skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Been a Mac user for decades, agree that Mac font rendering is preferable to Windows defaults. But also agree here that Linux can be very good too. Out of the box Ubuntu (since at least 16.04 or so) looks quite nice. Good enough that people that don’t like MacOS font rendering complain about it being too Mac-like.
At this price, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot barge pole until local API is a reality.

If their servers shutdown and it becomes abandonware you want to be sure it's still functional when you're spending a little more than "toy money".
Yes, you're right, here is far better than the FT. Badly phrased on my part I think. If you have a subscription and aren't using github/iamadamdev/bypasspaywalls then you can block or mute individual users.
Tips for Writing a College Admissions Essay
I slapped myself in the face.
There is a massive housing shortage in the Netherlands, isn't there? I agree on your other point but might be logistically complex and expensive v.s. Berlin for instance.
Scala and SBT are some of my biggest productivity killers. They murder my machine and take years to do compile.
This is not relevant to the subject, and full of lies. @dang -- clean up the thread
Very much this -- it will unfortunately have a horizontal bias if done naively, but I've been exploring the space of doing lossy preprocessing to improve image compression, but the layered heuristics in png make this difficult. This format is simple enough that we have a number of approximation heuristics -- find the closest color in the last 64, use a smaller delta, or preserve one or two channel colors in the next pixel.
I think that's mostly due to my target audience. This data comes from twitch streamers who want to have music playing during their streams.

I'm sure some of these people use MPD, but given what I've read after googling it seems like you need to be a technical person to set it up.
It runs byte code in a JS-(or WASM) implemented JVM, isn’t it?

It is really fast, but slightly different than J2CL.
In addition to finding a cool tutorial site, I have a less exciting recommendation: spend some time reading the reference documentation. This will give him a sense of the scope of the language, the difference between core language and library features, and most of all, a bit of direction for how to help himself find answers as he progresses out of the absolute beginner phase.

The standard docs don't get recommended to beginners very often because they are not designed to be fun/motivating like learning sites, but provided that the student is intrinsically motivated, I think it can be exciting to look at all the modules and start to learn about all the things that people have built and provide for the programmer. Learning to navigate the reference material is an important skill. Some of the sections are confusing, dry, and unhelpful. Others are very worthwhile and knowing where they are is important.

Python in particular has a large standard library, much of which is quite old (good in that it is very mature, not so good in that some of it is barely relevant any more). I've been programming python for a decade and I look at the standard docs every day for something. `stdtypes.html` is kind of a big mess but at some point you have to learn most of what is in there.

If I were hiring a programmer, one of the things I would try to evaluate would be their basic research skills.
Not to mention Turbo Pascal was compiling faster than Go, on a single-core, in-order 20Mhz PC...
Yeah I don’t know if I will trust software to do things for me in the house. Automation is something I will not use smart systems for. I only use them to provide me connectivity so I can control them from my phone.
Cybersecurity engineer here, have worked for FAANG, my entire home is automated to the teeth - every single little thing - and I'm not concerned about privacy or security because I've chosen my products and network firewall rules carefully.
Ask HN: How was your experience buying a SaaS company/service from a platform?
I am currently checking out various SaaS marketplaces to maybe buy a company. Has anyone made good experiences on a certain platform? I checked out the following:
- https://microacquire.com/
- https://empireflippers.com/
- https://digitalexits.com/listings/
- https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/
- https://www.sideprojectors.com/#/
- https://quietlight.com/listings/
- https://latonas.com/
- https://www.flippa.com/

Are there other marketplaces you would recommend (implies you bought something successfully)?
I wonder if the author tried making pixel diffs capable of using lookback. They'd be one byte longer but would possibly happen a lot more often than full pixel values. It's also reminiscent of the delta blocks from MPEG. If anything I would trade the 5-bit run for delta-from-lookup on a whim (the cases where the ratio between short runs vs. exact lookback is extreme seems like it might only happen for pinstripe patterns). I should probably implement the change and test it before posting...
"There was a concerted effort to not only obtain and copy our device and follow everything we were doing, but then also, when it hit a critical mass, to actually put us out of business,"

That is NOT market competition...at all and it is 100% shady. Competition is "I make something, you make something better". It's not "You make something. I make something to make it better. YOU try to put me out of business by LEGAL means." That is not competition.
Something I always wondered about Visual Studio and Windows programming:

If you compile a C++ program with Visual Studio, it gets dynamic dependencies on some visual studio DLLs. DLLs that are not necessarily installed by default on the Windows of the target user you're compiling for.

So the question is: MS created both Windows and Visual Studio. So why can't Visual Studio compile to something that works by default on the Windows of the target audience without requiring them to install those additional DLLs? Doesn't the win32 API provide enough, and can't Visual Studio statically link in whatever extras it needs, or those extras be added to the Windows API that is present by default if they're that necessary?

Also, given that Windows comes with pre-installed programs that were written in C++, how did those programs get compiled to not require those Visual Studio dependencies, are MS not using Visual Studio themselves internally?
I don't think that's particularly fair. We all pay into the basic social programs. I don't have children but I'm still paying into the public system and I don't believe I'm being unfairly taxed. To be able to afford to pay into the private school is a luxury.
Plenty of software engineers know how to put devices on their home network without granting them access to the internet. I have some wi-fi bulbs that I do this for, and I can control them over the network internally.
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.11557
There's lots of people working at Google.
Germany Announces New Government
I Grew Up Poor. How Am I Supposed to Raise My Middle-Class Kids?
Windows paths can contain unpaired UTF-16 surrogates, which are not representable in UTF-8.
So no source and no understanding that because of compulsive military service most of Israel is ex military and no intelligence agency will allow the government to be blackmailed by a private intelligence firm?

Seems like a conspiracy theorist to me.
People blinded by hate tend to not be the most creative thinkers. The either/or right/wrong mindset does not lend itself to creativity.
Wait for the subscription-ware version where you need to pay 2 Billion per year to the defense contractor for the feature.
You mean, give them cash for switching? No, that certainly wont harm them, but, uh, there might be better uses for that cash.
I think a memory of even private information belongs to the rememberer, not the remembered, and that the dangers and damages of remembering are mild compared to those of forgetting.
"If most intelligence in the universe is hive minds or is big slow brains like planet-spanning mycelium networks we might completely overlook it."

Or intelligent life made up off entirely other principles(and with very different goals to survive), than what we know. Do we understand what is going on inside of jupiter? Or inside the sun? Maybe there is life, that starts to evolve at certain pressures and temperatures? Well, maybe not likely, but I am glad, that the self centered philosophy, that the sun and the whole universe all are moving around us humans who are on top of it all, fades a bit more. I mean, we clearly are awesome at technology and so far we have not seen much technology from any other species. But maybe very advanced life has no need for our tech anymore, so we would not spot it, by looking for it.
Hah, probably not!

But it's a good rule of thumb that unless the full name is used then "[the] Council" means "the Council of the European Union" rather than any of the others.

Maybe it's just me who finds that useful...
Exactly, click bait nonsense. The thing is that before companies could claim "work won't get done if you aren't in the office". Now that that has been proven false, the are grudgingly trying to keep their employees. Remote work is the new carrot just like healthcare was in WWII.
Rockbox – open-source firmware for mp3 players
Out of curiosity, I modified the benchmark program to simply toss the pixel data into lz4/lz4hc for comparison (patch file: https://paste.debian.net/1220663/).

I'm actually quite impressed how the resulting size is a little bit smaller than lz4hc (actually not even that far away from libpng), while the encoding speed is quite close to lz4, despite seemingly not having as many hacks and tweaks under the hood to get there. So the encoder is IMO doing amazingly well actually.

However, the decoding speed of liblz4 is off by roughly an order of magnitude. But again, liblz4 probably benefits from decades of tweaking & tuning to get there. It would be interesting how much performance could be gotten out of the qoi decoder.

Here are the totals I get for the "textures" benchmark samples:

decode ms encode ms decode mpps encode mpps size kb
libpng: 2.2 32.4 58.67 3.94 160
stbi: 2.1 17.0 61.50 7.49 228
qoi: 0.7 0.7 191.50 170.54 181
lz4: 0.1 0.6 1226.06 206.40 258
lz4hc: 0.1 70.9 1029.26 1.80 200

And for the "wallpaper" samples. The spreads seem to be a bit more in favor of qoi here:

decode ms encode ms decode mpps encode mpps size kb
libpng: 131.9 2287.1 66.63 3.84 8648
stbi: 147.5 1177.1 59.55 7.46 12468
qoi: 56.3 56.5 156.13 155.60 9981
lz4: 14.3 53.1 614.53 165.50 18019
lz4hc: 13.9 1901.7 630.94 4.62 12699
-- Possible stupid question here (apologize, I'm not an expert) --

How can a cheap plastic cover block the engines of a fighter aircraft? Even if they forget to take it off, shouldn't it be destroyed by the jets?
Which is a good point.

Back when the internet was starting to bloom I got a nice email from Scott Adams of Dilbert.

Seems he had gotten a number of fan mails meant for me and was trying to find who to send it to. I also had a number of fan mails meant for him! We exchanged the mails and had a nice chat about it!
But what does McDonald's gain from the PR backlash? Is there some perpetual contract between McDonald's and Taylor, and they just screwed up by buying a worse model? You'd think that the corporate overlords would perfer the machine to be working so they make money from the sales...
I think the part on DB adapters is right in the sense that NextAuth allows us to use whichever db persistence we need.
But if that is handled by Ory. what Db does Ory use? Should we set up our own.?

Also, authentication and authorization are core for an app. If we do authentication here, how does authorization work? Can I bring my own authorization like oso etc.
That's not really an apt comparison. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Glad to hear your positive experiences. Could I share your feedback with a few colleagues in DBS here?

As you say, it's about context. Here we keep pushing the message that Singapore is an ideal place to do business, that the regulations are business-friendly, and the financial systems are efficient, well run and reliable, and this is largely true. A failure of this nature and size may be a blip in the Japanese or European markets, but it's also about perception. That takes a hit. It will affect the investment appetite, and our economy depends a lot on international business and money moving through our financial institutions. That's the first impact.

More practically, and looking locally, about three-quarters of our GDP is in the services sector [1]. Pretty much everyone is banked, and payments are increasingly cashless. A lot of these payments (including salaries, payment for services like air-con repairs, etc.) go through our local equivalent of your UPI called PayNow, and DBS' PayNow systems were failing. I remember carrying cash in my wallet just a handful of times over the past couple of years, and I pay for pretty much everything electronically. So... these systems which failed are far more central to a well functioning economy here than in some other countries. That's the second impact.

MAS (our regulator) is rightly concerned about the long-term implications. You can be sure they will have a thorough root-cause analysis. Some heads may roll. DBS will definitely be slapped with a multi-million dollar fine and be told to present a comprehensive plan to ensure this doesn't happen again. MAS will appoint people to oversee & manage how this is done, and knowing MAS they may start other audits to identify potential problems in other systems. They'll definitely be watching DBS closely, and they will probably look at other banks too.

References:

[1] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/modules/infographics/economy
On the other hand, if a company wants to micromanage its employees there isn't much that will stop them. It's possible to get the advantages of remote IDEs without the managerial snooping, you just need to work for a company that trusts its employees.

Not saying I prefer remote IDEs, just that they are more a symptom here and not the root cause.
I suspect that the main issue with rewrites is that the users or product managers see it as an oportunity to add new features or redo old ones extensively. In the end the scope of the rewrite is no longer a rewrite but a new product that is incompatible with the original it was supposed to replace. I have seen this happen a couple of times. A straight rewrite for technical reasons and well defined scope does not suffer these issues.
>Forget about the deck crew and the pilot being blind morons.

I thought aviation is THE industry that runs on procedures and checklists you need to tick before and after each flight to make sure the even if you're a complete klutz, nothing like this can ever happen. Did that go out the window?

>It means the flight computer for a plane that took twenty years and a trillion dollars to develop can't detect that there's a fucking cover blocking the engine.

This is pure gold. Even my robovac can detect when something is chocking the suction intake and shut down and send me a notification on my phone. The fact that a trillion dollar weapon missed this feature is hilarious.
Hi Gianluca, great article, really.
If you didn't know him, this guy developed Uniwhere, an app for university students that had to compete with a much worse one, funded by taxpayers money.
They really tried every shady trick to make Uniwhere fail, they even banned it at some point, but at the end Gian won and nowadays his app is helping thousands of students.
You made a very motivational speech at the CLab meeting some years ago, really thanks for sharing with us your experience.
I'd like to see this in xpra.

Does anybody have an idea if QOI+lz4 would improve compression ratio further?
Occasionally, it is because of that though. If not 'stupid', at least inexperienced. I've had plenty of things I've done that worked, but were, in hindsight, 'stupid' (and have been called out on that). Sometimes, people try to make a lot of post-hoc justifications for a block of code or a data/tech decision that really is, just... 'stupid'. Again, that's more likely down to inexperience than anything else, but not every decision is a 'good' one just because people 'had their reasons'.

Examples

Having a 'user info' table with 190+ boolean columns for 'country' ('US','CA','DE','IT', etc) in case someone wants to indicate they're 'from' two countries.

Joining views on views of joined views which are themselves built on joins of other views is, likely, not a terribly sound data decision. (X: "It worked fine last year - you must have broken something." Me: "well... last year you had 450 users, and now there are 37000 users - this isn't a performant way of doing this". X: "Can't be true - the person who wrote it is a DBA")
Are these the big/little cores I've been hearing so much about?
Alpine Linux 3.15
tar -czf ./file.tgz ./*

edit: i do hope that is correct without checking :-)
Windows paths are sequences of utf-16 code units, so they can contain unpaired surrogates which are not legal in unicode (and therefore UTF-8).

That’s why on windows Rust’s OsStr is an extension of UTF8 called WTF8, which allows surrogates (then again “traditional” unix paths are just bags of bytes so it’s not like windows is any worse).
I like how this reached the top page soon after "Go does not need a Java-style GC" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29319160).

Moreover, are the significantly lower GC pause times help improve snappiness of GUI apps, such as IntelliJ IDEA?
Kong since 0.x versions. We run into scale issues (database tuning parameters, caching, database replication) so I agree it would need a small team owning it. We actually use so little of the features that we consider building our own or look for other solutions.

https://www.haproxy.com/user-spotlight-series/building-a-glo... use haproxy as gateway. Possible because it's a single service, relatively simple authentication and users are fine without custom error responses. That might be worth looking into.
I use it in a few projects, all are polyglot monorepos. I think bazel really shines in that setting. I have one tool to interact with my codebase. I use it to manage all build, test, and deploy, but also code generation, running local dev servers. I think its worth the hassle of setting it up for large multi language projects.
Slides link: http://crystalclearsoftware.com/2021cppcon/cpp23lib.pdf
I understand now better why my country (Switzerland) wants to purchase 30-ish of those for "National Skies Protection". It is well in line with their past strategies and accomplishments:

1) Provide a sky patrol, but on only on office hours (9 - 17).

2) Buy for 1B CHF worth of radar, that would unfortunately lock on cows pasturing.

3) Buy for 0.5B CHF worth of software, then discard it because it's incompatible.

4) etc, etc, etc ....
Yup. I remember trying to open an account and getting the “we’ll respond in 7 days”, then 5 days later getting “missing document, please provide and we’ll respond in 7 days”.

Going to a branch in person took an hour of waiting. Once I got in front of someone it was pretty efficient but hold crap that was way more painful than US banking which isn’t exactly known for its customer service.
> the strategic nukes come out and we all die

To borrow from the Bronze Age conflicts between the Egyptians, Hittites, et al, you don't want to annihilate your adversary because you still have to trade with them. Wars are just a strategy to establish a more favorable trading position.
And far more money.

The US is just far wealthier than Europe.
I’ve done all my dev work in a remote vm in azure for 3-4 years now and really like the model. I can start coding on one machine, pick back up on another, and zero dev-cruft on my local machine. I’m interested in container based ides for similar reason. The downsides he mentions are legit, but on the whole, I recommend trying the approach.
Wonder if the current hiring and rewarding contributes to over engineering?

How would you look if you just invoked APIs to get your work done versus designed and implemented an end to end solution.

Many times, I have seen over engineered solutions come from promotion attached initiatives.
> Poultry production is so efficient that, kilo for kilo, it has a relatively
low carbon impact – roughly on a par with olive oil and almost a 10th of that of
beef, according to the Carbon Brief website. But higher welfare standards
require more land, more heat and more feed, which mostly comes from
land-intensive soya. If we want to eat “happier” chickens, there will be an
environmental cost.

Not only "poultry" (which includes all farmed birds, like turkey or duck, and
not just chickens) but also pig meat production emits about 10 times fewer
greenhouse gasses than beef production (rasining cows for their meat). Even lamb
and mutton and even breeding dairy cattle emits three times fewer greenhouse
gasses than beef production:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

Chicken and pig meat are way more sustainable than beef and even cow milk dairy
is, and -worldwide- we eat many times more chicken and pig meat than beef:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti...

Meanwhile, almost 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production,
most of it from burning fossil fuels:

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#energy-electr...

Only about 18% comes from agriculture in general, including farming, but not
only. Only about 6% is specifically from meat production, the majority of which
comes from cows and only a small portion from smaller ruminants, lambs and
goats, and other land animals, chickens and pigs.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the most effective way there is
to reduce the impact of your dietary habbits on the environment is to stop
eating so much beef. And if you want to reduce the impact of your behaviour, in
general, on the environment, the best way is to stop wasting so much energy and
stop burning fossil fuels, for example by driving less, flying less, using
public transport, turning off the light when you don't need it, turning on the
heating and cooling only when you need it, making sure you don't overuse your
household appliances (don't put the washing machine on for a pair of socks) and
so on.

Good news is, you can protect the environment without giving up meat :)
Where Will Shopify Stock Be in a Decade?
Recognizing Employee Stress Through Facial Analysis at Work
Standards adoption is definitely an area where government incentives work.
I think one of the problems of DIY smart home implementation is ... the DIY part.

I think the DIY designs suffer from sedimentation, or buying something that works for very specific function, then forgetting about it and moving onto the next very specific function. Although individually these functions may work, together they multiply problems.

I think much of this can be reduced if DIY-er sticks to a fewer solution. Just on for communications, I have seen Bluetooth, ZigBee, LoRA, Wifi, Ethernet, and modbus in a single home...
That’s not totally clear, due to the way the problem is often described: As a one-off event, with no clear rules for what the host will do. If there is no clear rule about what the host will do, you are still left in the dark. For example, the host may have decided beforehand (in secret) that he will open another door only if you picked the winning door. In that case, switching will lose you the prize with certainty.

But yes, if it is clearly understood that the host always opens another door after you picked one, you should switch.
"@dang" doesn't do anything special. The most reliable way to reach the mods is to email them using the Contact link in the footer.
Other Games on 64 Squares