skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>consumers go to aggregators because they want to, not because they are forced to.

Recently I wanted to buy 10-ish dead tree books in English and get them shipped to an eastern EU country. Going through the first 20~ DDG results of online stores exactly zero would ship them here. Also, the local bookstores would have only few books in English, mostly the 'bestseller'-type stuff.

Amazon was the only place that would have them available and would ship them here..
I don't get it. I just don't.

I don't even WANT to have that conversation with a random person...

What is with these people?

Gotta be honest I'd even be a little uncomfortable about the shirt... the whole situation is wonky.
Did I miss the night city saver that’s pictured in the logo?? It’s my favorite and does not appear to me there…
digital audio, yep -- in contrast with analog audio :)

The TL;DR is that you make your computer spit out a certain amount of distinct values per second (like, say, 44100 floats per second, times two for stereo), and your DAC will convert that stream of numbers into an audio signal that your speakers will be able to use to produce sound.

The way I like to mess around with ideas is to grab a library that writes to WAV files and see what I can make -- a Sine oscillator at a certain given frequency is a good place to start -- and then you can load that WAV file into Audacity (or your other favorite sound editor of choice) and analyze what you just made.

More complex audio topics will require some DSP knowledge; I started teaching myself by reading http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm, but there are a decent amount of other resources to learn from too. Especially ones that focus more on the audio aspects of DSP.

There are some interesting programming challenges in the audio space; for example, if you want to pipe sound directly to your speakers (or in a plugin for a DAW), you're going to have to make your code real-time friendly. Designing an "audio graph" to hook devices up together (as if it was a modular system) can be a pretty interesting problem space when you're designing for real-time, polyphony, efficiency, etc. It's a fun topic if you're into both programming and music!
>Insisting that we act completely unnaturally seems futile and counterproductive.

That's how we have civilization...
Right, but we don't have any economically viable alternative to cars. If we outlaw cars, then what?
Any situation that has a plus and a minus is hard to decide. Typically it's also a private plus versus a public minus. If you remove yourself, you lose the benefits but the beast goes on without you. If it's going to survive regardless of your actions anyway, why not throw another drop in the ocean?

Goes for employees and customers.
You waited 3 hours for a passport appointment?
Read about Marek's disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease

"However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains.[13] The vaccine's inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens."
Why start with water heaters?
It's probably safe to assume that the largest reason the parent doesn't feel financially secure is because of the cost of housing.

So, sure, the parent could make a different choice, and move to a lower cost of living area, but then they'd be making significantly less, and might still not feel particularly financially secure.

Even now, with many companies realizing that remote work is ok, and planning to allow some form of it permanently, many also plan to change (lower) people's salaries based on where they end up deciding to live, even if they do the exact same work.
pnpm is really good. The workspace implementation is the only one that feels (mostly) intuitive and also comes with certain functionality usually associated with tools like Lerna. It also doesn't seem to break certain expectations that packages make in regard to node_modules and the like. While there a few things that could be improved, I think it's definitely worth a try and provides a good compromise between NPM and Yarn 2+.
I think the biggest selection problem is the Minority Report UI problem: hanging hands are not precise tools, nor are they comfortable to hold up for > ~a minute.

Right. The Autodesk people figured that out by 1990. It's like trying to draw while wearing mittens. And they had fingered gloves as input devices.
During the 1990s, there were many attempts at tactile interfaces. None of them ever caught on. My favorite was the levitated metal ball. It rested over a shallow bowl, and offered all 6 degrees of freedom, plus it could resist your movement and push back.

VR is good for looking at 3D models, but not for working on them.
The Metaverse is simply an immersive evolution of the internet itself
I use Cascadia with it (I know, poor license compatibility microsoft bad yadda yadda), and it goes together quite nice besides the inconsistent weighting.
Because the trisolarans didn't know who was out there until they received a message from Earth. They were worried that if they sent a probe to another star then a more advanced civilization perhaps hiding around that star would see the probe arrive, trace the source and annihilate them.
Once we learn to control antimatter it will be bad day for the Galaxy.

>lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods.

The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain :)

I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result.

Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission" instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions, including ones about modern world), people do write scientific articles on it)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...
> surprising that browsers never supported perl client side?

They did, actually:

https://perlhelp.web.cern.ch/Components/Windows/PerlScript.h...

If you installed ActivePerl, you could use, in IE 5.0,

<script language=perlscript>…</script>

I even remember using this for shits and giggles. And then I noticed noone else was willing to install it, and gave up on it.

(Don't get confused by the server-side bits, those are for IIS, this stuff did both server-side and client-side...)

[Ed.add.: also I don't think Netscape ever supported anything other than JavaScript, but I'm not sure of that.]
I am fairly certain they aren't naive about setting up their fact checking organization. They want to be taken up by anyone trying to verify facts so it's not in their interest to integrate bias.

Yes, there are revisions and the fact checkers fact check the fact checkers. They aren't colluding to implement left or right bias here. They are just making matter of fact statements like "it's false that the pfizer vaccine modifies your DNA" and providing sources that verify the claim and "no, politician X did not say Y"
"The whole of the USA" isn't a good metric to use since wages vary a lot between areas. What matters to your "middle class-ness" is the median wage in your particular area. And it's quite a bit higher than $65k in some areas.

Consider that the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development considers residents of San Francisco to be "low income" if they make under $82,200 as an individual or $117,400 as a family of four as of 2018[0]. Those numbers are 80% of median income, which means in SF for an individual the median income was about $103k. You said, "if you can earn 100k in your first year you're upper middle at minimum", but, alas, no: if you made $100k in 2018 in San Francisco, you were barely even middle-middle class.

Also consider that making the median wage in your area may still not allow you financial security. We're defining "middle class" here in relation to median wage, which may not be a universal definition. I would expect it has more to do with the median resident's purchasing power.

[0] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/poverty-san-francisc...
Turns out people lie (even in court, but let's just focus on the innocent until proven guilty part)

https://reason.com/2018/10/17/seneca-valley-mean-girls-false...
> packing my lunch to save money

Dressing cheaply also saves money. But it's a mistake for one's career. Wearing clothes that are a cut more expensive than your peers and competitors is a good investment in your future.

People adamantly deny that they're so shallow as to be affected by this, but I've seen it happen too often to discount it.

Back in my Zortech days, we decided on a policy that our employees would wear a suit whenever meeting customers. We even paid for the suits. Initially, there was a lot of grumbling about it. But it paid off. Our customers loved it, because they were sick of seeing software people dressed like slobs. For many of our employees, it was their first suit, and they loved the effect it had on their interactions.
You can see the shirt she wore at https://scontent.fapa1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.18172-8/2346745....

While I don’t condone this behavior, the back of the shirt says “When was the last time you were penetrated…”
Both the left and right are donors, nice.
yes, they are rolling alright; a flaming dumpster rolling downhill
I don’t understand how people are conflating recycling and climate change. I have seen more and more of this recently. Of course, virgin plastics mean consuming more fossil fuels but beyond that the two are largely separate in my mind.

Recycling everything is unlikely to do much to avert climate change, and could even make it worse if recycling is more energy intensive, but almost every day I see a discussion on climate and many “well, I recycle what I can” comments. Is there a common perception that recycling is a solution to the climate crisis or is it just that people feel it’s the only loosely-related option they have?

I’m not saying recycling isn’t important — it is — but it’s much less important than our rapidly collapsing climate.
MIPS the brand was bought for cheap from a bankruptcy, and resurrected by its new owner… to be an ARM partner building ARM chips.
>and then use the entangled pair of particles (one on earth, its mate on Trisolaris) to monitor events on earth in real-time.

This, of course, breaks the known laws of physics, since lightspeed is a hard limit on the speed of causality. You can't use entanglement that way in the real world (if QM is anywhere close to correct)
Those are the three branches of the state. We consider government to be the executive only. The judiciary does not govern.
A female hacker? Unheard of!

EDIT yeah we live in a post-joke world
Amazon has committed the "sin of success", so they're in the spotlight. Criticisms of Amazon make sense when viewed as criticisms of laws and incentives all business operate under.
Not to condone this behavior, but I think it's absolutely worth noting that she was wearing a shirt that said "Penetration Expert" on the front (which the article mentions) which is reasonably mild. But the shirt also says on the back, if you follow the link, "When was the Last Time you were PENETRATED..." [capitalization sic] (which the article conveniently leaves out).

I've gotta say, that is way more sexual of a joke than I'd personally be comfortable wearing in a business casual environment, and I can't help but feel that if you wear that you're really opening yourself up to people teasing you with "Oh yeah, when was the last time you were penetrated?". There's a big difference between "she was asking for it because of her clothes" - bad argument - and "she chose to wear a shirt with an overtly sexual joke on it and people repeated the joke to her".
Don't forget that if any company were to do litigation completely in-house, the second they were involved in one major litigation would be the perfect time for anyone else to take the company to court -- their lawyers are already all busy!
This doesn't ring true to me. I can memorise a phrase, mimic it, and associate the whole phrase with a meaning. But that comes before I even know what each individual word means.
90% of this “article” was a sales pitch for an affiliate refinancing service.

This article was pretty ridiculous and tone deaf, warning that people who are thinking about bankruptcy that they will have to sell their vacation homes.
No reputable brand is going to sell even half decent shoes for $35. This is a good example where you can see how much people are really willing (or able) to spend on “local” or “quality” goods that can help pay for a store’s staffing needs and other expenses.
My first stab at prototyping was with an STM32 discovery kit, a couple of breadboards, and a bag of random parts. The best advice I can you give you though is start with an idea. Do you want to do sensing, audio, LED art, a tiny game console, a robot? That’ll determine the kinds of hardware you should get and will direct your learning. I can also recommend Making Embedded Systems by Elecia White.
Covid 0! Be happy! Socially distance! Do your part! Flatten the curve.

Stay at square 0.
With Amazon there has been a long-term strategic plan. Bezos had been operating Amazon at a high level for a quarter of a century and most of his personal wealth is tied up in the stock. Your golden parachute premise doesn't apply in this case. There was a strategic plan, Bezos wasn't counting the seconds waiting on a golden parachute. Amazon is largely commanded by long-serving execs that notoriously take a long-term strategic view, not executives looking to bail out at any moment. Jassy for example has been there since 1997.

Amazon's ad business has extraordinary margins and is growing fast. They knew they could afford speed bumps between the starting block and where they plan to end up (one of the world's largest ad networks, reliably printing $30 billion per year in operating income).
if you want blisters instead of warts, cool. In all fairness, it might work, if you only put a tiny amount.
I guess I'd be just as nervous in space with thousands of tonnes of explosive propellant. Spaceflight always operates on the very edge of what's possible, not of what's safe.
I don't see a mention of quantum computers in the article. I think LHCb detected the particle.
In my experience, the most common failure case is that businesses will try to cut costs by either combining the roles, or stretching a PO or scrummaster across multiple teams. I’ve met people who I imagine could be good POs in a different situation, but were scatterbrained from having to manage 3-4 teams’ backlogs.
I frequently shopped at Barnes & Noble ~20 years ago. But they slowly carried less and less that I was interested in, seemingly shifting from a "store for people who like books" to a "store for people to buy gifts for people who like books".

At first I placed online orders with them, but once moving to online shopping at all, it was clear that Amazon had even better selection, prices, shipping, etc.

But I still enjoy a good physical bookstore. I might still shop there in person today if their stock was more interesting, even if the prices were a little higher.
What is a "black" name?
Can't wait for the day when this people finally realize that they are filling the car three times a week with a distilled juice of dead corpses called gasoline.

Cars are basically sacrificial altar machines requiring a daily offer of blood and flesh from prehistoric animals to keep moving... and they are worried by the leather in other's cars while driving home, pfff.
Founder of embattled electric truck startup Nikola charged with fraud
> That is not how a market economy works!

Well, you're right. I'm not in disagreement with the way in which dispassionate markets are understood to behave. I'm in disagreement that such a dispassionate job market is any sort of ideal that ought to be embraced by the average joe -- and that we've largely accepted it as if it were (or at least as if it were "good enough").

Let's say I go to a potluck and bring store-bought cookies as my contribution. My friends say "come on, wallacoloo, we all worked our butts off preparing good food for you: we deserve better from you." I reply, "well then, find a new friend who's willing to make better food for you and show them to me. Once you show me that such a man exists, I'll contribute to you as much as he would."

It's an absurd scenario. It's insulting. That's not any type of relationship we should aim for. But suddenly, once you introduce enough indirection (money, specialization, larger-sized groups), I'm supposed to think that making every such interaction into an adversarial one is somehow proper.
read this instead, it is the court decision: https://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/02bd25d5-26...
I'm pretty sure Common Lisp has well over 100 keywords.
If the phase changes happen on any kind of non-random schedule, however, it would still be introducing information into the system. And therefore violating know laws. Right?
Or just send it a random signal, such as static or even better, an aesthetic screensaver. Showing black on a CRT didn't save any power, and the computer stayed on anyways (since it often took 3-5 minutes to boot up in those days). Black could mean something is wrong or signal is disconnected.
The Shapeshifting Cam Girl Rewriting the Rules of Digital Porn
Why do these things take so long to find? Do they not show up in all collisions - why not, wrong matter, wrong speed? Do they regularly appear, but the "camera" has limitations? Is the "camera" all-seeing, but measurement interpretation inefficient? All/some of the above?
The person in question, for reasons unknown to us (perhaps peer pressure), also decided to perpetuate this kind of comedy with clothing that read "When was the last time you were penetrated?" It seems quite unfair to expect to dish out this kind of comedy without taking some of it back.
Hashids – Generate short unique ids from integers
Exactly-once semantics is virtually impossible to achieve, there is a lot of literature all over the internet, but an easy example could be the following.

Imagine a client sending messages to RabbitMQ with some retry policy if it doesn't receive the ACK from the broker. If the client sends the message and it doesn't receive the ACK in the terms it has been defined (maybe a timeout of 30s), it will retry to send the message, as the consumer assumes that the message hasn't been received by the brokers, but it could be that the ACK back to the client is the one that failed to be sent to the client. The brokers actually saved the message, and they stored it, but the client doesn't know, so it retries the message.

If you don't have some control over the messages, this retried message is _new_ to RabbitMQ, so it will store it and send back the ACK. Maybe this time it is successful and no other retries are made.

With this scenario, the brokers would have received the same message twice. By adding this kind of control (Kafka does more or less the same by discarding messages with already processed IDs when configured as exactly-once) you can try to avoid duplicates. Of course it is limited by memory and it is not in fact exactly-once semantics, so they are calling it now _effectively exactly-once semantics_, as it is more precise.
Mao's Study Groups and Mass Media, MKULTRA and the Internet
Ask HN: Short, Interesting, Skimmable Newsletters?
I'm looking for interesting, but short newsletters. Something that you can read in 5-10 minutes, and maybe dig deeper if something interests you. Could be weekly or daily.

Doesn't have to be startup or software related
It's PR nonsense. They dont want anyone not working for them to work for them.
My (hazy) memory says early IE only did VBScript, trying to "win out" against JavaScript, then MS "invented" JScript, until at some point they gave up and added JavaScript.

And yeah I used PerlScript (ActivePerl) in some hacks, but you had to install that separately which pretty much killed it.
> So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do?

Motivate other retailers to not be such lazy louts about technology?
CRTs were in use for decades.

In the early 1990s, there was no power saving. You could turn off the monitor with the front power switch, or use the screensaver.

A few years later, power saving options began to be introduced. The computer could signal to the monitor that it should go into a low(er) power state. Turning on again took at least 5 seconds for a visible picture, sometimes 15-20. That might not be appropriate if the computer had to be used in response to something like a phone call, or visitor at reception.
I didn't know what playdate was. From the website:

- Handheld game console with a focus on indie games

- Black and white display

- Analog crank on the side

- Comes with 24 free games

Sounds neat!
And when there’s a documented pattern to the point that lawsuits are filed with evidence and testimony, AND the person telling the story has very little to personally gain (and a lot to lose since conservative Twitter tends to send death threats over things like this), you tend to take the one more likely.

Further, if you read the article there is a literal whole company with a business relationship that was cancelled with blizzard over this. I think you really really really should do some soul searching on what makes you have a knee-jerk reaction that they're making it up.

But also, news organizations are cognizant that their credibility takes a hit if they just publish every single accusation regardless of attribution.
> One of the Blizzard employees first asked if she was lost, another one asked if she was at the conference with her boyfriend, and another one asked if she even knew what pentesting was.

Was that on the shirt too?
Take React.js's "Add React to a Website" article[1] for example. The example of adding JSX to an existing website[2]... breaks! And you won't exactly know when until it does and you have to delete your package-lock.json file. It should work the first time, but once you commit those package versions, running `npx babel [...]` may break depending on what is in your package-lock.json file, and when.

Why? Because installing the dependencies they specify and running babel (implicitly at the latest version) does not have reproducible results. It's that simple. package-lock.json is specifically supposed to help with this, but in some cases, it just doesn't, and it's entirely possible, and common(!) to have two sets of package.json files produce differing package-lock.json files.

They even have a warning below that can still occur even if you already have the dependencies specified above installed:

> If you see an error message saying “You have mistakenly installed the babel package”, you might have missed the previous step. Perform it in the same folder, and then try again.

[1]: https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html

[2]: https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html#add-jsx...
False. Confronting bad luck with well-prepared diligent effort can be pretty bad, but you can't know if the luck is good/bad without effort. It's like handcuffing yourself to "Schrödinger's albatros".

No, luck does not favour the prepared, but survivorship bias makes it seem so.
Oh I definitely understand. I just think it's ridiculous. The event is about the olympians. Spending a fraction of a percent of the budget of the event on the price seems fair.