skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a kid, every 4th I'd buy a bunch of bottle rockets and attempt to make a multi-stage one by taping them together and varying the length of the fuses. What would happen is the one with the shortest fuse would go bang first and blow off the fuse of the other.

I finally resolved this problem by locating stage 2 further down the stick (instead of adjacent), with its fuse up into the exhaust of stage one. Then it would light as it was ascending, and the stage 1 bang was far enough away not to disturb stage 2.

3 stages did not work because stage 1 could not lift the weight. A dual booster bottle rocket did not work because the fuse timings were too erratic. Always one would go first and blow the fuse off the other. (Wasn't that the problem with the Soviet moon rocket?)

Naturally, in college I gravitated towards aerospace and got a minor in Aeronautical Engineering.

Finally, when I had a real job, I could buy all the fireworks I wanted. I bought a huge pile, and set about lighting and throwing them. After an hour or so, I got bored and lit off the rest as strings. It was like someone threw a switch in my brain, I completely lost interest in fireworks and it never returned.

But my interest in jet engines, rocket engines and V8s has never waned.
> Eigenvector centrality has been around since at least the 70s

Yes, but the novel part is formulating the problem as such.
Thank you for your good-faith replies! I'm trying to understand other perspectives on this topic.

On the use of "blackbody" - I'm sure some people with little or no background in physics would certainly take offense to it. It may be a physical phenomena but it was still named by fallible, biased humans - it shouldn't be exempt right? Surely you don't need a "white" version for a term to be problematic?

"Blackbody" seems as problematic as "blacklist" to me because the term it's paired with (radiation) has a very negative colloquial connotation (nuclear war, cancer, etc). Thoughts?
I rarely use Rust for the performance or memory safety - it's a nice perk that allows for data structures and algorithms I wouldn't otherwise use but it's not the main reason I reach for it. I use Rust for its type system including traits, phantom marker types, affine types, sum types, exhaustive pattern matching, and so on. Once you get used to traits and composition over inheritance, it allows writing very reusable code that enforces a significant fraction of logic at the compiler level and scales much better with code and team size (modulo dependency hell, which I think is language agnostic but a work in progress in Rust). Rust's model of wrapping unsafe code in safe types also makes working with the world of C/C++ libraries much more pleasant once you get the hang of FFI.

Plenty of other languages have these features but not quite in the right combination or their communities are too small and they haven't caught on yet. Rust is, in my opinion, at an organizational and technical sweet spot for large projects.
Is there a difference between HDBSCAN and DBSCAN (commonly used for point cloud processing). The idea seems the same but I guess I never heard it called HDBSCAN.
Yes. HN isn’t real life. Billions of people still use FB.
This tool works on an existing binary without needing to rebuild it from source.
> Both Intel and Microsoft made some kind of categorical error in 1995-2005 in assuming that their dominance was tied to a particular programming interface.

Actually their judgement there was correct. There dominance absolutely was tied to monopoly power, via "particular interfaces". Working on alternatives would have undermined the monopoly.

They error was thinking the monopoly wouldn't have eventually been undermined anyways. They upped the risk for more reward, and got bit.

This incidentally is another reason why monopolization is bad: even when it doesn't last indefinitely, it makes for shitty companies that refuse or cannot adapt, and will be stubbornly stick to their ways until more sudden failure. Stagnation and then a jolt is less growth, and irrespective of growth bad for society. No government should want this.
What's your point? Are you trying to argue that just because you imagine someone does not have a smartphone then it's ok to fool ourselves to believe that no one has a smartphone?

Because mobile has been a basic requirement and competency for, say, the last decade.
I keep temazepam and Xanax at had because knowing they're there helps immensely, and maybe use one or the other a couple times a month.

Other things that help me are diet, but also very much so exercise both cardio and heavy lifting.

Another thing I occasionally do is write down my loopy thoughts in a sort of shorthand / appreciated English that isn't immediately readable by others in the house, sit with the writing for a few minutes reading it over then testing it in to small pieces and scattering the pieces in the compost where they might do some good.

Getting the looping worries out of the mind in to the physical realm where they are tangible as physical objects to be manipulated help me greatly.
As someone who wrote a lot of CGI, it was definitely not the same at all as microservices or serverless. That was the earliest mainstream way to do server-side programming for the web, but none of the modern design principles were applied.
Sounds to me like a joke based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
In my line of work (non engineering, strategy and other business side leadership roles) there’s also the problem of a very tiny pool of jobs to begin with, so I decided to be very proactive and I have started reaching out to companies that raised money recently or who have “we’re hiring” on executives LinkedIn profiles and cold emailing them something to the tune of “I have helped many companies with various hard to define problems and taken a variety of roles that may not fit the traditional job titles paradigm, I like your company and you’re growing your team at the moment, could I get a chance for a quick chat to see if you have problems or opportunities I could help solve?”

One week in, I’ve already had a handful of informational interviews, while my applications to actual postings go into a black hole.

I bet that approach could work for your profile as well, I’ve even deployed a sales enablement tool and a CRM to automate, track and document (for unemployment claims) my process

Good luck
> there is no way to share content outside of the list of who posted it.

I can see how I misunderstood. Still it seems like it might be a good compromise and would get me around the issue I described with mms of unintentional sharing. I'm going to see if I can get some of my family and friends to sign up with me.
The Invisible Curation of Content
Social media industry is very fickle, as the rise of TikTok shows, not to mention far easier to replicate by any country which desires so.
How to Perform Sentiment Analysis with Node.js
Python strings have a method called casefold() that normalises text in a similar way (although it doesn't seem to work on Korean).
I like Portaltotheuniverse.org's rss feed. Always something interesting to read.

https://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/rss/all
You invented "Chutes and Ladders: Legacy".
statifier works on executable files that have already been compiled. See http://statifier.sourceforge.net/statifier/man/statifier.1.h...
So you'd prefer a proprietory centralised re-invetion of usenet (with binaries) rather than this proprietory centralised re-invention of IRC?
And in 2020 they'd just be called... 'Cups'
A lot of people seem to think it was impossible to make cross-platform applications before Electron came along.
Work from home.
You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a normal person, apathetic to the small risk of choking?

You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational.

Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.
I always remember the exams frustration of remembering the exact page of some graph but being unable to get it back.
I hated it!
They don't need to be 2x faster than any Intel chips, just the ones in products they're replacing. And as it so happens it's pretty easy to get 2x the performance over an essentially passively cooled and severely power limited Intel chip that's in the air.
Really looking forward to seeing more software hacks on Teslas. It restores what was so great about the height of American muscle cars: people with more knowledge go faster. The commoditization of performance is fantastic - and I love my model 3 - but I’m excited for the future when I can get a 2nd car for my wife and hack the hell out of our 3! If Tesla took me to court over it, I’d suspect the publicity would easily make up for the legal fees!

The model 3 is a lot like the iPhone - absolutely the way of doing things and impossible to go back - but we shouldn’t forget the freedoms we lose, and the DRM we gain.
2002 was the year of the Nokia 7650, their first phone with a camera - 0.3MP which it displayed on its 176x208 screen. It cost €740 in 2020 money (€550 back then).

In 2020 you can buy a second generation iPhone SE for €489, with a 1334x750 screen (at >6x pixel density) and 12MP camera.

These are not roughly equivalent pieces of hardware, and the software they run differs immensely. MMS is not Instagram.
Addressing some of the python (And C) critics:

> (just the base python image is > 1Gb

just looked at https://hub.docker.com/_/python/?tab=tags shows container a small as ~26 MB

> C (God's programming language) itself just is incredibly unsafe and should definitely not be used in any kind of production environment

That might be true, but a Rust based operating system is still years (if not decades) away. And I am pretty sure that writing unsafe Rust is as easy as it is to write unsafe C++.

While I appreciate the safety that Rust bring to the table. some of the critics feel lazy and disingenuous. These weak arguments do not help Rust
It's a very weird form of price discrimination though, because the service you receive doesn't change depending on how much you tip.

The economic choice for the customer is, how much do they value their money versus not being an asshole...
State of the Cloud 2020
When you say "social network", do you mean Twitter Clone?

It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks despite it's many problems and the way the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph. IE, N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality, just for example and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important.

I think by earlier terminology Facebook/Myspace/Friendster/linkedin are social networks and Twitter/Mastodon/etc are "microblogging services".

I think the clone-Twitter impulse is kind of terrible. Not even to say Facebook is inherently better but because I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there (Discord is another format with increasing presences which shows that new ways of organizing connections are still possible).
I mean, it is rather obvious if one has taken the time to go through such a flow (or even to just look at screenshots of how it works).
This perfume is probably not even legal anymore. EU passed legislation to regulate fragrance materials 5 years ago, a bunch of materials got banned which forced major perfume houses to reformulate many classic scents with new materials for compliance. A keen "nose" can probably get something relatively close with synthetic alternatives.
Larger pages also relieve TLB pressure somewhat and reduce page table size, although large memory areas are supposed to just use giant pages anyway.

It's worth pointing out that L1 is universally split into L1I and L1D of usually the same size, so for x86 mainstream L1 is specified as 64 KB, meaning 32K+32K for instructions and data, respectively.
Looks like the author is using Android. Why not just use AdGuard Home as a DNS-over-TLS server (which is supported on Android P and above)? What's the benefit of plaintext DNS over VPN compare to DNS-over-TLS?
When you look at Consumer's Reports owner satisfaction scores for Tesla vehicles they are surprisingly high. In which case there can't be vary many getting the goodwill lemon treatment, possibly none.
This is very interesting. I know Intel has their own compilers, but wouldn't seconding a couple engineers to the GCC/LLVM teams yield exactly the benefit you're describing here? It's a trivial cost to boost their own add-ons.
Making Holder Stand for Metal Cutter with Large Angle Grinder – Wise Crafts
When I used to write games in 6502 assembly, I'd use a more native style rather than modeling the code after a high-level language. For example, I'd maintain global settings instead of passing lots of parameters, often having these live across many function calls. I wouldn't pass more parameters than fit in A/X/Y. The main loop was sometimes a big run of inline code instead of having many routines that only get called once. And so on.

Nice project! Looks like it was fun to work on.
https://www.adacore.com/uploads/techPapers/Safe-Dynamic-Memo...

> Standard Ada supports safe use of pointers (“access types” in Ada) via strongtype checking, but safety is guaranteed only for programs where there is no explicit deallocation of pointed-to objects

This validates "With Ada you can't use dynamic memory allocation and pointers safely, unless you buy into SPARK". (GC not relevant in this context.)

> In this work, we propose a restricted form of pointers for Ada that is safe enough to be included in the SPARK subset. As our main contribution, we show how to adapt the ideas underlying the safe pointers from permission-based languages like Rust [3] or ParaSail [13]

This validates that the pointer support in SPARK "post-dates Rust".

"heavier-weight" is arguable. I'll withdraw that assertion. SPARK is definitely less expressive than Rust though; it doesn't have lifetime variables, and it doesn't allow borrows of stack values:

https://blog.adacore.com/using-pointers-in-spark

> The most notable one is that SPARK does not allow general access types. The reason is that we did not want to deal with accesses to variables defined on the stack and accessibility levels.
Anything with the word -chan never had good moderation. HN is good because of the moderation and the work dang does. He's pulled me up multiple times and it reminds me to keep discussion in-line with the vision of the website.

Look at the top post of that board. It's a different crowd - sure there might be some cross contamination but it's definitely not a site you'd expect to see the same content and level of discourse on.
Come on, we need pictures!

Is it noisy, could it be used in an apartment with someone living on the floor below?
Wanna try making that the letter E?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
https://twitter.com/notado_app
This is the only JavaScript file they use [0]. It's a pure joy.

[0] https://subreply.com/static/script.js?v=6
MacBooks sold in the UK have a £ sign on them, where a # is found on a US keyboard.

So in the country the English language originated in, you're not allowed to use a character on the default keyboard. (And that's just one -- the € is on there too, among others.)

We're not talking obscure key combos, we're talking characters in use everywhere you go every day. Would you really appreciate not being able to use the $ character on a forum? Every time you type a comment about a price, a key on your keyboard doesn't work, or the comment is rejected for an invalid character, or the character is silently deleted? Forget about it.
The purpose of gunpowder is to burn rapidly. Burning generates a lot of hot gas that tries to expand. The bomb's physical shell, along with the inertia of the stars, resists the expansion for a brief moment, creating pressure that's used to propel the stars away at high speeds, but also ensures that the burning gunpowder charge has time to ignite the stars before they fly away.
That was in March 1997, completely different thing from this one...
> There's no evidence to support that with the novel coronavirus because we don't know how it functions nor have there been people recovered long enough to determine what the long term effects actually are.

And my point is that the same can be said of the new flavors of influenza. The variations of influenza which are circulating this year haven't been studied for years because they, like covid-19, are new. They make new vaccines for influenza twice a year because influenza is constantly mutating. We don't know what the long-term effects for any new mutation of influenza are. I don't think that should be taken as a license to fearmonger.
This is the best answer IMO. It's not for nothing that people say things like "one glass a day keep the doctor away". We have plants that we've discovered a long time ago that help us sleep, and we make all sorts of tea with it, why not use this?

If it's illegal where you live, then sure, but if it's legal then what's the big deal?
Blue Zones, Where people lives to be 100 Years Old
As I mentioned in another comment, this was not something that I had thought about before reading the suggestions today on HN, but it's definitely something that I am actively considering for the future.
I used to favor .io, now I like .dev or .sh. .ai if appropriate. Never really liked .co (too close to .com).
Both of the claims apply to PRNGs. Math.random isn't required to be a PRNG.
A Chrome Extension that captures Estimated Time and %%20done of GitHub issues
No, but in an industry as technical as semiconductors, I'd like to see the evidence that default-hire-MBA is ever better than default-hire-PhD.

AMD and TSMC both have always had technical leaders. Intel had a series of legendary technical CEOs during their most formidable years.

The first non-technical-PhD CEO they had was Otellini, but he had been there for 30 years before becoming CEO.
Exactly. Luckily a solution has long been found. Simply take a log of the stock market back and then pay me a billion dollars to convince me.

(also you could predict variations in the rotation rate of galactic pulsars. That would be pretty convincing for scientists. But who cares about those guys ?)
I guess we could compare AMD's new chips with Apple's old ones and see how that looks.
AMD, Apple, NVIDIA and those AWS chips use TSMCs 7nm process node which has a ~50% efficiency advantage over Intel's 14nm (the actual nm isn't comparable though).
Some serious mental leaps taking place here, well done. I take issue with the assumption that Apple's behavior in the (increasingly incredibly niche) MacOS ecosystem will somehow change Microsoft's strategy in any way. This may be the passing of Mactel, but I doubt Wintel is going anywhere anytime soon.
Innovation and the Future of Chemicals in Agriculture
If we follow that line of argument to its conclusion, declining the PR is the least work of all.
> While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills"

I'm assuming this is satire, since that's apparently exactly the goal of corporations.
Wouldn't sloppy QC also be a signof manufacturing issues?
Not sure that a civil war for independence counts as "visiting foreigners".
Ask HN: As a senior PHP/Drupal engineer, am I hireable outside this area?
I've been programming since I was 10, and have been specializing in Drupal for the last 15 years, 11 of which have been done professionally. I'm senior-level and lead teams on large projects for Fortune 100 companies. I've grown tired, bored and largely uninterested in the work we do. So much that it has challenged my love for software over the years and has caused me to neglect continuing to grow my own skills and knowledge outside of this tight ecosystem. I feel there's so much new technology, platforms, etc, in software these days, and I'm not involved in any of it. The challenges we solve and the technologies we use repeat endlessly.

The hesitation to make a significant change is strong. I'm as qualified and experienced as you can be in this specific area, the work is relatively easy to do, and the compensation is high. I also mainly feel incredibly inadequate and insecure about branching off in an area of software development that is mostly new to me. Would I even be hireable or desirable to another company or startup outside of the CMS world? And even if so, do I start over again as a novice in a new field?

I'm looking to be challenged, to be exposed to people much smarter and experienced than I am, to new technologies, to work on something meaningful and technically complicated and impressive, and to stop working on client-engagements. I think I would really enjoy working on a product and being part of a team trying to grow it (both from a business and tech perspective). I've worked on numerous side-projects throughout the years, and would love to see, and be a part of, a real business going from inception to growth (even if I missed out on the earlier years).

As I scour through job listings, especially for startups, I'm discouraged as the stacks and experience often being looked for is far from what I can offer right now. I assume I'd miserably fail any interview since I feel very outdated.

I appreciate any thoughts, insights and advice

Thanks
Ask HN: Help me identify an Isaac Asimov story [ANSWERED]
I am trying to find a story (not sure if it's a short story or a novel) by Isaac Asimov that I recall reading many (many!) years ago that is relevant to the current Covid pandemic. It's a murder mystery set in a future where no one ever leaves their house. All human interactions are conducted via telepresence. The protagonist is an old-school detective who stirs up the social order by insisting on interviewing suspects face to face. If anyone recognizes this story please let me know. Thanks.
> permanently lower oxygen saturation and neural degeneration unrelated to the blood oxygen across a broad population of unknown size is crippling comparable to polio.

Comparable to polio? Put some real numbers to it, otherwise you're just pulling shit out of your ass. Post-polio syndrome effected 25-80% of survivors. The handful of anecdotes of people having trouble after surviving covid-19 are a far cry from that.
Ask HN: Why can Apple out CPU Intel?
Seems Apple are moving to their own chips for many reasons, but commercial ones aside, I see reports of Apple chips operating at 25-30% better thermal efficiency than their Intel counterparts.

My question is, why is it that Apple can achieve such massive jump in the heat/performance ratio? And why couldn't Intel? Is it just that Intel can not embrace ARM or is it an issue of backwards compatibility forced on Intel that makes their chips so inefficient in comparison?

Seems like building a CPU is a very non trivial task and seems this current situation would be similar to Intel making it's own laptops.