skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason is that c++ is a stable “api” whereas llvm ir is a somewhat moving target
I'm not entirely sure why they titled the article this way, as it sounded (to me and others) like LWN is saying goodbye, rather than a staff member retiring from LWN. The former would be very sad. Anyway...

I just wanted to say how high-quality LWN's content is, and very much worth subscribing to -- and it's not just Linux kernel stuff. I wrote several guest articles for them last year, and their editing process is excellent. You definitely cannot bluff; you really have to know what you're talking about, and then explain it clearly. They're (mercifully) allergic to buzzwords and hype. I even had to unlearn using the word "very": I would say "very fast" or "very good" or "very whatever else", and they basically said "cut all the very's, just say fast or good or whatever else, and let the reader decide whether it's very". And their (few) staff members are highly technical, so you get an excellent technical review as well.

They're also a bit allergic to modern styling: I made a couple of minor suggestions and they politely declined. At first I thought their approach was a bit backwards, but on reflection I'd much rather they focus on quality textual content than make changes for the sake "looking modern". Their site works well on phone and desktop, is easy to read, and loads fast; what more could you want?

One thing I do wonder: does LWN have a succession plan? Jon Corbet occasionally reminds us in his dry way that he's not getting any younger, and I know they only have 2 or 3 staff members. I hope that when the time is ripe they line someone else up who has the same focus on content and quality.
Sure the font and justification could have been different, to each his own. But yeah, I was referring to the simplicity, the table layout, prudent use of color and the absence of JS.

I find the web to be unusable without configuring a Pi-Hole to be my DNS server.
Custom Laser Patterns Using Holograms: 6 Steps (With Pictures)
Matomo is pretty great. Just wanted to chime in to encourage others to self-host it. It was fast, free, and configurable.
1) It's still censorship, even if it's not government censorship. The word applies.

2) It's perfectly fair, and a good idea, to call out a thing as bad even if it's legal.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean they were high when they were working.
If he weren't well-known enough for this to be news, there's a good chance this "mistake" would never have been corrected.
Does anyone actually still buy into the "overwhelm the health system" narrative? I mean, that was the original reasoning for initiating lockdowns (two weeks to stop the spread, flatten the curve) and it's repeatedly been threatened but never actually come to fruition. Indeed, healthcare workers are busy, dedicated and hard-working, and I'm sure they would like Covid to end, but the idea that scores of people are dying untreated because hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid cases seems not to have ever materialized. (Except maybe NY under Cuomo's watch)
So I looked up FXhash and from what I gathered, people write a function to generate an image, and then it gets run with some random inputs so you get a bunch of similar but slightly different images out.

To call this an “absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before.” is comically absurd.
Remember when Yahoo was a directory (how I learned the word 'hierarchical'!) and there were people who maintained sites listing things like new Geocities sites?

I think a lot of the modern Web's problems can be traced to the desire to cut out human intermediaries in the early Web, mostly to focus on speed and monetization. (No curators in the models means no need to PAY curators). I also think the rise of the influencer and parasocial relationships are trying to fill the void. Most humans want human context in information searching. Those of us who don't need it are the weird ones, not the standard case.
Think of it like a car with a starter wearing out, at some point you turn the engine off and it never starts up again, until you replace the starter. Similarly bad batteries, corrosion on terminals, etc. Startup is a much different workload on electronics and in the case of HDDs mechanical devices than running.

I have an old fan that will need replacing one day that takes about 15 minutes to reach full speed as the bearings are gone. Everytime I turn it off I wonder if the next time I turn it on it will be time to replace it.
State of Valhalla
Although Aix went the Windows way with XCOFF instead of ELF.

It is a kind of funny feeling to deal with import libraries and definition files on an UNIX.
The long answer: https://conwaylife.com/book/
Microsoft Customer Source Code Exposed via Azure App Service Bug
Reaper does. Unfortunately, WavPack has a bit too much performance overhead.
A better title would be something like: "Most advice sucks: how to determine when it doesn't"

The important point I got out of the article, wasn't that most advice is bad, which seems clearly true, but a theory as to why:

1) Not novel - it just repeats what everyone already know, but maybe with a new anecdote!
2) Not actionable - the advice to vague to be practicable, good advice needs to be more specific which probably mean not applicable to everyone, which means not oprah scale.
3) Not based on evidence - why does this advice work, as opposed to being survivorship bias or junk extrapolation of real research.
I suggest a different name next time. The US is not known for winning wars

(edit: whoa didn't realize this was flamebait, i think it is a common journalistic trope, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/am...

https://www.vox.com/2018/2/15/17007678/syria-trump-war-win-i...

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/real-reasons-u-s-ca...

nothing to do with nationalism)
Most you weren't alive then but Alaska had a 9.2 earthquake in 1964. I well remember the news accounts. Luckily not that many people lived in Alaska at the time. I cannot imagine if a quake of that magnitude hit modern day San Francisco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Alaska_earthquake#:~:text....
Oddly enough, your comment appears word for word in the HN guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Disintermediating Network Effects for Fun and Profit
GoL implementations for big systems don't evaluate the cellular automata step-by-step. They implement HashLife - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife . The first example on that page shows position 6.3+ octillion for a Turing machine, computed in under 30 seconds.

If the special purpose hardware ran at 1 THz, it would take about 4 quadrillion seconds to get to the same point, which is a bit over 200 million years.
Dorsey joins a long list of founders who were ousted (effectively or actually) or it simply became too uncomfortable to stay [1] who then go on to criticize their former empire.

9 times out of 10 I find such criticism to be completely self-serving (eg to promote their new venture or agenda), a product of bitterness at the exit, a chance to take a swipe at the powers-that-be or a combination thereof.

Twitter's developer API followed a typical pattern: do anything you can to get traction for your platform. This includes being "open" to encourage developers to build stuff on your platform. Then, when you don't need them anymore, ditch them. From a purely business point of view, he wasn't wrong for doing it. It just surprises me that anyone is still shocked when this happens again (and again... and again...).

Those who are still bitter at getting locked out will champion this quote of course.

Take this quote:

> “IN THE BEGINNING, TWITTER WAS SO OPEN THAT MANY SAW THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME A DECENTRALIZED INTERNET STANDARD, SUCH AS THE SMTP (EMAIL SENDING) PROTOCOL. FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS, ALL REASONABLE AT THE TIME, WE TOOK A DIFFERENT PATH AND WE INCREASINGLY CENTRALIZE TWITTER. BUT A LOT HAS CHANGED OVER THE YEARS”.

Put another way: they chose to be a business. No business chooses to create a federated system, at least no successful business (to date). There's simply no reason to. The problems with spam and abuse of the phone networks, email, texting, etc are largely a result of predictably bad actors in an "open" federated system.

The people who call for open standards either aren't a business or they're losing to the industry leader and they want "open standards" to not die.

[1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/twitter-did-jack-dor...
The book that documentary is based on is one of my favorites, second only to the making of the atomic bomb.
The job of roman Censors was to supervise public morality. The term censorship is appropriate
It's always gonna be chicken-and-egg for this, and browsers won't spend the time sandboxing and supporting a codec until it's already popular.

So this will probably see a JS / Webasm shim, and if that proves popular, Blink and Gecko will consider it.

The day might come soon when browsers just greenlight a webasm interface for codecs. "We'll put packets in through this function, and take frames out through this function, like ffmpeg. Other than that, you're running in a sandbox with X MB of RAM, Y seconds of CPU per frame, and no I/O. Anything you can accomplish within that, with user opt-in, is valid."
Not the same as walking up to a complete stranger and having it out.
>"FB/Meta has no obligation to carry your speech"

Why not? I believe it should, given its size. The phone company has an obligation to carry my speech. Net Neutrality would require ISPs to carry speech. There are a whole host of things the government can compel "privately owned" systems/companies to do.

In these kinds of discussions, scale matters. There is a big difference between compelling a company with a billion+ users to act as a platform and forcing a small business to do the same.
> The break from the common definition of "numbers are real because I can go buy 24 tangerines and 24 is a number"

If I have two dogs, and you swap one of them out for a different dog; well, it's not the same and I'd notice.

What I find interesting about "24 apples" is that all of those apples are in fact also unique individuals - none are identical, they have different weights, percentage moisture, sugar content, number and positioning of seeds, etc. Their exterior markings will be as unique as fingerprints. None of them are really interchangeable.

Saying that "there are 24 of the same thing here" is an _abstraction_ of reality. It's our perception, our agreement that they can be considered "the same thing", but it is not a physical reality.

It might be real for of protons, but not of people, cats, apples or tangerines. Macroscopic objects are not numbers.
I feel like they would do rather well - there are so many new crypto "projects" and so many people "investing" in them. Investing in new coins using Eth for purchasing is very normalised in those circles, and people are super hungry for opportunities to enter an ICO.

Most of the people (or people with bots) making any sort of money with these new coins are getting in on the ICO and dumping their coins during the initial peak after public release. The whole thing is like a high frequency pump and dump, and there are large profits to be had for the few who can pull it off, which makes buyers particularly rushed.

The Binance Smart Chain has even more of this going on, it's madness. It's like the wild west of defi.
Your county health officer and my county health officer have had quite different takes on covid.
There is a lot of money to be made if someone comes up with a game changing cancer treatment - so the incentive is there.

It is impossible to treat cancer without killing cancer cells, so I'm not sure why this is troubling to see
Personally I’ve only been lifting properly for 2 years and am not good enough for competition lifting (definitely not for bench, maybe for squat though). I take more of a hypertrophy than strength focus so am not accustomed to going for ORM with equipment and stuff like that. Does seem fun though
I think there is probably some opportunity for an Emacs distribution that is specifically targeted at these potential users. However, not as a way to try to get them to join the Church of Emacs[1]. Emacs would be no more than an implementation detail for a great note taking app. I imagine something along the lines Nicolas Rougier's notebook-mode[2], but without the focus on literate programming. Just nice formatting, quality variable pitch fonts, and familiar keybinds. Maybe some kind of slick configuration of artist-mode too.

[1] Of which I am a proud member, btw.

[2] https://github.com/rougier/notebook-mode
Having worked in datacenter where servers were running for 5+ years in racks, when the datacenter went dark due to a UPS going up in flames there were definitely systems that did not come back online.

Most notably we had a large NetApp array that would not boot, once we replaced the controllers we had lost 13 out of the 60 hard drives in the array. They would no longer spin up. Like physically seized. Because they had been spinning for so long, they would have likely kept spinning just fine, but with power gone, it was done.

Fans are another fun one, anything with ball bearings really. Power supplies are another issue, due to the sudden large inrush of power when the switch was flipped back to on, some power supplies had their capacitors go up in smoke.

This is not rare, this a common occurrence. When you have an absolutely massive footprint with thousands upon thousands of servers, that have been running for a long time, there will be things that just don't come back once they have stopped running or when the electricity is gone.
> Everything you have listed here would be much much easier in a database.

No, it isn't. How would you buy a ticket from me online when you don't know me? The only real option is to use stubhub which requires us to both create accounts, put our credit cards in, verify ourselves, you put the ticket up, me to buy it, and for me to not know the ticket is A. not been purchased by someone else B. authentic.

A decentralised app that runs this requires a smart contract to mint tickets and a smart contract to wrap reselling them, plus a web UI to tie it all together. An open source developer could build this and charge $1 per tx to maintain it.

What's the centralised alternative?
Or just give the artist some money and not waste any resources minting a worthless NFT?
> grokking the fundamental advice

This is much harder than it sounds! The roots of true fundamental understanding go very deep.
Is that really a problem from a legal perspective?

There are plenty of things that are easy to do but have strict legal frameworks around them. Quick examples include copyright laws, use of force/violence and driving rules.
What kind of robots are you interested in? Or is it just about the framework? I’ve been working as a ROS consultant for over 3 years now but never properly considered tutoring.

You can check out my blog (https://msadowski.github.io/) and if my experience seems relevant then feel free to reach out through email (you will find it on my profile on HN) to see if we can make it work.
It fails in Safari. :(
Twitter has recently opened up their APIs quite a bit[0]. I'm wondering if it's too late for the developer community now to embrace these APIs now that Twitter is "built up" and no longer a smaller company.

[0]https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2021/b...
To be pedantic, Facebook definitely does have the capability of censorship:

> Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.[1]

Facebook has enough power over communication at large to effectively suppress speech should they choose. Censorship does not have to be perpetrated by governments. Hence the terms self-censorship and corporate-censorship[2].

What people really mean when they talk about censorship is first amendment rights. Here, you are correct. The first amendment protects against government censorship only - nothing Facebook does could infringe your first amendment rights.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship
The flag made of hands is a thing out of my nightmares.
The author of the hyperlink, not the photo.

The NFT is the hyperlink, not what it links to.
When you've got a massive datacenter packed, even 0.01% is a meaningful amount of hardware.
i've been using this for a few months now. super easy to get set up and run yourself!
> NFTs are trusting a single authority, which is the consensus of all of the nodes/miners of the blockchain.

That's only for the in-chain history. To actually be able to trust that the NFT is what it's represented as, you also need outside third-parties. For example, many artists are having to deal with NFTs fraudulently claiming to represent their work or benefit the artist, which is not something you can validate using only information on the blockchain.

Once you have a way to confirm the authenticity of the NFT, you also don't need the blockchain because the actual trust is coming from the artist's own statement.
Sounds like challange accepted by a few of us.
It's sad that just a year ago, saying this would get you banned from the major social media providers. All because of politics.
I would appreciate a list of web3 projects that don’t have and explicitly don’t want to have any VC involvement (or big company involvement, as it would mean the same thing).

I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring to those projects.
Exactly this.

Starting about a month ago FB changed all their algorithms and a lot of independent artists are seeing 50%+ reductions in engagement across Instagram and Facebook.

I have artistic hobby pursuits and can confirm. Many times I'll post a piece of work and my friends won't even see it in their feeds because FB is gatekeeping content between artists and voluntary followers now, in favor of "influencer" content from cash-cow accounts that don't produce any art of their own.

It's sickening to say the least. Yes it's legal as of now but we should really be having a discussion about whether it should be okay to have a non-transparent gatekeeping algorithm between people who mutually chose to follow each other.

Personally I'd prefer that if if someone voluntarily follows someone, they should have a legal obligation to not hinder any communication. That person chose to subscribe, and they can choose to unsubscribe at any time. What they are doing is tantamount to the USPS paging through your magazine subscriptions and trashing some of them as the mailman feels that day.
This post addresses Jack Dorsey's recent criticisms of Web3 being owned by VCs and big tech, which I agree with. But he doesn't offer a solution—this post is my solution.

HNers will understand network effects more than most, and how difficult it is to build systems that are resistant to capture. Web2 went this way and in some ways Web3 is headed there too.

Hope you find it interesting!
It's not that hard in my experience. You generally do it by using a guarded scope where the user provides a callback and doesn't manage the resource (like a thread) themselves.
I’m personally hopeful for platforms like http://gm.xyz as they go from centralization to decentralizing parts of their app
Having had to restore a NetApp cluster from backup because the disks would no longer spin up after having been running for 4+ years... yup. The hardware was fully working and according to all internal metrics was still perfectly good, but a power outage and they never came back up.
Suppose you collect visitor data, and then leak it (accidental or otherwise), and users have their identity stolen and lose a lot of time/money dealing with the fallout. Would you agree that as a site owner who collected this data without securing it properly that you are morally obligated (and ought to be legally obligated) to fully compensate all the damage caused by the leak?
There was a pretty high profile case in New Mexico of Chinese growers setting up shop on the Navajo reservation. It was a big operation too.

(you can probably search for better articles, here is one I just found)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56835897
In the 1960s, certain restaurants and other establishments argued that they were private, and could choose who was allowed to enter and do business there.

They were making the same mistake you are - arguing that they were not obligated to be even handed and non-discriminatory in the services they offered.
As empty as "renewable revolution" or "space race"
If it's compatible, what's supposed to be the value in re-implementing libsodium instead of just vendoring or forking it and copying in the important parts?
Why don’t things make sense?
Was it actually rocks in a jar? I always thought it was some kind of recording.

Completely forget about this. Thanks for the random nostalgia hit.
Offline: The origin story – division deepens
It's a 20 year old format.

ZStandard is a very good compressor, with an especially fast decompressor. Maybe someone should try using this instead of zlib in an audio format (FLAC, WavPack, ...)
Thanks for the nice words, Ben. The curious can have a look at his articles at https://lwn.net/Archives/GuestIndex/#Hoyt_Ben . When's the next one coming? :)

Meanwhile, I'm not going anywhere quite yet, but we're definitely looking for writer/editor types who would like to be a part of LWN and perhaps carry it forward in the distant future. Please drop us a note at lwn@lwn.net if you'd like to talk.
The Python repl / console also makes a great desk calculator (for those who haven't thought to use it that way) .
I would have thought the REAL scam would be to have an actual token - and get crypto holders to buy that token, fully knowing it is a scam - but thinking they can buy in low early & dump it in a week on the victims.
> having been started by crypto experts in response to Heartbleed

This isn't quite right. NaCl is a Daniel J. Bernstein project that predates Heartbleed by several years[0]. Though I'm sure Heartbleed generated new interest in better designed, more secure, crypto libraries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaCl_(software)
Trust requires us to give leverage to centralized authorities over our critical records. If you deposit money in a bank, they can unilaterally decide that you can't withdraw it today. Their systems can be down. They can be closed at a time you want access to your money, etc. Or the person at the front desk can simply not like you, and if they're the only branch in town, you're out of luck.

Critically, trust like this comes from scale. The likelihood of a bank screwing you personally over diminishes as the bank grows larger. In other contexts, people call this a network effect, and it is an anti-competitive moat. Even if we completely trust the bank, which we don't, this anti-competitive moat leads to all sorts of problems, like stagnation of service quality (look how long it took us to get same day wire transfers and decent quality online banking).

Decentralized systems democratize trust. They break anti-competitive network effect driven moats. This is a good thing, even if we completely trust our centralized authorities, which again, we should not.