skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wonder why any time I see these claims, they’re never accompanied by anything resembling reliable evidence.

Because the stories have been on all the news sites, it's common knowledge, and thus it would be superfluous to submit detailed documentation every time it's mentioned? I can't help it if you're not informed about politics and tech.

> you on the other hand are free to vote with your wallet and your time by buying their devices and developing for their ecosystem (or not).

People always say stuff like that, but do they really mean it? It feels like just empty rhetoric to shut down criticism of Apple, not an actual suggestion. I've been a professional Mac developer for over a dozen years, my software has been enjoyed by countless people, and I've also provided many tech insights enjoyed by many people, including this one under discussion, as well as the Google Chrome bug story that's been going around — that's me too! Are you seriously saying I should pack my bags and leave the Apple ecosystem forever and no longer write software for the Mac or write blog posts about it? Is that what you really want? Is that what people in general want, for me to leave the Mac? Don't say it unless you mean it, and are willing to drive away longtime Mac users and/or developers like me.

I hope you'll enjoy your "curated" criticism-less ecosystem with no actual developers who care about the Mac.
I was under the impression, at least as it pertained to the elderly, that GA is commonly known to be a significant risk.
> Is there a non-root way to build and a way to install at least some of the packages in my $HOME

Yes. You can install Guix as a package manager on top of your POSIX OS. Then, you have profiles, and you can install packages into your personal profile in your $HOME, or into temporary project-specific environments. You can also define the environment by writing a manifest file which list requested packages and their versions, and put that file under version control.

How it is used is documented here:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/guix.html#Package-Management

> How does it handle python wheels and other non-source language-specific packages?

Of course you can install Python packages:

https://guix.gnu.org/packages/P/page/12/

If there are no pre-built packages for your machine architecture (say, you are developing on ARM), they are built and installed on your machine (or, a build server which you defined), otherwise you get automatically a compiled package from the Guix server. Also, and in difference to pip and so on, any needed C libraries will be installed as well, with the right versions. So, it is a bit like Conda, but it will also work if your project happens to mix, say, Python, C, C++ and Rust, and perhaps runs on mips or armhf. (My next side project will be a Game with a strategy engine in Rust, and a GUI written in Racket, just as an example).

I have not yet tried it with Python, but I can confirm it works with Common Lisp libraries. Basically, you can get anything which is FLOSS, and if you need proprietary stuff you might be able it via a non-free package channel (similar to Debian).
Not a dumb question! If you're talking about spinning rust, this is precisely the job of some particularly niche sysadmins (the kind that manage storage clusters) to know. I'm not one of them, but a quick search produces this:

https://serverfault.com/questions/13839/does-orientation-aff...

The easier answer I'm comfortable giving (despite me not being a sysadmin by trade) is that good storage software/setups should abstract over and protect you from something like this, because SSD/HDD bit-rot is absolutely a thing regardless of orientation -- if you're not using a WAL-ing (ex. zfs) or checksuming (ex. ceph's Bluestore) file system you're exposing yourself to data corruption. Only thing left is whether you'll actually have your drives long enough for them to exhibit complete failure from orientation, can't know that except to test like Backblaze/other providers do.
I think ..... most people have no idea what they actually look like when hunched over a keyboard. It would do wonders to have a large mirror next to our workspace so one could see just how preposterous they're contorting their body.
>Yesterday we had 241 Covid-19 fatalities

Yesterday, 241 Covid-19 fatalities were reported, with the actual dates of death spread out over the previous days/weeks.

Edit: Just for extra clarity - we don't know how many died of Covid yesterday, due to reporting delays. There is data for "Covid deaths by date of death", but it always has a slight drop off due to these reporting delays.
I had a bit of a scare around the same time. I was following dual passions of computer science and piano playing, meaning around 12 hours a day of typing and/or piano-ing. I started to develop regular tendinitis in my wrists and fell down a rabbit hole of ergonomics and posture. With computers you can replace keyboards if you have money, but I was a musician in college. Also, you can't really change a piano keyboard all that much (and you really wouldn't want to) so I did a real deep dive into posture and getting the most out of what I already had
You do know that both GNU and EFF say that Apple's apps store are not compatibly with the GPL?
Doctors discover unknown set of glands in human heads
Not just you, even as a native speaker this is very hard to parse. The title is ambiguous on its own (are "life cycle" and "long run" referring to the same thing?) and the abstract is very unclear.
Half the populations of those countries dont even have reliable electricity. There is no chance they're using BTC except maybe for the politicians to launder money from corruption.
And when you look at the data (Figures 2,3), you’ll see that “substantial” is a subjective term.

For patients who had minor illness and recovered at home, the measured impacts were a fraction of those who spent time in the hospital. In some cases, the data shows a small benefit to having Covid in the minor cases.

Moreover, of the ~84,000 participants, only 361 had a confirmed positive test result.
They already treat Trash/Bin as a special concept internally. They have since launch. You cannot have 'Trash' and other tags/labels, like 'Inbox' set at the same time, for instance.

So it might be a disgusting hack, but it's been whatever it is since launch, although incompletely.
yeah I don't get it either
I personally have had carpal tunnel release surgery and bilateral rib resection for thoracic outlet syndrome. These surgeries fixed most of my issues but for the last couple of years I haven't tolerated sitting well because of my back so I use a standing desk. I've thought about a computer interface that is the opposite of this article. Something that requires more non-repetitive physical movement so that you're exercising while you program. Sure it would take longer to type but we all know working on a computer all day is bad for our health.
I'm of the same mind. The way in which new antibiotics are identified for example.
> Plus, the fact that it seems Google simply started considering nofollow as a kind of hint, not a decision, did not help the spam situation either.

When nofollow is used for all user generated content they kind of have to take it as no more than a suggestion. Just ignoring UGC when it comes to ranking would throw away too much of the web.
> Internally at Google the vendor all source code and make it build using bazel.

It sounds like that is done for consistency, to make it easier for Googlers to move between projects written in different languages, and to lower the cost of setting up new projects into their existing tooling and infrastructure?

I don't think that's really a comment on whether Cargo is good or bad, so much as a language agnostic approach to managing code that Google finds works well for them.

If you're not Google, you're probably better off using Cargo.
Let's imagine you have a barrel with a burning person inside and a barrel on top with a water. You can a) watch person to burn, or pull a lever and empty a water barrel on it, and risk that person will drown. Then someone cries "wait, you have to think it through so that there will be definitely no negative outcome!", knowing full well that waiting = burning.

This may be not the best comparison, but I think it is close enough. Mozilla spent decades to put themselves into a corner but voluntarily getting 100% dependent on a money coming from a shady entity, hoping that said shady entity would exist forever. Now regulator came to that entity and in the process all symbionts will suffer, and Mozilla the most because they are completely dependent. And now they ask to stop and think.

Ok, we are thinking - do what exactly? What does Mozilla seriously expect? Any action except for doing nothing will hurt them. Or do they expect that DoJ will conjure "free" hundreds of millions to compensate Google feed?

tl;dr
Mozilla ask us to "think about consequences". Ok, we did. Now what?
Python Library: Statistical Arbitrage Trading
> Really, "lock free" programming is just locking critical sections with lower level hardware primitives.

I have to disagree, as the more interesting lock free algorithms use atomic operations that can fail. Yes, a compare-and-swap is like having a critical section on modifying that particular address. But a compare-and-swap can fail if what is currently there is unexpected. The result of that failure generally means redoing a bunch of work, rather than just trying again. Interesting lock free algorithms tend to have the structure:

1. Read some data.

2. Perform computations on that data.

3. Trying to commit the result of that computation. If someone else committed data to the same location after you read it in step 1, go back to step 1.

That's less like a "critical section," and more like a transaction. For lock free algorithms that just rely on atomic operations that cannot fail (such as an atomic increment), then yes, those are just like having a lower-level critical section. (And, on some architectures, that's exactly what they are.)
It is undecidable. If we had an algorithm to compute # of steps in Busy Beaver (n) (let's call it S(n)) then for all Turing Machines with n states run S(n) steps. If it doesn't halt, it will never halt. Halting problem solved! (well, blank tape halting problem, which is as hard as halting problem).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver#Proof_for_uncomput...

> On reflection though, that's not just a bargain, it's also an outright contradiction; we know no such program exists, so making this offer doesn't affect the market at all. Perhaps there's a sneakier variation on this.

We do know Busy beaver 1 to 4 (via brute force). We have lower bound for 5. It's definitely possible to compute more of these values. Uncomputable does not mean not possible to compute, it means you cannot find an algorithm that solves the problem in general.

So, maybe by dedicating bizarre amount of compute, you could find BB # 1M to claim your $1M from me. Get rich quick!
Well, print out a PDF.
Cheese is a much bigger challenge. The best vegan cheeses still aren't very good. I've had a very few that were barely acceptable when well-disguised (such as in a sandwich), but none that I'd eat on their own.

By contrast the state of fake milk is pretty good already. I much prefer cow's milk when drunk straight, but when mixed in baked goods or in coffee, a good oat or almond milk tastes just fine. I might not even notice if I weren't explicitly looking for it.

I'd really like to see big bakeries start using the fake milks and fake butter (which is also pretty good as a substitute). It's hard to find vegan baked goods, not because they're difficult to do well but because the market seems to segment into specificially "vegan" and "everybody else". You could make perfectly acceptable plant-based Twinkies. Oreos already are (more or less).

The great thing about Impossible Burgers is that it's possible to not eat meat without having to make a big deal out of it. You don't need to seek out a place that specializes in it. It won't qualify as "vegan" by most people's definitions, but it at least lets people reduce their animal product consumption without having to have that dominate their eating habits.

If Impossible Milk helps nudge that process along, so much the better. But I really hope they can tackle cheese.
Pope endorses same-sex unions
Kata Containers rewritten in Rust gets a major speed boost
Then what happens when you add a new locale?

I think to solve this 100% you need namespaces.
The correct URL is now https://www.delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=4187 .
There is no chance that people could donate any amount comparable to what Google gives.
If I were using software or services created by Arabic-speaking developers or from a company that does business primarily in Arabic, sure. I would expect such things, in fact.
This is a good principle to aim for but it is impossible to fulfill in many cases. There are always going to be invariants that the application may wish to enforce which cannot be enforced in the database (or, if there was some ideal schema to enforce them, the migration from the existing schema would be enormously costly). This is the whole reason we have ACID transactions in relational databases - so the application can enforce its invariants!

(Exercise for the readers: construct a set of invariants that cannot be enforced within a database schema.)
Sounds like an interesting idea for a VR/AR game. I'm picturing somewhere between fruit ninja and a vana white simulator
I only have had entry-level introductions into QM, but had no trouble understanding this. It that may be because I do have a background in computational dynamics, but I'm no expert in either field.

If I understood correctly, what the article is trying to explain is that the software/hardware architecture optimized for neural net processing is equally suited for many-body simulation of quantum equations. The architecture allows to broadcast the intermediate results among all individual particle simulators, which is untractable in other architectures: Monte-Carlo simulations lose accuracy and coupled cluster simulations can only solve stable lattice configurations.

Personally, I like the observation they made that the fitness constraint for their training is determined by physics: whichever solution yields the lowest total-system energy wins.
MTA launches real-time first-of-its-kind 'live subway map'
One more: https://github.com/microsoft/Pyjion
I don't know about that, but I'd love to have eye tracking for focusing windows. Since I don't generally maximize windows, I find that I'm often typing hotkeys for the window I'm looking at, not the window my mouse is on (or was last focused, depending on your wm)
It's becoming a pattern now

Internet -> Centralizing

AI -> Centralizing

Blockchain -> Centralizing

Is Technology cursed to give us 1984?
> I really hope we don’t end up with JavaScript code being written to be optimized well on one particular implementation of a JavaScript engine…

I'm afraid that ship has already sailed.
> English speaking, so it doesn't fit the split.

English speaking =/= American values.

But a tiny part of your search-engine, social-network, app, or whatever is about the translations of the UI. The largest part is about how social constructs, ideals, workflows, and so forth fit. An Indian user might be able to read the screens on your app just fine, but might still be left out due to cultural issues.

In the EU this often becomes very clear when your startup "expands to Belgium" for example. It is not just about translating the app in Dutch and French; the way people interact, do business, communicate; the problems people have, the problems they dont have, and so forth are very different.

This is a pet-peeve of mine: we are all pushed in an American Template due to the prevalence of Silicon Valley "dictated" norms. When I was young, nudity on television in my country was normal. A local movie would have to have at least two naked tits. Today our media has become prude; no more tits on TV on prime-time; something that creeps onto us as "collatoral damage" of using primarily US media platforms.
That gets to the difference between a generalist and a specialist. Sometimes, I need to hire a specialist because we need someone who can provide high level expertise to a group of generalists. (E.g. a specialist on visual design and interactions with javascript, react, and best practices regarding such.) If we are looking to hire for that skill, trivia isn't going to work but neither do we want to hire someone who can talk a good game but would be quickly exposed by an expert, and will lead us down the wrong path.

Now, I can give you all sorts of answers here. My point is that unless you're going to put a lot of effort into redesigning the interview process from first principles for your company due to some need (like Google), or you are putting your effort into a startup like interviewing.io, you're likely going to take an existing process and tweak it. And that explains why the fence is there.
GM Debuts Electric Hummer Pickup with $80k Starting Price
I am glad people are finally looking in that direction. A lot of studies and media attention has been on death rates. This is useful at the start of a pandemic but now we need to look towards the future. Most of us will catch Covid-19 at some point in our lives. What will be the outcome of surviving it?
The impact of a stroke varies a lot with the kind of stroke, and the proximity of quality treatment.

An awful stroke speedily treated by top doctors has the chance of imparting basically no change to cognitive function. Of the same token, not-the-worst strokes with mediocre care can ruin one's capacity to work.

It's a really complicated medical event, with high variance in outcome. Strokes suck.
Finally a meaningful comment.
MTCP: TCP/IP applications for your PC compatible retro-computers
> I wonder if it can be solved with UX?

I saw a HN comment the other day, talking about the problem of popular servers in the fediverse blocking polarizing servers. It proposed a solution at the client level: make it easy to switch between identities on different servers. My addition: UX along the lines of Firefox multi-account containers, where you can have multiple tabs (here: conversations/rooms) with different identities open alongside each other, rather than having to switch profiles.

I think making it easier to participate in other communities without losing access to the large one, should the large one stop federating, is a good strategy for encouraging users to vote with their feet. Otherwise, it's hard to justify losing access to the large community, just to enable interaction with a small one.

I'm not sure how this solution squares against combating abuse, though; encouraging multiple accounts might make this harder.
The question is: does JavascriptCore implement other ES6/ES7/ES8 features just as inefficiently? Does it mean we should always transpile to ES5 even on browsers that support more modern variants?
Right. Contributing changes to the GPL'd software itself back isn't the issue. It is the intended "viral" nature of it, that also enforces the GPL onto all code linked to it. See for reference the issues with GPL-symbols in the Linux kernel, ZFS, or libreadline,
I did the same, while also using historical knowledge of events and things like architecture and relative spread of cultural or fashion clues. I would love to detail how I pegged basically all the images, but that is not something that can be discussed here for reasons I will not elaborate on.

It's actually an interesting point that is directly related to the subject research. How can you get an accurate picture when things cannot be discussed freely … you simply can't.

I encourage everyone to diversify your channels for for discussion and knowledge, be it distributed forums or even things like using some of the browsers and/or plugins that allow for open discussion on top of what is permitted by the heavy handed types (to put it it extremely lightly) among us.
On the repo there's also a comparison[1] with some of the other implementations.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/Pyjion#how-do-this-compare-to-
> I'd just like to note how Zig does this:

Right, what I'm talking about is the implementation of "comptime @sizeOf(*usize)".

That it does the right thing is good! It's easy to accidentally implement it in a way that does not.

> And for what it's worth, I would greatly prefer Rust having a proper spec

We all would :)
The coolest thing I've seen today.
The results showed that colour had a large impact on people's guesses for some pictures, but for others there was very little difference. For me, colour didn't actually impact the guess much since I don't know when colour photography became mainstream, and even then, you get B&W pictures even today.

The hardest part for me was having no context of where the pictures were taken (although I should have guessed in the US). The picture of the farmers & the horse could have been taken today in many parts of Africa.
> How many people use Gmail in a language other than US English?

You'd be surprised. There are only about 400 million native English speakers [0], and Gmail has 1.5 billion users [1].

If we assumed that all native English speakers use Gmail, they'd represent not even a third of the users. Of course, there are many non-native English speakers, but I'd assume a significant fraction of them would prefer to use Gmail in their language.

I'd argue i18n has a huge impact, but Google really doesn't optimize for it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/26/gmail-dominates-consumer-ema...
17 Years Living Off-Grid on a Self-Built Island Homestead [video]
Right, my bad. I can't edit my comment anymore but yes, it's mSATA/mPCIe (which have the same physical interface so you have to be careful which card you put in which port), not M.2.

---

These interfaces can be really confusing, and it doesn't help that even manufacturers and vendors often incorrectly mix them up as well, which makes searching for adapters quite an ordeal...

The Wikipedia page[0] is good as a primer now, but I remember spending like an hour or so figuring out if I could put an M.2.2260 in an M.2.2280 port (hint: the last digits only signify the length of the card so yes). And then the B-key/M-Key/E-key varieties, which ARE incompatible. I swear PCIe/SATA are worse than USB-C/TB in figuring out what you can put where to what effect...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
I agree, Numba is awesome for lots of reasons. The biggest advantage for everyone, the Numba team as well as its users, is that it is opt-in and done with intent. The programmer is saying, "I am willing to constrain my code to get perf". And that you can do that inside an existing runtime is pretty damn cool.

I think for Python to get decent speedups the semantics for the code being optimized needs to be highly constrained.

Optimizing full in the wild Python code is a huge huge task. Optimizing for operations over constant type arrays is much much easier.

Yes this doesn't speed up the call or the allocation rate, but start with some easy stuff or nothing will improve.
The reference to bugs being more cheaper to fix the earlier they're found is one of those claims that gets passed around without much attempt to look at the supposed sources. I believe the most common citation trail bottoms out in a study that no one has access to anymore, and the whole thing seems dodgy. One link: https://www.techwell.com/techwell-insights/2013/10/what-does....