skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Today, even older 10 years old laptops are quite good at doing usual things like checking emails, browsing the web, watching a video or doing things like that on the go.

Even coding is generally doable (unless your project is extremely massive).

It gets the job done, even if it's not as fast as recent laptop (which is in turn not as fast as a recent desktop).

Also, buying these things can make a lot of sense for some people.

For example, in my case, I'm a big fan of cheap laptop (usually secondhand thinkpad) + decent desktop.

On one hand a decent desktop is much faster than almost any laptops available (and the few laptops that are faster have issues like heat, low battery life and being heavy).

On the other, a small Thinkpad (ex: x250) is a good enough compromise when on the go.
Also, as it's quite cheap (if secondhand), so it's not dramatic if it gets damaged which is always more likely for mobile objects.
A few years back, I slipped on a patch of ice, felt on my old x61, and completely broke the screen, I just bought another x61 and swapped the disk and it only set me back 130 euros which not as bad as breaking a brand new macbook pro in the same manner for example.

So, yes, in the end, it's worthwhile to maintain them and do things like changing the battery or replacing faulty components. And the after market for this things is quite developed, you can pretty much find any components on ebay or other web sites (I just did it last week with a broken DC jack replacement on an x230). Combine with the fact these are some of the easiest laptops to disassemble, it makes them remarkably serviceable.
If he means human history = US history then maybe. 1 out of those 5 are very US specific right now (racial unrest). The raging pandemic is once again regional where US is the worst globally but I'd not apply to the same to Europe and not at all to East Asia. The remaining 3 for sure a global problem but even then I do not
think a chance
for a
nuclear war is
higher than before say in the Cold War
This is one example of a monad, probably not the most compelling if your language supports exceptions already (apart from having more explicit types).

But there are many other examples that are useful in practice (IO, streams, parsers, lists, operations in context, futures, etc as mentioned in other threads). A monad is the interface you need to implement for each of these to compose nicely.

Then one day you'll need to compose Foo's, so you'll ask yourself "is there a monad for Foo's?" and if there is the code generally writes itself.
They already are. Based on someone I know, they were warned by their coworkers at WebEx that much of the work was outsourced to China and they had concerns that they were installing backdoors.
Horcrux Encrypted Messaging
Minimizing energy expenditure is called efficiency.
I’m not sure. Two observations:

I have dozens of Word documents created on Windows in the mid-90s that current Word versions refuse to open.

Excel for Mac keeps subtly adding four years to every date field if the file was originally created in Excel for Windows.
I disagree. It's not about collecting information - at least, not directly. Assistants don't seem to be designed to gather neither any substantial amounts of information, nor any unique information.

Due to their limited communication capabilities they're extremely poor at collecting meaningful data - there's simply no point in talking to them as their utility fails with anything but the simplest and most direct commands. There's not much data in "turn kitchen lights on", "set alarm at 10am", "play $album by $artist", "remind me to buy milk" and "convert 4.7 miles to kilometers" - at best, this exposes a few minor behavioral patterns that can be trivially determined even without a dedicated device to talk to.

And, hopefully, outright spying wasn't one of the design goals, even though they can be of dual use. Google, Apple and Amazon may be cooperative but they aren't NSA, after all.

My opinion, it's about use of particular services. Alexa will push you towards Amazon purchases, use of Amazon Music, etc. Similarly, Homepod requires investment into Apple ecosystem. And Google Assistant will push towards all things Google. In my opinion, voice assistants were made to be helpful within their particular ecosystems and thus add more ties to their vendors' services. (And, sure, those services collect data.)
Asus zenfone 7 vs. Asus Zenfone 7 Pro specs and prices comparison
IE6 was so painful because it was performant (great for end users), but closed source and full of bugs that the developers had to work around to not look stupid from the non-tech world (instead MS fixing them over time). This was happening for a long time (10-15 years), which was very frustrating.

I don't think Google Chrome is that bad for the world.
Didn't work, it updated anyway.
Never heard of this project until now, and Im surprised its actually built on top of Elixir/Phoenix. For such a good project, its not mentioned much in the community
Not meaningless, but otherwise you are mostly comparing the _sizes_ of countries. Is being a bigger country (with more deaths) more dramatic than being a smaller one?
What remains to be done for GIMP 3?
A borgmon
Having talked to a lot of old folks who worked there the tax breaks were a huge incentive too. Lowering the corporate tax rate since the 60s has meant that corporations no longer needed to invest in R&D, just pay accountants instead.
I recommend reading the original "Monads for Functional Programming" paper by Phil Wadler, it's in a tutorial style and IMHO still better than any blog post explanation I have seen:

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/b...
Ah, I see; that's talking about changing certain behaviours from undefined to well-defined; I was talking about requiring the compiler to pick sane realizations of behaviours that are not well-defined.
You can run something compiled for x86 on AMD without modifications. That is not true for custom proprietary tools from cloud providers. All have more or less equivalent offerings but the cost to migrate are not negligible in a large number of cases. So lock in is more of a concern here.

And even with processor architectures, I have started considering ARM migration as ARM has started becoming more popular in cloud.

This is not to say I don't believe these tools have their benefits, just that the benefits need to be really weighed against the cost on lock-in, which in my opinion are quite understated with those who choose to use it without a second thought.
Have you read A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes? It's a stunning exploration of those same themes: memory, introspection, self-deception.
Nope, glaciers. Baikal is an exception, because it is formed in the rift of two tectonic plates.

The current crater is possible because the tundra is lots of frozen mud with gas in it. Gets warm, bubbles form, gas goes out.
Edit: The gas is the result of biomass decaying. The cold had stopped the process for thousands of years but when the environment gets warmer, the bacteria activates and resumes the process.
depending on the distribution of processing times[1] dropping slow request and retrying can improve latency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution
China Curbs Exports of Some Artificial Intelligence Technologies
You are right, this happens a lot when drafting documents out-of-court documents.

IMHO this is a useful "feature" for lawyers. Don't forget that usually lawyers of two parties are working"together" only apparently, when in fact they are always litigating for their client's best interest.

The goal is not to reach a common agreement, but to reach the agreement that best serves the interest of one's client, most of the times at the expenses of the other party.

This is achieved in many ways, one being having text in a contract that the other party is not fully aware of, either because it's not properly understood or noticed.

This means that including in a document text without the other party noticing is a good old trick that quite valuable to any lawyer.

As a lawyer my position on this is that it's the other party to blame if it did not check the document properly (I always compare the documents for differences even when sent with revisions).

> (c) usually charge by the hour, so some efficiencies are actually going to cost them money if they implement them

I tend to disagree with this line of thought. Lawyers have a thousand ways to inflate their timesheets. Using a tool that makes their life more miserable by forcing them to do manual work that could be automated is certainly not one of them.
It isn't offensive but for the current generation it is plain wrong as you say. I think what he (KI) says might have been quite true for the generations living during, and for a few decades after, British India, but no longer. Keep in mind Britain has changed drastically too in these decades. It is no longer the cultural power it was, and countries like India now have plenty of our own problems for anyone to even think about the past.

Besides it is nothing but romanticism. No invading country is truly altruistic. They give with half an hand and take with the rest one-half hands.

Also culture and modernity are subjective concepts.
These hybrid databases are really exciting. I also really like how mature pingcap is from a technical perspective. On the benchmarking page this paragraph really stood out.

> If you don't have reproducible, fair benchmarking, you can be blinded by your own hubris. Our contributors and maintainers depend on benchmarks to ensure that as we strive to improve TiDB, we don't negatively impact its performance. To us, not having benchmarks is like not having logging or metrics.
Wouldn't you want to own a company that doesn't pay profits for 20 years, but gives you $10B every year after those 20 years?

Discounted cash flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cash_flow) is being used to value companies for this reason.
I tried Google's PageSpeed Insights (is that what you were using?) for the following sites. In at least one case it recommended removing Google Analytics to improve speed.

(Score) URL

(100) http://esp32.rosskoepke.com/

(100) https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

(100) http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

(100) http://news.ycombinator.com/

(98) https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/

(91) https://docs.python.org/

(85) https://joinmastodon.org/

(69) https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/

(46) http://news.google.com/

(17) http://www.medium.com/

(11) http://www.reddit.com/

It's certainly something where reasonable people could disagree but to me these scores match up well with my own personal perceptions - the Rust docs website is about the most sluggish I'd like a website I use regularly to be and it's in the middle of the "orange zone". Also it notably issues failing scores for it's own property (Google News) as well as Medium, which uses Google Analytics.

I looked through the suggestions it provided for each of these websites, and the only recommendation I saw for using Google/Alphabet properties or technologies was to use to:

"Serve images in next-gen formats (save 3.3 seconds):
Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption. Learn more." It then listed all the images and their sizes under PNG (current format served by Reddit) vs. their size using one of these compression formats. WebP is a Google technology, but JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR are not.

For the poorest performer, Reddit, it recommended that as well as:

Avoid an excessive DOM size (currently 1,663 elements): Consider using a “windowing” library like `react-window` to minimize the number of DOM nodes created if you are rendering many repeated elements on the page. Also, minimize unecessary re-renders using shouldComponentUpdate, PureComponent, or React.memo and skip effects only until certain dependencies have changed if you are using the Effect hook to improve runtime performance.

For the discussion forum, https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/ the tool only had 2 recommendations:

Remove unused CSS (1.35 s)
Remove dead rules from stylesheets and defer the loading of CSS not used for above-the-fold content to reduce unnecessary bytes consumed by network activity

Eliminate render-blocking resources (1.08 s)
Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles.

For https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ it's top time-saving recommendation was....to remove Google Analytics.

Avoid long main-thread tasks (2 long tasks found)
Lists the longest tasks on the main thread, useful for identifying worst contributors to input delay.

URL Duration

/analytics.js(www.google-analytics.com) 105 ms
Counterintuitively, this is actually what makes me optimistic about the future. I think every generation before us (or near enough) thought they are at the end of times, humanity never faced such crises as now, and everyone else had it easy.

It doesn’t mean we are guaranteed to solve our problems, but at least it means we have a track record of working out utterly hopeless situations. Or if you like, just because a problem seems hopeless and beyond the reach of solution, it doesn’t mean it really is.
I have a dream:

A large company buys Thinkpad as a brand and launches a few shiny Linux Laptops
Lol. Sorry. Just got up :)
LMFAO that's cool

If you click the gif it redirects to a page where there's a bigger version, where if you that gif it becomes a video and she talks a bit.

EDIT: The page it redirects to, https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra
We set up a pleroma instance on OpenBSD a while back. It works pretty well. Kind of a pain to get set up due to version mismatches of elixir and Erlang and what not, but it wasn't too painful. I imagine it's a lot easier on a supported distro like Debian. Can't wait to upgrade for the new chat system. Hopefully that goes well on OpenBSD.
/me looks at the front facing camera and tof sensor on his phone and sighs...
I use an X200, which is the generation before this. It just does what I want for media/web consumption and the light development work I do in my spare time. (I have a more modern Thinkpad for work. I think I'd be able to do the work on the X200, but maybe not in the way that I do with Typescript incremental compiles etc. VSCode would probably also suck.)

The only time I notice performance problems is bad websites, like Twitter or Reddit. But I'm getting a little stubborn about it, TBH, I don't think I should replace a perfectly working computer in order to use a site meant for displaying 500 character messages which worked perfectly well in its old incarnation. (And some of those same sites also suck on new hardware.)

There are a number of things that I do in my day-to-day life which I don't expect to ever change, things like maintaining a journal, sending and receiving text messages via e-mail, IRC or Signal, backup and organize pictures of my family, listening to music from my MP3 collection, watch videos (in reasonable but not ludicrous resolutions for the 12" screen), etc. These are things that I've done on this computer since I got it in 2009, they are completely solved problems and I would be extremely happy to use this machine until I die.
How does promotion work in that case? From what I've seen going part-time is essentially hitting a pause on your career goals, it's not sustainable for medium-long term.
Offline LaTeX Workflow on iPad
> Noam Chomsky said humans are living through the darkest and most consequential time in history.

> Chomsky said the current age is a “point of confluence of severe crises,” including the threat of nuclear war, climate change, a raging pandemic, economic depression and racial unrest in the United States.

The period between 1914 and 1945 would probably beg to differ.

I've found it interesting to read "left" and "right"[1] pundits on Twitter recently. Each "side"[2] believes that this is the last chance to save democracy and all hell will be unleashed if their candidate loses. Ten years ago we had the "Tea Party", on average a deranged bunch of lunatics without the ability to see or think clearly. In response one could validly and amusingly proclaim "facts have a notoriously liberal bias". Fox News was extremely partisan and contributed to a sort of radicalisation of the right. In 2020 the same lunacy seems to have taken over the Democratic party as a whole. Facts are out of the window on both sides. Fox News and CNN and a whole host of other media outlets are contributing to radicalisation of both sides.

In 2016 the media convinced me that Trump would turn into Hitler 2.0. I'm glad and embarrassed to realise that what he has turned into is an average Republican president except he understands the working class and he hasn't started any wars.

This is "the darkest and most consequential time in history" for people who want to push an agenda (right-wing commentators will claim the same, not just left-wing ones) and for media outlets who want to increase their ratings. We are facing deep, deep problems that need overcoming, but only people whose worldview was based on the assumption that the growth and stability of '92-'08 would last forever are going to be swayed by claims of this being the worst ever.

In order to be able to tackle the challenges on our plate society needs to be able to think clearly. What we need at the moment are calming forces, not the inducement of more panic.

[1] for want of better descriptions

[2] if you can really call them "sides"
Way to throw the hyperbole, Noam. "Right now" doesn't even crack the top five most historically-important periods in the past century, much less all of human history. There are some unusual things going on right now, but the only one that's going to be remembered in a few decades is Covid. By most other metrics, it's business as usual.

From an American perspective, it's absurd to elevate "now" above the Great Depression, World War 2, the Vietnam War, and the massive social and political changes accompanying each, to name just three eras in the past century. Tack on another century, and now doesn't even make it into the textbook.

Yeah, there's never been another moment like this, but that's true always and forever. There are some big things going on all the time. Add them all up, and this is a pretty bland time in the grand scheme of things.
Or a retry button. The point is that the application does not know if your network has a ridiculous latency that messes up tight timeouts
This is a reply only to your comment and has no bearing on my opinion about the parent: It's very possible that those young people are outliers and unusual cases (very small numbers statistically) which is why they're stories and why you probably know about them. (That's how the media works. What's 'usual' is boring, and doesn't sell papers.) What's the data on most patients who are hospitalised or die? It may be different.

In fact, without being a scientist, AFAIK this is one of the major problems of science and how it is consumed, understood, and used/abused in society at large, but also within the publication realm itself. If a certain scientific finding is boring and merely confirms something else (which is critical in science), there are less incentives to do it. As a result, truth becomes characterised by 'sensational' things, not necessarily true or accurate things. Scientists and followers of science fail so much to see our own biases and shortcomings. We're getting there, but we're hampered very much by our human nature.
Can you share your "illustrated guide to back exercises, aka core strength exercises" ?
The Power of Character and Strength
> The really real American slavery was also retionalized as "cant decide for themselves or cant be trusted to make the right decision or are taught civilization and made better".

No, it wasn't. Actual slavery was always very obvious in the property, trading and exploitation system. You bought slaves, you sold them, your children inherited them, and you financially profited from owning them because they worked for you. Nobody claimed that they'd buy slaves and made them do hard labor in the plantations for the slaves' benefits.

> The male female relationship in saudi also do not ressemble parental relationships. It is really softening what is going on.

That's not what I said. The legal relationship is close to that of custody/guardianship, not the emotional one.

I don't get why you're so set on re-framing them as slaves. They have slaves. Slaves don't have slaves. You can find the Saudi system despicable without grossly misrepresenting it.
It doesn't have to be just sustainable, it has to be competitive. Companies can just decide invest into automation instead, or close shop and move production to other countries.

Germany is a relatively low-wage country considering its productivity, but also its factories are highly automated. If these variables change, production will continue to move to cheaper European countries, just like US production moves to Mexico.
This article is actually now quite out of date as PHP has switched to a tracing JIT which appears to be heavily based on LuaJIT.

https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/5874

https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/4bf2d09edeb14467ba7955...
Successfully trying to log in can already be a crime depending on your jurisdiction in my opinion.
"Correctly predicted 10 of the last 0 eco-pocolypses" comes to mind.

[Adjust the figures as you see fit, but the latter won't come close to the former.]
Its different for everyone but I'd say 10% minimum which is still more that the US average.

This is a bit oversimplified but savings rate is the one factor to how long it takes to become financially independent. Most people will want to enjoy life a bit but a high paying thrifty SWE could theoretically save 80% of their income and retire (or be financially independent and work on whatever they want) in about 6 years.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
Fractals on a IBM 1401 Mainframe
You mean like https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...

(And more or less ThinkPad was already sold: from IBM to Lenovo in 2005)
It's both. It's a reminder of a feedback loop:

greenhouse [IR trap] increase of
emissions -------------> global temperatures
^ |
| [methane from |
| melting permafrost] |
-------------------------

It's a consequence, and a warning that it will happen again, and again, and again, until life on this planet is so hard for us that nations will be at each other's throats, just trying to survive, and then we can kiss human civilization goodbye.
WebBundles are built for content-addressable networks
Everything else aside; where do you get the slightest clue from Trump and his life history that he "understands the working class"

Like, that's such a low ball man. Do you understand the working class?
Whilst I've seen this point of view a lot, it strikes me as defeatist. A kind of "I shan't involve myself solving the problems of the world, for inequality now finds equality in death".
I think this is a very important point.

Usually, taxes incentivize companies to spend their profit on making the company better - buy new machines, pay the workers more, invest in r&d. This way, they reduced their taxable profit by spending the money on themselves. The companies profited from getting better, the state (or society) profited from growth and innovation.

Now with reduced taxes, but even more importantly tax evasion and offshoring, this incentive is gone, companies hoard money and pay out to the shareholders.

And that is just lazy. Giving money to the shareholders is like telling your investor that their money is better spent elsewhere.
Node.js Shebang
This is very cool, thanks for sharing!
Instead of making bad Mac Air clones a company should make 1:1 replicas of sturdy, old school, ThinkPads (t420, x230, x220, etc)

There's a market for cheap, reliable, battle tested equipment