skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What evidence is there of McConnel having access to Trump after Jan 6? I have the impression that their relationship cooled. McConnel stated that Tump “provoked” the mob on the senate floor.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/mitch-mcconnell-riot...
Conveniently leaving out the second definition from your own link:

2 : to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage, exploiting migrant farm workers

The article is about definition 2 folks.
Chromium-based browsers and Firefox have discarding built-in.

chrome://discards/ has some advanced options (in Chromium-based browsers).

Funnily enough, Google mentions The Great Suspender as inspiration for this feature in the August 2015 changelog: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discar...

> We actually had a great chat with the author of the Great Suspender extension while developing tab discarding and they're glad to see us natively tackling this problem in ways that are more efficient than an extension might be able to, such as losing the state of your user inactions.
What if the way Covid-19 forces us to teach is better?
Maybe you should try Guix?
Very interesting, and it gives a really good highlight of the whole Oumuamua event, which got a bit distorted in the media.

The things that stood out were:

- Our range of vision to spot such objects is narrow;

- We don't have much "resolution" of the object, and we have to work with limited data;

- that fact that we managed to get that data was already really good and it's enough to theorize about a lot of stuff, but not enough to tell precisely what it was.

- the object behavior as it approached the sun doesn't match the type of object that we perceived at the beginning;

- the object could have been stationary;
When discussing software updates, I feel like folks on HN commonly overestimate how much impact opportunity for controlling updates has. I haven't seen someone in my social/professional circles ever hesitate before applying an apt-get update. Nobody I've known checks changelogs (except developers checking on direct dependencies), nobody reads the patches for the updates to verify nothing malicious slipped in. "There's an update, I'd better apply it, unless it smells like a breaking change."

So in practical terms, my experience is that vanishingly few people will behave differently than an auto-update system would behave, except in rare occasions like a malicious update making the headlines. We definitely need a solution for rejecting malicious updates, but I feel backing away from auto updates throws the baby out with the bathwater and would be a net-negative change for the industry and for users.
Excellent, thanks for the chuckle.
> Started streaming 8 hours ago

WTF.
Twitter Resets POTUS Account
Growing up, the internet did not feel real to me. Just a collection of memes fighting each other, fire-walled from reality. It seemed like an entertaining farce but not real.

This was relatively true for the internet I grew up with, but it is certainly not true now. What happened in the capital was quite a wake up call. And much of the blame for it does look to be the result of things like click-through maximization and engagement maximization pushing people towards extremes, things like karma and likes allocating status to those staking out extreme positions. It is a terrifying thing to think about, but if you start thinking of social media influencers and followers as a sort of client-patron relationship, the historical precedents are not comforting.

For myself, I am coming to terms with the fact that I cannot really trust any opinions that have been inculcated in me during the wild years of social media. I have deleted my Reddit and Facebook accounts, have diligently trained the YouTube algorithms to avoid any even remotely political content. I no longer trust myself to develop sensible opinions in such an adversarial environment and am doing my best to just not have political opinions and focus on simple things like maths and programming.

Steve Omohundro had a talk recently where he described the need for "personal AIs" to help individuals resist manipulation from corporate AIs maximizing engagement. Perhaps once such things like this exist, I will allow myself to have opinions. But until then, I don't think I have any hope of making sense of this cacophony tuned for my engagement. Until I get such a thing, this will be my last post on HackerNews.
I'm saying that the internet and tech culture needs an organization that is more inspired and proactive.

For example, Peter Theil risked ostracizing himself from the broader tech community to gain massive leverage and influence, and it worked and continues to work.

We should be supporting more flexible and crafty organizations to turn our memes into reality.
Many billionaires, famous people, and ex-leaders of countries have bodyguards when they go out in public. Bezos has bodyguards.

Some billionaires are relatively unknown, so maybe they get away without needing that.
In mathematics, both are common. For example, when working with polynomials or polynomial-like things, it is common to label coefficients starting with 0. E.g., a0 + a1 x + a2 x^2 + ...

The subscript on the coefficient then matches the power of x, letting you write the general term as ai x^i, which works out great when using capital sigma notation.

One the other hand, matrix rows and columns usually start from 1, so the elements on the top row are usually a11, a12, a13, ..., and the next row is a21, a22, a23, ..., and so on.

In an attempt to bring some unity to the two sides on this issue in programming, let me offer something that I'm sure everybody will be able to agree on.

Once upon a time I was implementing some mathematical code in C++. It was a mix of things from places where mathematicians would number from 0 and where they would number from 1.

I decided that the code would be clearer if the code looked like the formulas in the math papers they came from, which meant I wanted to use 0-based arrays in some places and 1-based in others.

Solution: I overloaded the () operator so that array(i) was a reference to array[i-1]. Then I could use 0-based or 1-based, depending on whether I was using a formula that came from a 0-based or 1-based area of mathematics.

Everybody agree that this was not a good idea?
first vimtutor and then :help user-manual
I wish they had one that would do that based on memory or CPU usage of a tab.
There are regular commuter helicopter services between islands over the ocean in Japan, like this one:

http://www.tohoair.co.jp/english/shuttle/
> Our internal research found that clear error messages confused our users and removed it.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or if you're serious. If you're serious, please tell me what product you've butchered so I can avoid it like the plague.

Clear error messages only confuse people who shouldn't be using the product in the first place. More importantly: a clear error message at the cost of a few confused users is far more important than an unclear error message that costs even more users hours or days of trouble.

I would far rather have a message that tells me that the software broke because the desktop manager found a crash loop and point me to the crash loop logs even if some other poor unfortunate soul has no idea what a crash log is or can't figure out how to access or understand the crash log.
It's weird to see the Republican party embrace intellectual property theft. Levandowski stole from his employer and his colleagues at Google to enrich himself at Uber. Why would that possibly be worth a pardon?
"The only thing that matters is HEAD+1. I don’t even know why we use version control. It’s entertaining, I guess—the commits and the bug fixes and the rewrites, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to have the past snapshots to make changes to the current code. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."
I discovered last week, to my chagrin, that the RAM on my x1 carbon Stinkpad was starting to fail--memtest x86+ confirmed it. Memory corruption is insidious, so I rushed to the internet to buy new DIMMs, opened the sucker up...and there's no DIMM. The RAM is just soldered into the motherboard. No upgrade, no fix. This is now a pile of unreliable junk that randomly flips bits in memory. So data evac commences, with MD5 hashes and double, trip-checking everything.

A reminder that not only software bitrots, but hardware too. Make sure not to buy a Stinkpad (or any hardware) with non-replaceable parts!

(and I just bought an M1 Macbook Pro...)
That is not what I've seen from the crowd except during speeches. I, too, naturally tend to believe the worst about these people but there's definitely a sense of Trump supporter community there.
"Mother should I build the wall?"
> He pardoned a literal spy who was convicted of espionage of state secrets but he did not pardon Assange. Incredible.

Assange and Snowden remain unpopular with Senate Republicans, and my understanding is that he was told pardoning them would hurt his chances of avoiding a Senate conviction in his second impeachment.

He was also recently steered away from pardoning himself, his family, and some Republicans that may have helped the capitol rioters (and he apparently got the message), but who knows if he'll change his mind in the next couple hours.
At that point, why not get an actor and use a ton of make up to cover the imperfections?
Honestly these seem like pretty generous and useful offerings. I appreciate the commitment they make to not use them as a sales channel as well. Will be interesting to see what else is offered in the coming February announcement.
I don't know what his personal life is like. But a person with the freedom to do the things they want and the energy to embark on ambitious projects will have no trouble having a genuine social circle and having great experiences barring some serious psychological obstacle in doing so like Howard Hughes.

This is far more important than this vague idea of reputation. Just because a person has a good reputation doesn't mean they are respected or loved. It could just be that they do not figure at all in people's minds. You can live up to people's expectations and die having never really lived.

Honestly it's somewhat reflective of the infamous slave morality vs. master morality debate
I’ll try to look up details, but I’m fairly confident. I discovered it because I was installing packages on a server which was firewalled, and had the CRAN repository proxied.
You lost me. What's this "this" in "this is why", exactly?
His book ‘Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine’ is great as well. I always feel it is his most underrated work.
I just discovered SymCC and wanted to play with it this weekend. Any tips from hackers using symbolic execution + fuzzing technique to hunt security bugs?

> on some benchmarks, it even achieves better performance than the source-based SymCC

This is cool.
I wonder what your take is on how well this would work for people who want children in their families. Wouldn't access to kindergartens and schools and simply to other kids be an issue?
What a strange criticism. That these orgs are useless because they couldn't get Pardons from a President more or less totally opposed to their goals? It's completely unreasonable to expect otherwise.
Thank you for all the effort, you and your team do inspiring work. After building a pretty big C++ audio app, I think it's time to make a change, and try something a bit kinder (SOUL).
Nobody was convicted on the basis of Steele's dossier.
I have a problem with that. It shows moral corruption. It's not corruption in the legal sense but outlines the issue of why the pardons do not make sense.

ex-POTUS is still an influential individual and is just profiting after the binds of the position are lifted.

I think it would be a pretty nice decree to disallow the president to become extremely wealthy X years after presidency. Let the influence slowly fade and let's see if POTUS as an individual, after being elected to do public good, can produce some value outside of benefiting from being elected.
Couldn't one based indexing be sugar the compiler provides?

I don't think having pointers and indices behave differently is a good idea for the record.
I never deal with any of this sort of thing.

People think I'm weird or must struggle with bad UIs for being picky and only using older FOSS apps but IME your life/UX is actually a lot better for it.
> users are generally pretty poor at managing software

This is an assertion which begs many questions.

Who are these users? What do you mean by "generally"? What do you mean by "poor"? What do you mean with "managing software"? Which software specifically? Why is "managing software" hard? What are specific case where this might be true? Is this statement falsifiable?

For instance, how does age, social background, education level, language, culture,... factor into the experience of "managing software"? Sure, the problem can't be software itself in it's entirety?

See, statements like these tend to break down once you start digging into the murky nuances and specificities of reality.

Moreover, accepting them at face value tends to reinforce a belief which isn't based on fact: that the users of digital technology can't manage their devices, and therefore shouldn't be confronted with managing their devices.

... which is then translated and implemented in interfaces and systems that simply lack the functionality that gives users fine grained control over what is or isn't installed.

Over a longer term, this promotes a form of "lazy thinking" in which users simply don't question what happens under the hood of their devices. Sure, people are aware of the many issues concerning privacy, personal data, security and so on. But ask them how they could make a meaningful change, and the answers will be limited to what's possible within the limitations of what the device offers.

A great example of this would be people using a post-it to cover the camera in the laptop bezel.

People don't know what happens inside their machine, they don't trust what happens on their machine, and there's no meaningful possibility to look under the hood and come to a proper understanding... so they revert to the next sensible thing they have: taping a post-it over the lens.

The post-it doesn't solve the underlying issue - a lack of understanding which was cultivated - but it does solve a particular symptom: the inability to control what that camera does.
> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position.

Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.?

The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm.

To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.
main discussion on the frontend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25843040
I'm curious what other OS which avoid X11/Wayland do, such as Android. Do they implement an architecture like what you mention?
Interesting, I stand corrected.
Truly is. I think egotistical maniacs are the biggest problem in tech.
Somewhat unrelated but, in the U.S., I believe that the government still doesn't need a warrant for emails stored 180+ days in the cloud, because the Email Privacy Act never passed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_Privacy_Act .
Auto Tab Discard has a setting, "Discard a background tab if its memory usage (totalJSHeapSize) exceeds (in MB)"
Or a tinkering curiosity that is fun to play with, in my case :)

I've been meaning to explore if the ideas in Efficient palette-based decomposition and recoloring of images via RGBXY-space geometry[0] could be used for creating better paletted PNGs and GIFs. Learning more about color spaces is quite relevant, I would say.

Thanks your for confirming my suspicions and the link!

[0] https://cragl.cs.gmu.edu/fastlayers/
The American style of individualism in its traditional form is hardly anti-family/village/church. In fact, one of its notable characteristics for early observers used to European values was that Americans were prolific joiners. Want to do something? Start a club for it! That has broken down over the last decades, but blaming it on individualism seems questionable at best.
VPN Bidding Wars
What we call oligarchy now and what they called democracy then -- it's the same picture. Re democracy's weaknesses, I think the most important factor was that whatever their radical ideas, they were living in a country that had been born out of a revolution / civil war and were living through the failure of one attempt at creating a country (the Articles of Confederation) so they were primarily concerned with creating a system that could actually work for a while and maintain stability through turbulent times. They were true believers in (what they called) democracy, enough to bet the future of the country on it, but they also believed it had weaknesses, and they did not want to embarrass and discredit it by building a democracy that failed because of something that seemed inherent to democracy itself. That's one reason they were obsessed with its weaknesses. Another other reason is that they had to sell their new system to democracy skeptics. So, they had to convince both themselves and others that their system built around the idea of democracy was designed in a way that guarded against its weaknesses.
No, but pointers are thought of as array indices. If you understand arrays, you understand pointers.
But back in 2000 I remember there were debates on whether the new century/millenium started in 2000 or 2001.
So theoretically in the next 2 years or whatever, this big feature and many smaller ones will come to gimp. Still how long before mass adoption would start because as you mentioned the biggest hurdle?
Qemu is also several kinds of broken on M1.

I was able to get qemu to boot an x86 Linux after applying a huge pile of patches I found on a forum.

If you are expecting to get up and running instantly with a VM to put all of your comfy old software in, not so fast!
> is [now] completely toxic and can no longer be used to prop up his other failed ventures

You are underestimating something. I remember how Bush was literally Hitler and Cheney was an impossibly evil name.

But now Bush is a lovable cook, Biden admin was taking with Dick Cheney about foreign affairs and Liz Cheney was just celebrated by the left/media for dumping on Trump.

Trump brand won’t be what it was, but it’s something different now. I think the political left did themselves a great disservice by not giving in to election fraud investigations, when people were asking for signature matching, observer access, proving compliance with Article2, scanned ballot uploads, whatever else was reasonable and we should expect our election system to provide without question. Even the most rabid TrumpHater5000 should have supported that because it would have proved he was wrong. Now in some people’s eyes we will never truly know. For practically half the country Biden has an asterix by his name. That doesn’t seem like a great start and it didn’t actually tarnish Trump Brand except to the people who hated him already including the establishment GOP. His approval among supporters is not lower since Jan 6th, as difficult as it may be to understand.
Yes, I am not arguing the market logic. I am arguing against the market logic.
Show HN: Dumbdown – A dumb alternative to Markdown
She'
Do you have any numbers to back that up? A 747 burns 10-11 tons of fuel per hour and carries about 360 passengers. For a 12 hour flight, that is about 350kg of fuel per passenger. Starship's tanks hold approximately 250 tons of fuel and 950 tons of liquid oxygen. In order to match the per passenger fuel efficiency of a 747 they would need to carry about 700 passengers. Starship has about 20% more internal volume as a 747, so it seems likely that they would be able to fit at least the same number of passengers. That puts them at about 50% of the fuel efficiency of a 747.

In addition, methane combustion produces 2.75kg of CO2 per kg of fuel, while kerosene produces 3kg CO2 per kg of fuel. If they are able to fit 20% more passengers than a 747 due to the larger internal volume then they would be within about 66% efficiency on a CO2 emissions per passenger basis.
Lewandowski would be the Polish spelling of it as there is no "v" in the alphabet
I wholeheartedly agree. I am currently trying (and failing miserably) to quit news-watching altogether.
I will not come off it. This is an article about open source being exploited in the negative sense of the word. And the op seemed to want to do more of the same. So, pretty solid, I'd say.

Communication is key!
Judges deciding cases based on what the law says, free from fear of political reprisal is the intended feature. Lifetime appointments get you that (or very nearly to it). If you know of a strictly better way to get the same feature, what is it?
> It's designed to force people to handle the damn error as near to the call as possible.

Except for not even remotely doing that:

1. if a call can fail but returns no useful value (or the caller cares little about it, and thus ignores everything it returns), Go will not complain that you're ignoring the return value entirely

2. if you have several calls which can fail, nothing forces you to actually handle all the errors, because Go doesn't check for that, it relies on the compiler error that a variable must be used:

v1, err := Foo(false)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("error")
return
}
fmt.Println("first", v1)
v2, err := Foo(true)
fmt.Println("second", v2)

will not trigger any error, because the second calls simply reassigns to the existing `err`, which has already been used once, and thus is fine by the compiler.
What is the difference?

From the website it sounds like the favicon is changed. So the tab doesn’t go away it’s just on pause

Google: “ a discarded tab doesn't go anywhere. We kill it but it's still visible on the Chrome tab strip. If you navigate back to a tab that's been discarded, it'll reload when clicked. Form content, scroll position and so on are saved and restored the same way they would be during forward/backward tab navigation.”

In the future this will be updated to also use a serializer for discarded tabs.
He was investigated for 2 years and is still accused to this day for Russian collusion. Pardoning either Snowden, who is in Russia right now, and Assange, who is accused of being a co-conspirator in the Russia collusion accusations, would be like throwing gasoline on that fire. I don't see how he could do it without alienating most of his establishment support, which he still needs after leaving office.
I've noticed this as well, and I've concluded that the actual surprising part for new coders is mutability. In basically every domain where non-developers invent algorithms, everything is immutable - spreadsheets, math!. Heck, even reading an article - the words you've already read don't change their meaning just because you've kept reading.

Mutability is really a result of the fact that computers are physical machines. So I think if you're going to teach software development, you should really start at the machine architecture and build up (ala NAND to Tetris) or start with an immutable-by-default language and only dip into mutation as an "advanced" concept, only to be used by experts and definitely not by beginners.

I endorse the second way, as I've seen it work very well, whereas I've seen more than one ship crash on the shore of understanding pointers...

Of course, my N is small.