skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success.

The name Sun Microsystems is one that I, and most people, associated with microsystems - with workstations (and servers). Sun was founded in 1982 with Bill Joy as a founder, who was already a renowned programmer from CSRG. Andy Bechtolsheim had an exciting hardware design. Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy risked starting a new company, and had enough chops to manage it into a success. Sun IPOd in 1986. Sun almost bought Apple right before Java was released.

Java was released in 1995. Sun Microsystems already had over a billion and a half dollars in revenue a quarter, which was pretty good at the time.

One reason for Java was protective - Sun wanted a language people could run on workstations and servers that it had some say over. A free, open source language was part of that, it helped in its adoption. Java was more of a defensive move, that Sun wouldn't be locked out of some kind of language ecosystem controlled by Microsoft or Netscape or other companies.

Sun wasn't a software company, they were a hardware company that released a product to defend their hardware from being locked out of competitor's ecosystems. They also weren't in a position to put out a computer language and force programmers onto it, being free and open source, and the ability to run on multiple platforms helped in its acceptance. Being able to run on multiple platforms was the whole point, they didn't want people to get locked into the Microsoft ecosystem with the release of NT 3.51 etc.
Counter: Android is open source.
The real reason is very clear to me: Wolfram builds a fairly unique and complicated product. Their advantage comes largely from a very narrow market with few competitors.

Releasing the source would deprive them of that advantage, which has financial implications. The benefits of additional contributors might not outweigh the potential loss from competition.

The article is a typical critique of open source generally, and one can debate how true or false each point is, but it's not relevant to the real reasons. It's just a smokescreen over "we'd think we'll make more money this way".
Yes, which makes it even more absurd that people here are complaining about calls to increase J by having the OP sue Bose (given that increasing J is the only way we can actually make them care).

Everything about it is quite unfortunate.
This is a crucial question that really deserves an answer. If only because it all by itself could shed some light on what exactly happened here.
Exactly this.

Oh just be a world beating, industry leading, technical titan of a company with multiple revenue streams and you can afford to give away some code to make us all happy.

Wolfram just has to launch an operating system, a search engine, a line of mobile phones and laptops, a cloud services unit, and sure then they'll give away Mathematica, what the hell why not?
I have a feeling it won't be dialed down, but dialed up to 12. There was an awesome cartoon that I can't find anymore - two VW busses side by side. One with a bunch of classic progressive stickers - "Liberty", "Civil Rights", "ACLU", "Free Speech", "EPA", etc. Another one that's beaten up, with "Race", "CRT", "Hate", etc. representing contemporary progressivism.
Eh that's rather revisionist, C was a high-level language for the 70s. It isn't nowadays because there are languages that are so much higher level that it is low level in comparison. It's not much different from Fortran in that regard.

Rather than the purpose of C being an optimizable low-level language, it's more accurate to say that is the niche it carved out for itself.

There's plenty of crap in C that doesn't help with either optimization or a good ABI.
This one appears more complete: http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/library/SimpleSabotageFiel...

This reads like "The Anarchist's Guide to Bringing Down FAANG." (MAANG?)
Not only did they drop the price, but in the email they referred subscribers to the Disney+ package that includes Hulu and ESPN.
Google has handled themselves better than the content providers in past disputes, and the providers typically fold. I think Google has garnered goodwill by proactively reducing their prices etc.
Spies may be storing data to decrypt with a future quantum computer
I’ve got to agree with you here. While I personally agree with the people commenting about open source being about the license rather than governance, I do not think that was always as widely accepted as it currently is in this comments section. I recall seeing a lot of hostility from people in the past about governance of a licensed project not being in line with ‘open source values,’ for example.
I really like the idea that projects really just consist of "the next step". What do I need to do to advance this project/assignment/thing by one step? Define that and put it away to act on at some point.

It helps me manage feelings of overwhelm.
There is no way I would let a device like that into my house. In the (detached) garage, maybe, but even there I'd be very careful about how it is stored and charged.
1980/2022 Bergman/T.E.C Teatro Escuela Central/Federico Herrero/Archivo Nacional
yes, a chimp could literally rip the arm(s) out of a human without a sweat. 1 chimp arm is roughly equivalent to 2 of the strongest human arms.
At the risk of repeating myself:

> The system rewards cheaper and faster. But that's an issue of (primarily financial) incentives, not sociocultural biases.

Abusing other workers is a common phenomena at all levels of a company. Low level team leads (line/operations managers) are almost always of the same "class" as the people under them. They almost always ascend from those lower ranks.

In any given instance of abuse, there may be other factors. But there is always a zero sum financial incentive to do so - to exploit others to benefit oneself.

To be clear, I'm not in any way defending CEOs or any other executives. As a category, they are grossly, inexcusably overcompensated for the value they deliver. I'm just saying that the issue is systemic, pervasive.
Sam Harris is hiring a Head of Web3 Projects
I don't understand why this comment is so high up. It's just really naive to compare mathematica and python on runtime speed as if they're both tools used for the same purpose.
Whether you like their choice of syntax or not, wolframs tools are state of the art on what they do. Just don't hammer your nails in with screwdrivers.
Yes but you get some context instead of just download link
`player` and `Player` are different in Nim. Ditto for `date` and `Date`.
1. Start with no - this is an awesome primer on negotiating

2. Never split the difference - ditto . IMO, "start with no" is a sub set of this but it is worth separately anyway

3. Fooled by randomness

4. The black swan

5. Books on intermittent fasting by Dr Jason Fung

6. All books by Noah Harari but start with Sapiens

7. Security Analysis by Ben Graham
Judo and other throwing-style martial arts could be described as using "reverse body slams".
Telling the time with computer vision
Wingman for Haskell
> This is misleading as it posits that since there's a "before you" and an "after you", "you" are standing within some time continuum.

It was not misleading, it was a question. What person does not think they were born or that someone died?

In my experience, time does not exist. It is an illusion. Have you read Barbour's book?
I agree that you can't discern the difference between the appearance of impropriety and literal impropriety and shouldn't try to.

My point is that the existence of fines and non-stop training courses drilling in the correct messaging software to use to all employees doesn't end this behaviour. Do we increase the punishments or require more training courses to be taken? Will that have any effect?

I'm suggesting that if we really care about reducing impropriety we should also improve the software in use.
Huh? Open source absolutely works with product management, their are tons of companies doing this today. OSS is a great way to market and up sell to SaaS
I can't find the source right now, but IIRC, google checks your @gmail mails for shopping receipts and build a list of stuff you bought.
We would love a web view but don’t have any ability to design or much experience with building web apps, so we stuck with a terminal UI.
The bomber pilot who designed the artificial Christmas tree
My guess is that in these cases, the humans put themselves into a vulnerable position in pursuit of the monkeys.
And by using Firefox, or an ungoogled Chromium.
I'm going to say Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover.

Hear me out -- when you're debt-free in a modest paid-off house, you have so much extra "brain space" that used to be devoted to managing bills, worrying about layoffs or the next job, etc. Whereas if you're debt-free with low overhead, you can push back on management, be bolder in your current work, pay cash for continuing education, take interesting but not top-paid work, make mistakes and not stress about them, etc.
I can't fight a pet dog that's 2/3 of my weight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_formation_of_t... looks strange and twisted turns
same. using ublock on desktop (firefox and edge) and mobile (firefox). why kill only google analytics when there are thousands of creeps
Amazing, Thanks!.
This site really has become india central. Holy shit.
I work daily with 70% ethanol for sanitizing, and 95% ethanol for cleaning. I can never get the 70% stuff to light. Even with an open flame.

By the way, most hand sanitizer is around 70% or less. Above 70% and it doesn't kill bacteria as well.
>Elite college entrance is a lifelong shortcut in the distribution system of money and power

I'd say it's more a projection of that system. If you eliminated elite colleges entirely, the system wouldn't simply vanish.
What I meant by subsidizes is that it is the hook that allows the others to exist at a smaller profit margin.
ahem it obviously was a business service model success as Oracle bought ti for exactly that reason!
It does not have a hard dependency to Tokio. Any runtime can use tracing to emit the necessary instrumentation to work with Tokio Console.
I really think that when British sat foot in Boston they looked around and said „you keep it“. Of the dysfunctional places in this country thats a topper.
Third-party JavaScript running on a domain could similarly steal passwords typed into that domain.
On the other hand, incidents like this one drive a backlash against less-than-lethal weapons (and various holds), forcing police to deploy lethal force more often. I don’t know what the answer is besides “we need to stop making policy based on the whims of angry mobs”.
Size Doesn’t Matter: Composition Determines How Deadly a Meteorite Impact Is
I'm seriously interested in the use of netguns or bolo-guns or even some kind of goo-gun that can just trap people. Tazers and pepper spray are way too violent and ineffective.

This one kinda works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yEYRxASpzw
It is both hilarious and sad: like something from the film Brazil but also like normal bureaucracy in Corporate America of today.
Speaking of shock-loads to Li-Ion batteries...

I was once responsible for figuring out how to track the flight path of an object being towed through the air on a rope. This ended up being a GPS transponder with a ISM band packet radio and a Li-ion pouch cell. Packaging this was difficult, as the device would occasionally be slammed into the ground at at least terminal velocity.

One of my first prototypes was essentially all of the above stuffed into a bit of ABS pipe, with some foam inside for cushioning. We flew the prototype once, slammed it into the ground, and it promptly stopped working. Upon cracking the enclosure open, I found that the battery lead wires had broken free from the PCB under the shock load. As I extracted the pouch itself, I found it had formed itself into an arc segment, with r=1.5", same as the ID of the ABS pipe.
It seems like the ability to declare a parameter to be a constant string (no runtime computation allowed) would have been useful here, or in any printf-like API. If you really want to do that, it could be using a different function.
Exactly I’ve been building OSS for companies for a long time now, it’s an incredibly viable business model as shown by the boatload of products that do it today
Would love a real GUI but we have no design talent and stuck with something simpler.
That's an interesting story, albeit one that sounds like a good fairy tale. Any source for this?
Not very convincing, I'd say.
Claim number 9 might be right for the specific listed cases but it certainly isn't true for all domains. In the browser world, open source has clearly produced better results (chrome, firefox, webkit) than the closed source alternatives (IE before chromuim Edge).

Also, this post is an insult to big projects such as Blender, which have been a terrain for innovation and experimentation for years. Blender is also is an example of long term effort and unified design.

In the software library world, open source clearly wins in terms of market adoption and innovation. If the author has a car, it probably runs linux, sqlite, and many other open source components.

In AI research, the common set of tools used by the community is open source (Tensorflow, Python, etc.)

In conclusion, interesting perspective, but it does not match mine at all.
between 1970 and now, if you look at the same far away galaxies, they are receding faster now than they were in 1970.
To be fair, in the programming case you change the code or data to make the variable correct, while in science unless there's a mistake somewhere you follow the data, you don't change things to 'fix' it. However we all know this, we know scientists aren't going to try and 'correct' reality or the data to fit our assumptions. Well, excepting the tin foil hat brigade, but we shouldn't pander to them or let them dictate our use of language.
Best of HN 2021
At least they punish the perpetrators... They over-punish whereas we under-punish. Under-punishment is worse because it implicitly punishes those who do the right thing by allowing perpetrators to get away with crimes; it encourages crime. Just wait 10 years and you will understand what I'm talking about. You severely underestimate how bad things have become. It will dawn on you suddenly like a nightmare from which you can't wake up.

Maybe this comment seems alarmist but I'm trying to help. Read it with an open mind and a grain of salt. Better be alarmist than sorry.
It's not 10 characters either.
Well, then it depends if interactively means redefined methods or just glueing together existing methods in new ways with new data. If it's the latter then no new compilations are needed. If it's the former then we are dealing with a type of work that can probably not be done in pure Python or similar and would require some kind of compilation anyway.
Uh, no. Tasers are supposed to be used on non dangerous individuals, like drunks. If there's a real threat you don't want to be close enough to use a taser in the first place. If the taser fails, you're literally standing wide open close enough to be physically attacked.
"Learning how to learn" course (the corresponding book: "A mind for numbers ..."): evidenced based 101 on how to learn: the essence is ~12 points on what to do and the most important what not to do to learn something (100s references).
https://barbaraoakley.com

You are learning almost all of the time on the "knowledge" job.
(2019)

Interesting compared to this recent take: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolf...
Does it? Other commenters are saying that 70% stuff doesn’t light even with an open flame. Maybe it’s what’s in the nonalcoholic remainder that makes the difference?
It’s crazy. I had a lot of respect for the ACLU, but the days where they stood for something; and everyone could point to the principles and at least begrudgingly admire it are long gone.
I think the question needs to be a bit more well formed for the answer written.

Does he mean "why doesn't Wolfram opensource all its stuff", or "why not opensource and also take contributions from a community", or "why is it that Wolfram is finding itself in a situation where there is no viable opensource competitor", or something else?

I believe there are some Google opensource projects where the source is open (and even a libre license), but it's still presented as-is, with no real way for anyone outside Google to contribute.

There are other projects where there's a clear corporate owner, but outside patches are accepted.

It's not that I disagree with this post, but it's very unclear what this person means by "open source".

So in the most scathing of all critiques, I would summarize this post as "not even wrong".
I believe this is why Amazon order confirmation emails nowadays don’t state what you purchased!
Weaponizing computer code to attack a domestic company's normal and legal operations is a bit black and white to me.

As far as I am concerned, anyone has the right to disagree. The company disagreed on terms with some potential hires who wanted a better job offer and has a right to look elsewhere for employees. There is nothing more to it than that.
I don't care about server-side analytics. They can keep my IP, user agent, what pages I visit, etc - I give them those details willingly.

What I do care about and actively block is JavaScript trying to enumerate fonts or fingerprint my canvas or whatever is the latest and greatest web API abuse for fingerprinting.
Interesting! I use rust mainly for embedded. There's a framework called Embassy that uses Async. Mainly built by one guy who's pretty sharp. I prefer to use interrupts, DMA, timers etc directly instead of Async, but it seems that a large number of Rust programmers consider Async to be fundamental. I wasn't sure if that was just the web devs or what, but here are 2 counter-examples.
If disabilities were that good, people would be lining up to give themselves one.

I am 10,000% "ableist" despite having a recognized disablity because having a disability effing sucks.
That sounds like a pretty lucky escape. A little bit less lucky and you'd have had nothing left but some black and unidentifiable bits.
"I'm surprised Disney/ESPN is only $15/mo of the bill to be honest"

It's probably more. They're just happy to keep your money.
> How else would you subdue someone? You can’t expect all cops to be able to go 1-1 or even 2-1 with someone to subdue them physically.

Why not? We hold all firefighters to the standard of having the physical strength to break down doors and carry people to safety; and a large part of their downtime is upkeep of their physical fitness, to enable that. We hold all soldiers to the standard of being able to haul huge packs over miles while being shot at; and a large part of their downtime is also constant upkeep of their physical fitness, to enable that.

And, in fact, by closest analogy, we hold all EMS personnel (and also orderlies for in-patient wards) to the standard of being able to bodily subdue people who are in a state of violent delirium, to get them strapped onto a gurney. And, again, we expect them to work out to achieve and maintain the requisite level of physical fitness.

So why can’t we hold all police to the standard of having the physical strength to bodily subdue people, and expect them to do the required upkeep on their physical fitness to enable that?

(Yes, the people police are dealing with sometimes have weapons. Mostly they do not. Even in America; even in the most gun-carrying parts of America, they mostly do not. The strategy for subduing someone should focus on the majority case — subduing people with no weapon, where it is safe to overcome strength with strength — with subduing people with a weapon as a tactical exception, rather than that tactic being the general-use rule. The expectations for police should be built around the requirements to carry out the general-case tactic [physical subdual of unarmed offender], not the requirements to carry out the exceptional-case tactic [armed takedown of armed offender].)

And note that I’m not suggesting police go in and wrestle people to the ground. They should be using tools, like man-catchers. It’s just that those tools are just multipliers for the effectiveness of physical strength, and so you still need to be highly physically strong to make effective use of them in a one-on-one or two-on-one confrontation.
That's sort of what's happening. If you imagine space as a rubber sheet with the galaxies pinned to certain places, something is pulling the sheet apart, making it seem like the galaxies are accelerating away from each other. We know the math behind this mechanism thanks to general relativity (it only needs a certain energy density for empty space), but we don't know what causes it. So we just call it "dark energy." Without it, the original expansion of the universe caused by the big bang should be slowing down due to gravity. Dark energy causes it to accelerate instead.
I don't know the etymology of the use of the word dope but used in this document it either makes a strong case for its authenticity (or esoteric familiarity with language of the era by the hoaxer) or is a red flag.

> (7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.

That caught my eye anyway.
Java was killed by Microsoft using their famous Embrace, Extend And Extinguish method. It's on the wikipedia page as an example of the EEE method.

The fact that Java remains at all today is a testament to the power of open sourcing something.
There are a bunch of smaller companies that open source a community edition and upsell to SaaS. Confluent and elasticsearch are the first that come to mind
I can only reply to your "impossible to detect" with respect to clusters with the "technically challenging but apparently real and prospects for better measurements and extension to larger scales is promising" at the end of Kaiser's 2018 slide deck https://chalonge-devega.fr/Kaiser_29mars2018.pdf which I do not think is contradicted by the (interesting, thank you!) Mpetha et al (2021) paper, which cites at least three of Kaiser's earlier publications.

Broadhurst & Scannapieco (2000) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/312630 is also relevant here, as it distinguishes between X-Ray studies and optical ones (SPIDERS being an example of the latter) pointedly at §4.2.

I do not disagree that ~ 10-20 km/s is small, but it's the little things that cause "tension" headaches, isn't it?
Not every time, "whenever possible".
Chimps, no, but a small 20kg macaque, yeah definitely. You could yeet such a small animal, for lack of a better word. That's why they band together :)
I’m not legally required to reply in any way, although the email strongly implied that I am. This looked a lot like the kind of emails you’d get from someone gathering information before they decide whether to file a lawsuit against you.
There is no more a well-defined “Python people” than there is a “Perl people” – both of their user bases span industries and computing architectures, hobbyists and professionals, old bones and young bloods, true believers and weary journeymen – and they overlap significantly, for that matter. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.