skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once again being downvoted for being pro-web & having some suggestions/feelings. Anyone care to contribute some actual points, or are we just going to downvote each other silently?
Ask HN: Pros and cons placing idle computers to work outside business hours?
Anyone have experience placing 10s-100s of computers into paid service (e.g. MQL5 [1], Digital Coin Generation [2], Golem P2P network [3], MinePrize [4], etc) or with distributed decentralized storage (SiaCoin [5] vs Storj [6] vs Filecoin [7])? Is it worth the effort? Best practices? Any exacerbated security or support concerns? What about altruistic grid computing through BOINC, Rosetta@home etc? Assume enterprise class computers and networking with tier 1 gigabit Internet.

[1] https://cloud.mql5.com/en

[2] http://digitalcoingeneration.weebly.com/

[3] https://www.golem.network/

[4] https://mineprize.com/

[5] https://sia.tech/

[6] https://www.storj.io/

[7] https://filecoin.io/
Code will stay compatible (if someone refactors something, they'll update all the drivers), so that's not it. You just need to test your hardware with each new kernel release (every two months), otherwise you may not notice any breakage.
Sysadmins: Really Expensive
To this day the question I have about the Quadratic Seive is something like "what is being reduced in degrees of freedom by each relation added to the matrix?"

It seems like the sequence of primes in the factor base (which are quadratic residues) is very much related to the residues of the factors (they are) and somehow this it's doing in the abstract something like CRT to construct the factors. But I have never read a deeper explanation beyond the mechanics of implementation.
Haha, I probably wouldn’t go that far, but yeah. I had a 15” i9 and they definitely weren’t worth the premium. Doesn’t help that it had what was probably the worst Pro chassis in the past decade or so.
For anyone interested in a more technical summary of the some of the main ideas:

Problem Statement

The Erdos conjecture that all primitive sets S satisfy f(S) <= f(PRIMES), where f(S) = sum_{s} (1/(s log s)) and PRIMES is the set of all primes.

Definitions

Define A_q to be a primitive set such that all elements a are divisible by prime q, but no primes less than q.
* Example: A_3 contains multiples of 3, but no even numbers.

Define A*_q to be the set of all integers divisible by only primes >= q.
* Example: A_q is a subset of A*_q.
* Example: A_q is also a subset of q \* A*_q (i.e. multiply each element by q).

Define g(a) = 1/a * Product_{p<LargestPrimeDivisor(a)}[(1 - 1/p)].
* Example: if a=7, then the Product term (excluding the 1/a) is the "density" of A*_7. This is because (1-1/2) of integers aren't divisible by 2, (1-1/3) aren't divisible by 3, and (1-1/5) aren't divisible by 5.
* Example: if a=7, then g(7) is the density of all multiples of 7 that aren't divisible by 2,3,5.

Results

In [1], Author proves that for all A_q, with A_q \neq {q}: f(A_q) < k*\sum_{a\in A_q} g(a) <= k*g(q), for a constant k.
* The first half of the inequality comes from a cited result: 1/(a log(2a)) < k*g(a).
* The second half of the inequality comes from clever construction of the sets S_a = (a \* A*_{LargestPrimeDivisor(a)}), for all a in A_q. These sets are constructed to satisfy g(a) = |S_a|/|NaturalNumbers|. So because (1) S_a and S_b are disjoint for a\neq b (2) S_a is a subset of A*_q, this implies that sum(g(a)) = sum(|S_a|) <= sum(|A*_q|) = g(q).

In [2], Author shows that k\*g(q) <= 1/(q log q). Note that the right-hand side of the inequality is equal to f({q}).
* This uses a pretty clever partitioning of the primitive set A into A_2 U A_3 U A_5 U ... U A_q U .... Combining with part 1, this implies f(A_q) < f({q}) for all primes q, so f(A) < f(PRIMES).

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02250.pdf
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.02384.pdf
In old days, there are no competitions vs TV. Now TV is attacked by streaming services.
A spreadsheet. A chat app. A document editor. A map editor. Anything where information is on screen & needs to be live. Aka, what a huge part of the web today does.
The concept system actually materialized and was pretty underwhelming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg

The big issue is that most of those early consoles were designed with the expectation that games were on ROM chips directly connected to the CPU bus and mapped into memory so you wouldn't have to load all the assets in RAM (which was miniscule, a few dozen or low hundred kilobytes at most). If you just bolted a CD-ROM onto that architecture it can't be mapped into memory so now you have to cache things in RAM or architect your game to allow for seeking and getting them on demand.

Sony did take all the learnings from the SNES CD-ROM and used it to design the Playstation hardware. They added 2 megabytes of RAM, a huge increase over the SNES, which worked much better with games on CD-ROM.
But all of that crap is optional. The first thing a macOS user should do on a new machine is go to system preferences > Trackpad and turn that stuff and "Force Touch" off.
Some electronic locks can be replaced with a reliable Sargent & Greenleaf mechanical combination lock, if they have standard mounting.
Has development of PCem restarted?
I’ve never seen a car that didn’t have its own UI and relied on an Android/iOS device. CarPlay and Android auto are always optional.
I have notifications disabled on my browser because for every 1 useful notification I got, I get 50 requests to send me notifications because I visited a website once.
That's why people with strong enough brand have been moving to Substack.
Totally agreed!

It’s a bit ambiguous, but the Apple App Store guidelines seem to require you to be able to opt-out from marketing push notifications, while still keeping other notifications.

From guideline 4.5.4: “Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. (..)” [0]

The developer/user experience guidelines also recommend to have a clear screen to opt-in and out of different types of notifications, and never to abuse privileges (e.g. send marketing notifications with a “time critical” flag to break through focus mode etc.).

I really hated Uber Eats when I thought they were abusing their notification privileges to send spam. But I recently found out that they do allow you to opt out of marketing notifications while still allowing order-related notifications (although they really are pushing it (pun intended) by sending at least two post-delivery notifications asking for tips and ratings, which could easily wait until I actually open the app again or at least be limited to just one delivery confirmation notification). Not sure if they are asking for clear opt-ins for new customers (they probably assumed opt-in based on some general consent I gave before this Apple policy came into effect).

[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#app...

[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... (“Sending Marketing Notifications” at the end)
BMW made a 180 with their infotainment system in the new BMW iX the old one in the i-series was at least usable.
How many people do you think will go through the trouble of signing up for an account and giving x publisher their credit card for a 25 cent purchase though?
meh monitor

previous gen cpu

only 16gig

pretty underwhelming to be honest
The article I linked sourced from TechCrunch at https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/29/why-android-jelly-bean-4-2...
Intuitively I knew an idea like this must exist, but had no idea of how it could be formulated. If it is indeed accurate, even just to a point, it's probably one of the most important abstractions/heuristics/ideas I have ever read.

> Adjointness is only a part of the story. One often sees equations of the following form inverse(x) = adjoint(x)/norm(x). Once you have adjoint and norm, you magically get inverse.

That said, I am often spectacularly ignorant and easily seduced by simple views of complex things, but if there were name for this form or axiom, like Nemecek's axiom or something, I hope it sticks.
The Mongol Empire was not a single ethnic group. The top leaders were ethnic Mongols (much in the same way as Europe used to be a family business), but the troops were mostly from conquered peoples. I would assume that the field army was mostly Turkic, as Turkic peoples were more numerous than Mongolic peoples and their societies and styles of warfare were similar.
An app that starts out as a web app, but lets you add it to your desktop and it will look just like any other app on your computer. Given that the browser/OS supports it.
> But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself.

the Fediverse is _incredibly_ heterogeneous. pick any two distant corners of it and often they'll be completely unaware that the other corner even exists. the platform allows for different cultures like this and the tooling is such that i _think_ this will remain true as it grows (admins can and do "defederate" with communities whose presence makes the experience worse for them, and as sibling points out there's far less algorithmic-driven content).

so i'm receptive to the idea that a long-term fix for influencer culture -- for those who want to avoid it -- really can be found there, simply because it allows for so much self-sorting. influencer culture might very well still exist, but just like every other culture on the platform it'll be concentrated only to specific corners of the Fediverse.
Same. I had to remove all of the volume and media buttons and Siri from my Touch Bar prior to upgrading to M1. Interesting idea, poor execution, and no followup.
Even Google's own load balancer only offers 4 nines.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla
I hope that the free web apps option works for this group of folks. I don't work for the Office org, but I'll see if I can't figure out a way to channel your suggestion about online community engagement to someone who can do something about it. Thanks for the follow-up!
Except all that information is on screen, shared live, via the web. A chat app talking to the next tab in the window isn’t worth much.
Yet they still sell them.
It’s doing an AOT translation of x86-64 opcodes to ARM64 equivalents. There isn’t really any back and forth, it just digests the binary all at once.

This would still be pretty slow (see: Microsoft’s version of this under Windows ARM) due to the need to issue a ton of memory fence instructions to make ARM’s looser memory model behave like Intel’s, except that Apple baked the ability to switch the CPU into an Intel-like memory model directly into the silicon.

So in practice it is shockingly fast.
Earlier you praised democracy being the system by which the "population" decides "their own political matters." You go on to cite this democratic system where "46,000 neighborhood meetings" determine family law as being exemplary citizenship involvement and democratic process.

Then you take a viewpoint (legalize polymarous marriage, basically) that goes against the democratic majority in the US and Cuba. Wanting to force an anti-democratic solution while praising democracy as the solution is contradictory.

Do you want polyamorous marriage, or do you want democratic decision making on family law? Until the public opinion changes, you can only pick one.
I replaced the HD on my 2009 24" iMac with an SSD some years ago and upped it from 4GB to 8GB. A great performance boost. Old OS but it still works well for me.
The author seems to be completely blind to the underlying issue. Lack of numeracy, much less advanced numeracy, in the general population makes it difficult to communicate about complex topics.

Communication with the general population is key.

You don't "use" it because there isn't demand for its use. The advances we dream about in the sciences are retarded by a widespread lack of understanding regarding how those advances are made, how long they might take, what they cost, and what costs would be offset by their achievement.

If anything needs to change it's the teaching of mathematics primarily as a language to describe everyday life more accurately. The question every grade school child asks, "why do I need this", requires an irrefutable answer that doesn't need several years worth of prerequisite knowledge. Then we need to get on with improving our civilization.
Tim Hortons coffee app broke law by constantly recording users’ movements
Should be! https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/intellij-idea-2022-2...
I don't mind paying for content but not all content is worth paying for. If micro-payments ever become viable I'd be game for that but the paywall options of today are far too onerous!

I sometimes clear cookies, use Brave in private mode, edit the html to remove a fade out etc. But 12.io makes all that BS a thing of the past.

+10 12ft.io

BTW speaking of billionaire owned news... doesn't work on washingtonpost.com
With COVID lockdowns a huge population of people suddenly started video conferencing with Zoom/Teams/etc. If pre-COVID you only conferenced occasionally with those apps or used FaceTime or some other conferencing better using hardware encode/decode the keyboard was likely your biggest problem.
> Why pay USA wages when you can hire a Canadian or Mexican at 75% the cost?

Why hasn't this happened already?

If the workers are equivalent, but much cheaper, surely everyone would do it?

The reality is that outsourcing is never a 1:1 replacement for in-house staff - regardless of where in the world the workers are based.
> [Accessibility performance improvements are] a magnitudes more important improvement and pushing the web forward than...

I don't think zero-sum adversarial X vs Y thinking is helpful. Both of these have value. As a developer, it sounds like accessibility already worked, and that the benefit to the accessibilities-using features is speed, which is good, but likely not groundbreaking. But I also would like some of the many features of the web to be unlocked by this slow-to-implement browser, and SharedWorkers is over a decade old & sits in an important & unique spot. Trying to play favorites isn't in my interest, but recognizing the values of each I think is informative.

> pretending that whateverworkers are a thing that is usable beyond very few convoluted examples

If you don't even know what the thing is you probably aren't qualified to judge. You don't seem to be interested in learning or informing; you seem to be trying to score points, & doing so by mockery & cruelty. I hope we can find better manners, more appropriate for good, learned, engaged Hackers, than this.
I'm gonna guess that if Apple invested this level of effort into it, it's not a "remains to be seen what the performance improvement will be". You can take their graphs and charts and sort of de-reality-distortion-field them to know that it will be much faster than qemu for the workloads Apple knows people run frequently, but still slower than if you had a new x86_64 machine.
>> For one - a neural network is a universal function approximator.

And Magic: the Gathering is Turing-Complete [1], but we are not communicating over an implementation of the http protocol in Magic: the Gathering.

Because that would be awfully inconvenient.

______________

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828
One note, I used the images of the chips themselves and the M2 chip is physically bigger than the M1 chip by 21.8%, but the article claims a 25% increase in transistors. So there's only an actual 3% increase (1.25 / 1.218) in the transistor density with this new process. Most of the advancement is presumably in the form of better heat transfer and cheaper silicon per unit area.
Yeah you can't open many tabs for large pages at once. I'll happily trade doing that for the computing freedom and git, xmpp etc actually working. iOS automatically kills your tabs anyway so it's not like you're actually using it.
In my experience as a SRE, most teams/companies claiming above three nines are not measuring correctly or lying.
This is already the case for the install prompt used by PWA. The browser uses an interaction heuristic to send an event that allows a PWA to show an install button.
You: "Ukraine has lost Donetsk forever"

Also you: "People just support whoever most recently took over"

Seems like internal consistency is less important to you than asserting whatever Putin would like to be true.
My Bet: AI Size Solves Flubs
I don't consider this solution an excuse for vendor lock-in. I consider this a problem that has no known solutions without vendor lock-in.

If you offer users a way to export, then you offer phishers a way to social engineer users. So either you prevent social engineering (lock-in: yes), or you allow exports (lock-in: no).

Which choice has a higher precedence when serving the market of "non-technical mobile phone users"?
Tell HN: I used the same computer since 2007 (with minor upgrades)
With all the news about the Apple M2 and the people excited to sunset their couple years old computers, I feel compelled to share my reality (and that of many others outside the HN bubble).

I'm a 27 years old software developer from Brazil. The computer in question was assembled in 2007 from parts that were mostly bought abroad (and then gifted to me) by a wealthier relative that was visiting. That's a key point: the currency exchange rates and the import taxes make electronics out of reach for the common folks.

That was an AMD2+ motherboard, 4GB of DDR2, a 5400 RPM rust spinner, and a Phenom X4 coupled with an ATI 4870.

Although the household was never in a dire situation financially, I had always been taught by example to fix things and keep using them for as long as possible. Even back in elementary school times I would troubleshoot computer issues myself and brush off dust from the components.

Yes, there have been hardware failures since 2007: two HDDs died (about 6 years lifespan for each), the 4870 died (but I extended its life for one more year with the bake-it-in-the-oven trick), one DIMM failure, a PSU blowout and a CPU cooler bracket mechanical failure.

All replacements that had to be purchased would cost me a significant amount of money. HDDs and PSUs were not that expensive, but GPUs were out of reach. When that DIMM died in 2018, I purchased an used and dusty DDR2 replacement kit off AliExpress.

After the pandemic hit and I got my first proper (remote) job in 2020, I splurged and replaced some components: a hand-me-down GPU from a wealthier friend (I had been using the onboard graphics since the 4870 died), an AMD3 motherboard, a Phenom II X4 and some DDR3, all used and from AliExpress.

The monitor, a 22" TFT panel from Samsung, is still kicking since 2007 with a couple of dead pixels. Same goes for the mouse, manufactured by an unknown Chinese brand, and a membrane keyboard that I completely disassembled and scrubbed clean under a running faucet.

Even with my career finally taking off (I'm due to complete undergraduate Computer Science this year) I don't see myself doing major upgrades/purchases any soon.

When was the last time you gave something extra life instead of throwing it away?
I'd take every claim in this article with a grain of salt. There simply isn't much documentation from that time in the Mongol empire.
Thanks! Yeah, I know, but I suck at typing and spelling. And yet, I chose a profession that’s just basically what I do all day.
I agree that the secure enclave with integrated touch id is more secure. However, if your threat model is an attacker has root on your system, the secure enclave isn't going to protect you from much.
I must live in a alternate universe. At a previous company, the last two "engineering managers" I've worked with definitely could NOT read code. They did not read PRs, other than perhaps the title and Jira it linked to. Any technical management, including PR and design review, was delegated to the staff or principal engineer(s) on the team.
Google somewhat confusingly uses it for both “site reliability engineer” and “site reliability engineering”. Both the practice and the practitioner
Apple originally went to Intel because IBM was unable to deliver a Power chip with any semblance of power efficiency. IIRC Windows compatibility took some time before it was available.

Apple has said that Windows availability on the M series processors is up to Microsoft. Bootcamp is no longer needed, you can now install alternative OSes on the same drive and boot into whichever you want. At least that's the way Asahi works.

Apple's hypervisor API is the way to go in any case. If companies use that Apple will take care of all necessary drivers. Doing things on bare metal will require a lot of work and Apple won't help with that.
You've got to be kidding
The 67W USB-C power adapter is available as a free option at order time (on the higher end model).
> Putting the waste on a ship with the potential of the ship sinking or having an accident elicits a big "nope" from me.

Are you aware the several nuclear submarines have sunk? Their fuel is enriched far higher than terrestrial nuclear plants (>80% for nuclear subs, ~20-25% for power plants). Yet no adverse impact is observed. Even in cases like Kursk where some radioactivity release is monitored, it subsides to background levels just a few meters outside the wreck.
Adding to the list of steppe empires, not an Asian one though, the Commanche Indians are way up there in terms of barbarism as well. Not just against the encroaching westerners, but other tribes as well. They really did not mess around with the sadistic torture of their war prisoners. Proper nightmare fuel.
I would say nothing but also everything. Racket is Schema and Lisp mashed up. Though Common Lisp is very easy to read once you have Racket down. Personally, I prefer Racket for my personal side projects.
Or MisterFPGA can do all this and more. Well worth checking out for anyone into old systems. Great community as well.
C 1972, C++ 1985, Erlang 1986, Perl 1988, Python 1991, JavaScript 1995.

C is half-way to 100: an amazing fact in the rapidly-changing world of technology. Of all these, Perl seems to have suffered the biggest loss of popularity so far, while Erlang has the least popularity to lose.

I'd be somewhat surprised if any of these are still in common use in 2072, but OTOH, I'd also be surprised if any of them were completely unused, with the possible exception of Perl.
I'd be less annoyed by accidentally touching the touchbar all the time if it were positioned at the bottom of the screen instead of at the top of the keyboard.

Hey, Apple: why not just lose the touch bar and make the whole screen taller and touch sensitive instead, huh?
nft-native brands (ex. bored ape yacht club) will be polarizing brands like supreme or rolex or hermes. many people will think it's dumb. the target audience won't care. mainstream brands will adopt nfts as ways to engage super fans.

nft access passes (ex. proof collective) are online-first country clubs and will disrupt traditional ones.

generative art nfts (ex. fidenza) will be more popular than traditional art for decamillionaire millennials and gen-z.

nft fundraising has already eclipsed kickstarter, patreon, and web2 monetization models (youtube, spotify, tiktok, instagram) for creators.

reddit is wrong. nft ticketing is not going to disrupt ticketmaster anytime soon. nft deeds are not going to disrupt realtors anytime soon. entrenched monopolies aren't going to make changes to their business processes to satisfy some angry powerless online communities.

disclosure- i trade nfts. i own none of the listed nfts but have in the past (bayc) and may again in the future.
https://webkit.org/blog/12824/news-from-wwdc-webkit-features... makes it clear that this restriction will be lifted with the new Safari 16 Push API.

"You do not need to be an Apple Developer Program member."