skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> = 0072 + 2 * (filenameLength // 2)

I'm having a hard time understanding what is meant by this. Particularly when 114 is the size of the patch after the 8 header bytes. The description also seems to get the word size wrong by treating the first 4 bytes as a NULL-terminated string.

A 4-byte ID and a 4-byte big-endian length is almost universal for audio data. There's even a Python module[1] for it. And it's often nested, so within a chunk of data will be smaller chunks described the same way.

The more complete and easier to analyze description of this patch would look like:

"FORM" (114)
"PTCH"
"CAT " (4)
"REFS"
"DESC" (35)
[BC 01 03 00 00 FF] -- ?
(2) "17" -- File name
(19) "Scream 4 Distortion" -- Patch name
"PARM" (37)
[BC 01] -- Another BC01
(15) -- Number of params that follow
[01 01]
[02 3E]
[03 00]
[04 3E]
[05 1E]
[06 00]
[07 00]
[08 00]
[09 00]
[0A 00]
[0B 69]
[0C 28]
[0D 00]
[0E 00]
[0F 55]
[00]
"BODY" (0)

(In fact, "FORM" is the header used by AIFF files.)

So a patch is a CAT, a DESC, a PARM, and a BODY (required even if not used). The number and meaning of parameters will depend on the type of effect, but from this we can guess they're all byte-sized, though a mix of signed and unsigned.
The 0 byte after the list is a bit of a mystery.

The meanings of these parameters I assume was found by changing a value then seeing which byte changed in the file. The next step will be to compare a patch from a different effect. Even better to find one that makes use of the BODY section. Another fun way of reversing a format is to modify an unknown byte then see what happens when it is loaded.

As for the way the website is presented, I think it would be helpful if the description activated by clicking on a byte instead of hovering. That would make it possible to then select and copy the description. (Truthfully, I'm increasingly convinced that hover effects in general are bad UX.)

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/chunk.html
Seems like a useful way to get hydrogen and oxygen, then, provided you can capture/separate the gases and someone else is paying the power bill.

I should try this for Hindenburg 2: Electric Boogaloo.
I’m interested to hear how the multi-IMSI setup performs globally and how the devices handle the SIM profile switches.
I don't see why this is such a big deal. Company with operations in China gets order from Chinese government to suspend accounts of people the Chinese government don't like. Company with operations in the US gets order not to trade with people from US embargoed countries [1]. What's the difference?

[1]: e.g. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2018/07/19/gcp-move-update/
I see the same thing in Chinese webnovels. The victims of any scam get blamed for falling for it and the scammer is considered the intelligent one, though sometimes only until they themselves get scammed in turn. Basically, honesty isn't seen as a virtue, instead there's a sort of tit-for-tat mentality of returning evil for evil and good for good.
I mean our Twitter and Facebook have been shutting down accounts from elected offices of NATO "targets" like Venezuela and Iran for a while now https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/12/us-pressure-social-media-.... I don't see people up in arms saying "legality is irrelevant".
Or they knew this would blow up on Twitter, but that they would get in trouble in China for refusing the government request of their own volition.

So they did what the govt wanted, waited for the uproar, and now they can CYA by blaming the Western mob on the forced change of heart. Zoom ends up doing the right thing, and the execs don't end up in a gulag somewhere.
My impression is that Microsoft are taking a very conservative interpretation of the x86 ISA patents (compared to e.g. qemu-user which has made this available for years now).

Patents have a 20 year lifespan, most of the x86_32 ones have expired, but x86_64 is just barely still covered (the first publication was in 2000, and first commercial product was on AMD Opteron/Athlon64 in 2003). So it's probably just a matter of time before the userland emulation stuff is further extended, although we won't get anything newer than SSE2 for the same reason.
I don’t want to justify zoom but I do want to point out that we shouldn’t be ok with judging a country to the point of saying they have “bad laws”. Maybe it’s because I am Italian and have seen what happens when discussions go head to head like this (II world war for instance). If we would stand by “no acceptance of bad laws”, we’d isolate those countries even more. I think it’s far better to accept that’s how they operate today BUT also engage with them in conversations that matter to us like democracy and human rights.
The student:professor ratios at Boston University CS classes were much higher. I didn't realize the importance of that until i had this comparison with the other institution.

It led to many fewer questions by students, teachers assistants (something the other institution did not have and did not need because one professor could attend to all of his students), and in general less interaction between students with each other and with professors/TAs.

The curriculum at both were essentially the same for this set of classes.
I don't know when it became a thing, but it's a well known fact in all gaming communities that the Chinese are responsible for the vast majority of cheaters. If you region-lock the game, cheating becomes a much smaller problem.

Maybe a person who has lived in China or is Chinese could shed more light on why they want to cheat in the first place?
I find this back and forth really interesting. On the one hand, you have Apple who wants to make app developers into a commodity and their platform (iOS) the premium experience. On the other hand, you have app developers and cross platform framework developers trying to make the platform into a commodity. Strange bedfellows indeed!

Personally, I miss the days of classic Mac OS when both the platform and the applications were premium, high quality software. No in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no microtransactions, no shitty web frameworks. Everything was native and really well designed. The operating system and third party apps were all part of a cohesive experience.
Physics is the problem that nature has thrown at us. Technology problems are something that we create to solve real problems. Unfortunately, we lost the real problem solving part somewhere and the biggest technological problem we have now is how to keep eyeballs throughout the globe glued to your app or service.

Of course, it will feel crappy in solving that problem.
While I believe you, you may also see how your argument is similar to the argument "non-proven pseudoscience medical treatments cured my disease, therefore they work".

I would be very interested in a study that looks at how much of the dark/light color scheme preference is just due to habit and esthetics.
Apple blocks things in China right?

Zoom performs China's bidding globally.
My understanding is that what makes these new SSDs so special is the embedded decompression hardware. That sounds great... but I can't help but think back a couple generations to the PS3 and its cell architecture. Yeah, it was more efficient than x86, but few developers really managed to capitalize on it until the end of that generation. By that point, the PS3 was lagging far behind the 360 is US sales and had long since been eclipsed by PCs in terms of performance.

Will we see something similar with these SSDs? Are devs actually prepared to take advantage of the special decompression hardware? Or will it be the stuff of dreams and tech demos for the first few years?
I feel like hashed passwords are somewhere in between “completely okay to publish” and secret.

With good crypto, it should be difficult to make a password hash useful even if it is public. (Although weak passwords can make this worse if salts are also made public.) However as part of a defense in depth strategy, you probably don’t want to release them publicly.

I feel like there are different levels of secrecy at play here. I think the article means things more like ssh keys or api keys specifically.
Wish I knew about this during quarantine.
Phone Skins in CSS
This is probably outside the purview of Jepsen but have you ever looked at Kdb, or the language it is build on top of? (K)

Curious to hear your thought on it! Would love a Jepsen style analysis of kdb
“ As a result I’ve improved a number of biomarkers (e.g. resting heart rate, resting blood glucose, strength, endurance, nutritional deficiencies, etc)”
— how does one measure / track these things? ESP resting heart rate, blood glucose and nutritional deficiencies.
Just like it is a mistake to project every instance of subtle, overt, or systemic racism on all white people but here we are, talking about privilege differences between classes in the first world while the third is pointing and laughing at our stupidity.
Tim Cook has said it: We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make.

So it would make no sense to trade Intel's poor schedule and performance for AMD's uncertain future performance.

And aren't all x86 licensee prevented from keeping that license if they are bought?
So do all AMD Ryzen CPUs in the form of TrustZone/PSP, usually a Cortex-A5. It's equally as user-inaccessible as the T2.
It's usually no more than a day or two's work for us to get a new dialect figured out and to wire up CI tests with containers etc.

It wouldn't be infeasible for someone new to Clojure to manage it about the same time also. The hard part is the SQL, not the Clojure.

Fortunately there actually is SQL Server support already: https://github.com/juxt/crux/blob/master/crux-jdbc/src/crux/...

...and I'll make sure the full range of backends is made clearer somewhere. Good feedback!
>The Go crowd knows when to stop.

Considering Go is removing "blacklist" from it's code and documentation because it can delusionally be construed as racist, I'd say they don't know when to stop.
> The only thing I've found you can easily carry into old age is (assuming no senility or debilitating disease) coordination. One can be weak and frail yet still somewhat graceful.

This is a beautiful and powerful example that eloquently supports your point ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0eFx5a-FMg
Martin Fowler has a nice collection of essays & videos. He recommends starting with a monolith, then breaking out capabilities over time. He also mentions that micro services are useful as a solution for partitioning work across teams.
https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

I’m trying to figure out how to avoid having too many micro services in my team right now.
"that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity"

So, what all encompassing media are they referring to here? Fox News? OAN? Reason? Obviously not. Just the fact that FN itself is the most watched cable news source makes this whole premise rather dubious.
I can’t help you with actually converting speech to code but it occurs to me this would be a benefit to everyone. Speaking the words that are represented by the code we write would require a much deeper understanding of what we are doing and why.

Food for thought for sure. Good luck.
> Wireless SIM in your phone you'll be prompted to associate that number with iMessage

That was my problem with it. The “number” it will associate is some internal T-Mobile number and not the Twilio number you would have assigned in the Twilio console.
Personal writ of summons FTW!

It bugs me that people don't name bad cops personally in lawsuits. Sure, sue the city for employing them even after all they have done over the years, but sue them personally for injury / suffering.
A Guide to Pic Microcontroller Paging
> When the NSA mentioned connections between datacenters were tapped, I believe FAANG immediately end-to-end encrypted links between datacenters...

This is correct, at least for Google. I worked at Google when the Snowden leaks happened and there was an immediate company-wide push to encrypt all server-to-server traffic.
You can choose not to abide by local laws and likely be shutdown entirely.

That way you’ll have effectively zero ability to influence local legislation / promote the interests of users.

Do you mean to imply you believe this would be a more optimal approach to the problem?

There’s perfect, and then there’s the dirty, mean, savage, brutal, beautiful world.

Edit to add:

> The company said it would no longer block accounts outside of mainland China at Beijing's request

Blocking accounts of non-Chinese at China’s request seem like an incredibly dumb move in the first instance.

I wonder what motivated them to comply with that request. Aren’t a lot of the Zoom devs based in China? It’d seem fairly trivial then for China to demand compliance via those employees based there.
> I think it’s far better to accept that’s how they operate today BUT also engage with them in conversations that matter to us like democracy and human rights.

That's a nice idea, but China's approach is to deplatform those conversations.
Ah ok, so it's not a thing you'd use for constantly sending commands.
PS3 actually sold more than the the 360, but they both got smashed by the wii.
Following the local laws of countries where a company operates in is a fundamental condition necessary for globalization.
The idea that the americans know best and don't need to follow local laws is really just another form of imperialism.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/10/amazon-...

https://twitter.com/william_fitz/status/1270740531081932801?...

Googlers downvoted and flagged a comment that raised the possibility of astroturfing. Looks like we hit a nerve. Their employer is spending millions trying to sway public opinion.
They sure do. See: Trump.
Thriving in a crowded and changing world: C++ 2006–2020
Not intending to come back to life
While i may still be alive,

i committed career suicide 100x over

and don't intend to come back to life
Most US companies that I am familiar with apply US laws to all their users, at least to some extent. For example, I don't think that YouTube will allow you to post a blatantly copyright-infringing video, even if your account declares a country that doesn't enforce US copyright laws. Similarly, I suspect that Facebook would take down a page for a terrorist group, without needing permission from the country they are based in. I'm curious if you know of counterexamples.

I'm not necessarily saying that US and Chinese laws are equivalent in this sense, but it does seem like something of a double standard.
> I personally use type aliases in typescript over interfaces, I think they're a more natural fit for JS than interfaces but that's a separate conversation :)

The TypeScript docs recommend the opposite, preferring interfaces. Interfaces are also structurally typed in TypeScript though; the major differences are that interfaces can only be used to declare object types: https://microsoft.github.io/TypeScript-New-Handbook/everythi...
Just replace the creepy voices with ads and watch the money roll in.
Hello. I have just completed my first term with UoPeople. For me, it's been a blessing to be able to pursue a higher education from home and on my own schedule, without the financial commitment that other institutes have.

My purpose for getting a degree is to A.) Have a degree, and B.) Have the competitive advantage over others in my field. Many employers these days want 2 things from employees: a degree and experience. I've already gone off into the world, worked for a few years, and started a family. Now it's time I complete my resume by getting a higher education.

Specifically with UoPeople, the educational method here is much different than what I've experienced before. Peer assessment has it's ups and downs. The fact that we are headed by peers (on written assignments) I think is an effective when done right. I'm an English teacher and I've started implementing it with my intermediate students.

Only time will tell how the rest of my path goes. For now, it's a good solution to my situation and I plan on taking advantage of it.
A replacement for modern x86-64 system is definitely not what the comment I replied to described, even though a lot of these ARM boards certainly apply, depending on subset of tasks needed.

Here is one example of what you get for 50 dollars:

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/

This is a quadcore 2GHz 64bit board that can run Android / Ubuntu 20 / Wayland / WebGL / Linux Kernel 5.4 / Vulkan.
Why quantum computing cannot work [pdf]
It started with not allowing anyone to agree or even argue that vaccines cause autism because people can die if they believe they shouldn’t get vaccines. Then, we couldn’t argue that the Holocaust didn’t happen because that could give rise to a new Holocaust. Then, we couldn’t argue that Black crime was self-inflicted. Now, we can’t argue that police brutality is overstated.

In each case, I tend to agree with the mainstream opinion. However, I only got to be that way because I heard both sides’ arguments and came to my own conclusion.

There is an idea that these ideas are inherently dangerous and that holding these ideas could lead to lives lost. While that may be true, entirely censoring one side of a discussion makes everyone feel like evidence is being withheld and suspicion only grows. Even worse, ruining lives by doxxing is what was sought to prevent by stifling discussion in the first place.

The only way forward is to accept that these ideas must be openly discussed, no matter how dangerous the opposing conclusion may be. If the truth really is self-evident, then there is nothing to fear, provided all sides are afforded ample opportunity to make their case. Otherwise, perhaps those who seek to censor are not, themselves, as correct and righteous as they might think.

Edit: Even the Amish let their kids roam free temporarily in Rumspringa so that they don’t feel like they’re missing the truth.
Interesting that you choose Watts and Compton. Almost like you choose two random neighborhoods you believe to be disadvantaged.

How exactly do your friends volunteer in this two places that just happen to show up in Dr Dre songs from the early 90’s?
I was looking into that space recently and I have used otter.ai for transcriptions which gives you 6000 minutes/month for 8 USD, which is insanely cheap in that space. Their British language model is quite good as well.

I’ve bulk exported generated srt/vtt files from my fav podcasts and using tinysearch that was posted here recently with ableplayer to provide audio full text search of my Jekyll published podcasts posts and with clickable timestamps to audio play of search phrases.

Whenever I want to know what podcaster has to say on specific subject a quick search makes such a difference!
Well the spectrum is between enemy and competitor. Hawks are arguing former, doves and moderators the latter. Policies and tolerance towards costs will differ depending on position i.e. there's room for cooperation on some issues if not viewed purely as enemy. Partner is definitely off the table though.
Human rights are more important than corporate rights. But where does that leave us in the situation, whereas others have said Apple cuts off apps like the one in Hong Kong, and they use the excuse of local laws. Apple and zoom both need to stop enforcing Chinese law, or stop seeing the benefits of being an American company. The ability to complain about your government, to point out injustice, it's a human right, not an American right. I'm safe and sound in the US so I'm not subject to this. But the people of the world should not have their right to public expression taken away by profit driven American companies.
Sure, but the same could be said for iPadOS and iOS which have native clients.
Mint w/ Cinnamon was the first distro I tried (as my main; I dabbled with Damn Small Linux for a bit on a couple non-daily-drivers) after switching off Ubuntu in the wake of Canonical refusing to budge on the Amazon Lens. Absolutely hated it then; yeah, it looked a bit more traditional, but it felt just as inflexible as GNOME 3 or Unity, and certainly no less buggy, either. Ended up switching to MATE and thoroughly enjoyed it (stuck with that before eventually moving to Debian, then a brief Fedora stint, then flip-flopping between openSUSE and Slackware before settling on the latter).

Haven't tried Cinnamon since; maybe it's improved in the last decade or however long it's been.
Customer counts for ISPs worldwide by ASN. There are approximations for some economies, filing for federal regulations and stock exchange notices. There are yearly numbers for broadband which are pretty hazy. I went to a meeting where china declared 160m extra online users had been found that year.

A huge amount of internet modelling and sampling would improve at scale if we knew this. I've discussed this with researchers in the field. Akamai and Google and Facebook have private information which is their secret sauce.
Yup, even google does the best thing it can here.

https://youtu.be/P_UVPTdjxC0

I find it incredibly hypocritical for any american to compalin about china, ya'll fucking made it what it is today.
The one class I took in college that was relevant to my job, at all, was the AI course on structured vector machines, which were irrelevant after two years. For most programs, correctness is a nice-to-have, forget speed or responsiveness or data structure choice.. and in production code, non-technical and constant factors override theoretical solutions. University computer science courses, on the whole, are quickly obsolete or obsolete to begin with, incompatible with software development as it's practiced, and are best reviewed in the week before seeking a new job to score well on leetcode. The best skills you're going to learn are the metacognition you're picking up in university, the ability to learn new languages and adapt to new environments and solve new problems, not anything that's actually taught.
That's not really a fair comparison. Of course PC gaming will be far faster in many cases, there is no price or size ceiling.
> [...] and Lisp do-- allowing full use of the programming language at compile time.

If you only expose a subset, you very specifically don't have the full use of the programming language.
> There just is no evidence that people of different languages think differently.

Languages are used to express ideas. We have debates on this very website about the expressiveness of languages, how expressiveness of language enables (in)efficiency, and which languages are best for a given task.

The expression of a thought influences and, in some cases, limits the kinds of thoughts that can be expressed. This is evident when you see things like someone "writing Java in perl".
How often do you really do novel/unique/innovative stuff? Honestly.
It depends on the law. At a certain point local laws transgress international norms and it’s justified for countries and companies that have the power to get away with it to flout them: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-xpm-2013-12-15-ct.... More broadly, it’s akin to how courts in the US will generally enforce judgments of foreign courts, but not if those judgments are based on laws that deviate too far what US courts consider to be the basic norms.

> Many companies adopted the Sullivan Principles, prepared by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, a board member of General Motors. The Sullivan Principles asked its signatories to treat all workers equally, in effect calling on U.S. corporations to violate South African law, but only a few acted.

> IBM became the first company in South Africa to appoint a black as a supervisor of white employees. On the other hand, IBM's largest client was the South African government, and its computers were used primarily by the military.