skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just for some perspective, in some states there is zero tax on any food because it is seen as essential.

The problem is there are a lot of assumptions being made about the choice to buy a soda in any given situation. Someone in my family, for example, has type 1 diabetes, and occasionally (not usually; they control it well) needs something sugary for weird situations to regulate their blood sugar.

On average the state might gain from some policy, but is it always in the best position to understand what is in the best interests of the individual?

I guess I've never understood the focus on sugary beverages in particular. Why not candy? Pastries? Sugary cereal? Seems arbitrary and capricious to me.
> He was fined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 for touting initial coin offerings on social media without disclosing that he’d been paid to do so.

It'd be awesome if the same happened to the flood of web shills.
Just put it under "contact tracing and covid prevention" and people will cheer you for it and ask for more.
Location: Houston, Texas
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In all likelihood, the local government conveniently blamed the wet market while the propaganda machine at the national level started blaming Americans visiting Wuhan for a military comp. I seriously doubt bats from faraway caves were being sold in a wet market in Wuhan. I personally haven't seen anything as disgusting as a bat being sold in a wet market, but I suppose the possibility is nonzero.
Sure. Yeah, I apologise if I was aggressive. I agree with you that yeah profit maximising has no necessary relationship to the happiness of workers. But, I was surprised when I read Ford's biography that a lot of (aggressive) practices I thought 'hey this is just bosses being bosses', actually might be poor management.

Re, VC money creating a rat-race, I think you're probably right.

Though I think there must remain a slice of the market that's not determined by the rat race. But it could well be the slice of the market that VCs aren't interested in funding because it's not big or fast enough. I guess I would cite something like Linux as an example. It's not really a start-up but by not being fuelled by money, and being open-source, it was able to under-cut and out-compete Microsoft and a bunch of other OSs in the hobbyists -> server -> mobile. But I suppose it became a platform that a bunch of other businesses like Redhat and Android were able to launch off.

But yeah I guess the general trend is profit invites competition, and competition is amoral.
It is fine for a personal script where you know your files don't have newlines, but for a robust script as part of a package running on other people's systems you'd have to take it into account.
Spotify does not like it when the internet connection is spotty or not existing during startup, even when you put it in offline mode before, or when your corporate VPN null-routes the Spotify IP range.
How do we audit that the TPM chip is secure? What happened when a bug in the silicone is found later?
I'm not a language designer, but maybe there should be a warning or a compilation error or something, instead of a silent but arbitrary decision. But it gets ugly easily, with three-leter variable names that can be grouped in different ways.

If I designed a new language from 0, I'd like to allow only single letter variable identifers (possibly with unicode sub-indices and modifiers).
Thank you; I didn’t see the other threads in search results because they were pointing to different URLs. Next time I’ll search for something simpler like "Canon" instead.
Trouble is, they also wake up a lot.
Actually you are right, that was my first gig after college, however I actually know of Swoole and researched a bit, but when codebase and tech stack is already given to you by people worshipping their choice you haven't a real handle.

Like written above my statement was meant like: there are people out there, the are so in love with php, that they would (ab)use it for everything.
I also know it is my fault to hired with these guys in the first place, however it definitely teached me how to not do things.
In General this will have less of an effect than you’d think, because effectively you are unable to enter restaurants or bars in most cities without having the app because the owners refuse to offer manual paper based contact tracing due to increased effort even though it is totally legal to not use an app at all.
> What is it about building "web-related technology" that makes it so cheap?

Mainly a huge existing (and ongoing) investment from Google.

> Why isn't there a platform for making apps that compares?

Not enough money in it for a company that would make something properly polished, and the open-source stuff works well enough for its own developers and gets bikeshedded to death whenever anyone tries to add good defaults and provide an easy onramp (if anyone even cares enough to try). Like, in theory you could glue together something with Python, Qt, PySide and Freeze where someone can write two lines of Python, push a button, and get GUI executables for all major platforms. But good luck getting anyone to accept your patches or commit to not breaking compatibility with what you're doing.
It's so weird that all this research and discussion never once mentions daylight length difference between summer and winter in parts of the world far out of the equatorial belt.

The difference is between almost 16h of night time (depending on your definition, of course, since some light will be there even if Sun is not out) in late December and 8h of night time in late June at 45 degrees of latitude.

I wouldn't be surprised if sleeping twice during the night was more frequent during winter time in Europe.

Still, ever since fire was introduced into houses, there was an artificial light source as well.
A bit tangential to the main post, but I'd to share a recent positive experience with Mullvad:

I am a regular user of Mullvad and recently wanted to try a different VPN, that only provides Wireguard configs (i.e. no native app). I used the default setup.

For some reason, my internet connection was flaky, and when it disconnected and reconnected, my traffic leaked.

That never happened to me with Mullvad as the app comes with an "Always require VPN" option out of the box and it has always worked reliably.
I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire.

If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.
Yes it is useful, because "array ops" auto-vectorize well and you can write complex function that are vectorized. It's a bit like expression templates but with compiler support.
Typically if something can be written as an array op expression it isn't worth rewriting with intrinsics or assembly.
For me it's a killer feature :)

You can also mix and match scalar and slices, so for audio code it's quite cool:

a[0..frames] += b[0..frames] * volume;
What exactly did Macron ever do to earn your respect?
A human artist can purchase material or access freely available material, look at it, learn from it and then draw his own.

An AI could do the same.
> If I designed a new language from 0, I'd like to allow only single letter variable identifers (possibly with unicode sub-indices and modifiers).

In the nicest possible way - this is absolute madness.
Amazing in depth overview.

There are useful comments in my (shameless plug) post about my same transition:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25845147
This looks like what people have been doing with Java for years, except worse because Go lacks tuning. A common approach with Java is to bootstrap your service with a maxheap based on the environment.

https://eng.uber.com/jvm-tuning-garbage-collection/

Here's another blog from Uber on JVM tuning.

Some notes:

1. They have options

2. They have a powerful gc log, no need to roll your own finalizer thing like this

3. Choosing the max heap size, which seems like what they actually wanted here, is trivial

You could say "but that's more complex", but to me it's that the JVM has far more mature features, tons of tooling and options that they could explore and adopt, and that the obvious wins are trivial to achieve through basic parameter tuning.

Further, this GOGC parameter seems to be a very weird knob. The knobs you'd run into with the JVM will often be a lot more straightforward ie: a static value for heap size vs some number that's based on a working set percentage.

I wonder if over time Go will end up with a tunable GC.
Probably when Trump started to brag about it, saying that "he knew" it came from China, he was leaking some CIA information that he couldn't talk about it. Unfortunately it transformed the issue in a political issue and therefore people couldn't talk freely about it without the risk to be canceled.
I hate to be this skeptical, but let's say this is 100% possible (I have my doubts, see previous attacks on things like TPMs and SGX, but I digress). You probably could get 90% of the logging capability by putting monitoring in front of and behind the server, and associating connections by traffic/time.

It just seems like this goal of using technology to prove they're trustworthy is unlikely to actually work for a VPN company due to the threat models.
HTTP Feeds
God damn debating with you people is useless sometimes.

My second paragraph is meant to show a possible other explanation why the Chinese didn't want foreigners snooping around their bio labs: in my belief the same evasiveness the Chinese has/had would apply to the USA if China wanted to visit and have unlimited access (for a thorough investigation) of American bio labs.

And I'm not talking about whether American journalists would be arrested. I'm just talking about the evasiveness about the labs.
> If you need to hide all of your traffic from other users in your local network, you can accomplish that in a trust-no-one fashion by running your own VPN endpoint on a server you control which provides better privacy guarantees compared to a centralised commercial VPN whose business model will eventually involve selling your data (once user growth stops but shareholders demand continued revenue growth).

Well not really. There was a great (german) interview with the perfect privacy founders recently [1]. They seem to be decent guys with close ties to the Chaos Computer Club and I strongly suspect they wouldn't want to work like that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMr0gJvI-6I

> But if you need to hide your traffic from anybody but your peer on the internet and you need to hide the fact that you talked to that peer, then, I'm afraid, your out of luck.

Nah, that one is easy just use an anonymous sim card or an open wifi and your good to go.

Honestly these discussions often feel pretty asinine to me. I personally use paid VPNs to pirate to my hearts content, work around my ISPs terrible networking and a little bit of geo-unblocking. Of course you can't use these services to protect yourself from three letter agency type surveillance or equally powerful threat actors but if they are "private" enough to block the music industry and their lawyers from suing you that's a pretty high standard of privacy, certainly more than any ISP alone gives you!
> What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world?

“The romans were so much better at building stuff”.

You could make buildings matching those, they’d be massively over-engineered and overpriced compared to the modern equivalent, and significantly more limited in suitable locations.
This conclusion immediately jumped out at me: why not strive for the benefits of both?

This seems to just be an attempt to keep critics at bay.
> And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time.

If that were true, then great, it would represent a genuine step forward.

Most of the time, you get a webapp that looks the same, works the same, but takes longer to develop (with a larger team of specialists), fails at basic accessibility, fails at SEO, is more brittle, buggy and harder to maintain.

And not to generalize but those React "kiddies" are very much everything-looks-like-a-nail guys. Because they lack breadth of experience and training they'll shove that one tool into every project, even where it makes no sense.
Yea there's no reason other than greed to not fully implement pwas, local storage over 500mb, and native share intents to pwa
It will continue until we become unable to mass-manufacture ever more powerful yet cheaper media consumption devices. Then we will be screwed.
What would that evidence look like?

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform have a press release with more detail[1], which the Telegraph mentions - it's how I found it - and you can download a pdf which contains the partially redacted emails. It doesn't seem to me that the Telegraph has misled anyone regarding this news at all. Perhaps you could read it and be more precise as to where you think they're providing slant, or even lies, if that's what you think.

[1] https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/release/comer-jordan...
We assume it is, just like we assume CPU works as advertised. In other words, TPM is part of TCB.
> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks.

Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils".

You can't really tell people to buy masks where there is none available, and you can't really tell there is nothing to do unless you want to put every one in panic mode. You can't really trust people to act rationally in the presence of a new and unexpected situation that nobody trained for, and you can't tell them that you're also as unprepared as they are for that.

So, handle the situation like you want, there's no way you aren't damaging something. I guess it was easier to take a slight (to medium for some government staff, Olivier Véran) reputation hit and announce it to the press via your health minister, than risk a state-wide panic meanwhile you are fixing the mask situation (remember the stockpile was left in a degraded state and wasn't usable).

If you think of it, the only reason why getting vaccinated is not yet mandatory is because of the next elections in May. You wouldn't risk to alienate ~1/6 voters (again, they are the most motivated ones and they refused to get a shot despite not being allowed in restaurants), if it's not national-security-like important. So I suspect it will become mandatory either when we crossed the threshold where it's really dangerous (500.000 covid case per day, we're currently at 350.000), or after the elections, in june. Whichever comes first. With our current trajectory, you could expect the president or the prime minister to announce it in about two weeks, despite having said differently in previous announcements.
Politicians will never or very rarely correct their statements. It is for the same reason as football referees. I took up refereeing as a hobby and we were taught very firmly by the ref coach that no matter what decision we take, we stick to it and never change it. Because that is a sign of weakness and will degrade the quality of the game even more than that individual decision.
Dump is the proper term in this case, though, given S3 limitations (I.e. no append to file) which means you need to either create new file for each insert (very expensive) or append replace file for update. So practically it’s a workable read only replica with dumps of updates. For reasonably small datasets it can potentially work otherwise you look at rebalancing, partitions etc. and probably you’re better off with parquet,avro etc. given you are usually at the stage of introducing spark etc.
A norm does not make it a minimum baseline: a norm is something that's prevalent or average.

Not disagreeing with your desire to make that the baseline, just with the terminology :)
What an awful graph. Should be a logarithmic Y axis anchored at zero
Dell’s new XPS 13 shows how dull MacBook Airs have become
The best thing that I found that works is Clion. Everything else in the ecosystem lacked polish, or ergonomic, or consistency. And Clion is lacking in these too, just not as much.

Maybe I'm setting the bar too high for an old technology? I don't know.

What IDE (or just DE) would you recommend that works well?
No I don't, and of of the reason why, is that its much easier to organise golang code (no header files).

And even if a project was that size, it would compile faster than the C++ equivalent.
So what is the point? I already assume the code on their server is not malicious by using it. What extra trust does an untrusted TPM chip give me?
As a user I disagree. For business software I even disagree more.

What I need is a software which does have the required functionality. What I don't need is a bloatware which has errors in all function.

As a user, I hate CD/CI. After I just get used to the old functionality, suddenly my buttons moved, my function I rely on behaves differently. I have to start to learn again instead doing my productive job.
> yeah but the problem is: which budget are you optimizing? That of the company of course.

The budget of the company is predicated upon what the user will be willing to pay for the service.

You’re wasting electricity and battery life of thousands of devices of users who don’t care or want to “vote with their feet”.

Now obviously users are also constrained by what is made available to them, but time and again the shiny and early to market wins out even if it’s a literal trash fire…
Not going to happen. The reason for the Semantic Web never taking off were never technical. Websites already spend a lot of money on technical SEO and would happily add all sorts of metadata if only it helped them rank better. Of course, many sites’ metadata would blatantly “lie” and hence, the likes of Google would never trust it.

Re exposing an entire database of static content: again, reality gets in the way. Websites want to keep control over how they present their data. Not to mention that many news sites segregate their content as public and paywalled. Making raw content available as a structured and query able database may work for the likes of Wikipedia or arxiv.org. But it’ll not likely going to be adopted by commercial sites.
relevant other sources

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27367394

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I
You're simplifying too much. The tobacco company example illustrates very well how you can distract and lead astray by asking biased questions. Leading (smoking) statisticians like Fisher continued to point out there may be confounding causes. He did not falsify data. Even a spurious discussion about a "smoking gene" was created. Asking questions may seem innocent but it can be done strategically and can hinder drawing the right conclusions. Eventually the scientific method would correct those views, but it took more than 40 years even though the statistical data was available from the start.

Judea Pearl dedicates a whole chapter (Ch. 5) of his The Book of Why to this example.
Much like mixing garbage into food. You get garbage, not food.
I’m less optimistic. Carbon rationing is the only solution. But what political power is there that would be able to simply declare and enforce a maximum amount of fossil fuels to extract per year in the entire world?
On June 21st, 2011 Mozilla decided that Chrome would lead and Firefox would follow. Almost every single change to Firefox since then made it more similar to Chrome, not less. If you're making a browser, you follow the leader, not the first follower.
Well that's mainly for latency I think, not just a complicated computing problem.
I've almost done this too but I saw that people having full time in masters or researcher in a lab more successful than people doing part-time masters as me. They have more time to do research. They produce more because it's their main job, they can go deeper. They collaborate more with researchers that also broader their research and network in the area. It can be the hardest thing to write a paper from research idea to result alone or with an advisor which is the advisor only will help you with the theory writing.
Actually, it was about fiver or six years ago. It was an early Swift project.

https://github.com/bmlt-enabled/BMLTiOSLib
With a full-on rewrite, it's mostly because said top engineers have realized that their application has grown from tiny humble beginning to a behemoth with stuff bolted on everywhere, remnants of no-longer-used components never been removed and the likes, while their superiors won't ever grant budget for actual software maintenance (e.g. remove old cruft, update that Symfony release or in some extreme case, actually use a framework instead of hand-written router and ORM code) but they would be willing to spend money on a complete rewrite.

What these "top engineers" need is a decent CTO, not people like you who come in and tell them to continue working on a tech stack that they have despised to work with for many months now.

Incompetent upper management will only lead to resignations out of frustration, not to progress.
Even though I usually like to stay away from political topics on here, but it pains me that a country I (used to) love so much, UK, is spiraling deeper and deeper into a void. So much so I have to believe its leadership no longer acts in favour of the country. For reasons unknown to me, however it is long known Brexit was a wanted scenario for Russian geopolitics, as laid out in their textbook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Evidence that would convince an independent panel of people trained in the field that it confirms a lab leak. Given the odds against that evidence would likely have to be fairly hard.
https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2...

Page 8.
Hmmm light is a package of photons and when it reflects and the object is blue it looses the blue spectrum(photons) in the package. This package can be disected with furier and should have a different wavelength then befor……. Are you sure thats not how it works?? I would love to be proven wrong. Had not enough physics to fully grasp that concept :)

And did you ever use a blacklight in a dark room? Many things are shining. For example teeth. So smilling could get 220nm to a dangerous zone and kill the one that is smiled at? … hehe little joke.
Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage.

This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK as this policy lasted for six months and it undoubtedly was part of the reason care-homes were hit as hard in the first wave.

Now here we are a year later, and no one has been held accountable, no talk of this in the media, no anger. Not only were we treated like children, we were treated like children by incompetent heartless leaders that got a lot of us killed, and there seems to be no corrective process for this.
Is this a debate about Pied Piper vs Hooli box?