skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> String processing library might want to iterate over chars, to do it a code needs to decode UTF8 string

UTF-8 was specifically designed such that most code can deal with it byte-by-byte without any decoding step. I've written many parsers for example, they all just read byte-by-byte and special things happen at ASCII characters (such as ';' or '\n'), and it works trivially with UTF-8 inputs, I don't have the care at all.

I've also written a text editor with a complicated text rope data structure in it. Do you think I should have made a different text rope for each different text encoding the editor should deal with?

No - what my editor does in UTF-8 mode for example, at the visual and editing layer it pulls out data byte-by-byte from the text rope and interprets it as UTF-8. If there is invalid UTF-8 it has to deal with it. But hey, that is the reality of files on a file system - they can contain encoding errors, right? Deal with them! (if you can't simply ignore them).

> Or when trying to get a slice with chars from 5 to 12.

There isn't a single definition of "char". What even is a "char"? Is it a byte? Is it a unicode codepoint? Is it any other kind of Unicode combination of codepoints or glyphs or combine sequence and emoji modifiers or whatever all that junk is called?

If you need a specific subsequence of some UTF-8 encoded text, use a library that fetches it from the byte storage. There is no point in making a programming language type, because you'll lock in to certain usages, and next thing you'll need is a completely different type.

The reality is that data is stored in memory in byte sequences, and that's the representation that a programming language should expose. Everything else is code / libraries.
> So it's easy to see Israel's interest in supplying technology to those regimes and assuring good relations;

It's easy to see that it's in my interest to kill a woman on an unlit street and nick her purse. What kind of argument is this??

It's especially aggravating since so much propaganda comes out touting Israel as a democracy and decrying the savage Palestinians for being a dictatorship.
All I see is a white egg and a blue egg.

Jokes aside, it must feel surreal to see it in person, a "photoshopped out" piece of reality of you will.
But why? Where does that come from? Why is it different in Eastern Europe? My experience was that it was just another subject; those that were more diligent were as good at it as at other subjects (many were girls, as girls tended to be more diligent in general). Many were bad at it but they were bad at most subjects.

I would guess the 'being bad at maths is OK' or 'maths is uniquely hard' is a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning many students don't try as hard as with other subjects.
As someone who, after fond childhood memories, wanted to give modern VS a shot on a large C++ codebase, and immediately retreated back into Emacs, I have to agree: VS Code is a breath of fresh air, and a promise of a better IDE.

I mean that wrt. the state of Visual C++ - I spent months coding in unaugmented Emacs, without support of LSP[0], running build commands manually, because that was more productive than VC++ that would regularly freeze or crash for no reason. The only reason I keep it around now is because I need its build tools, and because of its debugger, which works great[1].

It's a stark difference compared to my experience with Visual C#, which I consider a solid, robust product.

--

[0] - Took me a while to block off some time and get clangd to work with the idiosyncrasies of both the codebase and my Emacs setup; now that I've done that, I'm a happy camper and need VS Code no more.

[1] - Of course, I invoke it on demand via `devenv /debugexe`, not by keeping the project open in Visual Studio. On that note - if anyone knows a good replacement for MSVC debugger, I'd love to try it. Extra points if it works with Debug Adapter Protocol - though as far as I can tell, there aren't any DAP-compatible debuggers for C++ outside of vscode-cpptools.
From my experience, what the writer is talking about is a transcendental experience that sounds awfully similar to what happens under psychedelics. Experiences like this are highly influenced by set, setting and expectations, and can go wrong.

Meditation is an incredibly deep practice, and if you engage in it you must be aware that it is much more than a stress-relief tool. Many people meditate with the explicit purpose of reaching that state. When you keep that fact in mind, experiences like what was described in the article are desired and welcome.
Low cost router board features WiFi 6 and five GbE ports with Qualcomm IPQ5018
Is this wrong at all? I like YouTube, particularly creators like Gamers Nexus/ Hardware Unboxed for example, and like it when they engage in discussions on reddit or discord.

The internet connects people, sometimes 1:1, sometimes 1:N.
I want a law passed that requires the installation of a giant light on top of the car to indicate to me that it is in self-driving mode and may do something unpredictable at any point. At least give me a chance of avoiding a crash, especially if I am underway on a motorbike.
FSD videos -- hands off, car does something dumb and they grab the wheel.
This seems like a very uncharitable reading of that quote.

Btw, what is organisation meant to do in this situation? Sue the person they believe is infringing on their rights without regard to humanity? Ignore the issue altogether?
This is just sad to read. You wonder what is the point of all this stuff. Imagine inducing trauma in yourself for no discernible reason. Why, why?
> an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not a charlatan

I'm really hoping you were going for darkly ironic humour, if not, please reread your sentence I quoted and, I don't know, contemplate on it.

Received transmission? From the Trisolarians perhaps?
Pharma companies should not profit off pandemics. It is an ethical thing to do. And beside that, I know that drug companies are heavily subsidised by state and their research is mostly done with tax-exempt money.
How would you describe your psychological state before going to your first 10 day meditation retreat?
I work in a large company and a manager cannot do that. The most he can do is argue to assign you a bigger yearly bonus (at the expense of your coworkers).
>Iran afaik was a full blown dictatorship before the islamic revolution

Yes, but he was talking about before that wasn't he? Iran was a democracy (flawed, but still) before the US–UK alliance overthrew the parliamentary system and installed a puppet dictator, to keep stealing their oil.
> You can't expect customers to be courteous and professional with you if the product is sex

Whatever the product, even if there is no product, one should expect others to be courteous and professional and sex "workers" (I do believe it's real work, yes) deserve to expect this just as much as others - it's just a shame that so many men (not always, but generally) let them down so much.
In my personal simulation hypothesis, quantum mechanics is a workaround for when pesky scientists started looking closely at the edge cases in the simulation’s behavior.

It’s expensive to simulate every particle, so it’s easier to simulate the macroscopic observables of a system in bulk. But if you try to look at individual particle interactions, you end up seeing that things aren’t deterministic any more (because the individual particles aren’t typically simulated), and the results of experiments are heavily dependent on when/what exactly you decide to measure.

Wave function collapse is what happens when the simulation had to fully evaluate a particle interaction that would have normally been optimized away.
Meanwhile, you can't walk two blocks in SF without seeing a Cruise or Waymo car, and those are driving thousands of miles between disengagments. This looks like a hobby project in comparison.
The people I speak of weren't immigrants though. They were just abandoned in their own countries.
As another article published here some time ago said - mostly not.
So they're funded by dozens of nations yet charge a fee to access their so-called Public Standards? Operational costs cannot be covered by the member countries? After all, public standards benefit everyone, and is the raison d'etre for the ISO to be constituted in the first place. A corporate paywall makes sense, not from an org acting for the public.
The EU is still, at core, an economic/trade union, not a geopolitical actor. That's both cultural and structural.

Meanwhile, european people's appetite for "international" politics is been mostly satisfied with world politics... especially US politics, which was good and saucy for the last few years. The most animating issues of recent years have been: Trump, BLM related US politics, Israel-Palestine conflicts & climate change. Most of what happens in EU parliament attracts very little interest in the greater citizenship-journalism-politics sphere. National politics is, by far, still the main political sphere.

European politics rarely becomes primary news/politics "stories." That applies to both Hungary, within the Union and Belarus, an immediate neighbor. It also applies to Ukraine and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which was largely about EU affiliation.

Notable exceptions are Brexit, peek refugee migration and the Greek/Euro crisis... 12 years ago. The ironic exception to "EU politics doesn't exist" is the nationalist, eu-skeptical camp which has been developing an EU-wide audience.

In any case, IDK if "helpless" is the right word. It's more like "uninterested." Hungarian freedom of the press and such just aren't on anyone's agenda. The fact that they're EU doesn't really mean much.
I don't know about you, but I don't make my money by forcing people to piss in bottles.
I think it's a shame that people have bundled Elon into the Bezos / Branson battle. What Musk is doing is far more useful (and has been for a while now) than the measuring contest that's happening between the other two.
What Happened to Flight MH370? (2019)
>To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered states of consciousness seems implausible.

... Why would that be implausible, at least for non-pedantic values of risk-free?

More and more, modern neuroscience confirms aspects of Buddhist teaching; from the nature of self to the workings of emotion. Buddhist meditation practice has been shown to have real and permanent (and positive) effects. Monks have studied the workings of the mind in altered and unaltered states for lifetimes, over thousands of years. Can you name any practice more effective? Because if you can, I'm certain the monks will be interested.
If I somehow made it seem as I thought Apple sell data then that wasn't my intent (but neither does Facebook or Google sell their data).

However I do believe that Apple is only doing what you describe as a PR move. At the same time Apple fight other's advertising and tracking they are strengthening their own version of this. That users get something good out of it is strictly a side-effect. Promoting Apple because of this is in my opinion worse than promoting Facebook for their behaviour as they don't try to sell it as "protecting their users" as far as I know. Using an Apple phone is likely better than one Facebook had its hands on but the thinking and ethics behind is worse in an Apple product as they are successfully being extremely disingenuous towards their users about protecting their privacy.
Before getting super vocal, please consider that HN is a global community and hence your critique might be very irrelevant to GP or other readers.

Sex work is very different in Australia for example, where it is regulated, with regular testing, mandated security at venues, and no risk of criminalisation. Full access to banking. And while assaults are always a risk, there are "camgirls" who have been doxxed and raped too.

This is why I think people should stop being outraged by words especially in mass media. Context is key, and context is local.
I wouldn't conflate mindfulness (or capital M mindfulness, you could say) with meditation either.

Meditation has always been a deeply spiritual practice; Mindfulness attempts to turn it into a psychological, clinical one.
Along those lines there's a notable pop-sci book by Robert Sapolsky, "Why Zebra's don't get ulcers" (https://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras-Dont-Ulcers-Third/dp/08050...).

Basically this guy made his scientific career by doing epic experiments where he observed communities of baboons during various social interactions, blow-gunned individual baboons with tranquilizers, then very quickly, took samples of their blood to analyze glucocorticoids (these are stress-response hormones and have a half-life measured in minutes).

Anyway, crudely stated, the major finding is that animals have intense episodic stress throughout their lives but never suffer health consequences from that stress because it's occasional. Humans, on the other hand, can get the same levels of "fight-or-flight" stress but at long-lived, daily intervals. Excessive glucocorticoids, over a long term, can interfere with the normal functioning of the body and precipitate a wide variety of health problems including heart-disease (and ulcers, as the title suggests).

In the case of driving, an aggressive lane-changing drive in a fast car might be exhilarating under certain conditions, but it's a different story for a daily commute. It's no accident that the advice given to people that experience aggressive drivers on the road is often along the lines of "Let him go, don't become a part of his bad day." Aggressive driving is a self-reinforcing bad habit that becomes part of people's identity in many cases. Personally, I don't care about the health of aggressive drivers, but I do care about their propensity to cause accidents and hurt innocent people.
Early adopters pay more and support product development, which eventually trickles down. News at 11.
Here is a technical report about the exploits: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2021/07/forensic-...
> you should be spending your time and your money and energy trying to solve problems here on Earth.

I think that largely misses the point, either on purpose or out of sheer ignorance.

So far the main contention is that they should never have been allowed to amass such insane amount of money that they can have this dystopic billionaire space race. Had they paid better salaries to their employees, kept working conditions sane, had lower working hours, etc etc etc. they might have solved (or at least not created / helped with) many of said problems in the first place.

Edit: typo
Two questions regarding Musk that people should ask more often:

1. If the public money being thrown at SpaceX were redirected, what could NASA (or other private companies) do with it?

2. If the administrators of NASA collected $80B (combined) in salary and bonuses last year, largely from public coffers, would that be considered reasonable?
We haven't even entered the real "Space Age." Commoditization of space flight is an important step. Call it whatever you want, it might be frivolous for Bezos and Branson to be the ones going into space, but who cares? It's such a small aspect of what's going on behind the scenes, where we have several private companies pouring billions into research of space flight.

> But what he and Branson are doing has none of that R&D that defined the space age, where innovations in materials and technology found real-world applications and became everyday objects for common people.

Except that these companies absolutely are doing R&D. We don't know what sort of "real world applications" might come from it in the future. We do know that right now, it's extremely expensive and difficult to go into space for anyone. Hopefully in the future going into space will become more than an expensive hobby for billionaires, but you can't get there without investment into space exploration.

> All they're doing is spending millions of dollars doing something that has already been perfectly possible for over 70 years.

Yet we still haven't returned to the moon and haven't gone to Mars, or to an asteroid, or to really anything else in that time. Being able to do it and it become a thing that we do are two different things entirely. We can't rely solely on NASA for innovations in space flight, especially when its funding can be stripped and killed off on the whim of a President, like Obama's disastrously bad space policy did during his presidency.
Yes, a good PR move by Apple. Especially when you can get access by going to someone like NSO instead.
>Eastern Europe, like many other poor places in the world, is depleted of human capital because its simply such a crappy place to live.

What makes you think that it's crappy place to live (e.g Poland)? except politics
Without more details you're just announcing your biases to HN.
I find this logic quite interesting.

Amazon is often the best employer many individuals have ever had in their areas.
While terse, the sentiment was to highlight that maybe it isn't swimming that is the issue at hand here. It's swimming the english channel every day.

A normal activity that when pushed to the limits of endurance, can overwhelm an individual. But that doesn't necessarily make swimming or meditation something to be feared or avoided.
Transmission simply means their teacher considers them ready to also become teachers, it’s not some whoo science fiction mind meld or something… There are some cases of teachers giving this out inappropriately however these are rather obvious if you were to speak to one who has achieved the real deal vs not..

Buddhism is largely an oral tradition, in that the teachers who exist today can trace their education back up a tree, this is all I mean by transmission.
Agreed. The last comment that got everyone upset could be understood to be poorly worded, but that first one, which never was edited or deleted, is damning.

This is a shame, because Muse Score is a great piece of software.
Carl Sagan on Albert Einstein – The New Republic
When you changed it. To use your own words, if you "suspect someone is using my services to break the law or engage in terrorism" and you then delete all evidence then you are absolutely tampering with evidence. If AWS was used to DDoS all hospitals in the US and people died, would you see a move by Amazon to delete all trace as just fine and dandy "because the US isn't a police state"? I doubt that. It doesn't matter if it is a small or big crime; knowingly deleting evidence is a crime too.
Good talk, aside from the anecdotes, which I don't believe. The design is exactly the same as we had in the late 90s. Still live in many of the major equity exchanges throughout the world.
The Three Tropes of White Victimhood
Whilst at the same time endorsing coups because that country's interests didn't align with his private interests.

Elon Musk is not a net positive for humanity.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/elon-musk-confesses-to-l...
I've heard that NNSA recruits pretty actively among people separating from the service.
I also see much more that we get "pre glued" things that we then glue a few more things to.

Do you mean other trends like increasing use of frameworks, scaffolding tools and “convention over configuration”? If so then I agree. One of the trade-offs being made there is immediate convenience against long-term flexibility. You get more functionality out-of-the-box with these kinds of tools, but the price is that they often don’t compose well.
“Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup.”

My experience of not wearing makeup in lots of places, over many years: Nothing happens. It’s fine.
I don't know. I believe the most likely outcome is effects that are serious, but significantly less serious than the mainstream consensus claims. I believe the error bars are much wider than anyone admits. I believe the narrow range of countermeasures that it's politically acceptable to move towards implementing are not particularly reasonable and will not be effective.
It's a great quip. Single planetary culture is a local optima.

Even mild resource extraction from space or a second planet massively boosts a civilization's resource base.

Not sure why Bezos and Branson are getting flack, when people just as rich as them are spending it in worse ways.

And, if it comes down to it, I'd rather see the super wealthy spend their money on technological advancement, than be another drop in the bucket on things government should be doing (social support, healthcare, etc).
I think those comparisons are unhelpful. The idea of closer integrity in Europe is not what is unsavoury in those examples, it is the manner in which it was attempted. The EU is an attempt at democratic and mutually agreed union, celebrating differences. Napoleon and the third reich were conquest, bloodshed and forced change.
> many individuals

What's the proportion of those to the total number of individuals employed, directly or indirectly by them?
Leading PropTech Companies in 2021: Overview
Bi-polar is specifically screened for as a contra-indication for retreats, at least Goenka ones (along with Reiki practice, interestingly). They may still allow a diagnosed individual on, but are supposed to give extra attention.

What retreat did you go on, and did they ask about bi-polar experience pre-retreat?
In a similar vein, it seems fairly unlikely that anyone's implementing the actual C++ specifications rather than the final drafts.
What am I missing here?
From what I read the guy is trying to be chill with somebody who is infringing.
Does somebody have a more informed take?
> If there is one single lasting international effect of Orbán and his party, it's how he demonstrated how EU is completely helpless against rouge states (as well).

Helpless and hypocritical. If Orban rolls out surveillance he is a dictator. If UK or Germany do it, it's the noble fight against terrorists, pedophiles and kids downloading moviez from the internet.
> Like most bioinformatics programs, AlphaFold 2 comes equipped with a “preprocessing pipeline”, which is the discipline’s lingo for “a Bash script that calls some other codes”.

Having Bioinformatics people requiring to stray a long way from their core competency to learn a scripting language from the 80's to write glue code seems... suboptimal. How many hours of expert time has been wasted figuring out how to split a string in bash?

Can us software people build a better tool to eliminate the need for this?
> extremely unlikely

That implies that there can only be exactly one universe, whereas the simulation hypothesis (just as the multiverse or many worlds interpretation) say that there are infinite. Thus, the probability of something happening is undefined, as there is no denominator and everything possible happens somewhere.
That is a good article which summarises the state of AEB and its general capability. It's worth noting that the most effective system they tested doesn't use radar at all, it was an entirely vision-based system: Subaru Eyesight. Worth remembering this when people agonise over Tesla ditching radar sensors on the Model 3.

I chose my parents' most recent new car precisely because of this—a 2019 model year Subaru Forester. Not only was the active safety top notch, its chassis tuning means that it's more capable of remaining composed after swerving to avoid an obstacle. (It was also one of the few vehicles which ticked every box for them.)

Here is the comparison I relied upon for that decision. (Yes, I am Australian.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs7PSpIMJYk
Seems super niche as the data hosting limits are really low. I post speedruns to youtube sometime and an hour long run can be 20gb+ @ 1440p60. I might post 3 runs in a day if I broke a PR twice for example, that's more content than the premium tier on here created in < 4 hours.