skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The "english-literate" world (emphasis on literate) is, or historically has been, very familiar with Greek glyphs.

I would be shocked if even 1% of native English speakers could list the full Greek alphabet much less have a comprehensive familiarity with what each letter means across all branches of mathematics. I would be shocked if even 5% of native English speakers could tell you what theta generally means in geometry, much less all its other meanings.
Archive link for those who don't want to create an account:
https://archive.md/ubmyY

Also, holy crap, David Bowie was incredibly prescient.

> ”The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

> “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. ”So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

If only we could hurry up and abolish intellectual property so we could get on with restructuring the economy around the inevitable.

Also, it's cool to see decentralized financial platforms like Ethereum already enabling a democratization of the kind of thing Bowie was trying to do with the Bowie Bond: https://asone.andysimon.co/
Having to leave a country is pretty much the opposite of 'resilient' in this context. They have to leave because it is a centrialized system and can be regulated like any other entitiy.

Matrix is federated and individual servers can be run by volunteers/individuals for whom EARN IT would not apply.
> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices.

We don't have this today mainly because wireless carriers do the minimum required to compete with their minimal competition. It doesn't have that much to do with 4G vs. 5G or whatever. Even living in a city, I don't expect 5G to improve the situation all that much, unless carriers start really spending on their network.

The ubiquity, reliability, and bandwidth will only be there if carriers make huge investments in their networks, which I don't expect will happen.

You can certainly get what you want today, with 4G/LTE. You just have to go to a country with carriers that actually prioritize that, like Taiwan or Japan (and probably several other east/southeast Asian countries).
For the client experience, it's not even close: Slack's product experience is far superior. I love the idea of Riot as a decentralized e2ee group chat client, but the implementation is so buggy and far from being production-ready that any attempt to use it seriously is an exercise in frustration. In comparison, Slack is mildly annoying at worst, and usually just works.

If it were one or two little things, I'd file some bugs or even try to fix the issues myself in the Android app, but my experience has been that I have at least one experience-breaking bug or UX issue at least every other time I interact with the client. Especially if you have encryption enabled.
This is again one of those cases where, even though it's nice to see the source code, it's very hard to verify what's actually running on our devices. The same case with Signal and other secure messaging apps.

How would a scheme work, that (within the confines of the current App Store regime) allowed users to verify the source code look? Could Apple/Google maybe hash every file as part of the compilation/linking process, and then concatenate that in some way and include it in the signed binary and expose it in the App Store?

It would be really neat with some process where I can clone a repo on my machine, run some script and get an identifier, and verify that it is the same as what is being shown in the App Store on my device.
Staying alive: background tracing and the NHS Covid-19 app
Isn't this already the case? I order a beer or two on most flights and don't think I've ever been charged.
The current line up of X1 Carbons (the 8th gen) are absurdly priced! $2279 for a base model with an i5, low res screen and only 8gb of ram.

For that price you can get the highest end 13" macbook pro, 32gb of ram and 2TB of SSD. baffling
I would participate in (and could provide resources to) the creation of an open foundation that had as one of its goals the writing of an open source keybase API[0] compatible server.

If anyone else is interested, please contact me directly (email in my profile).

[0]https://keybase.io/docs/api/1.0
I am all for a complete re-write, but not on the level of society, but on the level of you and me.

If you could see into the future and know for a fact that you couldn't change a thing about it, would your concerns cease to have meaning?

If the answer is yes, then it is a matter of determining what in your short lifetime, you can realistically change and what you cannot.

For me, I've determined that the things I cannot change are human nature, including my own. What I can do is modify my lifestyle to be exposed to more of the human traits I cherish and fewer of the ones I resent.

That's the conclusion I've come to. Housing prices and inequality simply don't make the list of things I can do anything about and even if I could, I believe I'd be playing human sin whack-a-mole. I whack one sin, another one pops up. At some point, I just had to accept that there are traits human possess that upset me, and find lifestyle solutions to mitigate them, that's all :)
At least GCL System Integration Technology Co., apparently, and presumably most or all of the Chinese PV manufacturing industry, which is most of the world's:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i...

HN discussion at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002696

Like the DRAM cartel in the mid-1990s, it will probably hold prices constant for a while (the price freeze has lasted a year and a half already) before they start falling again. In the DRAM case they fell to the previous trend line, but in this case they might not; reducing panel costs much further would make them cheaper per square meter than things like window glass. Crystalline silicon photovoltaic panels have a minimum raw-materials cost per watt governed by terrestrial insolation and the mechanical fragility of silicon; this is different from the situation with DRAM where bits in RAM can be made arbitrarily small.

The US is currently imposing punitive tariffs on solar panel imports because the zombie bankrupt US solar panel manufacturer Suniva filed a lawsuit saying prices were too low — and won! So, whatever is going to happen with solar energy, the US will not be a participant for a few years, and maybe not ever. The EU certainly could make important moves, if they were to fund a venture to spin up PV production at prices that undercut China's, and certainly they are big PV buyers.
I've wondered if this same approach can be taken to technology projects, rather than pure science. We can see examples of long term efforts that degenerate in a way very similar to what happens to a degenerating scientific program.
Not even that. All encrypted traffic in china needs to be decryptable by CCP. Which means if your call in zoom was routed to one of their China servers, then CCP has access to it.

That is on top of the fact that Zoom encryption is weak af.
I agree that price regulation would be a great step.

But if the patient's cost is constrained to $150, the government is not only regulating price, but taxes are probably subsidizing a portion of the cost. This basically brings us back to single payer.
That is crazy when APM is such a saturated market. Granted, there aren't a ton of GraphQL-focused APM tools that are automatically aware of field resolution times and such, but GraphQL makes it a cinch to support; if a company like Datadog came in and added it to their already existing APM suite, Engine would be finished. Datadog APM is expensive, but it's generally interesting beyond GraphQL, and its not five figures expensive at this scale.
The difference is that in the US we actually get to find out about these abuses.
Was using Firebase for a small project to store non-relational Data. Switching to JSON was much more easier.
Moving away from the unsustainable XUL extensions model ("no stable API boundary, just feel free to poke the internals of Firefox any way you like") was another piece of architectural churn that had to happen.
Even the technical challenges are significant. It's one thing to make an app, it's another thing to have a 24/7, global, distributed application with lots of money running through it. You'll need site-reliability teams to handle maintenance issues and a significant number of developers on staff. If there's some new law, regulation, or bug which requires changes to your system it needs to be done NOW, not whenever someone gets around to it.

>who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties? who sets up payments and issues refunds?

Lawyers. You're going to need a lot of lawyers.
Would be cool to have an open protocol where anyone can make an app to hook people up P2P.

> who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties?

If it's P2P, then the same as any other P2P transaction. If I pay a random dude to deliver my lunch, and he assaults me, this is handled by the local police. It's a risk I'm willing to take if I choose to trust him. A distributed trust system w/ reviews will help make things safer.

I feel like sometimes we seek 100% safety in a world where that's not possible, and when it DOES happen we point fingers. With a middleman like Uber we can point fingers more easily, but ultimately we're responsible for ourselves.

> who sets up payments and issues refunds?

There are public escrow services such as escrow.com that could be integrated. And there's always cryptocurrency.
> This was helpful to me. How does the PE company fare in the bankruptcy scenario? Have they put up collateral or are somehow on the hook to the lenders?

All deals are different. You're probably not going to have any collateral put up by the actual PE firm in most cases.

> It's my understanding that the bankruptcy applies only to the purchased subsidiary, so the PE firm only stands to lose the principal they put in at the start.

In most cases this is true. Depending on how aggressive the firm has been and how long they've been involved, they might have already dividended out their principal.

> If so, it sounds like the PE firm gets all the upside, but is less exposed to the downside. So they are incentivized to rachet up the risk.

This is a correct but simplified conclusion. They're incentivized but there's usually a set of checks and balances in the form of banks providing financing and investors willing to finance deals. This system of checks and balances typically erodes as the business cycle/bull market rides on.

The binding constraint in most of these deals is how much leverage you're able to get away with.
[disclaimer: I work on the Dart team.]

As others have already noted, the intent here is to purely measure the one-time startup cost of the runtime in ahead-of-time compiled code - i.e., the amount of time necessary before we can starting executing any user code - i.e., the print in this case. It's assumed that the time to do the actual print is trivial here.

If you want to compare, you might compare with other garbage collected language/runtimes.
I've just tried it again a week ago (last time was ~2 years ago).

While there's definitely lots of improvement, it's still painfully slow and eats lots (like, 40% of 1 core) of CPU time. Took me a two attempts and a couple minutes (!) to join a relatively crowded room at #synapse:matrix.org on a freshly installed Synapse. I get it that there are over 12k people in there, but I haven't seen any other platforms having similar issues.

And this just doesn't feel right, design-wise. It could take a long while loading user pictures, presence states, ancient chat history and extra fluff. But seeing the most recent messages* and having an impression of joining the room should be nearly instantaneous.

Still a huge improvement over what it used to be. I remember waiting for no less than 10 minutes in a similar scenario, and it used to consume nearly 100% of CPU available.

*) For some reason, previews never worked for me. Despite being able to join, when just trying to peek I always get either the never-ending "loading" spinner or "this room can't be previewed" message.
This has been a problem with trackpoints since as long as I can remember. Definitely saw pointer drift on a thinkpad running XP, and see it today on their latest. Wonder if they'll ever actually solve it.
PRC = China for conversations regarding government policy and potential privacy violations and undue pressure on development.
The same concerns could be had for software developed in the U.S. US Gov = U.S. for all intents and purposes with regard to this topic. Now you're just splitting hairs.
> Labor doesn't have a centralizing node

Why doesn’t the US have a Labour Party? That’s what we have in the UK. (But it’s not very popular!)
I believe it was meant to be "banded together". My apologies if you were aware and trying to make a joke. :)
Most select(2) based servers were single threaded, however. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.
Interactive React lifecycle methods diagram
This is probably the best place to start: https://matrix.org/clients

And of course more broadly, Matrix as a whole isn't even limited to only messaging apps, although that's where most of the focus has been thus far. There have been some fun demos/projects in the past though:

- Synchronized presentation slides: https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-presents

- MIDI over Matrix: https://github.com/McOmghall/midi-over-matrix

- VR videoconferencing: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/matrix-vr-demo
I think the need for single payer is best stated in terms of risk. There are many things that can and should be paid for by the end user, because they are things that you buy when you have money and forego when you don’t.

Health care is not one of those things. People get sick and poor at the same time. Especially if it’s a serious illness. It just makes no sense to sell it that way.
Didn't Dell finally fix the nosecam?
Sidewalk Labs pulling out of Toronto’s Quayside project
I don't remember, I got here almost 10 years ago. But it was most probably from following a link on a blog, since the first time a co-worker of mine ever mentioned HN was a few months ago.
Nice, my only problem with it is that it's centralized.
The only way this works is if carriers invest in a ton more hardware, which means leasing more tower space, creating new tower space, getting creative with placing radios in areas where you can't really put towers, etc.

That's expensive. What's also expensive -- sometimes even more expensive -- is running wiring to all those places to connect those radios to the backhaul network.

I frankly do not expect US carriers to go to that expense, at least not universally.
Deckset for Mac: Presentations from Markdown in No Time
> The tests in this project, being limited to broad, "smoke test"-style assertions

Doesn't this put the code far above most academic code by having some tests?
I think current economics favors using solar panels to power a hybrid electric water heater.
Nobody is confusing Chinese people with the PRC. Stop muddying the waters of an important and policy impacting conversation.
For all of its quirks, I love having a 3:2 display on the MateBook X Pro. Besides the Surface Laptop and Surface Book, there's not much else on the market with this aspect ratio.
Yes. I _love_ Keybase Git for instant, immediate, safe backups of private repos. Keybase Git has been an absolutely killer feature for me since it came out and I'll miss it terribly if Keybase-the-software takes a turn for the worse. Now is the time to ensure I've got everything properly backed up, I guess.

https://github.com/spwhitton/git-remote-gcrypt is probably the best alternative for now, but I'm wailing and gnashing my teeth at the prospect of going back to PGP keys. Maybe there's some way to intersect https://github.com/FiloSottile/age and a git remote.
>What makes you say that? I don't think this is true.

the same thing that probably made you say this :

>I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust.

emacs is an older software package, from the 'original home of hackers', extended in a (sorta) language that is notoriously connected to old-school AI and academic programming. The holy war of vi vs. emacs has raged for decades -- and emacs/vi/lisp jokes are some of the oldest computer geek jokes in existence.

I can imagine the fans skew older then say fans of something like Electron or Flutter.

The only computer-geek-joke-theme that I can think of that'd be older would be the billions of COBOL jokes -- but that's just because i'm too young to have heard the billions of punch-card and wire-routing jokes that inevitably existed before I was here.
To be fair, when I know Union workers doing the same job as me are being paid nearly twice as much with medical benefits, sick time, regular raises, proper safety equipment, regulated working hours etc. It's kind of hard not to feel a bit exploited by comparison.
MPA and Amazon Ask GitHub to Suspend Kodi Add-On Developer's Account
I think you need to take a chill pill, and maybe reconsider some of those racist views you seem to be cultivating there. They’re make you look like a rather ugly individual.
You're gonna love incompleteness if you can grok it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...
> Modern science is just barely science

This is way too pessimistic without being more specific than just "modern science". Modern science is accurate enough to produce technology that allows your phone to tell you where you are to within a meter or so, to communicate with a space probe that has exited the solar system (not to mention launching the probe in the first place and having it go where it was intended to go, visiting multiple planets and moons over several decades), to produce the global networking system that we are having this conversation on, and so on for many, many more examples.

There are particular areas that are called part of "modern science" but are just barely sciences (or really not even sciences yet). But there are also areas of modern science that emphatically are sciences, and not "barely" either.

> modern science seems to be performed with a goal in mind (often funding of some sort)

Modern science now mostly does, but that hasn't always been the case. The research that originally led to relativity and quantum mechanics was not. It was done out of intellectual and scientific curiosity. If your question is whether doing science for those reasons is better than doing it to pursue funding, I would say yes.
> I always said if sysadmins all banned together, they could change the world overnight.

What do you think they could all agree on though?
U.S. surveillance is ok if you're a US gov entity. Completely irrelevant to the question posed by GP.
Let's get 'atter.
In Hong Kong, 1 of the transmission vectors for SARS and COVID19 is from sewage pipes in high-rise apartments. Body fluid goes into the drain and its droplets spread to floor above and below the infected unit's.
I wasn't aware of Answers.com; that's a great counter-example! I knew of a few of the others before this comment and I've viewed them as providing some amount of service or support for the price paid so yes they are selling GPL they didn't write, but they're selling something else (their time) along with it.

There's certainly an argument that selling support for software you didn't write (or didn't write in large part) is 'bad'. I also believe that if you are selling the (free/gratis, GPL) software without support you're not going to be in business long.

And all good points on the differences between CC & GPL, my only point was that selling compiled CC-BY-SA binaries provided security-through-obscurity level protection from someone reselling your product (when paired with trademark protection).

Thank you for all the things to think about!
> While it is true that a narrow set of low value software projects are tamable with a Gantt chart, high value software projects that fill previously unmet needs do not lend themselves to being tamable by predictive scheduling techniques.

I think the author vastly overestimates the value and importance of project that most developers work on. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything that I could consider “high value”. I’ve worked in big (and small) companies, working on Big Important Projects, but if I’m being realistic I think the overall value and actual importance is actually quite low.

Other than that, I think the essay has a fatal misunderstanding - it’s not about setting deadlines, but it’s about estimating what it costs to do build software. This is useful because it helps us guess when it would be done, how much can be delivered, etc.
If you consider driving 3+ hours close ... And a "grad student" is generally damn poor (and I was) ...

My point was that Neiman-Marcus had a product (properly fitted business suits) that was actually (probably upper) middle class. And that product, in fact, served its purpose really well.

People still underestimate the effect that an excellent suit has on people's perception of you in business. Being tech, I normally cruise around in really casual wear. However, investor meetings demand something a little more upscale so I'm pulling out my nice suit. I chuckle at the difference in behavior of the people around me (both employees and strangers) when I show up for work in a suit.
There was way more funding in the 1960s than there is now.
You are referring to this Github Issue: https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/788

"Yes, we sold our previous 2 businesses. But I want to point out that (1) neither of those sales ever hurt (and arguably both sales greatly helped) our users, (2) Keybase deserves special consideration which we are aware of, and (3) both Max and I are happy in a world where we never try to sell a company again, and only build things we like."

I feel silly for falling for it too. Even very wealthy people enjoy extra money.