skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not literally impossible, but, yes, Florida is miserable without air-conditioning. You can get by in the coastal areas if the building is designed to make the most of the sea breeze. But anywhere away from the coast is hot, humid, and bug-infested. You need the windows open to cool the building, but then the bugs come in.

The population of the entire state was very low until after the invention of air-conditioning. The population roughly doubled between 1940 and 1960.
Thanks for the nudge. I keep forgetting the markdown here is different
I have the opposite problem: I don't want to buy a single article, I want a subscription that works on every news site. Individual article purchases suck for the same reason that individual source subscriptions suck.

We learned a decade and change ago that microtransactions are a bad idea and very difficult to account for. Mental and payment network transaction costs dominate if you actually ask for tiny amounts of money all the time. Functional microtransaction schemes work by separating the point of payment from the point at which costs are accrued. This is ostensibly to batch transactions together, but also has the effect of making it far harder to consider how much you've actually spent. Users either agonize about spending a penny to read another article, or they get sticker shock from how many articles they read per month.

No one likes being nickeled and dimed, so subscriptions offer an escape valve for all of this. Instead of charging the user some accrued cost that they can't really budget for, you just charge them a fixed amount per month for unlimited access to a given resource. If we can't expect the customer to spend money when everything is a transaction cost, then we shouldn't bother tracking those accrued costs. Just figure an average amount of what it should cost and bill them at the end of each month. This works great if the subscription service is largely all-inclusive for the service that you are purchasing.

The way most news paywalls work is sort of like "quartering and dollaring". You see, most people don't go straight to a single news site to get all of their news. They go to aggregators, find the story they're looking for, and then go to that particular site. So the paywall on those sites is fundamentally indistinguishable from a microtransaction popup, except instead of wanting 10 cents to read one article, they want $10/mo to read all their articles. It's not like actually subscribing to any of these will actually fix the problem, since there's tens to hundreds of different paywalled sources out there. I don't want to subscribe to one news source - I want a variety.

For the record, the only service I know of that aggregates news and has a subscription option is Apple News+. As someone who daily-drives an Android phone and a Windows desktop, this service is mostly useless to me. Don't get me wrong, I do have access to iOS and macOS devices, I'm just not interested in a news service that only works on two of the six or so different computing devices I have access to. "Oh, this article is paywalled, I guess I need to pull out my iPod" is not materially different from "Oh, this article is paywalled, I guess I need to pull out a browser I don't normally use".

(Alternatively, Google could revert the changes to their ad system they made that moved advertising revenue away from third-party publishers, and we could go back to publisher advertising being able to pay for this content.)
US prisons universally break basic human rights...

There should be no extradition to the USA whatsoever until they stop doing so.
https://github.com/automerge/automerge-rs

I can't speak to its usability as I'm waiting on a 1.0
Freedoms are always a balance between the freedom of self and others.
> Zig shows a third way by rethinking, from the ground up, how low-level programming could and should be done.

I don't know about that. "that of C's "syntax-sugared Assembly" is pretty much how most people want to do system programming. Don't systems programmers want to be as close to assembly without delving into the pain that is assembly? Also, I don't know how "ground up" it is. Seems like zig is just more syntactic sugar on top of C to me.

Wasn't there a big push for D to supplant C/C++ a while back. Now Rust has joined the fray. Why would Zig succeed when D failed and Rust is failing? What is it that Zig offers that D or Rust doesn't? And does that justify the migration of legions of C programmers and mountains of C code to Zig?
Actually, for a while I used example.com a lot and I was surprised how often it worked just fine.
Google says Android 12 will make using third-party app stores easier
The shareholder theory is gone. Management has taken over and run the company for their own benefit, not for shareholders.
> But these mechanical keyboards are all so incredibly loud that your coworkers will hate your guts after just a half hour of sitting within 30 feet of you.

There are plenty of silent mechanical switches, the choice to use a clicky-clacky switch is down to the individual.
Ask HN: Did you know Google knowledge panel can give wrong information?
It is said information is the new gold or oil in 21st century, yet we are bombarded with fake news and propaganda, just the other day I was searching through google search engine and saw that the provided knowledge panel gives wrong information. How do we fix this and will people be interested in a browser plugin that can provide them with a confidence percentage or the reliability of data or if its different somewhere else? For example the information that google provided wrong to me was correct in wikipedia so maybe the plugin can point that its different in other sources?
> No hidden control flow

It's true that a macro in Rust could introduce an early, invisible return. But this can only happen inside a macro. A reasonable option would be to disallow those in a project where such concerns are critical.

Otherwise Zigs "try" is similar to `?` in Rust, and "defer" comes pretty close to non-obvious control flow for me.

I'm particularly not a big fan of "defer" (and "errdefer"), which I already don't like in Go. Sprinkle multiple of those in a larger function, and following the logic can become quite tedious.
I don't understand what's being said here. I think what's confusing to me is that this post appears to express that dethroning the very largest companies isn't prioritizing efficient management or innovation. I would think regularly churning incumbents at the very minimum prioritizes innovation.
Good idea, although I'm not wild about selling a Chromebook I can't access but previously had signed into my Google accounts to some stranger.
Yeah, high-contrast is much riskier on dark themes—it all depends on whether you’re going for æsthetic dark, accessibility dark or low-light dark, which are three different situations with quite different needs. But for light themes at least, high contrast has no serious risks.
As a winter dweller, trust me, sense of humor is not what is missing. The sun and heat is what is missing.
Three Dangerous Words: Normally, Standard and Routine
Hmmmm... https://sta.li/
Quite possibly just someone in a car pretending to be a taxi.

Is this true in London? Do people privately own black cabs?

I think London has a 2-tiered taxi system - black cabs and minicabs - and I suspect faking a black cab would be much harder?
There's a big difference between making obvious mistakes that make everything worse and making the "right" decision for a future consideration. Beyond first-hand experience (i.e. making the mistake and then recognizing it in a future, similar decision) I'd say even the best "architects" have about a 20% success rate when moving into uncharted territory. Planning for tomorrow at a strategic level is hard.
> have very welcoming immigration laws

But also huge language barriers, especially for small shops, not speaking the local language is seen a disadvantage.

> we have no massive local companies that can utilize all that talent and no big VC funding

That is not because Europe has less money, but because they have different risk profiles and competencies regarding investing. In some European countries governments are the biggest venture capitalists, which speaks to the inefficiency and desperation created, which explains the lack of unicorns booming up.

This is not just a money issue, it is also a culture and competence issue.
CRDTs don't guarantee coherence, but instead guarantee consistency.

The result may often be coherent at the sentence level if the edits are normal human edits, but often will not be at the whole-document level.

For a simplistic example, if one person changes a frequently-used term throughout the document, and another person uses the old term in a bunch of places when writing new content, the document will be semantically inconsistent, even though all users made semantically consistent changes and are now seeing the same eventually-consistent document.

For a contrived example of local inconsistency, consider the phrase "James had a bass on his wall." Alice rewrites this to "James had a bass on his wall, a trophy from his fishing trip last summer," and Brianna separately chooses "James, being musically inclined, had hung his favorite bass on his wall."
The CRDT dutifully applies both edits, and resolves this as: "James, being musically inclined, had hung his favorite bass on his wall, a trophy from his fishing trip last summer."

In nearly any system, semantic data is not completely represented by any available data model. Any automatic conflict-resolution model, no matter how smart, can lead to semantically-nonsensical merges.

CRDTs are very very cool. Too often, though, people think that they can substitute for manual review and conflict resolution.
We built our $100mm startup after getting rejecting in YC interview back in 2014. Even since than I am actively involved in YC. We submitted our new startup's application this fall. Lets hope they hear us this time.
twm dates to roughly 1987 -- it was already pretty old in 2000, 20 years ago.
Honestly I respect that and prefer that as well; just tell me up front so I can move on and not waste any more time. I come from a wall street background and did break through eventually, but they just leave you hanging with no follow up. And the recruiters treat candidates like dates they are ghosting, its really not an acceptable way to treat a human being after they put days even weeks into preparing and coming in.

Why do they do this? Because there is absolutely no downside to leaving you hanging and then they have backup plans to fill the spot. Its also just emails and coordination that pays them no dividends, so they don't care. You're dead to them.

The worst is when companies post a position they never intend to even fill just to collect resumes and see their options.

The whole thing is very reminiscent of the dating scene which is not very professional.
>In many countries, people are eligible to file for common law marriage status after a certain term of living together as spouses. Nothing wrong with that. In others, however, the status of common law marriage is imposed on people living together for a period of time, regardless of whether the people want it or consent to it. This is a violation of human rights as it denies people the right to chose who they are married to. In the country of Colombia, the period is 2 years after which the status of common law marriage is imposed on a couple

This basically makes the choice implicit (live together for 2 years) rather than explicit.

>(...) carrying with it the full range of legal responsibilities of consensual marriage, including property rights.

And this is probably the reasoning - to protect mostly women (as per the customs back in the day), where men lived with them long term, promised them eventual marriage etc, but never did so, thus not giving them any of those legal rights that come with marriage.
Yes, see the "host mode".
> I would love if a compiler expert could chime in here, but my understanding is you could never write a Typescript compiler that was “strongly” typed because there is no data structure that can efficiently represent arbitrary types like “4 Or An Object With An Attribute Set To 4” in any meaningful way.

(I don't consider myself a compiler expert by any means, but I've been doing it for nearly 20 years, so I feel relatively safe weighing in here.)

In short, if you were compiling a function like that for bare metal (or anything relatively like it), there would be no one function that takes in all of those types and acts on them. Instead, you would compile that function once for each combination of incoming types. The version that only takes the number 4 would not have any inputs at all and may end up entirely constant (depending on what it does, of course).
It's then up to the caller to make sure the right variant is called. If you have strong types up the chain, this is easy and completely overhead-free -- they'll be compiled in their different versions, too. If you have a weaker type constraint (e.g. just any Number, rather than THE Number 4), then you'd do conditional dispatching at the call site.

For what it's worth, this is essentially how templates work in C++. It's also why compilation can take so damn long and can produce gigantic binaries, because when you have a function with 2 inputs of 4 different potential types each, you're up to 16 variants. Change that to 5 inputs of 4 different types and you're at 625 variants.

All that said, static compilation of TypeScript in its current form would be very difficult to make efficient, simply because JavaScript types in the abstract don't map nicely to hardware; Arrays can be extremely simple and linear or ungodly complex with holes and property overrides, and the 'right' thing to do with a Number is often different from the fast thing to do. That's why JITs are so valuable; they allow you to get around the ambiguity.

Edit to add: I should mention, it's possible you won't actually generate all combinations. You might know that certain combinations are impossible to hit due to other type constraints, or you might just know that they're unused (which leads to problems when you don't have the original function definitions to turn to; that's why C++ templates have to be in headers (I think that's true, at least? I might be wrong on that; I just use the magic, I don't understand it)).
I'm glad you asked :-) I reverse-engineered the Sinclair Scientific calculator, documented its code, and built a simulator: http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...

The short answer is that they used a 4-function calculator chip with just 320 words of ROM and managed to reprogram it into a cheap scientific calculator, a remarkable feat. The tradeoff was that the calculator was very slow and inaccurate.
I'd just like to say that this is one of the most beautiful websites I've ever seen!
How does this compare to https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/research/ob... ? (Tensorflow is not needed for some of those functions)
An issue in academic labs is that the funding agencies forbid spending grant money on computers. So the academic workers pay for their own computers out of pocket, and are quite unhappy about it.

They buy the cheapest computer that will do the job. Now, to make full use of the university computer network, their computer has to be "set up" by the department IT person, resulting in a significant degradation of performance, possibly installation of software that you don't want, and the inability to do your own maintenance. Often the computer is too old to support the latest OS, so it can't be "set up" anyway.

So they typically connect to the campus guest wi-fi network and use things like Dropbox to save data.

Now you can buy a computer with grant money, if it's purchased with a piece of scientific equipment. So the spectrometer in daily use, well, it was purchased 20 years ago, it only runs Windows NT, and can't be connected to the network for fear of breaking it.

The data have to be accessible on a different computer at home. They can't take the same iPad home because it might be radioactive.

Nobody's going to buy an iPad for the lab.
Or to the Maltron dual-handed keyboards.

* https://www.maltron.com/uploads/6/1/2/5/61250099/s9751652005...
The article makes it clear that it is a nationwide policy.
Yes imagine recording a video stream, you'd have to update every directory above a file every few mS when files are written, and because file metadata usually gets priority on a spinning disk the heads would go crazy and throughput would go way down - probably couldn't keep up with the incoming stream
This is really nice! I frequently use

!w - wikipedia

!drs - docs.rs

!http - http status codes

!a - amazon

!yt - youtube

!usps

!fedex
That already happened, see plentyoffish.com, created by Markus Frind in Vancouver, the first (or first popular anyway) free online dating website. Sold for $575M. No outside funding, and for a long time it was just him and his girlfriend running it, working about 10 hours a week. When he sold it to match.com, they had 75 employees and he was working normal hours.
That sounds really interesting but unfortunately my German ist nicht. Is there an English translation of some kind?
I would say the largest inherent danger with fusion reactors is the prospect of a tritium leak. D-D fusion reactor designs are not on the horizon. They are a “probably, one day” option. So for now we are aiming for D-T operation. All signs point towards a functional MCF reactor needing to be pretty large and, by extension, have a large recirculating stored energy (roughly 100 MJ). Tokamaks face the prospect of disruptions that slam all of that stored energy into the wall. An event like this would breach the reactor and leak the tritium fuel. The entire reactor and tritium processing facility should be behind a bioshield that shouldn’t leak, but the risk is there and real. It takes extreme care to prevent dire scenarios.

Stellarators don’t have the chance of disruptions, but would still need to rely on tritium.
Ask HN: Anyone else annoyed by Zoom's new “Passcode or Waiting Room” policy?
Seems like, unilaterally, Zoom just decided to enforce the use of at least one of their security options: Passcode or Waiting Room.

This can be especially annoying for organizations, like ours, where we loved how simple it was to just share a link and get immediate access to Zoom rooms. I understand passcodes can be appended to the URL, but we really like we just had to bookmark mark these URLs and we were ready to go.

This is especially useful since we're in the middle of a Pandemic and we spend a lot of time in Zoom meetings, switching from one room to the other.
You think NYT and WaPo are not mostly anti-Trump propaganda? As for RT, it's the only outlet that openly and strongly criticize US foreign policy of never ending wars, no mainstream leftist or right-wing outlets go this far. For obvious reasons.
Providing New Member Onboarding for Online Meetups During Covid
Tradeoffs :-)

(Also, if you use something like goimports, it's pretty much automatic.)
TS is really getting Ninja with typing.

The ultra expressiveness of TS may not be a virtue. It may simply encourage us to be creatively academic with our designs, and do novel, non-obvious and hard to understand and maintain things in the code.

With some of the newer TS releases, I can hardly fathom through the release notes why such a complex degree of metaprogramming has utility for anyone, and what kind of corner cases people must be diving into. They are actually quite hard to follow, and I find myself trying to parse through the need for such a thing, literally unable to conceive of an example use case. Perhaps without a strict philosophy such as they have in Go, the designers just go on ahead and implement their favorite intellectual exercise, or something that helps them with a task in the TS compiler itself, which may not generalize very well.
mechanical != blue switches

Some mechanical keyboards are loud, but not all of them. My newest keyboard is a Kinesis Freestyle Pro with "Silent Red" switches. It is "mechanical" but quieter than my MBP. I am sharing a home office with my wife right now, and I was worried when I ordered the keyboard because she complains that my chair creaks and makes too much noise, but she was fine with the keyboard.

I have a CODE keyboard with brown switches at work, and putting dampers on all of the keys helped that quite a bit. My coworkers expressed some interest in that one, but no one complained.
US squeezes China's biggest chip-maker SMIC
I think you are expanding the categories so much as to be useless. Selling books (Amazon's original market) is entirely unrelated from selling home security systems (Amazon Ring). Transportation/logistics (Amazon marketplace) is entirely unrelated from server space as a service (AWS).
I am not a mechanical keyboard freak, but I do own one with black Cherry MX switches (they are the linear ones without click, basically Cherry MX red with stronger springs).

I can type more silent on that keyboard than on my notebook keyboard. If you don't hammer the key you only hear a faint noise of friction..
Ouch. Especially with the one which led you through 9 months of due diligence, then refused to sign.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't string you out for a while longer, then offer to buy the entire operation when you were forced to fold.

Have seen that done before - on purpose - by a place that knew the value of the operation and figured they could get the whole thing cheaply that way. And did so successfully. :(
It's not the click, it's the aesthetic - especially if one gets into customizing, building, by hand, selecting keys and keycaps, etc.

It's the equivalent of people who spend time and effort to really work on their car and make it what they want it to be. It's the equivalent of people who really appreciate a high quality tool instead of just picking up something cheap from the local store.

It's also art. Some keyboards are just beautiful creations with both utilitarian as well as artistic merit.

Yea and it's the click too for some, but "click" is just one option for people building mechanical keyboards. There are far more options than just "it clicks" and "it doesn't click" for switches.
I usually survive Edmonton winters by descending headfirst into the arts scene, but this year...
Won't it just tell you if a police officer is within 2 meters for 15 minutes?

Except for undercover or plain clothes police officers this doesn't seem like a big deal.
Obviously it wasn't "Rick" in the flesh (I think). But more a "Rick" class programmer. :) Sorry to anyone who's real name is Rick.
I don’t want to call them out. I want to never have to call them out. With Uber I don’t have to so I’ll take that.
Wordpress?
Don't know if Blogspot or other blogging platforms offer it, but I'd say Wordpress covers most/all of them.

Plus, easy to import/export data.
This is just not true, the master build is literally the first thing you see on the download page.

Don't get me wrong, it should be clarified on the ziglearn website anyway.
atime isn't updated on every access. That "relatime" mount option that's almost universally used? It updates atime when the file is written (so mtime and ctime are updated anyway, no extra cost to bumping atime), or after a day if no writes happen but reads.
$500 KWh is still much more expensive nuclear. Furthermore competition with electric vehicles isn't going to decrease battery cost, it's going to increase it. More demand for a constrained supply leads to higher prices. Wind is also geographically dependent, not all regions are capable of generating wind power at the same cost as Hornsdale. If your wind averages half the average wind speed you're going to have to build a lot more wind turbines. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is geographically independent in terms of it's output.
> In reality, the deep state is an unstoppable machine underneath the facade of democracy

Just depends on what you care about. For the majority of citizens democracy matters because different policies have an obvious impact on daily life.