skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit of irony, as people that were scraping Ticketmaster ended up with Federal charges and took a plea deal.

Pretty interesting story on how it worked, here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgxqb8/the-man-who-broke-tic...

The plea deal: https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newark/press-releases/2010...

The eventual sentences: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nj/Press/files/Lowson,%...
PEP 648 – Extensible customizations of the interpreter at startup
“Rough consensus and running code.” Works pretty well most of the time.
Or you could act like you're responsible for tens of millions of dollars and hand it over to someone who can make sure it doesn't blow up.

"We don't need to hire an electrician to wire up the office, I did my garage using uninsulated wires and it works perfectly!"
I would love to pick your brain sometime! Thanks so much for the general commentary - very useful as I try to find an optimal infra setup for my project. Thanks again.
> Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it.

Jobs wanted Flash gone because it was direct competition to the App Store. That's it. There is no other reason.

Jobs could not say that of course, so he used his massive platform to assert that HTML5 was just as good as Flash, and that Flash was "riddled with security holes".

None of it was true, of course, but Jobs had charisma and a massive following of True Believers, and so his frontal assault on a competitor was successful.

An entire industry and platform destroyed so that Apple could not only control what games were played on its platform, but to charge for them

Yes, Flash had security issues, like every platform and program and browser ever, but there was nothing about Flash that was uniquely terrible the way Jobs and his minions asserted
That's just restating your claim, you still didn't explain what specifically you think is missing or impossible.
Amazon's Echo Frames
Used GSuite (Google Workspace?): It's fine, it is improving but lack of shortcuts even for basic tasks (I can change the font on Word with just a keyboard, try that with Docs without a mouse). Dealbreaker is the 5 million cell (not row nor column) limit, which is even lower than Microsoft's old limits (more than 15 million cells, which was increased in 2007 to you-have-a-serious-problem-if-you-somehow-fill-this-limit cells).
I am not spreading "misinformation." That term is the new slander. I am referring to initial infections, not pretending that tourism has been going full swing since March. You cannot compare New Zealand to New York City. I don't even think you can compare Seoul — and I accounted for the difference in interventions, regarding Seoul. But you conveniently leave that out.

As for your "everyone likes to quote," I in fact said: "you'll note that death estimates in the United States were from 200 thousand (if we followed their recommendations) to 2.2 million (if we did nothing)." Are you pretending now that I am misrepresenting the paper? You are simply repeating what I've written, and pretending to be contributing something new to the conversation.
tl;dr using WebRTC just for realtime client<->server data sucks, but WebTransport[1] is coming soon to serve that exact usecase with an easy API

WebRTC has data channels, which are currently the only way to achieve unreliable and unordered real-time communication (UDP-style) between the browser and other browsers or a server. This is pretty essential for any networked application where latency is critical, like voice and video and fast-paced multiplayer games.

As other commenters have noted, it's a royal pain in the ass to set up WebRTC if all you want is UDP-style communication between a server and browser, since you need to wrangle half a dozen other protocols in the process.

However! A new API, WebTransport[1], is actively being developed that will offer a WebSockets-like (read: super simple to set up) API for UDP-style communication. I am extremely excited about it and its potential for real-time browser-based multiplayer games (which I'm working on).

https://github.com/w3c/webtransport
Australia has detected its first case of the South African Covid-19 variant
I'm as libertarian as they come, but I've also lived in Baltimore and know how incapable the city is of controlling its crime. Baltimore's homicide clearance rate in 2019 was 32%. Not only does that leave its residents living in fear, that also represents an outrageous injustice against victims whose deaths are written off as business as usual.

Baltimore residents have a right to set their own destiny, but if they reject innovations in crime control that at least have a chance of being effective, I'm sure they'll spend the next 30 years like the last 30: getting absolutely nowhere. I spent decades desperately hoping and expecting Baltimore to turn the corner. It's an absolutely beautiful city with a rich history and many world-class cultural and educational institutions. But it hasn't changed (except even more murders over the last 50 years) and won't ever change if it doesn't control its crime.

Frankly, the city already has many hundreds of street-level "blue light" cameras all over the place. To me, those are far more problematic and intrusive with respect to privacy than aerial surveillance. I'd much rather be an anonymous pixel on a giant map than a person whose recognizable features are video recorded and stored on a government street level security camera. To me, blue light cameras are both more problematic and fundamentally less effective. And yet, that's what the city has already accepted as a worthwhile privacy trade off.
Okay, but the exact same logic applies? Doctors who are experts in disease detection likely reside close to clusters that study said diseases and have high populations and access to modern technology.

Put it very concretely, say patient 0 was infected in a village a hundred miles away, is asymptomatic like most patients, travels to Wuhan, infects someone, that person is the officially first detected case.
The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash player.

Flash on the web only worked if you had Flash player plugin installed. Both browser and Flash updates themselves would break the Flash plugin constantly. That was across all browsers and platforms. Keeping plugins updated and reliable was a mess, for a long time there weren't even auto updates.

Flash was a mess the whole time. Let's not pretend that it ever really "just worked" because it didn't.
My company always worked half days on Fridays, which was a pretty good balance. I occasionally worked in something fun or recreational, but was mostly a good time to get a chore of some kind done without interruption or taking time away from the family over the weekend. My wife works and kids would be in school until later in the afternoon.

We are now off entirely on Fridays and we may stay that way. But currently that is my day to help kids with at-home schooling. It's still a blessing, but not currently useful time to get much else done. Hopefully schools can reopen here safely in the coming weeks and months.

My brother works as a paramedic, and instead of the typical 24 hours on, 48 off, his station works 48 hours on and four days off. It's a sleepier town, so they are able to get in sleep as needed while on shift. He seems to end up with one to two month-long stretches of time off each year just by taking a few shifts off.

There are some downsides, like working some holidays or some full weekends when others are off. But many of his co-workers have second jobs or own businesses to fill in their time.

Most of us have to heavily plan to get one or two weeks off in a chunk, and are usually used for vacations away that seem to add more complexity to life.

Having just that extra weekend day can help alleviate the rushed feeling of the weekend.
Kubernetes Resource Interface for the Edge
> I broke that functionality in Chrome so I could control when it updated. I didn't accept it. I won't accept it. I would encourage others not to accept it.

> I will abandon platforms that take away my control.

If you are still using Google Chrome, then it sounds like you will work to avoid the limitations of platforms that take away your control, which is very different from avoiding them.
I didn’t say it was OK. I’m not in a position to do anything about it, and my friend lives many states away. But as a practical matter, it they’re going to keep running errands and such, I’d infinitely rather they be doing it in a self-driving vehicle.

I’d also suggest a little empathy for people in such a situation. “Taking away their independence” sounds so minor and practical, but often is basically a euphemism for “removing the sense of self-determination that allows them to stay alive”. It’s not as simple as saying “Old Joe shouldn’t drive anymore”, because the implications can be pretty severe. That doesn’t mean that it’s a great excuse for Joe to keep driving! But it does mean that there are some pretty big philosophical conversations to be had about it. And if/when self-driving cars come around, a lot of those drawbacks vanish in a puff of smoke. Then we can say, as a society, “we want you to keep just as much independence as you’ve always had! You just don’t need to be the one working the controls of the car anymore, but it’s still going to take you on every errand and friend visit you’d ever want to go on, and actually help you be even more capable.” That sounds pretty damn splendid to me.
The author is right.

But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed.

Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.
> Like many conspiracy theories, this claim is not easily falsifiable.

The claim that the virus originated in nature and spread through unknown intermediaries to humans in Wuhan, of all places, is equally hard to falsify.

Previous outbreak of SARS could be traced to bats in Southern China, MERS could be traced to camels.

The hypothesis that the virus escaped from a lab that hosted samples from Southern China is at least plausible.
As what, MHTML?
If it was simply a case of ordering over the phone, Dominos would’ve been fine. The problem was that they had “online only” coupons and their website and app weren’t “ADA friendly”. It’s more complicated than it seemed on the surface (like the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit)
I mean I agree with you, but what does that have to do with portability? I don’t see how this affects which computer architectures and OS environments a project can be compiled for.
>> Japan and Korea have collectivist cultures and made that leap in the past 50 years.
> Japan and South Korea are both democratic republics.

I think we should be crisp on the difference between government systems and culture. East asian culture tends to be very collectivist regardless of the government system. When you originally said "collectivist culture" I assumed you were referring to this culture (tallest hammer gets nailed down, route memorization learning, respect for seniority over ability, etc).

But if you were referring to the political system then that's true now, though this might be putting the cart before the horse. SK, Taiwan, and even Japan all got a lot of economic development done under authoritarian regimes (even if they were democracy in name). Only once economic development came did they transition. Ironically the growth slowed after that so if you think political system is a causal factor of economic growth, it might appear at first glance that democracy is bad for economic growth.

> Isn't Singapore more or less a democratic republic now?

Haha, well, maybe formally. As others have pointed out Singapore has practically single-party-rule. By some accounts, China owes much of its modern success to copying Singapore's flavor of state capitalism. Deng Xiaoping visited Lee Kwan Yew in 1978 and that set the course for China to pivot away from communism to state capitalism. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/lee-kuan-yew-lauded-for-cr...

> Before Xi, China was slowly moving in the right direction for global dominance. China under Xi is moving backwards.

I agree with that statement, though time will tell.

----

To sum up this discussion:

1. if it's ultimately a question of whether democracy is a necessary condition of economic growth or even creativity, I would say no. Plenty of good science was done in Germany in the 40s or the Soviet Union, and economic growth in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan under military dictatorships.

2. Would more creative work have been done with more freedom? Hard to prove or disprove but I intuitively would lean towards yes, especially for disruptive innovation (the kind that the folks in charge wouldn't like or be able to see). I think we agree here.

3. Is democracy a sufficient to create economic growth? I would say no, looking at some of the other non-western democracies out there, or democracies which failed.
Who to trust then?
On a careful review of your comments, you indeed never actually stated support for "tough policing," so I will retract that portion of my statement.

On the other hand, you did say at the very beginning, and I will quote your words here:

> Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.

which I am honestly not sure how it is meant to be interpreted, if not as a statement of support for "tough policing" (at least in theory, since any policy that generally priotizes ensuring the criminals are caught over police not violating their moral, and constitutional, obligations is very likely to result in police violating those obligations).
Buddhist philosophy can help. It states that our suffering is connected to our desire. You can think of our desire as simulations. Things we want to have. And our suffering is reality. We can have endless amount of desire. With the help of technology, we can create a lot of things that we want. But at some point, suffering will show up. It's a type of memory overload situation. The mind and the body are connected. Our personal suffering ends when we die. But the karma of our actions may continue.
> problem #1: Environment management

Great observation. Python environment management is getting simpler, but is off putting for people without a software background. Unclear even CS majors get enough classroom exposure to package & dependency management to utilize Python efficiently.

I’m more optimistic about an on-prem deployment of Jupyter Notebooks or Sage Math Cloud as a way to hide a lot of the setup complexity. More like a wiki for math. Curious if anyone has stories/tips to share (good or bad)?
I'm pushing for our actuarial team to transition to more R + Git. After 3 years of preaching, most of the actuaries now use RStudio + git as their primary work tool. It is happening.

What we did :

1) Provide documentation on everything from install to using internal R libraries for ETL.

2) Provide mostly problem free, always updated VMs with RStudio Server/ Shiny Server.

3) Establish an hotline channel for instant help on R or git.

4) A couple members on the team developed really close working relationship with IT and we have great respect for each other work.

What we provide is way better and by being active, we built users trust in the tools.

We are phasing out SAS and proprietary modeling tools. Python never took hold even if we bought Anaconda entreprise. Excel is there to stay for sure but since actuarial student learn R in school, it is easier to onboard new hire.

If you want to go down this path and have a chat, hit me up. I'm in P&C. We use R both in development and production environments. We use it for pricing, spatial contractual obligation, claims assignment and a couple more models.
Thanks for the catch! I updated the language to "...purchase a trip slot and editing access for as low as $10"

Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.
This post goes into great detail: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-propos...

I believe I originally saw it here on HN.
If you're referring to constantly sending save states back and forth, some emulators work this way currently.

If I'm not mistaken, RetroArch's networking functions in that way.
"As to the memoization, that is not hard to manage in Python."

Yes it is. Recursive calls for financial calculations easily go hundreds of thousands of calls deep. This is why high-end actuarial modeling software either decomposes it into a dependency graph and unrolls function calls where possible, or just "brute-forces" it by being a thin wrapper over c++, i.e. using operator overloading on ::operator().

I've seen ill-fated efforts of capable software developers attempting to unroll the recursive function calls, and ending up with 2000 line functions that are impossible to maintain.
My experience was to upload to Newgrounds and Kongregate and send it to my mom on an ancient computer and she'd run it just fine. I am sorry for oversimplifying but I do think many people had the same experience as I did.
The cost of non-lockdown would also be borne by the young and healthy, because there would be second order effects - including job losses, business failures, panic buying and food shortages, possible civil unrest, collapse of existing health systems, and loss of essential skilled people at all levels. Among others.

There is no trite healthy vs vulnerable tradeoff here, and it's simply a fantasy to believe that everyone under 40 would be able to get on with life without consequences while the over-55s were dying off quietly.

The reality is far more complicated. Letting Covid run wild would have been far more damaging than mitigation in a huge number of ways - economic, psychological, political, medical, and more.

The one area of valid debate is whether good mitigation strategies were chosen and implemented wisely. Often they weren't. Test and trace, masking, and PPE provision should have been central, allowing more limited lockdowns.

In the most badly hit countries none of that happened, and without them full-spectrum lockdowns were the only (blunt) tool that was left.
So we need AI driver certification then. Just like we have with people. If the AI can past the, perhaps 5x human capability test, its licensed to drive, just like the 16 year old teenager driving his new truck on the highway behind you with his four buddies scolling coors.
that costs millions!
Why does building and rolling out a standardized environment cost so much? Could you break down the requisite steps and resources required to achieve this?

Thank you, I appreciate it :)
what!? why does that link redirect to fbi.gov??
I wonder why none of the top comments mention Ruffle[1]? It's a wasm flash player emulator, and it provide the necessary sandboxing. That sounds to me like a reasonable alternative to a buggy and now unsupported official player.

[1] https://ruffle.rs/
Like a web of trust, but for link recommendations?

Maybe it could work by changing the incentives. If you had a magical perfect AI that was loyal to you and ran on your PC, it would always act in your interest - Spidering the web and returning interesting things based on your feedback. Whereas the current model is, none of this stuff is self-hosted, it has to run on Somebody Else's Computer. SEC costs money to run, so they have to make that money back by tweaking the recommendations, and none of the big ones inter-operate. YouTube will never recommend videos from the Fediverse.

So anything that's not self-hosted (which is just a specific form of a subscription payment, anyway) will never have your best interests at heart, it can only have some of your interests at heart. This same problems comes up in politics - Companies have no interest in creating public goods and we shouldn't expect them to do so.

But anyway, I think this is where some of the good stuff will fall out of AI in the next 10 or 20 years - Having intelligent agents that try to cut through the BS of the web on behalf of their owners.
What kind of "feedback" do you get from the mussels in a polluted environment? Is it death or something more interesting?
Do you really need evidence for this? 99% of the people I know are really struggling with the lockdown measures (although most of them accept they are neccesary). And the vast majority of those are due to lonliness. Only a few are actually scared of covid.
Going to hard disagree.

What he's saying there is that today we have free implementations of libraries which solve incidental complexity and those libraries work (nearly) everywhere (nearly) the same.

I worked in finance on K and the name makes in impossible to use google/stack overflow to find anything about the language. Which meant I had a paid for help and tech support from a company that's been largely unchanged from the 80s.

It was fucking phenomenal.

Once I gave up the idea that I knew best and started working in the way the language expected me my productivity was an order of magnitude higher than it would have been in a cobbled together python pipeline like the one he uses there. And because someone was responsible for the language and tooling I could use scripts from before I was in primary school, and they worked as expected.

I dare you to try and do the same with any language that isn't C.
No. This is untrue. Apple had no intention of working with Adobe. Flash competed with the App Store.

Adobe approached Apple many times to nail down performance issues and Apple blew them off
That’s revisionism. When the iPhone first came out, apps weren’t a thing. Jobs advocated for PWA (he didn’t want apps), but people complained about performance. So Apple added the App Store with iPhone OS 2.0.
Easy for you to say.
No one can be trusted 100%. That's the whole point of the linked analysis. You assign certain probability ranges (based on facts, past track record, research results, etc.) to various events and then mathematically infer the probability of event in question.
You certainly CAN.

My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it.

Likewise, you could split up a Flash file into as much spaghetti as you wanted. But most of them were single SWF files.

Honestly, I think efforts like FlashPoint will have a better time archiving flash content for this reason than trying to preserve HTML5 content of today.
If Amazon wanted to they could stop this tomorrow. All they have to do is post on their website "If any vendor offers you money to leave a good review, send us a photo of the offer. We'll check it out, and if it's real we'll pay you double what the vendor offered and then ban that vendor from Amazon."
Yeah, monitoring isn't helpful when people knew what the issue would be upfront.
Agreed. Shipping quality on Amazon has declined massively (before corona), and since marketplace and comingling, products have often become unreliable and even dangerous. On top, there was a forced price raise to sell me videos I didn't want. I did the math and am now prime-free.
You are right. I had to re-read the article with fresh eyes, hah! My first reading had left me with the impression that they were keen to introduce all the negative aspects as early as possible for the sake of "neutrality" and "transparency" ... hence my comment. But now that I re-read it, it's probably not the case. D'oh.
Agree 100% with this. Better analytics can be a key competitive advantage for insurers and modern tools / cloud offer potential to be much better than Excel.

I've been working on a product that turns JupyterLab into an IDE for life insurance calculations - Python API wrapped around an optimised C / GPU computation layer underneath, all integrated with key open source libraries.