skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On XML:

> Not sure anyone really knows how XML happened. It’s
> basically the W3C’s fault, I think? It’s okay for some
> things but in the end I’m not sure it’s something anyone
> actually wants to use, it’s just going to be one more of
> those mistakes of the past.

Look, I was doing web dev when XMLRPC was in. For simple API stuff, JSON ended up being worlds better. No fiddly XML preamble, no schemas, no envelopes, just enough structure to be able to quickly pull out a couple of fields and we're set. Beautiful.

But let me tell you how much I appreciated XML and schema validation when we were working with fifteen different partners all using a standardized XML format with a schema. These are cats who were putting XSDs into their IDEs, clicking generate to get a class, and then just not caring.

So when our integrations broke because they were sending XML payloads that failed schema validation, our conversations were so easy.

Before you say "yes but technically you could have done the same with $OTHER_THING" -- sure it's possible, but XML is ubiquitous. Shit, our tools were in Ruby.

XML can be a bear, but sometimes you need a bear.
Reality has a left-wing bias compared to Rhetoric.

Or rather, rhetoric has a right-wing bias because "he who pays the piper calls the tune". People like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife

spend a fantastic amount to push various right-wing causes. For instance they could easily pay people all day to edit Wikipedia and if there were not countermeasures we would see a lot more of it. (e.g. «General Motors» would love to own its Wikipedia page)
Ah. Too sophisticated...
there's gotta be something weird going on here. either they are rolling "tuition" waivers into this, or they are quoting salaries for 40 hours but the actual positions are paid at 20 hours (on paper).

as a more typical example, the University of Illinois offers somehwere around $22k to CS grad students (and it's one of the strongest CS programs in the world), and $20k to math.

https://cs.illinois.edu/about/awards/graduate-fellowships-aw...

https://math.illinois.edu/admissions/graduate-admissions/fin...
Markup character and namespaces aside, I think what makes JSON easier to read is that it is more explicit about whether a child object is a singleton or a list, where XML requires you to consult the schema for minOccurs and maxOccurs.
The only problem with json is that you can't do comments with the default implementation.
No Samsung phones are built in China, most of them are now manufactured in Vietnam.
No, I have no reason to believe CS6 stopped working, that's just the only terms I have on my local and I couldn't find an obvious archive of Adobes terms for previous versions.
Evernote's API also uses Thrift, fwiw
https://dev.evernote.com/doc/reference/
Slow breathing, unless you are doing it to an extreme, doesn't actually significantly alter blood oxygen levels. Mostly you are dealing with carbon dioxide levels. In fact, due to the dilation of the blood vessels caused by CO2, cellular oxygen levels can go up when breathing slows down, as more blood is delivered to the cells themselves. It takes quite a lot of stress for O2 to drop for normal people who haven't pre-trained themselves into getting comfortable with raised CO2, quite longer than any sort of remotely comfortable breathing technique. In other words, the urge to breathe is actually generated by increasing CO2, not falling O2. If you put yourself in a chamber with normal CO2 and abnormally low O2, you wouldn't feel an urge to breathe faster, you'd just eventually become delirious. So the analogy of caloric restriction to O2 restriction isn't actually applicable for gentle, even mildly uncomfortable, breathwork. But it's still an interesting idea.
Malpedia
Who makes better food?

Thats all that matter. It was a crucial factor in the fall of the Romans (they hadn't invented pizza yet), the Mongols, the Brits, the Soviets, the Germans etc etc.
who doesn't love x12, especially with its loops and segments?
While that's true, it's irrelevant to my comment. PKCE is layered on top of the either of the two strategies I described and solves a totally different problem (untrustworthy user agents).
Don't go too far out of your way to avoid paying taxes on options. When money's growing on trees, pick it, and pay the taxes.
We need to know the elemental sequence of every human protein at some point, so we might as well start now.

Deepmind has made some interesting progress on modeling molecular structure from first principles using advanced ML architectures. Hopefully years from now these types of tools will let us understand the in vivo structural dynamics of these amazing molecular machines that give rise to life.
Anyone know why Paypal cancelled? I mean, other than the usual "they're silENCIng oUR COnSERvaTIve VoICes" bloviating nonsense?

Also, odd that they post the letters as images instead of text that'd be easier to index, ey?

Also strange that while the web archive grabbed it, I'm getting some weird redirect error:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201023183821/https://www.epik....

In any case, archived here:
https://archive.vn/41KvI
Dang. I thought you may have inadvertently pointed me in the right direction as to why I can't even get my indexing service to start. But, no luck. Maybe I'll get around to putting more hours in to fixing it someday.
It's not 100% in either direction. They're opposing some stuff, but acquiescing when it benefits them directly.
> enforce a level of competence

Can you please elaborate? In the US, I see "lying" and "corrupt" as some of the most defining characterisics of modern US "rulers".
> There is nothing to guarantee that attackers will destroy the data and not further exploit it even if you pay them

Their business model relies on them being honest. If they don't follow through on their promise of destroying the data they'll kill the ransomware market entirely. So far, I haven't heard of major instances where ransomware gangs didn't fulfil their part of the bargain.
Doesn't your disclaimer kind of also explain a bias against SB, as NMR is mostly used for protein dynamics elucidation (vs. the more rigid structures of Cryo-EM)? Or do you actually mean all fields of SB?
Hmm no, XML is 10x harder to read than JSON, period. It's just a ugly format with so much metadata information which are not human friendly.

I think that's the main problem of XML it's not meant to be read by humans but people thought it was.
A lot of laptops are built with pretty lack luster thermal design.

Less voltage means less waste heat. If you can lower voltage without lowering clock speed, you'll be able to maintain turbo boost longer instead of constantly thermal throttling.

Not my first recommendation but it is a valid strategy.
Probably because it would take a lot of work, money, and time to validate the ferries, and someone would also have to make them; which would entail its own set of regulatory hurdles.

A more reasonable approach might be hovercraft ferries, like they have in Dover, UK. At least the equipment already exists.
> It’s interesting that his analysis of war elephants has a lot of parallels to his thoughts about chemical weapons.

Well, both technologies find themselves in the same situation; they are well understood by the militaries of their day, and those militaries have no interest in using them. It's not surprising that the same results might come about for the same reasons.
Well, that's not really a "right to privacy" except in how it's been interpreted in court. So, Common Law says it we have the right, because of the precedent of past interpretations. The precedent also holds that the meaning of the right to privacy will drift over time as technology changes.
Tell this to the average Uyghur, Taiwanese, Mongolian, Tibetan people
An interactive map of homeowner tax subsidies in California
So your proof of the usefulness of a system of disputable value is — that it's used to settle transactions of other systems of disputable value?

And, of course, those DeFi systems in turn are used to settle transactions of other systems. It's tokens all the way down!
If you've got a good idea of what the customer is experiencing (logs/descriptions/whatever you can get for info), using the source code work backwards from whatever code could generate the state the customer described to determine how it got there. At some point you'll probably come across some bit that looks weird and that's quite possibly the problem.

It can be a bit of work, and it presupposes a certain understanding of the system in question, but one can absolutely do this. It's basically my day job.
Celebrating MusicXML’s 20th Anniversary
Well that depends, right? If you’ve analyzed it thoroughly and come to the understanding that the ROI is poor and the budget would have been better spent elsewhere, then obviously you’re probably correct and someone else is not doing their job right.

But if it’s more of a shallow, knee-jerk reaction like ”this much spent on EMAIL SIGNATURES!? This has to be a waste of money!”, then perhaps you’re wrong to jump to conclusions quite so fast. You haven’t really elaborated, so we don’t know which one it is.
This is interesting. Can you expand?
Having just finished a 10 year PhD stint, I second this advice. It is absolutely critical to have a supportive department, secure funding sources, and an advisor with whom you can work well. If any of those is not the case, it’s a recipe for a bad time.
@acnops this would be a great feature to implement in the back end to allow users to input a Youtube link rather than upload a file.
The only area I know something about in your list is silicon chip tech, and I'm convinced that China will have at least one ASML competitor and at least one ARM competitor (or comparable) in the next 20 years, likely faster. Western countries trying to their block access to that tech (eg the US govt trying to stop ASML from shipping chip machines to China), is going to speed that up, not slow it down, because it creates a giant internal market for such tech.

All the Chinese government has to do to accomplish this is sit back and wait. There's plenty smart Chinese engineers and the market forces will do the rest.

(Source: I freelanced for a Chinese-owned lithography startup some years ago. It got run into the ground by bad management but that doesn't change much about my observations about market forces and Chinese engineers)

I have a hard time taking the rest of your list all too seriously given that the one I know something about is, I think, mistaken.
i like promises too and was one of the most vocal supporters. but they are alien to a lot of people. at least that's what I experienced so far :( async/await just feels right at home for everyone
I've become skeptical of people talking about technical debt and clean code and all the standard Fowler/Uncle Bob/PragProg-isms. Not because they're wrong. If anything they're all right, but in a rather vacuous, well-yeah way. Yes technical debt is bad. Yes we should start with a design. Yes we should do refactoring. But using the analogy of the author, that's like telling someone who's overweight and eating a lot of junk food that they should "eat healthier and exercise". Well yeah. They probably knew that already.

And so many people try to make it a dichotomy. Like that diagram of a project with a design versus without. That's not a fair comparison. What does a design even mean? Wireframes? A written document of features? How do we change this design? What's the way in which we get feedback? And what sort of projects are we talking here? A programming language is very different from a website. And what even counts as no design?

Some other notes:

- I'm not sure the author correctly used the Pareto principle. It's not just a generic "split things into 80/20" but a specific observation on how 20% of the causes result in 80% of the effects.

- The post could have used a quick proofread. There's quite a few spelling mistakes and poorly phrased sentences. I totally get if the author is not a native speaker, but they could easily enlist one to help (if the author wishes, I'd be happy to proofread—contact me).

- I get the whole "make this post fun with cats!" but honestly I'd prefer a straightforward example with no funny images. Maybe that's just my grumpiness.
That book is one of the best books I have ever read.

criminally undervalued for people trying to understand why the world is the way that it is.

I talk extensively about Robert Moses in my newsletter, but as you might imagine it's hard to summarize a 1400 page book in a handful of emails, so I haven't quite figured out exactly how well the looping Robert Moses's story into the greater narrative I'm trying to convey.

I would love your thoughts on the newsletter as you read through it!

I just started rereading Jane jacobs's "the death and life of great American cities"

I'm sure at some point I'll be looping it into the newsletter as well.

I'm with you on the non pejorative anarchist philosophical thought.

Not necessarily anything to do with anarchy, but more about the value generation of spontaneous, self-organized, responsive, iterative, goal-seeking behavior at an individual level.

Have you heard of "The problem of political authority: the right course and the duty to obey" or "seeing like a state: why schemes to improve the human condition fail"

as if you're reading list isn't already long enough, these might be worthwhile additions.
>crap XML enterprise apps are most developer's understanding of "real world XML"

I mean if there's enough of it, it kinda becomes "real world XML". Right or wrong human's ability to actually use the tool or tech well is often where the bar is set. Could be a great idea but if folks can't do it... won't fly.
Ask HN: Where are all the crypto companies?
It’s a been few years since the big ICO craze and some companies raised hundreds of millions. I saw Filecoin just launched but I’m curious, are there any active companies with customers that are using crypto as a necessary component of their business?

Excluding exchanges
9DoF Gesture Mouse
Here's some logs + a writeup of when they spammed Lobsters on behalf of LoadMill: https://lobste.rs/s/utbyws/mitigating_content_marketing

My first name @push.cx if you want to share notes on these or other abusive users.
I would have expected some mention to https://jsonnet.org/ too, which after a bit of practice can be brilliant.
A blogger I read when people still did such things asserted that this sort of overengineering is fear. It's really dreadfully obvious once you know to look for it.

People are so afraid of making a bad decision that they refuse to make any decision at all, and then make a giant mess in the process. What you should do is spend your energy on finding reversible decisions, and then not spend a lot of effort on actually making them. We know where the paint store is, we know they can make up paint in 15 minutes, fuck it, paint it blue, we can always paint over it later. Hard no to black, though, since you can't paint over that shit.

People are so used to avoiding decisions that on a few occasions I've entirely flustered someone who wanted to tear into me (sometimes with an audience) but cutting them off and saying, "Yeah that was a mistake, and here's how we're going to fix it." None of them had any idea how to recover from someone saying "I was wrong" and going on to try to fix the problem. I still have a little video in my head of one guy's eyes bugging out when he realized what I just said.
> loading gdb may take two minutes while recompiling to add a printf only 3-4 seconds

To be clear I’m not talking about adding some specific print statements to the code while debugging, I’m talking about keeping those statements in production code.

Of course, there’s cases where logging might be your only option. In that case: Go for it!
> it can be flipped on its head to justify an aristocracy: the wealthy today are the ‘best’ and they will pass on their genes, successful values, and educational strategies to their children.

I disagree, I don't think this argument can be flipped on its head:

The point is that it's pretty clear that the wealthy today are not the best and that meritocratic approaches are much more effective than crossing your fingers and hoping that Einstein's kid will also be an Einstein.

A large reason why affluence and intelligence are at all correlated is because wealthy people have access to better education and better early childhood environments. The fact that even with those advantages, wealth is so uncorrelated with intelligence shows that we have a pretty big problem.
Also, E2E chats are not available on the desktop version of Telegram.
It's indicative of just how broken the times we live in are that the CEO of a financial company feels righteous in abusing their customer's private data in the way that David Barrett has here.

Worse still, he had his official company marketing account go and hype up everyone who replied to him on Twitter applauding his actions here.

It's not surprising to see a tech CEO feeling so empowered to do so, given how widespread similar political behaviour has become in recent years.

One could say that these tech companies have egregiously overplayed their hand in the past few years and personally, even as someone sitting in the middle with little skin in the game, I hope the coming years sees the same entities metaphorically have their fingers, nay the whole hand, shattered. The alarm has been sounded and it is time to reign this industry in.
Was this a 4 person family in a 2 bedroom apartment?
That’s not my experience in Kansas City. The city has been putting in bike lanes and special intersections everywhere the last couple years. I can count the number of cyclist I’ve ever seen using them on one hand.
"As a bootstrapped founder when I was younger..."

How long were you willing to work for someone else before you became a founder?

Status takes many forms.
It’s made for documents. It just doesn’t fit to general data structures. For instance when do you put class members in elements and when in attributes?
Arrow is rapidly become a data interchange format for Pandas and GPU compute, didn't see that on there
Uber using notifications to promote CA Prop 22
It's the "economic integration reduces conflict" falsehood which has been around for at least 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
That's interesting, I forget a lot of things, but what you describe was never a problem for me. I have no real explanation but a vague idea: It needs time. If you've spent some time here and got to know folks it is unavoidable, for better or worse, to connect comments to people. Things connected to people you know, even only casually, are easy to remember.
In the very rare event that no amount of additional instrumentation can yield an exception or extra visibility.. having the customer share or record their screen, depending on how reproducible it is for the customer.

I’ve only needed to do this a few times and I think all but one was customer error/misunderstanding, not bug. If you haven’t already, send them a screen recording of how it should work (rather than just a text or voice explanation) and ask them to confirm that theirs is actually different.
No trailing commas and multi-line strings are my other two big complaints. The ability to leave keys unquoted if they don't have any spaces would also be nice.

The best part is that these are a superset of JSON and could easily be added if there would just be more buy-in (lots of unofficial support already exists).
There are a bunch more possible entries in the human-readable category, one of the more popular contenders is TOML. https://github.com/toml-lang/toml .

There are more. I don't know if java dot-properties file is worth including.
Mozilla Hubs – Private social VR in your web browser
It’s 7 orders for the protium isotope of hydrogen:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=diameter+of+hydrogen+a...

One reason hydrogen is so hard to see...
I see an issue in the web industry that there is sometimes an economical incentive to maintain a solution with technical debt. Just ponder the idea that you hire a bunch of contractors to build you a house, and then you keep them on payroll to come back and fix every broken pipe that they installed to begin with. Even if they feel honor for their work the'll soon drift in to ugly insustainable work due to the nature of their incentives. We might need a proper system to hold engineers responsible insted of hiding behind a company, and in the long run be a solution that provides _space_ for engineers, plausibly.
A few things here- first, we know the sequence of most proteins already. This is about structure, which is very different. It is entirely unclear that we "need" to know every structure to solve most important problems in biology (either basic research or applied).

As for Deepmind... they made an incremental improvement over the existing field (and everybody will be doing the same thing in 2 years). This ignores and underweights the decades of contributions from a wide range of people to bring us to this point in protein structure prediction and design.
The CD-ROM is now on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993

Brad Templeton wrote about it: "I believe this CD is now a piece of history, as the world's first major eBook project using current fiction. At the time it was the largest anthology of current fiction ever published in one volume, and it may retain that title even today. Prior ventures were small or featured either unpublished writers or public domain works. This anthology featured novels that in most cases had not yet come out in paperback."
A country never stops wanting more investment, and once a country has accepted investment money, there are parties in both nations that are incentivized to continue the relationship.

If a country takes money from China, they will continue to want to take more money from China instead of switching to a less well known, more risky alternative.

Also, if a country reneges on their investors, why would investors in any other country want to invest in them? They've already shown a willingness to go back on their agreements.
All the last 5 months or so of using Windows 10, I thought this issue was only on my computer because I installed TechSmith's Capture app. Now I know it's not. Viewing/Opening photos is a very common task people do on PC. How could this have passed the QA tests is beyond believable to me.
Interestng read, didn't know most of this. Not that it matters in the end: at one point we just needed something simple which would just work and MessagePack does just that :)

Btw JSON is often a popular choice, but although this is not explicitly mentioned in the main article as a con which is an oversight imo, the actual JSON standard does not support NaN/+-Inf for floating point. That's insane, which is why most implementations have an option to allow that anyway, but not all, which can be quite the showstopper.
It should mention canonical s-expressions[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_S-expressions
Realpolitik means that we acknowledge that great power wars aren't an option while MAD exists - and that MAD isn't going anywhere for 100 years or more. That means that soft/economic power is far more important than hard power.

Anti-ICBM tech sucks balls and it only gets worse with new weapons like nuclear cruise missiles.
> were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation

That would be a highly unusual trajectory.

Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity.

And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.
My girlfriend is Chinese and she's the best cook I've ever met, so there's one opinionated bit of anecdata for you.