skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Kirk getting the worst of it, the risk taking, jovial and daring Starfleet officer who sometimes clashes with his superiors? Let’s just turn him into a total renegade who disregards authority and gets into bar fights while jamming to 20th century hip hop and end the trilogy with Kirk on a motorcycle...while jamming to 20th century hip hop.

And I know: the movies were trying to give us younger versions of the crew but sheesh..

Agreeing with your general point, but I found this depiction actually believable for Kirk in his 20s.

Take a look at real-life celebrities in their 30s/40s who have an "edgy" reputation. They often were a lot more extreme in their youth.

Seems to me they wanted to portrait Kirk as a bored rich kid who doesn't really know yet what direction to take in his life. That's not that unusual, even for persons who later found a very strong direction.

Even Obama writes about such a phase in his bio.
I think teaching anything to a not self-selected group is excruciatingly hard. It's the same with foreign languages, math, biology etc.

An easy way out that schools use is to teach things that can be memorized like laundry lists. Name the 5 components of the <thing>. Name <famous person>'s 3 contributions and write a sentence to each. Specify the formula for <physicist>'s law.

As you say, if you try to teach a non-self-selected general population computing, you'll see how nontrivial even the mental model of files and folders etc. can be. But these are people who successfully do complex jobs in their lives. Sometimes even some sort of STEM-related or technical/engineering job, just not computer related, like a car mechanic. I don't think it's some sort of brain-compute-power/intelligence issue. A car mechanic uses similar brain pathways to "debug" and repair a car, keeping logical dependencies in mind etc.

Perhaps it's about the transition from physical to the entirely abstract/symbolic world.

It may be about a mental defense against the low-status of nerds, as in "I'm not like them (thank God, haha, I have a life), so I can't do this...".

Again, forcing knowledge into someone's brain is extremely difficult. They need to cooperate by their own will, otherwise you just get memorized lists that are forgotten after the test.

People learn languages by immersion when they want to interact with people around them, but when people are forced to live in a country they don't like, they can go decades without properly learning the local language, despite going shopping etc. and living a normal life.

I know relatives that run to me with all sorts of IT tech support issues, pretending they just cannot solve it. But when it's actually about something they really want done, like watching a movie or an episode of their favorite TV show, they are suddenly able to figure out all the details of torrenting.

Not that this is some novel insight, but motivation is key. If you have an actual goal in mind that you really want to achieve (like watching the next episode of a show), you will push through the discomfort and uncertainty of learning how to get there. If you want to learn a language because you love a culture, or you need it to talk to clients at work to get a promotion etc., you will learn much better.

Some charismatic teachers can create motivation where there was none. This sometimes ends up as "learning to please the teacher", but sometimes a single teacher's influence sets someone on a whole career course.

Learning basic coding (perhaps not necessarily becoming professional devs) should be possible for a large part of the general population if they have direct use for it today ("I cannot do <desired activity> unless I figure this out") outside of made up tests and teacher-pleasing.
I see it as filling out the space of possibilities within computer graphics. E.g., CGI in movies might be more practical and technically difficult, but what else can we do? It's interesting to see the boundaries pushed at least.
Yeah, sounds like an awkward conversation but I know there's some huge companies using it. I guess they named it that way because cockroaches are believed to survived since the dinosaurs. I guess be the same if you named it BedBugDB, they are hard to get rid for some people too.

But I think some just dismiss it based on the name. I think if I was going to build a startup, it'd be on the top of the list for database choices only thing I really wish it had was Full Text Search and CIText but I guess those will be added some day. I think it's a neat piece of engineering though so far!
(From the FAQs)
How does the change to the BSL affect me as a CockroachDB user?

It likely does not. As a CockroachDB user, you can freely use CockroachDB or embed it in your applications (irrespective of whether you ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). The only thing you cannot do is offer CockroachDB as a service without buying a license.

- - - - -

Cockroach is asking not to take open source and start offering it as a service. Which sounds like completely reasonable thing to do!

Of late there has been plenty of fear mongering when it comes to licensing. I wonder if this is some paid blogs from cloud companies which helps form some opinions or the age old open source license-and-principles which hold little water with predatory cloud companies around.
Was thinking about this recently in the context of Yoda in Star Wars. In the original movie he sometimes spoke in what has been dubbed "Yoda speak", e.g. "Speak backwards, I do" but I didn't get the sense that it was the form for the majority of his dialogue. Then it felt like it became a meme and, by the time that the prequels came around, this was the main way that he spoke, to the detriment of his overall character.

Thanks for the magic of internet some amazing person has done the numbers on this: https://buydemocracy.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/yoda-speak-ori...

TLDR; Empire: 22% Yoda Speak. Jedi: 33% Yoda Speak. Phantom Menace: 74% Yoda Speak. He seems to have become very much a caricature of himself during his pop culture hiatus between the movies.

Many thanks for posting this and giving me a name for this phenomenon :).
Looks like the page is down unfortunately.

I've seen headlines like this before, but at the time a lot of the vulnerabilities were in packages that were installed on the image but were not launched, or generally not exposed. I do wish for an easy way to frequently update images though (i.e. rebuilding them from scratch installing the latest packages). It's often hard to determine what you're including in your container.
The double-edged sword here is that you can get hit by their stack retirement policies. Cedar-14 was killed this year, and Heroku-16 is gone next year.

For better or for worse, Docker images will continue to run.
"Used machine learning, optimized algorithms..." well at least the algorithms were optimized!
I thought the book by K.N. King was a great introduction to (modern) C [0]. Easy to follow, nice questions at end of each chapter including a few challenges.

———

[0]: http://knking.com/books/c2/index.html
TL;DR Businesses just pass these costs on to their consumers.

Businesses have somewhat standard target gross margins, customer acquisition costs (CAC), LTV:CAC ratio, etc. and will determine pricing based on multiples of these variables. Ad spend is often a huge component of CAC and this directly feeds into what companies need to charge their customers in order to use their products. The assumption that businesses will just eat a higher cost as sort of consumer benefactors is quite naive. I can assure you they won’t.
Good thing Censorship will never be a thing in the USA, ah crap...
Ask HN: Programmer at a Financial Startup
Hi,
I was recently hired at a new Financial startup as a C++ & Java dev. What should I read to get myself familiar with market trading and general Finance theory ? I'm especially interested in programming for finance and market trading.
I've worked for an ad agency before, I ended up leaving at least partially because I couldn't support the creation of things like this without feeling incredibly dirty. At one point I was explicitly told not to include tracking on conversion rates for a campaign that I was working on because everyone involved knew they'd be abysmal.
> Surely that should be "does NOT want you to see"?

Nope, it is "does". But I actually see both "desirable" and "undesirable" images, side-by-side in my results. Pretty funny.
> major advancements in the past decade: LLVM, WASM, async/await, Typescript, Golang, Rust

Are these really major research achievements? What research contributions are there in WASM, async/await, Typescript, or Golang? I can see in LLVM and Rust though.
I’m starting to think that technology doesn’t change nearly as quickly as strong opinions about technology. FP has been around forever and it will still be around when someone digs up an idea from the seventies that got forgotten because everyone was being brow beaten by the “forget X the only true way to program is Y” crowd. Im tired of the dogma and the stifling of real criticisms. Everyone taking a dump on everyone’s ideas only to turn around and repackage it and sell it as something new to unquestioningly champion. There’s a wasteland of technologies that were once the one true way that were discarded as unworthy when something new came along. Usually there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with it which is why they’re resurrected years later but I wonder what the cost is of these boom and bust cycles are.
Should you be trying to learn multiple programming languages at once?
If they have to block you due to law, then sure since it's not their choice. Signing a contract however hardly makes it any less discriminatory. Signing a contract that means you now have to block Armenians is like signing a contract saying you won't allow Armenians into your store or will refuse to sell them stuff.

Just because this type of licensing contract is common in the media industry doesn't make it acceptable. People should just pirate whenever they hit a wall like that.
I think we are in general agreement. While self taught developers have been around from the beginning, until a few years ago, most companies wanted only those with a CS degree regardless of what they were to actually do. DB admin - CS Degree; maintain a Wordpress site - CS degree; write ML algorithms from scratch - CS degree.

It is changing now. Don't get me wrong; I see the value in
CS knowledge having spent a lot of time learning it though never for any degree. All I am saying is that we need to recognize that a job requires a specific skill set and theoretical CS may not be it.
Great point!

I'm not a big user of stories, but I noticed that usually you can't respond publicly to them, but usually just a DM.

Also usually the view-count is only displayed to the author.

I'm wondering if that has a role to their success?
To be fair, you didn't say you did or had owned one - you just told us to discount design flaws in them!
A bit unrelated but i just got the remarkable 2 eink tablet and it's by far the best writing experience i ever tried.
You'd be surprised how "dirty" (dusty) the air inside houses is.
> remember this? Remember this thing you liked? Here it is again but I made it bigger and faster!

This seems to be the general direction many of the new sequels go. See also: Picard.

Agreeing though that JJ Abrams did it in a particular ham-fisted way, like in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Red Hat stopped long ago of being an open source company with open source values unfortunately, not to mention that a lot of good talent had exodus long ago to FANG companies which are now driving most of development.
I hate when web links try to open an app. If your product is an app, I refuse to use it. So no harm no fowl, for me at least, here.
> How much of the application and how many of the connections are sub 20ms? How many are over 100ms?

Good question, the core of the execution engine of the application is a synchronous dataflow graph driven by your audio thread most of the time, so if you set a buffer size of 64 that's going to give you the usual 2ms of latency for instance for the actual computations, and for all the audio processing.

Separate threads feed that in external OSC, MIDI, etc... messages through lock-free queues which should be fast, but I haven't done entire round-trip measurements, will do that !
At the higher level you are right. At my level, 1500 FIDE, it is considered an opening where you can develop slowly and quietly and it gives black a lot of options.
Amazon asks U.S. to include warehouse, grocery staff in vaccine rollout
Do not store money in doubles and buy some bitcoin
I think everyone is more or less doing this.

The question is now, are you going to do something about it?
At the moment of collection, you do not know how your data will be used in the end. Even though you might be totally okay with what the original collector does with your data, you cannot be sure that your data is not being sold, stolen or legally requested by a government.

Think of Nazis using church data to hunt Jews or the US government orchestrating drone strikes.

I am not saying things like this will happen to your Facebook data, it's just that church members in 1930 also could not foresee what would eventually be done using their data.

Data collections are inherently risky. We should just avoid them wherever we can. The world is changing, take a look at China. Just because young people in the West have only seen democracy, does not mean it will last forever.
They way I see it, a 911 (or any sports car, really) is for when you want to drive for the sake of driving. In any other use case, it is an impractical compromise, because it was built for a specific purpose. The 911 may even be the most practical sports car, others are much less usable day-to-day. If you choose to daily drive a Porsche, you choose a specific compromise. For driving fast and giving you that fizz of being in control of a powerful machine, obviously it's superior to a minivan, because that's what it was designed to do.

You can certainly drive yourself and one other person on a weekend trip in a 911, no doubt. Anything beyond that quickly becomes a hassle, unless you go for a roof rack or a roof box, which is not ideal. It makes the car top-heavy and is not nearly as secure as packing things inside the car. There is also the issue of suspension travel and ground clearance, again the 911 is better and more comfortable than a lot of other sports cars in this respect, but it is still quite firm and has low ground clearance.

A minivan carries more people in comfort, holds more luggage inside the car hidden from prying eyes, it has better gas mileage and it is cheaper to purchase and service. It does vastly more things better than a 911, which only does a few things exceptionally well.

Personally, I would rather drive a minivan with my friends and our gear to a cabin far in the woods for a week or two of vacation, than I would take a 911 for a drive on public roads or a track day. The minivan is better at the things most people want/need.

Unfortunately, they have been swayed towards SUVs and trucks and sports cars by marketing.
> Who cares if people involved with google make more money.

Anyone who cares about moral hazard?
> Also worth pointing out: the apostrophe in the Facebook newspaper ad’s headline is wrong. A big old dumb quote mark.

This is why I love reading Gruber
Thank you, this is all very helpful.
A bit of a tangent, but is anyone else holding out for a Wireless 6E router? I've been limping along with an old Asus RT-AC66R for many years, but will probably finally upgrade once a good 6E router is on the market, so that I hopefully won't feel a need to upgrade for a very long time after.
The details about the actively malicious ones in there seem a lot more interesting actually. The "X% have some outdated code somewhere, we didn't test if its actually used" reports on the other hand seem to be required yearly publishing for any security company doing anything with containers...
This. I just install debian with MATE, install i3 on top, clone i3 config file from my git repo and all setup is done. Sound works, brightness works, external displays work.
Learn in Public
The problem is that such a comment doesn't help. It's just a pessimistic viewpoint where you have to read the fine print to see that things are better in reality.

"Catalytic converters generate 100 times less toxic pollution. Installing catalytic converters into millions of cars prevented millions of tons of toxic pollution" gets turned into "A single badly maintained diesel car produces as much pollution as thousands of legal new cars."

Why turn a success into a failure? It only serves to make people feel powerless. Being "technically correct" was just a way to masquerade the real message "Don't try, you will fail and when you fail it will undo [0] your success".

[0] only a small part of (this is the fine print)
Why is there no eBook of Future Shock?
LimeSDR is additional hardware.

https://limemicro.com/products/boards/limesdr/
Yup, I was fine with games like Beat Saber, and (initially!) Vader Immortal, that uses the teleport movement system... until you're put on a moving platform, or (worst) have to climb up and down... and OH YEAH that triggered it. Bad.

> It's a bit like if everyone who tried alcohol for the first time took 10 shots of vodka and then span in circles for 10 minutes straight

Okay, that made me laugh, and I think I see where you're going, but I really think it's different.

Alas, one of the first things I tried was RecRoom, which has thumb-stick navigation that was set to super-fast movement, so that was the first thing that really got me.

Where I disagree with your idea is that days later, in simple, slow, self-controlled movement (such as the ladders in Vader Immortal) it got me again.

> There are also hardware solutions...

Yeah, if someone came up with some non-drug way to take this away, I'd probably get a VR system right away (after testing it with my friend's system, of course!)
Not a perfect test, but you can try for yourself on https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/ if you're curious

(the tells for generated images on this one are quite obvious when you know what to look for)
Don’t worry, our censorship will be of a good kind. It will censor only liars and bad people.
And S3!
I’ll be interested to see how the plan for bi-annual releases for self-hosted analytics goes - in theory that will be better
there was some fallout with apple in late 2018 and zuckerberg allegedly ordered facebook employes to use android instead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718
> Anti-elitism is never a good thing in actual technical fields

I think it's not anti-elitism but just elitism.

Outside the CS bubble, being a PhD physicist has more prestige and status than being a PhD computer scientist. A physicist is universally recognized as a scientist, nobody would ever question that. A "computer scientist" is not universally regarded as such. I'm not arguing whether it should be, but it's clearly not universally like that in people's perceptions.
GSMem: Data Exfiltration from Air-Gapped Computers over GSM Frequencies
https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
> Things like motion sickness and the screen-door effect are results of lower refresh-rate/resolution than what should be used for VR.

I disagree -- it's the same principle that makes me motion sick on boats, when I can't see the horizon for reference. It's a vestibular thing, not just a vision-system thing.
How to let go of a lifelong dream
And the non-standard UI, the weird animations, the increased power consumption, the general non-macOS-ness of it all.
I deal with this, but they do let you know far ahead of time, and they don't seem to stop existing dynos from running even after a stack is retired. So I now just get a nice, clear message on one long running application I haven't taken the time to update (or more likely, wind down.)

"This app is still using the cedar-14 stack, for which the end-of life window has closed as of November 2nd, 2020. The cedar-14 stack will no longer receive security updates and builds will be disabled for apps running on the cedar-14 stack."
Whistleblowers allege spy agency wrongdoing, says UK auditor
You may not be aware but the issue of anonymous donations has been a hot topic on the MIT campus after MIT president Rafael Reif refused to stop taking anonymous donations in response to students who made this demand during protests that were calling for his resignation.

It has been said by the US Supreme Court that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and there are now a few international organizations out there which are fighting hard for increased transparency ... like GlobalWitness:

https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/corruption-and-mo...

Would not be surprised one day to learn that Alex Acosta received, for example, an unrecorded beneficial interest in real estate owned by Mr. Epstein in exchange for that "sweetheart deal," if the appointment by Trump to labor secretary was not reward enough.
No. It's explicitly set out in the GDPR that refusal to agree to the unnecessary collection of personal data must not be a reason to withhold service.
Exactly, many of these reports are of the kind "your java Web app container has a priv esc vuln in sudo" which is irrelevant 95% of the time. Need some smart tooling to help comb through all that noise.
How hyper-realistic is it really though if it's made using a 3d printer? Looks great in the photo but how about in person? The texture of the "skin" has got to be off.
That matches my experience -- I could play Beat Saber with no problems at all.

The sad thing is that it's like saying, "You can play any game on this system, as long as the game's name starts with the letters A-D. You can't play any game whose name starts with E-Z, though!" You're going to miss out on a lot of great stuff, and frankly, there's tons of non-VR games to keep me busy forever.
Same here. When watching the Elton John movie, I could see all the artificial image enhancements made to the picture to make it look better, but burning the sincerity out of it in the process. Same for sound, which made characters mouth completely out of sync with the music (the first scene, the voices are singing intensely, but you can see the faces not breaking a sweat, uncanny valley ensued).

This week, I started (and gave up) to watch "the witches", which has clearly been designed by committee. All the ingredients are nice, but there is this feeling that they are put in there because people though they should be, not because they felt it should. It was not story telling, it was product manufacturing. We were being sold concepts: this is a lovable character, here is a tragedy to bound, here is the bad guy, she is scary, oh, look at the grandma you wish you had, and so on.

The problem is, they do that because it works. Star wars remakes made banks. Disney live actions as well.

If I discuss this with my friends, they don't seem to mind, they enjoy it.

Now I ate at Mc Donalds for year, enjoying it, so I get that you can very well enjoy scientifically crafted quick and satisfying experiences.

But at least for movies, it's becoming hard for me. Maybe I have rose glasses about movies in the past, but I watched Groundhog Day last week, and it felt nothing like this. Pure creative and fun experience.

I guess it' a blessing: it will save me time and money.

On the other hand, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Don't know why I'm bitter about this, cause it's not like it's an important thing, but I react strongly to it.
"Timnit Gebru: Google and big tech are 'institutionally racist'"

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55281862

It's good to be critical and reflect on the company you're working for. There are bad cultures and attitudes in any big company, not just tech.

But if you're going to sprout your opinions publically about your (ex)-employer like that, sorry, but I wouldn't want her in my team. She sounds like too much of a headache to deal with. Her work must be truly extraordinary to warrent having that headache.