skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wonder when investors will wake up to the value of having engineering-savvy management.

To be fair, engineering-savviness and willingness to be management (especially the kind of management that are legible to investors) are substantially anticorrelated.
Chains are amended, not mutated. Consensus about what new blocks to accept to the chain can change at any time. For example the chain following the original Ethereum rules is now called Ethereum Classic and its market cap is less than 0.5% of the new consensus.
Yes, it's quite problematic.

First, it's obviously not a fair measure; tax contributed is not a direct reflection of education quality. Parents, background, accidents, moving abroad... You can't possibly clean the statistics enough to get rid of all those factors.

Second, it's not the business of the school to know my tax information and employment status. You can't measure something based on a number that you can't know.
>counting on managers to defend against this behavior and not actively promote and drive it

Good luck...
Yep, and RR gives nice preview what web would look like with two-way links.
There is an amazing indy video game called "Kentucky Route Zero" which is an adventure esque game where you explore a mysterious magical road in Kentucky and meet all sorts of fantastical people and creatures. It is bizarre and the genre is probably best described as magical surrealism.

Anyway Spoilers when going through one of the caves, you meat these bizarre computer science researchers who have an old mainframe named Xanadu. It's all a reference to the actual project that shot for the moon and just kinda got left behind. Interesting historical tidbits shoved in the game.
A large part of that is actually due to civilian opposition after Fukushima that led local governments to attempt to get others to build nuclear.

The really long term Chinese goals are ~80% nuclear still.
I love how the Free version of the software says "sold out".
That would be an improvement from previous AIs which have become racist.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/...
Define “similar per capita rates”
Financial times shows that Florida had 20% more deaths attributed to COVID per capita cumulatively.
I do agree that CA failed to build on top of the success of early shutdowns, but I disagree that a hands off approach of Florida or the Dakotas can be deemed as a success by anyone.

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart
Fantastic article. I now have something to point people to when they ask "what is wrong with pinning?" or "what is wrong with static linking?" or "why can't you just use pip?" Michał has had to deal with some pretty crazy stuff the last couple of months ... scratch that, years.

The recent attempts to empower developers to distribute their own software means that there is now the potential for there to be as many bad security practices as there are pieces of software, because systematic security design that used to be managed by distributions has been pushed down to individual software projects, which have only a tiny view of the issues, and thus repeatedly make locally convenient decisions that are disastrous for everyone else. What do you mean someone is using a project other than ours that shares a dependency? Why would they do that?

One other thing to keep in mind is that from a security standpoint the approach that Nix takes is not good. Nix can deal with pinned dependencies on a per-package basis, but if those pinned versions are insecure and the developers don't have a processes for keeping dependencies up to date, then users are sitting ducks.

Unfortunately pinning is a symptom of at least three underlying issues. The first is that developers do not properly assess the costs of adding a dependency to a project both in terms of complexity, and in terms of maintenance burden. The second is that many of the dependent libraries make breaking changes without providing space for the old api and the new api to coexist at the same time for a certain period so that developers can transition over (I have been bitten by this with werkzeug and pint). Mutual exclusion of versions due to runtime failure is a nasty problem, and pinning hides that issue. Finally it seems that at least some developers are engaged in the Frog and Toad are Cofounders continuous integration story, but with a twist, rather than deleting failing tests, they pin packages so that they don't have to see the accumulating cost of pulling in additional dependencies. Externalities, externalities everywhere.

edit: because it is just too on point https://medium.com/frog-and-toad-are-cofounders/technical-de...
Checkout backstabbr. It's a web based version of the game and allows a lot more asynchronous playing. It also allows you to remain anonymous which helps with biases and super judicial alliances.
You're absolutely right about that, and that's even worse than I had remembered! Not only can two parsers not be trusted to have equivalent acceptance contracts (in the absence of bugs), but they can correctly disagree on the acceptance of a single input!

The actual RFC language[1]:

> This specification allows implementations to set limits on the range and precision of numbers accepted. Since software that implements IEEE 754-2008 binary64 (double precision) numbers [IEEE754] is generally available and widely used, good interoperability can be achieved by implementations that expect no more precision or range than these provide, in the sense that implementations will approximate JSON numbers within the expected precision.

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159#section-6
Nope, we are not at cross-purposes. You just don't understand what I am saying.

Let's say you need an algorithm for a real-life situation, and you manage to write one down.

Ok then, you are good to go, just use it!

But ... how do you know that the algorithm you have written down is correct?

Now, a constructive mathematician would require you to also provide a constructive proof for your algorithm. A mainstream mathematician would additionally also be fine with a non-constructive proof for your algorithm. So, who is more real-life?
The rules for the replacement election (FPTP with no primary, held on the same ballot as the yes/no on the recall) are particularly perverse and chaotic, and are both the main reason we don’t see more recalls with how easy they are (because even if you know you can recall the target, the replacement selection process is both poorly representative and unpredictable even with a solid knowledge of popular preferences) and the main motivation for factions that are convinced they can't compete in regular elections to seek them.

> Those 1,495,709 signatures aren't cheap.

20 years ago I remember valid signatures on California recall or ballot petitions were pretty consistently about $1/signature in signature gathering expenditures; even if that's gone up since then, it's not that expensive, especially considering the potential impact.
If only energy was that easy to transport.
Unless they decide to add more algorithms after the fact, I'd be very surprised and outraged if this detected anything other than Dagger-Hashimoto via its memory access pattern.
Well how else could they tease you into eventually accepting the terms? You get that little dopamine hit from a notification, but can't deal with it until you accept their terms.

It's fairly insidious.
Dude there’s been no lockdowns in this country. Stay at home orders haven’t even been enforced, and people like yourself make them useless anyways.
I agree with you of the idea that Bitcoin's doom is going to be energy. In my case, I do think Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and other approaches like the ones used in ETH2, IOTA, Nano, etc will come to replace PoW.

I think at some point, government is going to ban PoW mining in the same way they ban gasoline based cars or plastic bags.

> The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies

That's the key: citizens of stable countries are just speculating, but for people of not so stable countries (Mexico, Argentina, China, among several others) where people just do not trust their government & their banking system, Cryptocurrencies deffinitely have value.

In my case, I have part of my portfolio on Bitcoins, because there is no easy way to open a USD account in Mexico, and storing USD or gold is just not practial. And with our stupid president having 4 more years to go, the country is quickly going to a deep recesion. I don't doubt that when a recession come, the government will "lock" the banks to prevent a "cash run" as they did before (and as it has happened in other countries like Venezuela and Greece)
The idea of an AI agent "wanting" something (especially something it wasn't programmed for) is still strictly science fiction. We don't know how to start building something like this and even if we could, it seems unnecessary.
I'm using Elixir professionally for 4.5 years and Rust for 2.5.

What you and the patent poster said applies to both.
How would 'simply give everyone a home' work? California is the most expensive real estate in America. The state is spending 13 billion a year on triaging itinerants, many of whom refuse sobriety rules that may put them on the path to free housing.
There is a giant homeless industrial complex siphoning out money intended for the homeless on management, top price union labor to modify motels bought with tax payer funds at way over valuation price that will 'house' a few dozen people in former hotel rooms.
What would you do to house anyone who wants a home?
upvar means that you have access to the variables of the calling function. You can ask, what is the value of local variable foo in the scope that is calling here?

It's a facepalm-stupid thing to put into a programming language. Programs that use it will not be efficently compilable; the compiled code will have to provide upvar access similarly in order to make them work.

When compiling a function, you don't know which callee might ask for an upvar, so you can't optimize away variables or keep them in registers across calls.
It's not just a few lottery winners. Every single person who bought and held BTC for a reasonable amount of time has made money. BTC is an extremely valuable investment vehicle that has no equivalent.
It's important to consider each decision. Sometimes it is not fine to be liberal, sometimes it is.

In this case, I'd say that an MX record containing an IP address is not a big deal versus an MX pointing to an A record that contains an IP address, so one may consider that it makes sense to favour successful delivery of emails over strict enforcement of the standard and to accept it. That's pretty much what Postel's law is about and why many servers do accept it (though it also makes sense for a server to refuse to be configured that way even if it accepts it externally for robustness).

Postel's law is not an anachronistic concept. This sort of design consideration applies everywhere in the real world.
The whole point of Bitcoin mining is to produce a block, which contains a bunch of transactions. The Bitcoin network dictates that each block's SHA256 hash starts with a certain number of zeroes, so the only way to achieve this is to brute force the block data until you find the "winning" block which hashes to a number of zeroes.

Once someone finds a winning block, they're rewarded with a number of Bitcoin. This subsidies the cost that goes into mining that block. However the reward halves after every 210k blocks, so as the reward goes down, miners will prefer to only include transactions with high fee. Eventually the true cost of mining will reflect in the transaction fee.

And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.
I agree with the article, but I would go even further. This whole thing is stupid. You physically can’t put an IP address into an MX DNS record. What the syntax (perhaps misleadingly) allows is to put a domain name there with labels consisting of only digits. That is, the “IP adress” 1.2.3.4 you wrote in your MX record is actually the domain name "1.2.3.4.yourdomain.com" with “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, “yourdomain”, and “com” as the individual domain labels. There is no way to actually store an IP address in an MX DNS record. It just so happens that the usual syntax for IPv4 addresses turns out to be valid syntax for an (unrelated) domain name as well.

And, of course, if you try to write an IPv6 address, it will naturally fail, since IPv6 addresses uses colon “:” characters, which are not allowed in domain names.

Therefore, it would be beyond silly for programs to actually use these invalid domain names in MX records. MX records which point to domain names which cannot be resolved are simply broken.
I first heard about this game on This American Life - they had an actual ambassador from the US help a novice play. I found it super interesting and now have a copy of the game but haven't played it yet (hoping to post-COVID)

The episode, which I found fascinating, is this one: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/531/got-your-back
The OP is talking about technical details like static linking and language ecosystems, but if you zoom one level out, this comment correctly pins where the underlying problem actually lies: that the distribution maintainers inject themselves into the development process of all the software they ship.

When A/B are not well-maintained upstream, distributions can assist by updating its dependency D, but even when A/B are well-maintained upstream, distributions still might monkey with them when D changes, even when that change to D actually breaks the software. To me, the root cause is that the distributions are effectively attempting to participate the software they ship, but do so by getting in the middle, rather than participating upstream.

As a former author of some well-maintained upstream software I found their involvement made the software overall worse, but as a user of a distribution I find their maintenance of otherwise unmantained software sometimes helpful. In other words, I think the goal is admirable but the mechanism is wrong, and doing things like adding more dynamic linking only further enable the bad behavior.
why is hacker news so anti crypto
One guy achieved more than the entire FBI. Using Google Search
I go along with the lockdown policy only out of a sense of duty to my community, but ultimately I can protect myself alone. That being said, eventually people are going to decide they want their lives back if this isn't improving.
OpenXanadu demo (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c
If folks are interested in best practices to follow when laying out a PCB, I really enjoy this series of videos on YouTube where someone whips one up live over the course of 3 hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-8nUU6e3E
Android's Airdrop-like Nearby Share is starting to let you share apps, too
You forgot:

4. Government gives money to families whose kids don't have more than 3 day misses per bimestrial.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...

TL;DR

# Reuses needed to break-even with standard single-use plastic bag (LDPE;Low-density polyethylene)

Organic cotton - 20,000 reuses

Conventional cotton - 7,100 reuses

Composite - 870 reuses

Recycled PET - 84 reuses

Polypropylene, non-woven, recycled - 52 reuses

Polypropylene, woven, recycled - 45 reuses

Unbleached paper - 43 reuses

Bleached paper - 43 reuses

Biopolymer - 42 reuses

Polyester PET, recycled - 35 reuses
The distribution provides support for much longer than upstream does. Also, packaging is actual work. Just because some hipsters in some company consider it cool to release new features every 4 weeks, it does not mean that the volunteers of some linux distribution can keep up with thag. So if you want your distribution to work well, you should focus on workable and transparent interfaces.

If you are happy with the support cycles of your upstream and can live with a black box, on the other hand you don't need a distribution in the first place.

Besides, the whole "vendor everything, link statically" idea works well only for the leafs of the tree. Guess what Rust would do if llvm was not a readily usable library but a bunch of C++ files directly used inside clang? Thanks to the Rust mode of operation, it is impossible to do with the rust compiler what they did with llvm.
When I said public i meant with my face and name.
This Bay Area project summarizes how bad the US sucks at public transit now:

"VTA broke ground on the $2.3 billion, 10-mile, two-station extension in April 2012."

Including planning, that's more than 10 years to add 2 above-ground stations and track on existing right-of-ways that goes 10 miles, for $2.3 billion. This is not high-speed rail - it goes at walking speed.

The only good thing I can say is that at least it's done, but SJC's new airport terminal was only $1.3 billion by comparison. (That project had a professional out-of-state manager from FL though, who prevented the cost from escalating out of control to $2-$3 billion, never finishing, and bankrupting the City of San Jose.)

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200519

In addition, the VTA stopped their Campbell extension 2 stops before the Netflix campus, so it's useless. Again, there's an existing right-of-way there.
Let us not forget, that this is an app, and we can replace it at will.

If only more of the world's problems were so easily fixed.
Just too bad it's also no open standard and for now in the cloud.

I tried in for a little product review I did of a friends app. Once I was done I found out there is no good way to export any of it to anything readable...

My choices where broken markdown or css-hacks for clean screenshots.
Perhaps I should share how I take my electrical engineering notes, which are extremely math heavy. It probably is interesting.

MathML is effectively the accessibility standard for people who have print-related disabilities (which I have), not LaTeX. There really is no way around it. One way or another, I basically do everything in MathML.

MathJax in academic courses, in terms of accessibility, is the way to go. Here is an awesome reference: Preparing Accessible Math Documents using MathJax v3
https://progressiveaccess.com/ahg19/ahg19.pdf

But MathJax is clunky and requires an internet connection. It just is not sleek or nice to use.

There are some pretty good scripts which back-translate LaTeX into MathML. Likewise, there are scripts that back-translate MathML into LaTeX.

You may find this interesting: For my graduate electrical engineering coursework, I take all of my notes using a braille notetaker (8 key input where each braille cell is created by combinations of these keys known as chords) connected to my laptop running a screenreader known as JAWS.

I take all of my notes in Lambda braille code, which gets back-translated to MathML on my computer. It is an extremely efficient way of taking notes and doing coursework. My peers are actually jealous of my ability to create such amazing notes. I have the best cheat sheets for exams: everyone wants a copy of mine.

Sometimes using OCR can be useful: Rarely I like to take notes with a pencil and paper (I can see perfectly fine but I have a print-related disability). Sometimes I like to take screenshots of math online. Sometimes I want a whole page of math equations from a textbook.

For this, I use MathPix (MathML, LaTeX, and several other outputs): https://mathpix.com/

There is also InftyReader, which does the same (but no handwriting recognition!), and is not nearly as user-friendly, or updated, for that matter (MathML, LaTeX, and several other outputs): https://www.inftyreader.org/

Perhaps some people here might be interested in speech-to-text rendering of math in LaTeX, which I do not use. You may want to check out this fascinating post: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/145367/how-can-i-use...

There is some program called MathTalk which does this, in conjunction with Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional: https://mathtalk.com/mathtalk-products/

But, apparently, there is a better, more updated, open source package, utilizing Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional, which does speech-to-text LaTeX called Mathfly: https://mathfly.org/

The speech aspect could be useful for learning, in terms of reinforcement, especially with the braille keyboard rendered MathML notes. It could be used for Anki flashcards (spaced repetition), or audio notes apps such as Audio Notetaker or Glean (see: https://sonocent.com/).
> Effort that perhaps the person doing the original work being commented on shouldn't necessarily be expected to take up.

It doesn't apply to all situations, but sometimes you end up with less net effort by listening thoughtfully more. I expect this is especially the case when you want or need to optimize for some form of popularity. If you're just making things for the joy of creation, sure, just ignore everyone as that's certainly more work than pleasing only yourself.
The only major problem (IMO) is that Lean and the others (Coq, Hol, Isabelle, Agda, Idris, etc...) are all pretty hard to read.

Check out "Automated Propositional Sequent Proofs in Your Browser with Tau Prolog" for a promising approach: https://www.philipzucker.com/javascript-automated-proving/ It's rendering LaTeX proof trees.
I thought I was having a serious neurological issue for minute there. Maybe don't make your product make prospective users nauseous, eh?
If these private corporations decide to censor some message, an individual "just dropping" them won't help them spread the message one bit.
Tesla is worth 8x more than BMW without advertising
Yestersol (2015)
It’s sounds like pinning dependencies is just done because we developers are a lazy bunch that just want to guard against the rare case of a breaking upstream change. I was burned too often in the past by breaking changes or more often behavior changes in transient dependencies to not put up some defense. But I still don’t pin versions in the main dependency files (cargo.toml, gemset or similar). I just have the generated lockfile and put that under version control. so all developers in the team get the same versions of direct and transient dependencies. I define the dependencies with version ranges. Every package manager works differently here. I like cargo the best since a statement like ‘version = 1.2.1’ means give me a version bigger than ‘1.2.1’ but lower than ‘2.0.0’. One should never add lockfiles for library projects as they need to be open for future updates. I also add dependabot to all repos and let the bot inform me about updates.
Please stop making your sample ad wiggle.
The biggest pile of hand-waving I've seen...
Avalanche seems to have sorted it out. It's been working on a PoS network without any significant issues so far.
Useless advice of the type of "choose the right tool for the task", what is boring? what is the right tool? That's always the question, not the answer. There are also so many other variables to decide success and outcome that I am not sure anyone can point their finger to the technology stack and certainly claim that it is the cause of this or that.
> Many of history's greatest human rights abusers committed their crimes in the firm belief it was for the greater good.

That's true. But it doesn't follow that authoritarian collective action is never for the greatest good. It's no coincidence that almost all of the world's democratic government governments have enforced lockdowns and other restrictions.
Also, machines used for mining can be put in cooler places and with better cooling than an average home with a gamer PC.