skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I notice that modern companies don't pay dividend anymore.

They optimize for growth and survival, which makes sense.

Google and Apple have so much cash that they wouldn't really need to make money for years, and they would still survive.

Paying dividend is kinda okay, at best. Buying back stock is a bit better. The best is to just keep th cash.

Don't get me wrong. As a shareholder, I like it. But it's bad for the company.
Google, not that I typically support things they do, found a way to do both:

https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9149304?co=GENIE...

As far as I know, appleid's have some kind of password/authentication system that could be used to encrypt backups.
At work, we have a trillion custom slack emojis, and one is a big X with the caption “no-just”, encouraging people to refrain using just in sentences like “you just need to set up the Kafka consumer”.

Now that I’m writing this out, it sounds kinda dystopian , but I actually appreciate the doublethink. I believe that pruning “just” (and cousins like “really” “very”, “it” the direct object/noun, “something”) has increased the clarity of my writing.

I think that these words actually do have a use, but only in long recurring interactions where it’s clear that you don’t use these words in everyday communication. Humans are language detectives, and will detect these changes in speech as a signal of emotion. When you’re sincerely emotional about something, these normally vacuous words can be super meaningful. You can even use them in documentation (sparingly), to make a point.

There’s a Tao Te Ching verse about how the wise practice “not-talking”. The implication is that normalizing silence makes words more meaningful: words only carry meaning because they contrast with silence, so if you’re talking all the time nobody will listen to you. It’s a good idea with many implications and applications, and I think it applies to these words. :)
Oh how splendid.
That's the one upgrade (SSD) I did too.
Callback hell in JavaScript.
I'm sorry, but your understanding in this regard is mistaken. Non-N95 masks are simply not designed for this purpose. They will always let in outside (contaminated) air.

From the Ars Technica article above (which I believe is citing this paper: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/4/e006577.full.pdf)

> Wearing cloth masks resulted in significantly higher rates of infection, the authors found. They also noted that in their test, the cloth masks were only 3 percent effective at blocking particles.

Ask yourself this question -- why do surgeons wear masks when operating on patients? It isn't to protect themselves from the patient... it's to protect that patient from the surgeon. If the patient is infectious, then a surgeon wears a completely different set of protective gear to protect themselves.

And N95 masks only work when properly fit. I haven't been fit for an N95 mask, so I don't know what size would be right for me. If you don't have the right size/type of mask, it can be more dangerous for you than if you didn't have a mask. Why? Because when you have a mask, people can feel completely protected and stop taking other precautions. If you are keeping isolated from others, there is no need for a mask.
> what the practical benefit is in having it wrap around

There's a pretty big practical difference between "getting an unexpected numerical result" and "letting an attacker steal my TLS keys and mine bitcoins on my machine."
What the article is speaking of is setting one sprite to two different positions on alternating frames to provide the illusion of two separate objects, which will flicker.

I never saw C64 games do that much, but Atari games did. Adventure being a good example - it effectively only has 2 "sprites" but flickers when more than 2 are in the frame. An infamous example would be the Pac-man ghosts, flickering 1 ghost across 4 frames and looking overall terrible (this is on top of all the other problems Atari Pac-man had).

At least a few NES games made extensive use of this. The bullets in Contra flicker for this reason I believe. I think 1990 Batman and Return of the Joker also did this for the full screen to provide an illusion of two mixing backgrounds.
I'm thinking people like you who were possibly abused cannot see the other side of the coin

We see how regular parents behave towards their children just fine, thankyouverymuch. We have eyes in our heads. You, however, as your reply shows, are congenitally unable to consider that some parents maltreat their children and that these parents look to the outside world like well-adjusted people. (If they didn't, relatives/the State/whoever) would have stepped in long ago.

No, I don't know how they train psychologists and psychiatrists to even perceive that problem. I suggest you look into that and do not come back until you have done so.

That's EOD here.
But they are now, and that's what matters. When prices fell the first time, it didn't even take a week before the government passed the largest stimulus ever, 80% of which went to corporations. Investors know that the government will do anything to underwrite their risk.
In 2013 a friend and I created an SDK for building games with GNOME's Vala (that transpires to C with GLib), SDL2 and Chipmunk physics for Android, Linux, and Windows (all within the same codebase).

It worked flawless, I even ported a XNA example. It may be useful for someone today:
https://github.com/avalanche-games/avalanche/wiki/Getting-St...
Yes, they were on a different level in February, because the first batch of tests from the CDC was defective. Not now.
> the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits

Where is the innovation/research in this area happening? This is one of those topics that I find very interesting but any attempt to serious inquiry into it tends to result in ridicule from people I know with some expertise in physics and thermodynamics, as though it was just obviously nonsense.
I don't see the evidence of this here, it's just an Amazon page.
This is the alarm that keeps going off for me from getting too optimistic. If it's accurate that 78% of the U.S. was already living paycheck to paycheck [1] and many haven't made a dime in two months, it doesn't matter if there's pent up demand for things. There's just no money to buy them.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-i...
Looks like either every single person I reply to disapproves of my words, or we have yet another busy little beaver, eh dang?

Let's see how this one fares.
Saved :)
It doesn't need to be centrally managed, the situation can emerge organically just based on how people are incentivized. Especially with the impact computers and scaling at low marginal costs has and how much more one person's labor can be worth compared to another person's labor.
How to be eco-friendly and have a website?
I’ve recently pulled up Mission Impossible, Cybernoid II and International Karate on my C64 and played for a few hours. One of these games has synthesized speech. Each of them fits in less than 64K, on a processor that can be implemented with 930 logic gates (although the original 1978 version had about 3000 transistors which is a bit more)

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
Plenty of games used to be written like this, where you basically had a C (or C++) OpenGL ES platform independent code base, and then a bunch of small platform-specific parts for the different OSes.

They did usually have tiny pieces of code in platform-native language though.

I even wrote a game like that back in 2012 (originally for Samsung's bada OS, later ported to many things) https://github.com/peterholak/rail-climber (it says 2016 on github, but the code is much older).

One great thing about it is, when you have a desktop target, you can compile/test/debug things much faster (including things like level files), and only do a mobile build every once in a while to check that it still all works as it should. Almost like a full featured game engine.
8MB is 1600X the size of the example app in C.
I would say the vast majority of How to Design Programs (https://htdp.org/) is about exactly this. It's not presented this way, but that's what the Design Recipe makes you really good at.
But that's the point. Parent poster is assuming that the future profits of a company won't change over the next 15-20 years because of coronavirus. Everyone in this subthread is pointing out that that's not a valid assumption. We've already seen the discount rate drop to zero in the last couple months. Will it stay there? Will we get hyperinflation? Will we get deflation as laid-off workers lose their spending power? Will the target market of many companies end up dead? Will companies go bankrupt through lack of cash flow? Are we going to see civil unrest or a breakdown of political authority?

Many of these are permanent consequences that will absolutely effect earnings 15-20 years in the future. The market seems to be pricing in an assumption that this will be a blip: we'll reopen, businesses will rehire, and 2021 will look much like 2019. I don't believe that's likely.
I think that's a very reasonable concern. It however isn't really about io_uring - it applies to all "async" solutions. Even today if you are running async IO in userspace (e.g. using epoll), it's not very obvious where something went wrong, because no task is seemingly blocked. If you attach a debugger, you might most likely see something being blocked on epoll - but a callstack to the problematic application code is nowhere in sight.

Even if pause execution while inside the application code there might not be a great stack which contains all relevant data. It will only contain the information since the last task resumption (e.g. through a callback). Depending on your solution (C callbacks, C++ closures, C# or Kotlin async/await, Rust async/await) the information will be between not very helpful and somewhat understandable, but never on par with a synchronous call.
Well it seems like “real wages” have not increased in decades?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
Sorry, I wasn't aware that I was doing that - I'm just using the official numbers I've got on hand. Can you provide any sources that provide an estimate that better lines up with the claim that COVID has "already killed 5x [more than] any flu season"?

I know that different states and countries are reporting COVID deaths differently. I've seen "shutdown skeptics" claim that the reason Belgium and New York and Sweden's official numbers look so bad is because of this: supposedly they're using a methodology closer to the one you claim is being used to source the flu numbers, unlike everyone else. So I don't think my official numbers are purely what you claim they are, but probably a mix of different methodologies. Even if on balance that's producing an undercount, do we have evidence for something like an undercount by a factor of five? The former I'd be happy to accept, the latter is a bit of an extraordinary claim and calls for the evidence to match.

Neither of my sources for the flu numbers say their number was derived in the way you're suggesting - the US one in particular says that it's an estimate using a statistical model rather than a count anything like what you're saying. Did I miss something in the sources?
Firebase Newsletter #9
As a funny aside, I built the emacs-native branch for the first time this week and I had to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB of ram for the build process to not run out of memory.
there's truth in this, a lot, but I find a little paradox that if bliss is here, why is everybody moving ?

I try to strike a balance between enjoying the moment and enjoying the change too.
> Gaming graphics cards don't work well under Linux

They work fine, haven't had a problem with them for years, using nvidia cards. Most distros just ship the proprietary drivers now, and those just work.

There just aren't masses of native games. That said, Steam now has a built in version of wine called "Proton" that's worth checking out.
I was in the same position. Asking the same questions. Is it his fault? It's probably not. Whatever he did has stopped me from seeing him as a parent. I think of my parents as team members I can't fire yet. They might be lazy, unskilled, or unwilling to change. But attacking them won't solve any problems. What you need to do is get into their head. Act, think, and see the same way they do. What would I want others to do that will get me motivated to change?

I give them targetted praise whenever they do something I want. Give treats for wrong decisions but drilling what they did was wrong. Make them feel important and special. Let them feel guilty for not being able to live up to the expectations you build around them. Let them see the perfect human you see them as. Use metrics and numbers that are easy to parse, use social signaling. Instead of giving your opinion about something, point towards someone they might be interested to hear about or care to change them.

Say you love them the way they are but point towards changing societal expectations.

Again, you aren't the bad guy who wants them to change. It's the society or someone else. It is easier to get through the head.

Push them into groups with opposite view to them. People behave differently under group pressure compared to when you are talking to them one on one.

Whenever they come across material that re-enforces their existing belief, try to distract them. Change their environment. Offer to clean their room and remove harmful material. Change places that remind them of their previously held beliefs.
Here's a case I stumble on: Rust seems to generate unnecessary branches. Compare copying an optional range:

C++: https://godbolt.org/z/VCf638

Rust: https://rust.godbolt.org/z/jRFiw_

I think the key difference here is that C++ allows specializing optional on trivial types - can anyone shed more light?
I miss getting together with a my family.
I'm from a european context and I'd say quote or quotation works fine: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/251563/get-a-quo...
I don't want to lionize you, but I think you shouldn't sell yourself short. You were thrust into an incredibly difficult situation that very few understand and did what you had to do to make the best of it against insurmountable odds. You should be proud in the knowledge that when push comes to shove you can do what's required, that's much more than most can say for themselves.
Comparing US wages to countries that have far greater social safety nets and healthcare is impossible. And volatility of wages and the insecurity of not knowing if you will have stable work (and hence healthcare) or not is a more important metric, although also impossible to measure. But not impossible to feel and see the results of.
This is shamelessly off topic but what’s the best tool right now for using open type features (like ligatures) for PDF typesetting from simple ascii text?

I’m using asciidoc which has thankfully recently shipped hyphenation support, but I don’t think it supports ligatures. They feel like another must have for beautiful typesetting.

I’m wary of TeX because I find it so hard to get the stylised results I want for our org (a school) but should I be less afraid? TeX based tools always felt content first, which is laudable, but presentation fanciness is a requirement when one works in pitching — in this case to school children.
You could compare it to the value of gold over time
I see that site is maintained by SourceHut though - are the test run from within their own DC? That could contribute to the performance score.
Good advice, and please don't be too harsh on yourself for having forgotten to call. She would've forgiven you many times over.
You are stuck in an echo chamber. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...
Personally, I'm hoping more of those folks move over to SourceHut[1]. It doesn't require JavaScript for anything, and it's much faster to boot.

[1] https://sourcehut.org/
great hack and really enjoyed the tone / thought it hilarious. "thousands of words by someone who gives a shit" is my favorite internet genre. still plenty of room there, though... :`(
Depends on the issuer. As I mention upthread, I think US major airline bonds are probably ok, more or less regardless of rating, since the gov't will always bail them out in the end. The largest hotel/hospitality chains may befine as well (though I haven't looked into their financial situation). But businesses will still continue to disappear over the next year from this, so I would tread with care.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the mid-90s was a hot time for language design: the CGI-bin protocol of the Web suddenly made it possible to write code in any language you wanted and distribute the results, even with a loosely graphical interface, painlessly to clients (in the sense they didn't need to install anything). I call it the "Cambrian explosion of languages".

Though Racket was not created for that purpose, it's unsurprising that many others from that era were linked to the Web.
How sure are you that that getting an unexpected numerical result isn't going to let an attacker take over your machine? In most code I see the behavior is just undefined and not paid attention to by the programmer, regardless of what the compiler is doing. A huge fraction of the time you'll just step out of the bounds of an array, just deterministically instead of nondeterministically. People don't pay attention to what happens in that case regardless except in like 0.01% of the time when they're writing some kind of bit manipulation magic, and in those rare cases they can handle them in C++ too, with a custom wrapper or an unsigned type or something.
Wouldn't this mean that these tidal forces may (have) cause(d) highly accelerated matter to shoot through our solar system?
Another arch-er here.

The main reason I moved to arch was KDE Plasma 5. When it first came out version 5, was buggy, but usable enough to be a daily driver. A rolling release made it easy to get the latest updates and I haven't needed to revisit my decision since the last 5 years.
On the other hand seeing someone complete an online degree shows a lot of grit and determinism. Especially if they are balancing it with work and family commitments. Most people can't even complete a single MOOC, the dropout rate is enormous.
Why forego at all? (-:
Yup. Starcross was similar; I meant clues rather than copy-protection under another name. I played store-bought versions of these game (on my old Commodore 64) and never bought "invisiclues" so the line between these categories was quite clear. I don't recall what the medium of my final "tap out" in Zork 3 was - but recall being stuck for months and finally looking up the "hello sailor" bit.

This might not have been such a problem if I had played the Zorks in order, but I bought Zork 3 before Zork 1 because that was what they had in the shop. Otherwise I might have seen the verse in Zork 1:

"Oh ye who go about saying unto each, "Hello sailor",
Dost thou know the magnitude of thy sin before the gods?"
Yup.

If you look at it from their point of view:

We were making an API that take images does stuff on the GPU and pushes back an answer

It needed to be secure, fast and easy to look after. If they had forced cognito down my throat, and it stopped me from shipping on time, they would have missed out in $$$ of GPU time. I trusted that architect more, because they were honest, and actually helped. Making me want to stay inside the expensive walled garden that is AWS, more.
> Not having undefined behavior does make life easier

I have mixed feelings about this. It seems like many examples of undefined behavior are things that don't make sense to do (ie ought to result in an error) which would often be undecidable at compile time. Runtime error checks would incur performance penalties so it's up to to programmer to include them.

The borrow checker is an obvious advantage here. Beyond that, I guess you could do many of the same things in unsafe blocks and they could cause problems just as easily. If they end up breaking things no one will blame the language because the tin was clearly labeled.

I do prefer language designs that make it possible to write things that are safe by default. It just seems like many problems are misattributed to undefined behavior but are actually due to systemic issues in the design of the language.
Just going from the last one I read for DGraph, it did extremely well. Pretty sure etcd did well.

They always have bugs somewhere, but there are huge differences between bugs that show up for very specific, niche cases, and normal "I wrote to the db and it dropped it".
> I find it very frustrating that Gitlab requires Javascript for simple basic things. You can't view replies to issues or even browse files in a repository. GitHub UX is so much better, but sadly many projects moved to Gitlab because of Microsoft acquiring GitHub.

How much coverage does the API have? In theory it should be 100% as the website uses (as far as I remember, haven't looked into the source) Vue.js but I'm not sure in practice. If the coverage is 100% or near 100%, you should be able to do many of the things in the terminal or it is possible to have a completely server-side web application (not sure of the exact terminology, I mean like the delightful SourceHut[0] thing). The biggest concern is ongoing maintenance as Gitlab tends to move pretty quickly.

[0] https://sourcehut.org/
Nah. That doesn't guarantee a return. It might mitigate the downside but there's still risk. No one takes on risk to break even.

You invest for a return. Stopping a slide yesterday has little to do with getting a return tomorrow.

The future. New products. New ideas. Etc. That's where a return comes from. Not the Fed.
Inflation has been hidden since the Obama years of quantitative easing due to globalization. You can pump cash into the market and, if you keep the cost of consumer goods low by outsourcing to 3rd world labor, the CPI doesn't increase. Meanwhile, the cost of items that are produced here, e.g. homes and cars, skyrockets. Trump has continued the trend of pumping the market and accelerated it in the last few months at an alarming rate. Problem is, globalization is decreasing as countries isolate. No place to hide the inflation. The stock market will continue to increase despite the bad news.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100823/coronavirus-case...
Is it possible that the C virus is (almost) over but there is a collective anxiety attack? And if this collective anxiety attack existed, is it possible that people are harmed by it? Apparently A & E departments in Germany have fewer patients with strokes and heart attacks: https://www.sr.de/sr/home/nachrichten/panorama/weniger_mensc... (in German)
What I don't get was the broad internal push to building on AWS directly, which was great most of the time, but came with big downgrades in metrics and alarms if you were to use the AWS equivalent.
That’s an average per consumer. It’s likely skewed way up by extreme outliers. Need to see median, 75th percentile, 95th percentile to really understand it. The headline seems like deliberately misleading journalism.
> X/Xwayland is the one compromise one has to make.

No you don't. You could use Windows.

> So perhaps we should assume nvidia just isn't a thing as well.

Sure, that is what I do. How do you explain that to a novice that is just trying to run linux on their computer for the first time?

Look, I use linux full time for most tasks, both at home and at work. Professionally I am a kernel engineer. I am very pro linux, and pro new linux users. I think that we do linux a disservice by pretending that there aren't issues. The simple fact is that the linux graphics experience is not seamless like it is on other operating systems. We shouldn't pretend that it is just because experts can make it work.
Sure, I was speaking more broadly. Jepsen isn't a meaningful tests for a lot of databases, or use cases/configurations of databases.