skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the problem is that if you join a room with lots of different servers, your server has to go handshake with each one to check its signing key in order to verify the events the server has emitted. #synapse:matrix.org is almost by definition one of the worst rooms for this, given most people in there are joining from their own server.

Solving this is an interesting challenge - one option could be to opportunistically trust events. Another could be to opportunistically fetch server signing keys. A better one would be to implement MSC1228, which switches all our IDs for public keys, which should make verification much easier and less burdensome.

In terms of peeking rooms over federation - sadly this still isn't implemented yet. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc244... is the proposal to fix that however.
> You have a very strict definition of science that I'm not sure how I feel about

The reason I am using such a strict definition is that looser ones make the term "science" a useless label that can be put on anything one likes, or withheld from anything one doesn't like. To make the term useful and meaningful, it has to focus on something more objective than individual preferences. The something more objective that I have been implicitly using is that hypotheses have to be tested using evidence and experimental data, and discarded if they are falsified; otherwise, even if the person making the hypothesis is a respected "scientist", the hypothesis doesn't get to be counted as "science".

> we're dangerously close to a no-true-scotsman problem

The way to avoid that is to have a reasonably objective criterion for applying the term. That's what I've tried to provide above.
That's partially because photos used to be rarer. So either the subjects were richer to have access to photos, or the subjects dressed their best when getting their photographs taken.
There is this wonderful utility: dependency-cruiser[0]
for javascript / typescript projects.

It visualizes dependencies in a project. I found it so so easy to refactor and move files around after I started using it. I am not usually a visually-oriented person, but for this usecase, and to be happy, `dep-cruiser` surely helps.

[0]: https://github.com/sverweij/dependency-cruiser
I'm kind of curious about the license status of this. Zork has been commercially sold (on iOS) within the last 10 years, and I don't quite know how this source would be MIT's to give away, unless there is a deal with whatever legal entity owns Infocom's intellectual property these days.
Couldn't agree more. I had worked for Microsoft before where a) there were hardly any special screens for VCs in meeting rooms - mostly you'd connect your laptop and start Skype (for business), or later Teams, b) the typical 5 minutes at the start of the meeting went with "can you hear me?" - "hello?" before things got settled. What a waste.

With Google meet, finally somebody did the _one job_ they needed to solve (low-latency, mostly-working VC over IP) and they solved the user interface + calendar integration. I love it.
There’s some good initial investigation into this at https://reincubate.com/blog/staying-alive-covid-19-backgroun..., which I posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108867 in case it warrants a separate discussion.

Sounds like their approach is fairly privacy conscious and clever in terms of taking advantage of how each platform works - whether it works well enough and whether people will use it despite “not using the Apple/Google way” I guess we will see
It is AS safe insofar as risk of infection. The risk of driving to the grocery store is pretty low if you are at not to much below average in your driving skills and not drunk.

Current stats are I believe 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US. Someone came up with a great metric to compare risk called "micromorts"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

Defined as a 1 in a million chance of death per unit of exposure. All causes in the US give an average of 22 per day in the US in 2010. Traveling 5 miles by car is 0.02 micromorts. Climbing Everest is aprox 38k mm if you are average competence for people who normally do such a thing.

To get the risk profile of going out you would have to get the all cause probability of dying from everything else other than driving and add the chance of dying on a given trip but 0.02 is probably fairly reasonable.

Infectious disease is particularly interesting because its unreasonable to assign a simple probability of infection and then probability of death because if people in aggregate opt to collectively take more risks they each may indeed face only a small initial chance of mortality but their collective choices can going forward spread the virus around and greatly increase their chances of infection in future expeditions.

This is what people who want to assess the risks for themselves usually fail to get. They aren't allowed to do it because they are extremely likely to be bad at it and their risks effect others futures.
Bram Cohen: The Instigator of BitTorrent
> How much power do the VCs typically have?

I think it's less about the power relationship, exactly, and more about the way VC-funded companies are setup to be run. As part of raising a round, you prepare a business plan that involves aggressively spending the money over a couple years. You're committed both internally and to your board to execute that plan, and it's cognitively difficult to do something different as there's social pressure to do so (and one of your VC's greatest sources of power over you is they're the reference for your next fundraising round).

The result is that your company has planned to run out of money with potentially a multi-million dollar annual burn rate in two years. If as those two years are approaching, the company and/or market situation don't support raising more capital and the company isn't close to profitable, the momentum of that burn rate applies a great deal of pressure for a sale, destructive layoff, or total change in goals to "anything that improves the bottom line".

Also, the search for a story to help raise your next round can have a big effect on companies -- my view is most of Dropbox's problems when I was there (2012-2014) resulted from the search for a totally new business bigger than Dropbox Business that could justify a bigger valuation than $10B starving more obvious investments (Carousel, the now-dead photo sharing app, at one point had ~10x the engineering resources of Dropbox Business).

> Reading about Zulip - didn't you get bought by Dropbox before being open source? Is your current situation a lucky outcome - or was it a condition of the sale?

It's an extremely lucky outcome. There's a combination of factor that made this possible:

* Dropbox leadership prioritized doing the right thing by their users, and so we were able to get permission from both leadership and legal. I'm sure my personal position as a leader at the company who had a personal relationship with the people who had approve it made a difference (Though Luke Faraone made a big difference by asking legal if we could and inviting me to the meeting!). But I think Dropbox deserves a lot of credit, because they spend significant time from expensive resources (legal, etc.) making this happen, and I don't know of many companies that would ever do that.
* Our users were big fans, enough so that 10 of them flew to Dropbox HQ for a week to help us do the technical work required to do an open source release with all 10,000 commits of history intact and with a scripted installation process. This was essential to Zulip being usable after that release.

https://zulipchat.com/history/ has a bit more background on the early history (though it's a bit out of date).
Misposted: Title of the Aeon article is "How science fails". Which makes more sense than "... the philosophy of bad science" -- since how can bad science be said to possess any philosophy at all?
How do you prevent your platform turning into a tool for money laundering/extracting cash from stolen credit cards?
I think it's more because the examples people are familiar with are cherrypicked "heads I win, tails you lose" examples that have recently been recognizable American brands. Someone linked a list of LBOs elsewhere in here and TXU was at the top of the list. A lot of people lost a lot of money on that deal but you didn't see the kind of press Toys R Us got. I'm guessing a tiny percentage of people here even know what TXU is. Toys was a brand everyone recognized and PE got paid on that even though they went under.
The C64's disk and keyboard would have made life a bit less painful than the Speccy, but neither had decent video output, so I doubt much real development happened on them. There was some though, e.g. the true bedroom coders getting started.

I posted a few links to some examples of 80s coding and cross compilers in an answer down below.
I host a git repo on Keybase. Is there a replacement specifically for this feature? I don't want to host the plaintext on any cloud, but I want the ciphertext to be highly available and easily re-encrypted in case of compromise.
Chuck your comments are always filled with great information and humour. Thank you for your years of contribution to HN so that lurkers like myself can be informed and entertained.
I've done the "look ma no mouse" thing where you just use your keyboard. Heck, I used to have an emacs config where scrolling would scroll through my undo/redo tree^[1], which lemme tell you, confuses the hell out of other people using your computer.

But ultimately sometimes executing some annoying combo of C-v/C-s/M-f/M-b is less ergonomic than using the wonderful invention that is scrolling. Especially if you want to aimlessly scan through code instead of purposefully navigate.

I suspect part of the reason for emacs being a hard sell is the reputation of emacs being an all or nothing platform. You're supposed to not use the mouse, do everything in emacs, write elisp to make everything super automated and awesome. And sure, you can do that! But it's okay to be a bad emacs user. It's okay to use the mouse. It's okay to not write elisp. It's okay to use other apps. VSCode doesn't come with a religion. I don't think emacs should either.

[1]: Inspired by this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1806/
That’s a decent point if you focus on battery cost, but if reducing vehicle weight was ever a policy goal we could achieve that at a negative cost by banning SUVs. Until we do that, I’m dubious about any public expenditures to reduce vehicle weight until we fix the low hanging fruit.
Yes, yes, I know all about that theorem. How does it have any relevance to what I or this thread were talking about? Maybe because it stopped Hilbert's program?
Vi has text input modality, unlike essentially, well, anything. It's an entirely different model of operation which it shares with no current software and hasn't for a quarter century.

It's strange to be talking about the UI details of vi/emacs (both, by current standards, about equally super-weird) when the article itself is a kind of perfect vignette of the organizational dysfunction of the group that maintains emacs.
"at least one stupid chat client that's actually a giant piggy web browser running"

I wonder what app that could be :-)
Unfortunate for climate change. The heat from those ACs has to go somewhere. And they emit greenhouse gases.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/countries-crank-ac-e...
Hm, it was a problem on the professional ThinkPad line as well.

https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html?m...
Interesting comment!

I have this relatively unconventional theory that, if we use automation just right and make the cost of food production, delivery, and preparation low enough, and also do so where ownership of the machinery is distributed throughout society, that we could make it a social norm to give anyone who needs it free food. All in a voluntary system. We just need to make the actual cost of the whole supply chain low enough that people don't care about giving away a bit for free. Like in the extreme case how cafes give out free wifi because the marginal cost of delivering wifi to one more person is so low. I could imagine shops having a "free food" option made using some low cost proteins and fiber and prepared using some cheap robot. And then they would charge for hand made food or something, using the free food as a loss leader.

So my theory is that those robots need to be made as cheaply as possible. And that makes me think they need to be open source so anyone capable of manufacturing them can compete to supply them. Like how 3D printers got so cheap once the patents expired. They went from $30k to $300 in 20 years.

The real trick is sustaining robotics businesses that can pay engineering talent to produce open source robotics. Prusa Research has succeeded here with their 3D printers, and I am hoping I am able to reproduce that success with the farming robot I am working on now. But we aren't certain we will make it open source. It depends on how we can sustain funding. I think it's very possible though and I'm committed to it.

I think it's extremely interesting that Prusa Research can give all of their IP away and coexist in the market with clones at less than 1/2 the price. Users understand that the first party product is higher quality, and those that can afford it still buy from Prusa. There seems to be room in that market for both Prusa and the many clones. I wonder if we can reproduce this success with automation in other areas.
I Left Apple
Typing this from FreeBSD on mine.

I used to run OpenBSD on a laptop (not this one) and that was great too.
I was about to jump ship to VSCode, but lsp-mode (despite minor hiccups) has extended my Emacs' expiration date.

So if I almost gave up, after having lived in Emacs for the last 12 years, can we really expect much popularity with those that are new to computing?

In 2020, Emacs is mostly just for people that love to build or customize their tools, or for folks that want a better Vim (i.e. Doom Emacs). And to customize Emacs you have to have a basic understanding of modes, hooks, keymaps, etc -- as well as at least rudimentary knowledge of elisp. Getting good at that stuff is a multi-year-long process. Emacs will never be "popular" for the same reason that if you want to have a fun night with friends, (statistically) chances are you'll choose to play Rock Band as opposed to learning real instruments. But as is the case with many niche and challenging things, it's hella fun and rewarding once you've spent a few years doing it.
Yeah, thinking about just a bit more, it seems like it's not possible to do without giving the source to Apple. If it's done on a the developer's machine I'm guessing it's always going to be possible to mess with it somehow.
Lots of technologists believe that everyone should use IRC, or some next-gen IRC-alike, to communicate. Anything you can do with a specialized messaging app you can do with a messaging relay network. But, of course, specialized messaging apps outstrip messaging relay networks by orders of magnitude; IRC itself has usage that is a rounding error of WhatsApp's. Most people do not perceive any value from being part of a federated relay network; the audiences are not, in fact, the same.
1) I bet Stallman's never used ido.

2) You already use Emacs. What would it take to get a new user to use it? It would have to be installed by default, and be the quickest and easiest way to edit a file. That means startup performance.
i like p2p as the default, but i'm not as confident that the liabilities go away so easily with that configuration.

totally agree that the world is full of risks and sometimes we just have to accept them.

escrow in some form would likely be necessary, but the fees of escrow.com are prohibitive for this use case.

instead of pricing being controlled by the marketplace, it'd be cool if it were more like a trading platform where riders bid for rides and drivers offer rides (with considerations for starting point, distance, and trip time).
Fred Meyers works really well and if the delivery is days out you can edit the order until its around 24 hours and it only charges you the difference.

Presently there is no charge for curbside pickup and they even support ebt for those whom are out of work.
She developed a prototype based on a hunch and a whim. Great work, no doubt, but engineering isn't based on intuition and some experience. Real engineering has a goal or specification in mind, and then proves through modeling, analysis, and _finally_ testing that it meets those specs.

Whipping something up and then seeing what it's capable of doesn't qualify.
Open Source in China: The Players
Totally agree. So much of programming and designing is figuring out what pattern your code is falling into and what stuff "is" or "means".

I believe it's totally okay to name things utilities when you haven't yet established a common pattern or understanding of it. Naming things is hard and spending so much time on it and organizing things can often block you from progressing to a place where you DO have more information and can intelligently name things.

You'll always be juggling unknowns, so it's okay to have dumping grounds here and there, so long as over time you clean them up as you gain more info.
> they told me it was more likely they would make sure we wouldn't exist

How? Is it possible for a smaller company to defend against such hostility?
We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene
Sure, but 1 customer actually paying $22k for a feature is a lot more valuable then thousands of customers saying they will pay $5 for a feature.

There is a big gap between being interested and being committed
You should check dash[1]. It adds a lot of those "many little things" from Clojure (such as ->, and ->>, and let) to elisp.

[1]https://github.com/magnars/dash.el
> If the contracts are usurious and predatory then they probably will not stand up in court if challenged.

That's exactly what netcan was saying upthread.
I think that by "global" they mean that it's on top of the screen, rather than on top of the main window of the app to which it belongs. It's actually hella confusing for new users when they get to running apps in parallel, and switching between them. This is exacerbated by not having well-functioning maximize on windows, so a typical macOS desktop is cluttered with windows from several different apps - but the top menu is relevant to only one of them.

Shortcuts for menu items are normally shown in menus on Windows and Linux, right-aligned next to the label. For Windows, it's part of the platform UI design guidelines, and if you're using standard APIs to define your UI, any item with a shortcut assigned will render appropriately.
Is it really too hard to imagine why the creator of the Free Software Foundation would rather people use a free software text editor over the current proprietary alternatives?
We do. We also had over a week to show up to the polls during the primary. I strolled in and cast my ballot and strolled out without waiting in line at all, it took me five minutes to vote. However, that's because I'm an informed voter who has ample free time to read about these things.

On the last day of polling, lines that were nonexistant the previous days suddenly appeared wrapping around the block at my polling station. A lot of people were still waiting to cast their ballot after polls closed, and local media ripped the board of elections a new one for having less locations (ignoring that you now had over a week to vote).

All of this could have been avoided if people had been paying attention to the multiple mailers sent to every registered voter on file, the banners put in front of polling stations ahead of time, the advertisements on TV and radio and the internet, the billboards, and the full vinyl wraps on trains and busses that advertised voting being over a week. None of this ended up mattering, because most people don't have the time to pay attention. And if you are ambivalent about the issues on a ballot and approach your polling place and see a line that wraps around two blocks, you will probably just turn back home.

This is why it's critical that decision making based on sound logic and establish facts should not be at the mercy of the ballot box, because that will never be where you find a carefully thought out thesis, but rather a popularity contest based on who has been shouting the loudest in the months leading up to the election.
The idea that one can go about his own world, think for himself, and get into positions based off his own information advantages before wall street catches on. As a type 1 diabetic, this idea has paid off handsomely with my returns on $TNDM and $DXCM
Zoom to Crack Down on Zoombombing, in Deal with NY Attorney General
Not exactly. Its owners could always pack up and work elsewhere. Or in the case of capital, invest elsewhere. You have to beat the alternative option.
> I'm not a full-time computer professional.

Emacs is used by non-computer professionals as well. If your profession relies on the manipulation of text, emacs is the tool to use.

>their investment spent optimizing and maintaining their Emacs setup.

It's really not that bad. Say you're a fiction writer: you only need to figure out your preferred workflow once, but then you can use it for decades with only minimal changes.

Of course, once you get the hang of it, you might think it convenient to be able to write short mails directly, or do a bit of your own typesetting all from the comfort of your, by now, favourite editor, but .emacs files usually see very little churn. What's in a .emacs has usually just accumulated slowly over the years as one's usage of the program increases.
Create time and attention budgets for your life
Unless they abandon an infrastructure project after ruining miles of city streets....

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Out of the box, Emacs is slower than vim, and this is part of the reason why Emacs isn't installed by default on distros. Serious users don't care about startup performance, but that helps to explain why Emacs isn't gaining new users. Emacs isn't the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.
Thank you for this illuminating comment; it was helpful and imho exemplary.
Of course it's not a bug, that is not in question. As I mentioned above, the problem is that even if you are fully aware of this, you still have to check that whatever `useSomeStatefulThing` hook you used to replace a global store does not use local state. So the assumption you can simply replace a global store with localized hooks to manage state is not true, and will certainly lead to bugs. You must use Context instead (or proo drilling as you suggest).
hey, i would like to know , please email me, maradona.ug@gmail.com
What WSGI do people recommend for python? I've been using gunicorn but this made me think of alternatives. Quick google search found this benchmark [0], is it really that bjoern is much quicker? It seems all other WSGI are ~ equivalent.

[0] - https://www.appdynamics.com/blog/engineering/a-performance-a...
yes, i didn't mean to imply that the technical challenges weren't substantial. real-time matching and routing are also not trivial.
If it really were nothing more than mundane construction work, then why was Google involved in it?
You can't resize it horizontally to fit the screen, such that icons don't shift position relative to the screen when new icons appear (and either enlarge the dock, or make other icons smaller, to fit).
Oh yeah you could definitely implement this with some nice config. But that's the problem: only insane people like fiddling with configuration that much.

I know my gateway to emacs was spacemacs. Except spacemacs, when I used it, was slow as heck. When VSCode feels snappier than emacs, something's wrong.

People talk about rewrites far too often but I wouldn't mind a significant rearchitecture/rewrite of emacs. Stuff like this^[1] makes me think it's long overdue.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo...