skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. The first language I ever used/learned was batch to script things in windows. When I learned python shortly after I recall it taking quite a bit of convincing myself to accept/use the "magic" of control flow being able to automatically jump back after a function returned as I was so used to manually wiring up all my gotos (was more of a painful experience than an 'ah-ha' I guess...)

2. When I was going through Tim Roughgarden's Algorithms course and saw the derivation of runtime complexity for mergesort and finally understood/visualized what a logarithm actually did (in school it was just taught as some rote function to help you manipulate eqautions of the form y=b^x)

3. Learning how TCP works from the bottom up. I think the biggest aha moment was when the textbook I was reading explained the TCP algorithm as a state machine that's just running on the client and server machines with the rest of the underlying network just forwarding packets, i.e. "pushing the complexity to the edge of the network".

4. Working through the nand2tetris project resulted in a lot of "oh X is just basically this at its core"

5. When going through a textbook explaining how relational database engines were implemented and seeing that they're essentially just using disk-persisted hash tables and self-balancing search trees to build indices on columns and make `select`s O(1)/O(log) time (I wasn't taught this in my uni's database course and assumed there was some fancy magic going on to make queries fast)

6. Realizing that I could just do a form of graph search/dependency resolution when learning a new codebase/trying to understand how a function works. I think before seeing someone do this in front of me I would usually just panic at the thought of "thousands of lines of code" rather than just "keep iteratively diving into the functions being called". Whenever I'm learning a new language, the first thing I'll do is setup the LSP plugin in vim so that I can quickly navigate up and down call graphs. Tbh I don't understand how some developers claim to not need this and instead just manually grep+open file in order to "jump to definition".

7. Forcing myself to derive the rotation logic for AVL trees. I was curious if, given just the high level properties of how an AVL tree behaves in order to guarantee O(log) time lookups, if I would be able to figure out all the rotation cases. Was a very rewarding exercise and something I plan on writing a blog post about (eventually...)

(edit)

8. Learning about the log data structure and how state can be replicated by replaying/executing this stream of transformations/updates.
Good sarcasm needs an element of absurdity or irony. Pathos and non-sequitur alone aren't usually sufficient.
that is still way WAY more than enough to justify it's utility.
Surprisingly, no mention of Cracker Jack's 3D lenticular images, which I remember as common in the 70s and 80s.

I'd imagine any kid from back then got at least one 3D photo of a gopher standing on its hind legs, with the admonition from other kids to squeeze the sides of the lenticular photo inwards so that the paper curved concave, to improve the 3D effect.

(Or maybe it was a marmot: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/doEAAOSwFpVbV73H/s-l1600.jpg)
These are all great points, but we can do more to accelerate the electrification of everything and the deprecation of petroleum for all but the most niche use cases.

We’re almost to the point that non essential combustion should be banned after a reasonable amount of time.
Ancient Judean dates grown from 2k-year-old seeds
Testing Compilers Thoroughly by Being Less Conservative About Undefined Behavior [pdf]
Reread the comment you are replying to (especially the context of "than") and consider the scale of the resources invested in the military.

DARPA accounts for a pretty small part of the military budget and is probably not the reason for poverty.
No that would be wrong, good business model would be to create a specialized platform to resolve customers' issues fast and easy and charge companies for the access to that specialized service. I had a similar idea like this one but unlike this platform I didn't want to do it publicly but privately.

Advantage of doing this publicly is that you can create sort of question-and-answer site where users can search for specific complaint they have or find similar one.
Very interesting. But I'm not totally clear -- what does this mean for compatibility with v1?

The article states that hybrid torrents that support v1 and v2 can be created. But what does this mean for end-users (clients)?

Will most torrent software be upgraded to support both v1 and v2? And will a client be forced to choose from the v1 or v2 swarm, or will it be able to download from and seed to both?

I mean it seems like clients would participate in both swarms -- I'd just like to know if that's confirmed.

Also, is is possible to add v2 to existing torrents "retroactively"? Who would do that? Or would this solely be for new torrents moving forwards?
Sylvan Clebsch now is on Project Verona, alongside David Chisnall that used to contribute to GNUStep and also researcher on CHERI CPU.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-ver...

The Imperial College hosts a Microsoft Research unit.
Realtime is both software and hardware.

A realtime OS won't do much preemption, probably would rather stick to cooperative scheduling.

On the hardware side, explicit cache controls are big in realtime chips. Your programmers know exactly which data is in cache and what isn't, and therefore can accurately plan how long tasks take.

The MMU traditionally wasn't realtime. I wonder how they managed to get realtime controls with virtual memory. (They must have some kind of guarantee on TLB lookups or something)
The Amiga and CD-ROMs
I don't know why named parameters haven't been added to C over the last 40 years. We had named struct initializers for 20 years.
Non-amp link https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/apr/16/recipes...
I just watched the video and in context, suspending this guy does a disservice to: the student, who must learn to listen and process in context; the educator, who must teach without fear; and the school, that loses revenue because it becomes both feared and a laughing stock. If I've somehow been misled, I don't mean to offend, but seriously, this does not bode well for anyone in higher education.
There's also a path through tidal flats to the island of Lindisfarne in extreme Northeast England. (There's also a causeway for cars although that is covered at high tide as well.) People do need to get rescued every now and then.
Although if celticninja is a 60-70yo from Mongolia, they are presumably an outlier for posting here.
How to Transition from iOS Engineer to Distributed Systems Engineer?
I have been working for about 4 years as an iOS engineer at a large company. I have gotten the chance to work on some pretty high profile things, and it seems like I would have a good career trajectory here, but I'm just not interested in working on apps anymore.

I _think_ what I'm interested in now are distributed systems. The problems that interest me are the challenges of building systems that are efficient, correct, and can scale to millions of users. I have read a bunch of papers on the theoretical side of distributed systems, and it seems like it would be fun to work on these problems.

Ideally I would like to stay at my current company because of my unvested RSUs, and my company does have some open distributed systems engineer positions. I fear that I would currently be rejected outright because I don't have any work experience building distributed systems and so I need some way to demonstrate proficiency/potential. This is challenging because my current job is far removed from distributed systems.

Here is my current plan:
- Set up 1:1 chats with hiring managers to better understand what their engineers do, and what they are looking for. Also ask them what I can do to improve my application. My company encourages these type of chats.

- Work on some distributed systems side-projects. Some ideas: Implement a simple form of Raft/Paxos, build a simple distributed key value store, multi-player load balanced game. I could also simulate traffic to demonstrate how well the system scales, and could try different approaches to see the perf impact.

Any other suggestions for how I can transition into a distributed systems engineering position?
I would expect the justice system in SF to come down hard on those bike hunters. Wonder how they get away with it.
Yep, the connectors on those things can have intermittent contact. If you're uploading data to the SD card live while in flight, those intermittent connections can screw up your data. The workaround is to use a flash chip to write live data to it and then once the rocket lands, dump all of it to the SD card.
If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes.

Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews: our first promotion case in 2 years is the colleague who performatively did no work for months while the manager was out, bullied me for continuing to schedule and work with our partner teams, and encouraged another co-worker to have a meltdown about it that cost them significantly.
>I guess mobile internet was its downfall as few people want to seed from a mobile connection.

CGNAT has a lot to answer for, too
That's basically what happens with mobile data plans in India. Fixed speeds, pay X amount per 1 or 1.2 GB
"And immediately my issue was eventually resolved." - from their testimonial.
I'm against that business model better one would be charging companies not users and in that sense all customers should be treated equally, only customers that maybe should have priority are business users.
>Netflix’s success is from being first to market

Plenty of companies are first to market and don't win the market. Also, Amazon Video predates Netflix streaming and Hulu was out only a year later.
Please check "Are paywalls ok?" at hacker news [FAQ](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

Also, previous discussion about WSJ:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938
It is being researched at Imperial College London, which hosts a Microsoft Research unit, it was brought there as Sylvan Clebsch joined Microsoft.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/pony-co-desig...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-ver...
Why won't ISPs stop advertising 'unlimited' service that is actually limited to N gigabytes a month, where N is substantially lower than what's possible given the speeds they provide?

Because they can get away with it.
I gave it a minute. Not very funny, frankly.
I think there is a point to be had that GPT-3 is nowhere near human level in its responses, but is that really the bar to set? It seems extremely high.

Unfortunately the hype surrounding GPT-3 (and deep learning before it) wrongly implies we are making great strides towards AGI; it's inevitable people then ask for the evidence and set the bar so.
I estimate that thousands of people use torrent every day since 20 years. I use it very often. maybe it's just that nobody uses it in your close network
Why the “noise makers” among us can’t code
It even manages to evade the usual "Show simplified view" bottom bar that Chrome mobile shows when it detects that a page is likely hard to read.

Rather ironically, you get a much more readable view if you select "Desktop site" in the Chrome mobile menu and then double-tap the main text column.
Why do you think they are abusive to their workforce? They are clear about their culture and pay top dollar for engineering talent. There are no surprises when you join.
My wife arranged this and ended up getting just as much work thrown at her, working just as much, but getting paid less and next to zero promotability. She obviously went back to full time after about six months.
I suspect that they have an overengineering vision. This could originate from a culture very strongly (excessively, in this perspective) centered on engineering.

They have a very positive view of their recommendations, like they have of their customized thumbnails.

Yet I, and all of my friends, find the recommendations nearly useless, and I also find the thumbnails mostly ugly.
I consider shellcheck absolutely essential if you're writing even a single line of Bash. I also start all my scripts with this "unofficial bash strict mode" and DIR= shortcut:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

### Bash Environment Setup
# http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/
# https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Set-Builtin.html
# set -o xtrace
set -o errexit
set -o errtrace
set -o nounset
set -o pipefail
IFS=$'\n'

DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"

I have more tips/tricks here: https://github.com/pirate/bash-utils/blob/master/util/base.s...
China Bans Scratch
Lots of companies use BT in a datacenter environment to efficiently distribute binaries to a large number of hosts.
This is where Brave had a good idea with their micropayments to content providers [1], based on the sites you visited.

You may not agree with their execution, and I don't think it will ever work, but I wish it did.

* [1] https://creators.brave.com/
Thanks!
Currently there is no way to de-colour, or erase, a face. I admit it, it's a pretty important feature that's still missing, it's the next thing I will add to the editor.
FAANG = Netflix
Nearly all of the "heavy lifting" as it were are C or C++ libraries. Python is just the 'plumbing' level. It is not dissimilar to using MATLAB where the drivers are all optimized code but the connection between them is MATLAB.

This design pattern is a common of nearly all SDR frameworks (Gnuradio, Redhawk, Pothos, Etc.) The "interconnect" between processing elements is typically shared memory, and that is why it lends itself to GPU work as well.

That said, since my head is most comfortable thinking in C, I tend to write stuff in C rather than Python :-).
Lmao, you might be alone on this one. Also, doesn't your theory mean that child-free monogamous couples who both WFH are the real winners?
Watch “Hunter.x.Hunte .x264.AST4u.mp4” on Vıvo
I sometimes discover these old protocols when I am testing things on localhost and using traditional netcat. The original nc does automatic reverse DNS lookups. rje was assigned port 77. I knew about rje from using port 77 but I had not read this.
Do you know if the `--` trick mentioned in the article to stop option scanning works with all bash programs? I thought parsing was up to the program itself. Is it just a widely used convention?
I hate everything about WFH. I like travelling to a different environment each day, interacting with my colleagues, being in a space designed for work (proper seating and desks, aircon), looking someone in the eye when I'm talking to them, feeling the bustle of the city centre when I go for a stroll at lunch. Working from home makes me feel like a widget at the end of an internet connection.

Then again I don't have children and I cycle to work so maybe that's the difference.
Founding CTO or Starting CTO or Initial CTO?
Rating and social media systems give the strongest voice to your worst customers.

I run a few SaaS apps and by far the majority of my time spent in support is dealing with unreasonable customers. In the past, SaaS apps used to be able to ignore them but now they hold your company hostage with threat of bad reviews.

It's true that these systems could be used for good - letting other users know about issues with a product. In my experience, it's not how they're being used in practice. These people want special treatment and they get it - from me, and from everyone else.

It's really not fair to my other customers. I'd love to refund these unreasonable people entirely and send them on their way. I don't want their business. But the damage is just too great for refusal of service. One 1-star review is as powerful as ten 5-star reviews.

I'd like to see a rating and social media system that tracks the average rating of these customers across platforms. I'm sure it's overall negative for those on the attack.

These often verbally abusive, entitled customers are a real problem. They increase the cost for those not willing to be as pushy/loud/abusive. Giving them an even stronger voice is not a step forward.
Or Archer Crazy Cyborg vs. Space-Bot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqSvbkTLevQ
," he said, on an ARPA-funded network.
1. When I realized that there's a thing called "computer science", and you can actually study things related to programming. It's not just ad hoc tricks written by experienced and bearded C programmers. You see, I'm self-taught from an early age, and learnt programming via skimming "VB for Dummies" when I was 8 y.o. or so. I didn't know anyone at all that knew how to program. It would take another decade before I met someone who knew how to program.

2. When I read K&R at the age of 14. Before that, I had just followed random tutorials that I found on the internet. From that point on, I went straight to the source (no pun intended) when it comes to learning new stuff.
One of my co-workers setup and office in his garage for this purpose. Even though he had an "office" of sorts in his house with his computer and all, it didn't provide enough separation to switch his head-space, especially because he'd potentially be in there on his computer for reasons besides work. So he setup a separate office with separate equipment for work. When done, he just leaves the garage. The point being the commute might not need to be that long. Just a signal to your brain your done.
Apple Delays Privacy Change Amid App Publishers’ Concerns
Why would the that be the protocol's responsibility?
Dropping the N seemed both potentially confusing and offensive - you can rest assured I'm not pining for Netflix from Netflix :p
What kind of a paywall does WSJ have? I always get a wall.

Is it X articles free per month, or do they allow only crawlers on their sites?
I worked on CYC (in fact I designed all the low level datastructures and the level architecture) and indeed it was an amusing bug in the higher levels of the system.

Certainly CYC had no sense of fiction (when I was there) which is a very important function I agree, but that wasn’t within the project scope, at least back then.
Passing structs to functions is bad bad/Creates functions with 14 parameters instead.
Amazon deleted 20K product ratings after investigation found paid-for reviews
Thaw just the slices you need in the toaster until it is warm but not yet actual toast
Show HN: Iterate on MVPs 10x Faster
Hey everyone! Founder of Abstra here. We've just launched our Beta version and we are eager for any feedback.

If you have any criticism or comments regarding Abstra I'll be online here to answer ASAP. Any feedback is very valuable for us. Thanks!
It is anecdotal, so I should have phrased it more carefully. When I was in mainland China about 15 years ago I talked to several people eager to practice their English, in various regions.

They were aware. One kid in particular I remember vividly having that conversation.

But this was a very small sample.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentially_visible_set
I'm not sure if this is precisely what you are looking for, but it's been on my radar for a while for a potential upcoming project. It has limitations (64-bit Windows only, for one) which is why I haven't acted on it yet. But it is part of my pre-project research just the same.

https://github.com/taroz/GNSS-SDRLIB
Italy Is Investigating Apple, Dropbox, and Google
I can’t believe the reactionary comments to this.

Of course, we have no idea of the context. But if it was anything like the linked video - and it could have been worse - it’s perfectly understandable why students would be surprised and perhaps upset.

If you disagree, its worth asking yourself, what reaction would you expect if you were a chinese professor enunciating the word “cunt” during a lecture, with no prior warning?
Another project from the Long Now Foundation that people might find interesting is Long Bets (https://longbets.org/), a site for charitable wagers based around longer term predictions of the future. With the site approaching 20 years old now, we're starting to see many of the medium term bets coming up for settlement, and it's interesting to look back and see what people were predicting around the turn of the century.

Some of the ones I found particularly interesting that are/will be settled this decade:

Bet 12 (https://longbets.org/12/) - No one will win a Nobel Prize for string theory by 2020

Bet 1 (https://longbets.org/1/) - The Turing test will not be passed by 2029

Bet 4 (https://longbets.org/4/) - Pilotless passenger planes will be routine by the end of the decade.

Bet 712 (https://longbets.org/712/) - A commercial driverless car service will be available (in Las Vegas)

The site was also somewhat notable for the "million dollar bet" (https://longbets.org/362/) between Warren Buffet and Protege Partners about whether a curated portfolio of hedge funds would outperform the S&P500 over a ten year span.
DARPA has driven a lot of research in self-driving cars, space exploration, internet infrastructure (TOR for example), neural implants and so on. It's budget is also lower than some weapon systems that have never even gone into production.

I dislike the american military-industrial complex, but if I had to keep one thing from it it might be DARPA.
> Why not stick with SHA-1 but also add SHA-256 for verification for clients that support it?

Apparently you can do that with 'hybrid' magnet links.

The problem is the two swarms are different so as more people move over to v2 the v1 swarms will become smaller and smaller -- thus giving people an incentive to upgrade, I suppose.

...and they seem to have solved more than one minor issue since they were breaking things anyway...
Not necessarily even lower latency, just predictable.
> I'd like to see a rating and social media system that tracks the average rating of these customers across platforms.

How much would you pay for such an analytics and customer grading system?
The trick is to book them with a couple of like minded people. Nice quiet private office basically and your calendar looks like it’s already full so people don’t book you into useless meetings.
I saw a reddit comment not long ago that said something along the lines of "Intelligence is knowing that the word niggardly has a non-racist etymology. Wisdom is deciding not to say it anyways because it's not worth the hassle" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...)
Ouch. There are definitely pitfalls along this path. And if the manager doesn’t understand what the deal implies I’m sure it can be very hard and stressful. Too bad it didn’t work out for your wife.
DOS games in the browser using Web Assembly
When I deeply meditate, I can sometimes make subjective time go faster, so that I can look at clouds and they look time-lapse.
Key to Preventing Covid-19 Indoors: Ventilation
The same happened in Italy, but I think that the change happened after dubbed American movies started using the Italian word to translate the n word. This associated the originally neutral word to offensive contexts, so the word meaning started changing for those who learned it in those contexts.
It's not legal, therefore it's not practical? That doesn't make any sense at all.
Some notable ones off the top of my head include the Internet, GPS, computer mice (and basically the foundation of UI that uses them), onion routing, and prosthetic limbs.

Compare DARPA's $3B budget to e.g. the DoD's $650-700B budget. You can argue that either or both should be spending some portion of their budget on "the people" in a myriad of ways, but that argument gets way too close to personal politics for an engagement here to be worthwhile, IMO. Don't forget to vote!
> It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward.

The hash it relies on is broken, so their hand has been forced.