skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before WWII French was certainly considered the most important foreign language in continental Europe and English eventually became prevalent only after. (I vividly remember my grandma being somewhat disappointed that we were taught English as the first foreign language in school, instead of French.)

It may not be that far fetched to imagine a 1930s internet ("The League of Thoughts") coming somewhat naturally in French.
I seem to be repeating myself to young whippersnappers, but the web is not the same as the internet.

Here is the early history of the internet/arpanet: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html

The internet clearly predated Minitel. The big difference is that it was not initially used for commerce. It was to link the military with universities.

I joined Xerox in 1985. Two years earlier the network we were on converted from Arpanet to Internet. There might have been some group somewhere in Xerox that was still on the Arpanet but the military were worried about security so they created the Internet. You can call the exact date of the split between arpanet and internet as being the birth of the internet.

Sometime in 1980 I was also involved in hooking up the internet to my college.

Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet.

The web made the internet easier to use - that is true. But before then we still had email and discussion boards and distribution groups. It was all text based and somewhat ugly.
Ask HN: How did you turn your PhD into a startup?
I'm curious to learn more about folks who were able to build companies around their research ideas. Did you have know going into your doctoral studies that there may be commercial applications or discover it along the way. Also curious if there any interesting and complex problems where research applications could translate into business opportunities.
Possibly unpopular opinion: Java's biggest mistake, by far, was annotations that define behavior at runtime.

So now we have consultingware like Spring where if something isn't working, it could because you missed an annotation somewhere, or put the right annotation in the wrong place. Which annotation? Where? Maybe you'll find out a week from now that you made a mistake, when a customer finds a bug in production.

This took all of the compile-time checking goodness that you got from Java and threw it in the garbage. Now you either have to call an expensive consultancy, read books/manuals about your gigantic framework (fun!), go on forums, etc. You can't just use your coding skills.

I still often use Java for my side projects because I love it without runtime annotations, but thank god for the rise of Golang. I'd rather deliver pizza than go back to the misery that is annotation-driven development in Java.
How would you detect that, though?
...right up until Nikola becomes a synonym for Theranos or Enron. The company is public, when it implodes there will be lawsuits and not just from a few private investors.
I wonder how hard the is going to be when Apple Silicon forces us back to non-apple laptops
I mean, Perl is 32 years old.
It's usually not a truth table, the "effect" column is stuff like "call f1 then f2" or "call f2 then f1 then f2 again".

You can transform it into a truth table by pulling these into input variables "f1ShouldBeCalledFirst", "f2ShouldBeCalledFirst" etc, or by using separate table for each binary decision, but that was overkill for my needs and it caused combinatorial explosion. YMMV.
And that’s not even accounting for benefits, which often add a huge amount of cost above and beyond the listed salary.
It seems like 2021 is going to be a big year for BEAM languages.
"The beatles had crap guitars and played anyway."

That reminded me of a video of two guys playing a shit WalMart toy guitar and making something surprisingly listenable.

https://youtu.be/gWPysY0Wis0
Sacrificing freedom & rights for user experience and comfort, that's how we get dictatorships. Apple takes total control but we shouldn't worry because they are "the good guys" acting "on user behalf" ?

We have to distinguish User Experience (short term comfort) from User Respect/Freedom/Rights. Choice is bad for UX, but it is good for avoiding abuses.

If you download FB, Instagram, TikTok, etc. on the app store those are malwares that collect all your data and Apple is doing absolutely nothing about it. ICloud is not even end-to-end encrypted. Let's stop this myth that Apple provides actual privacy.

Apple doesn't care about you, they care about power.

If they need to put "Privacy" in their ads for you to buy it, they'll do it. If they need to keep malwares on the app store to generate revenues, they'll do it (but they'll make sure you believe you are safe thx to their fake privacy propaganda).

It's true other game platforms are closed but first we have more choice :

Mobile gaming = Google or Apple

Home gaming = Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, Linux/Windows/Mac, Steam, Itch.io, GameJolt, Windows store, Epic game store, Origin/Ubisoft/Blizzard, etc.

Second : it's not about gaming only, it's about the right of people to control the device they bought.

Iphone & Google have a far bigger monopoly and control on our life than an Xbox sitting in our living room, so it makes sense to worry about Apple and Google first.
Swift for Linux needs more ecosystem support
It was back when France was still "communist" and managed to make a profit out of it :-)
The Anthropic principle idea that this universe's physical properties can't vary much and produce carbon/hydrogen/oxygen (CHO) based life on the surface of planets is probably not correct and was just popularized many decades ago when the understanding of nuclear physics was not as complete as it is now. The possible paths to a CHO universe with acceptable planet surface conditions were not well explored.

From the linked article:
"Suppose the fine structure constant were in fact 10% different — enough to prevent stellar fusion from producing carbon."

This is an old idea and is probably false (I am not an astro/nuclear physicist) but the author of this in-depth paper is[1]. Fred Adams is at the Physics and Astronomy departments at the University of Michigan and in this 2019 paper[1], with over 500 references, states the fine structure constant can vary by 4 decades/orders of magnitude (decade=log10(max value/min value)). See table two on page 140 for that range and ranges of some other fundamental values. The most constrained value ranges still vary by an order of magnitude (down quark mass and the up-down quark mass difference).

[1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03928.pdf
If you know that a method isn't virtual, calling that method is just a function call with an extra argument for 'this'. If it's virtual, you have to look it up in a vtable, probably dereferencing two pointers in the process and making it harder on your instruction fetcher.

Java makes a lot of common classes final (e.g. String and Optional) so that it can avoid this. As I understand it, it's also got a lot of pixie dust to predict this some of the time, but then you can't rely on it.
No, developers demanded time-limited trials for paid apps, which we had for many years before the App Store.

But Apple _never_ delivered on that. Instead, Apple pushed "subscriptions", which is just another name for rental.
I just switched to Doom from a very trimmed down and customized version of Spacemacs. I liked Spacemacs layer concepts, but many of them I had installed for very basic functionality like syntax highlighting and code formatting, but to get that I had to pull in this huge layer containing multiple packages. Emacs was constantly getting bogged down by Spacemacs or becoming buggy at my attempts to speed it up.

Doom is so much better on the performance end, I don't feel the need to keep an emacs server running all the time just for occasional editing in the terminal. I'm interested to see how well it performs with emacs-native-comp. The Doom ui also feels a lot more cohesive. I've never been a vim user, so I use the default emacs bindings but still have a leader key; Doom's setup with the leader key is really well thought out and I'm glad that vim concept has made its way to emacs.
Show HN: Luggage Storage at Convenient Locations
BagsAway is an alternative to storage lockers! The luggage storage booking platform connects you to secure luggage storage locations in local shops, cafes, and hotels.
Maintainer of ZoneDB (zonedb.org or https://github.com/zonedb/zonedb) here:

We extracted this project from Domainr (https://domainr.com), using tooling that updates the database each day. It’s formatted as a single text file (zones.txt) and associated metadata in JSON files. We also generate a Go package for our own uses (the tooling is written in Go).

It’s similar to the PSL, but where the PSL has wildcards and inverted matches, ZoneDB explicitly lists each “known” zone, including retired or withdrawn names.

https://github.com/zonedb/zonedb/blob/master/zones.txt
What a colleague always told be before I asked him a question: "Remember, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people" :D.
I have exactly the same setup with the addition of a $150 condenser mic for acoustic guitars!
I’m not sure what you mean by “better answers” — is there a better answer to “Why am I not in intergalactic space right now?” than “life can’t form in the emptiness of space”? You can justify that with the causal reasons why life couldn’t form, like there being not enough atoms out of which to form life, no stars to provide energy, etc., but the conclusion is the same: Life can form some places much more easily than others, so we should expect to find ourselves in the places where it forms easily, even if those places are vastly unrepresentative of space in general.
I'm no expert here but from what I've read bacteria can be used as vectors in genetic engineering. I think this is an important point to mention since GMOs are sometimes seen as playing god, while I'm not sure if they are really so different from traditional selective breeding techniques. In the end, we should evaluate these techniques based on how safe they are, rather than thinking about "naturalness".
Just because it’s hard to start a new tree when you’re at the root doesn’t mean the up and coming tree can hire a lumberjack to cut down the existing tree.
"rust community" is not a single organism.

I also think we should understand someone was probably quite excited to see something they liked taken seriously by a company they respect. Maybe in their excitement and rush they user hyperbole.
> but ultimately hinders your customizability and understanding of the text editor you are using.

[Citation Needed] Spacemacs is just elisp. It is documented and you can explore its source the same as anything else in emacs. `SPC h d` + `which-key` is a godsend for learning and understanding what emacs offers.
Valve was dev and publisher for Half-Life so their game is on their platform. Same with EA, Ubisoft etc. AND guess who?

Epic. Dev and publisher for Fortnite. What do you need to install and run to be able to play Fortnite? Epic Games Launcher.
Yes. I predict as many as 0.01% of web users will be using EWW in the year 2025
Yeah this is really the way to go, when you're young you have a principal problem anyways. I think part of what is maybe appealing about larger equity offers is that you're in with no skin, and you have no skin to give so the math seems to work. FAANG (or any public company) is going to solve this problem for you with incentive stock plans and even employee stock purchase plans. If you're going to be smart you're going to need capital before you start going into illiquid and volatile investments anyways, let a big company solve that problem and enjoy youth.
This is part of an issue of "Nature Astronomy" that is focused on climate change: https://astronomycommunity.nature.com/posts/the-climate-issu...
thank you for explaining the rationale behind your decision and taking the time for the AMA
Hey HN!

Some months ago I shared (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500588) a bot I made that finds and curates the best remote jobs and posts them on Telegram channels. More than 500 people joined and the comments were generally good

Now I've created a blog and newsletter where I'll be sharing the best jobs found every week the week for 50+ categories.

I'd love to hear your feedback on it to make it better. What's what you like the least about it?
Well yes, that and actual cheating (the competitive scene if rife with cheating of all kinds).

If AI teammates were allowed to have a pre-developed, shared model between them for communication so the other automatically "knows" what the others moves mean then it would be closer to fair grounds but that's considered cheating even though human teammates do the same thing.
The right way isn't Either / Option (though it's a lot more viable with top-level type inference); it's unchecked exceptions.

Checked exceptions have bimodal usage, from the programmer POV. Either you care about the exception, and you deal with it very close to the throw point, or you don't care about the exception, and it should be handled far far away, across many stack frames.

The former isn't a problem. It's the right thing if e.g. you try to open a file and the file is missing, and you have reasonable error handling logic to retry, open a different file, replace the file and try again, whatever.

The latter is where the issue lies. If you're handling errors far away, then you're handling lots of different errors there, and you're not distinguishing between them, because there's too many different failure modes. You're most likely just in a loop logging errors, or terminating. You're too far from the cause of the exception to do anything specific with it, the context is lost. So the effort to transport the exception type throughout the call graph is pointless.

tl;dr: checked exceptions are fine near the leaf of the call graph, but are increasingly pointless towards the trunk.
You should read the book People Powered by Jono Bacon. Has some really good insights and is a 101 course on exactly this.
A more modern extension: Everything in moderation, especially moderation.
Would you mind expanding a little bit on why this is bad ? I'm fairly new to TS and find myself doing it a lot.
The article notes that this browser was originally written by Lars Ingebrigtsen, probably best known for Gnus. Lars is still hacking away on emacs regularly, you can see his blog posts about his work here: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/
And all for 10 cents worth of potato dust cast into the shape of a chip and covered in sodium.
On the other hand, it is nice when the competition brings something completely different to the table. It serves the needs of people who would never have those needs served by consumer oriented browsers.

While this may not be competition in the "winner takes all" sense, eww is does have to consider what those consumer browsers are offering in the context of its domain of application. If it doesn't, it will lose those users and it's reason for being.
AI ruined chess the same way horse riding ruined running.
Probably because if you’re joining an early stage company you’re inevitably going to get diluted if there are any later rounds. By how much will depend on how the company is performing so they won’t be able to know exactly what this will look like ahead of time. Perhaps putting the percentage in writing opens up some liability down the line as a result.

You should be able to get the number of outstanding shares at the time you join in writing though and then the percentage is trivial to calculate (though as other commenters pointed out you might not be able to get information on any existing liquidation presences investors might have that make it hard to really know what you would get if the company were to sell for x amount...
Use Swift. Go native or go home.

I've prototyped apps with React Native, and it was a dependency nightmare. More time was spent researching and hacking in fixes and dealing with upgrading the app to the latest version than actually building the app.

In contrast, we have an iOS app that was build 11 years ago, and it still runs flawlessly on the latest iOS version. Apple supports their environment, whereas, in ReactNative, even minor versions introduce breaking changes.

Hybrid mobile solutions are a nightmare, unless you're building a basic crud app that doesn't interact with the hardware on the phone. But at that point, just build a solid mobile web applications.
Could you elaborate on how git-timemachine is different from magit, as the latter also lets one navigate the git tree for a given file, doesn't it?
I'd recommend Doom for anyone that wants to base their own configurations on one of these. It's not as big of an abstraction layer on top of vanilla emacs, so it's easier to pull apart and reuse.
This is called “arbitrage”. It takes millions and billions of dollars to play this game.

Keep in mind that the majority of back-end clearing and settlement of trades in Europe is done by Euroclear [0], who reported over 27 Trillion Euros of assets under management in 2015. In the US, virtually all back-end clearing and settlement is handled by DTCC [1], who reported handling over 1.7 Quadrillion dollars worth of value in 2011.

That’s the scale of the market you’re playing in when you first pretend to arbitrage.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroclear
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_...
No, in that example, the TA is very misguided and clearly didn't understand what passive voice is. Passive voice only applies to verbs, and it's often used to invert the object and the subject, occasionally used to emphasis one over another[1]. Unfortunately in English, there are a lot of adjectives that look like verbs in passive voice, examples like "interested" and "motivated" are given in the link you provided. The Edinburgh professor is not wrong either, he just thought every university teaches in America teaches passive voice the wrong way. Not in my case.

[1]: https://www.ef.com/ca/english-resources/english-grammar/pass...
This is good. it should be a setting.

And there's already a good bit of parity because macos natively supports many (emacs style) linux keystrokes (for example control-a beginning of line, control-e end of line)
Apple has made a decision not to target folks who want direct downloads. They are targeting a different (and very large and lucrative group). They've also managed to block direct download of built in / unremovable apps by carriers and to some degree pioneered the direct to consumer model of cell phone sales, all consumer benefits.

One result - they have a pretty high level of trust among users. And so they can charge a pretty remarkable premium. This level of control has also made them popular for developers. Their ecosystem has a much more consistent development experience, many more users are on a relatively recent iOS and the per user spending is far higher to name just a few elements.

Many of these things are benefits for DEVELOPERS. Sony and Microsoft make the PS and XBOX, also closed systems with networks they hope benefit developers.

And finally, does apple have an obligation to help developers make money or is their focus more properly on consumers?
Control, as an example, is free of third party DRM on Steam. Ditto Journey and BTS. Compare Control with Doom Eternal's pages:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/870780/Control_Ultimate_E...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/782330/DOOM_Eternal/
The Degree of Fine-Tuning in Our Universe – and Others
Reason is another really solid, well-supported virtual instrument suite.
For extracting news articles: https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Didn't Bush and Obama do the same thing with their allegiance to Saudi Arabia? Recruit a bunch of kids, send them to be maimed and kill civilians...

Does your sense of morality and ethics end at the border, shouldn't these types of values be a bit more universal?
Yeah, I use S3 myself for a static website (as well as podcast hosting and misc other stuff). But the lack of hard cost circuit breakers make me hesitant to recommend AWS in general to beginners for casual storage and hosting.
I think the problem with Discman is they didn't stay fashionable for as long. My first Walkman was my dad's old one from high school. And they didn't really fade completely until the 2000s.

The early model of Discman skipped really bad, so anyone listening to music while doing some physical activity mostly stuck with Walkman. It wasn't until memory was cheap enough that they could have decent buffers that people started using CD players more, but not long after that, MP3 players started to become popular.

CDs were more of a car thing. Everyone at my high school had those big ass books of CDs in their cars, even if they all also Rios for personal listening. Then the big 20GB HDD-based MP3 players came out and that's what everyone had.
Inlining and outlining are per se probably some of the least destructive optimizations for debugging: they don't affect the order or existence of instructions, compared to the naïve translation model, merely where it is located within the executable.

(Admittedly, generating the debugging records to be able to refer to variables in the non-outlined portion of the function from the outlined function is probably not done, although it's probably doable with the current DWARF expression syntax. This is much like how most of the <optimized out> variables you see in gdb could be specified with DWARF information but aren't because the compiler doesn't maintain the information.)
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted.

I’d add that it’s a lot of work moderating and dealing with the drama that online communities tend to create.

Nowadays there are also legal implications, with certain jurisdictions making you liable for user-submitted content.

Unless you’re really passionate about creating a community of like-minded individuals, I wouldn’t bother.
The text in the book whether paper or electronic is digital, like PCM or JPEG. The slides and vinyl decay gradually and irrecoverably even within a lifetime.

You can illustrate the principle well enough with your player built "out of a motor and a piece of paper" but the music will be too distorted to want to listen to it. So I don't think this has much practical meaning.

The use of digital data means the CD transport is completely independent of the music on a CD, if you aren't interested in spinning plastic discs and laser diodes you can dispense with that part and keep all the audio as it was - and indeed of course in fact we mostly did. The sound of vinyl is wedded to the physical manifestation, the grooves, the stylus, the rotating disc, but PCM data doesn't care how it is stored.
Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Google...

Subscription models produce lots of recurring revenue, so companies absolutely adore that model when they can get away with it.
The keyword here is "sift". Sifting physical records curated by someone else is (still) much better for discovery than app recommendations.
Lichess has great variants to play. If you haven't tried crazyhorse or multi-player version bughouse, highly recommend it. In crazyhorse you can put captured enemy anywhere on the board as your own piece.

Likewise in bughouse, you play with a partner (where you are opposite colors) against another team. You each play your own game against the opponent but each opponent piece you capture you can give to your partner to place on their board and vice versa. First person to win the game wins for their team. It requires good communication and a different strategies than traditional chess as you need to account for two games and the flow of pieces on both boards.