skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It seems clear enough that protobufs were optimized in a scale that involved a lot of time/cost-sensitive reads and far fewer time/cost-sensitive writes.

Nah, you're assuming too much. Protobuf was thrown together in a fairly ad hoc way by a couple (brilliant!) engineers (Jeff and Sanjay) to help make the Google search index protocol easier to maintain. The specific design decisions in Protobuf were not carefully tested or weighed against other possibilities. They just did something that worked well enough, and it worked well enough that it was rapidly adopted by the rest of the company. It was then too late to change anything.

Yes, the fact that a variable-width size must be written before the data is a kind of big problem, which essentially requires you to make two passes over the message tree, one to compute sizes and one to write the data. There are some clever optimizations that can reduce the impact, but I don't think the designers would make the same decision if starting from scratch with no need to support legacy. But there was no point in history where it was worth breaking compatibility to fix this issue, so that's how it remains. It's a problem, just not that big a problem.

(I maintained Protobuf for several years, including writing version 2 and open sourcing it.)
My brain does nlp better than any system out there. I’m also able to ride bicycles and do motor control better than Boston Dynamics. I can also construct and prove math, do physics and code all of this in Matlab and C. My brain can handle all these wide range of tasks almost seamlessly with just 15 watts of power, that Silicon Valley’s super computers can barely do 1% of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore I'm pretty sure rape, murder, burglary, and assault aren't victimless. Feel free to educate yourself, it looks like the rates of these horrible crimes are going upwards.
You can use most websites with javascript disabled just fine. In fact, it generally greatly improves your experience.

Thanks to the ADA, American sites (or sites that do a lot of business with America) must work with assistive technologies, mainly web browsers designed for the blind. Most of those do not run js. So, you cannot design your website so that it doesn't work with js disabled, unless you are willing to expose yourself to massive legal liability. People used to ignore this a lot, but since Domino’s Pizza v. Guillermo Robles, most sites have been fixed so that they are usable without js.

I strongly recommend getting ublock, blocking all js by default, and then whitelisting sites where it is required/useful. It's hard to overstate just how much better it makes browsing in general.
This is a great way to preserve dedicated flash apps & games. But the tech being independent of the browser doesn't mean developers have integrated it that way. There are still thousands of web pages using tightly integrated flash & HTML that will be broken. You would then need to run the Flash runtime with an HTML&CSS&JS emulator along side, no?
For a couple of years I wrote a blog called Drug Law Blog, back in the days when medical marijuana was getting going in California. It became pretty popular, but I felt uncomfortable about monetizing it bc my interest in drug regulation really is mostly intellectual/libertarian and as a parent I didn't really want to take money from the marijuana industry. I eventually shut the blog down prior to legalization of marijuana. (I had thought the blog would help me build my practice as an appellate attorney, but that part did not pan out.) I think if I had had different values I could have made a tremendous amount of money, but it just wasn't for me.
> At the end of the day, making a change in an Excel sheet is easy; understanding formulas is achievable; but learning to code is hard.

This is the crux of the matter. I would guess that there are more than an order of magnitude Excel users than Python programmers. Python is great if you already know programming, but expecting domain experts to learn Python in large numbers is going to be a daunting barrier.
> - Laying off 25% of their engineers

If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us.

> - Sending all of your browsing history to Cloudflare

Are you referring to DNS over HTTPS? That's not all my browsing history, though it is still more than I want going to CloudFlare.
How should these issues be caught without people submitting them to Google?
I wasn't speaking about any particular section of the paper. Happy to hear your thoughts on it though!

Ultimately though, they're irrelevant to my point, which is that even if you personally dislike the conclusions of the paper, even if you disagree, it is an existence proof of thoughtful and deep analysis of broader impact.

You are more than welcome to dislike the concept. But it still remains present.
> penalize???

Due to bad content, I flatly refuse to go to Web sites of ABC, ..., WaPo. E.g., if there is a post at Hacker News from the NYT,

===>> NO WAY <<===

will I go there. Same for The Guardian, the BBC, etc. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Bad media has fooled me way, WAY too often, and I will NOT go back. I just conclude, bluntly, fooling people is all they know how to do. But they aren't fooling me anymore.

It's worse than that: For many years I got triple play Internet access -- Internet, landline phone, and TV. And my house had three nice TV sets. But I NEVER used the TV (except for movies on VCR). The triple play was cheaper than just Internet and landline phone access.

What happened was, I clicked through all the TV channels looking for something worth watching and finding nothing once too often and flatly, absolutely, positively, totally gave up on all of TV. All of it. Now I have no TV set at all.

From me, ALL of TV has been penalized, totally. And nearly all of the mainstream media sources have been equally penalized.

What do I pay attention to? Hacker News for one: I get good links to good content and the often good comments on that content from Hacker News readers who post.

For the issue of images and video, notice that Hacker News has none of that! Fine with me!

For more? Sure, a few selected blogs and YouTube channels.

In total, there are a lot of good URLs just on Hacker News!
> I'm curious: what's wrong with myFunc(List<BaseClass * >) ??

Well, nothing I suppose, except BaseClass cannot then be a template, and you cannot have derived class-specific return types like a template would allow.

So, having BaseClassInt type return int from some function but BaseClassLong return a long gets more challenging than it should be. (I recognize all my examples so far had a void return type, that was just for simplicity).

> But both BaseClass * and DerivedClass * are compatible with each other, and may convert into each other, as long as you know the pointer goes to the right kind of class)

Which loses type safety, unfortunately.

> In this case, we've created a static_assert (aka: a compile-time error will pop up) if T does not convert into BaseClass

I'll look into the static_assert() option, could prove useful in some cases.

At the end of the day, there are two things at play here - my lack of C++ familiarity, and in some cases it's just how C++ is.

It is a strange feeling though, having a language limit your expressiveness for the first time...
Most wealth is controlled by only a few people, so I imagine that the Walton family is the big contributor?
https://web.archive.org/web/20201229081029/https://www.polis...
No. Not only because what's "basic" varies between languages, but because it's precisely the most "basic"-seeming lemmas that map most poorly between languages.

Take the first ten "operations" of the Ogden list: come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take. Every one of these is the kind of word that has multiple non-interchangeable "synonyms" that you could use, depending on context. Expressing the "same" "concept" in another language is kind of like being forced to choose between them, when there's generally no 1:1 mapping.
My argument wasn't to assign blame specifically, but rather question the implied premise that government are acting entitled when taxing wealth or cutting up companies, and that companies bravely create wealth with no outside help. Amazon could not have been successful without the wealthy environment it started in. In turn, that environment did not appear out of thin air and is the result of many efforts.
I should be the one to decide when my computer stops being able to do something it could already do. The default should be that I do nothing and my computer continues to be able to do what it already did.

It's wrong every time I have to do something to allow my computer to continue doing something it already did. This is why I have to be exceedingly careful not to install updates on those dwindling platforms where I still have that control. I have no idea what features are going to be removed, and usually have no way to get them back. (Hello e-fuses in the Nintendo Switch, or Apple no longer signing old iOS releases to prevent downgrading.)

We should not normalize the idea that third-parties can take away the capabilities of devices we own.

Edit: I would go so far as to say that it should be illegal for a device manufacturer to prevent you from reinstalling any old firmware onto a device you own. (Yes, yes-- I know that we're getting into the whole "But that old device firmware has security bugs! Think of the Internet!" discussion. Liability, both for device manufacturers and for device owners, is a conversation we need to have too.)
This was probably working while the Swiss people were working and buying their products, but in Zurich Swiss people do banking and non-Swiss people engineering (and the number of non-Swiss people grow exponentially, now maybe 1% of people in Zurich is a Googler). They usually go to the German border for weekend shopping instead of buying the expensive Swiss products.
FreePascal has a lot of containers, perhaps more than the STL, but they all suck

I wanted a good hash map, so I spend a lot of time comparing them. There are like 10 separate map implementation in FreePascal, but they are all slower than C++'s std::unordered_map.

Then I compared another dozen of libraries, and found the fastest one that is like 50% faster than std::unordered_map. But it was a rather straight forward implementation of non-linear open addressing.
This is a really interesting article on some of the challenges facing enthusiasts for technologies such as Python in a "traditional" corporate environment.

I'm a really strong advocate for these technologies - and have been developing a notebook based product for use in the insurance sector - but there is a lot of resistance.

- There is very little awareness of the power of open source tools to do traditional data manipulation tasks;

- In addition to Excel there are both legacy and newer proprietary systems backed by consulting firms that have a strong hold over parts of the market.

On the other hand there are some areas where there is increasing adoption of Python and (especially I think) R to do statistical analyses that are difficult / impossible in Excel. Also DataScience tools and techniques are now being taught as part of standard actuarial courses.

Finally, firms are increasingly acutely aware of the risks of relying on Excel and are looking for tools with better control / testing environments.
a building has actual value as opposed to bitcoin simply contributing to the eventual heat death of the universe
Dawn Wells, Mary Ann on ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ Dies at 82
It is yet another ominous warning about the dangers of proprietary software
I'm a shy autistic human, spent most of life slowly learning alone. Tried to write 2006 with goal 4 billion people get basic machines. LibreOffice because other apps couldn't handle 100+ pages.
>> We're living in many simulations now

I mean it's completely possible we are living in a simulation, but the idea that there can be infinite nested simulations or that we could simulate our own universe seems unlikely. I mean think about a program that runs a copy of that program recursively, you'd run out of memory. Now I am aware that some argue that we could be ancestor simulations which would only render what we same like in gaming, BUT! that would mean they would have to simulate billions of minds and a world with physics and fidelity as convincing as our own which would take an insane amount of energy that I can't imagine anyone wanting to do.

If we are a simulation then reality is much more complex than our own.
Vaccinated US nurse contracts Covid-19, expert says Pfizer shot needed more time
Imagine a world without class action. It’s not hard. Think about your internet provider. If you are in the US, you undoubtedly waived your rights to class action and taking the company to court. And then you wonder why your provider raises rates despite you being under contract. Why they can advertise data-capped, throttled service as unlimited.

It’s because there is no way to sue them for an amount of money big enough to make a difference. The best you as an individual can do is sue for a few bucks. Who had time for that? So you assume that’s just the way things are. You get screwed.

But they don’t have to be that way. If only a lawyer could sue the company on behalf of all the customers for all those tiny injustices. All those injustices together would add up to real money that might make companies think twice. It would also add up to enough to motivate a lawyer to take the case with no upfront payment.

So I understand if you don’t care about $7 checks, but that’s not the point. The point is a check on bad corporate actors that screw you, but just gently enough to that you don’t personally sue them.
My Christmas Amazon experience was helping my young daughter search for a doll to buy with a gift card and finding mixed into the results a large number of graphically illustrated sex toys. (She typoed "dolll" as the search term.) The convenience of an everything e-commerce site is not worth the nonsense.
This would have made bank on iPhone back in 2008 when novelty apps (eg BeerMe) were big.
I don’t understand what this has to do with portability.
Political ideology I guess
Minimally invasive to the fresh water muscles, parallel redundancy, human plus laboratory confirmation.

Like using rats to find landmines or dogs to find contraband without the long training times.
But it doesn't matter. We know that it could have come from a lab, even if it didn't. So why shouldn't we be asking those serious questions anyway?
That's absurd.

There is zero possibility that third-party licensing income for the Lightning port standard is a consideration in any engineering decisions at Apple.
Yes, of course. Don't make that particular update. Or freeze a virtual machine with flash in it and use that when you want/need.
>If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us.

See also:

>Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share
Yes, even in Baltimore, where both violent crime and property crime are less than half what they were 25 years ago. Crime won't usually hit an all-time-low every single year, but it was much higher in the past than the present.
It is very rare that the government hires engineers outside of contractors. I would argue compensation really is not that bad even for public employees (I was a GS federal employee, work in private sector now). A couple of years in, you essentially have a job for life, more than fair compensation, pension, 401k matching, etc. BLS' estimate of average salary for a software engineer is 107k per year. It is not all that challenging to make that much as a government employee in the DC area (GS-13 step 2 is about what is comparable).
Triggered by your comment, I triple checked with the person in question. The difference was ~155€ net from 2000€ gross to 2600€ gross. I updated my original message accordingly.
This already exists for Uber drivers in California: https://uber.com/blog/set-your-fares/

I don't think it will have much impact since small undifferentiated suppliers are largely price takers in a competitive market.
Every year we get a few people who think that GPS can't be wrong. Maybe if one of 'em dies and someone sues they'll get around to updating it.

Probably not. At least one person dies each year in the Mojave Desert because they were following an electronic map instead of a paper map. It's in the local news most times it happens.
9M730 Burevestnik
A question to ask is whether bezos could have started Amazon if, instead of being a wealthy US citizen, he were a poor non English speaking citizen of say, Madagascar, back in the 90s. He almost surely wouldn’t have.

All that is to say that despite the founder genius culture of worship that exists, success is heavily dependent on the society you are in, and those who benefit the most (through a combination of work, skill, and luck) should be obligated to provide resources to maintain that system, commiserate with their ability to do so.

Bezos’ wealth is largely tied up in Amazon stock, so obviously he would have to sell off portions of that stock in order to pay his obligations, but it’s not like he has some mandate from god to be the king of Amazon à la medieval kings. Further, given that his taxes would be paid in dollars, not Amazon stock, I’m not sure how that constitutes a government takeover.
To be fair, it takes years of energy to train our brains to the point where it can do all those things, and our brains aren't extensible in the same way hardware/software is. I guess there's also a lot more variation in yields. ;)
In the US, actual public employees (not contractors!) are generally required to be paid according to the GS payscales: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

A GS-9, which is roughly a freshly-minted graduate with a Master's degree, starts at $45k/year, growing to about $60k/year (although this is also adjusted by locality). This is well below prevailing tech sector rates.
It’s an Apple M1.
I like the idea, in general, but I'm finding this makes for confusing navigation. In particular, the idea of a "node" being the set of subnodes with the same name is counterintuitive to me. Maybe it's just the terminology, or maybe I just find things easier to navigate when they're presented in a strict hierarchy.

I did immediately get the "Everything2" vibe, which is cool, but the thing is -- I've never done anything other than a random walk through Everything2. I couldn't imagine trying a directed or semi-directed traversal of related topics in Agora.

What am I not grokking?
"the arrow" is an expression of a function operation, or rather, how a function transforms its arguments. In Haskell, the following signature:

func :: A -> B

declares a function func that takes one argument of type A and returns a value of type B.

I'm guessing a bit, I feel this goes over my head, but here's my layman's interpretation:

In Rust, in order to declare a linear type, you must do so when initializing the variable:

let x = vec![1, 2, 3];

Now x is declared as move-only, so that the vector cannot be duplicated by assigning it to a second variable; after assignment, accessing x will result in a compiler error.

In Haskell, you declare a function

func :: A %1 -> B

to indicate that after this function call, accessing A should result in a compiler error.
some even only last 2 years depending on where you live:
https://ballotpedia.org/Driver%27s_license_costs_by_state,_2...
Ask HN: Good general overview of computational models and their limitations?
Most resources I've found only focus on the well-known models, like Turing machines and finite state machines.

I'd love a general overview, including some kind of power hierarchy or comparison of the different models and their limitations.
Painting a garage door is very different work than staring at a computer screen and interacting with coworkers. Some people enjoy physical labor occasionally as a nice change of pace.
Yes. "An externality is a cost or benefit caused by a producer that is not financially incurred or received by that producer." [0]

Dominating a market so thoroughly that your competitors go out of business and must find another line of work creates a cost for society that is not borne by the winner unless they pay for it through taxation. Namely those costs include retraining, possibly monetary assistance, etc, etc.

Beyond that, companies like Amazon[1] and Walmart[2] have well-established histories of paying their workers so little that they have to use SNAP to make ends meet.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/externality.asp
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-on-food-sta...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
The real problem wasn't flash games. It was flash banner ads.

Lots of badly written flash content would (even on desktop) completely peg a CPU core. And it would do that even when the content wasn't visible (for background tabs, or if you'd scrolled past the ad).

This is bad enough on desktop, worse on a laptop (where you care more about battery and thermals) but it was a disaster on the very low power phones we had at the time. It made the iphone's browser feel extremely janky and unresponsive, and your phone would warm up in your hand. People had no idea that the problem was that "punch the monkey" banner ad they had already scrolled past. The website operator didn't know what ads were being served. Everyone just had a bad time.

Steve Jobs was asked about it in an interview once and he said he'd never seen flash managing to work smoothly on a mobile device. He said if Adobe could show it working well, he'd reconsider. But as far as I could tell, Adobe never rose to the challenge. I think android had flash working for awhile, but they eventually dropped it too. (Probably for the same reason.)

On desktop, I remember having an option in chrome to make flash not play by default. That way flash banner ads just wouldn't get loaded. I imagine they could have done the same for mobile safari - but that sort of thing was never Apple's aesthetic.
The spookiest thing about Plan 9 is "Working state unknown"[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
It's not as niche as you might think. I think the problem is that there are already lots of other websites selling antique maps. For example:

- https://www.raremaps.com/

- https://artsourceinternational.com/

- https://www.swiftmaps.com/product-category/antique-maps/
In 2023, to fly most drones in the US you will have to broadcast your location
I think there's a realization that some computation has become too complex or too risky to put in a spreadsheet. The reasons the author gave for moving to python less about difficulty of coding, but that other problems were bigger than learning to code.
It didn't exist yet. We were evolving from simple raw messages with all sorts of problems.

The alternative was something custom again, with better support for schema evolution, but pb was convenient due to existing implementations in Python (system tests) and C# (UI).