skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd partially blame this one on the Steam app too. If it is able to receive the message and give you a notification, it should also let you see that message in-app without internet.

Discord is the same way and it drives me mad, especially considering how fussy it can be about connecting. Snapchat on the other hand handles it right. If I get a notification (for an actual chat at least), I am able to open it anytime later regardless of whether or not my phone is still connected.
Big Pharma, Dr. Fauci and the death of hydroxychloroquine
Yes, that was part of the plan.
[flagged] [dead] On Having Whiteness (sagepub.com)

2 points by ttt0 15 hours ago | unflag | past | 2 comments
I you are just learning the language, I'd suggest skipping this particular book altogether for now.

I'd start with a "Re-introduction" tutorial on MDN [1] followed by another Axel's book - "JavaScript for impatient programmers" [2]. Don't read the whole book at first, focus on specific chapters: parts on Modularity, Collections and Asynchronicity.

As for TypeScript, the official Handbook [3] is great. Don't dwell much on intricacies of TS type system. Use it here and there to aid your editor or IDE in highlighting mistakes in your code, and get deeper into it once you get a good grip with JavaScript in general.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re...
[2] https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/toc.html
[3] https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/intro.html
Apple is encroaching on Facebook’s territory like never before
Frankly, with the exception of people who are very close to me and actually know what I would appreciate, I don't like gift exchanges that much in the first place... Just a good way to end up with things you don't want but feel guilty about getting rid of.
If we're sharing anecdotes: a former schoolmate, also in NYC, had their phone stolen and was quite literally able to track the phone to the thief's home, but all the police did was take a report.

Hmmm. Maybe the problem is that the police are Luddites.
I second this. A Timeless Way of Building is a beautiful book.
In terms of the heated seat argument, I imagine a future where they take it to the extreme and charge by the Joule for heating.

That would mean those with a lot of thermal mass when they are sitting would have to pay more to get more electrons traveling through the tungsten heating elements. BMW would argue that this is a way to combat obesity.
The majic button that sends your job application to all employers automatically
Perhaps alcohol is a bad example because you can quit it completely. That's not really the case with something like a smart phone, so perhaps the better comparison is food. You can't stop eating food completely if you struggle with addiction, but you can learn healthier habits.
In the UK there's also https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/employers

They run an accreditation 4-day work week with no loss of pay scheme.
ML in the Blockchain!!!
GCC specifically has bootstrapping as a feature in the build system. They take care to document which older version of GCC is required to build a newer versions. If you pick a version that doesn't rely on C++ (4.x IIRC) you can compile GCC with a very small and general C compiler (tinycc or so). That helps to provide a chain of trust and also gives you access to a new platform if necessary. LLVM only offers cmake so you always need a (full-feature) C++ compiler to build it.

That being said, GCC could make things better by providing a C-only entry point in modern releases, but it's still better than LLVM in that regard.
Isn’t using Onion routing pretty much what Apple is proposing?
very relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2183/
The problem with this, specifically the assumption that RL gives an equivilance to natural selection and evolution, is that RL typically assumes a computational environment it interacts in while natural selection and evolution assumes the physical world as the environment.

The important difference here is that in order for RL to translate to solving real world problems, you need to faithfully and computafionally simulate the real world's physical processes and rules, or at least enough that n-th order processes exist accurately.

I've done various types of computational modeling and simulation work at different scales throughout my career with all sorts of scientists and engineers and I can tell you, pretty much no domain is there where you have good enough representative models RL can be used in. Some narrow special cases exist but nothing to the degree of a massive environment full of well coupled expert domain models. Some of the best cases are going to be so computationally bound that it would be quicker to do things for real vs simulate.

If you want RL to work and learn, it's likely possible under the connection you point out, but has to do this using physical machines and sensors interacting with the physical world like life as we know it does. Your AGI won't be able to cheat and run through the evolution process quicker using faulty reductionist models we use in most simulations (which is what everyone implicitly is hoping for), IMHO.

If you try this, your AGI is going to learn all sorts of flaws within those environments or at the very least, have so many narrow scoped bounds it won't be that "general." A lot of simulated models are frankly garbage (they have some useful narrow scope but are typically littered with caveats) and they've been in development pretty much since digital computing began.
A lot of people turn subscriptions and pay per use into a tiresome religious argument. I don't want to pay an upfront for-all-time fee for everything I use. Sometimes I want to buy outright. Sometimes I want to rent for a period. And sometimes I want to pay per use. It depends on the thing in question, my usage patterns, and the amount of money involved. (And it can change over time.)
> But it is very surprising, even weird, that both fish do so with the same AFP gene

Maybe that constellation of a gene is the "obvoius solution" and both fish will likely develop it by chance? Why assume the genes jump over ...
Its just moving from short term memory to long term memory.
>In most Unix utilities, “long lines are silently truncated”. This is not acceptable in a GNU utility.

Would be interested to know examples for this.
I don't assume it is because the police had been defunded. I think the reality is that it is not worth anyone's time to follow up e.g. £100 theft when the bank will refund you. That could easily cost £5K+ to investigate and prosecute and if the thief doesn't really have anything, they can't get the money back anyway.

I had a motorbike jacket stolen once which contained my house keys and wallet. The police found the guy and he was fined £40 or something. I lost the £100 bike jacket and had to pay around £40 to get my keys recut. Was it really worth it?
Or we dig until we find life than can extinct us:

>Smilla's Sense of Snow
Vouching for this because I think people are just trying to kill it because it's a huge scandal that cheap and effective drugs were suppressed. How many lives were needlessly lost is something we should try to assess, but the corrupt government-media complex of course has no interest in finding that out.
IP addresses identify computers.

They only identify people when joined with other information.
> However, it is likely that the same FLoC IDs or range of IDs will be associated with someone.

This seems all quite speculative. In the first paragraph they describe FLoc IDs as changing constantly - why would they assume new IDs are not being generated, and groups are not constantly being mixed?
yeah the downvotes were quite unfair
I see your point but I think you have to factor in:

1) The driver's time. If I can read on my way to work, that's a win. Price effectively reduced.

2) Time saved not getting an oil change, new tires, other maintenance, etc. Price drops a bit more.

3) I don't have to buy a "family sized" car that's only fully utilized a small percentage of the time. That over-pay / under-realized has a cost associated with it. Instead, I simply hail what I need when I need it.

4) Along the same lines as #1, family QT increases when I use a family vehicle.

5) When I'm able to rightly size my vehicle, there are eco savings as well.

6) Or perhaps I'm too old to drive and owning a car doesn't make sense either. If someone else has to shuttle me around, their time is a cost.

Again. I agree. Companies profit from some products and markets more than others. That said, these vehicles and biz models are not the past and can - and will? - change the future.
Ask HN: Is it ethical, if during an online conversation I record my own voice?
The Cerebras CS-2 wafer-scale engine (850k cores, 40 GB SRAM)
Here is one significant problem with this preprint:

"The health system never had a requirement for asymptomatic employee test screening. Most of the positive tests, therefore, would have been tests done to evaluate suspicious symptoms."

In other words, there could have been people who caught Covid-19, but because they had already had it, the symptoms were mild and they didn't get tested. It may be possible for these people to still be infectious (we don't really know this). For a proper study, they need to look at a decent population of people who have regular asymptomatic screening.
How could it be not symbolic? You can't un-kill the dead. Even an all-out revenge massacre wouldn't fail the "symbolic" predicate.
"Stupid article tries again to make fun of smart people"

THAT would be a great title. They are trying to sell this idea all the time.
Artificial spider silk provides sustainable alternative to single-use plastics
Simple =/= Easy
Show HN: Statosio.rb
I think what's happening here is we're conflating "developer" with "product designer." And often, yeah, they're the same - but if you're in a big enough team that you have one person doing the designing and another person doing the software architecture and another doing coding, it's the designer hat which needs to be at the coal face watching the users use the product and understanding their pain points.
Ask HN: Handling customers that want feature previewing?
Curious how you folks manage the release process with larger customers that ask for advance notice (ex: 2 weeks) or previewing of any features before release or general availability?

We have a single sandbox environment currently, but different customers are asking for varying amounts of delay before feature release. How do you manage bug fix deploys in these cases as well?
I just had to give you a +1 for that.

Don't forget that there are people who want to find out if you are a fart enthusiast, so they can then use that to coerce you into "playing ball" with them.

Sort of the digital equivalent of the "$5 wrench[0]." Social media and adtech have been a freaking goldmine for spies.

[0] http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png
There's a lot wrong with this article.

For a start, the whole "3 million applied to Google in 2020 and only 20,000 were hired" is for the whole of Google. Not just developers. And it sounds like a lot but really it only works out at 150 people per role ... McDonalds probably gets more than that in any large city with relatively high unemployment numbers. It also assumes that all 3 million candidates were actually suitable for the roles. Having hired plenty of devs in the past, I can be sure that many probably shouldn't have been applicants. Using the raw, unfiltered number is dubious.

Ignoring all that though, the article assumes that the way FAANG companies hire is optimal. Given the number of stories about people who are really good being turned away that's probably not the case. For a company like Google that's not a problem; they can afford false negatives. They don't really affect the outcomes for the company given it's size. Other companies, and especially startups, can't afford the same false negatives. If you're a startup and you hire the wrong person it's going to have a significant impact on the probability of success.

Copying what FAANG companies do rather than working out the best way to filter the candidate pool for what you actually need is a really bad idea.
That's a great reminder that the internet is full of cowardly bullies. They don't actually want to understand things, they just want to tear other people down to make themselves feel better.
Honestly, who asked for FLoC and the MS alternative (edit: it's PARAKEET)? Why can't ad servers just follow my Do Not Track preferences? Serve me a random ad, or a context based ad if I have Do Not Track set... seems a lot simpler no?

Those using ad-blockers are going to use them anyway, but some assurance that I won't be tracked would go a long way towards me turning off ad-blockers on the sites I don't frequent, and even those that I do if they don't have a ad-free subscription. Those wanting personalized ads, can set the Do Not Track preferences accordingly, possibly by site.
VPNs (aka proxies) can also help. I think most ISPs (at least where I live) also use dynamic IPs which reduces the utility if IP for tracking somewhat.

I think cookie + browser fingerprinting is a much better way to track people in this situation, because it removes the uncertainty associated with dynamic IPs and multiple users behind a NAT.
On this topic:

Are people.. better humans when spending more time in solitude & less around others where cognitively-draining politics is inevitable?
Thank you for the suggestion. I just set up Friendly+ for a couple of time sinks like Instagram (hide stories, go straight to chat page), Facebook (hide stories, disable suggstions), Youtube (go straight to Subscriptions page), Twitter (disable promoted tweets) and even HackerNews. I also like that you can save tweets and other media posts easily.
> Ownership is overrated.

I'm largely with you on this, philosophically, rationally, economically. But we're probably a tiny majority, most people seem to react on emotion on this.

Amateur psychology time: I think a large component of the desire to own is insecurity about future availability and prices. In my personal case, I find that as I got older and moved up the income ladder, I seem to increasingly loose the desire to own. Partly because I can easily absorb much more price volatility now. Partly because of increased self-knowledge / life experience, that in practice there are almost no material possessions that I really want to own for very long times.
Haha yea. I don't get the point except that it is a shorter name.
That's why I always give consumable gifts - chocolate or wine or whatever.

Gift giving is not about changing a person's life forever, or shouldn't be. Its making them smile on the day. That's it. If they're entertained or please I knew what they liked or just hungry, I've succeeded and the gift has succeeded.
No but they can bear the blame until they burn out and afterwards be replaced by a fresh bundle of youngsters. That's how it usually goes at the companies I consult to clean the mess
This seems just wonderful!
So the people who do not share your beliefs should be treated by therapist? That's a serious claim you know...
As someone advocating against this for a while, who has a internet only sim these days and no phone number it is scary how many companies depend on SMS for security.

Even if it's only second factor today, what really prevents the company from allowing password resets one day? Nothing, I likely would not even notice it until it is to late.

I can own an email address, but I can never own a phone number. Nearly all contracts clearly state that the number is not actually yours in different wordings and nothing prevents anyone from reclaiming the number and give it to someone else.

It's stupid. And annoying.
Maltese, which is the official language of Malta, is an Arabic dialect.
Every organizational problem is a management problem. I doesn't mean developers can't and shouldn't try to fix it. Concluding such article with "Developers are fine" is too cynic.

For reference, at my org, management already does what it says it should do and already don't what is says what it shouldn't do. Still there are developers who need to step up their business understanding. Despite all the training, the stimulus, the right incentives, it is not natural for new tech/team leads to communicate well how technical challenges must translate into business decisions.

This shit is hard and complex, stop trying to assign blame.
OH WOW! I had no idea! Yeah he does deserve more support. I still donno why MS can't contribute to projects directly. But I'm happy there's another possible solution to my problem.
The difference is that Uber and Doordash have a lot bargaining power
> Apple’s approach is pragmatic. If they offered anyone the ability to jailbreak, you would see major app makers manipulating naive users into jailbreaking in order to bypass security, payment restrictions or similar.

The problem is a social one and hasn't been properly solved by technical measures as you note. Instead of acting like the digital world is somehow separate from the rest of the world, we should have enough strong and effective laws and regulations that if a person steals from me, they can reasonably expect to spend a few years in prison.

The result of discovering a person has released a fraudulent product to the Google Play Store is currently that they get get their Google account shut down, maybe. The actual result should be that they find out what the inside of a prison cell is.

The result of discovering that a company tracks a user without effective permission through the use of dark patterns that meant a user pressed "I agree" under the misapprehension that this was the only way of using the app should have their shares acquired by the justice system at a penalty rate - or some other effective penalty so that companies don't balance the cost of obeying the law with the cost of the fine.

If Apple believes that their users want protection from digital thieves, Apple has a responsibility to lobby for better laws and regulations. They can't use halfmeasures as a pretense in the hope that some amorphous other will get laws that protect their users passed.
I have a theory on why we're seeing so much "bad management" for software engineers: most leaders at workplaces have not been engineers themselves at a company with a great engineering culture (I wrote about what I think this means [1]: it's all the high-growth small and large tech companies we know)

The CEO, and the people under the CEO know and understand traditional, top-down management. Let the people with context and decision power make the big decisions, and pass this downwards. Works with finance, works with marketing, works with IT support, and should work with engineering as well... right?

But it actually doesn't work with software engineers as well as it could. Or with designers. UX researchers. PMs... all these people would produce a magnitude more output when given proper context and autonomy.

A few leaders read about this, and try giving autonomy. These results end up even worse than the status quo, as you can't just make it a free-for-all and expect it works overnight.

And to prove this point: look at companies where the founder had worked at a high-performing company before. Before founding Twilio, Jeff Lawson spent years at Amazon (he was one of the first AWS PMs), and in his book Ask Your Developer, he writes about just how much this experience shaped him, and all the practices he adopted from Amazon.

There's this really weird divide between "forward-looking tech companies"[2] who "get it", and everyone else. Which heavily benefits this first group.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-developer-culture-tes...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717390
Nuclear energy is far too expensive and far too slow to build, it will not contribute much to our energy future. Our build rate for nuclear is tiny, less than 1GW/year, and there is little hope of scaling nuclear production capacity to something 100GW/year or more, which is what we would need if nuclear is going to contribute in a significant way to a climate solution.

In contrast, we are scaling solar, wind, and storage production at a huge rate, and the increases in production capacity are huge each year.

It's been a few months since I've don the napkin math, but at the current rate of production increases, extrapolated to 2035, we will just barely be able to replace all fossil fuel energy with renewable electricity. Electrification of many primary fossil fuel uses, such as heat and transportation, will require 1/3 to 1/4 as much energy (see the amount of rejected energy in the top right here [1]). But at the same time, the developing world will be greatly increasing their use of energy services, and renewables will be the easiest way to do that. So even though developed countries' total energy use will go down as we electrify, developing countries' use will go up.

[1] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/...
So, developers want a blank check, is what I’m reading?
> I don't want to miss a notification that my delivery food arrived, but I don't want to be bombarded with daily advertising messages from foodpanda trying to get me to change my behavior.

Yeah, this really drives me crazy.
We use the term archive at our company. Mostly because there have been many cases where we take things out of the archive and continued support then commercialization.
We're talking about businesses here, not your private amusement, though.

As a business you need to ask yourself: and who pays for the time it takes to educate at least two employees on this "basic and elementary matter"? If it really were so "basic and elementary", how come even critical infrastructure regularly falls victim to the most primitive of ransomware attacks?

Misconfigured email and network access settings, vulnerable, out of date software stacks, non-existing contingency plans, lack of monitoring, no escalation strategy, etc. etc. Billions are lost each year due to this.

It's very easy to underestimate the actual complexity of the task in its fullest whilst overestimating one's own abilities because "it's not hard to setup NGinx and service stack XY on a random x64 box".

Anecdote from personal experience: tasked an applicant for a DevOps position with comparing two systems we could choose from for a backend service. The systems came in the form of installation packages and docker-images respectively.

Having had no experience with Docker at the time, I thought it'd safe my team a great deal of time to have the "new guy", who knew Docker inside out, deal with it.

A week later we had two results: 1) a usable comparison of the two systems and 2) an e-mail from the cloud service who informed us that the machines we rented were performing DDoS attacks on a foreign company...

New guy had forgotten to properly secure the test machines he had set up and it took hackers all of 72 hours to find and hijack them. Luckily it only took a few clicks to wipe the offending boxes, but it served as a warning for what happens if you take the whole "big scary nothings" too lightly.
Being forced to release source code is a restriction. Some people are okay with that, and others want totally unrestricted code available.
`knowledge blinds`