skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that the media never talks about is their own role in the success of conspiracy theories. By wanting to be "neutral" they love often presenting "both sides" instead of just seeking to present the truth. So they'll invite both a climate sceptic and a climatologist and treat them both equally to be "fair". Or an "anti-vaccine" and a professor in epidemiology. A racist and a liberal. And on and on.

Of course the incurred raucous "debates" are good business: what's more clickbaity than a respectable professor losing their temper when confronted with a bad faith ideologue? But the end result is terrible for science, rationality and democracy.
Though it is internally-built, Hack is already open source at https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/.

FB uses a pretty wide array of languages internally -- I don't know if they release statistics publicly, but you can filter/search their open-source projects by language at https://opensource.fb.com/projects/#filter.
This sounds like someone said “black lives matter” and the response was “ALL lives matter.”
So your argument is companies should hire people who good at communication so they can hire a developer who isn't?
They are speaking of modest inflation, the 1-3% mentioned above. Obviously hyperinflation is bad. But deflation will also harm the poor just as much, while the rich are the sole benefactors.
It’s not about the cost in the charts you shared, it’s about the frequency (downtime / opportunity cost) and what’s involved:

https://caredge.com/tesla/model-3/maintenance#schedule - Hertz could easily train 1 tech at every airport to do this entire maintenance with a basic lift and simple materials.

For a Toyota Camry, this work occurs 2x as often (downtime is a big deal for rental companies) and is not easily performed without a much more capable shop: https://caredge.com/toyota/camry/maintenance#schedule

Less moving parts, less fluids…now I want a Model 3.
I believe the issue is way too technical for most of FB’s user base(which is supposedly enormous) and it seems most senators too so appropriate action is not to be expected. And then you have the issue of people not wanting to look stupid especially on high positions.And then the obvious, but often understated, power and monetary issue of FB being a major part of US’s tech supremacy. It all adds up to a horrifying unstoppable mess and FB's top management seems to be playing everyone in power to do something like a fiddle.

Then again FB could end up in the “thing bad --> ban it!” corner, but I doubt it.
I enjoyed the perspective. Simultaneously though, in 2021 it is just professional malpractice to continue to use C. There will always be the programmer that doesn't hold it right and introduces a bug. Meanwhile, the entire world of technology is under constant siege from within and without via the world's spy agencies and ransomware gangs. With these attacks routinely shutting down hospitals and costing lives, it's really hard to justify continuing down a path that hasn't fixed this problem in literally 40+ years.
I don't work at FB but can say with second hand experience that the company is "all in" on Hack/HHVM. The language has diverged far enough from PHP that moving back is simply not feasible.

As for "considerations of using some open source language", individual teams are mostly free to use whatever best fits their use case, similar to what you may expect at any company of that size. Pretty much every major language is in use at FB somewhere or the other. And HHVM is also open source.
It was talked about for a long time. People went to prison or got in trouble.

People don’t talk about Trump that much any more either. That’s just how the world works. It moves on very, very quickly. Almost everything gets memory holed. Besides 9/11 and a few other major major things, past stuff doesn’t get talked about much.

Why is no one talking about whatever it was with Hunter Biden any more? Or Hillary’s emails? What about those caravans that were all supposed to be coming countless different times. None of this stuff is discussed any more.

I’m not sure if you’re pulling an elaborate troll job here. The way you worded portions of this post is exactly how certain politicians also speak. The feigned surprise of it being all the rage then dropping out of existence. The questioning of why no one is doing something, etc.
Very nice to see!

I use my machine in closed clamshell around 90% of the time which means the battery is usually in pretty terrible shape after a couple years of use. Will be happy to see battery replacement times hopefully go down on these new machines as waiting 5-7 days isn't fun to deal with.
My favourite use of e is determining how many (independent) trials it would take to encounter an event of some likelihood.

Eg. if an event has a 1/10 chance of occuring, how likely am I to encounter it at least once after 10 trials? What about a 1/1000 event after 1000 trials?

Well, if it has probability p, then there is 1-p of it NOT happening. So the chance of seeing a 1/p event after p trials is:

= 1 - (1-p)^p (looks a lot like e)
= 1 - 1 / (1-p)^-p
= 1 - 1/e (63.2%)

This comes up a lot in real-life, since it feels like if we do something with a 1% chance 100 times, it should occur, but there is really a more than 1/3 chance against it!
Try cinnamon. It's better than the current generation of Windows UIs.
Possible spoiler (I don't know if my proof is correct)--

Algebraic numbers are countable, since their description is a countable combination of rationals which are also countable. The measure of a countable set is zero, so the measure of its complement is 1, and thus the probability of choosing a transcendental is 1.
I sometimes worry that I'm somehow becoming more and more of a jerk as my career progresses, instead of less. Maybe I'm just sick of this career.
Awesome work! How computationally intensive is Acoular / how complex would doing this from a live feed instead of recorded files be? Thanks for posting your project.
In every thread on HN with very many comments you'll find comments that tangent off from the core for one reason or another. It's extraordinarily common here. You've been here for nine years, so you already know that.

The reason I wrote that specific comment, dear pc86, is because there was wide discussion in this thread about Britain not being able to do their own version of AWS in-nation or not being able to do it cost effectively. So it only makes sense we, the US, might consider returning the favor with Britain on something they do far better than the US does (cost effective healthcare). Especially given they're an exceptionally important economic partner to the US and Amazon getting that contract is valuable to a US company.

Did you happen to see Zenst's comment? They mentioned "The Catcher in the Rye," the audacity. What does that have to do with datacenters or software?
DuckDB developer here, DuckDB has a query engine that can directly query external data formats (stored in CSV, Parquet, Arrow, Pandas, etc) without loading the data directly, but also has its own columnar ACID-compliant storage format.

It can certainly be used in the same manner as DataFusion, but can also serve as a stand-alone database system. DuckDB aims to have much more comprehensive SQL support beyond only SELECT queries.
Games are usually CPU-bound. When the graphics additional layers are thin, and DXVK is indeed very thin, there's no reason it will take a huge performance hit.
> but instead of doing that

I keep hearing this like there is nobody working on this problem. There are a significant amount of resources being dedicated to this problem. Is it enough? No, of course not. These types of global coordinated efforts are more difficult than any technological problem we have ever faced.

In developed countries, per capita CO2 emissions are decreasing at a steady rate. Adoption of EVs and renewables will accelerate this decline.

The problem is in the developing countries (especially China and India) where these rates are increasing. But we can't exactly tell these countries to stop developing. So our only option is to continue to develop technology that will make it cheaper to use renewables over fossil fuels. And that's all well under way.

Carbon capture is just another tool for us to explore that may scale as more entities adopt it. The idea that because it costs too much to do now, we shouldn't explore it is silly. Solar was not financially feasible just a decade or two ago. Battery storage was the same.

Point is, we should explore every option. That does not mean all our progress in EVs and renewables stops, it's just another avenue for us to reduce our carbon footprint.
You can admire your digital trading cards! Just check out this program I made that cycles your NFT's as background wallpapers for your computer. github.com/NotaRealThing /s
The reason people believe in mass cover ups is because of cases such as the death of Vincent Foster which was written off as a regular suicide by all major media publications.
Past related thread:

The Last of the Iron Lungs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742901 - Nov 2017 (65 comments)

Also:

One of the Last People to Live in an Iron Lung Is a Longhorn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785650 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)

Reinvented ‘Iron Lung’ Technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756993 - April 2020 (1 comment)

Ask HN: Where to find specifications for pressure for an Iron Lung - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22582257 - March 2020 (3 comments)

A Callout: Parts for an Iron Lung - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15777702 - Nov 2017 (23 comments)
I'm not dismissing Common Lisp. I've actively searched for and applied to jobs that advertised using Common Lisp.

I just don't see the Common Lisp community rallying to make it more cohesive (and thus more popular and attractive), which is fine, but it means it won't get used outside of enthusiasts bringing it into niche pockets of companies. I have the same complaints with F#, which is one of my favorite languages, because there are just too many libraries/frameworks that are just one-off side projects of a single developer. (There are of course separate reasons for F#'s lack of uptake.)

If the entire Common Lisp ecosystem is as good as people say it is, then I don't see why it couldn't go through a path like Erlang did with Elixir and even so without a syntax change (just a nice bundling of the ecosystem and tooling) instead of just relying on war stories of its use and telling people they just don't get it.
some conspiracy theories are true. some are not.

some have a large set and pattern of evidence so strong collectively that a reasonable person may conclude that they are correct, and beyond all reasonable doubt -- though they cannot be 100% perfectly certain.

some theories have weak, or easily forged evidence

the ongoing challenge for us is to figure out which type any given theory is
I'm sure that's right. I just meant "you don't need to have tournaments online if covid is the only worry."
Widespread spying on everyone was a conspiracy theory for tin foil hatters until Snowden. Now no one is surprised by any of that now. Some conspiracy theories will turn that nugget of central truth into largely true, but most don't.
Controllers behind the head are tracked by some algorithm magic that fuses the last seen position by the cameras with accelerometer and gyro data for the blind spots. Seems to work like a charm. Probably not as good as full lighthouse system, but good enough.
How about a mention that so many "conspiracy theories" have a certain grain of truth to them [...]

Examples? And also what do you mean with conspiracy theories, may a group of corrupt politicians and businessmen qualify as a conspiracy in your sense?
Interesting! All of those things make sense, and combining a bunch of incentives and gamification elements like this is probably the way to super-charge completion.

On the contrary, I am a bit skeptical personally about the long-term effects of adding gamification to everything we do. In the end, intrinsic motivation is the strongest force, and I worry (mostly on a personal level) that so much pressure on external motivating factors will make us immune eventually.

In Peergrade, we had a small amount of built-in gamification like this. We would show you how much feedback you had provided compared to the class average. This led to fairly significant improvements in both feedback amounts and quality.
<<< this is important
<<< this is not important

To be fair, neither is important. You don't have to reach for a transcendental if you want infinite polynomials, you can manufacture one for integers, rationals, irrationals...the familiar example -

f(x) = 1 + 1/x + 1/x^2 + 1/x^3 + 1/x^4 + ...
f(1) = 2
That's Phoronix benchmarks in a nutshell.
For Linux, many GNOME-based distros shipped with Pidgin (an open source communication program) well-integrated with the desktop environment, really early on compared to other OS's. I'm hesitant to say "Linux did it first", but it was definitely an early adopter.

That said, it's hard to compare the two given Pidgin is a general purpose communication tool without vendor lock-in (e.g. it's also an IRC client, has peer-to-peer mode, etc), and most Linux installers let you opt-out of these sorts of bundled software.

I think the real issue is some might find MS Teams to be obnoxious software (I suppose, I barely have used it)
> I said having the vaccine after an infection was clearly a huge benefit over having just the vaccine or just the infection - so do it.

Yes --- amazingly so. We don't have wonderful data for SARS-COV-2 yet, but some number of recipients of mRNA vaccines who are survivors of the original SARS apparently have strong antibody responses to all coronaviruses. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108453
That cookies landing page is a crime against humanity. When will this problem be solved!
> Big tech should be paying for this stuff…

I don’t see anything about anyone paying the content creators. What fairness is it to har one platform currently freeloading of of the work that another platform is freeloading of its users (while begging them for donations mind you) suddenly have to pay the first freeloading platform?

I can’t speak for others naturally, but every vontribution I have made to Wikipedia has been made on the basis of contributing you our common knowledge base, not to try to provide a free service for a profit driven corporation.
The answer to your first question is yes.

Your second question is based on an incorrect premise.
Hack is internally built, but it is also open source:

https://github.com/facebook/hhvm

I joined Facebook in 2019 and left this year.
Prior to FB, I worked mostly with python, javascript, and C++.
Even at FB, I worked mainly in python (instagram backend), but spent a lot of time in the Hack codebase.

My experience was that FB's Hack + HHVM stack is much easier to work with and felt more productive than any other backend stack I've used. It's important to consider that a huge portion of Facebook's backend is one giant HHVM monorepo (called www). The consistency and uniformity has allowed FB to build lots of tooling and developer productivity on top of this one stack. For example, when you add feature flags, the tooling will automatically create a diff (PR) to remove the feature flag once it has been fully rolled out for a few weeks.

There are rough edges and weirdnesses, but HHVM is pretty actively being improved. Old mutable builtins are being (or have been) removed, the type system has gotten better, better error and warning messages all the time. FB is very responsive to data on developer productivity.

EDIT:
Another anecdote, when I first joined I was working on both the Instagram python codebase and the Hack API codebase (some of Instagram's APIs are in Hack/HHVM). I constantly wondered why we didn't migrate the Hack code to python, and talked with various people about proposals and potential paths to do the migration for the APIs I worked on.

After a few months of working in both codebases, I completely flipped. After witnessing insane bugs and horrible architectural contortions designed to mitigate python performance issues, I wondered why we didn't just migrate the python codebase to Hack. Python (on cpython/cinder) is just not ready for large scale web services, and Hack is a much more productive environment than Java/C++/Rust for backend.

Typescript may be an even better option, but has some issues of its own.
I struggle to understand how this happened, because Fielding is so explicit about the pitfalls of not letting form follow function. He warns, almost at the very beginning of the dissertation, that “design-by-buzzword is a common occurrence” brought on by a failure to properly appreciate software architecture. He picks up this theme again several pages later:

Some architectural styles are often portrayed as “silver bullet” solutions for all forms of software. However, a good designer should select a style that matches the needs of a particular problem being solved.

This problem is endemic in software architecture. Every time I read a criticism of Design Patterns most of the complaints about it echo text literally in the book itself. Each design pattern chapter has a long list of reasons why not to use it, but somehow that gets lost in translation.
Get them to choose a static site generator - https://jamstack.org/generators/

Host it with neocities free tier - https://neocities.org/
This actually was helpful. Some constructive feedback, the code sample only had mixed-case/capital letters in the "font-family" value. It would be better to use a code sample that had more mixed-case. I also like the idea others have suggested of hiding the real font names.
Huh. I seriously need to graph the size vs price thing and figure out where the sweet spots are. I last did that sort of thing a few years ago, got completely out of the game. I just googled a bit and discovered 18TB drives are a thing and went and looked for those. lol

I guess you're right about not needing local redundancy... although this is very much at odds with the "disk is over 500GB, redundancy required!!11" beeper in my head :D

(And wow things do fluctuate quite a bit, I just poked around and found https://www.amazon.com/MDD-Ultrastar-HUS726060ALE614-Enterpr... (6TB) for US$99, but that's a DVR quality drive, only rated for short term storage.)

Also, TIL about the tax thing, that's really cool. TIL about the Indian GST.
> can they really then use that monopoly status to raise prices?

No, they can use this monopoly status to extract data or otherwise bully consumers (which they do). Private monopolies are inherently bad.
Well, this is great. Because, while I don`t like to admit they launch a lot of trends that other manufactures tend to follow. Hope they go the same way.
My grandfather didn't use a Podstakannik, just a glass. He had a special grip to avoid scalding his fingers: he would grasp the glass by the rim between his thumb and index. Since the tea didn't go all the way to the top and glass is a poor heat conductor, the rim was cooler. Then, as he lifted the glass from the saucer, he would slip his pinkie finger under the bottom of the glass to prevent it from slipping from his grasp of the rim. Because the glass was thicker at the bottom, that location was also cooler.
You nailed it. Twitter is filled with a lot of interesting content, but the dominant "trending" topics are basically navel-gazing activists masquerading as journalists obsessing about their own identity (if they are in a favored group) or desperately using some sacred cow identity group as a tool to gain status with their peers.

I deleted my account after I simply asked a question one day in a thread with a prominent startup founder who happened to be a Black woman. Someone else on her thread had stated that she was worried about encouraging her daughter to learn to code because she felt that nobody would hire her "due to the extreme racism that was obviously prevalent in tech." I simply stated that my company was trying hard to hire folks like her daughter, and asked what we could do to make people like her feel welcome and understand that it wasn't a problem at our company. Then the veil was pulled back on the performance. The questioner didn't really have a question. She simply posed it as a performance, and then I was mobbed with statements telling me that I needed to "Listen and let Black women speak." These narcissists aren't interested in solutions, only in gaining status in their silly, secular imitation of evangelical fundamentalist churches. Replace "Satan" with "toxic whiteness" and you have Dana Carvey's church lady on SNL in the 90's.
> Aren’t most Linux UIs largely copying or being strongly influenced by Windows?

No.
User perception? The users are perceptive, then, because in this behavior, Windows absolutely is working against them.
IANAL but I don't think that's true.

A patent doesn't allow you to practice an invention; it allows you to exclude others from practicing it.
What do you mean by this? Is it because they didn't explicitly say "The Russian Federation"? Because we both know that's exactly what they meant, and that it is most certainly a nation-state.
On Windows 11 I just search for 'Mouse' in the start menu and one settings menu (the new settings UI) showed up with a nice slider. Even lets you swap the primary mouse button from left->right if you're wanting to do that.

That was just one example though. I'd argue like 90% of searches for Linux help have an answer which contains 'run this in a terminal'.
My argument is that you can meet them halfway rather than dumping all the responsibility on the developer like this guy does.

But as a consultant I guess his job is to help toxic managers hire people they can work with, if that is the case he doesn't have a choice to change the manager.
That reminds me I forgot another reason:

Reason 5 - Quality of vaccine, freshness, poor QA, defective dose

I think this is a likely concern in some countries. The vaccines are challenging to transport and properly keep stable and manufacturing of them happens in many places and was put in place and scaled up very quickly, quality control could be an issue, same as proper transportation and storage.

I would honestly give this one a 5% chance.
Locutus of Borg probably...
People using lawyers to skirt the law will always happen.

But the idea is that we __want__ people to do that. No one likes it when lawyers tell them "you can't legally do that", even when the lawyer is on their side.

Fox News / CNN has a team of lawyers whose job is simply: making sure what they air is legal. All news teams have this, to varying effects. (Maybe not fact checking every article ever written, but at a minimum, lawyers provide advice and review every now and then).

------

In any case, Fox News / CNN will not ever say anything blatantly slanderous / libelous. Its why they word things in certain ways. They could have footage of X literally shooting Y in the face, and they'll describe it as "Alleged suspect X allegedly shot Y in the face".

That's a result of this "lawyer training". They're wording their articles so that suspect X won't be able to sue them for libel / slander. You won't find any such weasel words in any social media post.
All of the “www” code (backend which serves all the web apps and APIs) is Hack. And a lot of that code is generated via internal frameworks like Ent which is a graph abstraction over database access.

There doesn’t seem to be any incentive to switch www away from Hack: it wouldn’t reduce the learning curve very much due to all those internal frameworks, and would remove the opportunity to optimize the language for the www codebase.

There are open source languages used in the internal backends though (services behind www). Most of it is C++.
That's not the one I'm thinking of but his history is amusing.
Does anybody have experience with `lc`? The description is quite intriguing.

https://github.com/c-blake/lc

c-blake/lc: A post-modern, "multi-dimensional", configurable, abbreviating, extensible ls/file lister in Nim