skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I’ve been using Emacs for years and my config’s performance is still something I have to hack on regularly.

The only performance issue I've had is startup time, and it doesn't bother me much as I have it running all the time. But certainly, if you want to keep launching new Emacs windows, you will need to optimize your config.

> but at minimum I would try to integrate lsp-mode or Eglot as well as company (and maybe flycheck) out of the box.

I can somewhat understand company-mode, as the default completion just sucks. You'll still get into an argument about which completion mode to use, as there are several good ones, and people who like a given one tend to hate the others (and then you'll get a lot of complaints from new users who have to find a way to change it...). Personally I think they should make ido and its ecosystem the default. It's good enough[1], and people who want more can modify to get helm/company/whatever. Also, ido comes with Emacs, and the others don't.

lsp-mode: IMO it's just not that "stable" and/or robust. While many love it, there are lots of complaints about people struggling with some of its quirks, and then just giving up and moving to VSCode. The other thing is that it should be trivial to turn off. As an example, I use elpy for Python programming. It's great for some projects, but for one-off Python scripts, it's incredibly annoying - so I keep elpy off by default and enable it only on some of the larger Python projects.

Flycheck: It's good, but I had performance issues. I finally dropped it for flymake. It would have totally sucked if flycheck was enabled by default when I was an Emacs newbie, and I would have erroneously ditched Emacs as being too laggy when all I would have needed was to disable flycheck.

[1] I used it for 10 years before switching to Helm. I still fall back on it sometimes.
> “PC Professional” and columnist Lisa Birgit Holst do not exist. The latter’s name, which many readers have successfully discovered, is an anagram of the phrase ‘This is a big troll.’

That will see re-use.
Common Lisp macros are precisely "compile time code execution that enables syntax manipulation". If by "runtime generation of code" you mean to include executing that code after it's been generated, that's not macros, that's `eval`.

Just as use of `eval` tends to be discouraged in Lisp land, it's not something that a Haskell or Rust programmer would often reach for. But in Haskell, if you really want it, GHC has an API and you can have the whole power of the compiler available to you at runtime. This isn't really a language feature per se, it's literally just linking in the whole compiler and calling it like an ordinary library. I'm not aware of anything similar to that in Rust but I haven't really looked. However, if you're only trying to generate code and not JIT-compile or execute it, the same Rust crates that support compile-time AST manipulation (like `syn` and `quote`) can equally well be used at runtime.
formal is the opperative word here. this things been discussed since it was given emergency use.
The war in Afghanistan was lost by the Bush II administration sometime between 2001–2003. They took what should have been an international law enforcement operation and turned it into an indefinite military occupation with no plan, no criteria for success, and no off-ramp. They dumped hundreds of billions of dollars in with limited accountability or due diligence. They had no clear separation between “good guys” and “bad guys” and limited understanding of local relationships or culture, and ended up killing large numbers of civilians and leaving a large part of the population and local social structures angry at them.

The predictable product was a dependent and kleptocratic puppet government and military without local legitimacy or support, an endless parade of suffering, continuing local opposition, and ever growing apathy among the American public. US civilian and military leaders consistently lied to the public, and were too cowardly to admit their “mission” was an abject failure.

And now all of the people who set up and supported this 20-year debacle: military contractors, hawkish congresspeople and DOD leaders, pro-establishment media, etc. have the temerity to claim that there was some kind of magical perfect withdrawal that the US military could have executed with no bloodshed or instability, and Biden’s administration were just too careless or pig headed to let them plan and execute.
I've never seen a single argument against Greenwald that doesn't reduce to boohoo he disagreed with my faction.
HN is a very big fan of this, especially Dang.
I personally don't think that the IEEE would have any capability of really shifting the industry. It isn't like IEEE guidance for privacy preserving programs really moved the needle. You needed legislation like GDPR to do that (and even then it remains incomplete). Ultimately, adopting memory-safe languages for systems programming is going to be very expensive. You need more than just recommendations to make that happen.

I do think there is risk with legislation binding developers too much or forcing them into suboptimal approaches if things aren't written well. One could imagine legislation that does not permit the use of Rust because of the presence of `unsafe`, but that would be a terrible misstep.
How Do Young People Get Around These Days and Stay in Touch with Each Other?
"Well, I'd Suppose that In Large, You'd Own A Car and Pay Your Taxes just Like Me, The Polictical Correct Home Owner. Franklin D. Roosevelt." - The_Master39
Sometimes the only difference is success
Investment, consumption, and hedonism: unless you have a broad sense of “investment”, aren’t all of those selfish?

I suppose my valuing the health of an ecosystem of other lives is selfish, too. I’m writing to push for a broader sense of what it means to invest, as in increasing the carbon content of soil for the health of future life, and promoting regulation towards cleaner air and water.
> Squirels seem to forget where they buried their stash?

This is well-documented. In the wild they do this with acorns. It's estimated they "remember" ~70% of their buried acorns.

What's crazy is the other 30% is where the trees come from.
Maybe it is hubris but you know the saying “If shoeshine boys are giving stock tips, then it's time to get out of the market."
One could argue that keeping such out of date information online and readily accessible could cause harm (like a now deprecated, but top-voted, stackoverflow answer) but it's not something a big flashy red banner at the top of the page couldn't solve.
Does Astra use an autonomous flight-termination system or one with a human-in-the-loop?
I think more precisely, the nature of the deceit is this: Shadowbans lie to a specific individual about their participation in the community.

This is because the user is not considered part of the community. A shadowban is something you deploy against a user that is presumed to be a malicious actor in the system. It's deceit, but in a similar category of deceit to telling a user the resource is 404 not found instead of 403 or 401 because you don't even trust them enough to let them know that they found a resource that exists. It's deceit with the purpose of stymiing further malicious action.
Thanks for your reply. That makes sense.

So would I be right to say that the problem is that the way power is delivered to individual transistors is getting too complex while the features are getting too small? The article started out by focussing on the total current at transistor voltages, but at 12 volts to the chip it’s just ~16 amps (still a lot!), spread across say 100 pins = 160mA per pin. Which isn’t as impressive as 200A. 200A is clearly not a wire you see going into a CPU.

It’s a shame that the article seems to have chosen to oversimplify the problem at the expense of helping us understand. The complexity of power delivery from the top of the chip looks fascinating, but it lost me at the outset with claims that wouldn’t pass muster with a high school electronics enthusiast.
> Would you suggest that they receive training which allows them to think of software as infrastructure?

I don't know. I don't know enough about detailed practices in fields like civil engineering to have any idea what would translate. I'm not convinced that "teach every software engineer to use model checking for everything they ever write" is going to be a winning approach. This is why memory safe languages are so valuable. You don't need to teach engineers new techniques. You just outright eliminate an entire class of vulnerability that has persisted despite efforts to eliminate it with other means.
But nobody is banned here. It's banning certain links. When we hear ban we think accounts, not content.
Here's where I saw it. And yes, I admit sloppiness with my word choice.

"Differently from the usual Direct Response technique, in RR, respondents toss coins to determine whether they will respond to the question or just mark “yes”. This still allows admission rates to be calculated, yet it guarantees full anonymity to respondents because no one can tell whether an individual respondent answered “yes” to the question or because of chance."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685008/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response
the accommodation being paid by AirBnb is temporary
Most people who encountered it never really understood its programming model. In short, they tried to use it as an imperative language, but XSLT doesn't want to be an imperative language. The basic paradigm is pattern matching. You're supposed to create templates that say what to do when a node meeting certain characteristics is encountered (including how/whether to continue descending into the node's children/siblings/etc). Instead, what you see in most real-life XSLT programs is a whole bunch of xsl:if statements that attempt to conditionally (and, worse, procedurally) handle multiple node types within a single template. That's a dead giveaway that the program's author didn't really understand what they were trying to do or how to accomplish it in the language.

XSLT doesn't do itself many favors, either, because the model depends on the execution of a few "hidden" default templates that drive the tree processing. If you don't know those are there or what they're doing -- or worse, if you don't know they're there and you accidentally override them -- then it's really hard to understand what the heck is going on. It just looks like poorly-defined magic.

Plus, you need to understand XPath to write effective templates and most people don't understand it as well as they think they do. It's deceptively powerful.

Finally, add on the fact that XSLT programs are themselves valid XML -- who the heck wants to write code in XML! -- and it really never had a chance to be understood, much less liked.

But many of its ideas were good!
I am not really fond of this speech or way of thinking and wrote a counterpoint here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/stoicism-is-not-enough

Chiefly:

> I suspect this kind of stoicism — for Marcus and Wallace and some modern popularizers — is a response to perceiving the breakdown of a functioning world. Their prescription for dealing with such troubles is to develop profound internal strength, and in doing so the stoic attitude can dodge some societal-level failures by compartmentalizing toward a robust individualism. While this is good in situations where you truly can’t change anything, where it fails is more subtle. By couching success as something that happens entirely within the ego, it encourages one to downplay anything external. If a stoic attitude is applied too liberally, the insistence that success lies solely within becomes an unconscious dodge of difficult forces and responsibilities beyond one’s complete control.
And Intel are going with it now also.
Context: AM (Automated Mathematician) is a program that starts with a knowledge base of set theory and heuristics and builds its way up to natural numbers, Goldbach's conjecture (depending on how you interpret the print-outs), etc. Eurisko takes AM one step further by having heuristics to guide the development of new heuristics.

I read this because I'm working on a history/review of AM and Eurisko. It's one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of AI: a good old fashioned symbolist AI program that has all these impressive success stories, and defines the SOTA. Source code was never published and it was never reproduced. Eliezer Yudkowsky said[0] of Eurisko that it "may still be the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built". Like something out of a Borges story!

Further reading for those interested:

AM: An artificial intelligence approach to discovery in mathematics as heuristic search.
Douglas B. Lenat. 1976.
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:sb448rj9905/sb448rj9905.pdf

The Nature of Heuristics I
Douglas B. Lenat. 1982.
http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/Heuristics_I.pdf

The Nature of Heuristics II
Douglas B. Lenat. 1983.
http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/Heuristics_II.pdf

The Nature of Heuristics III
Douglas B. Lenat. 1983.
http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/Eurisko_Heuristics_III.pdf

On the thresholds of knowledge.
Douglas B. Lenat, Edward A. Feigenbaum. 1991.
http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/On_the_thresholds_of_knowledge.pdf

AM: A Case Study in AI Methodology
G.D. Ritchie, F.K. Hanna. 1984.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.4342&rep=rep1&type=pdf

AM has been reimplemented[1] in Prolog.

[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rJLviHqJMTy8WQkow/recursion-...

[1]: https://github.com/akkartik/am-utexas/tree/master
I put in a new birdbath and it took two years for birds to "find" it. Now they're there daily. I don't know why, but if I had to guess it's a new generation of birds without no set habits that found it.
Hell, I am out of Facebook, but it’s not because they’re preventing me from sending links to Crazytown, USA to my friends. Five years later and still no revolt.
Part of the problem is that the actual impact of vulnerabilities in the program is often divorced from it's actual purpose. A simple TODO list that allows RCE is one example. It also has a wide variety of impact based on the user - is it just installed on a random personal computer? Or is it on a hospital server?

I don't know that it's particularly possible for a developer to truly understand all the possible impacts of an error in their program.

I'm not sure what the best way to handle that uncertainty is. Assuming all failures are critical would do the job, but certainly isn't free. However doing something like is suggested here - somehow requiring safer languages - might be a decent middle ground. The cost of using languages more built-in safety features is often not very high. Actually often such languages claim that those features make them cheaper to use.
It’s not uncommon to page back as you get about 200 pages in to reconnect things, etc. but the book is literature and a big part of enjoying it is enjoying it for its sake. The tangents and ideas and writing - it’s just a fun book to read and imagine with it.

People get hung up on plot and other devices which make for great stories. And that’s great. IJ isn’t for everyone - but if you love literature there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy a long love making session to the book. It is extremely well crafted.
No, as you would expect with a virus, COVID can and does cause myocarditis, at a rate much higher than any vaccine, again, as you would expect from an active vs at most inactivated virus.
Sure:

javascript:(function(){ function sleep(ms) { return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms)); } let sidehover = false; let guildhover = false; let sidebar = document.getElementsByClassName("sidebar-2K8pFh")[0]; let guildbar = document.getElementsByClassName("guilds-1SWlCJ")[0]; async function hide() { await sleep(50); if (!sidehover && !guildhover) { sidebar.style.display="none"; } } async function show() { await sleep(150); if (sidehover || guildhover) { sidebar.style.display=""; } }; guildbar.addEventListener("mouseenter", () => { guildhover = true; show(); }); guildbar.addEventListener("mouseleave", () => { guildhover = false; hide() }); sidebar.addEventListener("mouseenter", () => { sidehover = true; show() }); sidebar.addEventListener("mouseleave", () => { sidehover = false; hide() }); hide(); })()

The `sleep(150)` and `sleep(50)` can be tweaked to adjust the delay between when you hover over the server bar and when the channels bar is displayed (that's the 150 ms) and between when you move the mouse off the side bar and when the channels bar disappears (the 50 ms).

If you're using the electron desktop app, you can open the javascript console with ctrl-shift-i and paste it in there for the same effect.
The population of Portland has more than doubled. Interest rates are at 0 and Portland has a popularity increase over 35 years making properties more desirable.

Portland is trying not to ruin what made it unique with density everywhere and they are not making new land so all of that equals higher prices.

Once interest rates go back to 7% and people start leaving you will see prices go down.

Salem or Gresham would be a cheaper city to move to.
Thomas Pynchon enters the chat…
I'm cautiously curious about how you'd interpret this data: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/upshot/pandemic-economy-g...

It seems pretty straightforward to me that a massive pandemic is going to hurt the economy, regardless of government action. I'm sure there will be other data points to look at in the future for what the consequences of various responses were (e.g. Sweden vs neighbors/etc?).
I posted it as a reply to Rietty -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343549.
I do not believe it is remotely reasonable to say that our software should be deliberately insecure so that people have the ability to root their own devices. That problem can be solved with other means, without exposing all of our devices to anybody else in the world who can send the same payload.

If I can root my device through an exploit then I am not at the mercy of the company that made the device. But I am now at the mercy of every single criminal or oppressive state that wants to use that exploit to harm me. And given that there is no way to confidently determine which pieces of software do not expose this capability, this cannot be an informed decision made by consumers.
When did we all become women? (2006)
Which is why I said “I have no idea” rather than “it doesn’t work that way”.
The take-over was fast, orderly, and largely bloodless. The USA has managed to evacuate a large number of Afghans who were directly helping it. To date there has been not been any widespread campaign of executions, mass imprisonments of political opponents of the Taliban, or reprisals against the civilian population.

Would a protracted civil war between the Taliban and the US-backed puppet government, ultimately leading to the former’s victory (but with more bloodshed and bad feelings) have really been a better outcome for the people of Afghanistan?
yes for now
I'm still drunk what are you doing?
Moving out caused my mental health to deteriorate. The meaninglessness of living alone and wasting my life working for Big Corp made me suicidal. I was hospitalized in a psych ward for a week. I tried half a dozen antidepressants. Nothing helped. Now I've moved back with my parents and I'm trying to turn my own, meaningful (to me) projects into a business. I don't know if things will work out financially, but I already feel much better than I did. Regardless, I don't believe I'll ever feel the way I once did about this world.
Will P ever be equal to NP?
In the US those farm cats are generally called "barn cats". They will live in the barn and their "job" is to kill vermin and protect the livestock that also live there. They seem to do this instinctively.

They need to be fed independently as it ties them to the barn. Otherwise they'll leave in search of food.

When farms are sold typically the barn cats will stay with the farm as it's the only home they've known and if taken they'll often try and return to the barn.

The complexity of all this behaviour is kinda crazy to see. It's likewise the case with dogs that have herding instincts. You'll see them blocking chicks or ducklings from getting out of their pen or just getting stressed when they think some of the animals are where they shouldn't be. Often any tendency to chase other animals is actually the dog trying to get the animal back where it belongs.
mac is a pitiful walled garden about to be canabkized by apple for the type of privacy invasion and dmca2.0 google gets. get out now.
I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone.

I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.
If you’re trying to leave Facebook, going to WhatsApp might not be the best move.
What is good companies? What do you want in return and when do you want that return?
Portugal situation is a bit more nuanced than 'decriminalized all drugs' implies. Drugs are still very much illegal and cannot be owned or traded. Not even marijuana. What changed is that possession of small quantities of drugs no longer leads to prison, but may lead to administrative penalties.

> In July 2001, a new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. The offense was changed from a criminal one, with prison as a possible punishment, to an administrative one if the amount possessed was no more than a ten-day supply of that substance.[2] This was in line with the de facto Portuguese drug policy before the reform. Drug addicts were then to be aggressively targeted with therapy or community service rather than fines or waivers.[9] Even if there are no criminal penalties, these changes did not legalize drug use in Portugal. Possession has remained prohibited by Portuguese law, and criminal penalties are still applied to drug growers, dealers and traffickers.[10][11] Despite this, the law was still associated with a nearly 50% decrease in convictions and imprisonments of drug traffickers from 2001 to 2015.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal#Regula...
Vm86-Based Venix Emulator
Turkey population density: 109/km2

Population density in my state: 6.35/km2

50 miles/100km is nothing in many parts of north america. I have in all honesty driven that far just to pick up groceries.
In a seemingly polar opposite performance against IBM’s story here, Nintendo’s Switch Joycon controllers have similar issues. Almost all Joycon units will inevitably fail. Perhaps not every unit, but the failure rate is extremely high. Nintendo refuses to acknowledge the issue but will quietly offer free repairs if you report it to them, and otherwise seems to be doing a pretty great job of covering up what should have been a class action lawsuit years ago.

Perhaps it is because of the fact that the result of failure (minor to major annoyances depending on the game before being forced to eventually replace the controller) is not so nearly as catastrophic as total data loss that Nintendo has been able to skate by as long as it has. But the reactions outlined by IBM 25 years ago outlined in the article are eerily reminiscent of the actions of today’s Nintendo.