skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorbet has its own written-in-C++ parser that does the actual parsing. At runtime, the sig call basically sets a flag for the next method that is defined which hooks into it to validate that the parameters passed in are as defined, and that the return value is as expected. I believe they're delving into the dark magic in the interpreter directly, the docs are here: https://sorbet.org/docs/runtime
I am confused.

From the paper: "Thomas F. Knight, Jack Holloway and Richard Greenblatt developed the first LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the late 1970s."

From Wikipedia: "John McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

Shouldn't the paper say "Symbolics LISP"?
The original estimates put COVID-19 at approximately 3-4%. At the time I'm writing this post, the United States has had 253,309 deaths from 11,789,304 cases, or 2.14%.

Without the lockdowns, without the mask mandates, without social distancing, without closing establishments where people congregate, COVID-19 easily overwhelms healthcare systems. We saw this play out in Wuhan, New York City, Italy, and elsewhere. When the healthcare capacity is overwhelmed, the results are catastrophic.

It's all well and good to say, "well, 2% isn't as bad as we thought." But that's not how it is. The problem is that with 10-20% of all patients requiring hospitalization, the hospitals can't keep up. Healthcare is a finite resource. It's not just the COVID patients who suffer, it's everybody who needs hospitalization for anything.

It is foolish to act as though this isn't as bad as it is.
Hey, could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it a lot already, and we're trying for a different sort of conversation here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

In addition to the guidelines, you might find these old links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html
finally someone dares asking the important question.

had hoped for one to be offered in an arte.tv docu the other month .. excellent photography and filming tho.
+1. I have been able to cope with just about every other part of the Linux desktop experience, but the pointer sensitivity is atrocious. I wouldn't make a big deal of it but it's so obvious every time I do anything in a GUI. I've tried trackpad and corded mice and they're all the same:

When I turn the sensitivity down low, it caps the max "flick" speed to be sluggish. When I turn the sensitivity up high, even tiny delicate mouse movements lurch my pointer halfway across the screen.

More than anything else, I want a mouse acceleration curve that works like macOS or Windows. Both those operating systems come out of the box good defaults and good configurability. Linux has neither.
I have a 2014 Macbook Air that I'm about to replace the battery in. Once that thing goes I really think I'll have to head over to Linux. Mac quality has gone downhill.
um, M1
If you're comfortable reading docs and starting from the command line, Arch is the hands down winner IMO. Rolling release distro means everything is up-to-date. AUR is packed with anything you could wish for. The Arch wiki is indispensable.
> slow, but it's a start

That it's slow makes it a bad one.

It's the issue endemic to existing ARM laptop offering: in the best cases, either the performances are lackluster and the battery life is good, or the performances are terrible and the battery life is great. Sure the pinebook is super cheap, but the performances are bad and it gets 6-8h battery.
I wonder though of this is the case. If we look at early PCs, they grew relatively fast. A big driver for that growth was digital spreadsheets.

VR has been around for a while. Why hasn’t anyone built the software that skyrockets VR to the masses. Is it because it has no real value beyond entertainment?

For example, for me, having a huge workspace with infinite amount of displays is the way to go. It would be a killer app. Its availabe today for Quest, but I still havent made the jump. The reason being is that we seem to get closer to Mixed Reality devices and THAT platform seems to have no-brainer killer apps. Including pokemon Go.
I've recently started using a kind of middle ground by putting spaces around the !. Makes it harder to miss without losing the "reads like text" property that's lost when using == false.

if ( ! isLast(e) ) reads perfectly, especially since my native language doesn't insert the "not" im the middle like english does and my brain is used to that. if (isLast(e) == false) just jolts me out of that state where code reads as fluently as text. YMMV, of course, and I have a suspicion that your native language might play a role in that...
"Democratizing" makes more sense when the industry evolved from AI/ML frameworks which required a Ph.D to use to allowing anyone to train a model (e.g. Theano -> TensorFlow -> Keras/fast.ai), and allowing people to train models on GPUs without a grant-funded supercomputer cluster, for very little cost (spot/preemptible cloud GPUs, Google Colab)

In this case, I agree it's not equitable.
This is... really off base for 2020. Solar and wind in the US are incredibly cheap sources of energy. Literally the cheapest options: https://www.lazard.com/media/451445/grphx_lcoe-02-02.jpg

Residential solar is expensive because you don't have the same economy of scale you see in utility-scale deployments. Also something like 1/3 of the cost is "soft costs" such as marketing and the crazy red tape associated with permitting.

The latest academic modelling shows that we can meet 70-80% of energy demand from renewable energy alone, even without storage. All it requires is building a modest excess of capacity and a 50/50 wind/solar mix. When it comes time to add storage, battery storage costs have been plummeting and already dropped 75% over the last 6 years: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...
Maybe it's because he uses gentoo?
How is it a corporate IT failure? When my predecessor chose the VPN provider it ran on all of the systems we used at the time. Corporate IT should have had a Crystal ball I guess
Perhaps do some research? A key takeaway of the Mueller report was that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. I mean, here's a New York Times article, which as everyone knows, is not fond of Trump and does not hold punches: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/us/politics/mueller-repor...

Mueller did not exonerate Trump on the obstruction of justice charges, but that's not what this thread is about, we're talking about Russia.
Archive link in case you don’t want to pull in a hundred scripts just to read it:
https://archive.is/wsnUY
> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?

Stop buying, using, and supporting the Apple ecosystem. Vote with your money. The new chips are faster. So what? The laptop you have today works fine, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware.
Why just not buy preinstalled Linux? https://puri.sm/products/.
What would be the fallout of moving patents to only be physical objects and have to at least have a prototype?

The patent timelines make sense for non IP goods.
Saying "there is no God" instead of "I don't know whether or not God exists" presumes a certain understanding of cause and effect, of being and essence, of meaning and purpose. After all, the atheist says "there is no need for another uncaused cause because ..." - that "because" serves the purpose of religion. I would argue that one cannot be an atheist without that "because". An agnostic can act in the fashion of an atheist (presumptive atheism), but an ill-considered atheist-in-act is not an atheist in intellect.

In fact the branches of natural philosophy nominally used to make the determination "God cannot exist" by the atheist cannot speak to being and essence (because the sciences presuppose them) and cannot speak categorically to meaning and purpose (because those depend on what philosophy has determined about being and essence). Prescriptions on how to live (i. e. what the moral response to being must be) flow from the first two and therefore also cannot flow from science alone which presupposes whatever kind of universe the scientist finds himself existing in. "Can I derive 'ought' from 'is'" is presumed by the physicist and can only be addressed by the philosopher.

To put it another way, one cannot be an atheist without a religion - one can only be agnostic.

To put it a third way, Cicero says "religion consists in offering service and ceremonial rites to a superior nature that men call divine." The atheist says "there is none to serve" - but that is patently untrue, for in that case there would be no end to strive after and all atheists would perish by inaction. Therefore, all atheists have chosen to serve some superior nature, either themselves, or some ideal (Chaos, Order, Balance, etc.).
As has been said elsewhere, atheism is a religion the same way not playing baseball is a sport.
Do you know of any publicly traded companies that split out IT in their financials?

Do you consider Apple, which builds consumer electronics (e.g. hardware engineering) a tech company?
Not OP but I do recommend PopOS. It's worked really well for me.

The sluggish performance you're getting is honestly probably related to CFS (the default linux process scheduler). Windows does an AMAZING job with scheduling for UI applications. You almost never feel like your computer is struggling because anything UI related gets scheduled first. CFS does not do this.

I've found that changing the scheduler to something that may be less efficient overall, but is aimed at desktop use makes my experience so much better.
If you’ve a cat in Constantinople, she’ll be waiting in Istanbul.
It still approaches zero.

edit-to-add:

I recall during our new parent class the lecture where they were discouraging the use of pain drugs during birth because it increased the chance of a bad outcome by 2x or 4X. (I can't remember the actual value the nurse said.)

When I asked what is the actual chance of a bad outcome and what is 2x of that. She didn't know and didn't like me pointing out in front of the class that 2x was probably still pretty close to zero.
I’ve just got a couple eBay things from China from April.

I find it kinda fun to get a new bike light or little gadget that I forgot I ordered.
I have experience at several companies with many different cultures, and I don't know of anyone who likes to slog through the details before getting to what the final problem or solution is. People just don't have time for that. Putting the important part first serves the dual purpose of quickly informing people who aren't interested in the details, and telling them up front why they might care about reading the details.

It's like having an abstract or a blurb to briefly summarize for management.

Similarly, if you need someone to take action based on the result, you don't put it at the end where nobody's going to read it. You put it at the beginning, first thing, and then build up the background.
> with fans blazing because HN on Safari can be demanding.

You've got to be joking?! I have a MacBook Air from 2020, which should still be less powerful than a MacBook Pro from 2018 and even on huge websites full of crap the fans won't kick in, let alone on HN which is the lightest website I frequent often.

The only time I hear the fan is when I compile a large project on my IDE or when the IDE re-indexes the JRE!
I don’t look at it with sarcasm. I have an issue that laptops and PCs are not having the same ISA.
A bit less commonplace-looking font: https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
Macbooks getting worst has been the trend for the last 10 years and they released a new chipset 1 month ago.

Maybe they will recover all of their fans but it might take more time for some of us. I think today there is still room for doubt.
> even if "tech company" is a misnomer in many ways.

Well it is a misnomer and that's precisely the point.
I mean, the New York Times headline itself said "Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy".
I use Ubuntu for my media PC, and I feel like for the casual user, it's plenty easy enough. I use it as an appliance with a steam client and a browser. Do most users actually need more than that?

It's arguably easier to use than windows and macOS because it doesn't require a bunch of separate sign-ins to do things.

I think the only "hard part" for the average user is getting into the boot settings to actually install ubuntu. For a developer I think it's a non-issue.
It will be great to collaborate, Max! So far I have the storage part figured out. And scoring is currently applied to the entire set of indexed documents. My goal is to work on some sort of nearest neighbours approach. So it'll be great to see if we could port KNN over to Solr.
The Library of Babel (Book, 1941)
Announcement of DOSBox Pure for RetroArch/Libretro
Banjo-Tooie Turns 20 – The Rare Team Tells the Story of Bombs, Bugs and Bottles
Learn to use keyboard shortcuts instead. It's faster than using the trackpad and makes it much less important.
Well, you just have to learn all the popular ligature forms, just like you have to learn all the popular variations of letter forms (e.g. "a" and "g" both have very different variations that are popular in different typefaces).
I don't find them bad actually. Maybe we can leave under one roof after-all... my city even builded small houses for cats next to suburbs. So people would know where to go and feed them. which makes everything clearer.
> In a short essay, W. V. O. Quine noted the interesting fact that the Library of Babel is finite (that is, we will theoretically come to a point in history where everything has been written), and that the Library of Babel can be constructed in its entirety simply by writing a dot on one piece of paper and a dash on another. These two sheets of paper could then be alternated at random to produce every possible text, in Morse code or equivalently binary. Writes Quine, "The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two are sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters."
For normal daily use, I prefer something that don't require too much messing around with. I don't really care that much about customization either. For work, I'll just ssh into a remote linux server. I don't necessarily need to do everything on a single local machine.
I've written a few small posts on HN[1] about moving to Linux as someone with a decade of macOS muscle memory that I'd like to still take advantage of.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23607374
It's called proprioception. It's your body's sense of its position relative to itself and to an extent the sense of position in your environment. It involves your inner ear, eyes, sounds, and even sensation of air moving over body parts

VR headsets gives your eyes visual cues that don't necessarily match that of your inner ear and body positioning. Lag between your inner ear's sensation and what your eyes see also causes problems.

Additionally your eyes aren't just a pair of fixed cameras mounts in your skull. They constantly scan (saccades) a scene and change their focus and that's that's then constructed by your visual cortex. The world doesn't have a depth of field effect applied to it, your eyes do that for you. Forcing both eyes to focus on a particular focal plane causes a lot of strain in because your eyes are not identical.

Besides human sensory input the lag and lack of precision of the game's sense of your body really fucks with your proprioception. Using a traditional controller uses small muscles with fast reaction times and little of your large motive and balance muscles. You can split your focus easily on the events and visuals of the game and work the controls.

With VR you have to make a lot larger movements and use more of your muscles for balance. Most people are not highly trained athletes their game avatars are and do not have that level of coordination or muscle endurance.

VR basically short circuits a ton of your body's senses or gives them conflicting input. Some people can adapt, many can't adapt for long, and some can't adapt at all.
Dell sells the XPS with Linux.. I know 'cause I have one.
> As such, I think these drug companies don't really have much to release for each vaccine.

They should still release the data. PR releases don't always match reality.
opened to post this. total joke showstopper to consider open until an actual open source toolchain is ported to this weird architecture
Author should check out https://arc.codes and https://begin.com because I think that's what they're looking for.

I would err to say that Pulumi is not and should not really be used for this, but I was just thinking of how annoying it is setup some open source projects in AWS (especially if they're made for it or any other specific env) and that having the Pulumi config, at least some basic modules, would make it so much easier to get started.
Could be Debian unstable.
I think that's a misleading way of looking at things. There is no "CISC philosophy". RISC designs came out as a new way of doing things and existing designs were called CISC for contrast. It's not like there were two schools of thought that were developed at the same time and the CISC designs intentionally rejected RISC philosophies.
I think the problem is that the sanctity of the 5-Eyes data-sharing was abused. While what you say is both true and also valid, the promises offered were (excuse the phrase) ass-raped by the US and extremely one sided.

Sure, there was a great deal of naivety on the part of the European Nations that were lining up to share the Great Firehose (As you say, 'If you could, Why wouldn't you?').

It is also true that there was a certain amount of 'beers, bribes & hoe's for the bros' involved but I honestly don't think that anyone in Europe ever truly considered that any intel gathered would be used by the US in the way it was.
Just because people can, or have, redefined things illogically doesn't mean they should.

I fully support efforts to gently nudge deviations of the vernacular toward reason and rationality, especially before it it crystallizes into some abomination like "literally" has become. That way lies muddy thinking, and madness.

The price of language-reality congruence is eternal vigilance and kindhearted pedantry.
I use an old android phone + google cardboard headset when I do drone surveys or inspection. It has become indispensable, as the drone camera gimbal is slaved to my head. Much easier to inspect hard to reach stuff in (or on) the manufacturing facility I work at this way.

I'm always sort of impressed that I am able to have this functionality using (literally) the trash of others.

Once the resolution gets high enough that I can read small text comfortably, I plan on removing monitors from my office all together and migrating to some sort of AR terminal multiplexer. The general idea being that I can throw the headset on and wrap myself in some sort of window manager. I use a whole pile of monitors during daily work and despite needing them all during certain development projects, 50% of the time, I've got 2-3 displays sitting idle which is annoying. Having a 3 dimensional bubble of monitor space would fix this nicely for me.

I know this is what work spaces are for, but I've never been very proficient switching between them. I prefer to have all my current projects visible if I look around me.
Maybe this is a high cats/dogs ratio compared with other major cities. Clearly, more research is needed: for as many cities as possible, find the ratio, plot it against the prevalence of Islam, compute a coefficient, and test whether one can reject the hypothesis that it's zero.
The saddening thing to me is how low on this list of voted improvements "Better tuned acceleration curve" is.

I don't use touchpads, I use mice. That instantly "solves" the first couple problems: I don't need multitouch gestures, and I don't need touchpad palm detection.

I understand that from these results I must be in the minority. But man it would be great to have better tuned acceleration curves.
Interesting that the author didn't consider stability or long time support as a factor to choose a distribution.

I was a happy Fedora user, but I got tired of an uneven quality and only 13+ months of support for a given release. It is a great distro to use the latest versions of everything, but it was too much disruption for me. I guess I'm getting old.

I'm currently on Debian stable, that comes with "good enough" versions of the software I need, and I can compile almost anything else. And it gives me plenty of time to do work without having to spend time on the OS.
I run linux on a Macbook Air 4,2 (2011) and its pretty nice.
>Is there a field of study/practice that deals with such changes to large scale system? It does sound like a very useful thing to systematically study, if possible.

"Analysis points to ways engineering strategies could be reimagined to minimize delays and other unanticipated expenses."

(from comments below).

The two quoted authors in the press release are a prof in energy studies and a nuclear engineer.

What I notice is that MIT does not have a Systems Engineering undergraduate department, but numerous specialties.

In a large design/build project such as a nuclear power plant, the systems engineering group (there must be exactly one) keeps track of the performance and function of each of the subsystems (civil works like containment, basements, buildings; electrical; controls; HVAC; the nuclear bits; and so on). In addition, it is the system engineering group that responds (or directs responses) to a change order request, and the overall impact on expense, on functionality/reliability/safety, and schedule.

It seems these are responsibilities that are not identified here with a known role; instead the authors reinvent system engineering for themselves.

There is a lot of SE work done in numerous industries (Elon Musk is what I would call a systems engineer, based on how he identifies things to do and how he gets them done. His degree is not in SE though).

A short list of US universities offer SE or related disciplines; in California/New York/Illinois. MIT is not one: it has a research group not a degree-granting program.

References:

https://www.incose.org/ The International Council of System Engineering. Has published a handbook in numerous editions over the years.

https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering... First published 1995, based on other reports published in the 1960s.

MILSTD 499, 1970s, very dated by today's standards
> Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux.

One can only wonder why running linux containers on OSX would be slow.
> computer hardware that wasn't SGI wasn't allowed to be any color besides Beige

Not true. Digital (DEC) PCs were "almost white" (maybe stightly off-white but still approaching a cream, not beige).

Hard to find a picture that shows this without having aged but this does a good job: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/68...

Note the marked difference between the beige floppy drive and the case.

Also: https://www.speedhelp.net/Bilder/Computer/ISA/P1/digital_ven...
There's similarly a Jewish culture that one can identify with without practicing Judaism.