skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Source code answers the how and what but it doesn't provide any answer to the most important question of all - why?

The vast majority of technical documentation I read doesn't answer why, either. The closest examples I see these days are tech talks (e.g., videos of Rich Hickey talks) and FAQs (e.g., the Python FAQ has a number of "why" questions). Sometimes also source code comments (e.g., the Swift stdlib actually has fairly informative comments).

For some reason, even though there is clearly demand for the why, and programmers are happy to supply it, nobody ever wants to provide it inline, in the documentation proper.

It's a rare, rare piece of software that doesn't at some point make me tear my hair out and ask "why?!" upon discovering some behavior which is working exactly as documented.
At the risk of contributing to the thing I'm railing against, these google sunset comments are so boring, especially when discussing Google Cloud products.
The fact that they compile to the same assembly instruction does not make them similar source code.
Sorry tangent, but been working w/ Svelte a long time. Can you tell me about this:

> especially when you try out the new HMR stuff

I tried setting up HMR w/ Sapper but couldn't figure it out. Using Rollup. Are you referring to WebPack? Happy to take offline. Ping me on Discord if you want: @arxpoetica
I guess this will go down as the biggest heist in the history. It's 1404 pages long and likely co-authored by lobbyists. I'm honestly worried for the future of the country.

Few random things when I glanced:

- $25,000,000 pay raise for Congress

- $35,000,000 for The Kennedy Performing Arts Center

- Howard University gets a $13,000,000

- $500,000,000 for the Institute of Museum and Library Services

- Pandemic relief for aviation workers, $40,000,000,000
Not exactly. Again, 1 screen, but folks are seeing 2 different movies.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-bud...
I've seen and heard from people who think social distancing doesn't apply to them if they are wearing a mask... hell there are people who don't think social distancing applies if they are indoors.

edit

Also people who are using bullet proof vests / helmets are generally TRAINED on how to use them, thus know the limits.
Ask HN: Where Does the Money Come From?
Between the government and the fed were looking at +US$2T in stimulus and asset buying. That’s just here in the US. Where does all this money come from? Does anyone have a real and simple answer as to where this money comes from and how we fund it?

Thank you!

- A concerned millennial
Thanks for the nice words.

I think that's the upper limit, you can find it for less.
Given the specs, it's a great laptop compared to the new models.
It's totally okay to manually set the YouTube player to 4K for this use case.

For low-motion static content like a slideshow or console window, a ultra-low frame rate usually results in acceptable fidelity while minimizing bandwidth, but not all hardware decoders (think Chromecasts, TVs) play well with them, so it wasn't possible to go down this road in general.

(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and not that of my employer.)
> the regulation needs to leave enough room to allow airlines to avoid emission taxes by using carbon-neutral fuel.

Where exactly do you expect this carbon neutral fuel to come from?

Fuel=energy, and energy doesn't grow on trees. Well technically biofuel can grow on trees but whatever.

What seems to be forgotten by many "optimistic" folks is that we NEED to cut emissions TODAY, and reduce them by ~7% a year for the next 30 years, to avoid catastrophic warming and feedback loops. By many measures, today is already too late.

Now tell me how we are going to turn these planes carbon neutral today, or even next year, without turning to hypothetical abundant solar energy that will turn atmospheric CO2 into fuel, or turning half of Indonesia's rainforest into palm trees (note that this is not CO2 neutral at all, land change use is one of the biggest culprits today).

The only solution available today is grounding some of those planes. They can take off again when magical carbon neutral fuel is abundant enough that we can afford using it to fly at 850km/h.
Admittedly, America dropped the ball, tripped over it, and broke it's nose.

However, lets not forget that the WHO was also wildly irreaponsible by not declaring this a pandemic sooner.
Not in this case, no. The physically separate nodes are so low power and still share significant points of failure that it doesn't matter.
I guess I'm too dumb to understand what is novel about this? What does it tell me beyond James Gleick's popularization of chaos theory circa 1987?

In some other thread, people told me I was wrong about reality having finite resolution. So is there a "sub-Planck scale"? How can simulations tell you if there is or isn't?
Nano all the way... Always liked Nano better than Vim, but nice to have a choice.
You’ll still get looks for wearing a mask. It’s ridiculous.
We didn’t know there was a huge testing problem until we had a huge amount of people who needed tests.
Hi, I’m Dmitry, an IT consultant. Open for extra work.

Location: Russia
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Possible, B1 visa
Technologies: primary Java + AWS stack. Secondary Angular, sql/nosql, etc ...
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitriy-zlykh-300b2b76/
Email: dmitry.zlyh@gmail.com
To be fair, 'list' is such a generic term it's not really useful. ArraList and LinkedList and even a hash table are all examples of lists, but their performance characteristics vary so wildly that it doesn't make sense to call any of them simply 'list'.
I guess taking an Uber isn't the best idea.

Maybe the driver would give you a bad rating if they have to drop you off a drive through test facility.

In practice, you can walk through too -- or have a friend swap you at home (at-least that's being contemplated some places).
When you're doing gamedev & are bumping up against your FPS, the GC is just another form of memory management. Doing GC-per-frame tends to work pretty well with a generational GC (generational hypothesis & frame-by-frame updates go hand-in-hand), but you usually have to take care about long-lived data. That's when you end up getting into more manual memory management combined with a GC. In a way, your GC'd high-level language RTS ends up being your scripting language.

That's how I've been thinking about it with Haskell at least (lots of GC knobs, manual performGC hook, compact regions for having long-lived data, good FFI, as high-level as any scripting language you could hope for)
The conversation was about using the protection incorrectly - and yes you could likely say the same thing about any method of protection that is being used incorrectly.

Airbags are great - shouldn't put one in front a baby.
Sunscreen is fantastic - assuming it's not expired.
etc etc.
Containers most likely wouldn't have existed if we had a proper ecosystem around static linking and resolution of dependencies. Containers solve the problem of the lack of executable state control, mostly caused by dynamic linking.
If more people can work from home, or attend classes online because teleconferencing and online classes are functional, and not unusable and stuttering it means more people stay home.
I can tell you that in normal times the FDA does prevent a good amount of injuries and deaths simply by being a chilling force for medical device manufacturers. It's not a matter of religious fervor to sometimes prevent the marketing of something because it can potentially be harmful.
Once you know a handful of different programming languages, write an interpreted language embedded in your preferred host language.

It doesn't have to be fancy, I recommend using Forth or Lisp as a starting point; but write something real, do your thing.

I find that most compilers are toys and replicas of existing languages on top of that, which misses the point of designing your own tool.

https://github.com/codr7/gfoo
Global Warming Helps Sweden's Vineyards to Success
I spent my entire childhood reading Asterix comics. The best part about these comics is that the jokes make more sense as you age. This is sad news.
That's not necessarily true. The article mentions this. While ObDev still doesn't have all the APIs necessary to implement all the features of Little Snitch using NetworkExtensions, they are working on it with Apple and feature-parity is not expected to be an issue for the 10.16 release.
I don't see any evidence in media or conversations that anything of the sort is true. If anyone has looked inept in the eyes of the public its potentially the federal administration in the USA. But what blame does WHO shoulder?

WHO appears to have been fairly well in front of this pandemic as soon as the evidence began to support it. The White House was in full denial/hoax mode until the end of February.
Traditional pre-minced garlic has a distinct off-flavor, in addition to the fact that it cooks differently in the pan. But Litehouse (U.S.) sells amazing freeze-dried minced garlic that is almost indistinguishable from fresh garlic, and despite retail markup it's[1] somehow cheaper than traditional freeze-dried sources. I have a whole cabinet full. Costco sells extra large jars, but because it starts to oxidize and rehydrate after opening I prefer the smaller jars.

Depending on the recipe, freeze-dried garlic is even better because you can control how quickly it browns by adjusting the amount of water when rehydrating it.

[1] At least, it was cheaper last time I checked.
Portability depends on a great deal more than just object code formats. The list of OS environment functions to call to achieve anything useful is radically different from one target to another.

This is what makes porting hard work. Cross-compiling is only the first step of a long trip.
> The unplanned for surge has been in videoconferencing (for work and for school)

Thing is, ISPs in the UK (including mine) are saying that typical evening use is 10-20x typical daytime use, so the uptick in remote working isn't actually an issue for them at all.
Thanks! Blue kittens (#139 in your Dropbox) is the best wallpaper I ever had :)
Ok, but if you have the idea that "Planck scale" means something, then how can it be a shock then?

Often understanding something better makes it less obvious, but at my level, I don't understand what's non-obvious about this.
> Bad abstractions and models make it much harder to understand code, though.

True! The point I'm trying to make is more that code clarity is important and worth striving for, regardless of the means you use to achieve it. Clarity is a non-negotiable part of my definition of "nice". If it's also part of others' idea of "nice" -- especially those of novice developers who look to more experienced developers for guidance -- then this paragraph might suggest that clarity can be down-played. It can't.

If you're an experienced developer, you should be able to find good abstractions for achieving clarity in-context. But novice developers can still identify code that's unclear (to them, especially).

Blindly applying abstractions rarely helps with code clarity. Some developers apply certain abstractions because "it's a best practice", rather than because it's actually more clear. That's definitely not what I'm advocating for.
Obama ramped up the CDC pandemic response team in 2014 after bird flu, and Trump let CDC leadership roles go unfilled in 2018 after they left. The Trump admin is directly responsible for the CDC becoming an 'embarrassment' as you say.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/28/michael-bl...
> this time as the first mainstream browser to fully block third-party cookies by default

Third party cookies have been blocked in Firefox since September 3rd (2019) [1]. They mention Brave in the article, so surely Firefox being large than Brave should be included in "Major browsers", but not a single mention was made in the article. It really reminds me of the meme "what do you mean you've seen it?".

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/09/03/todays-firefox-bloc...
I believe that "worse is better" can answer a lot of these questions. Convenience and simplicity are highly attractive.
In some regards, I'd argue yes; from my perspective, many western democracies have been following the US down its path to post-truth politics for years, as other countries' politicians have seen how effective the strategy of simply denying or ignoring anything you don't like is, and sought to replicate the success that (particularly) the Republican party has had in driving voters deeper into their partisan blocs.
Criticism and Candor
Given the history of advertising on the web and advertising in general, I am hugely skeptical of anyone who claims that ethical personalized advertising is even possible.

It was critical to election tampering in 2016, it's been used for racism, sexism, and every imaginable sort of scam.

The only way personalized advertising would be remotely ethical is if it were explicitly opt-in. I notice that's not a thing on your list of steps Google is planning on doing. No surprise.
Living in NYC it was very eye-opening to me how readily supposedly fiercely independent and "how dare you, the government, theoretically infringe on my theoretical rights" population fell in line with the government orders that are just shy of rights suspension with the only bone thrown to the electorate being a suspension of evictions.
It is confusingly worded, but DOES NOT mean all browser storage mechanisms will break.

The key phrase is “without user interaction”. Only e.g. invisible nested iframes that scammy ad companies love to use will have their localstorage limits affected. Top level frames are unchanged.
I too am on a once a day sprint. I use a similar technique. I have one Scrivener project for my posts. I create a folder/doc for each topic I want to write about, usually 5-15 ahead of where I am. In each one I jot down the idea. As the week progresses and I find supporting info I drop it in there. Then when it comes time to write the article I have enough to go on.
I had the symptoms. But did I have the coronavirus?
I suspect it will be shown that disposable $0.50 N95 masks are largely effective and that the US population was deliberately misled about their effectiveness because the country has no way to provide such masks not only to the general public but to healthcare workers.
π and e are not algebraic numbers. So the set of "useful" (read: definable) reals is larger than the algebraic numbers.
I'm also trying my best to push back on misinformation, but not feeling like I'm having much positive effect. It feels like there's just a flood of it.
There are so many edge case situations that I don't even understand how people prescribe "just" showering after poop. Sometimes people get diarrhea. Sometimes they get constipation. Some people just have to go twice a day.

Bidets and air drying or TP drying accounts of all of these.
Not yet, though I am working on replacing proprietary software I use with free software that's Linux/BSD compatible.

It's a long journey - started using Windows. macOS is a nice gap-stop, but the long term destination is probably something like OpenBSD or Qubes OS.

Perhaps eventually replacing much of the old software on my machine with stuff written in memory safe languages like Rust. There's some far-off efforts like Redox OS that may well end up being an option for me.

I keep my eye on security developments and I try to improve my situation as and when I have the time/energy to.

EDIT: To say, I have also switched from iOS to Android - after many years of waiting till Android itself became more secure. I've also dumped a lot of non-free software like Google Authenticator for free alternatives like andOTP. I'd like to eventually run something like Replicant or whatever is current/actively developed in the future.
When we talk about something being "C-like", the syntax is what we're talking about. Being "distracted by the syntax" doesn't make sense when the syntax is the entire point of the statement being made.
Yes and no.

For work that doesn't require a lot of communication and collaboration, it'll be easy to outsource to other countries, just like now.

For work that is intensely collaborative, having the team speaking one language in one (or adjacent) time zones is key.
And the reason we're using containers in the first place is precisely because we've messed up and traded shared libs for having a proven-interworking set of them, something that can trivially be achieved using static linking.
There is huge difference between "no evidence of human to human transmission" and "evidence of no human to human transmission". The former means, we don't know yet. You can blame them for not knowing. But admitting that was right. And when they knew, they told everyone. At least in this instance, they haven't lost any credibility. On the contrary, it shows integrity to admit your limits of knowledge.
You guys are looking at a different image than I am then. The disclaimer is huge, very prominent and also in the center of the page. There are many more better examples of scams out there--this one is mild.
Often I am the only one wearing a mask in the whole grocery store. Munich, 1300 infections. One infected for couple city blocks.
Blocking cookies from a blocklist of "trackers" as your link clearly describes is not the same as disabling them completely.
Apple have to put restrictions on websites, otherwise users might break free from AppStore walled garden.
To be clearer; this is a huge win for privacy/antitracking without any? real downsides.

> “chrome will never have this”

Indeed :)
Truly it is a golden time for luddites who kept buying "shiny metal disks" to keep on "primitive spinning spinning rust" in spite of the derision.

Because I agree completely; a few pixels of definition or hues of colour are a great deal less important than a bunch of dead people.
This is amazing. As long as none of your "unsuspecting" "victims" notice you have a dedicated IP lol
Basically our whole economy is based off of BS IOU's and the moment there is any problem in the world the whole system comes crashing down around us. Decades of economists and investors building layers and layers of obfuscated financial abstractions so they can get rich finally has its consequences.

I guess it's been a while since we've eaten the rich. It was a long time coming.
Or
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-bud...

/heh, folks downvoting factcheck.org these days....
Covid-19 Authorities, Contract Vehicles, and Initiatives – AiDA
Similar mistakes were made by seemingly every country that hadn’t dealt with a SARS virus before. This might be partially explained by the leadership position the US has traditionally enjoyed on the world stage.
> Sometimes people get diarrhea. Sometimes they get constipation.

Right - I said 'nobody healthy'.

> Some people just have to go twice a day.

That's insane. Who's routinely shitting twice a day?
This is one approach, but you can avoid breakage by accepting cookies initially while enabling "clear cookies on exit." Combined with Firefox containers this works pretty well.
I'd say he is arguing that the public is okay with it as it has been blatantly obvious for his entire presidency, without people rioting
Ask HN: Is there video conferencing software for Linux AND hardware-accelerated?
This is a spin-off question from a comment on HN post "Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom" ( https://meet.jit.si/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968 ).

Everything I tried (Jitsi on Firefox or Chrome, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Zoom, Slack) consumes a full CPU all the time (a.k.a. no hardware acceleration), making fans spin and slowing down other work.

I'm using Arch Linux & Xorg on a recent Thinkpad with Intel CPU & GPU, and the packages mentioned by the Intel section of https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration (intel-media-driver, libva-intel-driver, linux-firmware) are installed.

In the aforementioned post, user jasondclinton says that hardware video decoding is coming to Firefox on Wayland ( https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-76-VA-API-Formats , https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619258 , https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D65536 ). So if I understand correctly, this means conferencing over WebRTC with codecs H264/VP9/VP8 (and maybe others? The merge request says it "enables VA-API for all formats") will be accelerated in Firefox on Wayland. That's good and I'll try it.

Apart from that,

- Do you know of any other options? Regarding Zoom/Slack/Skype/etc, I'm not very surprised: Linux market share is low, so from a money perspective, fixing this may not be the best spending of engineer time.

- Finally, I'm surprised that acceleration could be missing in Chrome on Linux, because Google must have worked on it to ship a good Google Hangouts/Meet experience on low-powered Chromebooks. Am I missing anything? (Is there a flag / dependency / binary package I could need to enable it in non-Chromebook Chrome?) Is video acceleration really positively nonexistent on Chrome/Chromium on Linux?!

Thanks!
This has not been litigated in NYS: based on my quick search the order has not been challenged.
It's not entirely clear that some politicians aren't contemplating ending the lockdown and accepting the casualties.

It seems crazy when you run the numbers.
It's been amazing following all the progress so far. I'm a proud $5/mo sponsor and look forward to writing something in Zig soon!

Are there any concurrency constructs provided by the language yet? I'm just starting to learn how to do concurrency in lower-level langauges (with mutexes and spinlocks and stuff). I'm coming from the world of Python where my experience with concurrent state is limited to simple row-level locks and `with transaction.atomic():`.

An equivalent article to this would be awesome for Zig:
https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-03-23-concurrent-programming...

Edit: I just found this announcement for async function support: https://ziglang.org/download/0.5.0/release-notes.html#Async-...
I guess this mentality leads to the current state of play where all UI related latencies are out of the roof compare to the 80s. At work, I deal with systems that require 16G of heap as the minimum. Funnily when things get rewritten in Rust providing the exact same functionality and the same or better performance the memory requirement goes down 10x (or more). It is up to us how much garbage our systems producing, how much CO2 is wasted on this. I guess many of us are ok with it. While some of us are not. https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go...
Clarity is primary; good abstractions allow you to achieve it. The fact that bad abstractions harm clarity is something we agree on very strongly.
At age 62 (18 months ago) I took a 1 day “ham cram” and got my technician license, and bought a couple of $25 vhf/uhf walk-in talkies. And played with homemade antennas for a while.

A year ago I enrolled in my local community college’s Electronics 101 course, which meant resistors, voltage, current, capacitors, and inductors. And voltmeters and power supplies.

Six months ago I took Elec 102, which are transformers, diodes, AC to DC rectification, transformers, and, voila, transistors.

Next step: microcontrollers, sensors, and relays.

Future: relearn imaginary exponents and Euler.

It’s a _big_ field!
Agree, but it's not so cut and dry.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...

edit: speaking of cut and dry..men should be clean-shaven to ensure snug fit.
Elaborating, the hypothesis that Cantor disproves is "The real numbers are countable -- that is to say, the real numbers can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers".

You never have to use the axiom of choice, because the hypothesis tells you there is a one-to-one function between the reals and the naturals. You can then order the reals in the order suggested by their image in the naturals: f(0), f(1), f(2), ...