skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at a startup (Amplidata) where we build a distributed storage system in OCaml. It got acquired by Western Digital, which later sold it to Quantum. Afaik, there is still development going on using OCaml.

Couple of things I took away from the experience:

- After an initial ramp-up, most of the developers liked or even loved the language. Downside was the limited tooling/libraries (2010-2015, seems better now).

- Quality of the resulting product was quite high: bug rate was fairly low, especially once experience with the language increased. Turns out sum types, gadts and the module system (functors) are very powerful to express invariants and design composable logic.

- OCaml was successfully picked up by team members without a formal computer science background, or even without a lot of programming experience. Not that it turns everybody into a great programmer, but it seemed to coerce new hires into delivering a working feature, without a huge risk of breaking a lot of other code.

- It is still possible to write crappy / unmaintainable code. But in OCaml it is often as easy (or even easier) to write good code.

- If something did turn out to be broken, it was painful. Debugger support (GDB) was initially non-existent. Under heavy load, we triggered a couple of bugs in libraries, which was quite painful to fix. On the other hand, we also triggered bugs in malloc and in the Linux kernel, which were as painful, so it might have had more to do with the high-load scenario, than with OCaml.

- For really low level stuff, or very high-performance cases, we did need to use the escape hatch to call C code. Interfacing Ocaml with C was not the most pleasant (was before ctypes library). Debugging bugs at that boundary was extremely unpleasant. One trigger for this was the fact that multicore OCaml never materialized, which also damaged the "political position" of OCaml within the company.

- Management (especially after the acquisition) was at best indifferent, and at worst hostile towards it. OCaml was perceived as being difficult to hire for (or outsource). Using more "standard" languages like Java, C++, Python was seen as the safer bet. They tried and often failed (C++ turns out to be damn complex, and maintaining a large Python codebase turned into whack-a-mole, but for bugs.).
Reminds me of the way the US administration likes to use the term "China virus". Nothing ever changes.
I would say that as a student, you would be asking a potential advisor what mix of projects would be an example course of the research. What is "their approach" to the sequence of your grad projects over several years? Examples? What combination of risk/certainty does it have? I think you can tell pretty quickly whether the advisor has this concept even in mind.

Former students should have this idea in their mind too, after finishing the program. If they don't, they haven't learned one of the important things about a PhD...

And if you feel that it's too rude to ask, or the professor can't handle such a question (or you're hesitant to ask) -- either you probably want to find someone who is comfortable with such questions, or better find out why you are uncomfortable. Better to be awkward up front and get the answers you want, than be polite and suffer for 5 years to discover the wrong answer.

I mean, that's a whole nother topic -- this is a huge investment of years of your life. You should ask difficult questions before you make the leap. And the professor should owe you such answers before committing to taking you on.

In fact, it's not that different from an awkward pre-nup contract conversation. Only this time you don't have to be swayed by emotion.
Yes. So seller A wants to sell for $1.00 and buyer B is willing to buy at $1.06, an algorithm will calculate the presence of this potential (or actually have knowledge from other systems that this a certainty) and purchase seller A's stock with a margin of overhead of $1.03 and sell to buyer B for $1.06 netting $0.03.

The algorithm is essentially a parasitic entity.
I'm on the Beta channel and using this for several months already, even since on the preview.
Can't say it's perfect but I'm getting used to it pretty fast, like 2 weeks. Have no complaints since, and it feels snappier subjectively.
I'm building a pure backend service that I want app developers to be able to consume. If they have a static app, they shouldn't be required to run their own backend just to get around CORS. At the very least you're adding an extra hop, which is going to increase latency.

That said, it would be cool if static hosting services like S3 offered CORS proxies for uses like this. I wonder if that's a thing.
Raw youtube video is here: https://youtu.be/5Xz0WudBEUI
Show HN: Faven – A web tool to help you generate favicons
Hey Guys,

I've created a tool to help you generate favicons in the
browser without your data sent to a server.

github: https://github.com/22mahmoud/faven

I build this tool to discover new tech

alpinejs a minimal frontend library to help you manipulate the dom. I find it very helpful on small apps, and landing pages.

comping alpinejs with tailwindcss make my prototyping, and development faster.

use snowpack for fast development and use web modules on production without bundle since my project is small.
Thanks for sharing. There are often good reasons for creating DSLs, internal or external.

However I argue that I haven't seen many cases where configuration DSL were well justified.

By configuration here I mean something that describes differences between different deployed instances of the same code. If you take all deployed instances of the existing system and see what is minimal amount of configuration to describe these, you would usually find that very little information, just a few lines would be enough.

The rest of configuration file complexity comes from the designer's attempts to predict the future extensions. My point is, these should be resisted for the sake of future generations of maintainers.
Yeah because who needs rural America with all of their useless farms...
Others might say that they're not illegal and/or that you have a duty not to enter into them in the first place.
We are so close to wiping polio out globally. Bill Gates has been trying hard. A few cases in Asia every year and we’re done.

Probably less than 100 globally in a few countries. Bill Gates will get it.

Anyway, while it’s great, and we should be happy, 400,000 kids will die from malaria in Africa this year.

We could do more to save millions of lives over the next 10 years.
You’re dealing with two different things.

reCAPTCHA v2 and the badly named Invisible reCAPTCHA¹ assess the user and either let them in, or gate them on puzzle solving. So, it does pass or fail you, where fail means trap you in purgatory indefinitely (though some hold it’s actually hell rather than purgatory).

reCAPTCHA v3 never presents a CAPTCHA for you to solve, but decides a score (in practice, I’ve only seen 0.1, 0.3, 0.7 and 0.9) where higher means it’s feeling more friendly towards you, and it’s up to the site operator to decide what to do with it. (You should provide alternative means, e.g. if you’re doing fraud prevention for signup, fall back to SMS verification. Too many sites provide no recourse for a low score, which is illegal to do in various countries on accessibility grounds. With reCAPTCHA v2 and Invisible reCAPTCHA the site owners can at least blame Google, not that that gets them off the hook.)

Given the use of Rekognition here, I presume this project is breaking reCAPTCHA v2 and possibly Invisible reCAPTCHA, and not reCAPTCHA v3.

———

¹ I call Invisible reCAPTCHA badly named because it’s only invisible on the happy path—all it’s doing is hiding the “I’m not a robot” widget, effectively having the code “click” it when submitting. And given that reCAPTCHA v3 is then invisible, never showing anything to the user… yeah, it’s confusing. Arguably reCAPTCHA v3 isn’t even a CAPTCHA any more either, so… yeah, the names are all a bit of a mess.
my PhD advisor forgot I exists
Anything that smart people spend a lifetime doing—programming, font making, engineering, woodworking, auto repair, painting (house and fine art)—has depths that look completely crazy to outsiders.
Growth rate is an output metric. I would recommend de-emphasizing the output by revisiting infrequently and stopping comparisons with others, in favor of concentrating on the inputs. The poster you respond to has a very good set of things to look for. What’s holding you back from making progress on one of those? How fast are you building trust with individuals you work with and how can you accelerate that (think about specific relationships to make it less abstract)?
They still read epub, right?

Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.
I'd guess Amazon delivers 0/3 of their rural deliveries. I've never seen a last-mile Amazon vehicle outside of a major metro.
When you're dealing with a new disease there are no best practices for treatment. This is tautologically true. That's why doctors have to use their best judgement and try different things and write down what seems to work and what doesn't. Often they get it wrong, with very bad consequences. For instance putting covid patients prematurely on mechanical ventilators had catastrophic health implications. When this became apparent ventilator policy changed. People died and now we know better. It's ugly, but that's how you learn about treating a new(ish) disease. Waiting for the results of multiple randomized controlled trials is, frankly, fantasy. Covid has almost entirely ran its course and we aren't close to having solid treatment results from randomized controlled trials. Premature and ad-hoc treatment is how we've muddled through the pandemic, and it's how we'll muddle through the next pandemic, too.
Participation-washing as the next AI trend
Or Genghis Khan, Muhammed, the zulus, Egyptians, Assyrians, romans, Aztecs etc etc etc. every single color, creed you pick it. All mass murder and colonization. Human history in a nutshell.
>swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives

Just fly in at a higher altitude and if there's some there go around them.

Drones carrying air to air missiles might be more challenging.
It has nothing to do with inclusionism---we can only say about inclusionism and deletionism when there are parties to determine (and debate) what would go into the encyclopedia. Instead what we see right now is the complete lack of such parties and its consequences. This problem is, I believe, in fact prevalent for smaller language editions of pretty much every Wikimedia project; I've personally seen such an incident from the Korean Wikitionary in early 2010s.
It's not even that long ago, when my wife and I bought a house it took a couple of years before we had furnished it. My son filled his flat in a day at Ikea.

It's less valuable to people because it is so easily available.
It's not as simple as thinking in terms of those first order effects. Mailing subsidies reduce the cost of non-local alternatives for goods. It can often make it impossible for small businesses to exist in less urban environments and can lead to downward spirals where rural communities are self-exterminating because processes like this consistently siphon money out of the local economy.

Imagine if shipping of all consumer goods were made free. Amazon would be INCREDIBLY more dominant. And in fact, this is a large reason they started with books. The USPS has a special program built for a world 100 years ago called Media Mail which allows you to ship books for next to nothing. It made it impossible to run a bookstore profitably. Removing shipping subsidies to rural communities may very well create more of them and will definitely make them more resilient.
What do you believe syncing means? This discussion talks about whispersync reporting last page read and most recent page read events. What do you think that's supposed to do?
If there was ever a discussion that should be heard by more people working in tech, that’s that right there.

DDG’s results are (perhaps decreasingly) heavily based on Bing, which as you will learn from that discussion had had significant issues with CP discovered (and reported to FBI) in its search results effortlessly—even while the same images were flagged by Microsoft’s own photo DNA algorithm.
Thank you for the recommendation! Definitely will track its price now. :)
>Take for example internet surveillance:

There are three somewhat current reports on there. One comes from the US State department, one from an organization started by Eleanor Roosevelt with strong US ties, and one lists both China and the US as "enemies of the internet."
Probably just you.
There's no static schedule. It's an e-ink display. Refreshes happen when software tells it to display something new and take several hundred millis per blank - and a screen can be up to three blanks (because if it doesn't go white-black-display, then some pixels get stuck "on" or "off" or "halfway").
I have a silly hobby of collecting battered metal toolboxes. I like the fact that the history of their usefulness is displayed as the dents, scratches, rust, etc.

The nice thing about that hobby is nobody else collects them, so I can often pick one up for a dollar.
Wouldn't this devolve into people asking the same questions over and over?
errrr... not sure I understand correctly what you mean with "bugs and speed", specifically "since quantum".

I remember that the day that Quantum released, I suddenly got DMs from my non-tech friends who announced that they had installed/updated FF, and were happy how incredibly fast it was. I remember that because those were people who would usually roll their eyes if I mentioned anything software related in a conversation.
As I said earlier, you're espousing an outlook that has already given up. As other commentators have pointed out, checks and balances are unreliable at best, futile at worst.

If you are interested in negotiating for minor concessions with entities who have demonstrated a willingness to work outside the law (and write new laws where needed), then your pragmatism will boil you slowly.
> To the point where UPS or FedEX rates start looking attractive for normal letter mail?

> but the reality is USPS is, has been, and will be insanely inefficient for decades

Because you mention them and efficiency, here's a reminder that FedEx had horrible guidance in September 2019 (YoY from 2018 lowered guidance) leading some analysts to speculate towards bankruptcy; had deliverability reliability issues such that Amazon cut deliveries with them.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/09/26/is-there-hope-for-...

https://investorplace.com/2018/12/fedex-reported-earnings-an...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2019/12/18/am...

And Fedex is struggling while it's workforce is free of pension and healthcare costs for their mostly contracted workforce; which has been ruled a mis-classification of workers

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fedex-settlement-idUSKCN0...
Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret buying the device.
It was unreal to be on higher ground, and see light on the horizon all around, but have it be dark above. It also became eerily quiet. I will make an effort to be in the path of a total eclipse again before I die.
This. Op seems to suggest pricing is fixed when shipping for Amazon. Without any knowledge I would be surprised if it was. In fact 3rd party shippers can charge whatever they want to deliver Amazon packages because until Amazon can deliver all their packages they need shipping partners.
I couldn't be happier with Amazon's delivery service. I can track my delivery (the tracker tells me how many stops ahead of my delivery, etc) and I get a picture of the package on my doorstep.

USPS has been mostly reliable and yet on Saturday a package scheduled for delivery didn't make until Monday with no status change until Monday morning.
I've done it plenty. YMMV I suppose.
> they're not illegal

We'll see! Until then, revoking certificates is retaliation.

> you have a duty not to enter into them in the first place

This isn't how contract law works.
They're all "app stores" that block alternative sources.

All of them distribute games and entertainment apps (music, video, etc). Sony has also distributed apps not related to entertainment, e.g. folding@home.

Saying a console != a smartphone doesn't help discussion when what we're discussing is walled gardens here.
Mobi, ePub, and MS Word (not sure how good Libre Office is at this though) were all acceptable formats last time I checked.
I'm sure one can find some antique luggage :)
The deal is 15+ years old. To my knowledge it was made back when Google was still a very young company. There's a surprising amount of legacy contracts from Google/Bing/Yahoo floating around that power all of these search engines (Ecosia, DDG, etc).
I have yet to find any site/service on the internet with more varied (in a good way) recommendations. Some of it is junk, but I find myself laughing at least once a week at some of the articles pocket recommends.

Today's highlights:
1. What did Jesus wear?
2. What happens to your body when you walk 10,000 steps every single day
3. A 16-million-year-old tree tells a deep story of the passage of time

My first reactions:
I mean, what did Jesus wear? 16 million years seems way too long...

I would never have looked up any of these things, and the odds of me stumbling upon them on Reddit, Facebook, etc. feels extremely low. The sort of stuff Pocket recommends just feels so different to the things other sites recommend to me. I've been a long-time fan of Pocket (even before it was added to FF), so there is some bias, but every time I open a new tab in FF and navigate to some site, there's that split-second of loading where I glimpse these titles, and very often I find myself clicking the back button to do a double-take. Pocket is good. I like it. To each his own.
Thank you. I'd rather just by an off-the-shelf. Seems like Synology is pretty solid from the comments here.
As a rising 5th year PhD in ML -- I could not agree with this advice more! I have very hands-off advisors. I spent the first 3 years "wandering the woods to find something".
Last year, I really had to sit down and think about how I can finish up my PhD on time. I pretty much did what you outline here. A lot of tools I used were organization tools I learned from my business school/product manager friends.

I honestly think the PhD system needs to be overhauled. even at a "top-tier" program like mine, it is amazing to me that at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research. 100 years ago, the way you became a physician was to follow around a physician and one day you were ready to be a physician yourself. In the year 2020, this is how PhDs are trained. I do realize that a PhD is not a "professional" degree like MD or JD, however, given that most PhD grads will 1) go to industry 2) go into academia, we need to teach students about project management, planning etc.
This is a beautiful font, it looks like the kind of thing I would expect to be seen used in a dictionary or encyclopedia.
they suggest a default 0.5 threshold in their documentation. if you're testing "passing" their captcha, it'd be pretty reasonable to consider anything below that a fail.
> Also it's pretty much impossible to grow a zfs pool and there are no consistency check tools or repair tools. So when you actually do get corruption, you lose it all.

`zpool scrub` is the consistency check and repair tool. It's happy to detect and repair everything from bit flips to realtime `dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/ada0` of a mirrored/raid-z disk.

Growing a single vdev can be impractical especially for raid-z. Adding new vdevs to a pool is straightforward.
it's called speculation and it gets more speculative with each successive assumption
This is a very interesting and thorough document but seems more of a philosophical guide to studying with Professor Gilbert - plus general research study advice - than an actual syllabus; although perhaps due to the more open-ended nature of PhDs that is usual (I don't have an academic background)?

I ask because I clicked on it expecting some technical list of topic areas, though I did find it instructive and useful despite that.
Are there jailbreaks and/or custom ROMs for Kindles? It's a nice little device; would be a lot nicer without it constantly phoning home to Amazon.
Americans like to think they are immune to propaganda, or that for some reason other countries produce more of it than they do. What I have observed as someone not living in china or america is that they are roughly on equal footing and produce about as much deceptive trash as any other country, my own included. This means you will have a lot of americans answering your question by saying that america does less surveillance, not understanding after all the years of pledging allegiance to the flag and having armed police in their schools, that they are very very similar to china and it would be naive to assume they are not being watched as much.

It is also unlikely they even know what happens in china to a good extent because china itself is not very communicative; they still report the same covid stats since march, for example, and their government websites are full of broken links. It is hard for me to get accurate info on china even from news sites, I wouldn't trust what most people say.

All that said I think China is worse, but Americans would have you believe the difference is gigantic.
A sign of the times... (^_^)
Shared bike and scooter companies are freaking out over a new bill in California
I've also used a port other than 22 for sshd. And I can confirm that the past month I've been getting hit with lots of failed login attempts on ssh. My basic look at the logs shows it trying random dictionary words for usernames. And every connection attempt comes from a different IP.
Facebook can't give you their SDK without having their own developer account.
Maybe you should take a look in the mirror, we're all toiling in rarified contemporary hothouse cultural specialization.

"Hey, here's a cool article about a guy who spent a year creating another over-engineered javascript framework because he had an aesthetic dislike of semicolons. This matters! Upvote!"

Welcome to Hacker News.
This is the sort of news the world needs today. Let’s keep the ball rolling. Keep making things happen, HN Community.
To take Apple to court you need lots of money.
None of the good guys gets that much. So best you can get it is two bad guys fight each other.
I once visited an estate sale I was walking past. It was an older home, packed to the gills with trinkets. One bedroom was filled just with Christmas decorations.

I suspect that grandma was collecting all this stuff to give to her heirs. But those heirs were selling it all for pennies.

It was all kind of sad.
Just like mine :)
I need to fix that. Apologies. Somebody already caught it an earlier round of feedback, and I just haven't gotten to it yet with the pandemic. But will soon.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120982 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120804
> It's … brilliant?

Assuming it's a steady state then it's certainly good for Amazon. Particularly since their competition doesn't have the scale to reduce costs similarly.
Nope, IIRC, the only open ebook format supported is mobi.

Never used Kindlegen though, Calibre works great for me. (Although I have never authored an ebook).
I do PROFILE=on for my own www/firefox FreeBSD package builds too, but it does make it take twice as long. https://www.freshports.org/www/firefox
Given that agreement on Hong Kong independance was set to expire relatively soon, is difficult to justify serious intervention from a cost/ benefit perspective.

The original seisure of Hong Kong was an act of gunboat displomacy, and not exactly an exemplar of justice and law. Consider how its seen in donestic politics in China.

This does not mean that I approve of China's activity, just putting things in perspective.