skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been thinking more and more that when it comes to advertising, trying to squeeze irrational behaviour into a logical system just isnt going to work long term.

Rory Sutherland's "Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" convinced me that advertising has not changed at all, no matter how much Silicon Valley wants it to. Their delusions WILL come home to roost eventually.

Only ~10% of advertising $ is spent on direct response.

~90% of advertising is brand advertising, with no immediate conversion as a goal. It's about slowly nurturing the creation of a STORY inside the heads of prospective customers.
The twits point that Carmack personally worked on that very code (to prepare it for the Github release)!

He explicitly writes there:

"it turned out that it fared a lot better going through the gauntlet of code analysis tools I hit it with than a lot of more modern code. There is something to be said for straightforward C code. Bugs were found and fixed, but generally in paths that weren't enabled or hit."

"the performance scaling using OpenMP was already pretty good, and this was not the place for one of my dramatic system refactorings. Mostly, I was just a code janitor for a few weeks, but I was happy to be able to help a little."

and

"I can’t vouch for the actual algorithms, but the software engineering seems fine."

As shown, he even points that the believes "a lot of more modern code" would have been worse than that "straightforward C", which matches my experiences.
> If Electron was built with Gecko, it would go a huge way towards preventing Chrome from becoming the de-facto way of accessing the Web.

People coding specifically to Chrome when writing Electron apps is way less harmful to the web than people doing the same with web pages. The latter case specifically hurts other browsers, because people who don't use Chrome can't use the site.

Additionally, each Electron app represents a (smallish group of) developers. They're a very small number compared to all the developers writing public-facing websites that (should!) work in all commonly used browsers.
It's kind of possible to do that, but I don't know the specifics. Like you can select chrome provided webview or system provided webview. However, looks like gecko is explicitly not providing API compatibility, so looks like a no go from start.
>"KW specifically asked for (actually were persuaded to commission) two step sequencers - not "something to automate their tape loops.""

A tape loop is nothing more than a primitive form of sequencer. By definition they loop a sequence. They do the exact same thing. So not having to physically change the tapes and speeds on a tape machine by programming it into a sequencer is most definitely "automating" that process. The issue with analog tape machines is that they were not fun to deal with on the road or work with live.

And no they were not "two step" sequencers. What would be the point in that? You could do that with that a single finger - on/off. The Synthorama was a 16 step analogue sequencer and they had two of them which game them a 32 bit sequence to work with[1]

[1] http://kraftwerkfaq.hu/equipment.html
This is the only time I've ever actually been embarrassed to be part of this profession. Maybe other cases i can just say it's limited to this other subgroup that doesn't include me...
Have you tried bookmarking it or keeping notes ? I bookmark stuff which I think would be useful but then I dont remember I have the bookmark of it.

"Every once in a while the page which gives me the answer is something that I wrote" -- Wow.
Are TPUs too application specific to replace GPUs? It seems cloud TPUs could be competitive with GPUs in terms of $ per number of target epochs, provided you can do data parallelism for your workloads.

Also, IBM offers bare metal pricing which is somewhat cheaper than virtualized instances attached to GPUs (and faster too).

I think GPU virtualization is not quite there yet because Nvidia does not give access to core GPU functionality needed for efficient virtualization - you're stuck with using their closed-source libraries and drivers.
A job or two ago:

Everything on-site for a couple reasons (50 servers). Mainly because as a manufacturing company, machines on the shop floor need to talk to the servers. This brings up issues of security (do you really wan to put a 15 year old CNC machine 'on the internet'?). Also, if our internet connection has issues, we still need to build parts.

The other big part of it is the mindset of management and the existing system, which was built to run locally, does Amazon offer cloud hosted Access and Visual Basic workers?
SiteGround Review: Get Up to 77% Off for 1 Year
Depends on who you expect it to be accessible to; but for the visually impaired, it's probably better to try the other interfaces to something. GUIs and TUIs are generally not good value for time in this case, and TUIs have no existing technology for interfacing with screen readers as far as I can tell.
Designing a Hello World Edge Computing System Using Open-Source Sofware
No, they’re equivalent. Nobody stops you from from stepping through pixels in multiples of 4 and then writing that to the display buffer.
Mike Maples on the traits and actions of the best technology founders
This is typical academic code. The response is utterly embarrassing for the software engineering profession.
> And everyone I know IRL is saying they won't go out yet even as restrictions are lifted.

Which supports the point that the lockdowns do not need to be in place because people can take care of themselves.
Firstly, setting the domain attribute on a cookie explicitly allows sub-domains. You want to leave that off to enable host-only cookies. But secondly, as I just said the host/domain on the cookie does nothing at all to prevent cross-origin requests to that domain, which is the relevant concern for CSRF. Setting the domain/host is completely irrelevant to this attack.

Yes, adding to PSL is not at all scalable and will likely cause you a world of pain down the road. It was not intended as a serious suggestion. Use proper CSRF defences.
This github issue sounds a lot like it is politically motivated. He is clearly trying to make the leap from "I don't like the tests in this project" to "public policy is wrong." No actual evidence, just cranky poo-pooing on the project.
The title is misleading, the GitHub issue doesn't actually point out any flaws in the codebase.
Compared to what I have seen with React + React add ons its fantastic.

("2 Scoops of Django" is an excellent book to describe best practices. It's something I haven't seen the equivalent of elsewhere).
We use a public cloud, and believe me: we do consider the security implications. We veeery much do.
So basically Datagrip?
But I like the fact that webkit exploit have enabled jailbreaking locked down hardware

Only mostly sarcastic.
WirePlumber, the PipeWire Session Manager
"random guy"

lol
Care to share a couple examples of the meaningless sentences in this piece? I found it more interesting and engaging than the Wired piece, precisely because it dived deeper into the theory behind the interaction design choices that Apple made here.
Deep Render raises £1.6M for image compression tech that mimics ‘neural
if (restrictiveParams[eventName] as! [String: Any])["test"] != nil

In Swift, now hopefully you wouldn't write this code but it's not entirely unlikely too. In fact the above Objective-C snippet is one of the few cases where Objective-C's forgiving `nil` behaviour doesn't save you from a crash.
You can reduce any field to "it's a just bunch of...": All coding is just a bunch of binary numbers. All chemistry and biology is just a bunch of molecules. All construction is just a bunch of concrete, bricks and steel. It's nonsense, and is exactly the kind of naive and insulting statement you talked about.

Complexity is emergent. Look below any complex system and you'll find a simpler one, but that doesn't mean the higher-level complexity is unnecessary. All the things you complained about have good reasons to exist, invented by people who actually work as professional web developers and need to solve problems.

The real problem is "seasoned programmers" who don't work in web development, but who expect to be able to jump in an master it in a day, based on the fact that they put together a GeoCities homepage twenty years ago, and are enraged and disgusted to find that things aren't so simple anymore. It's absurd. Developers wouldn't expect to be able to jump into kernel development, or database development, and find it to be a breeze.
With the current lockdowns in place, the other problem of mass starvation is eventually going to crop up, though before that happens it will be crowds with pitch forks and torches.

Life is suffering.
Where does value come from besides labour? If gold was everywhere, it wouldn’t be as valuable as it is - but it’s not, you have to dig it out of the ground and it can be hard to find; the labour input into the process of producing gold is what gives gold its value. A silicon rock is about as useful as any other rock, but the labour which goes into fabricating it into useful components is what gives it its value. A hammer is useless without an arm to swing it. Even when that arm is attached to a semi-autonomous machine, its sole purpose is to reduce the time expenses by human labour on some material - this devalues human labour in the abstract (not a bad thing of course, in fact crucial for our social and technological development), but at the end of the day the process reduces entirely to human labour producing value.
Dang, that sucks. I noticed that he says "its principal feature was that it was Electron-compatible" about Positron.

That's a lofty, and frankly, unnecessary goal.

Maybe Positron could/should be revived, as a thing of its own, an independent Gecko-based app host, with its own API, distinct and separate from Electron.

(I'm guessing the author of Positron was hoping to attract current Electron users by aiming to make a switch as easy and seamless as possible with a compatible API, and while that's valuable, it would be good to just have an incompatible Electron competitor to begin with.)
Isn't that antithetical to the entire idea of git and of Microsoft?
The hashes will only be different if you install different versions of the derivation (package). All the inputs of a derivation, so even selected plugins and compile options influence the hash.

That said, if me and you agreed on a specific git commit of the nixpkgs repo and build some packages from that, our hashes would be the same. This knowledge is also used to download packages from the binary cache. You can see the automatic building of the packages on hydra.nixos.org, from there they will be made avaiable on the binary cache.
Jupiter turns a year old today. How’s our stack?
Wolfram's framework is unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power. That alone should be sufficient to show you why folks are so skeptical of the claims. Combined with the fact that he introduces new terminology and refuses peer review, this should give you reason to expect that there is a simpler, more canonical, already-explored branch of theoretical physics which covers the same stuff.

I wish that you had linked to the material that you didn't "get anywhere with"; without it, it's hard to actually examine the quality of the underlying arguments. I found writeups like [0] which seem extremely well-argued; the formal ideas come from [1], and the core idea is Bell's theorem [2]: there is some essential non-locality to QM, we can experimentally see it, and so we can't just say "oh, it's all a big computer", even if it's a computer with interestingly high dimensionality or interconnections, without further justification.

[0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/04/23/why-stephen-wolframs-...

[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
Show HN: Vitamin D may reduce susceptibility to Covid-19-associated lung injury
I'm actually really interested in beekeeping, but thanks for the encouragement.
What do you think of these types of things https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gNncDK7MXHo/VRCXCXz6byI/AAAAAAAAJ...
An easy, relatively worry free installation/out of the box experience? The option to install uncommon software in a way that may be crappy but would work (make install?)?

That's what's holding me back, although I'm fascinated by the concept.
Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?
I switched careers and got into coding about five years ago and I have always wondered about this and am a little embarrassed about it.

Sometimes after finishing a big implementation, I just go back and read my own code ... and I like it! I feel proud that I translated some kind of abstract problem solving into a concrete solution, and somehow it works!

I feel like I created something that flows according to my ideas and it’s a joy to look at. Are there analogous feelings in other creative pursuits you practice?

Of course not everything is like this, only novel problems I encountered have potential to give this feeling, CRUD back-end endpoints are routine by now. Also I don't feel like an exceptional programmer, feel more like an impostor, so please don't read this as bragging.
The agency collecting points for bad driving is located in Flensburg.

Having "Punkte in Flensburg" thus means one got caught driving too fast, under the influence or over a red light etc.

If you collect too many points you lose your drivers license and have to do a test and psychological exam to get it back.

This test usually called the "Idiotentest" because you drive like an idiot and you (deservedly) get treated like an idiot by the agency.

The whole affair is really annoying, expensive and takes quite some time.

If you fail the psychological exam (they find out you are an alcoholic for examle) you might never get the license back.
Is the technology demonstrated in this YT video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5PYzGgHx14 - in anyway similar?
I am not a webdev, but isn't that a task for the loadbalancer in the first place?
I never really got that unless people were complaining about Django's ORM. The framework is flexible enough that you can use as little or as much of it as you need.
I hate that so much, but it’s not happening on this article for me? Also on iOS safari.
Show HN: Making Postgres as Easy as Firebase
Why you shouldn't use a web framework – the revenge (2018)
Try to compare this sort of logic with what we already know happened with the last financial crisis. Before that crisis, banks lent out a lot of dud loans and people bought too many expensive houses. A lot of the people who ended up being unemployed afterwards were not the people who made bad financial decisions, they were just a regular part of the economy, and the damage lasted for many years. I think if you tried to carry through with the "average of normal + lockdown" logic for the financial crisis, you'd get an unrealistic result: you'd expect the economy to be back to normal fairly soon because all those people who could be working the way they were before the crisis could just show up to work (they can do that work just as well as they could before the crisis, obviously). None of this has anything to do with "fear", this is just what recessions look like.

Just because the system could go back to normal in no way shows that it will, or even that it is likely to, and that's a fundamental feature of recessions. It's like the system as a whole has multiple equilibriums, and which equilibrium it ends up in depends on the history leading up to it: the "average of normal + lockdown" only tries to show that a desirable equilibrium exists and vaguely implies that that's the equilibrium it will end up in.
My understanding is that conventional economics and past experience both say that it is far more likely that it won't and that the recession will be as genuine as any other.
If your customers still want the system to run air-gapped from the internet, cloud is basically off the table.
+1 on this -- I had lots of remote issues when traveling to Windows desktop locations. It was surprising how few good solutions (hint: 0) I found. Until VSCode, which has been awesome.
Hey HN, for the past month we have been working on a building the easiest possible experience for Postgres.

We wanted to get a similar experience to Firebase, where you can set up and query the database directly from a dashboard - no other tools required like pgAdmin or Dbeaver. This is a quick demo of our progres. We've still got a long way to go, but thought the community here would enjoy it.
In an airplane the (.8x) works out because the seats are going anyway. I don't see how that works for Walmart where they can not do the delivery.
Guns are practically banned in California, especially San Francisco.

What's off is they don't address what this individual is doing out during the quarantine.. If he were taking the virus seriously this would've never happened.

He shouldn't have been out. But it's probably time that San Francisco passes a law to make murder illegal.
> And just because a key is public, doesn't mean that it is going to be automatically sent to a third-party.

In practice, it pretty much does - bad actors continuously scrape the GitHub firehose looking for AWS secrets, and then automatically spin up EC2 instances to mine cryptocurrency. GitHub's token scanning just ensures that AWS sees the tokens too.

If you don't believe me, keep this website open for a few hours - it's a realtime stream of secrets scraped from GitHub: https://shhgit.darkport.co.uk/
Maj Sjöwall died very recently, the 29:th of April.
Why I’m Joining Facebook’s Oversight Board
There's a renewed interest in on-prem bare metal recently with a lot of different offerings helping to make various parts of the stack easier to manage.

Awesome bare metal is a new repo created by Alex Ellis that tracks a lot of the projects: https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal

Also we (Packet) just open sourced Tinkerbell, our bare metal provisioning engine: https://www.packet.com/blog/open-sourcing-tinkerbell/
Having worked in Aero, "actual engineering" likes to reduce the ability to screw up converting between units by keeping things the same i.e. keeping things imperial because its been that way for a while.

(Part of) The reason Gimli Glider incident happened was because it involved switching units.
I'd imagine this is the next couple of years in finance due to COVID. Shocks and reverberations for a long long while.
Reminds me of Tomoe River Paper [0]. They originally made paper for industrial purposes but now sell it to fountain pen users. It’s made in japan as well, and unlike any paper I’ve seen produced elsewhere.

[0] https://unsharpen.com/company/tomoe-river/
I'm reminded of the idiom "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater". And I agree that software engineers should more actively contribute their expertise here.

With that said, if a research paper's main contribution is a model whose results were evaluated using a code with major bugs then retraction of the paper is only professional.
The policy is mostly a reaction to what happened in Wuhan, Iran, and Italy. Especially Italy. The mass graves filling up are a pretty good motivator, as it turns out.[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/12/coronavirus-ir...
The virus is obviously for some of the economic impact and the lockdown is obviously responsible for some of the economic impact.
There are plenty of cities and counties which have 0 recorded cases which are going on two months of lockdown at this point. Please realize that people are dying in those cities Because of the lockdown, and lives are being destroyed. As you say, The lockdown might very well be better for the economy in the long run, but the root cause will not be eliminated. That does not mean that there couldn’t have been or can’t be a better version of the lockdown that is less destructive
Libc, zlib, sqlite3
Global Automotive Filters Market Predictions
Not that it's a big thing, but seems weird to put the responsibility about you not forgetting something, on the person leaving the feedback, rather than just filing the issue yourself.
Pick your battles.
It's fairly realistic. On my Mac, I only use Homebrew for casks. I have everything else installed through Nix.

One of the nicest things is that I have nearly completely overridden macOS' outdated utilities with a GNU userland (without any annoying g- prefix).

I also define most of my user configuration with home-manager (both on Mac, NixOS, and work's Ubuntu servers). On a new machine I just run

nix run nixpkgs.home-manager
home-manager switch

My home-manager configuration:

https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home
Learning to Let Go
It's like thrashing for memory. Once you can't keep up with requests it's extra strain which inevitably will bring down the system.
There is actually quite a bit of complexity with load balancing, but the good news is that a lot of the complexity is understood and is configurable on the load balancer.

I think what Rachel calls a "suicide pact" is now commonly called a circuit breaker. After a certain number of requests fail, the load balancer simply removes all the backends for a certain period of time, and causes all requests to immediately fail. This attempts to mitigate the cascading failure by simply isolating the backend from the frontend for a period of time. If you have something like a "stateless" web-app that shares a database with the other replicas, and the database stops working, this is exactly what you want. No replica will be able to handle the request, so don't send it to any replica.

Another option to look into is the balancer's "panic threshold". Normally your load balancer will see which backends are healthy, and only route requests to those. That is what the load balancer in the article did, and the effect was that it overloaded the other backends to the point of failure (and this is a somewhat common failure mode). With a panic threshold set, when that many backends become unhealthy, the balancer stops using health as a routing criterion. It will knowingly send some requests to an unhealthy backend. This means that the healthy backends will receive traffic load that they can handle, so at least (healthy/total)% of requests will be handled successfully (instead of causing a cascading failure).

Finally, other posts mention a common case like running ab against apache/mysql/php on a small machine. The OOM eventually kicks in and starts killing things. Luckily, people are also more careful on that front now. Envoy, for example, has the overload manager, so you can configure exactly how much memory you are going to use, and what happens when you get close to the limits. For my personal site, I use 64M of RAM for Envoy, and when it gets to 99% of that, it just stops accepting new connections. This sucks, of course, but it's better than getting OOM killed entirely. (A real website would probably want to give it more than 64M of RAM, but with my benchmarking I can't get anywhere close with 8000 requests/second going through it... and I'm never going to see that kind of load.)

I guess the TL;DR is that in 2011 it sounded scary to have a "suicide pact" but now it's normal. Sometimes you've got to kill yourself to save others. If you're a web app, that is.