skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you invent something, but you do not share it with the general public, and a group of other people invent an equivalent, then who was first to invent? Who is going to have the credit?

I'd say it is akin to a proprietary technology which never got released to the general public, and then some FOSS technology comes along which does arguably the same, yet is FOSS and gets widely adopted.

Want the credit? Should've released it to the public then. That's a side effect of working for secret services; you don't get much, if any, personal credit. Nor even credit as a secret service. E.g. because the ops remain secret.
Isn't this a lemon market? Owner's expectations always are too good, or not? It is their "baby" and they are biased to think it's better than it is. A seller could hire someone to run the thing for them, so why sell unless the person needs money or is hiding something? Maybe I am too pessimistic.
You make a good point. My main challenge at the moment is lead gen. Part of my frustration is spending time on things like marketing that have no quick feeback loop.
Here's the article, halfway through. Search for "The Struggle to Save Heirloom Rice in India"

http://riceplusmagazine.blogspot.com/2019_10_17_archive.html
2 isn’t an alien, exactly... but it’s a little bit of an oddball amongst the primes. There are indeed a lot of theorems that start with “let p be an odd prime.”
There ARE a number of messages that can be represented as a polynomial of prime powers, look up Godelization. More generally there are SOME very compact methods to write large numbers using functions, eg factorial and tetration: 12345! + 3^^3^^2 -1 would be huge. The problem is MOST numbers do not have compact representations so they'd be bigger. I do wonder about how effective it is to pad messages in-band to align with the nearest compact representation.

Funny you should mention scifi because there's a story that got me interested in this topic [1] where some folks encode a large, important message into a compact algebraic expression like this. Turns out they're pissed at the recipients and the decimal expansion would be enormous so it would take them a while to decode it.

1. Fredrick Pohl, "Starburst", pp 56, 58, 59.
If you are working on an old code base for a reasonable time I recommend to get to know the old developers. Check out the commit history, who wrote what, talk with them a bit if they are still around to get a feel for them. After a while you will probably see patterns, guy A usually wrote solid code, guy B a bit more sloppy. If you are investigating a bug in a specific area of the code use git blame and start investigating any additions by guy B first
> The second has no clue if new things are working (or at least, nobody bothers to inform me), but they’re quite successful.

I had a similar eye-opening experience. I worked for a company that insisted on doing everything the right way, with mountains of process, planning, metrics, measuring, followups, reviews, and customer feedback. It sure felt like we had the recipe for success, and it felt like we were checking every item on this list. We always felt super busy, as if we were doing important work every minute of every day. Yet it took us forever to ship new features, and the onerous planning, review, and feedback requirements turned into planning gridlock.

I then switched to a company that focused on quickly shipping features above all else, only measuring feedback with random sampling of customers and spot checks of quality. All of our customers loved the company because we could deliver their features quickly, and they could always see that we were moving the product in the right direction.

It's difficult to communicate the stark difference between these two environments unless you've seen both sides of it. It's even more difficult to convince engineers that the process-heavy, data-driven approach isn't necessarily the best way to run a business.
Yeah this is the error in the parent calculation
The world economy, from ancient Babylon to tech entrepreneurs
This article may not age well.

One of the women on this ship has since tested positive for COVID-19.

She was allowed to leave and flew to Malaysia before she tested positive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/16/world/asia/coronavirus-cr...
That's because they deliberately make it terrible to convince you to install the app. They ruin the experience even more with all the nagging they do even if you have the option to be based about the app disabled. There is no reason their mobile site needs to be as terrible as it is.
I think the real takeaway is that this kind of device is possible and they've given a blueprint. It will now be possible to start engineering new form factors, have scanners that are mobile, or maybe scan dogs and cats.
Thanks for this it makes it a bit more clear, but I'm now never going to touch web again lol.

It sounds like hell to me.

However, what you describe above sounds like what you need to write a full blown application. Why does one need this to display simple information like a blog or news? Tasks that I used the HTML tables stuff for. Nowadays I can enter a personal blog with maybe 100 lines of actual text but it still pulls several megabytes of javascript.

I just can't wrap my head around why all this is necessary when all you want is to display information that could be equally served by a text or html file.
Digital Ocean has been great for us. It's easy to setup and scale, offers lots of server "droplet* types, and is inexpensive.
I wonder how long it’ll take for these to appear at the airport checkpoints.
100% correct on this article. Google is dying as a search engine because it chose politics over product function. G is a censorship engine attempting to make Chinese style internet across the globe where G controls the narritive 100%. Use any other search.
Wow, this is amazing.
I can't help but think of all the sarcastic answers I would give the so-called manager with a slight grin on my face.

Seriously, I think this list is a potent illustration of modern management bullcrap.

Come on guys, don't do this to your team, they are not children...
Yes and no. "Rendering" in computing has historically mostly meant what you say, but it is defined much more broadly in the dictionary. There's clearly no pressing need to distinguish the pixely variety from virtual DOM calculation with the term (otherwise it wouldn't have caught on), and it works by analogy, so I think it's fine. There's no "should" with language unless people can't understand you.
paper: "Unexpected biases in the distribution of consecutive primes" http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720

explanation for non-experts: "The Last Digit of Prime Numbers - Numberphile" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVvfY_lFUZ8
The Fraught Future of Recycling
This doesn't actually help you, it will only ruin your chance for negotiation and you will end up getting the lowest possible salary.

Open salary will only help pay inequality because everything is a secret right now and some people are better at negotiating.

If it were all open, we would have equally low salaries across the board from company to company.

It also puts the value on the position and not the person applying.
This is a decent article on how the load balancing between GCP loadbalancers and kubernetes works.

We use terraform end to end and tried the http/https L7 loadbalancer first in our setup but I had a heck of a time with:

- there is no API for the annotation mentioned in the article so if you miss it while setting up a backend, nothing works
- gRPC was hard to get going. Most gRPC examples out there use some port such as 50051 so you assume that is needed. gRPC does work over 443.

We currently use istios ingressgateway as a loadbalancer that you set in your kubernetes setup. It works but I don't know if it is better or not. We had to run an ingressgateway pod as a daemonset on every node so that we could get the real IP addresses from requests for security logging. That was a pain.
Something could be provably invulnerable to RCE the same way other properties of programs are formally proved in computer science. The general class of techniques for software is called "formal methods".

A program could also be implemented in a safe language where the defined semantics rule out RCE. Of course this would then depend on how much trust and/or verification is put into the language implementation and specification corectness.
Related and well-known by software developers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_string-sea...
Can someone define pay inequality for me? Is it that people with the same job ought to be paid the same?

Having worked in the industry a while, I've seen many engineers with the same job, same title, and wildly different levels of productivity. Even people with less experience out performing those with more. I struggle to see how removing all nuance around actual ability within a band is a good thing, and suspect people armed with this information asking for raises are setting themselves up to hear they're just not that good. Human beings aren't fungible resources. While someone might be good enough for the job, it's unlikely they're exactly as good as their peers.

I do think more information is a good thing, and as such making this available is great, but I don't think it leads to the outcome some seem to hope for.
The leading digits of a uniform distribution does not follow Benford's law.

Look at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22340018 from elsewhere in this thread or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541264 of mine from a couple of months ago.
Path to Green
I'm sold. Link please.
Reads like the author is one of these spammers...
You're still assuming ALL of that remaining land area in the circle is habitable.

Eg. India has 43% of it's land classified under "others" [0]. A large chunk of that 43% is not likely to be habitable.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
There is a remarkable asymmetry between physicians who take risk to read the mri and are paid a few hundred dollars and the corporate stooges who run the hospital and charge whatever they like. And yet with such a willing supply of doctors from abroad there is no end in sight.
I want to host multiple Flask apps on digital ocean. Is there any tutorial you can suggest
What kind of questions would you ask?
What question in particular do you find not appropriate?
Android: Detecting Device Presence in a Pocket
Have you shared this on /r/HomeAutomation and /r/HomeAssistant?

Much less technical crowd in general than HN, but framing old tablets (as informational displays of 'smart home' state etc.) is quite popular, and I think your project is much more suited to it: much lower-power (such a device is only useful if always-on really), and much less distracting (e-paper not glaring bright colourful iPad or whatever).

Looks great, I'd definitely be interested at $59 (in £) if it's sufficiently/easily enough hackable!
Is it just me or the article has been taken down ?
I think potentially very high.

There's a subset of operators that are similar (but not identical) between programming languages. For instance you can add numbers like

const a = b + c

in javascript

int a = b + c

in java, etc, you can even write

(b+c) as a

in the select statement of a SQL query. If you look at basic operations on numbers and strings it is not hard to translate expressions between conventional languages and query languages. Now query languages have different ideas about control structures, but working at the expression level you can mostly avoid that.

Now there are issues around data types (are we adding ints or floats, what to do about overflow, when you index the Nth element of a string is it 8 bits (maybe part of a Unicode char), is it a basic plane unicode char, or could it be any codepoint, or something else...) but those problems don't turn up 100% of the time when you try to translate.
It is disingenuous to claim that social media is merely "everyone talking to everyone". There is aways a third party involved: the social network itself with its feed algorithms and like counts, and that is where so many of the negative impacts stem from.
If I recall correctly, rice can sustain a much greater number of people per unit of land than any other crop, and this explains why East Asia is more densely populated than any other part of the world.
Speaking as a consumer, it would be nicer if we could cut out the middleman entirely, though.
thanks for the analysis! I thought I must have made a mistake.
We use terraform for our kubernetes app configuration and it works well. Being able to pass values from one resource to another is extremely powerful. For example, the database instance credentials down into cloudsql proxy.

The only and most frustrating missing piece of the terraform kubernetes provider is CRDs. I hacked around it by using some yaml provider bit I would like a cleaner solution.
> What this needs to do is be able to generate songs that are already written within some amount of error %

That is really easy. You just switch out some words using a dictionary, maybe make sure you are using a rhyming dictionary for words at the end of a line.
> It's not a matter of what is/isn't a "natural form of expression." The point of C/C++ is to be high-level enough for humans to build their own abstractions over hardware.

Sure it matters. If primitives don't map naturally to the hardware, then you have to build a runtime to emulate those primitives, just like GC'd languages do.

> The success of the design of C/C++ is in that the creators had no knowledge of modern GPUs, yet GPUs can efficiently execute them with a little care from developers

You cannot run any arbitrary C program on a GPU. This fact is exactly why GPUs were able to innovate without legacy compatibility holding them back.

Only later were GPUs generalised to support more sophisticated programs, which then permitted a subset of C to execute efficiently.

The progress of GPUs proves exactly the opposite point that you are claiming. If C were so perfectly suited to any sort of hardware, then GPUs would have been able to run C programs right from the beginning, which is not true.

> And why would that not be backwards-compatible with legacy C?

That's not the point I'm making. Turing equivalence ensures that compatibility can be assured no matter what.

The actual point is that CPU innovations were tested against C benchmark suites to check whether innovations effectively improved performance, and some or many of those that failed to show meaningful improvements were discarded, despite the fact that they would have had other benefits (obviously not all of them, but enough). It's simply natural selection for CPU innovation.

It's incredibly naive to think that only hardware influences software and not vice versa. For instance, who would create a hardware architecture that didn't have pointers? It would simply never happen, because efficient C compatibility is too important.

The problem is that C was given a disproportionately heavy weighting in these decisions. For instance, a tagged memory architecture would show zero improvement on C benchmarks, but it would have been huge for the languages that now dominate the software industry.

> that there is a language substantially better fit compared to C for low-level programming (e.g. embedded, kernel).

The limitations of C are well known (poor bit fields and bit manipulation, poor support for alignment and padding, no modules, poor standard library, etc, etc.).

Zig addresses some of those issues. Ada has been better than C for a long time. A better language than all of these could definitely be designed given enough resources, eg. see the research effort "House" [1].

[1] http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/
Are there only four sets of questions? It would be nice if the game would show some kind of "You got them all, now invite your friends!" or similar instead of simply looping me to loop city without explaining anything.
Love it. You guys could run a kickstarter campaign.
> What protocol are you talking about?

Any social tools built on top of a decentralized database would do it.

- https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db (3Box)

- https://github.com/amark/gun (Iris)

- https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/ (Manyverse, Planetary)
> This ethic of ceaseless work and ceaseless renunciation of the fruits of one’s toil provided both the economic and the moral foundations for modern capitalism.

Well, that turned into communism fast...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22341801
import qualified Data.ByteString as B
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as C

main = do
let x = 100
print (x * x)
let y:_ = B.unpack (C.pack "foo")
--let z = x * y
return ()

If we uncomment that line, the output of this program changes from 10000 to 16. Yes, I learned this by triggering similar action "in the past" accidentally. Don't remember details, but that program also involved ByteStrings. The convention of explicitly type-annotating top-level declarations is there for a reason: it limits the scope of damage.
It also clearly says "2500 radius circle" in the article title, and the submission title. The article is fast and loose with diameter vs radius later on as well. I can't blame the original commenter for using it as a radius when that's in the title.

But I agree, it's actually the diameter and changes the math a lot.
This actually fits with the visual impression you get from the map. It's clearly far less than 50% of the inhabitable land mass
Great Famine (Ireland)
“What did you want to be when you grow up” feels a bit out of touch.
I enjoyed this post on reddit explaining why China has such a large population [1]:

"You might be familiar with how the Nile River in Egypt works from school. If you aren't - for 9 months out of the year the Nile has a moderate flow rate that is sufficient to support human settlement and agriculture. For the remaining 3 months the Nile's flow rate increases dramatically and it floods a huge area around its river banks.

That flooding might sound bad but its not. Using soil for agricultural purposes will deplete it's minerals within about 100 years. That's a long time compared to a human life, but not compared to a civilization. When the soil runs out of minerals you can't grow anything in it anymore, and it turns out that this is the limiting factor for most civilizations. IE, a civilization will begin intensively farming its soil, deplete the soil, then starve to death.

In the modern world we're able to replenish the soil's minerals with fertilizer. They were sort of able to do this in the ancient world as well, but this involved transporting huge amounts of animal manure which is difficult to do and, in practice, if an ancient civilization had to manually fertilize the soil it would result in very low agricultural yields.

This is what makes the Nile's floods so good for the development of civilization - every time the Nile would flood it deposits a huge amount of new soil in the areas that got flooded. The source of that new soil was hills and mountains in Central Africa, so it was filled with minerals. Or to put it another way - every year the Nile naturally dumped a huge amount of fertilizer on Egypt.

This natural fertilizing allowed Egypt to be by far the most productive agricultural region West of India for thousands of years - everyone from the Pharaohs to Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire fed themselves using the food that the Nile was able to grow.

How does this relate to China? The Yellow River in China is the same type of river as the Nile. It spends most of the year with a moderate flow rate, then has massive floods for a few months that deposit a bunch of new soil along its banks.

Where the Yellow River is different from the Nile is in its size. The Nile is a single, small river with practically no tributaries or lakes. The Nile's floods only cover a small geographic area located immediately adjacent to it.

The Yellow River, on the other hand, is a massive system with hundreds of tributaries and lakes. When it floods, it covers almost the entirety of South East China - which is an area thousands of times the size of that covered by the Nile.

The Yellow River basin has been among for the most productive agricultural areas on Earth for much of human history. Because the only limiting factor to population size is a region's ability to produce food, this also means that the Yellow River Basin (and by extension, China) has managed to maintain a huge population for the entirety of human history."

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/exghji/e...
> I think not being a real multi-user OS would have lead to trouble sooner or later

iOS is still doing great. :)
Browser choice does exist on iOS. I use Brave.
Unfortunately DuckDuckGo’s image search is worse than their regular one :(
I like the metric system and would love to see the US switch to the metric system, but this comment is just wrong on so many levels.

One litre of water only approximately weighs 1kg and density is relative to temperature and pressure. Further, the "standard pressure" density is measured in isn't equivalent to average sea level pressure. Celsius is as much a SI derived unit as Fahrenheit is. The official unit is Kelvin and water freezes at 273.15K. Not such a beautiful number, but still based on the scientifically more significant definition of temperature.
Using quantum dots for treating coronavirus
I thought they had to turn the magnet on and off. This would first align all the magnetic moments of the specific atoms and then as they randomize when the field is off, they interfere with a superimposed radio field creating peaks and troughs. Tomographic calculations are then applied to the collected radio signals to give an image. How can a permanent magnet be used?
No 10 could scrap BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model
Firefox because privacy. Also container tabs to keep multiple accounts open on the same site, etc.
Basically, they offer raw boxes, typically for Linux use. You would terminal into your box, called a droplet, and then install or run whatever you want as though the box were local. They have good setup for security, too, so you can control who can visit your droplet.
I can't imagine playing D&D with roman numerals...

Str XIII
Int IIX
...

It would be no fun at all. Probably with limitations on manufacturing they wouldn't have the large number of different dice. Those dice look like fun from the outside but when you are playing you don't want to be looking for the 1d8 this time, looking for 3d4 (the first 2 are easy to find, the third went under the rug). Probably it would be more like a modern game (Toon, Paranoia, ...) where everything depends on one kind of dice.
Do you not like the substance of the questions, or do you not like the delivery of the questions in this list? After reading through a small sample, I agree with you that if you asked these questions verbatim it would be ridiculous. And this list is kinda massive, so there are probably some that truly are not useful.

The substance behind some of the questions could be useful IMO. One would need some rapport and context to use them. If they were reworded and delivered in ways that made more sense for those people, it could be helpful.
I was very interested in Tildes, especially because their commitment to privacy and staying independent of investors. However, Deimos + potentially other admins are far too liberal with their moderation for my taste.

Not every network has to be a bastion of free speech, but being closed minded and erasing entire discussions that they don't like is a great way to build an echo chamber.

I wish a remember more of the context, but I had bookmarked this page[0] because it was an interesting discussion on this matter. As you can see, it's been nuked.

0: https://tildes.net/~tildes/ct2/no_invite_links_available_hav...
First we,ll figure out translating Java to Ruby, then English to Japanese, and only then we,ll be ready to translate Perl :D
The image was put in public domain. No further exclusive rights are required to sublicense it. You are allowed to pick work from public domain and sublicense it if you want to.