skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HTML+ECMAScript keeps the developer at quite a distance from the hardware, and it imposes all kinds of limitations which don't have to exist.

The web is good enough for pure content delivery, but for more advanced interactive applications, the limitations are a huge waste. For instance, I have a computer at home with a 12-core, 24-thread processor, but web applications are basically single-threaded with some very limited support for web workers. I'm also limited to basically one language, which is garbage collected, so performance and memory usage are significantly worse than they could be. And as far as graphics, you're limited to WebGL which is ages behind the state of the art in terms of graphics APIs.

Basically there is a whole universe of tools out there for software development, but if you want to target web you're limited to a handful of poorly performing, hacky options.

For my work, we use several web applications to collaborate. As someone who works on highly optimized user-facing software, it's frustrating to understand how poor these web applications perform given the potential of modern hardware.

The reason we use them is because you can send anyone a link, and they're into the software in one click. There's no reason we couldn't have the same experience for native software, where when you click the link your computer downloads a native binary and runs it in a sandboxed environment against a standardized system API. It would take a lot of careful work and planning, but there's no technical reason it couldn't exist, and it would be so much better for developers and users.
> And now the last time I tried to load a kernel module I had built for my Ubuntu system, it refused because, duh, it wasn't signed by some UEFI key I had never even seen. So now of course, the Ubuntu is fucking gone.

There is no conspiracy here. The option you are looking for is in your BIOS/UEFI, not in the OS. You should have known better and read the fucking manual. Your machine comes with Secure Boot enabled by default, by the policy of Secure Boot, there are two possible outcomes.

1. If the OS doesn't support Secure Boot, you cannot boot the OS until Secure Boot is disabled (or you add your own signing key to BIOS/UEFI).

2. If the OS supports Secure Boot and signed by a big firm, you can boot it by default, but by the policy, it cannot execute any unsigned driver until Secure Boot is disabled (or you add your own signing key to BIOS/UEFI).

By supporting Secure Boot, Ubuntu has made OS installation works out-of-the-box, otherwise you cannot even install the system (if so, I bet you'll complain how Ubuntu is gone for you, and how free and open source has terrible user experience - due to its absurd priority on the notation of freedom, does not even boot, and blablabla). TL;DR: Your rants are unwarranted. You can always disable Secure Boot, try disabling it first.

If the UEFI on your PC doesn't allow you to disable Secure Boot, you can write a warranted angry post then, the conspiracy would be real (there used to be some evil embedded/tablet PCs that did this), otherwise it's not - you are free to disable Secure Boot, adding your signing key, optionally, even deleting Microsoft's signing key to fully control Secure Boot under your own discretion in the vast majority of PCs.

> Even Windows you can just boot into a development mode and it might scream at you on the desktop, but it will allow you to modify your system as you wish.

This is plain falsehood. Again, read the manual from Microsoft: If Secure Boot is enabled, you cannot boot into a development mode - the BCD setting is disabled. Windows does not allow you to modify your system as you wish. You cannot run, develop, or debug an unsigned kernel-mode driver unless you disable Secure Boot [0]. Disclaimer: I run Linux/BSD exclusively, I don't do any development on Windows, don't take my words for it, instead, check my citations to Microsoft's documentation. It's for Windows 8 32-bit that happened to be the first hit in my search, but I believe the policies are the same in Windows 10.

Finally, locking down a system is not only used for DRM. Maybe you don't want it on a PC, but it's often desirable in production systems. For example, on my server, I completely disabled kernel modules, hotpatching, /dev/mem, etc., so that no code can even be loaded into the kernel (other people do the opposite, it's a tradeoff between uptime and security). There may still be some exploits that make it possible - PaX/grsecurity has better countermeasures and blocks additional attack vectors - but it's not available to the general public anymore.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/w8cookbook/se...
I think that's pretty normal and is meant to stop rules-lawyering when you do ban someone.
It looks really good. It makes me wish I had a retro project idea I could use it on. It'd be great for a demo-scene website.
> fork.dev

That looks cool! Personally I love the simplicity of both Sublime Text and Merge so I gravitate towards those (I don't really care/need about customization)
RAI is Italy's state-owned TV channel(s).

It's controlled by the party that is governing, and has all the problems of anything that is state-run, including a huge potential for inefficiencies, bureaucracy, and at times corruption.

Given the quality level of the "experts" used by the government in this pandemic, I wouldn't give it any credit.
On Finding the Balance Between Proximity and Distance in Times of Pandemic
UC Berkeley (where I did my CS degree) follows this model after admission. There's CS61A, an introductory class for people with some math/computers background, and CS3, an introduction for people coming in with no background. Successful and interested CS3 students are then funnelled into CS61A.
Money makes money.

Say they raise enough to earn interest on their capital.

Say they make 1% interest per year.

Storing a GB costs $10. 1% of that is 10c.

How much does it cost to store a GB for a year?

Amazon charge ~1c/m for infrequent access and 0.4c/m for Glacier.

So somewhere between 12c and 5c a year.
I am a kid from a post-communist state. What I saw was that abused children had it very rough even though they were very bright, and the lazy smarts generally had perfect conditions at home with loving parents ready to help at any time - and I don't mean with homework itself. You wouldn't believe what sense of not being loved and stress does to a child.

> the socioeconomical situation is exactly the same (because communism)

Not true at all. It might look that way to an american, but there are things like social capital, and it's not even true for financial capital. From USA perspective we were all equally poor, but from our perspective and "in our world", 300 vs 900 usd monthly wage is (was) a huuuuuge difference.

You have to consider that my parents and parents of my former classmates were raised during actual communism. Do you know how they raised children during communism? They beat them, because disobedience could mean death or lifelong prison or being sent to uranium mines - for the whole family. One bad word was all it took. And many parents haven't yet realized, even today's, that this is not the correct way. On top of that, during the 90's, rampant corruption has emerged, then the economical crisis, etc.

And then of course the teachers - their role during communism was different that what it should really be today, and many have not realized yet.
Fork is definitely my fave on Windows too. I’ve heard people say good things about GitKraken but the UI really didn’t click with me for some reason. Sourcetree (on Windows at least) is slow and a real memory hog.
Toptal's Playbook for Working Remotely
> wonder what the threshold really is for changing that idea

It won't happen until some significant proportion of the population has had someone related to them or personally known to them die.
At 10$/gb they are charging 200 times what you pay for a gb elsewhere for a month. So they are at least getting 200 months worth of money from you upfront. Even aside from what the others mentioned with the endowment.
Esports and the Dangers of Serving at the Pleasure of a King
"The virus is created in a lab" is a conspiracy theory that is being kept alive because of the way American politics work.

People asume that all this writing is "organic". It is not. It is orchestrated and coordinated. Basically the current US administration gains politically by keeping war rhetorics; the "maybe the virus is created in lab, maybe released by accident, maybe on purpose, we don't know, China is not being transparent" is a key part.

Accepting the virus as a natural phenomenon puts the focus on the actual policy response and that is much less of a winner.
Correct. It’s a republic.
Indeed, it's profitable for the developers (leeching users' data) but not the users.
2 million innocent people massacred in countless criminal endless wars, and yet its people do NOTHING about it, all the while patting themselves on the back for "killing Hitler."

No money for nurses, million dollar bombing missions every twenty minutes for 20+ years.

Death cults in the Pentagon, a long line of pedophiles protected by every President since Kennedy ..

Get the picture yet?
I’ve made the same observation too. At one point I was using the guis for the simple stuff, and resorting to the command line if things break. But using the git cli tools is a skill that is very easy to forget, and by the time I got to the weird edge cases, I was pulling my hair with frustration on both myself (for forgetting) and the guis (for actually aggravating the problems)

From the on I resolved to only use the cli, and over time it has become almost as easy to navigate as the guis - all the different cli tools are actually quite great when you get used to them.

The flip side is that I feel comfortable going deep and resolving all the weird edge cases as I can drop to as low level as I wish.
I find kids understand the concept of functions really intuitively if it is stated simply - input -> func -> output, it doesn't have to be difficult maths, and it can make for some great games. It looks a little intimidating if using the notation in this article but they easily grasp that a function transforms inputs and returns outputs, and it can be a fun introduction to maths and programming, and then later to things like graphs based on functions.

Another game I play with my kids to introduce the concept of functions which aren't just for numbers is a haircut function. You start by deciding on what the function does (curls hair, cuts it short, makes it longer), write that in the middle of the page, then you draw some input people on the left of the page, and on the right hand side draw the output for each input. Bonus points for running the function twice to see what happens to that person. This is a popular game with my kids and gets them involved as they can draw their own.
Anyone with a little physics background, know that this totally bullshit. A large body like Saturn could not change its orbit so dramatically in less than a few thousands of years.
I noticed that it's using box-shadow for the "3d effect" on buttons and window borders.

I'm a bit disappointed they didn't use the "inset" or "outset" border-style [0] which pretty nobody uses anymore these days. I thought this kind of design is pretty much why these border-styles exist.

[0]: https://htmldog.com/references/css/properties/border-style/
I'm sure if you speak to an 18 y/o today they'll tell you there is a scene. But give them 10 years and they'll be saying the same as you.

I think it's just how our brains change. When we're in our late teens, striking out into the world everything is new and full of possibilities. We hoover up new experiences and crave novelty as we find our place in the world. But later on in life that's no longer necessary - we enter stable survival mode instead.

I think evolutionary biology can explain a lot of this (the same happened to me too btw).
Show HN: We Built a Search Engine to Uncover Any Audience's Sources of Influence
Try putting that track into your random-shuffle collection; you might get some more miles out of it that way. That's what I do for my housework music: whether it's in a pocket mp3 player or 'mpg123 -C -Z *mp3', it's all familiar tracks that roughly fit the mood, and the familiarity of the tune is there but there's just enough surprise from its being up next to make it pleasant without being distracting.
His quote was rather crass: "Today is a sad day, and people will react in different ways. However you react, those emotions are real, and they matter"

There's a difference between "you feel sad you're fired" and "you'll miss your mortgage next month, because no one is hiring, and your kids may be kicked out of their school district as a result."
> Our goal is permanence

Nothing is ever permanent. I've seen so many services come and go, that I'm quite sceptical about relying on cloud services for my data. My 25+ years of data is on a local NAS and on an offline copy at a trusted location.
So is this the virus or pneumonia scarring lungs?
In my opinion, British universities focus less on technical skills/knowledge, but more on research skills. Initiative is encouraged. You come out knowing more useful things, with experience in independent work/research, and with more confidence in yourself.

A Russian university would absolutely hammer you with technical knowledge (including in many irrelevant subjects), but when it comes to actually doing an independent research project plagiarism is rampant. As a student, you are belittled at every step. You are unlikely to get involved in any independent research, initiative is discouraged, you learn a lot of things that are not useful.

However, I agree with other posters that British universities bizarrely seem to often reward/celebrate athletics more than academic achievements. Somehow, the top of the social hierarchy are the kids that are good at team sports. In a Russian university, how you do at sports is for the most part irrelevant and if you are not involved in the sport yourself, you will likely never hear about someone's sporting achievements. That makes for a healthier social environment, I think.
Probably not, it's just more effort to verify you as legitimate and your baseline behaviour is closer to a robot, meaning when your account gets hijacked, it's more difficult to detect deviance.
Warner Media Streaming Service HBO Max Launch on May 27th
GitKraken has been a godsend, I have been really spoiled by it. Managing big repositories has become a breeze thanks to the visualization techniques it uses.
If only the company behind it weren't so questionable about their privacy and monetization policies. I am still on the fence on the product.
I ran windows 95 in VirtualBox recently to play an old game. You need a shady kernel hack because modern CPUs are way too fast, and some shady display drivers.

Electron sounds nicer.
`git add -p` is pretty fast for staging parts of files
Show HN: NectarJS 0.4 adds memory mgmt and ffi for native JavaScript compilation
I find a git-gui is useful to visualise complex workflows, merge mistakes that have been pushed to the repository, and relative status of various branches simultaneously. That, and the per-chunk/line staging is very useful to do visually, can add/remove lines from the index and see exactly what is going to change on what files (without paging through millions of git diff pages).

All of this is possible with the terminal tools, but made much easier with a GUI. It also makes it possible for non-experts to fix problems without just blowing away the repository and repeating work.

I'm still using GitX(l) on mac, it keeps dying and being resurrected as a fork, I've always found it the perfect balance between "too simple" and "too complex", and I can just launch it from the terminal "in context" when I need it.
This is beyond me as well but I chalk it up to our entire field being immature, which means there are endless possibilities and endless chaos.

IMO background activity should need an extra permission similar to notifications and geolocation.

But we need to sort out UX (and start punishing the companies that "misunderstand" GDPR to mean they just need to add another popup) as it is starting to get bad now.

BTW, this needs to be fixed across a number of situations. There's no reason why I would want to allow a build tool to access all my projects just because I want to allow it to access one project. (Github and Azure Devops, I'm looking at you)
A lot of great music is in the back catalogue.Google music has a good catalogue for example include possibly all of the curated Grateful Dead recordings like the Dave's Picks, and Dick's Picks. Enough content for a lifetime.
To find new music rather than seek out new artists, a more promising avenue might be to look into the past, there so much of great work which has fallen into obscurity.
"not load" - nothing happens and eventually connection timed out (unfortunately I don't have exact recollection if there was a message or just nothing happened). But I did research it and closest evidence I found that this was not a technical issue but deliberate blocking was from some discussion on Center for Internet Security:
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/reliance-jio-...
It is called "reality".

Like cities have pollution problems because of thermal engines. Like airplanes or ships.

We know we should fly on Pegasus feeding themselves on rainbows but that is not feasible on the short term.

All human activities have risk. You can minimize those, but never made them zero.
GitKraken is horribly slow too. I've only ever been happy with flow (which I've now paid for cause I love it) and Sublime Merge which I still use on linux but am less happy with
Or you could encrypt your data if you're so concerned about it
Hi HN. Second-time founder (previously co-founded Moz), launching our product for the first time today. It's a tool to help founders, market researchers, PRs, & marketers discover the publications and people followed+engaged-with by any describable audience.

Search for "woodworking" and we'll uncover several thousand profiles that talk about woodworking online, then show you the podcasts, websites, social accounts, and YouTube channels those profiles interact-with most.

Feedback welcome; hope the data proves useful to some of y'all for your own projects.
I have not-so-fond memories of being bullied for being clever while growing up in the UK. I was placed in all the accelerated programmes and bumped up a year in some cases, which resulted in the odd situation where you were bullied for being a nerd, but also relied upon by the same bullies when they needed help with their tests.

I landed on my feet as a programmer, thankfully, but not until the depression set in and my performance in sixth form and university utterly plummetted. Impossible expectations, zero family support (never good enough and never doing the right thing _for them_).

Hearing stories about the different priorities in Russia and Latvia, from my various friends who came frmo there, made me feel quite envious, although I only heard the good parts of it (like learning multiple languages from a young age).

It's definitely not just the education system that's to blame (although the repeated hammering it takes from successive governments is an issue), there's definitely a wider cultural issue where it's almost cooler to be ignorant.
I do all my commiting and most trouble-free pull-/pushing with a GUI. When merging/rebasing becomes more non-trivial I'm beginning to resort to the CLI (and sometimes SmartGit or git-gui for hunks).
A brittle star-inspired robot that can crawl underwater
Funding is always limited, so if you are going to allocate funds with limited resources you might base it on a model nature provides: Diversity.

While there is no guaranteed way of choosing the right research to fund, an allocation of those funds among a set of common projects with similarities and dissimilarities would yield the most progress -- or at least, the highest probability of achieving progress. But how do you go about calculating the allocation?

There is a good set of papers that describes a framework for performing such an analysis.

M. Weitzman et al., 1992
M. Weitzman et al., 1998
H. Simianer et al., 2003

We built an implementation of the framework described in those papers, and though we are targeting the agricultural sector, we'd be curious to see it applied for other purposes such as measuring research progress, and allocating funds for it.

You can check it out here: https://mostdiverse.com

Reach out if you want to run some of your own data, we are happy to see this applied to areas outside our expertise.

P.S. We are trying to get funding too! Ha!
Our biggest problem is that research is expected to be in Academia. Not withstanding few exceptions such as DeepMind and FAIR, vast majority of industrial research is by definition short term. For example, the founding document of Microsoft Research asserted that they only want to hire researchers who are willing to work on relevant problems with 2 year horizon with emphasis on product integrations. Similarly, even at Bell Labs research was expected to help phone lines (a fun story being C/Unix were underground projects, borderline "unapproved").

All these while, investment in science and research have had returns that blows up any other investments you can possibly imagine. So why are companies so relunctant at even putting in 1% of their revenues in research? Why we as nations put less than 1% of GDP in research? Why true exploratory research is only expected to happen in academia?

These are obvious and massive gaps in our economic story and progress. But anytime you have gaps, you have opportunity! One of my favorite funding models to play around is a slight variation of Y-Combinator model. Instead of giving $120K to teens who can whip out websites that you can later offload to trillion dollar stupid gorillas in 5 years, imagine you do this: You hire researchers who are passionate and give them $0.5M grant to have 3 year runway. They need not build companies, do pitches or generate revenues. They just do their own curiocity driven exploration, they set their own agenda. Bunch of these folks even perhaps work in same buildings so they can collaborate and may be spend some money to hire students/post-docs/engineers. After 3 years, VC looks at their ideas, prototypes, demos and funds a teen with massive enterprenuerial spirit to build products off of those ideas. In other words, we create pool of innovations and pool of people who can build companies. We decouple short term determinisitc execution from long term randomized innovations. It's like having brain with parts that think fast and slow.

How will this work out? I would expect 99% of funded researchers producing nothing useful in terms of business. From the rest 1%, possibly 9 out of 10 are minor things and may be 1 is significant breakthrough leading to $10B company. But more importantly, there is 1 in 10,000 chance that breakthrough leads to something of the order of $100B. This would result in expected return of 20X. More importantly, these companies will be cumulative, so your expected return grows over time with same continued investment! If done right, I think this version of YC could become first $10 trillion company because it will be sort of a meta-company whoes product is long lasting companies built on big breakthroughts.

There are obviously several issues in this idea that I haven't worked out yet: (1) why VC should fund academia like labs when government is already doing it? (2) researchers want to open up their ideas so what moat do you really have? (3) how does collaborations happen? (4) why any enterprenuer wants to execute on someone else's ideas? etc.

PS: Loonshots is a must read anyone interested in this area.
Ambani is losing his wealth and person who benefited the most during this time is Adani who is going to surpass ambani in wealth.
Thank you to the author for making a native application.
Fighting with the Data
Excellent private government story