skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It can be simultaneously true that Google's gotten better at displaying results pages that fully satisfy the user without the need for a click, and worse at other kinds of queries.
The latter case -- searches which I have to rephrase, or that cause me to give up on the search entirely -- adds to the total number of searches that do not lead to clicks.
It's not. To be easily human-parsable you want to do one thing at a time. It's that incrementation that you've ommited that messes things up.

On a side note, having gotten used to newer languages, an option type sure is a nice thing.
You don't seem to see the difference between the letter and the spirit.

Sure, Tusky complies with the letter of the definition; that doesn't make it moral

This is what Stallman said:

> If a free program has a malicious feature, other developers in the community will take it out, and you can use the corrected version. You can also run free application programs and tools on nonfree operating systems; this falls short of fully giving you freedom, but many users do it.
"Patronage" is a word with a few different connotations.

I meant it in the simplest way, which simply means "support".
As one of the OpenSSL maintainers, I would like to move away from C and probably to rust. But the problem is that C is the most portable language, and rust's platform support just isn't close enough.
But generally (in the US) the seller's commission of 6% (or whatever) is a contractual agreement between the seller and their agent, and then the seller's agent pays out the commission to the buyer's agent (as specified in the purchase contract, which is a different contract than the one between the seller and their agent).

If you go in without an agent, you must write into the sale contract that you want part of the seller's commission taken off the price, otherwise the seller's agent gets the whole 6% for herself. But in my experience, most buyers are clueless about how all this works and would never know to do that, and would not get a discount, regardless what the seller's agent might say.

(Of course actually it's a bit more complicated, the 6% actually goes to the seller's broker, who pays out both the seller's agent and also the buyer's broker, who then pays out the buyer's agent.)
The study also calls into question information reported by Chinese authorities.

>The Lancet paper’s data also raise questions about the accuracy of the initial information China provided, Lucey says.

If anything, this source strengthens the possibility of lab leak hypothesis.
> As I understand it, because they were ready to pay whatever it costs.

That particular cost wasn't financial though. It was a promise to fast track rollout where other countries wanted to go through lengthy approval and review processes (I am not saying lengthy == bad in that case), vaccinate their population as fast as possible and share data about efficacy with the manufacturers. The Israeali government was ready to take risks that many other countries weren't.
I'm interested in hear about why you believe you're a failure in the meritocratic system.

I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of reasons:

1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end of the day everything is subjective

2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)
I don't see how any conversation could work under the standard you're proposing. The original comment was based on a wild assertion about the geographical placement of virology labs; no argument or evidence was offered, and it's not clear to me that there's any real trend it's referring to. If it's unreasonable to ask for a more detailed explanation of the assertion or specific evidence in favor of the assertion, how are people supposed to engage?
Really depends on your definition of "merit" (which is frequently misunderstood the same way evolutionary "fitness" is often misunderstood).

Read Young's original book coining the term: it was both a satire and dystopian lament. Far from a term of approval!

Certainly many people -- perhaps most -- believe that "IQ" (loosely defined) is in fact the proper definition of meritocracy.

(In case it's not obviously I definitely disagree)
As a further data point, Freddie deBoer just published a post with details about his Substack Pro deal - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/financial-transparency
No, because if you're investing on a 1-5 margin, the market dropping by 20% in two weeks, and then going up by 80% over the next five will leave you flat out broke.

Meanwhile, someone not investing on margin will be up 60%.
> Seems like you need to default to auto update but have an opt out.

We have that. Our software auto-updates, but when you start our program you get a launcher where you can select one of the last five minor versions for each available major version.

Typically the next major version is made immediately available and active in the test environment, while a "boss user" gates them in prod.

When setting a new major version as active, the previous ones are still available for a long time, along with any potential new minor versions for those.

This has made our life so much easier, since any critical issues can almost always be worked around by the user simply launching a previous version, either minor or possibly major. So we can be much more aggressive with pushing out changes, which our customers also appreciate.

It's not perfect but works very well for us and our customers seem happy.

It does require us being careful when making database schema changes, or similar potentially breaking changes. But a lot can be handled quite transparently in the database (using views typically) or through code, and our database upgrade tool can also migrate data as a last resort.
What's disappointing about this is how inaccurate some of the information is. For example, we even go the extra step of adding the OccupationSchema meta tag on Levels.fyi for salary data to be shown on queries. However, Google only uses the base salary component and not the total key, which highly misleads people into taking what's shown as 'per year' as the total compensation, especially since there isn't even a clarification for it on the salary cards.

Still think it does make for a better user experience overall, just wish they'd add these details to some of these Search schemas they themselves adopted for the purpose of getting more pinpointed info.
Planes actually have major portions of the software written in non-C languages such as ADA - see https://www.manufacturing.net/aerospace/news/21175187/airbus...

And are very proud of it. Medical equipment is not all implemented in embedded C systems.

And since modern embedded systems can easily run python or embedded JS versions, well, perhaps certain critical libs can actually get implemented in something that does not deal with memory... and the 5-10% penalty in performance is not going to be something anyone really notes.
Which is prime example as to how C does not consider timing to be observable behavior. What the code does is that it tries to specify the operation in sufficiently complex way that makes compiler give up on any optimizations.
That wrong info came from the pages which are listed in the search results. So much objectively, factually incorrect info is written in to blog posts which show up in google search results which then get copied to instant answers. Particularly historical info is filled with mistakes, people misunderstanding the context of some old news article and then taking it out of context to drop on wikipedia where it is taken as fact.
Nothing is ever perfect. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least try to track down criminals. Which has essentially been the West’s response to ransomware so far.
> The problem is not the language!

It is. A language that lets you write unsafe code is an unsafe language.

> If C is not sufficiently safe for you, you shouldn't take planes, or drive cars, or rely on medical devices, because the software of all these critical embedded system is written in C.

Citation needed. I would expect those programs to be written on a language with very strict types and no pointer arithmetic bullshit, like Ada.

And even if some of these software pieces are written in C, (a) that's very bad, too, and (b) it may be more suitable for those scenarios. But a program that reads and parsers unlimited amounts of user input, supports an ever growing list of complex (and often improperly defined) protocols, and is edited/expanded/updated daily, is definitely not such a suitable scenario.

> The problem is on how you write the software. There are projects that have strict code standard, such as MISRA C or even stricter ones.

Again, the problem is the language, not how you use it. If the security of a piece depends on how it is manipulated, it is by default insecure. A secure language shouldn't let users make mistakes (or at least avoid them to a very high degree, both in compilation and run time). And a library that is the backbone of the confidentiality and privacy of millions of people (and billions of dollars in businesses) should be written on a secure language.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

— Ubik, Philip K Dick, 1969
Even safety critical software can run reliably for the range of inputs that it's likely to ever see, but contain security holes.

For something like OpenSSL, it must produce a correct output for every single possible input. Even safety critical software may extremely rarely fail in unusual conditions. For security sensitive software though, all it takes is a single possible input that will trigger a bug, because the attacker is not a random process.

Writing secure software in C is extremely difficult.
Canada will, with luck, already be half done with the first dose in two months. But yes, there's likely to be a surfeit in the entire developed world by July or so. The domestically manufactured Canadian vaccine for example, if approved, will likely end up primarily exported.
All I really want is a great conversations view like Gmail has.

Sadly they only mention it in passing (it's blocked by global indexing).
No, it's not appropriate, and it's dead and gone in 14 minutes.
According to Google search, 90% of the web is content farms.

Probably some financial positive feedback loop is responsible for this.
There's nothing that guarantees that's constant-time. It's just written in a way that's likely to be constant-time, and observed to be constant-time with current compilers, but there's no reason why a specification-compliant compiler couldn't make it variable-time tomorrow.

You can do exactly the same in Rust. Rust isn't any help there, but it doesn't obstruct you either.
I'm not some newbie but who was A&P? Never heard of them.

Regardless I'd disagree about the reach of Sears vs. Amazon. They kinda look the same as a retailer scope (Sears owned phone-order, Amazon monopolized online), but that's where the analogy ends.
Pay, Perks, People, Prestige, Projects, and just general work environment. Not necessarily in that order. Some of these are also subject to a sort of "compounding interest" for the rest of your career too that less known companies can't provide.

I'm aware things aren't perfect rainbows and unicorns there (or really, at any company). But the friends and excoworkers who've gotten into FAANG, and similar companies, absolutely love it. And not just for the pay.
Question, why do we use Docker?
Employee status reports are time-sinks for managers – ReportSlice solves that
> why not just use a system-wide package manager?

Here's a question:

Even supposing all we had is e.g. Debian distros, why does Docker Hub exist? Why not just host all the artifacts in some repository and allow `apt-get install docker-image-$image-name`?

Why do so many programming language ecosystems use their own package management (Python's PyPi and pip, Rust's crates, Node's NPM, ...)

I'm open to people's thoughts on the way in which this following analogy doesn't hold. But I think the general (and imo deeply unfortunate) answer is that the software can provide a better experience if it handles these things like self-updates, even if it shouldn't be its "job".
In theory, the purpose of the admissions test (or job interview) is to find people capable of doing the work, so they won't wash out from the hard, demanding programs. But none of these tests are rewarding people for doing useful or directly applicable work in the first place. So ideally you'd want a test that didn't require wasted zero-sum-game studying marathons, but would also correspond to the type of work involved... again, I don't think IQ tests are this. But such a thing would be useful, if it could be devised. If you still look at grades in addition to the standardized tests, like in the US, you'll wash out the not-willing-to-put-in-any-effort crowd like that.

To steal another idea from the job interview discussions: what you want might be entry-level intro survey type classes that are broadly open to lots of people (maybe online) but have a high bar for completion to gain full admission, and focus on some of the hands-on aspects of the field in question. "Lower bar + weed out courses" is used in a lot of places that couldn't get away with the high bar of MIT or such.

Alternately, I often suspect the best solution would be fully randomized admissions. Does it make sense to stratify by institution, so that you have one single gate into university, instead of looking at the output of four years of work across mostly-evenly-distributed places? Where you can more legitimately assume that what someone gets out of their time will be the result of what they personally put into it?
Yeah, I like the way Ubuntu handles it. Basically, if you come boo-hooing in Issues and you are using an ancient non-LTS version, you'll be asked to install an LTS (or latest) version first. That way you only have to maintain a tiny subset of your releases, and your users are incentivized to use LTS or make sure they are up to date.
When will the last-argument-as-block be implemented in Java?

This one brilliant feature allows for easy DSLs without macros, parsing, or otherwise introducing new concepts to the language.
Start Your Week with a Bang
5. A rewrite in Flutter
It’s quite possible that it’s a pangolin virus. Guess what trafficked in Chinese wet markets?
What I want most out of Thunderbird is a self hostable web application that I can run on my own servers, and access as TLS1.3 in a browser, as a modern webmail app as competition for Rainloop and Roundcube.

I realize this would probably require a complete re-write.

The closest I can do to that now is a much more cumbersome solution involving something like a bare bones xfce4 desktop environment, the Linux thunderbird client, and VNC-over-SSH or apache guacamole.
I'd argue China needs to engage in proper sanitation and stop treating citizens as disposable.
I believe these attitudes are somehow commonplace along academia, but I think it extrapolates to several disciplines, including software development or engineering.

There is a misunderstanding between where on the abstraction layer you are standing and how smart you are. The commonplace along mathematicians is that, as we are standing pretty low, we are the smartest of them all, and since there is basically no interaction with people in other layers, this belief gets comfortably reinforced.

Smarts comes in different flavors, and realizing that yours is just one of many and does not work at all in other contexts is hard. Treating others like morons and acting bored is a lousy way to deal with it.
My reading of the article is that these monies are allocated for a report on what to do about SpaceX's lead.
Super sorry this is my first post on HN. Which part is inappropriate?
No. We're still on the last stable version (2.5.0.1)

Every version after that either doesn't start [1] or makes random containers miraculously stop working.
The 2.x version has your CPU burning, but that seems to persist in 3.x [2].

I stopped trying after they pulled in the auto-upgrade feature. Our team has no time playing bug-hunt easter egg at random times.

I honestly don't comprehend how this software gained such a wide adoption on Macs.
Docker on Linux works flawlessly meanwhile.

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/5146

[2] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/5116
> President Trump first invoked the DPA in late March 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic...limiting the export of medical goods, increasing domestic production of masks and ventilators

https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-...

Nothing in there on vaccine export but one would assume it is implied.
Is Citrix ADC a security library?
I have 2: one that I keep at work and another for my home computer.

Home: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B085ZQZXFX

Work: https://smile.amazon.com/USB-Hub-Adapter-Ethernet-Charging/d...

Both are 8-in-1, work well and share the same ports. I've only used each a few times, though.

I actually prefer the "work" one. The "home" one is metal has sharper edges/corners and if I were to haphazardly throw it in my bag, I think it may scuff other things up a bit. I can't remember if the "work" one is metal or plastic, but it has softer edges and is softer to the touch.
I remember reading this article in the WP a year ago which seemed to conflate viral escape with bioengineering and imply that lack of the latter implies lack of the former:

"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
The top comment on the original 2017 Ghost 1.0 thread on hn is complaining about the lack of the dashboard they finally added.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731
I find that particularly interesting considering that men are more at risk of dying from Covid.

Maybe women have a somehow weaker immune response, making it harder to clear the infection, but lowering the risk of a deadly overreation.

I wonder if there is serious research about that.
> don't forget housing

If housing is that high, it's because there's corruption somewhere. You put up a prison building and it should stand for 50 years with not that much maintenance. Housing should be the lowest cost of all.

> 4.4-to-1

That's absurd! Only the most hard to handle convicts would need such a ratio. Easily fixed by separating prisoners into different prisons based on the crime, likelihood of violence, medical conditions, etc.

These are all costs that could be easily reduced if the US wasn't so corrupt.
Modern electric appliances are often more efficient than burning fossil fuels. For example, the electric motors in cars are just inherently a lot more efficient than gas motors, not to mention less mechanically complicated, quieter, etc. (One of the reasons that electric cars today already have the lowest lifetime cost of ownership.)

At Rewiring America they found that electrifying all American cars, heating/cooling, appliances, etc would save 40-50% over fossil fuel equivalents just because of the inherent efficiency of electric machinery. This makes the problem of decarbonization 40-50% easier.
This deep connection is the good stuff. The really bad stuff is learning to let go of your kids, watching this connection change and hoping that it changes into something even deeper.
Etcd Basics
You don't have to put your content on google, you can add yourself to robots txt and google will respect that.

You want to be able to force google to take your content, AND force them to pay for being forced to take it.

A better idea would be coming up with plans on how to break up googles market share to split it among multiple smaller search engines which may allow you to bargain for paid content with.
I occasionally see their jobs page[1] and think I would love to work there, but I must admit being hired through Upwork gives me pause.

[1] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/careers/
To me, the original C-style code looks nicer than the Java.

C++:

bool found_minus = (*p == '-');
bool negative = false;
if (found_minus) {
++p;
negative = true;
if (!is_integer(*p)) { // a negative sign must be followed by an integer
return nullptr;
}
}

Java:

int strlen = str.length();
if (strlen == 0) {
throw new NumberFormatException("empty String");
}
int index = 0;
char ch = str.charAt(index);

boolean negative = false;
if (ch == '-') {
negative = true;
ch = ++index < strlen ? str.charAt(index) : 0;
if (ch == 0) {
throw new NumberFormatException("'-' cannot stand alone");
}
}
I recall many people calling the Wuhan lab leak theory as conspiracy on HN. They were adamant that it came from bats. Interestingly enough, those accounts were all brand new accounts and some haven't been active on HN for several months all of sudden started coming out of the wood works.
C# is tied to .net, and the cross-platform story on that framework is...complicated

Java is tied to JVM

Swift is tied to MacOS.

Of course, with the exception of JVM, they are all nominally "cross-platform" in the OS sense of the word. But I haven't seen any substantial Linux/Mac .Net codebases yet, same with Swift on Windows
Can RMS will try to lead, but will he be successful?

Open source software has never been bigger, but the FSF, and Stallman, are nowhere to be seen. I see articles about Linus all the time.

I've seen him speak twice, and both times persuaded me mainly he is an awful speaker, and actively put much of his audience off joining the FSF (I saw a talk where he did his famous "it is our holy task to deflower the female Emacs virgins" joke).
Note the the glass board these guys are using to train us with architectural diagrams? Pretty cool, huh?
It’s because the EU and Japan are doing badly at vaccines. I said nothing about their economic policies.

It does have nothing to do with that though, just as you say. I’ll change my mind if Japan ever experiences hyperinflation from too much stimulus though!
Does that even make sense?

What if your 71 year old father is an agoraphobic hermit and your brother has some wonder job that puts him in a position to literally save the lives of other people as long as he's in close proximity to them.

I understand this is a hard to credit hypothetical but in those circumstances or similar ones we might want your brother at the head of the line. Not because he's more likely to die but because he's more likely to infect me. Or say, any hypothetical fellow citizen.

Frankly I think the most critical thing is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. Any other criteria should come after "as many as quickly." After that sure, have an argument over if more important to get people who might die vaccinated or people who might spread it vaccinated. Knock yourself out - but don't get in the way of the critical thing.
"Sadly, this is the form of status that I seek."

It just goes to show you have to pick the right peer group to achieve the things you want, as people will want most to impress their peer group.

I've often caught myself with that and Hacker News, dreaming of hacking together something that would yield a good scoring submission on HN, but ultimately would be unimportant.