skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the last section, where he says people "weren't avoiding Ruby for speed reasons", that's only true if you take speed very literally. Ruby has concurrency problems compared to many of the more recently popular backend languages like JS, Go, Elixir, or even Java. It has single-threaded performance that's fast enough for a lot of things, but out of the box its ecosystem and standard libraries don't default to evented IO, and the GIL messes up threading, both of which can be footguns for anyone trying to build a resilient and scalable service.

When I was a junior engineer, one of our demos to a client failed because we had a group of 20 people try to use a server that had a highish latency connection to a database, and using synchronous IO meant that a 50ms db round trip for each executed query, with each request running maybe 5 or 10 queries, on a VM with 2 cores and one Rails process per core, would queue up incoming requests until they hit the 20 second mark and started timing out.

Bad concurrency because of evented IO is not exactly the same thing as being slow, but it manifests as much the same developer experience, so it gets misinterpreted and Ruby gets a reputation for being slow.
I am merely a random stranger on the Internet with a random opinion. It's up to OP to consider it or ignore it.

Speaking for myself, I ran a few donation-funded projects for a few years and found out that it involves too much mental gymnastics. Hey, I'm almost making the minimum wage. I don't have a family, I live with my parents, but at least I'm free and don't have a shitty boss. It's great, and I'm happy, right? Right? Tell me people, it's great, it's truly great?

So I learned the business skills, started working on a for-profit business idea, tweaked it based on the early feedback, and grew it into a full-time business that pays comparably to a corporate job. It was much harder than keeping to tell myself that my parents' basement is all I need, but it paid off well in the long term.
> It's not worth it, just learn C or C++.

And your productivity on your team plummets as a result.

Rust also has slow build times [0], but it didn't stop people from using it.

[0] https://pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity
Considering the value proposition of BTC is to avoid keeping your money in fiat currency that is constantly depreciating while BTC is appreciating, the analogy is apt.
Okay...to restate what I already have:

I'm honestly not sure why not having RabbitMQ/Erlang or X tech listed as an example of Y is such a big deal - especially when the other examples are fine examples.
Renewable energy isn't a commodity like oil. You can't yet generate watts at a waterfall in the jungle, and turn around to sell them to towns in the desert.

A bitcoin mining operation at a geothermal vent in remote Iceland is not taking away energy units from people in India.
Ahh so you are the one who uses mission control.
Apple Privacy Chief: North Dakota Bill 'Threatens to Destroy the iPhone'
> Your assignment is to memorize the first 100 digits of pi having been intentionally given so little time to do so that your only chance of completing the assignment is to cheat.
Githubbuddy – organize your starred repos
I don't know whether it will turn out well, rather that it's the newsworthy topic in Africa now (afaik).
BOINC's unit of credit, the Cobblestone (named after Jeff Cobb of SETI@home), is 1/200 day of CPU time on a reference computer that does 1,000 MFLOPS based on the Whetstone benchmark

Eventually, credit may reflect network transfer and disk storage as well as computation.

Credit has no monetary or other value; it's just a measure of how much work your computers have done.

Total credit: The total number of Cobblestones performed and granted.

Recent average credit: The average number of Cobblestones per day granted recently. This average decreases by a factor of two every week.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Computation_credit
There’s some great shows on Amazon Prime called Dino Dan, with follow-ups Trek’s Adventures and Dino Dana. All great fun. Live action episodic show for kids probably 3-8.
The general public buys much less yielding investments, they even buy lottery tickets by the millions!

And we're not talking black or white here.

It's not that miners suddenly will earn zero money.

It will just decrease to the point where it may make sense to sell some of the equipment. That equipment might still be somewhat profitable, just not as insanely high as it is now.
No, I doubt it considerably. In fact bitcoin enthusiasts are likely to have a better understanding of fiat than the average person, due to the value proposition of cryptocurrencies.
I don't know if you're serious, but you can't make proof of work more efficient, nor can cryptocurrencies realistically get even close to the transaction capacity of current "paradigm" (banks). This won't ever change the paradigm. I fear you may be misinformed about where Bitcoin is headed.

I get you, though, I was also in it for the technology (as well as the profit, but I got in back when the "bitcoin faucet" gave away mined bitcoins freely, and I spent like 2 whole bitcoin on socks, there was no investment scheme in the beginning), but it has since become clear that this system can't be more than it currently is: an investment scheme that only works so long as more people put money in.

It will take another paradigm shift, as big as Bitcoin was compared to the "paradigm" before 2009, before perhaps someone proposes something that has all the beneficial properties and actually practically works (regardless of energy efficiency).
Thankfully nobody will ever fight a war of pollution externalizations.

Over resources, yes, pollution, no.

Economic calamity if pollution directly affects some nation, possibly.

Not even as part of an escalation.

A war requires a lot of vested interests to 'care' add to that mechanisms for populism.

'ABC is polluting' is not enough of anything.

Also, non-market forces that care the most about things like pollution, are the one's that are also least likely to want war, or to put those kinds of cards on the table.
Recently thinking without proper answer :-)

Would it be possible to "dissolve plastic by liquid into other liquid" which would potentially not impact environment that much ?

Better than land field or burning ? Like throwing some sort of eco friendly acid on it ?

Layman question, answer appreciated. Obviously the outcome should be causing less harm to environment.
Cmd-Opt-D to show/hide Dock btw, if you didn't know that. Can be handy to know for those weird cases where it's not showing/hiding as it should. May or may not help with this particular case you're seeing though, but give it a try!
> the Wasm-functions you call will return immediately

That can't be right. Doesn't JS block on the call, like any old function? The wasm function returns a value, not a promise/thenable. So if the wasm function takes a long time/forever, it will not "return immediately".
Did you somehow miss the decades of schools teaching DOS Windows Excel Word etc. because that’s what everybody used?
and a pony too.
Considering I have devoted my life to cryptocurrency and blockchain, am not a dumb person, and have entirely opposite views to the author, you can certainly believe there are many people who disagree strongly.

If you judge my electricity consumption don’t be angry when I judge yours! Better to have a free market and price in externalities.
Kind of funny they mention it’s similar to C’s switch statement when it’s verbatim a Rust construct.
White House looks at domestic travel restrictions
Yup, Marxists with their CRT nonsense despise science (and mathematics), which being objective contradicts their narrative that everything is a social construct.

That's what you meant right?

US university scientists consider the left to be their enemy, not the right. Ask one.
My favorite analogy about being a parent is that children are like a tightly furled lotus buds, and our job as parents is to give them the room to unfurl into the unique flowers they are, rather than clay to be molded into whatever form we see fit.

Molding them to follow your passions may seem to work initially - kids naturally want to please their parents - and it certainly could happen to align with their personal excellence, but it can also ultimately rob them from developing their own unique talents.
Glider engines are not meticulously rebuilt. The most prolific glider maker (Fitzgerald Glider Kits) is famous for its trashy rebuilds. Anecdotally: https://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/thre...

These rebuilt engines generate at least 20 times the pollution as emissions-certified engines:

https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2018/02/heavy-duty-truck-glider...
Getting sick of people pumping Crystal in every single Ruby posting. Just stop.
Don’t move the goalposts. Bitcoin has little economic impact relative to its energy use you wrote. Oh, but it does. Miners created something of value, others bought with real money substantially greater than the cost of creation - and durable enough to resell indefinitely (with mundane care & handling). The only ones fit to establish “economic relevance” here are those who actually bought Bitcoin, with an estimated total resale value of $650B. Picasso's Les femmes d'Alger was sold for $179.4 million in May 2015; the economic impact of Pablo painting for a few days was indeed enormous. Those vs gaming, where while making/marketing games is profitable the tremendous energy going into playing them produces no lingering resale value of any form.
hehehe, I knew someone would challenge that. I don't know the particulars, I am inferring that recycling plastic is better than dumping it in some way from the fact that it's more expensive yet people still do it. I did not mean it in the sense of "I know a lot about plastic recycling and ready and willing to defend the mainstream view against people who think it is misguided."
The US seems to be optimizing vaccine distribution for the lowest risk of offending anyone, instead of the lowest risk of fatalities.

The fear is that doctors might reserve vaccine doses for family, friends, or highest bidders. The optics of such a situation would be terrible and would surely be in the headlines for months, but the actual odds of this happening and the resulting impacting are very low.

This follows earlier attempts by the CDC to optimize vaccine distribution according to racial demographics rather than which demographic was most susceptible to COVID (elderly). They eventually relented, but I'm still stunned that our own CDC was considering going against their own fatality models in an effort to appease social justice concerns. (Source: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-12-30/how-race-fa... )

We had nearly a year to prepare for this situation. It's almost criminal that the government didn't think to prepare a vaccine distribution system that would have solved these issues well in advance. No doctors should have to scramble to find patients to accept a vaccine when under 10% of the country is vaccinated.
I lived in Kenya. Stuff under the road doesn't stay there long. They get incredible abuse and little maintenance. It's hard to think of anything that would generate more microplastics than putting it in a road. Plastic in the ocean, in your garden, in an animal's mouth, anywhere else, just can't compare to the grinding action of thousands of cars daily.
Its not all relative but surely you recognize that theres a difference between malum prohibitum and malum in se?
> Recycling plastic produces a lot of nasty chemicals and is awful for the environment, but we still do it, because the alternative (chucking it in a landfill) is worse

Manority of plastic waste is NEVER recycled. Lets not spread myths.
Truffleruby is the way to go.
Graalvm is in the process of becoming the universal, faster VM for most high level languages, for example it is already the fastest for R and once the python implementation mature it should become the fastest python runtime too.
A mouse is an interface best suited for continuous-shaped requirement, e.g. aiming a pointer in games, drawing, and other inherently 2-dimensional arbitrary precision input modalities.

Textual interfaces (e.g. code), reading, navigating filesystems, etc. is inherently discrete (folders have files, files have words, words have letters). For discrete applications such as these, I (and many others) prefer mouseless modes of interaction. A mouse can point at many different precise points for a given character in a word, but it's still the same logical place.

(Yes, I'm aware that pixels are finite and thus the continuous analogy is "technically incorrect". Its validity stands.)
Damn. The apology letter that they had his ex-lover write as a condition of bail is still up on the sheriff's facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=802064459817968

I wasn't aware that US courts are allowed to compel prisoners to make specific public statements without a trial.
A lot of profit form generics. It's a common tactic for pharma to identify a syndrome with a commonly available drug, like ADHD with ritalin. The medicine need not be expensive or even novel.
Idk why I see downvotes here for a legit comment and concern. Parking lots are absolutely awful.

First, cars. Enough said.

Second, they take up a lot of space with low utilization.

Third, heat.
Wrong. Inflation is a way to tax lenders, and reward debtors who get to repay their debts with less valuable currency. As the poor and middle class are more likely to be net debtors, they tend to benefit from inflation.
Really interesting book,
I love the idea of mouseless and i might get this book to challenge myself to use no mouse
I'm sorry about the rejection, it hurts when you put time and effort into something. The best remedy is to apply to other companies quickly!

I read through the presentation, it was very interesting! But it seemed more about advertising and marketing than bioinformatics or programming. Was the job related to data acquisition and experiments?
Thanks for taking the time to reply to everyone on this thread. Especially to correct my memory on grading, either I am misremembering the course or the policy.

The impact of IDK is an interesting example of unintentional bias. Do you think it is worthwhile publishing or sharing with the academic world at-large? Seems that if there are clear trends, it could be used as a guide for grading policy elsewhere.
There's going to be an awful lot of wasted hardware and electricity before mining is complete in ~2140.
Ah yeah, text clippings are an amazing feature. The feature was added in 1994, for System 7.0 or newer[0]. Super useful. I used to be in the midst of a conversation with someone on Hotline and want to save a snippet of text. Select it, drag to desktop, done. Saved for later as a file I can refer to or even drag & drop to some other program.

[0] http://asa.max1zzz.co.uk/English-North_American/Macintosh/Sy...
You can still have keys to access and decrypt messages (for notification purposes) you don't need to save them to db instantly.

This is a trade off between server load and security.
Then we're back to the First Rule of Adtech.

If "the sites you visit" are the ones talking to Tealiums and Segments, it is trivial for "the sites you visit" to lie about the browser IP address and make it look like requests are coming from all over the world instead of just one box sitting under $FRAUDSTER's desk running a script.
> Producing JavaScript apps that are both fast to run and easy to maintain does not feel like a problem that has been solved yet.

If the language is not part of the solution, maybe it's part of the problem?
A more professional way to cheat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprompter

This could be set up by placing a phone screen on the laptop keyboard facing up, then positioning a 45° piece of glass and some black baffles.
Hawkins: Diving into the reasoning behind the design system
Maybe, but only running miners when electricity is cheap doesn't work for a proof of work currency. 51% attacks would consist of an individual turning on their ASIC on a windless day. You need a large base load for it to be secure.
BTW, here's the current proposal.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/127/...

It's pretty much banning firearms unless you're rich. The training requirement alone would cost thousands of dollars, the licensing requirement costs 800 bucks a year, and it has an outright ban on magazines.

So, if we apply the same standard to voting or publication...
The post says that risc-v isn't supported by Rust but this is incorrect:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm...

It's not tier 1 but it is supported. In fact, embedded Rust on risc-v is super hot right now.
> Dispersing a fine mist of micro plastics into the environment

Huh? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this is happening...?
At this point, I'd like a block diagram of Python's various package manager tools, to show me which ones rely on what other ones, and which sit alongside.

Poetry uses Pip, right? Where does setuptools fit? distutils? What are wheels, eggs?... Where does Poetry fit vis-a-vis virtualenv?...
Buy fossils!
I'm no legal expert, but that seems difficult for a court to do. They're not legislative (or, not supposed to be). And I'm certain the ACLU would fight that tooth and nail.

Signal was subpoenaed in court, and told to give up information[0] on certain customers. They replied the only information they had was the time the account was created and the date of the last connection. Admittedly, this was over 5 years ago. They fought to get these court records released.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/fbi-demands-sign...
Apple argues North Dakota bill targeting App Store could ‘destroy the iPhone’
Have to be in the mind of the enemy, son.
They are trying to strong arm the locals into basically saying they (Samsung) pays zero property taxes to the next 25 years. https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/02/04/samsung-... . I hope Austin passes on it if Samsung can't do any better than that.
If energy demand suddenly halved, I do think we would choose to turn coal plants off before solar panels. Of course Bitcoin isn't half of any country's energy, but proportionally it works the same way. There is no reason not to turn it off except some daredevils' get-rich-quick scheme falls apart.
Something I would like the community do is force vendors such as Azure and AWS to support the ACME protocol to provide the option of free certificates to users. HTTPS isn't an add-on any more, and it shouldn't come with a yearly tax.

Unfortunately, a yearly tax has a margin, so the vendors have been dragging their feet. DigiCert and GoDaddy have bribed the Azure team with kickbacks and wholesale discounts, so Azure is now refusing to implement anything else. Why would they? They get a margin on every issued certificate!

So please: If you have a presence in AWS or Azure, call your sales representative and pressure them. Submit requests through the feedback portal, and vote up existing requests.

Raise this regularly, or it will never happen by itself. The incentives just aren't there!

Pressure must be applied by a large fraction of the customers.

You are that customer.

Apply pressure.
Nice article. Lots of useful ideas.

It would be nice to know how much WebAssembly actually optimized here vs just writing WebGL in JavaScript. There are too many changes here to know if the speed ups and size gains are related to wasm or just to dumping three.js, and switching all the previous canvas 2D rendering to webgl rendering.

In fact (maybe I missed it), if they're using AssemblyScript is it possible to just run it through TypeScript and check?
Market cap is an estimated resale value under current/predictable conditions. GDP is a total of cumulative annual transactions. We can measure Bitcoin both ways, and each is remarkable.
Is this really the same? If you open a PDF in LibreOffice, you'll get a version of the document that's effectively converted to an ODT. You're then adding a layer with an image in it, and then re-exporting the result as a PDF. I'd be shocked if this didn't break various parts of the layout or replace fonts, etc.

Really the underlying issue here is that the PDF format is overly complex and not really designed to be edited, so it takes a pretty large number of development hours to build something where editing a PDF in-place works cleanly. Obviously Adobe has software for this, and so does Apple. But it's not an easy ask. Actually, the hard part of this is not the fact that you can drag and drop an image (every Linux app already has this), it's that you can seamlessly edit PDFs in the first place. I would be shocked if there aren't some bugs in Apple's implementation where this breaks unexpectedly.
Most bitcoin enthusiasts at this point are more likely to be speculators who enjoy amassing (currently) rapidly appreciating assets that can be converted back to fiat currency, than deeply-committed ideologues who are familiar with the economic implications of the project.
50% tax abatement for 5 years from the City (which has a ~50% higher tax rate than the county). I can think of a lot of ways it could be much larger. How about 100% abatement for 5 years? 50% abatement for 20 years? 100% abatement for 100 years?
I think the problem here is that some people made the fire burn so bright that it's impossible to even talk about the issue without fanning the flames.
The title of this post is complaining about Ruby's speed, and it only makes sense to provide an alternative solution.

It's good for people to know of alternatives.

So, No.
Unless you had multiple teleprompters around the room, that sounds like it would be less successful than the unprofessional ways some of the students came up with.
I think by "immediately" he specifically meant "synchronously". He contrasted with web workers which run in separate threads, which means that they send messages back in an asynchronous promise.
Pruning for Neural Networks
So Facebook now controls the political thought of people. If past behavior is any clue, it is perhaps, already doing this.

And it looks like it is cozying up to the new administration.
What Did the Old Telephone Network Sound Like? Overview of the Recordings
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The only way critical infrastructure should be connected to the internet is via data diode [1]. Otherwise it should be air-gapped.

It still lets you remotely monitor systems, but if you want to adjust the operation of the critical infrastructure you have to physically go there and do it in person. People often complain that this is inefficient, but if your own workers are unable to remotely affect a system then neither can an attacker - given the consequences of an attacker compromising a critical infrastructure I think the inconvenience is a fair price to pay.

[1] for those unfamiliar, this is typically implemented using two computers connected via fibreoptic cable, such that there are only transmitters (lasers) on one side and only receivers (photodiodes) on the other side. Thus the information can physically only travel in one direction. The computers at each end handle conversion from connection-oriented protocols (e.g. TCP) to connectionless (e.g. UDP) while maintaining reliability.
Based on the shape and the pricing per square metre, it looks like the primary use case is for pavement.

As for being a "horrible idea", this is what happens to plastic today in the slums of Nairobi:

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/kibera-slum-nairobi-pic...

Even if the bricks leach a bit, it's still much better than the status quo of soaking individual plastic bags in sewage for years.
I share many concerns about tracking people, but let's acknowledge that adtech democratizes access to services that most people (worldwide) would not be able to afford. "Free" is the only price that works for the 36% of the world's population that is in poverty.