skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely agree that marking the end of the Roman Empire with the fall of Romulus Augustulus in 476 is not very meaningful. But there was a definite collapse of Roman civilization in the West, with a highly urbanized society with a sophisticated economy and an elaborate tax system funding public goods (infrastructure, the legal system, security) and a fair level of literacy being replaced by a largely de-urbanized, almost completely illiterate, and in many places de-monetized society. The collapse didn't happen instantly or at the same time everywhere, but it did take place roughly during the 5th Century, and would have been noticed by people who lived at the time. They might not have known right away that things would be different forever, but there were definite events along the way - the sack of Rome in 410, the failure of Majorian's attempts to reconquer critical territories of the Western Empire, and others.

I mostly feel that there's been a trend in historiography to over-emphasize continuity, with the theory of the "transformation of the Roman Empire." It looks much less like a "transformation" of the Empire from one state into another, and much more like a civilizational collapse. I agree that why this collapse occurred is difficult to answer, but I find the argument that it didn't occur unconvincing.
Isn't this anathema to the whole blockchain-currency credo? It's all about no authority. Its all on you to keep your bitcoin secure. For better or worse.
Gateway is one such term.

To fit your perspective, though, you could say that Google controls supply and service of user clicks, user attention, or even user interface.
The Unexamined Model (Of Covid-19 Transmission) Is Not Worth Trusting
If your 401k has ETFs or mutual funds in it, the fund managers are rebalancing every month or every quarter. Saving small amounts of money on these transactions really adds up when you think about compounding over decades.
Well the flame is saying it's a misunderstanding of the difference between data smoothing and model-based forecasting.

To which I'd say that just begs the question of if there's a difference to begin with, and what criteria you would use to distinguish them if they are.
The single socket epyc boards expose a lot more PCIe than threadripper boards, from what I can tell.

$/core-ghz is much better on the TR parts though, if you're paying retail. Epyc chips sometimes show up on secondary markets at much better prices than retail. (e.g. my 7742's I basically paid the same $/core-ghz as the current top end threadripper parts).
> which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia

This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons:

1. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of upbringing makes it difficult to recognize merit.

2. We've lowered the bar for standards across education, in an attempt to bring our lowest up, failing to realize that the primary result was bringing our best down. That hurts merit at professional levels especially, where the pipeline effectively shrinks.

3. Our media has regressed to the lowest common denominator. The most popular sources of influence in our society are uncredentialed hacks who spread misinformation ("Dr." Phil, "Dr." Oz, Oprah, etc). Even our official "news" sources are primarily entertainment venues and are fully editorialized. This makes it extremely difficult for the average person to recognize merit.

It's like our entire culture has been consumed by charisma, such that incompetence permeates every sector of our economy and society. Things were too easy for too long, and now we face a reckoning - either we fix things or our nation collapses. There's no room for popularity contests, crony capitalism, or diversity initiatives during times of crisis.

Edit: what about this comment is deserving of being flagged?
Designing Variational Quantum Algorithms with Tequila
It makes a number out of a number. Type signature isn’t supposed to explain the implementation, just the interface.
Thank you! I really appreciate it :) Hit me up if you have any questions!
I don't think I agree with this. I think what the poster is looking for is how to help the more businessy founder understand the engineers that (s)he's necessarily going to be hiring and working with. That strikes me as a perfectly sensible and worthwhile goal and one that will probably help their start up have a healthy culture in its early months/years.
Not to get far off topic, but in what way is Apple a monopoly? What do they have a majority market share of, internet-connected watches?
I wanted to add one point to that

- most people only install popular apps

- top apps in playstore are actively hostile to using their website.

Reddit, Imgur, instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, twitter etc. You name it. They either don't have a functioning mobile website or native only.
What is Facebook a monopoly in?
If you have access to a PS3 Ratchet and Clank All 4 One is an excellent couch co-op game. Most of the LEGO games are great couch co-op too.
Maybe spruce up the whole site too.
According to wiki, Google Shopping is now run entirely separate after a case in the EU (though it's not clear if that's just in Europe or not).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Goog...

I think it's a good start. All ancillary Google businesses outside of search/ads should be required to run at arms length IMHO.
Someone has unofficially ported Battle for Wesnoth to Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.alessandrop...

The controls are actually not half-bad.

There's also A LOT of board game ports of varying quality.

I've been enjoying Through the Ages. Ticket to Ride is competent. Splendor, Race for the Galaxy, and Twilight Struggle also pretty great.
Let's Make Everyone a Queen
Most of the common TCP congestion control algorithms (Reno, Cubic) are loss-based: they try to send more and more data until the link no longer can buffer all of the packets, and drops some of them. Naturally, this approach requires the buffer to fill up, causing the latency to spike.

There are algorithms that try to use increased delay as a signal that the link is full. This approach has multiple problems, one of which is that delay can be really noisy on wireless networks; another is that if you have a loss-based and a delay-based connection sharing the same link, the delay-based one will get much less than a fair share of its bandwidth. People have been trying to make an algorithm that both coexists with Reno/CUBIC and does not induce bufferbloat for the last 25 years or so, and there's been some progress, but none of it has
reached the point where it could be used as a default congestion control for all operating systems.

The problem of "I have files to transfer in background, but I want my connection to yield to more important traffic" can actually solved using a special congestion control algorithm called LEDBAT [1]; it's used by Apple for things like software updates, and BitTorrent uses it too. Unfortunately, I think only Apple implements it in its TCP stack, so anyone who wants to do that would have to roll their own thing using UDP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEDBAT
As evidenced in this epidemic, epidemiological modeling is either not very good or overconfident. I mean, all models are wrong, but theirs have also been useless. Why trust a model if you can do a serology study instead?
> The problem was that they were trying to use that to "leverage" their way into dominance on the internet, by pushing (really quite aggressively) users to use Internet Explorer

Absolutely correct. By the way, have you visited Google with a non-Chrome browser? They’ll encourage you to use Chrome for “the best experience.” Seems very much like leveraging, never understood why people don’t make a bigger deal about this.
If the risk could be reduced 10-100X it may be worth consideration. I could imagine one of the crazier/more desperate countries trying this in order to get ahead long term (North Korea?).
The Lego games can be really good with younger kids.

FIFA / NBA 2K for older kids.
> trying to make sense of what the (well-tested) Schrodinger equation says about reality.

Nitpick: The Schrödinger equation predicts unitary time evolution (which is another way of saying that physical systems evolve in a deterministic manner). Interpretations of quantum mechanics exist to make sense of the part of quantum mechanics that doesn't follow unitary time evolution, namely the measurement process.
Even better imo? Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

It's a fork, but some nice quality of life upgrades and tweaks imo

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shatteredp...
I'm pretty much unable to do this. I think I focus too intently on what I'm consuming. Doing almost anything else lessens my focus on the podcast, and makes me mess up whatever else I'm trying to do. So I basically just sit there and stare into space while listening to one. Because of this I don't tend to consume them very often.
Fuel cells don't really win compared to gas. Its hard to see any adoption of them even in those areas. For utility vehicle the price matters very much, and hydrogen is not cheap.

The ICE manufacturers are not gone die just like that for many years, however the question is, when they have all made the transition, what will the market share of Tesla be and who will they take it from.

The problem for old manufactures is that they have a gigantic capital investment in things like engines. A lot of that investment has not been amortized. Switching to EV requires both a massive investment in redesigning all cars to be EVs, huge investment in retooling your manufacturing and a lots of margin if you don't build batteries.

All that goes into your margin for EVs, and thus they are terrible for most automakers. So you are forced to sell a product that doesn't make much profit and requires a huge capital base, when you already have a huge capital base for producing marginally profitable ICE cars that are dropping in resale value quickly.

I think I disagree with the point about finaces. Sure a cheap ICE car is better, but when buying an car comparable with a Tesla in price, I rather have the Tesla. Gas is cheap now, but power is still cheaper usually. Gas could be more expensive again for many reasons. In 5 years ICE car will have basically no resale value while EV should hold their value much better.

All that said, buying a cheap ICE car with an efficient engine is the way to save money. Or use public transportation like me :)
The thing I find interesting about these is that, normally, when you hear something ungrammatical, you get an instant feeling of non-correctness. For example if I were to say "The people is walking down the street" - it instantly stands out to you as wrong. That same feeling doesn't seem to happen with Escher sentences.

While not the same idea, it reminds me of garden path sentences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
While I agree with you (that a lot of books are no better than the internet content and TV shows we decry so often as unintellectual), the other side of the coin is that one person's drivel is another person's necessary information. A lot of entertainment addresses deep topics as "humor" that are too uncomfortable to talk about via other pathways.

When I was a child, I read a lot of comics. I also was one of the top students at school.

The mother of a same-age friend didn't want him reading comics because it was drivel. She wanted him to be one of the smart kids and wanted him reading important stuff.

My mother told her one day "What do you care if he reads comics? He's at least reading if he's reading comics."

I don't know if that helped my friend. I don't know if his mother changed her policy. But it sure as hell stuck with me all these years and it's been probably 47 years ago or something like that.

If I'm one of the smart kids, you can credit my mother's policy of letting me read drivel because it was at least reading.
I don't think their priority is making a specific area where users are free from malware; they're trying to make it hard for malware overall to integrate with Chrome. Adding a supported path for software to integrate with Chrome (allowing extensions not through the store) where they can't block malware would be giving up on that goal.
I was actually delighted to discover that I've matured (ossified?) enough as a programmer that my source code is in fact fairly deterministic: the other day I somehow managed to completely wipe a fairly complex function (100+ LoC) from my repo before I committed it. I did this a week or so after I initially wrote the function. I then rewrote the function from scratch, with very little memory of how I wrote it the first time, just knowledge of what it needed to do. Ironically enough, almost as soon as I finished writing this function, I found a copy of the original one that I'd somehow stashed and forgotten about, and the two functions were literally identical.
This is a neat example, but wouldn't dynamic dispatch imply polymorphism?
as of ~15:45 PDT 5/15 searching saddleback bbq lansing on Google and DDG the links in the advertisements go to the restaurant's website, not GrubHub or DoorDash for me
I think one of the appeals about this site is that it is simple and isn't another one of those Bootstrap websites.

Dark mode would be nice though.
Identity function is more confusing than just ()=>{} which is obviously noop because it doesn't return the input.
you're correct, I wrote this in too much haste
What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies? I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern in the media before I was old enough to remember or something?

Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
I am learning Svelte, so I typed that in:

https://wiby.me/?q=svelte

Two links came back:

"Facts on Farts"
"NiceJewishMom.com"

Not a good first impression.
Maybe they have super high engagements per day - like twitter's early days?
> Comcast, they need to be broken up

Breaking up a regional monopoly into smaller regional monopolies doesn't work (see baby Bells).

What would be better is requiring the owners of any last mile infrastructure to lease said infrastructure to any other interested operator at cost. This worked with DSL, but the mandate ended when we moved on to other technologies like cable and fiber that had no such requirements.

Instead, we now do the opposite. We give ISPs tax breaks and incentives and piles of cash to "build out the infrastructure" (read: we pay them to invest in their own business), because they threaten to not build it otherwise (read: they're threatening to deliberately decline to grow their business), and for the privilege of paying them to increase their customer and revenue base, we (get this) give them the exclusive right to be the only operator of any similar last mile infrastructure in that area.

How fucking stupid can we get?

We should not allow these agreements to happen, and we should retroactively void any that are currently in place.
As of now there is no mobile support. Definitely looking to figure something out for future updates though.
Agree, there's definitely a risk for uncanny valley in voice assistants around tone. Emotion in particular is an area where I think we won't have sophisticated enough systems to address for some time, which means it's mostly something that makes things unintentionally worse. A few of these downsides include:

1. tone has a different valence than what the subject matter requires ('Sure thing! The funeral home number is...'), which reminds you of and amplifies negative feelings

2. tone is used to get something from you, which makes you feel manipulated

3. tone is uniformly applied, which through repeat exposure makes the world feel false

Totally agree that randomized prosody would help aid in making assistants more natural; tempo and rhythm don't have as much emotional weight.

I'm not sure explicit markup is the right way to approach the problem, given its lack of understanding of user context and state of mind, and the likelihood developers execute poorly. It feels like a solution at the wrong level of abstraction... getting in sync with a user's emotions is a pretty high bar.
That's pretty cool actually. That speaks to your consistency as a programmer.
Ah great! I hope the pointer saves you $5 :)

Go’s support for race detectors is super ergonomic. You need a unit test for the parent function that’s spawning the routines. Run that unit test with the race flag, and it’ll catch it for you. If you’re curious about how it works, this post is good: https://blog.golang.org/race-detector
While it's probably true that most of the tech companies have some form of platform monopolies, William Barr, out of all people, is not to be trusted. Hatchet man through and through.

The motives here are entirely political. Notice that the ISPs, telecom industry in general, defense industries are left out of this discussion.

Tech companies lean left, largely donate to the Democrats, and have been the focus of conservative groups for years as they are considered "biased" towards those on the Left. Like many things about Trump's administration, it's about revenge against those who oppose him, be they companies, state or individuals.
interesting! why 42 seconds? did you ever end up building this?
J.C. Penney files for bankruptcy protection
GF and I have had success with Minecraft, Overcooked 1/2, Human Fall Flat, Don't Starve Together, Rocket League, and the Halo co-op campaigns[1].

Unrailed is an early access game on Steam. Short but not bad. A bit like Overcooked in terms of task management.

We've tried Borderlands and Diablo 3, but quickly became a bit bored of them and dropped off. Lots of loot and not a ton of substance I felt.

----------

1. Halo: MCC is out for PC and will include six titles for $40 - though you need two copies for co-op play. Halo Reach, Halo: CE, and Halo 2 are out currently. Others coming in 2020)
Just something I didn't make clear in the above comment: I expect that Hardware-description-language-to-layout pipelines will improve a lot in the upcoming years, so if a process becomes viable for open hardware, projects that were developed on an FPGA (here is a wi-fi chip, for instance: https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi) might be transferable with a lot less effort than doing everything from scratch.

I would also like to point out that these tools will likely help us juice up a bit more performance from the existing processes, but we aren't really likely to see a lot more of Moore's scaling, going forward. So the door is open to new processes, that may or may not be open hardware-friendly. And current, top-end processes might also become cheaper over time. While I doubt a lot of new foundries will catch up with the end of Moore's scale, it might actually become easier to get there, while disruptive technologies get some time to play catch-up. Together with innovative synthesis tools.
Happened with Rockefeller so probably
CoffeeScript rocks for functional programming. Less chars and more sense per LoC, easier to learn than JavaScript and syntax sugar is sweet.
> HN should be dark mode by default

A less controversial solution would be to simply hook into the user's system-level light/dark setting: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

That said, I've wanted this feature desperately for a long time. Browsing HN on my desktop monitor in the evening is blinding and gives me a headache. I find myself resizing the window to be phone-sized just so my eyes are assaulted with less light.

If you need a hand with the CSS, I'd be happy to write it myself (speaking of which; is HN open-source?)
Just because they had a more lax approach in the past doesn't mean they aren't working hard to regain control now. And either way, none of that addresses the issue where expanding control would only make the malware issue worse, not better.
There is a huge difference between SaaS and marketplaces. The latter is very prone to creating monopolies or oligopolies, but the former not so much.

About the developer tools you mentioned, take for an example the CI service. It is relatively easy to switch to a new one. I have used Codeship and Circle CI in the past but have switched to Google Cloud Build since it ia cheaper for my use case with Docker containers.
I think this might be correct, especially during a lockdown, those are the people most people see.
Yelp is a parasite that participates in extortion of small businesses. They need to be investigated themselves long before their word has any weight in this matter.
This seems like the sort of argument that should be distributed in the peer-reviewed literature to scientists, not on a news website.

I am far from average in my consumption of medical literature--I read several papers every week and have some (limited) background in biophysics. Nonetheless, this debate is miles over my head. One would need to know a great deal about pharmacology to evaluate this article. There are lots of reasons to use one prodrug over another; likewise, there are a great deal of differences between animal models and humans.

See also this reddit comment:

http://reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/fv8p4k/comment/fmhydy...
The GitHub project page has a better and more comprehensive introduction than the CERN page:

* https://github.com/ozel/DIY_particle_detector/

Paper (Open Access, click "Download PDF"):

* Smartphone and Tablet-Based Sensing of Environmental Radioactivity: Mobile Low-Cost Measurements for Monitoring, Citizen Science, and Educational Purposes

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/19/4264
I've implemented a new system. Can't buy another game until I finish the current one.

Same with books. So far it has kept the pile of shame from growing.
The Google search engine didn't have anything to build off of when it was introduced since it was using an algorithm and not ML. You could create a search engine today without utilizing any click data outside of "what link did this user click on the result page and did they search for a similar query or try another link as their next action".

In fact, this is already happening. DDG is building its own crawler (I often see the ddg user agent on my web properties) and they don't have any open "machine learning expert" positions.
The product we're building, Cadence, is actually our solution to the daily standup problem.

Let me know if you'd be interested in trying our product out -- seems like you'd give great feedback. My email is melissa@cadencework.com
You can have your cake and eat it too. For example, react’s functional components are both good in product terms and good in technical terms. C#, JavaScript, python, swift and others have lots of tools for programming in a more functional style.

And java isn’t where all the ‘stuff gets done’ - well, outside of the enterprise programming bubble. JavaScript and (surprisingly) python are the workhorses of the modern startup ecosystem. I can’t speak with certainty about python, but separating logic and data, and using immutability with stateless components and functions is all very common in the JavaScript world.
The only programming languages where arithmetic symbols are allowed identifiers have an identifier sigil (ala Perl, PHP), require whitespace around arithmetic (some teaching languages), or don't have conventional arithmetic syntax (e.g. Forth, Lisp).
Should Art Say Things?