skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lifx, people who make "smart" lightbulbs, have gamed the amazon seller system to remove critical reviews -- even those by high rank amazon reviewers. They really don't like their product described as: Hardware Malware.

Amazon is Big Data. They could _easily_ identify generated reviews if they wanted.

They don't.

I myself stopped writing reviews as an emotionally abusive department at Amazon discourages critical reviews _albeit_ 5 star. Community Team is staffed by persons with reprehensibly poor English skills not fit to judge review compliance with vague rules.

Don't trust inarticulate reviews.

Don't trust articulate reviews without line breaks.

Don't trust products with more than 800 reviews.

But wait there's more...

Amazon will cancel your account for returning "too many" items. Catch 22.
Install linuxptp on the boxes you designate as grandmaster and client. On your grandmaster clock host:

ptp4l -i eth0 -m

On the client:

ptp4l -i eth0 -s &

If you want to sync client system clock and watch the synchronization process:

phc2sys -a -r -m
What is browser drag grop?
It was better for them to do that in 2019. My guess is that next 100 years we will live w/o that popular viruces.
I reach for SQLite if I need persisted state for a local application or custom file format but why use it for things that may need more write concurrency like web server?

Postgres is basically just as easy to use and backup.
Wouldn't it still be over the network/IPC, unlike SQLite?
I might be able to help with the car accident injury. I had a rear-end car accident 11 years ago. I know the pain/suffering. It's like nothing you can imagine till you have it and then it never goes away, worst of all no professional knows what to do about it.

The last two years I've read pretty much everything and contacted every researcher/research group working on this. They have some good material, but eventually I had to adapt their work into my own techniques. I'm now about 80-90% fixed and in a few months I think I'll be all good.

I've developed an exercise program along with an elastic head sling that supports and strengthens the neck. If you're interested DM me on twitter https://bit.ly/2LTVMMl and I'll send you some info about how I did it, you might have to modify some things but I think the basic ideas will apply.
and a 151 byte web page...
How is it that when I look at pictures from the 1990s they look... dated, I guess? But it doesn't feel that long ago!
Sounds similar to sortition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
The project looks interesting. I am always a fan of embedded virtual machines. I have some questions after skimming the documentation.

Why do built-in functions use a keyword/operator syntax for arguments, while user defined functions use parentheses? That seems confusing (and was deemed a mistake in python worthy of a decade of pain to remedy.) It would certainly make sense to special case their implementation in byte code for efficiency, but since there's a compilation step, why does the syntax need to change?

Why did you choose to go with Arduino function names? Do you like the camelCasing?

Why is there both a "next" keyword and a "continue" keyword? Don't they basically do the same thing? If the purpose of "next" specifically is to mark the end of scope of the loop, why not use the word "done" or another word that isn't synonymous with "continue"?

If space and efficiency are a priority, and there's a compiler from a higher level language, why did you go with an ASCII-code rather than a true byte-code? That gives you 95 visible characters per byte, which seems to potentially waste 18% or so of program space.
>Evolution and thought are the same process.

That sounds interesting; can you elaborate a bit on that ?
I might be mistaking things here but I believe that Apple's CoreData and Android's equivalent are both powered by SQLite under the hood.

Messages on macOS stores all your message in a SQLite file under ~/Library/Messages/chat.db
In Go-land you pay even for what you don't use
If you like SQLite, then DuckDB[1] is probably worth looking at. Very similar in many ways, but DuckDB is a column-oriented rather than row, so does have some performance advantages. It is quite new, so I might not go all in for mission critical production yet, but it is worth exploring for analytics work.

[1] https://duckdb.org/
Out of curiosity, just how many rows were you trying to insert, for this to be a problem? My memory is a bit fuzzy, but on SQLite even standard INSERT statements can scale to hundreds of thousands per second, if you do them in one transaction. Just curious about the scenario here.
Seems like ESD. The ESD event makes electrostatic fields, means you don't need to discharge directly into the circuits, a discharge onto the case of the PC will create very strong fields also inside of it. These short term fields can cause components to get a bit out of whack.
IIRC Uber will put drivers on notice if they're rating approaches 4.6
That's not normally what you need for an application format though is it.
Nearmap counterattacks short-seller's scathing claims
The most basic weed-out phone screen questions at FAANG still essentially test for undergraduate CS abilities far above for-loops. Tree traversal, data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis are several topics suggested in the very preparation guides provided by recruiters at these companies.

A lack of understanding for-loops would either get caught at the resume screener or suggest some blatant fabrications thereof akin to a pianist not knowing where middle C is. We don't even need to use FizzBuzz, our most basic interview questions we use are considerably more difficult and our candidate pipeline is sufficient to support this to boot.
> I Miss: Generators

Excuse me, what?! Python has stackless symmetric coroutines; Ruby comes along and brings you stackful symmetric coroutines, what's there to miss?

How is `return to_enum :each unless block` not infinitely nicer than pythons yield? (and waaay more powerful as a little cherry on top)
Building from source is probably easier for a non-tech user than filing taxes that are anything more than a basic W-2.
On Ubuntu, sometimes I like to do Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get into a tty, login, and then do `sudo init 3` to shutdown everything pertaining to the graphical shell. The interaction with the computer is much faster there.

After I get bored, I do either `sudo init 7` to be sure, but mostly just Ctrl-Alt-F1, which brings me back to my graphical shell.

This method has the advantage that you are always on the same system, not needing anything else. Oh, also the music works, if you don't kill the GUI with the first `init` call.

Coupled with tmux, emacs/vim, nvlc, lynx, and coreutils, you can really be more productive there, from the extra speed, less memory requirements, and less available distractions.

EDIT: I could not find the actual link to the library either on HN or in the OP, so I am linking it here [1], for the convenience of myself and others.

[1] https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich
I'd say there are 4 main places in Switzerland: around both ETH (the most prestigious universities) in Zürich and Lausanne, with plenty of spinoffs, in Geneva (mostly finance) and in Zug (lots of crypto).

Zürich has all (most?) of the big tech, plus lots of start-ups. Lausanne is mostly just start-ups and small companies.
What do you think of this, then? https://github.com/ssrg-vt/hermitux/wiki/Fast-system-calls-i...

I just had this in mind because skimmed it a few hours ago in the context of https://ssrg-vt.github.io/hermitux

mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26142285
Intelligence has a strong nurture component that we call education. It's unclear what good, if any, better genetics would do. We are already capable of reproducing and outsourcing many of the brain's functions to computers, and it seems likely we will reach the AGI endgame within a century or two conservatively. Arguably we have far too much intelligence and will end up causing our own destruction.
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." - gandalf
New Rocket Lake Chip Matches Zen 3 in Single Core Performance
I use use cases and use case diagrams a lot

I occasionally sketch out class diagrams and sequence diagrams
> it has mutable strings a-la Perl

Yes, but they're not popular these days. Ruby 3 almost defaulted to frozen-strings by default (I wish it had) and a lot of the ecosystem moved to that style resulting in some nice memory saving. Rails enforces it on its code for example: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/0f09dfca363410f51f6f6078...
Amazon vs. Reliance: Why are two of the richest men in court?
Seattle is both as expensive and as competitive of a hiring market as the Bay Area (there used to be a CoL delta but the gap closed after 2013ish, when Amazon and Microsoft stocks both went on a tear and Facebook expanded with multiple new large engineering offices there).

I say that as someone who recently left Seattle to move to the Bay pre-pandemic. Only miss the lower taxes, and certainly not the weather.
Softwares suffers from a similar pattern. Think security issues.

Indeed, any kind of specialized skills suffer from the same problem, when you want to cut costs.

You can only get what you paid for.

(and I’m not saying paying for is a sufficient guarantee either...).
FYI, your comments all show up as "dead" to me. I vouched for this one, but not sure why they're dead.
In the end I do believe that some people where able to get their money back. I remember Paul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD developer) going to court in Denmark. The court agree that you should be able to get your money back, if you didn't want Windows and didn't understand that Windows would be part of the deal. Because PHK understood that a copy of Windows would be included with his laptop, he could NOT get a refund. So you'd have to be an unsophisticated user, who wanted to install an alternative operating system, so basically "No One".

The way Microsoft dealt with the whole thing though me that they don't really care about their EULA. It's not actually enforceable or relevant to their business. If it where, not paying the refund, or forcing the OEM to seems like a way to give anyone who truly wish to violate the EULA a legal entry point.

Still, the OEM licenses was/is not worth much, and most of us knew that. You could buy a Windows 98 license for something like $30, you just had to get it with a mouse, because then it would technically have been bought with hardware. Even if the mouse was only $10, you have to assume that the real OEM where getting even better deals.
Yep, that was pretty much exactly the issue.

Except this was in a home-rolled solution which made it incredibly opaque where the ".friends" access actually happened (or if it wasn't ".acquaintances.where(type='friend')".

Made it very easy to get pages on the road, which just turned incredibly slow later down that same road, and fixing it wasn't trivial without knowing exactly what to preload when.
It literally says OLAP on their website. Why would I use this for a static website?
Sort reviews by new. It’s amazing how many “5 star” items have an average of 2-3 stars when you look at the latest reviews.

I was looking for some L plates for my car. A lot of reviews called them “beautiful”... it is a white square with a letter L that sticks to your car... trying to find one which didn’t fall off or damage the car was far from trivial. Fortunately newer reviews mentioned damage or falling off or does the job which gave some steer.

I have been purposefully shopping elsewhere recently. Other sites are usually cheaper and there is less doubt about what is actually going to get received.
There's another analogy to be made here.

If most countries weren't doing lockdowns all over the world to the tune of billions of dollars lost - the incentives for developing vaccines so quickly would be much smaller.

Giving a grant for 10 million dollars to 10 companies that might have a shot at developing the vaccine is one thing. Banning almost all business worldwide till the vaccine is developed redirects almost all the money in the world towards developing that vaccine.

If governments banned fossil fuels ignoring the economic consequences for a few years - we would solve global warming no problem. The alternatives would get developed in record time because of how much money they would be immediately worth.

But the suffering in the meantime caused by the regulations don't seem as justifiable in case of global warming as it did in case of Covid lockdowns, so governments won't do this for global warming (or at least - not until people start dying of global warming in big numbers).
Hahaha, okay, I genuinely like StackOverflow but the comments there read like a parody.

The guy is asking for hypotheses and some guy is responding with hypotheses but then there are like two other guys who are all like "we don't know, this could be anything", one of whom goes up to the answerer and tells him his hypothesis is just guesswork.

Classic. These guys won't help or stay out of the way. Just injecting themselves in the conversation to be annoying.
I goto Reddit, HN or Nextdoor for product recommends. Amazon reviews are a joke nowadays unfortunately.
John Scalzi: Being 'canceled' means learning you're replaceable
I currently have a project with Django and you made me look this up because I remembered it differently. And yes, there is in fact a cache layer between the QuerySet (.all) and the iteration.

See: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/db/queries/#cac...
Are there any iOS browsers out there with user script support?
Once you write enough popular reviews you will receive email offering a variety of remuneration tactics to whore your dignity - confirming the prior reply. All such email is forwarded through Amazon. They do nothing to stop these solicitations clearly violating seller rules or Amazon Vine.

Amazon takes no actions when this behavior is reported. They really don't care.

"We want your honest reviews"

lies

they want lies
Oops, I mean 1991 not 1999:

From dgh@dgh Thu Feb 7 12:09:13 1991
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 12:07:38 PST
From: dgh@dgh (David Hough)
Subject: Highlights of Bill Joy talk, re-broadcast

This has been given around the world, most recently at the quarterly directors
meeting on 31 Jan. A tape was made that will be available from somebody somewhere
later. It’s vintage wnj. When assessing wnj-speak, remember Eric Schmidt’s comment
that Bill is almost always qualitatively right, but the time scale is sometimes wrong.
John Gage collaborated with Bill. Note that some of the specific Sun and SPARC
projections are confidential.
> It could be hardware performance, but I would guess that's not all of it. It might be performance tuning.

At least when it comes to comparison between these two devices, the answer is simple: it's the hardware spec. It's not like the Librem 5 uses some specialised kind of secret software - it's all FLOSS and it's being reused by various PinePhone distros a lot.
I work in computer vision and pretty much all recent SOTA models had custom CUDA code. So I'd argue the opposite that in my field, lack of custom CUDA kernels will effectively exclude you from research.
> Political will power and incentives are also important factors.

Yes. I think people would rather take a vaccine that doesn't have 10 years of "long term effect trials" than together form the political will to pay a LOT more taxes for some war effort to scale healthcare because the vaccines are "too risky".

> manufacturing and training were scaled up quicker than ever before in history.

If 5 people can build a bomber in a year then a 100 people can build it in a month. But if training a doctor takes 5 years then training a doctor in an extreme hurry still takes more or less 5 years. Not to mention the time to build hospitals (or forming the political will to do so).

Basically: politics and healthcare scaling are interesting topics but quite irrelevant to the Covid pandemic response. Any healthcare changes (and the political changes preceding them) would have to take place in the early part of the 2000's.
I have huge anxiety talking on the phone, I absolutely hate it and won't do it unless it's the government/legal related tasks which has no other way for me to perform other than calling.

Having the video on helps a ton, also rely on text chat a lot and try to go into a call prepared on the topics that need to be discussed.
Show HN: I built a request payload validator for JavaScript based server
I dont even think HN represents "programmers" in general. Most of people I talk and socialize with are programmers. When I say I dont encounter that sentiment outside of HN, it includes them.

And CS is not taught purely by giving you problem set that you try alone. A lot of effort goes into trying to attract children by gamified programming systems or by nice graphics, into exercises that are actually age appropriate and so on.

There is self learning, but there are massive parts of it that are not self learning. And the self learning part is not even the thing that makes programming special. People self learning is not something that only programmers would do.
If you have a static website with a lot of data behind it, eg. a map visualizing some larger dataset, then OLAP database will be actually a very good backing storage.
Thank you :) It doesn't sync with third party storage services as of now, but I might consider it in future.
The first half of your comment contained pretty legit complaints about Apples anti-consumer choices and genera direction. You completely lost me in the second where you just lost your temper and griped about things that bothered you personally
about the world like BLM movement and (something about?) LGBT.
Well that went south fast.
This got downvoted?! If you want thirty years of backwards compatibility, go use Windows (you saw how well that worked for security...).

OpenBSD is an OS that people choose to use when they want security prioritized as a trade-off against other things such as performance and binary compatibility (there's always trade-offs). Many firewalls use it, for example.

If you value other things more than sheer data security, then there's other (beautiful) choices. (Analogously, there's no single best vehicle for everybody.)

Anyone with a modicum of actual OS kernel development experience would acknowledge these mere facts as universal truths, instead of "unpopular opinions."
Not sure how much this will help for batteries but I've found it helpful for other products, go to the manufacturer's site and try to find a list of authorized distributors. Most of the time you'll find that an authorized distributor also has an amazon store front. Not sure if it still avoids the stock co-mingling problem though if it is stocked through an amazon warehouse.
Yeah, this whole "marketplace" thing needs to die. I'm watching the exact same thing taking place in real time with a local shopping website that has started including external sellers and "facilitating" or "fulfilling" the order for them through their marketplace. One of the main things I'm noticing is that this "marketplace", as with Amazon, is being flooded with Chinese, unbranded knockoffs with fake pictures. Each actual product * every conceivable variation/renaming of product * every seller willing to sell it = huge explosion in products. (Okay, exaggerating a bit for effect there, but true to some extent).

The marketplace thing only kinda works if you have "dedicated" or "focused" or "themed" sellers that functioning within clearly defined niches/segments. Instead, you get a seller that randomly sells 15 kitchen towels, 3 garden ceramics, 50 woodwork jigs (really only 5, 50 variations), and 1 food product. Next thing you know, I'm searching through 50 pages of "school supplies".
I dont know what you mean by principle here. He is partizan for his tribe arguing against other tribe. And by partizan I mean strong clear partizan. There is nothing wrong with consistency, but there is also nothing interesting or special here.
I wonder why Bitcoin still has its place on the throne. I mean you've got privacy coins, you'd think individuals + corporations + criminals would all be in favour of that. Then again, corporations typically use an intermediary.
Anti-Vaxxers Misuse Federal Data to Falsely Claim Covid Vaccines Are Dangerous
I read this and remembered how much I used to^W^W hate Microsoft. Microsoft intentionally did not fix the virus vectors in their software. They could have easily stopped 99% of viruses with these steps:

1. Make Windows ignore autorun.ini on writable media. -- When a user double-clicks on a drive that has a hidden autorun.ini file, Windows executes the binary referenced in the file. This is how most Windows viruses spread.

2. Disable automatic execution of scripts in Microsoft Office documents. -- Microsoft Office supported normal documents (DOC & XLS) and template files that can contain scripts (DOT & XLT). One could rename a .DOT file to a .DOC and MS Word would open like a .DOC file, and then silently execute the macros contained in it. This is how most Microsoft Office viruses spread. Since most users never use macros, Microsoft could have easily disabled the function by default and provided a config option to enable it. Additionally, Office could refuse to open template files that have a non-template file extension. And finally, it could prompt or simply refuse to execute macros from removable media.

3. Require PC makers to turn off the floppy boot option on new PCs. -- Nearly all PCs were sold with their BIOS settings configured to automatically boot from the floppy drive if one is present and has the right boot data on it. If someone turned their computer on while an infected floppy was in the drive, their computer would get the virus. Microsoft could have easily required PC makers to turn off the floppy boot option on new PCs. This would make the computers start up faster and stop an entire class of viruses. Microsoft could have gone further and made Windows refuse to start after booting from a floppy. Users would quickly develop the habit of removing floppies before turning on their computers.

But Microsoft made a lot of extra money because of viruses. When a person's computer got viruses, it would slow down or corrupt files. Many folks would go out and buy a new computer, paying for new licenses of Windows and Office.

Viruses harmed so many businesses in the developing world, keeping poor countries poor. I lived in Ghana when I was a teenager. I did some PC technician work and saw the impact of Microsoft viruses first-hand.

Microsoft really cheated the World out of a lot of economic growth and quality of life.

The IT media (PC Magazine, PC World, etc) turned a blind eye to it. They didn't have the integrity to go against their big ad buyers, the anti-virus companies. Nobody with an audience would hold Microsoft accountable.

Back then it was Microsoft; now it's Google & Facebook. Companies continue to exploit because US social structure has not progressed.
Interesting project, especially to gain insights into the FPGA programming part.

I think it is essentially a mixture of PTP and NTP now.

I guess this will work within the same local network, as the major inaccuracy of NTP comes from the asymmetric path delays at the network layer over the Internet.

PTP solves this by incorporating these hardware timestamps exactly. But this works only within the same LAN.

Here is an interesting PTP core:

https://github.com/freecores/ha1588

Yes it is "old" but that is typically fine with HW projects.
What I've never got to grips with is the "use a single writer with SQLite" advice. That seems doable with a long-running application server, but if your application boots up on every request (like PHP, Python & Ruby applications generally do) how do you do this, when you have multiple simultaneous users?

It feels like SQLite is missing a separate gatekeeper-binary to act as the single writer: the database server as it were.
Sorting by new also usually exposes things like hijacked item or seller pages more easily