skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BBR v2: Model-based Congestion Control Performance Optimizations [slides]
...obviously this isn't scalable to do one-on-one. That's why it's better to broadcast it. Have a televised debate where you convince someone with this method - so you can link-share to anyone online you meet with the same idiocy.
A regex simplification in Loki increased performance by up to 300x
Machine learning math is basically calculus, linear algebra and probability theory. Pick up intro textbooks on these. Enjoying the dopamine rush of insight from blog posts can be more harmful than useful if overdone. You have to sit down and digest these things without diatractions, and that's not easy for most people outside a school environment. Consciously understand this fact and take an adult, planned approach to keep yourself on track if you truly want to understand things.
It's not about the river size. Do androids dream of electric sheep? has an amazing premise and a good "main" story.

I don't want a full universe explaining every point; just a compelling story to drive the Man in the High Castle.
Forecasting Unemployment with Claims Data
Way too expensive to regulate in real time and the sample size for regulating is pretty low. What you need to do is make the punishment for bad behavior strong enough to minimize fraud. I would like to think most actors are good actors and we take the bad actors and make an example to the rest of the industry what to expect if caught. It will always be a cat and mouse game.
If you think Graham’s number is big, Rayo’s number is a lot bigger - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayo%27s_number

Rayo’s number is actually a function R(n) where n=googol. You can define much bigger numbers just by using a bigger n, e.g. googolplex. For something even bigger still, you can iterate the function. Think about Rayo’s function iterated Rayo’s number times.
My favourite spot was a little later, early & mid 2000s. The barriers had been lowered, but publishing still required some motivation. There was a ton of content to discover, a lot of discovery channels and "information wants to be free" still felt like a prevailing wind.

I think part of the reason was, as you say, lower standards. We were being exposed to content that didn't have an outlet before that. The music was new, black, polished chrome... to borrow a Jim Morrison line.

A bigger part is discovery though. Blogrolls & link pages were a thing. One good blog usually lead you to 3 or 4 others.

These days, most content is pushed, often by recommendation engines. Social media content is dominated by quick reaction posts, encouraged by "optimization."

The medium is the message. In 98, the medium was html pages FTPed to some shoddy shared host to be read by geeks with PCs. In 2003, it was blog posts. In 2020 it's facebook & twitter.
I don’t live in a tech hub. My company cut pay across the board because of Covid. I interviewed for $BigTech, got a job that’s fully remote - even post Covid.

More roles will hopefully become remote.
no, again, this would only be a reasonable analogy if there were _any other way_ to download software onto an iOS device, which there is not.

It's not Apple's _dominant_ position as a delivery mechanism that counts - it's their literal monopoly on it.
The Purity Paradox: How Tolerance and Intolerance Increase at the Same Time
I think Tim Cook and Apple made the correct decision.

I own an Oculus Quest, which is fairly light weight and totally self contained while my Brother owns a more capable Oculus device that is tethered to his gaming PC.

I use my Quest many times a day, often for just a few minutes at a time. It is so easy to get up from my desk, and jump into a ping pong game, enjoy a favorite part of Vader Immortal, randomly try a VR art piece, etc., etc.

I don’t want to spend huge amounts of time on the quest, rather to just use it the way I would take a walk or a hike.

I love the Oculus Quest, and if Apple sells something better with good content, then I am all in.
The good news is, the next war will be fought by drones against drones.
One of the things persons not involved in the industry find interesting, is that in the entire history of manned spaceflight, no human has ever visited geostationary orbit.

No one has ever stopped in geostationary orbit, but you have to go past where geostationary satellites stay to get to the moon, so quite a lot of people have really.
Using AI to Improve Maternal Health Outcomes by Increasing Intervention [pdf]
I have a .science domain name, and I only found out after purchasing it and building out a website that it is on many blocklists because there was a time when it was one of the cheapest TLDs, and scammers took advantage.

Which is a darn shame, because unlike .io or .xyz where the TLD doesn't necessarily signify what type of content you'll find, .science is clearly a subject-matter specific TLD, and it bugs me that because of these scammers, the association between science and scams is being perpetuated.
I wonder if there's any single app company other than Google and Facebook that could take this stance and have Apple actually care. It's definitely not hey though.
Show HN: Listo – Your Social Watchlist
Proud to be on HN!

we are unhappy with the information flow in current social media, like Facebook and twitter. We found that the problem lies in the follower-concept itself. By default, everyone shares content with ALL their followers. That way there is too much content that isn't tailored to the preferences of the user - the signal to noise ratio is very low. Therefore, most content in my stream is irrelevant to me.

Our goal, through Listo, is to turn this around and make sharing and recommendations personal again. We want to enable a much higher recommendation quality than current social media systems can offer.

Our idea is very simple, but the consequences are profound. It boils down to this:

Let your friends add items to your reading, movies, and music lists all in one space.

This is in fact very similar to what is already happening today. People are sending you personal recommendations about HN articles, books or movies via email/WhatsApp. But you have to add them to your reading list yourself, otherwise they will get lost in several chat histories. We created an app for this use-case, that requires zero discipline from your side: Let your friends put interesting articles and books directly into your personal reading list. Let them put movies, tv shows and youtube videos into your watchlist. The same goes for music, podcasts and anything else.

It reflects word of mouth in the real world. Our app allows you to send recommendations to specific people. Instead of telling the world that you like an article, you send it to friends you know will like it. That way, recommendations become more personal and of much higher quality.

Information can still spread exponentially, but in a more controlled way than retweet-feedback-loops. Every single person acts as a filter in the information flow.

FAQ:
Q: But doesn't this app need a critical mass to be useful at all?
A: Actually no. Only two friends sending links to each other already have a benefit. But the more friends are sending you recommendations via the app, the better for everyone.

Q: What if my friends don't have the app yet?
A: In this case, our app makes it easy to send recommendations via other apps, e.g. WhatsApp. Once the receivers sign up, they will find all items in their list.

The app is developed with Flutter/Firebase and available in Play Store and App Store.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.listo

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1502284126

A challenge we are facing right now is to find out how we can make the product more viral. Any insights on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts and questions!
The point of the article is to teach people about the original meaning, to encourage them to care, and to point out that by paying .io domain fees you are directly supporting this ongoing human rights disaster.

This is a time when BLM protests have led to various aspects of structural racism in society being reexamined. For tech, it's a good time to reexamine use of .io too.
I agree the next war will be fought by drones but I’m skeptical it will be fought against drones. I very much hope you’re right though.
Chrome is slowly removing support for synchronous XMLHttpRequests [1] [2]. It's eventual removal could very well break legacy web applications.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/12/chrome-80-...

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30876093/will-chrome-and...
Great article ! But I must admit, I didn't expect it to be using gradient descent. I like the Wikipedia derivation as well [1]. It says that the minimization problem is convex, so you'll find a global minimum with gradient descent. But more interestingly, at the cost of inverting a potentially huge matrix, the article presents an elegant analytical solution to the problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_least_squares#Matrix/...
The race car in this instance would be the paper, it is well presented and assuming it survives scrutiny, eternal. One particular manifestation of it for one contemporary system might better be thought of as the garnish on the free salad bowl placed next to the car
my understanding is that their on-device browser monopoly (Safari) cripples many capabilities of PWAs, like for instance push notifications.
Not op but: I wouldn’t say they couldn’t have been invented, but it’s unlikely they would have for economic reasons. Controlled Fission almost had to be done by government due to the resources required and uncertainty of the payout. It seems unlikely any private company would have done what the Manhattan project did just to get a small cost savings over burning fossil fuels
> Losers con’t: E&Y – One word: cash. If your audit can’t confirm the cash in the bank, you need to find another business. Full stop. E&Y is the auditor of record in two other major suspected frauds

Not sure I get this. The news reports also seem to claim that E&Y rejected to sign the balance sheets. Or was that just after everything went haywire?
Sorry I meant promotion here.
> In middle school, I created a Word doc to store my thoughts. That doc was my journal. I would write in it nearly daily, and often go back and reflect on what I wrote. One day in high school, my hard drive failed. I lost it all—five years of my life—from a silly computer error. I felt like I lost a pet or something. It really hurt.

Not to rub salt in the wound, but Word documents work well with printers. Periodically printing his documents would have insulated him from hard drive failures, while offsite backups would have also protected his data from house-fires. Unless something went wrong with both at once, he'd still have his data.

Anyway, when I think durability, a webapp is the last thing to come to mind. What happens to your data in this webapp when the author gets bored in a year or two and shuts the project down? A locally hosted system with a transparent data format is clearly the way to go for something like this; something like org-mode perhaps.
> VR gaming is mostly compelling to people who are sexually unfulfilled. Apple builds products that are desired by attractive rich people, which is key to having premium brand pricing power and therefore high profit margins.

There's... a lot to unpack here.
Bloomberg article from yesterday[1] phrased it as "[..] auditors couldn’t find about 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in cash [..]" and "[..] were unable to find accounts [..]"

I, too, was wondering what to think. How can I imagine to be unable to find an account?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-18/wirecard-...
They are still OK, IC aging only occurs when it's active. So a chip designed for 10 years expires after 10 years of use. If you occasionally plug in that old console, it will be fine. It's likely other things will expire first in the system, like power supply, or something mechanical if there a DVD drive, etc.
I mean outside of HN :) HN makes up < 1% of our customers
I was in similar position like you. Niche technology stack and while I was gainfully employed, the prospect didn't look good in that I could get a similar job in similar industry, but I would not enjoy it at all. I spent about 2 years and rebuild my entire stack. Prior to that, I was all proprietary technology. I focused on Python and AWS. So about 18 months ago, I managed to get a job with a highly respected company, same pay, better career track. Don't give up, you'll get there.
> VR gaming is mostly compelling to people who are sexually unfulfilled.

Ouch. You can't just throw statements like that around without any supporting evidence. Where did you get that from? Can you link any studies?
> Are you suggesting that nuclear reactors could have never been developed independently, and that the nuclear bomb was a necessary precursor

An uncontrolled nuclear reaction is significantly simpler than a controlled one. We still don't have fusion reactors, while fusion bombs were developed 10 years after fission bombs.
I mean, I can, but this is probably the wrong thread.

You're also slightly off about "allowing" competing browsers. MS never limited other browsers in Windows; you were always free to download another (and there were others). It just gave IE an absurd inside track by including it FREE with Windows and making it the default, which was hugely damaging to Netscape (which, at the time, was charging money for a browser; yes, this sounds bananas today).

This was a textbook example of monopolistic behavior, since at the time Microsoft OWNED computing. There wasn't another viable platform. The Mac was, at the time, circling the drain. Desktop Linux didn't exist. If you wanted a computer, you ran Windows, full stop. MSFT was leveraging their enormous monopoly power to give them a monopoly in another market (browsers), and that's a big anti-trust no-no.

Apple has nowhere near that kind of market power. The iPhone is a minority player in a huge market -- much bigger than the PC market Microsoft dominated in the 90s. Android holds a majority position there.

This means Apple doesn't have a monopoly. You can, and people do, buy something else that allows you do configure basically whatever you want. Apple isn't distorting or damaging the phone/mobile market with their behavior, as MSFT was.

Apple definitely DOES have enormous influence and power in mobile computing. That's very true. But because they are a minority player, they don't control the market. And so there's no real legal argument on antitrust grounds to compel them to do anything differently.
> A suicide drone can be used to take out any individual anywhere on the planet, fully remotely and untraceably with minimal collateral damage, while radar, missles and explosives can't.

This just sounds like you're trying to persuade people on why drones are definitely the future of war.
Even if there were no legally mandated building codes banks and insurance companies would probably require most of what we have on the books now in order to get anything done.
I don’t believe it’s compliant with various regulations. I haven’t looked in-depth
mamba feels so much faster than conda, it is awesome.
> It's definitely not hey though.

For Hey alone, agreed. I don't think they have enough clout.

But Hey is a cool/popular new thing. If the next 20 coolest newest things also skip Apple as well (because Apple continues this grossly unethical behaviour) then Apple iPhones might lose their largely-unearned reputation as the place where the coolest/most-polished apps live.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge multinational corporate stance to make this painful. It just has to be enough of the trendiest new things people want.
>Real people lost a lot of BTC on Mt Gox, so I'm not sure how the BTC stories are in outer space.

That was the fault of Mt. Gox, not bitcoin. Also the fault of uneducated users, don't leave your bitcoin sitting at an exchange.
The first thing I did back in February with the Coronavirus was figure out how much coming down with it would increase my yearly exposure to micromorts (it doubled it). That was good for figuring out how afraid I should be compared to other sources of danger in my life.
I've had similar results, using Fastmail with my .xyz domain.
Hopefully by then people in general would be smart enough not to buy closed down crap that makes monopolies possible.

Replies like yours and another sibling (
hoorayimhelping) do put that hope into my heart.
These weapons are so cheap that the cost of starting a country just fell by an order of magnitude. I could see a hacker warlord of the future giving everyone who is a citizen some sort of transponder to prevent drone attacks and have the drones kill everyone else in a given area.
Absolutely this.

I've seen a bunch of "new takes" on email over the years, but none of them have been interesting to me because I don't want to run my mail on something goofy and proprietary that I can't easily and (mostly) painlessly migrate somewhere else.

Also, I'm not sure email needs a "new take."
I guess I should ask what you consider a small project. I have some five-digit LOC projects written entirely in Python. I have never noticed this typing issue everyone is very concerned about and am often baffled by the emphasis placed upon it. What am I missing?

I am willing to entertain the idea that I have been very lucky or that I have some programming mannerism which has caused me to skate by this kind of thing, but I just don't get it.
The goalposts of social science always seems to be moved to where the ball goes. But, I think if we're being honest, than yes.

Not the only goal obviously. But, there are countless economists & policy researchers publishing on similar topics all the time.
Moving from EventMachine to Async
If you want people to build, do what the Chinese do (who learned it from the Japanese). Give smart people lots of money and get out of the way. China told it's thousands of regional banks to lend towards productive purposes. This was called "Window Guidance".

The best thing you can do is give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck out of the way. There are three ways to do this; Bank lending, government spending, and private equity.

The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production. One reason is that very few large banks make most of the loans. Government spending on high technology and research has also been declining over 30 years.

The reason people build today in Silicon Valley is private equity is funding projects (giving smart people money and getting out of the way). The problem with Silicon Valley is that private equity is a drop in the bucket compared to the capacity of bank lending or even government spending. In fact most of the tech, including the fact that Silicon Valley exists in the first place, was because of federal government spending. (fyi Google started as a government grant, google maps, waymo)

Lets look at the USA. There are 15k Banks in the US but the majority of lending happens in the top 3. The US can just instruct it's thousands of local banks to lend for projects instead of real-estate/asset purchases and suddenly you will have a lot of people with money to build things.

Alan Kay who was at Xerox Parc, which is estimated to have produced trillions in wealth cost only 100 million dollars, says that Parc worked because smart people were given money and management stayed out of the way. That they invested in people.

In fact, the vast majority of high technology was funded this way. Government gave labs lots of money and they created computers, the internet, rockets, GPS, AI, etc etc etc.

So a combination of government spending + bank lending can kickstart building.

Lots of smart people out there can't build because of the lack of funds. Give these people money! Let them build! Don't make them do a dog and pony show in front of VCs about WHAT they are going to build. Just invest in people and stay out of the way.
Before looking at accuracy, you already have compliance challenges with logging IPs / user agents and using it for analytics purposes.
Wow that was terrifying, because we all know we have the potential to go in that direction.

looks up how an EMP works
Exactly, people forget that Valve developed SteamOS after Microsoft's shenanigans, when they tried to lockout 3rd party programs i.e. build it's own "app store"
I will say this: I am very, very glad my New York Times subscription was through Apple's IAP - because I could end the subscription easily. Had I paid NYT directly, I would have had to be on the phone with them.

This doesn't justify 30%. I actually think it's fine for Apple to take a cut. Just not 30%.
> Or get them a Chromebook and teach them the basics of Sheets and Docs. Check in when the laptop dies, shit you could have a backup one to swap out to and still spend probably 50% of what you would on the Windows PC, 20% on the Macbook.

And then how do they FaceTime people from a Chromebook? With one of the 20 video chat apps that Google releases every year? I’m not interested in teaching them what’s new and what’s not. I have 80 year olds who don’t know English setup on FaceTime since iPad minis came out 7 years ago or whatever, and they know the ins and out of iOS. They’ve never had to be taught about a new app.

I originally did try Android tablets, and google couldn’t get their shit together with Hangouts video or Google video chat or whatever other ones, and I wasn’t going to waste my time being their Beta tester.

I also have better alternatives than figuring out what Windows LTSC is, where to buy it, and installing software. I can just get a MacBook Air for just as cheap, and tell my relatives to go to the Apple store when they have a problem. I installed a content blocker, and don’t even have to check in every quarter.
I never knew that. How incredibly ... reasonable. Really changes your UA math in a good way.
Centralization and scale are amazingly efficient but when things go wrong it similarly scales all the way. But hey, at least it wasn't 2.3 trillion this time.
> VR gaming is mostly compelling to people who are sexually unfulfilled.

I would dramatically question that, both because most of the VR experiences that are well rated currently are entirely non-sexual and because most of the VR sex experiences are pretty disappointing. Even a really expensive setup is basically just a mostly non-interactive 2d video wraparound.

Though it was funny to put my wife in one (with her consent) and hear her responses.
Well, there's two kinds of people - those that are happy with what they earn (saving under a mattress or (maybe) in a bank), and those that want to have more unearned profits and invest their savings / pensions in the stock markets (or other businesses).

You mainly hear about the latter kind, and finance is in particular an industry that's targeting them. When people want something (profit) out of nothing (little to no work carefully picking investments, instead just give your money to someone else), there's a lot of people willing to sell them "something" that's really "nothing".
It seems like annotation is coming into its own. In addition to the W3 standard, there are a lot of interesting UI/UX ideas in the space for instance this UI/UX that was posted by Azlen Elza (in Twitter) that would be perfect for annotation.

https://twitter.com/azlenelza/status/1272600877493137408
QuickBooks Cloud Hosting for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs)
True but it’s just following the form of “suicide bomber”.

Maybe kamikaze drones would be more apt.
I had not seen SqueakJS before, cool idea.

I have played with Amber, which is a mature Smalltalk development system in a browser experience.
Acquiring Chinese companies will do that.
A good UX is great for a single app, but standards compliance is great for the entire software ecosystem.
Its no about platform but using proprietary stuff, you should be able to compile and run it on a complete opensource android without the proprietary parts.