skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It absolutely is. My problem is that that is the maximally controversy-inducing framing for that particular statistic. A breakdown of net worth by quintile will show the same effect in a clearer way. "The top 3 people have the same combined wealth as the bottom 140M" sounds like "the typical member of the top 3 people has almost 50 million times as much wealth as the typical member of the bottom 140M" when in practice the bottom 140M is mostly composed of people with substantial-ish negative net worth (e.g. a car loan) or substantial-ish positive net worth (e.g. a paid off car or a small retirement account).

The disparity exists and is large, but a misleading representation of it doesn't help anyone except those who profit off controversy.
In J, I think it's very difficult to move on from the initial stage of dealing with "line noise" as the author mentions.

For me, this was further complicated by the fact that error messages are very hard to understand in the beginning.

I've written an article that describes how I typically deal with solving most of the domain/rank/length errors: https://www.justus.pw/posts/2020-07-31-errors-in-j.html
Go work a month with these kernel maintainers and then come back and report how you feel about having to review these turds.
Mozilla must put the advocacy bits aside and focus on the core product. Perhaps the problem with a non-technical CEO is that the advocacy and new shiny stuff is given as much importance as the invisible (and insanely complex) work that makes a browser fast and safe.

A total failure of strategy here - if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves. Instead they axe the future of Firefox.
I hope not because I don’t want my phone to be a Windows like malware shitfest. I like that I can install any app there is and be reasonably sure it isn’t going to steal my private data or ransom me.
Please, I hope this is a thing. If not, I'll code the implementation.
This seems very interesting for numerical computation, but at first glance few of these operations seem to apply directly to general computation (I'm sure that there are isomorphisms that can be used to apply them indirectly).

The example with sorting was the oddest from this point of view. The author praised the idea of the permutation vector as being a relatively direct mathematical specification of sorting (return the permutation of the original array in sorted order) while leaving out the 'sorted' part. Also, this focuses entirely on the result, but there is no word on the algorithm - 'how is the array sorted' is the question that computer science is designed to solve, as opposed to 'what are the fixed points of a sorted array'.

As such, as someone with no experience of J, I'm left wondering if this is another example of the infamous Haskell quicksort - well-picked examples of code which produces a desired result are extraordinarily terse and expressive, but actually implementing well-known algorithms is often just as verbose as C, give or take.
Digitizing Burning Man
> I don't get the anger people direct towards Epic when in fact they are doing a good thing for the market that very few companies would have the power to do.

I guess it comes down to if you think having another game store & launcher installed in your PC is free (not speaking just monetarily here) or not. If you think it is free then there is no downside.

If you think it is not free:
* Another app to manage
* Another company to syphon data
* Another place you you have to register a credit card
* Another place where you have to add your friends or hope there is cross-store play

Then you will be annoyed that they have artificially restricted access to a game you could otherwise have bought directly or on your store / launcher of choice, e.g. Steam, GOG, with the only limitation being what the the developer wanted to release on.

Now I think EGS is mostly time-based exclusivity (I think there are maybe single digit permanently exclusive games on EGS) but the point still rankles. You can argue "Short term pain" (exclusives, assuming that stays short-term) for long term gain (more store competition) but that is not a guarantee.

> Yeah it sucks games are not ubiquitous but it's not always in the best interest of game developers to distribute their games everywhere and I think it should be perfectly understandable from the point of view of customers.

Many people, myself included, do not want the console exclusivity wars to be something that migrates to PC where there is 0 need for it (i.e. you are not developing your game on two completely different console architectures which adds to cost, maybe adding some store integration code only.) Especially paid exclusives.
I think the main issue here is: budget.

Lebanon is in severe economic crisis. And that effects everything, especially government spending.

You say, "a demo expert should oversee storage of these stuff appropriately", well that means hiring an expert. Or "use a professional repair crew"; that means protective gear, removal of explosives around, special cold-welding equipment; and all these require budget.

Hiring 2 immigrant welders for a week = 200 dollars (and I’m being extremely generous here). Versus taking all the security measures and use protective gear to do things right = 20.000 dollars.

I believe there are more and more bad things on the way for Lebanon. A major electricity outage, or a leak in a chemical plant, or a bridge collapsing... All due to maintenance problems, might be just around the corner.
VMS is old and used to run multiuser systems and on relatively expensive machines; but they were called 'minicomputers' because they were already less huge/expensive than mainframes. And after the mini came the 'micro' which is more or less the PC as you know it.
Animating URLs with JavaScript and Emojis (2019)
I guess thousands of developers would pay for a fast docker implementation on mac. File access is so slow if you want to mount your sourcecode into the container.

There are solutions like docker-sync but they have a kind of random delay, sometimes the sync happened fast sometimes it takes a few seconds.
Five years ago it was clear that possibly the best thing that could happened to the future of Firefox, Mozilla, and the Web would have been for Mozilla Corporation to have gone belly up. But we're past the point where that might do any good with respect to salvaging Firefox or Mozilla's name.

Mozilla Corporation's role today is to siphon away any attention or enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards the ideals that Mozilla was originally created to facilitate. The Mozilla Corporation was supposed to have been set up to further the ideals of the then already extant movement that had been operating on a shoestring budget. The imprimatur should have been to direct its paid staff towards doing the boring work that unpaid (but highly effective) volunteers weren't interested in—not to wrench control away and consolidate power within a (now-proven ineffectual) company making ill-conceived commercial plays while trying to fit in with the culture of the Valley and squandering billions.

In the early 2010s, I attended a conference—one sponsored by Mozilla—and brought in on their dime, having been a fairly involved contributor for a few years, but not someone on the corporate payroll. Another guest and I mentioned how poor a job the travel agency had done, essentially fleecing Mozilla and doing much worse than if we'd arranged for travel and accommodation ourselves and then forwarded the bill. "Mozilla has a lot of money" was the response. After the better part of a decade, Mozilla's revenue has only grown, and so has their propensity to squander money.

The best option we have now is for folks to wake the heck up, to realize that the Mozilla that exists is not the one portrayed in either its messaging or fixed in the minds of casual slacktivists, to start a grassroots effort (a la early Firefox) to work on an independent browser—where, unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become (not helped by the FirefoxOS efforts; nor the mess that Gecko codebase has become)—and most importantly never allow that effort to be subverted in the way that the Corporation managed to cannibalize and take over Mozilla.

But that's not going to happen, because Mozilla continues to position itself as the organization where folks with a casual interest in the health of the Web are supposed to direct their good vibes, while thoroughly proving itself to be unworthy and incompetent at upholding the principles it's supposed to be fighting for, and while time and time again, the public have proven themselves to have short attention spans on the order of months—so, by the end of the year Firefox and Mozilla will be back to being perceived as your old chum that's fighting the good fight, instead of being steered by a bunch of clueless, well-salaried Bay Area devs LARPing as some motley crew with your best interests at heart, all while the term "non-profit" gets bandied about in public discussions, much to their delight.
> It's not about the patterns being wrong, it's about the patterns being verifiable and having a compiler that's on your side, not on the side of watching the world burn.

Yeah, but not all programs genuinely need to be multithreaded [0] that too with memory sharing, and even in a program very few data is shared. And a lot of patterns can't be verified by compiler to be amenable for static memory management. That's a tradeoff.

I am not telling rust's cognitive overhead makes it unsuitable for everything. It definitely has a place.

But unlike what a lot of people on HN tend to say, rust is not the perfect language for everything.

Languages like OCaml deserved a significant portion of hype that rust gets now. But there is no mozilla and no HackerNews spamming taskforce behind OCaml. On the positive side, all 5 companies using OCaml pay well ;)

[1] As a user, I don't want your code to exhaust all my cores, unless it is a batch job. I'd rather urge to choose better algorithms and data structures for the job and many times parallelism is just unnecessary.
There are always trade-offs though.

1) If you're busy maintaining backward compat, you're not busy building innovative new things -- Microsoft. 'nuf said.

2) You have a built-in excuse to not make your new stuff equal in functionality or greater to the old stuff, because hey, customers can just use the old stuff right? I built some software that talks to O365 Sharepoint. Ok, I have two choices of API: the older Sharepoint API or the newer Graph API. They recommend Graph, ok. Build the product and put it into production. Get a new customer requirement for fine-grained auth, and then find out that Graph doesn't handle fine-grained auth -- only the Sharepoint API does that. Oops. Ask Microsoft when that capability is coming to Graph? No timeline, because the Sharepoint API isn't deprecated.

3) Keeping old stuff working may be easier, but building new stuff is harder because the landscape is muddier -- how many times have you looked at Microsoft docs and found multiple ways to do things with no idea if the docs you're looking at actually apply to the approach you're using now?

I think there are ways to have (mostly) the best of both worlds. Linux does it by bring as much stuff in-tree as they can -- they break compat all the time for out-of-tree stuff. Ever try to keep a proprietary VMWare module building without errors? In-tree KVM never breaks because they're super careful with the ABI. Some languages have explicit mechanisms by which they attempt to keep things current, but make it easier on users -- Kotlin is an example of this [1] but its a young language so time will tell whether they can actually thread this needle. My experience so far is yes, I think they can -- I've updated code from Kotlin 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 with relatively little pain.

[1] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/evolution/kotlin-evolu...
Is telegram considered trustworthy now?
Get your shorts ready everybody.
Because the information leaked to the public 2 days before. The moment that happened, the information became public, and then it wasn’t insider trading anymore.
Definitely secured for the executives and directors. They have very little incentive to make things work and continue to hire their friends and pay themselves lavish salaries.
Original paper Dynamic ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet driven by sustained glacier retreat [1]

> We show that widespread retreat between 2000 and 2005 resulted in a step-increase in discharge and a switch to a new dynamic state of sustained mass loss that would persist even under a decline in surface melt.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-0001-2
Ok, but for one thing I only put that in there to provide the perspective from which I was hating on the article, and for another I agree that that’s typical and my point is that I don’t think we’re dealing with a Carter or a Reagan or even a Nixon, in terms of historical judgement, but, like, a Buchanan or a Johnson (and no, not LBJ)

[edit] to illustrate: it’s 2080 and you’re a politically-motivated hack historian making a worst ten Presidents list. Do you list 10 political enemies? No. You make 5-8 uncontroversial safe picks, and 2-5 are your political enemies. My contention is that, due to his effectiveness in and execution of the office, Trump is likely to eventually land on a lot of those lists due to being in the “safe pick”, legitimacy-lending category, not the political one. Meanwhile, yes, he’ll be on those plenty for political reasons for the next decade or three.
Mozilla broke features that did not need fixing. They also removed features such as RSS support. RSS supports anonymity and does not add dollars to Google's kitty. So, Mozilla's policy was lockstep with Google's.
This will be an unpopular comment, but how do we know that what you say is true? Should we really accept what you say? Why do you want people to donate? Are you trying to write yourself into the story, bring in your 'sister' along with telling us about death?

My view is that I appreciate people witnessing what they experienced. That's a service to humanity. But when you are playing with others heart strings, start witnessing deaths you haven't seen (the 2 visitors) and make a call for donations, I feel manipulated.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/07/google-cloud-makes-it-chea...
US plans to produce ‘Iberian’ ham in Texas and Georgia
Time isn’t the issue here, it’s the fact that people defended an AI as if it were a person.
Do entreprises get charged more for edge or chrome similar business options? Competing with free is hard.
> Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it.

The people providing the service should get paid. Who bears the cost in the end, and whose credit card gets billed, are just implementation details. Choices for employers and employees to make among themselves. The provider doesn't care. The provider gets paid.

Employees will like to read that employers should pay, because they don't want to pay. Nobody likes to pay, including employers. But in the end, employers pay employees for value delivered. If that value includes the benefit of a service that costs money, it's part of value delivered.

Maybe the employee pays and the employer reimburses. Maybe the employer pays and the employee's pay, benefits, or expenses allowance gets docked accordingly. Maybe the employee and the employer split the cost somehow. Maybe the employee bears the cost entirely, so employees who can do without the service have financial incentive to do so.

It's not up to the provider to figure this out or negotiate it. If diners want to argue about who pays how much of the tab, the restaurant still gets paid. If tenants want to argue about who pays how much of the rent, the landlord still gets paid. In the USA, auto mechanics usually own their own tools, while in Germany, garages usually provide them. Either way, the toolmakers get paid. They don't wait to get paid until employee and employer figure it all out.
The Ugly Scramble
Geez maybe they said, “No human being should be allowed to suffer if he is under the roof of the wealthiest nation in the history of man.” The pain leads to Police, the fear of seeing a future you, leads to shelter seeking grievance gazing.
Never knowingly under-leased, John Lewis moves to rent out its furniture
I'm not sure. I think advocacy is a core part of its USP -- Mozilla is privacy-friendly, and that's an important point, especially as all internet users, even average consumers, are being constantly hit over the head by how data-hungry these huge corporations are.

It's an uphill battle, sure, and there are a lot of things to overcome, but I'm not so sure I'd blame the leadership on this entirely.

I'd blame the market...for now.
There's a whole magazine about things like this.

In previous decades they had feature articles and a few pages of fine print with a couple sentences about each reported incident large or small. Fortunately most were not fatalities but were kind of grim like obituaries anyway.

_Man checks oil tank with lighter and lives._

Now it looks like their website is mainly an incident log:

https://www.industrialfireworld.com/567881/hydrotreater-fire...

This linked event was last week when I was actually driving through the massive tank farm of this old refinery which extends to both sides of a state highway which has always cut through.

I wondered what that smoke was.
Could you tell us which EU law allows this, because I'm not sure what you're talking about. The only thing with two weeks I know about is for returning online purchases which wouldn't apply here as it's a renewal. As far as I know cancellation deadlines can be up to three months.
By your own admission, then, you don't know much about this topic. It's frustrating for gay people to have these discussions with people who just don't take homophobia seriously as a problem. Imagine if you had written all of this vague non-commital verbiage about support/opposition for interracial marriage. "I mean, I don't care if a white person and a black person get married, but maybe there is a great argument against it that I just haven't heard because I don't give a fuck."

I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here. But I just want to put it out there that reading this thread as a gay man in 2020 is massively dispiriting. It's clear that only a tiny minority of straight people, even on HN, have any real concern whatever for gay rights.
Theres also literally a world between bay area and third world.
I'm not a company myself so it doesn't really make sense, although I do consider my parent's home as a backup if I need to leave my house for some reason.

But my company does everything we can in order not to have a single point of failure, however unlikely it is to fail. Because low probabilities of something still mean it can happen, and you don't want to allow that if you can avoid it.
This is true. Mozilla knows well how to market to the tech crowd with the "we're the saviors of the internet, privacy, everyone else is evil" marketing. For the billions burned, you'd expect a lot more. The internet browsing experience feels the same as it did 10 years ago.
I've just about finished writing a VM for the ZMachine (the VM that Zork was written for to make it portable). It's been tremendously enjoyable and I've learnt a lot.

I'm planning a series of how-to videos out of the project and will definitely be referencing this article to ensure my presentation of concepts is accurate. Thanks for sharing this.
100% this. Mozilla needs to move out from SV. Their boards,executives & managements are way too cosy with other execs.

Firefox has been absolutely decimated by Chrome.

When MS(Seattle) was the monopolyin web browser, Mozilla (SV) being in SV worked great. Time to move Mozilla out & to be honest, it's probably time for Mozilla HQ to leave USA.

Chrome didn't do anything Mozilla could have done if they had put the vast majority of their funding into the browser instead of pet projects.

Dear Mozilla execs, stop thinking of yourselves as thought leaders. The browser is the fundamental way to access the internet. This is where 99% of your focus should be. Keep iterating and making it better and easier to consume, protect and develop with Firefox.

The last 10 years of firefox have been embarrasing tbh.
I am completely okay with letting off-season fruit become more expensive for a while and the tech companies and their vaunted AI divisions get funded by market sensible prices to actually develop the systems we need to do fruit picking robotically (it absolutely can be done, but funding to drive down costs is sporadic).

I mean really one answer here is: maybe we as a civilization don't actually need mass-farmed fruit, because it's not actually cost-effective to produce and consumers clearly don't actually value it very highly.

The point of UBI is a grand solution to stop us having goods and products which depend on creating a defacto underclass.
moz management is how they got here in the first place. They hire through nepotism and pay themselves lavish salaries. No incentive but to just coast and keep calling themselves fighters of systemic racism and freedom saviors of the internet.
That is very ambitious but i hope this can mean open access education can be delivered to the poorest of poor. Having 2-4 LED TVs with latest educational content directly streamed. The overworked teachers should become guides to the students.
Yesterday I started donating $10/month to the Mozilla Foundation. TIL it’s not the Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox.

I stopped using Chrome when they added the “feature” that logging into gmail was the same as logging into the browser.

If there was a little notification to the top right in the Firefox with a link to “pay”, even if it was optional, there is some proportion of users who would. And I would bet that your average Firefox user is an order of magnitude more likely to do this than your average chrome user.

So I wonder why they don’t do this? I’ve had similar frustrations for other products I get for free that I wanted to pay for.
The article talks about object properties, not methods. The problem described is that each property is like a global variable that all methods share. So the string object having 40 methods is not a counter example. As far as I can tell from the docs, Python strings have exactly one property: the sequence of characters that make up the string.

And the api surface isn't strictly shallow either. Strings rely heavily on the Format class, right?

Happy to be corrected.