skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently, the slashes came from Apollo's Domain OS/Network file system.

From [0]:

"Q: What is the history of the //?

A: I wanted the syntax of the URI to separate the bit which the web browser has to know about (www.example.com) from the rest (the opaque string which is blindly requested by the client from the server). Within the rest of the URI, slashes (/) were the clear choice to separate parts of a hierarchical system, and I wanted to be able to make a link without having to know the name of the service (www.example.com) which was publishing the data. The relative URI syntax is just unix pathname syntax reused without apology. Anyone who had used unix would find it quite obvious. Then I needed an extension to add the service name (hostname). In fact this was similar to the problem the Apollo domain system had had when they created a network file system. They had extended the filename syntax to allow //computername/file/path/as/usual. So I just copied Apollo. Apollo was a brand of unix workstation. (The Apollo folks, who invented domain and Apollo's Remote procedure call system later I think went largely to Microsoft, and rumor has it that much of Microsoft's RPC system was).

I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would like http://www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just written http:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the client would figure out that www.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too late now. It turned out the shorthand "//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz" is rarely used and so we could dispense with the "//".

Discussed .. wow 2020 is 5 years ago.

47 points by lelf on July 30, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 86 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398107

[0] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#etc
Meta: the IEE(E) has been around for a little while. One of the references:

> [5] L.B. Stillwell, ”Note on Standard Frequency,” IEE Journal, vol. 28, 1899, pp. 364-66.

That's 126 years ago.
Definitely, I would however recommend that next time they would instead use something like "mysterious radiation of the forbidden belt clandestinely detected around censored earth after tremendous epic solar that some governments might try to hide, the 42th reason will surprise you" without what I am afraid that the entire staff is going to go through a major life crisis before they even had any child possibly contributing to a quick extinction of human species, warning, danger, how dare you not read the article yet?
They use bulk mail to send out flyers, coupons, and can use zip codes to AB test these.
For me this all comes down to people have rights and organizations have privileges to operate granted by the society you are wanting to operate in. If you operated a company on an island where nobody was effected, I could see the argument of the parent. But as soon as you say hay I am going to offer x to these people, then you are operating under a set of rules that are determined by the society you operate in.
Same! My wife ran a business from home during the pandemic and we actually went through the effort to work with Google Maps (they called us) to get it on the map. And of course USPS has no problem. But our address was originally a federal building with a letter, still only has a letter, no number, and there are now all sorts of work-arounds floating around on how resolve addresses in our neighborhood. What's wild is the Post Office is literally down the street from our house, and our house predates the founding of most of the big delivery services, which all manage to deliver to us, given their preferred incantation. If I can't get the shipper to pass the right incantation to their shipping service, shenanigans ensue. My (least?) favorite was an item that went across the Pacific Ocean 3 times over the course of 3 months.
Dangerous Ideas in Water Management
„Genossen, wir müssen alles wissen“ (if you know, what I mean)
This line of reasoning -- "don't worry about these authoritarian power grabs, they're spearheaded by incompetent bozos" -- is faulty. Look at what's happening in the US right now!

I'm not in either country but I'm pretty outraged at the amount of this crap going on all over the western world. I'm also an Apple customer but I'm pretty upset that I have to rely on a big corporation to defend my right to privacy from foreign snoopers.

I also think it's counterproductive to try to play the "your government is worse than mine" game. We should all be pointing the fingers at all of these governments (and their authoritarian big tech allies) all over the world.
Fully agree. Imagine giving your data to company XYZ which promises you full encryption privacy. The company XYZ opens a subdivision in country CBA and all's okay unless CBA's law is changed to mandate all companies to give all their data. Now your data is lost to CBA's agents.
Did you not get to doing lots of integrals? A whole new field of patterns to memorise, which I hated.
This article assumes that the services themselves won’t be cut, so they’ll have to use more contractors.

I think the point is that they’ll cut the services and contractors too. I’ve worked with government quite a bit at various levels and the level of messing around, pointless ideas and internal politics is astounding, as well as the lack of accountability and oversight in general.

The opinion I walked away with is that just like twitter, chunks of it could be cut away or properly digitised without affecting what people on the outside perceive or care about at all.
Honestly, DOGE seems like a disingenuous enterprise simply based on the fact that they are not starting with the DoD.

Defense contractors simply couldn't stop accidentally electricuting people in warzones[0, 1]. They have had a major negative impact on readiness while benefitting from massive contracts[2] and . There also appears to be a situation where DoD leadership has been captured by the defense industry[4].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32334682
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/another-mysterious...
[2] https://www.icij.org/investigations/windfalls-war/us-contrac...
[3] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/pressroom/articles/2023/0...
[4] https://quincyinst.org/research/subsidizing-the-military-ind...
We're not likely to have commercial fusion within 20 to 30 years. Even if we do, it won't be to scale. At this point, we can just assume the AMOC is shutting down as we've been doing very little to date to prevent that.
Rare Disease Search
Yep, same here. Pixel 6a and Firefox, it takes a while but it sounds pretty good
Encryption is encryption. Purposely breaking it defeats the purpose.
because employees are an EXPENSE for a startup.. they already weigh very heavy on finance for early companies.
> If we could magically pick a frequency and voltage for electrical systems to use (without sunk costs), what would it be?

> What's the most efficient for modern grids and electronics?

I do not think it is possible to answer the question as posed. It is a trade-off. Higher frequencies permit smaller transformers in distribution equipment and smaller filtering capacitors at point of use. On the other hand, the skin effect increases transmission losses at higher frequencies.

If you want minimum losses in the transmission network, especially a very long distance transmission network, then low frequencies are better.

If you want to minimize the size and cost of transformers, higher frequencies might be better. Maybe the generator is close to the user so transmission loss is less important.

If you want smaller end-user devices, high frequency or DC might be more desirable.

You have to define some kind of objective function before the question becomes answerable.
Makes sense...

I was more thinking from a system design/security standpoint...I haven't heard anything about any senior/experienced engineers being used for anything atm ...
Suppose that the status quo is the worst option, the second worst is enforcing the bad laws against the big guys, the best is getting rid of those laws.

Now, that might not be the case. Given the existence of bad laws, having someone who is able to break out of the bad cage might be better than if no one can, but let's consider what happens if we assume that it's worse.

Regardless of how they're ranked relative to each other, you would only pick either of the two worse options over the best if it was easier to do it. But getting bad laws enforced against well-heeled players is actually the hardest thing to do because they're doing something sympathetic and have the resources to fight, which is harder to do than repealing the bad laws.
The hospital at home movement is growing in the United States
OpenBGPD 8.8 Released
> Who's this article's intended audience?

Exactly my thoughts. It seems as if the author thinks C programmers have never noticed there are other languages. In my experience they use C or C++ for good reasons. I use many of the other languages mentioned but sometimes C is the right tool.
Yeah this only worked with Firefox on my phone. All other browsers generated a screechy noise instead.
CodeRabbit now supports Bitbucket cloud
I didn't flag it because I don't think it's a bad HN submission, even though I think it's a bad idea.

Maybe I'm too tolerant of intolerance, though. I could see someone flagging an HN post announcing an event with a nazi headliner.
In fairness, most of these Trump lickers are not "computer geeks." They're venture capitalists and businessmen working in tech who pretend to be geeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

Obviously, Apple is going to comply with US federal law, given that their headquarters and employees are there, as well as their most profitable market. But when possible, they have shown themselves willing to fight against intrusion.
That's fair.

Edit: I suppose I'm conditioned by honestly often incompetent activists to think that every new piece of evidence of something in nature is a claimed proof that humans must scale back their ambitions or else.

I recognize that this is not healthy.
I think the Rust borrow checker is inspired by Cyclone. Not sure how that coincides with the GC development timeline
The phone itself is only a piece. Apple sells multiple services, without them the phone is useless. If you can't access the appstore, the backups, etc. what good is an iPhone? Now, the UK can say that UK citizens' data can't travel outside of the UK without the UK government permission.

So it's still a problem. This seems like a looming PR battle.
As I said, the law is not being respected, but it doesn't invalidate the law.
> they provide the means for the urban areas to exist

Unless you’re referring to farmers I don’t understand this point. As of right now it is the other way around.
Show HN: A simple Hackernews client for iOS and Android
We at Emerge Tools (YC W21) recently released open source Hacker News apps for both iOS and Android. The apps use the latest SwiftUI and Compose frameworks and are entirely native. Our goal is to help dogfood our products, but more importantly our team just enjoys reading HN every day and wanted an app to hack on and call our own. :)

We are still missing some features but should otherwise be pretty solid. And open to any contributions.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-by-emerge/id674092...
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetool...
It's OK. The revenue is from incompetencies of engineers and enterprises that can not switch into siginificantly cheaper cloud vendors.
Someone familiar with small African villages. For "king" read boss, mayor, civic comptroller, or foreign moneybag. It's more like getting a Key to the City[0] that comes with an expectation of resources.

> after invoking the spirit of their dead chief

"Hey, Frank used to say stuff like that! Boy do I miss Frank."

OP isn't exaggerating his experience, and the interviewer doesn't find this unusual enough to unpack.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City
This is really cool actually. I like how it uses the personas to query the LLMs from different angles. And 250 “queries” for free? That’s amazing value and impressive parallelism . Nice job guys!
Encryption is encryption. If this is for dirt digging or evidence for police... then make the person provide it instead. Spy agencies just have to deal with it. Sure there are other ways of tapping information.
I'm pretty sure this is not unique to Apple. They likely served the same order to Google, Microsoft, and any other major provider that has any user data. And most of them complied without objection.
> they should find another way to call a taxi with a lower price.

like what? Uber's business plan was always about eliminating competition. The company successfully did so by undercutting prices, only to jack them up when they had the market to themselves. There is no Free Market Fairy way to fix that.
My grandparents lived within walking distance to grocery stores, supermarkets, friends, and restaurants; they continued to walk to those places well within their 80s. It kept them mobile, healthy, and part of the community; probably more so than their children (my parents), who are trapped in their suburban homes and have nowhere to walk to, even if it was socially acceptable.

A lot of the elderly become weak and fragile due to lack of exercise, not due to age. Now we expect them to drive everywhere with failing eyesight, slow reflexes, and questionable judgement, with unfortunate results.
I've contributed here and there over there years, even got something merged that broke Linus's printer driver. It really isn't unapproachable, frustrating, or demoralizing.
Then it must surely be more than just a marginal increase.
I wonder how many moronic questions Knuth has to endure? I guess this was just one more.
For that order of magnitude to work, in practice, the most challenging aspect will be getting enough surface area between the water and heater.

Otherwise, you will very quickly vaporize the water near the heater and the resulting lack of contact will inhibit heating the rest of the water volume.
Interview with the creator of Amiga game Moonstone
> The magnitude of the secret does not matter: if your company says "don't steal and leak our data" and you go ahead and do it, it's still wrong

I don't share your reverence for corporate secrets. To you, the exceptions are the secrets it is ok to share. To me, the exceptions are the secrets it is ok for corporations to keep. And corporations have certainly not earned the benefit of the doubt that I would assume, despite their willful silence, that these were legitimate.
> Looking to 2035, BNEF’s global benchmark LCOEs falls 26% for onshore wind, 22% for offshore wind, 31% for fixed-axis PV and almost 50% for battery storage.

Battery storage costs falling so dramatically is going to be huge. It's not just about utility-scale storage, think about the implications for microgrids and residential when paired with solar.

> New solar plants, even without subsidies, are within touching distance of new US gas plants. This is remarkable because US gas prices are only a quarter of prevailing gas prices in Europe and Asia.

I think this is the key metric from the article. Looking at the structure of energy contracts in the UK where providers are required to pay the price of the costlier energy supply just makes me think that whoever is bringing renewables online here will make a fortune as long as we keep using gas.
No, the standard in the US is 15 or 20A. 20 is more popular nowadays.

240V appliances typically get a 35 or 50A circuit.

But then you also have to deal with the fact that a lot of homes have wiring that can only handle 10A, but someone has replaced the glass fuse with a 20A breaker. Fun stuff.
Where are these significant cheaper cloud vendors?
Amazon requires employees to work five days a week from the office without paying them extra for it. Even if paid extra for it, it is not healthy considering the number of contagiously sick people at the office, risking a persistent inflammatory load on the body. I don't see good workers wanting to work for Amazon, and I don't see good outcomes ahead for Amazon. It will remain a non-innovating laggard that is trivially outcompeted. The only reason AWS even profits is because of its outrageous egress cost.
Spoil from incompetents is the good strategy and all too much nerd engineers should follow the strategy.
I don't agree. Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in general against well-heeled players is a good thing. We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.

(I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws. Yes, some of the laws that big players break are bad; some are fine. I'm not just talking about Uber here.)
He said he'd fix the bot problem. The bots were Elon shills and the problem was that Twitter kept removing them.
Plato’s “Apology”.
Reread my comment. You are confusing proof and fact.
a somewhat related anecdote (at the time i had no kids though). i too never owned a car. never even learned to drive. and when i got a job in the US, in san diego which is very spread out too, i thought "this is it, i'll have to learn to drive now". to my surprise, i didn't. i managed to arrange my life such that i could either walk or take a bus to work, shopping etc. the same in los angeles and later in auckland, nz, also a very car centric city. again, i was single without kids, so i didn't have to consider the needs of others when choosing where to live. now with kids we live in places with better public transport and i still haven't learned to drive.
I cannot see the difference in the access mechanism between an agent and what we use today for APIs consumption. The agent, whatever it is, is basically a client, P2P node, etc.
https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-ens...
Postcodes are very useful (but not perfect) proxies for household socioeconomic status, which is useful for marketing and sales analysis.

That data linked with the payment method that the register collects pretty much gives the store exactly who you are and where you live even if you chose not to sign up to the store's loyalty program.
The existence of a fictional movie says nothing about how popular conspiracies are. I have seen a lot of dystopian movies and read such books, including cyberpunk. A Scanner Darkly, The Illuminatus Trilogy, The Matrix, Snow Crash, Dune, eXistenz, just name some random ones. I'll mention four series, too: Twin Peaks, X-Files, Utopia, Nikita. That doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, because I am able to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction.

The trouble from 80's is different. We've shifted power vacuum, but whilst doing so the rich have become very much more rich, and [generally] they don't want to take responsibility; they want raw power. Things like bullshit (lies, conspiracies, manipulation), drama (such as creating friction between poor and middle class), obliteration of facts and science, cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions and law, and criminal behavior (including methods to avoid paying tax) are each tools for achieving more of such power.

UFOs are one of such, too. They're a tool to accelerate the distrust in government. For the acronym UFO itself is broad. A meteorite or Starlink satellite could be mistaken for an alien spaceship. Furthermore, drugs, hallucination, psychosis and the power of suggestion alone are strong tools to feed such fables.

I am well aware fans of conspiracies can very well be fans of X-Files but it is fiction first and foremost, plus don't forget Scully's role and background.
What chipsets were deprecated that are still mainstream?
Would you say that C is "here to stay" in Linux? I would say so. I think you understood what was meant.
“Epic” stood out more to me than “mysterious” in terms of low-brow clickbaitiness.
i will simply disagree that the dominant social dynamic leading to this favoring of foriegn capital over us law is not systemic corruption.
Have to side with the one language argument here.

It's hard enough to get a single programming language to work right. C is old and stable.

Rust is new and mostly stable, mostly stable isn't going to cut it when billions upon billions of devices depend on your work.

At the same time this type of ego driven drama keeps me out of the open source community. I have enough people telling me how to code during my 9-5.

I open source most of my projects, but it's not a collaboration. I'll even admit, I get really annoyed when someone puts in a PR that's literally just a bunch of spacing changes in a readme. I think there was some influencer who was claiming that you should go through GitHub, and submit as many changes for things like grammar as possible to a bunch of different projects .

And then on your resume you can put that you contribute it to all these projects. Not fun.
Indeed, but I was referring specifically to the charge that taxi alternatives (eg, outside the medallion system) existed pre-Uber. And I think, they did, but only in very limited use cases like airport shuttles, and not with fleets anywhere near large enough to have a car five minutes from anywhere at all times— hence the need to book those things ahead.
Is an "Alien" Language Possible?
This review of Matti Eklund's book, Alien Structure: Language and Reality, made me wonder if an alien language is even possible. Wouldn't any representational system need to use logic? When the reviewer asks, "if we wish to know whether a given language is alien, we will need some way to connect its sentences with propositions" then doesn't that mean alphabet, grammar, axioms and rules of inference that are computable (whether or not sensical)?
Oracle. I like bare-bone ARM VM and bare-bone volumes.
you're entitled to your opinion, but it is not one shared by the normal parts of the government (which supports corporate IP). I think you have a larger issue that is independent of whether this individual is qualified for the role they most recently occupied.
Great.

Now please extend this to national parks.
Agreed, investing in platform facilities and AWS capability seems like it cannot be a terrible idea.
> systemic risks

Is the key phrase here.

Good to see the EU recognizing there are innocuous things that when scaled to X- or Facebook- size produce systemic risks.

And if you want to be a platform that large, well, you owe additional societal responsibilities that your smaller competitors don't have to worry about (yet).
Your deaths claim surprised me. AFAICT England has ~10 deaths by electrocution per year. The US has ~100 domestic electrocutions and even more occupational electrocutions.
In my experience, every sufficiently large org with data centres on multiple continents has an accretion of legacy systems and special exceptions.

And a heuristic anomaly detection system that generates masses of false alarms, and enough different teams and documents and policies to bury an army of SOC2 auditors. And so many log lines almost anything can get lost in the noise.

The janitors always have keys to everything. Especially when it’s required by law.