skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My last job was on the billing team at a payments company, so my perspective is colored almost entirely by that (somewhat traumatic) experience. To be fair, it may not be as representative of business in general as I think.

We had an app store, so maybe a merchant would pay $5 monthly for an app that made their cash register double as a time clock. It was my team's job to slice that pie.

We keep $1, the bank that sold them the cash register gets $1, and the app developer gets $3. Or something.

But the merchants and the developers all live in various countries, so the "billing solutions" that we had to partner with in order to ensure that everybody gets their slice of the pie couldn't just accept "Give Joe $1" they had to know what the money was for so that they could justify the fees they were extracting from this pipe of money.

The smart way to do this would be to get all stakeholders to agree on a few hundred lines of code that would handle whatever regulatory needs they were on the hook for. That code would go in a smart contract and then we could use a blockchain as a single source of truth for the data.

Instead we had four companies all with their own separate, private databases, all attempting to reach consensus about what was owed to whom and why--usually based on out of date information from various channels.

What we needed were distributed systems engineers, and what we got was four stacks of middlemen and a directive to multiplex money between them. If they add a fifth stack of middlemen, the codebase will explode.

At least for me, once I saw one egregious inefficiency that would be solved by financial consensus algorithms I started seeing them everywhere.

Take wireless service for example. Why do we have several separate overlapping cell networks? Wouldn't it be better to have one big network and just pay the nearest network operator per-kilobyte? The only reason that doesn't work is that such a volume of USD payments would constitute more in fees than it did in payments.

----

Sorry for the rant. The point is that the way we do accounting in USD is so saturated by middlemen that it takes weeks for them to agree and allow money to move anywhere. During those weeks, the accounting complexity continues to increase.

Since our money moves so slowly, each company has to build at least two billing systems--one to handle the debts as they occur and another to move the money (usually monthly) to resolve the debts. But if the money can move as fast as the debts accrue, then you only need to build one billing system, and you don't have to pay an army of middlemen to badly approximate consensus.

It's not about the token itself, it's about the practices in place around that token. The people who occupy privileged positions in the ebb and flow of USD haven't had reason to change their ways for a very long time. The alternatives, on the other hand, are evolving rapidly.
I got it to go 2.5 km away on a very long beach, so it always had line-of-sight. It didn't lose control, so I imagine it could have gone farther (but probably wouldn't have enough battery to come back).
Gateway PCs Are Back
Show HN: Neural Image Compression Demo
Hi everyone, I've been working on an implementation of a model for learnable image compression together with general support for neural image compression in PyTorch. You can try it out directly and compress your own images in Google Colab [1] or checkout the source on Github [2].

This project is based on the paper "High-Fidelity Image Compression" by Mentzer et. al. [3] - this was one of the most interesting papers I've read this year! The model is capable of compressing images of arbitrary size and resolution to bitrates competitive with state-of-the-art compression methods while maintaining a very high perceptual quality. At a high-level, the model jointly trains an autoencoding architecture together with a GAN-like component to encourage faithful reconstructions, combined with a hierarchical probability model to perform the entropy coding.

What's interesting is that the model avoids compression artifacts associated with standard image codecs by subsampling high-frequency detail in the image while preserving the global features of the image very well - for example, the model learns to sacrifice faithful reconstruction of e.g. faces and writing and use these 'bits' in other places to keep the overall bitrate low.

The overall model is around 700MB - so transmitting the model wouldn't be particularly feasible, and the idea is that both the sender and receiver have access to the model, and can transmit the compressed messages between themselves.

If you have any questions or notice something weird I'd be more than happy to address them.

---

[1] Colab Demo: https://colab.research.google.com/github/Justin-Tan/high-fid...

[2]: Github: https://github.com/Justin-Tan/high-fidelity-generative-compr...

[3]: Original paper: https://hific.github.io/

[4]: Sample reconstructions: https://github.com/Justin-Tan/high-fidelity-generative-compr...
This is exactly the problem, of the people you listed, only perhaps freidland and patton meet GPs definition of cancel culture. The others got backlash for doing incendiary, public things, which doesn't meet the definition given by GP.

Hsu, Weinstein, and Boghossian definitely do not meet GPs definition. After a second look, Freidland also does not. He was fired by netflix solely due to their preferences and without any sort of external hubbub at all. (I'm also not clear how Friedland's firing meets any definition of cancel culture, so I'd like to hear your definition as well).
Something to integrate into your thought; the unregulated water table that allows agriculture to tap deeper and deeper and deplete the aquifers to keep CA the '5th largest economy' in the world.

How much does that contribute to the general aridness of the area?
So is Google fuchsia - it is even capability based. (But Google is not cool here around HN circles, despite their contributions to open source and fostering one of good engineering environments, they aren't cool because they don't shout some Privacy buzzword like Apple.) Also it is not written in rust, which is webshit-favorite-of-the-month.

Redox is still Unix like, it moderately changes the file paradigm. Microkernel Unix clones are not new. They mention Minix as inspiration while there is no mention of L4 which did lot of work in microkernel performance.
You are under the impression that I’m flippant with what I say, as if operating in this industry for as long as I have, and dealing with various regulators for years, hasn’t trained me to be careful! Any government agent can feel free to google me! And go fuck themselves.
> "It's a transcript of the following talk by R. Martin with some substitutions made (SmallTalk -> Haskell, Ruby -> Rust, and others)"

I kept wondering why I'm wasting my time reading this, until the end, only to find that this is the style of Uncle Bob.
> or, with €100 down, €78 a month – roughly what most Parisians pay for an all-zone metro and suburban rail pass.

Not exactly true: by law, employers must pay half of that amount, so most Parisian pay €38/mo for that "all-zone metro and suburban rail pass". If you don’t work, that’s free. Pretty much nobody pays the full amount.
I may not be explaining this well... But it's very effective at dissolving or softening asphalt, and so it's used to compact the material and finish it into a smooth surface for final rolling/compaction.
Pure politics, flagged.
A key fact is always omitted from these stories.

So far as we know, nowhere in nature does any organism make a membrane de novo. Every membrane in use anywhere came from extending an existing membrane, and maybe splitting it.

So, arguably, the real basic stuff of life is not nucleotides, but the primordial membrane we are still busy extending.

One thing we can be certain about is that the world where life originated was very little like today's. Besides lacking oxygen, whatever got in the water stayed until it degraded or stuck to something else. Today, anything of any value gets eaten in short order.

We can imagine seas teeming with random nucleotides and RNA. A remarkably simple RNA can reproduce others it bumps into. Once any two of them encountered one another, the seas would instantly be filled with (near) copies of whichever was even infinitesimally faster at it. It wouldn't matter if they were unstable, because they would always be making more.

When you have trapped some in a semipermiable membrane, you are most of the way to life as we know it.
It is not a whole lot of new concepts as rust crowd likes to portray it.
Diapers to Bricks: A $100B Plastic Challenge
Correct me if I'm wrong but the culprits for the fires are Eucalyptus trees imported from Australia. It seems a bit backwards that American Indians would know how Australian Aborigines dealt with forests.
The right language choice for a problem space is a force-multiplier.

I don't think 'several times more productive for the at least some of the cases where it was designed to excel' is a particularly strong claim; the devil is in asking 'which cases are those?'.
Maybe because Amazon App store used to cough up one paid app for free / day to get users to use their store.
> You can close an AppleID, thereby deleting donload info

That's not what GDPR requires. I am sure Apple has a way to request to delete sensitive info such as app purchases without loss of service, or else they d be in violation in EU.

> to aim at Apple is to ask if the data is anonymised.

I can't see a way in which my app purchases could be anonymized (then it wouldn't be personal information)
US budget deficit soars to $3tn record
If you look at the links I provided, you’ll see they have much better wildfire results than their immediate neighbors (who deal with the same climate) and also that their own results have improved over time significantly despite forest size increasing (more fuel load). I think their approaches warrant a deep examination and we should learn from their successes, even if their scale is different. For example, why wouldn’t compartmentalization via a dense road network and forest management work in the US? Sure the worst wind driven wildfires may still take place but there are many more that would be prevented. I don’t think the scale impacts how well their approaches would translate.
Tesla Fails to Escape Nikola’s Truck Design Patent Claims
Allowing multiple app stores inherently breaks the 'curated' feature. It would make it like on my PC, where I have to install 10s of 'stores' to access individual pieces of software. Perhaps you think this is a positive thing, I don't.

One possible workaround would be for Apple to allow additional stores/sideloading, but all apps available via this method would need to also be available via the Apple store, if accepted. Not sure how this would be enforced though.
A possibility I just considered was a whitelabel option so that email vendors like Fastmail could offer it as part of their subscription... integrate to their contacts and calendars and let them to do the work of that, similar to how you're letting Google do the lifting on their side.

I pay for the following subscriptions/software as a tech user (I do some development, but most of my work is design and management):

* Fastmail business (I've got email in the archive back to 1998)

* Microsoft Office for Mac

* Dash

I see my subs as a monthly work/business cost, so I'd see Mimestream as "worth" somewhere around the $10/month price point. I'm just one data point though :)

The company I work with/for uses a combination of GSuite and things like Lucidchart/Confluence/JIRA, but that's their choice :)
The government will revoke their license and file charges against the executives / fiduciaries for violating their laws. Exchanges operate under the laws of the countries they are based in, many of which are offshore (Cayman, Seychelles, etc.) which have less strict rules than US / EU / UK exchanges. Of course you lose legal protections as a customer, but the free market has not been valuing those protections as much as statists would want you to believe their value is.
Compared with cpp yes. There are some bumps but God it's still incomparable.
Though I'm curious if the "reusable" trend is more of the same. Are single-use bags and straws really that bad for the environment, and do reusables get reused enough times to make a difference, or is a reusable straw just another thing to make money on? (Not that I imagine reusable straws is a lucrative enough industry to be worthy of dedicated political lobbying teams, but who knows).
Unless you are Goldman Sachs, the NSA or someone else who is being specifically targeted this is always true.

Otherwise, switching ports or making your systems a bit different to the others on the internet means the majority of hackers - 'bots', 'scanners' and 'script kiddies' will move on to easier targets.

On the internet you don't have to outrun the bear, you just need to run faster than some other guy.
Murakami translations change a lot more than you would expect
What's one trillion more
Oh great. More cars. Just what Paris needs. Also, it's an alternative to a scooter, but much bigger and more massive. This is "safer" -- for the driver. Less so for the people they will hit.
>> I've been here over 40 years and I don't ever remember fires blanketing our entire state in smoke for extended periods of time until recently.

This stuff was not uncommon over the hundreds of years of this country's history. As other commenters have mentioned, it's lasted for decades in the American East, West, and particularly Midwest.

Climate change is an issue, but saying this stuff never happens and (presumably human-led) climate change is the sole reason is not really likely to be true.
45 kmph (28 mph) is still pretty fast for Parisian streets. I'd feel nervous about letting 14-year olds without a license drive these cars.
Is there a button to play the sounds on the site?
I'm 30 years old and don't have a driving licence. Many people learn to drive because their parents paid for lessons. Mine did not.

In university and since, I lived in many different countries. I haven't had a long-term visa. Currently I'm in New Zealand. Here it takes 2 years to get a driving licence. If my residency visa is approved, I'll be able to start learning to drive. For now, I use an old rusty bicycle that I bought from a scrapyard for $20. It would be nice to have a vehicle like that in Paris, because it would cover my head when it rains.

Legislation was intended to educate and protect people, and that is good. The problem is that the educators realised they had a captive market, ramped up prices, and now entire market segments (foreigners, young people) are excluded. Compared to the dangers of other mobility options (e.g. scooters), I think the Ami is much safer. It would be interesting to see how it is treated in other areas of law (parking fines, collisions) compared to bicycles.
no we didn’t get lucky. We started fighting fires which used to occur naturally. That leads to accumulation of unhealthy forest growth which eventually burns in a big way (now).

And of course other effects like PG&E not maintaining their grid => unnecessary fires; more people live in forests => more deadly/damaging fires; etc.

As usual, looking at data and scientific consensus will help, I just hope we start doing so sooner, rather than later
I'm not a vegan of any sort, but one day I realized that I hadn't eaten meat for really long time and I didn't really want to anymore. That must have something to do with fruits: there's definitely some almost material "energy" in them and eating sandwiches with meat feels like chewing paper sometimes. 10 years ago my diet was almost entirely meat.
I agree with this story, but I would add one more thing (which so far, Rust doesn't suffer from, but is starting to sneak in with const functions).

Haskell suffered from people showing some great idea could be implemented in Haskell, without actually producing working finished code people could see.

For me the classic example is ripgrep. I remember seeing tutorials about how regexes could be nearly and efficently done in Haskell, but it was Rust and ripgrep which made a day-to-day useful tool, which gives me confidence I can also use Rust to do useful things.

Of course, I'm not saying everything has to be useful code, but having some commonly used programs in your language does help it seem practical. Haskell does have some great stuff (pandoc comes to mind), but very little considering its age, and compared to Rust.
This article is not about the "streaming" you are thinking about. It is about using your PC as wireless speakers, i.e. streaming your phone audio to your PC.
> As one might have guessed, this is not an essay. It's a transcript of the following talk by R. Martin with some substitutions made (SmallTalk -> Haskell, Ruby -> Rust, and others). You are free to make any conclusions from this.

I don't find this particularly interesting. Starting from the first questionable statement,

> Not because Rust is Haskell without HKTs

I was wondering why the article had so many inaccuracies.

Fundamentally, Haskell did not clearly solve any particular problem with other languages. There are a lot of cool things you can do in Haskell, and arguably, there are problems in other languages that aren't issues in Haskell. But the advantages of Haskell were never as clear cut as Rust.

In addition, Rust has already seen uptake on a level that Haskell never has. What's the most important Haskell project? Pandoc? Haxl? On the other hand, many companies have already started building core infra in Rust. Facebook with Mononoke, Libra, Eden, and Hack. Dropbox for storage servers. Mozilla with Firefox.

I think Rust has a bright future, and I don't think the analogy with Haskell is right at all.

EDIT: Judging from some of the other comments, I'm perhaps not surprised that GPT-3 achieved some success on HN.
You can work around that somewhat by crumpling aluminum foil up and shoving it inside aluminum cans, although that might not be worth the hassle either.
"Haskell in its time was at the forefront of functional programming. It was the language that kind of characterized or epitomized what FP was really about. There were other languages that were functional, but they were only sort of functional. And of course, I'm talking about languages like Scala, or JavaScript. Those were the two major competitors during the same mid 2000s."

I guess this guy has never heard of OCaml or SML.

Though Haskell was a leader in the FP field, it was never the only language to epitomize FP.
Just because bad apps may make it onto the app store doesn’t mean Apple’s implementation is failing. Security holes are not discovered in a vacuum. It’s like playing wack a mole. For obvious points just like at how Epic got banned from the App Store. They snuck in a direct payment option and got approved for release, only later did Apple find out. It’s possible that those bad apps snuck in malicious codes and the app reviewer missed it. It happens. However without Apples review and ability to act as goal keeper there would be much more of those kind of apps,.

I’m not sure how third party stores are the best solution to this. That means users would have to trust another gate keeper for security and validation. 3rd party app stores will just increase the possible of malicious apps
There were some life-cycle analyses done which created quite a stir arguing that plastic was better when the full life-cycle was considered. I can't find the original paper but here's a summary [1] of studies with sources (from a bag website)

1: http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplasticstudies.html.
Poloniex has moved to the Seychelles, which is the “Land of the Free”. If you don’t desire the protections offered by the Seychelles, please use Coinbase. What’s wonderful about the crypto industry is you can voluntarily choose the exchange you like!
> shift to modern languages with integrated tooling, e.g. Erlang competition:

>

> C++, Java => Go, Rust, Kotlin

My first C++ IDE was Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS in 1993, and Borland, Zortech, Symatec, Microsoft, IBM, and plenty of others had well known C++ IDEs.

Many of the ideas of modern C++ IDEs is basically rediscovering the work done by Lucid and IBM with their Smalltalk like capabilities for C++ tooling in the late 80's/early 90's.

Java is well known for being one of the languages with best IDE support out of box. It didn't start like that in 1996, but the last 25 years have been good to it.

Go and Rust are yet to have similar offerings and Kotlin, well it is a JVM language and profits from the Java eco-system and Google's push to replace it on Android due to non-technical reasons.

Maybe better examples should have been provided.
Yeah I think people get usage confused with number of users.
"BearSSL and BoringSSL are not affected because they do not support DH(E) cipher suites. GnuTLS, Wolfssl, Botan, Mbed TLS and s2n do not support static DH cipher suites. Their DHE cipher suites never reuse ephemeral keys."

Good for them.
The OS and in house projects are in Rust, and there is support for programs in other languages as well.
Very similar format to the British Channel 4 series After Dark (1987-97):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(TV_programme)

itself inspired by the Austrian program Club 2 (1976–2012):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487238/
I can see how these sound very attractive (particularly to a 14 year old). But we really need to make cities and city transportation better so these kind of vehicles aren't needed.
I think it’s okay for Apple to remain vague here. The internet can be a weird and terrible place. By phrasing it like this, Apple can prevent all kinds of creative forms of harassment and discrimination. Instead of allowing bad actors to try to play the game of finding terrible loopholes to jump through.
You are suggesting HR is amoral but in fact they are actually evil.
It's not easy to tell all your players that their games don't work anymore or that they cannot use coroutines. Regarding the second point, more concretely: they no longer can attach a function to a game object that defines its behavior over any length of time, and they no longer can call the sleep() function to suspend execution for a length of time.
Relationships between large German companies and the government are even tighter than Amazon's.
Mixed Feelings Can Follow Being Lenient
> there are always unchecked exceptions

I’m not sure this is necessarily true.

There are always unchecked Throwable’s, but exceptions and Errors are quite distinct things.
What about “roll your own” equates to google wallet? That’s very much not roll your own, and not what the grandparent was arguing.
I'm 28 without a licence and love electric scooters which I sometimes use on the street when I feel it's safe. I would be afraid to drive the Ami because I don't know the traffic rules and I don't think I could just go on the sidedwalk with this when I don't know what to do on the street like I can with a bike / scooter.
System engineer here. The economic system current is wrong, it does not reward
keeping ecological systems in a good state! We need to fix the economic system so that preserving wild life and nature is rewarded.

Well functioning eco systems is very valuable to us as humans yet we do not preserve them as we should.

Wildlife is valuable
Clean air is valuable
Oceans clean of plastic and full of fish is valuable
Not warming earth is valuable

How do we make a fix to the economic system that such values are kept for future generations?
An interesting law, that I never heard anyone suggest here (Sweden / Stockholm). But many argue that instead the commuter pass should be free. Considering it is subsidized about 50 percent with taxes already, I think we have a good system as it is. In Stockholm the price currently is about €90 / month.
Most large SaaS companies do this. It's hard to get enterprise customers to take the time to write a review, but with some incentive...they might. They didn't ask for a good review, they just asked for an honest review and in return you get a gift card. There's nothing unethical about this.