skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>sometimes partly right

>They weren't, because it didn't happen.

My understanding of some of the redditization claims I have seen was that, during some periods of time, HN was "becoming relatively more like reddit." This is different than claiming "will inevitably and permanently become 'like reddit' " (Where 'like reddit' might mean "suffer certain reddit-like dysfunctions" or simply "be sufficiently similar to reddit by some other criteria.") In the first, reddit is a direction. In the second, reddit is a state.

If someone claims to observe or have observed a trend of redditization, sometimes I become curious and want ask questions like "in what way" and "to what degree" and "did this trend continue unabated, for how long" etc. (Also, can we quantify this, maybe with lexical analysis?)

You seem to argue that HN must become permanently "like reddit" by some standard of similarity in order for a prior suggestion that "HN was becoming more like reddit" to be a valid observation. I disagree. Redditization is a matter of degree, and it might be cyclical in nature, or you and the claimant might be focused on different aspects of reddit culture.

I understand it can be tedious to have ongoing comments from people who lack a larger perspective making similar, repetitive claims of temporary or alleged redditization of HN. But the argument that is made in the site guidelines, and the one you make here, is not a compelling justification for the claim that every one of us is always wrong when we claim or suggest that some form of "redditization" is occurring. (That's how I interpret the comment about "semi noob illusion" and also your comment "They weren't, because it didn't happen.") The redditization influence doesn't need to 'win' in order to be real. A shift in the reddit direction doesn't need to become comprehensive and permanent in order to have occurred.

>But what are the odds?

The odds that HN is currently experiencing some degree, of some form, of redditization is quite high in my opinion. I've seen entire subthreads of reddit-like nonsense in the past two months, with everyone upvoting each other. It remains to be seen the degree to which this wanes in the future.

What is redditization? I'd like to see the people who complain about redditization enhance their criticism with a list of specific qualities they associate with redditization.

For me, redditization may be suspect whenever I see a great deal of highly upvoted comments in most or all of these categories: (a) inane comments, (b) rhetorically rich but otherwise empty comments, (c) snark or trollish sarcasm, and, less often, (d) entire threads of mutually upvoted thematic ironic humor. I'm sure others would list other factors, or other ways of characterizing 'redditization'.

By focusing on specific characteristics, granted, the community could talk about comment quality without mentioning reddit at all. For better or worse, this ignores a real cultural dynamic involving a subset of HN users who have a comfort and familiarity with (and preference for) reddit cultural norms.
I’ve never heard of a reviewer writing 15K lines of code. That would be a serious undertaking for someone who is reviewing as an unpaid community service in their free time outside of doing their own research/teaching/etc.

Maybe a very dedicated reviewer might check a short simulation code that can be written in a few hours max, but even that is exceptionally rare in my experience. Reviewers usually look at the results and validation simulations in the manuscript, and if they look reasonable trust the code doesn’t have major bugs affecting accuracy.
That's only if you don't review the changes, and trace the entry points at least.
Thank you for all of the great times playing Sky Wars!
I have a samsung note8 with termux. Some months ago I bought a small portable keyboars that connects to the phone through usb-c. Works very well. Can and do code on the phone.
That's an interesting thought, but what part of that requires you to buy a new car? Car technology moves notoriously slowly, and the comfort and features of a new car compared to a 3 year old car at 2/3rd the price is negligible. (outside of the move to electric cars anyway)
I will offer an observation here: franchise production of food and drink relies upon homogeneity. Sometimes, people go out for something new, but often people want the same old thing. Someone across the country in a strange bed, where their accent sticks out, might want something familiar, and that is the experience of McDonald's in the United States. I could go from one corner of the country to another and the burgers would taste identical.

And so, people want replicable coffee drinks. And coffee can be a fickle beast to brew. Given that, unlike McDonald's which can freeze and ship, you must go from bean to drink on premise in a matter of minutes, I could see a focus on trying to ferret out a way to make that expensive cup taste the same from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.
This is like if John du Pont published a 3,000 page proof of P=NP that made no reference to the well known problems with proving it, circumvented peer-review and appealed directly to the general public.

Remember: no-one ever claimed the prize for disproving the TimeCube guy either.
There's a difference between economies of scale and technological advances enabling the leverage of comparative advantage and the situation with Uber Eats. Uber Eats is just VC cash being burned to employ human labor to hand-deliver fast food to the lazy and gluttonous. It's not appealing to me. I understand some people will enjoy it while it lasts.
100 percent this.

And yet, even within the web development community, we hear a lot of complaints about how this or that isn't beginner-friendly; or how such-and-such is gatekeeping, and so on. This has been baffling to me. Is it the same in other disciplines? Are engineering, bioinformatics or medicine, for example, expected to be beginner-friendly?
I thought a lot of other large "fast food" retailers do the same for their equipment? Chik-fil-a does something similar for quality control and some predictive cooking if I recall correctly.
‘Black Mirror’ Season 6 on Hold Because Society Is Currently Depressing Enough
awesome. thanks for your generous replies!!

will spread the word about Sia and Pixeldrain when the topic comes up :)
Oh and forgot a couple of music recommendations, listening to these now:

Kraftwerk - The Robots

Marillion - Kayleigh

And hi my unknown HN friend. Currently in Kyoto, Japan, for maybe another month before returning to San Francisco.
Fantastic piece, particularly the "Lagrange multipliers"
There's some other criticism (which I won't link because the text is partisan, and it's elsewhere on HN already) with some links that point to (potential or perceived) issues:

- https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/issues/116

- https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/issues/30
No it's not, from what I understand of quantum computing, with more qbits you would be able to factor larger numbers in the same amount of time (100ms), when with your 5GHz it would take longer than the age of the universe.
I didn't know about using chrome mobile as webview provider. What are the dis-/advantages of using it? Any experience?
Show HN: GitHub Starred Repo Tagging
With respect, that's a metaphor, not an answer.

Why shouldn't the system be able to just drop incoming requests until it's able to handle them? That's what routers do.
There is no cloud solution that lets you ship and forget a system.

Come in 15 years ? It still works.
Is that possible with cloud even in short periods, like 2 years ? No.

Will it ever be possible? No.

Thats primary reason for me. I can use cloud only for stuff that are nice but not mandatory to have for service to work, like status page.

Plus, work is more enjoyable then using somebodies else stuff.
Ignore the "it might be" please
Operation Cygnus Report (Redacted)
Azure Sphere OS source code doesn't seem to be on GitHub. You can find it here though (filter for Azure Sphere) https://3rdpartysource.microsoft.com/
I couldn't say for certain, but I feel like people in the UK run cars much longer than Americans as they don't do as many miles. It's not uncommon to see cars in the UK around 15-20 years old (often not older as there was a trade-in scheme years back)

The rule of thumb in the UK is a car gets about 10k miles per year and "modern" cars tend to last about 150-200k miles before they're not worth the repair costs.

For example, my car is a 2005 Focus which I recognise is older than most cars on the road, but costs me a couple hundred quid in maintenance each year and I have no intention in upgrading until it becomes uneconomical
I found it an exceptionally well written piece that illustrated some of the minute thinking that goes into designing a small UI element like this.
I'm not super familiar with Heroku and similar platforms, but if I don't rent EC2s (which I take to mean what you meant by "VMs"), how do I host and serve bespoke backend components?

Even if all it does is suck data in, perform some computation, and send it off somewhere else - are you saying there are SAAS providers that are better equipped for this?
You could think of it more as acting the part.
That's awesome. Just finished the video on home manager which seems very useful.

Your videos being directed at co-workers actually serves to highlight the usefulness of this tool.

"Oh, you're missing dependency x, y and z? Here, just copy and paste this nix command to get my Nix environment."

Then you can immediately continue discussing more productive things.

I'm curious about generations. If you roll back to a previous generation and then continue to modify that, will the generation be overwritten? If not, is there a way to track only the history of generations that contribute a change to their current generation?

Also, I saw you run NixOS in a droplet. Do you have any experience running it locally as a desktop environment? I'm curious how mature it is as a full blown Linux Desktop.
Maybe they lacked resources and dev mind share ? Javascript of those days wasn't javascript of today ? “Apps” were almost just glorified shortcuts for some.

Now that I think about it Winamp 3 had its own interesting application framework (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasabi_(software)).
Doctors sound alarm over social media infodemic
Can someone elaborate why this is being upvoted?

EDIT: Not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. I'm just interested in why people find the article interesting and/or if there was some recent news which made Norsk Data relevant again…
On my Windows setup running on Bootcamp, the previous versions of Firefox had trouble accessing the microphone for many of the video call providers while Edge and Chrome are working fine.

I guess it's time to boot it up and check.
>> Anything related to selecting or copying text is improved, including web browsing.

You couldn't make text selection in iOS any worse if you tried.
HA is definitely super tricky. Not many products do it well. One of the last NoSQL databases I used for instance was quicker to restart than for failover to be detected so DBAs would just restart the cluster instead of waiting for failover to happen during an upgrade.
It's very easy to make the logical leap that increasing inequality is equivalent to "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". And most people don't necessarily have a problem with "the rich get richer" part, but they do object to "the poor get poorer".

It is a leap though. Bezos, Gates, Musk, Buffet, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg all started as regular people and became ultra-rich through their work and ideas.

But it's not a complete fallacy either. If you are a real estate owner in New York City, your assets continue appreciating at a good pace, well above inflation, and you have a vested interest in NIMBY, which does indeed restrict social mobility.

Social mobility, or social mobility opportunity are harder to measure though, so a lot of people are ok with using the inequality as a proxy. I do agree with you that it's an imperfect proxy, and focusing on it can have negative side-effects.
Why doesn't the server just drop incoming requests until it's able to handle them again? As I mentioned in another comment, this is what routers do.

edit I hadn't noticed this at the bottom of the article:

> they could have rewritten their web site code so it didn't send the machines into a many-GB-deep swap fest. They could have done that without getting any hosting people involved. They didn't
I am amused that MS has its own Linux flavor, but I won't make a joke about it. I won't mention previous attempts at embrace, extend and extinguish.

I want to focus on the IoT part.

Do not get me wrong. I am glad MS tries to show they care about security in IoT space. Heavens know I don't want to see Starbucks microwave botnet in 2021.
Exactly, the individual runs aren't actually the "deliverable" of the code; rather it is the average of many runs that represent the real result of the code.

Nothing presented clearly compromised the (supposed) reliability of the distributions produced, so the impact of these bugs beyond the inconvenience they add is unclear.

To be clear, it is certainly not true that removing these bugs will somehow prove that the model and its inputs themselves are correct.
This is a really interesting failure pattern and has led to the development of so-called "circuit breakers" to avoid the cascade.

(Many of the recent (last ~5 years) AWS failures have been due to cascading failures and it's neat to read their postmortems).
Both of these issues don't have any connection at all with any claim that the code could produce scientifically wrong results.

The 116 is "if I use it this special way I would expect something else and not what I see" which can be simply answered with "well, don't do THAT."

The simulations by design are not expected to produce exactly the same results in different runs. That's why they are simulations. The reporter tried some "partial save" and expected something else.

The 30, if I understand correctly, is observed on Cray to behave in some minor detail not exactly the same as on the PC (which again doesn't have to even mean that the output is scientifically wrong). Seriously? If one is a Cray user, he can fix it, so what?
If you want a fun take on Shakespeare's poetry, Zach Weinersmith's (author of SMBC comic) Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness is free for the duration of pandemic [0]. As are many of his other books [1].

[0] - https://www.smbc-comics.com/covid/files/Mini-Sonnets-web-v2....

[1] - https://www.smbc-comics.com/covid/
Flutter Super State: Simple State Management for Flutter
I believe it is because NORD-5 appears to be the first 32-bit minicomputer, built by Norsk Data in 1972.
> You said they got the location wrong. They didn't, you just failed to find the office at that location

They used Google Maps, which doesn't actually list that as the location.

When you look for the main offices of the Wuhan CDC, on Google Maps, Baidu Maps or Bing Maps, you find a different location several kilometers away. I'll grant that a different map service, Baidu Maps, shows a small satellite community health center at the given location.

> Yes, they are. Did you even read the paper?

What paper? Nobody has posted any paper yet. All I've seen is a PDF from a website that anyone can upload to, which the authors subsequently deleted because they said they couldn't vouch for its claims.

> They're reporting that hundreds of live bats were hosted at the WHCDC. I haven't seen anyone come out and disprove these claims, so they're most likely not just made up.

Some random people on the Internet uploaded a PDF, so their claims are probably true? Is this the standard of evidence we've reached?

> That paper was authored by researchers familiar with the matter

I still don't know what paper you're talking about. Are you talking about the non-peer-reviewed PDF that was uploaded to a site anyone can upload to, and subsequently deleted by the authors?
Looks slick, does it support the SQLCipher variants of Sqlite?
Monte Carlo Geometry Processing
Just because unit tests aren't provded in the codebase, it doesn't mean testing hasn't been done. Quite often it's difficult to model certain things in tests, e.g. Linux kernel drivers, embedded devices etc.

However, it seems that the author of the GitHub issue has personal/political problems with the Imperial researchers because of the lockdown: https://pastebin.com/LadbM3E1.
Well, it's open source, so he volunteers his time. Maybe the feedback should have been filled to Github in the first place? Certainly he is not lazy if asking to do a favor but probably busy with something else.
To be a bit more concrete, this is a bit like saying "Computers could be used to simulate/represent physical theories, hence studying computers could lead to a theory of everything."

That's not even wrong! Studying computation, computation systems, or even just mathematics in general almost certainly could assist with progress towards a TOE.

That doesn't mean that pointing at a computer running a few dozen lines of code[1] and saying "A TOE could be in there... somewhere" is materially useful.

[1] I'm paraphrasing Stephen himself here!

Personally, I feel that if Stephen really wanted forward progress towards a TOE, he's uniquely positioned to do so. He controls a company that makes one of the best Computer Algebra Systems. He's in a position of power over a large, highly talented staff of mathematicians, and he could push Mathematica's features towards multiple relatively unexplored areas of computational mathematics where there isn't much available at the moment.

Unfortunately, he's made the decision that the only two such areas worthy of his time and his company's resources are cellular automata and graph rewriting.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, he could have done added all sorts of features for things like handling Einstein summation convention, tensors, Geometric Algebra (and noncommutative algebras in general), topology, etc...

Those would at least have immediate utility to working physicists, and if pushed to the extreme could maybe help uncover some fundamental theory somewhere.

But nope. He likes to play with graphs, like a kid with with a Spirograph only interested in making pretty patterns.
The Economics of Intelligence
Writing Style at Amazon
Yes just moved from 4 servers in AWS costing 700 usd/month to a single dedicated one that costs 40.
You May Be Barking Up the Wrong Tree
I'd even argue that the XR2206 is pretty obsolete when it comes to function generation methodologies.

For one thing, it's very limited in frequency - 1MHz max, and dependent on analog components to generate it.

For another thing, it's really limited in waveform types. Practically, you can only generate sine, triangle, and square waves. Modulation is possible, but requires extra hardware to pull off.

The advantage I see of the DDS is that, once the signal generation portion of the product is software based, you can push upgrades to functionality via software updates. Not something any XR2206 can do!
Does anybody know if there is any improvement in the OTP generation algorithms?

I like to have all of my clocks set 10 minutes ahead and Google Authenticator had always been failing generating correct codes. I mean, it's just 10 minutes. IMHO, The OTP generation algorithm should not be that dependent on time.

Then I abandoned it just like many other people.
That config looks like it kills the site if there are 2 or fewer back-end servers (similar to the setup in the article).

Wouldn't it make more sense simply to limit the number of connections per back-end server?
Anyone for an Online Beer Festival?
Anyone else think about the Aurora spy plane fables from the 1990's?

"strange, loud pulsating roar... unique... a deep pulsating rumble that vibrated the house and made the windows shake... similar to rocket engine noise, but deeper, with evenly timed pulses."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(aircraft)
The billion dollar (figuratively) question: When will GeckoView for jailbroken iOS come?
Why do you think "personal data hoarding" a huge problem?

I see it as MY data and YOUR data is pretty worthless. Aggregate data has value, but then that doesn't contain much insight about any individual at all.

Isn't it true that the more people's data you have, the less it says about any individual?
That makes little sense. If people are isolating for COVID, it's going to knock down transmission of the other infectious diseases too.
This is not Wolfram's first Theory of Everything.

Wolfram published "New Kind of Science" almost 20 years ago. Scott Aaronson was kind enough to review it: https://scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf So was Juergen Schmidhuber and many others http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html

Wolfram has now moved from CA to Hypergraphs (essentially sets). They are so generic structures that you get anything physics-like from them if you want.

For example, if you visualize hypergraph that you get from normal execution of numerical simulations for relativistic, quantum or general relativity simulations, they would look cool and you might realize that they are connected to physics. Just like Wolfram's pretty pictures. Would execution graph representation explain more than equations and code? I don't think so.
Maybe public pressure? If all turn against him, he will find out what control he really has
Most of my equipment has physical interfaces, video and audio in and out

Some equipment is very latency sensitive -- I'm talking microseconds, not milliseconds.

More generic tasks need easy access to that specialist equipment (much of which doesn't quite grasp the concept of security)

Given that we therefore have to run a secure network across hundreds of sites on multiple continents, adding a couple of machines running xen adds very little to the overhead.
> If keyframes are 10x the size of non-keyframes

The solution to that is "non displayed frames", which VP8 allows. It means you can have a key frame which isn't part of the displayed video feed. You then send a super low res keyframe, and keep increasing the quality with further non-displayed frames until the quality is good enough to use as a reference frame for the real displayed frames.

That effectively lets you spread the bandwidth of a key frame over many seconds without introducing latency. The downside is both the encoder and the decoder need to do more computation to decode all those extra frames.
Sherlock: Nucleic acid detection with CRISPR nucleases
Spotify Is Down
For some of us at least. Life continues though...
The post is about long distance travel.
The evidence shows that this model did not have good predictive power. For example, the predictions made about Sweden did not come to pass. The predictions made about the US did not come to pass - specifically, 5400 hospitalizations were predicted by by March 19 for NYC, but only 750 actually occurred - off by an order of magnitude before lockdown measures could have any impact.

Did this model provide clarity and insight for the decision making process? Or, did it instead induce a false sense of panic?

Here's some more info as to what this repo does and does not contain, and why what was released is not enough.

https://www.aier.org/article/imperial-college-model-applied-...
This is just not true. A properly set up system requires very little manual work. Updated, monitoring, and alerting are all automated.

I help manage ~50 on prem servers plus NAS, switches, etc. Over the past three years, I have had to replace one hard drive and one power supply. And neither of those brought anything down because of redundancy. We get alerts when something goes wrong, but that is a rare occurrence.

This is my original point: servers won't just explode the minute you look away. It is not a full time job to "manage" them, unless you are at a real datacenter scale where a 1/1000 event happens twice a day. You set them up and then they continue to do what they do for a very long time.
Heptapod – Mercurial for Gitlab