skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I politely disagree.

I'm currently walking away from a code-base (and the company who let it be built) that was obviously built by someone who's mental model of how the code works was incorrect. At some very basic levels, it under-performs compared to literally every other example of this sort of code I've ever seen (and it's extremely common), which results in a subpar user-experience and an EC2 instance way bigger than necessary to run this sort of code. A lot of code running doesn't need to run in the first place, and due to the incorrect mental model, there's a substantial amount of code that doesn't run.

Nobody really understands how bad it is, though, because it's barely tested (and the engineer who wrote most of the code has argued that we don't need tests, for various reasons) and all of the engineers on the team who didn't build it initially, have told me that they're not familiar enough with how this sort of product should work to understand that it doesn't work like that (again, this is a super common kind of product).

There's a lot of other anti-patterns (I started keeping a list in my first week) but I think these are the most damning. This code is in production. Nobody at the org brought up these issues earlier in development (like saying "hey, nobody else's product does [annoying thing that doesn't need to happen], why does ours?"), which leads me to believe that the whole technical org is at fault.

It sucks and I can't wait to be done with this experience.
They require strict observation of Robert's Rules of Engagement.
I guess it depends a little on who is making the choices. If it is politician driven, might be fair to call it banning. If it is the school system and teachers making a choice about what to use to teach effectively that seems like good policy.
Protip: Anything labelled "smart" these days is emphatically not.
Show HN: We built a Rotten Tomatoes-style website for VPNs
w00t!!!??? 7 days to open an account? It takes 5 minutes for most banks in Europe, fully online, low or no fees.
The article says it’s about books being available to kids in libraries, not curriculum per se.
Yes it is.

We have run out of ipv4 addresses, CGNATs cause problems with self-hosting, ipv4 allocations are not fair and are driving up the cost of infrastructure/access. Particularly problematic in developing Countries.

Security is not an argument, ipv6 firewalls have existed for a long period now.

If we want to make the internet to scale then we need to encourage the use of ipv6.
I don’t know who practices that, but it’s not a very professional approach. The only time I’ve known that to happen has been for quick reaction alerts, when it’s considered an acceptable risk to save time.

For normal operations the pilot doing their own check isn’t a lack of confidence in the ground crew, it’s the prudent, smart, and responsible thing to do when playing with people’s lives and very expensive aircraft. I’ve never known ground crew to get upset over it.
wchar_t *value = (wchar_t *)malloc(length);

// The documentation says that if the string for some reason was not stored with zero-termination, we need to manually terminate it. Sigh!

if (value[length]) { value[length+1] = 0; }
>I don't think we'll ever be able to calculate program designs, like having a computer design the theoretically optimal {sorting algorithm, hashmap, SQL engine} for a given processor, for a particular performance criterion (average-case and worst-case performance)

Not talking about efficiency here. The theoretical optimal for time complexity is already done. We know how to calculate a quantitative measure for average case and worst case performance. For many problems we know the solution for how to optimize for both of the above cases.

When I refer to design I refer to the aspect of computer science we do not have theory for. How do you organize your logic? What is optimal organization of code such that it is optimal and future proof? This area I believe can be formally defined.
> Not all religious people see sacred texts as infallible or perfect.

That’s true, but some do.

>The same "context-specific and region-specific and time-specific" criticism could be said for science, statistics, and academics.

I think we can both agree that science and religion are not on equal footing in terms of self-correction. Science goes back and forth in a matter of years to verify observations. In religion you can easily step over the line into blasphemy even when simply asking a question.

>Both scripture and science are done by humans, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth in both of them.

I don’t disagree. My concern is apparent truth derived from misinterpretation.
Employment becomes a partnership when you are rich and have in-demand skills, not when you have a personal epiphany about the nature of work.

IME employers can actually sense this when it happens and a lot of the ridiculous bullshit you would otherwise have to put up with melts away.

You ain't ever being a partner working on the checkout tills at walmart ;-)
No, they are literally calling for banning books from school libraries. Books that are not used as part of the curriculum.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/henry-mcmaster/

They are also literally calling for burning books:

> Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.

> “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

https://fredericksburg.com/news/local/education/spotsylvania...
So, order electronics from the internet for my non smart, non internet connected devices. Got it.
But the graph in the article shows that ZGC now gets better throughput than G1! [EDIT no it doesn't]

I suspect the answer is that ZGC is not considered mature enough, and has a higher memory overhead than G1.
I found a honeywell timer on amazon, which requires being hard wired. There is no way my landlord would have let me do electrical work in my previous property, and getting an electrician out for a "simple" job like that is ~$80 plus $75 for the timer. A hue bridge + bulb is ~$75 and I can use my existing lamps too.

> You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.

Having an electrician hard wire an extra switch for each lamp, configuring latitude and individual timers (presumably they don't all work off the same trigger so if you want to change them from 30m before to an hour before, or 15m after you have to update them all), managing DST... That doesn't sound massively simple to be be honest.

> mechanical timers have been able to do this for decades.

I don't think people are claiming that smart homes are allowing for things that were never physically possible before; I'm certainly not, but it is definitely more convenient.
I think he means it's a problem solvable by manufacturers that does not involve end user surveillance.
Agreed that "did you know" sucks. Worst possible way to teach me to use the device.

That said, it's a really interesting problem figuring out how to teach people what Alexa can/can't do. How do you tell your users "we built a feature so now you can set subscription orders!"

Personally, I don't get why they don't run ads. Like, instead of a smiley face delivery person, just say "here's a new thing your Alexa can do"
Because your pixels need to transform from the image color profile to the display color profile.

By default this all falls back to sRGB, which is not the "ground truth pixel value" you may be assuming it is.
Nice, we'll add a guide shortly. This is already possible but we just didn't have time yet to add it to the guide :) If you want, create an issue in the GH (https://github.com/ory/kratos-nextjs-react-example/issues/ne...) repo for this so you get notified once it's available, and so we don't forget!
Is there actual data on cryptocurrency use in Argentina?

Last I lived in an unstable Latin America country with inflation issues, the common solution was just to buy dollars. So much so that the country, Ecuador, eventually just switched over to using dollars entirely. So I can believe it's possible that people are trying to do similar things digitally when they don't trust the local currency. But given the user-hostile nature of a lot of the cryptocurrency systems, I suspect they aren't doing all that much of it. As an example, look at El Salvador's clown-shoes attempt to switch over to using Bitcoin.

So as much as I grant the theoretical potential of an imagined version of cryptocurrencies to be useful, I'm still pretty skeptical of the actual use of actual cryptocurrencies, even under those conditions.
Thanks for bringing attention to this matter. Our app isn't operating in the US (we are a brazilian company), so FDA approval is not required.

We also don't claim medical benefits, it is only a tool used by therapists during therapy and for homework activities, all of which must be done under a professional SLP guidance.
A lot of the other comments on here are saying that this is banning books from curricula [1]. But I would...like to see the sources for this assertion?

All of the stories I have seen [1][2] say that the books are banned from the school library system. As far as I am aware, school libraries usually contain a wide range of books, not just whatever is required for the curriculum.

So banning a book from a school library does seem to be a fairly strong suppression of ideas. Libraries have usually been the place where you go to find ideas outside the safe circle of whatever is permitted by your (usually insipid) curriculum.

For example, I am not a fan of Ayn Rand's philosophy, but I am still glad I got to read her books from my school library, so I could make that decision for myself. School libraries curated by legislators with an agenda seem like a Really Bad Idea.

----------------------------------------

[1] This would be within limits, I guess, but still weird. Wouldn't you just use a different curriculum?

[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-mat...

[3] https://www.kmuw.org/education/2021-11-09/goddard-school-dis...
VPNs are a mess. It's becoming a very commercial market, and companies are bought up by less reputable and bigger ones, making it hard to know what to trust.

The biggest pain points when researching a good VPN are:

- Sponsored content / Ads

- Fake reviews

- It takes time

- Inconsistent metrics and info across sites

To make finding a good VPN even easier, we've aggregated over 500 online reviews, 3k Reddit posts, 4k HackerNews posts, and 400 Youtube videos.

## How it works

Using GPT-3 and BERT, we've built a service that collects VPN reviews from all over the web, filters and aggregates them, and presents the summarized results in a short and understandable form.

## What's next?

We're constantly improving SeekVPN and will soon add new features like:

- Building a community for VPN enthusiasts that helps each other

- Running statistical analysis to spot discrepancies and contradictions among reviews and filter out fake reviews

- Increase catalog and add more filters

- Improve summaries (pros and cons style)

We eventually plan to do our analysis for other categories of SaaS products. It should become the Rotten-Tomatoes for software products.

Let us know what you think! What should we add or improve?
The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.
Does any of that change if you stop thinking about it as a prank and instead consider it as performance art? With art, provocation isn't shameful, it's often a goal.
I actually have a natural gas generator that powers the majority of the house, and I was happy to see the lights all worked fine during an outage when the internet was down along with the power. The switches all obviously worked, but the Home app worked too so I could continue to set scenes/etc. It was quite nice!
> At some point I would imagine subpixel hinting gets disabled entirely in desktop OSes but we just haven't got there yet.

I’m pretty sure it’s gone on macOS.
To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on?

I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..”

Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic?

I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’?

Thanks for taking the time today!
> Estimates sit at around 240,000 deaths

You're of course referring to total estimated deaths over 20 years from all supposedly war-related causes (which includes poverty), not civilian deaths directly attributable to the US. The Taliban - as the blood-thirsty conquering force attempting to enslave the population of Afghanistan for the past several decades - is responsible for most of those deaths.

It's funny how many people try to pretend the Taliban don't exist, their murders don't exist, the consequences of their conquering don't exist, and their aims don't exist, when it's convenient.

The actual civilian deaths in Afghanistan by the US is a very small fraction of the number you're quoting, which is the point of the parent comment. The vast majority of violent civilian deaths were from the Taliban and associated groups, via suicide bombings and other intentional mass murder events.

And the vast majority of all deaths during the Iraq civil war, were Iraqi on Iraqi murders. The US stepped in-between the warring factions and tried to stop it, which cost a lot of US blood and treasure.

This isn't hidden magic information. It's right there in the estimates along with the number you quoted out of context. They break out how they arrive at the death totals.
No, there's no such thing. It's just bad marketing. Everyone wants more customers.

It probably means the vector of spread is word of mouth and other things.

SaaS companies are notorious for this.
The PDP range where Mini computers not Mainframes - the only mainframe class systems DEC had where the DECSYSTEM-20 / 10.
Not really. It's not designed for that. It's designed to be as lightweight as possible.

also, instead of Glibc, it uses musl, which although is supposed to be binary-compatible, does have some gotchas, so the larger the system, with more apps and libraries running on it expecting glibc, will have issues.
That would be indeed interesting. Ravens are able to use tools, maybe they will grok currency concept too.
The F-35B costs (currently- it's growing by the day) roughly a third of a billion dollars each in acquisition cost alone.

That's over a quarter billion pounds.

To put that in perspective: the pre-primary and primary education budget for the entire country, in 2016, was 800 million pounds.

Do you think MPs will hand-wring about this plane being flushed down the drain as much as they do about fiscal prudence in early education expenses?

I wonder if UK teachers spend their personal funds on school supplies like teachers in the US do.
Such a toxic attitude can go two ways.

Isn't then an employee a soulful being that exists for the purpose of extracting as much value from the employer as possible with the least amount of work delivered to only provide value to itself in a form of an end-of-month salary?

Employers and companies are built of people. Calling them a soulless construct and pretending everyone in the world is out there to get you is not a healthy attitude.
Is this programmable? Like you're going to change the text for this specific time frame and return to the original text after the programmed schedule?
Hi Scott, for the TI-99/4A versions of your games, did you handle the development of the ROM cartridge? What was that like? Did you have to split up any of your code to separate the game engine from the adventures themselves?
Put another way, I don't really have a problem with 3rd parties - or individuals who are so inclined - repairing Apple gear, but the recent moves have shown that the company would much rather deal with the small headaches of setting up and administering such a program if they can set the terms under which it happens.

Otherwise, legislators (think: US Congress) will do it for them, with disastrous results. Doing it like this means everybody gets something out of the deal: Consumers can choose the best repair option for them, Independent shops now can take Apple business and without worrying about warranties, and all of this happens in full view of the company and people who are watching them closely (Again, legislators).

It's a closed system and Apple sets the rules, but just about anyone can participate. On the whole, that seems like a net good to me.

* The same sentiment might apply to Deere as well, but I don't know enough about that particular situation to say if it would still be impractical to take a similar approach.
There are also other GCs that are heavily competitive with ZGC, such as Shenandoah. It might make sense to see how they all pan out before choosing a new default.
Any openings on planes are usually closed when parked in order to prevent birds and other critters from getting inside and causing random damage.
The Riemann conjecture unveiled by physics
Oh, is today the day on HN where we give unwanted writing advice? In that case, I'll just tell you that I don't really listen to people who universalize their individual reactions and act as if they're their only audience member in the world. So next time you want to give feedback, please do it in a fashion where your individual feelings are clearly marked as such, not hyperbolized into the total ruination of the writing in question.
Full text report:
http://arxiv-export-lb.library.cornell.edu/pdf/2106.04942v1

The summary in the paper is perhaps clearer than the article about it:

> "Our study has significant implications for the fundamental understanding of defect tolerance in these materials and the design of halide perovskite solar cells, in particular for tandem cells. Using a novel suite of multimodal microscopy techniques, we unveil the remarkably complex energetic landscape that charge carriers must navigate in halide perovskites. We provide the first nanoscale picture of how this energetic landscape influences photodoping, carrier recombination and trapping."

> "We find that the pursuit of homogeneous chemical compositions is not necessarily the best way to maximize the performance of this family of semiconductors, at least while the material still possesses deep trap clusters that lower device performance from the radiative limits. The existence of mixed Br and I samples induces the formation of beneficial local heterostructures that confer enhanced defect tolerance to these materials. In these regions, charge-carrier photogeneration and radiative recombination occurs through a rapid wide-to-narrow bandgap funneling process, more efficient than in the chemically homogeneous counterparts."

What's really interesting is how these materials are heterogenous at the nanoscale, which is rather like how the biological light-harvesting protein complexes(LHC) operate, with ordered aligned arrays of chlorophyll molecules held in particular orientations within the protein structure that optimize funneling of photon energy into reaction centers (water-splitting for H2 production).

However, these materials may not ever be commercially successful, due to issues like lead pollution and the working lifetime of the materials (they degrade fairly rapidly in full sun). Regardless, this is still very useful and important basic research.
Whats needed is a much stronger guarantee. For example, "If this device ever, even once, shows an error message or misbehaves, then we'll give you a full refund, plus $100".

If there was some logo and brand associated with that guarantee, consumers would prefer it, just like today some only buy organic or freetrade. Then manufacturers would want the extra sales generated by that logo/brand, and have a massive financial incentive to only apply the logo when the product is good enough.
No, that graph may be hard to understand. It shows the relative improvement each GC has made since Java 8, not the absolute performance.
Another top-level comment mused:

> I found it hard to quickly determine whether Kratos can run completely
> self-hosted, or that there's always some connection to Ory / Ory Cloud services.

I would appreciate answering that at the proper comment, I'm sure many readers here are very interested in the privacy aspect:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330048
> none of the individual animals would have any idea what the overall system was doing

Strike "animals" out, and it sounds like any worker in a big enough org. (Maybe I should stop reading Kafka)
> One complaint that I have about the Lutron system is that they don't offer relay-based modules.

Yes they do, here is the cutsheet: https://www.lutron.com/TechnicalDocumentLibrary/369-549b_Eng...

This one can switch 5A using a Pico input device.

Just to be clear, every commercial lighting controls line has relay modules, it’s necessary for occupancy sensing.
Oh god I installed Nest fire alarm products throughout my home. Such a PAIN. Last 8 months at most before new batteries. Wireless updates kick it off the network all the effin time. Wish I could get my money back - now I am committed to this garbage product for at least 5 more years (if they last).

Worst - incredibly little value generated from nest.
"Books whose authors are no longer able to give a talk on college campuses without multiple threats of physical violence against them". Curated, of course.
It was great when I was a kid (almost 50 years ago).

Other poster lists some tangible changes made to their menu but for me the difference is simply that I was a kid with a working-class single parent and my tastes were simpler. Hamburger + small fries + small Coke was an affordable "treat" for us.

Perhaps marketing is as responsible for killing McDonald's image: when small disappeared and it was "regular" size. Super-size dinks.... "Would you like fries with that?" Or when giant burgers (Bic Mac, Quarter-pounder, Double Quarter-pounder, Double cheeseburger) started dominating the menu and the small hamburger took a back seat.