skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the author of the above piece. I'm a bit late to the party here, but really appreciate the conversation——it's my first time on this site as a solo blogger (former Ars Technica writer).

For those that found this interesting——especially those that are frustrated by the current software patent system——consider subscribing. It's free, just a passion project I'm doing on the side. I think writing about & publicizing these problems is one of the ways forward to a solution, which is one of the reasons I started Letters Patent.

If you have questions about what i've covered, or suggestions about what to write about, please send them my way: joe@letterspatent.org.
Maybe not literally all of them.

You could probably find a few that aren’t- these are what are called “useful idiots”
I did a month, diving directly into the deep end with flakes and all. I don't know, it really is hard in the beginning. Like, really hard. But eventually I got myself a setup I could use in my two laptops and workstation. A setup, that sets my home directory, all my programs and my custom desktop just the way I want. Everything is in the github repo, and installing with the flake will give me the exact experience I have in my other machines.

I tend to use lots of custom tools and commands, that are really painful to install and setup for a new machine. With NixOS all of it is just one command away.

But, I agree, it is REALLY HARD in the beginning to grasp things.

Here's my configs if you want to see how I approached my own setup: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos
So you’re against how universal care is setup in Canada? Each visit has a billing code for a certain amount of work. If you brought up other issues you’d be told to make another appointment.
I feel the same way about a lot of poetry, but I think kitschiness is a cultural thing, not a personal perspective. How would you define it?
When I was briefly working in a construction plant. Weekends is when non critical or potentially risky operations on machinery would be done, as to not block the production chain during workdays.
Maya Angelou was a living legend. She is not being gatekeepered by a HN comment. Especially considering the context is the availability of her work in greeting cards. That's as mainstream as access gets. That word doesn't mean what you think it means.
Do you see any reason why the GBA couldn't perform the role of a hardware wallet? Secure element excluded of course.
True to an extent, but don’t forget that for quite a while Chrome was genuinely far ahead in technology, so the number of people who liked Firefox was dropping rather precipitously. They probably felt immense pressure to come up with ways to not just stop the loss of users but to reverse the trend. A pretty tall order for anyone. Microsoft couldn’t do it either.
Actually that's something really needed.

Most of the time, the more detailed reports you show to your physician the more they are overwhelmed, so I hope it would manage to become a new standard where the doctor can easily find what they look for.
If you are looking for a truly simple virtual machine, check out SUBLEQ. It's ONE instruction and you can do it in like 7 lines of C. Or maybe three if you compress it.

gemini://biomimetic.me/subleq.gmi
> Google provides a service, but they also require everyone to use their service. There is no realistic alternative if you want to reach the 70% of the market Google controls.

Epic/Fortnite beg to differ. Unlike with Apple, no one is forced to use the Play Store to get apps for your phone.
To which you agreed without reading the fine print like an adult would, and then you started crying when the agreement was enforced.
seriously? a racist relic of a not-so-bygone era? does anyone really give a fuck?
> Rust guarantees memory safety with a feature called ownership. Ownership works differently from a garbage collector in other languages, because it simply consists of a set of rules that the compiler needs to check at runtime.

At runtime?
Show HN: tuneX – like tinder but for music creators
But isn't Firefox even supports Android 5 devices?
People are scared of police forces with drone swarms that murder everyone... Nobody ever thinks about why this doesn't happen and nobody ever thinks about why when it does happen, the police doesn't necessarily use their pet technology and just uses decades old tech instead. Installing face tracking into security cameras + attack helicopter is more effective than a mythical drone swarm.

Of course the drone swarm fear only exists because it isn't real yet. It will disappear as soon as drone swarms become real because then everyone will realize that the police aren't out there to shoot you up, unless they do and then they will just use regular pistols or helicopters.
A lazy programmer writes a bunch of tests, writes just enough code that they pass, then creates a PR and lets someone else find all the corner cases they didn't bother to think about.
Levels of Becoming an Innovator
Even with NVRAM, you still want to use an append-only log instead of mutable data structures in order to support streaming replication, incremental backup, concurrent writes, and triggers.
If it's encrypted and only you have the key, then it doesn't matter where it's stored. You can even publish it, it would just be random gibberish without the key.

They just need to ensure that's the client side that deciphers the data, and that the private key never leaves the browser side neither. I think that can be audited through JS debug tools.
It's implied by them announcing it's release.
Are you making the case that Google risks to go bankrupt because some small open-source maintainer adds a donation link to their app?
This is close one of the motivating use cases for VNC if recall correctly: touch screen office phones (over ATM I think). Instead of making the phones smarter and adding/customising buttons, just thin-client them all with resistive touch screens. You'd have a controlling box already on site (PABX or whatever) and the the deployment would be homogeneous per site. Right until entirely softphones replaced them, all the office I worked in still used awful WinCE or whatever local OS even though they spend 99.9% of their time doing nothing or just showing call progress. Strange it didn't catch on (anywhere I noticed I mean!)
yes, cats are very curious and perceptive, constantly trying to figure out how the world works (and how to eat that bird outside the window!). just because they don’t perceive the human problem in this case doesn’t mean they don’t generally want to help.

cats are social, just not the same way dogs or humans are, and they form habits based on things they’ve figured out about the world (the litterbox being a good example, a hybrid instinct & learned social behavior). my cat has figured out that her human and her canine sister are harmless to her and she can relax and even play and cuddle with us. she’s also food motivated, so can be trained on that basis.
Amazon certainly did DR tests like that, shutting down entire datacenters, back before AWS had AZs. Jesse Robbins used to run them. Once a small tornado from a Hurricane remnant (2005 or 2006 season) took out power completely to one of the smaller east coast datacenters.
The latest version works fine on my x86 phone with Android 5.
Thinking about this further, SVN forces history to be a linear history of commits, which is easy to reason about.

DVCS have a DAG of commits, which can get arbitrarily complicated and difficult to reason about.

Rebase-based workflow results in a linear history of commits, which is easy to reason about.

Merge-based workflow results in an arbitrarily complicated DAG of commits which is difficult to reason about.

That's all there is to it.
Oil Doesn't Require Quoting Everywhere
I'm not "attacking" them for wanting to have access to large amounts of raw patient records (which is, in fact, what the dispute was about). It's just not surprising that a sovereign country would refuse to allow foreigners to have that data.
100k people ask Biden, will ya break that 2-2 FCC deadlock already?
> The ampersand symbol is a ligature.

Nice one. Never knew this either. Small clarification/update.

The ampersand symbol is in the process of becoming something other than a ligature, specifically:

> The ampersand comes in many different forms. Because of its ubiquity, it is generally no longer considered a ligature, but a logogram.
Wrong, most websites in the US are currently required to be accessible. The ruling described by TFA overturns that in one region.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/website-accessibility-la...

Edit: I regret how rude this comment is. It is also wrong, I misunderstood what happened.
Many internet companies, including Google, have used patents only defensively (so far). However, there are plenty of tech companies that do assert patents offensively, including Apple, IBM, Qualcomm (famously), Oracle, and lots of others.
Overall an enjoyable read, but as someone who includes SQL queries in code, I disagree with two points:

I despise table aliases and usually remove them from queries. To me, they add a level of abstraction that obscures the purpose of the query. They're usually meaningless strings generated automatically by the tools used by data analysts who rarely inspect the underlying SQL for readability. I fully agree that you should reference columns explicitly with the table name, which I think is the real point they're trying to make in the article.

While it's true that sorting is expensive, the downstream benefits can be huge. The ability to easily diff sorted result sets helps with troubleshooting and can also save significant storage space whenever the results are archived.
> A lazy programmer documents their code, so thar [sic] coworkers do not waste their time.

I have been compelled to write detailed documentation specifically because I was getting tired of being asked questions about it[1]. Though I would say the issue isn’t really laziness so much as general asociability and a need to focus...

[1] It does nothing to stop the flow of questions but it does mean I’m more likely to give an answer that’s actually correct :)
And which permission do I take to access that?
Not only does this technically deliver on its main claimed feature, it seems to go pleasantly beyond that: A bunch of different pre-programmed movements, what seems like manual control, and even motorization of the wheels (though that might be ad trickery). "Expensive" is a weird word here: It's a hell of a lot to pay for a toy, but for a piece of tech this complicated it actually seems like a decent price.
> Does this lead to the same sort of problems with the development of physical systems?

I would argue that physical systems aren’t developed in a “waterfall” method.

In mechanical design classes in engineering school, we learned to start with low fidelity sketches to capture customer intent. We come up with several options, build those into increasingly higher fidelity 3D models, use simulation to refine, take a few candidates and get physical prototypes, do physical testing (strength, endurance, integration, etc.), determine the best one, then go into limited production to prove out and establish the production process, then go into full production.

We are taught (and in the automotive industry it’s a requirement) to have cross functional teams involved in the design stages of both the item and the manufacturing process.

To your point about inadequate spec: My opinion is there are so many different backgrounds coming into software that there is no common language or background.

I think everyone thinks their way is better and it’s hard to communicate technical ideas when you need to constantly recreate and translate between terminology and documentation methods. This lack of convergence and common knowledge is what I think results in poor specs.
Epic is literally suing Google over exactly this problem. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368363/epic-google-fort...
What is not clear about necessary but not sufficient? Of course sandboxing is necessary, but graphics is a deliberate hole in a sandbox. If that hole is unsecure, the whole thing is.

How does X help here?
Oh my god. I do, and will.
wicked good :-)
The tone of the link is a bit juvenile but I'm not sure its a simple case of payment due for services rendered.

It seems like this is about a donation link on an external developer page. Can they not provide a donation link for other games not on the Play store? Surely you're allowed to have a donation link on your developer page somewhere. How buried does google need the link to be? Is the policy clear?
But this could spark innovations, like an adapter to put a 3-fan RTX 3080 graphics card on it.

Or a portable snap-on expansion to power it with 8 car batteries.
Japan Says Dumping Fukushima Radioactive Water in Pacific Ocean “Unavoidable”
This looks _amazing_! Thank you for sharing!
HPVM – Heterogeneous Parallel Virtual Machine
See how heartbreak is depicted, for instance in a masterpiece like Paris, Texas and in a random Venezuelan soap opera.
I'd add "be aware of window functions"[1]. Certain gnarly aggregates and joins can often be much better expressed using window functions.

And at least for the database we use at work, if the sole reason for a join is to reduce the data, prefer EXISTS.

[1]: https://www.sqltutorial.org/sql-window-functions/
AMO = addons.mozilla.org, I don't know what FR is, but in short... well, I dunno about actually technically incompatible, but yes Mozilla redid mobile extensions and at the same time switched to only allow installation of a tiny hand-picked set of approved extensions on mobile.
Product Reviews Update – New Google Algorithm Update April 2021
Google has announced a new search ranking quality algorithm update to its search engine it is called the product reviews update. This update is aimed at rewarding high-level product review content, above thinner product review content.
It'd be $500 if it had grown at the same rate as Bitcoin!
> I see some people are feeling conflicted trying to balance 1) Making the web more accessible with 2) Increasing business/startup costs.

Doesn't the ADA already have some exemption for startup/small businesses where it doesn't apply if you have less than X employees?
The "invention" is DRM. You think Apple read this patent and said "a-ha, that's how you do it?"
Flock means "group"
Perl (5). It's an incredibly capable scripting language, many things essential for Shell programming are much better integrated than in Python (e.g. regular expressions). It gets a lot of hate these days but it's still a damn fine language and perfectly suited to shell programming (and larger projects).
The Day Muzak Died
Ocaml and Haskell are two other contenders if you are looking to learn functional programming. Both compile to native code and quite effecient.

Haskell has few web frameworks which are worth taking a look.

Needless to say C++ may also be an option given your familiarity with C.

Other newer contenders are Crystal and Nim. Both look promising but are still young languages.

DLang and Zig are more known for systems programming but like rust can also be used for web programming.

For a go like language also take a look Vlang (which has a lot of stuff built-in, web framework, orm, testing, ...)

I think all of these languages fit your requirements, as you can see there's quite a lot of choice these days.
As usual there is no right or wrong way to go. (:
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad science. The null hypothesis is that cats would react the same as dogs, and the study suggests that’s not true. While this is not surprising to most people, it is still a more rigorous attempt to understand the differences between cats and dogs than simple intuition and anecdotal experience. I do think the experimenters should probably have done a follow-up study more attuned to cats’ natural abilities, but they likely feel the same way.
Thanks for benchmarking, but as I mentioned, this was/is not a significant problem that would give way for Wayland. What I wrote in the second part of my comment is.
By crippling non-root features on the phone would be my main "restriction". I should be able to do anything with my own hardware.
Sure, it looks simple, straightforward, honest... But its from Oracle. There must be cthonic tentacles holding knives lurking somewhere nearby.
Decent ad.
I was expecting something about lazy initialisation.
> Wall Street firms paid their New York City-based traders an average bonus of $184,000 last year.

I wonder in what proportion to salary.

In any case this article is just an outrage piece, since when does it make sense to track anything against trader bonuses?
Lots of mistakes (or at least rare opinions going against the crowd) here.

Here's a better general performance tuning handbook - https://use-the-index-luke.com/
This is an aside, but a colleague years back showed me his preferred method formatting SQL statements, and I've always found it to be the best in terms of readability, I just wish there was more automated tool support for this format. The idea is to line up the first value from each clause. Visually it makes it extremely easy to "chunk" the statement by clause, e.g.:

SELECT a.foo, b.bar, g.zed
FROM alpha a
JOIN beta b ON a.id = b.alpha_id
LEFT JOIN gamma g ON b.id = g.beta_id
WHERE a.val > 1
AND b.col < 2
ORDER BY a.foo
Thank you for this! I was going to sign my parents up. They live closer to Boise.
> title question was never scientifically answered

The title changes changes “who refuse to help their owners” in the article to “who harms you,” which is a big difference. The study [1] never uses the word “harm” with respect to cats; it does to reference a different study using infants. That specificity with the word should communicate what they tested for.

Anecdotally, I have had a cat and a dog. Both of them reacted, immediately and quite viciously, to people who raised their voice to me. (Growl and barking and hissing.)

[1] http://animalbehaviorandcognition.org/uploads/journals/30/AB...
Less than 15

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/website-accessibility-la...
Yes, I've noticed the same, as well as software getting buggier over time (I have a 1st gen Fire TV 4k, and the Disney+ app doesn't respond to pause)
Jack Ma’s Alibaba Hit with $2.8B Fine for Abusing Its Dominant Market Position
AMO is addons.mozilla.org, i had to look that one up too. no idea about FR, that's harder to google (since it's the country code for france)
This is pretty great. I would gladly work with any 1X engineer like that.

My favorite bit of humor is:

• Writes code that &emdash; gasp &emdash; has bugs.

The misspelled and non-decoded em dashes started out as an actual mistake but are now kept in because of the delicious self-reference:

https://github.com/cutenode/1x.engineer/issues/9
I agree with the source that the latter (explicit table specification in the SELECT list, whether using aliases or not) is to be preferred to the former; at the same time (while I am sometimes guilty of using them) I agree that single-character aliases are generally a poor choice for the same reasons that’s generally true of single character identifier names; column aliases are variable (well, constant) names and the usual rules of meaningful identifier names apply.
Ask HN: Most interesting crypto tech that emerged lately?
I've been following crypto for a long time, and more recently a TON of new technical tools, ideas, etc, have come into play.

I would be interested in hearing from you which technologies are most promising or interesting from your perspective, and why. Thanks!
3M classic superfit 33 earplugs (33 nrr) are comfortable and quiet. I buy a box of 250 and it lasts me forever.
A nicely researched put together podcast.

I listened to this after the “Stuff You Should Know” podcast that came out on the same day, this one seemed to have had the full weight of Radio 4 behind it.
It's absolutely not free
The Autodidactic Universe [pdf]
With a look at the data sheet [1], it seems to be a transformer used for signal and power isolation:

> The CTI provides all the MAU (transceiver) functions except for signal and power isolation. Signal isolation can easily be provided by a set of three pulse transformers that come in a single Dual-in-Line package. These are available from transformer vendors such as Pulse Engineering (PE64103) and Valor (LTll0l). However, for the power isolation a DC to DC converter is required.

The data sheet provides several sample implementations using a PE64018, PE64103, PICO 33223, or PICO 33143 for this.

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/components/national/_dataBooks/1988...
Surely that's a contradiction? Either it's a security problem by their criteria, or it isn't; if it is, then they should pay up and fix it, if it isn't then they have no legitimate reason to care if you put full details on the front page of $MAJOR_NEWS_SITE.
Thank you.

I have often thought that leading a shining beacon like Mozilla should and would be done by a previously successful executive who doesn't need the money and would like a challenge. Compensation would be $1/year, everlasting respect, and a true legacy to leave behind. But that's just my vision of panacea I suppose.

I respect Mitchell Baker's history at Mozilla but is it time for a change?

reference: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/

edit: changed phrasing and tone
I recently worked at a single digit billion dollar valuation SaaS provider and we had to run everything on AWS, GCP and Azure, to be where the customers were.

Total cloud spend was in 2 digit millions per year.

Many hundreds of k8s clusters, all using each providers k8s managed service.

My general high level take is this:

* AWS

Products mostly work quite well. Their UX is terrible and very inconsistent between products. But things mostly work, and their support is generally excellent, especially when you have a TAM (Technical Account Manager) who you can reach out to at any time. They will help you navigate any support issues, and ensure you get a quick resolution. But AWS stuff is generally very complex, overly complex in my opinion.

Also at scale API rate limits just kill you, and AWS continues to struggle to provide any real visibility into API rate limits. I'm told that large services internal to AWS have to work around this by building their own caching layer in front of any control plane APIs. Also the api limits are at the account boundary, so you have to start doing account sharding.

GCP:

Has better UX, more consistent experience. Much better visibility into limits and things like that. You still probably end up having to do project sharding at scale to work around limits. We continued to run into a lot of issues with GCPs load balancers blackholing traffic, and it was never really resolved. I think their support is generally worse than AWS. I've had substantially worse support experiences with GCP than AWS at 2 companies now. Mostly support not being particularly useful, and not resolving the issue. As a customer it feels like Google has struggled to adapt their culture to the needs of real enterprise customers. AWS has this much more figured out. But my GCP account teams have always been quite good.

Azure:
The worst of all 3. Lots and lots of issues with their k8s service, low limits on the number of nodes you could deploy. k8s 1.18 supposedly fixed a lot. But their answer was always just that you have to upgrade. Their support engineers were frequently gave us actively bad advice that would have resulted in full customer outages if we'd followed it. The engineers on my team fortunately didn't listen and instead figured out how to fix issues themselves. Also frequently ran into various limits and you need to start thinking about subscription sharding.

Of the 3, I personally prefer using and interacting with GCP. But their support or is still certainly worse than AWS. That said, I always felt bad for our TAMs at AWS. It felt like a non-stop job where you had too be available at all hours to deal with unhappy customers. They usually gave us fantastic support, but I wonder at what personal cost.