skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sadly had to use one recently and it was to fax documents to the IRS. Their only two options were fax or mail the documents. No email. Thankfully I had a scanner (in a box somewhere) and found an online service that faxes PDFs on your behalf.

I've also had to fax documents to immigration (again, government). I guess my point is if you're dealing with the government, you'll probably have to fax something at some point.
Based on your eye rolls and subsequent "explanation", it's clear that you don't understand the Lindy Effect. It's not about listing examples of things that have been around for a while. It's about predicting the likelihood that something will continue to be around given how long it has already been around. This effect is well studied and just a cursory glance at the Wikipedia page will give you some solid sources for more rigorous understanding.
"Our water pump went out" would go from being a 2 hour side of the road fix or tow to potentially a mutli-decade incident...

Either add a second pump or just power it from a legit non-mobile federally rated reactor plant.
SARS-CoV-2 RNA reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome (2020)
I think the difference is that survivorship bias applies when the difference between winners and losers is mostly due to chance. I don't think the fact that we use 4-legged chairs and not 5-legged is survivorship bias. I believe the Lindy effect's prediction that 4-legged chairs will be around a long time. Of course, whether it's survivorship or not is case-by-case.
I don't think movie theatres will ever go away, especially after the pandemic they got for sure 10 extra years anyway. The social aspect is so important, it also means doing something else (like eating at a restaurant), there will always be people preferring them.
It's draining working for PMs. There were a couple of times I got to work for a more senior dev and it's like you have another job (a good one).
I wholeheartedly share this sentiment. The blockchain scene is one big marketing and advertising cesspool. Completely devoid of soul.
Library of the Steppe
IIRC, there's a protected page between the stack and the heap, where any reads or writes will `kill -SEGV` the program. With regular function calls, you'll be advancing the stack pointer slowly enough to guarantee a hit on that page. With alloca(), you can move the stack pointer in larger steps, thus missing that page.

(The lowest few pages of memory are protected in the same way to increase the likelihood that a NUL pointer correctly blows up in your face when you try to access its memory.)
> I wish we lived in a world where everyone spent a few dozen to a few hundred hours learning hard stuff to thereby make their lives permanently easier, but we don't. Most would rather spend a few hours doing relatively monotonous stuff over and over than actually learn something new.

I get this, but I'm not sure that using a phone that exposes a full Linux system is the answer here. In fact I think for many people one could make the opposite argument – spend a few hours learning how to use an iPhone and never have to worry about many classes of problems.

Yes, many people use iPhones because they don't have the ability to make an informed decision, but many people also have all the skills to make that decision and still choose them. It's all trade-offs, and for some, walled gardens and EULAs are not a problem, and having a camera and (closed source) software that allows better photos of their kids is far more important.
Ubuntu Mate just works, been using with two 4k monitors for over five years.
Alarms for life safety in large buildings are traditionally hard wired with bespoke wires that have been tested and carry distinct markings. The system has emergency power which is also designed, tested and listed for the specific use.

The system is designed by a licensed engineering, installed by a specialty contractor, and inspected by the authority having jurisdiction.

Commercial construction is not just like your house only bigger.

A WiFi connected smoke alarm is full of incidental complexity. That makes it inherently less suited to function than the simpler design.
Tying up capital equipment and personnel for much less time to serve the same journey. Consider San Francisco to Chicago, a route I have done both ways. The flight is 5 hours, the train ride 50 hours. A 737 is more expensive than the California Zephyr trainset, but not by 10x.

I'm not sure what noise has to do with efficiency - I doubt that the energy expended on vibrating the air is physically or economically significant - but it is worth noting that trains are loud. Particularly because regulations written in blood require that they blow their horns three times at every level crossing at all hours.
This message is a telegram.
You're making excuses. Facebook didn't hire translators even though they were profiting off the genocide. They didn't cut off services. It wasn't just the military but nationalist Buddhists were outing their neighbors, doxxing them as Rohingya, condemning them to death via Facebook.

And for you to suggest that Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for their actions because other tech companies would do the same, is lazy and dishonest. The fact is that the genocide was lead by Facebook, not some other tech company, and I will keep reminding people of this event every time some apologist tries to ignore what happened.
> Most people are honestly pretty lazy and the sad simple fact is that they do not want to be challenged at all ever.

I (fellow curmudgeon perhaps) totally agree
This just has to do with printing.

This is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 256.
Quit with :quit or Ctrl-D on an empty line. Ctrl-X ? for cheatsheet.
TXR works even if the application surface is not free of dirt and grease.
1> (+ 0.1 0.2)
0.3

OK, so then:

2> (set *print-flo-precision* 17)
17
3> (+ 0.1 0.2)
0.30000000000000004

But:

4> 0.1
0.10000000000000001
5> 0.2
0.20000000000000001
6> 0.3
0.29999999999999999

I.e. 0.1 isn't exactly 0.1 and 0.2 isn't exactly 0.2 in the first place! The misleading action is to compare the input notation of 0.1 and 0.2 to the printed output of the sum, rather than consistently compare nothing but values printed using the same precision.

The IEEE double format can store 15 decimal digits of precision such that all those decimal digits are recoverable. If we print values to no more than 15 digits, then things look "artificially clean" for situations like (+ 0.1 0.2).

I made *print-flo-precision* have an initial value of 15 for this reason.

The 64 bit double gives us 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3 to 15 digits of precision. If we round at that many digits, we don't see the trailing junk of representational error.

Unfortunately, to 15 digits of precision, the data type gives us two different 0.3's: the 0.299999... one and the 0.3.....04 one. Thus:

7> (= (+ 0.1 0.2) 0.3)
nil

That's the real kicker; not so much the printing. This representational issue bites you regardless of what precision you print with and is the reason why there are situations in which you cannot compare floating-point values exactly.
I'll mention the SF novel "Black oceans" [1] again. It describes a scheme where someone extremely driven and confident of success, but utterly poor, can make a deal with certain shady organizations, which - in case you don't make it and repay them in agreed time - will simply harvest you for (very valuable) organs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charne_oceany
What’s “night time entertainment “?
First, I would like to see a source for your 95%. That sounds fishy. Almost every sport I can think of incorporates high intensity interval training and did before it became common for the layperson to incorporate in exercise regimens.

Second, what elite athletes do often does not translate to what laypeople can and should do. Most elite athletes have a tremendous gene advantage over other people, not to mention the time, energy, diet, coaches, etc., that allows them to push beyond what the average person can tolerate. It's almost ridiculous to say, "Micheal Phelps does xyz in the pool and you should too if you want to improve your health in the most efficient way possible."
I did some digging and it seems both countries have been threatening each other for decades. Israel has repeatedly blocked their nuclear program and has threatened offensive action if it continues. Not just recently but even in an article from 2006.

It seems both sides are throwing threats around and it seems unfair to only mention Iran’s threats.

https://m.dw.com/en/israel-threatens-iran-over-nuclear-resea...

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-israel-iran-iran-nuclea...
That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally throughout history. Communication is important enough that the language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.
The radio is the most trivial part possible in fact computers with cellular radios have been a thing for a very long time.

The little micro cell tower alternative arrangement exists to support devices that expect to communicate with a cell tower where cell service is poor. You normally actually plug them into your wired router so they are actually for areas where relying on wireless would be the worst possible experience.

Fiber is able to provide Gbps to for example all homes in a square mile where they each get Gbps and can indeed fairly heavily use it. Cellular internet isn't actually wireless you run fiber to the towers and then everyone in that square mile.

Urban areas where 80% of people live have a high density so for example in New York City that 1 sq mile contains 27000 people.
Level 3/CenturyLink/Lumen CEO reassured panicked investors and employees scared that their company would be worthless with 5G and beyond by basically saying that the last mile will increasingly become the last tens or hundreds of meters and that fiber is still the infrastructure on which these increasingly dense base stations depend on. And that the “edge computing” will likely live on the cabinets owned by the fiber provider.

It makes sense to me. Just add more fiber and let people access them over whatever.

My biggest gripe is we could choose to do away with licensing fees and spectrum auctions and open mm wave 5G to be something like Wi Fi but we are shortsighted as usual.
The Single Responsibility Principle, By: The Clean Code Blog (2014)
VR has fundamental usability problems. If you and the world move separately, people get disoriented. Most of the successes involve a virtual world locked to the physical world (Beat Saber) or where the player sits in a vehicle. Still, there are dancers using VRchat with full body tracking, the closest thing yet to full dive.

AR, in some ways, has more potential. In AR, people can still see where they are. It's mostly a hardware cost problem. If you could get AR goggles down to swim goggle size and selling for $39.95, you could do Pokemon AR.

I'm interested in big virtual worlds. Lately, that field has been invaded by the Make Money Fast / NFT / ICO crowd. They've been building crappy virtual worlds with overpriced virtual assets. I'm not sure how this ends.

Second Life has found a new big success. They added an area of "premium homes" two years ago. If you sign up for a paid membership, which is about $100/year, you get a nice upper middle class American house in a nice neighborhood. The neighborhoods are well laid out, nicely landscaped, and have several distinct styles. You can decorate your house, invite people over, have parties, visit other people, walk or drive around, or just hang out in your house. They've built over 60,000 houses so far and are struggling to keep up with demand. The neighborhoods are all hand-built, not just stamped out from some template.

These are planned unit developments in a virtual world. It's something people stuck in some crappy apartment want - the American Dream. [1]

This isn't the only option - you can buy raw land outside the planned unit developments and build your own thing. But many people just want to buy a nice virtual lifestyle. Something nobody seems to have anticipated is that there's a market for rather boring virtual worlds.

[1] https://youtu.be/2peH7aeuwPI
That is true. There are however techniques software emulators can use like run-ahead that can get you lower latency than even the original hardware on a PC: https://near.sh/articles/input/run-ahead

The caveat is that it doesn't always work, and it makes the power requirements even more unbalanced. Some might also see it as a form of cheating to go below the original game's latency. If you want to match the original game's latency precisely, FPGAs are the way to go right now for sure.
Of course it shouldn't be base 10. It should be base 60. That has more prime factors and wastes fewer bits than BCD does.
Very cool product
They were sending drawings through telegram lines for newspapers during the American Civil War. Thus, the fax is older than the phone. But in terms of general population use, of course most people encountered a phone before they encountered a fax.
How are you finding build/packaging times with gradle + kts building a kotlin project?

Gradle can be impressively fast (i’d hate to use a gradle build without the distributed build cache feature these days, what a difference), it can be reasonably easy to identify slow parts of a build (digging through build scans isn’t too hard). When it comes to extending it, groovy is actually pretty comfortable for making little doo-dads to assemble some shell scripts from templates, or populate an h2 with some build metrics, or whatever you need, but all in all i think i’m over gradle.

The speed is hard to keep on point, requires constant babysitting in a medium or large team and the learning curve really requires a reasonable working knowledge of groovy first (or kotlin - i haven't used the kts facilities) and a lot of java developers just aren’t interested in learning properly so they hack something in which leads to band aids that get hairy easily.
Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas.

The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging.

The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems.

Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown.

Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.
1) Don't access randomly. That means either that the hash function you use is more like a reducing/mapping function (i.e. order preserving), or you iterate in the hashed order of your data. Obviously, this only works for scans and batch processes, not random user queries unless you can batch them.

2) Have a leakier bloom that fits in your L1/L2 cache size. You may have to have 2 layers of bloom filters, and this will be highly dependent on the relative expenses of the various operations.
What Is WebRTC Server? WebRTC for Video Conferencing
I think one of the problems today is that floating point remains the default even for scripting languages like python. I'd wager that the huge majority of users of floating point arithmetic in their programs actually want correct math rather than efficient operations. This feels a bit like Random vs SecureRandom. So many people use the default and then accidentally shoot themselves in the foot. IMO, for scripting languages we should have infinite precision math by default and then be able to use floating point if you really care about speed.
None of them feel obvious. I never would have made these predictions in 2010, 2015, or 2019, and I wouldn't feel comfortable making any of them out until 2030 at minimum (and only for fax machines and spinning drives on consumer PCs).
> For example, if Elon Musk succeeds in landing the first person on Mars, his coin price should theoretically go up. And if, in contrast, he makes a racial slur during a press conference, his coin price should theoretically go down.

Yes, and when people are making emotional/ideological financial decisions, I’ll buy the dip.
One thing that keeps disappointing me is the utter lack of reference-style (API) documentation.
Sure, the conceptual documents contain examples. But if the example isn’t clear enough, you’re completely on your own.

For example, the following document has been largely useless to me even though I’ve spent whole days trying to make the examples work for me: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/cross_project_publ...
But every standard office chair with wheels is 5-legged.
If the most powerful actor in Iran is proposing a peaceful referendum, wouldn't you agree that this is some very mixed messaging then?

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/424343/Ayatollah-Khamenei-R...
Wow, that’s horrifying.
I rarely go to theaters but then I own a house with good movie-watching options. Personally I tend to do live theater rather than going to movies with folks. But it seems as if going to the movies will remain a fairly popular option for younger people at least.
I think VR headsets are within a factor of 10 of the cost of a good monitor, and within a factor of 5 of the angular resolution of 20:20 vision. It seems very plausible to me as the resolution goes up and costs come down that e.g. a company would start pushing employees towards a headset instead of multiple monitors within the next decade.
Research even before the 70’s in the 50’s people were looking into nuclear powered boring machines that would use heat from nuclear fission to melt rocks.

I don’t know if this was ever gotten to beyond “cool ideas for the nuclear age” concept art pamphlet phase.
Zig Playground
Israel is not only an apartheid state, it is a literal ethnostate as the basis of its constitution which consecrates it to a single ethic/religious group. It is guilty of ethnic cleansing and Israeli politicians routinely call for genocide.

But it is fine because it's a US ally.
I think a lot of these predictions depend on your use case.

Point and shoot...I have DSLR. I didn't have one 15 years ago. It's not for every day use, of course but I use it frequently. I can do so much more with it and the quality is so much better.

Mouse...my parents/in-laws haven't used one in years since their main computer is a tablet

Home phone? I installed one (VoIP) a few years ago. If I need to reach anyone at home I just have 1 number to call and I don't need to worry about phones having no battery, on silent etc...Also my kids (oldest is 4) and may need to reach me when they are older and for sure they aren't getting their own cellphone for a long time.
The same goes in Common Lisp, but for very different reasons:

* (= (+ 0.1 0.2) 0.3)
T

In Common Lisp, there is a small epsilon used in floating-point equality: single-float-epsilon. When two numbers are within that delta, they are considered equal.

Meanwhile, in Rakudo, 0.1 is a Rat: a rational number where the numerator and denominator are computed.

You can actually get the same underlying behavior in Common Lisp:

(= (+ 1/10 2/10) 3/10)

Sadly, not many recent languages have defaults as nice as those. Another example is Julia:

julia> 1//10 + 2//10 == 3//10
true

IMO, numerical computations should be correct by default, and fast in opt-in.
Gradle is a new problem to solve an existing problem and thus making it an even bigger problem. We tried to use gradle for an existing large spring application, after days of groovy and illogic we went back to maven... At least Android studio takes care of most of the gradle stuff. I will take a look at the Kotlin DSL, maybe it was just groovy.
I quite like gradle for small projects. But as soon as the project reaches an arbitrary threshold of complexity, gradle goes from boon to bust. The venerable ant is so much simpler to use in complex environments. Or maven, which -- unlike gradle -- has a pretty stable plugin API...
Bob isn't a service provider, Bob is the other party Alice wants to communicate with. The entity you're referring to is called Facebook, not Bob.

Nothing about the internet requires there to be an intermediary with the plaintext. Compare e.g. Signal.

And if the internet is free-as-in-beer then Comcast owes me a big refund.
I came across beaver.io only yesterday and I am already impressed. It was likely that this project was related IMHO.
I can see that, I think the Lindy effect needs some refinement.

My personal take is that there’s a an apex for a particular generation of technology, and that is good forever. A 1930s Farmall tractor is an example of that... there are improved modern replacements, but the 1930 model still does the job near optimally. I would guess that a non trivial number of those tractors will be in use in 2130.

1980s/early 90s minicomputers are similar. Many of these devices are still in use today, and probably could be kept in use for decades to come.

Modern tech is a little harder because we’ve been in a rapid growth phase and the software services based world is more aligned with production than sustainment. I’d bet that trend will change in 20-30 years.
The answer depends on why you want to grow a business sense. What are you trying to achieve with your business skills?

If you want to understand the business world, the management aspect of it, I suggest reading Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

If you want to get better at networking, I would suggest reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

If you want to understand marketing, I would suggest, Marketing: An Introduction by Philip Kotler

Peter Thiels' book Zero to One might be a good starting point to understand the start-up world.

But for a general instinct about business, you have to stay curious and learn how people think and behave. Being curious about anthropology, psychology, economics, news, trends, sociology are key.
I have circa 1,5TB of SSD storage on my desktop. And I find it sufficient for my gaming needs. Fast Internet helps though.

Solid state isn't too expensive now, if waiting for downloading is okay. You can get 480GB disks for around 50€. That is what, less than price of new title? And likely can at least one to three of them at one time.
https://defo.ie

As an end user, I have been using ESNI-enabled openssl to make HTTP requests to sites using Cloudflare and for me it works great.
The iPhone was definitely not the first smart phone.
The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as wickedness and attacks it.
I never really bought this argument. Poor people aren't taking regular flights or driving SUV's. Climate change is a problem caused by the consumption habits of the wealthy, not the poor.