skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most Git commits (almost all non-merge commits) only point to one other commit (node, whatever) and that still forms a tree of branches naturally. Rebase is a "consensus algorithm" that some need in git to keep their commits a straight line. On a single machine a blockchain consensus algorithm is nearly indistinguishable from "rebase" and yeah doesn't "feel like you need a consensus algorithm". That doesn't mean there isn't a consensus algorithm.

Multiple different heads is a tree. Multiple forks is very much a tree. I think it is Blockchain proponents that are overcomplicating things and bending over backwards to describe their Merkle trees as non-tree as possible.
The only people who deserve bullying are the bullies.
There are some sources that discuss the idea here:

https://sites.google.com/view/sources-stellar-engines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU
The pitch deck described in this article is baffling. It's full of all sorts of numbers about how awesome it'd be if Twitter experienced hypergrowth and their subscription growth was 2600% or they increased their userbase to 3X in three years. Yes, that would be awesome! Isn't it traditional to pitch some ideas about how you might achieve that growth? Particularly for a mature product company that you plan to acquire?

Perhaps I'm underestimating the power of "Product X". I bet that'll be awesome.
Bellingcat: Auto-archiver – Auto archive links to videos in a Google Sheet
100% of the details are in the papers.
Halve deforestation associated with beef consumption, not overall
There's a fork of this as well, though I don't know much about why the fork happened or anything:

http://kolibrios.org/en/
>The agreement with Novell only covered “Windows 3.1”. That is why the second, finished, working edition of Windows for Workgroups, a big version with massive changes, was called… Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

>And that’s why NT was also called 3.1. Because that way it fell under the Novell agreement.

I am calling BS on this story. I was around during when NT 3.1 came out, and even in the the trade magazines there were no mentions of anything like this. It was called NT 3.1 basically to parallel Windows 3.1

In addition, the legal reasoning doesn’t make sense. The law isn’t like source code where clever hacks are just mechanically executed. If you go before a judge and try to tell them that your completely new product is covered by an old agreement because of some clever naming, it is not going to go very well for you.

So based on the above, I think this story is wrong.
Bellingcat Tech team develops tools for open source investigations and explores tech-focused research techniques.

https://github.com/bellingcat
Seriously! Now, I will end up spending 3 hrs trying to figure out why `807 points and 426 comments` for such a trivial and common experience!
Ask HN: Time for a Career Change?
I worked for Google for a few years and hated every day of it: lots of proto shuffling and bureaucracy and very few interesting problems to work on. I'm now at a different company, but I'm honestly feeling very burned out here too. I have a lot of meetings due to being in a fairly senior IC role, but I'm an introvert and feel very ineffective.

I've also become painfully aware over the years how many aspects of development are tedious and uninteresting. Things like wrangling dev environments, writing tests, debugging issues in prod, hunting through docs, and chasing down teams to figure out how a large system fits together (especially if the system is boring). A lot of engineering work is plumbing together different systems, and having more experience doesn't make this work any easier or faster.

I used to really enjoy programming, but that's because I would choose to work on solving problems I found interesting. I've always appreciated elegant systems (ideas like lambda calculus, Unix's files, programs, and pipes, LISP, Haskell, etc.), but most of the systems I work on are the exact opposite: large and boring. I also really dislike corporate culture: trying to maneuver politically, show off in meetings, etc. I'm starting to wonder if being a software engineer is really the right choice for me. Any thoughts?
I'd be interested to see a HN poll to know how many of you roll your own (that is, you're serving all HTTP traffic on the back end of a load balancer), or using a website hosting service. But I don't know which hosting services are popular so I don't know what to add to the poll.

I have a happy little node server that's been running on an AWS micro instance since 2013 and I periodically stick a new SPA into the public area with auth through the express middleware. It might look a bit frankensteinish, but it works just ducky and costs like US$10/month with 20GB of SSD (most of that is the elastic IP + load balancer).
Ironically you're proving Socrates point by misinterpreting Plato's writing.
The design of the header (slides down if you scroll up) combined with the banner above it makes for a terrible UX on a phone. It takes up so much space that you can barely read the article. The dropdown on scroll behavior is also so sensitive that it makes it really hard to stop it and read.
And because I'm procrastinating when it comes around to learning the bloody rust borrow checker; but I need to know at least one WASM language.
And that's why the Halfbakery exists!

https://www.halfbakery.com/

https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Weather_20music#1372541387

Weather music

The Four Seasons

Weather. It's all very well and good, but you can't get it on iTunes.
Until now.

For several decades, thousands of weather stations around the globe have been recording barometric pressures on a minute by minute basis.

In a recent lucrative deal with the Met Office*, MaxCo. has secured the non-exclusive rights to this data. Sped up by a factor of several thousand, and digitally remasturbated, these barometric pressure fluctuations become a dynamic soundscape available on a wide range of regionally-themed CDs.

The daily fluctuations in recorded pressure become a rich A above middle C. Spells of sunny, dull or stormy weather add modulations and overtones, whilst the seasonal barometric trends become deep bass notes. Longer-term climate shifts are reflected in gradual transitions of timbre and amplitude.

Listen from the comfort of your own armchair to fifteen years of your local weather. Enjoy full stereophony as the pulsing mercury of Africa plays a counterpoint to the slow- shifting monsoon-driven barometry of Asia, or let the perpetual depression over North Wales lull you to sleep.

Buy now while weather lasts!

[*actually we just had to agree to buy them several packets of Hobnobs]

— MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 29 2013
Why is the word “he” in quotes? Are you implying that they’re trnsgnder or something? But you don’t put “his” in quotes, so that probably isn’t why?

It is confusing.
The world’s biggest hydrogen fuel cell EV has started work in South Africa
Thank you very much for your kind and empathetic response, I really appreciate it. It is a pity I can only upvote it once.

As someone who views most psychiatric diagnoses (autism/ASD included) as being primarily cultural constructs (with the science behind them being quite weak, far weaker than most people think), the suggestion that some of these things labelled as “autistic traits” are really just traits which some cultures (especially mainstream Anglo-American culture) disapprove of, is one I have a lot of sympathy for.
A cursor lets you step through a table one row at a time. You can use it to move between rows and read and update them.
dynomight has a blog about it
Maybe he's the guy who posted a couple of days ago about pulling a disk out of a RAID array on his first day in a leadership position...
Because QM needs absolute time and space coordinates?
I agree; there should be more protections and I'm pointing out that they could be offered. Github could certainly enforce at the platform level that the only tags allowed for use in Actions must be annotated, maybe even signed, and must never be force-pushed.

The use of tags isn't necessarily the wrong strategy: I'm mostly just pointing out it is treating tags as mutably as branches that is the problem. I don't think you should ever force push a tag, personally, and I always find it problematic when people treat tags like branches and confuse the two.
From their website: "written fully in assembly language (64bit and 32bit)." Whoa..
Germany has defined what Level 3 means to them. The driver needs to be able to take control within 10 seconds. If the car can't wait 10 seconds for the driver to stop playing and pay attention to the alert, it isn't Level 3 (in Germany). It can't be cowboy level 3 where you are still driving with your hands on the wheel and foot over the break pedal waiting for the software to stuff up.
That's a very cool project for tinkering. It's a small niche, especially that it's written in assembly, it limits the scope of the things one can play with. But nevertheless, it's a very enriching experience as well as a very unusual one.
Personally, I've never been a fan of "the measured life."

Pro athletes and ultra-high performers use these types of metrics to maximize their "potential," but it seems to come at the cost of burnout, injury, and things like mental health and family issues.

I get a pretty significant amount of stuff done, and pretty well, but I could care less about measuring it.

I don't compete with anyone; especially with myself.

When crunch time comes, I roll up my sleeves, and get downright obsessive, but I also do things like take "side trip projects" (for example, breaking out UI widgets into open-source packages).

I get done what needs doing. I learn a lot, and I keep myself relatively healthy.
Yeah, why not keep the free gov money train flowing?

/s

Not exactly an environmentally friendly strategy. Soulless corporate executives, what shall we do with you?
Well, it's a great timing.

Fail it's because I am new; Succeed then it's my superior capability; plus, the learning rate during crisis is at least 10 times higher than the peaceful time, let alone the nerves and mental fortitude where peaceful time would never train one for.
>I've noticed whenever I pig out on dairy I feel really really bad like 2 hours later.

>It's at a point where I try to avoid most milk, pizza is temping though.

sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance to me rather than "less animal gunk".

> I think it's easier to pitch the health benefits of eating less animal gunk.

> So yea it tastes good.

And how well have public health campaigns that told people "stop eating delicious things because they're unhealthy" fared?
Not sure if you've seen this issue in the tracking:
https://github.com/rxhanson/RectanglePro-Community/issues/46

I am planning on adding some control into the UI for it, but no guarantees on a timeframe.
Isn’t Tor at this point widely suspected to be compromised by state actors? Aren’t people who use Tor for nefarious purposes arrested regularly these days?
> I'm strongly in favor of allowing more efficient video formats to be used in their place anywhere that supports animated GIFs because that actually kills their niche.

Haven't the sites that can be bothered to encode animated images as MP4 already done so and switched to the <video> tag? Who is left now in 2022 with GIF that would actually switch to MP4 and not just keep GIF, support for which seems to be in no danger of being removed? Especially since you'd still have to worry about backward compatibility, because neither Chrome nor Firefox have implemented <img> mp4 yet.
> Neither the written word nor the spoken word are of much value when the communication is one-way only.

What, you mean like when it's documented?
This is cool and all, but I can't shake the feeling that it's a workaround for a certain kind of OS design where showstopping glitches are a fact of life. If OSs had proper fallback drivers (I.E., if the nvidia GPU driver crashes repeatedly, fall back to framebuffer), then this sort of testing wouldn't really work, because the OS would appear to keep working despite being in a failure condition.
>Why care about wealth inequality as a first-order concern?

Because, markets behave in a zero sum manner when limiting constraints are reached (ie room for growth has run out), and many economies aren't really growing all that much right now.

As a simple example, there is only so much land in Manhattan (all of which is already owned; some of which might be for sale). That means if you ever wish to own land in Manhattan and currently do not, you must take it from someone else who already owns land in Manhattan (making it their loss). This makes owning land in Manhattan a zero sum market. Granted you wouldn't take it in a literal sense, but trade for it. The point here is that you can't just magically make yourself some land in Manhattan. Rather you must trade for it, and beat competing offers from other market participants.

Which brings me to my next point...

>If my median income is going up, why should I root for periods that decrease it, even if it means that the wealthy are being hurt more than I am?

In short, focusing solely on your own income is too short-sighted. As the price of everything is dictated by the collective market (ie other market participants who also have disposable income). If you don't acknowledge this, then there's potential for you to be priced out of markets even if your income is growing, but growing slower relative to everyone else. Hence, if your income falls, but at a slower pace than everyone else, you will be better off in markets, because effectively, your earnings will trade relatively for more despite your income having decreased.
Something similar but with amazing first person footage is Andrzej Bargiel's ski descent of K2 from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiGkU_eXJa8
> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break.

lol. I run IT. Nobody at my workplace knows what I do.

Contrary to TFA, my automation gains accrue to myself and my company. It seems difficult to see this as anything but win-win. I get respite and time to think, and my company gets improved responses and uptime.
What happens if we ask Laplace's demon (assumption of reversibility) to battle Maxwell's demon (entropy decrease) - will it end in an infinite loop?

At some level, even systemd is built on a superloop, or "main" method, which depends on a power supply.

So the computers are depending on physics again, to persuade us that:

• electron + positron = photon

• photon really is a fundamental particle in the Standard Model

• Elementary charges are measured as +1, -1 electron... ok I'm confused now.

• One Electron Universe?
You're making the mistake of considering these as independent variables and extending them to infinity assuming no one will respond to current state of the world in the future.

The only way the fed will keep rates at 5% for 30 years would be if we had a gangbusters overheating economy going full tilt with near zero unemployment for the entire time. In which case the GDP graph will be up and to the right the entire time. And in that scenario GDP (and thus tax income) will be rising faster than debt and interest payments rise.

Put that aside though and assume that we somehow end up in a situation where debt servicing is a huge chunk of the budget. There are tools to solve that problem. We can accept more immigrants and give more incentives for existing citizens to have kids to kickoff population growth. We can increase tax rates to payoff some of the debt. If you want to get esoteric the Treasury can mint coins and deposit them at the Fed - something the US Government does every year, creating brand new money out of nothing. Yes this would amount to some monetization of the debt but it is a possibility. All of these strategies and many more have pros and cons. Perhaps in reality we'd use a mix of many different strategies.
> Nvidia has agreed to pay $5.5 million in fines to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges that it failed to disclose how many of its GPUs were being sold for cryptocurrency mining

$5.5 million USD seems like nothing. Why isn't the total profits made this way disclosed?

This would still be a lenient requirement, as it doesn't take into account the fraudulent stock gains.
People aren't paying with their own money for DDoS machines normally. Well, maybe there are some small operations like that. But often the traffic comes from a hacked service that's a part of a bigger botnet. It may lead to a larger detection ratio on AWS/GCP, but the attackers are not paying the costs.
Heroku is a one of kind platform, many tried to replicate, none have come close, the ability to setup a whole app with a few clicks on dynos and add-ons is great. The price was always salty $50/month for 1gb RAM shared CPU, and in the few past years no newly released features comes to mind. As a customer I have no idea what this security issue impact, the communication has been poor as this post does not clarify much, you have to click a status post link to see a feed of what's going on.
> I wouldn't suggest accusing others of being part of an "angry mob".

Why not? What are you going to do about it? Be angry more?
It is a lot harder because you have to do it.

If you don't care about it, you're not going to do it.

If you don't do it, there won't be RSS support.

And so, the circle shrinks.
At this point it's maybe not worth the effort to find out. A related problem is that the IDE and most VB6 controls and apps are awful about littering all of their settings in the Registry (where it doesn't belong) or equally hard to find spots. Most of the VMs I've seen you can't even rebuild at this point: they were lifted and shifted from some distant past developer's machine and nobody anymore has the raw license codes or files to unlock the various third party components (and some of those component companies no longer exist, so good luck).

I imagine that's a problem many projects would face trying to use the RAD Basic IDE, too and I don't think it's possible for it to be "no migration", because there will be components that won't work, won't relicense, etc.
> Why care about wealth inequality as a first-order concern?

Because we’re really concerned about utility, not wealth, and except at extreme levels of absolute deprivation, relative material deprivation is a bigger source of disutility than absolute deprivation.

(Technically, that makes wealth inequality a second order concern, though.)
Small ideas that could easily be picked up by other languages
Portability was not a goal, apparently.
Kindly don’t say stuff like this. After taking antibiotics I had severe, severe anxiety that lasted months along with insomnia. Now the anxiety is mostly gone but I’m still dealing with some sleep issues. If you google antibiotics anxiety microbiome you can read a bunch of studies.
The single hardest thing in software development is brain-to-brain information transfer. It works really badly. But in software development (especially at larger scales), everything depends on it.

So work on writing technical information unambiguously. Not code, but written language. It's like a superpower in software development.
That seems to be the crux of it, right? How to decompose a problem into bounds, constraints, and an objective function? I’m thinking of finance applications.
I've seen this happen in Toronto, too.

Not quite an attack but I remember the Toronto Police tweeting about a turkey disrupting traffic: https://twitter.com/TPSOperations/status/1362483565267742721
Level 3 autonomous driving isn't made with the use case of sleeping but with you being able to do other things while still awake (for example use your phone or watch a movie). For those situations 10s is more than enough time to react.
Ever since I bought an ereader, I notice I've read more. I finished The Pragmatic Programmer and The Effective Engineer - recommended on HN - very recently. With it, I've only read technical books, and am currently reading Rust for Rustaceans, but when I feel like it I intend to read fiction.

You can blame yourself all you want for not practicing skills that will increase your salary, but at the end of the day even the most successful people have hobbies and free time, and you should enjoy it! You probably spend more time at work every week than doing a hobby (because you cook, eat, sleep, shower, commute, ...).

I guess that's a long comment to basically say that you sometimes should read things just for your personal pleasure, and it's completely fine!
Nobody is stalking you.

Replying to your frequent postings on a public forum and stating the fact that your accounts are sock puppets, which you don't deny, is certainly not stalking.

If you're terrified of people publicly replying to your public posts, then don't post in public, simple as that.

If you bravely decide you have thick enough skin to tolerate people replying to your posts, and you hit the rate limit, then post later, simple as that.

On the other hand, your creepy and unlawful actions of launching massive denial of service attacks against other users and threatening to spend thousands of euros to ruin their lives by committing fraud and identity theft is DEFINITELY stalking.

You went WAY beyond "telling them off". So don't pretend we all don't know what you really are.

YOU are the stalker.
Tall vs. wide leadership strategies – Part 1: Gaming origins
The more efficient your system is, the more fragile it is. Just look at global trade and how quickly it fell apart because of Covid. A more down to earth example is being “efficient” going on a trip, leaving last second to get to the airport, and then ending up missing the plane because of an unexpected problem happening on the way. The book “The Goal” (introducing TOC) is a good read to understand the problems with focusing on “efficiency” instead of the goal you are trying to achieve.
It’s time we fix the unethical design of cookie consent windows
> Having to individually play each reaction image would make them unusable.

Good, I'm not a fan of them ;-)

> The proper way to handle this is to respect the prefers-reduced-motion CSS media feature.

There's a big difference between clicking to play an animation and never playing an animation. The <video> element uses the former. But prefers-reduced-motion seems more appropriate for the latter.

In any case, why wouldn't prefers-reduced-motion also make reaction animations unusable?
(Former) Salesforce employee here, long enough to have been there a couple of years before the Heroku acquisition. I can't let this stand without a comment.

Heroku never seemed to want to integrate, but instead be the "cool kids", those who just do not have to worry about the enterprisy stuff such as automated backups, DR, high availability, enabling Java, etc. Everything they did was great, everything "Salesforce" sucked, yet they never made any money before the acquisition. The acquisition was a waste of money in first place (IMHO).

The founders did not even try and so they left.
Fortran???
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU made this a law.
Interesting that it says SF’s median rent is $1900. That’s far lower than anything I’ve seen.