skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can make most of the same arguments about hereditary royalty - that what they're good at (and have been trained since an early age to do) is running a kingdom, that it's hard to use their power/wealth without risking their ability to generate more power/wealth, that the immediate aftermath of suddenly losing royal rule has often gone very poorly (France, Russia, etc.), that it's not evil to want to keep control of the kingdom you built while you're alive, that they don't really have meaningful capacity to use their power to improve things anyway, that real royalty don't cackle like evil kings in cartoons, that they didn't even sign up to be royalty in the first place, etc.

But society has decided, for the most part, that not having (non-figurehead) royalty in the first place is better, for many reasons. For all the good that a good monarch might be able to do with benevolent leadership, we've decided it's even better for nobody to have that power. The negative impact of a bad monarch is not offset by the positive impact of a good monarch, and "good" monarchs legitimize the existence of the bad ones. Same with billionaires. To say that it's good to have billionaires that promise to give away 99% of their wealth at death is to say that it's good to have billionaires that accumulate billions during their lives and retain the personal choice about what to do with 99% of their wealth.

I wouldn't call Queen Elizabeth II a good queen or Emperor Naruhito a good emperor because all their power is in the hands of a democratic government. I would say that this is the minimum expectation for a monarch today; it's not to their credit that they've done so, and they haven't in any real sense even chosen to do so. Whether they're good or bad people is up to what they do beyond that. If we were to say that the norm for billionaires is they must give away 99% of their wealth upon death, I suppose I could think of Buffett much the same way I think of them, neither positively nor negatively. But even so, both of them were born into their roles in a way that Buffett wasn't, and Buffett, to my knowledge, isn't advocating for the 99% promise to be compulsory.

If, say, King Salman decided that he wanted to use his power and wealth for charitable causes upon his death (and he certainly has been contributing to charitable causes), but retains the monarchy and passes it to his son, I would certainly not start calling him a good king! If he says that he can't dissolve the monarchy immediately but comes up with steps to gradually wind it down by the time of his death, and tried to work with the other reigning non-figurehead monarchs to do the same thing, and questioned the legitimacy of their rule if they didn't agree, then I might consider calling him a good king.
If each Amazon employee created a company worth as much as Amazon, it would be enough to give every American a $4,250,000,000 bonus.
I love how I said Java has problems C++ doesn't have and get responses saying C++ is a terrible language.

Java has problems C++ doesn't have and nothing you said says anything to counteract that point.
Probably poverty and industry. Germany has more industry and has historically had a stronger economy. So, that probably leads to lifestyles that promote more energy use.
It is of course a smart move by the legislators, since the car industry in critically important for the economy and "proper" cars have a much larger profit margin.
> Little is known about “Unix” but […]

As opposed to eunuchs.
Baby boomers will remember a wonderful musical made off the poem shown on TV during the Thanksgiving weekend. It used a lot of Greig music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin_(195...

In its heyday it was as popular as the Wizard of Oz musical. Wikipedia says that because its copyright expired, no network now reshows it. However it is available on youtube.

https://youtu.be/563V_2pIuwU
Nice article. On a semi-related topic, I find that one mistake that folks make is buying into the "hype" around Head of Sales / Marketing candidates. The first thing that these people learn how to market or sell is themselves, and even mediocre ones can usually present themselves and their backgrounds really well. There are great people out there but be careful!
> 4_100_000_000 - 2099-12-03 16:53:20

We're going to party like it's 2099! Watch out for that Y2K+100 bug!!
Unless there is some deep insight in the article, I feel like the person's identity is not something we need to know.

It was a terrible situation. What benefit comes from knowing? Are we supposed to judge that person for not wanting to suffer slowly instead of taking a faster route? Or are we supposed to commend his bravery or sacrifice?
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/

If only there was a network of automatic telescopes watching the sky 24/7.

Oh, there is.[1] GEODSS, with pairs of automated telescopes, picks up satellites, larger space junk, and incoming missiles and asteroids. It has a star catalog and a satellite orbital catalog, and reports anything it doesn't already have on file.

One of the GEODSS sites is no longer used by the USAF, and it's now run by MIT to detect near earth orbit asteroids.[2] The University of Arizona also has Spacewatch, with two automated telescopes.[3] Those two between them have discovered several hundred thousand minor asteroids.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Near-Earth_Asteroid_Re...

[3] https://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/
Optimal Code Splitting
Learn why vendor bundles are an anti-pattern, the optimal way to code split using my custom heat map visualizer, and other code splitting anti-patterns to avoid.
I've noticed this trend too -- but I've also noticed people starting GitHub Repos for websites/apps just for the Issues.

No code, no PRs, just a way for the public to create Issues.

Not sure what this means for the "culture of code" other than things are blurring...
You're not supposed to catch exceptions. They are not for handling logic. They're there to make fatal errors across threads and modules be safe and robust.
I feel like I'm missing some obvious link here. If changing the name on a legitimate transaction is enough to let it go through, what stops actual Evil Terrorists (tm) from just telling their financiers that their name has changed every three months to stay ahead of specific filters?

If I had infinite resources, IMO, the way to go with this sort of thing is to have no blocked transactions or obvious failures, and only relaying the suspicious transactions for law-enforcement to review. If there are crimes, actually get involved and prosecute them, don't just create weird financial black-holes for innocent people and behaviour. From the customer side, no more stupid disruptions. If there are actual bad actors at play, they don't get any immediate feedback they've been flagged and are less likely to change their strategies and cover their tracks.

If there are too many transactions getting flagged this way and law-enforcement ends up buried under dots to connect, then that's a signaling mechanism for them too-- they've obviously done a bad job of crafting their filters and need to adjust for signal/noise.
You do and you don't. If you're using a Java library written by someone who doesn't believe in checked exceptions in Java, you might be lulled into thinking everything will be fine.
Perhaps not all at once, but there are plenty of problems with underfunded solutions.

A few years back, I was fortunate to have a random conversation with a reknown researcher from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He was lucid and blunt: if we had more money we could solve fusion.

A couple days later there was news of China having done the longest running fusion reactor burst (?) to date. Two-plus minutes.

I keep thinking about that conversation and his "promise."
A lot less than infrastructure for cars. For example, upgrading the A8 autobahn in Germany costs 71000€ per meter.
BrandMaxima Launches Influencer Relationship Management for Agencies
> 1 / 0 just returns 0, #yolo

No thanks.
Not a presidential election, but the 1974 New Hampshire senate election was redone in September 1975 following multiple contested recounts producing different winners [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_and_1975_United_States_Se...
"Total revenue" is probably a bad choice of words by parent. We're looking at just the revenue from the App Store. It does not include revenue from phones, computers, wearables, or anything else. Just the sum total they collected from their 30% cut.
0. Define what problem you are trying to solve, make sure you understand the domain.

1. Come up with a set of options by doing research, talking to people who have solved similar problems before, etc.

2. Rank them by some criteria (e.g. availability of libraries, documentation, raw performance, hireability, support, quality of tooling, etc).

3. Do some prototyping in your problem domain using the top 2-3 (more if you aren't confident in your ranking) and pick whichever you like best.

4. Always be willing to change your mind down the road. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy and try not to lock yourself in too much until you're confident in your choice.
> this could be fixed by giving voters the opportunity to
> generate multiple ID numbers that lead to “proof”

3 ballot system does it [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot
Do know that performance marketers are a tiny group and most of them run their own businesses with great success.

You can also become a performance marketer if you are inclined. Takes times, but not a lot of money. If you are interested in this sort of thing go watch some Jay Abraham videos on youtube.
> "Social sciences" are generally considered the "science of society," and the term comes from philosophers in the mid-1800's.

Some of the philosophers named it "science" of society in order to piggyback off the reputation of real science.

Because real science has such a great reputation, everyone from creationists ( creation science ) to social "scientists" ( social science ) have tried to associated themselves with science to gain credibility.

Social science isn't science. Neither is creationism.

Real science ( as most people understand it ) deal with natural laws and the natural world.
> How do people deal with things like deeply nested JSON in Elixir?

Have you gotten to play with the `put_in/2` [0] and `update_in/2` [1] macros? They're designed to manipulate deeply nested structures like JSON

iex(2)> my_parsed_json = %{"some" => %{"deeply" => %{"nested" => %{"key" => 1}}}}
%{"some" => %{"deeply" => %{"nested" => %{"key" => 1}}}}

iex(3)> update_in(my_parsed_json["some"]["deeply"]["nested"]["key"], & &1 + 1)
%{"some" => %{"deeply" => %{"nested" => %{"key" => 2}}}}

As a side note, a common misconception is that updating a large data structure on the BEAM is inefficient because values are immutable, so you have to copy the whole structure to make a tiny change. This is untrue, as Elixir (and Erlang) "maps" are implemented as HAMTs[2], which support very memory efficient updates by "sharing" the unchanged parts between the the old and updated maps.

[0] https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/master/Kernel.html#put_in/2

[1] https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/master/Kernel.html#update_in/2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_array_mapped_trie
"word of the day" calendar remixed - i love it

are there similar projects that show other things? where did you get this idea from?
I use multicursor all the time and it works great. Probably because I never got used macros.
Help TXR!

A pattern matching implementation is badly needed for Lisp programming, holding up work that benefits from it, like compiler work.

In terms of programmer interface, there are two "schools" for writing pattern matchers: "match by printed notation" and "match by code". Succinctly: match by code means (list a b) matches (1 2), binding (a 1) (b 2). Match by printed notation means that you have something like (@a @b) instead which looks like (1 2) but with explicitly denoted variables. Some "match by code" systems make some use of backquote for this: `(,a ,b) matches (1 2). I think Fare's matcher has something like this, for which it carried its own backquote implementation.

I'm not attracted to "match by code". It doesn't scale to nested objects. Code for constructing complicated, nested objects looks ugly. That's why Lisp got backquote fifty years ago already. There can be many code variants that produce the same thing. The user will be annoyed if (cons a b) is a valid pattern, but (list* a b) isn't supported as an equivalent. How far do you take it? Should (mapcar 'succ a) be a valid pattern which binds a to (0 1 2) for the input (1 2 3)? I do have to acknowledge that simple cases of "match by code" are readable.

TXR Lisp has support in its syntax for the future implementation of "match by notation". The syntax @ident produces the form (sys:var ident). ident can be a symbol, or integer token. The former case is called "meta-varialble"; the latter "meta-number". The syntax @expr produces (sys:expr expr), where expr can be a (...) or [...] compound (the latter being sugar for (dwim ...). These notations can be coupled to a pattern matching system. For instance, if we have a point structure with x y members, we could have a pattern like #S(point x @column y @row). This is valid read syntax now:

1> (defstruct point () x y)
#<struct-type point>
2> #S(point x @col y @row)
#S(point x @col y @row)
3> *2.x
@col
4> (car *2.x)
sys:var
5> (cadr *2.x)
col

So we can imagine

(match-case some-obj
(#S(point x @col y @row) ... col and row are bound ...))

kind of thing.
Yes; there are now several hundred pending PRs for both fixes and new extractors, all ignored.
This is commonly repeated but is completely false. The Pentagon was completed in 1943 but the Air Force didn’t exist as a separate branch until 1947.

I can’t find any evidence that the Coast Guard was ever headquartered in the Pentagon.
Which had its failures, e.g. Estonia had to reissue 750,000 IDs due to manufacturer's fault.
> python server application, which involved a lot, "oh shit, that throws" whackamole.

This matches my experiences with Python, and docs, even official Python docs, are somewhat lacking when they describe what might get thrown.
Why should consumers subsidize R&D by a company with no accountability to them what so ever?

US is the leader in many tech areas due to free market competition as well as defense spending, not Google's R&D. Google is also happy to sell their R&D to China, but then somehow finds it uncomfortable to transact with the DoD.

Hard to make case Google is a net positive for the US with a straight face.
Would the internet be healthier without 'like' counts? (2019)
> To what end? And how efficiently? If there is one lesson from the last millennium, it's that innovation has poor economies of scale and is stifled by centralisation.

I would not say that has been the lesson at all. For pricing, sure, but "innovation" writ large as a concept? I'm skeptical.

I don't see how spending numbers alone proves anything about the level of innovation.

Plus, if innovation is "stifled by centralisation," why do you go on to speak so positively of VC/private equity, among the most consolidated and least liquid of all capital markets. Further, hasn't the volume of VC funding actually gone down in recent years, indicating increased central allocation of funds?
SoftBank near $40B deal to sell Arm Holdings to Nvidia
I find it very interesting how the transcript put online is not the same as the original in significant ways. It is great that the pdf is available, but that is not what is going to be searchable on the web (especially with the quality of the memo text being so poor). The transcript present online does not give any indications that the transcript presented is highly edited. Here is one example paragraph left out that came after the third paragraph to the end in the online transcript:

"The association of Chevrolet with hot rods, speeds and such is probably inadmissible, but possibly the existence of the Corvette provides the loop hole. If the special parts are carried as RPO items for the Corvette, they undoubtedly will be recognized by the hot rodders as the very parts they were looking for to hop up the Chevy."

I enjoyed this post quite a bit as I am interested in cars and how the internet records history differs from the paper age.
Attention really reminds me of focusing in proof theory https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/focusing
While America wants to break up their big tech, China is directly subsidizing their companies and shielding them from outside competition until they’re ready to launch on a global scale.
C’s Biggest Mistake (2009)
Well, you are mentioning that in hindsight in 2020. When it started in 2009 and technologies like deep learning were mostly limited to companies like Google and universities, would most investors have went with those high values knowing they won't even have a product 11 years later? 2009 was just 5 years after DARPA challenge and Level 5 self driving was still a moonshot.

Also, the wiki article mentions that funding amount to be between 2009-15. I don't know how Google accounts for cost, but would they count the value of shared technology?
You're not convinced... because you understand the component costs and you believe they add up favorably? Or you don't know and don't care?

The answers to your suggestion start with knowing the volume of plastic, time to degrade, degradation byproduct toxicity, and alternative 'recycling' methods and their costs.

There's also clear evidence that the 'current' model and practice for plastic disposal (that you endorse) is NOT safe and effective. Until you can suggest how to fix its demerits, it's unhelpful to blithely suggest we just keep doing it.
I built and maintain dory[1] which supports macOS, but I haven't had a mac to test with in many years, and I'm not giving any more of my money to Apple (I happily would if they respected my freedom, but that's not likely to happen so I don't usually mention this caveat).

However I care about the humans who benefit from the software and run on mac, so I try to maintain support. This might be a great way for me to actually test instead of asking the community to test for me :-)

[1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/dory
Android asks you if you want to switch to Chrome when you open Firefox?
Do you think that would be more likely than voting for socialists in the current system? I think the difference is that with direct voting when the endless subsidies ruin economy it will be easier to vote for something reasonable, instead of being stuck with someone like Maduro.

The issue is the same as letting someone spend his own money, he may end up spending all of it on something stupid (like alcohol), and some people indeed do that, but most people end up spending rationally.
Why not just have bunch of repos? You can use what google does with chrome and use depot tools to checkout from a bunch of repos.

Edit: Why am I getting downvoted for asking a question?

We use multiple repos and we have a pretty large codebase consuming a TB a day.
Ask HN: How to extract the consistently upvoted domains on HN?
There are several analyses and tools that give the most upvoted/favorited etc submissions on HN; I have yet to see an attempt that ranks the domains' long-term popularity on HN.
If the petroleum industry couldn't make political donations (and wasn't very aggressive about doing so), I would agree with you more strongly.
Isn't a second just how long light takes to travel 299,792,458 m?

Also, "since Unix time was created before leap seconds." I found this interesting for the simple reason I've never spent any time thinking about Epoch vs Leap Second histories.
POSTED ON JAN 7, 2014
Like the ticking of a clock
> Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Google.

You're just making things up at this point. Bell was easily larger than all of those with the possible exception of Amazon.
Paper is provably secure as long as every step happens in public (which also means no voting by mail).
I enjoyed the lunch party we threw at work when it hit 1234567890.

I worked in Corporate IT at the time, so most of the office had no idea what we were celebrating. Somehow, neither did 80% of the tech staff. But the few of us who appreciated it really enjoyed the cake.
Because you lose the 'single head' concept of actually being able to always have a clear view of the current newest version and of linear version history. The ability to map a single revision number into the state of _all_ source code (including third party dependencies) is extremely powerful. You also lose the ability of performing sweeping changes across an entire codebase in lockstep (think: backwards compatibility breaking API changes).

Not to mention that Google internally avoids multiple repositories (and instead runs of a single monorepo) - it's just the android/chrome/public stuff that's mostly split up.
> It is encrypted and Apple has the key.

> The reason the distinction is important is that if it were clear text NSA/FBI etc could gain physical access to the servers and read the backups without Apple's knowledge or approval.

Where does Apple store the keys? On the very same machines?

It's like having a bulletproof lock, and storing the key under the potted plant.
This site is not a good site to look at. I am currently on mobile looking at the linked page. I had to scroll past about 13 ads before the actual article started. Was not a good start.

Edit: after switching to a desktop, this site is not mobile friendly
Shared delusions can be fun and entertaining. As long as they dont rob you or your family important resources or make you do dangerous things.
He's a good guy now, right?
Yeah, this works... once. Maybe twice. At some point no one will insure you and you are seriously on your own because the fire department just won't come. But I suppose it is technologically feasible to design a less likely to burn home. You'd have to actually try though.
YouTube stars' demonetized after accusations of throwing parties amid pandemic
Web-based netboot automation system using ipxe
Microsoft criticizes Apple’s new App Store rules for streaming game services
Anyone know if they're still on Mercurial?
Japan does this.
They shouldn't, the accountability should come with regulation ensuring fair competition and respect for user data, not just going ahead and reducing competitiveness of US companies by breaking them up.

I will be really surprised if Google sold their R&D to China, as it makes no sense whatsoever, but my comment was in general about all US big tech companies.
You'd get a poor failed state like Switzerland.
Python is great, but in this case, you could get almost identical output using bash alone:

for t in {0..4100000000..100000000}; do TZ=UTC printf "%'13d - %(%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S)T\n" $t $t; done
Why should copyright expiry decrease popularity? They can still broadcast the show.
Vernor Vinge sounds like an intriguing author!

“Most years, since its inception in 1999, Vinge has been on the Free Software Foundation's selection committee for their Award for the Advancement of Free Software.”[0]

Since “A Deepness in the Sky” was written in 1999 as a prequel to “A Fire Upon the Deep” (from 1992), which do you recommend to read first?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
If curious see also

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19061690
Couldn’t you just use a pointer?
> Couldn't largely distributed digital systems also be designed?

Probably, but it would probably be so complex that only a small subset of the population is able to understand how it works. For a vote that’s accepted by the general population you want a process that’s as simple as possible. Everyone understands how paper works.

> Whatever is written on that paper or how it's handled better also be provably secure somehow.

Here that’s largely solved by having lots of volunteers that do the counting. It should be pretty hard to compromise that.
> On that note, I doubt your grandma understands voting machines,

That is an argument against voting machines.