skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The trouble with news today is that the ratio of publicity and punditry to data collected in the field is too high.

Try to find out what's happening in Kabul right now. What have we got?

Vast amounts of commentary are available, all resting on a very narrow base of facts. There's a little bit of cell phone video leaking out. Large numbers of people at the airport, out on the tarmac, hanging around planes that aren't going anywhere. Aljazeera has a reporter embedded with the Taliban, and he got a tour of the presidential mansion, showing lots of guys with rifles exploring the place and having meetings.

On the PR side, we have statements from the US State Department that the US embassy has been evacuated, civilian flights out of Kabul have stopped, military flights are continuing, the US has a few thousand troops at the airport, and more troops are coming in. There's a Taliban Twitter feed.[1] "The situation in Kabul is normal".

So what do we really know.?

- General agreement that there was no substantial fighting in Kabul.

- General agreement that the US holds the airport and the Taliban holds most of the rest of the city.

That's about it for hard facts. Yet there's a huge volume of published bullshit on all major media of all persuasions.

[1] https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1427101139481268227
lesson for myself : it is possible to live in two (at least for me) mutually ethically exclusive worlds...
Similarly, when trying to hire one of us, if you want us to know what we're getting into, don't fall into the corpospeak trap of vague "we leverage big data to deliver value to our customers by providing them with real-time yadda yadda" type language on your About Us page. WHO are your customers, WHAT do you provide that they want and HOW do you do it? Example: We use a network of heat sensors installed in our clients' retail locations to determine customers' foot traffic patterns so our clients can gauge interest in new products and optimize their store layouts. Coming out and telling people what you do in plain language is more likely to make one of us go "oh, neat, I'd definitely like to solve problems like that". Vague blather makes us think you're hiding something.
Because ya'll don't have any trees.

Wooden utility poles are made from a single piece of wood, usually the trunk of a pine tree. It's cheap to toss a bunch of them on the back of a truck and drive them to wherever, but they're typically longer than a cargo container, so putting them on a ship is annoying.

The forests in North America has lots of tall, straight pine trees but there are fewer forests in Europe and what forests there are tend to have more deciduous forests, where the trees are shorter, narrower, and ... squigglier.

You could have shorter poles and fit them into cargo containers more easily, but now you're stuck with short utility poles. Concrete or metal utility poles are a thing, but they're more expensive.
Read ghost wars and directorate S. Few simple narratives explain afghanistan. It is a clusterfuck but for reasons that are definitely not at all related to whatsapp. In the simplest expression it has been a proxy war with pakistan or at least pakistans psuedo-separate intelligence services.

If you want to talk win and lose, we "lost" afghanistan in february 1989 when the soviets left and we promptly abandoned all the afghanis that helped us to assist in driving them out.
I actually really like the rooms in some of these maximalist photos, but that doesn't mean I'd want to buy the stuff in them, or design my living space that way. I've learned through experience that a lot of it is really appealing in the moment, but some things I change my opinion about relatively quickly, or I'm much more variable in my opinions of. If I know that about something, I don't want to have it.

I was with a significant other once who had really similar tastes as me, but we differed a lot in our buying preferences. They were a lot more maximalist, and I was more minimalist. I went along with many their purchases because I did like the stuff after all, and loved them, but I noticed over time we were much more likely to get rid of the items they wanted, the "maximalist" items, and keep the stuff that was more minimalist. It wasn't just because we kept what I wanted either -- they got tired of it and wanted to change it for something else. The minimalist stuff they didn't initially see as exciting or interesting, but they also never got tired of it.

Minimalism isn't just about reducing unnecessary stuff in some sort of purity ritual, it's about learning and focusing on what consistently and reliably works for you emotionally and functionally. Simple tends to work well a lot of the time, and even though it's not as fun and novel, it tends to stay loved. In this regard, I think something can be minimalist if it reflects something that will work for you over the long run, that you won't get tired of and will last.
Nerds are people who are incredibly easy to market products to - it just needs to appeal to the rational mindset more than the emotional mindset.

Putting out a website full of statistics, or a tutorial, or a Product Hunt launch, or just a Show HN with a paragraph about how your product is incrementally better than the existing solutions will get thousands of nerds showing up at your door. We might like to think we're better than people who follow ads, but really we just follow different ads.

Promoting technical documentation as marketing is a bit odd though. Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs.
This is a no brainer for any serious setup. We use our main domain to add subdomains which point to local services.
When you're accessing a Windows-produced NTFS file in Linux, there is no Windows, only a Linux-mounted filesystem which holds that file.

Similarly, when you're accessing a Linux-produced FAT32* file in Windows, there is no Linux, only a Windows-mounted filesystem which holds that file.

In other words, a file is merely a file, and contained in a filesystem. If you can mount and access the filesystem, you can do anything you want with that filesystem, even up to deleting files contained within it.

* Windows can only read Microsoft filesystems, so the Linux-produced filesystem has to be one that Windows knows about.
I encountered the same issue once. Was trying to identify a song in a DJ set and all I had was a tape dub converted to MP3. Making a snippet and playing it back to my phone through a TRRS cable didn't work to identify the song through Shazam or Soundhound.

Playing it loud on an average, bass boosted bluetooth speaker box (almost to the point of distortion) and letting my phone's crappy microphone pick up the song... Did.

Given that the song detecting apps expect to pick up songs people play by sticking their phone in the air, I would not be surprised if a signal could also be _too high_ of a quality for a match.
It gave me a very peculiar feeling. Some of them triggered a memory I can't quite recall, due to how young I was at the time. Quite unsettling. But then at the age of three or four I was quite scared of the vinyl cover of "ABBA: The Album".
Everything can be blamed on global warming.
> but I always had a different understanding of the “thundering herd” problem; that is, if a service is down for whatever reason, and it’s brought back online, it immediately grinds to a halt again because there are a bazillion requests waiting to be handled.

That... doesn't have much to do with the thundering herd problem. It also doesn't make much sense as a concept on its own merits -- say you come in to work and your inbox is full enough for three inboxes. Does that fact, in itself, mean that you decide you're done for the day? No, it just means you have a much longer queue to work through than usual.

The thundering herd problem refers to what happens when (1) a bunch of agents come to you for something while you're busy; (2) you tell them all "I'm busy, go away and come back later"; and (3) the come-back-later time you give to each of them is identical, so they all come back simultaneously.

And that's exactly what's happening here, except that instead of giving each worker thread a come-back-later time when it asks for work, you're receiving work, sending out individual messages to every worker saying "hey, I'm not busy anymore, come back RIGHT NOW and get some more work", and then rejecting all but one of the thundering herd that shows up. The reason the Gunicorn docs and the uWSGI docs both refer to this as a "thundering herd" problem is that it's a near-perfect match for the problem prototype. The only difference is that, instead of giving out identical come-back-later times to worker threads as they ask you for work, you tell them to wait for a notification that includes a come-back-later time, and then when you get one piece of work you fire off that notification separately to every sleeping thread, including identical come-back-later times in each one.
Here is the explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ6FD59U0_E
That’s a very controversial standard as it can be abused for tracking and does not really protect end users from spoofing.
Peter Sripol on youtube has made four airplanes from scratch.
Sure makes you think about what else the FDA allows...
The old line of rotary-wing aircraft "beating the air into submission" is so gloriously accurate on every level. Those pilots are wired different, kind of like submariners (checklists, roles/responsability, ...) in order to deal with their complex environment.
Ah, open the link and first thing I see is Finlandia Hall's main concert hall. I worked there as an event assistant and host as young student back in the day. Was very nice to listen to classical music concerts and other on the work there. Nice place, great historic atmosphere. :) No events anywhere near as important as the Helsinki Process during my days though. This was between 2005-2010.
Now that’s a fun fact! Thanks for sharing this blast from the past
Thanks for the share! I took some quick (read, not proof-read) snippets on this if anyone wants to see: https://synth.app/s/uiElJvnnk
When I visited India, I drove by this area where there were there were stalls with Indians breaking up old rusty equipment back into parts. Much respect. I think people in the west, don't have a clue how hard some people work for so little return.
Retail stores in the US are required to verify the age of those purchasing tobacco products and alcoholic beverages. They typically limit the types of identification they accept and they could lose their license to sell those products if they sell to those who are under age.

There's absolutely no reason why banks can't do something similar (actually more stringent) when extending a line of credit. The PATRIOT act in the US requires banks to verify the identity of those trying to open an account or secure a mortgage loan, so requiring something similar for lines of credit shouldn't be out of the question.

The root cause of the issue is the law I referenced in the comment[1] that started this subthread. If consumers were able to sue banks and credit bureaus for false information, then banks would have much more incentive to be more diligent. Right now, they can offer "identify theft protection" service where the consumer has to pay them instead. That doesn't give them incentive to be more diligent, and, quite possibly, has the opposite effect.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28194787
The area covered by the lasers should remain painted, so we could see all the spots which haven’t been hit ever.
How about judging the essence of an argument instead of just talking about prose and going on an irrelevant tangent about "recent articles on HN"?
It's not answering your question (indeed what you've described is actually very similar to my entity simulation example), but it sounds like the actor model might be a good fit, FWIW.
Generate React Component from Figma
5 yrs from now, using the term "addict" will be illegal...
Good, the lockdown was a huge mistake...
This is so true.

It sucks India does not have a hardware ecosystem similar to Shenzhen. There is no capital available for independent innovators who want to build hardware products. There are few skilled engineers who can develop the tooling required to make parts like screws, fittings etc. at a scale and price that makes sense for the market. Import duties to encourage import substitution have only made parts more expensive and made logistics more complex.

I think the attention given to IT services and software companies and startups has left the hardware industry without talent or capital. If you can make 5-10x as a software engineer than a tooling engineer, it makes zero sense to study mechanical engineering.
Boundaries, Membranes, Gestalts
> YouTube should warn people that its content shouldn't be mistaken for a comprehensive education on a dangerous topic.

You mean like those hundreds of safety warnings even for trivial appliances like smartphone chargers, which nobody ever reads? Do you think someone who builds a helicopter in their garage will be deterred by a warning "This video doesn't teach everything there is to know about mechanical engineering"? Come on.
What Is Parcel JavaScript?
Moving beyond coin voting governance
Sorry to hear that. It’s definitely a tragic story. I ordered some things from McMaster Carr just the other day and it arrived within a few days. I get frustrated sometimes when the parts I need have to ship from China and take a month. But they are cheap and they’ll arrive eventually.

It’s definitely sad to see genius wasted because the tools just sometimes aren’t available in places like India.

Thanks for this information, it’s easy living in the US to forget just how easy our lives are in so many different ways.
Please do your research before you criticize. If you have ever seen a tuk tuk, you would know that the top is a curved artificial leather covering stretched on a iron frame ( https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1ChvBPXXXXXbaXVXXq6xXFXXXo.jpg) . If you look at this tuk tuk, you can see the steel mounting frame for the solar panels instead of the usual artificial leather covering. So I am pretty sure that the did install the panels there as well. Also it seems quite simple to induce that being knowledgeable enough to operate a welding plant and hook up solar panels, he would know that the best place for the panels would be at the top. The only problem is that a tuk tuk has around 1.3mx1.7m space at the top. So obviously he needs another place to mount some more panels and the sides would be the next logical choice.
Projecting sex imbalances at birth from 2021 to 2100, global, national, regional
No, domain reputation does not solve the problem of spam (and especially [spear]phishing).
Madden NFL 22: X Factors ready to make a return in Madden 22
There are a lot of things which can be achieved by No-Code / low-code platforms, which otherwise used to take a lot of effort if you start from scratch using coding. Examples could be Customer Portals, Internal Apps for companies, Workflow applications, dashboard etc, employee/vendor onboarding etc. So given the need of such use cases, it is no brainer that these platforms are there to live long and thrive.
He is absolutely lacking in leadership skills...and you all know it.
Ah, the old Afghanistan resistance. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-os... (1993)
>"what amount happens on device vs. what amount happens on server" is a form of bikeshedding

There's a massive difference between a search carried out on a device someone "owns" and carries with them at all times, and a server owned by someone else.

To claim otherwise is absurd. Hence all this backlash.
I respond to Lego. When I see something I want small set of nice principles, ease of use to an extent, possibilities of reconfiguration and creativity. (probably why I loved the likes of Maya and Houdini.. it's mostly a DAG with input, geometry and renderers, have eternal fun with it)
Here's the quote with a tiny bit more context:

> Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots [...]

Seems pretty clear-cut to me. The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
I took some quick (read, not proof-read) snippets on this if anyone wants a quick run down: https://synth.app/s/uiElJvnnk
It is an argument that the consensus of the overwhelming majority of experts on any given subject with such a consensus is strong evidence for that position.
Interesting, thank you. Yes, the rains are different here too, there is almost no quiet rain here anymore, it's violent and also it rains much less. Sometimes we go more than a month without any rain at all, which I could not imagine happening 10 or more years ago. Currently we are 100mm under the average on yearly basis, which combined with higher temperatures means everything is drier.

And of course there are more hot spells and they are hotter, last few days were around 33-34°C, which is becoming more and more common. Although we don't get 40°C, for now.
Mytechmag Artificial Intelligence Edition Jul 2021
This is spot on. And the converse is also true. There is no faster way to lose me as a customer than a shoddy documentation. No matter how great rest of the material is.

What will get my full attention, beyond documentation, is easy to try examples and a sandbox environment.
Based on the documentation, there do not appear to be any bitwise operations available in SNOBOL.

It looks like computing x as remdr(3) + remdr(5) is a pure mistake. You only care about the case where remdr(15) is 0, and it's true that remdr(3) + remdr(5) is 0 if and only if remdr(15) is 0. But you're calling remdr twice where you should only be calling it once.

(Or, really, you can keep the weird calculation of remdr(3) + remdr(5), which is conceptually incorrect but correct in every case that matters, but stop computing it with two extra calls to remdr. You're already calculating those values and storing them in the variables y and z; compute x as y + z, which must be much faster than calling remdr two additional times.)

As a side note, why do you want to use "a language for non-numeric computation" for this purely numeric problem?
Classical data structures that can outperform learned indexes (2018)
Seems they have, in 91.0. The colored bar that appears above the container tabs are not appearing for me after the update.
Cardano Price Prediction
Same here. Haven't seen this mentioned before, seems like great advice
Mutual single recursion is still a loop; you just pick where you want to cut the cyclic dependencies to return to the top. In the worst case, you can put a `switch` in the loop and track what state you're in, although that's gross (you have to keep the union of all variables that might be used in each state).

Multiple recursion, like in `fib n = fib (n - 1) + fib (n - 2)`, is more general than loops... in a world without higher-order functions. You can make such a function tail-recursive by doing the continuation-passing transform, which basically just makes the stack explicit. (You'd then want to "defunctionalize the continuation" [0] to clean up.)

(I've actually done this in Java! Writing the multiply-recursive solution is sometimes a lot easier to do (and verify); transforming it into an iterative solution mechanically exposes a lot more hidden details, but you still have your recursive solution you can test and compare against.)

[0] http://www.pathsensitive.com/2019/07/the-best-refactoring-yo...
Anyone know why they went with this rather than do-notation so that we can implement our own async etc?
I'm pretty sure that nerds respond well to (marketing) blog posts that show how some new tech solves all of their problems by showing a simple example of that tech, while ignoring edge cases and future complexity.

That'll all be fixed/implemented in 1.0, anyway.
Am I to read your comment correctly as if to indicate that you are seriously validating the legitimacy of QAnon given their ostensible 'prediction' of COVID?
SaaS is for any particular use case with a predefined set of rules and workflow specific to that particular use case or industry. No Code is basically a set of lego blocks to build any use cases without writing any code. So definitely there is a major difference. Examples could be https://bubble.io, https://drapcode.com, https://www.adalo.com, https://webflow.com etc.
I guess it's turkey time!
> So a modern choice would be either to have specialized background job processes, or microservices. Each such process would have manageable thread pools and a good CPU fit.

That makes the context switching problem worse. If you're running 100 services with 8 threads each on an 8 core CPU, that's got the same overhead problem as running 800 threads in a single service - potentially worse if the kernel has to do a more thorough context switch (e.g. TLB flush for spectre mitigation) when switching between separate processes. (And if you're going to solve that problem by running each service in its own container or VM then again that only makes the context switches heavier - fundamentally if you're running 800 threads on 8 physical cores then you've got to switch between them somehow).

> It also is a non-trivial fact that servers can perfectly have 128 cores or such, just like TB-sized memory isn't unheard of for JVMs. So that's another option for "less modern" apps: go the thread pool route, increase CPU count.

Well no shit if you just buy more CPU cores whenever you want to run more code then you don't need to worry about getting decent performance out of your hardware. But most of us are in businesses that can't afford one physical CPU core per IO-performing function in your codebase, which is what you'd need to sustain that approach (not to mention perfectly predicting how much load every single function needs). I guess when you add the 129th function to your codebase you then throw away all your super-expensive servers and buy even more expensive 256-core replacements? Or you forcibly split each service at the 128-function boundary so that you can deploy it as two microservices on two machines?
Split horizon:

I run DNSMasq on port 53, to serve DHCP and local DNS queries. DNSMasq forwards queries it can't answer (queries for "real" domains) to Unbound on port 1053.

It's not split horizon, because Unbound only serves the LAN - I don't serve DNS to the world - and because Unbound isn't an authoritative nameserver. But it's not that hard to make DNSMasq serve zones, and it's not hard to make DNSMasq serve those zones only to queries from the intarwebs, and serve the DHCP 'zone' to local queries.

And anyway, I guess you could use something ugly like BIND instead of Unbound, if you need an industrial-grade authoritative DNS server facing the internet.
Way way back in 2005, before ZFS shipped, I actually checked this. Solaris' ls(1) with the `-f` option was able to list a directory with millions of files very quickly. But before I tried the `-f` flag I tried plain `ls`, and that failed miserably because a) ls(1) wants to sort the listing, which means reading the whole directory into memory then sorting it, b) I was using en_US.UTF-8 as my locale, and sorting in UTF-8 locales was way slower than sorting in the C locale.

Any time you're dealing with such massive directories, you really must use the `-f` option to ls(1).
US doesn't have ID cards. Although people are trying to mandate them for voting.