skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lossy compression is fascinating because of how we can make certain optimizations based on the human eye, not keeping data in the right order necessarily. JPEG has seemed to stand the test of time so far, but new image formats like AVIF are definitely interesting.
The evidence is sadly too thin to make a definitive call one way or the other at this point. We may never know.

But at the same time I have to wonder how much it matters? It's the difference between telling some researchers to double-check their containment procedures vs. not? I think it's extremely unlikely that this was an intentional attack from CCP on their own people. It wasn't a Uyghur town as far as I know, and even so containment was nearly impossible so it's a dumb idea anyway.

So the only two plausible theories is it was either a natural source or an unintentional lab leak. At the end of the day it doesn't matter that much which one was true, the response is about the same. Maybe on the extreme end the lab could be shut down and its work moved elsewhere. People are wasting an enormous amount of energy arguing over this.
The Substack Narrative
> There are plenty of very successful languages that look nothing like the C family.

It's not that there aren't successful languages and have a different look and feel, it's that there's pushback against them when they are targeted towards the niches C and C++ are already strong in. Obviously many languages exist and many have become popular, but certain niches are more resistant than others and sometimes it's for non-rational reasons.

> I'd be more than willing to give Ada a chance, but when I looked at code samples I definitely had to fight an automatic response of thinking it was something out of date based on how it looks.

That's part, but not all, of what I'm talking about. The style C follows is damn old itself, sometimes predating the languages you're thinking of as out of date.
Yes, decades. I saw them in the 90s. They needed that feature to compete on the web during the dial-up era because GIF already had that feature, and it was well-established and featureful.
And the movie!
A classic still, and always.
NOAA and the NWS provides weather data for most of the country but forecasts aren't easily accessible through their website. Instead, companies like AccuWeather take that data and turn it into forecasts and sell them on to media companies to be plastered with ads.

Imo the NWS should just start providing forecasts of its own on its website. I'm sick of having to trawl through ad filled weather websites for a 7 day forecast
It's simultaneously true that a single individual cannot communicate and that the actions of a diffuse, uncoordinated population are heard. That population can always be expected to contain a lot of uninformed, irrational consumers. "But what if everyone simultaneously thought very carefully about they want to consume" is not a thing that will ever happen and therefore not a valid solution.

I don't absolve executives of moral guilt, they're clearly doing something wrong. I distinguish between this condition of being in the wrong with the condition of being to blame or responsible for the result. They are guilty, but if they didn't make the call, there will always be another greedy, narcisistic, power-hungry sociopath ready to take their place in the boardroom. "But what if all executives in the entire competitive industry rejected the cash grab and instead made the moral choice" is also not a thing that will ever happen and therefore not a valid solution.

Without a mechanism for coordination, neither consumers nor producers can effect change; the system is all that's left to blame. Therefore, instead of moralizing or advocating individual action, we should build mechanisms to help people coordinate, work to shift the Overton window, and change the system to incentivize the behaviors you want, building very carefully to make sure that your changes are self-reinforcing.
I never do. If I bother to do a thing with spam other than deleting it I report it to SpamCop [0].

[0] https://www.spamcop.net/
Yeah a few gaming laptops don't have them on, reviews of them usually comment that it's unusual as streaming games these days is popular, but there you have it.
The GPL gives developers an incentive to make their code free, which is better for the developer. It's therefore better for everyone.
Cyber Risk Management: Does cyber risk get enough boardroom airtime?
To your first question, https://www.usds.gov/.

To your second, well, /shrug. A reasonable number of folk might well jump at the chance to have a job like that on their resume, and there's likely a fair amount of possible cross pollination w/ various folk in the DoD/military to bring up bodies and relevant expertise (i.e. security).
I'm fairly sure Android crash reporting is all manually done, and even zips it up for you to inspect.

But some of these are impossible, e.g. how do you localize a stack trace?
Stripe moves developer chat from IRC to Discord
The Double-Edged Sword of Empathy
As with changing temperatures, I don't think it's the fact that they're changing, but the velocity of these changes that's particularity worrisome.

If a 1,000 year old tree suddenly can't survive in the now new climate in the same location, that's a little bit more than curious.
I don't use rust so I have no money in this game, but based on the two links you provided, Rust ranks the highest among the "safety minded" languages. It ranks the same level as Ruby, Swift, Matlab or R in the Jetbrains ranking. That's incredible for such a new language.

I mean, neither Ada nor Zircon are even on the lists, so in terms of mindshare, they are clearly blown out of the water by Rust (from the evidence you provide). To discount Rust based on usage when the alternatives being suggested don't even make the rankings is also a bit dishonest.

In fact, the argument "I think Linux should adopt rust for safety" makes perfect sense. Here's finally a safety conscious language that seems to be embraced by a larger community, and even the big tech players. Instead we get people suggesting arcane alternatives that may be technically better, but have a snowball's chance in hell to become commonplace any time soon.
Saw this post on Reddit in r/nottheonion and I wasn't surprised one bit seeing the past history of arrests made in India over matters such as these.
Mehmed II did declare himself Kayser-i Rum after taking Constantinople so perhaps you're right.
Depends on which cryptocurrency you're talking about. Bitcoin? 0%. Monero? +Infinity.

The real question is: why do we still allow oil companies to exist when they're the ones responsible for much of the world's pollution? Because the USD is backed by oil.
I think many would jump at the opportunity to be paid to pioneer what's known in advance to be highly visible and impactful FOSS project. That's like a manhandle-project-class career legacy for you, at a fraction of the cost for the government.
I don't think anyone here argued that blockchains are totally free to run, just that developers don't have to pay. Mainly the costs are paid by users, who pay fees to miners for running their transactions.

You don't have to run a node to hold coins. A piece of paper can do it.
From what I remember, John McFarlane and his Pandoc project helped a lot in getting CommonMark adopted.

Github used to have its own "Github-flavored Markdown" before CommonMark came along.
Rendering game worlds in text [video]
I don’t necessarily think there is a contradiction, “thou shall not kill” should be be translated as “thou shall not murder” in the context of the old testament.
The word for “kill” used in the commandment was not used in any passages of the bible related to warfare. There is even a clarification that this does not apply to killing other people in warfare or unarmed combat*

While the literal meaning of the 10 commandments has changed relatively little (mainly due to mistranslation or the shifting definitions of words) almost all of them mean would mean very different things to modern christian pacifist, a with burning 16th century calvinist, a 2nd century christian or a 6th century bc. jew.

I mean even regarding killing, while it’s easy for us, living in the modern world, to interpret it as a general ban on killing, a society which did not kill people under any circumstances would likely have been inconceivable in ancient times, it simply could not have existed since it would had been conquered and it’s members enslaved or exterminated by neighboring tribes.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill
I'm a US person and I have to say I agree that Washington Post is not far-left. While it's true that the relevant question is "what are the conditions in my country?", it's important to remember that part of the GOP's identity politics has been to paint even moderately left and centrist positions as "far-left".

That said, within the US political climate, WaPo is definitely left of center. Just not far-left.
What % of species that have existed in the last 300 years are now extinct because of us? Is the rate of extinction graph linear, or is it trending up logarithmically?
>If you think a distro is increasing your support burden it is quite acceptable to tell users from that distro to use the distro's bug tracker.

Sadly, this is in itself adding a large support burden.

I think distributions should be doing a much much much better job of informing their users how they should report issues.

tracker.debian.org seems to be almost impossible to find on google for example (If I search i3-wm debian it's not in the first 5 pages!).
On Leaving UNC
Imagine a spherical cyclist ;-) Mass scales like the cube of its radius. Surface area (air resistance) scales like the square of the radius. As the radius (mass) increases, the air resistance becomes relatively less important.
I already work at a FAANG and only make $200k 3 years in. I really have no hope of cracking any of the others (I work at the least impressive one, naturally).

Seems like being intellectually inferior will stunt me for literally everything - I have fewer positive life experiences than a Stanford pre-freshman
> macOS allows it as of 10.5, but it is not exposed to the user.

Depends what you mean by "not exposed to the user": while ln(1) can't create directory hardlinks it works fine via link(2) (on HFS+), with the limitation that hardlinked directories can't be siblings.

And of course directory hardlinks are fucking terrifying because `unlink(1)` will not work, and `rm(1)` will recursively remove directory contents, so you need to go through `unlink(2)` in C.
Without knowledge of their reward function its difficult to tell if they're converged on this strategy or if its just broken.
Author here. I've dug reasonably far into international cinema -- at a glance, about 250 - 300 outside US Cinema, across various time periods: French New Wave, Korean, Iranian, etc.

On David Lynch -- I like stuff that is weird and unusual. I LOVED the first three or four episodes of Twin Peaks. But after that, it was an unbelievable disappointment. You cannot seriously tell me that the latter half of Season Two was good. It was clear that Lynch had drafted the body of a Blue Velvet-style movie that lent itself well to a few hours of material, but once you got past the first three or four episodes, there was no material left. From there on, the attempts to keep the plot together became more and more abstruse.

With a guy like Lynch, these movies do not showcase the "raw power of the human imagination" -- what they showcase is a man who is deeply disorganized.

To the extent that his films are flawed, they are always flawed in the same way: execution of the latter half. Premise and first half is always fine. That pattern speaks volumes.
From a quick skim and from a few Google searches I cannot find a definition of "headless React". The first sentence in this post already assumes you know what it means, as do most other sites I can find that mention it. Can anyone enlighten me?
We voyaged the world in wooden boats for a long time too. It was absurdly laborious and dangerous.
Of course! Many people are deploying full-blown web apps on Workers today. We're constantly working on new features to fill in gaps so more types of apps can be built entirely on Workers. Durable Objects, cron triggers, increasing the time limit from 50ms to 30 seconds (and eventually 15 minutes), etc. are all part of this, and we have more coming.
That's true. There's been multiple ice ages over the eons, not to mention shifting continents, and new species radically changing the landscape (the land used to be dominated by giant mushrooms, before plants came along).

That being said, although climate and the makeup of life on earth changes on its own, and can greatly change over time, the big difference here is how fast this is happening. I feel quite confident that humans will never kill all life on earth, because life is very adaptable and resilient. However, rapid climate change could result in the loss of a huge amount of the biodiversity that exists now. Many species will die, and be replaced with more resilient ones.

I think what we're also likely to see, is that some of the most adaptable animal species are small animals (eg: rodents) and insects, things that are typically considered invasive species. Larger animals don't reproduce as fast, and there aren't as many, so they have a smaller gene pool that doesn't recombine as rapidly as with animals that can produce large amounts of babies every year. That makes them way more vulnerable to being killed off by climate change. So, yeah, I hope you like cats, rats, possums, mosquitos and cockroaches.
rST doesn't support nesting markup (bold and italic? nope. code styling in a link? nope.). It's decent for writing software docs, but not good at all (in my opinion) for writing blog posts or other prose.
I should have used the creation of Bitcoin, the true cultural milestone on this board (January 2009).
Is this a long way of saying '#fakenews'?
Please don't cross into personal swipes and flamewar in HN threads. It leads to hell and discredits the position you're arguing for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well I'm not American and I read mostly "self-help" books, from "In Search of Meaning" to "Code Complete" to "Extreme Ownership" to "High Output Management" to "Never Split The Difference". I always read one before I go to sleep.
the sooner we move to nuclear the quicker we will get to clean energy
From what I understand they knew because there was a lot more than a handful of cases. The government was suppressing the news because that's what you do when you have bad news in an authoritarian state. Remember the early news from doctors who were trying to understand what was going on and were getting censored by the government? They had to form an underground information exchange until the problem finally got so big (and spread internationally) that they couldn't pretend anymore.

IMHO, this discussion about the lab is a distraction from the real discussion we should be having. The one about suppressing discussion between doctors who are merely reporting on what they're seeing and delaying the worldwide response as a result.

Even today the CCPs official numbers on COVID infections in China are extremely unlikely. They claim to have had fewer cases than even New Zealand. Clearly there is political influence being exerted over the official figures.
Yes, similar viruses are known far outside Wuhan. In this case, with the first known infections occurring in Wuhan and no known bat coronavirus source anywhere near Wuhan, other than the Wuhan Institute of Virology..., lends credibility to the lab theory, does it not?

Infections from nature aren’t rare, unfortunately neither are infections from labs. In fact, if you compare the relative few places on earth where this type of viral and pathogen research occurs to all the places humans interact with the natural world, I.e. the whole world, you could say infections coming from labs are actually are far more common occurrence proportionally adjusted.
There is even a paper trail of government officials expressing concern about lax safety measures at this particular lab. Well before the world heard of coronavirus.

If it is common for humans to be infected by bat viruses, I don’t see that as a point against the theory that one or more humans working at a lab that analyzes and manipulates bat viruses were infected with a bat virus that then led to a larger spread of the infection outside the lab.
> Hence I have zero sympathies for these 'activists' aka hired thugs.

This is a weird derail, since the point of the posted article is that the evidence implicating the accused in Maoist sympathies was illegally planted.
Ask HN: Mental health providers for remote teams
We are a remote first organization. I want to extend an opportunity for everyone in our organization to have access to therapy. I think that this will increase overall health, happiness and productivity of everyone in our team. What are some providers that we can engage to make therapy available for everyone in our remote team?
Well, some limits of support should be given:

- How about 5 years minimum for hardware? And as much as the vendor wants to promise.

- How about that requiring that vendors at least allow for customers to pay for extended support for another 5 years by paying 20% of the initial price per year.

It is just ridiculous that currently many devices are insecure 3 months out of the gate.
Well it seems the claims that the lobbyist is making about his contacts with Congress have been denied by the elected officials. They wouldn’t lie would they?
> It's a corner of the web that hasn't been fully co-opted and dominated by centralized trillion-dollar monopolies hell bent on quantifying your ad preferences while beating all divergent thinking out of you.

Yes, but in the view of an outsider who at least has some knowledge of what it's trying to accomplish it seems mostly dominated by people running pump and dump schemes, scams, and other activities of ill repute. As such it is hard to see it in a positive light, and in the solution spaces of most businesses blockchain doesn't really fit and is the worst kind of vapourware instead. Worse, a lot of the applications seem to assume a perpetuity of things where there's no clear path of stewardship (decentralized or otherwise) of what happens when people get bored of it or the network stops being able to meet it's intended goals. Most applications of blockchain require people to not be bad actors and exploit the system, unfortunately it seems to have attracted a lot of bad actors.

The only use I've seen that makes any sense is CT (certificate transparency), where it actually fits the model provided by the blockchain concept well. It's my only example of a relatively 'clean' blockchain tied to something useful and practical and helps even people that don't understand it.

People excited around blockchain seem to be excited with the community they created and I don't think that's wrong. However, it is hard for me to see that community worth personally joining when a lot of what you see discussed around blockchain ends up being bots, salespeople, scammers, astroturfers, or the misinformed. It's not inducing the same medium of creativity as lot of other web inventions like forums, flash, mobile apps, etc. It just ends up being about itself which is fine but nets limited interest which makes the negative actors stand out that much more. I'm sure there's pockets of genuine good here and there, but it's hard to see past the dark vile ichor that surrounds everything.
Please don't respond to a bad comment, or a provocation in a comment, by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only takes us deeper into hell. We're trying to avoid that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No, they’ll need a new target to paint as a ‘globalist,’ Bezos doesn’t inspire the same amount of irrational hatred in this crowd for some completely unknown reason.
In France, there's a system called VAE (acquired experience validation) which is a mean to convert experience to a credential. It requires to prepare a complete file with an university. The VAE acknowledge an equivalence with an university degree
Well, if the authors of these posts disagree, they should contact the government and offer their testimony as well, then we can consider their argument to hold similar weight.
Oh definitely. Rust was the first to be trendy enough to get traction though. I'm not bashing previous attempts to replace c.

Dependency management, packaging, and testing are what really made Rust take off. The best of any language I've used.
I don't think it's usually a problem of "remove either A or B", it's usually "should we remove A or invest work in making it compatible with changes ahead?".

I see how usage telemetry can be useful in deciding whether or not it's worth it to keep supporting a feature, but I offer two counterbalancing points:

1. What people may be worried about - what I myself am worried about - is the methodology creep; it's too easy to end up having telemetry drive feature removal decisions, as in, "monthly report says feature X is used by less than 1% of users, therefore let's schedule its removal for the next sprint". The problem here is, telemetry alone will likely lead you astray. It's useful as a data source, not as the optimization function of product development.

2. If a feature you're worrying about has significant use, you most likely already know it without telemetry - all it takes is following on-line discussions mentioning your product (yes, someone might need to do it full-time). If removing the feature will have major impact on your maintenance budget, and non-telemetry sources don't flag this feature as being actively used, you can just axe it - revenue hit from lost userbase you've missed is unlikely to be big.

From this follows that the telemetry is most useful for deciding the fate of features that aren't used much, and don't cost much to maintain. At which point, I wonder, do you really have such low margins that you can't afford to carry the feature a while longer? I'm strongly biased here, because I'm going only by my personal experience - but I'm yet to see a software company[0] that doesn't have ridiculous amounts of slack. Between the complexity, management mess-ups, piles of technical debt and the nature of knowledge work being high-variance, having a feature slow your current development down by half[1] won't have much long-term impact.

--

The question thus is, are the gains from usage telemetry really worth the risk and potential ethical compromise? Would those gains be significantly lessened, if the telemetry was opt-in, and the company put more work into getting to know the users better? I suspect the answer is, respecting your users this way won't hurt you much, and may even benefit you in the long run.

--

[0] - Other than one outsourcing code farm I briefly worked in (my boss loaned me for a couple weeks to a friend, to help him meet a tight deadline), but these kind of companies don't make product decisions, they just close tickets as fast as possible.

[1] - And hopefully leading some devs notice the need for a refactoring, in order for that feature to not be a prolonged maintenance burden.
"serious blind-spot though"
Historically I think you are correct. The barbarians at the gates could topple any elite before this one.

However, I think there is an even bigger blind-spot in the general population: technology.
We have a level of technology such that aggression and basic necessities can be quite easily produced with few people (drones, modern agriculture etc). They are not as dependent on us as previous elites. I think they know that when they fly to New Zealand they can keep all the refugees out quite easily, while maintaining a life with as much comfort as today.