skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit disappointed that False is not on there, since it was both a compiler that fit in less than 1k of binary code, and also the origin of the whole esoteric language craze that is still going on.

(Brainfuck was a direct response to it, trying to make a compiler that was significantly smaller - the original compiler was 240 bytes.)
Before I critique it, I should point out for those at home that Hanno's position here is absolutely the conventional position, lots of important smart people will tell you Hanno is right about this, not just a few kooks. If it's important to you to have popular opinions about such topics - rather than thinking about it on your own - this is the "correct" opinion to have.

Now, having explained that, I'm sure it's quite wrong after spending many years thinking about this (more than 10 years but probably less than 20) and I'll try to briefly explain why.

The DNS is a key source of truth, and so we need to actually secure the DNS hierarchy. Because of the belief Hanno espouses, there have been a lot of attempts to dodge this work over the years but it's the nature of the problem that dodging it can't work, it just moves the problem and then we're back again from a different angle.

DNSSEC is narrowly tailored to solve only the problem we actually had, securing the source of truth, and nothing else. It isn't a privacy technology, or an anti-censorship technology, or a delicious new flavour of ice cream, it just secures the source of truth.

The thing about security is that the Happy Path looks exactly the same whether you have security or not. You've all been here with HTTP. Remember when most sites you visited either didn't use HTTPS or only used it for a "login" step and then kicked you back to HTTP? How often did a site you visited actually have a breach because it used HTTP? Probably never. The happy path, where nobody was trying to steal your credentials or whatever was nearly always the path you were on anyway, HTTP was dangerous but you didn't really feel it. In hindsight that seems crazy but people put up with it for years.

For DNS we're still in that dark period, and unfortunately lots of people are wrongly confident that it's for the best.
But what to do if you have a CS degree with knowledge of all the things you mentioned and perhaps more, but people keep calling you "programmer"?
I think its a very good argument to compare because its based on our understanding of physics.

Even with all our adaptations we still get cancer from sunlight on a regular basis.

It is easy to understand why, UVB light is near ionizing has enough energy to damage human DNA causing cancer.

Below UVB there is not enough energy to cause DNA damage through a known mechanism except heating.

Heating directly related to power absorption, a 1500 watt microwave will cook you a 300 milliwatt pulsing microwave transmitter will not heat your flesh enough to cause any damage.

We have a pretty good grip on how various frequencies of radiation affect human biology and cell phone emissions are orders of magnitude lower power that whats needed to heat flesh enough to cause damage you literally get more heat directly from the phone being warm than RF absorption.

I don't propose we stop looking for any possible biological activity due to microwave (or any other spectrum) but repeated test have not shown this to be the case and to do so would mean there is some new mechanism for this to do so.

If you are scared of 300 milliwatt RF emissions I would be more scared of multi-watt LED light emissions due to higher energy levels (terahertz vs gigahertz).
Actix (the actor framework) is separate from what people are discussing here: actix-web, which supports actix). In earlier versions of actix-web it was based around actix; I remember implementing actors and handlers. Since 1.0 or so that got changed to more of a standard setup.

I’ll add my 2c on actix-web: in my opinion it tries to do too much. hyper (simply based on tokio) is all you need for a fast async server. Anecdotally, I know many people who basically use just this stack, over actix-web/warp/tower etc.

There are other actor systems, like kay [0].

[0]: https://citybound.github.io/citybound/kay/index.html
It's possible Firefox already does that via its enabled-by-default tracking protection. At least I don't seem to have an issue with the back button here.
Wayfinding Sans Symbols Version 2.0
Ha! I am working on a few now.
If he hadn't commuted that sentence, how would they be pressuring her to lie about Assange right now? They tortured her for years. There's not much they could have done to escalate from that.
>I hate cancer as much as anyone, but it’s hard to see how it might be a good thing that someone’s tobacco advertising is being censored by the state.

Do you realise how absurd you sound? Have you any idea of how tragic it is for a family to lose a loved one to cancer, how many people millions of people have died unnecessarily from smoking? Comparing Facebook to that sounds completely out of touch with reality, unless you can point me to the millions of people killed by Facebook.
DNSSEC prevents certain kinds of attacks, like cache poisoning, on the DNS system and a little over 15% of internet hosts are behind resolvers that validate DNSSEC signatures when making DNS requests.

You’re thinking about DANE’s TLSA records, which supports trusting certificates not signed by the CAs browsers already trust. DANE does require DNSSEC to work but that’s not what the article is about.
Ah yea, "Eternal September". I'm just old enough to have gotten on usenet when ES was in full swing, but you could still get a glimpse through the dust of stampeding trolls and the campfires of the marauding neverdowells of the lost great edifices that stood in that land before. I have to confess that I was one of those trolls: Edgy McEdgeLord saying things and acting in ways that I'll never dare with real people in a real room.

I would like to see AI moderated feeds of some sort, tuned to the preferences of the seed group. It would be a interesting social experiment at least.
Thank you for the clarification. I was a bit concerned that the article was bringing down this feat.
It is pronouncable as a word, just not in English. It sounds approximately like 'beh-ehm-weh'.
> I am not aware of many innovative products or services that are first available in the EU, and it takes more than a year to appear in the USA (examples are welcome).

Do you have anything like Klarna yet? They let ordinary people buy stuff online on invoice and handle the risk for the merchants. This makes buying stuff online very convenient. It is a Swedish company which has been active in Europe for almost 15 years.

Spotify, while not as innovative, also took many years before they entered the US market. It is pretty normal for Swedish tech companies to focus on the EU market first before entering the US market many years later.
Do You Solve Programming Problems or Complete Exercises?
Can't you use async/await with the compat libraries for futures and for tokio?

https://tokio.rs/blog/2019-12-compat/
No, that would have hastened USENETs demise. The whole eternal September problem stems from small villages turning into big cities.
The 10 LOC/day includes the entire project, including analysis, requirements, design, documentation (user and tech), test, management etc, in a large project. Saying (as many do) that an individual programmer has produced hundreds of LOC per day is to miss the point.

You have to start by defining your terms of reference and make sure you are comparing like with like.
I agree completely. The Fed also can't keep QE programs forever. I think if the Democrats win in the fall, it could be a major trigger. There is no reason to think they won't intend to roll back the tax cuts and push for anti-trust against most FAANG seems likely too. Given how FAANG dominates the S&P, it could spiral quickly. The only question is when and how bad will it be. I think we need a real down cycle because just turning down the burner temporarily means the pop will be even worse.
Sorry, but the ship has sailed. I ran a BBS and FidoNET node (and even a hub) and it was the golden era of computers for me. Sadly, there's just no way that we could ever drum up the sustained interest to (re)build a semi-private network with a high technical bar again. People simply don't have the time. It was the era before smartphones and social media and Netflix and most people came home from work and watched cable TV or read books and most average people never conversed with other people outside their immediate sphere. It was new and novel but that feeing is long gone. Now people get into arguments online and don't even appreciate the long chain of technology that makes it so instantaneous.

Believe me, I would ditch all of this tech and go back to 1992 in an instant if it was a viable option but let's be real: we've been discussing this in the semi-annul Fido and Usenet HN posts for years and yet, here we are.

The only way this could happen is if some techno-elites with name recognition decided to recreate it. Even then, it would probably die quickly. Remember Ello?
Finally, some sanity applied.
The branding does look nice, but borrows liberally from Adobe.
Article 1 section 9 isn't an amendment and is still just a bunch of restrictions :P

The first one, for example, is

> 1: The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
A forensic scientist would testify that they extracted the files from there.

It is exactly the same as when a confidential source gives up an address (for example) the source never gets into evidence.
McClatchy, nation's second-largest newspaper company, files for bankruptcy
Central Lateral Thalamus may enable consciousness, says study
I have to disagree. Nazi's and other people of ugly opinions have as much right to voice that as anyone else. We have laws against actions that should cover whatever ugly they get up to.
Windows 7 in classic mode?
Asbestos apparently kills 255,000 people annually (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5982039/). How many people has Facebook killed? "Asbestos killed millions of people, and I don't like Facebook, so we should treat Facebook the same as asbestos" is not a valid argument.
People always forget that software engineering is a relatively new thing and still rapidly evolving. If you look at buildings a couple of hundred years ago(not the still standing, but the average) or the golden age of flying ~1950 it was mostly the same. Better than not having those things but nowhere near perfect.
I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.

As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.

https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm

(From an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812)

Brian Reid's Usenet Usenet usage reports as of 1988 reported about 140k active Usenet users, from a population-with-access of about 880,000.

Usenet was small.

(Some of these stats also cited in in one of the links (which I wrote) from TFA.)
4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so.

And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.
I think you're correct that there's an "Amish bias" at work here. I don't see that as a negative either -- I have a bit of that perspective myself. I certainly prefer a "calm countryside".

Overall I'm unsure if the EU is doing good here or if it's just posturing and getting in people's way. I guess the truth is somewhere in between. There are clear advantages to the way the US handles this stuff but perhaps the EU will dodge a bullet or two.

I do think it's a wholeheartedly positive thing that the US and the EU take different approaches. It would be truly awful if there were no differences in our attitudes toward technology and its adoption.
The devil’s in the details with haptic feedback. It can be good, but many implementations are bad.

Apple’s implementation on the Magic Trackpad, for example, is incredibly effective. On iPhone, it’s...fine but not great (it’s not usually a net negative, at least).

One of the worst I’ve ever seen was on an early Verizon “iPhone killer” back around 2008. The whole phone just vibrated — it wasn’t positional at all, the motor started up too slowly so it felt mushy, and it was used far too often.
Screen relative units are not possible to be used here - you have no idea how big the image will be on the screen, since you don't know how big the screen is.

Using js onresize event is a no-go, if JS is still needed the spec is worthless. Lazy loading images with JS worked before just fine, this has to be about not needing special JS for this feature.

No, parent is right: It's impossible to satisfy that recommendation, usually.
Inside their own borders as well. States are creatures of violence. They are created by violence and require continuous violence to remain in existence.
> HN certainly is one, but I think HN has way less users than quora, and HN is geared specifically towards certain people looking for intellectual excitement

For sure. Smaller userbase, no obvious or easy-to-monitize ads, heavy (and specific) technical focuses. Doesn't represent the internet -- or even really the US/International tech scene -- but it's a fun place as long as you don't lose sight of that.
I am talking about the Two General's problem which I thought original commentator was referring to as the original problem.

In this situation you are describing a server that wants to send a client a message, and both parties need to be sure that they are in agreement when to attack a common enemy they can't deal with alone because the message contains the attack plans and timestamp for attacks.

Wikipedia has a good explanation:

"The first general may start by sending a message "Attack at 0900 on August 4." However, once dispatched, the first general has no idea whether or not the messenger got through. This uncertainty may lead the first general to hesitate to attack due to the risk of being the sole attacker.

To be sure, the second general may send a confirmation back to the first: "I received your message and will attack at 0900 on August 4." However, the messenger carrying the confirmation could face capture and the second general may hesitate, knowing that the first might hold back without the confirmation.

Further confirmations may seem like a solution—let the first general send a second confirmation: "I received your confirmation of the planned attack at 0900 on August 4." However, this new messenger from the first general is liable to be captured, too. Thus it quickly becomes evident that no matter how many rounds of confirmation are made, there is no way to guarantee the second requirement that each general be sure the other has agreed to the attack plan. Both generals will always be left wondering whether their last messenger got through. "

There is no solution, only a decreasingly smaller change of disagreement e.g. by sending many messages or keep acking each other x amount of rounds (there are other strategies).

No timeouts, only death.
Automated Direct Mail Marketing for Insurance Agents
shekels is more fun to say than dollars, that's why I use it. Currency is interchangeable, so why not?
While not quite the same thing, and a commercial tool, i've been using Ant for Figma [1] with a designer to prototype UIs before building them out. There are still some rough edges, but it works pretty well.

[1] -- https://www.antforfigma.com/
I still use it every day too.
I think the key point is that most actor models, at least the ones I know, are truly concurrent with preemption, whereas most models based on OO are sequential. There is only one thread of execution in the OO program, whereas there is no notion of this in an actor system. All processes execute at the same time, so to speak.

There are also some points with the messaging being truly asynchronous, so you can't rely on the order in which messages arrive, usually subject to certain constraints. Erlang, for instance, require that between any two pairs of processes, order is preserved in the messages.

Also, creating a new actor creates a new thread of execution inside that actor. This is not the same as creating a new object.
That's not an appropriate response to somebody asking for evidence. The hate for Facebook here almost seems cultish sometimes.
Fixing the bug only fixes it for Firefox users, but disincentivizing it fixes it for everyone.

For me, uMatrix blocks it; it redirects through https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers. I could disable it or go through IA or whatever, but I really haven't the patience to deal with these websites.
Russia Fines Twitter and Facebook $63K Each over Data Law
For non-rusties: unsafe means turning off Rust's advanced safety features, reducing its safety level to that of C or C++. Which is to say, it's as safe as almost all software you're using right now. Of course, one usually turns off the safety features because one is trying to do something tricky to squeeze out performance or achieve some low level feat, so it's also an indicator that something is dangerous is going on.

In your C++ you might add a comment explaining the behaviour you're relying on to convince any reader of the correctness of your code. The cool thing about Rust is that anywhere you don't have the unsafe block, you're (theoretically) certain there's no tricky business going on without even having to read the code.

There was a lot of commotion in the community because many rustaceans take a lot of pride in having this safety features. They took offense at disabling those features, risking Rust's reputation of safety, for seemingly meaningless goals (such as winning the TechEmpower benchmarks). It's not disabling the safety features that makes the code faster btw, it's the tricks you're allowed to do when the safety is off that might yield performance improvements.
I agree with the article, why is it in git repo?
I eat only strangers' leftover food – and it's the best diet I've ever had
That's exactly what this law goes against, because someone in Europe is banned from using Facebook Dating even if they want to.
Yes. To what level then? I guess node-red is actually fulfilling that gap.
Hi,
Your two posts were invisible for most other people because they are "dead" and "dead" posts are invisible in HN's default settings.

I think (not sure) that it is because it has been downvoted. I do not know why. Maybe because it is difficult to comment as there is no context.

I could see both posts because I like to watch dead posts (an option in HN's profile).
Depends. If he has been running an adblocker for many years he can have avoided a shadow profile.
Typically parallelism is particularly interesting for performance, and the (usually?) shared-nothing architecture of the actor model is not conducive to high performance computing.
Every single project which has tried to drop the GIL has failed in some way. It's not some "esoteric features", it's fundamentally a hard problem that implicates the entirety of the python object model, python C api, scoping, imports, and GC.

I think multi-interpreting is the way to go, but that still would require a framework for ensuring safe memory access.

Speaking of Go, I always thought it would be neat to write a python implementation in Go, but leverage Go's GC, and implement the 'go' keyword/function for easy parallelism. But you still have the problem of scoping and memory safety. Or similar idea but with Rust. Something tells me that isn't a trivial undertaking, especially if you want all the libraries, which is 75% the point of python.
> If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using USENET to this day.

How does this square with Eternal September being caused by (paraphrasing) "too many normal users with access"? AOL giving its customers NNTP access is frequently cited as one of its downfalls.
The number 600 would be the number of expected blind schizophrenics in the US right now. But as people have been looking for them over time, the actual number should be higher.
> I'm curious, to anyone working on Windows kernel development, at what point does a feature/scheduler improvement become so good that people decide

A kernel developer is going to be 3-4 steps removed from those decisions. In many ways they are just a consumer of a product like this too and work on their subsystem. They are unlikely to be worried because it's the product they build and might even feel that it's inexpensive for the level of engineering they invest.
I agree that the Irish government can be too cosy (and too slow on data protection) with big companies but the idea that that is the only thing keeping them in Ireland is ridiculous.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Pfizer and IBM have been in Ireland for decades. They may come for the tax but they stay for the people. It has a highly educated workforce that is very flexible and easy to manage/work with. I've lived and worked all over the world and Irish employees are the easiest and most fun to work with - even compared to the UK. It's pretty simple to get visas for companies. Accommodation can be a bit tricky to sort in Dublin but it's nowhere near as expensive or bad as San Fran etc. People generally don't mind moving to work here as the work/life balance is good and it's a super safe/friendly place for foreigners and families.

It has some industries with significant clusters (pharma, data, aircraft leasing, finance, tech, marketing) a stable political and social environment. It's civil service is generally efficient and isn't corrupt, it's easy to pick up the phone to them or a politician if you have a problem and need advice - even as a small business.

It's also the only native English speaking country in the EU now, cheap to jump on a plane to anywhere else on the continent or the US and has good internet connectivity.

For more examples: https://www.idaireland.com/invest-in-ireland
HN is kinda dying as a community, though moderation isn't the whole story. There are also some long-standing bugs, and misbehaviours of the voting system.

Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake; it just teaches people not to say anything interesting, because they won't get a response anyway, even when they're wrong in a subtle or interesting way.

The formatting available to users is maybe close to the right amount, but the implementation is broken (for example, it doesn't end URLs when it sees >, so you end up with broken URLs when you go out of your way to protect them). It could probably also do with proper first-class block quotations, people end up putting them in <pre> blocks or italics, and it's not always clear.
It's a common slang term, just like how you'd say 'quid' or 'bucks'.
From the intro:

> The motto of this book is “one level deeper.”

Really we need both. Lots of people do learn by experimentation. There are (now) a lot of tutorials for them. But on the other hand there are people who really aren't satisfied until they've pinned down all the details - what is an electron really etc - and this is more suitable for them.

The more the merrier. We just need a bit of signposting too.