skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking of monitors, I got one of those absurd 49" ultra widescreen displays a few months ago. The resolution is 5120x1440, so it's functionally equivalent to two 27" 1440p monitors placed side by side.

The text is naturally not as crisp as a 4K monitor, but the amount of screen real estate is great for development. Paired with a tiling window manager it gives so many options. I did the dual 27" 1440p thing for years, and I find this setup superior. With the dual monitor strategy you have to either deal with a huge bezel right in the center of your vision, or push the secondary monitor off to the side, requiring more neck movement to see what's on it. With this monitor, everything remains much more clearly in my field of view.
Google has a TWENTY year head-start of building server farms all over the world and hiring PhDs to develop the complex algorithms and software to do the indexing.

Can't just buy time on someone else's cloud network and hire a couple of coders to compete with that.

You could throw a lot of money at it but not compete on years of investment.

My brain is swiss-cheese these days, I wish I could remember the name of that one-man startup a decade ago that actually had a lightweight high-speed crawler and was making a serious attempt at competition. Was covered around here several times. But obviously they didn't succeed if I can't remember the name.
> The point is none of the third party app stores pay for any of the platform development ...

Isn't that because Apple doesn't allow for third party repos/stores/etc?

If that changes after all (I'm personally hoping it does), then it would make sense that the new alternative store(s) would have their own overheads (development, running costs, etc) and would have their own fees.

That seems sensible, yeah?
Can you recommend books on the topic to learn about this kind of stuff?
This was barely coherent and mostly doesn't touch on what the article purports.

The growth rate in your western country is pegged, as a matter of policy. It's met through immigration. Whether you have kids or not is neither here nor there; they will meet their target (note that carbon footprints are high in the West, and low in 3rd world countries, to the extent that marginal differences in growth in the 3rd world are irrelevant). This will subside when the global growth rate falters, which is already projected to happen. This can be accelerated by a) improving universal access to contraceptives, and b) improving 3rd world economies through trade and just regulation. In the interim we still need to improve efficiencies in the short-run to curb carbon emissions immediately. Obviously, not having kids has zero impact on this either. Innovations like renewables, seaweed-infused animal feed, etc are entering the market and will help bridge the gap, made possible through political will and investment from the financial sector in the order of trillions.

Don't have kids if you don't want them, surely. But don't pretend it makes a dent in the environmental crusade, and by extension, don't judge parents for a natural desire to start a family.
Please try Codependents Anonymous. You may think it doesn't relate to you, but if you suffered through 10+ loveless years and now can't yet recover, you'll see that the meetings probably resonate with you. There are free Zoom meetings. Best wishes you.
Noticeably absent from this discussion: Microsoft's attempts to kill Quicktime(amongst a range of competitor technologies), and their reasonable success in these pursuit.

Relevant excerpt:
Microsoft Threatens QuickTime Partners
In addition to providing roadblocks to QuickTime running on Windows, Microsoft also worked to stop QuickTime by threatening its partners to abandon licensing, distribution, or development of anything related to QuickTime, or else prepare to face the retribution Microsoft could deliver.

Hardware: Microsoft leaned on its Windows PC OEMs to prevent them from bundling QuickTime; trial testimony revealed specifically how Microsoft took quick steps to block Compaq's licensing of QuickTime.

While Compaq was enthusiastic about licensing QuickTime to help differentiate its PCs from those of rivals, after Microsoft heard about the plans and expressed its disapproval, the company suddenly withdrew and refused to continue any talks with Apple.

Applications: Microsoft also jumped on Avid Cinema, a new consumer video editing product based on QuickTime that long time Apple partner Avid was preparing to release.

Microsoft told Avid engineers, "You need to rip QuickTime out of your product if you want to be in this channel." Months later, Avid announced a partnership with Microsoft on its new AAF format for multimedia authoring.

Drivers: Microsoft also pounced on Truevision, a video capture card vendor. After learning that the company was developing QuickTime drivers for its video capture cards, Microsoft invested in the company with the proviso that the company could not market, brand, or refer to the drivers as a QuickTime driver, and could only bundle them with a specific application, not offer the drivers for sale separately.

Advanced Authoring Format
Microsoft had backed up its threats to jump into the media authoring business to kill QuickTime entirely by developing the Advanced Authoring Format, the last missing component of Microsoft's rival offerings.

In June 1998, Microsoft advised Apple that its only remaining choice in the matter would be to agree to a broad technology sharing plan that donated its technology to Microsoft and abandoned its own competitive efforts:

•Apple had to agree to cross-license its codecs and collaborate with Microsoft on all future codec development
•Apple had to adopt Microsoft's DirectX run-time platform on Windows in place of QuickTime
•Apple had to adopt Microsoft's proprietary streaming technology
•Apple had to adopt Microsoft's new proprietary AAF file format for media authoring

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/5F0C866C-6DD...
One month later...

With an amazing line tally of 4,988, and the highest possible score of 9,999,999, American gamer Harry Hong was crowned “Tetris DX Marathon Champion” on 13 September 2007. The record was made at Funspot in New Hampshire, USA, the world’s largest arcade centre. - https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-line...
> I'd rather use OS level UI scaling you will have sharper and better picture

I tried various OS scaling methods. The problem with "magnify or zoom in on the whole screen" is that it's very cumbersome for an elderly person, easily getting lost on where you are on the screen. The problem with an OS configuration to make all text and icons bigger is that it doesn't do it for everything — many text labels, buttons, menus, etc., remain at a small font.

That's why I'm hoping a hardware-level solution (a much bigger display) is the answer.
Wow. Lotta dead comments. I don’t think I’ve seen this many, in a single article, before.
Respectfully: I think this is the case if you yourself have commodity skills and don't know how to network. For folks who find themselves in this spot, the advice I've always given folks I mentor is to learn to do the networking thing and maybe pick up some stuff that's a little bit outside the norm but can be leveraged for multiplier effects in the job. (They exist! And they're usually pretty fun.)

Speaking for myself, I've never gotten a job through a process either initiated by a cold email from a recruiter or from filtering through an automatic process on the HR side of things, and I have a boatload of experience and I like to say I'm pretty good at The Technical Thing. I get jobs from talking to people, and I help folks get jobs (at Mux, hi, we're hiring!) through talking to people. I got an email yesterday from a new hire who came onboard because he saw a Who's Hiring post on HN, shot me an email, and I connected him with our recruiters 'cause he sounded like he'd be a good fit. No robots involved, except the SMTP ones. This happens pretty regularly and a lot of the candidates might be ones who'd look like a bad fit for a keyword filter.

There are jobs and there are people fit for jobs where keyword matching is a thing. There's also a monstrously large chunk of the industry where neither the job nor the ideal candidate can be expressed as such. So look at that, and then be that. And if you're finding walls, find the right person to talk to to help you get around those walls, because at places you want to be, people want more good folks to be there.
I do the same and have triple displays that is placed with ergonomics in mind, so workspace is like 3*n mostly.

There's no drawback for me except probably terrible carbon foot print..
There are multiple interpretations of quantum physics. According to the "many-worlds hypothesis", the randomness is also deterministic -- it means that the reality branches into multiple futures, different futures containing different outcomes.

Here, randomness means that you cannot predict the outcome, because in the future there will be multiple copies of you, and whatever specific outcome you predicted, some of those versions will see a different outcome. But at the same time, this is fully deterministic, in the sense that there is an equation that describes exactly which futures will happen and which outcomes they will contain.

(There are also other intepretations, which add a new assumption on the top of this, such as "and one of those futures, selected randomly, is the real one, and then the remaining ones disappear". Which is kinda unfalsifiable, because yeah, it could be like this; but it also could be that all the different futures are equally valid, and each of them contains a copy of you saying "oh, so this one is the future that actually happened" -- but of course, different copies of you saying it about a different version of the future.)

EDIT: However, from the perspective of the "many-worlds hypothesis", everyone has an infinite number of futures... so the statement in the article doesn't make sense here either.

So, I am going to assume that the paper actually referred to something else, and the author of the article, trying to simplify it, turned it into something nonsensical.
It had to do with bugs, etc. And that a game wasn’t E.T. level awful.
I love that, in the archive, the last modification dates of the files are from 95-98.
Ha! Around 4 RFCs and 20 Internet Drafts more: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/quic/documents/
The one skill that we're undeniably the best at in the animal kingdom is throwing. No other animal even comes close.
The noise is inherent to our sensor technology... Very sensitive telescopes are cryogenically cooled to reduce the temperature of the focal plane, reducing the noise. As in an above comment, the light from distant objects is more spread out and appears weaker - fewer photos are arriving each second and hitting the focal plane than if the telescope were closer. At a certain point, the signal gets buried in the noise.

I worked on the BICEP Array telescope at the south Pole - the light we are observing is actually extremely low energy and we can't see it unless our detectors are colder than the light source we are looking at (which is about 2.7K). We cool our detectors to 0.3K!
These all use sigils on variables in one way or another: Unix Shells, AWK, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Basic, PowerShell, DOS batch scripts
This isn't about the curiosity of collegues??

Again, this isn't some random suicide, these are people in a known high pressure environment already aware this person committed suicide.

The organization can pretend nothing happened (even though everyone already knew), or they can take charge and try and help these people cope with that devastating news and help anyone who might already be in a bad place...

Once you're dead you're dead, that's why causes of death aren't personal... there's no person left.

The organization doesn't even have to frame it in of terms this person's death, just a simple call out that "if anyone is struggling with this loss or needs help come to us".

Anything is better than pretending it didn't happen.
Everything I Needed to Know About Observability, I Learned from ‘Bewitched’
I had to click through more than 100 links to download all the data, how can this be acceptable? Specially coming from Amazon. How hard is it for them to create an archive with all the data? This is ridiculous, I can't imagine how was the meeting when they decided to produce purposefully such garbage UX.
It depends on the kind of humor. Humor is a very powerful tool that may even dispell insecurities if done right, but it could also be very rub it in one’s face offensive.
I used to work with a guy that was very visually impaired and he used a 40" monitor set to VGA resolution. He would still have to crane his head to the left & right sometimes to follow the mouse on screen.

Going to something like a 49 or 55" television could work but you need to check the field of view at the distance they'll have it set up. Get a piece of cardboard at your largest anticipated screen dimensions, prop it up at their normal viewing distance, then put some high contrast marks on the edges & in the corners and see if they can make them out without too much head rotation. If they can't then cut the cardboard down to the next smaller TV size and try again.

Once you have bought the right sized TV, then adjust the resolution so they can make out screen elements (the window close button is a good one to test against). Then adjust the mouse size, browser zoom, etc.
Love microns. The newsletter is great.
When you buy from Amazon, you are supporting their various awful practices. Yes, you
Try using a tablet or any display laid on desktop, it's terrible posture and very painful after a while.
Thank you @simonw thanks to you I get to learn Python and pipelines :p
Oh, sorry. I missed that.
> Distributed systems are hard. It takes time to determine where all possible information could live. And you have to make sure you're providing the correct information. And do this flawlessly, every single time lest you open yourself up to bad press and potential fines. This all takes time in systems as large and distributed as Amazon.

This implies that Amazon is serving GDPR data requests manually, rather than the whole process being automated. Surely that can't be true?

I agree that identifying where data can be stored, and extracting it correctly, is a difficult problem. But that problem is identical for every user, and it should only need to be solved once. You aren't determining from scratch which databases contain user data on every request, right? Nor are you re-defining your export schema for each user, or re-implementing the identity authentication, or deciding which pieces of data don't need to be in the data export for some legal reason, or any of these other systematic difficulties.

And if this automated, why suggest that the difficulty applies to serving each individual data access request rather than just to defining and implemeting a repeatable process?
Why not just split the peers up over separate wg interfaces?
it might be useful to distinguish between LSD - the drug and journey, and LSD - the social phenomenon via Dr Tim Leary, Burning Man, music bands and the like.. Stan Grof from my point of view, is solid and responsible.. the other side, outrageous and unexpected, with all the ecstasies and injuries associated with such chaotic vigor. Detractors and their allies, law enforcement, quickly point out the social costs, and after decades, I see they are not entirely wrong about that part. Enthusiasm and outright dismissal of the negatives, do not overcome that, and in fact strengthen it.. since you know, drugs have been known to affect a person's judgement over time :-/

(thx for posting "fringe" journey material here on tech-heavy YNews)
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-spent-3000-on-a-samsung-smar...
Especially about the law. I really wish HNers would refrain from giving legal advice because it’s often wrong, sometimes dangerously so.
Bill Baxter (CTO, Vizio)

Smart TVs continue to make money for the manufacture after the sale by providing data to viewer measurement and consumer research companies and through all of those apps they integrate in the TV’s smart functions and subsequent app usage.

“This is a cutthroat industry,” Baxter went on to say. “It’s pretty ruthless. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off the TV. I need to
cover my costs.”

http://cjni.com/smart-tvs-too-smart/
Important Web3 Concepts: Part 1 – Performaroo
What I mean is "coarse-grained composition with text/bytes" (described in the blog post in my first reply)

If you're thinking that's tautological (how else would Common Lisp and Clojure communicate?), then this subthread might help with the context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30814716

I don't think Common Lisp, Clojure, and Racket are compatible with Emacs' s-expression format. Lots of people here are saying they use JSON or the like with Lisp, not s-expressions.

Emacs can use its own format to communicate with itself, because it controls what process is on the other side of the wire.

(In any case, any variety of s-expressions IS TEXT; there are non-trivial issues to get it back in memory -- like what to do about graphs and sharing, node cycles, integer sizes, string encodings, etc.)

But the point of the slogan is that when you have even a small bit of heterogeneity (among Lisps) then what you're left with is "Unix". A Lisp machine isn't a big win for this reason.

It is cool that Lisp machines had a robust ABI. That could solve the IPC problem. But then you have the problem of a Lisp machine communicating with a Unix machine, which I'm sure was a very real thing back in the day. So now you're left with the lowest common denominator of Unix. Again that is coarse-grained composition over wires, which is analogous to shell. The shell doesn't have to be involved strictly speaking, but the syscalls that are made and parsing that is done is pretty much the same.
+1 SourceInsight, it was very helpful when working on a large legacy C/C++ codebase.
Attaching split keyboard on the armrest with a trackball or trackpoint would be a sweet spot.
I know that some people might subscribe to the latter ideal, but that's not my belief system. I believe that we should continue to innovate and improve our lives, but that the people who do the innovating should see the reward of their efforts, not just their bosses. That's why I'm a (libertarian) socialist. Socialism isn't about making sure everybody has equal resources, it's defined by the phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution", as opposed to communism's "... According to his need". Communism is meant to describe a post-scarcity economy,realistically. Socialism is about removing the class division between worker and capitalist that's really it. You can have welfare and whatnot and that's a good thing in terms of social utility, but it's not inherent to socialism. That's more social democracy, which is a reformist ideology where you just tack amendments onto capitalism, rather than a socialist ideology.

I do agree with not wanting insurrection though - the time for that in the West has probably passed. The global South on the other hand, is still oppressed enough to warrant taking up arms.
Distributed systems store information in different databases and warehouses. You don't want your Amazon.com retail data co-mingled with Alexa data for multiple reasons. Two of the preeminent security concepts is least privilege and data segregation.

Your data exists in different files and databases. That's why you get multiple files containing your data. And let's ignore that the zip archives contain files of different types.

If all the files were of the same type, what would you prefer, that Amazon edit these files and combine them into a single file? How could you prove that Amazon didn't edit out any files maliciously?

The typical way to verify file integrity is by checking hash sums. But here you don't have access to the original hashes (because they're internal Amazon files). Even if you had access to the hashes, we know the hashes wouldn't match because we're presupposing that the files have been modified to combine them.

If they were to combine all the files together, there would be no way for Amazon to document that nothing was changed. Which means the process isn't auditable, and people will come up with conspiracies about how big bad Amazon is sanitizing files before sending them out.
It’s not really in the same vein, since the OP is referring to modern PHP and your article was written over a decade ago.

Many of the points in the decade-old article still stand, but the ecosystem around PHP has papered over a lot of the cracks in a variety of ways.
For the end user but for a commercial developer you have to pay I believe.
It's not a remake, it's a sequel of sort.
> I was hoping this would explain a bit more about why the algorithm does the things it does. Do we have proofs for why certain types of mixing are more secure than others?

Only the most simple of proofs for the most simple of circumstances.

Lets say you have a 2-bit number (x0, and x1 for the two bits) that you want to mix up / encrypt. The output can be 0-bits, 1-bit, or 2-bits. 3-bits or more wouldn't work (8-outputs vs 4-inputs).

1-bit "wastes a bit" of information (you go from either 4-possible inputs into 2-possible outputs).

Therefore, having 2-bit input (4-possible inputs), your maximal amount of "mixing up" you can do is to have 4-possible outputs. That is, a 2-bit input should mix into a 2-bit output.

There are patterns for how to make these "bijections". AES used Galois Fields (which are always a bijection), as well as S-tables (substitution tables, or 8-bit / 256-input to 8-bit / 256-output tables to mix things up 8-bits at a time).

It turns out that ADD / XOR / BITSHIFT are all you need to make a modern, high-speed bijection. So more modern ciphers prefer those functions instead.

-------

From there on out, there's just a lot of testing that goes on. You run tests to see if any bits seem "corelated" to each other (ie: Differential Analysis. When Bit#25 changes, does that cause Bit#66 to change 50% of the time? Or does it change 52% of the time? Because 52% of the time would allow us to run probability attacks and figure out how Bit#25 and #66 are connected with just 25-or-so trials).

So you try to make your functions as "flat" as possible, to defeat probability analysis (also known as differential analysis). There are other probability/statistical tests, but these are largely ad-hoc ideas.

So you learn all the cryptography-probability tricks about how other ciphers have failed (correlation between bits, etc. etc.), and emperically test your functions against such analysis. Make your probability distributions as "flat" as possible (50.00000% correlation between bits), and you'll defeat differential-cryptoanalysis.

--------

The only way for 2-bits of input to mix into 2-bits of output is to have a 1-to-1 and onto function, also known as a bijection (and sometimes called a permutation).

> Also, it's funny how even world-class cryptographers can think it's perfectly fine to directly output internal state as the digest. Some things are only obvious in retrospect.

What's wrong with this? There's the same information at that point. You only have another permutation function. Once the internal state is "sufficiently mixed up" (that is... in the 2-bit case... the 2-bits of input can become 2-bits of output in a sufficiently mixed up way), you can't get any better than just returning the input state.

Once all 256-bits of input have a 50% chance of changing all 256-bits of state, then you can just output the internal state as your "answer". In fact, "mixing" them up any further might accidentally throw off your statistical analysis... so its better to NOT muck with the number anymore.