skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The promise of recommendation engines is that you will get that niche experience that will scratch your itch just right. I don't know how well that works in practice, but even so, it seems like it removes the chance of stumbling on something so alien you'd never consider it but you end up loving it.

I was thinking the other day about non-demand TV and radio, and how it was obviously worse in many ways than what we have now. But I spent many a happy afternoon watching a movie or classic TV show that I'd never heard of because I had no options, and really enjoyed myself.
Indeed. Memory mapped files are the bubble sort 2.0.

They look simple and approachable on the surface, lead to an elegant code and seem to solve the problem in basic test cases, but in practice they have nasty scalability problems. In particular, trying to work with very large files leads to cache thrashing that affects the entire system, which makes mmaped files particularly unfit for implementing off-memory data structures. Moreover, the code has zero control over this behavior, because we ultimately over-allocate memory and outsource swapping details to the OS.
I mean, they are, since murdering a human has exactly the same consequences to them as playing a videogame (none).
> I'm not joking, but the real problem here is all the hot steaming dogshite that they choose to load, not really the number of requests, IMO.

Neither making requests not transferring data around are CPU-bound activities.

> Many of those requests are also running GPU code to fingerprint clients. Canvas and WebGL. To "prevent clearing cookies to bypass paywall" fraud and ban scrapers.

Even taking these statements at face value, considering that javascript is single-threaded by default it still sounds like a perceptual performance problem (not real performance problem) resulting from a poor software architecture. Expensive tasks are expected to be offloaded out of the main thread to avoid getting it blocked.
Given the widespread use of "A/B testing" and targeted/algorithmic ads/UX/content, I don't understand why anyone would expect consistent behavior from any software.

Unless you have matching SHA-256 hashes, the default heuristic should be to assume that you might have a "customized"/testing variation of the software. We really need to get in the habit of including hashes when talking about software behavior.
To point 3 - Protect what matters most - please do check out Peergos (https://peergos.org). We provide private and secure online storage that collects no metadata and is not dependent on DNS or TLS.

Disclaimer: I am one of the Peergos devs.
For easier reading here:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
>What cryptographic standards have come from cryptocurrencies?

Zk-STARKS, which are fairly revolutionary and completely unknown outside magic internet money dudes. Non-trusted setup ceremonies and the newer Zk-SNARKs are also pretty much crypto-only. Bulletproofs arguably as well. Maybe verifiable delay functions; not sure of the history there. Most cryptocurrency engineering is evolutionary, and it's the combination of things (Mimble-wimble etc) that makes it worth something.

On the non crypto side, there are novel consensus algorithms, interesting data structures and contributions to distributed computation in general.

There's lots of social problems with blockchains, including carnival barker types overhyping things they don't understand. You could have said the same things about the internet in the 90s. The technology is pretty interesting, and making the things do useful work is one of the few actually innovative areas in software engineering right now.

There's lots of obvious places for this sort of distributed, trustless database that aren't just magic internet money. DNS is an obvious one. Identity is another one. Provenance of food/wine/art is another. Pretty much any place where database disintermediation is desirable, which is almost everywhere.
There are probably a lot of factors: do you use more exotic hardware or more mainstream hardware [1], do you use exotic software (NetworkManager VPN plugins with few users) or mainstream hardware. A beginner's breakage is an advanced user's, "oh, I'll just edit this configuration file, done". Then there are probably large differences between distributions.

Regardless, having experience with Linux and macOS -- macOS often has annoying breakage too. I can imagine that it is the same on Windows.

All software is broken. But at least with open source software you have the possibility to fix it if you have the technical chops.
Serious question to those in the gaming industry: I heard C++ is mostly dominant there, can any other language even be considered for writing a game engine in? For serious AAA titles?
Servers are down for the main site, info can be found here.

https://joincircles.net/

interesting experiment in building some kind of global sybil-resistant ubi
> Instead, those responsible for revealing it have spent considerable time, and still are, in jail.

Not entirely true: Chelsea Manning was released in 2017.
Just got it. Pretty neat, will use it a bit more and give feedback. From some initial use .. 1) can you make the arithmetic operator 'x' display as an 'x' or '*' rather than a '.' (feels like a decimal). 2) is there a way to delete from the UI rather than only from keyboard. A big improvement from the stock Calculator app. Thanks !
I tried programming a module for my car without a lane assist ADAS system. I only stopped because it was my daily driver. I am still saving up for another car so I wont be afraid to break my car.
The internet pre-'attention economy' was so much more wholesome and pure. It used to be exciting to surf the web; now it feels like dumpster diving. Now it's something I try my best to avoid.

What happened?
How does this help?
> ultimately intractable problems for society

So sayth the people who want to borrow lots of money and not pay it back. The economists may have evidence to back the idea up, but that evidence isn't what is driving the political discourse.

The political discourse is driven because voters with loans go ballistic when rates go up. And so do wealthy businessmen who can't afford to repay their debts.
I felt more of a smooth Segway from real event to news report to the detective who is about to be assigned to this case vibe.
It's not a great quote. Sagan is eloquent in describing his fears, but the concern for Beavis and Butthead was "ok boomer" even at the time and an extremely bad look now. Even in B&B Judge is clearly worried about the same things Sagan is, the difference is Judge's belief that the intelligentsia aren't going to be any help for us either. (And they weren't! And still aren't!)

It's not so prescient. The same quote was often raised 15-20 years ago during the Bush Jr. years with similar praise for its foresight. But the economical transformation was well underway when Sagan wrote it, and even today it hasn't been that long (25 years) since it was written. In some sense it's horribly myopic - concern about 10-30 second mass broadcasts rather than 20 paragraph conspiracy theories from your uncle is quaint!

It's not a good context for it. Sagan would have detested Kassam and Rubin, holding them up as prime examples of the media, political, and intellectual failings he's describing.
The real world contact you see has a negative bias because you probably live in “first world country”.

What do you think it feels like you lived in Venezuela where the currency is devaluated faster you can look and you are being foreced (!!) to use that currency!

Would you have the same bias?

Sure you can say “that not happening to me”. But how do you know it won’t ever happen to you or your country (every super power country has had it down turn at some point (and with that often monetary crisis). Might change some time, but history won’t make you feel sure about that.

And Venezuela is not alone. There has been hyperinflation on average evey 2 year in some country around the world (until one day it reaches you).
Not my experience. One time the hard drive of my Mac Mini crashed. I lost all my mp3s. Fortunately, they were all stored on my iPod, so I could just get them from there.

On Mac: There was an application that could do that, but Apple sued them and so was not available anymore.
On Windows: Was not able to get those mp3's out (don't remember why exactly)
On Linux: Was able to mount it and get those files out with some Open Source iTunes clone.

At that point, I totally ditched Apple.
This doesn’t really solve the same problem, even though the two often go hand-in-hand.
While macOS does constantly nag you to update, it never actually forces you to, unlike Windows 10. Hopefully, Apple won’t follow Microsoft’s lead here in Big Sur…
My copy of microsoft rarely asks me to update and it does that by making a schedule. OP was probably ignoring those for a while. I dont remember windows forcefully updating at all

Those updates probably includes the bloatware microsoft adding and also needed security updates, but mentioning that wouldnt be as click baity. And this is a bloatware I am ok with. Takes no space and they are needed programs.

And if you are using notepad (which does not save your files automaticly) to write important stuff you deserve to lose them to be honest. Perhaps next time he will use microsoft word that was forcefully installed :) There are so many other alternatives even if you ignore online ones.
I never had any real issues with Windows when it comes to updates. And I find the experience on Windows much more productive than any Linux distribution.

Windows has a cohesive interface, and only one interface, so there is no issue of applications looking completely out of place. It's far more stable than any Linux desktop. A GPU hang in Windows is usually a black screen for few seconds and a message "Graphics driver had to be restarted", in Linux it takes down the entire OS with it and needs a reboot.

Apt-get breaks every few weeks and when it breaks you have to google obscure solutions to fix a hanging lock file or broken dependencies. And most of the solutions are of the kind "well, it works in that other distro". Except when you switch to that distro something else doesn't work because there are hundreds of distros, some of them with their own package managers.

No thanks, I'll stay with Windows for now. Ironically I think Microsoft would have the best shot at making a workable Linux. Kind of like Google hid Linux underneath Android and ChromeOS, the same way Microsoft could make Lindows which hides every nasty Linux bits and exposes a consistent environment.
15%

That's actually low! Once you add some custom lists, it'll go higher than that. The lowest ratio of blocked requests I see is 38% on mine. When I use a news reader app on my phone, it goes up to around 55%.
> enable WSL and work from there

What do you mean? You can set up a bootable Linux install from Windows, or just use WSL instead of booting Linux?
(a) People who do very little with their computers. A tiling window manager, an Emacs, and a few terminals will never break, sure.

Don't be so optimistic ;). As of recently, Emacs started freezing regularly for 10+ seconds when editing Rust code while rust-analyzer is used as an LSP plugin. First, I thought it was rust-analyzer, but I did some tracing and all time was spent in FreeType functions during the hangs (probably something going rogue, triggering a lot of font rendering). Lo and behold, use terminal Emacs (no X11) and the problem is gone.

But since life was busy, I didn't have the time to debug it further and installed CLion, which works great.
There should be an option to "reopen last session" under history iirc
I agree that sheer package count is a weak metric especially for very hyped up "can I put it on my resume" prog.langs, and in the context of "maturity" (as opposed to "popularity"). I also agree that programmer attrition rate (or its complement retention rate) are a bit better.

While I cannot speak to Rust's packages, as part of testing a new Nim package manager against the published ecosystem, I happened to just a week or three ago be surveying the freshness of Nim's ecosystem. About 80% of those 1400 Nim packages have been updated in the past 2 years. By last git update, 50% have not changed since 2019/October and 30% have not had a commit since 2018/November. 50..80% fresh (with apologies to Rotten Tomatoes!) is much higher than I would have guessed naively. I am not sure even Python would score so highly. I realize these above numbers are but a start down a more real analytical road. Maybe someone could measure Rust in this way.

In terms of package quality, the one time I re-wrote something that existed in Rust in Nim, my Nim version ran like 10x faster than Rust. That was a couple years ago (https://github.com/c-blake/suggest if anyone cares) and is just one data point. I do think Rust unfairly enjoys a presumption of performance when almost any language has ways to make code run fast. Less ambitious or knowledgeable programmers can always make things slow, but they also seem biased against picking up Rust. So, there is also a sample selection bias, but this has probably all been said before.
I don't hear too many complaints from C users. Perhaps because C never overpromised?

I understand C++ is messy because, back in the day, Stroustrup never say no to a request or suggestion from a potential user. He wanted his language to be widely used. Guess he succeeded.
I think Windows is moving more and more into a platform where Microsoft will sell you their services. Windows has no other value for Microsoft now after giving away free upgrades so ultimately these stability issues are not going to be a priority for them since their business model is no longer about an OS but rather using that OS has a delivery platform for their other cloud services.

If the direction where the country is going is not where you want to go and you have no power to change that then moving out is the smartest choice.
I don't think it's incuriosity or ignorance.

From my observations of Canada, the reason is that it "creates jobs". It it's the classic "not-invented-here" syndrome. Noone wants to borrow the solutions of another country, or even a province or city within Canada!

Always finding some rationale to do it their own way, or do more local (inferior) studies to tick a box. Then hire a bunch of inexperienced engineers to build something that they have never done, and get x10 expensive, and 10x worse results.

All under a flag that it will create local jobs.

Imagine that's how tech would work? We want to be build a complex micro-service system, that we have never built, and we are only going to hire talent from within the distance of 10 km, to "create jobs". How would that work out?
You may find this interesting:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/its-all-ch...

"Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception."
Me? I just open a new tab to Netflix and watch it. As easy as that. Life is just too short for this.

If you're opening that new tab in Chrome or Firefox, you're watching Netflix in 720p, even in Windows.

I just watch it in 720p in Linux and don't worry about it. Life's too short.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23931
They put games into ‘maintenance’ mode when they realize they need to move on from it. Here is a similar press release for their MOBA from about last year:

https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/blizzard/22833558/heroes-of-...

They’ve gotten pretty corporate to be honest since Activision took over.

Anyway, seems like the main focus going forward will be Diablo 4, Overwatch 2 and WoW expansions.
The first command doesn't work anymore unfortunately. You'll still get it listed and it's a potential footgun.
The world has already realised this – while Windows remains popular on the desktop, the desktop is dying, and Windows has had a small and declining share of total new devices for quite a few years now [1]. As the large pool of workers who learned to use computers during the 1990s and 2000s retires (slowly), Windows will die out in enterprise too. Microsoft is encouraging this by shifting its apps to the web and competing mobile OSes. They want to get businesses into 365 and Azure where they can make sustainable profits, and eventually shed the cost of maintaining Windows.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
You write the name of the class, add a dot and press ctrl+space
For ages, every 5 years or so I attempt to move away to Linux. I've done it about three times already and each one was a different kind of hell of new terminology I could not understand at the time (what the hell is a swap folder?), core features that broke randomly (why is my left speaker mute, after plugging a second monitor), software that failed or wouldn't run (games, photoshop), etc. Every time I ran to get help to the internet, communities always tended to be hostile or just arcane (oh you obviously need to open up a terminal and run 'xgrt -y -r <your resolution>' -- what in the world is a terminal?).

Windows just works, it's bundled with every PC ever, and it's hard to want to leave that for something so much more difficult.

Nowadays, I know I could get a Linux box up and running without issue, and that friction is an order of magnitude lower than it was a decade ago, and I'm itching towards trying once more given that these thousand cuts in Windows are killing me, but it's gonna take time to gather up the drive to undertake the jump.
That is mostly about politics and blame shifting in high stress high pressure situation. And us vs then dynamic.

That does not actually show the drivers regularly do stupid things or that it would be easy for human to stop doing things the engineers considered stupid.
I installed Fedora Workstation on my desktop the other weekend. The performance and simplicity is staggering. The only things I’m missing so far are iterm2 and keychain synced over iCloud.
I also find the desktop experience unreliable, and I use Ubuntu, Windows 10 and OS X.
Not really.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
Hacker News is written in a Lisp, started by people deeply interested in the language, and frequented in a large part by people who feel similarly.
Prolly a mistake.
I recognize that the following is an HN middlebrow dismissal of Carl Sagan, so I'm probably wrong, but I want to try anyway.

My worry with quotes like these is that there's always a hint of nostalgia and conservatism mixed through it. It's easy to remember your own past as more nuanced, more substantial than the present, but is that really true? I can never tell.

In this case, were people really more well-read and less ignorant in Sagan's past than they were in the mid nineties, or was he simply surrounded more by well-read, nuanced people when he was younger than when he was older? Or maybe both are the case? He complains about dumb TV shows in exactly the same way people these days complain about dumb Youtubers. Wouldn't there have been equally dumb things in Sagan's past that just happened to be easier for him to ignore?

I've read quotes with a very similar vibe but focused on other (perceived) societal changes, such as changing sexual mores, immigration, and so on. It's basically the standard template "things were better in the past than they are now, wrt $TOPIC-that-I-care-about, so I worry about the future". In Sagan's case, obviously, $TOPIC is science, but you could swap it out for nearly anything and write a similar story and it'll ring true to people with similar values as yours.

Basically, I think all I'm asking is, is society really dumbing down? Or are we simply confronted with it more?
You answered your own question. Attention is essentially the currency of the internet and it's a finite resource. People got better at competing for your attention. Things are now optimized for "engagement" rather than enjoyment.
Yeah but this guy was a socialist! /s

This randomly came to my YT queue one day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk1kuYPt51g
Hilda is _so_ good! The ending to the Mountain King, omg!
OSX, it just works, even more than windows.
The book is "The Demon-Haunted World" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
Lemmy plans to support ActivityPub:

https://wedistribute.org/2020/05/lemmy-announces-alpha-suppo...

I didn't try it myself though.
Yeah, all that FUD and EEE strategy. I still hear in my head adapted saying that "you either die a hero, or live long enough to become Microsoft" (which is especially valid when one thinks about the big corps nowadays).

Younger peers think that Microsoft being evil was a fad or a meme, but I remember bribing lawsuits where Microsoft would earn literal billions of dollars shoving their software to the state offices, schools etc., and vendor locking it to the point where anything FOSS would just bork out.

Too bad we don't care for the modern corporate history as much as we do for the non-modern one.
That copy doesn't have images. A wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200710094652/http://tech.mattm...

I feel like I've seen more than a handful of personal sites crushed by HN traffic in recent months. I wonder at the server architecture that can't handle HN traffic. In this awesome, far-future science-fictional year of 2020, it should not be a feat of engineering to write something that can handle a few thousand pageloads. I've had posts visit the front page a couple times, and from the traffic numbers I saw, it's not like you have to handle ten thousand concurrent connections. Ten concurrent connections would do it.
Most users can't or won't be bothered to take hardly any steps to improve their security or privacy.

Only after they lose control of their email or bank account (or lose an entire physical device) do they confess to having followed none of the recommended prevention measures.

Granted, it really is a drag and a time cost to try to follow good practices. I hate the extra password manager and authy steps on my phone when I'm in a hurry. It can be a real challenge to juggle apps and find your way back to the app which you are logging in on (twice or three times! - copying username from bitwarden, switching back to paste it in the username only page of the app, then repeating to do the password, and then finally switching to authy for the 2fa and back). No typical user is going to suffer this in the name of security.

Some fundamental changes need to be made to devices, UIs, apps, and even legislation to improve this. Cookie popups are not the answer (especially when the pop-up is so large that it doesn't even fit entirely in the visible area of my giant phone).