skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Apple wouldn't go down this path if they weren't confident that their designs would scale and keep them in the performance lead for a long time.

There are two reasons to think this might not be the case. The first is that they could justify continuing to do this to their shareholders based solely on the cost savings from not paying margins to Intel, even if the performance is only the same and not better. Their customers might not appreciate having the transition dumped on them in that case, but Apple has a specific relationship with their customers.

And the second is that these things have a long lead time. They made the call to do this at a time when Intel was at once stagnant and the holder of the performance crown. Intel is still stagnant but now they have to contend with AMD. And with whatever Intel's response to AMD is going to be now that they've finally got an existential fire lit under them again.

So it was reasonable for them to expect to beat Intel's 14nm++++++ with TSMC's 5nm, but what happens now that AMD is no longer dead and is using TSMC too?
Don't know why this is getting downvoted but it's actually true https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html (Ctrl+F 1700x then 8700k)
I am not suggesting a hypothetical economy which only did those things. Governments need to build militaries and roads etc.

I am rather suggesting 170 years ago the yardstick for success may have looked very different. Something that is obviously flawed today may have seemed far more reasonable to people at the time and even somewhat worked. Hell the US still had slavery back then, it was simply a very different time period.

Which kind of makes me think what biases someone in 170 years in the other direction aka 2190 would have thinking about our time period.
Well…wait, how is that different than having a non-botnet car with a serious defect?

Say, all those cars with defective Takata airbags. I guess you’re arguing that you feel safer that the manufacturer can’t remotely disable the car, but I don’t see how how a cell connection has much to do with a car having a deadly issue or not. It has to get fixed no matter what.

(Also, given how many cars are leased, and the increasingly long time of those leases…lots of people, in fact, do not own their cars.)
I have seen software in Canada that cannot handle accented characters. This is in a country where a quarter of the population is French. Case in point:

> Sudbury (Ontario, Canada) woman supports petition to add accents to French names on government I.D.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/petition-french-names...
I'll try to give a rough overview of what's going on here.

The function z produces the puddle (ahem - "event horizon") through a technique I accidentally found from "orthogonal" raymarching. The accident being the value is supposed to be the distance of an incrementing ray for an SDF (signed distance function), but instead the distance is completely replaced on each recursion resulting in the reflected fluid appearance. I think this is due to the ray distance oscillating backwards and forwards in a way that is similar enough to neighboring rays to not appear noisy while giving the appearance of reflection. The exact functions used for the SDF are not so important so long as it incorporates itself.

fillRect is doing pretty much everything else, by painting each pixel. To achieve shading without fillStyle, the width and height arguments are varied between 0 and 1 to give grey scale shading due to subpixel anti-aliasing. Speculative edges are also achieved with negative values (0 to -1) which creates white gaps and fill adjacent pixels instead.

The chevrons are sampled from a radial fractal a*20-r&44 where 'a' is the angle of the current position wrapped in some periodic function (cosine), and 'r' is the radius. The bitwise AND operator is the key in generating these types of patterns (although OR and XOR also work very well producing other types of patterns), the constants are found through - a lot - of trial and error. In this case the result of the fractal is used as a "truthy" condition (i.e non zero) to toggle between the shaded sides (X/48 or Y/48) and 1 (the dark bits).

Some other hacky details: S and T are the X and Y pixel positions, these names are used so that they can be referenced before they have been assigned because these names have already been assigned unused functions by dwitter. This saves some characters by allowing me to define X and Y inside of atan2 while also passing them as arguments, at the cost of the fillRect X Y position being invalid for the first pixel and from the previous iteration on the rest.

I'm finding a recurring property of dweets that end up packing a lot in - is sharing significant portions of code for different purposes, in this case it's fairly straight forward but still a big win in terms of characters: S, T and r are only defined once and used for both the puddle and the ring. This type of size optimization always gives a lot more road than syntactic wrangling, which while important are only finishing touches. However they cannot be forced, ideas with enough shared code can only be found.

Feel free to ask me anything else.
I agree, although the quality of the ABC collapsed a few years ago after serious budget cuts and they will probably lose that trust over time.

But the other thing to note about Australia is that the country is a bit of a demographic and cultural misfit in SEA, and reliant on the US umbrella to have unquestioned security against the countries just to the north including two superpowers and any number of countries with the potential to be economic and military powerhouses.

It would be strategically justifiable for Australia to get serious about building up a powerful intelligence system, in a way that it just doesn't for Canada. I imagine if Canada wanted to become the next US State it probably could. Australia is much more isolated and it is foreseeable that the US might withdraw from the Pacific in the next 50 years.
I've used a combination if stylish and opendns domain blocking to address this. I now prefer to read through hackernewsletter once a week and some random reading once or twice.
> This incident seems to be a mark in the column of the old argument that authoritarianism is bad for economic growth because of the ever-present potential for capricious action such as this.

And yet, compare the economic growth of India to China, or Yeltsin Russia versus Putin Russia. Or look at South Korea's economic miracle in the 60s -> 80s, under a repressive, authoritarian regime.

All things considered, authoritarianism seems to be able to hold its own with respect to economic growth.

And in this case, a strong argument can be made that this is the bad kind of economic growth - the kind that introduces systemic risks through the economy, by overleveraging credit. 2007 says hello.
Absolutely adore the series! I have the full collection illustrated by Tove Janssen.
I think it's serious either way, just in the longer-term. He continues to sow discord and distrust in our institutions which will last beyond this election cycle, and will only continue to weaken the country as a whole. But I don't think it'll amount to a sudden takeover. Fingers crossed.
Ask HN: Thoughts on Email Courses?
Recently took Monica Lent's Blogging for Devs 7 day email course.
(https://bloggingfordevs.com/)

Thought the content was great but the delivery format (straight to email inbox) made it extremely effective.

It made me wonder, why aren't there more email courses out there?

It seems like many e-books and online courses would be far more engaging/effective/valuable as email courses.
I am in no way discounting your description. The behaviors you described are incredibly immature and possibly misogynistic. I am not clear on the social context in which those communications occurred but not anything I would want to be involved with. That level of immaturity and poor empathy has nothing to do with any mistake or apology.
Perhaps add support for also getting the actual normal/regular ping output so one can have that along with the graph? Apologize if that’s already there I was just looking at the usage video and switches and it appears to only output a graph? Would seem useful to also have the normal/traditional ping output as well.
As a long-time reader of blogs (eg. slatestarcodex.com, kalzumeus.com, etc) I've sometimes struggled to keep up with all the posts that I'd like to read. I often don't make the time to sit down and plough through some of the longer ones.

I noticed that I listened to a lot of podcasts when commuting, so I made this website to convert interesting blog posts into a podcast. The tech component is mostly glue: the trafilatura scraper + AWS Polly TTS.

Given I find this site pretty useful, I figured that some HN readers would enjoy it as well. Here are some of my favourite articles from the past ~18 months with the accompanying audio:

Doing Business In Japan

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/e096c7623b305cb129c4dd...

A Deep Dive into K-pop

https://dormin.org/2020/09/06/a-deep-dive-into-k-pop/

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/741f2612536071e911f9a9...

Peer review: Troubled from the start

https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-st...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/4712ffd8d05dd1b51df2b7...

The Real Reason Your City Has No Money

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-
reason-your-city-has-no-money

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/1f92611929679af2763b34...

A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics

https://medium.com/software-safety/a-software-engineers-guid...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/0340fb5628b642f8dd4959...

Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China

https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/f749f66d4be0b6899bf25a...

Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"

https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/2571f6e06b9c358d5a9ce3...

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/9008b40fde501cf4ea3c39...

Why Deep Learning Works Even Though It Shouldn’t

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/why-deep-learning-...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/dd360c22e33717098e7a2c...
I'd be interested to see some examples of nuanced sentiment analysis. I'm just a google-fu nltk/scapy duffer so I'm sure I'm nowhere near the horizon of capability, but what I have seen is so woefully out of touch and brittle that I wouldn't trust it for anything other than large scale bulk trend analysis.
There's a violent group that literally burned down police stations and forcibly took over an area of an American city for weeks and applied their own, extra-judicial authoritarian system ostensibly by force of some kind of 'morality' but it was ultimately backed by the threat of violence.

This is violent, political extremism by any obvious measure, why are we treating these groups any differently than weirdos showing up with AR's and flowery shirts?
I can't imagine an editor without soft wrap as the default.

Sublime, wordpad, vim all use soft wrap.
I'm definitely considering at least doing a video on it. I also have a new Linux laptop I'd like to compare head to head against my slower compile-in-a-vm solution to see what I'm missing out on by running macOS all the time :)
If your response to people holding differing opinions is that 'They are obviously stupid and misinformed and brainwashed', I don't think that any productive discussion can be had. I can, after all, say the same thing about anyone who disagrees with me.

Attack their argument on its own merits.
Exactly. This thing would be a killer dual-boot linux machine. But they won't release any drivers, and I think secure boot will probably only do MacOS.
Japan has 1700 miles of high-speed train lines that can go up to 200 mph.

Am I missing something? Isn't the hyperloop supposed to target aircraft speeds (+600 mph)? Does the author really not understand it wouldn't be competing with trains?
I dont understand this argument. Let's for a moment think it will happen (it wont, any actual anti-aging treatment would be immediately commoditized)How is that situation "worse" than the one we have right now?
A Nuclear Powered Nuclear Waste Dispenser
Nuclear power has many advantages but the few disadvantages are severe. One of the major ones is leftover nuclear waste of nuclear power plants. It is highly toxic and stays radioactive for thousands of years, leaving a pandora box of nuclear death for future humans to deal with. We urgently need to clean up after our nuclear shit trail.

Currently we bury it somewhere and hope it will not escape any time soon. This is rather naive. Give it enough time and it will leak into our environment. So how can we improve? Shooting the nuclear waste straight into space is a compelling option, either on a stable orbit leaving our solar system or directly into the sun.

Current rocket technology is not gonna do it. So let’s try something else: Make a big bullet containing our nuclear waste. Accompanied with a giant cannon that is fueled by water steam produced by nuclear power. Build up high enough pressure to accelerate the bullet to earth's escape velocity.

How to build the capable cannon? Dig a cylindrical hole down into earth, add a sufficient amount of pressure chambers along the cannon barrel. The shooting mechanism: Release pressure of the chambers from the bottom to the top sequentially, accelerating the waste bullet to the needed escape velocity. Before all that, calculate where to dig the hole according to the needed trajectory. There it is: A nuclear powered nuclear waste dispensing cannon.

Biggest potential hurdle: This nuclear waste dispenser design only works out if it can dispense more waste than is produced in order to operate it. Figuring that out is key to success and is left as an exercise for the curious reader.

Biggest potential failure: The nuclear waste bullet does not reach escape velocity and comes right back at spaceship earth. Mitigation: Simulate several failures without real nuclear waste but the same bullet case design and a realistic non-toxic replacement material for the waste.
> Two decades ago, it was widely argued that dynamic programming languages were more productive because you didn't have to spend time dealing with type signatures. The only reason, then, to use a statically typed language, was for better performance.

This boggles the mind. I am using typed languages since I can think. I never once recall an instant where I was saying "Uh uh, this type signature is driving me craaazy". Like seriously, I don't even know what articles like this are talking about. Types are not your enemy, they surface issues early. Yeah you can whip something up in Python and JS, but ultimately you DO have to deal with types, except now you don't have a compiler doing this job anymore, you have to do it yourself... Somehow.

The only thing typed languages need is something like `dynamic` from C#, which automatically boilerplates untyped access with reflection, without cluttering your code. I.e. duck typing is one of the things some languages like Java need to get better at. But the situations in which I yearn for this are far and few between.

You don't think about types, unless you are new to typed languages... It's really that simple. I never have to think about types. Perhaps its subconcious, but its definitely not slowing me down, its making things faster through robust refactoring, auto-complete and welll doh: TYPE SAFETY!
Decision Trees in Machine Learning (ML) with Python Tutorial
Just an idea that occurred to me. Curious if this could work out.
As (yet another) Canadian, I've used the same phonological distinction in my close relationships with Americans to great success. It's been surprising to me how much tension is eased by disambiguating the two senses!
PicoRio: The Raspberry Pi-Like Small-Board Computer for RISC-V
>If one wants to have strict guarantees in the form of proofs why not using Agda or Idris instead?

Because they're research languages. The amount of non-toy software actually verified in them is zero. I'm not even sure if there's any non-toy software written in Idris besides the Idris compiler itself.

Coq's track record is better, but its language is ugly as hell in comparison (and to actually do anything you'd need to extract to Ocaml/Haskell anyway and the same applies to Agda).
No, an instinctive apology as though you were at fault, even though you (to a bystander, or in hindsight) obviously weren't. It's not sarcastic.
It's all about context.

If you make an honest mistake on, say, WikiData, nobody should jump down your throat. That's not productive and the context is one where some degree of empathy should be expected. It's a commons. And trust me, I know how internet nerds can be on a commons - internet nerds that often get things very wrong in their criticisms but will swear and yell at you while leveling them.

That context is important. The goal that I hope we all want to push for a data commons is a productive shared environment. But when it becomes narrative or editorials, now there are very serious political and scholarly issues at work and popular narratives are frequently self-sustaining via institutional norms. You can cite hundreds of documents and publications for a popular liberal (like lib dem) narrative even if it's no better supported than a position published by an esoteric scholar in Maine and win any arguments about which should be included in the definitive encyclopedia entry on the topic and which should be quietly shoved aside. Even disagreements listed in these pages tend to be relatively popular narratives that are not particularly disagreeable to those in power, or have become popular enough despite that opposition and are the exception.

Turkish nationalists denying the Armenian genocide on Wikipedia will be drowned out by process: the dominant media and scholarly narratives (which are roughly correct). But what would we see on a page about Evo Morales back in October 2019? Would we not see the repeated dishonest narratives and headlines of the New York Times? In fact, we would: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evo_Morales&oldid.... No contextualization, just the implication that the NYT narratives are a good resource. And here is the closest snapshot in time to that wiki page: https://web.archive.org/web/20191112031842/https://www.nytim...

In short, mistakes should always be contextualized by the roles of those involved, the goals sought (and hopefully shared), and a desire to get at the truth even if it's uncomfortable.
They have had ads in the recent past to that effect
Encryption on Signal is all client side, the server can't see the plain text, says Signal.
How to receive emails in a S3 bucket with AWS SES?
I don't like JS on web & desktop, but this one[0] is cute.

[0] https://www.dwitter.net/d/7063
As a former Southerner, I can confirm. The Southern United States is the most British in its social constructs.
215loc? This makes me want to (finally) sit and learn Rust. Even with Python + PyPi packages, I doubt you can do much better and still have a portable result.
The reason why central planning (i.e. "optimization" of Soviet sort) fails has nothing to do with complexity, algorithms, data quality, etc. That central planning always fails due to economic calculation problem - the logical proof of impossibility of stable centrally planned economy was published by Ludwig von Mises in 1920, and pretty much accurately described the fate of all socialist economies. Briefly, the proof relies on the fact that human utility functions are hidden, and that the only way to extract information about them is to observe voluntary trade between humans. These trades in aggregate create prices which guide the economic planning by independent producers. The very fact of imposing central plans on people (who are no longer able to engage in voluntary trade) effectively destroys the input information about what people want or need and how much they value goods. After this information is destroyed, no matter how fancy the computers and planning algorithms are, they cannot possibly produce any meaningful plans. Garbage in - garbage out.
Native support for keychain + fingerprint

Not sure if they fixed this in Big Sur, but since Mavericks all the way through Catalina there's been a critical bug with Safari's use of the macOS keychain, such that if you don't use iCloud Keychain, then you cannot migrate your Local Items keychain (the one used by Safari) to another machine, even during a restore from a backup. Hence a loss, damage, or theft of your machine means the loss of all passwords saved by Safari.

I posted about it here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626562

I switched to Firefox for this reason. I can't afford to lose all my passwords.
Look up "aspect based sentiment analysis"
`-cart -checkout -"check out" -clearance -discount -sales -PayPal -shipping` is what I use on occasion to remove e-commerce sites from the results.
In a socialist system ALL assets are controlled by small cadre of Party plutocrats.
In the last discussion about the PicoRio, there were concerns about the Imagination PowerVR GPU in the phase 2 device (which will be late next year according to this blog post, with phase 1 coming late this year).

Comment about those concerns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380452

It seems like they are addressing that somewhat:

> Imagination embraces the RISC-V ecosystem

> Imagination’s PowerVR GPU Driver (DDK v1.13 release onwards) supports RISC-V as a target application processor and will be easily integrated with the PicoRio single-board computer platform.

> Imagination is also creating a new open-source GPU driver to provide a complete, up-streamed open-source kernel and user-mode driver stack to support Vulkan® and OpenGL® ES within the Mesa framework. It will be openly developed with intermediate milestones visible to the open-source community and a complete open-source Linux driver will be delivered by Q2 2022. Imagination will work with RIOS to run the open-source GPU driver on the PicoRio open-source platform.

It sounds like the proprietary driver will be available when the first phase 2 devices ship, but an open source driver will be available ~6 months later. If it does materialize, this will be quite an open platform. I will not purchase a phase 2 or 3 device until it does, though.

Regardless, I will probably purchase a phase 1 device (which is headless / has no GPU).
In 1.0 there is small window you can add to the GUI that displays your rocket launch count at all times.
Nips. banned.

Militias. let's debate!!
Nope, we’re both wrong. I’m not planning to track down which of the last two dozen podcasts I listened to that I heard my figure for Texas on, particularly since it was off, but that $100M was split between Florida, Ohio and Texas, lion’s share to Florida[1]. Note that your article is from September.

Trump carried all three States, all three will walk into 2021 as Republican trifectas during redistricting season, and all three will be sending a majority Republican delegation to the House.

Texas walks out of the 116th Congress with 22 Republicans of 36 House seats and will walk into the 117th without losing a single seat. However my original claim of a shrunken Democratic delegation was incorrect, garbage in, garbage out. My apologies.

Kudos to you, you forced me to re-evaluate both my claims and my sources, however you haven’t come back at my main point in that paragraph: money doesn’t buy elections. Beyond this $100M spent in support of Democrats in three States they did abysmally in, Bloomberg spent $1B on his own Primary run which failed almost the moment voting started. $1B bought him 49 delegates and American Samoa in the very first batch of States and Territories he was on the ballot for in the Democratic Primary.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/bloomberg-sees-losses-after-...