skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which conclusions have you drawn and have you changed to (or solidified) the correct OVER orientation now?
Mildly mentally handicapped people normally aren't institutionalised today. Long-term/residential psychiatric hospitals are for very severe cases.

This feels like a pretty rosy-tinted view of pre-modern institutionalisation, too. A lot of these people would have ended up in workhouses and similar.
1-2ms(avg) in FF on Linux on a 60Hz Display. 2.5-3.5 in Brave in a similar setup.
> led me to the conclusion that it's not really suited for serious production software.

While I get that you may have been frustrated with a Python setup, concluding that it's not suitable for "serious" production software isn't a proportionate response, and the evidence of many companies using it for "serious" production systems suggests that it is in fact fine. Examples include Instagram and Dropbox.

> It seems like you practically need to containerize a python code-base to make it repeatable.

This is pretty much the case for any interpreted language that has dependencies that aren't compiled into the binary. Arguably even for anything that doesn't produce completely static binaries.

Yes Python has a learning curve for production use, all languages and ecosystems do. In Python a fair bit of this happens to be on deployment, rather than in, say, compilation stages. Python is not out of the ordinary, it's not the worst. It's not the best either, it's fairly reasonable for its age, complexity, and typical uses.
I’ve really enjoyed that. About the only thing I have to finish doing is breaking years of habit around !$ and using $()
I agree. I think that is something that gets lost with all the start up founders coming out of the ivy league. I worked full time when going to college. When I graduated, I had to get a job immediately to start paying back loans. I didn't have a network of high net worth individuals willing to roll the dice on me with huge checks. I'm sure me and others could do (have done) some cool stuff if we had even our bills paid for a couple of years while we tried to make a go of a cool idea.
Plenty of languages have types that let you ask those kind of operations in a nice way. E.g. in Haskell you'd do

traverse (flip when (putStrLn "James and Jane have same car color")) $
liftA2 == james.car.colour jane.car.colour

The problem isn't that SQL supports tri-state logic, it's that it gives you no way of opting out of it. Over 90% of the time a given value should never be null, but there's no way to put SQL into a mode where a null in a given intermediate stage is an error. Instead it will silently give you a strange answer with no indication that anything went wrong.
Show HN: A semi-skeuomorphic podcast player app with a spinning turntable
> effecity

is that a thing/word?
You can now track the corona outbreak on Fitbit
Facebook Filed a Lawsuit Against Basant Gajjar in California Court
Bybrand launches feature to bulk update of email signatures for G Suite
Have you worked with C++ much? It has the same problems to a much, much worse extent.
You could check out Pythonista, Codea, Javascript Anywhere, TechBASIC, DraftCode (for PHP) and Continuous (C# and F#). Those are all coding apps so you can program directly on the device. Several of them also enable packaging the programs you create for distribution on the App Store. Several of them also have built-in GUI authoring tools although I generally prefer to build my GUIs in code.

Working Copy is an excellent GIT client and works well with many of the above and there are plenty of coding editors. There are also a plethora of non-programming creativity apps, many of which are useful for coding projects.
Indeed, we are star-huggers. Earth orbit is tiny when compared to the last round rocks we have around it.
Ash HN: Tips to Convert an Old Setupbox and DVR with Broadcom BCM7453 MIPS Chip
I would like to convert a 10 year old satellite setupbox + DVR into a media player as it has a 160 GB HDD with a USB and Ethernet port. Has anyone did this sort of thing? Perhaps by installing Debian for MIPS? The Broadcom BCM7453 is a 300 Mhz MIPS system-on-chip with support for MPEG-4 and dolby digital decoding. Linux kernel for this seems to be available: Set-top box Linux (BCM7xxx) - kernel.org baseline - https://github.com/Broadcom/stblinux-3.8/tree/master/linux
Coronavirus: How Not to Interpret the Death Statistics
>The fossil fuel industry sells oil and gas to others to burn, it doesn't light the stuff up itself for fun.

Who said they'd burn it for fun? Necessity suffices.

>In Russia, one of the world’s top producers, the industry is considering resorting to burning its oil to take it off the market, sources told Reuters

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-turmoil/when-o...
You're not really addressing GP's point, IMO. The tech isn't really the hard part about Instagram. The market penetration and now monetization is. No one is going to use pixelfed over Instagram because the whole point of using Instagram is for the network effects (clout). If people move/continue to move off Instagram, it will be for something that more effectively connects them to fame and reach, like TikTok.

No, it's not complicated stuff to build something like TikTok and Instagram. But it is complicated to do all the other important parts besides building it, which are just as important if not much more so. To get people to use it, and to incrementally improve it 0.1% more week over week -- that's the part that you need a full company to do, and that's the thing that a lone founder will struggle to do.
Asynchronous programming

With the addition of async to django core, I felt its time to finally learn the concept. I first took interest in async early last year when I re-read a medium post on Japronto; an async python web framework that claims to be faster than Go and Node.

Since then, I've been on the lookout for introductory posts about async but all I see is snippets from the docs with little or no modifications and a lame (or maybe I'm too dumb) attempt at explaining it.

I picked up multi threaded programming few weeks ago and I understand (correct me if I'm wrong) it does have similarities with asynchronous programming, but I just don't see where async fits in the puzzle.
> As a result there are some false positives.

Could this be a feature rather than a bug here? Help maintain tracing to a very high level statistically while still giving plausible deniability for personal privacy?
Too many, yes, but far from all. At least our politicians are less aligned to lobby groups than the companies behind those groups, be they small or Google-sized.
Your own first two points are in conflict. Either humans from the past raised in today's world would be like today's humans, or like the past's humans. Pick one.
>If I'm not mistaken, the technical term for these broad-area drainage systems is "river"

In some area's/countries - yes. What I was referring to would be your towns/cities and heck in the UK, we have most accomodation plumbed for water going in and out.

Some countries/area's have what they call storm drains.

Yes they all end up at the river, ideally for the sewage - after it is treated, though again mileage may vary from country to country.
So if someone wanted to get into GPU computer what's the best way?

Is it CUDA? openCL1.2?
Vulkan has some compute stuff, would that be good enough?
Someday, You Won’t Want to Code for a Living
Mods, can we get the title renamed? This API has 4 pdf-manipulating methods total, it cannot be either richest or more comprehensive!

I propose “Freemim PDF Tools API Documentation”, based on page title.
This looks great, I'm going to consider this for future projects!

I do a lot of Django, and have found the `django-configurations` package to be pretty good. The thing it's missing that Gila provides is the config file layer, but that's also not _typically_ how Django projects are configured, config is generally done in Python rather than config files.
Goldman’s vampire squid gave way to BlackRock
GDPR is heavily based on the old German "Bundesdatenschutzgesetz" (Federal Data Protection Act). There is little new in it that wasn't the law in Germany already, only now it carries way higher penalties.

The law was passed in 1977 in its first form on the federal level, was already in effect on state-level in 1971, and thus is older than Google by a few decades.
Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
Do you have kids?

It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past.

I wonder if your opinion is from someone with kids or not.
In theory, anything is possible, sure. Problem is, in order to live forever one must be indestructible. This is because for the modern human the mean time to the death in an accident is way below one thousand years. (Indestructibility would bring with it its own issues.)
I think I need a beard for this to work.
It is like Khronos keeps missing the point why developers jump into more productive eco-systems.

Lets see how they manage Vulkan, which keeps getting extensions that NVidia and AMD first develop in DirectX anyway, like Raytracing and mesh shaders.

Google and Samsung had to adapt Microsoft's HLSL compiler to target SPIR-V, because plenty of game developers weren't willing to write GLSL, or to port their shaders.

For those that don't know shading languages HLSL is closer to C++ in language features, also similar to what PS4 uses, while GLSL is pretty much still stuck in being a C derived shading language.
'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Covid-19 Patients
Shouldn't have stolen the color scheme from jwz. Now we have two problems.
Main Problem with the Big Companies is that these are located in Ireland.

The Commissioner there has no resources [0] to pursue these cases but he can't be bypassed when it comes to fees (at least convention of the other Commissioners if not by the GDPR itself).

The other Commissioners are becoming more and more upset with this and planing to institute a board to overrule Ireland's Commissioner. But all of this is very slow...

You can't imagen the frustration over this on part of the other Comissioners

[0] https://technology.ie/data-protection-commissioner-double-wo...
Boundaries 2: Assisted Processing
The main picture seems like something out of a science fiction nightmare
Dow University claim that vaccine ready for corona treatment
You're making the argument that reducing your demand for something does not reduce the demand for that thing, because demanding less of something makes others demand it more.
Nice suggestion. Seems like RAL is equivalent to Pantone but in Europe. I’ll look into its licensing and implement it if it’s not much of a headache :)
Another interesting angle on this question comes from the Jaynes bicameral mind hypothesis [0].

Given that a major component of PTSD is moral injury -- e.g., I can't believe someone intentionally did that to me / I can't believe I had to do that to someone else -- I wonder whether (if the bicameral mind theory is true which I think it is) ancient warriors experienced PTSD not as internal angst but rather as a "dialogue among the gods" that happened in one's head following stress.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
Hey Arnold on Zoom, Gluts, and Scarcity
IEEE floats with non-signalling NaNs make some very aggressive tradeoffs (in the name of performance) that were maybe a reasonable default in 1985 but are certainly not so today. General-purpose programming languages should not be offering them unless very explicitly opted in to.
> When a province rebelled against Roman Rule and Rome would crush them, insurrection was punished particularly harshly. People would be put in groups of 10 (hence DECImate) where each group was responsible for choosing which of those 10 would die and for killing that person.

This is incorrect. Decimation was a form of military discipline, not civilian, and it was _extremely_ rare for most of Rome's history. It was usually used for mass desertion. Thousands of people were executed for individual desertion during WW1, so you could argue that it's not THAT exotic a punishment.

The Roman Empire _did_ do various nasty things to rebellious provinces (Judea is particularly notable), but again, really nothing that we haven't seen in 20th century wars, unfortunately.
Great read, though his writing style is less intuitive if you are fairly new to JavaScript and trying to grasp some of its concepts. For example, in his reduce function [0] example, he names his variable "current" to bind the accumulated value the reduce function is going to eventually return. That is a totally fair name, but I don't know if it really "clicks" if you were reading over this for the first time. I think it would be faster to grasp the reduce function's purpose if it was simply named "accumulated" or something alike, especially when this snippet is advertising the idea of higher order functions and callbacks.

Little things like this I am nit-picky about, but overall, great book.

[0] https://eloquentjavascript.net/05_higher_order.html#h_fx3e34...
Even before Discourse I recall forum software that managed mailing lists. There was usually a sticky with a message warning forum users that each post is sent out as an email, so be respectful of this and format accordingly should you desire a response.

EDIT:

I actually don't know if it was forum software or just mailman plugged into the forum somehow.
Searching for "noahide", the first results are antisemitic. There's still some work left to do here.
To me this makes an excellent argument for taxation rather than banning. People do occasionally find advertising useful. The problem is not the existence of advertising, it is the amount of it. In medicine, it is the dose that makes the difference between a useful medicine and a poison. If we had about 95% less advertising volume in our lives, people wouldn't be so upset about it. And the remaining 5% of ads would need to be better (more useful, more entertaining, more pertinent) to compete in a reduced ecological niche.
The owner of the site gave a talk at DEFCON 17, "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Chris...
Except CUDA is proprietary and doesn't work on iGPUs and non-nvidia GPUs?
I think this segment has mostly moved to groups.io, which is of course hosted. Other than that, mailman is still in use in a lot of places. It's not great, but it still works.
An important piece of the early internet. I remember when my brief submission made it to the last issue of HOE (Hogs of Ecstasy) and felt like a small celebrity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_t...

On March 16th there was a request to avoid "non-essential travel and contact with others", on March 20th pubs and resturants were forcibly closed, and by 23rd the restrictions on movement were being put into law.

The three-day period I was thinking of was the 20th-23rd; the number of people out and about on the weekend of 21st/22nd was widely reported as the reason for the stricter rules the following Monday e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/boris-johnson-...

If, however, you mean "what's the proof that people were ignoring the pre-lockdown restrictions in sufficient numbers to make the stricter provisions necessary", all I can do is point out that the people with the best access to that data did chose to require the stricter provisions in response to what they saw. For more you're going to have to wait for the inevitable public enquiry (and I am deeply deeply uninterested in having a discussion about whether lockdowns are the only or most effective policy here).
Consider my platform: https://sourcehut.org

Example list: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev
Well, now that SPIRV is upon us, we can write a custom shading language which targets SPIRV
You can still use openCL and openGL on Apple hardware through MoltenVK (the former because it compiled to SPIR-V)
I believe you are correct. I believe COVID 19 IS in the category of RNA based retroviruses. No one here is saying it is the same thing as AIDS! That's silliness. But tests being rolled out on COVID 19 contain a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). I believe the virus does fall into the retrovirus category; like malaria, AIDS and ebola.
The star counts are huge, too - about a half a trillion stars in our galaxy alone.
Thread Dump Analysis API
Yoel Kenan (founder, Africori) talks about the digital music business in Africa
Stjepang/smol: A small and fast async runtime for Rust
A gif?! That would have been an opportunity to appropriately use the <blink> tag!
It definitely won't be the same... "all happy families are the same, unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way. "

Forget where that's from, but seems true of companies too. Each company I've joined had skeletons you'd never see during an interview. After the honeymoon period wears off, the truth starts to show.

Not to say that you shouldn't find a new job. Definitely don't expect it just get better though.

In fact trading the known badness of your current company for something else gives you opportunity to find different ways a company can be dysfunctional. Enough of those experiences and you'll get good at pointing out dragons before they get nasty. Truly valuable for a senior developer.
Except Vulkan is a giant pain in the ass to set up.

Just getting through the Vulkan tutorial is a weekend long affair.
Careful there, I think you mean virthay farthy
The release cycle of that common code is also a big factor.

If your common code changes fairly irregularly, you are correct, monorepos have reduced benefit.

If your common code is as likely to change as anything else, or more likely, then your multirepo setup can begin to incur more cost.
What Happens If You Stop Advertising During the Crisis?
> irthay ary

FTFY
> You might even have to add parenthesis! It's so verbose it puts Java to shame!

It's a serious problem, because in the real world programmers are not willing to double the length of their code for the sake of catching bugs that happen maybe 1 in 100 times. If the language doesn't make it easier to do the right thing than not, you'll end up with bugs. http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/04/worst-practices-should-...

> NULL doesn't behave the way it does out of some need for mathematical purity. Understanding the model just tells you when you know you need to handle your NULLs. The system behaves the way it does because the system doesn't know what you want to do when a value doesn't exist or is unknown. Logically, there is no answer. That's what you're complaining about here. It's like asking the system to add two numbers and only giving it one of them.

The problem is that there's no way to have a model that doesn't include that. At least 80% of the time, probably more, having no value for a given field is just an error, there is no correct way to handle it, so you want to mark it as non-nullable and get on with your life. But in SQL there's no type system that can distinguish nullable things from non-nullable, so you have to either treat every single column and intermediate value as nullable, or make error-prone manual checks, or just get weird results every so often.
Propositional Logic for Python Developers
I agree. Additionally the added ability to get my data back via take-out features from most services has been a general boon for me, and a major upside to the law. A far more important feature of the GDPR in my eyes than vindictive punishments.
I don't get how this can be used anywhere except when you have 2 deployment targets which seems really limited.

Also checking for environments is done weirdly, why not use

if 'ENV' not in os.environ:

instead of

ENV = os.environ.get("ENV", None)

if ENV is None:
people should be able to sue the persons involved in ruining their life for a tweet or twitter or any platform should give coverage for free speech, dont like it dont read. simple
The global recession triggered by COVID-19 started to affect the advertising landscape. The country-wide lockdowns and the state of uncertainty rapidly depleted consumer spendings.

“Going dark” is a frequent choice for brands during the recession. When the sales drop, executives review budgets to minimize the losses. Marketing and ad spendings are usually a low priority and first to experience the cuts.

So is it a smart move to stop advertising? We've gathered short-term and long-term effects your brand will face if you stop advertising.

Spoiler: They're worse than we've expected.
No problem / Kein Problem

Wir hacken schon mal deinen Sprachschatz!!

"I am learning German and would like to interact with a German community like the one here on HN."

So wärs nett.
https://archive.vn/hPnxr
CUDA definitely.

NVidia acknowledged early on that you wouldn't necessarly want to use C on the GPU, and moved CUDA into multi-language support.

So while CUDA C++ is the leading language, you can make use of Fortran, Julia, Haskell, .NET, Java, Python as well.

You also have very nice graphical tooling for GPGPU debugging, where you can debug your shaders just like any other application.

You can go through the GTC 2020 videos, https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gtc/session-catalog/
I probably would not choose C++ either unless I really needed its USP's like extreme memory/performance optimization or required compatibility with exotic hardware. But at least with C++ you can compile a binary which won't behave differently on a different system most of the time.

But there are a lot of other languages out there besides C++ and Python.
Sheer speculation, but I suspect some of them grew out of it over time and the communities fell below critical mass, and the conditions for new entrants to replace them weren't there. It was very much a product of the BBS world, and I have a hard time imagining stuff like this gaining traction now.
> As I grow older, I grow more impatient to effect change in the world.

Aha, found your problem!
The LibTerm app does that: https://libterm.app

> LLVM: You can compile C code into LLVM IR format with clang and interpret it with the lli command.
I was just talking to a friend about this. It seems like the old web is vanishing. I miss the random, often times horribly designed custom pages people used to setup. I hope we’re looking in the wrong place.
Google at ICLR 2020
The closest I can describe is that it felt like I watched Blade Runner (director's cut), enjoyed and was invested, and then at the very end Deckard said "I'm a robot" and killed Rachael.

I've debated this at length with people, because I know it's a popular film, but felt the same way after re-watching it.

It pierces my suspension of disbelief that AI can be created that simultaneously (a) simulates complex behavior & (b) completely lacks self-reflection.

Either give Caleb a character flaw (thus justifying his implicit murder by Ava) or have her successfully escape, reflect in the helicopter, turn around, and end the movie with her conflicted after re-landing at the house.

Otherwise, I don't see how the ending doesn't reveal the entire plot as a Shyamalan-esque mechanical Turk (ha! or inverse, as the metaphor would be). A filmmaker got us to believe a lie by omitting any contrary evidence? How difficult!
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth's putting on its shoes
Emperor Ashoka of Magadha (India) fought a bloody war against the kingdom of Kalinga. The carnage wrought by war moved him deeply . He converted to Buddhism and he is responsible for spreading Buddhism to much of Asia. Was this because of PTSD ? The sorrow and remorse he felt was real and changed him from a ambitious emperor to a deeply spiritual person.
I like that talk. Probably one of my favorites.
OCaml Multicore Update: April 2020, with a preprint paper