skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mozilla wrote Gecko, with enough web compat to effectively take on IE6, in about 4 years. We made a couple of significant changes in years 4-6 right before Firefox launched, but Gecko was basically "there" about 4 years after Mozilla transitioned from the old Communicator engine to Gecko/NGLayout/Raptor/Magellen.

Having said that, Gecko wasn't a Netscape start from scratch effort. They acquired and built on a very simple and modular cross platform rendering engine that was used for the preview function in an HTML authoring product called WebSuite by Digital Style out of San Diego. (This is where Netscape got engineers Rick Gessner, Peter Linss, and manager Jim Hammerly.)

So, maybe if you count the WebSuite and the Netscape efforts both, you get something like 5-6 years of effort to get Gecko up to sufficient capability to compete in the market. That's a far cry from "it took Mozilla 25 years" though.

And yes, the Web is much more capable today, which makes building a rendering engine more difficult for sure, but the 25 year comment seemed wrong enough to me that I thought I'd share some of what I know as a Mozilla participant for the last 25 years (and a full-time Netscape/Mozilla employee for the last 22.5 years.)

This is not in any way meant to take away from the efforts of any new engine devs or teams. I'm amazed that anyone is even trying given how large the platform has become and have great respect for those trying and succeeding.
As if incandescent lights aren't plagued with a lithany of issues of their own...

Electricity consumption, waste heat, short lifetime, ... Not to mention much less control over color temperature; you get what you get. With LED you just have more choice.

OK, you visited an expensive apartment which put no thought into its lighting. So? It'd have been a better experience if they'd put no thought into their lighting but used incandescent bulbs instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake
Yeah, and in gas/oil-fired electric turbines you typically inject a whole lot of water to create more mass going through.

A power plant I worked at in the 90s tried to keep a 4:1 ratio of water to fuel oil.

It was always amusing to explain to lay-folk that we "burned more water than oil," even if it wasn't technically precise.
So now they are bots?

2 weeks ago they were legitimate users and Elon was insane. Now they’re bots.
Small companies I work for don't really use consultants. In the one case they were, it was for particular expertise, not available in house, that is central to the growth of the company. So I doubt they would be cut in this case, unless the company got into a lot of trouble (such that they would also be laying off staff).

Small sample size, so pinch and sprinkle.
What Do I Mean by Skin in the Game? My Own Version
> Under ideal conditions with brain imaging, it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press one of two buttons).

I think I read somewhere that this result couldn't be reproduced with a more rational task. The original experiment asked the participants to press one of two buttons when some signal was triggered, and asked them to remember what time they saw when they chose which button to press, all while hooked up to some EEG machine. The spike corresponding to their choice was consistently happening before the self-reported time.

However, if I'm remembering correctly, when further experiments were carried out with a more rational choice, they were unable to find a similar gap that would precede the reported time of choice. A possible conclusion is that in fact the original experiment had found nothing interesting about conscious choice, but something interesting about how we make random choices - when the normal variance in brain activity happens to spike in some way, the timing/place/some other characteristic of the spike is used later by our consciousness to determine the result of the choice.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to find the paper I remember, so I don't know if I'm remembering it right and/or if it is regarded as a good paper or not - so don't put too much stock in what I've said above.
Just curious how many examples that show FIRST major discovery after say 40? I think I spotted a few.
I'm sure 3b1b will make an explanation video :)
I'm a big fan of Sword Art Online, which I initially compared to The Matrix in which it represented the Japanese point of view which tends to replace master narratives with smaller stories... e.g. in the matrix VR is a threat to all humanity, in SAO VR is something Ralph Nader warned you about.

Later I saw Ready Player One which is a better comparison and was written at about the same time.

In SAO, though, the incredible thing is that the SAO victims go back into VR (it's less dangerous because the deadly Nerve Gear is replaced by the safer Amusphere.) At the end of the first story arc, Kirito (the hero) and most of the survivors escape the death game, but Asuna (his girlfriend) is still stuck inside and he has to rescue her. In later story arcs Kirito investigates crimes in VR, gets lost in another world, etc.

It seems to me that the captains of this industry should be taking science fiction a little more seriously. If Zuckerberg had seen Ready Player One it seems he could do a better job of explaining the Metaverse. In the sense that Sword Art Online was touted (in the SAO universe) as a quantum leap over previous games, I was hoping Google would use Stadia as a platform to develop high complexity games that support 20+ users on a monster server but they used their opportunity to develop... Nothing at all.
Iptables is a little old. You may want the newer nftables instead.

The iptables rules can be converted directly to nft with iptables-translate and the syntax is more simple.
There is a documentary: Counting from Infinity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBADiHU_0Wg
you are confusing cpu bandwidth with ram bandwidth. no surprised tbh.

apple’s marketing sounds a bit like “it’s got electrolytes”. unified memory is fast but not new and definitely not that fast.

do people actually think that apple’s ram runs at 400 gb/s?
I just flat-out prefer the Code variant’s glyphs to the default ones in every case. Especially the l, which is what makes the Poly + Code handling unfortunate.
I think it’s their egos they’re squabbling over, not grant money.
Speak for yourself. At least 80% of my messages run over Signal these days. And I communicate with a wide variety of people, not just techies.

I think a major contributor to this was that Signal got normalized early as the venue for a large group chat started by some friends who moved to my neighborhood years ago. Over time this chat became a sort of neighborhood forum where people advertised open rooms, traded goods and services, and exchanged news and gossip. And because it was on Signal, everyone installed Signal.

I know I'm in somewhat of a strange bubble, but I just want to underscore that this kind of world is possible. The adoption fight hasn't been lost yet, especially since some cracks are starting to show in the incumbents' moats these days.
After quick glance on the study, I am a bit skeptical regarding proper statistical control of metropolitan temperature.

In blunt words: no wonder the temperature rises if it is measured at a place that is surrounded with concrete and stone today.
> You do realize Northern Europeans are adapted to needing less sunlight?

... Do you think people don't travel, or that we only have Northern Europeans living here in Europe?
There is no way email hasn't improved US productivity. So much more efficient than the old system.
No you can't make a startup off this result now get back to optimizing ads.
Let's be real though, nested directories aren't necessarily the best way to organize or find documents. In an era where systems support tagging, full text search, and other graph connections between files nested folder structures aren't necessary for everyone. They're a conceptual holdover from a different time with much more limited means to persist data.

That's not to say they're obsolete but it's not necessary for whole classes of users to use and understand them.
How do you determine what an active user is?
Back when I was using Twitter I had one account for me and 20 sock puppets. I deleted my own account and abandoned the others.
Another approach is to get a used thin client instead of a netbook. You can get a HP t630 or similar wyse with a AMD SoC for <$100.

Much better build quality than a cheap consumer device.
Isn't it the same phenomenon as hiring alumni from your graduated school ?

I've anecdotally seen it happen again and again with the universities of the recruiting managers being overly represented in the candidate pool.

To note, Indians have a closer affinity to english putting them in an interesting position when moving to the US/UK (where I suppose you live). That affects wether the immigrant pool has a pretty normal social distribution or if the people getting out of their country are also used to getting out of their comfort zones. Japanese are specially affected by this, and workers that decided to go abroad will be less flocking into disporia communities.
> On top of that, even the "warm" color temperature LEDs put out a pretty good spike of blue light.

That's what I figured. LCD monitors are all painful for me to look at as well.
This is very useful! Thanks for sharing!

I've been looking for a list of semi-blessed crates like this for a long time. Before finding this and the OP's site I looked at the dependencies of rustc and cargo and considered those to be mostly trusted.
>Moreover, I think this result would not only be a more significant advance than Zhang's previous breakthrough, but also constitute a larger leap for number theory than Wiles' 1994 proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (which was, in my opinion, the greatest single achievement by an individual mathematician in the 20th century).

Was the rest of the context not more enlightening?

E.g. Would constitute a larger leap than proving Fermat's Last theorem which was "the greatest single achievement by an individual mathematician in the 20th century"
This kind of thing shows up around several other related PL features, so much so that it has a name: https://wiki.c2.com/?SpaghettiStack
Distributed Preservation of Service
> His post to the sales team notes that 25 percent of the organization was affected by Musk’s mass layoffs on Friday

That's significantly less than has been reported. I guess we have no real way to know.
Yes, people can and do shop around all the time for many medical procedures.

For example. if you are going to have laser eye surgery, call 10 doctors and you might see a 3-5x difference in price.
Not really, he seems a grinding kind of mathematician, vs. Ramanujan who wouldn't bother with proofs.
Babel does this, using a library called gensync. I have a writeup which goes into more detail: https://writing.bakkot.com/gensync

gensync instead creates two functions, one sync and one async, which is probably a more familiar API for consumers of your code.
In this case, he makes a difference!
Yeah I see ads as the biggest threat to my future in their ecosystem. It's a revenue stream that seems to so reliably ruin any company that dips more than the tiniest bit of a toe into it. Which sucks because they're by such a large margin the least-bad option that I hate to be stuck with any of the alternatives. Of which the largest (Microsoft, Google) are at least as bad on the advertising front, so that leaves me with... Linux. And just no remotely-OK solution for phones and tablets, at all. I have so very little interesting in "tinkering" with those platforms.

Damnit, Microsoft, why'd you have to ruin your OS with ad and spying garbage and shittifying your calculator and notepad apps et c. just as you were starting to add useful stuff like WSL that might have made it a viable OS for actual work and not just playing video games?

So I guess it's Linux. Ugh. Or maybe the FreeBSD driver situation will get better before then and I can use that. That'd be... fine, I guess.
Tim caused ads, so Tim doesn't need the force of personality to stop ads.

Tim wants ads. Tim is a money guy, not a product guy.
Basically all that comes up on Google now.
Complete aside it is interesting that he announced his result in Peking university given that he has been vocal about his dislike of the Chinese communist party.
Interop overhead makes SQLite in .NET a lot slower than an embedded database, in my experience - though this may be a problem with the stock SQLite wrappers and not an unfixable problem.
The problem is that many people who say, "I just hate the CCP" go on to say things like,

* "China steals everything" (which essentially labels Chinese people as thieves).

* "Chinese scientists created CoVID-19 and then lied about it" (alleging that Chinese scientists have no integrity).

* "China only copies" (implying that Chinese people aren't creative).

* "Chinese numbers are all fake" (implying that millions of Chinese people are in on some conspiracy to fake everything).

In other words, in my experience, many people who say they just hate the CCP actually hold a huge number of negative stereotypes about Chinese people, and have a very conspiratorial view of the country.

One fact that everyone here should take into consideration is that the Communist Party has a very broad base of support in China, and is fairly popular. Most people actually approve of the central government, not in everything, but in general. If the Communist Party were as comically evil as people in the West tend to think, it wouldn't have this level of support, and it would lose power pretty quickly.

And one can't explain its popularity by claiming that Chinese people don't know what's going on - they tend to be far better informed about happenings in China than 99% of commenters in your average English-language internet forum. If you can't imagine why people in China would support the government, just consider the fundamental transformation that hundreds of millions of people have gone through in the last few decades. People who did not even have running hot water in their homes or reliable electricity are now wealthy enough to fly to Paris for a week.

I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture of the Chinese government or the Party, but I'm just pointing out that things are significantly more nuanced than most people here think.
With a book title like that it's unsurprising that this is her theory. So an entire round of "tech journalists" produces no answer, at all.

Pretty suspicious as the answer is obvious: phones are large because people want large phones. The reason that the iPhone SE is never updated is because nobody buys them, women included. Small phone fans are just a tiny vocal minority.

To add, when the Android ecosystem pioneered larger phones, there was intense pressure on Apple to follow. Because, again, people want large phones.
He's one of my personal heroes!!! Go Zhang!
I upvoted you, because AFAICT you’re correct that they plan to reduce (but not eliminate) ads with the new “blue” model.

I’m interested to see the degree to which they reduce ads for paying users: having a split ad/payment model is famous for producing “self-consuming” incentives, since the users who demonstrate the most purchasing power are the ones you promise not to advertise to.
Careful, prime numbers are not hard to find.

Like, try

openssl prime -generate -bits 2048

Congratulations, you just found a prime that is big enough for every cryptographic protocol that uses prime numbers (not counting unusual and non-deployed post-quantum proposals).

Some number theory research may impact the security of cryptosystems, but not all results do.
1. Doesn't the D compiler contain an entire C compiler? Half the point of that section was to say that any C parser is halfway to being a fully functional compiler. That's arguably an exaggeration, but I fail to see how D serves as a counterexample.

2. How does the D compiler handle GCC- and Clang-specific extensions to C?
> Mozilla wrote Gecko, with enough web compat to effectively take on IE6, in about 4 years.

Yes, but web standards were at least an order of magnitude simpler back then.
We had a descriptive yet very generic term for function-like stuff: "subprogram".
I am updating my assumptions about Subway Sandwich Artists. When they seem unfocused on the artwork at hand it may be because they are thinking more important thoughts.
> you could make a generic `map` function that worked on any container type.

not only container types, it can be any type that has a consistent context of evaluation for the final value being calculated: "doing async IO", "doing optional presence", "doing potentially erroneous extraction", and so on. In that sense, "doing multiplicity of values" is the context expressing a container type you mentioned as an example.
Well, the Champagne region is North East of Paris and the reason wine production around Paris declined isn't a change of climate.
When I jump, do I become a satellite?
Chris Sacca on Elon Musk Running Twitter “Alone”
The original article describes three small (actually - one-person) companies going after some big guys. There is a patent troll behind them, but the article mentions that such a discovery is not an ordinary thing to do. At the patent troll is still a much smaller company than defendants- I guess.

Besides, the idea of punishing me for being successful, that is - having more sales of my product, while popular, seems extremely counterproductive to me.
Why do you care what it "truly" is under the hood? The observable behavior is what matters, and in many languages, this is made explicit by some kind of "as-if rule".
>A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together'

While it's true that consciousness-aware features are processed in a distributed manner, I don't think it follows to say that consciousness is spread throughout the brain. The core function of consciousness is integrated processing of disparate sensory data into a single decision stream. In other words, various sensory experiences can all influence our decision-making in arbitrary ways, and this "availability for high level decision-making" is what we identify as consciousness.

The location of this integration-decision apparatus seems like the best place to "locate" the seat of consciousness. While cortical areas are essential for specific kinds of processing, we shouldn't "locate" consciousness "in" those areas. This is because the output of a cortical area is modulations in signals sent to various downstream target areas. If we were to artificially modulate the downstream targets with an exact duplicate of the pattern of output from the cortical area in question, we would have the same conscious experience. The conscious experience isn't in the signal or its modulation, it is in a very specific kind of integrated processing. That is, there is some kind of representational translation that takes disparate frequency modulated signals and integrates them into a communal representational schema to support the single decision stream. Presumably this communal representation should have a unique computational strategy that stands out as a change in signal dynamics as you follow a stream of sensory processing up the hierarchy. Consciousness would be localizable to within this boundary.
Yeah, I guess you're right. I've updated this.
Some of this is quite controversial. On some controversial points I think he's wrong, e.g. font size. https://typographyforlawyers.com/point-size.html. The federal appellate courts require at least 14 points, and the Supreme Court requires at least 13 points. Magazines may use smaller fonts, but (1) printing costs matter a lot more in that industry; and (2) the average age of the federal judiciary is a lot older than the average age of most magazine readers.

On other controversial points, I think he's right, e.g. one space between sentences: https://typographyforlawyers.com/one-space-between-sentences.... But I'll probably never be edgy enough to do that.
FDA Deregulation Increases Safety and Innovation and Reduces Prices
For anyone that doesn’t know (although admittedly not particularly relevant, but topical) Narayana Murthy is the FIL of the now-current UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.
Wouldn't it be better to use async/await for that?
It's never enough for investors (all of us, really). That's the difference between public and private companies. One must seek profit over all, and the other is run by people can choose not to do so.
Can't humans be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability?

What is the specific difference?
I wonder what other cool app (other than Mastodon) has been implemented based on this protocol.. 99% of the app out there is built based on centralized and traditional protocol, it's pretty cool to see more app built based on this protocol with new use cases
Hardy may have a point, on average. And it’s probably because of the responsibilities factor, i.e. older people have kids, families, departments to run, etc that takes them out of the game. If I did math with this level of intensity I would not have time for both without a partner willing to make quite some sacrifices.
SolarCity was founded by Musk's cousins.

Did they solicit his advice along the way?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity
What scares me is that Elon Musk has now technically access to all the logs and even to the DMs.
SMS is very rarely used anymore outside of the US and a few select other countries, and for most people Signal and similar messengers serve as a replacement for text messages, not a supplement. It's probably just not a worthwhile market/feature to keep anymore.

Come to think of it, I'm having a very hard time coming up with any sensible use case for using Signal over text message. Presumably both sides still need Signal for the encryption to work, so what's the point? Might as well use the internet to send the message. The only scenario I can see it being useful is when you have GSM, but no internet connectivity, and that's rare these days.
This is by far the most important point that is completely missing from the ethics course I took.

Sexual harassment is bad. Victims have an ethical obligation to report the harassment. The result will be HR protecting themselves, likely via moving the harassed person to a new team or making their life suck in other ways. The only path forward after is to fight, likely in/with the threat of courts. Social fall out (because a manager or their skip level's life got harder) is almost guaranteed. A product deadline may be missed. The blame is often directed at the victim and not directed at the person who was harassing. I have watched this play out multiple times.

In this way, reporting someone for sexual harassment is a sacrifice. So while there may be a moral impetus to report, there is a cost to do so, and the end result is not an ethical question, but a cost benefit analysis.

The cost benefit analysis is then hampered by short term vs long term thinking. If nobody reports it, the abuse continues. If everyone reports it, then some of the abusers would likely be punished. The individual cost of reporting is high, and so a person would rather move on than fight. The abuser then continues to abuse.

The end result is that the ethics themselves are obvious and uninteresting, but it is the economic factors and game theory factors that bring all the meaning to any type of pragmatic discussion of ethics.