skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The part about scalability is very outdated. And comparing it to a centralized database is useless anyway. You would need to compare it to global net of nodes which all sync with one master database. Due to the time it need to sync you simply cant ever reach performance of a single DB.

The second thing that is misleading is the idea that a read-only DB would be possible without either trust or decentralization.

Just because your software doesn't implement a delete or update method doesn't mean its read-only at all. And even if there is crypto verification in place like a chain of hashes that would break if something is changed in the past. I all means nothing if you dont wanna trust the source of the data and verification.

The key part of "blockchain" (pls call it distributed ledger (DL), it doesn't need chains of blocks) is the public state of the system. It allows to verify the data without trusting the parties that gave you the data.

The conclusion of the article is correct. If you dont need the trustlessness and decentralization you almost certainly dont need a DL.
Probably Verilog.
Implementing “weightless threads” with Python generators (2002)
Games especially seem to have more trouble working than other programs. Something like DxWnd may help in those cases.
> There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling.

Well, if I had some type of personal assistant who worked for me (as in, a real human), I would just call out "Hey, Sam, please order pizza for me" and continue with whatever I was doing.

The reason people don't make phone calls is they add a lot of additional friction. You have to dial the number, and wait for someone to pick up, and give them your address, and deal with frequently-questionable voice quality.
HFT may not, but trading itself definitely provides positive value. People's utility function is not purely monetary over an infinite time horizon. Trading allows you to trade off price and risk over multiple time horizons.

For example, a trade where someone needs to convert his assets into cash due to a family emergency benefits both sides. The person with the emergency takes liquidity from the market and pays a premium because the trade is time-sensitive - he needs cash the next day. Other liquidity traders may profit from such "uninformed" flow in the long term, but both parties are happy because they got what they want.

Another example is trading off risk and hedging against certain changes in the world that would affect you.
Voice activated code snippets or command line switches would be nice. "Hey ffmpeg crop the first 15 seconds of input.mp4 and increase the volume by 15%".

Modular so I can switch out the speech recognition and the NLP and fulfillment
The No-Code Generation is arriving
> Pichai's net worth in 2020 is estimated at between $600 million and $1.2 billion.

Somehow I think poor Pichai will survive.
"The Social Dilemma" on Netflix touches on this - in part, the algorithms that run these platforms and govern (guide?) user interaction are responsible in large part for pitting people against each other. It's in their best interest to keep eyeballs on their respective sites as much has humanly possible.
It of course depends entirely on what kind of tool you are trying to build. PDFs capture a ton of visual information lost in plain text. I know the parent article is discussing construction of a text model, but what about say, if you were attempting to build the ultimate AI page reflow tool? etc.
> Microsoft making software for Linux? Huh? Is this an experiment? How long are they going to support it?

VSCodium [0] is a fork of VS Code without Microsoft telemetry and branding.

If Microsoft decided to stop supporting VS Code, I think the development community would quickly pivot to VSCodium and pick up from there.

[0] https://vscodium.com/
On principle, no. I'll stick with my 32" 1080p POS dumb Samsung before I entertain anything like that.
I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
I don't think specific examples are really useful here. At the end of the day, either I'm allowed to say "I am not a racist" at work and be left alone for making that statement, or I'm not. If I'm not, it's a cryptofascist struggle session.
I can definitely say that for food I MUCH prefer the web/app interface. I can swipe through a bunch of nice-looking food and just tap on something that looks appetizing.

You can't get that with voice no matter how you do it. It's like if a restaurant had no menu and the wait staff just recited the menu in your face and asked you to pick. Even with real humans, voice isn't the best interface for presenting food choices.
Several years back, a tourism minister claimed it increased tourism by 10x. I still don't think the parody sits well with me, but knowing it helped others become more prosperous eases my disappointment.
Yep, oh-ohs. We said it the same.

My fav is when she decides to interpret your words instead of playing the exact playlist you’re telling her to play.
Scenic: Garmin's devices appear to do some calculation on number of times the road doesn't go straight over a given distance. Seems to work well enough. OTOH, someone at Google has to make this a feature.

Paved/unpaved: that's one suck-ass assistant you've got there. I know the Garmin on the dash of my motorcycle will give that option. The Garmin RV-specific GPS has loads of other options, such as avoid any low overpasses that will rip the solar panels off my RV. Though it doesn't look like Apple is any better than Google, only because Apple Maps doesn't offer the option. Anyway, satellite and street view? Rand McNally had this information since dirt was first created, no need to get the satellites out.
They release periodic delta torrents of the entire collection. I won't link it here, but it's trivial to find
Guide: Tips on How to Safely Clean Your Car During Covid-19
That's fair, NLP has done decently with mechanical deconstruction of normal sentences for quite a while now. But as you note, mapping that onto a template for response is a long way from "understanding".
Frames used to be an idea in AI, but they seem to have been sidelined and possibly forgotten now.

Frames mean that words and sentences have a context, and you can't understand conversations unless you understand the context.

This starts from simple and obvious distinctions. E.g. - as a silly example - "make dinner" usually means "Prepare and cook an evening meal". But if you have a project called "dinner" it might mean "build and compile 'dinner'" An AGI should be able to understand the difference, and ask for clarification if it doesn't.

Eventually you end up with subtextual and implied communication - e.g. "I'm fine" can mean two completely opposite things depending on tone of voice and the contents of minutes-to-years of previous conversations.

All of this is many orders of magnitude harder to handle than "Bedroom lights off."
Thanks, you're certainly correct! I was a bit sloppy and didn't care to lookup the proper wording :-)
TypeScript – don't require to implement optional abstract properties
I found a thread with the search term

hackernews comments to visitor rate
Alas, that was my read as well.
The Momentum Sprint
I actually got a Lemur Pro for work, and I really love it. I had an XPS 13 2020 Dev Edition for about 2 months, and long story short, Dell support sucks, and we decided to return the device, and went with a Lemur Pro as the replacement.

Pros:
- Great battery life, I develop in typescript currently and am getting a full day of battery

- Using a dock, I can get up to 3 displays, maybe four if I try with the on-board HDMI port

- Charges with USB-C with up to 65W, so one cable for everything.

- Full sized USB A ports for quick flash drive access

- Typing on the keyboard is very solid (however I do have one con listed below)

- Can turn off camera via software (with Pop_OS)

- Linux from the get-go

- Came packaged pretty well

- Lots of goodies came along. Pins, stickers, etc. Not everyone will care but I thought it was a nice touch

- Recyclable box, plastics, tc came in the packaging.

- It's SUPER light

- Good amount of customization in my opinion

- Has another m.2 slot you can put your own or buy it configured and filled up

Cons:

- Regardless of configured RAM, first slot is always 8gb, so anything beyond 16gb total will always be non-dual-channel. Believe this is soldered.

- Touchpad could be bigger

- I believe the max brightness is something around 300 or 350 nits, which may cause issues when working outside, haven't had the opportunity to because of COVID

- The keyboard has pg_up and pg_down on top of left and right keys, which is rather obnoxious and I wish they would have went with pg_up and pg_down for fn + arrow instead.

- Possible con for people: SD card slot is only micro, not full sized

- Only one USB-C port

- No thunderbolt

- Power button is unintuitive imo, but I'm nitpicking at this point

- Compared to the dell, the bezels are a bit larger than I like, but again, nitpicking/doesn't really bother me
This is a very important point. Congress is complicit in allowing this, because they have the authority to shut these agencies down.
Do you find yourself going back and revising what you've dictated? When I type, I'm frequently pausing, going to other parts of the document, and deleting things I've already written. All of these actions I find more annoying when dictating. Not to mention some of the baffling Random capitalization Choices and, over/under insertion of punctuation.

In general, I find dictation useful on my phone to take notes to myself. And maybe to send a message in a chat situation. But it just doesn't work for me for anything slightly more formal / long.
We weren't there, we might not survive on that kind of climate for long periods, or the plants/animals we depend on. And the change is happening fast, fast enough to not leave much room for adaptation, you will get extinction of key pieces needed for our survival instead of adaptation. And something that is slower to adapt is a civilization tied to the ground by buildings and agricultural fields.

And even if you can call "record" what can be indirectly deduced from ice cores, the records they are talking are methodically measuring and registering them live. Those records are the broken ones.

With the lockdown, less circulation and flying, it may have helped to add less carbon to the atmosphere than we the previous year. But adding less doesn't mean that will be a reduction of what is already is in excess, the carbon added to the atmosphere could stay there from decades to centuries, and we keep adding new carbon to that furnace (fossil fuels, and positive feedback releasing frozen carbon around the poles). Even with full zero emission the carbon that is already there will keep increasing global temperature averages.
That's right. We are a bunch of large corporate butt kissers. Can I please have a cushy job at Apple & engineer nothing for 4 years please?
They had hardware in 2005, but started transitioning to JVM only in 2010.

They used some of the intel instructions meant for running VMs to get fast concurrent GC. It’s probably a lot easier to court customers with a software only solution than with custom hardware they can’t really repurpose...
They're absolutely monitoring side effects during phase 3. some safety effects can be rare enough that they don't show up in phase 1/2.
2020 NASA Tipping Point Selections
But would you have gotten better results if you had typed those same queries into some website?

While an artificial general intelligence would be capable of fluent speech, a perfectly good speech system does not necessarily need to be an AGI.
We have written a database in zero GC java and one thing I have not seen any evidence of "escape analysis".

@State(Scope.Thread)
@BenchmarkMode(Mode.AverageTime)
@OutputTimeUnit(TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS)
public class EscBenchmark {

Rnd rnd = new Rnd();

public static void main(String[] args) throws RunnerException {
Options opt = new OptionsBuilder()
.include(EscBenchmark.class.getSimpleName())
.warmupIterations(5)
.measurementIterations(5)
.forks(1)
.addProfiler(GCProfiler.class)
.build();

new Runner(opt).run();
}

@Benchmark
public int testEscapeAnalysis() {
int[] tuple = {0, 2}; // esc analysis? where are you?
return tuple[rnd.nextPositiveInt() % 2];
}
}

And the output of GC profiler:

Benchmark Mode Cnt Score Error Units
EscBenchmark.testEscapeAnalysis avgt 5 8.234 ± 0.029 ns/op
EscBenchmark.testEscapeAnalysis:·gc.alloc.rate avgt 5 2647.216 ± 9.275 MB/sec
EscBenchmark.testEscapeAnalysis:·gc.alloc.rate.norm avgt 5 24.000 ± 0.001 B/op
EscBenchmark.testEscapeAnalysis:·gc.churn.G1_Eden_Space avgt 5 2643.140 ± 177.137 MB/sec
EscBenchmark.testEscapeAnalysis:·gc.churn.G1_Eden_Space.norm avgt 5 23.963 ± 1.613 B/op
EscBenchmark.testEscapeAnalysis:·gc.count avgt 5 157.000 counts
EscBenchmark.testEscapeAnalysis:·gc.time avgt 5 103.000 ms
Just like picking Go, gccgo, TinyGo, TamaGo or whatever might come down the line.
Toyota systems launches digital currency pilot
It totally is. They're selectively enforcing their policy against people large enough to catch the attention of PayPal's Compliance Teams.

Automated actions are taken against small accounts, Manual Enforcement will happen against large accounts.
Context is hard, but it seems like “recent” means (99% of the time) order by date descending, grab the first 15 or so, and then how many of those photos contain a person with a mask.

Maybe the difficult part is whether or not you look for the 15 most recent photos containing people, or the 15 most recent photos of anything.
https://snowboy.kitt.ai/ is about the only good third party hotword detection engine. You can hook it into Assistant with a bit of work, and with Tasker/Automate and a rooted phone, you can open apps, press buttons, pass voice commands, and more.

Imo, Assistant is limited because of privacy, see how it asks you to opt in for a more personalized experience and it still won't unlock your phone for you.
For something like that I'd rather press a button or have it happen on a timer.

Where it could really shine is in more rare commands. "Make me some Pad Thai". Unless you're a huge fan, you wont want a button for this. And it's faster to say than type into your phone.
They're keeping the Bad Guys(TM) out!
Nokia was selected to build the first ever extraterrestrial cellular network.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/10/19/noki...
I think you underestimate the resistance. The problem isn't just that people don't want to do it, it's also that people don't want other people to do it because it's annoying.

It might pass in a coffee shop, it probably won't in an airplane, it will almost certainly never pass in a library. People will try it regardless of the appropriateness of the location, because some people aren't aware or are assholes, and as a result the entire technology will get a bad rap. See google glass as an example.
No, the point is that you'd be annoying the people around you if you were talking to your computer the whole time.
As an open source developer who enjoys coding, a lot of these thoughts resonate strongly with me but this article is overly pessimistic. It's OK to be pessimistic but that doesn't mean you should stop trying to make things right because otherwise it becomes self-fulfilling.

Also, we shouldn't look at fiat currency as the only form of achievement, especially given the artificial economic environment of the past decade.
Many smart people know that Slava co-founded RethinkDB and realize that it's one of the best databases in existence.
That genuine brand value is way more valuable in the long run than worthless fiat paper or company stocks whose earnings are denominated in that same worthless fiat.

It's important for millennials to realize that the past 10 years of monetary policy which contributed to significant centralization of wealth and power is not normal and it won't last.
Even with the long names, Lisp code can be very compact, because the language is very expressive. In my experience, You can implement the same functionality in Clojure or in Java, with the Clojure version being 3x to 5x smaller than the Java one. This does not necessarily hold for all domains and all code, but it is often the case.
I think this suffices as a summary, "The other reality is the frustration and drudgery of operating in a world of corporate politics, bureaucracy, envy and greed— a world so depressing, that many people quit in frustration, never to come back."

Some of us just aren't cut out to work in a big corporate environment. From what I've seen, large technical companies are made up of two sets, the technical set and the manager/business set. Unfortunately, it seems that the manager set yields a disproportionate amount of influence and power and therefore is "valued" more. I'm sure there are smaller companies that could make the folks leaving stick around the industry. But, if they've been successful and are mid career they may have priced themselves out of those opportunities.
It’s not clear that cigarette smoking is actually net harmful, due to the substantial decrease in obesity associated with smoking.
Show HN: Quickly Build Databases and Data-Driven APIs
I also think the only way for Windows to survive long term is to allow evolutionary branches and clones of it, like how the AT&T and BSD UNIXes and later on Linux and SysV and later on Darwin and Android managed to remain so successful.
Yeah, while the movie made me laugh, the old "people from abroad are stupid because they don't speak English well" stereotype is really tired.

The one redeeming quality the movie had was that it usually got its laughs from people's reactions to Borat, not from Borat actually being a dumb foreigner.
> forced hysterectomies are performed on undocumented immigrants in concentration camps show that it's not really about racism for the people that are doing this.

The accused doctor is named Mahendra Amin, is an immigrant, is brown (if you couldn't tell from his name), and has a history of medicare/medicaid fraud (he settled with the State of Georgia). How did what is most likely just more insurance fraud from a brown immigrant quack with a history of insurance fraud become "Nazi forced sterilizations in concentration camps?"

Ironically, I'm more likely to be downvoted/flagged for pointed out the doctor's name, race, and immigration status than you are for spreading misinformation.
The article didn't really say much specific, I guess its really hard to know who is affected. Californians has one of the lowest cancer rates https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/cancer_mortality/c...
One thing I haven't seen discussed is the poor affordance / discoverability of speech technology.

Google Home can do some clever things however, it also does not have the ability to do some very basic stuff. As a user, how do you know what Google Home can do and cannot do?

It is just trial and error. And if Google Home introduces a new feature to be able to complete new types of queries. What now? How does a user know that last month it wasn't able to do something and this month it is able to do that thing.

And lastly, the interface of voice is very clunky. It has no concept of temporal memory like

Me: "Ok Google, navigate to the nearest safeway"
Google: "navigating you to the nearest gas station"

The natural thing to say is "no, I meant safeway nott gas station"
however, I now have to say "Ok Google, navigate to the nearest safeway".

This is analogous to if keyboard had no backspace and you have to retype everything everytime you have a typo. Well that's the state of speech technology right now
It's odd to me that in a time of increased political correctness it's also seen as perfectly okay by the mainstream media to mock a group of people as dumb and evil just because they're foreign and unknown.

Cohen writes: "I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the U.S. knew anything about, which allowed us to create a wild, comedic, fake world." Why not just make up a fake country then? Why disparage real people for no reason.

The article seems terrible to me. They're talking about one American immigrant and his friend who have decided to make an ad campaign out of the film. I can't imagine how they think that's representative of the thoughts of the nation.
I understand your point, but I'm not sure that GUIs won out because they were dramatically more user-friendly. It certainly helped, but I think they won because it made multitasking possible. Multitasking from the users perspective that is, the ability to interact with more than one application at the same time. That was just not possible on a console, so even people who didn't need user friendliness were able to do things they couldn't do before. I was young at the time, but that's how I remember it at least.
Stay on topic, please.
Hey HN,
Pasha here, creator of “less”.
This is a tool to speed up all the common, boring, non-differentiated work most software eng. teams still spend time on.

Many existing no-code/low-code tools don’t fit well into a “real” software development process. I am making something that solves that.

A lot of the vision is not there yet, but I am very eager to get some early feedback.

Please let me know what you think!
USvGoogle.org
Cool :)

I’ve been thinking about building a web app that scrapes specific subreddits.
If you are publishing a JVM GC benchmark, you should really include the parameters you used for the program as well as what steps you took to find those particular parameters. While I think it has gotten better in recent years, there are still many knobs for most JVMs which can make a big difference in performance.

Ideally, you would want to have the benchmark developers cooperate with the team creating the JVM you are evaluating in order to be as far as possible with the benchmark sort of like how the TPC benchmarks are done.
He also applied for federal benefits to treat his black lung disease [1] while claiming that his disease has nothing to do with the exposure he had while working [2]. Which is _possible_, but seems unlikely to me. I must admit that I know nothing about the particulars of the disease.

[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-blacklung/coal-baron...

[2] https://thehill.com/regulation/energy-environment/519173-for...
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time.

Raise your hand if you remember the early days of Xbox "recognition", as you listen to other people in your party:

"Xbox, record. XBOX, RECORD. X...BOX, RE...CORD."

It's the reason that "oh, we can't sell an Xbox without a Kinect" Kinect went into the garage after a few months.
I don't know, I like swiping through photos of food to make my decisions on what to eat, and then it only takes about 30 more seconds to complete the order at most.
You're presuming that every phrase was worded _just so_. This could very well have been from the author refactoring their sentence and not simplifying everything. They probably were thinking in these terms (the author is a PL guy from MSR who's pretty heavy into a lot of the formalism) and this sounds like a not-perfectly-polished formal thought.

It's technical, and sometimes technical writing isn't written perfectly. That doesn't mean it's due to willful obtusity, or trying to sound smart.
It might be a good way to learn to talk to people, or just talk... Actually, just use Discord for that, join random servers and the voice chats.
The PHP Wikipedia page seems to argue that the most popular implementation, Zend, is an interpreter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Implementations