skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ball packing (no, it's not some new thing Bay Area VCs are doing--I mean, it probably is also that but it's not what I'm referring to here; rather, it's the n-dimensional analogue of sphere packing) gets stranger in n-dimensions as well.

If you have an n-dimensional integer lattice with unit n-spheres at each even-numbered point, you get inscribed n-spheres. For n = 2, those circles are tiny: about 29% (1-1/sqrt(2)) of the radius of the bigger (r = 1) ones. At n = 3, they're somewhat bigger but still small. At n = 4, they're the same size. At n = 5+, the inscribed n-spheres are actually larger than the unit spheres, which means they extend farther despite being "inscribed". This is probably impossible to visualize, because it's never that way in our 3-dimensional world.

High dimensional spaces also make it difficult to come up with good distance metrics. In 1000+ dimensions, nearly all the volume is on the boundary, and neighborhoods in the classical sense (e.g. visible clusters) don't exist. It's trivial to come up with metrics that "work" but it often requires domain knowledge to come up with ones that are useful.
“Computers”, BSA Merit Badge Series (1973)
Deep Blue
I'm a staunch metric supporter, but to be fair I have never encountered a country that measures screens as anything other than inches.
> Or it's stable? Look at the codebase, it's a pretty dead simple bridge. Make your app open source and all those Linux devs you're supporting can help you out!

Even the simplest bridge needs upgrades, unless you want to be stuck with react 16.

> Yup, and you get it for free with if you build your app with RN and React Native Web.

That's better than nothing I'd say yeah. That's kind of the issue with react native, you need platform-specific rendering code and since companies don't really care that much about linux desktop it's not really there.
Do people in crypto sincerely believe Tether is backed? I'm not being sarcastic here, I'm genuinely asking. I'm a bit of a skeptic of how the crypto market has developed overall, and the intentions of the major players, so I keep reminding myself that I'm biased, but I haven't believed Tether is even remotely close to being fully backed for a long while, and I've just sort of assumed everyone who's 'bought in' to the crypto space also knows and just doesn't care, or they think it's 'too big to fail'.

Is that the case or is there genuine belief it is fully/mostly/partly backed?
This also differs based on state within Germany.

In Berlin for example the Grundschule is 6 years and then you go to either Gymnasium or Sekundarschule[1] for another 6, which offers either university-bound education or vocational education but generally everyone attending that wants to and is academically capable can get a highschool diploma out of it, allowing them to go to uni.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekundarschule#Berlin
Wow, excellent, thanks!
This is also how you lose customers.
If you don't have any argument to support an opinion, you can always support it with "it's <year>". Or if you live in a very rich country, "in <country>".
This is an amazing explanation. Thank you!
National Software Reference Library
Python “Sandbox” Escape (2013)
I haven't had a look at the YJIT design, but your reasoning:

> detecting parts of code [...] and then apply a fast compiler to that part

applies to the previous JIT (MJIT) design, which created C snippets and compiled them on the fly. I don't think this is the case for YJIT, although I'm not 100% sure.

Surely this isn't the case, for example, for TenderJIT, which, for the bytecode instructions, builds assembly code and (optionally) invokes the original interpreter functions.
This is basically THE signal to start of the process. Given the majority popular support (76% !!!) and this statement from the political leadership it would be extremely unlikely parliament would not follow through.

Before this was made public there might have very well been some secret discussions, and the President and Prime minister might have very well used this statement to signal "please wait". This is as green light as green gets.
I pay a small amount extra a month for my host to manage upgrades of my own WordPress sites and common plugins, I keep things simple on purpose to minimise the plugin hell you mention.
As much as I can do this myself, I can't guarantee timely updates as a private individual.
I've migrated 2 WP sites (one for work, one for a local club) to github pages to reduce the maintenance pain of WordPress.
So the biggest Heroku clone I can think of is Google's App Engine, and it's complicated for no reason. The most comical example is storing/accessing secrets. What should be something like `heroku config set MYSECRET=foo` is instead an entire tutorial on setting up a separate key management system and configuring GAE to use it, which cutting every corner still took me at least 2 hours.

It's like this all the way. Postgres is one click on Heroku, a miniature ordeal on GAE. Yeah I can handle it, but why. Maybe I don't have the patience and there's some light at the end of the tunnel. I thought maybe that light was gRPC, but turns out App Engine ironically can't run gRPC services.
Removing the GIL is surely a breaking change although not exactly a syntactic one. Putting it as Python 4.0 should clear the doubts and allow for widespread release without breaking existing code
I'm surprised that hash parameters are not mentioned to store state. They have many advantages that (for the kind of apps I do) work pretty well:

* they are not sent to the server

* hence, the URL size limit is that of the browser, not that of the backend handling the request

* hence, they disclose less info to the middlemen

* they can be shared easily from person to person

One drawback is that they require more processing on the frontend side.

As always, trade offs.
Following up on yesterday's "Master's at Arms" badge (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344293 ), I thought people might be interested in what the requirements were for the "Computers" badge for the Boy Scouts of America, nearly 50 years ago.

Here are the requirements, from https://archive.org/details/BoyScoutsComputers/page/n5/mode/... :

1. Do the following:

a. Give a short history of computers. Describe the major parts of a computer system. Give four different uses of computers.

b. Describe the differences between analog and digital computers. Tell the use of each.

c. Explain some differences between special- and general-purpose machines.

2. Do the following:

a. Tell what a program is and how it is developed.

b. Explain the difference between an assembler and a compiler. Tell where each might he used. Describe a source and an object program.

c. Use a flowchart diagram to show the steps needed to set up a camp.

3. Do one of the following:

a. Prepare flowcharts to find out the average attendance and dues paid at the last five troop meetings.

b. Prepare flowcharts to work out a simple arithmetic problem. Explain to your counselor how this program could be stored in a computer. Tell how it could be used again.

4. Do the following:

a. Name four input/ output devices for computers. Explain the use of two of them in a system.

b. Explain the Hollerith code. Show how your name and address would be punched on a card.

5. Tell the meaning of six of the following: a. memory b. bits c. on-line d. bytes e. microsecond f. address g. channel h. interrupt i. register j. console k. central processing unit

6. Tell the meaning and use of 12 of the following: a. business data processing b. information retrieval c. simulation d. scientific processing e. floating point f. truncation g. fixed point h. accuracy i. input j. record k. output l. file m. software n. instruction o. hardware p. indexing q. loop r. subroutine s. real time t. time sharing u. cybernetics

7. Visit a computer installation. Study how it works.

8. Do the following:

a. Explain what each of the following does: design engineer, analyst, customer engineer, operator, programmer, salesman

b. Read two pieces of information about computers. Describe what you read.

c. Describe jobs in the computer field.
Exactly. Every HN thread that mentions Heroku always has people responding with the same half dozen Heroku competitors. In reality, none of them are comparable. If I have to touch Docker at all then it’s not comparable to Heroku. If I have to configure a service at all. It’s not comparable. If I have to do anything other than click a button to add a database, make that database HA, and make backups automated, then it’s not comparable. If I have to manually manage things like environment variables (for managed services) instead of the system just doing it for me, then it’s not comparable. If I have to deal with complicated role policies, and access management instead of just saying who can and cannot push, then it’s not comparable. If it takes more than clicking a drop down to resize a service, then it’s not comparable. If I have to go to a third party website to add something like monitoring or logging from that third party, then it’s not comparable.
Still it’s nice to do to give you an idea (and vice versa to imperial)
You guys are funny. Bitcoin is one of the largest currencies in the world with over 100 million users. Read the Bitcoin Standard to understand why.
Yes, but just because everybody knows, they're over by Christmas.
8-bit number to binary string (2013)
As a user, I want native apps with some added value compared to web apps. I don't actually care about "polished", 60fps and things like that. So we are in a different camps.
Worse! The enemy list. But what are they going to do, is what I want to know. Baltic sea will soon be pretty much closed for them and they sure could start WW3 over that but would they? They don't seem to have that in them.
> Because people are capricious ...

Right. So you'd rather have them vote for a single candidate who sells them hopes and dreams that they'll make the right decisions to solve all their problems 4 years at a time, instead of voting for solutions to specific issues they're interested in where subject matter experts can actually improve things?

Corruption and greed are inescapable. At least by not giving a single person and party absolute power over everything, the damage can be contained to specific areas of government.

> Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.

What's absurd is the current absolutist model that is easily corrupted via social media (Cambridge Analytica, etc.).
https://twitter.com/tether_to/status/1524652531170881537

Surely this is related
They do have collateral. There has never been any evidence that they don't. The peg is already re-converged.

Just as it has quickly every other time this has happened. It reconverges, unlike UST, because they actually redeem your Tether for dollars when you ask.
Thanks but:

1. Learning a new language is non-trivial for many people (and don't sneer - it's about time not competency)

2. The ecosystem matters. If the code you want to interface with is in Python then "don't use Python" is just glib.

I'm mainly proficient in Javascript, Python and C#. My choice of language is rarely based on "which is best for this task?" but mostly "want do I need to run on and interface with?"
while i agree in principal, i am quite bothered by unused applications cluttering up the dock. i use the dock to tell me which apps i am currently focusing on, so inactive apps really get in the way.
COBOL is a bit of a different beast :)

Very interest article, and related discussion, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221877.
Can you name one library affected by the change?
What people really need is an object advisor with a fiduciary obligation and no commission incentives to help them answer this question.
Donating to venture capitalists, that a first!

Donate to your closest hospital / food bank instead

Time ahead of us will be very challenging
Yes. This is Gall's Law:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law
What's so horrible about it? It's pretty much on par with Java and C#, but feels lighter, generates native Code and makes it easier to talk to C libs.
>>The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising.

I'm a consumer of tether. I know the risks, and I take a calculated risk in using it for some applications. I perceive almost everything in the space as an experiment, and I'm willing to run that experiment. I personally believe that my sentiment is common among those who use and hold crypto assets. Cryptocurrencies are widely perceived as experimental and subject to large unexpected rice declines, hacks and other risks. That goes for stablecoins too.

I don't want you to forcibly prevent people from making any offer they want to me. By doing so, you are violating my right to free association, and assuming you know better than me what's best for me. I am not a child.

Maybe we can give people an option to suspend their rights as free citizens, and subject themselves to your political camp's centralized control, and leave every one else alone to decide for themselves, in accordance with the basic principles of liberal democracy. Is that a fair compromise, or are you going to presume large sections of your fellow citizens are not only financially illiterate, but also are too poor in judgment to realize they are better off under the control of people like you?
> Putting both countries in a new list of 'very unfriendly countries'?

My best guess would be exactly that. The last thing Putin wants is a repeat of the Finno-Russian wars of 1917 and 1941, which resulted in catastrophic losses on the Soviet side.
This is somewhat out of date as modern day system in Germany is a lot less exclusionary and less prone to railroading pupils to vocational education than it was 20-30 years ago. This also depends on state, in Berlin for example basically any capable/motivated pupil can get an Abitur by attending an Integrierte Sekundarschule.
In my book, a medical treatment that does not beat placebo is ineffective. That's also what we are asking pharmaceutical companies to prove through those double blind studies.

If acupuncture does not beat placebo, lets direct people to homeopathy instead - which basically means drinking water - to get the exact same placebo results. There are less risks associated with drinking water than being stabbed with needles, dirty or not. We could even have those cost fully covered by the state, few millilitres of water won't bankrupt anyone.
> Local variable names should be short

It depends on how complex the functions/algorithms are, and what mental references can be assumed.

Local variable names help explain how/what the function does. Function names and context might only be enough to explain the intended output.
I'm really interested in using this library, but I have to admit I'm struggling to think of use cases. I can see differentiability being useful in feature extraction and maybe some uses of augmentation like colour correction, or spatial tranformations -- for example in the image registration example they give -- but overall the kinds of operations offered by the library tend to be used for preprocessing, and not really needed in the trainable pipeline.

For instance edge detectors and even most feature detectors are basically hard-coded kernels, are they not? And you wouldn't apply them on intermediate representations, they are only really valid operations for the input layer, and not needed during back-propagation.

I find the examples interesting, but mostly are things that could be done using OpenCV and don't exploit the differentiability in any meaningful way. But maybe I am missing something.
AI to remove any object from a picture
Let us know what you think about it!
Here is the product hunt page if you want to add a comment: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/magic-retouch-by-photoroom
I really love that idea of pruning unused and redundant usage of endpoints. You could take that functionality and apply to to whole application features in the UI too for example.

It’s inspired me a lot. I assume this axeman had to integrate with either logs or analytics to get the usage counts?

I’m not sure such an idea would even work these days at large organisations following the Big Agile TM nonsense, imagine trying to explain that to a dozen or so product owners and scrum masters…
I’d suggest they care less about new products diversifying income and more about new products making them look diversified and less like a monopoly. That is the logic behind changing their name to “Alphabet”, distract from their utter dominance in search. Their only real fear and existential threat is from the govt doing an antitrust on them and forcing a breakup, hence it’s worth a few billion every year to keep that wolf from the door.
That depends on what method of storing state in the URL you use; History#replaceState[1] versus #pushState[2], not on storing state in the URL in general.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History/rep...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History/pus...
> Packages are usually poorly tested

Just in general? I don't know of any packages in my app that are poorly tested. Simply do not choose dependencies that don't meet your standard, whether it's TS or Dart.

> and the fact that it's dynamic language does not help

Most packages nowadays are written with TypeScript or Flow. JS itself is fast and stable thanks to the billions put into the VMs.

> upgrades are often and painful

You don't have to upgrade. In the early days things were more painful, but I've upgraded the past few major React and RN versions with no hassle.

> the tooling is not very stable in my opinion.

Seems stable to me since the last couple years.

Personally the apps that Flutter makes are of worse quality vs RN apps. Emulated native will always feel cheap compared to real OS controls.
Surely it is very difficult for a company to "guarantee" anything about the price of a commodity sold in a large open market. There are all sorts of reasons prices go up and down, it seems hubris to imagine you can tether anything.

Even national governments struggle to do this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
It's sad that Intel isn't rolling out AVX-512 more consistently, especially now that their new 10nm process doesn't have such as big clock frequency penalty for using these wide instructions.

If the rumours are true that AMD Zen 4 will have AVX-512, then it'll be yet another sad corporate failure of watching a small underdog competitor show you how you are supposed to be managing your own flagship products...
How does *++argv not run accidentally run over the end of the buffer?

Is this some sort of BSD specific behaviour?
Agreed with everything you've said.

I'd also add that the rise of cloud computing hasn't helped either. WP was great when hosting consisted of shared LAMP services or hosting your own. But WP is a huge pain in the arse to host on services like AWS (as well as expensive too). So lots of companies that might have opted for a CMS solution like WP could easily be swayed to another alternative. While this wouldn't be the biggest contributing factor -- it's a drop in the ocean compared to the points you've raised -- it is yet another example of how the industry is moving on from WP style content.
It reminds me of projects being moved to the Apache foundation, that too often felt like an obituary of sorts. I'm sure there's good stewardship of those projects at Apache, but nothing exciting to come out of it.

And it's a shame. I wish there were more of these big companies that would just, idk, pay an organization like Apache or in this case OpenJS so that they can operate as a software development and open source stewardship company, pay people to work and manage these projects.
The data is confidential, so I'm afraid I can't disclose that. Wouldn't want someone else to successfully decompress it.
Xi Jinping’s DESPERATE Lockdown Power Grab – crazy Covid restrictions (10m vid)
Breaking Free of the Gatekeepers of Western Search
European Commission prefers breaking privacy to "protecting kids"

Fixed the title.
QE drove investors to riskier returns and an inappropriate focus on growth companies that promise the future. This is a fundamental effect of low interest rates on valuation.

Suppose you open a spreadsheet right now, discount 100 years of cash flows, and measure each cash flow as a % contribution to the sum (aka npv). You will find that at medium to higher rates years 0-20 make up the greatest percentage of the npv by far. But as you lower them, that relationship flips and cash flows for years 20 to 100 become the lion's share of the valuation.

WeWork isn't the only 'ridiculous promise-the-future' company we saw over QE, just the first I could name off the top of my head. But through the lens I described above, all those weird 'how could investors be so stupid' situations make more sense because the valuation math was slanted to favor such situations.
Crypto, networks, MTV and future teen wallets
Average km driven in the US: 14,000.
Average km driven in the EU: 7,000.

What you want to compare is percentage of annual income spent on gasoline. Some Americans (California) even pay double compared to Germans and triple compared to French.
Greediness.
I just saw that on Twitter and have absolutely no idea what it means. Can anyone explain it?
No, it's back to 99c
> Most Russians don't seem to want to invade other countries.

What are you basing this on?

https://www.levada.ru/en/ratings/

This seems to show strong support for the Russian government and this analysis seems to suggest that few Russians are concerned about Russians crimes and as many as half are very supportive of horrific violence against people they see as nonhuman.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2022.2...
Yes, until they run out of cash and you sit on worthless tether.
Plastic-eating bacteria have actually already been identified <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis>

I think the big difference now from then is that we have a lot of bacteria that already are in the ballpark of doing the right thing, they just need some help with the polymer structure. That's perhaps a smaller gap to bridge.
Crystal is not production ready. It doesn't even have production-ready parallelism (and there has been no discussion about it for a couple of years), so it can't be compared to Go.

I'd love to see large-scale adoption, but it's stuck in the typical vicious circle of no users <> little development.

Additionally, if they don't release parallelism support quickly, they'll be forever stuck with an ecosystem designed with the assumption that only one thread runs at a time¹. This was a deal-breaker for me, when I've evaluated it for use at my company.

¹=this is a very serious problem. Ruby has implemented parallelism (via Ractor), but the vast majority of the libraries assume a single thread running at a time; creating a project that uses parallelism will likely have many subtle bugs caused by the libraries.