skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I had the pleasure to make C++ code compile for WebAssembly. It is challenging and interesting the unexpected ways that it breaks. And how many times the mental model that we have as developer and the reality of the C++ specification differ in small ways.

And that's because the way most programmers write C/C++ programs is with the mental model of the actual machine they are writing the code for. That's not so strange, it's being taught that way. It's even praised as a skill to look at the generated assembly if you want to understand how something is compiled.

But that approach is fundamentally broken. One needs to program against the abstract machine which defines the semantics of your programming language. Everything else leads to unportable and subtly broken code with hidden assumptions of how undefined behavior is resolved.

Sometimes you need to do this for performance reasons? Well, then you pay the price. It's expensive.
After 3 years of updates, Google drops Pixel support like a hot potato.

As far as I'm informed every Pixel version so far had battery degradation issues. After year or so the battery seems to have only a fraction of the previous capacity.
Never heard of the Arab Spring?
Gun control goes back farther than that, at least to Reconstruction. Can't have those freed slaves getting too free, dontchaknow.
> The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone.

This crisis has really made me ponder the extent to which individualism has taken its toll on the American society. Really, large parts of the country don't seem to care about the collective good and are just turning a blind eye toward their fellow citizens in this moment of crisis.
Let's just say a combination of a few essentially computational factors--memory, conscientiousness, and scholarship and/or expertise through experience over a significant period of time in varied contexts. But really it's just my intuition, and I'm not the most intelligent person in the world so maybe I'm wrong.

I don't really mean intelligence in the technical or usual sense, just in the sense that it applies to a climatologist that makes good predictions in this context.

Anyways, I'm just here to deliver the message, I don't really pretend to know either way--but I do tend to agree with certain experts over others because their arguments are much more robust, given my math background it appeals to my reasonable side.

edit: I thought about it some more. I think I can boil it down to one thing--high information entropy in their written work.
Mozilla is not any company.

For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level for 5 years would be considered good performance.

Even in most aggressive startups maintaining revenues at $400-500 Million level is likely to cause first management change and rarely lay-offs of 25% of the workforce.

Even if that was the reason, clearly mangement have been unable and unlikely to that kind of growth. Firing quarter of your highly skilled workforce is not the right approach.

Had they killed 25% of the projects and retained the best of talent from those projects and repositioned them in other projects it would have made sense. While as you say such highly skilled workforce has salary growth expectations, hiring from the market is always costlier in terms of absolute salary, training, on-boarding, performance risk and finally attrition before RoI is achieved .
I was referring to "making the ocean acidic". If you meant to write "making the ocean more acidic", you should have done so! But then it won't sound like we're turning it into acid soup.
There was a short shout out to Windows.
Using an old BlackBerry as a portable SSH or Telnet terminal
Surprising move from the man who said something along the lines of[1]:

"Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/05/25/bury-gold/
Drivel sensationalism
Relevant:

American Passports Are Worthless Now

https://medium.com/indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20...

The USA has become a plague state.
Yes, how can it not be obvious? Look at our continual failure to make even simple plans for cv19 and execute them nationally? It's partly the president's fault but we have multiple failures, and the situation makes clear our underfunded public health system's weakness. It can be done, look at how well other countries are organizing and dealing with it.
I used to work in the industry, mainly designing the machines that handle wheels and I really miss it and miss being in the railyards.
memex is cool but not quite fully baked enough for me to continue using it. I've seriously considered setting up my own instance of elasticsearch for this kind of thing, just for my own personal history + bookmarks.
>From then-on, we will be inside the volume of intense x-rays and high-energy particles.

It goes on saying that the high-energy particles would not be a big deal.

I guess x-rays are a different story.

So saying that "the effect wouldn't affect earth much if at all" probably not correct.

But then again, in a 100k years we probably won't care one way or the other. We will either be super advanced by then or won't exist.
This was back in ~2014, though last I looked into it significant amounts of data from a sat is still many thousands of dollars per GB. (NOT GB/s)
"Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time."

Most NPM packages.
> ... becomes ...

What do you think the best predictor is at the moment?

Do you think it is even hypothetically possible that these people aren't comparing notes over golf?

And why is it objectionable? There are enormous information imbalances out there in the market - why be upset about this one? CEOs aren't the biggest fish in the pond.
You point out a key fault in the approach people employ to derive inferential outputs vs. descriptive outputs. I feel like I could rant about the obvious wide MOE and high alphas that have to be employed for inferential models. But I also feel like it's a matter of convenience. Incredibly smart, well-learned data scientists are either subject to their own bias, to their employer's bias, to the audience's popular appeal, and a number of other skews to usable inferences.

Let's say we have 10 models of Greenland's ice sheet predicting non-linear declines in total ice at 10 different progressive rates. If those 10 models have an MOE in the top quartile, and the rate of change for the relevant variables meets high confidence, I'd say we can reasonably infer melt will progress similar to some of those models. I wouldn't shell out a publication declaring it an accurate model, or even one professionals should use to guide decisions. But, given additional precautions are taken, I would expect a sound decision to consider inferences from the 10 models.

I'm talking a whole different script and procedure for handling inferential outputs, communicating them to stakeholders, and setting fair expectations. It's an approach that people don't use, even though it is necessary. At the very least, it averts the kind of surprise conflicts in data that undermine productive, preventative planning and action.

Instead, like you point out, the approach and the bias inherent to the outputs necessitates extreme skepticism. I remind myself a lot of that line from Rick & Morty, when Rick says, "Sometimes science is more art than science." Data is the same kind of beast, especially as you attempt to work around rudimentary entropy. Physics isn't any less subject to the same context. We already have proof that the thermodynamics we see here on Earth are not uniform across the entire Universe. If you and I were standing at different ends of the Universe, I could as easily call you a quack for your declaration that a dropped ball's speed and trajectory can be predicted by your equation.

Anyway, I could keep going, but we both know the downvotes are self-righteous, self-aggrandizing people who have to be right to as deep an extreme as necessary. It's the only way they can sleep at night, so they can wake up and compound the mess they already compounded the previous day.
Living in TN right now, it's looking pur-ty rough.
For me, it looks rather realistic. If you love the US, shouldn’t you embrace such articles in order to have some intellectual food to reflect on? If you don’t think so, the current admin provides more than enough good news anyway.
In rural areas you have more space to stock food to live completely off the usual distribution networks for a longer time. In cities if you live in a small apartment you are tributary to shopping very often or having deliveries frequently, which increases the chance of contamination.
Don't know how I missed that then. I remember building the early alpha versions and using servo to visit sites and I was surprised it worked that well for a fairly new rust project.
Where in the IPCC reports do you find an existential risk to humanity? I’ve read most of AR5 and I haven’t come across it.

I’m worried about climate change, but activists like extinction rebellion are far from telling the truth, and the doomsaying is preventing action.
Dual-Boot Manjaro Linux and macOS
Although Hanlon's Razor advises considering incompetence[1] before ascribing malice[2], there's always this advice from 1944:

(p.29) 11.b.10: "To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23389921

[2] https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...

We play croquet
And go rollerblading
Here's to homies on lock
For insider trading
>Covid-19 has exposed how almost all world leaders are useless when faced with big challenges

Many countries have done pretty well coordinating a useful response against this virus. The US has done terribly, but there are plenty of examples of other nations responding well to it.
> So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy?

That's not their entire approach to privacy.

How would you have them exist? There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020. There aren't enough unpaid volunteers to work for free and outcompete Chrome.

What would you have Mozilla do? They're trying to develop other services that can actually make them money so they don't need Google's money to exist, and people here are shitting on them left and right for this.

Could Mozilla be managed better? Yes of course. Is there some obvious grand strategy that would save them if only they didn't miss it? No, I don't think so. "Just focus on the browser", say people who haven't paid for a browser since Opera, if ever. Ha.

Mozilla are not in a good strategic position. Public trust and technical expertise are the only major assets they have, and those are not directly monetizable to the tune of $100M. I do hope very much that they figure out how to leverage these assets into more neutral, more grassroots profit streams before the next renewal of google's deal. But let's not demonize them unnecessarily, they have it hard enough as it is.

In web technologies they're the last ones on "our side", pretty much.
Yes, I know. I had the subscription for two full years. When it auto-renewed for the third year, I decided to cancel it, within the two weeks cooling off period required by EU law. The terms and conditions provided by the company can say what they like, but they are not allowed to invalidate EU consumer protection laws.

In any case, the main issue was that N26 support escalated this in an extremely aggressive manner. I was talking to them politely. I actually said something along the lines of "I believe, under this EU law, that I'm entitled to cancel the auto-renewed subscription. Isn't that correct?". Their response: boom, debt collection agency. Completely uncalled-for and turned this previously happy customer into someone who hates their company.
Drought is a big factor for the conflict in Syria.
> I have been inexorably pushed away from GCP, towards cloud agnosticism.

On a side note I think this is what all of us should be aiming for. Every time someone on a team I'm working for starts trying to use some very complex tool that a SaaS/cloud has built for us I always urged them to look for a simpler solution.

Do you really need AWS Lambda/kinesis/etc or can you write your code and deploy it onto our cluster as a normal service/api/control loop?

If you make it really easy to write code, deploy it, and monitor it, you'll often find it's way less devops time to write your software as apis/control loops than it is to use a large amalgamation of cloud services. I also haven't found a good way to unit test cloud services and their interlinking.
It's not necessary to be alive either yet here we are. I am not sure what happened to rationals about humans and the environment but it's taken a really dangerous twist into something very very antihuman. Thanks but not thanks. I'll eat my fish with pleasure.
Vaporware is not an accurate description. I'm pretty sure you they have manufactured hardware that you can deploy for a test deployment. Also pretty sure they're working with the military for weaponization and wireless power transmission.
under ultra-liberal capitalism, the cost of funding public is not profitable - and by that i mean the value created cannot be captured by an individual/entity, but is instead spread across society (aka, a common goods).

This idea is deeply seated in the minds of those who would bear the highest cost burden (the medium to high tax bracket payers). For them, it is "cheaper" to pay their own way, than to "subsidize" the healthcare of the "poorer" people (even tho it's not that much, and they don't see the value lost to private healthcare companies).
You are correct and it's disheartening to see multiple replies asserting non-arguments against your observation.

In political science, "failed state" has some commonly accepted definitions (eg- unable to project power and defend borders), none of which apply to the US even when accounting for the terrible mismanagement of COVID-19.

But like with some other terms, there's a group of theorists (usually not political scientists) who are diluting the word and throwing it around politically.

In terms of the underlying reality, the US very much a functioning state.
Does this imply you think some races are more meritorious than others?
So, they have a 'Digital Minister' who's competent, which puts them way ahead of a lot of places ...
He says a lot of things. I give it a low chance of actually happening.
Note that the enforcement of a lot of regulations and rights _in general_ have been under-enforced under Trump. This Patriot Act episode is an entertaining take on a topic that is very little comical[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/uKXIvfQnYEY
There must be something coming to our economy soon if he is willing to bet so much on gold.
Is this something you struggle with when you find ants in your kitchen?
It's currently a good predictor (socio-economic clustering) but it's less causal (find the right buddy -> immediately become wealthy).

It's objectionable because it introduces yet another mechanism for dramatically increasing inequality and economic stratification while also making capital markets more corrupt and less efficient, which undermines core aspects of our economic system.
And so it goes
I think most people can (and do) agree with these ideals stated in the abstract, but still do things that violate them in their jobs / real life because of practical considerations such as pursuing a profit.

Not unlike how most people understand the dangers of climate change, but continue to drive cars, fly, use air conditioning etc.

Or, stated another way, we are all hypocrites to some extent.
> Mountainbike prices are a rip off

You haven't seen road bikes. Look for S-Works.
No it's not that simple and if it was we would already have done it. It's not just a matter of political will it's a matter of what makes sense from a market perspective. It doesn't make any sense to rely on wind and solar. The are not and will never be the primary source of energy for our needs.

We will have fusion before we have wind and solar covering just 50% of the worlds energy consumption.
We're living in the 2020 time warp. Entertainment-wise, everything from the beginning of film has been simultaneously smeared and crushed into this one year.
If you need to run something that only runs within debian, you'll likely be able to that in a straightforward way using LXC or docker containers. I wouldn't reach for a VM unless I needed the extra layer of security offered by the VM.
America has entered into a strange category of it's own. It's looking similar to Brazil in some measures (inequality) and similar to Europe in other measures (average wealth, some levels of development) and it's somewhat to Turkey or India in yet other ways (dominated by ruthless religious parties that haven't, yet, eliminated Democratic processes entirely).

I suspect that in every third world nation, and now here, people ask themselves "how does a nation so filled with competent, intelligent people allow itself to be dominated by corrupt, delusional people." Especially here in the nation that once and maybe still does have more competent people than anywhere else in the world. The answer is that the corruptly delusional ideologues and the competent technocrats are mixed together with no way of unraveling them. Look at Dr. Ben Carson, brilliant surgeon.
Show HN: A open source graphical translation management utility
I had a career in science so I completely understand how models that predict the future are refined over time, that isn't concerning at all. Saying "we predict temperatures will rise between 0.5C and 2.0C this century" is just smart science.

But my comment isn't around a future prediction, this is measuring the temperature right now. You mention "the complexity of accurately measuring total net energy absorbed by a whole damn planet", which I can understand is complex, but ignore "net energy absorption" for now, let's just focus on "what was the average temperature last year". Would I be correct saying we're still not sure how best to get that data?
The UNESCO "wealth of the 1%" sloganeering is one pet peeve of mine. This is the data where the article derives the claim "the top 3 richest people owning more wealth than the bottom 160 million." The way they get this eye popping number is by summing up all financial debts and subtracting them from total financial assets. What this ends up doing is overwhelming the sum with the roughly $1.5 trillion in student debt. Unlike a mortgage or car loan, which trade financial debt for financial assets, student debt is an investment in human capital. According to this UNESCO data, the very poorest people in the world are American lawyers and doctors fresh out of medical school. These people have a great deal of non-financial wealth. But according to this methodology, such a person with $300k in debt plus 300 people with $1k in reported assets equals a total of zero. Running the numbers this way is great for shock value but it doesn't make any sense if you think about it.
I'm not sure that that there's a correlation between privatization of the post office and the lifespan of a country. Countries like Japan and Denmark seem to be chugging away just fine since they stopped providing those services.

Apologies for invoking Godwin's law, but Germany is another example of a country where state-owned postal services tend to be correlated with regime change. There was all sorts of drama starting around 1900 when the central government started bringing independent post offices from Kingdoms like Bavaria and Württemberg into the fold. Probably the most contentious of these takeovers was the Danzig Post Office. Many mailmen were tortured and eventually executed. Things have been much more stable in the decades since Germany privatized their postal system.
This is an example of how you can use the Beads language to quickly make useful web apps, desktop and mobile applications. This particualr product was intended to be a desktop app. It needs to be a desktop app because it does a lot of file manipulation on your local drive, reading in and merging string files, etc.

You first click on the folder icon to locate the source code file that needs to be scanned for localizable strings. After it finds all the localizable strings, that becomes the "base language" for the product, and you can add more localizations. You can have as many languages as you want.

Each little colored chip in the display corresponds to a message. In the example below, we have just started the Spanish translation, and the first 3 translations we did were marked as "tentative" because we are aren't sure the translation is good. The green chips mean the translation is finalized. The white cells show missing translations, that need to be done.

The utility stores the external translation phrase dictionaries in Excel-friendly tab delimited format (sometimes call CSV format, although we aren't using comma-delimited for obvious reasons). We have buttons so you can do rough translations via Google Translate, which works remarkeably well for many computer oriented phrases. There is no substutute for a native speaker, but I have found google to be correct more than 80% of the time, so it definitely helps.

This is the handy graphical interactive localization utility for Beads, but could easily be adapted to some other source language, as it only needs to be able to parse enough of your source code to extract the strings that need translation.

It allows you to visit Google translate to get your translation started, and lets you keep track of your translation progress, add new languages, etc.

It is smart enough to detect when the original phrase has changed so that you might need to re-translate strings, if the meaning of the base language changed.
So much ranting, yet not a single example of a GCP product that Google has actually killed. Got examples?

I mean, there's stuff like Python 2 support being sunset on managed services, but as Yegge himself points out that's on Guido, not GCP.
Turkey is the secret ruler of Europe. They have European heads of state send them billions on a moments notice, cowering on their knees and openly denying the Armenian genocide if their leader orders.
if you want humans to change you have to come up with better solutions not just ask people to change. It's never worked and it never will.
> Yes, there will be fatalities due to edge cases.

If the public thinks this is how self-driving car work, I think self-driving will have a very hard time becoming popular and avoiding extreme regulation.
Has this issue been unduely politicized in the context of an election year and a bitterly contested presidency?

Which national plans would be possible within the context of the constitution? The US is literally a collection of states.

When central dictates were issued by the president in the form of travel bans, partisans predictably cried "racism". It seems inconsistent or even hypocritical.

Perhaps the "unraveling" is more a function of bitter partisanship?
But the crumple zones don't help the objects (now projectiles) flying about your car. The crumple zones will finishing crumpling around the same time that something sitting on the rear deck of your car will hit you in the back of the head at 50 kph.

The original point was about unsecured objects in the car becoming deadly.