skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rockets are not 100% reliable--having one carrying radioactive waste explode on launch would make for a really nasty mess to clean up.

Ultimately, the total volume of Radioactive waste ever created is tiny in the grand scheme of things. Burying it is not a technical problem. The problems are entirely political. This is also why breeder reactors don't make sense. They're trying to apply a technical solution to a political problem.
Signal requires Android 4.4 or better. Essentially any Android device meeting that requirement, which isn't so locked down that it allows you to install software (from the Play Store, APK sideloading, whatever) will be sufficient.

The Nexus 5 is 8 years old now. (The age is a particular problem given its lack of replaceable battery.)

You can find used budget smartphones from 3 - 4 years ago for about $20 and they will have far more performance and capability.

From a security and privacy standpoint, you should probably run a recent operating system. That's a tricky one with smartphones, Android is rarely maintained properly by the hardware manufacturer for long. A device supported by something like LineageOS or similar would be good to look for.

As a starting point, the budget Motorola series (Moto E, Moto G series) tend to have small screens, large batteries, and unlocked (or unlockable) bootloaders, often with maintained LineageOS ports.
Pingdom integration or similar may be an option. There are some very cheap or free options out there.

Checking from outside is not ideal though as a network outage looks the same as a sinking, a leak or any other problem.
If you have Stylus or Tampermonkey, you can also just override the CSS.
Nah.

There are really dumb laws that you need a powerful defense or deterrent against.

The biggest problem is that you cant talk about them, or even share the deterrents, because it makes you a target for the regulators if you do. Its actually better that the regulators simply know you have a lawyer, and that they have no idea what your legal strategy is. In finance, ignorance of the law is an excuse (“scienter”), they codified the law specifically that way for themselves, and so giving any knowledge about the law undermines the defense of your own actions, and being able to say “my lawyer made me do it” is an even better defense.

This also means that each and every project has to recreate the legal guidance, until Congress explicitly makes a safe harbor route a default regulatory regime.

Corporate Securities lawyers know it, exchanges and service providers know it, they carved out a niche for themselves to provide this legal service and it costs 6 figures easily. It is not a perfect defense.

Many crypto project issuers are victims in this regard, with everyone onboard with this racket, they cant even talk to the SEC about what’s wrong.

Taxes aren't that hard but most providers overthink the word “crypto” when they hear it and confuse themselves.
I really liked those Czecheslovakian-German coproduced kids movies quite a lot!
22.5% of students get 3 As or better so that doesn't sound very impressive to me. US med schools are much more competitive than that.
It is the right wing attempt at "just kidding."
"A program structured as a sequence of short, tight loops over vectors/slices as described is more or less hitting the performance sweet spot of modern microarchitectures."

Sure, but even faster is not to loop over intermediate arrays at all, by virtue of never constructing them in the first place when they aren't necessary.

"Moreover, there's usually no need to allocate or copy the array in that sort of data flow. I mean, unless you're chasing worst case performance to make a point or something. Slice the buffers out of a pool and allow ownership of the data to follow the execution context, then you're free to modify it in place."

That starts getting into "I'm sure someone can come up with some solution that meets some of these goals". Whatever map you're talking about here isn't one that is defined as creating a new slice based on mapping a function over the old slice. I mean, it kinda sounds like you're saying "well, if you just write a conventional for loop you can do all this in one pass" to me? Which is my point? I'm not the one pitching for lots of array creation, it's people who insist on using maps and filters in a language that, of all the major languages, just isn't going to put in the optimization time to convert them back into loops under the hood.
I agree that it mitigates the problem, but it does not seem to solve the root cause of it. Aren't ads and ad targeting the main reason why companies want to store and sell that data? Other uses of user data is considered a lot shadier and respectful companies will not engage in them. If we start considering ad targeting to be a shady business practice, we may actually end the incentives for big conglomerates to want to store user data in the first place and thus end up with a system where user profiles are the exception rather than the norm.

In a less techinical point of view, ads are probably a net negative for society. People are buying things they don't need, spending time they could be doing other things and just having a worse experience they could have were not for content farms and other practices incentivised by ads. I do see the value of ads bringing services to people who wouldn't have money to pay for them otherwise, it's income distributions of sorts, but I think we can do better.

Anyway, interesting read about ip blindness. As long as the CDNs and proxies are not controlled by the same company that owns the ad networks, then it could work out. Though it's hard to find the correct incentives for the right people to own the right parts of the network. Another alternative would be something like onion, which is more distributed (although quite wasteful of resources).
A typical large C++ code base will have hundreds of reinterpret_cast<T> or C code base with void*. It's not that horrible.
So it was a terrible coup attempt, but it was most definitely a coup attempt.

They had plastic ties and a noose ready for the vice president and the speaker of the house (2nd and 3rd in line) to the presidency.
This thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-...

Posters had narrowed down the excessive writes down by limiting memory usage, so they knew it was a swap problem, and some users said the latest OS fixed it. Now that I’ve checked it again, they’re saying it’s better but not fixed.
Much earlier than that. The IBM/360 architecture had instructions for doing arithmetic with BCD numbers (packed and zoned decimal formats) in the mid-1960s. I think earlier IBM architectures had them too. COBOL natively supports that datatype, so did PL/I.

After all, the biggest customers for mainframes were banks, insurance companies, the IRS, etc. that dealt with large sums of money and needed their accounts to be accurate to the nearest cent. Dealing with very large integer values is a problem that was solved a long, long time ago.
They do not, at least not in the way "in-process sandboxing" means in the context of Java's Security Manager, which is now being considered for deprecation and removal. Java's Security Manager does not create a single set of permissions for the entire Java program, but rather assigns different permissions to different Java classes running in the same program and even on the same thread, through a mechanism that assigns different permissions to different subroutines on the call-stack, composing them in some elaborate way. The same operation can be allowed or blocked depending on the call-stack by which it is reached. For example, writing to a specific file or socket could be allowed if the call stack contains a trusted subroutine that is known to ensure the access is done "safely" but blocked otherwise.

The reason this is now being considered for removal is that even though this mechanism is very flexible and powerful in theory, it is too elaborate to be used correctly by most programmers in practice.
Why shouldn't domestic medical students have priority over foreign medical graduates?
Yup. There’s some discussion of this in this issue https://github.com/observablehq/plot/issues/359, which notes that the ~100 test plots in https://github.com/observablehq/plot/tree/main/test/plots are rendered by Node with JSDOM by https://github.com/observablehq/plot/blob/main/test/plot.js.
It's a bit odd that they're focusing on Matrix rather than MMS in chatty. MMS is the big issue everyone has with it and there are patches to fix it, matrix clients already exist for Linux.

Other than that this is supper exciting!
I agree. Servers are cheap compared to people.

If we had to endure another large python migration, we would just migrate to a different language with better perf.
Canadian military laying groundwork for arrival of armed drones
> This way the codes are explicit when you read the code

Good call. It might have caught the off-by-one mistake I made (the codes start from 1 and not 0 in the blog post). Maybe even switch to using an enum as our index instead of an int.
I had this realization during one of my later linguistics classes. It was a syntax class, so didn't really have anything to do with pronunciation; but it was an upper level class, so it was a safe assumption that everyone knew IPA.

In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times).
Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty.

(For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)
My plan is to password protect things like Netflix, probably add additional site filters to my pihole, have a desktop in a central location for kid use with restricted privileges, no smart phone, etc.
This should be the clickbait article title.
> do you have an example of someone being hurt by tracking and data collection
The vast viral world: what we know and don’t know
They typically have acceptance rates in the low single digits too.
For us non-financial types: What is the motivation for avoiding a stock split?
Ask HN: What are some good resources on creating a business?
Hey folks,

I'm asking from the perspective of an engineer who's completely ignorant about all things related to building or running a business.

As for why I'm asking here instead of just going off what a Google search might tell me; I'm finding it difficult to find anything credible within what seems to be a mire of get rich quick schemes and out right scams. I'm hoping y'all might be able to shine a light on this topic.

Resources on any topic, ranging from business fundamentals and bookkeeping to managing skills are appreciated.

Thanks!
This account is getting caught in HN's anti-abuse software (correctly), but I've let the comment through because I don't want to prevent you from replying. (You may need to edit it to fix the whitespace - sorry, that's our bug.)

I don't want to keep doing this, though, so would you please use your main account? I removed the restriction from it, so it should work.

A few responses: if you say you didn't intend to mislead by editing your comment, I believe you; nothing factual that you've said about pg remotely justifies the abusive language you used; Elon Musk has nothing to do with any of this; if someone was bullying toward you on HN, or you felt they were, that sucks, and I'm sorry we didn't stand up for you. I try to stand up for someone who's being unfairly criticized when I know about it—don't forget that we don't see the overwhelming majority of what gets posted; I consider it a smear when people say awful things about others without justification; it doesn't depend on payment.
That sounds a lot like a trojan installed in your browser, or perhaps someone who shares your computer has peculiar habits.
I'm in Minnesota, but I've had friends that own small businesses have people refuse to come back to work and they've straight up told them it's because their unemployment benefits pay them roughly the same amount (or more) as they'd get for working.

The local turkey processing plant has a huge sign on bonus right now for the same reason, just to try and coax people back to work.
Isn't XRP centralized?
Did you not read the second half of the article?
Well, it's solvable in the sense that breaking language compatibility is a choice that doesn't have to be made, I guess. The 2->3 transition was managed as effectively as such a big thing could be but it's for left the industry littered with a bunch of weird self-maintained python2 forks, compatibility layers for the C side of python. A 2x theoretical performance improvement doesn't pay down the engineering costs to make a switch if you recoup it in lower hardware costs later.
How to Conquer Covid-19 Amid a Confederacy of Dunces
Mentioning Putin (a vilified figure) in the first sentence indicates that it is a preemptive strike to discredit the journal in anticipation of the publication of successful results of phase III of the trial.

There are obviously issues with peer review but the scientific method is the best we've got.
TV based advertising is also bad tbh. There used to be ads related to fairness cream which is effectively virtue signaling you should use this cream to look white and beautiful. And there are ads related to soft drinks claiming you will be strong etc.

Ads sucks and it is alive due to economic incentive from ads. And we know where there is economic incentive its hard to stop (eg. bitcoin mining economic incentive)
Oh my, this sounds like a really valuable feature. I wonder if the folks maintaining HN would consider adding accessibility enhancements like this.
It's kind of strange to wander into a conversation, and then balk at the fact that people expect your contributions to be relevant to the conversation.
I thought the reasonable approach was to believe in aliens (not here per se) due to the law of large numbers.
Theory and Observation in Science:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observatio...
I actually think that this is at the core of most of these companies.

Take anonymous money transfers for any amounts. This is why KYC/AML laws exist.

If someone could show how a cryptocurrency with anonymous features can follow KYC/AML laws, I'm all ears.

Begging for regulatory clarity makes it seems one-sided. It seems very clear to me that the dream the cryptocurrency companies are trying to sell is fundamentally incompatible with the intent of the regulation, even if not yet its text.

What can they be left with afterwards? We'll see, but it won't be the vision they've sold.

> Nobody wants to invest millions into something that may or may not end up being designated as illegal.

The bitcoin blockchain has child porn on it. And BTC is explicitly designed to break KYC/AML laws. Yet people invest.
Creating ML Datasets with Ease Using BigQuery and Dataflow
> news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism"

This is "mainstream Republican" and it's about 1.5bits of information after "is UA resident".

Tucker is one of the most popular people in the USA.
Same. This one of the reasons I can't stand initialisms.
Chomsky’s followers are not as powerful as they used to be so you can say this sort of opinion without losing your job as a linguist. That said, this objection does not directly contradict Graham’s point. There are issues with Chomsky’s theories, but they are non-obvious and we learned a lot along the way. Would it have been reasonable to have dismissed these theories out of hand? Maybe but we false positives and false negatives exist as a trade off, and we would miss things if we try to lower our false positive rate too aggressively.
So if you had the sail at a 45 degree angle to the sun, bouncing the photons forward to your orbit, wouldn't that eventually slow you down? Or do you get pushed outward into a slower orbit at the same time and cancel it out?

It's all a moot point anyway since solar sails are so ridiculously impractical that this would basically never work in real life regardless.
I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect.

the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up

blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling

wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page"

youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"
Stockpile of Unfinished Ford Pickups Missing Chips Is Now Visible from Space
Ability to succeed doesn't really factor into what was attempted. That is in the mind & intentions of those who were involved & instigated it. Some people were very much acting with the intent to stop the transfer of power. If you believe that successfully stopping that transfer would be a coup, then the actions of 1/6 were a coup attempt.
Not going to lie I thought this was going to be about beer
So by this same reasoning, adding a little water spray to the input of my air compressor, and a water seperator on the output, would reduce energy consumption since the water would absorb heat during the compression stroke making the compression closer to isothermal rather than adiabatic?

Do any commercial products do this?
Sorry for my ignorance, but why do you need to replace "<" and ">" etc with "&lt;" etc? If I am not wrong:

- When the user input is plaintext, you will output using .innerText, which means such replacement will actually break those special characters.

- When the user input is actual html (or contenteditable), such replacement will also break those tags. If you don't want tags in the first place, why make so that user inputs html?
Show HN: BigBrain – DraftKings x HQ Trivia
There are many ways to get to the same place. It's worth a shot to experiment with different approaches, they also don't have the same pros and cons.

I'm sure at this level of tech they are well aware of the prior art.
Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.

I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.

The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.

* described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

Edit: oops I mixed up the dates- Joel's blog post was from 2008. But the point that file sync was widely derided as a consumer product still stands.
Undergrad computer architecture class freaked me out. Assembly doesn't even accurately describe what the machine does.
IBM used ~1.2cm^2 (150mm^2)
.NET 5 API with GraphQL – Step by Step
Hi everyone! Nik here, I'm the founder and CEO. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
Mystery Signal from a Helicopter (2014)
> "delegated advocates"

I've sometimes pondered a system like this, but I never had a name for it. I will have to check David Graeber out.
Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its early days.

I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic.

There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure.

[1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.
How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?
Im more impressed that he does it himself.
This is a nice starting point. It seems like it was written from someone who's fairly paranoid (not trying to judge the value or correctness of paranoia, here), which means that it's not too hard to customize it--if you are less paranoid, skip some of these steps.
This seems related to Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
I stand corrected. GraalVM seems mature, but apparently the Python support is not.
If search wouldn't be free out ad-supported. Paying for it would be the biggest productivity boost for a developer.

But people don't like to pay for software. So we alternatives.
Ask HN: What % of your salary would you give back to not return to the office?
If you're already permanently remote, good for you.

But if you're only remote because of covid, and you are already being summoned back to the office, or warned that it is coming, what would you pay to be able to be 100% remote forever in this job?