skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Minor note---you can get much tighter theoretical minimum latencies than the ones listed in your table.

1. The table's mins divide straight line distance by the speed of light. This gives you the time it takes for light to travel in a straight line from, say, London to New York. However, your "real latencies" are roundtrip ("ping") latencies. Thus, you need to multiply all the theoretical latencies by two.

2. Data does not travel through a fiber optic cable at the speed of light. This is because light actually bends around the cable when transmitted. These are called cosine losses, and mean the light travels roughly 5/3 the actual cable distance. So, multiply again by 5/3. (This is why HFT firms use microwave links for long distances.)

If you multiply the theoretical maxes by 3.33, you'll see that they're very close to the actual latencies you're observing. New York -> London becomes 62.7 ms optimal, so you're only 13% slower than the theoretical max.

Here on the west coast, I typically see within 10% of the theoretical min for data going over the Seattle -> Japan submarine cables.
I can believe some billionaires having this opinion (since some aren't super sharp) but it's total BS. There are plenty of humans on earth - there isn't any shortage of labour out there.

People over-reproducing is a strain on society. I'm not saying we should limit how many children folks can have, but there isn't any societal upside to 14 person families.
I haven't tried, but I get the sense that those are more about cleaning up the run time than the build process. At least the flatpak/snap world also is kind of anti-integrative in that everything is vendoring everything else.

I personally think containerization is just too much a PITA to use for software that doesn't live in a bubble, e.g. desktop software. The capabilities revolution (Capsicum or CloudABI) would be more secure and easier to program with, so we just need to force our way there, and then everything will take care of itself.
For those of you who haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s Wired article on submarine cables from 25 years ago.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
> why not simply go to trial and suffer the same legal fate?

The same reason most people take a plea bargain. Punitive damages. "Prison for six months, or the risk of a jury sending you to prison for ten years" is a pretty strong incentive to plead guilty.

If the punitive damages can be expected to be 10-20x of what you'd settle for, you'd probably just take the plea.
Or, you know, they can do what they always do - take a piece of totally benign information (in this case source code), confidently and wrongly contend that it's a back door for the socialists and scream about it on fox news.
If you're looking for a cost-effective alternative to Heroku, might I suggest signing up for my product https://primcloud.com. We're pushing towards public availability by end of February early March at the absolute latest.

I'm a former lover of Heroku and maintainer of Dokku.
People say that like the "debt" doesn't ultimately matter - as if adopting a policy of "you only get property ownership rights if you can prove you're sorrier than the person who claimed your stuff" won't lead to calamity over the medium-long term.
Page is jumping all around on me and barely comprehensible and all I can think is "Desirable Websites: where do people prefer to browse?" and the answer is not this =/
F-150's are the classic work truck. Business is down across most sectors these days, work trucks aren't getting the wear and tear. And I'd wager that with so many people being either out of work or on reduced hours, driving in general is down.
No, seriously, what ongoing action(s) of China “must be stopped” and what actions by whom are likely to succeed without causing more harm than that which would be stopped? Referring to Wikipedia without even a link to the “List of Internationally Recognized Chinese Bad Stuff” is a tacit recognition that there isn’t much that can be “stopped” short of an armed conflict nobody wants and nobody liked Trump’s attempts for economic sanction either. “Save the Spratleys” is a weaker rallying cry than “Save Tibet” and the navy is plenty engaged there already.

The win/loss/left-a-mess ratio of the US doesn’t engender positive predictions of future actions especially given how many are in endless overtime. Is it fatalistic to be realistic?
A lot of the tech now, see Cloudflare Durable Objects and DynamoDB Global Tables, allows having many centralised authorities. Eventually one in every major city in the world.
Biden Commerce Pick Sees ‘No Reason’ to Lift Huawei Ban
Great stuff! If you like this, check out turtleSpaces https://turtlespaces.org
Prometheus Unchained
AT&T Customer Since 1960 Buys WSJ Print Ad to Complain of Slow Speeds
That's not really a reason why, it's the (vague) plan going forward.
Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information.

Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through.

Even worse, the level of writing makes it almost impossible to comprehend. Articles are badly organized, unclear and explanations are missing or hard to understand. Again, any attempt to fix the form was rejected. Editors are much more interested in citations and levels of notability.

I gave up. I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts, I see a tremendous value in something like that, but alas the market was killed by the free Wikipedia.
Google should be smart enough to sense that would not be a smart move in the current political climate.
Hah, no I paid for Sublime Text way back when, and before that I was big on Notepad++. I rarely update either though :)
Not impossible in impoverished areas. A rural trailer park, some section 8 housing in a bad part of town, or maybe they scooped up some single-family units at the bottom of the housing market crash.
> Obviously not, and that seems to be a deliberately obtuse interpretation for the intention of muddling debate. The insinuation is that there are many reasons people may become "aggressive" and a lot of them involve someone else acting poorly.

I've seen far more people acting aggressive to pedestrians without being provoked by the pedestrians because they're in a lot of internal distress (acting erratically, unkempt, possibly homeless) than I've seen pedestrians inciting "locals" to be aggressive back to them.

Walk down a street and past someone muttering that they're about to murder a bunch of people and you might not go back that way next time.

Sometimes "you were asking for it" isn't the explanation.
Ditto old theatre buildings in London's theatreland. These alt routes help deconflict the people exiting the current show from those coming in to see the next one.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/exposed-the-us-na...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/08/19/how-russian...
Totally this - especially when compared to the nearest neighbours - Finland, Norway and Denmark.
Medium-rare with a light salad
In some large Internet Scale firms there were ARBs, Architectural Review Boards. They served this purpose, by having very senior members of staff review proposed architecture and implementation approaches PRIOR to coding occurring. The danger was that over time, this sometimes devolved into the members waiting to just beatdown people presenting to them and being internally "political".
How will they know the source code they're reading is what's on the machines?

An important part of elections is for people to understand and trust the process. Paper is easy to understand; you and a bunch of your neighbors counting paper votes is easy to trust. Maybe mix in a machine to speed up the process that is also verified by hand.

Yet I can't help but think nothing will convince those who so easily believe in a vast conspiracy to alter election results spanning multiple states with different political leanings and cultures.
Tangential, I've wondered recently if it's possible to work only when you want. A lot of people talk about working just enough to pay for necessities, but I'd rather work a little bit to cover those necessities, then have most of my time where I can either live or choose to work on demand, i.e. to support hobbies that can get expensive.
It's funny, because the Red Cross is famously one of the least effective deals in charity.
That's why I never accept code based on review in web tool unless the code is evidently correct. I usually check out the branch and try to figure out how the code affects or is affected by other, sometimes distant code.

Ideally, of course, everything should be hidden behind leak-tight abstractions.

Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.

I recently had a developer reuse a function that generates IDs for some other type of ID.

That function that generates IDs happened to use OS entropy pool directly. It was used before, once every startup of the application so it was deemed OK.

But now with high demand for IDs that is no longer acceptable.

I noticed it because I followed the code to see how the function actually generates IDs. That would not happen in web based tool because there simply isn't convenient way to follow the references from the new code.

That is just a simple example, I get things like that every other day.
You'd be building and running these outside of Iran for them to work, which would limit the Iranian government's ability to perform the attack you describe.
> I once was seated near such an exit when someone who had apparently left (and left something behind) started hammering on the exit door.

Pretty sure you let in a freeloader, haha
Yup, I would run one but I don't know any Iranians...
Funny, I worked on Tapenade (one of the compared automatic differentiation software). I'm happy that it still reaches 60% of the performance of something written directly inside an optimizing compiler.
Definitely. Very often “common sense” is an after the fact explanation for some other underlying issue.
If you're referring to the tenderloin, there's a larger issue there with obstruction of sidewalks. I'm certainly not arguing these should be 'cleaned' or 'swept', though, just pointing out that 'crime' is rather incidental to the reasons why someone might avoid the area.
Donations are not a zero sum game but they aren’t terribly elastic either. Try as you might, every dollar you get as a donation is taking some of that money from someone else.

There will be times when Wikipedia is not sexy, but taken for granted. That’s when you need the endowment.
Everytime Wikipedia comes up on hacker news there's always comments about how they're wasteful and incompetent.

What is this self righteous anger for?
They're incompetent but somehow Wikipedia exists.

Is it jealousy?
I'll have to check these out, thanks! Haven't read any of them
AirTunes already had multi-room support. It might have been technically different. But you could select to mulitple AirPort Express at once and they would play the audio synchronized.
> Pure C99. No external tools are required; datatype99 is implemented using only preprocessor macros.

And sure enough, the code is unreadable and unmaintainable as you'd expect.

You can build Boost out of C99 macros. There's a really good reason why you shouldn't.
I'd add that there is a deep connection between active learning and understanding the "domain of expertise" of a model, for example what inputs are ambiguous or low confidence, and which are out of distribution. E.g. BALD is a form of out of distribution detection - a point with high disagreement it not only useful to add to the training pool, it is a point for which the current model has no business making a prediction.
Super great question!

It definitely depends on the company. For example, a startup that’s working in a highly-regulated industry where copy has significant legal implications (healthcare, banking, etc.) might have a super robust copy workflow off the bat. Others may not (this is much more common), especially if it’s primarily one person writing and reviewing the copy.

As a general rule of thumb, what we’ve seen is that (as with most processes) it’s easier to starting think about early on so you don’t end up needing to hastily put a system in place after things become unmanageable.

To be honest, lots of the challenges + workflow hacks we heard from larger teams mirrored things we heard from smaller teams

A few things in particular that might help at your stage:
- Thinking about copy as part of the design process, ie. working on copy at the same time as (or even before) you work on the mockups. This is huge bc it reshapes where copy sits in your product development workflow.
- Extracting strings out into separate files/trying not to hardcode strings. Like you said, this will set you up for success for internationalization + localization down the line. This will also make it easier to get an overhead view of your copy so you can start establishing more consistency (and reuse copy from different parts of the app to save time).
What is a SPAC? Explaining one of Wall Street’s hottest trends
And suddenly I don't feel bad anymore about work where a service of ours was pelting a backend service in a similar way with (batch size)^2 requests...
Source code isn't worthless, it's just not as important as the developers who wrote it because those developers can write a next, much better version, of the same software with the domain knowledge they have acquired writing the previous version(s). In practice this means that source code is disposable.
I agree with the conclusions drawn in the article, but not the premise. Source code is definitely not worthless. Two examples:

1) using source code to find security exploits

2) competitive machine learning algorithms

In the second case, imagine if a competitor had access to algorithms used in marketing for bidding on ads. You know what features it uses, what default values it uses, how it works, etc. You could do some damage with that knowledge
yeah.. I was recently reminded of the consequences of possible gap in my CV. Such a bullshit - it's like a slavery with an extra step.
"The Smartest Guys in the Room" told that story, and the short version is that Andersen was the auditor which was supposed to be ferreting out accounting issues (and has certain legal responsibilities). McKinsey was a recruiting ground and consultant.
Is work down? At least where I am, even during the strictest parts of lockdown construction never stopped. And so many people are starting renovation projects that's the price of things like lumber has gone up significantly.
You can read 100 different takedowns of Parler's arguments, but they're all mooted by the fact that Parler was self-evidently hosting material that contravened the AWS term allowing them to be cut off without notice. Parler has no case here.

Broken record: I'm still surprised so many people here have so little exposure to the hosting business to believe that there's actually an inviolate right to due process in keeping your stuff hosted somewhere. Hosting providers have to kick users off all the time. It is a basic fact of life in hosting: people abuse stuff.

Parler wasn't running a phishing scam, spamming, or DDoS'ing people, but that's not my point; my point is: if you're a hosting provider, your contracts basically have to give you the right to boot people at your discretion. The idea that anyone thought AWS's might not? Baffling.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/ai-identifies-songs-b...

Ima gonna hit u up too :)
Evidence of exceptions does not disprove the rule. You already know this, I'm sure.
I gave up on Godot three years ago because I couldn't do something very simple: set the origin correctly on 2D sprites so that they correctly show above things behind them. There is a setting for it (mentioned in the docs, at them time, for the exact thing I wanted) and it did indeed fix it, but it also made my sprite be drawn offset from where the editor showed it, which was immensely annoying.

I hit a few annoyances like that.

But! Godot has not been standing still and is constantly improving. I haven't had a chance to try it out again since, but I wouldn't be surprised if the issue I hit have been fixed. Its just important to note that it doesn't have the same manpower behind it that Unreal or Unity have and to temper your expectations accordingly. It is a great engine, though, and getting better all the time.

I'm also still very proud of the fact that there's a tiny bit of code I contributed in godot-cpp :)
Also, short sellers do other shady stuff. Like intimidating friends and family of people who work at the companies they are shorting.

Look at what happened to Fairfax Financial and their CEO Prem Watsa. Short sellers mailed the pastor at Watsa's church, with a fake return address, claiming that he was a pervert and a fraud. They impersonated journalists, impersonated government investigators, and even harassed the dean of the business school at the University of Toronto.

They filed a lawsuit against the short sellers in 2006 detailing all these activities, and that's what caused the attacks to stop. Elon was correct to call out the short sellers spreading FUD at every opportunity.
I was referring to downvotes on maybelsyrup's comment, not its ancestor from haltingproblem.
After you buy a chip with that many cores, your future problem will be heat, not cold. :)
Haskell on Google Cloud Is Great
I edited my post if you're interested, I assure you that I don't do anything to agitate these people, and if I did, I'd deserve whatever came to me (probably a knife).
Ford Cutting F-150 Pickup Production Due to Chip Shortage
Is that enough to pay salaries and hosting costs? Sounds like the dividends will only cover 20% of their current expenses if they stop making grants. At it is it’s less than 10% of their burn rate.

That’s a very excellent start but I suspect someone will want to grow that later on. In fact they’re at 90% of their goal and less than 60% of their target date, so they could be looking for $150M as the stretch goal.
Tax evasion, err 'financial optimisation'.
For Spotify users, there is the excellent RaSpotify client. https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify
My Japanese colleague told me with no humor, that I should never work for free, end of sentance. I was at the offices of $Giant_90s_NonProfit when a group from Japan was on tour of the two story office in San Francisco. They were full of energy and had questions, but someone told me the reason they sent a large and important group for the tour, is that they have no "non-profit" in Japan.

I suspect that the non-profit goodwill in the USA is changing a lot in the last year.
Yeah, but liquidated damages can far exceed the cost of the project. In most CapEx you can see clauses that include 3-10X the cost of the project in potential liquidated damages if your robot goes down and damages things, or causes the line to go down. I have no idea how this is handled from the Service side but i imagine it's similiar. IANAL.
legit question. I am thinking about rather frugal life. Flat in the city, no junk food, older car.
> They would be much faster just building it themselves from scratch, than trying to understand the crummy code we had hacked together.

They might use your code as a reference, especially from any research components of the project.

You'd be surprised what automated analysis of gitlab repos bring to light.
Shannon info and KC are asymptotically equivalent.
How Shipping Containers End Up in the Ocean
Ask HN: How to deal with financial regret of what could have been?
I'm in 31 and I know that I'm lucky in the sense that I have a lot going for me: youth, family, savings, etc. but of late I've been having a lot of regret thinking about the past and the decisions I made surrounding btc that I owned early on.

A lot of this is probably due to missing out but at one point I had enough that at current market prices would be just north of 100 million USD. It's honestly an insanely absurd number to think about but could have completely changed the trajectory of my life.

While I made some money selling (2013), it was just enough to pay off my loans, buy a place and invest a bit but nothing close to its current valuation. So another thing that bums me out is that I just couldn't see it growing much beyond what it was then. I understood the use cases but didn't really see the absurd growth as a possibility.

Of late, I've been having these obsessive and debilitating thoughts about a life that could have been possible if I had the foresight to hold on to even half of what I had instead of cashing out then.

The fact that I will probably only achieve a similar level of financial success is if I get extremely lucky over the next few decades while trading the next 20-30 years of my life working is a bit depressing. I have nothing against hard work and that's probably the route I'll be taking now but given the choice of that instead of investing in experiencing the world around me more richly and deeply, helping out my family and friends in a more meaningful way, I just feel awful amounts of regret at having thrown away a winning hand.

These recent thoughts have been triggered by reading some old comments of mine about bitcoin on online forums and I'm having difficulty shutting these thoughts down. I know the answer on some levels is therapy. Is there any other advice besides get over it and therapy though? I'm assuming there are probably others that may have been in similar positions?
Ask HN: How to back up GBs of data while traveling?
I'm looking at a solution for friends who will be traveling the world to let them back up their data (mainly photos, videos, so multiple GBs per month). They would love to ensure they do not lose them, for instance, due to bad luck or customs scrutiny.
How would you do this?
Does it still make sense to send SD cards by mail? Is there any service provider on this?

The main challenge is that they do not expect to have much internet connectivity during their travel.
And this new way, while less convenient, is arguably superior due to its decentralisation. They’re not just going after one service they’re now going after people all around the world running these proxies.

Just set one up myself took 15 minutes and that includes setting up a fresh VPS.

Just thinking what the best way to share it is.
May I ask if you attribute your success to the "no code" movement/idea.
How do you think the people who lend the money and their employees pay their housing costs? Not saying that there shouldn't be some humanity involved if possible but it certainly not shitbag, they gave someone money and he should give it back.
You assume the OP doesn’t refer to him/herself as a local. Have you considered it’s meant to be about how the article doesn’t distinguish between behavior of the locals in various regions?

> The "aggression" you reference is also a bit troubling because it is framed entirely with an external locus of control, which absolves you of any role.

You’ve clearly never experienced aggressive panhandling. Your only “role” is being present.
And if I killed someone to get their wallet no one suggests that because I didn't get much out of the wallet it's OK for met to have a lenient sentence ?

If McKinsey knowingly offered advice that led to thousand of deaths then the penalty should be more than $1200/body regardless of what their fees were.
It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing the way that right-wing extreme selfishness is so often justified by trying to make a false equivalence with unselfish left-wing ideas.

Wanting people to be less shit to each other - and to the rest of nature - is not the same as advocating for the right of the rich to shit on everyone else.