skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>the whole ecosystem upgrade treadmill

I haven't noticed that as a user of Apple phones and laptops. The 4 year old iphone SE is working fine with the latest OS. I stopped using the 2013 macbook air because it was kind of falling apart a bit, not due to any weirdness from Apple. I'm not even sure what the "ecosystem upgrade treadmill" is.

I did have the issue of the screen of the SE being harder to replace than the 5 because it has a fingerprint scanner that can access your credit cards. I can understand Apple having security standards for that. The local repair shop still does it but it's £50 with an official part rather than £20 with some Chinese knock off.
> Tech forums on the internet have heavily declined in quality.

it's true. Nowadays all websites you're supposed to visit daily are "background-color: white" and owned by Facebook. From its wild days, the internet has become pretty boring.
I find it amusing that the best part of Windows and OSX right now are WSL and Docker support.

I use both when needed, but since gnome improved performance and UX its just so much better experience to use the real thing.

Unpopular opinion: companies whose core operation is around Linux should start using Linux on desktop instead of bending backwards to not do so. How about it, Linode?
The bubble was caused by fiscal, tax, and homebuilding policies. Zillow wasn't even renting the the houses it bought, just flipping.

Blame the government; Zillow had nothing to do with the housing price blowup.
I used to work for Google on machine learning. It's clear where the trends were going. Also, DM has entire TPU pods allocated to it (like search and ads do).
The problem is the financial component. The ones who concern themselves with price drive away the ones who concern themselves with tech.
Discussion from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29062982

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29061987
Predicting the future is not a use case for machine learning. And failure of financial models happens all the time - Long Term Captial Management is probably the best example of a big one. This has nothing to do with ML/Data Science, other than maybe some people thought it could do something it cant.

Also, the article reads a bit too much like a stream of conscious sprinkled with buzzwords and causal references that the author knows better than Zillow.
Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?
I want to understand how the experience was

what was the cost involved

what were the entry barrier for an average person to join

How similar was it to current social media networks

How big the industry around it actually become

From a tech point of view what do you think were the major breakthroughs and what made it to the internet we see today.

I have watched the documentary www.bbsdocumentary.com , so I have some context but want some more anecdotes if I can :)
A bit old (mentions tumblr) but always a good idea to own your content.

It's the perennial tradeoff: do you want reach or ownership. Of course, you want both, but getting reach from your own site takes effort, time or money (or all three). Platforms like Twitter, etc, allow you to leverage their reach, but then take ownership of the content (at least the form of content you put on their site, which may include excerpts or links or user click data).
Super duper off topic, but the second period in the second paragraph is in bold and it's surprisingly distracting. Not like "can't bare to read the rest of the article" but it did make me stop and check the source to make sure I wasn't crazy.
The only communities that are "like" HN seem to be HN and rationalist ones, like Astral Codex, LessWrong, etc. At least as far as I've found.

/r/medicine is also pretty interesting, albeit more diffuse.

You have to be a certain kind of person and a certain kind of commenter to benefit from the kinds of rules and norms we have here. We reward curiosity and heavily penalize single-layer jokes and memes. But unlike heavily moderated subreddits, we also value quality asides and off-topic branches, so long as, again, they reflect curiosity.

Perhaps the biggest blocker to HN-like communities for other fields is we're allowed to be wrong on the internet. And we're allowed to point it out, correct each other, and gratefully accept corrections.

HN & Rationalist groups can accept and integrate new information, and we can accept that some people are misinformed or having a bad day, and that they're not malicious or trolls.

Whereas in most online communities you can be either "right" or you can be gone.
Most video games are about violence because it’s the easiest thing to do
There is a valid discussion to be had about whether the Node.js ecosystem disruption of moving from CJS to ESM is worth the benefits, but the assertion that it's technically worse isn't accurate. A few things ESM does better in Node.js:

1. Asynchronous dynamic import() vs. blocking require(): allows the program to continue while a module is being dynamically loaded.

2. Circular dependencies: ESM correctly resolves most of them, while CJS does not. [example below] I believe this is possible because ESM top-level imports and exports are resolved before JS execution begins, while require() is resolved when called (while JS is already executing.)

3. Reserved keywords `import` and `export` vs. ordinary identifiers require, exports and module: Allows tooling to be simpler and not have to analyze variable scope and shadowing to identify dependencies.

I haven't really encountered #3, but I can say I've benefited from #1 and #2 in real-world Node.js projects using ESM.

----

Circular dependencies example:

// a.js
const b = require('./b.js');
module.exports = () => b();

// b.js
const a = require('./a.js');
module.exports = () => console.log('Works!');
a();

Running this with "node b.js" gives "TypeError: b is not a function" inside a.js, while the equivalent ESM code correctly prints 'Works!'. To solve this in CJS, we have to always use "named exports" (exports.a = ... rather than module.exports = ...) and avoid destructuring in the top-level require (i.e. always do const a = require(...) and call it as a.a() elsewhere)
Can someone point to a resource describing why various candidates got rejected in round 1 and round 2?

Any comments on the decisions or was it just voting without explaining?
It depends mainly on how much more money the homeowners believe they can fetch by listing the home versus selling it right away on the spot.

For example, if you're the homeowner and you think you can get, say, a few extra $100K's by listing your home instead of selling it right away on the spot, you would probably take your changes and list it. Even if you're under pressure to sell quickly, you might still try listing the home for a couple of months to see what happens. Only if you think your home is a lemon will you consider selling to Zillow.

That's why Zillow ended up buying all those lemons.
It's less that the positives are not represented it's that it's difficult to get into the finer details of a protocol if (just as an example) you are hung up arguing whether proof is stake is good or not.
I'm familiar with it. One of my interests is medical information. You can't put "medical" into it and have the latest "premium" articles come up.

I would love an easy way to readily find recent active discussions and articles with high karma for medical topics. But you have to search on words that were actually used in the title.

And that's kind of a variation of the question in this post. If there was an easy way to find "crypto related articles and discussion" right here on HN then you wouldn't need to ask "What other forum can I go to?"

I've been on HN more than a decade. It's bigger than it used to be and a lot happens here. It's easy to miss out on a lot of things pertinent to your interests.

I don't know of an easy fix for that.
I'd argue the best part of MacOS is the font rendering.
Claiming someone is an "idiot" is not brutal honesty.

Are you claiming that you think they have low IQ, or what exactly are you being brutally honest about?

What is even definition of an idiot for you?

This word only exists as a tool to either manipulate or shame or simply live out your emotional rage, it's not about brutal honesty. It's not about being truthful or even trying to understand the truth.

Generally, if someone calls someone else an "idiot", I can give benefit of the doubt few times if this happens, okay it's an emotional outburst, but otherwise I would lose trust in their general resolve.
I think there's super interesting conversations to be had on e.g. how crypto currencies could influence our society. They're dramatically mind blowing. Even if you're not into the technology, I think simply from a rhetoric point of view, it'd be interesting to take a deeper dive into the space and explore topics not widely discussed elsewhere. Case in point

- "Blockchains never forget": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/05/25/blockchains-never-forg...

- https://blog.simondlr.com/posts/decentralized-autonomous-art...

- https://www.notboring.co/p/crypto-bezos

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Z5BnBuFyE

Potential others are:

- https://www.untitledfrontier.studio/

- https://molochpilled.substack.com/

- https://vitalik.ca/
Death doesn't have to be a reason to dislike being bit by a spider. A bite from a tiny little brown recluse is no laughing matter.
If they had "no problem" cannibalizing their offspring, they'd quickly go extinct! In reality, cannibalizing of offspring only occurs in particular circumstances - if conditions are poor enough that most of the young won't survive anyway, for example. In which case their instincts kick in to cannibalize as a way to recoup the energy and try again at a better time. If conditions are right there will instead be a strong instinct to protect the egg sack / young.
Not practical and not what you are looking for, but an interesting take: if you view today's NFTs through the lens of Gamification (or the desire to amass Fake Internet Points) or through an entertainment/celebrity lens then these things provide a sense of status to others that also give credence to that idea.

Kind of like sports: the winner of a sporting event doesn't practically matter, it's just entertainment, but fans can feel extreme emotion from a win or loss, and many people form part of their identity around a team.

That said, entertainment itself is practical and necessary, and had been around longer than our modern financial systems, so maybe it does answer your request !

I do still think crypto will eat the world in every way it can, even if it shouldn't.
I hate to use this language on HN - but this post is a crock of shit. This is just an opportunistic post by the author that cleverly evades defining anything in solid terms, providing even one concrete example, and is a pot of handwavey BS. It started off encouragingly, and two paragraphs in, the smoke alarms in my head were blaring. The author doesn’t even have a clue (or for some mysterious reason didn’t mention) about what went wrong for Zillow.

Zillow’s massive screw up was that their key business assumption was a self fulfilling prophecy. If a model learns that “price to pay today is price to pay yesterday in this area * 1.05”, and Zillow is buying multiple homes in a neighborhood spread over time, you can see that the price is headed to the moon (and the buyer who puts their faith in the model to the gutter) in no time. In my parents’ town, they offered a neighbor a price, and came back 3 months later with an offer $70k higher. I have a strong suspicion what was supposed to be a price prediction model ended up being a price discovery agent due to the lack of a “visited” set. Oops!
If you are familiar with Forth, Postscript, or Joy you should have no problems with programming in Fortik :)

Still, the idea of Fortik is to encourage students to learn how simple interpreters work and to extend the language.
Note that Amazon already supports product listings with interactive 360 degree product visualizations. It's only a small step from there to full 3D modeled product renderings. That said, I can't say I would find it especially compelling to peruse a 3D model in VR as opposed to perusing it on a normal screen. Either way it just involves rotating our perspective around the rendering and observing it via the 2D planes of our eyes. I can imagine some small utility if I could accurately measure the dimensions of the product at arbitrary angles in VR, as a sort of freeform replacement for schematic diagrams, but that requires trust that the product listers will actually get the scale correct, and it would not be an overwhelmingly common use case.
At least for preprocessong csv files it makes a lot of sense. You can pipe data into it, run a query and output the result in many formats.
Maybe what I need to be doing is checking the lists which isn't a habit of mine.
Trading models are a very specific and exceptional (in multiple senses) subset of ML use.

A given business probably doesn't employ more than a few people of that class and rigorousness: not least, because those people have the option of making a lot more money at a trading firm.

So yes, all businesses should do all those things. And yes, the best run places do. But it feels like there's going to be a decade or two where employee supply & expertise lags corporate demand, with bad results.
Two examples searching for "memory leak" on DE bug trackers:

MATE: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Amate-desktop+%22memory+lea... (265 results)

KDE: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%22memory%20lea... (97 results)

That's just for the ones we found. I would be curious to run a full DE through valgrind :)

EDIT: Anecdotal datapoint ahead: i just had to kill atril (MATE PDF viewer) on a machine where it was eating 6GB RAM after running for a few days.
I think it would be good to find an alternative to "proof of work" (bitcoin) and "proof of stake" (ethereum). It should be called "proof of traffic", basically a crypto coin which anonymizes internet traffic for everyone. If such technology is possible, it would merge the ideas of TOR and Bitcoin, while rendering VPN providers obsolete. It would also have societal benefit through anonymity.
As a side note, I observed something connected with printers and their noise.

We (I am talking of a small hotel) used to have a needle printer (for receipt/invoices, it printed only a few lines of text as we used letterhead paper/forms), so the customer at check out would pay and just after the card was swiped on the POS or the cash was collected/change given, the receipt/invoice would be printed together with the "visual feedback" of seeing the paper fed under the head of the printer line by line and the "noise feedback" of the actual printing.

It took something like 5-6, maybe 7 seconds, not much, but enough to introduce a delay in the procedure.

Then things changed and now there is a thermal printer for receipts and a laser one for invoices, both are overall slightly faster than the old printer, some 4-5 seconds.

But both pause (silence) for 3-4-5 seconds and then instantly the slip of thermal paper comes out (very, very fast) or the sheet of A4 paper exits the laser printer (in practice appears from a black box).

Even if overall the time now needed is (slightly) less, we had more than one of the usual customers notice how it (seems like it) takes more time now to print the receipt/invoice, and the "impression" is exactly that, the silent pause seems everlasting while the wheezing of the old printer seemed "natural".
> modern MBAs

I wonder what the reaction is in MBA school when this topic comes up? Does the teacher say it's not applicable in today's world? It's obviously shunned by most. Can any of these ideas still work in 2021?
The magic of torrents is that you download music or movies or whatever. And they did that the first year the Bittorrent protocol was released. Note that at the time, all peer coordination was centralized through trackers, the DHT wouldn't arrive for another five years after.

By comparison, Bitcoin has existed for ten years and hasn't let anybody do anything yet, because a slow time stamping algorithm (proof of work) turns out not to be that practical for many important applications.
Remember that this is geared towards representatives of a corporation, not persons representing themselves. These kinds of answers are almost certainly in a record somewhere.
In our systems we trust
Even if I was doing a pretty hardcore drug I'd surely like it to be properly mix especially when it comes to an extremely hard to dose additive.

So I don't die
You couldn't imagine a package-driven ecosystem like npm or cargo catching on for game-dev?
> I find it paradoxical

The word you're looking is "contradictory"...
I dunno. Other than standing a lot it was not a very hard job. I was treated like a human and my boss would let me schedule stuff around whatever I had going on. I was a teenager in high school though so I only worked like 15 hours a week. I also didn’t need a lot of money living at home. Mostly dangerous jobs, ones that break your body like construction, and ones where you work with people who don’t treat you well are “bad” in my book. Wages and making a living would be a problem is this was your main job though, obviously. I didn’t like cleaning the play tubes, but it never bothered me much.
All "movements" have some merit, or they wouldn't exist in the first place. Nobody starts a "movement" just because. It exists because it solves something. "NoSQL" was a solution to something. Today you can benefit from best of all worlds, and still NoSQL has a place and a use case, just like anything else that exists.
Exactly. And to add to what you say, adversarial problems in data science are much harder than the regular ones which data scientists deal with and the hubris that I often see with data scientists won't cut it here. You need a different mindset to tackle these problems and they must be handled incrementally with the real world in the loop.
Mainly making cheats for games. Back then you have devices which allowed you to view memory, so I would play games and look for changes made in memory when you did certain actions. Made a map of them. Most of the time a life counter was good enough.

Also for my own games - you don't have pointers as such, you have your memory, and you need to know what lives where (and when it lives where).
US Government offers $10M bounty for information on Colonial Pipeline hackers
Sorry, no. The original schema was correct, and the new one is a mistake.

The reason is that the new schema adds a great deal of needless complexity, requires the overhead of foreign keys, and makes it a hassle to change things later.

It's better to stick the the original design and add a unique index with key prefix compression, which all major databases do these days. This means that the leading values gets compressed out and the resulting index will be no larger and no slower than the one with foreign keys.

If you include all of the keys in the index, then it will be a covering index and all queries will hit the index only, and not the heap table.
I wonder how it compares to Bluetooth?

No one seems to get Bluetooth right. The specification is more than a thousand pages, and my understanding is that 5.0 is an complete rewrite (but you still have to support previous versions).
They're either in the UK or Germany. But I suspect the UK.
They don't need to predict the actual sale price of every given property perfectly to make money. They need to be able to say that with 99% probability, we will find at least one offer for this house >= 500,000. The errant buyer with loads of cash is free to come in and offer more. As long as they turn a sufficient profit at the 500,000 price point they should be set. In competitive markets, for people familiar with local dynamics, this is very much possible in a short-term time window. The question is doing this at scale in a fully automated way for a much longer time horizon. Zillow tried and failed.
This is not true at all. For every module you can parse out and load the module's imports in parallel. As you traverse the graph the known and loadable module frontier can grow much wider.

The only way it would be serial is if every module only imported one other module.
The problem with Internet of Trash devices isn't a lack of cryptography - it's closed, poorly developed, throw-away software. In comparison to implementing a whole wifi stack, some dedicated hardware for AES is trivial. Given that NSA has been trying to get us to use "lightweight cryptography" for decades (eg 512 bit RSA), this seems quite uncompelling.

Furthermore for even smaller devices without Wifi, the "Internet" of things (where Internet means communicating directly over the WAN rather than to a more-capable local device) won't be compelling until the software situation has been sorted out. For example the best practices for using current Wifi smart plugs is to stick them on their own VLAN with no Internet access, communicating only with a local Home Assistant or whatever. There's no reason they themselves need to be on the WAN.
It's complicated.

The business climate changes. As you say, CEOs change and HP arguably went through particular tumult in that regard with a generally lackluster Platt and then all the Fiorina-associated drama. (Who lugged "the garage" around from stage to stage but didn't really walk the walk as much as talked the talk.)

Times change in other ways as well. It's hard to compare how major computer companies operated and what the expectations were of employees in the 70s/80s compared to today. I expect if you average mid-level Google engineer were dropped into HP, IBM, Intel, or DEC ~1980, they'd probably find a lot to not like.
I made the same point on twitter a few days ago.
https://twitter.com/mattmcknight/status/1456096267768147971

Even CarMax and Carvana with commodity products in the traditional lemon market have to work around this problem by adding an inspection to confirm the data- and they have a large spread between their buying price and their selling price.
Reality is that this is just Zuck yapping his mouth. Nobody cares nor will care about this, video calls will continue as they've always done, Second Life will stay niche, there's no AR until my phone makes me hallucinate.

We got a couple more decades at least for AR to happen.
> HN isn't going to be that venue at the moment, seems pretty hostile to web3/crypto.

I actually don't think HN is hostile to web3/crypto specifically. I think HN is suspicious of hype, and the hype level around those things is pretty insane.

I see a lot of skeptical comments that boil down to "but what is it actually good for?", and there's never really a good answer posted to that question. To me, that's an indication that there's more hype than substance. But who knows? That could change in the future.
>Simon has been big on "spreadsheets as functional programming"

Thanks for the keyword quote. Interesting topic as I felt Spreadsheet is very under-represented form of programming. Especially when trillions of dollars relies on Excel to function properly.
I keep several tarantulas and a few other spiders, and they are absolutely fascinating! Your description of the spider waving its arms and running from side to side makes me think it was likely a jumping spider. This group of spiders have large eyes and don't build webs to catch prey, and are really cute!
My friends are far-flung and we meet privately in our Discord. We have an audio channel, and anyone who's free hops into it at their leisure. VR wouldn't add much there; to take advantage of it would require us to look at each other, which precludes doing an actual activity like playing a game together.
Waylandis now default on all big distros.

The war is over people. Even the xorg people are happy about this.
Cruise ship with a courtyard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oasis_of_the_Seas

Almost 3000 rooms, but easily could have been more as all the cabins are bigger than in Munger Hall. Total pricetag is about the same at $1.4B. Does UCSB have a pier? Hmm...