket effectively overnight as it became untenable for squatters to hold on to them. If you can't afford $100/year for a domain to be used for something actually useful, you probably don't need that domain in the first place.

Of course at that price point, HTTPS should be the default and the extra profits should go somewhere other than ICANN.
If you want access, please send an email to [turing_ AT _microsoft _DOT_ com]. Remove underscores and spaces.
So the simple of it, is that it links parts of memory together? Just like human memory? Trying to keep the most valid parts of it together.
With 3-5 people you end up building your own UI framework.
There are still great public libraries in many parts of the world (and certainly all over the USA). Why wouldn’t kids get to experience them?
> essentially zero innovation

The innovation is in bringing these products to market and keeping multiple companies viable while doing so. NO ONE else has done the things he has. Put up or shut up. Edit: I'm not a fanboy and there are a lot of things about him I dislike, but the casual dismissals just irk me. If he's so unoriginal, you go do what he did.
I Was Wrong about Nix
Recently I was reading about digital signal processing and the difference between finite and infinite response filters.

Although probably not the way to teach it, it seems like there's a close relationship? A FIR filter is matrix multiplication on delayed inputs with a limited amount of delay, while infinite response filters use feedback in a way that seems similar to memoization of a recursive function on all previous inputs.
One of my favorite talks ever, up there with Munger's "psychology of human misjudgment"

Disagree with the conclusion (that climate change isn't worth worrying about)

But models aren't science
I think a more true representation of "brandlessness" is AmazonBasics. It's not exactly correct to think of the lack of a logo being the lack of a brand -- brandlessness is the brand, logo or not. On the other hand, having no phony story about your products ("Handmade by artisans in Nicaragua") or marketing ("Better than 99% of our competitors!") and just existing is how to communicate brandlessness.

"Brandless.com" was never what it told you it was... it was a brand with a logo that told you it wasn't, and it stocked mediocre products. Buying from them was supposed to "feel" like "anti-consumerism", and they told people they didn't invest in marketing so they could give customers better deals. Unfortunately, Brandless actually wasn't a radical rethinking of how we market organic kale to the 27 year old tech set.
True. On your last point, I think that actually makes pads a more significant invention over tampons and menstrual cups, because it allowed women in very conservative cultures where losing your virginity before marriage is considered taboo, to still able to go about their normal daily actives during periods. Interesting me and friends from elementary school in China were never taught to use tampons, tampons and menstrual cups didn't become a thing until very recently.
Yes, these things keep us up at night as well :-).
Maybe I am not understanding your point.

Out of the box, given a sequence of n tokens, BERT returns a tensor of dimension (n_tokens, hidden_size) [1]. Where hidden size has no relationship with the vocabulary. You can then fine-tune a model on this representation to do various tasks, e.g. sentiment classification. Thus BERT is said to be a language representation model.

Out of the box, given a sequence, GPT-2 returns a distribution over the vocabulary [2] from which you can draw to find the most likely next word. Thus GPT-2 is said to be a language generation model.

You could of course play with the masking token of BERT call it recursively to force BERT to generate something, and you could chop off some layers of GPT-2 to get some representation of your input sequence, but I think that is a little past the original question.

[1] https://github.com/google-research/bert/blob/master/modeling...

[2] https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py#L17...
> Well, I'm not sure I'd come back, actually

I’m at Amazon right now (Ads) and honestly this makes me really sad. It feels like I’m not allowed to be proud of where I work.
Not use iris for your Go projects
Accenture Health Named 11 Top Innovation Finalists for 2020
Similarly Psion has a pretty nice device. The psion 5 had a nice keyboard and limiting OS. It supports apps/app stores, but required windows and memberships to be a developer. I pushed them to open up a bit to get more apps, they thought it was a bad idea.
Season 24 of the bachelor has some serious political effect.
Your phrasing of this is a bit unclear. I think you mean that no "real" UI redraws when nothing has changed.

But otherwise most operating systems do run in full GPU mode all the time. The true-mobile ones, so iOS & Android, are almost always using dedicated hardware to handle composition without spinning up the GPU (although both use the GPU to render, so whenever something does change it's immediately back on the GPU), but "desktop" ones are generally always doing GPU composition as long as the display is on. With some hand-wavy exceptions to that primarily for video layers in select circumstances with proper hardware support.
A 200-year-old diary that’s rewriting gay history
This.

For Chrome users, I was using the "Windowed - floating Youtube/every website" plugin to achieve the same effect. It also gives you the control UI, which PiP doesn't have yet.
NextStep 4 actually, Objective-C and OpenStep were like manna from heaven and are still with us
Ask HN: What are your expectations for the next decade of tech?
Hey, you are totally allowed! You and I probably value things differently! I'm a parent now, my values have shifted over time, and I got really burned out trying to improve things over there. I didn't like that once I became a manager I was pressured to identify and remove (rather than train/help) my people who weren't top tier. Those could have been things local to my org. If you are happy, be proud of what you are doing.

Like I said, I think it was a really valuable 6 years. I'm glad I was there, I learned a ton, met awesome engineers.
"normal" users somehow end up with dozens of toolbars and adware and related crap anyway, which they don't mind at all, so MS taking another piece of that pie doesn't really look anything out of the ordinary to them.
IMO, this same pattern is followed by a lot of other things:

- corporations

- governments

- TV shows

- music

- all human relationships

Sometimes you want to be with the group, other times you think it’s easier to be without the group. It’s part of being human.