skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the provisions of the Treaty of Nanking is that the British Empire agreed to not interfere with Chinese trade with other foreign powers. They also withdrew from mainland China in exchange for the island of Hong Kong. Hong Kong was not an economic power at the time and became one as a British colony. [0]

By contrast, the British Empire continued to interfere with American trade long after the American Revolution, prompting the War of 1812 where the British Empire burned the first White House to the ground. Imagine if the British had burned the Daoguang Emperor's palace to the ground?

My point is I'm not belittling the subjugation of the Chinese under the British Empire. But at the same time, lets not attempt to rewrite American history. In regards to the British Empire, the Americans and Chinese have more in common than propagandists on both sides would have us believe.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nanking#Terms
For people interested about how and why banks deal with criminals, the best book I know is this: "Hot Money and the Politics of Debt", by R. Naylor.
I think you're thinking of tiktok. This administration just wants to ban wechat outright.
I don't think that's the right way to conceptualize this. Efficient shopping, prep, cooking and cleaning habits are complex and practiced skills, which not everyone has the time or energy to learn. I've cooked ever since I was old enough to be trusted with a kitchen knife, and I still regularly find myself throwing out half-eaten packs of meat or whole cabbage heads unless I sit down and literally write out a meal plan.
I'm surprised that GraalVM is not mentioned. I have strong suspicions that Oracle is lining up Graal to become the next default JVM, after watching some talks from core developers describing how fragile the Hotspot codebase has become. Graal would be a good way to encourage ML, given it has language support for Python. Perhaps Graal is just not ready for Oracle to show all of their cards at this point. Or perhaps my theory is incorrect.
On Uncomputability
Brings back memories of trying to get HPGL, PCL, or other non-postscript printers working with various flavors of Unix, lpd filter scripts, trying to get a form feed to spit out the paper, etc. Pretty sure there's an ugly Perl script of mine still doing this at a previous employer.

My friends and I used to create a little mayhem sending bursts of form feeds to the DEC band printer in the lab when the teacher was near it. It would shoot out paper 5 feet or so.
Thoughts:

-We should legalize drugs so that criminal organizations actually have to drop dead

-If the government is in control, will they get corrupted as easily as private drug dealers do?

-Do the ‘legitimate’ business elites of the S&P ever mingle with the arguably wealthier elites of the criminal underworld?
And wasn't that addressed in Stickman's ruling? There's a difference between "something that we can allow in an emergency" and "something that has been going on for 6 months and legally continues forever", like the situation in PA.

Further, if there are medical and scientific uncertainties... Erring on the side of constitutional rights seems a LOT less potentially exploitable to me. If you think that something is so critical that you need to permanently remove rights to combat it... You should be able to back that up with incontrovertible evidence.
DACA was an executive order by a Democratic president.
Well yes; you are correct. But, it's also meaningless. When I was 19, my girlfriend's 8-year-old brother killed himself on Father's day to get back at his dad. Almost all kids believe in some fairy tale about the afterlife, almost glamorizing it. So far, we have no evidence of anything like this. You can't be famous after you're dead because you don't exist at all. You'll never see the newspaper article, and frankly the world as you experience and believe doesn't exist outside of your head anyway. Nobody actually cares about you as you know yourself. If they ever do hear your name, it will be something else in their mind. The real you is at best somebody else's worm dirt. That thing you did is now just something that happened to somebody else. You're not even relevant anymore. When I was in school, it seemed like the whole point of life was to torture future kids with the requirement to learn your name. And yes, that is exactly why people take on a destructive path when generative significance seems impossible. It's easy. But it gets you nothing. I don't think it's so much atheism as much as dark nihilism. If you worshipped, above all, your own life, not your own pleasure or comfort, but life itself, the sanctity and freedom of your own mind, then you would not care about fame or the famous.

Cue Kevin Tillman: "He's not with god; he's ..."
> (it just got lambdas in JDK 8)

Interesting use of the word 'just'. At the risk of making readers feel old... Java 8 was released _6 and a half years ago_.
JDK 8 was released march 2014, so "just got lambdas" should be read as over 6 years ago...
> as deleting repo will delete also its forks

I haven't observed this to happen - in my experience, the first fork becomes the new "upstream" for all the rest.
> Let the Europeans deal with the Middle East since it is their backyard and not ours.

You have to admit there's two sides to that, though. The fact that the EU doesn't _have_ to defend itself reduces the incentive to do so. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we were to learn that the USA (pre-Trump) lobbies EU countries to keep their defense budget low, as that maintains dependence of EU on the USA.

But I 100% agree with you. Pull USA influence out of Europe - that's the best way to force Europe to take its self-defense seriously.
Actually I was underestimating it https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...
Marrying a citizen, yes. But the chances of H1B visa holders marrying other H1B visa holders (or people from back home) are pretty high given that the elephant in the room is that all of this discussion disproportionally affects Indians and Chinese.
Ignorance and pettiness describes this administration quite succinctly I think
Ah, now you’re reminding me of a case in Ireland where they let the Hindu, not Catholic, patient die because they did not believe in abortion. That is not a scenario I want in my life. Doctors choosing your morals for you and calling it their conscience?

I guess it’s the libertarian thing. Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
Less fecal matter.
Or NYC can cut their budget. NYC spends 3.2 Billion on homeless services. https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-citys-spending-on-home...

Not saying the cuts need to come from that segment, but let the sheer size of some of these budgetary items sink in.
The relevant item from the summit is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535438 (sorry posted in parallel).
The model was correct? Or was it? What is a correct model?
Thanks for your detailed reply! As you mentioned - lessons learned by SQLite here are indeed crucial. We are very carefully trying to craft a storage format before fixing it in-place, specifically to try to avoid these problems. Backwards compatibility is a must, but backwards compatibility to a sane format is massively preferable :) No doubt we will end up making some mistakes in hindsight, though.

We already support reading from the arrow in-memory format [1], therefore it is already possible to use DuckDB to perform SQL-on-Arrow. More support there is definitely possible, and I think this is a very promising direction.

[1] https://github.com/cwida/duckdb/pull/866
Here are a couple of past submissions that talk about how WeChat implements moderation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085915

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20502727

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20448103
"They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking the data to say, 'Well if the world is warming up, why is Kentucky getting colder?' They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt," argued Naomi Oreskes.

(...) The ICE campaign identified two groups which would be most susceptible to its messaging. The first was "older, lesser educated males from larger households who are not typically information seekers".

The second group was "younger, low-income women," who could be targeted with bespoke adverts which would liken those who talked about climate change to a hysterical doom-saying cartoon chicken. "

Brutal.
Much of the harm and disruption could have been avoided or mitigated.
> Should Europe ban all U.S. tech companies based on that?

That is the logical next step if WeChat is considered a such a danger.
WeChat is actively censored for both Chinese-registered and non-China-registered accounts, thus implying that communication through the platform is monitored, reviewed, etc. It isn't a far leap to say those capabilities are usable for spying and it seems unlikely that they wouldn't be if an opportunity arose.

You can read some thorough investigations into the extent and mechanics of the censorship here: https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/ or here https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/
Possibly noteworthy for the comments on RISC-V, which he started with, and I hadn't heard before.
This is the report that the article was based on:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

The 2.2 million figure came from the worst case scenario. The assumptions for that scenario are:

"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months."

You don't get to claim a reduction from a baseline that assumes 0 intervention and 0 personal behavior change. That figure was used in the report as a baseline to compare various mitigation and suppression strategies.
The nature of the H1B being tied to a single place of employment is ludicrous though. It enables a power dynamic where these workers are basically indentured servants. This dynamic is a detriment to both these workers and their native counterparts.

Once an H1B is offered it should remain in place for some set time period, with procedures in place to address fraud either in the case of the company or employee.
Mean Stack Considered Harmful
CCC Camp infrastructure is special, and fun, and definitely a great source of real-world experience. The various infra teams now have a decades of experience scaling it up - water, power, waste, internet, each coming with its own set of challenges. The event is full of engineers, such that the level of overengineering increases year by year - last camp, one team even brought and manned industrial dishwashers as a public service! Same goes for similar non-profit events that build their own infra rather than contracting it out to an expensive events company.

Constraints are very different, obviously - the ground can't be dug up, public toilets and washing stations are sufficient, there's some existing infrastructure to partially rely on, and it only has to work for at most ~2 weeks or so. Still, many of the "lessons learned" could be applicable elsewhere and I wish there was time to document more of it.
It seems to be a mostly US-centric thing.

I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process - which is kind of weird, as we have much, much more stringent workers rights/laws, making it more difficult to get rid of a bad hire.

Sure, US companies, especially in tech hubs, operate on a completely different scale than companies over here - at least in terms of funding/capital, size, and impact; So one might suspect your companies and startups to be more selective. But yet, it seems like a completely different world.

Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture.
Someone decided the algo was producing usable results when it was picking the highest contrast areas.
Can someone clarify for a layman what this means in practice? I still want to use uMatrix on Firefox. Does this mean that over time, uMatrix will eventually stop working?

Separate question, is there somewhere can we can read from the author about this decision to archive uMatrix?
Yes and you cannot expect the Native American workers to sympathize with your plight. The focus is on productivity and the cost of labor and not on humans behind it. The Native American workers had faced it for decades via outsourcing and offshoring and now the pendulum is swinging back to the right again. The rules will be changed ,if needed , for US and it’s citizens to win the game.
I remember lpd with some horror and was very glad when CUPS came along, made printing on Linux even easier than on Windows.
It doesn't.

But it's worth noting that an argument against cryptocurrencies is that it would give criminals and others free reign as there would be no built-in checks to prevent them. Yet as we see these checks are ineffective, weakening the argument against cryptocurrencies.
> What seems outrageous to me is that this seems like simple retribution for Tik Tok users getting one over on the president [1].

We've been here before haven't we? [0] [1] [2] [3]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/us-to-investigate-tiktok-ove...

[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19273614/2...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/technology/tiktok-nationa...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
The virus is a strand of genetic code that is errantly read by ribosomes.
Malleable backups are not secure when they need to be restored, something that could be necessary if by some chance a server of yours became dead suddenly.
The ones that care probably get that data from those companies or from the NSA anyways. However, if each country actually did try to play this game the US currently is with TikTok/WeChat/China, we’d either have no global companies, or all of our data would be shared between any company and the country that requests it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meth_mouth

The hypothesized causes of meth mouth are a combination of MA side effects and lifestyle factors which may be present in users:

Dry mouth (xerostomia)

Clenching and grinding of the teeth (bruxism)

Infrequent oral hygiene

Frequent consumption of sugary, fizzy drinks

Caustic nature of methamphetamine (less likely: “Meth mouth is generally most severe in users who inject the drug, rather than those who smoke, ingest or inhale it.”)
Yeah it's a losing battle to suggest Java is mostly fine on HN. In this bubble we only use FP and/or Go/Rust and/or C++.
Oh man, you just made my day. Thank you for this.
In my opinion, Java as a web language is good when you don't need to really understand what's happening (like in low-traffic situations). If concurrency isn't an issue, then the massive amount of libraries can help you a lot.

In high-traffic environments, that ignorance punishes you. I've always felt Java and the JVM are of the mindset that you need a Ph.D. to even understand how it works or how to configure it, and if you can't get it, then you're just a bad programmer.

You need to know if you're blocking threads, if there's memory contention, and if libraries you pull in are using the forkjoin common pool (which you're likely using as a default threadpool). And when something blows up, finding the reason (even for any of the above issues) is really tough. You can use flight recorder, heap dumps and gc logs all day, but good luck navigating it all unless you're a genius. I've seen too many devs end up shrugging and hoping the issues are transient.

Even figuring out proper threadpool usage isn't straightforward. Look at the number of concurrency abstractions just to model concurrency in your system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhguOt863nw. It's ridiculous.

Lots of large tech companies "seem" to "make it work." But if my experience is at all similar, they're just relying on a handful of Ph.D.'s to hold the hands of the rest of the company when it comes to troubleshooting.

Part of the reason I fell in love with Elixir/Erlang and the BEAM is that it provides a simple (actor) concurrency model (with a single concurrency primitive, a process) and guardrails (time-slice scheduling) to prevent libraries from shooting you in the foot. OTP's observer makes finding bottlenecks a breeze.

For the web, taming concurrency feels way more important than any cpu-crunching perf gains the JVM can give you. I'm too stupid for the JVM; I'll stick to tools that take away numerous categories of complexity and get me closer to mastering my system.
Absolutely and I am aware of its origins, but I've seen the analogy brought out at least a few times here on HN when discussing the merits and potential of an idea that seems obvious but has gone unexplored or uncommercialized. I get the sense that there may be some beliefs around the evaluating of ideas, at least in this crowd, that lead some to see it as being comparable to noticing a sum of money on the ground. I'd love to understand that.
Sigh. What a pathetic reply.
I dunno about you, but it takes me about 30 minutes to cook a decent meal, and about 10 for cleanup. My partner often helps with one part or the other, so it's around 20 minutes a day. Add an hour a week for grocery getting. Round trip to a restaurant, waiting for my food, for the wait staff, etc., takes upwards of an hour a day. When I cook, I usually have leftovers for the next day's lunch, which is rarely the case when I eat (ate) out. I don't agree with your statements on saving time or money, unless you're doing fast food, which has its own hidden costs to your health.
I’m pretty sure I used this weapon in Diablo 1.
Remove Twitter Explore/Promoted/Trends and Other Social Dilemma Traps
There is evidence that exposure to other corona viruses gives some level of protection to covid. The Vietnamese have higher exposure to corona viruses that most other people which is one theory as to why they are less affected.
I think your take is far more charitable than what is going to happen. Getting back to normal after job cuts, housing uncertainty and healthcare uncertainty is going to be a challenge of it's own. This is compounded by the fact that the hospitality/restaurant industry never had the margins to begin with to survive a prolonged closure or slowdown.
Remove Google search result Ads
That's your first problem, assuming there is some sort of reciprocal logic at play here.

It's simply about power - we ban things because we can, and we judge the blowback as being not as bad as the alternative.
https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/nycs-high-income-t...

"1 percent of New York City residents generated 43 percent of city income taxes"

While I am not saying the current rate is fair or perfect, to say that the city wouldn't be hurt by losing tax revenue ignores the fact.
What are the challenges in making tech more sustainable?
Uh, what?

> Don't deceive yourself that this is some step in a principled fight. If it were that, we'd have slapped tariffs/embargoes and more on Russia a couple of years ago. We'd be implementing measures against Venezuela, Myanmar, North Korea, a whole host of countries doing similar or worse. I haven't heard a peep about those.

We have been doing that. It has been widely covered by every major media outlet in the West for years, including: NY Times, Washington Post, Reuters, AP, BBC, NPR, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, Sky News, Bloomberg, and on it goes.

There is a massive US economic blockade effort against North Korea, and the North Koreans have been flipping out about it 24/7 for years. It has been in the news non-stop for years in relation to North Korea. The US has been routinely conflicting with China about maintaining their side of the enforcement related to that effort.

In fact, the US economic blockade of North Korea has caused so much damage to their country, it has prompted cannibalism inside of North Korea and at times risked mass famine.

If anything the US should probably consider backing off its extreme blockade of North Korea, rather than risk pushing them into actual widespread famine, given their instability and nuclear weapons.

The US has crushed the Iranian economy with its economic blockade on them, reducing oil exports by 80-90%. It sent inflation skyrocketing and prompted mass civilian revolt, which then prompted the Iranian Government to murder thousands of protestors in 2019.

The US has recently come close to military conflict to enforce its economic blockade against Venezuela and its energy industry. The US economic blockade of Venezuela has destroyed their energy industry, bringing their energy exports to barely a trickle. That also has been very widely in the news.

And the US has heavily sanctioned Russia, along with going very far out of its way to try to harm Russia's energy interests, eg by trying to stop Nord Stream 2. In fact the US has been borderline belligerent on that matter, coming close to pissing off its European allies in the process.
The US has a criminal for a president. They have no credibility.
I don't think you understand, this is geopolitics. This is the clash of ideologies. This is democracies vs dictatorships. This is market economy vs state controlled industries. This is EU, US, Japan, Australia, Canada, UK, Taiwan, India, South Korea vs China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, North Korea.

Those that say EU will side with China and go against US, don't know how geopolitics work. And haven't been paying attention to Europe standing up to China these past few weeks.
If that's what you think, you should really learn more about government. I don't think you have a clue.

Many, many powers falling under executive branch (and agencies') regulatory authority, which Congress does not go into N-th level detail about how to implement, have to go through significant public and internal review, and have good explanation.

If you're unfamiliar with this, you should read:

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41546.pdf

https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...
The problem with this line of reasoning is that there is sufficient evidence that all deep states collect information from one another. China, Israel, Russia, U.S. included.

While I am sympathetic to how many people use WeChat to communicate with family members bank home, etc., I am a greater champion of U.S. due process, which is what we see here.

China protects its domestic companies by outright banning Google, Facebook, Twitter. Then it unilaterally censors anything critical to Hong Kong, Uyghurs or its central government.

In basic strategy, one should at least play tit for tat.
I can't wait for the next Stratechery post where Ben Thompson decries EU regulation against American business but five minutes later justifies US actions against Wechat.

The general cognitive dissonance from American commentators is astounding. If the rest of the world would treat US business with the suspicion that the US treats Chinese business American companies wouldn't operate anywhere.
Java got lambdas in the most recent quarter of its development.
I like to see physical results.

I have a Pi Zero with an environment that can give you temp/pressure/etc and blink LEDs. I also have an automation hat that provides the ability to interface with stepper motors or other things. They use Python. There are quite a few projects related to these online, covering various domains and skill levels.
you have half your brain thinking analytically, and the other half devoted to being disingenuous? how is that not a waste of resources when both halfs could have been thinking properly?
What if we had done something like mailed masks to every American? I guess that’s kind of outlandish though, oh wait...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/18/politics/postal-service-face-...